Chapter Text
“I’ll see you in a bit,” Tim shouts through the wall as Dick sits him on a gurney.
“Right, yeah,” Bernard calls back. It does not sound like a real yes.
“That…” Dick frowns slightly. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Let’s sort my leg first,” Tim says. He takes in the space, it’s a pretty good, improvised med-bay, cramped but with enough space that he can patch up and change without having to worry about someone seeing him undressing or putting his suit on in an industrial dumpster. Also cleaner than that, which is probably ideal considering his current state of affairs.
Dick pulls out X-ray goggles from a drawer across from the gurney. “Your ribs are all intact,” He says. “Your ankle is too. Your tibia, however, is not. But it’s a clean break. I’ll splint and wrap it and we’ll see if you need a cast once the swelling goes down.” He pulls a Batarang out of his utility belt. “How attached are you to these jeans? If you want to salvage them, I can unpick the stitches but we’ll be here a while longer.”
“Just cut them off,” Tim tells him.
“Okay, doing that now,” Dick cuts through the fabric, “Do you need any painkillers?” He holds out a bottle of co-codamol.
“It’s a clean break,” Tim pushes it away, trying to ignore Dick’s raised eyebrow. “I’m fine, Dick.”
“You have a broken leg.”
“A tibia with a clean fracture in it. There’s a difference.”
“Medically speaking, that is a broken leg,” Dick says.
“It’s not a severe break though. I’m fine,” Tim leans past him to put the bottle back on the cabinet.
“Okay, this might have to hurt a bit then. Tap out and tell me if you change your mind on the pain relief,” he places splints on either side of the leg and it burns but Tim keeps his expression calm. The sharper pain is a good distraction from playing the last hour over and over in his head. It would be so easy to just focus on the broken leg or the mission and pretend that Red Robin doesn’t have Tim Drake’s relationship problems. Red Robin does now have Tim’s relationship problems. Bernard knows they’re the same. “How much did you overhear on the comms?” he finds himself asking.
“I didn’t,” Dick says, wrapping gauze around Tim’s leg. “That should be stable if you keep your weight off it… I’d like to hope that if something’s going horribly wrong, you’d tell me of your own accord. And if you don’t, I am literally dating an Orwellian nightmare.”
Tim sighs. “Bernard maybe hates me now.”
Dick stands up and leans against the opposite counter. He frowns for a moment before it breaks into something more sympathetic. “What happened?”
“The space we were trapped in wasn’t… great. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. He got off with some bruising and I just have the tibial fracture. We didn’t suffocate or anything. But we were trapped with two other people, well parts of two other people. One of them, Jeniffer, was still alive initially but… she was crushed from the mid-abdomen down. She wasn’t going to survive that, no matter how quickly we could get her out of there.”
Dick nods sympathetically.
“I found out she had kids, photos in a locket on her necklace. I think she was fighting to hold on to see them again. I lied to her. I told her that we were going to get back to her family, told her some benign stuff about me and surprisingly, Jason. I’m not sure if she was conscious but she was fighting death and it was just going to prolong her suffering. I’m hoping she went unafraid."
"Yeah," Dick agrees. He pulls some wipes out of a storage tray and hands them over to Tim. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“It was rough, but we’ve all been through worse,” Tim wipes the blood off his hands. “The other person was dead on impact. I don’t think there’s much left of them that their family could identify.”
“How did Bernard react to that?”
“I had him keep his eyes closed while I was examining the area and then kept my phone off the rest of the time,” Tim admits as he brushes debris out of his hair. “It sucks, but I think in terms of trauma, it’s probably better to be stuck in a dark, cramped space than a well-lit cramped space filled with mangled bodies.”
Dick frowns. “Probably, although either of those situations are going to be traumatic for someone.”
“I know, but I didn’t have a load of time to weigh that up,” Tim snaps, briefly defensive. He shoves that thought back down. Dick isn’t the person he should be angry at. This is Tim’s fault, not anyone else’s. “He was terrified of me. Seemed to think I was Clayface taking my own place.”
“Were you switching between voices a lot?” Dick asked.
“Probably. I was trying to keep him calm and Red Robin is better at that than Tim Drake.” He reaches for the uniform Dick brought with him and starts pulling it on. He thinks briefly about how many things being a vigilante has gained him and how many things he’s lost. He wouldn’t trade being a hero for many things but he has a feeling that might be part of the problem. “Bernard said I lie to everyone I know, that I’m a stranger to him and that we’re going to start with a second first date.”
“Ouch,” Dick doesn’t dispute any of those claims either.
“I don’t lie to everyone,” Tim states. He doesn’t. He’s always told the truth to… who has he always been honest with?
