Archive of Our Own ^beta

Gotham burns. It is fire and neon and the pulsating, ugly heart of a rotten society, the oil-slick underbelly of the capitalist regime, home of the scum of the highest classes and the last vestiges of ruined moralities. Gotham is red and copper with smeared, dripping blood and black with shadows and grime. Gotham is green with the toxic sludge in gutters and blinking, flashing lights and blue with bruises and bar signs. Gotham is yellow, gaping fat and angry headlights, purple with popped veins and cold corpses. Gotham is filthy with discarded needles and broken bottles, grime and muck coating shoes and pants-hems, smog and puddles of acid. 

Gotham burns; it’s light and color and it carves itself into Tim’s eyelids. He’s never seen so much color, so many smells and sounds and life. Gotham has a beating heart, beaten and black as it is, and Tim loves it. It is dark and bright and death and life, the paradoxical society of evil and stolen innocence and good and charity in technicolor, the stars covered and the sky glowing all the same. Gotham gives Tim hope; Gotham is the dark fighting for the right, the survival of light against all odds. 

Tim aches for it; for a heart that beats and lungs that breathe and blood that bleeds in color. It’s unattainable. Tim is Timothy, is Leviathan, is crumpled-paper skin and stark black veins and eyes that glow blue in the dark and silent footsteps and a torn-out heart frozen and dead. His blood is made of ice. He is ice; Mother made it so. 

Gotham is supposed to freeze his head, lock his emotion away, mature his mind. It isn’t working. It can’t be working, because he’s been in Gotham three days and all he can feel is warmth and sound and color, the antithesis of his home and purpose. Tim is a snake under a sunlamp, bathing in the light. Gotham is a shining sun and the comfort of the dark and the assurance that some people are free. Free to think and choose and pick right over wrong or wrong over right and learn unhindered and support different perspectives. 

Tim’s been sitting on a fire escape and watching for three days. His clothing is smeared with rust and dirt and grime and blood, shoes coated in muck. It’s raining, and his dressings stick to his skin, pulling with him when he moves, hair wet and dripping. Tim hasn’t stopped shivering in fifteen minutes. Tim ignores the feeling of grease and oil on his skin and in his hair, tapping his nails against the rusty railing of the fire escape. It smudges orange on his fingers. 

Above him, the Gotham smog covers the night sky, coating the city in liquid soot. The city itself provides him shadow and shelter. Below, two floors down, two grunts employed by Black Mask speak unabashedly about their boss’s operations. They’re stomping on glass and blood and rust and bone, kicking around filth and dirt, harassing passers-by and the occasional alley cat. Their ‘smoke break’ has gone on for an hour and a half. From the second floor, Tim can hear every detail of Mask’s plans, and the goons can’t even see him. He’s not even trying to hide. If they were Mother’s followers, her mindless servants, they would be lying, heads cut and split and black blood seeping on the concrete alley floor. Tim wouldn’t even look away as she did it, wouldn’t stop her. They would deserve it. 

A shadow looms over the alley, darker than the others. It’s a supernatural, artificial darkness, a trick of light and a tactic for fear. Batman. Behind him, a boy in a suit so blinding it glows, radioactive and volatile; his Robin. Tim settles in to watch. He had researched Gotham before he was sent here; he knew the duo by name and identity, in lieu of hasty, blurred video and questionable article. 

He had never seen them work in person. 

It takes one punch for Mask’s dirty grunts to crack. Up-and-coming crime lord can’t afford much else, but Tim had expected more. Shame. 

Batman grabs the grunt he hadn’t punched by the collar, dragging him close. Robin kicks the first in the groin. “Who are you working for?” The Bat rumbles, his voice low and angry and not, at all, a rasp. It is, nonetheless, an incredibly stupid question. This was Gotham’s Dark Knight? The wraith crime ran from, the shadow caught only in blurry, shaking photos and reports made with trembling fingers?

Pathetic. 

The goons he’s assaulting are actively wearing black masks.

