Chapter Text
Gotham lay veiled beneath a suffocating shroud of fog, the cloud cover so thick it swallowed the city’s highest skyscrapers whole.
Spires that usually cut the skyline like jagged teeth vanished mid-rise, their upper floors dissolving into nothing, marked only by squares of light suspended in the murk. Tim watches rain pelt the windshield in mesmerizing sheets, each sweep of the wipers carving a fleeting clarity through the cascade before the water gathered again, bending the skyline into something dreamlike, its reflection trembling in the river below.
He’s always liked that about Bristol—the way the township clings to the hill, the tip of the city always within sight through breaks in the trees. The main road is narrow and treelined, only the mailboxes at each driveway marking where woodland ended and private property began. It’s normally serene, the drive up, normally something Tim looks forward to, watching the city disappear behind him as trees rose up on either side of the car around each curve.
Today, the drive is anything but.
He eases the car up the slope, wipers squealing in a steady rhythm as rain pelted the windshield faster than they could clear it. His world shrinks to the small, wavering tunnel carved by headlights and blades, and he drives within it, slow, steady, cautious. He leans over the wheel, squinting through the narrow arc, dropping his speed another five miles per hour.
Tim was being overly cautious, he knew that, but he was also driving his father’s car, and he was not in the interest of adding a totaled vehicle to the laundry list of qualms he already seemed to have with him.
His father bristles beside him, shifting in wet clothes that squelch against patent leather.
“Is that really necessary, son?” Jack drawls, the edge in his voice reminding Tim that their earlier conversation hadn’t been forgotten, that his silence of contrition would not absolve him of fault because Jack wanted a fight.
Something inside him flinches at the awful certainty that Jack won’t drop it, that he wouldn’t grant him even the small mercy of getting them home in one piece before laying into him.
Tim had taken every precaution—warming up the car, leaving twenty minutes early, fully aware of how treacherous the roads would likely be—and yet, no amount of fretting or preparedness could’ve prevented the accident that took up two whole lanes on the expressway. There had been a multi-vehicle collision, the scene flanked by two ambulances and a police cruiser, all stood squarely between Tim and the likelihood of picking his father up on time. Traffic had moved in an agonizing crawl past debris and first responders, all funneling into the left lane.
He knew his father would be irritated, but he hadn't expected this.
“Unbelievable,” Jack had snarled after dumping his suitcase in the trunk, the passenger door slamming behind him as he took his seat, soaked and prickling with agitation. Tim remembers gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles blanched, his body instinctively bracing for impact, but all his father hurled at him then, in the throng of idling cars outside the arrivals gate, were words.
“Ungrateful,” he continued, fussing with his damp clothes, moisture sloughing off his overcoat in sheets.
“That’s what you are. Ungrateful,” he repeats, despite the fact that Tim had made great time, even with the nearly twenty minutes he’d spent in dead stop traffic, only arriving ten minutes later than his father requested, but that had given Jack a full ten minutes to stew over the simple fact that Tim couldn’t even manage the courtesy of being punctual.
It was an unnecessary request, in Tim’s opinion. His father had a driving service, and if the usual chauffeur wasn’t available, they could have easily sent a replacement. But this wasn’t about necessity. Jack had asked for a ride to make a point, to remind Tim that he needed to actively participate in their family, to punish him for darting off to—in his father’s words—laze around with the Wayne’s, skipping galas and fundraising dinners, shrugging off anything Jack deemed mandatory.
But Jack didn’t seem to care that there wasn’t much of a family to participate in anymore.
Even before they lost Janet, they’d never been the perfect nuclear family his parents espoused them to be. The furniture in the living room was seldom used, the dining room table merely for show, everyone stealing off to separate parts of the house when they were all home together. Tim was used to eating alone, long accustomed to preparing his own meals from leftovers his nannie’s left when he was younger, and then eventually, cooking for himself entirely.
