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Tim’s well aware of the risks surrounding fighting Poison Ivy. First of all, it’s morally dicey--a lot of the time, she’s rightfully opposing some environmentally damaging bullshit being wrought by the Gotham elite. Second of all, she’s one of the class of Gothamite villains with a Ph.D., meaning her plans are both genius and insane.
Tim supposes he would go crazy after defending his dissertation, too. He likes to think he would come up with a better way to cope with that, but who is he to really judge?
Ivy’s latest coping mechanism is propping up another villain squad’s plans. Well, it’s an attempt at that; Tim has discovered the greenhouse where she’s been developing her latest strain of dangerously superpowered plants, and he’s making his move to destroy them this evening.
The real issue at hand is that Tim has no time to be dealing with this shit. He’s the CEO of his dead mentor’s company and crime in Gotham is only surging while multiple people try to be Batman, their combined erratic behavior amounting to a swirl of weird off-putting shit. Damian’s being a pest, even more than usual. Wayne Industries’s stock has been taken on a wild ride throughout the past four months, and it’s recovering now, but the work truly never fucking stops.
There’s too much to do. Nobody else seems to be willing to do it right.
Tim hasn’t slept in three days.
Doing all this grunt work includes being the one who tracks down Ivy’s center of operations. And monitoring when the greenhouse guard changes. And breaking into Ivy’s meticulous research documentation to understand her plan.
He gets to that last step, hunched over Ivy’s handwritten notes in the humid air of her greenhouse, when things go a little off the rails.
It’s barely his fault. If people around him weren’t constantly flaking out, he wouldn’t have been alone, and he would have some kind of external impulse control. Cass and Steph have been crime-fighting partners recently, and have blown him off tonight to go on their own patrol. Tim is pretty sure that “patrol” for them means something a lot more romantic that Tim doesn’t want to hear about, anyway, but it sucks to be ditched by them.
Dick hasn’t been inviting Tim on patrols with him and Damian lately (not that Tim would accept), and Lonnie has dropped off the face of the fucking earth. And the rest of his friends are dead or gone right now, so…So it’s just Tim in the greenhouse, reading Ivy’s notes, when he reads the effects of the plant she’s breeding.
In its current full form, the nectar is an insane stimulant. It burns off fairly quickly, after ramping up focus, adrenaline, strength--putting the user in a roid rage that makes them unable to feel pain during their rampage. It seems kind of boring to Tim until he gets to the paragraph on what microdoses do.
Ivy claims to have run a trial where taking a quarter of a dose had kept the subject awake, alert, functional for seven straight days. It could probably be used for energy drinks in tiny, tiny, tiny doses.
Standing there, Tim has a full daydream about finally getting caught up with his schedule without the irritation of sleep interrupting him. He could work on cases all night, and then be awake to do a full day of work. He could even cut out Monster for the entire time, and make everyone think he’s becoming more functional.
Tim almost doesn’t want to disrupt Ivy’s plan, here. He knows she’s going to use it for evil, but it’s such an attractive idea.
His impulse control was never that good, even when he had others with him. Tim pockets two vials of the pale green fluid and then pours the rest into the biohazard receptacle, and then he says a quick sorry to all of the plants before he uproots them all into the incinerator.
All of Ivy’s work is handwritten, and Tim feels horrible trying to destroy it, so he just gathers it into one manila folder and then makes his escape with it clutched in one hand. He lies to himself and says he’s only keeping it so that she can’t use it.
When Tim gets back to the Batcave, Damian and Dick have already arrived home and passed through the space, judging by the parked Batmobile greeting Tim’s return on his bike. Tim cautiously checks all the corners of the cave before spreading his new folder of botany notes out on the desk and beginning to pore over them.
Ivy wouldn’t keep any notes on who she was planning to supply to, so Tim doesn’t kid himself by pretending that he’s doing the reading for case reasons. He’s searching for potential side effects.
A scouring of her volume of notes tells him that the microdosed test subject didn’t experience anything worse than some Adderall-esque jitters towards the time that they crashed. Her notes are immaculate, and Tim trusts her scientific integrity too much to doubt her on this.
In the name of peer review, Tim puts a single drop into his coffee and then stashes the vials deep in the cave’s snack fridge, tucking them behind the emergency stock of nasty protein shakes that everyone hates.
The first day is incredible.
Tim is awake for all of his meetings, and he feels like a human being even towards the end of the day when he has to meet with the accounting department. That group is always giving him the scowliest looks, as though Tim was personally the one who murdered their former boss, but today Tim is able to smile through all their backhanded compliments. He also finds a way to tell them as politely as he can to go fuck themselves, and only a few of them even pick up on it.
