Chapter Text
“If you want to learn what someone fears losing, look at what they photograph.” - M Foley
Damian stood slightly to the side of everyone else that had gathered in the manor. He'd been told to show up despite his current business with the Teen Titans. Bruce had been nothing short of crystalline on that point and it had taken what little patience Damian had left to not bite his head off. In the end, he'd only held his tongue because he understood - maybe better than anyone - how hard it was to deal with Tim's death.
Damian had seen thousands of people die, a good amount of them on the other end of his own brutal attacks in his duration under the thumb of the League of Assassins. He'd dealt with the loss of people he trusted in his life, had watched good people die horrible deaths when they were minutes too late on patrol. Hell, Damian had died himself. Twice. All of that, all of the combined experiences and not one of them had ever prepared him for losing Tim.
Outwardly, he wore a stone-cold expression, his jaw set and his eyes belaying a very clear vibe of him not wanting to be anywhere near any of the people in this room. He knew the expression he wore, knew it mirrored so many from his petulant childhood, mirrored one he'd given out of impatience last week, and he knew how it would be taken, but he just didn't care. He'd never had time to explain himself to someone else, had never found the patience for such asinine endeavors.
An older gentlemen in a business suit that looked like it had probably seen better days entered the room, took up a position behind Bruce's desk and cleared his throat. The room fell silent and Damian knew why he'd been called here in an instant. Tim's will. There was no way it could be anything else with how down-trodden the man looked, with how shaky some of the room's occupants looked.
Damian swallowed down the lump that was rapidly rising in his throat, pursed his lips and told himself to keep a firm hold on his current demeanor. He crossed his arms and waited. There were only seven people in the room aside from the rumpled-suit man, one of whom Damian wasn't familiar with in the least. What it told him in no uncertain terms was that they were all included on the papers that were being lifted from the briefcase.
He tucked himself further into the corner he'd chosen, just enough room between people to see the guy, but not up front enough to be noticed if someone wasn't looking for him. Leaning against the bookshelf, he tightened the way he was holding his arms, held himself tighter as the guy began reading from the will.
Damian paid only enough attention to understand who was being talked to for the most part, watching Jason come forward and accept something small and silvery that he tucked away immediately, Dick sign for a paper listing what had been left to him. He heard Bruce's name mentioned in shares for the company and Alfred's mentioned in relation to the contents of Tim's accounts. Damian's name came up and he stepped around Bruce and the person he didn't know, moving to sign for a paper listing out what he had inherited, but he didn't look at the paper more than seeing his name on it, folding it and tucking it away in his pocket with trembling fingers.
It was only sheer will that kept him focused on the last person in the room, that forced him to understand they were from a charity organization and that Tim was giving away the earnings from his play on the stock market and the entire contents of his music and book collections to them with the exception being made for anything of sentimental value to any family member. Stephanie was last, her items handed to her from the briefcase, two small envelopes and one medium-sized pouch that she didn't open.
They were all read a very concise message and then the guy excused himself. Damian started to push away from the shelf when Bruce's hand landed on his shoulder, stopping him from retreating. Damian forced the well of emotions back down, clutched at the paper in his pocket as he stood beside his father, somewhat rigidly. Somewhere in the chaos of it, he heard plans being made, understood someone had to dole out everything in Tim's apartment and deal with the rest. Bruce's voice sounded hard, but in a way Damian could identify with: like father, like son. Bruce was grieving and while he was far more rational than he'd been told his father had been when it came to him, he could honestly hear it in his voice that he was hurting just as much.
He heard someone sigh and the hitch of Stephanie's breath as she excused herself from the room, Alfred following after her at Bruce's bidding. Bruce's hand tightened on Damian's shoulder and the next words truly struck fear into Damian's heart.
"Damian will deal with it. I believe he's more than capable and he has been given a longer period of time away for bereavement than any of us."
Damian's heart jolted in his chest and he squeezed the paper between his fingers, holding back the pleas, the terrified words begging them to change their mind, to not force him to see Tim's death on this level. He swallowed down everything that told him he wasn't sure he could do this, bit back the angry words of how no one ever took his emotional well-being into account. They hadn't on his birthday, they hadn't when he'd been dealing with coming back from the dead, nor when he'd pushed himself down the path to redemption for all he'd done with the League, and it stood to reason that they wouldn't now either.
