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English
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Published:
2020-03-12
Completed:
2020-03-14
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3,153
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2/2
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brother, mine

Summary:

Damian isn’t here.

He was, he was when Tim fell asleep, upset and enraged at his little brother, his own words- I wish you’d never come here! You’ve ruined everything!- ringing in his head like some kind of commercial that’s too catch to pass on. Damian was home, just yesterday, and now he is not.

No one in the house has heard of Damian Wayne, and Tim doesn’t dare to ask Bruce, too afraid of the answer. No doubt he’d be enraged at the fact that Talia had lied to him for his life- and, besides.

Tim’s too caught up in living his life like he was supposed to do, before the hell-spawn ever came tumbling into it. He’s Robin at night, leader of the Teen Titans on the weekend, a straight A+ student during the day. His lack of sleep is still endearing, and Dick is still around, leaning down to smile and talk to Tim like he’s the one who hung the moon.

Notes:

this isn't happy, and i was upset while writing it, so here you go. :))

tumblr: potato-reblob

Chapter 1: home

Chapter Text

Damian isn’t here. 

He was, he was when Tim fell asleep, upset and enraged at his little brother, his own words- I wish you’d never come here! You’ve ruined everything!- ringing in his head like some kind of commercial that’s too catch to pass on. Damian was home, just yesterday, and now he is not. 

No one in the house has heard of Damian Wayne, and Tim doesn’t dare to ask Bruce, too afraid of the answer. No doubt he’d be enraged at the fact that Talia had lied to him for his life- and, besides. 

Tim’s too caught up in living his life like he was supposed to do, before the hell-spawn ever came tumbling into it. He’s Robin at night, leader of the Teen Titans on the weekend, a straight A+ student during the day. His lack of sleep is still endearing, and Dick is still around, leaning down to smile and talk to Tim like he’s the one who hung the moon. 

When Damian lived with them, Tim didn’t get smiles like those, not anymore. Dick gave them all to the youngest in the room. Tim wasn’t the youngest with Damian, he was just the replacement. The one who didn’t belong- who wasn’t really Bruce’s son, but an interloper. Without Damian, Tim wasn’t any of that. He was the adored youngest, the one who could do no wrong, Bruce’s successful, newest and adopted son once again. He’d missed it, missed being special.  

So, no. He doesn’t miss Damian. He doesn’t even have time, too caught up in the euphoria of the R on his chest and the wind in his hair and Dick’s love on his side. 

(Jason doesn’t come around. Tim doesn’t have too much time to miss him, either.) 

Bruce pays more attention to Tim too, now that he doesn’t have an unruly brat to watch after. He frets over Tim’s lack of sleep, his unhealthy habits, worries after him each time he dons the suit. Tim gets it, he’s the baby now and Bruce has always been partial to the smallest child around him. That’s Tim, now. 

That’s Tim, and he doesn’t hate it, not one bit. 

Sometimes, though, he expects a retort about his uselessness. Sometimes, he expects Damian to peer around the corner and glare at him. Sometimes, he expects Dick to ask him to try harder with his baby brother. 

That never happens, because Damian isn’t here. Damian was never here.

But, of course, the high always has to end. 

(He hadn’t wanted it to.) 

 

 

Patrols are long and full of laughter. Dick will spontaneously break out and start up a game of tag, just like old times, and all three of them will spend those slow nights running around Gotham’s skyline, calling you’re it!  

Dick didn’t do that, when Damian was around. Not really.

 

 

His mind drifts to Damian, in the end. It takes months before he even thinks it, thinks, where is Damian now?  

At first, he thinks that Damian might not exist, but some research into it has him slamming his laptop shut. Reports of a small boy, trailing around with Talia every once in a while, circle around the dark web. He’s still alive, still breathing, but some important event that brought him to Bruce had never happened. It’d never brought Damian into Tim’s life. 

He feels terrible when he dares to think, I hope that event never happens. 

Maybe, he thinks, too, that the time stream changed. Damian might not even be Bruce’s anymore. Talia might have had a child with some other poor man who’ll have to deal with the terrible little demon, but that’s not Tim’s problem anymore. 

With no one there to remind him of his ex- little brother, he forgets about Damian after that again. 

(A year passes. Something feels weird on the ninth of August. It slips Tim’s mind that this would be his brother’s thirteenth birthday. He doesn’t even bother to think about it.) 

