Chapter Text
Dear Mr. Timothy Drake-Wayne, this letter seeks to inform you that the process of distributing assets from the various Drakes’ accounts, created by Jack and Janet Drake, is now complete. As beneficiary, I am writing to provide you with the details of your inheritance as outlined in the trust document, since you have recently come of age…
When someone dies, it is said that the people left behind in their absence face five primary stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Tim Drake’s life is a constant, never-ending cycle of these five truths.
Tim steps to the right of a large rock sitting in the middle of his path. The small hiked route is at a small incline; the air is thin and misty. Tim hates it here.
There are worse places to be, but the sentiment makes little difference. The crime of Gotham rages on outside the bounds of his current mission. There are worse places to be, he’d rather be anywhere but here.
Pulling his jacket tighter around himself, Tim reaches a small dirt plateau where a log cabin sits. He steps onto the creaking porch of his parents’ old cabin in the woods. The keys sat heavy in his pocket, jingling at every given moment. He fought the instinct to dig the key’s teeth into his palm. It had been something like ten years since he’d been here—his last visit was a blurry memory of New Jersey’s cold morning, his mother’s sharp morning voice, and his father’s abrupt departure. It smelt like the surrounding forest, untouched by the pollution of Gotham.
As Tim jammed the key into the lock and the door rattled with the motion. The doormat was a stale red frozen in time. The door groaned as it swung open, revealing dust mites swirling in the forest's pale light. Everything was frozen in time. The furniture sat exactly where it had been left, sheets thrown over old chairs, the mantel above the fireplace still home to sterile framed pictures of landscapes.
Tim stepped in past the threshold, right into the kitchen. He placed the keys on the counter top with a soft clink. A few frying pans hung from the ceiling, swaying gently with the breeze from the open door. Tim didn’t even know why he was here. Nostalgia, probably.
WHAM
He swung around wildly, only to see the screen door had slammed closed. Through the doorway Tim could see the bend of the road he’d taken, riddled with cracks and potholes, bracketed by trees. Nothing was there.
Over the years, his memories of this place had been morphed. Despite everything being the same, it was still odd and unfamiliar. He moved methodically, searching. The living room yielded nothing but old furniture and a fireplace that hadn't been used in years. The kitchen, the bedrooms, an office—nothing but dust and a chilling feeling.
He hadn’t thought about this place since his mother’s funeral. He remembered the cold, awful weather, the way the snow had fallen down on Christmas Eve. That empty, too large feeling of grief. No matter how hard he tried to shove it down into that box behind his ribs, under his chest and under his suit. No matter how hard Tim tried to smother it, it didn’t work.
And he would never, ever admit to it, but it was starting to get to him.
When Jack Drake had emerged from his coma, Tim had been overcome with an odd type of anticipation. Not enough to erase the odd grief of losing a mother, no, but suddenly, they had another shot at playing father and son. Even though Jack yelled and had loved Dana too quickly, Tim could deal with yelling and Dana, who he liked well enough.
When Jack had discovered Tim was Robin, that ended.
Jack Drake stormed into Wayne Manor, hands heavy with buckshot and salt. Tim had jumped in between Bruce and him without much of a thought. It had only been years later, after turning the moment over and over in his mind, that Tim had realized he had never been scared of his father before.
Jack Drake had followed Janet into the grave, anyway, leaving Tim alone to miss what could’ve been but never what was.
CLANG.
Tim stumbled over something.
“What the—!”
The small fire extinguisher that had sat next to the stove skidded across the floors, knocking into the opposing wall. The tips of his toe throbbed in his sneaker. Tim reached down to grab at his ankle and almost smacked his face into the kitchen island. Great.
With a sigh, he rested his temple against the counter top, letting his ankle drop out of his hand like a dead weight. Tim looked up for the fire extinguisher.
Directly in front of him was another door. Odd. It felt like he’d gone through every room in the small cabin. Reluctantly, he peeled himself off the island and cringed and immediately swatted at his hair. Ew the dust, Tim grimaced, fumbling for the doorknob.
Tim opened the door to see a narrow hallway leading down a set of stairs into a windowless room. It was a room he didn’t remember, but the hallway was familiar, with its ugly baseboards. The walnut floors creaked as his steps made hollow thumps. Swinging the door open, he saw nothing. Darkness enveloping the view. Fluorescent bulbs flickered to life as he hit the switch, illuminating swathes of dust painting the air.
“Oh my god.”
And there, laying out on tables and shelves, was a small museum’s worth of artifacts.
Artifacts. Statues, pottery, and scrolls, some still wrapped in packing materials, others displayed, waiting for appraisal. The air in the basement was heavy. Dust clung to everything, coating the artifacts in a fine layer.
Tim stared at the collection before him, his breath caught somewhere in his throat. He took a slow step forward, fingers hovering over the edge of a stamped crate sitting on the floor. It was well over three feet tall. Some of the items looked ancient—Mesoamerican styles, scrolls bound in brittle leather professionally sealed, large sealed and sterile containers with a small fridge off to the side. The room was carefully sterilized and the single window had privacy film on it.