There was a round of agreement and Damian simply kept silent, accepted the business card from the stranger and quietly informed them he'd pack it all up and set aside a time for pickup before he excused himself, forcibly removing himself from Bruce's grip to do it.
He forced himself to walk away rather than run, forced himself to get all the way back to his room before he closed the door and collapsed against it, sliding to the floor and pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes as the bitter sting of tears assaulted him. He sat there, head bowed as the tears came, relentless and unyielding to his desire for them to stop, his breath hitching in his throat in a way that told of how badly he wanted to scream, of how much that he simply couldn't.
Hands shaking, he wiped them on his jeans and pulled out the crumpled paper, doing his best to smooth it out and read it through the tears that trailed down his cheeks. He found mention of several things that likely meant he'd been left some of Tim's supplies for their job, had been given possession of his computer and all external drives with a notation that they were Damian's, not his guardian's.
It struck Damian just how much Tim could surprise him, even now, even all the way from the grave, and that straightened out his breathing just enough to kick him into gear, just enough to urge him to get it over with.
Pushing himself up, he pulled his phone out and sent off a text to his father that he was going to deal with the situation immediately and to not expect him on patrol until it was completed. It wasn't such a large change anyway, wasn't any worse for Bruce than his absence when he was with the Titans. Besides, it wasn't like he hadn't been replaced anyway.
The bitterness on his tongue reminded him to keep his emotions in check, to shove it all down where it belonged and remain civil to his father despite all of his obvious failures at being one. So many children - his own and not - and Bruce still hadn't perfected that particular job.
He sighed, shoving some overnight items into a shoulder-bag, putting on his leather jacket. He hitched everything up around him, lifted his helmet - a gift that he'd yet to have proved where it came from, but highly suspected Jason - from his desk and trailed out of the room and toward the garage.
He weaved amongst the vehicles, stopping in front of the jade green motorcycle, his fingertips sliding over the paint job before he mounted it and settled, pulling on the helmet and bringing the vehicle to life with a twist of the key. Hitching the bag tighter against himself, he pulled on his gloves and flicked down the visor, maneuvering himself around the other vehicles and out into the bitter cold.
The streets were wet and his bike kicked up a spray of water behind him, leaving his pants damp and his body shivered slightly as he maneuvered his way into Gotham and toward Tim's apartment. He hadn't asked for a key, hadn't needed to. Tim had given him the access code to the alarm a long time ago and if Damian couldn't pick a simple lock, he was in for a lot worse of a time in Tim's absence than he'd thought.
Damian parked his bike in the slot right beside Tim's, took a minute to rest his hand on the seat, to just stand there and collect himself as he stared at the beautiful red and matte black of Tim's motorcycle and how many things it reminded him of when situated so very close to his own.
Hands shaking the slightest, Damian turned away, pocketed his keys and unstrapped his helmet, tucking it under his arm and heading inside. Four flights of stairs later, he ducked out onto Tim's floor and made his way to his apartment, lock pick in hand, gloves tucked away in his pockets. He stepped up to the door, made quick work of the lock while looking like he was struggling to hold his helmet and open the door.
Once inside, he closed and re-latched the door, disarming and then re-arming the alarm on stay mode before flipping on the lights and settling his helmet down on the couch. He took a moment to remove his bag, jacket, and boots before shedding his pants and rummaging in his bag for his sweats. Once he had them on, he made his way to the small alcove with the washer and dryer, opened it to find an entire load of Tim's laundry just left in the water, smelling faintly of the very peculiar scent of mold that came from clothing left too long in the wash.
With a sigh, Damian emptied his pockets, pushed his phone into his sweats pocket and deposited his jeans on top, added detergent and turned them all back on. The scent hit him like a slap in the face, reminded him of a dozen times he'd actually allowed Tim in his space, of Tim's friendly smile and the way his eyes had held such understanding, even when Damian had been a brat in return.
Sucking in a shaky breath, he turned away, closed the French doors to the alcove and moved to the front closet, opening it and finding all the moving boxes Tim had stashed there from his last move. Tugging them out and fetching the tape from the top shelf, Damian set about putting the boxes back together and transporting them to the rooms they were labeled for. Three unmarked boxes went in the center of the living room and he pulled out the elegant matte red hard shell suitcase set Tim had probably used all of once and settled one in the bathroom, one in the bedroom, and one on the living room couch.
