Chapter Text
The boy standing across the desk from him watches him with steady blue eyes, the glint in them strange and altogether incongruent with his otherwise mild demeanor. Bruce isn’t sure what it is, if it’s the way the light shining off them seems to gleam just a little brighter than usual, or the uncommonly intelligent way they scanned the study as he walked in—hovering a half-second longer over the grandfather clock to his left—but he doesn’t trust him.
“You look familiar,” Bruce says, setting the folder back on the desk between them. “You’re a Drake, right?”
“Tim,” says Tim, and nods. “I’ve been going to galas for a couple years now, that’s probably how you know me.”
That’s not it, but Bruce can’t place where exactly he’s seen his face.
“You can’t seriously expect me to agree to this,” he says, intent on operating as though he has any leverage on the incredibly small chance Tim hasn’t realised he’s got every last metaphorical card.
“Sorry,” Tim says, looking, despite the impressive amount of blackmail on the desk between them, actually decently sorry. His feet shuffle a little, then still. “But you can’t seriously believe you have a choice.”
Which is unfortunately how Bruce thought he’d respond.
Still, they’re at a bit of an impasse, because Tim wants badly to supervise him as Robin, and Bruce wants badly for the name Robin to fade into oblivion forever.
Just like—
“It’s not safe,” Tim is saying. “For you or for Gotham.”
He’s very put together, for a boy who can’t be older than twelve. Almost professional looking, a descriptor which Bruce usually wouldn’t find himself using for a child but has almost no choice but to employ when faced with such an outfit. The lines of his shirt are crisp enough that Bruce wonders if he’s breathed since he put it on. He pulled the folder out of a briefcase, for Christ’s sake.
It’s odd, though. He claims to have walked here, but there doesn’t seem to be so much as a speck of dirt on his shoes.
“I would have asked Dick, but I haven’t been able to contact him in Blüdhaven,” Tim says, with an apologetic air. He knows where Dick lives then. He would, of course, since he knows so much more than that about Bruce himself, but the easy mention is uncomfortable.
He keeps talking, an almost nervous chatter. Bruce should probably say something, but he wants to see if he’ll reveal anything else, so he just stands there on the other side of the desk. Tim mentions Robin again, and he frowns to ease what feels less like a twinge and more like someone has stuck their hand into his chest, wrapped their fingers around his heart, and squeezed.
Tim’s hands are easy at his sides, his weight evenly balanced between his feet, but it’s less of a power stance and more like he’s bracing for something—odd, since as they’re both aware, this is only a pretense of negotiation. On a different boy, the look in those eyes and the set of that chin might have been reason for concern.
This is not that boy, Bruce thinks, and stays silent.
“—constantly getting injured, passing out in alleyways,” Tim continues, now visibly agitated, his hands gesturing haltingly in a manner that might be endearing in another context.
That’s…true, Bruce admits, at the same time as he places just where, exactly, he remembers Tim from. This is the stranger who stuffed him into the Batmobile the other night. He’d tried so long to trace who it could have been, but the nearest camera hadn’t detected so much a flicker coming out of the alley after his own departure.
Now, the shadowy figure at the back of his mind crystalizes, gains Tim’s pale face and angular features.
What was a Drake doing in Downtown Gotham that late at night? Just how long has Tim been following him?
No wonder the stranger knew what address to type in. It’s the house next to his. They have the same zipcode.
“Look, son,” he says, tacking the last bit on in a halfhearted attempt to not be a complete asshole to what is, despite the situation, still a kid. His brain processes the word a second later, and regrets it instantly. From the stiffening of Tim’s shoulders, he doesn’t much care for it either.
“Tim,” Tim corrects.
“Tim,” Bruce agrees. “I admit things have been different, lately. The loss of Jason has been…” devastating, “difficult. But I’m handling it. I certainly don’t require some kind of intervention.”
“You haven’t moved your arm since I came in, so you’ll forgive me if I doubt that.” Tim says. “Sir.”
Bruce’s injured arm twitches.