In a moment of sentimentality, Bruce had once told Tim that he was proud of how clever Tim was. Intuitive beyond all measure, he’d said: Tim, I couldn’t have picked anyone better to put on the mask, despite how sometimes, Tim felt he’d gone to great lengths to try and convince him otherwise.
But it took none of that skill to put together what was in front of him. This was physical. Tangible. A secret left out in the open but buried under years of neglect.
It was an immovable fact that there was a small fortune's worth of antiquities, avoiding display, unlisted in any documentation Tim had been given access to.
Usually, when someone is dead, they don’t tend to surprise you.
He hadn’t thought there was anything left his parents could do to surprise him. More than just smart or instinctive, Tim had learned how to be adaptive. By force or by opportunity, long weeks and months of quiet, sudden absence gave Tim the space to learn. He learned how to cook and clean. How to flip a breaker, how to switch a fuse. More importantly, it gave him space to mess up. And mess up badly.
But standing here, surrounded by the evidence of two people’s lives that he’d never really understood, Tim had never felt more stupid than he did right now. It was the same old mix of resentment and longing—wanting answers, wanting them to still be alive to give them, hating himself for never having the courage to ask them. He’d spent so long trying to be objective, to analyze every piece of his life like it wasn’t his to form the most logical opinions.
But to be objective was the best approach.
And so, hands trembling slightly, Tim snapped as many pictures as he could, falling into a familiar rhythm, as if he was taking crime scene photos. Click. Flash. Wind the film. Click. His fingers worked automatically even as his mind reeled. Some of the symbols looked vaguely familiar, resembling modern familiar language. Romantic and cyrillic. Altaic. Others were completely alien to him.
Tim opened one of the drawers in a metal filing cabinet against the wall, rifling through yellowed documents and crumbling invoices. Most bore official stamps—customs declarations, shipping manifests, bank statements—but the dates spanned decades, long before Tim had been born, but the most recent entry was dated just before his mother’s death, November 29th.
Tim forced himself to take a slow breath, steadying his hands as he flipped through another set of papers. Some of the artifacts had coded labels, but a few had handwritten notes scrawled in the margins. The oldest file was nestled in the back of the cabinet, almost falling off the filing track in decay. As Tim picked it up, he noticed a small sticky note sat on the front. On it, was a long string of numbers: 120470626
Between 8 to 10 digits. Nine numbers. ABA format. A standard routing transit number.
He pushed away from the filing cabinet, pacing the length of the room. Thoughts raced around his head. They whispered in the edges of his memory, in the faint recollections of his parents talking late in the night in the halls of this cabin.
Facts:
One, his parents had an unlocked basement full of antique and priceless art.
Two, each container had a corresponding file detailing shipping and keepsake data.
Three, none of these artifacts had been listed as part of the Drake estate.
Fuck.
He swallowed hard, pressing a hand to the edge of the filing cabinet to steady himself.
If the documents here were accurate—and they looked as legitimate as anything he’d ever combed through at the Wayne Foundation—his parents had been holding purchasing relics from overseas. Most likely stolen in the past, which would explain the lack of public claim for them.
Tim forced himself to look back at the crate nearest the wall, reading the faded shipping label. Oaxaca, a year before he was born. Next to it: Khartoum, a year after he became Robin. It seemed that at least four crates were dated for a year.
Right behind him, next to the door, another box sat inconspicuously.
The most recent: Lake Como, dated December of two years ago.
Something like 40 crates sat in the room, not a single one marked as Drake property on legal beneficiaries.
Tim forced himself to sit. His head throbbed with a dull pulse. His nose was stuffy. His fingertips were frozen. The metal chair scraped against concrete as he pulled it out. The sound screeched against his ears. His pulse hadn’t slowed since he opened the door.
He stacked the folders he’d pulled from the filing cabinet into a loose pile and dragged the nearest one toward him. The tab read: OAX-01.
Oaxaca.
He swallowed.
The folder crackled when he opened it. Inside it were customs declaration forms, shipping manifests, export permits, a copy of a wire transfer confirmation.
Just paperwork.
His hands trembled slightly as he flattened the first page against the desk.
Customs Declaration – Republic of Mexico.
It bore an official seal stamped in blue ink with the declared value sitting up in the corner. 177000.00 Mexican Pesos, equivalent to 10,000 American Dollars.
He leaned closer, breath shallow.
The stamp on the page wasn’t printed on or painted. The ink had bled into the paper fibers in uneven patterns consistent with stamping. He knew what fake stamps looked like. He’d seen enough counterfeit documentation. He’d made enough of it.
Tim rushed back to the kitchen to pick up his laptop, hands moving across the keys robotically despite the static humming at the back of his mind. The screen cast a cold glow across the desk. He typed in the export permit number printed at the top of the page. The website for the Archived Ministry of Culture records popped up.
The format matched. Permit numbers structured the same way. Same prefix. Same suffix length. Same year coding embedded in the middle. He opened another tab and searched for export permit examples from that era.
They all had the same stamp, the same insignia.
He compared the one in his hands to a digitized sample on his screen. The placement of the seal overlapped the printed lines in the same way. The ink distortion matched age patterns. They were…authentic-looking.
