#tim drake as joker junior has some sort of chokehold on me i swear

[flwrkid14]

Buried Beneath The Laughter They Ignored

Tim is totally fine. Ridiculously fine, actually.

It didn’t matter that he woke up feeling this bubbling, manic laughter in his chest, like everything was suddenly so fucking funny. It didn’t matter that he’d woken up from another nightmare last night, crying, calling for his mama—not the mother he lost, but the mother he gained, Harley Quinn. And it didn’t matter that most days, he felt more like Joker Junior than he did Tim Drake.

It didn’t matter that no one else seemed to fucking care.

He shoved down every bit of laughter clawing up his throat, because he knew if he let even one chuckle slip, they’d all give him that look. The one they always did. Disapproval masked as concern. They didn’t like Junior. They didn’t want to believe Junior was still in there, clawing his way up every time Tim breathed.

It didn’t matter that no one ever asked him how he was doing. They didn’t want to talk about it. Because talking about it would make it real, and they preferred pretending it wasn’t. They expected him to be fine, to push it down, to carry on like nothing happened. If he tried to bring it up, they’d say he was being insensitive—insensitive to Jason's trauma. What fucking irony, he thought bitterly. As if it wasn’t insensitive to be stepping all over his by not letting him speak.

It didn’t matter that he caught them glancing at him sometimes, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for him to snap, waiting for Junior to come out again. But they never asked. No one asked what was going on in his head. No one fucking asked.

It didn’t matter that when he finally snapped, when he finally screamed at them, sick and tired of pretending, they had the nerve to act clueless. As if they didn’t know.

It didn’t matter that Dick, of all people, screamed back. Yelling like he was being unreasonable. Like he was the problem. He screamed at Tim, demanding answers, to ask what the hell he meant by Joker Junior, as if—

As if they didn’t know.

They didn’t fucking know.

This whole time, they hadn’t known.

They didn’t know Tim had been taken. They didn’t know Tim had been missing. They didn’t know Tim had been held prisoner at the hand of the Joker for months, tearing him apart, piece by piece, until Junior was the only thing left of him. They didn’t know he had screamed for them, begged for someone to find him, but no one ever did.

They didn’t know how much he had suffered. Alone. They didn’t know how much he had changed. They didn’t know that every time he woke up now, it felt like he was still Joker Junior, just wearing Tim’s skin.

And they didn’t know how much it hurt—how much it broke him—to realize that they had never known.

Tim wasn’t fucking okay. And it mattered—oh, it mattered—that they didn’t fucking know.

Because if they didn’t know, it meant no one ever bothered to look. It meant no one ever cared enough to notice.