It didn't take him long to pack up the items from his list into the largest of the suitcases, to leave it on the couch and make his way back through the house, picking up the various plants and putting them in a milk crate one had been sitting on in the kitchen. He watered them all and then settled it by the door, intent to take it back to Alfred.
His phone vibrated and he pulled up the picture of Dick's list, shuffling through the house in search of the items written on it, putting them into the suitcase in the bedroom and leaving it at that before he dragged two of the unmarked boxes with him to the bookshelf and began emptying the contents into it, putting aside a few of the more limited edition books to give to Jason, knowing he'd appreciate it, even if he didn't say it. The music went next, all of it except one classical CD and Tim's favorite album, which Damian deposited into the suitcase full of his items.
With all of that neatly labeled and taped up, He placed them out of the way, next to the only blank wall in Tim's apartment and set about figuring the rest of this shit out. He worked tirelessly for hours, running on little more than diligence and forced brainpower the entire time. Every once in a while he'd find another external hard drive or thumb drive and add it to the ever growing collection in his suitcase. It occurred to him as he put a small SD memory card into the suitcase that somehow he had been given the most private pieces of Tim's collection. He had been entrusted to see every single private thing Tim had, to see him for who he truly was before death had claimed him, and the revelation rocked him to a level so deep that he felt numb in the wake of it.
Even as he dumped Tim's vitamins and prescriptions into the little red suitcase to be evaluated later, even as he added all the medical supplies Tim had lifted from the cave, he felt as if everything were simply static. The world existed, but it did so behind some gauzy otherworldly veil that Damian couldn't quite push past at the moment. Even as he slipped Tim's shampoos and soaps into Ziplock bags and tucked them into his own suitcase, he still couldn't find it in him to truly react to the revelation.
He emptied the bathroom down to the bare bones, placed the nice towels into the last empty unlabeled box and carefully wrote Shelter across it, knowing that's where Tim would have wanted his nicer things to go, and maybe that was why the universe had seen fit for Damian to be the one to do this. Maybe his consideration for others - a thing he'd learned from Tim - was what came into play here.
Leaving the curtain up and a single towel and roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, Damian closed the door behind himself and moved on to the bedroom. All of the nice bedding he added to the box as well as the majority of Tim's clothing. He kept a few things, wouldn't have admitted to single soul that he was saving them for himself, to keep little pieces of Tim around for the rest of his life, wouldn't have ever told a soul that he stood for a full ten minutes, tears streaming down his cheeks as he pressed his face into Tim's favorite hooded sweatshirt.
Hours later found him in the kitchen, the bedroom packed and the still-good food in Tim's fridge laid out on Damian's plate as he picked at it, unable to do anything more than that, though he knew he had to eat eventually.
Half of the kitchen later and Damian found himself back in Tim's bedroom, freshly showered and smelling like Tim, curled up in one of the giant t-shirts that Tim had always favored to sleep in beneath the covers Tim had slept in the very same day as he'd left them. When he fell asleep, it was with tears in his eyes and his face shoved into Tim's pillow, his arms around it, clutching it as though it held the power to bring him back, and he imagined what a sorry sight he must make.
----
Damian spent the following morning just sitting in the midst of the covers on Tim's bed, staring at the now-blank walls, his memory filling in the paintings that had hung there the evening before, supplying him with images of the only other time he'd ever been in this room. He could feel the ghost of Tim's arms around him, could feel the essence of the turmoil that had been within him in those hours.
That night he'd left Wayne manor in the midst of one of the worst storms they'd had since he'd come to live here, had broken into Tim's apartment and waited on him. By the time he'd come back from patrol, Damian hadn't been able to stop the shaking, hadn't been able to fight the feeling of his own death and rebirth from drawing itself back upon his skin. He'd been gone - mentally absent - by the time Tim had found him, squeezed in between the couch and the wall and fished him out, tucked him in his arms and carried him to the bedroom to wrap him in all of his blankets, to rock him until he'd been able to breathe again, until he'd been able to tell Tim everything he was feeling.
