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seriousficTitle: Dangerous (the What Have You Done remix)
Fandom: Batman Nolanverse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,425
Characters/Pairings: Tim, Batman
Author’s notes: Written for Tyleet as part of that remix thing. The original is here. This story was betaed by Kernezelda and Gran Sigma, who I thank profoundly. It also owes something of a debt to D. Benway's In The Blood, which I had best acknowledge here instead of in the comments.
Summary: The son of Batman and the Joker has been psychologically tested since childhood. It doesn't work.
Tim's first memory was of a psych exam. He didn't think it was odd—he got exams so often he thought he came out of the womb to meet a Rorschach test. His father told him their family had a history of mental illness, so it was important to find any deviance early on. After each test—they were only half an hour, give or take, like a booster shot against something Tim was assured was in the shadows—his father would take him out for lunch wherever Tim wanted, his dark suit clashing with the garish colors of McDonald's, where Tim only ate to get the Happy Meal. They ate together and talked and when he was older, Tim started getting the feeling he was still being tested.
***
At age ten, Tim's father turned the never-used sleeping porch into a rabbit hutch for his birthday. Tim had been going through a rabbit phase, because his favorite cartoon was dedicated to rabbits that flew through space and blew up robots, and so the prospect of having his own thrilled him. He promised that the butler would never have to help out in their care, and even though his mother frowned at his father for going so far in indulging him, Dad just shrugged and went to take a conference call.
Seven months later, a snake got into the hutch. Tim came home from school to find the rabbits asleep and not waking up. One had been eaten. Tim cried like a much younger boy and no matter how his mother soothed him, he couldn't stop the wracking sobs from spinning his tiny body on the floor. She grew fearful, as if it were her responsibility to deal with precisely this and now it was here and she could do nothing. Finally, she snapped at him, and that raised voice triggered a sort of muscle memory in Tim. He seized up, came to, and mumbled an apology. His mother ushered him away and said they could go for a drive and Tim knew it was so the butler would have time to clean away the mess.
Tim didn't have the words yet to say he needed to do it, he needed to watch the bunnies lie sleeping in the ground and then disappear forever under dirt. Instincts long lurking in his bones and under his fingernails told him Mom would grow fearful again if he tried to explain. Each night that week, he snuck out of bed and returned to the hutch. The fence had been fixed and doubled, but Tim knew it was only a manner of time. And soon enough, he caught the snake outside the fence. He hopped the fence easily, coming down on the other side of him.
It took him in with its killer's eyes and hissed, its rattle joining the cacophony.
Tim cut its head off with the sharp end of the shovel he had taken from the shed.
After he told the doctor about it, there were no more psych exams.
***
At age twelve, Tim discovers that not everyone can see people like he can. His father can't. People are a mystery to his father, a vast unknowable plain, and he regards them with a religious faith and fear, God and the Devil in one. To his father, there are the good and the bad, the black and the white, and he has a vague faith in the good but for the bad he reserves fearhateangerdisgust. He feels so much more for the bad than he does for Mother.
For Tim, people open themselves up and write themselves out on their skin. Every gesture, every pronunciation of every word, it spews forth detail and sometimes he thinks he gets it from his mother, this insight, and he doesn't know how she can know so much. How can she know how much people hate and annoy and lust and still let them purvey their candy-coated venom to her? Because they don't take her seriously. They see her as someone who got lucky, had a playboy knock her up, and then he settled for settling down with her.
He loves her, of course. Because she loves him. And fears him.
***
At age thirteen, Tim admits to himself that his father doesn't love his mother. She loves him, and he appreciates her, but it's not the simple love Tim sees in the old couples who sit in the park together and bask in each other's silence (sometimes he can breathe, being in all that green with just that for company, and sometimes it's so irritating because why can't everyone be like that, why can't he be like that?). Tim doesn't think his father cheats, though, which is why so many of the parents at Brentwood Academy don't love each other anymore (or is at least proof of the fact). He doesn't think his father was ever the womanizer they say he was. Because he can read his father, a little, and his father doesn't write that out when a beautiful woman goes by, or a beautiful man for that matter. His father doesn't seem to enjoy anything. He is utterly still.