The Bat shakes his prey, lifting him off his feet. They mutter back and forth, the goon letting loose information Tim had heard simply by listening. Impatient Bat. 

His voice is dusty and gravel-like and dark, and Tim struggles not to hear his Mother’s Talons in the shadows. He is watched, a parliament and court at his back. He has gotten away with three days a statue, but Timothy will need to find a base before the week is done; a cave system, or a stone alcove, or somewhere dark and stark and chilly. Mother alluded to a branch of the Court residing in Gotham long ago; they would have had a place for him, and will welcome him open-armed if they still operate. A house, then. A house and a safe hide-away, unneeded shelter from rain and nightfall. This will be a sign of his success; proof of his cunning and oil-slicked scales. 

Mother doesn’t accept failure. 

Failure to comply means split skin and sluggish blood, too-cold bedchambers and a needle in his arm freezing him from the inside. Failure is cutting words–he should be invincible–and dark stares and an arena fight to prove that he has some desperate, fleeting worth. That his life has meaning, any at all. That he may one day be a worthy heir. Failure to be worth is to be a Talon, to be stripped of his mind and his autonomy and his status and the warmth he gathers and hoards in his chest. Failure means the worst death; the death of the mind. Timothy cannot fail, cannot be unsuitable. Mother will obliterate him. 

A hand on his shoulder, a swinging knife; and then Robin, clutching his cheek. Blood seeps between his fingers, red and rich and human. Timothy reaches out and catches a falling drop on his finger, and it is warm in a way a Talon’s never is. He looks up, and Robin is still staring at him with two fingers holding in blood under his eye. Tim can see his own eyes glowing faintly in the lenses of Jason Todd’s domino, the boy’s blood smeared on his finger and still dripping from beneath his eye. 

“The hell,” Robin says, anger flickering in his face, red and hot and alive. “Was that for, kid?” 

And Tim works his throat, trying to force words up. He hasn’t spoken since he stepped into Gotham, and he hadn’t spoken on the plane, and he’s never spoken to speak before, to respond to someone other than his Mother, never spoken not to give orders.

“I-” and his voice cracks down the middle, hoarse and shaking. “I did not see you, I was startled.”

The red drains from Robin’s face, and he stares at Tim with an expression that he can’t read. Robin is expressive, compared to Mother and the Grandmasters and the Court and the Talons. Tim isn’t well-versed on the nuance of expressions; that’s one of the reasons Mother sent him to Gotham. To learn manipulation, to drown in oil and grease and blood and come out graceful and grinning. 

“You ain’t from Gotham proper, are ya?” The Robin-bird asks, inquisitive, grim, morbid. He stares at Tim as if he’s concerned; as if Tim is in danger, not being from the city. As if the city isn’t the safest place for something like him; as if he cannot mold himself to it as days fade by. Robin is unaware of Tim’s capabilities, and it grates on him, but Mother says that to be underestimated is the greatest exploit that Timothy can use at his current size and age. 

And so Tim leans into it. 

He harnesses the lighter accent that Gotham’s wealthiest use, injecting some scared, surprised emotion in his voice and posture, shrinking back from the boy before him.

“No,” Tim whispers, “No, I’m not. I’m so, so sorry I cut you! I really didn’t mean to, truly, you scared me.” Tim’s trick works; his shaking voice, hoarse from disuse fear, and Jason Todd’s mouth twists into a frown. He leans more casually against the railing next to Tim, looking over his soaked hair and now-black-and-brown garments. Tim is a mess; fallen into disrepair over his obsession with Gotham and his need for more warmth. It would have gotten him punished back home, to be seen in such conditions. Here, with the Robin, it aids his lies. His appearance makes him pathetic, makes him seem weak. Childish. 

“Oh,” Robin says, “Can I help you get home? What’s your name?”

Robin’s emotions stretch across his face in a genuine, mortal way. A way that Tim can never even hope for, can never achieve. Emotions are fake and powerful and weak and Tim can only learn to abuse them. So he sniffs thickly, as if he’s close to tears, and nods with a trembling neck. 

