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Rated T for my standard stuff
This is a series of drabbles and stuff that detail what I imagine must've happened while Tim traveled the world during the early days of the Red Robin series. Enjoy!
Tim didn't tell anybody when he left.
A few years earlier, Bruce had arranged to have the stables out back of Wayne Manor converted into an apartment for Tim. Ever since, the place had been in a perpetual state of disarray. Tim hardly lived there anymore, spending more time crashing in random bedrooms at the manor after patrol and constructing his own, private safe houses using his own budget.
When it came time to pack up and go, he found himself less prepared than he expected to be. He had always known, someplace in the back of his mind, that he couldn't remain as Robin forever. But at that moment, the moment it had been torn from him, it had been the only thing that had ever made him feel…worth something. And now, without it, he was nothing, nobody. So, when it came time to pack up and go, all he really did was grab a suitcase and a backpack and stuff them full of whatever they'd carry. Between the two bags, he had about three changes of clothes, two utility belts, his iPod, and a handheld device that was linked into the Batcave database. Then he grabbed his jacket and headed off.
But he straightened up the apartment before he left. Alfred didn't deserve to have to clean that nightmare.
Perhaps the east end of Gotham wasn't the greatest place to start over, but it wasn't like Tim had anywhere else to go at the present moment. There was still a little bit of prep work that had to be done, before he could actually move to another town. And besides, the safe house was the closest thing to home he'd had then, and sleeping on East End streets was unsafe at best.
Tim stayed there for a total of one week before he started off. In that amount of days, less of his time was spent on prep work as what he spent on nostalgia.
He'd grown up in Gotham City, was born and raised and lived almost his whole life there. He knew the place like the back of his hand, yet it always seemed to have some surprises for him…a backstreet he didn't recognize…a shortcut he never knew existed…and it really was a nice place to live, no different from any other large city in America.
In the week before he left it all behind, Tim would walk the streets, just to hear the sound of his own feet smacking against the pavement. Anybody else would've told him he was nuts. The East End was not the place for a casual stroll, much like the South End. But everybody he passed, all the seedy-looking characters that seemed to flood the sidewalks, mostly left him alone. It was obvious that he was still pretty much a kid, and besides, everybody was too busy worrying about their own problems to try to cause some for somebody else. Thanks to their asshole Congressmen, those problems were magnified by at least ten times since a year ago.
If anybody had asked him why he bothered going out in such a sad excuse for the outskirts of a city, he would've said that it was just so that he could remind himself of what he worked for. The world had taken the biggest strike in history at these poor people, had beaten them to a pulp and robbed them of everything but life—so far, anyway. Somebody's failings, somebody's apathy, had cost them all they held dear. And he wasn't about to be the person that perpetuated that.
He needed to remind himself of what could happen to a world without heroes. Because if he forgot, then what was the purpose of even having a mission at all?