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Batman sits with his back turned. The screens of the Batcomputer cast flickering red light, framing his head like a halo. It makes the man appear larger than life. Dick hates how part of him still thinks of B as a force of nature, regardless how painfully obvious it has become over the years that he’s simply human.
A human who needs to eat and sleep.
The empty coffee cups littering every horizontal surface of the desk show B has been doing neither. Alfreds quiet intervention is falling on deaf ears: The cups should have been cleared by now. Dick sighs: Loud intervention it is. His jaw is throbbing. He will have to ask the butler to check it out later.
The cowl in his hand is heavy.
Dick wishes, for a moment, he had it in him to tell a grieving father to stop breaking so visibly; to throw that cursed piece of plastic at Bruces feet and leave.
He hasn’t. So, he doesn’t.
“You should sleep.”, Dick says instead.
B glances up, hums, before turning back to the computer, eyes darting between 4 screens and 10 open and moving taps.
His eyebags are darker than any humans should be.
Please, Dick thinks, don’t let this be a repeat of Jays death. Timmy isn’t here to drag you out of this.
It’s an ugly though. Dick has been having it a lot lately.
The man’s frame remains broad, but after days of neglect his body is starting to show its limits: His slicked back gala hair has become greasy, his skin gaunt, eyes sunken and hollow. B’s iron will is the only thing keeping it upright.
Dick blinks. Once. Twice.
Before him sits another silhouette with smaller, thinner shoulders. Just as driven. Just as self-neglecting.
“Tim, do you know why B scheduled you for patrol? You shouldn’t even walk without crutches”, Dick had asked, less than a month after Hoods attack. “Because I asked him to”, Tim answered, “Gotham’s becoming restless. Robin needs to be seen.” The boy’s neck was still wrapped in bandages. It was the same answer he always gave; After his first near-death experience, after inhaling so much fear gas they had to lock him in the isolation cell for 24 hours, after his father’s death. By the time Dami cut Tims grapple line, no one said a word when B sent the limping teen back on patrol with Robin two weeks later.
It needed to be done, so Tim would do it. Same as B. Another Bristol kid making it too easy for the world to forget that, beneath everything, they’re a person not a force of nature.
Dick puts down the cowl, swallows down guilt and regret, and does for B what he should have done for Tim: “Thought so. Well, I’m going to visit Timmys favorite rooftop. You can join if you want to.”
“Tim has a favorite rooftop?”, B asks.
“He had one at least. I’m going to grab my suit real quick, meet me at the exit in 5.”
“Nightwing, this is important information you failed to disclose.”
“I’ve already checked it out B, it’s clean.”
Unhappy silence follows.
“But”, Dick continues, “grab your suit and come see for yourself.”
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Red Robins favorite rooftop is unassuming; an old crumbling block nestled in between all the others, too low for a good view, too high to reach the streets quickly. In another city it might've been called an eyesore, here, it’s simply embraced by the glass, steel and stone surrounding it. Gotham has a way of claiming even her ugliest parts.
Around them the skyscrapers reach for the stars. It’s a vain hope: the stars have not been seen in Gotham long before Bruce was born, and they will not be seen long after he and his are 6 feet under. Fog and smog cling to his city the same way misery does.
His city, Batman thinks, and wonders when he gave up calling it his home.
He shakes his head and scans the rooftop for a clue in the half-melted snow one last time.
Landing on melted snow takes practice. Dick slid of a rooftop into the arms of trigger-happy black mask goons the first time he tried. As did Jason. By the time Tim fell and scraped half his side bloody, he had given up trying to ground the birds.
“There’s nothing here”, Batman says and readies his grapple gun. No cameras, no people.
“Stay”, Dick says, “I want us to talk.”
“Talking won’t find Red Robin.”
“Sitting in the cave won’t either. You’ve seen the files. He’s been planning this for almost as long as you’ve been back. We won’t find him, not if he doesn’t want us to.”
“I’m not giving up on him.”
Dick looks up. There’s something in his eyes Batman can’t quite parse.
“Use your words, Nightwing.”
“You’re right, you don’t. Not once it’s already too late”
“You blame me”, Batman states.
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know…”, Dick says, “B you need to stop, this is not healthy.”
If Batman had it in him to laugh he would. He doesn’t, so he aims his grapple.
“We should've done this years ago. If we did, maybe things would've turned out differently. Maybe Tim would still be here.”
Batman’s grapple drops.
Dick’s right.
He sometimes wishes he wasn’t.
Dick plops down on a gargoyle’s head, feet coming to rest in tiny grooves. The stone must’ve been worn down over years for them to form.
Batman looks up. The skyscrapers press in to either side, swallowing you whole. It seems fitting for Tims favorite place: The boy had felt Gotham’s hunger too. He understood.
At least Batman thought he did. He was wrong: Tim's gone. Another miscalculation. Another lost son.
“He abandoned us”, Batman says.
“We failed him”, Dick replies.
“Batman needs Robin”, a scrawny teenager says, pulling him and Dick out of the rubble. He looks too much like Jason and nothing like him at all. He repeats the words so many times they lose all meaning. He says them one last time in an alley, checking a petty criminal’s pulse and Batman knows Tim is right.
When he comes back from Lady Shiva, the big puppy eyes adoring their every move are gone. He flinches more often now. But he can complete Dicks former training routs, so Batman nods to himself and ignores that Tim no longer changes in front of him.
