Chapter Text
The 90s were the time for pre-made, packaged junk food. Devil's food cake Snackwells, French Toast Crunch, Danimals Drinkable, Hershey's Cookies N Cream, Pop Tart Crunch, Reese's Puffs, Wingstop, Fruitopia, Taco Bell, KFC crispy strips and chicken pot pie, McChicken, McDouble, Shake & Bake, Hot Pockets and Bagel Bites.
But unlike most Gothamites of the 90s, Tim Drake was raised eating homemade food. He vividly remembers his mother saying something along the lines of: “junk food is just junk, not food. Trash. I'm not giving my son trash.”
When she was home, Janet Drake made her own bread, bought unpasteurized milk from a local farm in Metropolis and crafted it into butter, yogurt, fortified soy milk and cheese, and she paid someone to keep the bees she got the honey she drizzled on raspberries from. Janet Drake was not a chef in the professional sense, she was so far from being a chef that she was one of the shareholders of Drake Industries, but she was one in every way that mattered in Timothy Drake's life. She tended to him like a rich man's personal chef and masterfully, purposefully kneaded his stomach like she did her dough.
But when she wasn't home, he ate the junk food of the 90s. Deep-fried fries, chicken wings, fish sticks, pizza puffs, apple fritters—deep-fried everything. He ate all of that, and he did it all with white-and-orange cans of Fanta neatly lined up on his desk.
Tim remembers the 90s but it's true that he only reached teenagehood in the early 2000s and by then his meals were mostly a cataloged, industrious affair because of his newly found Robin career.
When she isn't anymore, only junk food follows him to his nineteenth birthday.
You can learn a lot of things by opening someone's fridge. Namely, how much value they put on themselves and their stomach. When Tim Drake opens his fridge, he learns something about himself, more or less, or you could say that he discovers himself. Discovers all the ways his life derails out of his control, his control slipping, his caring subdued, his love dying in the pan that boils oil to burn the ends of frozen fries.
The fridge hums faintly. The breathing of a dormant beast.
Frozen food is what he owes to his fake independence, after his father's death. Before that, he only ate either his mother's homemade meals or the junk from fast food chains. Frozen food is junk he can pretend has the warmth of handcrafted food when he puts it in the microwave and the exterior is hot and tender under his teeth, until he reaches the center, cold and unfeeling. He pulls the freezer open. There he has 2 boxes of pasta, 1 box of pizza and 2 boxes of chicken, alongside his direct Japan imported Wagyu beef—which is just meat from japanese cows—a bit of old Ossetra caviar, Iberian ham—which is just jamón, a type of cured pork produced in Spain and Portugal—and canned tuna. Right under the freezer, on the upper shelf, he has his cheeses: Camembert, Ricotta, Neufchatel, Colby Jack, Appenzeller, you name it. Appenzeller used to be his mother's favorite, something about her own, middle-class mother’s—Marianne Cox—fondue. It's now his favorite. For some reason or another. He doesn't like delving into it, lest he gives Freud something to yell Eureka in his grave.
Moving left, near the Neufchatel, he has one box of milk; and if he grabs it, he's pretty sure he'll notice it's no longer a box-of-milk, but just a box. On the second shelf he has some Matsutake Mushrooms next to the processed bacon and the processed sausages, two-week old pizza slices—Tim will throw the plate, for he won't be able to wash the grease stains—some half-bitten Cheese Curds from Conner, who bought them when he did a stop in Wisconsin, three tomatoes and one half onion from when he did marinara. On the bottom shelf he has the love of his life: 3 cases of grape Zesti and one case of Pepsi, which he likes more than he does Coca-Cola, and everything is better than Sprite, along with 2 cases of bottled water because Gotham's tap water is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. Or, better put, a nuclear disaster that has already happened. On the other hand, his right one, he has the fridge's door, where he has 6 tapped green smoothies, pristinely labeled, listing each one's contents and nutritional value, courtesy of Alfred and his sleek, aptly British handwriting. He has three Mountain Dew bottles and a single, organic strawberry jam jar, never opened.