“I’m Tim,” he says, because it’s as fake and as real as any name for him can be, and speaking it into existence for the very first time sediments it as one of him, one facet that he can grow and nourish and use. “I live in one of the brownstones in Dimond District, but I got lost on the metro yesterday and couldn’t get back home.”

Tim’s a good liar. Of course he is, he’s been raised in it. He can see his lies set in white marble and Latin script and silver ink on beaten parchment. Those were testaments to his strength and his cleverness and his ability, burning white light on a high pedestal. But the effect his lie has is clearer even than that when it plays out on Jason Todd’s face. A mere second of disgust, followed by pity and annoyance. Tim’s read Jason’s files. Jason Todd: Gotham street rat turned heir to billionaire

Tim’s good at lying because he can see the evidence cross a human face for the third time. Jason Todd’s face displays flashes of disgust, pity, annoyance, before it moves on and accepts the lie with ease. Because of course it does; Tim’s a good liar. Robin’s smiling comfortingly, but there’s tightness around his eyes and in his neck.  For a moment, Tim panics. Is it a façade? what if he’s not as good at reading as he thought? Already, Robin is tricky, it’s a mask and a person rolled into one. Tim might not have gotten a handle on Jason Todd’s mannerisms like he thought he did; what if Robin received the training to see through his lies, and Tim wasn’t prepared for it?

“Do yer folks know yer out?” Robin asks, and Tim deflates. Hopefully, Robin thinks it’s out of shame or something equally mortal and dumb. Not because of relief, or something like a tell. (Relief is nice. Leviathan doesn’t feel it often, but since Tim’s come to play he gets if more. Like a hotdog or a ratty blanket.)

“No,” Tim says, because if he had parents aside from Mother, and if he were a normal, mortal human boy and not a facet of the winter and the dark and the cold, he thinks his parents ought to care that their son had gotten lost on the metro. “Mom had a business meeting in Metropolis, and Dad’s in Singapore.”

Robin mutters Singapore? to himself before asking, “You got a babysitter or anything?”

Tim lets his mouth pull into a frown. He’s not sure what a babysitter is, but if Robin’s asking, he definitely missed something in his research. Someone who sits on babies? Seems counterintuitive. “Why would I want that?” Tim responds, and Robin’s face twists up. 

“No wonder you got lost on the metro, kid.”

“It’s confusing,” Tim mutters, curling back into the shadow. Robin blinks for a minute, and his golden glow dims, and his eyes go a little dazed, so Tim shifts backwards and hides himself. Robin keeps staring into nothing and blocking Tim’s exit, which sucks. Tim reaches behind him and finds some type of coin—grimy, slimy, ew—and tosses it at Jason Todd’s face. 

The penny hits Robin square on the nose, and he startles and almost falls off his perch. 

Almost. Because Tim’s dumb and his arm shoots out to catch Robin by the garish red tunic. Under the flickering alley lights, its skin is black in the night and dripping the sky, speckled with stars, and when Robin turns and makes eye contact, Leviathan knows its eyes shine a frigid white in the dark. 

Robin’s domino lenses widen in alarm and he knocks the hand off of him and jumps from the railing. Tim leans out of the shadows and over the rail in time to see the last of Robin’s light trail from the alley. 

Immediately, the warmth dissipates. Tim hadn’t noticed it until then, but Robin brought with him a warmth like concentrated sunlight. Now it’s gone, and the gaping hole in Tim’s chest wants more of it; like he’ll freeze up without warmth. Tim’s a kind of cold that’s metaphysical, that’s been growing roots inside him since he was born. Sometimes he feels like the cold is his veins and his blood. Robin’s warmth that’s better than a ratty orange blanket and the rush of cooling blood. Tim doesn’t know what to do with it. Leviathan’s told to kill that warmth, but how can they kill it when they need it? 

Tim climbs down from the fire escape and shakes. His feet touch the ground and he can feel the slickness of blood though the once-white boots Mother gave him. He’ll ignore the ache in his chest for now. He has a mission to fulfill; learn the ways of Gotham. 

Tim starts walking.