“Not unnecessarily,” Dick half-agrees with him. He looks uncomfortable for a long moment. “You manipulate. You do what you need to do to achieve what you need to. And sometimes, that involves a Batmobile in the batarang budget, or it involves making contingencies against your own brothers. And I’m not going to tell you that’s always wrong. I can’t without being a hypocrite considering I have contingencies for all of the Titans. But it can be hard for people to come to terms with.”
“I didn’t have an option but to lie to him,” Tim says. “I needed friends at school but I couldn’t exactly say “Hi, I’m Tim Drake also known as Robin”, so I just kept lying.”
“Yeah, and I get that. I’ve done it to countless people too,” Dick says. “Hell, think how long Clark’s worked with Perry without him knowing how Clark always got the Superman scoop. As much as it’s all “Truth, justice and the American way”, we all do lie a lot. And sometimes, people are okay with it and sometimes it drives them away.”
“Probably why most capes date capes,” Tim says tiredly.
“Probably. But sometimes relationships work out anyway. Look at Clark and Lois, or Wally and Linda.”
“Didn’t Lois work it out on her own?”
“Oh, yeah, Clark had so many crises about stopping her from thinking he was Superman. But Lois Lane is Lois Lane.”
“So… Bernard just has to have the bravery of Lois Lane.” Bernard’s not a coward but Tim’s not sure he can see him hitting an alien with his car or interviewing people at gunpoint.
“Maybe,” Dick looks thoughtful for a moment. “We’re… we’re different to the Supers. We’re not fighting the likes of Doomsday on our own, but we’re beat up like we are.” He offers Tim some foundation and then gestures to his jaw, Tim’s make up is clearly flaking off where he cleared the blood away. He takes the concealer and hand mirror Dick offers him and starts hiding away scars again. “People don’t like seeing their loved ones in pain and I think that can scare people away sometimes.”
“Yeah, I have spoken to people before,” Tim jokes lightly. “And it’s not like I enjoy seeing the people I care about in pain.”
“No, but you’re used to it,” Dick says. He runs a hand along the side of his own head, fingers lingering on a scar for a moment. “How many times have you seen me with gunshot wounds?”
“Enough,” Tim says. “More times than I’d like to.”
“Yeah, I hate seeing any of you injured too,” Dick says. “But we’re used to it at this rate. I’ve mourned most of the people I love at some point or another. And then most of them have gotten better. But death and injury are huge parts of our lives. They’re not part of Bernard’s currently.”
“He did join a pain cult for a little while,” Tim argues. It’s not like Bernard’s lived his entire life wrapped in cotton wool. He’s gone through shit like anyone else. But he does wake up screaming from the pain cult sometimes. “But he still gets nightmares about that.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Didn’t you tell me the torture was pretty boring?”
“I didn’t even lose an organ,” Tim quips. “At least take my appendix or gallbladder, maybe my adenoids, you know?”
Dick snorts darkly, smiling slightly. “I know, right. It’s like half of them don’t even know how to shoot me in the face properly. Like holy tragedy Batman, your son’s become a taxi driver, this is the worst imaginable situation.”
Tim laughs. He is so, so glad that Dick’s back to being Dick but considering he’s now fine, dark jokes about his taxi driving career and the living hell the KGBeast’s life has become now every cape ever has it in for him have become fair game.
“But that’s also sort of my point, a life changing trauma for most people is a somewhat rougher than normal Tuesday for us. You protected Bernard today. But, if this works out, he’s probably going to want to know about you and what you do on patrol and your life. And that means he’s going to hear about everything we do and he’s probably going to worry constantly.”
Tim loves Bernard. The world’s so much less heavy when he’s with him. He wants to keep things that way. He’s probably selfish for ever thinking they could be that way. There are people waiting to find out if their loved ones are dead or alive. There are people with way bigger problems in the world than Tim’s fucking relationship drama. “Can we shelve this? You need to work out how the mall collapsed. I need to go identify people.”
“Right, but keep me in the loop, okay?” Dick says. “
“Course.”
“I’m holding you to that. Take these and we’re good to go.” He pops some pills out of a blister packet, putting them in a little cup for Tim.
“I am considered immunocompetent, you know?” Tim rolls his eyes. “This is unnecessary and probably just creating more antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
“Since the rooftop incident, I have to be more carefully monitored after a head injury, you get to take some antibiotics when a building falls on you.”
Tim rolls his eyes but takes the pills and the water Dick offers. “Right, if we’re sorted, I’m going to head out.”
“Just… call me if anything goes wrong, you know?”
“Yes, Nightwing,” Tim rolls his eyes lightly before putting his mask on, Dick doing the same. He takes the offered crutches. “Thanks for having my back, but I’ve got this.”