 

 

Tim spends the summer outside with Dick, running through the grass barefooted. He spends it with his camera, spends it in the manor instead of a lonely apartment that he can’t really call home. He spends it eating Alfred’s cooking, homemade, instead of take out. 

Dick takes him to the fair, once. 

Tim’s happy.

 

 

It’s nearing wintertime when Bruce and Tim come home from patrol, to Alfred holding a letter out for Bruce to take. In the end, Tim takes it and opens it for him. Bruce is blitzed out of his mind on some toxin Ivy mixed together, and he’s riding out the antidote that Alfred whipped up too. 

The envelope is worn, possibly from age. It looks like it’s travelled a long way, just to get here. There’s a stamp in the corner that Tim’s too tired to analyze. There’s no return address, though, and that’s what has Tim confused. There’s not even an address to the manor on it- how did it get here through the post without any of those things? 

Cautiously, he peels it open, wary that it could be some kind of trick. It wouldn’t be the first time- there was once when Dick had happily torn open a letter meant for Bruce and then passed out moments later from something laced along the paper’s edge. 

There’s nothing alarming at first, so he goes ahead and pulls the letter out. The handwriting is neat, precise, somewhat slanted. It looks familiar to Tim, but he can’t quite place it- 

Until he reads the first line, a nice, large Father looping around the top. 

You might not know who I am, the letter starts, but Tim does. He knows, he recognizes the handwriting, the writing itself.  

Without bothering to finish reading it, he shoves it in his pocket and quickly says to Alfred, “It’s just some kind of joke letter. Something about a woman from Hawaii, I think?” He pastes a smile on his face, and then he disappears upstairs to go burn the letter.

Damian’s trying to reach out. 

Some dark part of Tim doesn’t want him back. 

(He doesn’t burn the letter, but he shoves it into a drawer and doesn’t look at it again.)

 

 

The Titans are happy to have Tim whenever he stops by, happy to let him lead missions. Tim gets to hear Dick reminisce about being Robin and having his own team, but he always says that this one is Tim’s, and no new Robin will take it away. 

The R on his chest feels lighter than the RR he once wore.

 

 

The letters keep on coming, and Tim doesn’t read a single one.

He tells Alfred that he’s picked up a pen pal and he hides each envelope, until his drawer absolutely bursts with them. Stop sending them, he wills. I wish you’d stop sending them, before Bruce catches on.  

Then the letters stop.

 

 

The night he finally reads them is the night that Dick announces that Bruce has pinpointed Ra’s al Ghul’s base. Tim is mad and upset, furious at the idea that his time being the youngest will always come to an end, and that Damian will always end up in their lives to destroy it. 

He shouts at Bruce, screams at him not to go. 

“You can’t!” he exclaims, and he lets worry bleed into his voice. You’ll get yourself killed, Bruce hears. I don’t want you to get hurt, Bruce hears. If you go, you might not come back, he hears. (Tim means that he’ll find Damian, he’ll bring him back, he’ll find out about the letters that Tim’s been hiding for months now.) 

Bruce goes, and he takes Dick with him. 

Even though none of them know it, Tim feels like they’ve chosen Damian over him again. 

So, he goes upstairs. He slams his door shut and throws open the drawer of letters, and he reaches down to the very first one. After some digging, he pulls a lighter out of another drawer, and he holds the flame up to the paper. 

His eyes, blurry and going red, scan over the paper one last time. 

The flame goes out and he lets the paper fall to the floor.

“Oh my god,” he gasps, clapping his hand over his lips. “Oh my god, what have I done. What have I done.” 

The first letter reads, Mother has died. Grandfather is angry. I need to get away from him. In a fit of panic, he reaches for the next ones, filing through them. Grandfather’s found out about my letters. Father, have you been getting them? one reads, handwriting shaky. He’d written it with his opposite hand, Tim bets. He’s mad, he’s terribly mad, another one cries, I pray these letters are getting to you, Father, I don’t think I can send anymore.

The last one is in someone else's handwriting, not Ra’s’, but someone else’s. They never introduce themselves, but they say that the past letters were a mistake. 

Don’t come for him anymore. The al Ghul’s are dead and only the Demon’s Head is left.

Tim lets out a sob into his knees.

He’s doomed his little brother without even knowing it. 