He eats dinner with his siblings like usual. He’s quiet like they’ve come to expect from him, but today it isn’t because he’s falling asleep into his shepherd’s pie. Today he just listens to the chatter around him and hears, with awake ears for once, that everyone around him seems to be approaching some level of normal again.
The house has been a confusing nightmare since Bruce vanished. There are bad days and there are worse days. Today is nearly a good day, with nobody getting into an argument at the dinner table. Tim doesn’t have much of an appetite, but he finishes his plate and gets a nod from Alfred for his trouble, and he escapes dinner with a good feeling about how his family is doing.
Tim posts up in the Batcave after dinner and works for twelve uninterrupted hours. As he heads upstairs at breakfast time, feeling just as fresh as he did the night before, Tim wonders if this is what heaven is like.
On day three, Tam shows up at the office with two cups of coffee but takes one look at Tim and keeps them both for herself. She actually gets as far as holding out the iced triple shot oat milk latte for Tim to take before he lifts his chin and she actually recoils, pulling the drink back out of his reach.
“What happened to you?” Tam asks, eyes narrowed.
Tim tries not to look defensive, or shifty, or guilty. He doesn’t need the coffee, but he knows she brought it as a gift (or to keep him from cracking open an energy drink, the smell of which gives her a headache in the confined space of their office). He doesn’t think he looks that bad. Yes, the lack of sleep has engreasened his skin and hair more than normal and he woke up with a new breakout across his chin and forehead, but he showered the worst of that away.
He bluffs, “What do you mean? Good morning, by the way.”
“Uh-huh.” Tam gives him a brief smile and a, “Good morning,” and then drops the smile and gets back to business. “What happened? Did the tooth fairy finally bring you all that money she owed you? You look…”
“The tooth fairy’s supposed to bring you money?” Tim asks, willing to take this diversion as far as he can.
“Wh-- Tim,” Tam says. She sits in her chair with both cups of iced coffee sweating condensation over her fingers. “What did she bring you instead?”
“Um, a note with advice?”
Tam’s stare is disbelieving, but the conversation has been diverted. As Tim taps through the morning deluge of emails and chatters through the slightly-depressing-mostly-funny tale of his parents leaving old fortune cookie fortunes from old takeout under his pillow in lieu of even a single dollar bill, Tam follows the story and drinks both coffees and Tim holds her off until she has to leave for a meeting with someone from Marketing.
She can see right through him, but her time is limited and Tim’s more than willing to fill it with stuff that isn’t him and his experimental substance use. After today, their time in the office together won’t overlap enough for interrogation.
When he leaves mid-afternoon and she runs into him on the way out, she touches his wrist and gives him a searching look and says, “Call if you need me, big shot.”
“Uh--you too,” Tim says, as always flustered by the feeling of her eyes fixed on his, and the slightly dry brush of her skin on the back of his hand. His heart has been pounding more loudly than normal for the past hour, but now it reaches a near-excruciating volume. “I mean, you know where to find me.”
It’s not until the fourth day that someone at home notices.
Tim should have anticipated that it would be Alfred, because that man is borderline omniscient. He sees Tim emerge from the Batcave at six in the morning when Tim tries to sneak through the kitchen, at which point he clears his throat loudly to halt Tim’s progress.
“Good morning, Master Tim,” Alfred says.
Tim stops and turns around.
“Did you manage to get any sleep last night?”
There’s a house rule (mostly Tim’s fault) that everyone has to get at least five hours, or at least five hours of laying still in the dark without getting on their phone. Alfred hasn’t been cracking down on it as much in the months following Bruce’s death, but Tim is aware that he’s pushing his luck here. It’s been a week since he got any sleep at all, and four days since he started using a supervillain-synthesized stimulant to keep him awake, and Tim is aware that he’s giving off a bit of a manic energy by now.
He doesn’t feel tired. But the bags under his eyes are still getting worse, and he’s been avoiding eating because his stomach always feels nervous. Alfred isn’t stupid.
“I got a couple hours,” Tim tries to placate him with. “Things are just really busy.”
“Indeed. Still, I feel obligated to be the one to remind you that you are allowed to delegate.” Alfred gestures to the coffee machine, which has just finished brewing. It smells fucking incredible, but Tim doesn’t know what mixing caffeine with his new drug of choice will do. “You’re welcome to help yourself before Master Richard wakes up.”
“It’s alright,” Tim says. “I’m, uh, taking a caffeine break.”
Alfred looks even more suspicious now. He sets down the serving platter that he’s drying with a dish towel, and crosses the kitchen towards Tim, raising his hand to press the back of it to Tim’s forehead. As the hand moves to Tim’s cheek, checking the temperature against that of Tim’s forehead, Alfred remarks, “You feel a bit clammy this morning. Have you been drinking water?”
Tim smiles sheepishly. “Um, probably not enough.”