Tim was sixteen now. He’s gone his whole life only knowing this kind of familial dynamic, founded on solitude and distance, every public appearance a rouse, a lie meticulously manufactured to seem, by all means, normal. It was a stark derision from what he had with the Wayne’s, and he couldn’t even consider himself family.
He was often invited to stay at the manor while his father was away, like it was no skin off anyone’s back for him to stay there, among company, as opposed to the empty, depressing house down the way. At first, he didn’t quite know what to do with the invitation. It took him a while to finally take him up on the offer, to warm up to the idea of imposing in such a way, despite Bruce insisting it would be no imposition at all.
Tim remembers the first night he stayed over, remembers waiting for the silence to finally settle in, for everyone to scatter to their own corners the way they did back home and the novelty of his arrival to wear off. But that moment never came.
Instead, there was Alfred, appearing like clockwork with tea and something to eat, hovering in a way that didn’t feel intrusive, but attentive. And Damian. Contemptuous and bemused by Tim’s presence as he tried to adjust to life outside of the League. He lashed out occasionally, as if Tim was some kind of threat, as if his place might ever be questioned. He lurked, most days, as if knowing Tim’s exact whereabouts in the house at any given time were of utmost priority.
Even Bruce, in his own quiet way, made his presence known. He moved quietly between the office, the living room, the kitchen, taking phone calls out in the open like the presence of others around him wasn’t some kind of nuisance.
It unsettled him at first. The constant commotion, the easiness of existing somewhere that wasn't behind a closed door. But eventually, he adjusted. He began to do his homework in the living room before dinner, school books spread neatly across polished wood. He found himself lingering more, joining Alfred in the drawing room, keeping an amiable distance from Damian in the den.
He hardly ever spent time in the spare bedroom he used while he was there, because it wasn’t really his. It was just a place to sleep. He wasn’t Bruce’s legal ward, like Dick and Jason had been before being adopted, and he wasn’t blood like Damian. Which meant that he wasn’t a permanent fixture. He was just his Robin.
Tim wasn't naive, he knew that he would never be a part of the Wayne’s in a tangible way, that to them, he would always be a partner, their relationship transactional, conditional, all hinging upon whether or not they deemed him useful.
It didn’t bother him as much as he thought it might, the charade of it all. He was used to feeling like his purpose was to please those around him, that there was some tenuous contract he was expected to uphold. The only real difference was that in Tim’s house, silence was the default, it was expected, unchallenged, the only real noise that ever filled it the booming sound of angry voices—which, in recent months, had grown increasingly more frequent.
Jack had integrated himself back into high society earlier that year, resuming the life he and Janet had maintained like he’d never even left it, like he hadn’t disappeared for a year to recuperate after his accident. He picked up right where he’d left off like Tim’s world hadn’t been irrevocably altered in the process.
Jack was distant after they lost Janet. For months, he dissociated from their new reality, unwilling to confront how Janet’s absence changed their lives or his role as a father. He threw himself into his work, leaving for longer stretches at a time, his physical and emotional absence a familiar constant in Tim’s life, but without Janet, somehow felt more intentional, more deliberate.
With Jack gone, it was only natural that he’d been drawn to the Wayne’s, into the structured, predictable routine of training and patrol. His own father’s distance, both emotional and physical, feeding Tim’s obsession to fix Bruce, to hold his fraying edges together like mending the broken pieces of Gotham's fearsome protector might in turn mend his own.
After the accident, Jack’s booze habit quickly spiraled, long, idle stretches of rehabilitation leaving him irritable and rudderless in the shadow of grief. For a year, he lived on the ground floor, lumbering between the spare bedroom and the recliner by the fireplace. In the mornings, Tim cleaned away empty bottles and scotch glasses, and when night came around, he shouted, dodging Jack's angry fists as he hurtled all of his frustration at Tim.