Chapter 2: compound

Summary:

He has to see for himself. He has to make sure his brother isn't dead.

(Tim doesn't like what he finds.)

Notes:

so, yeah. i,,,, wrote a second chapter.

it doesn't get better.

(might add a third, but i doubt. if i do, it'll be bruce finding out Tim's Crimes)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Tim is grieving for someone his family has never met when he flees the house. He stops only to make sure he has his mask on his face and his boots laced up tight on his feet. 

It takes a moment to hack into and pinpoint Dick’s tracker, to call in one of the Teen Titan’s jets so Bruce can’t call his mission off and send him home. He’ll arrive an hour after Bruce will, but the Titan’s jet is small and fast, built to prioritize speed. It’ll get there faster than the batjet will, thankfully. 

Alfred doesn't stop him from leaving, but Tim has no doubt he’s notified Bruce of it. He won’t let Bruce stop him, though. He has to be sure. He has to know that Damian isn’t still alive- has to know that he still has a chance at saving his brother.

He spends the flight down with his hands tight around the plane’s wheel, gaze hard on the dark sky before him. He touches down when the batjet comes into view, parked right outside the compound that Ra’s is using to hide in. 

Tim starts up the jet’s invisibility function and takes off on foot for the compound. Men litter the area around him- Bruce and Dick made quick work of them, no doubt. 

Once he gets inside and past the main rooms, every corridor looks the same. They’re big and they feel so empty. They’re covered in red satin rugs, old oil paintings from years and years ago. Lanterns, covered in greying glass, orange flames dancing behind them, line the walls to light them up and attempt at warding away the dark. 

It most certainly doesn’t look empty, but it feels it. It feels empty and lonely, and both of those feelings press down on Tim’s shoulders like a weight. 

To think, Damian grew up running the length of these halls, marching through them as he was raised a soldier instead of a boy. To think, Damian grew up in this loveless home, and to think, Tim was the reason he had to stay.  

He thinks back to everything that Damian had ever said about his childhood. He thinks back to everything that Dick has ever told him, in an attempt to get Tim to act nicer towards Damian. 

Talia and Ra’s weren’t very nice, he’d said. They weren’t good at raising children. He’s gone through more than you or I did in our lives and he needs someone to support him- people to support him. Bruce is trying his best, but, can’t you at least try too, Tim? I know that doesn’t make all he’s said and done right, but it’s a step. 

(It was a step that Tim hadn’t bothered to take.)

Dick had also talked about Damian’s birthdays in years past, when trying to get Tim to come to a small gathering he was putting together. He’d talked about how he’d fought with his mother for the right to see Bruce. Only on his tenth birthday did he successfully manage to do so. 

Well, had. Once. In a different life.

And, oh, Tim thinks. That’s the event that never happened. 

Damian never beat Talia, so he never earned the right to see Bruce and never got to live with him for training. Instead of freeing himself from his mother and grandfather, he got himself beat into the ground for his attempt. 

He’d subjected Damian to four extra years of abuse, just because his first life hadn’t been all that it was going to be chalked up to be. He traded the year he’d failed to connect with Damian for four that he didn’t have to connect with him.

God, he’s a terrible brother.

 

 

He turns a left and he sees a figure dashing across the hallway, right before him. They’re tiny in stature, light on their feet. Instead of allowing himself to berate himself more, he breaks out into a run after them.

Damian? he dares to think. The name rolls off of his tongue, tumbles from his lips, desperate. 

The figure stops. 

 

 

Damian, the last time Tim had seen him- years ago and with red, puffy eyes from screaming and crying- had had blazing green irises, dark like pine needles and forest grass. Now, his eyes are murky, an ugly lazarus pit green. They’re dull, light. They don’t look like Damian, not much at all.

He’s dressed in green and gold al Ghul robes, regal and perfectly trimmed to his lacking height. While inches taller than he’d been at ten, he’s still no taller than Tim. Hell, Tim’s still got a handful of inches on him, from what he can tell. He probably won’t ever be, considering all of the stress put on his body.

He holds himself with grace, too, something that Tim hadn’t seen much of when they’d known each other. His hands, folded behind his back, leave his chest exposed. The stance sets off alarm bells in Tim’s head. 