Alfred pours him a glass of water and has Tim sit down at the kitchen counter to drink it. Tim has no choice but to finish the glass--he probably hasn’t had any water in a couple days now, and that may be contributing to his headache.
“If you feel ill,” Alfred says, “there’s no shame in taking a day to rest.”
According to Poison Ivy’s notes, Tim will not be able to rest for another three days at the earliest. And WE has the quarterly review coming up, as well as a routine internal audit, and Tim’s supposed to be getting on a plane next week to go to the one conference that Bruce thought was important enough to attend every year. He doesn’t have time to rest, and he also physically can’t.
“I know. Thanks, Alfred.” Tim smiles, and puts his glass in the sink, and leaves the kitchen. Blood pounds a muffled rhythm through his ears with the movement, but after a moment it passes and lets him walk without his balance wavering.
In the cave that night, Tim is alone with the T-Rex until he hears the elevator open and close. Tim’s been staring at the same lines of code for almost half an hour as he attempts to put a virus together that can crash Ivy’s computer server long enough for Tim to figure out what she’s planning to do in retaliation to Tim’s actions. His eyes are beginning to burn from overuse, but he hasn’t even begun yawning yet.
Whoever’s up at this hour walks out of the elevator and makes their way over to Tim. He frustratedly deletes a chunk of his code and puts his head in his hands.
“That variable’s your problem,” Bruce says.
“What? Oh.” Tim lifts his head and rubs his eyes and looks at the variable that Bruce is pointing at. “Right.”
“What’re you working on?”
“I got rid of Ivy’s stuff in her greenhouse but I’ve heard something about her making another move. I dunno. I just wanna know what it is.”
“Hm,” Bruce acknowledges. His hand pulls away from the screen, and clasps with his other one on the table.
Tim doesn’t look over at Bruce. He knows what expression is on his face already--Bruce is probably interested, but also feels obligated to tell Tim to go the fuck to sleep.
“I know,” Tim says. “I just need to finish this and then I’ll call it a night.”
Bruce doesn’t respond. Tim keeps typing for fifteen minutes before he glances back over to see why Bruce is just sitting there and watching him, but when Tim turns his head Bruce isn’t there anymore. He’s vanished, and there isn’t even a chair there where Bruce would have sat down.
Tim spares a brief look around the cave to see if Bruce is still hanging around, but he doesn’t see anyone. Giving up on the code for now, Tim goes to change into his suit. He’s running out of things to work on, case-wise, so he wants to check up on whoever’s out on patrol. At this point, Tim doesn’t give a shit whether or not he’s invited.
He’s halfway to downtown Gotham when he realizes that Bruce shouldn’t have been in the Batcave. Tim swerves unexpectedly, his handlebars dipping too far to the side, and he almost crashes his bike into the side of a building.
At the last minute, Tim yanks the handlebars to the side and pulls it together, coming to a jerky halt, nearly pitched sideways into a brick wall. He breathes heavily to catch back up with the panic that’s hit him out of nowhere, and then forces out a small laugh just for himself.
Tim’s gonna need to keep a closer eye on things that could potentially be hallucinations. Though…getting extra time with Bruce is not the worst thing that could happen.
“Hey!” someone shouts at him.
Tim considers revving his bike and taking off before they can catch up with him, but he recognizes the voice. He’s been meaning to figure out what Lonnie’s up to, anyway, so he just stays still and waits for him to get closer.
Lonnie’s feet hit the pavement almost silently on the street a few feet away, crouching to absorb the landing and then striding closer to Tim’s bike with his cape whipping behind him. With his mask on, Tim can’t tell what Lonnie’s facial expression is doing, but the fact that he’s appeared out of nowhere is not a great sign that Tim’s night is going on unmonitored.
“What kind of driving was that?” Lonnie asks.
Tim takes his helmet off and exaggerates his movements so that Lonnie can see him roll his eyes even past the domino mask. “I just got distracted for a second. Nice to see you too.”
“Okay, no.” Lonnie leans closer, peering at Tim’s face with the impassive expression of his mask. He tugs a glove off to push his fingers into the pulse point on Tim’s neck, poking and prodding like a medical student. When this brief exam is finished, Lonnie asks dubiously, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Hmm, I don’t know,” Tim says, “maybe I’m getting harassed by some random freak in an alley.”
“Why’s your heart rate messed up?”
Tim crinkles his nose up, then jerks his neck away to get Lonnie’s hand off of him. His heartbeat has been shallow all of today, but it’s not bad enough for Tim to be that worried about it.
Lonnie’s head tilts, and his voice gets a little more dangerous. “Are you on something?”
“ No. ” Tim doesn’t think that his defense of “this isn’t an illegal stimulant because the cops have never heard of it” will hold up against Lonnie’s judgment. They’re on rocky ground since Tim’s decision to roll over and let Dick try being Batman for now.