Tim reaches for the jar, opens it rather expertly, if he can say that, and plans his first home meal—his, of his mother—in months. Alfred's food, as delicious and nutritious as it is, doesn't have that indescribable taste of longing, of weeping ache he hasn't tasted since Janet's death. Alfred's cooking, his double smoked salmon, chicken with marsala risotto, roast duck with blackberry-orange sauce, steak au Poivre with red wine—all of it oozes a life dedicated to cooking and serving. Janet served a simplicity, an artless heart poured in her raunchy Creamy Tuscan Chicken, something akin in its care to the milk from a mother to her baby. Simple yet transcending. If anything, Tim would say it was that tasty because almost everything else about Janet Drake’s love for him was tasteless, stale, two-day old popcorn from Gotham's cheapest theater near Crime Alley.
Not even Martha Kent's idyllically provincial food does it for him.
Conner had shared his Ma’s jambalaya with him once, steaming Louisiana, gumbo, red beans and rice with andouille sausage and added roux, and he tasted the oil and flour at the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven in a Kansas farm. Sky-blue walls.
God, Conner had said around a mouthful of New Orleans’ cultured piece. It was almost p*rnographic, Tim thought, his cheeks matching the shade of the tomatoes welling in the rice. This tastes criminally good. I bet Clark would kill for this, God be damned. Tim had seconds of the jambalaya when he started devouring Conner's mouth, licking and biting around as he pleased. He tasted everything spicy, smoky, and homespun as he unraveled the flavors resting on Conner's tongue. But it wasn't enough. It wasn't close to being Janet Drake's most flavorful act of love. Her most important one. The only one he remembers in the same vein of their shared heart, beating, singing of nonexistent Mother's Days spent in Spain and clear mornings together in Rome. All the roads lead to Rome. But none of them led Janet Drake home. To him. He doesn't think she even knew the way, least of all the address. She just said Gotham and then Bristol, and she figured it out from there, the luxury from Bristol blinding and more essential to her than Tim could ever be.
Anyway, dinner.
He feels like making Sloppy Joes. Maybe shrimp tacos, salty and sunny as if straight from Cancún. Or cabbage rolls, or orange chicken, the sauce dripping down his fingers and chin, messily tainting his skin with cornstarch and soy sauce. In the end, he decides on meatloaf. Not for any reason in particular other than it was a last-minute dish Janet made once for his birthday, when she had forgotten and didn't have time to cook anything more elaborate. He is still overjoyed when he thinks of that particular birthday. After his sixteenth, he hasn't felt like going through another one and he stays strong against the onslaught from his friends to celebrate one. He managed to avoid it this year. Birthday happiness shredded to pieces by an assault he never expected Bruce nor Alfred to deal to his psyche. Tim forces the memory down to nowhere, to the cold void in the back of his head, the pitch black where his eyes can never follow unless he wrings his eyeballs out of their sockets and places them backwards.
He thinks about this when he orders the ingredients for his meatloaf. He thinks about his father and his hate of slaughterhouses, of cows killed before they could wail their misery and tarnish their precious meat with it. He thinks about his father's smile when the delivery man hands him the plastic bags with an all too-familiar heartfelt grin. He tips the guy sumptuously. He relishes in the painfully grateful glint in his eyes and tips him even more. What is 550 dollars for a two-times trust fund baby?
Jack Drake was a workaholic, though he didn't seem the type. Because alcoholism happens to be genetic or, rather, people believe to see it happen in families tethered together by an “alcoholism gene”, Tim isn't surprised that this exact vice of Jack Drake is part of his inheritance. Jack worked nine hour shifts and worked out deals with an efficiently polished brain. He had one good watch; he didn't need more than that. Not a Rolex, like most rich men would presume; no, he had a Patek Phillippe, gold and brown, bone white under the glass, something like Amelia Earhart’s own—he loved that woman more than some men did their wives—ticking every second, ticking his time, a countdown only he could hear. He acted like every second was the last. Jack Drake loved to travel and every second he spent without it, in stillness, a constant in little Timmy's life, it was as if he lost precious seconds of his life. Maybe that's why he died so loosely close to when he stopped traveling.