“I lost my son,” he says, and his voice doesn’t so much as shake. He takes a breath. “What you’re proposing, I don’t think you understand what it means. Not really. You wouldn’t be able to tell anyone—”
“I understand that,” Tim says, and almost smiles, like it’s a joke, and Bruce feels his irritation rising.
“Do you? Being Robin means being constantly at risk, constantly a target. You’d be injured, you’d see terrible things, and nobody could know. It means lying to everybody you care about, who cares about you. You could die at any moment, and they wouldn’t even know why.”
Tim is almost blurry at the edges. Bruce presses his fingers into his eyes, and when he takes them away his vision is clear again.
“I’m not going to put someone else’s son in danger like that,” he tells him, and even as he says it he can see Tim gearing himself up for a counter-argument. It won’t work. “I won’t let you put me in a position where I have to tell your parents that their child is dead.”
His throat has gone tight as he speaks, but there isn’t any chance of tears, only a bone deep resolve. He’s cried all his tears already.
Tim has gone very still, a peculiar look on his face.
“I understand,” he repeats, although he can’t possibly. Bruce hopes he never does. “But this can’t continue. And as we both know,” he gestures to the folder. “You aren’t exactly the one calling the shots here.”
“I don’t care if you tell them about me,” he says, and it’s almost true, even. Let them come for him. Maybe he deserves it. If all those photographs in the folder prove anything, it’s that he can’t be trusted to be Batman anymore. Gotham is probably better off without him.
There’s something eerie about the way Tim moves. Every so often, there’s a slight hitch in his breath, like a slowly revolving record with a scratch in it.
“You care if I tell them about Dick, though.”
He does.
Bruce curses, though not out loud.
Tim has the nerve to look smug. Idiot. Bruce sits back down, finally. He might as well. Tim, after a slight delay, does the same at the other side of the desk.
He’s inclined to believe that Tim really does just care about Batman. He’s aware there are fans. None of them have gone so far as uncovering his identity and tracking down his house, but there are fans. And Tim is a child. There was something so earnest, maybe even excited in the way he’d first shown up here, determined that he and only he could solve everything with one simple solution, despite his serious presentation.
There’s no denying he’s a threat, though, even at his age. He’s clever, and Bruce has seen time and time again how fast cleverness can twist into bitterness under the wrong circumstances. He knows all Bruce’s secrets. Bruce wants to think he wouldn’t actually reveal their identities, but that’s not a chance he can take. Bruce can’t let his own bad decisions affect Dick.
And he has been making bad decisions. He’s not blind, he knows his work has been erratic, lately, to say the least. That he’s hit harder than he needs to. At times unnecessarily. Last week, washing blood off his gauntlets—because Alfred refuses to do it, now—he hadn’t even been able to remember how it had gotten there. It’s just that the only time he feels anything other than sheer, deadened grief is when they start to hit back—
But that’s his fault. This, Tim discovering who he is, feeling like he has to step in, that’s his fault, too.
“I won’t reward recklessness,” he warns. Tim straightens. “And you’ll never leave the cave. Comms only. You’ll transition to being a reserve operative only if you’re lucky, and before that I’ll train you into the ground.”
Tim nods.
“You don’t have to do this,” Bruce tells him. He doesn’t beg him not to, but it’s a near thing.
“I do,” Tim says. “You won’t regret this.”
Bruce presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He slumps forward in his seat, both elbows on the desk. He sighs.
“Get out of my sight.”
“Yes, sir,” Tim says, disturbingly cheerful.
Idiot.
He doesn’t remember him picking up the briefcase, but he must at some point, because Bruce closes his eyes and when he opens them, both Tim, the folder, and the briefcase are gone. Which is just. Not ideal, in terms of blackmail-erasing purposes.
“We won’t tell Dick,” he says to Alfred, who has at some point appeared under the shadow of the doorway.
“As you wish, Master Bruce,” Alfred agrees, with that disapproving tilt of his mouth that means he thinks very little of Bruce’s decision, indeed.