“You’re slurring,” Lonnie says. He sounds pissed. “You shouldn’t be driving.”
“Whatever,” Tim huffs. “I don’t wanna be out here anyway.”
“You won’t be ever again, after I tell Spoiler what you’re up to.”
“Snitch.”
“Robin.”
“What’s your deal?” Tim asks. He gives a paranoid look around his stopping place, though it’s not a high-traffic pedestrian area. The last thing he needs is more talk getting back to Dick that Lonnie and Tim are back in contact. That conversation hadn’t gone well last time. “Are you just sitting around waiting for me to drive by?”
“Yeah, that’s definitely what I’m doing,” Lonnie says. His mask keeps his expression blank, making to the limited coverage of Tim’s mask a vulnerability. Tim puts his helmet back on and fastens it under his chin again, just to level the playing field. Lonnie adds, “Sounds like someone’s jealous that Spoiler actually texts me back.”
“Fuck off.”
“You fuck off.”
“Glad to.” Tim kicks off the ground and tears away from his parking spot, taking a tight circle around Lonnie before going back the way he came. Lonnie yells something after him, but Tim doesn’t hear it.
He doesn’t care what Lonnie tells Steph. Steph’s been focused solely on trying to get Cass’s undivided lesbian attention and apparently robbing warehouses or whatever she and Lonnie are doing , and has left Tim to do his own thing. Maybe Steph’s just as overwhelmed by the change of power structure as Tim is and she has a shitty way of showing it, but Tim definitely wouldn’t list her as his best friend anymore.
He ignores Lonnie’s jabs. He does a patrol route in double-speed, barely stopping his bike but checking in on all the street corners that his family hits at least once. At some point, he expects to run into at least one of them, but there’s nobody to be found. Tim’s been out of the loop just a little bit ever since Bruce disappeared, but he starts getting more and more irritated as he cycles through three different routes and comes up empty.
He should have brought comms. Tim forgot them, in the weird haze of sleeplessness he’d had in the cave.
Around three, he gives up and goes home. He makes a point to drive past Lonnie’s apartment, revving his bike to get Lonnie’s attention when he passes under his window.
As the next day at the office creeps past lunchtime, Tim has to admit that Ivy’s formula isn’t perfect. Though his mind is alert as it always was, with only brief episodes of disorientation, his body is getting more and more exhausted. His stomach feels weird, and he’s basically begging for a migraine at this point.
But he’s awake. And he’s more productive than ever--he’s caught up entirely on his preparation for the next week and he’s out of casework to do. Tim’s getting a little jittery as he pries into other peoples’ cases, sneaking into the files and notes gathered in Babs’s hard drive.
He hallucinates Bruce again, in his office, while he agonizes over an email to the PR team. Tim has half a conversation with the ghost before he remembers, and as soon as he jolts to full lucidity, Bruce’s voice cuts off in the middle of a sentence and disappears.
It’s kind of fucked up, but it makes Tim feel better anyway. He thinks he might be lonely.
As though summoned by that thought, Tam knocks once and pushes the office door open, finding Tim oscillating back and forth on his chair and blankly regarding an empty email draft on his screen. She pauses with her hand on the doorknob and the look on her face says she knows something’s going on but she’s still deciding if it’s in her job description to address it.
“What’s up,” Tim says, not stopping his slow back-and-forth drift.
“Nothing,” Tam says slowly, talking like Tim’s a frightened possum she’s just stumbled upon in her garage. “What’s up with you?”
“I think I should get my money back from that grief therapist you recommended,” Tim says.
Tam laughs out loud, and doesn’t disagree--she doesn’t need to know Tim was a no-show for his appointment anyway. She tips her head to the side, her hair tumbling off her shoulder and her smile dimpling her cheek in a way that makes Tim’s latent dizziness spike. “Wanna talk about it, or do you want to blow this popsicle stand with me instead? I was going to work through emails from home.”
There’s no way Tim can keep this up in close quarters with her for any amount of time. His clammy skin and uneven heartbeat will give him away in about thirty seconds, and there’s nothing that this discovery will do but convince Tam that Tim’s a sweaty and unstable freakshow. Tim’s done so much PR work convincing her that he’s actually okay to be around, and that he doesn’t portend death and destruction everywhere he goes.
“Rain check?” Tim says.
Tam’s lips twist with bittersweet acceptance; she doesn’t believe him, really. “Alright, I’ll hold you to that. You’re good here?”
Tim nods. He breathes shallowly until she gathers her things and leaves, as though if he takes up less space and makes less sound, the awkward widening chasm between them will get any smaller than it is.