Tim appreciates that peacefulness too.
***
At age fourteen, a girl in the special ed class at Tim's school is alone with four boys and they force a bottle into her vagina. There is one boy held accountable, African-American, nouveau riche family, and the others would sue the school for more than the girl's house is worth if their boys got so much as a detention. Tim catches a glimpse of the girl once, as she gets her things out of the classroom before he never sees her again. For the next month, while others are updating their Facebooks and experimenting with the product of a new marijuana dealer, Tim writes down the boys' movements in a notebook which he hides very carefully when he's not carrying it.
The fervor dies down, new atrocities replace it, and one night Tim goes into the house of one of the boys, into the bedroom, and slits his Achilles tendon while he sleeps.
Then he watches from a tree as the ambulance comes.
It's funny, watching them all scramble about like headless chickens to save the life of such a scumbag. Hilarious, really.
He does it twice more before the Batman comes from nowhere, jerks him off his feet and pushes him against a wall and holds him like he weighs even less than he does.
"I'm not afraid of you," he informs the Batman. "Man in a mask." The thought trails off.
The Batman says nothing. Tim falls asleep like he's waking up (from a dream or a nightmare) and the next morning, the psych exams start again. Tim spends two hours having his head shrunk (Tim likes the slang of that, it feels so real). That night, he breaks into the doctor's office and calls up his file. It has words like 'sociopathy' in it, but that isn't the diagnosis. His home environment is too good. Tim laughs and when the Batman comes, he thinks for a wild (crazy) moment that the laughter called him, like a homing beacon.
"You could've stopped me from getting out," Tim says. "Bars on the windows. Alarm system. Straitjacket. Collar. Leash." The man in the mask makes words tumble out of him, words that have to be queued up for others. It's an interesting sensation. Like a boil being lanced.
"That would just make you cleverer," the Batman replies. "You're clever enough."
"For what?" Tim insists, although that isn't what the Batman meant and he knows it.
"Your father loves you a great deal," the Batman says easily. "He tried to provide a good home for you. People with good homes don't…" A lot of things, apparently, because he doesn't finish the sentence.
"I gave you time. You could've handled it."
"There was no evidence. I serve the law, I don't supercede it."
"Then what good are you?" It comes out harsher than Tim intended. Batman's his hero, after all. Batman's every boy's hero.
"What good's a boy bleeding out into his bedsheets?"
"Because I don't have to think of the look his victim gave me. I can think of his screams. That I can live with."
"That's why you did it. The girl."
Tim smiles. He knows he's pleased the Batman, even though he'll never show it. He just knows. "Why else?"
The Batman looks down. "No more. Promise me."
"I promise, sir." He means it, because he doesn't want to be that boy in the file. He wants to be normal. Batman knows about normal. That's why all of Gotham looks up to him.
***
At age sixteen, Tim has a girlfriend. He doesn't know if he loves her. He looks in the mirror and thinks of her and smiles, but the words that come out are in another language, one he thinks maybe isn't meant for him. Still, she makes him laugh.
He walks with her and the man with the knife steps out of the alley and before he can even ask for their money, Tim breaks him. It's so simple, he can't resist.
Steph doesn't talk to him for three weeks. After they reunite, they make love after eating dinner at a Wendy's and watching a horror movie. While she sleeps, Tim looks in the mirror. There's something in his eyes he thinks he gets from his father.
The Batman is waiting for him when he gets home. They don't talk about the mugger. Tim thinks that's because the Batman's approval is silent.
"What would you have done," the Batman starts, "if the boy you cut was innocent?"
"He wasn't," Tim says.
"You can't make a mistake?"
"He bragged about it. He laughed about it."
