It was cold and it was dark, and Robin was alone.
He pushed himself up. When his hand touched the floor, everything shifted. He was walking now, through something thick and black. It was hard to make a step, but every time he did, white lines rippled from where he stood. He wasn't going anywhere in particular, just forward. There was nowhere to turn and nothing in sight.
He walked for a long time, or maybe not long at all. Finally, he stopped. There was a creature ahead of him, a vaguely feminine shape of black goo. He knelt next to it, tried to find a face. There was none, until he reached a hand over to touch it. The creature made a wheezing noise as it morphed.
Robin wanted to move backwards, but he was stuck in place. A cold hand was wrapped around his ankle, and he fell down into a sitting position.
The creature said, "you didn't go."
Robin knew the voice, but he couldn't understand it.
"You didn't go to my funeral…" the creature sighed. "Did you?"
Tim didn't know what to say. He'd been there, right? He'd missed a lot of things, but not that. He wasn't… "I did," he mumbled. "I was there."
Something changed. The creature was holding a jug of some kind of liquid. Tim tried to stop her, but he was too late.
She drank, and melted away, and Tim woke up.
It was a team bonding exercise, or something, but really it had been Tim and Cassie's scheme to organize a 'Freshmen' sleepover without having to go to one of their houses. Bart and Gar lived in the Watchtower, Jaime didn't think his parents would appreciate having so many people over, Cassie was afraid of her mother meeting her boyfriend, and Tim, of course, wasn't about to reveal he and his family's identity to anyone who didn't need to know.
"Robin?" Someone was whispering. Tim didn't open his eyes. "Robin. Tim."
That got his attention; Tim blinked and saw Bart watching him intently. "…wha?"
Bart huffed a little in a laughing way. He seemed to be in a better mood than he had been for a while. He said, "you were muttering. I wasn't sure if you were asleep and having a nightmare or just being weird like Jaime is."
Jaime, who was awake and on his phone, glanced over. "Bart," he said.
Bart made a face at him. "I'm just sayin', man. You talk to yourself a lot."
Jaime went back to his phone, proving Bart's point by muttering to himself, and Tim said, "what was I saying?"
Bart leaned onto his elbows. "I dunno," he said. "You okay, though?"
Tim shrugged. "I guess," he said. "I don't remember what I was dreaming. It was probably nothing, though." It was a lie.
Bart gave up on the position he was in and pulled Tim's blanket over himself until it covered his back and shoulders like a cape. Tim didn't protest. "You think Cassie will be mad if I wake her up?" Bart asked.
Tim frowned. "How should I know?"
"Well, you're dating her, aren't you?"
Being totally honest, Tim did often forget he and Wonder Girl were dating now. It had been over two months since they'd gotten together, and it didn't seem like much had really changed between them. Tim wasn't sure if he was upset about that or not. They'd only kissed once since she'd first kissed him that day, and though they held hands often, Tim got the feeling his girlfriend was a little uncomfortable in this new relationship.
Dick asked about her sometimes, and Tim always gave him embarrassed, shy responses, things like oh, we're fine, thanks, or she's— we're okay, yeah, it's not a big thing and the like. He knew Dick had been in a few relationships in the past, so maybe he would be able to help, but he wasn't sure if Cassie would appreciate Tim venting about their relationship to her former team leader.
"She'll probably be fine with it," Tim said. "But she might be grumpy if you— oh, great."
Bart, apparently not realizing Tim hadn't finished speaking, speed-crawled over to Cassie in her sleeping bag and shook her so fast she might've been vibrating instead of him.
"Holy SHIT, BART!" Cassie said as she struggled out of her sleeping bag. "Why?"
Bart blinked. "Sorry."
A green cat crawled out of Cassie's sleeping bag. It blinked up in Tim and Bart's direction.
"That's Gar, right?" Bart said. "Like, we didn't just leave him somewhere and find another green animal guy? Because I had a dream about that, once, and Miss Martian was pissed."
