Chapter Text
(Most beautiful cover art by: TheyReapWhatWeSow)
“Get a new hobby, kid.”
Tim makes the decision to fake his death on a Thursday. This is in no way, shape, or form a response to Robin’s flippant comment to him on Wednesday night. That would make him petty and childish, and Tim is whatever the opposite of all that is, thank you very much.
Robin just…showed him the light. Revealed to him a truth he had been furiously suppressing ever since his seventh birthday—he is better off on his own. Off the grid. Incognito. The Lone Ranger.
What was he thinking anyway? Running around town like some kind of child playing pretend paparazzi for heroes? He’s better than that, honestly.
Thank you, Robin, for pointing that out, actually.
Anyway, in the roulette of misery that is his life, he figures different past choices most likely would have led to different outcomes, and that’s why no one can fault him for the choice he’s about to make now.
(On nights he has trouble sleeping, he likes to play the game of odds and rationality—what if Janet had met Harvey Dent instead of Jack Drake at that Young Entrepreneurs of Gotham meeting thirteen years ago? What if Tim had been born to the Joker or Catwoman or god forbid, Brucie Wayne eleven years ago? What if he were a girl instead of a boy, if he were good instead of a trouble-maker, if he liked books instead of gruesome horror films? What if he were quieter or a better student or didn’t mind wearing suits or liked to sing instead of always feeling like his voice was sticky with thick, acidic lemon jello every time someone tried to speak to him? What if he had joined the circus a la Dick Grayson the first time his parents left him at home without supervision? What if he had fallen off that roof last week when he lost his footing instead of catching himself last minute on the ledge? It was all a game of possibilities that would never become probabilities because there doesn’t exist a world where Tim could be less…Tim. He is a neurotic trouble-making, chaos-attracting nerd whose survival instincts constantly war with practicality. He will disappoint his parents regardless of what he does. His Tim-ness will forever be in the way of being an adequate son or heir, so why even try?)
Sure, maybe if the Drakes were like The Brady Bunch or Leave it to Beaver, he would feel some semblance of guilt at making them think their only son is dead, but honestly? They all know how this will go.
Oh, Timothy was taken from us much too soon, yes, it is a tragedy, yes, please capture our good side when taking our picture at his grave for the Society Pages, why yes, we do accept donations in his honor, we’re terribly sad, which is why we will be naming a scholarship after him, what do you mean, our stocks have gone up, we didn’t think about that at all…
Honestly, they probably will be angry he didn’t think about doing this sooner.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter because Thursdays are days for plotting, and Tim knows that the key to any good cover-up (thank you, Law and Order) is having a good alibi, a simple story, and leaving no evidence. And Tim doesn’t want to leave his parents a mess, despite how tempting it might be to throw them under the metaphorical bus, so any plan that implicates their less-than-stellar parenting is a no-go. Tim’s trying for cool, mature solo agent, not moody, bratty kid who wants to see their comeuppance for criminal neglect.
He grabs a steno pad from the bottom of his dad’s desk and a cheap Bic pen that won’t be missed. He figures if anyone comes and investigates, he doesn’t want it to look like he’s run away, so he dives into the emergency cash box his parents forgot about two years ago and grabs enough money to buy a durable change of clothes, a space blanket, a first aid kit, and several MREs from the Army Supply store at the edge of Bristol. It’s owned by Ret. Col. Harry Binkley, and was featured in People Magazine under “Surprisingly Quaint Places Near Gotham”. Col. Binkley was so pleased by the extra publicity that he added a juice bar and a coffee corner and ever since, it has been Tim’s go-to after-school spot. He skateboards there every day and completes his homework, before leaving for Gotham around dinnertime. (The Col. thinks he’s going home to meet his parents for dinner—Tim doesn’t correct him.) Today, Tim has a different plan.
A bell chimes as Tim opens the door.
“Hey Private!” Col. Binkley’s gruff voice comes from under the cash register where he is fixing a broken telephone wire. “Help yourself to a cup, Drake. Just one. ”
Tim rolls his eyes, but grabs the styrofoam cups next to the fancy espresso machine. “Do you have any Zesti?”
“You know how I feel about that crap, kid. You’re lucky to get anything but water from me.”
“Are these cups smaller?”
