Chapter Text
When Tim was eighteen years old, he decided to retire.
When he retired he had been the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, one of the largest companies in the world, for two years. He had been the little known Gotham vigilante Red Robin for almost the same amount of time. Before he was Red Robin, he was Robin for three years. He was the adopted son of Bruce Wayne for a little more than half a year, before he was legally emancipated at the age of sixteen.
In his tenure as CEO of Wayne Enterprises, Tim was responsible for some of the most successful quarters the company had ever seen. As Robin, he led a team of super powered teenagers and helped to mentor and grow them into successful adult superheroes. As Red Robin, he rescued Batman from certain death without any support while also thwarting two separate organizations of assassins. As the son of Bruce Wayne, he never really managed to fit in, but they were still probably the happiest months of his adolescence.
Tim bought a farm on the east coast only a day’s drive from Gotham. It was small and run down, but he saw its potential in the smattering of pictures included in its online listing. It was a few acres of idyllic hillside with a few buildings falling down on it that held little intrinsic value, but it was exactly what he had been looking for. There was an overgrown orchard near a babbling creek, a small pond that was green with algae and a dark dirty barn. At the end of a rutted dirt drive sat an old stone foundation farmhouse that was probably well over a hundred years old. The listing said that the house had good bones and that was probably because they couldn’t boast that it had heating or even indoor plumbing.
That didn’t bother Tim. His mentality was that the more work there was to do, the better. He was intent on buying the farm to retire on. That being the case, he knew that if he couldn’t keep his hands and mind busy once he was there that he would never be able to keep his mind off of Gotham and everything he was leaving behind. The listing seemed to promise all the work he would need and more.
Tim bought the property sight unseen under an assumed name. He spoke to the real estate agent only once before the sale while using a voice modulator and claiming to be almost three times his actual age. The home inspector sent him a report detailing every glaring issue with property, but they were all things Tim already had guessed at from the carefully worded real estate listing. He hired a lawyer to complete the sale, still under an assumed name, and then transferred the deed from that assumed name to another assumed name.
On a cold November day, Timothy Drake left Gotham. On the same day John Timothy Drako showed up in rural Pennsylvania largely unprepared for the farm that his wealthy uncle purchased for him on a whim.
The first night that Tim spent on the farm was easily the worst of all the nights that would follow. This was not because of the state of the house, though the house was definitely in great disrepair. It was very cold, the temperature having already reached below freezing that night, and the house was incredibly drafty. The chimney needed to be repaired before Tim could use the pot bellied stove sitting cold and empty on the first floor, so he had to survive with only his cold weather sleeping bag and a small camping stove burning throughout the night. Tim reminded himself through that first night that he had spent nights in much worse shape.
If he was honest with himself he knew that it wasn’t the conditions that bothered him, it was the anxiety and the guilt and the merry go round of accusations (both aimed at himself and at others) that kept him up.
He imagined what his friends and family would say and think of him once they realized he was gone. He imagined what they would tell other people. He wondered if they would look for him or if they would honor his wishes and leave him alone. Around and around his mind went, unable to settle with anxiety scratching at his skin like an itchy too small sweater stretched against his chest.
He very nearly gave the whole thing up and went back to Gotham that first night, but he didn’t. He held onto his determination. He had promised himself at least a month. He would try to stay away for at least a month even if he didn’t manage to stay on the farm. He needed to try.
So, he did. Tim made it through the first night.
“Bruce, can I talk to you?” Tim asked.
It was the end of a slow night and Bruce was sitting at the huge array of computer monitors that everyone affectionately called the ’Bat Computer’. Everyone else had washed up and gone to bed. It was only Tim and Bruce left in the cave, both of them still in costume, except that Bruce had pushed back the cowl and Tim had removed his mask.
This conversation was important to Tim, even though he dreaded having it. The purchase of the farm had been completed the day before. Tim intended to wait a few days and then transfer the deed to his Drako alias. Once that was completed, there would be no reason for him to stay. Everything would be done, sorted, and he would be ready to go.
But, Tim knew that if he didn’t try to talk to Bruce one last time, he would never manage to stay away. If Tim didn’t leave knowing for sure that there was nothing left for him in Gotham, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away. It was unfair to Bruce, Tim knew that. Bruce wouldn’t realize and may never realize what conversation he was about to have. But, Tim needed this. He was trying to let himself need things. It was a struggle, something he had to mentally walk himself through constantly, but he was getting better at it.
Bruce grunted at Tim. He didn’t turn away from the computer to look at Tim and didn’t ask him what he wanted to talk about. Tim didn’t particularly blame him. Tim was giving him no reason to take notice of him. He was about full to the top with anxiety over the conversation he was about to have and he was masking hard. He had been careful to make his voice perfectly casual and his body language almost exaggerated in how loose and relaxed it was.