The house isn’t empty when he gets home. Two loud voices are having a screaming match in the living room--it sounds like Dick and Damian. It isn’t clear what their discussion is about, because loud noises are starting to become incomprehensible to Tim’s brain. Tim also straight-up doesn’t care what Dick’s antagonizing Damian about. At all.
“Are you quite alright, Master Tim?” Alfred asks.
Tim jumps, almost smashing his hand in the door to the garage as he forgets he was in the middle of closing it. “Shit--Alfred! Hi.”
“Hello,” Alfred says, though he’s narrowing his eyes. “Are you feeling under the weather?”
Tim doesn’t think he’s supposed to answer this honestly. He’s been better about staying hydrated after Alfred caught him slipping, but he’s been shedding weight like crazy because of how quickly his metabolism’s running this week. He’s kind of hungry, all the time, but too nauseous to actually eat.
“I’m good,” Tim says. He gives a thumbs-up. His hand has developed a tremor sometime today, but he can probably pass it off as caffeine overdose. “Um, I think I just need a nap.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” Alfred gives Tim another strange look. “Your presence was missed at breakfast this morning. If you’d like to lie down, I’ll bring your dinner to you in your room.”
“Thanks,” Tim says. He wants to smile, but it probably looks more like a grimace.
“My pleasure.” Alfred places a hand on Tim’s back, giving him a little push to start him off down the hall. “Miss Stephanie is joining us this evening. I believe she’d like to speak with you.”
“I’m kind of busy this evening.” Tim does not want to have a conversation with Steph right now. At least not until Tim’s dose wears off. He has tomorrow, and then the day after, and then he can feel free to communicate with Steph without fear of being discovered. “Is she staying the night? Tell her I can talk to her tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll try to divert her, but she seemed rather insistent.”
Tim rubs his face. “Okay. Thanks.”
He gets up to his room without being intercepted by anyone else. Tim locks his door and changes out of the suit he’d chosen this morning specifically because of how uncomfortable it is. Wearing constricting clothes keeps him more alert; it’s the main trick he learned during his first month as CEO. That and scheduling meetings with Tam for most lunch hours so nobody would sneak in bullshit during his the open hour on his calendar.
He’d promised Alfred he would sleep. Tim knows he won’t be able to, but he gets into bed anyway and answers emails on his phone for three hours as a compromise, leaving Tam’s texts unread even though the red notification dot on his home screen stresses him out. His brain is too wired for him to stop moving completely, but being immobile stops the dizziness in his head.
If nobody finds out what he did this week, Tim can clean up all the loose ends himself and things will work out. Tim can keep the ship going and if he does it with a stiff upper lip, nobody else will leave him.
In a testament to Alfred’s dazzling yet subtle skills of mental manipulation, he gets Stephanie to not come busting down Tim’s door that night. She settles for barraging him with texts that Tim doesn’t open.
If it means Tim doesn’t have to get yelled at in person for whatever intoxicated driving Stephanie or Lonnie thinks Tim was doing, Tim’s willing to play into the lie that he’s sick. He accepts a to-go mug of tea that Alfred brings to his room before bed and gives a sort of fake feeble smile when Alfred tells him that getting even more sleep will help his body fight off infection.
Tim does kind of feel like garbage. The serum isn’t a long-term solution, like he’d hoped it would be. Not all that glitters is gold, or whatever.
Tim slogs down the stairs into the kitchen around four, too early for anyone else to be awake, and gives in to the urge to have some coffee. His brain certainly doesn’t need to be any more wired, but sustenance might help keep him tethered to his body. It’s getting hard for him to keep track of how to use his hands.
Nobody catches him in the kitchen, despite the fact that he knocks over a stack of plastic cereal bowls and sends them crashing all over the counter. Tim takes the full pot of coffee down to the Cave with him and sits in front of the computer. Bruce isn’t here to yell at him for having a beverage near the keyboard, so Tim can do whatever he wants.
The deeper he gets into the pot of coffee, the more his eye starts to twitch. Tim gives up on drinking more when he gets too shaky without his body’s energy level improving at all, and he sets the pot down on the ground to get some work done.
He hand-writes out some more notes about his experience to add to Ivy’s research file. As he’s pulling it out and trying to force his bleary eyes to focus long enough to organize it, his hand catches two pieces of paper that had stuck together in his original look through the documentation. Tim pinches them and rubs his fingers to separate the sheets of paper, and finds that there’s a whole new page of notes on the test subject who Tim had taken inspiration from.
Fuck. Tim lets out a semi-hysterical laugh and drops his forehead onto the surface of the desk for a moment before composing himself and looking at the new information.
The test subject had been almost three times Tim’s weight, and had been a full adult. That’s maybe something Tim could have taken into account, as was the fact that the subject had been given a specific diet and fluid intake. Tim squints at the numbers, attempting to rationalize them away, but the fact is that he hasn’t made himself a fit comparison to this person.