“Yes. Don’t be a brat. Want my sandwich? My daughter made me extra.” The Col’s daughter always seems to make him extra whenever Tim comes around. Tim doesn’t question it. His stomach always seems to appreciate it.
“Sure. I have a camping trip coming up. I’m going to look around?” The Col. grunts in acknowledgement and Tim moves through the aisles with determination. Col. Binkley’s pretty cool and won’t ask a lot of questions about what he buys. He’s created emails to show his parents hired a live-in nanny for the time they’ve been gone and made that fake nanny look neglectful and deceitful so his parents will come out of this looking like naive socialites who just trusted the wrong person. Poor Timmy Drake, drowned in a lake, after a weekend of self-taught survival training gone wrong. He binged Survivor on Prime and thought he could reenact what he saw, but he didn’t wait thirty minutes before swimming. This is why eleven-year-olds can’t be trusted with their media intake. Tim sees his mother joining some sort of Mom’s Against CBS or something equally virtue signally to show the world how good of a parent she was. He hopes, when it’s all said and done, they appreciate how easy he’s making this for them.
As Tim is filling up the canvas backpack he found on a shelf with everything he needs for his fake camping-death trip (real cross-country-hitchhiking-to-Canada-and-living-there-for-the-rest -of-his-life adventure), he hears the bell chime again. He’s squatting by the MREs, trying to decide between Beef Taco and Chili with Beans when he hears a voice that instantly makes him cringe.
“Harold, my man, how are you doing today?” Mr. Wayne’s deep voice sounds friendly and fake and his laugh booms around Tim like a marching drum at a wake. Tim rolls his eyes and tries to crouch lower. Please don’t see me, please don’t see me.
“Timothy Drake. Wow. Is that you? You’ve grown like a weed, young man. Fancy seeing you here. It’s been a while.” It hasn’t. It has literally been less than a week ago when Mr. Wayne showed up randomly at his door, asking for his parents as if they both didn’t know that they had drunkenly told Mr. Wayne they'd be in Cambodia for eight months back at his gala in April.
The doorbell rang for the fifth time. It was eleven in the morning, and Tim had only just fallen asleep a couple hours ago after figuring out the right combination of painkiller and bandaids and Neosporin to make himself comfortable. His hands were shredded from almost falling off the roof last night, and he was smarting from the embarrassment of having to have Batman (!!!) bail him out. Whoever was ringing the doorbell like that was the worst kind of criminal, and if it wouldn’t get back to his parents somehow, he would have called the police and just let them deal with it.
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Door Stranger most likely couldn’t hear him through the heavy antique wood, but Tim still preferred to narrate his day-to-day to stave off the loneliness. And if he used comic book narrator voices, no one was around to know.
He stood on his tiptoes to unlatch the highest lock (he was a short king, ok?), and blinked into the concerned eyes of his ditzy next-door neighbor.
“Ah, Timothy, right? Sorry to bother you this morning, chum. Just wanted to ask your dad a question.” Mr. Wayne was wearing a Prada tracksuit and holding a golf club. His Aston Martin Valour was parked neatly in their roundabout, and Tim could see a large iced-vanilla latte balancing in the passenger’s seat. He smiled in a way that screamed fake, and Tim just stared at him before closing the door in his face.
He allowed himself one sigh, cursed his life, and opened the door again, his own weird, fake smile mimicking the billionaire’s. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wayne. The door slipped.” He deadpanned.
“Understandable, chap.” Both of them kept smiling.
Mr. Wayne broke first, clearing his throat. “Anyway, I was on my way to the course, and I realized your father and I haven’t gotten a chance to really ‘hang’, as you kids say, and I had a late tee time, so I thought I’d invite him along.” Mr. Wayne’s teeth were bright and Tim wondered if he used some sort of diamond paste on them. He looked around Tim’s shoulder, as if he wanted to see inside the mansion better. Tim hadn’t turned on any of the lights on account of his shitty night, so the early fall haze that Bristol was so well known for didn’t do much for his visibility.
“I’m sorry, sir, you just missed him.” A pause.
“Well, that’s ok, son. Why don’t you get your mom and I’ll give her a message? I’m sure you’ve got things to do.” He looked at Tim vapidly, smile still firmly in place.