While Janet Drake is always nagging behind his eyes, pulling his optic nerve with nimble, pianist fingers, searing her image behind his eyelids, Jack Drake is ephemeral and drifting away from his memories. It's, at the end of the day, a mercy. Or rather, an unconscious, desperate effort to keep his brain from rotting in misery.
Killing someone by stabbing is more difficult than most would think. Stabbing by throwing the weapon is as difficult as killing methods come. It's unrecommended and unprofessional. If you want the intimacy of death by the blade, for Heaven's sake—or Hell's, killer's pick—don’t even think of throwing it. It's cheesy, it's cheap and most likely, it won't work. Stabbing is already difficult as it is. You have thousands of years of human evolution standing between your knife and your victim's heart: collarbones, ribcage and sternum; in the back, the shoulder blades and more ribs. It's as they jokingly say: the way to a man's heart is through his stomach; past the liver, or through it, and go up right. Jack dies stabbed. Halfway impalement. By a boomerang, nonetheless. Right through the chest, between the ribs. It wasn't the luck of the killer. It was premeditated, calculated, a deliberate act of violence.
He was still alive when Tim made it.
Eyes wide open, about to pop like cracked bird eggs, gooey and bloody—but they weren't looking at him. They were scared, unfocused, consumed by pain and death ticking so close, so loud. Even Tim could hear it. It was all he could hear then. The ticking of the watch screeched and bit his eardrums off. His dad was gone before Tim started screaming himself, yelling, ripping his lungs apart to drown the tick-tack of the time running out. Then, the silence. When Jack was completely, absolutely gone—it was like water drying under the sun, slow, calm; it was there and then it wasn't, faded light in the jaws of the night. He tried to take the boomerang out but it was so sharp it cut his hands. Yet Tim squeezed and wrenched it to no avail, leaving his hands bloodied and his palms unrecognizable. He has the scars to this day as he has the everlasting memory of Jack's fingers trying to dig the linoleum, nails split open in a last ditch effort to hang on to something. Anything. Life. And like all of Captain Boomerang’s work, it was messy. A spiderweb of blood spreading underneath the dead body, a bouquet of red flowers curling around the floor like they wanted to burrow inside, blooming forever, flowing infinitely. A school-science-fair volcano of blood; spurting fat drops and lines thickly inked into the floor.
When Tim saw him for the second to last time, Jack’s face, so easy to love, to anger, to laughter, to pain, was stripped, drained of blood, of life, of everything, embalmed with chemicals. Everything Jack Drake was didn't exist anymore. Lifeless body clogged with formaldehyde. His dad's death record is in the depths of his most encrypted files, in his most protected computer, the one that has never seen the light of the day. Jack didn't die from the boomerang piercing his heart—all it did was break some ribs, but the vital parts of his chest were left mostly unscathed. The cause of death was internal bleeding resulting in exsanguination. Like an animal from a slaughterhouse; pelts, hides and heads removed, carcasses carved and eviscerated. Nothing left like nothing existed in the first place. But it did. It did. And it hurt that it was extinguished, the loss heavy and asphyxiating between his own ribs, aching and longing alongside the absence of his mom's food. It's painful. To want what is lost. For a child to watch their father broken and shattered and all that remains is the living and their over consumed grief.
Grief, Tim meditates, is the same as the overconsumption of a moist, never-ending devil's food cake, million layers of chocolate wasted in your mouth until your veins are spoiled and syrupy, and the blood in them is so chocolatey-sticky your heart slows down because it can't go on any longer. He has come to know Hitchco*ck used Hershey's chocolate syrup to emulate blood in Psycho. It's just like that, too. Swimming in indecently thick chocolate, head dizzy, muddled, as your breathing shallows and there's not enough oxygen in your brain to feel your limbs flapping uselessly anymore. 90’s junk food overconsumption and Hershey’s artificiality emulate grief, he punctuated once to Conner, Cassie and Bart when he was high with their communal joy and the adrenaline melting back into slumber after a long battle. They had hugged him hard enough to break him but they didn't. They held him together. He couldn't be whole without them.
He is stirring his heart's contents; two large egg's yolk and white with milk when he gets the call.