"What would you have done if his mother saw what you'd done and hung herself?"
Tim has no answer. The thought is blindingly obvious, but it must've hid from him. Now it leaps out like the killer in the movie he watched with Steph. Its blade digs into him.
"If she slit her wrists? Jumped off a building?"
"He'd still deserve it," Tim stutters, but part of him has just found those rabbits that will never wake.
"This isn't about punishment. It's about discipline. We must be disciplined, or all we give to Gotham is more madness."
In his mire, Tim wonders if that's all he has to offer.
"I'll give you a target," the Batman says, after an eternity of leaving Tim to his own inner night. "I'll expect you to be circumspect in dealing with him."
"I don't know how."
"Ask."
***
A Russian, male, mid-30s. Tim follows and writes down, watches and writes down, listens and writes down. Every week, fresh girls in a shipping container on the docks. They walk the streets and become something not fresh, and always the Russian pads his wallet. He's not innocent, Tim can cut him with impunity, but he's disciplined. He waits and the Batman is in his room when he has to talk, even though he hasn't breathed a word.
"I want to cut him," Tim says.
"I do too, sometimes," the Batman says, and Tim feels a fierce love for him. "But that's the way of the enemy."
"Can I shoot him?"
"No."
"Burn him."
"What's sane, Tim? What's disciplined?"
"I can catch him," Tim says suddenly. The thought has an allure all its own. "Shine a light of him. Let everyone see what he's writing…" He's muttering to himself at the end, but the Batman seems to understand.
"I'll know when it's done."
***
He has to cut some, it's true, men who are willing to take the Russian's money and so are just as guilty, but the Batman understands. He cleans the wounds Tim claimed in his fight, little things he is grandly proud of, and speaks only once to counter Tim's mad babble of accomplishment.
"Good soldier."
***
At age seventeen, Tim wears a costume. It is armor, and Batman has given it to him piece by piece, like a series of gifts. A picture of Tim in flight makes the papers call him Robin. Tim doesn't care what he's called. It's what he does that's important. He's the knife in the dark, the shield in the off-hand, and together he and Batman are something more than a team. They're something grand and terrifying, and the thought of it, the conceptualization, grips Tim's throat and brings tears to his eyes. He wonders if Batman ever realizes just what it is he's created. No, not created. Awoke.
Together, they've awoken something beautiful.
***
At age eighteen, Tim sees the Joker for the first time. She doesn't seem to have aged a day from the archive files Batman has made him memorize—green covers the white in her hair, greasepaint fills her wrinkles. Batman won't let him fight her. Still thinks of him as a little kid. It's a shame. Tim feels such a connection to her. He thinks maybe he's the one destined to finally kill her.
It'd almost be worth how mad Batman would be.
***
"I don't think they're my real parents," Tim admits once, with Batman, because he can talk to Batman. With Steph (who is talking of marrying him, which would be such good cover, such a perfect disguise), he chats and jokes and flirts, but with Batman, he can speak.
"Everyone feels that," Batman says. It's a weak attempt at psychology, but Tim appreciates the effort.
"She's just so… and he's so… I don't think they could've made me."
"You haven't seen every side of them." Like he's reminding Tim of something.
Tim shrugs. "Then again, maybe that's the joke of it."
"Joke?" Batman asks.
"God's." Tim smiles at him. A thought has just crossed his mind, and he can actually share it instead of bottling it up. "He tells jokes all the time. Most people just aren't in the mood for a comedy."
***
He gets home early that night. No headway on the Riddler case. Might as well get some shuteye.
"Hi Julie," he says, because she's not his mom. His parents are liberal enough to take the familiarity.
"Hey." She thinks he works at Habitat For Humanity all hours of the day. The Batman set it up. "Any homework?"
"Not since lunch period." Tim hangs up his backpack and spots his father in the foyer, relaxing between infinite business.
"How was work?" the old man asks.