Down by the mouth of the Cave, Tim hears the approaching roar of someone’s vehicle. Tim sweeps the papers up, attempting to stow them in the nearest drawer he can find, but his fingers are uncoordinated and he knocks several sheets of paper to the ground. Tim slides out of his chair and promptly kicks the half-empty pot of coffee over.
“Fuck,” he says, and rights the pot with shaky hands. He says “ fuck,” again, with more feeling, as he pulls the dripping pieces of paper out of the puddle. He can’t think of a way to dry them off besides drinking the coffee, so he slurps at the pieces of paper as he gets back to his feet.
Tim rises, still licking coffee off of Ivy’s research like an animal, but it’s too late for him to hide anything. The noise of approaching tires has stopped, because the beaten-up old model of the Batmobile has been parked and Batman is getting out.
Sighing with relief, Tim breaks eye contact with Bruce and places the wet pieces of coffee-soaked research down. It’s just a hallucinatory Bruce, and not someone like Dick or Cass who would be showing up to ruin Tim’s whole life.
“What’s up, Brucie,” Tim says. He barely has to think about talking anymore; the hyperactive part of his brain keeps him sounding so perky. With less urgency, he bundles up the pile of papers in its manila folder and takes it back to its hidden spot in the filing cabinet labeled “Finances.”
“Tim?” Bruce says, all choked-up and emotional or something. His voice sounds weird.
Tim’s been through this song-and-dance. When he imagines him, Bruce is either so casual it’s boring, or he’s all injured and bleeding from some random part of his body and he’s blaming Tim for his death. Tim doesn’t want to hear it right now. He has coffee to clean up and his overactive brain has started to turn in worrying circles that indicate he either needs to sit down or recaffeinate.
“Can we talk about it in a minute? I’m sorry, I know everything is my fault, etcetera.” Tim shuts the filing cabinet drawer with a slam, and a ripple of exhaustion and headache stems from the sound. He grimaces. “Lemme just…I think my dose is almost up.”
Bruce’s feet hurry up the stairs. “What did you take?”
“Aw, lemme show you.” Bruce is being much more accommodating than usual, so Tim smiles a wide smile and gestures for Bruce to follow him over to the fridge. He drags the enormous box of protein shakes out of the way and finds the two vials he left there a week ago--it was either a week ago, or he still has one more day to go, but it shouldn’t make that much of a difference. “Ivy was gonna use these for evil, or whatever, but they’re mine now.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s like, a pretty amazing energy drink. I think it might be frying my brain, but it’s whatever. I’m getting so much done and I’m getting to spend time with you, B-man.” Tim reaches out to pick one up, but Bruce’s hand snatches both of the vials out of the fridge, holding them out of reach.
“What the hell?” Tim asks, both startled by the interruption but also by the fact that…his hallucinations of Bruce have never been able to pick anything up.
“Was that file your research on it?” Bruce demands.
Tim squints. “Yes…but give those back.”
“No, I think you’ve had enough.”
“I need it,” Tim insists, a little more angrily. “I can handle it, I just need to be awake.”
He reaches up to swipe for the vials, expecting for his hand to pass right through Bruce’s arm, but instead he finds contact with real, solid flesh and bone. It actually feels like Bruce is here, in a shredded-up and dirty Batsuit, coated in fading bruises.
Tim’s lost his mind entirely. With the shock of this realization, his brain takes a more violent dip in and out of unconsciousness, so quickly he barely notices the microsleep until he’s having another one.
“Shit, Tim—“ A hand grabs one of his elbows, dragging him back to a standing position.
Desperately blinking over and over to get his vision to stop doubling, he finds himself being held up by Batman. Tim seizes his chance and snatches at the vials. He gets hold of one of them, but punches the other one out of Bruce’s hand, sending it flying.
“Catch it!” he exclaims, pointing, and then tries to run in the opposite direction with the vial he managed to obtain. He gets about three steps away before he hears glass shattering on the floor and he feels a hand grab at the hood of his sweatshirt, but it fails to get a full grip on the fabric and Tim gets away. He runs to the opposite end of the cave, where he shoves the vial into his pocket and starts climbing up the ladder that goes to Dick’s old trapeze platforms.
“Tim, get down from there,” he hears. He keeps climbing, trying to get up to at least the first platform so he can try to swing away, but he’s only a few rungs up when hallucinatory Bruce grabs him around the waist and starts trying to pry him off the ladder.
Tim holds on tighter and screeches.
“ Shush, everyone’s asleep, are you insane--?”
“No I’m not!” Tim screams. “ You’re insane! You lied about being dead for four months! ”
“Okay, first of all, I didn’t…sheesh, you’re down like fifteen pounds, what the hell?” Bruce tightens his grip around Tim’s stomach and rips him away, breaking Tim’s hold on the ladder at last and swinging him out into empty air. “How long’ve you been on this?”