His pulse thudded harder, he flipped to the next page.
Auction house reference: Morton Subastas– Private Estate Liquidation.
He typed the name into the search bar.
Results trickled in. Archived news clipping from a regional paper in Mexico. A family estate dissolved after the death of its final heir. Artifacts auctioned through a mid-tier house specializing in antiquities. Date: one year before Tim was born.
His eyes darted back to the folder.
The shipping date matched the auction window.
Exactly.
His breath came unevenly.
The article wrote about the deaccessioning of an old, wealthy family’s estate that had held art for decades. How they had bragged about their collection, until eventually, they flaunted their wealth to the wrong person. Pieces were stolen from the estate and the family wasted the rest of their money away on security and investigation, being forced to sell the remaining art for money.
He grabbed the next folder.
OAX-02.
Different artifacts, an ornate tapestry. Same estate reference. Same auction house.
The export permit number was sequentially close to the first, the formatting was the same.
He sat back in the chair, the metal pressing uncomfortably against his spine.
Okay.
Okay.
Purchased at auction. Legally deaccessioned.
He pulled another file from the stack—KHRT-07. Khartoum. The year after he became Robin.
The customs form came from Sudan. The export permit classification was under “private heritage transfer.” A note referencing a dissolved colonial-era collection that was stored in the UK before repatriation.
He typed in the collection name listed.
After a tense wait, he found a forum thread about the auction of a British family’s antiquities collection after legal ownership was resolved. Auctioned in London. The timeline matched the invoice date in his hand.
His heart hammered in his ears.
He flipped through more pages.
The payment was wired through some domestic intermediary bank from New York, listed with an international routing number. Tim opened a new tab and searched for the FDIC directory. He tapped erratically against the keys as the page loaded. Spinning and spinning. Fuck. Fuck. Tim’s throat closed. He couldn’t breathe. Fuck. Nothing was—it didn't make sense. What was this? He rubbed spots into his vision. Blinking them away, he watched the bank directory load, its filtering pop-up prompting him. Tim typed in the routing number stiffly.
ALLIED FINANCE & SECURITIES BANK PLC
His jaw clenched. His breath left him in a rush that felt almost painful.
He stood abruptly and crossed the room to one of the crates. The label pasted to the side mirrored the file code exactly.
He crouched beside it, fingers brushing the edge of the stamped wood. Professional packaging methods, aged but unbroken.
He stood again and returned to the desk, grabbing another file at random.
MARR-03.
Marrakesh.
Export certificate from Morocco. More of the same: a stamp, a signature, declared value, and permit.
He typed the permit number into the U.S. Department of Transportation search.
No records.
He widened the search. Adding the year, Tim waited as the page lagged. Still, no records. Hesitating, he entered “Drake Industries MNE.”
Still nothing.
With even more hesitation, he entered simply, “Drake”
An empty white page taunted him.
Tim scoured the website, looking for where he could find non-business permit reports. With a little bit of fumbling, he found it. Under the DoT’s Freedom of Information Act, a scanned document from the 90’s was accessible. The PDF was missing a handful of pages, but the permit number fell within a batch issued in Q3, the same year that the shipping document was dated.
His pulse stuttered.
He leaned back, pressing his fingers into his forehead. He glanced back at the file. He sat there for a long moment, laptop screen glowing in front of him, paper spread across the desk. He stood again, pacing once across the narrow space before forcing himself back into the chair.
Think. Fuck. Think.
His mind tried to pull him toward worst-case interpretations again.
He grabbed another file—LAKE-12.
Lake Como.
The most recent. Dated from two years ago.
Tim reasoned with himself. High-value art was sometimes withheld, pending formal appraisal to avoid penalties. Or it could be some sort of tax filing trick. That sounded like his parents. Deferred declaration, pending appraisal forever, stuck in red tape hell. Guess they hadn’t expected to die.
His parents had avoided publicity around personal assets, but they loved to flaunt in length about Drake Industries, renowned MNE. About life-saving advances in medicine and working with famous researchers, like Mark and Marie Logan, and Albert Wesker. Never anything else.
Privacy is never proof of guilt. But it’s not, not.
He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. He could still feel the echo of his earlier panic, but it was thinning. The fluorescent light hummed overhead. The bright shine stung Tim’s eyes.
He looked at the crates again.
Everything he’d seen was filed, there was no denying that.
His laptop screen dimmed slightly as it idled. He tapped the trackpad to wake it, but did nothing but stare at it.
Tim turned, sweeping his gaze across the shelves one last time, taking one, final picture of the wider room. He exhaled, slow and deliberate. He couldn’t walk out without taking every scrap of evidence he could carry. He was lucky that he’d brought a film camera. No matter the advancements on digital cameras, Tim was loyal to his brand. Duke called it “rich-people, classist, artsy-bullshit,” which, true, but Tim was just too paranoid to have digital copies of possibly incriminating evidence.
And when he was finished, he’d go back to Drake Manor. He would hunt down the Drakes’ beneficiary and rip them into little pieces. He’d scream at the estate lawyer until his jaw unhinged. And most exciting of all: he couldn’t wait to cremate his parents.