Sometimes, there’s something almost tranquil about hospital morgues. The dead always require respect, but minutes don’t matter for them in the same way. They can follow a procedure, check fingerprints if available, check dental record if available, look for identifying marks, if all else fails, take tissue samples and run them in a sequencer. This time, the morgue is a lot busier, forty dead, some like Jennifer easily identifiable. Others, much less so. Red Robin takes whatever samples he can, labelling them to keep track of which John Doe is which.
As clinicians and police talk to families, he secludes himself with his tissue samples, isolates DNA, sequences it, matches it to people in databases, checks if they have identical twins. If they’re not in a database, he checks their closest relative on the database and traces any family members he can find from there until he finds the right person. It’s meditative in a way. He tracks down identities, writes them down, passes them on to doctors or police to contact families and moves onto the next one.
The process is just the right level of repetitive and engaging to allow his thoughts to drift somewhat without the strong emotions chasing after them.
He wants to make things work with Bernard. It’s going to be hard. He knows it’s going to be hard. But he loves Bernard and Bernard loves the parts of himself he shows him.
He sighs when his top layer of gloves come into contact with the reagent, peeling them off, sterilising his suit gloves again and pulling on a new layer of nitrile gloves. The crutches are making all of this a bit of a nightmare but he needs to do something right now. He wonders if he can steal a lab stool with wheels from anywhere and push himself along with his unbroken leg.
He shoves that thought aside. He’s fine, he can push on with crutches. He’s fine and if he’s being hopeful, things can turn out fine with Bernard too. Bernard wants to go to the Oblivion Bar for a first date, they can do that. Tim can’t exactly see any of the portals to it himself, his brief forays into magic never turning out fruitful, but he has some contacts who could get them in there. They can do that. He tries to think of other locations. Titans Tower would potentially be messy as he knows that a lot of people with secret identities are comfortable going maskless there. Watchtower has similar issues and some planet destroying weapons. They could go on a date to the Hall of Justice as Tim and Bernard but they could do that before, there’s an entire public access area. They wouldn’t then be allowed in the restricted access area.
He’ll text Bernard when he’s done here. Batman is not going to let him patrol for at least a few weeks, probably longer considering his leg’s going to decondition a bit while it’s splinted and potentially put in plaster. Broken limbs are the worst. How can he lose an organ and be able to continue patrolling with just some low-dose antibiotics yet a little break that won’t even have any permanent side effects can bench him for weeks? “Three point seven billion years of evolution and this is the best you could come up with,” he murmurs to his leg as he moves over to check another sequence result. It’s a match for some college kid, same age as him and Bernard. It could have been either or both of them today.
Guilt twists in his chest for a moment and it’s irrational, he didn’t take Bernard anywhere dangerous, they have no indication that the building collapse had anything to do with him. But danger follows Red Robin and whenever anyone works out who he is, danger follows Tim Drake too. By taking up the cape and the mask, he killed his own father. Is he going to sentence Bernard to death by loving him too?
No. It’s an irrational thought. They’ve all learnt since then. Tim briefly feels blood on his knees, his dad’s corpse in front of him, Batman’s hand on his shoulder. Red Robin shoves that thought aside. Lois lived safe and happy while Clark and Jon’s identities were known to the world. Same with Linda. Even Lian, with the right bodyguards, was able to go on fine with people knowing her Dad’s Arsenal.
Tim can make this work. Red Robin can make this work. Part of him feels this is selfish. Another part of him thinks it’s too late for doubts. People know. Leaving Bernard now just leaves him vulnerable.
Tim nearly runs a hand through his hair before realising his mistake. He's distracted, spacey. There are people terrified for their families, and he can at least give them the relief of certainty, but to do that he needs to fucking focus. One sample left to process. He takes the vial out of the centrifuge and sets to work.
By the time the last bodies are identified, a pathologist pats him on the shoulder and tells him to go back to whatever Cave the Bats live in.
“Roger,” Red Robin says, peeling off the nitrile gloves and giving his suit’s gloves a perfunctory wash. He checks briefly that he hasn’t somehow shed any hair in the lab. Anyone more related to him than his fifth cousins quickly has their DNA scrubbed from public databases the moment they do one of those spit in a tube ancestry tests. They can’t use Red Robin’s DNA to identify Tim Drake, but in an ideal world, neither of them have any DNA on any sort of record outside of the Justice League networks’. “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can do to help?” He offers one last time.
“How old even are you, kid?”
“Doesn’t really matter,” Red Robin would disappear there and then but it’s kind of difficult to leap off a roof or out of a window when in a basement, on crutches.
The pathologist raises an eyebrow. Admittedly, it’s harder to seem like a cryptid under fluorescent light labs. “Get some rest, kid.”
Red Robin leaves the space and begins planning for his second first date.