Tim goes completely boneless, trying to wiggle out of Bruce’s grip. Bruce doesn’t feel as tall and broad as he used to, but that may just be because Tim’s grown a little bit in the past few months.
His tactic isn’t successful; Bruce has had way too much practice trying to carry around tantruming children. And Joker venom victims. And tantruming children afflicted by Joker venom.
Bruce keeps hold around Tim’s waist, hauling him towards the medical station in the opposite corner of the cave. Tim un-bonelesses himself and starts trying to make himself heavier with only his thoughts, with little luck.
He’s been moving around too much, and it catches up to him in one big wave, softening his vision into gooey jelly and causing a weird surge in his stomach that he doesn’t realize is vomit until he’s puking all down his front and all over Bruce’s arms.
“Sorry,” Tim groans, trying to keep himself conscious to apologize more. His mind is entering a kind of twilight state where he can’t fully tell where he is.
“This is why we don’t do speed,” Bruce’s voice tells him, a little too self-satisfied to be comforting.
“‘S not speed,” Tim gurgles, and then pukes again. This time, Bruce tilts him forward so he doesn’t get any more bodily fluids on himself. The vomit is a bright red puddle that indicates he’s bringing up blood.
That’s not good, he dimly thinks, and wants to giggle but can’t because he’s heaving for a third time.
“You wanna explain that to Alfred?”
Tim shakes his head fervently. He’s carried forward a few more steps and deposited on the examination table, where he slumps.
Bruce kneels in front of him. He’s still wearing his cowl and everything. Tim tries to keep his eyes focused on his face but it’s hard to see straight.
“You can’t do this anymore,” Bruce tells Tim seriously.
Tim scowls.
“I’m gonna get Alfred. Will you hand me the rest of the serum, please?”
Tim scowls harder and makes no move to take the vial out of his pocket. “You aren’t even my real dad.”
Bruce snorts. “Yeah, thank fuck I’m not.”
Startled, Tim blinks, his vision sharpening into focus for only a split-second before it wells up with tears. He barely realizes he’s crying until he’s covering his face and a shuddering sob is leaving him.
“Damn it. Tim, I’m sorry.” Hands are touching Tim’s shoulders, rubbing up and down and trying to soothe him. “Hey, look at me. I’m not Bruce. I’m not…Please stop crying. Please?”
Tim drags his hands down his face, trying to wipe away tears, but this surge of emotion has far surpassed what his body is capable of coping with. His already-woozy vision warps again, and he hears his heart pounding so loudly in his ears that the rest of Bruce’s words blur into a vague hum of worry.
He thinks he’s moved to lie horizontally. The pull of gravity changes on him, in some way. A hand pins him down by the shoulder, and a needle shoves itself into his arm. Tim’s too confused to protest until it’s too late for him to stop the medical attention he’s receiving.
“Alfie,” Bruce’s voice says, sounding too nervous and not low enough to really be his, “can I get some help downstairs? Bring Duke or Cass.”
Blinking stubbornly, Tim rolls his head to one side and sees Batman there, setting up an IV drip that’s attached to Tim’s arm. The presence of medical equipment reminds Tim that this is exactly what he’s been trying to avoid all week. He’s crashing a day early from Ivy’s forbidden juice, which he’ll have to document. His working theory is that if he’s a little bit better about eating regularly, it might go better next time.
It wouldn’t be good science if he gave up after one trial.
Like he’s sensed Tim’s thought process, Bruce holds up the intact vial, far out of Tim’s reach. He must’ve retrieved it from Tim’s pocket while Tim was either crying or throwing up.
“I hate you,” Tim says, barely enunciating his words.
Bruce takes off his cowl, and Dick’s face is underneath it.
Tim screams. It’s a bridge of excitement too far; his eyes roll back, and he forgets how to un-roll them before his brain shuts off completely.
Tim wakes up feeling like a pile of shit.
Every muscle in his body aches. He’s overwarm, as though he’s just taken a particularly brutal nap and stayed asleep for a couple hours too long, with all the brain fog and dry mouth that accompanies that particular experience.
Tim’s familiar with the feeling of an IV port in his forearm, of uncomfortably thin sheets draped over him, so he knows where he is before he even checks. His injury must have been pretty intense, if he feels this wrung-out even after getting fed a saline drip.
Tim pries his eyes open and tries to keep them that way long enough to get his bearings. He’s in the Cave, definitely a good start. He wasn’t bad-off enough to be rushed to a hospital. But on the other hand, he’s not in his suit, he’s in pajamas--this is not a good thing, because it implies that he hadn’t gotten hurt out in the field.