It was that night that he learned of Tim's infinite patience and his heart of gold. It was then that he had also learned that Tim had his own secrets, his own demons, and that they weren't so dissimilar to his own, because Tim had opened up in order to create a world where Damian could do so in return. They'd shared until the sun was peaking over the horizon, had slept with Tim propped up against the headboards and Damian curled in his arms, still wrapped in a half dozen blankets. When he'd woken up hours later to the sound of Tim's phone buzzing itself off of the dresser, it had been the longest Damian had ever slept in a single stint.
The memories of that night didn't haunt him like he supposed they could have, didn't plague him as one of the worst times he'd ever had to try to deal with what was happening to him, with what he was on this side of the grave. Instead, he remembered all of the good before the bad. He recalled Tim's quiet voice, the concern that no one else ever had for Damian laced within his every single word, and he recalled Tim's fingers combing through his hair, soothing the ache of how bad he'd been shaking away as they rocked at the most measured pace in the world.
If he were honest, it was one of his fondest memories.
The realization that he'd never see this room again, never feel Tim's touch or hear Tim's quiet voice lulling him to sleep ever again hit him hard enough that it stole his breath away, left it lodged in his throat, squeezing like a vice, and Damian knew what he had to do.
Pulling his phone out, he flipped through to his father's contact and dialed it, letting it ring until it went to voice mail – typical for any time he ever tried to call - and waited through the dull message. "I will be making the necessary arrangements to convert Drake's apartment into a safe house, as well as a small base of operations for myself whenever I am back from business. I will provide you with the details by this evening." He clicked off the phone and pushed his way out of the sheets, padded through the house to the laundry alcove and transferred the clothing to the dryer, adding a dryer sheet and turning it on.
He made quick work of his morning routine using the toiletry bag he'd brought with him and then set about modestly re-stocking the bathroom of the items he'd need to have in here - cleaners, all of the first aid supplies and a myriad of the pill bottles he'd tossed in the suitcase the evening before, though not all of them. He placed three towels and washcloths back as well as one hand towel and re-hung the small, framed photograph of a street tabby Tim had undoubtedly picked up at some estate sale or other. A few other basic necessities went into the shelves and he left the rest in the box he'd packed up.
The same treatment was given to the kitchen and the bedroom, returning certain items to the closet and walls, small things that made it feel more like Tim going back on the tops of the dressers: his favorite watch, the single set of cufflinks Bruce had given him three Christmas' ago with TDW engraved on each, a replica of some Egyptian vase that Damian quite liked, and the one painting Damian had spent hours staring at while he'd been in Tim's arms that night.
In the living room, he took it apart as much as he put it back together with only the barest hints of things. Enough to make him think of Tim, to know Tim from the items he left behind, but not enough to slap anyone coming here in the face with it beyond himself. It was only what he had noticed, what meant something to him because his eyes had lingered on it for longer than perhaps necessary. All the pieces of Tim that he'd stored away in his mind since the one night that had changed how they interacted above all else.
The final thing he left on the low coffee table was Tim's camera: a Leica M9, a work of art in and of itself if Damian were honest about it. He stashed the case under the table, positioned the camera just so and settled, the memory card in his hand, just staring down at the little piece of plastic in between his fingers.
Years ago someone had told him a photograph spoke a million words, told a hundred stories without effort, and that had stuck with him for a very long time. Closing his eyes, he called up the experience, willed his mind to recall the sensations, the scents, and the world when he'd been given those words. As they knitted together, he remembered Tim's face, recalled the way it had morphed from completely open to entirely reserved in that single moment.
Shivering, Damian dredged himself out of the memory, stood and made his way to where he'd unceremoniously dumped all of Tim's computer equipment before he'd started in on the room. Dozens of thumb drives, three external hard drives, two internal drives, and at least thirty camera memory cards littered the table beside Tim's laptop.
Settling down, Damian plugged in the computer and re-attached the Ethernet cabling, booting it up and waiting on the home screen to come up. Clicking to log into Tim's account, he watched it ask for his biometric scan and he sighed, quietly calculating the road he'd need to take to lift and recreate a fingerprint to get in. The faintest memory of Tim's voice drifted across his mind, the feeling of Tim's hand on his own at age eleven, scanning him into the system with laughter in his voice, amusement that it was having trouble reading Damian's thumb print. He remembered the dull beeps, one after another and the way his annoyance had flared and Tim had dropped whatever strange little charade it had been that had gotten them to that moment.