“I’m afraid she’s not here right now either. Shopping.” Tim gritted his teeth and went to close the door. Mr. Wayne’s huge ham hands (why were they so large?) stopped it before it slammed. He chuckled and Tim winced.
“Your nanny, then.” Tim wasn’t sure, but thought the question sounded more strained than Mr. Wayne’s usual flavor of airheadedness.
“She’s sleeping.”
“At eleven in the morning?”
“She has a thyroid problem. I’ll let them all know you stopped by.” Tim pushed the door closed but Mr. Wayne had somehow entered his foyer while he was speaking.
“I’ll write them a note. They can call me when they get back.” He inched closer towards Tim, who sidestepped him before he could ruffle his hair.
“Won’t your tee time be over by then, sir?” Tim walked back towards the front door and opened it again.
“Call me Bruce, chum. Call me Bruce.” He ignored the question and looked around at the artifacts and oil paintings displayed. Tim was not at all embarrassed by the layer of dust on some of the surfaces—Brucie Wayne wouldn’t notice Superman wearing a tutu if the man himself slapped him in the face, so there was no reason to think he’d notice the overall emptiness of Drake Manor. (Tim found it a lot easier to enter and exit the house from his window—he could avoid tripping the house alarm since his Dad had cheaped out and only armed the doors, and he could avoid the front and back door cameras during his nightly outings. His parents rarely called him for check-ins, but did seem to keep a close eye on those doors, if the multiple texts he’d receive from them every time a package was delivered was any indicator.)
“Mr. Wayne, I’ll let them know you were here but I was just about to—” Tim stopped when Mr. Wayne let out a huge exaggerated gasp. He was looking at Tim’s hands with a mix of horror and fascination—the bandages had soaked through, and some blood was dripping on the wood floor.
“Timothy, LAD, what happened ?” He reached for Tim, but Tim deftly moved around him, rolling his eyes.
“It’s no biggie, Mr. Wayne. I was skateboarding and fell. My mom got me bandaged super quickly,” which was obviously a lie, but it wasn’t like Bruce Wayne would know Batman was actually the one who fixed him up last night, “I just waited too long to change them. I’ll take care of that now and let my dad know you stopped by.”
“If you say so, Timmy, but I really don’t mind staying. Hey, have you had freshly squeezed juice from the Italian coast, my sons swear by it. Come by any time and try some?” Mr. Wayne kept up a stream of babble as Tim practically had to force him out of the house by walking him over to his car.
“Sure, Mr. Wayne.”
“Bruce, chum.”
Later, after Tim woke up from crashing on his mom’s Persian rug (“that’s $5000 a square foot, Timothy, it costs more than your entire body is worth, please be careful for god’s sake”), he grabbed his computer and sent an email from his dad’s dummy account:
subject: golf outing
from: [email protected]
Bruce,
My dear son Timothy told me I missed you today! I’m sorry, I was unavailable, I was getting surprise donuts for everyone. We took Timothy to the doctor—he said you were freaked out by his hands. Boys, am I right? Ha!! We’ll need to get together soon. Work is very worky lately so wait until I call you. Timothy is also very shy so no need to talk to him about anything! You can just email me here.
Sincerely,
Jack
Tim counts to five slowly, and stands up. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wayne.”
“Bruce, Timothy. Are those MREs you have there, buddy? Are you interested in prepping? My son Jason showed me a YouTube film on that last month. It was fascinating. I bought most of Harold’s stock, here, didn’t I, Col.?”
Col. Binkley smiles and walks over while Tim slowly backs away, keeping Mr. Wayne in his line of sight like he would a tiger or overeager puppy.
“That you did, Brucie. It was honestly good timing—especially fortuitous since my Marta was having all those tests last month and we kept having to close early. Poor Timmy here had to go somewhere else for his after-school activities, didn’t you son? She’s got a clean bill of health by the way.”
Tim slips to the other aisle while the men talk and quickly grabs supplies for the rest of his list. Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne’s doing an impression of a really annoying Whack-A-Mole, and comes back over to talk to him.
“So, Timothy, Harold here tells me you’re going on a camping trip? What fun, chum! Your dad taking you?”