"Just as fun as ever, Bruce."
Fandom: Batman Nolanverse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,425
Characters/Pairings: Tim, Batman
Author’s notes: Written for Tyleet as part of that remix thing. The original is here. This story was betaed by Kernezelda and Gran Sigma, who I thank profoundly. It also owes something of a debt to D. Benway's In The Blood, which I had best acknowledge here instead of in the comments.
Summary: The son of Batman and the Joker has been psychologically tested since childhood. It doesn't work.
Tim's first memory was of a psych exam. He didn't think it was odd—he got exams so often he thought he came out of the womb to meet a Rorschach test. His father told him their family had a history of mental illness, so it was important to find any deviance early on. After each test—they were only half an hour, give or take, like a booster shot against something Tim was assured was in the shadows—his father would take him out for lunch wherever Tim wanted, his dark suit clashing with the garish colors of McDonald's, where Tim only ate to get the Happy Meal. They ate together and talked and when he was older, Tim started getting the feeling he was still being tested.
***
At age ten, Tim's father turned the never-used sleeping porch into a rabbit hutch for his birthday. Tim had been going through a rabbit phase, because his favorite cartoon was dedicated to rabbits that flew through space and blew up robots, and so the prospect of having his own thrilled him. He promised that the butler would never have to help out in their care, and even though his mother frowned at his father for going so far in indulging him, Dad just shrugged and went to take a conference call.
Seven months later, a snake got into the hutch. Tim came home from school to find the rabbits asleep and not waking up. One had been eaten. Tim cried like a much younger boy and no matter how his mother soothed him, he couldn't stop the wracking sobs from spinning his tiny body on the floor. She grew fearful, as if it were her responsibility to deal with precisely this and now it was here and she could do nothing. Finally, she snapped at him, and that raised voice triggered a sort of muscle memory in Tim. He seized up, came to, and mumbled an apology. His mother ushered him away and said they could go for a drive and Tim knew it was so the butler would have time to clean away the mess.
Tim didn't have the words yet to say he needed to do it, he needed to watch the bunnies lie sleeping in the ground and then disappear forever under dirt. Instincts long lurking in his bones and under his fingernails told him Mom would grow fearful again if he tried to explain. Each night that week, he snuck out of bed and returned to the hutch. The fence had been fixed and doubled, but Tim knew it was only a manner of time. And soon enough, he caught the snake outside the fence. He hopped the fence easily, coming down on the other side of him.
It took him in with its killer's eyes and hissed, its rattle joining the cacophony.
Tim cut its head off with the sharp end of the shovel he had taken from the shed.
After he told the doctor about it, there were no more psych exams.
***
At age twelve, Tim discovers that not everyone can see people like he can. His father can't. People are a mystery to his father, a vast unknowable plain, and he regards them with a religious faith and fear, God and the Devil in one. To his father, there are the good and the bad, the black and the white, and he has a vague faith in the good but for the bad he reserves fearhateangerdisgust. He feels so much more for the bad than he does for Mother.
For Tim, people open themselves up and write themselves out on their skin. Every gesture, every pronunciation of every word, it spews forth detail and sometimes he thinks he gets it from his mother, this insight, and he doesn't know how she can know so much. How can she know how much people hate and annoy and lust and still let them purvey their candy-coated venom to her? Because they don't take her seriously. They see her as someone who got lucky, had a playboy knock her up, and then he settled for settling down with her.
He loves her, of course. Because she loves him. And fears him.
***
At age thirteen, Tim admits to himself that his father doesn't love his mother. She loves him, and he appreciates her, but it's not the simple love Tim sees in the old couples who sit in the park together and bask in each other's silence (sometimes he can breathe, being in all that green with just that for company, and sometimes it's so irritating because why can't everyone be like that, why can't he be like that?). Tim doesn't think his father cheats, though, which is why so many of the parents at Brentwood Academy don't love each other anymore (or is at least proof of the fact). He doesn't think his father was ever the womanizer they say he was. Because he can read his father, a little, and his father doesn't write that out when a beautiful woman goes by, or a beautiful man for that matter. His father doesn't seem to enjoy anything. He is utterly still.
