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bored-platypus · 1 month

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the moon will sing (time traveling tim)

so. i saw this super awesome post by @puppetwoman17 about time traveling tim drake and got obsessed, so here's a small ficlet i wrote about it!

The thing is, Tim expects it. He’s faintly aware of the blood seeping from his stomach, staining his hands red— hands which are uselessly putting pressure on his wound. If he survives this, he doesn’t even want to think of all the weeks of pure agony and fever, brought on by the wonderful lack of his spleen and the fact that healing from wounds sucked, period.

Death isn’t surprising— he really didn’t think he would live past, what, twenty-five? Thirty? To live until beyond 50 with his lifestyle was, well. It sounded painful, anyways. And you would need to be a deeply paranoid neurotic. Like Bruce. Because as much as he respected his father and looked up to him, if Tim turned out anything like Batman, he’d probably find a bullet through his brain sooner or later.

Half because Tim was reckless and his plans were so convoluted and insane that nobody really knew what was going on either, just to confuse his opponent. The other half was, well. You can guess.

So. He’s bleeding out, the night is uncomfortably cold and the wind bites into his skin, sand grating against his back, and all Tim can think about is how much he hopes Ra’s al-Ghul doesn’t show up like a damned wraith and drag him kicking and screaming to the nearest surgery table and take out his kidneys or something.

Tim’s also thinking about his family. And the probable inconveniences that come with his death. Like arranging his funeral and all his assets and his Nest and the fact that Tim is a very integral part of the family and Dick will probably fall apart and Bruce will mourn and brood, and, and damn it. Tim should probably revoke his thinking process or something.

—

Tim is twenty three years old when he bleeds to death alone, and nobody finds his body until three weeks later when his family has scoured the Earth and his distress signal rings, rings, but nobody sees it. His predictions about his family come true.

But that isn’t quite relevant, because Tim isn’t aware of such a thing.

Instead, Tim closes his eyes and falls and jerks up on his bed, clutching his chest as years of memories flood his brain, too much for a mere eleven year old. It feels like his head has been cracked open and molten lava had been poured through, scorching his veins and circulation. It feels like agony of the highest level and Tim is faintly aware of the darkness creeping in, his mind too overwhelmed and overstimulated from years of memories flooding into his brain.

And so for the second time in a few minutes and a lifetime, Tim welcomes unconsciousness with open arms.

The next few hours are spent in pure agony, his body being too weak to move and his limbs too short for him to coordinate. He’s pretty sure that there’s a pool of dried blood underneath him from a nosebleed, but he’s too tired to turn around, so he just uncomfortably shifts away from it. Not for the first time, he thanks his lucky stars that his parents are neglectful, because he doesn’t even know how he would explain all of this.

Two days later, he musters the strength to stumble out of bed, gulp down the bitter, carbon dioxide-filled water next to him and get to the kitchen. It’s April 1st, twelve years ago, Tim is eleven years old, and his family doesn’t know him yet.

Half of the terrible things that have happened to Dick haven’t happened yet. Jason hasn’t died yet. Duke is still a kid and his parents are healthy. Babs hasn’t been put into a wheelchair by the Joker.

Steph is still living with her father. Damian and Cass are being trained as assassins.

Mrs. Mac is due to come in a few hours. Tim looks at the blood-crusted covers of his bed and his crumpled clothes.

Oh, shoot.

So instead of researching or training, Tim spends the next hour trying to get the bedsheets off with his tiny, noodle arms, half stumbling on his feet because he’s way too damn short, and making his way to the bathroom so he can take a shower and get some of the blood off so it doesn’t stain too badly.

It’s probably a lost cause. Not that his parents will notice or care about a missing bedsheet, but it feels wasteful to just throw it away to hide evidence of his unintentional time travel.

Two and a half hours later, Tim stumbles out of the laundry room, his bedsheets and pillow finally in the washer. He collapses on the nearest chair and scans the room for his father’s computer.

He lets out a shaky breath. His family is generally unscarred. Jason is Robin again. Jason. The boy who Tim had held with a certain degree of, well, disdain. Thinking about it kind of makes him want to punch is past self in the face, or cringe in the way that you can only do when you think of something embarrassing you used to do. Like victim-blaming your older brother for getting beat to death while trying to find his mother.