For a second, his chest lightens with unnamed affection when he is illusioned with the idea of Kon-El calling him. Tim hurriedly adds the Knox unflavored gelatin to go pick up his phone and be utterly disappointed at the caller: Garrulus glandarius. Of-f*cking-course. Garrulus glandarius because, after all, jay birds eat robin babies. Jason is a red jay but equally as deadly as a blue one. Tim, who doesn't fear his death and definitely not by Jason's hand, still has pain pangs in his jaw where it dislocated from one of Jason's most viciously petty punches, he has a scar in his throat where Jason drew a bloody smile open, it itches sometimes.
“What is it?” Tim asks, listless, yet he can feel his skin prickling weirdly. “What does Dante want that he calls for me, of all poor souls to torment.”
“Dante’s Divine Comedy is but a Philosophy student’s final thesis on, what,” Jason drawls, voice cold and ridden with Crime Alley accent, seasoned with some New York and Spanish, the ‘th’ becoming ‘d’. “Allegory of the theologians? W-holly truth and not truth from metaphors. I am not that of a Dante-guy, anyway. I'm more into the whole Lucifer thing, allegedly, of course.”
A long stretch of silence. It's not a pause. It's a stretch because both of them let it linger, lengthening it as if wanting it to snap, their contempt filling the air.
“I meant Dante from Devil May Cry, you pretentious f*cker.”
“Don’t be difficult, Boy Wonder. Don't get your SB panties twisted.” Tim doesn't flush, even though it's true. Joke gift exchange with Young Justice. It's not quite a joke that he uses them on the regular. “And you being an uncultured little Bristol brat doesn't say sh*t about how pretentious I might or might not be.”
“I think that you enjoying the Aeneid says something.” Tim’s jaw clicks when he yawns. “What do you want, Jason? I'm busy and been too-alone for far too-long with my thoughts to have my wits on me right now. Spell it, O Great English Teacher.”
He has the oven preheated to 350° and he takes off the fire the onions, celery, garlic and thyme cooked crunchy tender with sunny-yellow butter. He adds mustard, soy sauce, tomato paste and Worcestershire, and allows it to cool while he whisks ketchup with brown sugar in another bowl.
“I’ve received word that Cobblepot’s been making deals in-and-out of Metropolis with—”
“Get Clark on speed dial, then,” he says, gleefully aware it’s not even a remote possibility. “Leave me alone.”
“—your favorite billionaire, Lex Luthor.”
Hook, line and sinker.
Like secrets go down the grapevine, common cold infects with just a misplaced sneeze and yucca moths depend on yucca plants—Tim’s hatred of Lex Luthor is but a consequence of his life coexisting with Conner Kent’s. He has known Conner Kent since before they met. His memories before him painted, marked by a love that sprouts blossoms from the curve of his fingertips to the recollection of his childhood he has all but lived again when he tells Conner about it. He is Timothy Drake because he has met and loved Conner Kent. It is fecund and fungal, this love. Their entangled hate, too. Tim knows by heart, by the voice that lulls him to peace, facts about cattle farming; and Conner knows because of him, not because of CADMUS’ discriminatively taught knowledge, about DNA transcription and DNA identification. It's the same thing, his animosity towards Lex. Tim could think that he hates the guy more than Clark if he was a less sensible person.
“They say that a book isn't worth it if it needs more than one chapter to get you hooked,” Jason continues to rant in his ear. Tim can practically smell the ozone-like smugness from him, see the predatory smile, the match and gasoline twinkling in his eyes with the fire of his self-righteous revenge under the stripped to red Oni mask. “I would say the same if it wasn't because I found the Iliad as tedious as Greek texts come at the beginning. But from a marketing standpoint, I think I'll stick to it. See ya at 2200, Park Row, Tiny Tim.”
Tim can't even say anything before the line goes beep.
It's been a while since he's had to go back to Conner's teachings, to imagining the tendons and ligaments of his hands flexing, shifting as they unknot a tension in his neck, in his shoulders, going down his spine, fluttering fingers pressing down sore points, chronically pained spots in his back. Relax, Rob, geez. You are like an old man, dude. All nerves and sensitivity… here, see, and he pressed his semispinalis capitis to a batter; specifically, the wheat batter Janet made for fried shrimps.