The cat transformed into someone who looked like a strange mix between a monkey and a boy. "Hell yeah she would be," Gar said. Recently he'd started experimenting with swearing, but he didn't dare do it while M'gann was around. She still often saw him as a little boy and though he liked the security of that, he was now a teenager.
"Use some big kid swears, Gar," Bart said.
Jaime said, "aren't you two the same age?"
Bart replied, "I never said we weren't!"
Tim groaned as he laughed and slid fully onto the ground. His friends were ridiculous and he loved them. He only really knew love from afar — his parents had been largely absent, gone for months at a time, and though they had loved him, they hadn't always expressed it in 'normal' ways. Bruce was similar. So he loved from a distance, too, watching, subtly showing his affection.
He hoped they knew he loved them, but he couldn't go out and say it. It wasn't natural for him in the way it was for others.
"Rob?" Gar nudged Tim. "You've been scary quiet. Like, use a face, man."
Tim blinked and furrowed his eyebrows. "Use a face?"
In response, Gar made a wild face that didn't really match any emotion Tim knew of. And he'd seen a lot of therapy 'name-your-feeling' charts. "Like that."
"You mean expressions?" Jaime asked. "Also. That was terrifying, hermano."
"You just don't understand the nuances of expressionalism," Gar argued. Tim wondered if he was quoting something, because Gar usually didn't bother with words like 'nuances'. "Hey, Robin, are you and Cassie still dating?"
Tim blinked. "Yes," he said, glancing at Cassie. "Right?" he asked her.
"Yeah," Cassie said. "Totally. Why?"
Gar shrugged. "No reason. Hey, I heard Aqualad talking about recruiting new people to the team. Do you think he'll let me come along and do it with him?"
"Who's he recruiting?" Tim asked, as he always felt a need to be 'In The Know.'
"Some duo in Jump City," Garfield responded. "I only heard some of it. I think aliens."
"Oh, I always like aliens," Cassie said, a bit too dreamily to be casual. Tim wondered if she was thinking about her childhood crush on Superman, or maybe a lesser known alien that she hadn't told him about.
The conversation continued until the group was too focused on the unimportant things they were talking about to notice Bart grabbing Tim and half dragging him out of the room. Tim didn't protest because he knew it was pointless; Bart more often than not got what he wanted. He was unrelentless.
"Are you sure you're okay?" Bart asked. Bart, Tim found, had a strange ability to see through people's masks. It was probably because he was so experienced with his own. "I did hear some of what you were saying. Something about a funeral."
Tim sat down against the wall. He could almost hear the others yelling from the room they'd exited. "A funeral," he said. He remembered that, but he hadn't said it in his dream. She had.
"Are you thinking about Wally or something?" Bart asked. Tim almost found himself surprised that he hadn't gotten it right, but of course Bart had no idea about most of Tim's life. Just the stuff he'd been told from other future people.
"No…" Tim said. He felt a little like he was drifting, in and out of this plane. "I was… dreaming about my mom. She's dead, she died probably… over a year ago. June last year."
"Oh." Bart chewed on his lip. "I'm sorry. Her funeral must have been a while ago, right?"
"It was." Tim cracked his knuckles one by one. "I don't know why I was dreaming about her. She said I didn't go to her funeral, but I did. I went to it. Some crime guy called Cluemaster was causing trouble and I didn't do anything because I was going to her funeral."
Bart was quiet for a while. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Aren't you the one who doesn't get why people say sorry for things that aren't your fault?" Tim asked.
Bart smiled just a little. "Yeah," he said. "I'm learning." He emphasized the word, like he was mocking someone or maybe just being a little sardonic.
"Good job," Tim said, a little faintly. "Gold star sticker for you."
Bart nodded, and stood up, and they both went back to the others. Nobody seemed to have noticed their disappearance, except for Jaime, who said something to Bart that Tim couldn't hear. Tim was more than a little unsettled but more than that, comforted. His mother was dead and his father was in a coma, but at least he had friends that were alive and awake.
That was enough, wasn't it?