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You know, we thank some people for merely living at the same time as we do. I thank you for the fact that I met you, that I will remember you for all my life!
— Extract from "White Nights" by Dostoyevsky
Everyone praises Dostoevsky as a cornerstone of classic literature. When it came to assigning books he thought best suited each of his siblings, Jason never once hesitated—Crime and Punishment went straight to Tim. He should’ve known better, Tim thinks. Jason, of all people, could not have chosen something that wasn’t meant to kill. The moment those four words—“Dostoevsky” and Crime and Punishment—left the girl’s mouth, it should have been an omen, a neon sign screaming at him to shut down his crush then and there. He should’ve dropped the daydreams of sun-kissed skin and silky, chocolate-brown hair, and maybe asked out the boy from math class instead, the one with freckles scattered across his face like constellations patiently mapped by the summer sun. Jason’s recommendation was never a kindness—it was a knife wrapped up in bookbinding. Nothing from the guy who once tried to slit your throat and actually stabbed you in the heart could ever be harmless.
Bernard practically cackled in his face when he saw him open the book at lunch. Stephanie, wide-eyed from sheer shock, asked for the title, typed it into her phone at lightning speed, and immediately leaned in to whisper animated Google findings to Duke. That should have been the first red flag. Maybe he should’ve done the same—researched the book, mapped out the possible psychological damage, treated it like a living person and dug up its entire background the way he once did with Jasleen Achari.
But no. He thought—it’s just a book. If he spoiled himself too much on the contents, he’d never make it through, and then how could he flash his “extensive” literary knowledge to the pretty girl? How else could he ask her to a cat-themed book café afterward, to discuss its depths over coffee and pastries like any girls seems obsessed to do in their first date?
Or maybe—just maybe—he should have noticed his friends’ suspicious behavior, slammed the book shut, and not gotten lost in daydreams of dates with a smart, humanitarian girl to miss all the red flags
It was not just a book.
But it was how he met P. Parker.
The story itself was set in summer. At first, he hadn’t noticed anything unusual while reading the library copy in the cafeteria. It was only when he forced himself through yet another page of dry prose that something caught his eye: faint, almost invisible pencil marks, pressed so lightly into the paper that you’d miss them if you weren’t looking.
Later, once the lessons were over, Tim cleared a space on his chaos-riddled desk and dragged over his bright fluorescent task lamp. He positioned it until the pages glowed harsh white. Then came the tools: a magnifying lens, a black archival marker with an ultra-fine tip. He tested it first on the margin of a scrap sheet, checking whether it would bleed through paper this thin. It didn’t.
Only then did he return to the page, eyes narrowed, and trace the first ghostly letters he had noticed.
It read, don’t do it, scrawled just above the printed line: I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles.
Tim froze. The handwriting was cramped, rushed, but deliberate. He studied every curve of it, then lowered his marker and tried to mimic the strokes, carefully maintaining the same slant and pressure, retracing the words until they almost looked like the original hand.
And then, because obsession always asks for more, he flipped back to the very beginning of the book. His lamp hummed, his magnifying lens hovered, his pen hovered like a scalpel over flesh. Page by page, he traced again—until finally, buried at the top margin of chapter one, he uncovered two initials.
P. Parker.
He flipped back to the page he’d left behind and read the words don’t do it over and over again. Each time, he imagined a different voice. Female. Male. Scoffing. Stern, like a warning: you’ll regret it. But in the end, the loudest voice was the gentlest one, barely more than a whisper—don’t do it—soft, sorrowful, almost pleading.
Tim should have known this book would ruin him the moment he chose that gentle, sad voice over any other.
He read slowly now, squinting for more hidden marks. And there—just barely—a faint trace, almost invisible, no more than a pressed dot from the pencil’s tip. Without it, he never would have noticed the word at all. Even under his magnifying lens, it was nearly lost.
overthinker.
Tim reread the man’s monologue and couldn’t help but agree with P. Parker. Even on the second page, you could already tell: the main character was drowning in his own thoughts.
Further down, at the page’s edge, he found another note, this one written crookedly, squeezed in to match the flow of the text.
Tim shut his eyes, the insides of his lids glowing red from the desk lamp. He tried to block out the world, but curiosity kept prying them open again, dragging him back to the page. Each time he read the description, he forced himself to imagine it. The heat so intense the air itself wavered. Sweat slipping down his temple. A desert, perhaps—his mind briefly placed him there, wrapped in suffocating layers of cloth. He recoiled from the image, wiped it away, and anchored himself: no, not a desert. A city.