It wasn’t the only way he looked at Jason, but he had always thought of him as too reckless. Maybe he really did deserve the beating. Well, not that he believed that young teenagers should be beat up by young adults in Robin cosplay, but at least Tim wasn’t exactly traumatized by the experience. Better him than some other poor civilian kid Bruce could’ve adopted.

And Tim did get his revenge. By getting Jason on his private parts. But whatever. Revenge was revenge, and Tim was better than the whole crime lord setup his older brother had. In practice, anyways.

Chewing on the ballpoint pen, he writes down the first thing on his list (in code, of course) since coming back in time.

prevent jason’s death

Well. Now that he had a comprehensive list, Tim was down and ready to plan.

—

A hour later, Mrs. Mac appears, none the wiser to what happened to him. Tim greets her as she walks in, and she smiles and greets him back, putting lunch in the fridge. She notices nothing wrong about how he stays sitting on the chair in the living room, and Tim says nothing about it. When she leaves, he pulls the piece of paper out of his book and the pen from his hair, scratching down some extra points.

Hmm. Maybe the Court of Owls should go early. Or perhaps that would create too much change?

Dick would have a better time in the future if they were gone, though. Tim frowns, dragging his pen back and forth in a short line on the table.

He still needed to factor in the fact that he was an unknown to the family. The thing is, Tim loves their dysfunctional, broken family and he knows Bruce and Dick loved him back. But to be honest, it would be easier to change events if he wasn’t being scrutinized by Bruce every day. And it wasn’t like Tim had any shortage of money, with his parents still alive and his family fortune enough to cover whole lifetimes, so he wasn’t worried about his own safety.

It would be nice to go to college too. Maybe Stanford. He was smart enough to make it, and the location was close to the vigiliante community that if he so wanted to, he could probably join and watch his family from the outskirts. Last time around, Tim just couldn’t leave Gotham. Being a vigiliante was his life— he couldn’t even justify it as a temporary thing anymore. Their family had gone through so much tragedy and Gotham was still filled with crime and Tim had an obligation to keep her safe. It just… he couldn’t escape his mantle because he loved it, and Tim had a difficult time letting things go once he loved them.

But if Tim could change things from the start, he didn’t need to be pulled back into the life. (He couldn’t have it, even if he loved it, because it was never his in the first place.) He could start anew, be a vigiliante when he was in college and far away from the family he hopefully would’ve fixed by then.

Well then. First things first, he needed to remove a factor from Jason’s death so he wouldn’t die in the first place.

—

Mrs. Mac comes by and cooks him lunch, and they eat in silence. Typically, Tim would fill the silence with chattering, glad to have someone to talk to in the empty manor. But Tim’s mind is whirring, drawing up and discarding plans. By the time Mrs. Mac stands up and tells him she’s going to leave now, Tim has thought of three contingencies and twelve more future events he needs to address.

He mhms when Mrs. Mac prompts him to, and eventually she leaves out the front door, leaving him alone with his thoughts. It’s spring break and Tim doesn’t actually have anything to do because he’s in middle school now, so he mulls over the Jason problem for a few more hours.

It comes to him when he’s microwaving the leftovers from lunch, and Tim is pretty sure he’s a genius, or something. Sheila Haywood worked at a refugee camp in Ethiopia handling medical supplies, but she was embezzling funds from the organization she was working for. It wouldn’t be difficult for Tim to trace it and report her. By the time Jason began tracking her down, she would most likely be in prison, just for a few years and everything would hopefully blow over and the Joker wouldn’t blackmail her because she had no use to him in prison.

It was cold, perhaps. But her life wouldn’t be over with a few years in prison, and Jason would be alive. Nothing more than they deserved.

Jason, alive. Then Damian, Cass, and Steph. He would see to his family, whole and happy. Then perhaps, in the future, when he was older and safely out of Bruce’s adoption zone, Tim could perhaps work with them. Laugh about how he never expected the Wayne family to be vigilantes, just to throw them off his trail.

Tim allows himself this one selfish thought, because he has nothing else but the shattered remains of a future that will never come to be, and a family he left behind but still exists.

a/n:

i wrote this in two hours under an inspired haze of time travel and tim, two of my favorite things

tim is a super unreliable narrator if you haven't already noticed lmao

also if i get any characterization wrong feel free to leave some discourse or ping me on the head

but like please be gentle cause y'know constructive crit, not bashing

thanks for reading! :D