#anon who asked if i would write more tim & dick fics this is partially your fault congradulations <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[bitimdrake]

ao3 | au where bruce really did die

Dick has five ringtones. He never puts his phone on silent, unless he’s in a theater—and even then, only on vibrate, clenched tight against his leg, ready just in case—and he has five ringtones. It’s important to delineate. There’s the one for civilian friends, the one for unknown numbers, one for their extended “family” of Gotham’s protectors, and for those in the community but outside the city. Distinct tones. Known by heart.

So when Dick’s easy afternoon sorting through gang movements in his bedroom is interrupted by the family-family ringtone, it gives him pause. Dick watches the phone chime and buzz away on the desk across the room, stringing out the options.

The thing is, the family group has exactly six numbers, and two of them haven’t been used in—in a while. He should have taken off Jason’s number ages ago, but he never could quite bear it. Still can’t, for all Jason is back and shooting. And certainly never going to call. Same story for…for Bruce.

Dick isn’t ready for that.

Another two numbers are only fractionally more useful, as of late. Cassandra he only added in the past year, and he thinks they’ve spoken on the phone once in all that time. Cass, to Dick’s understanding, does not like phone calls, and even if she did, it’s hard to imagine she’d call him.

Tim used to call him. All the time. Dick put him in the family group years ago, long before it was legally true, because Robin automatically counted. Tim counted, even if he had his own dad and his own home. Family. But Tim hasn’t spoken to him in six months. So.

That leaves only two family contacts that have really been justifying the unlimited calling plan lately, Alfred and Damian, and Dick happens to know both of them are in the penthouse with him right now. He can even hear Alfred fussing about in the kitchen from down the hall. And he saw Damian holed up in his room not half an hour ago, which is...

Absolutely enough time for an uncontrollable ten year old with an assassin’s skills to get into trouble. Shit.

Dick shakes himself from his stupor, and does what he should’ve done two rings ago. With a groan, he drops his enormous folder of case files to the side and heaves himself off the bed. Dick slogs across the room, trying to pluck up the energy to be the primary guardian to the most (beloved, but—) annoying child he has ever met, and scoops up the phone.

He’s so busy planning how to make Damian listen this time that he almost doesn’t notice the caller ID.

It’s not Damian. The icon shows a fifteen-year-old kid Dick can hardly recognize anymore, face pinched in suppressed laughter as he balances a stack of twenty saltines on his forehead in Dick’s old Blüdhaven apartment. Tim’s name on top.

Six months—months—radio silence, and Tim is calling him. Dick doesn’t even know where Tim is.

He stretched out his feelers to keep apprised, so he knows Tim has spoken three or four times to his Teen Titans, né Young Justice friends. He knows Alvin Draper was flagged by the German government for stealing a museum artifact three months ago, and Tim Drake was subsequently spotted entering Iraq. He knows Lucius’s daughter, Tam, found him and tried to drag him home shortly after. He knows she failed. Knows she came home a while later, talking about the sad and infuriating boy on some mysterious quest he refused to abandon. Knows every once in a while another of Tim’s aliases will ping an alert somewhere far, far across the globe.

It’s not much. It’s not enough to keep the nightmares from creeping in. But it’s enough to get him to sleep, most nights.

Dick tried reaching out himself, just after Tim left, until it became clear his attempts were unwanted. Give him space, he’d thought, a plan that has borne zero fruit. He tried again a few months ago during their brief Black Lantern zombie incursion, thinking maybe imminent danger and undead parents would be enough to lure Tim home.

Tim didn’t even answer the call.

He could be anywhere by now. Two weeks ago—twelve days, but who’s counting—one of his lesser-used aliases, Ray Hayes, flew from Egypt to Norway. Layover in Istanbul. Security footage at Oslo showed a head of dark hair above sunglasses and a scarf. Dick should really set up a more effective way to keep an eye on him, keeps thinking it, I should set something up to keep a better eye on Tim, and then finds himself pulled away to the next crisis with no time left to sort out how to spy on the entire world for the sake of one teenager. But. Twelve days ago, Oslo airport, Tim was up and walking.

Which, twelve days later, means absolutely fucking nothing. Twelve days since Dick could be certain he’s alive.