It's not something he has to normally appeal to. However, it gets him levelheaded enough for the time being.
Breath for me, Rob. Just like that.
Tim sighs deeply, steeled shoulders dropping into soft slopes. He rubs his eyes with his forearm. He continues cooking.
Janet was a fan of crackers, but she used panko in that one birthday meatloaf. So he uses panko, beef, pork and onion for the mixture, fingers scooping the mix, blending all the ingredients into an amorphous mass until the meat sticks to his skin. There's crescents from the meatloaf’s foundation under his nails even after he washes his hands two times. He spoons the meaty foundation into the loaf pan, spreads the ketchup mix over it until it shines like Janet Drake’s jewels beneath the Grand Lotus 6 Chandelier’s light, adds more of the meat foundation on top of the sauce, then more sauce, and sets it in the oven to bake until sun-kissed brown. He makes a brilliant creamed spinach with Pecorino Romano cheese in the meantime. Almost an hour later, Tim sits alone in his penthouse’s open concept living room, eating the meatloaf with crystalline glazed carrots and roasted broccoli.
It tastes phony. It tastes the way it should taste, but not how he wants it. He can feel the buttery note of the onions and garlic tingling on his tongue, the tang of Worcestershire, the kick of the soy sauce, the sweetness of the ketchup with just an aftermath of brown sugar. The meat is supple under his teeth, slightly peppery, like stars popping here and there in the lonely universe of his meatloaf. It's his. Not Janet's. But it leaves a bitter aftertaste that's all hers.
It's 1927 when he finishes eating. He still has two hours and a half before going to meet Jason.
And because Tim is nothing if not conscripted into paranoia, he researches. There was a time when Tim told Young Justice he would never make contingency plans for them. Now, the plans are buried in shame and 10 different asymmetric encryption methods, if only for his peace of mind. The Tim he is today is not the Tim who hadn't suffered Bruce's idea of a birthday gift nor that one year out in the wild. There's a sorrow to becoming someone different, someone your past self would have despised, someone who you wouldn't recognize in the mirror if it wasn't because you see that face everyday. It's a melancholy for the past. An abjection of the self, of the spirit. The abject body. His abject body, littered with scars he doesn't bother in remembering where he got from, broken and honed, reshaped, not of himself anymore. He knows this is what Jason feels like. The subjectivity of perception, the perception of the object, un-home-like. There is no self to die, said art historian Bernard Berenson. From Franz Kafka to David Croneberg, through two different mediums to tell the same story, the abject metamorphosis is defined by change. It's change in its most horrid form, when corruption becomes synonym of metamorphosis. It's not a larva to butterfly; but a human to an unrecognizable insect.
Still, he does what he has been coerced into doing. Is what he was made to become.
Jason happens to have been telling the truth. Jason is a lot of things but he is rarely a liar. He can be, and he is a damn good one when he wants, raised by Bruce after all, but it's an intentional choice he makes to be honest. Jason's honesty is as deliberate as a violent murder. And it's not in the slightest, gentle or sincere. Honesty can be insincere. Or, at least, Jason's is. It's something Tim has to applaud him for—only Jason Todd can make the truth sound hypocritical and counterfeit.
Getting back on track, Cobblepot has indeed been making amenities with Lex Luthor. Tim is able to track at least two calls between two burner phones. He pulls up the CDRs in one screen while he starts hacking Cobblepot’s network; he still has a well-hidden backdoor from last time so it takes him less than 10 minutes. The Penguin is an old man and he doesn't adapt fast to the current age of technology. It's too easy to hack for Tim. He can't even imagine how easily Babs would slip past the packet filtering firewall by manipulating the packet headers. He can clearly imagine her, adroitly dancing beyond the defense lines, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee over an electronic bass in the back, chugging her third Turkish coffee of the night. Maybe an Irish coffee. He himself is particular to energy drinks. Mountain Dew over Red Bull, Red Bull over Monster.