It was harder for him to sneak out when Jack was home. He patrolled less that year, the arrival of Damian and introduction of the Red Hood to the scene complicating everything more. And then Jason tried to kill him, and Tim’s predictable life fractured beneath him, the only thing he could be certain of throughout his own recovery and the Wayne’s relentless search for the Red Hood his father's brutal indifference.
He had always projected his anger onto Tim, even when Janet was there. Whether it was unresolved issues with his own father, or just poor emotional regulation, Tim had always been his father's outlet, the perfect vessel to project his insecurities and shortcomings onto.
And so, Tim bore the brunt of compounded losses, first Janet, and then his independence.
Their conflicts before everything had been about the purported disrespect of having an opinion, of Tim thinking he could possibly know better than his father by simply offering his response. But now, their quarrels were about responsibility, about Tim pulling his own weight, proving to Jack why he should keep a roof over his head when all he was met with was ingratitude and disrespect.
“I ask you to do me one favor—one favor,” Jack had seethed while Tim navigated through the sprawl of cars at the arrivals gate, spit flying from his mouth as he fumbled over his own anger.
“I told you I have a meeting in the morning, that I didn’t have time to make arrangements because of the last-minute flight change. I asked you to do one thing,” he'd shouted, slamming his fist against the dashboard so hard Tim thought he might dent the carbon fiber plating.
“It’s like you do this to spite me,” he added with a humorless laugh as Tim finally shifted into drive and merged into the stream of inching cars.
But the anger didn’t fade once they got moving. It lingered, simmering, tempered in the cascade of rain and blur of headlights, the silence between them as Tim drove growing louder by the minute.
On asphalt this slick, polished to a black sheen from hours of heavy rainfall, one careless turn could send them drifting. Jack thankfully fell quiet when they got on the expressway, electing to stew in silence while Tim focused on the road, watching irritably as he navigated each curve with an abundance of caution.
Water ran in thin streams along the curb as he crawled up the hill, slipping into storm drains with a hollow gulp. He eased the wheel through every turn, feeling for the slightest loss of traction as the tires skid over wet pavement.
It happens the moment he pulls into the driveway and shifts the car into park. Like a pressure valve finally giving way under mounting strain.
“You don’t have anything to say for yourself?” Jack asks sharply, keys still dangling in the ignition.
The question is a trap.
Tim knows it the second it leaves his father’s mouth. There is no right answer, no version of this that doesn’t end the same way. Nothing to gain from refusing to answer, from refusing to rise to the bait. The outcome was decided the moment he pulled into the driveway.
It didn’t matter what he said, he would only be delaying the inevitable.
“—Answer me, damn it.”
Tim’s breath stutters, his chest tightening with the realization that Jack clearly wanted a fight, and he had no choice but to give him one.
“There was an accident on the expressway,” Tim rushes, tripping over the words. “Only one lane was open—”
“Unacceptable,” Jack cuts in immediately. “Entirely unacceptable. All because you couldn’t be bothered to plan ahead, to leave a couple minutes early—”
“But I did,” Tim insists, already knowing it was the wrong move, that defending himself never helped. “I left twenty minutes early, I even waited for the car to warm up. The accident had just happened, the GPS didn’t—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the accident!”
His shout lands first, then the crack of his hand against the dash, and when Tim still doesn’t look at him, doesn’t offer that final concession of eye contact, a blow comes next. His head snaps to the side, ears ringing from the force of it, heat immediately blooming across his cheek. When he wets his tongue, he tastes copper.
For a second, everything narrows to that single point, the sting, the force, the inevitability of it all. This was always going to happen.
Jack is still talking, but it’s different now, sharper, his anger pulled taut. Tim risks a glance. There was something off about him, something unmoored—his father's eyes too bright, fury stretched far past anything the situation could possibly warrant. And yet, he looks at Tim like he’s done something unforgivable. Like being ten minutes late was some kind of irredeemable betrayal.
