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The magic dies, with Robin.
~
He’s in the cafeteria, when the news ripples across Gotham Academy, when Ives drops in front of him with wide wide eyes and says the words that shatter him, break him open and hollow him out, that define everything that comes after.
“Jason Todd is dead,” he breathes, and the world keeps turning, he knows the world keeps turning, but for Tim.
For Tim, it feels like things stop, frozen in that moment, in that endless heartbreak.
~
He doesn’t go to the funeral.
He’s spent months watching the Wayne family and years watching the Bats, but this still feels sacred, like something he cannot intrude upon.
It feels like his, and like something so intimate and personal that even he cannot bear to witness it.
He doesn’t go to the funeral. He waits and that night, when the rain is sheeting down and Bruce Wayne has retreated into Batman, he takes a bus across town and plods through the mud and rain until he stands over Jason’s grave.
~
He doesn’t mean to go, every day.
It’s only that--he goes, after he watches Batman beat a mugger into the ground, a vicious kind of brutality that makes his stomach turn.
It helps, to be close to Jason. Even if Jason isn’t dancing over the rooftops, beautiful and brilliant and alive, being this close to him helps.
He starts swinging by the grave after he follows Batman, and it isn’t even out of the way, because Batman always ends his patrol looming over the cemetery, although he never descends into it.
Tim can see the grief cracking Bruce open, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.
“He needs you,” he whispers to Jason, because talking to him here, in the dark, feels safe. “I don’t know what to do.”
~
Sometimes, he finds flowers tucked into the vase on Jason’s tombstone, sprigs of roses and delicate orchids, vibrant and lovely and out place in this dark and gloomy place.
“Did you have a nice visit with Alfred?” he murmurs, on those nights, and brushes his fingers against the petals, before he drops down next to the gravestone and sighs. “He’s getting worse, Jay.”
~
Batman almost kills a man. He begs Dick Grayson for his help, for some intervention and gets a door slammed in his face.
“What would you do?” he asks, tears on his face and mud on his knees.
There’s a thought.
The niggling of an idea that he can’t shake and it makes him want to throw up because it’s not his.
It’s never been his.
He’s never wanted to be Robin, only ever wanted to touch the magic of his hero.
“I don’t want this,” he sobs, because he hasn’t wanted any of this, hasn’t wanted the cold lonely nights or the terror he feels, watching Bruce, or the dead boy in the ground.
He falls asleep there, curled up under his coat, tears dried on his face, and he wakes when the ground shivers and shakes and a bloody muddy hand claws it’s way from the dirt.
~
When he’s slumped on the ground, caked in dirt and the suit he was buried in, Jason blinks up at the rain falling and at Tim, and there’s--
There’s nothing there.
“Jason,” he breathes, and scrambles for his phone, dialing with shaking fingers.
It’s late, and he shouldn’t call, Dick Grayson had thrown him out and Bruce--Bruce was cracking apart, but there was no one else.
“This is Tim Drake,” he says and there’s a sigh.
“Master Wayne has made it clear--”
“You leave orchids for Jason,” he blurts out. “Twice a week, you leave him orchids.”
“You visit his grave,” Alfred murmurs, and then, “Master Timothy--”
“I need you to come to Gotham Cemetery," he says and Jason twitches in the rain and mud.
“Now?” Alfred asks.
“Now,” Tim says, watching Jason run a clumsy finger over the orchid petal.
~
He’s sitting next to Jason’s bed, when Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson storm through the hospital. They don’t notice him. Not when Jason is lying in the hospital bed, asleep, his fingers twitching against the sheets.
He watches as Bruce goes pale and stumbles forward, as tears fill Dick’s eyes and his knees go out, and only Alfred catching him keeps him from hitting the ground.
Bruce is clutching Jason’s hand, too tight and can’t look away, but he sounds--Tim flinches away from the broken sound of his voice, the lost little boy asking for reassurance when he says, “Alfred?”
“It’s him, sir,” Alfred says, gently, and that’s when Dick begins to cry.
Tim slips into the hallway and sits cross-legged across from Jason’s room, far enough away that they have privacy, and close enough that he can still breathe through the panic of not having Jason in sight.
And he waits.
~
It’s hours later, when Bruce opens the door. He looks wrung out, and empty, but lighter, too, like the weight he’s been carrying for six months has slipped from his shoulders, like he can stand under the weight of the world again.
He’s staring at Tim, and there’s a frown on his face. “Tim? Tim Drake? What the--”
He cuts himself off as he sees the mud on Tim’s hands and face, on the clothes he’s wearing that are stiff and dirty, like maybe he dragged a body covered in mud. From deeper in the room, Dick says, “Tim Drake? He’s here?”
Batman stares at him and says, “I think you better come in, son.”
~
Six months later, when Jason wakes up from a coma, he looks at Tim, who is sitting at his bedside working on a case for Bruce.
Who has sat at his bedside every day of those six months, reading and sleeping and talking and quiet.
Who dragged him from the mud and brought him home and there’s something like magic in the air, when he looks at Tim and says, “I know you, don’t I.”