Unluckily for him, Cobblepot has kept himself tight-lipped about whatever he's been discussing with Lex. He doesn't think Jason knows exactly what the thing is about, which means that if Tim manages to dig even deeper into Cobblepot’s weak electronic network—in comparison to his personal network—he'll have the upper hand in whatever game Jason has concocted this time. Jason might be a crime lord, the God in his Crime Alley's playground, but Tim is an atheist and a man of actions, not of the words that Jason so much likes to flaunt around, to tease, to shoot in mock bullets, deadlier than any real ones. Tim knows Jason is methodical and extreme to the point, jagged teeth, heart of a harder wrought iron than his kitchen’s chandelier. Tim also knows that Jason burns fast and brutally. If railed up, he'll burn his heart up to 1,510 degrees Celsius, melting it, gushing toxic fumes that smell of a Robin's dead body.
Tim doesn't need to look at the keyboard to write. Not a single mistake on the screen.
He finds what he needs when the clock ticks 2011 time: an unassuming, like a zero to the left, file concealed using steganography. Even then, it's the crumbs of the cake for anyone else, but him.
… shipment AA-132145 on water. Four days. Written, updated and archived 07212013. It's July 23rd, which means this ghost ship is supposed to arrive in Metropolis two days from now.
Tim leans back in his chair, mind reeling. There's no time to stop the shipment on its course when it's already moving. He thinks of telling Bruce or Dick but he immediately throws the idea out of the window. Tim is not about to burn bridges with his maniacal, murdered and murderous adopted brother by telling Bruce or Dick. He is aware Jason only told him because he is the least likely to try and rule over his mission. Spilling the burnt beans would do more harm than good. He also knows Clark won't be so kind as to allow Red Hood in his city or to not tell Batman. Maybe if he was Dick, but he isn't. Helena has gone under the radar in an undercover affair recently, so she's out of limits. He is 90% sure Babs will help him but he doesn't want to ask her just yet; they didn't part ways on the best of terms when Bruce was lost in the time stream. Bart's too flighty and fiery in his prejudice against Jason to get him on board; Cassie would be spitting acrimony all the way but she would reign over her temper, sadly she is in Themyscira with Wonder Woman for training. He could deal with this alone and he has no doubt it would work. But he doesn't feel like caring after Jason, alone. The obvious answer to the conundrum is Conner. Conner might be more short tempered and more hateful towards Jason than Bart, but he can restrain himself from turning Jason in Carpaccio as long as Tim is there to mediate. Besides, Conner is always looking for an excuse to sour Lex's day, or knock him dead cold, normally it's both. Not that Conner needs any excuse, in Tim's humble opinion.
He pulls out his phone, unlocks it one, two, three times and his finger hovers over Conner's encrypted contact.
YOU, sent 20:18
Howdy
You busy????
Kon
Answer me
LOVERBOY, received 20:19
hiya
kill meeeee, i'll never say that again
timmy
tim boy
what's up?
YOU, sent 20:19
Just screenshotted that for later
Business reasons.
YOU, sent 20:20
Lappet faced vulture on it again
With Gotham's penguin
Undisclosed motive
LOVERBOY, received 20:22
[sarcastically surprised Kirk meme]
for real?
have you told your nest family?
is this a solo us kinda thing?
YOU, sent 20:23
Kinda kinda solo us thing
Us and robin baby eater
Don't get mad, Kon-El. At least, not so mad to pop a vessel.
LOVERBOY, received 20:23
Jason!!!!!!????-??;+!?;!
you gotta be kidding me, Rob. you have to be. there's no way you just said that
There it goes their name codes.
YOU, sent 20:24
I'm not kidding, Kon.
Again, try not to get that mad.
It's just a business thing
LOVERBOY, received 20:24
business thing with the guy who dressed with a second hand store robin suit, knocked me, Cassie and Bart out all just to beat you off like a a f*cking loser wonder Bitch Bot
boy*
no offense to you, Wonder Boy
pardon my french, Tim
but what the f*ck
YOU, sent 20:25
You are forgiven, Mister El
I'm serious, Kon. I'm asking you for help because I know all you just said.
But I can't tell anyone else.
Trust me.