The air grew thick in his mind, each breath clogged with dust. The acrid bite of plaster and brick. The suffocating press of scaffolding on every side. Crowds swelling in the street, indifferent to the staggering drunk men among them, their stench of alcohol and sweat carried on the air.
And then the faces shifted. Gotham’s streets. The same blotched skin, the swelling, the broken veins beneath the surface—Dostoevsky’s “revolting misery” mirrored in what Tim saw every day.
In that moment, something felt sacred, fragile. As though he were intruding on a private conversation left in the margins. Very carefully, so as not to break the spell, Tim lowered his pen and wrote beside P. Parker’s note, his letters small, deliberate, almost reverent, contrasting the neat print of writing with his own cursive letters.
I agree.
When patrol time came, he snapped the book shut and hid it away. It was no one’s business but his. If the streets of Gotham felt a little more suffocating that night, that too was no one else’s concern. Even when he resisted climbing down from the rooftops more than usual, keeping to the higher ground whenever he could, it was his secret to keep.
And if Tim found himself sharply attuned to the drunks scattered through the alleys, imagining the blotchy redness of their skin, the swelling of their faces in the dim light—well, that was still no one’s business either. Even if his body language betrayed him in his uneasiness and Cass noticed, she would never say a word.
So, yes. If the book—and P. Parker—had threaded themselves into his mind, haunting the way he moved and thought, it was still his to carry alone.
In his hyperfixation, he forgot all about the girl with the sun-kissed skin that started it all.
✩₊˚.⋆🕸️⋆⁺₊✧
For a family without boundaries, no one batted an eye at Tim’s odd behavior. No one guessed he had a new obsession—why would they? Jason had stacked their shelves with so many classically self-destructive books that Tim poring over one more hardly seemed remarkable. In Gotham, what was one more volume promising to hollow you out? Just yesterday Firefly had tried to synthesize a liquid fire that burns the body from the inside out, intending to introduce it into the drinking water supply—too bad people nowadays prefer to wash their dishes with bottled water just to be on the safe side.
P. Parker had written beneath a description of Petersburg: the town seems haunted, as if Dostoevsky paints it on the border of existence and non-existence, a mirage at the edge of your vision—blurred when you look directly at it. And then, in careful script: when the fog clears, it will rot, collapse on itself and perish with its people. it reminds me of Gotham.
And the city’s name was written with a capital G. Gotham. The only other time Parker had ever capitalized anything was for the author’s name.
Tim imagined the person behind these annotations: someone unfailingly polite, the sort who laces every sentence with thank-yous, sorrys, and pleases. Someone meticulous. Intelligent. Noticing minute details others would skim past.
And the city’s name was written with a capital G. Gotham. The only other time Parker had ever capitalized anything was for the author’s name.
Tim imagined the person behind these annotations: someone unfailingly polite, the sort who laces every sentence with thank-yous, sorrys, and pleases. Someone meticulous. Intelligent. Noticing minute details others would skim past.
Six mentions of staircases.
The number 730, underlined with a note to track if it reappeared and to research its symbolism.
And beside the line,“He was positively going now for a ‘rehearsal’ of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.”
Parker had scrawled: the downfall.
Elsewhere, when Dostoevsky described three or four doorkeepers in a single house and the protagonist slipping through a back entrance, Parker noted: social inequality—rich and poor living in the same house, but the rich use the main door while the poor are forced to the back. the repeated mention of dark, narrow staircases must be deliberate.
And then, a final highlight of the page, understated but deliberate: the word “three” and “fourth” with a number 2 written above them.
“three” with the written number 3, an arrow pointing to a note scribbled at the top of the page:
the number 3 is said to have an unequivocally positive meaning—reconciliation, peace, eternity. the number associates with the trinity. but in the context of this book, can it really be said to hold anything positive?
The next time he was benched—broken ribs this time, ordered to stay behind while the others ran patrol—Tim made his way carefully down the stairs into the study. Alfred was already there, waiting with his usual judgmental British calm.
Tim had an excuse prepared. On nights when he wasn’t allowed in the field, it was perfectly normal for him to “survey the cameras” while the others were out. Alfred accepted this without question, only pausing to take Tim’s hand and help him ease into the Batcave, mindful of his ribs.
Slowly, Tim pressed his finger against the clock dial, nudging the hour hand aside with deliberate care. He wasn’t about to repeat Dick’s mistake—the time Dick had actually snapped the thing clean off, forcing Bruce to hire clocksmiths to repair the antique. Tim had stayed behind to keep watch on the man—a display of curiosity, Bruce had called it—and the old craftsman told him it was an honor to repair such a piece. Every clocksmith, he explained, left behind a “witness mark” in the mechanism, so future hands could see the story of its repairs.