Shifting, Damian held his right hand over the scanner and then pressed it down against it, slowly swiping forward, letting it read his thumbprint, waiting as the hard drive light blinked frantically at him until the computer's Welcome screen splashed across the page and the system began to load.
Sitting back, Damian gazed vacantly at the little thumb print reader, realized that that had to have been around the same time he'd been making the will. All of it, all of the ridiculousness of Tim's new toy had really been him providing Damian a way in should his life come to some abrupt sort of close.
Rubbing his hands over his eyes, Damian leaned all the way back in the office chair, let it tilt and hold him, let his hands press harder against his eyes as he let go of the pain in his chest again and allowed it to overflow.
No matter what else Tim had ever been, no matter what anyone else had ever seen, Damian felt like he had - perhaps - seen the deepest into him. Behind Red Robin, behind Tim Drake the consultant, and behind Tim Drake-Wayne the adopted son of Bruce Wayne lay a beautiful person full of every complex emotion known to man, full of brilliance both tapped and untapped, and Damian... he'd been given the privilege of knowing not only the masks, but the reality, and really, nothing could ever compare.
-----
Damian spent hours drawing up all the necessary paperwork to transfer this house over into Dick's name. It was a very pointed sort of effort, to put it in the name of the one of them that Damian knew would never interfere with whatever Damian wanted to have done with this place, wouldn’t bat an eyelash at it should it be brought up. He crafted all the pieces of it that needed to go to everyone involved, including the landlord given this was a rent-controlled sort of place where things had to be transferred and forged a few things to make it appear legit that Tim had initiated this and shuffled the paperwork over to Dick to sign and back-date.
By the time he found it in him to order in some Chinese food, he was knee-deep in Tim's photos off of the SD cards. He clicked through the photos idly as he made the call for food, knew he could pay for it with the money he'd found tucked away in Tim's desk drawer.
The words from the night prior came back to him, allowed him to see the photos for what they were, to engage with them on a level far beyond the usual and he found himself wondering, once again, if Tim hadn't planned this as well. By giving him the indication that he should have every single memory card in the house, he had led him here, to this moment, and perhaps hoped that he'd find that very same conversation in his memory, remember the look on Tim's face and read into it exactly what he had.
Damian closed his eyes and gave himself a moment, opened them again and continued on with the photos. Images of street corners lit only by the glow of a streetlamp, time-lapses of Gotham's busiest streets during the night, entire memory cards full of their night life, full of the beauty of it, the pieces behind the dark, gritty, horrible city they fought every single night. He found smiles on people's faces, whimsical looks in the eyes of people at the circus, stunning photos of the acrobats in action.
Beyond all of that, he found the singular images - between the others - that stuck out more than all of the others: the candid shots of members of their little family, of the Teen Titans, and of Tim himself. There were days' worth of photos Tim had taken either on timer or with remote shutter release and yet others he'd clearly taken for the art they provided. His blood running down the drain, his bare foot and ankle the only evidence it could have been his own, the porcelain gleaming behind the vivid red of fresh blood. A catalogue of every new gash and scar Tim's body had ever collected and the how of it captured in some obscure way just one image beyond it. There were fallen criminals - only a hand cuffed to a pipeline in a dirty alley, a leg and foot twisted at an angle it perhaps shouldn't have been, the spatter of blood on the pavement, a glowing neon sign just beyond. There were photos of one of their cars that Tim had been run off the road in, close-ups of twisted metal and dripping coolant, a photo of the glimmer of transmission fluid puddled on the pavement, the beauty of the mountainside beyond it a stark contrast to the pain the photo held.
The morbidity of some of it captured Damian, brought him in on the idea that Tim had been more than any of them had thought. That Tim had held this obsession, this fixation with cataloguing everything happening to him and no one had ever suspected.