LOVERBOY, received 20:26
I trust you, Rob. Always. You know that
but im not letting that guy be near you alone again
YOU, sent 20:26
Tough luck, my friend
You'll have to say yes to working with him if that's what you want
LOVERBOY, received 20:26
thats rough buddy
don't call me friend when we have f*cked
(ー_ー゛)
LOVERBOY, received 20:27
sorry
bad timing for marital problems
are you sure???
like, 1000099000% sure?
YOU, sent 20:27
Yes.
I'm meeting with him tonight.
┬──┬ ¯\_(ツ)
LOVERBOY, received 20:27
tonighttt!!!2?(5(#)$!?$
are you dumb or insane???(??!?????
that's right, it's both
Sorry again.
I trust you.
(not him)
Remember that.
YOU, sent 20:29
That's gauche
I know. I love you.
LOVERBOY, received 20:29
I know.
I do love myself too
YOU, sent 20:29
(눈‸눈)
Meet me tomorrow, 6 in the morning
My apartment
Bring food
LOVERBOY, received 20:30
[cat meme: GOODBYE,
DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING I WOULDN'T TOUCH]
By 2100, Tim has a plan. For both Jason and the Cobblepot-Luthor association.
He rummages through his apartment. His Nest. It's not so much a safehouse, like Jason's scattered ones, but it's safe. For him. Like Titans Tower before it was violated, broken in, as many things that were Tim’s have suffered. Only seven people have their biometrics coded into the security: Bruce, Dick, Conner, Bart, Cassie, Cassandra and Stephanie. He is certain Babs doesn't need to have hers coded to access his Nest if needed. As he's certain she won't intrude unless it's for something more important than respecting the end of her promise. Babs’ always took her promises seriously.
Tim remembers the exact place where he leaves everything. His latest Red Robin suit, his woodwork box of weak spices, Conner's extra pair of round sunglasses, the photos of a past life with Steph, a gift he hasn't had the chance to give Cass. But he takes joy in seeing each thing displayed before him, clear-cut shapes and decisive physicality he can run his fingers on. It's grounding. Like a parent watching their baby sleep just to make sure he is there. It's a nervous habit. He can't just walk around in circles. That makes him feel like a madman, spiking his anxiety, and what he needs is to feel the opposite of mad. So he rummages when he needs to remember himself.
When he ends rummaging at 2109, he props a backpack over his shoulder, unfolds the sleeves of his thermal jacket, and succinctly grabs a can of Bush’s Original Baked Beans lying around his cupboard. He needs Jason to be agreeable but also off his game, so the can of baked beans is carefully saved in his backpack and insults are brewed in his head. It will go either awfully wrong or he will get a pass to do as he pleases. He is going as Tim, not as Red Robin, for extra flare. Jack and Janet embedded in his brain to go big or go home. It has not failed him yet. One of the few things he gets from his parents that hasn't.
It's still early so he walks. He wanders, Gotham's chilly night air hitting his face. Tim has no intention of rushing or searching. In Jason's game, he is the hunter. In Tim's, the hunter never reveals himself. Wolf in sheep's clothing.
His phone buzzes vaguely but constantly in his pocket. He doesn't open it, but he guesses it's from his group chat with Cass, Steph and Duke. Steph must have sent something, probably a complaint on, well, anything, and either Duke or Cass will be fueling her distaste. He'll open the chat when the meeting ends, and he'll see he was right. But for the time being, he just walks, his soft-soled shoes tapping quietly on the cracked, old asphalt of Gotham's dim streets. And because he isn't about to be robbed, he does what his does best and fuses with the shadows around corners, under tall buildings with their gothic architecture and decrepit stone rotten by rains and filth, across alleyways and flickering lanterns. He spots three eager robbers, not attentive enough to see him disappear into the next, even less illuminated street. It's okay. He has training they don't.