Half a year in Tim almost dies for the first time. Bruce mutters Jason’s name whilst cradling him. Tim does not leave.
“I know”, Batman says, “I know… But that never seemed to matter before.”
“Maybe he’s the only one of us with some sense.” There’s no malice in his words. It hurts even more for it.
“He always seemed fine.”
“He did. But we never checked, did we?”
“He was robin. I adopted him. If he didn’t feel like part of this family, he should have told me instead of deserting.”
Dick’s expression darkens for a split-second, before the anger rolls off him and is replaced by a sad smile: “We’re either your soldiers or your sons. You can’t have it both ways.”
“I did with you”, Batman says. It sounds childish even to his own ears.
“Not really. I never was you son, was I? Your partner? Sure. Your ward? Only for the press, and even that tie's long gone. Timmy slept in Drake Manor after patrol and faked your signature on every school document after. Jay might’ve been different, but he died and you know yourself what’s written on his plaque. On bad days, he can barely stomach talking to us. And I don’t recall the last time you went to one of Damis parent-teacher conferences. … We’re soldiers and brothers long before we’ll ever be sons.”
Batman wants to say your wrong. But Dick always could sense his lies, so he says nothing at all.
“After Jay, I swore I’d always be there for my little brothers. With candles and all. Even if it was them against the world, I’d have their back. And I did. For a while. And then Dami came and you were gone and Tim wouldn’t listen to me, and I- I chose Dami. He tried to kill Tim and I chose Dami. I didn’t even ask before taking Robin.”
“It was the practical decision.”
“No, it wasn’t. Dami was just hurting louder.”
The gargoyles stair down at them in silent judgment. Batman tries to think of them and not patrol logs.
“I’m not patrolling with Jason or Damian alone”, Tim said, voice measured in a way it only was when talking to his parents. Batman nodded and planned around the limitation for months. At least he tried to. Exception had become the norm by the time Batman gave up went back to normal rotation. Tim didn’t ask a second time.
“I was soo angry when you took Robin”, Dick says, “What gave you the right? Robin was mine; it was all I had left! And, then I turned and did the same to Tim.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You did. I told you as much. Tim did too”, he stares out into the smog, “maybe the cowl really is cursed.”
“Maybe”
“Ah, no! You’re supposed to say: “Nightwing, don’t say such idiotic things. Magic has nothing to do with my emotional constipation.””
“Nighwing.”
“What? Can’t handle a bit of truth here and there?”, Dick flashes a grin.
Bruce sighs.
“But seriously, if you hate the cowl too, why wear it at all?”
Batman does not reply.
Dick waits.
“Why do you?”, Batman asks.
Dick shrugs: “Because of you”, gestures to the next best skyscraper, “because of them.”
“There’s your answer. It needs to be done, so I do it. My wants are inconsequential”
“Timmy always said the same thing.”
“Yet he left because he wanted to.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“He abandoned the mission.”
“He left because we made him feel like an outsider, whose presence would hurt you more than his absence. Wake up B, this is on you as well! If he’d stayed, you would have ground the kid down to dust.”
“He should have borne it like the rest of us.”
Dick’s eyes widen in sudden realization: “You’re jealous!”
Am I? “Are we done here?”
“You could leave too, you know.”
“I thought so as well, a long time ago. The mistake cost a woman her life.” Batman doesn’t know why he's talking about her now, he hasn’t said her name out loud in years. “Gotham takes what she wants, regardless of if I offer it up or not. I was naive to assume Tim would be different. It never is.”
The Robin found Batman in an ally, blood pooling beneath his unconscious body. It’s as far as he managed to drag himself after confirming the Jokers arrest. Later Tim will say he is grateful Batman nearly died that night: The boy only discovered the festering gunshot wound while stripping the armor for CPR. It had turned sceptic by then. Tim never asked why he left it untreated, they both knew the answer. 43 days later the Joker was on the streets again.
“I’m sorry I ignored your pain”, Dick says.
Batman doesn't have it in him to look at his son.
“I’m sorry for everything this city has taken from you. Gotham isn't just your responsibility, as much as you believe otherwise: She deserves your care, not your soul. It’s never too late to break old circles.”
“It is. I’ve sacrificed whatever normal future I might’ve had- together with all of yours” and an eternity later, “I’m sorry.”
Dick looks like a deer in headlights.
Something in Bruce breaks at the sight.
Behind them, the first sunbeams tinge the smog purple. It’s the same shade as the bruise on Dick’s jaw.
“Oh”, he eventually says, “I gave up on that apology a long time ago.”
Bruce wants to embrace him and never let go. He doesn’t. His sons flinch whenever he touches them outside of training. For that too, he's to blame.
“Tim deserves to hear that apology too. They all do. I thought we could write a message and leave it in his system or the bats; in case he ever goes thru them again. Encrypt it if you must”, he says before Batman can interject. “Me, Jay and Dami are gonna write apologies as well. There are a lot of things he deserved to hear face to face, but this can be a start.
And B, your search ends today: Tim chose to leave and we will respect it. We owe him that much at least.”
“Okay” Batman says. And much later: “I miss him.”
“Me too… So much.”
The sunrise has turned red and orange. Light beams break thru the smog and transform Gotham’s misery into something more mundane.
“Maybe this is Tims way of breaking the cycle”, Dick says, “Maybe he finds out there what we couldn’t give him here.”