Tim, running on seven cups of coffee and not enough sleep, had deadpanned:
“Cool. So when my siblings break it again, they’ll basically just be signing the guest book.”
He made nearly a full circle with the hour hand before shifting to the minute hand It ticked forward, and for a brief second he paused, letting it hover on forty-six, before finally setting it in place. 4 and 7. The system engaged with a soft click. Alfred, of course, didn’t comment on the brief pause.
In his head, Tim counted. Seven — two. Four — three.
By the time he lowered himself carefully into a chair, ribs protesting, he accepted Alfred’s tea offer—if only to send him upstairs. Alone now, the numbers gnawed at him. “Four.” “Fouth.” Forty. Three separate times the number had appeared.
He pulled out his phone and searched.
The number four symbolizes stability, security, and strong foundations, often through hard work, discipline, and practicality. It represents wholeness and completeness—the four directions, four seasons, the square, the cross. In numerology, it is order, dependability, the structure that supports life.
Tim stared at the screen, lips pressing thin. Stability. Security. Strong foundations.
None of which described his life. Nor his family’s.
10:47—the time of death of B’s parents.
Four and seven, Tim thought, held no positive meanings in that book either. He knew it the way he knew that every algorithm, given an input, must yield a deterministic output.
The book wasn’t with him, unfortunately. And it didn’t simply materialize in his hands on a wish, no matter how much his fingers itched to flip through its pages until he found what P. Parker had written about the numbers 4 and 7. To watch those numbers twist on themselves as the story unraveled.
Later, he thought, staring at the camera feeds and thinking of nothing at all. He shook himself out of dissociation and focused on why he’d come down here. He hadn’t descended into the cave to monitor patrol routes. Not to tinker with unfinished case files. Just this.
The Batcomputer hummed to life beneath his fingers, its glow bleeding across the cave floor.
Every hack—no matter how masterful—left marks if someone looked hard enough. Subtle, microscopic, almost invisible, but still there. A faint signature. A ghost in the code. With enough persistence, you could always trace it back.
Except here.
The Batcomputer was different. It didn’t simply erase its tracks; it left no presence at all. Even the most meticulous digital autopsy would turn up nothing—no footprint in cached history, no ripple in the net. It was cleaner than anything the League kept on the Watchtower, and Tim had tested both.
No one would know.
If Bruce grew suspicious, if Oracle cross-referenced activity logs, if Cass watched him too closely and decided to tell—none of them would find a single trace of who he was searching.
That was why he was here. Why his ribs ached from climbing down the stairs. Why he’d accepted Alfred’s tea just to be left alone.
Because to pull at the thread of P. Parker—to find the person behind those ghostly pencil marks—he needed the one machine that could make ghosts real.
So he searched.
First, the library system. It was child’s play to crack open. The copy he had wasn’t unique; several were in circulation. Some were standard loan editions, others restricted to shorter borrowing windows, and one reference copy was permanently locked to the shelves. He pulled the records anyway, skimming the list of names. Elizabeth Jones. Jason Todd.
At that, he raised an eyebrow. Seeing Jason’s name outside the family chat felt like seeing a corpse: jarring, out of place. Unusual.
More names. Apparently half the school were secret Dostoevsky fans. Jasleen Achari. Samuel Riggs. His own name appeared neatly among them, logged as the current borrower of this copy.
But never P. Parker.
Maybe Parker had never checked the book out. Maybe he’d only read it in the library.
So Tim dug deeper. He breached the school’s database next, combing through the student registry until he found him. The only Parker. Tim wasn’t sure what he felt when the name popped up—when he realized this student was currently enrolled at his school. Relief, maybe, that he’d fixated on someone actually alive? Or concern that P. Parker wasn’t some former student quietly fading into anonymity, but someone present. Someone real.
Peter Parker.
A transfer. From Queens. Scholarship student. His file read like a model applicant: entrance exams in the top percentile, steady marks across the year.
Tim pulled up his schedule. His background. His photo.
Pretty, Tim thought, almost involuntarily. The thought lingered like an afterimage. Soft brown hair that refused to stay tamed, a boyish roundness still clinging to his features despite the shadows beneath his eyes. His skin was pale but warm-toned, dusted with freckles across his nose and cheeks—light enough that you had to look closely to notice. His jaw had the beginnings of sharpness, still softened at the edges, and his smile—if you could call it that—was nothing more than an awkward tug at one corner of his mouth. Tim found himself wanting to see him laugh, genuinely, not for a school photo. His gaze was open in a way Tim found almost alien—unguarded, earnest, the kind of expression that made people want to believe him without demanding proof.
