metalogs | grab your hat, get your coat, the cellar door is an open throat (open/closed)

“And you’ve connected that to your assumption that they wouldn’t want you there, which I think isn’t necessarily correct. I’m Jay’s successor, and Jason’s only preconceptions of Tim Drake are from the past year. If anything, your Exhibit D in their off-again-on-again argument with B.”

Exhibit D, potentially as damning as Exhibit C after he froze up, but not Tim’s fault. “And you can’t take that on your shoulders. Their relationships with him are … strained, and it’s hard to not get caught in the crossfire.”

"So I should avoid being in their crossfire," he points out, reasonably. As far as he's concerned, TJ's just laid out a good argument for keeping his distance. If he's potentially a trigger, why push it? It's just safer this way.

“B isn’t here. What happened the other night wasn’t crossfire.”

And now here they are at the vestibule of what he actually wanted to discuss, but that last step is a doozy.

“Jay should’ve backed off when you got upset, but he’s got a minus 4 perception when he’s emotionally compromised. And you - you don’t act as much like me as I would’ve thought.”

Tim went into what looked like a full blown panic attack. Jason knows what it looks like, and, with any other kid on any other day, TJ is sure he would’ve handled it differently. “If I’d known, I would’ve told you more about them in advance. I’m sorry.”

“If it wasn’t crossfire, then what was it?” he asks, a touch on the snappish side, before abruptly pulling it back. It’s not - snapping at TJ will not help anything. Two people being pissed off at each other and Tim being stuck in the middle is a situation he is intimately familiar with. It’s best to avoid it, and if you can’t avoid it and you can’t mitigate it, you make yourself small and less of a target.

It’s not supposed to happen in the Robin suit. It’s never happened in the Robin suit before. Bruce, Dick, and Babs, they - they have arguments sometimes, everyone does, but they’re not explosive like Jason’s and they don’t usually put Tim in the middle.

If TJ wants to talk about it, then Tim wishes he’d stop circling it and land already. “If you want to tell me I screwed up, then just tell me already.”

“You were in the blast radius,” he says softly. Kinda like he is right now, but TJ is used to things in his life exploding around him. Maybe Tim isn’t.

There’s some personal semantics at play, but he’s not going to offer a dissertation on how it can’t be crossfire if no one else is fighting back. “You didn’t screw up. People being worried about you does not mean you’re wrong or that you’ve made a mistake.”

When exactly did he figure that out? Sometime before Darkseid shot Bruce, but after his father died. Tim’s not… there, yet. “I just want to understand.”

“I did, though. Screw up. When I - spaced out.” There’s a very slight hesitation before he says those words. It’s the kind, euphemistic way of describing what happens, because he doesn’t want to say anything more clinical.

He’s not stupid. He knows what dissociation is. He doesn’t like applying it to what happened to him because it means acknowledging a problem, but he knows what it is. “It shouldn’t have happened while I was Robin.”

Oh, he wants to say that they’ve all made mistakes. He could list them out in brutal detail, but that would affirm Tim’s assessment that he screwed up.

He’s right that it shouldn’t have happened when he was Robin. It’s dangerous when he’s Robin. Two Jasons and another Tim - they might yell, but Tim should have been safe in that room. “You didn’t hurt anyone, and there’s an opportunity to work on the underlying issue. You don’t know Jason yet, so … I have to guess who he reminds you of. And none of them are here to judge you.”

It’s Bruce, or else… Dad.

(He would rather it be Bruce.)

“This conversation doesn’t go further than us. I just want to know you’re going to be safe, because I know you’re not going to stop being Robin. I need you to tell me what triggered you.”

“You don’t know already?”

The truth is, he’d assumed TJ already knew. They have the same parents and the same upbringing, right? He should know what their parents are like. He should know what it feels like, being caught in their arguments. He’s supposed to understand.

“Our timelines diverged at some point in your past.” He sets his ice cream cup down neatly beside him on the bench. “I don’t know how far apart they actually are, and what happened in my world isn’t always transferable to yours.”

(Stalling. Clearly evasive.)

Why is it so hard to talk about this, six years later? He accepted it a long time ago. It’s fine. “Mom died when I was thirteen, and I already told you I don’t remember fighting the Reach.”

Janet Drake’s murder means that, if it’s their parents, Tim has at least a year’s more memories to contend with.

For a moment, he wants to yell you’re lying and throw his ice cream like a little kid having a tantrum. Except that would be stupid because it’s not like TJ would lie about something like this. He wouldn’t. So if he - if TJ’s mom died, then. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know what that means.

He feels - grief, even though it’s not his mom that died. And. He’s not sure what else. Maybe. Maybe horror, too. If. If his mom was gone, then it was just TJ and his dad. And. And maybe that would have been okay. Maybe it would.

“What happened?”

The urge to physically move away is squashed immediately before he can recoil, but he’s keeping himself still and his voice even with a delicate tension.

Details are being pruned even as he answers. “She was poisoned by the Obeah Man.”

Snip. Not mentioning the kidnapping and ransom attempt. Snip. Not a word about his dad being comatose and paralyzed. Snip. Batman didn’t get there too late.

(Again. For the first time.)

“But your world is different. I don’t know if it’s better or worse.”

“I don’t recognize the name.”

It’s information offered just to clarify that no, Tim’s parents didn’t go through that. No one was poisoned. It’s a clear point of contrast between them.