Card after card went into the computer, more and more of the images that caught Damian's eye being pulled off onto the only brand new USB drive he'd found in the house, cataloguing Tim's world in glimpses that wouldn't give too much away, but just enough, and an idea began to form in his mind. He'd seen and heard about people holding events for their loved ones after their passing, had watched the grief that they felt pull together into something more when they posted the site or published the book, and he began to pull pieces of Tim's life together in a whole other kind of way. He pulled the dates of the photos, began to catalogue them based on when Tim had taken them, where he'd been.
When the food arrived, it was absently that Damian paid and accepted the bag of Chinese and it was with only the spirit of needing sustenance that he ate at all, most of his attention focused solely on creating this catalogue of Tim's life.
Far into the night, Damian ejected the last SD memory card and made his way to the dryer, settling on the floor in front of it as he'd seen Tim do the few times he'd been here while he had laundry going. He pulled the basket out from beside the dryer and set it aside, opening the dryer and pulling pieces of clothing out one at a time, folding each piece and placing it in the basket.
It was only belatedly that he realized there were tears tracking down his cheeks, that they were the silent kind that allowed you to live in the moment rather than be overwhelmed by the cause of them, and he simply let them exist, making his way into the bedroom and storing away Tim's clothing, allowing himself one moment of weakness, telling himself he would only pretend once that this was just a favor, that tomorrow Tim would be there, would come to stand right beside him and thank him in that quiet voice that was only reserved for Damian.
He returned the basket and settled in for the night, right back in front of the laptop, curled up in Tim's favorite chair, shifting into the position he had always liked best without being fully conscious of it, and inserted the first thumb drive with trembling fingers.
Some pain was meant to help.
-----
By day three Damian was most of the way through Tim's digital footprint, had delved deep enough into each and every folder to know that Tim had been meticulous in every single letter of the word. He'd kept his records and those of the company backed up to an astonishing degree, had squirreled away things on thumb drives as a precaution. Hell, even the single folder of intimate content Damian had found had been alphabetized by the act being portrayed. Damian had kindly deleted that folder, had wiped the browser's history without a single instant of looking through it, and then had continued on with his exploration of Tim's character.
His bookmarks yielded a Tim that had been orderly but chaotic in some ways, a folder of miscellaneous items showing there were things that even Tim couldn't calculate where they belonged, a rush of links that informed just how active he was on social media and how free he was with the passwords on those sites, given they were all still logged into or had their passwords saved.
Hours and hours of scouring Tim's posted contents on each site showed Damian highs and lows, showed him the reason for a lot of the medications in Tim's bathroom cabinets. He watched the periods where Tim had been truly happy, where he'd been floating on cloud nine and then he watched the dangerous dip of depression, the suicidal thoughts that had plagued Tim for a good portion of his life, and his heart went out to him.
It was there, too, that Damian pulled some of the most poignant offerings, the things that he could believe were actually Tim's own and placed them between the proper folders on his ever-growing project regarding Tim's life.
Eight tabs and just as many accounts later, Damian wrote a simple note and copied it onto each, explaining that the user had passed away and posting links to the charities Tim had kept in a bookmark listing, imploring that if anyone wanted to honor his memory that they do so by continuing his generosity towards other people. He posted a single photograph of Tim beneath it, of him smiling and at his happiest, and logged out of each and every account just after.
He made the arrangements for the boxes to be picked up by the necessary people, cleaned out the pantry of food that would expire anytime remotely soon and boxed it up and took it downstairs, leaving it with a written note taped to the wall explaining that everyone should have a free meal once in a while.
The rest of the day was spent scrubbing the place from top to bottom: sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, and dusting every single nook and cranny the place had.
Once it was spotless and he was certain he'd gone through everything but the front hall closet, Damian packed up all of the drives and the computer itself in the suitcase he'd placed the rest of the items he was taking home in, took out the trash, and prepared to leave it all behind for at least a month.
With a final deep breath, he left the apartment, suitcase and his own overnight bag in hand, and made the call to Alfred to pick him up, knowing everything he had wouldn't make it back on his motorcycle with him, knowing it provided him an excuse to return and understanding that it was - somehow - necessary that he leave it that way.
The close of the door felt like finality and the wind on his face as he stepped out onto the sidewalk minutes later felt like goodbye. When the tears came once again, Damian didn't stop them, didn't bother to hide away how he felt from the world. Let them know he grieved. Let them see this weakness, because God's help him, it was strength.