Peter Parker was pretty in a way that was soft, like a fawn blinking into the light—Bambi-pretty. Wide-eyed, startled, gentle. The kind of pretty that didn’t belong in Gotham at all, as if the city hadn’t had its chance yet to sink claws in and strip it away. Fragile. Breakable. And maybe that was why Tim’s stare lingered longer than it should have—the sheer improbability of someone like Parker existing here, all soft edges and bright-eyed naïveté, as if he’d stepped straight out of the margins of a Disney movie and onto Tim’s screen.
When Alfred came down with chocolate chip cookies and his tea, Tim had already closed everything. He sat staring instead at one feed where Bruce slammed a criminal into concrete, and another where Damian, out of seemingly nowhere, pulled a magical restraint to stab a target in a non-lethal spot. By the end of the fight, Damian’s stabbing piñatas were far more intact and salvageable than Bruce’s.
On principle alone, he finished the tea and all of the cookies. The latter was mostly so he wouldn’t have to leave any for his siblings. Alfred had made those cookies for him—a consolation for missing patrol—and Tim suspected even accepting the tea had been read as a sign of extreme distress. So it felt only fair to leave nothing behind. Let the empty plate and scattered crumbs sit there, a quiet, crumb-lined declaration: these were his, and the others could deal with the heartbreak.
That same restless night—what you could already call another day—he sat beneath the clinical lamp on his desk, rereading passages, lingering only on the lines Peter had marked. Having a face to attach to the handwriting felt disarming, especially when that face carried a prettiness that lingered even when he closed his eyes. He could almost imagine the quietness of Peter’s voice, something soft, bordering on a whisper, drifting through Dostoevsky’s prose. Reading to him. Steady. Calm. And then looking up—long eyelashes fanning tired eyes that seemed to catch light like reflections of distant stars.
what a paradox of a tragic hero he is.
Tim exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose as he leaned back in his chair.
He could almost see Peter’s lips part slightly as he thought—the kind of thoughtful expression that drifted in without forced effort. Eyes losing focus, not absent but turned inward, gaze sliding to the side or down at the page as he gathered his thoughts. Peter looked like someone who would do that; Tim could feel it. And if he didn’t? Then the real gestures… those subtle, thoughtless habits of his would be still endearing if not more than anything Tim could conjure up in his mind.
Maybe his blinking slowed. Maybe his mouth relaxed open by a fraction. A tiny pinch in his brows as he concentrated. A steadying of breath. A soft voice, head tilting the slightest bit as he spoke. Tim had never been so grateful for his memory—exquisite, inconvenient, relentless. One photo had been enough to imprint every detail, enough for him to picture all of it now with unsettling clarity.
Maybe his blinking slowed. Maybe his mouth relaxed open by a fraction. A tiny pinch in his brows as he concentrated. A steadying of breath. A soft voice, head tilting the slightest bit as he spoke. Tim had never been so grateful for his memory—exquisite, inconvenient, relentless. One photo had been enough to imprint every detail, enough for him to picture all of it now with unsettling clarity.
He opened his eyes again, reaching back for the book, letting the margins guide him to the next note.
to have compassion enough to see injustice done to an innocent creature, a horse. to run to its dead body, embrace it, kiss it, and be ready to throw himself at the man who killed it in righteous fury at the age of seven—yet still, in adulthood, contemplate the murder of an old woman because of his own foolish theories.
Walking through the corridors with his friends beside him, it took every ounce of Tim’s willpower not to peel away and start searching immediately. Any student with brown hair drew his eyes, each one inspected, dismissed, inspected again—his mind running comparisons against the image he’d memorized so thoroughly it had followed him into sleep.
But then his gaze snagged on something familiar. Warm brown eyes—the exact shade he had spent nights picturing, those same eyes that stared at him in the quiet, echoing room of his dream. In that dreams, Peter stood in the old empty manor from Tim’s childhood memories, surrounded by faceless servants and that too-long dining table with prisitne white cloth where two place settings still appeared every night despite everyone knowing his parents wouldn’t come home. Peter fit strangely, impossibly into that melancholy space—soft, gentle, a warm light in a cold room.
And now he was here. Real.
Tim’s steps faltered. He openly stared, attention snapping toward Peter with a clarity and sharpness that cut through Stephanie’s chatter like a blade. Beside him, Bernard stopped mid-walk, giving Tim a puzzled side-eye—clearly noticing he had been summarily, blatantly ignoring them.