The phone trills its fourth ring. Dick nearly drops it in the scramble to answer.

“Tim.” Too strong, too much—Tim didn’t want to talk to him. Dodging his calls for six months. Dick can’t overdo it and fuck this up. “Hey,” he adds, veering wildly in the other direction, too casual, like they just got lunch yesterday and their dad is alive and the world isn’t falling apart.

Good enough. Hell, maybe that’s what Tim needs: the pretense, at least to start, that things are totally okay and he won’t be interrogated immediately.

Maybe not. The line stays quiet. There’s just enough background buzz for Dick to be sure it’s still connected.

He grips the phone tight enough to indent the ridges of his case into his skin. “Tim...?”

If this is, god, if this is just an accident, a butt dial, Dick is...Dick is going to very carefully close and lock the door, and hope Damian doesn’t get curious for however long it takes him to fall apart.

There’s a crackle of static: a breath. Dick’s heart swoops so violently he gets lightheaded.

“Hi,” Tim says.

Dick crumples to a crouch, forehead resting on the corner of the desk. His free hand clenches onto the lip to steady himself.

“Hi, Timmy,” Dick chokes out. Where are you? How are you? I’m sorry; I’m so sorry; whichever part you’re still mad about, please let me grovel—but also: What is wrong with you? How could you just leave like that? How could you not call? I begged you to stay. It’s been six fucking months and I thought you died. Mostly: Come home; please come home. Hi, Timmy, come home please.

“I think—” Tim starts, and it’s only on the second syllable Dick realizes Tim’s voice sounds even worse than his. “I think...I was wrong.”

Dick opens his eyes, wood grain an inch in front of him. Wrong about—? Oh. Bruce.

The most surprising part is that there is some little, tiny piece of him disappointed to hear it. Dick never really believed in Tim’s theory, and even less after Bruce rose in a horrible parody of himself as one of the Black Lantern zombies. Even before that, he saw the skeleton. He heard the story. More importantly, he saw how Tim tore himself apart in desperation after Conner died, Jack, Stephanie. How some parts of him are still missing, even now that two of those three have returned. No more of the kid on Dick’s phone, giggling through his admonishments to not make him laugh when he was beating his saltine forehead tower record.

Tim’s lack of explanation about why he’d decided Bruce was alive didn’t help anything, just a mutter to himself about a painting, and insistence to Dick to trust him. Dick trusted Tim with almost everything. But to grieve in a healthy way?

No. Dick never believed the idea. Even if he could have dug up the faith, he just didn’t have the resilience—or luxury—to break himself against the rocky banks of empty hope. But, it turns out, there’s something about hearing just one more confirmation that your father is dead that never loses its sting.

It’s hard to find a response that won’t hurt either of them on the way out.

“Okay,” Dick says, for lack of something better.

“I, um,” Tim says, and doesn’t finish.

Dick takes in a heavy breath. What’s most important? “Where are you? Are—” Are you coming home, but he can’t handle the answer to that particular question being no. “Can I come get you?”

Dick really doesn't leave Gotham now for anything except the Justice League. It’s probably messed up, in the way that’s long since lost all shock value, that his greatest feeling of normalcy comes from hanging out with a ragtag team of superhumans, but there he is. Either with them, or being guardian of Gotham and Damian alike. He’ll make an exception to his typical travel plans. He’d love to make an exception.

Tim’s answering breath is loud and shaky, and Dick’s chest clenches with the fear it might come out in a yell. Stop trying to control me or why won’t you just trust me or why would I ever want to come home to a failure like you. Maybe not the last one. It sticks in his head nonetheless.

“Yeah,” Tim says. It sounds a lot more like a sob. “Yeah, that would—that would be nice. If you can. If you have the time.”

Dick never has time for anything, this year.

“I do. Of course I do.” He swallows. “You—you’ll wait?” Stay where you are. Let me triangulate you. Don’t run, please.

Another shaky breath crackles through the line. Dick’s gripping so tight his fingers have gone white around the phone.

“I’ll be here,” Tim says, thick but trying for humor. Honest.

“Okay,” Dick says. For the first time in ages it’s true. He pries his fingers off the desk, leaning into the faint warmth of the phone screen. “I’m on my way to you. I’m coming, Tim.”

on ao3