And this? This is unfair. Because Law and Order, CSI, and GCPD’s own newly updated manual have all taught him that an alibi’s got to be airtight—he can’t tell Bruce Wayne that his parents are going on a trip that he’s going to be pretend-dying on. They would not appreciate that. And yeah, Gotham Police suck but someone would ask who last saw Tim Drake before he biffed it, and Bruce Wayne may be an idiot, but he’s been weirdly obsessive lately about butting into Tim’s life.
Tim’s on a schedule, darn it. Thursdays are for plotting and Friday he leaves, and he can’t have Brucie “I Call You Tube Videos Films” Wayne getting in the way of that.
“Actually, my parents are on a work trip.” Vague. True. “My nanny is staying with me this weekend.” Sell it, Tim. “We’re going camping tomorrow.”
“You and your…nanny are going camping this weekend?” Does he sound skeptical? That’s not weird, right? Tim briefly wonders if Alfred Pennyworth ever took Dick or Jason camping. Commit, Tim.
“Oh, of course she’s not going. She’s dropping me off. I’m meeting a friend. A friend’s family. We’re going camping together. Stuart. His name’s Stuart.” Shut up, now, idiot.
Mr. Wayne nods slowly like he’s thinking it over. He then smiles and claps his hands together, startling Tim. “Let’s see? You’re probably going to Cheesequake State Park, right?” Tim nods knowingly, like he is an expert in camping locations, and wasn’t just going to make his fake emails say “the woods.” Thank you, Mr. Wayne for filling out the details. “The boys and I love that spot, we go all the time. You’ll need some more things, here let me help.”
Tim struggles for balance as Mr. Wayne begins filling his backpack with “the greatest camping gear ever”: including a swiss army knife, two reusable canteens, a portable water filter, blankets, tons of antiseptic and bandages, MREs, matches, a flashlight, and, inexplicably, a whistle. He hands Tim a tent with stakes and leads him out the door, yelling “Thank you, put it on my tab, Harold,” to Col. Binkley.
They awkwardly stand in the parking lot.
“Well, see you later, Mr. Wayne.” His skateboard is under his arm and he resigns himself to walking back home two miles.
“Nonsense, Timothy, let me drive you.”
And Tim?
Tim agrees because Bruce Wayne singularly focused on something is weird and unnerving and he is ready to get home and get moving on his plan.
Mr. Wayne drops him off keeping a cheerful stream of small talk up during the ten-minute drive to Drake Manor. He helps Tim unload, raising his eyebrows but not saying anything at the unlit house.
“Have fun with your friend Stuart this weekend, Timothy. Camping, huh. What an exciting experience.” Tim nods, not trusting his foot to stay on the ground instead of making its way to his mouth, and closes the door behind him.
Phew.
He rushes around, putting last minute details on his plan. He empties the rest of the emergency cash into the front pocket of the Army backpack, and figures out how to tie the tent to the back of it like a roll so he can carry it on his back. He goes into his room and grabs his stash of memory cards, the picture of toddler him and Dick Grayson, his phone, and Stuart, his stuffed goose that he had hiding under his bed, because he’s no longer a baby, mother, he swears it.
Kissing his laptop goodbye, he puts the finishing touches on the planted emails, and sighs as he turns off his light. It’s about 2 AM on Friday morning. Tim prints off the Greyhound schedule, grabs the fake id and passport he had made last year, and hums “O Canada” under his breath.
He has a few hours to rest before skating over to the bus station. Tim figures if he leaves after 8, all nosy neighbors will be at school and work and there won’t be any witnesses to the direction he heads. Satisfied with his plan, he lays down on his mother’s Persian rug one last time and falls asleep.
from Tim’s iPhone:
hey mom, hope you’re doing well. i love you.
(read)
there’s been a package on the porch for over forty minutes, timothy. we’re not animals. pick it up.
(read)
from Tim’s iPhone:
dad, i saw a documentary on egyptian burial practices last night. thinking of you guys! love you!
(unread)
from: [email protected]
Mr. and Mrs. Drake,
You’ve asked for daily updates. Your son is a pleasure. You are perfect parents. He has lots of friends. He’s going camping this weekend. I will be really responsible like you hired me to and take care of him. Nothing will happen to him.
Sincerely,
The Nanny