“This is about more than you being late and you know it,” Jack says, his voice dropping low, precise despite the crazed glint in his eye. It was almost like he was manic, feverish with the amount of vitriol coursing through his veins.
“You’ve been selfish. Completely wrapped up in your own bullshit. Running around with the Waynes like they’re your family.”
Each word lands heavy, their weight pointed, punishing, designed to make Tim feel guilty despite the absences of any actual fault.
“What does that make me, then?” he demands when Tim says nothing.
“—Just the idiot stuck bankrolling you? Letting you live off my dime so you can throw it back in my face? Acting like it’s some kind of burden to do me a simple favor?”
The accusation hangs there, grotesquely disproportionate, and Tim feels the familiar, disorienting disconnect, like he’s missed something significant, like there was a version of events he wasn't privy to, none of what his father was saying matching his reality. But that doesn’t matter, that Tim had unknowingly acquired a number of strikes that pushed him over some kind of threshold he was unaware of. It never has.
Tim remains silent. Not because he doesn’t have anything to say, but because he knows better than to drum up some kind of response to satiate him—knows that anything he offers would be twisted, warped, used to discredit him.
The safest thing was silence. The safest thing was to endure it.
“Look at me!”
Tim hesitates.
It’s small. Instinctive. A fraction of a second where he weighs his options—comply or delay—but he already knew the answer, that the outcome remained no matter which choice he made. The hesitation, it turned out, was an entirely other echelon of mistake.
The second Tim turns to face him, finally doing what he'd asked, Jack’s expression twists, contorting into something poisonous.
He lunges.
Tim’s hands fly upward on instinct, a half-formed defense maneuver that never fully connects, Robin reflexes cloying for control against the older, deeper instinct to stay still and take it—but Jack doesn’t reach for his face. His fist tangles in Tim’s hair instead, yanking him forward hard enough to make his eyes water, forcing him close, forcing the eye contact he'd refused before. His father reeks of aftershave and bourbon, the stench unmistakable with him so close.
There’s nothing measured about his anger anymore. It’s not even rage, it was something more erratic, more predatory as he searched for the reaction that he wasn’t getting. Tim could see it in the way Jack’s gaze flickers over his face like he was looking for something to latch onto. Defiance, fear—anything.
But Tim wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t arguing. There was no sign of the disrespect Jack kept accusing him of.
Somehow, that makes it worse.
“If you don’t start acting like my mere presence doesn't piss you off soon, so help me—”
The sentence falters, unfinished, whatever point Jack was trying to make unraveling. There’s nowhere for the anger to go, nothing tangible to justify it—so he redirects it.
He shoves Tim. Hard.
Not just to hurt, but to get him away like he couldn’t stand the sight of him sitting there, quiet, unresponsive, his silence an insult all on its own. Tim’s neck snaps back with a brutal crack, colliding with the driver’s side window, the sound exploding through his skull as white-hot pain erupts behind his eyes.
For a second, there’s nothing, his mind a blank void as his body struggled to catch up to what had just happened. And then almost as quickly as it had happened, the world rushes back in because Jack was still angrily muttering to himself, still reiterating his grievances with Tim’s attitude, with his purported disrespect.
The passenger door flies open, rain and wind lashing against his overheated skin before slamming shut with an impact that makes him flinch. The car rocks as the trunk opens and closes, each sound landing muted, warped by the roar of his own pulse filling his ears, drowning out whatever else Jack might have said after that.
Tim watches dazedly as Jack disappears into the house, waiting until the door closed behind him before folding over the steering wheel, almost setting the horn off in the process. The engine was still running, still vibrating through the seat and into his bones, a low mechanical growl steadily working to make him sick. He swats blindly at the wheel until he finds the keys in the ignition, twisting hard until the engine sputtered and died.
The pulse in his head was louder without the noise of the engine to mask it, each beat pushing against the swelling at the base of his skull where a solid knot was undoubtedly forming. He reaches back carefully, acid surging up to wet his throat the second his fingertips brushed the tender spot, red dripping from his fingertips like he’d dipped his hand in a puddle of it when he pulled it away.