Tim raised a hand in a slight, tentative greeting.
Peter paused. The curls of his hair bounced faintly as he tilted his head, wide eyes blinking in question. He glanced around as if making sure Tim was actually addressing him, then pointed at himself with a small, uncertain gesture.
Tim nodded.
And before Bernard could track where Tim was looking, Tim forced his feet to move again. His pulse hammered under his ribcage—loud, insistent, dizzying—as they drew closer, steps aligning for a moment like the universe wanted to make something of it.
As he passed, Tim couldn’t help turning his head to look back.
Peter was already looking, and then bowing subtly just his head in late response to his greeting.
Something warm and pleased hummed low in Tim’s chest, settling deep and certain. Those eyes—still on him.
It took three full lessons before Tim saw him again. Three lessons of pretending to focus, of forcing his pen to move across pages he wouldn't remember later, of ignoring the restless itch in his ribs every time he walked through the hall to the other lesson.
No matter how much money he had—or how many strings he could realistically pull—Tim couldn’t justify switching his entire academic schedule just to match Peter Parker’s. He couldn’t explain it in any way that sounded rational, not even to himself.
He wasn’t even sure what he would say if someone asked. That he needed to sit one row behind a boy he never spoke to? That he wanted to memorize the way Peter’s curls fell when he bent over his notes? That he was looking for something—what, exactly? Recognition? Confirmation? Proof that the boy attached to those precise, aching annotations was as soft in person as he looked on a grainy school ID that he remembers in such precision as the back of his hand?
Even Tim knew that would sound insane.
They had six subjects that were somewhat similar in nature, but still not quite aligned. Close enough to tempt him, but not close enough to justify rearranging his entire academic life around Peter Parker.
Peter’s schedule listed Computer Science II, while Tim was in AP Computer Science Principles and AP Computer Science A. Both advanced. Both higher-level, but CS II was still not in AP level of studying. And absolutely impossible to drop without raising every conceivable red flag.
Under no circumstances could Tim explain to Bruce—if he ever bothered to check—that he wanted to downgrade his CS track. Not for “stress management.” Not for any reason that didn’t require confessing,
I met a boy and his handwriting and looks rewired my brain into what can possibly become a life-long obsession.
English was no better. He’d ranted for years that English Literature was useless to him, entrenched in AP English Language, and now he was going to suddenly insist that AP Lit was his true calling? Suspicious. Monumentally suspicious. Alfred would give him that tiny knowing tilt of the head, Bruce would narrow his eyes, and Cass would send him a text with nothing but a 👀 emoji. Jason would gloat and taunt his pride. He wasn’t surviving that.
Languages were a dead end too.
Peter had Latin III.
Tim had Mandarin III—the furthest thing from swappable.
World History looked promising for exactly forty seconds. Tim was in World History, Peter in WH Honors, and that would be an easy enough shift—if Tim hadn’t already hit the school’s limit on advanced courses. Sure, money could probably bulldoze that obstacle, but WH Honors was popular; he’d most likely end up in a different group anyway without him outright telling them to put into Parker's group. And that defeated the entire point.
Almost all of Tim’s classes overlapped with Stephanie, Duke, and Bernard. Moving even one would invite questions he wasn’t prepared to answer—not without lying so hard that they would suspect him to be a clone.
PE Group I? Not changing. He has both Stepanie and Duke that will be on his case and stalk him into the other group if he will change. Extracurriculars? He didn’t have any for the purpose of patrolling the city—he was rich for school to ignore that he needs one other elective and a club participation to graduate.
That left him with Independent Study, twice a week—a controlled chaos where students scattered into labs, study rooms, or quiet corners and worked alone. If he wanted even a chance to spend that period near Peter, he needed to know him first. At least well enough to make proximity look natural, not stalker-level planned.
And then there was one last idea.
A small, ridiculous one.
He could switch his Health and Social Well-Being seminar—the short, once-a-semester talk—so it aligned with Peter’s group this week. It wasn’t suspicious; everyone swapped those around. He could “accidentally” sit near him. Start a conversation. Learn something real about him.
From there… maybe let it grow.
A friendship.
Shared Independent Study time.
A reason—a normal reason—to be around him.
It wasn’t the best plan he’d ever made, but it was the only one that didn’t involve hacking the scheduling system, bribing a guidance counselor with B's money, or confessing to Bruce that he had a crush intense enough to destabilize his academic studies.
So… it would have to do.