Tim appreciates that peacefulness too.
***
At age fourteen, a girl in the special ed class at Tim's school is alone with four boys and they force a bottle into her vagina. There is one boy held accountable, African-American, nouveau riche family, and the others would sue the school for more than the girl's house is worth if their boys got so much as a detention. Tim catches a glimpse of the girl once, as she gets her things out of the classroom before he never sees her again. For the next month, while others are updating their Facebooks and experimenting with the product of a new marijuana dealer, Tim writes down the boys' movements in a notebook which he hides very carefully when he's not carrying it.
The fervor dies down, new atrocities replace it, and one night Tim goes into the house of one of the boys, into the bedroom, and slits his Achilles tendon while he sleeps.
Then he watches from a tree as the ambulance comes.
It's funny, watching them all scramble about like headless chickens to save the life of such a scumbag. Hilarious, really.
He does it twice more before the Batman comes from nowhere, jerks him off his feet and pushes him against a wall and holds him like he weighs even less than he does.
"I'm not afraid of you," he informs the Batman. "Man in a mask." The thought trails off.
The Batman says nothing. Tim falls asleep like he's waking up (from a dream or a nightmare) and the next morning, the psych exams start again. Tim spends two hours having his head shrunk (Tim likes the slang of that, it feels so real). That night, he breaks into the doctor's office and calls up his file. It has words like 'sociopathy' in it, but that isn't the diagnosis. His home environment is too good. Tim laughs and when the Batman comes, he thinks for a wild (crazy) moment that the laughter called him, like a homing beacon.
"You could've stopped me from getting out," Tim says. "Bars on the windows. Alarm system. Straitjacket. Collar. Leash." The man in the mask makes words tumble out of him, words that have to be queued up for others. It's an interesting sensation. Like a boil being lanced.
"That would just make you cleverer," the Batman replies. "You're clever enough."
"For what?" Tim insists, although that isn't what the Batman meant and he knows it.
"Your father loves you a great deal," the Batman says easily. "He tried to provide a good home for you. People with good homes don't…" A lot of things, apparently, because he doesn't finish the sentence.
"I gave you time. You could've handled it."
"There was no evidence. I serve the law, I don't supercede it."
"Then what good are you?" It comes out harsher than Tim intended. Batman's his hero, after all. Batman's every boy's hero.
"What good's a boy bleeding out into his bedsheets?"
"Because I don't have to think of the look his victim gave me. I can think of his screams. That I can live with."
"That's why you did it. The girl."
Tim smiles. He knows he's pleased the Batman, even though he'll never show it. He just knows. "Why else?"
The Batman looks down. "No more. Promise me."
"I promise, sir." He means it, because he doesn't want to be that boy in the file. He wants to be normal. Batman knows about normal. That's why all of Gotham looks up to him.
***
At age sixteen, Tim has a girlfriend. He doesn't know if he loves her. He looks in the mirror and thinks of her and smiles, but the words that come out are in another language, one he thinks maybe isn't meant for him. Still, she makes him laugh.
He walks with her and the man with the knife steps out of the alley and before he can even ask for their money, Tim breaks him. It's so simple, he can't resist.
Steph doesn't talk to him for three weeks. After they reunite, they make love after eating dinner at a Wendy's and watching a horror movie. While she sleeps, Tim looks in the mirror. There's something in his eyes he thinks he gets from his father.
The Batman is waiting for him when he gets home. They don't talk about the mugger. Tim thinks that's because the Batman's approval is silent.
"What would you have done," the Batman starts, "if the boy you cut was innocent?"
"He wasn't," Tim says.
"You can't make a mistake?"
"He bragged about it. He laughed about it."