When he remembers how to turn his head, he lolls it over towards one shoulder to see if anyone’s monitoring him, and comes face-to-face with Dick slumped over asleep in a red fold-out camping chair, his cheek resting on one fist and his eyes closed. He’s still in most of the Batman suit, all but the cowl and the gloves, and Tim is struck with a terrible flash of memory.
“Fuck me in the neck,” Tim mutters under his breath, lamenting that the week had to end like this, but that slight noise is enough to make Dick’s eyes twitch open.
Dick’s eyes sweep a confused arc around the room before they focus. He sits up straighter, and passes a palm over his face, and he says, “Tim, you’re awake,” like someone who’s sat by the bedside of a coma patient for three uninterrupted months. Tim’s familiar with that tone of voice.
“Hey,” Tim says.
“So, uh,” Dick says, watching Tim a little warily, “you know who I am this time, right?”
Tim grimaces at the ceiling, not able to look at Dick anymore. His head is killing him, but of course he recognizes Dick. Once the embarrassment of this episode passes, Dick’s going to be insufferable about that mix-up.
“That looks like a yes, so,” Dick says, gracefully moving forward, “how’s your stomach? You’re lucky you still have it.”
“What?” Tim asks. He squeezes his eyes shut to try and keep the sound of Dick’s voice from reverberating around his skull in an infinite echo. “Can you quiet down a little bit?”
“Huh,” Dick says, barely amused. His voice drops several volume levels, and his next words don’t inflict as much damage on Tim’s eardrums. “I said you’re lucky to still have your stomach. What were you thinking.”
Tim says through gritted teeth, “I was advancing science.”
“I mean, this was just unbelievable, Tim!” Dick continues, like Tim hasn’t said anything at all. “You have a week off from patrolling with Cass and you get hooked on Poison Ivy toxin? I was trying to give you space but you’re clearly going off the fucking rails--!”
“Oh, shove it,” Tim snaps. He plants a palm and struggles to a sitting position, ignoring all protests from his stomach, his windpipe, his eighty separate sore muscles, his headache. It would be easier to just list the parts of his body that don’t mind the movement--which is basically just his earlobes and the point of his chin. “I can take care of myself.”
“You were going to die,” Dick says, his voice back at the volume that makes Tim’s teeth feel as though they’re rattling in his jaw. “What part of this whole thing told you to stop drinking water?”
Tim doesn’t remember the last time he had anything to drink. He starts to cringe while trying simultaneously not to show it. He ends up with his shoulders half-hunched in poorly-disguised shame.
“Leslie’s coming by later to decide if you can medically get on a plane next week without having a stroke--”
“What the hell!”
“--And maybe before then you can figure out how to explain you going off the grid for most of the day.”
Tim checks the watch on his wrist and finds not only a hundred and twenty unread emails but also that it’s past three in the afternoon. His dizziness from before surges again and he had to take a second to blink carefully until his stomach and head stop swirling around.
Dick takes Tim’s lack of response as a sign that he’s getting somewhere. He lowers his voice again and says, “I’m just worried.”
Tim takes a slow breath in through his mouth and lets it out through his nose, like Tam does when she’s meditating at her desk, straight-backed and serene. He wonders if she feels like she’s dissolving in acid like this while she exhales all her anxiety.
“You clearly have a lot more on your plate than you can juggle,” Dick says. He rests his hand on the edge of the cot, not touching Tim but at least getting close. “If you need to take a step back…”
“No, I’m good,” Tim says. He shakes his head gingerly, but doesn’t soften his glare when he directs it Dick’s way. “Are you done?”
Dick’s frown deepens, irritation cutting the weight out of his concerned expression. “Yeah,” he says flatly, “I guess I’m done.”
Tim huffs, trying his best to be dismissive about it. “You sound like Bruce.”
Instead of this getting Dick to leave, this comment coaxes a snort out of him. His exhausted and disapproving act breaks in a second. Dick rubs his palm over his face and says, “God, I really do. No wonder you thought I was him.”
The puncturing of the mounting tension settles the nausea in Tim’s gut. His shoulders relax. Things still feel like an ever-accumulating snowball of disaster, but the snowball slows down and some chunks fall off now that he and Dick aren’t about to start shouting at each other.
“The gray hairs aren’t helping,” Tim says, pushing his luck.
Dick drops his hand back to his lap and he looks at Tim with a tired gaze that’s still uncomfortably fond, even with his short burst of levity fading. “I guess not.” He checks his watch. “Leslie will be here soon. Do you want to watch something with me while we wait?”
Tim’s missed work beckons. He knows he should find his phone and assure Tam he hasn’t met a terrible grisly end, too. Now, though, watching the guarded hope on Dick’s face, Tim realizes he actually just wants to sit and watch Mythbusters with his brother for a minute.
“I guess,” Tim says. “If I get to pick what it is.”