Two of Bruce's most important lessons are these: how to fall and how to run. They both serve the same purpose of living at all costs. Tim can't tell how much Bruce emphasized these lessons to his predecessors, but they have served him well, however little he has used them like Bruce wanted. He almost never runs with the intention of getting away from trouble, it's more often than not, for the opposite. He has a habit for sprinting to burning buildings, falling skyscrapers, apocalyptic disasters rumbling at his feet. It's why he was in Young Justice. It's why he even got into the hero business. This is no different, even if he is just walking through Crime Alley's low, closely pressed roofs. The people from this side of Gotham are a tight knitted lot, every single person from the East End sharing the same history, the same grief, each one the flapping of a butterfly's wings for another. Canned sardines. Messily interconnected. A Habsburg’s family tree in the visceral, dreadful ties between them, even if they weren't blood ones in the congenital sense. The blood of the covenant is thicker than water, they proclaimed to get the youth to go to war. In a way, he understands. Young Justice, his Young Justice, is the same and there's no future where it won't stay like that. He can't imagine it. He doesn't want to imagine it. He'll knot his intestines with theirs if it means staying with them forever.
He gets to one of the taller roofs around, places his backpack down and waits. There's no doubt in his mind that Jason will find him.
The silence on that roof reminds him of his eternally young, immutable childhood home. A blank space that could never be filled just with the voices, lives, of a child and his nanny. That house that reminds him of Wayne Manor. A house of ghosts. Haunted. A crime scene in the eeriness of dead eyes, painted eyes on the walls. Bruce has made a mausoleum of his own tragedy. He is a masoch*st, alright.
And as if thinking of Bruce Wayne is an invocation ritual for Jason Todd, the late one appears not a heartbeat later in all his grotesquely liminal, alive body.
Tim already wants to gouge his eyes out and eat them.
The internet is a shapeless, faceless monster, a gutted thing that swallows everything unholy and wretched. This is, of course, to say he has read enough stories on the best human cuts a cannibal can serve to confidently affirm: “don’t eat the eyeballs, they are bitter”.
That's how much he really doesn't want to be there.
“Fancy seeing you here, kid,” Jason says, eyeless and mouthless. It reminds Tim of AM. “What a beautiful night.”
Jason talks like he doesn't mean anything he says. Paradoxically or hypocritically, he takes everything to heart.
“This is a school night,” he says lightly, intoning the words to make sure there's no underlying Bristol accent. “There’s nothing beautiful about a school night. But then again, did you even finish school?”
“Pot calling the kettle black,” Jason replies with ease. “Nepotism baby and high-school dropout—tale as old as time.”
“So you've watched Beauty and the Beast. I thought your childhood was devoid of any happiness. The woe poor me schtick getting old? Are you finally growing up? Or does crime lord Red Hood watch Disney classics in his spare time?”
With the Red Hood mask on, Jason has no mouth, yet Tim can hear him grinding his teeth. Figuratively speaking. See? He knows his literature, too.
Jason shifts in his place.
Tim eyes the two guns in their holsters, resting on either side of Jason's hipline. Straining his eyes to see in the dark without his Robin mask, he can make out another gun at his thigh, and he's pretty sure there's two blades inside his combat boots. He imagines it would hurt to have one of them slice his throat for a second time.
Coming here, defenseless and exposed, is but an offering. A meticulously extended olive branch. No. A charity. Tim has always been interested in them; for big companies, they're cheap but efficient marketing tools, peacekeepers, face-keepers. They work and they work well. People eat them up, starving, salivating. The shareholders can have their publicity, Tim will run with it for as long as it allows to help those who actually need the money.
Jason can have his guns and the certainty they will piece his flesh, Tim has something else for himself in mind, something tastier than violence on a silver platter.
“I’m just as surprised that you don't have the Big Bad Bat behind you right now. I thought you didn't stray too far away from the leash?”
Tim bites his tongue.
The nerve, the sting tastes of lemon.
“Still caught in your old Robin days, I see,” Tim says carefully. “You are the same as you came to the world—the second time, that is. Trailing after Bruce like a dog after his own tail. He isn't even here.”
Jason doesn't crack as visibly this time, but he tenses. Tim has only seen it happen when Bruce or Dick are nearby, and he savors the saltiness of indulging in such pettiness.
Even if everything else fails, Tim can always rely on his wit and his mind.
“This is, of course, not a call for banter between brothers,” Tim continues just as Jason did during the phone call. “If I remember correctly—this is a professional meeting that you orchestrated. About the package going to Metropolis on one of the Penguin's many ships. Didn't you know?”
Jason positively fumes.