Beyond the windshield, the outside world felt distant. The trees lining the driveway bend slightly in the wind, the torrent of rain beating down on the car with ruthless abandon. Tim should get up. He was expected at the mansion in a few hours. Dinner started at seven and Dick would be there no later than half past six to pick him up on his way in from Bludhaven.
Tim should move, he should get out of the car because he was bleeding, and he couldn't afford to soil his father's leather seats on top of everything else.
Moving, it turns out, is another mistake. His skull pulses in nauseating waves, the act of merely sitting up from his hunch enough to reduce his vision to a colorful burst of static. His hand stays clamped against the back of his head, blood dripping between his fingers, threatening to ruin the collar of his Gotham Knights hoodie.
“Fuck,” he breathes.
The walk to his room when he finally gets his legs to work is a trial of pure will.
Damp clothes cling to him as he peels himself out of his jacket, his shoes resisting with a wet squelch when he tries to shuck them off in the entryway. There’s no sign of Jack, the ground level of the house eerily quiet aside from the steady beat of wind and rain against the windows. He keeps one hand pressed to the back of his head as he lumbers to his bedroom, pressing gently against the knot to stymy the flow.
When he enters the en suite bathroom, he is immediately bombarded by harsh white light, the automatic sensor flicking on at full brightness until he swats at the control switch, finally bringing it to a manageable dim after several useless swipes. He stumbles towards the vanity, lowering himself down to retrieve the first aid kit he kept hidden behind a bucket of cleaning supplies under the sink.
Hoisting the kit up leaves him woozy, his balance wavering as he sets it down on the counter harder than he’d have liked. Once his vision cleared, he chances a glance at himself in the mirror.
His cheek was flushed where his father had hit him, the faintest imprint of his middle and index finger still visible, but what was more worrying were how his pupils stayed blown the longer he stared at them, two asymmetrical, inky voids that refused to shrink. Concussion, check.
Tim has patrolled marginally concussed before. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, or smart, but given the mechanism of injury, he wasn’t at risk of brain damage or anything. Jack had just managed to shake a few screws loose was all.
Gingerly, he tugs off his sweatshirt, using both hands to get his head through the hole without staining it further. Tomorrow, after he got through dinner and patrol, he’d douse it in folex and throw it in the wash on high heat, but for now, he chucks it at the overflowing hamper of clothes in the corner of his room.
Without it, blood drips down his neck uninhibited, a thick sheet of it pooling at the hem of his t-shirt.
“Shit,” he breathes, voice trembling as he palpates his skull with gentle fingers until he found the source of the bleeding.
The gash was small, no longer than an inch, nothing a little dermabond couldn’t fix, but Tim couldn't focus on sealing the wound until he stopped the bleeding.
He opens the kit, pulling out several packages of gauze and a bottle of wound wash. He allows himself a single, shaking breath, and then squirts the saline solution over the area, hissing as it seeped into open skin. He doesn't stop until he can see the white of his scalp in his reflection of the hand mirror attached to the wall beside the medicine cabinet.
Once he was satisfied with the clean up, he tears open a pack of gauze, folding it neatly and pressing it against the wound while he searched for the tube of glue. He shoves more bandages and bottles of antiseptic away, ripping apart his immaculate organization until finally, he found it—half empty and partially glued shut.
Tim would need to be frugal, but he’d have enough to get the job done.
He pulls away the square of gauze with a groan, already heavy with layers of blood. He rips two more pads open with his teeth, folding them again before pressing them against the wound with a protesting wince. Frustration coils as tightly as the ache throbbing in his skull. He really didn’t have much time. It was already five o’clock, and he still needed to make himself presentable.
Tim peels the gauze away to check the bleeding, cringing at the loss of pressure. The double layers are almost entirely saturated with pinkish red. It was a clean split, not too deep either. Dermabond would definitely do the trick. The application, though, wouldn’t be easy.