"What would you have done if his mother saw what you'd done and hung herself?"
Tim has no answer. The thought is blindingly obvious, but it must've hid from him. Now it leaps out like the killer in the movie he watched with Steph. Its blade digs into him.
"If she slit her wrists? Jumped off a building?"
"He'd still deserve it," Tim stutters, but part of him has just found those rabbits that will never wake.
"This isn't about punishment. It's about discipline. We must be disciplined, or all we give to Gotham is more madness."
In his mire, Tim wonders if that's all he has to offer.
"I'll give you a target," the Batman says, after an eternity of leaving Tim to his own inner night. "I'll expect you to be circumspect in dealing with him."
"I don't know how."
"Ask."
***
A Russian, male, mid-30s. Tim follows and writes down, watches and writes down, listens and writes down. Every week, fresh girls in a shipping container on the docks. They walk the streets and become something not fresh, and always the Russian pads his wallet. He's not innocent, Tim can cut him with impunity, but he's disciplined. He waits and the Batman is in his room when he has to talk, even though he hasn't breathed a word.
"I want to cut him," Tim says.
"I do too, sometimes," the Batman says, and Tim feels a fierce love for him. "But that's the way of the enemy."
"Can I shoot him?"
"No."
"Burn him."
"What's sane, Tim? What's disciplined?"
"I can catch him," Tim says suddenly. The thought has an allure all its own. "Shine a light of him. Let everyone see what he's writing…" He's muttering to himself at the end, but the Batman seems to understand.
"I'll know when it's done."
***
He has to cut some, it's true, men who are willing to take the Russian's money and so are just as guilty, but the Batman understands. He cleans the wounds Tim claimed in his fight, little things he is grandly proud of, and speaks only once to counter Tim's mad babble of accomplishment.
"Good soldier."
***
At age seventeen, Tim wears a costume. It is armor, and Batman has given it to him piece by piece, like a series of gifts. A picture of Tim in flight makes the papers call him Robin. Tim doesn't care what he's called. It's what he does that's important. He's the knife in the dark, the shield in the off-hand, and together he and Batman are something more than a team. They're something grand and terrifying, and the thought of it, the conceptualization, grips Tim's throat and brings tears to his eyes. He wonders if Batman ever realizes just what it is he's created. No, not created. Awoke.
Together, they've awoken something beautiful.
***
At age eighteen, Tim sees the Joker for the first time. She doesn't seem to have aged a day from the archive files Batman has made him memorize—green covers the white in her hair, greasepaint fills her wrinkles. Batman won't let him fight her. Still thinks of him as a little kid. It's a shame. Tim feels such a connection to her. He thinks maybe he's the one destined to finally kill her.
It'd almost be worth how mad Batman would be.
***
"I don't think they're my real parents," Tim admits once, with Batman, because he can talk to Batman. With Steph (who is talking of marrying him, which would be such good cover, such a perfect disguise), he chats and jokes and flirts, but with Batman, he can speak.
"Everyone feels that," Batman says. It's a weak attempt at psychology, but Tim appreciates the effort.
"She's just so… and he's so… I don't think they could've made me."
"You haven't seen every side of them." Like he's reminding Tim of something.
Tim shrugs. "Then again, maybe that's the joke of it."
"Joke?" Batman asks.
"God's." Tim smiles at him. A thought has just crossed his mind, and he can actually share it instead of bottling it up. "He tells jokes all the time. Most people just aren't in the mood for a comedy."
***
He gets home early that night. No headway on the Riddler case. Might as well get some shuteye.
"Hi Julie," he says, because she's not his mom. His parents are liberal enough to take the familiarity.
"Hey." She thinks he works at Habitat For Humanity all hours of the day. The Batman set it up. "Any homework?"
"Not since lunch period." Tim hangs up his backpack and spots his father in the foyer, relaxing between infinite business.
"How was work?" the old man asks.
"Just as fun as ever, Bruce."