Damian’s even got a new scar, spanning from his hairline to just below his right eye, cutting his eyebrow in half but leaving his eye unharmed. It looks like he’d brained himself on the corner of something, though Tim is fairly certain that isn’t the case. He’s barefoot, too, showing off scars on the bottoms of his feet. 

Tim snaps his gaze up to Damian’s eyes again, not daring to wonder about how those came along. “Damian?” he dares to utter instead. He hardly believes that it’s really his little brother before him.

Damian blinks once. “So you have been getting those letters,” he says, words clipped. Tim’s mind reels for a moment at the lack of familiarity in his voice, until he remembers that Damian doesn’t remember him at all. He wouldn't. To him, Tim and him have never met.

“Bruce hasn’t,” Tim says. He prepares for Damian’s rage. “I’ve been taking each letter before he can see them.” 

“Hm?” Damian questions. He doesn’t sound mad, not at all. In fact, he sounds almost amused. “The Batman doesn’t know he has a son yet?” 

Something is off about his wording. Tim shakes his head.

“But it’s fine, right? I’m going to take you with me and we’ll get you away from Ra’s, okay?” 

Damian only smirks.

 

 

Tim has only seen that smirk on one other person in the world. When Damian smirked, it was a small, hidden thing, the soft quirk of the corners of his lips and a raise of his brows. This smirk is ugly, snarling up, amusement glimmering in his eyes. 

He’s only seen it once, years before Bruce ever knew about Damian. Tim and him had gone to stop the League of Assassins from some dastardly plot centered in Gotham. They’d been moments too late, watched as Ra’s slid a sword through the man they were supposed to protect.

The same smirk had rested on his lips.

(Time freezes.) 

 

 

It all clicks into place embarrassingly slow.

When it does click, Tim coils back with all the force in his body, something screaming in his mind. He wants Bruce here, wants Dick, wants someone here besides the empty nothingness and this Damian here. 

But, no. It isn’t Damian. Not anymore. 

 

 

“Once I had Talia out of the way,” Damian- Ra’s- speaks, something akin to sorrow dripping from his tone, “it was easy to subdue the boy for the ritual to take place. It’s such a pity that both my own blood had to fall for this to happen. I’d once imagined that her and I would rule the world side by side once I completed my new transformation. It wasn’t like she told me she loathed the idea when I first brought it up. I needed a new body. She knew that.” 

Tim chokes on a sob that bubbles up in his throat. “You’re a monster,” he says. “God, what the hell have you done?” 

Damian’s- Ra’s’- eyes go hard. “I did what was necessary,” he spits. Then, his personality changes like a dime. “It’s all thanks to you, though, young detective. Without you, I don’t think this ever could have happened.” 

He wants to ask, what do you mean?, even though he already knows.  

“Had the Batman read the letters, there was no way that the boy would have ever stayed in my possession. But, as you say. The Batman doesn’t even know he has a son! Why, I ought to thank you, shouldn’t I? It’s all because of you that I’m young again, young detective. And now I have the privilege of telling the Batman of his son, yet another soul he was too late to save.”

“You can’t,” Tim says. His voice shakes. Wavers. Ra’s can’t break Bruce like that. 

(It’s a shame he’s breaking Tim like it.) 

Ra’s cocks his head to the side, looking like a little old boy with wide eyes, asking his mother why? “Why not?” he asks, voice high, (too high for Ra’s, but just up Damian’s alley, because this damn bastard has done the unimaginable-) Ra’s looks Tim over, and then says, “Are you going to stop me?” 

There’s no way that Tim can bring himself to fight Damian, not even if his mind isn’t there anymore. 

He removes himself from the situation, forces himself to only see Ra’s before him.

Damian is gone. Damian isn’t here.  

Damian isn’t here because Ra’s stands before him instead, wrapped up in a body too young. 

(Tim had told him, I wish you’d never come here! He’s still paying the price.)

Tim’s hands curl up into fists and he sets his stance. “I am,” he says. 

Only Ra’s stands before him now. 

(Damian Wayne doesn’t exist. Not in this world.)

Notes:

sdkfhlsgkh omg i was gonna add a part where tim goes up to hug dames bcuz he's like 'omg im so sorry damian, god, what have i done'

and then damian just steps away from it and says, 'detective.' as a greeting and tim's blood just runs cold cuz he's thinking, only one person calls me that, oh my god.

asdjlkhasg don't get me wrong i really like tim and he's such a good character BUT OMG I HAD TO