He covers it with the gauze again and twists the cap off with his teeth, jaw aching with the effort as remnants of dry glue around the rim cracked and fell away. When the cap finally twists free, he brings the tube up behind his head and attempts to pinch the skin together, faltering when he couldn’t quite close the gap the first time.
The flesh around the wound was swollen, his hair slick with blood and saline, making it hard to keep his grip and squeeze the bottle at the same time. His arms tremble with the strain, shoulders aching as he tilts his head forward, trying to find the right angle by feel alone. His vision swims the longer he holds it there, skewed balance wavering.
When the tip of the tube finally touches, he squeezes, but the glue burns against raw, open skin, his fingers unable to pull the edges of the wound close enough without being able to see what he was doing. He hisses, breath catching as the sting radiates outward.
“Shit,” he breathes, voice thin and unsteady. The blood-soaked gauze is all he has left to clear the glue away, the squares already too wet to do much of anything except smear it further.
His fingers probe carefully, brushing away strands of hair until he could see the wound again. He rips open a fresh pack of gauze, dabbing at it gently, and angles the hand mirror back in place.
This time, he goes slow. He leans back on his heels so he could see the edges of split skin without his own hands obscuring his line of sight. He takes up the edges of the wound once more, a fresh spurt of blood welling at the sight, and brings the tip of the tube back down. It’s slow, and it still stings, but he’s able to carefully drag the tube down, pausing to see if his line would hold before daring any further, layering each pass as if he were attempting to solder two pieces of metal together.
By the time he’s done, he was shaking, whole body tremors wracking through him as he stood, fighting not to sway with how exhausting the process had been or how badly his head had begun to hurt.
His arms hang at his sides, leaden and useless as he looks at himself in the mirror. His skin was slightly ashen, nausea and the faintest touch of blood loss leaving his face pallid and his eyes sunken. Tim’s hair was properly ruined, rain and blood leaving tufts of black matted and frizzing, tousled strands sticking up at odd angles where he’d combed it back to get at the wound.
He turns the shower on, stripping off his ruined shirt along with the rest of his clothes before stepping under the cool stream. Cold seeps into him like a salve, soothing the pulse at the back of his head and making him feel the slightest bit more human.
Tim stands there until the water at his feet ran clear, until the pressure behind his eyes had subdued enough that he felt like he could stomach cleaning up the mess he’d made before getting ready. He reassembles the kit with fevered urgency, setting aside a quick-freeze pack before stowing the bag back into its hiding place.
He dresses quickly, toweling his hair off carefully before splaying himself across his bed in nothing but his boxers. Tim could get dressed later, once the ibuprophen kicked in and he could stand to keep his eyes open without wincing. But for now, he was boneless, only moving to slide the ice pack beneath his head, laying his wrist across his eyes to rest until Dick arrived.
As he dozes, he thinks about his father’s face, about the twisted up expression he wore, like Tim was some kind of fuck up for being late, like the only thing he was good at was being the perfect receptacle to place whatever anger or resentment he harbored because he knew he would take it.
And then he when he couldn’t be bothered to think about his father anymore, he thinks about how disappointed Bruce would be if he called out, how hurt Alfred might feel after going through all the effort of preparing London Broil, arguably Tim’s favorite of all his recipes, just for him to call last minute to say he was sick.
By now, Dick was already on the road, already planning on stopping at Tim’s. Even if he politely excused himself, Dick would probably insist on bringing him back a plate before patrol, which would require Tim to show his face, to put on an act as if the fight with Jack hadn’t happened anyway.
He had no other choice, really. He’d already warned Dick to park beyond the line of trees fencing off the front yard from the road, already smuggled home a grapple gun to make his escape. The wound was closed, and Tim was more or less fine. There was really no reason not to go.
It was one night, after all. What was the worst that could happen?