He’s not going to ask for any more details, because it’s clearly not something TJ wants to talk about. “I’m sorry.”

The appropriate answer is a polite thanks, and he knows that. But it would keep him from saying something ambiguous and perhaps more important. “It was never your fault.”

Certainly not his fault that Janet Drake died somewhere in the multiverse. Not his fault about anything related to her. “What are your parents like now?”

Let him think what he wants. If he thinks it’s just because TJ’s thinking about his mom, fine. If that’s his way in, he’ll take it.

Up til now, he’d been thinking that their home lives were - the same, pretty much. That their home life was similar enough that he could just assume that TJ knew what things were like in the Drake household and leave it at that.

But that’s not a given anymore. And that’s why Tim finds himself defaulting to the Usual Description of his family. “They’re okay. They’re still pretty busy, with the company and their digs, so they’re not always around that much but it’s okay cause their work is important.”

Tim places himself third in importance, so it's more of the same. More more, probably, as Tim gets older and, therefore, to the Drakes' thinking even more self-sufficient. The reality is that third is inflation. They're pretty busy, with their company, and their digs, and their impromptu vacations, and the charity circuit... anything that isn't Tim.

But keeping himself fed, not burning the house down, and making sure no one knows what goes on in the Drake household is all one needs to be self-sustaining. "And how's Mrs. Mac?"

Well, that’s… weird. To his credit, Tim does go searching around his memories for a moment, looking for anyone by that name, but he’s got a blank happening here. “Who?”

He shakes his head. Yet another difference and yet... still so much the same. "My parents' housekeeper. She used to check in on me, when they were away. Maybe they hired someone else in your world. It's not a worrying difference. There aren't any worrying differences on your side of this, aside from the aliens. I think it's all on mine. That's good, though."

“Oh.”

It’s kind of weird that there’s only one housekeeper, when the Drakes own several properties, but then, maybe they finally picked a favorite to settle down in. “We just have a housekeeping service and stuff. They maintain the properties and get them move-in ready when mom and dad are ready to come back. It’s usually not the same people.” Tim recognizes a few here and there, but mostly they just do their jobs.

“So it’s just you and them, in essence, and you haven’t moved in with Bruce yet. You’re either pretending it’s an WE internship or that you’re on the football - or both - to cover yourself in case anyone decides to pay you any mind.”

Meaning… it’s probably the Drakes. The fear of disappointing Bruce wasn’t so heavy until life started blending Tim Drake and Robin into whatever Tim Wayne was. “Don’t bother arguing that it’s lacrosse in your world.”

“I’ve been staying at Wayne Manor most of the time when they’re gone. They, um, insisted when they realized how much of the time mom and dad are gone.”

Beat.

Then, quieter: “They don’t really know. B wanted to talk to them about it, but I convinced him it would be better coming from me. They wouldn’t really like it, but they don’t really pay enough attention to notice I’m not where I’m supposed to be, either.”

So that’s probably going to blow up in his face someday if he’s not careful enough, but he’s doing pretty okay putting it off so far.

“I know it seems like they never pay attention, but they do. Dad searched my room when I was dating Steph. He found - everything.”

Hiding things is disrespectful, even if it’s something no one dreamed of asking about. And Jack Drake demands respect from his son.

“You should let Bruce tell him. He can manage the situation better than you can. Dad found out a lot accidentally, and it didn’t go well.” How much should he say? He shouldn’t have said this much, if he wanted to preserve whatever relationship Tim has with the man, but it seems like the cord needs to be cut. “He pulled a gun on Bruce.”

See, Tim was about to point out that even if Jack and Janet were inclined to search (one of) his room(s), he been very careful not to leave anything they could possibly access that they could find.

And then TJ went and said that, and now he's looking kind of in shock. "He - what?"

He’d thought that too, once. It should’ve been secure, but Jack found his emergency gear. Found out he was Robin. “He stormed into the manor and pulled a gun on Bruce. I had to quit. Steph took my place until…”

Until she died, but not really, but that didn’t make the next year and a half of his life less painful to live. “Until I could do it again. That’s not the point. The point is, you can’t underestimate his anger. I don’t think he meant to hurt Bruce - and he didn’t - but you’ve been training long enough to identify the risks there. And…”

A cautious pause. “I think you know more than I do about dad’s temper.”

There. He said it. He’s almost done his due diligence, now. This can be over with.

“That’s not - he wouldn’t try to shoot someone, that’s not how he - “

Dad throws things sometimes. And he’s not… always careful where those things land. And. And he’s not good at reigning in his temper. But that doesn’t mean he’d -

And yeah, both of his parents do things that, that suck sometimes but they just don’t always think through what they’re doing. They never wanted to deal with a kid.

“I loved Dad, too, but I’m not defending his actions.”

Seeing it from this side is rough, because he knows how to look for signs in victims. Sentences that don’t say anything, incomplete arguments, debating a point that wasn’t made. Panic attacks. Overreacting when certain aggressive behavior happens in their presence.

He’s not supposed to see it in himself. “I didn’t say he shot anyone. He threatened Bruce with a gun. You’ve been taught gun safety. You don’t point a gun at anyone you don’t intend to shoot because accidents happen all the time. Especially when people are upset. Especially when he’s Bruce’s friend and everyone in the city knows that Bruce Wayne saw his parents get shot to death.”

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