Timothy Drake was not going to live to see his next birthday.
Tim did not claim to be a psychic or a fortune teller, but sometimes he knew things. Like how he knew he was going to die in less than three months.
Something was going to happen. A villain would get the upper hand. A wound wouldn't heal properly. Someone's bullet would catch him between the eyes. A cable would snap and maybe he wouldn't be able to catch himself in time.
And if none of that happened, then he would simply jump off a roof.
This roof in particular in fact. It was a nice enough roof, topping an abandoned apartment complex that reached twenty stories into the sky. Ten years ago it would have been crowded with people, but smuggling and escalated gang warfare had convinced most of the families to leave, and the complex had gone out of business. Now it served only as a home for rats and the occasional runaway, and for wandering Robins who needed a place to think.
It was a quiet part of town, cut off from the bustle of the inner city. A few more abandoned buildings were crowded around in a desolate clump, the city ahead, lines of warehouses behind.
Tim liked it here. There were few people, meaning no eye witness, no cameras, no one to report back to Oracle or Bruce, no one to ask him what he was doing, brooding there on the roof of an abandoned apartment complex.
If he jumped off, just stepped off the edge, right now, right this second, no one would know. On one would notice.
Which was good. He wasn't going to kill himself because he wanted attention. He didn't even want to kill himself, not really, didn't want anyone to think that he had given up, to think that he was weak, pathetic, everything that they had always thought he was anyway, but at this point Tim didn't really see that there was anything else he could do.
He was empty.
He was already a shell, already gone, it just didn't seem like anyone had noticed.
How could they not notice? Why couldn't they see, how could they not, he had been bleeding, why hadn't they helped him?
Too late now. It was only a matter of time before he collapsed. It had begun to show in his work months ago; an absentmindedness, a lack of enthusiasm, too many sleepless nights trying to catch up on the work that he missed because of the days when the weight on his chest was too heavy, when his body was simply too numb to move. He had been bleeding out. There were too many holes in his heart, too many empty places, too much, too much-
Why hadn't someone noticed? Bruce? Dick? Why hadn't they helped him? Why had they left him alone?
He didn't like being alone.
He had been alone before, when he was younger and smaller and not quite so empty, alone in a big house in a big city, everything hollow and still and echoing around him. He hadn't liked it.
Batman had saved him.
Where's Batman now? Where is he? Not here. Not with you.
You're alone.
He hadn't been alone. Not before. Before there had been Bruce, Alfred, Dick, Babs, then Steph, Kon, Bart, and finally Cass.
Who's left, who's left, you lost them all, where did they go?
Bruce and Dick were too busy with the demon child to even look at him these days.
Alfred and Babs were there but just out of reach, slightly aloof, on a pedestal somewhere high above him, and he loved them too much drag them down and get them involved with this, with him, with his mind and his mess.
Cass, who was his friend, his sister… He hadn't spoken to her since she has moved to Bludhaven.
Steph. Kon. Bart.
Lost them. You lost them.
And the ever present whisper at the back of his mind, the pang in his heart that never really went away.
Mom. Dad.
Better this way. Better now, better quick and easy, instead of pushing, trying to keep going, because he had nothing left to give. If he pushed any more his hollow center would crack, shatter right down the middle, and Bruce would have to notice that his third son had gone insane, and then he'd have to worry, have to deal with it, have to clean up the mess. Better this way. Better to leave a body, but none of the pain. Better a quick ending. Tim had never liked stories that dragged on and on when there was no sense of prolonging the inevitable.
Because Tim Drake was already dead. He had died some time ago, and no one had noticed.
…
"Red Robin? We've got trouble. Red Hood and a magician, three blocks south east of your current location, warehouse 37B."
Tim Drake was going to die. He was going to be shot, or beaten, or pushed. Or he might fall.
But not today. He could hold on a little longer. Not today. Today he has to save the asshole who happened to be his older brother.
But maybe…
Maybe tomorrow.
Eh. Not much happening in this chapter plot wise, kinda short, but I really needed to just establish were Timmy's head is right now.