A part of Tim wanted to have this conversation with the back of Bruce’s head and be done with it. He knew that would be cowardly of him, but he didn’t want to watch Bruce’s facial expressions as he said what he needed to say. But, Tim knew that if this were really a casual conversation, then he would walk up to the computer desk and lean against it to get Bruce’s attention. He desperately wanted Bruce to think this was a casual conversation. If Bruce got even a whiff of what was really happening behind Tim’s eyes, he would be likely to do something drastic. Tim couldn’t allow him to do that until he was long gone.
So, Tim casually walked up to the computer desk and leaned his hip against the edge, crossing his arms and giving Bruce a small smile that leaked easy affection. He knew this specific expression put people, including Bruce and the rest of the family, at ease. He knew that he put up an act around them constantly and he knew that nobody noticed with the possible exception of Cass and she would never say anything. He knew that this kind of behavior was part of what caused was his terrible relationship with all of the bats, but that didn’t stop him from doing it.
Bruce didn’t look at him, but his shoulders and neck went stiff in a way that Tim knew meant that he was paying attention. This was the moment. He had to spit out what he needed to say or he would never say it.
“I need to take a vacation for a few weeks,” Tim said as easily as he might order a pizza or comment on a finance report. His heart was racing frantically in his chest, but he forced his breathing to stay steady and his limbs to hang loose and for his mouth to remain curved in an easy smile.
At his words, Bruce stopped typing. He stared at the screen without moving for a long moment, one heartbeat then two, before spinning his chair to give Tim his full regard. Tim held himself loose, his mind screaming in panic while his body language communicated no tension and no concern. He gave Bruce nothing while he kept the turmoil inside hidden below a painfully perfect veneer of nonchalance.
“A project?” Bruce asked with a slight tilt of his head.
Tim translated the question in his head. He was fluent in Bruce-speak, better than most of the native speakers in the family with the exception of maybe Alfred. Bruce thought that when Tim said ‘vacation’ he really meant that he was pursuing a Red Robin case and needed to travel outside of Gotham to close it.
“No, a real vacation,” Tim said, widening his smile in an approximation of humor. Tim adjusted his body and his face to communicate to Bruce that he thought it was funny that he didn’t understand what he was saying. That was how Dick would act. He would find Bruce’s social inequities funny until he suddenly didn’t.
Bruce’s thick brows came down heavy over his pale blue eyes. “Tim Wayne is taking a vacation, you mean,” he said.
Tim translated again. Bruce was asking if Tim Wayne, the socialite and CEO, needed to take a vacation to satisfy some kind of public commitment.
“No,” Tim replied, freezing for a moment as he struggled against himself.
‘Just say it!’ a part of him screamed.
Tim let his facade drop just slightly, let the tension bleed into his muscles, let the corners of his mouth turn down into a small unhappy frown, let the warmth drain out of his eyes. He couldn’t let it all come out, he felt he would sooner die than show anyone everything that was going on with him. But, he had to show that he was serious, he had let some part of the truth leak out.
“No, I mean, I need a vacation. Just for a few weeks,” Tim said quietly and seriously.
If his voice was any quieter, he doubted that even Bruce, sitting barely a foot away from him, would have heard him. He could feel his fingers starting to tremble with some emotion that he was having trouble naming. Tim was extremely glad that his hands were tucked under his arms where Bruce couldn’t see them.
Bruce’s face had transformed into a thunderous expression at Tim’s clarification, his mouth cut into rigid lines, his brows turned down, his eyes squinting and running over Tim’s body. The searching look was Bruce looking for hidden injuries. He wouldn’t find any, he hadn’t since Tim had become Red Robin. Tim was too good at masking his pain and besides the only injuries he had at the moment were old.
“Are you injured?” Bruce rumbled, tightly leashed anger running just underneath a deceptively calm surface.
Tim was afraid of that anger, even though it had never splashed out onto him. He’d seen what it could do when it did get out of control. He remembered clearly the common pickpockets and low level drug dealers that Bruce had beaten into permanent disability and disfigurement right after Jason had died. He remembered huge blow out fights between Bruce and Dick that had ended with Dick stomping away with a swollen lip or a blackened eye. Tim was under no illusions about Bruce’s temper. He kept it tightly leashed, because when it got out of control he could be deadly. Even so, Tim was unaccountably ashamed of how much his fear welled up inside him whenever he saw Bruce’s temper thrashing just below the surface.
Tim translated Bruce’s question again. Bruce was asking if he needed the time off of patrol to recover from an injury that he hadn’t disclosed. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’d asked Bruce to cover for him for an injury that he didn’t want the others to know about. It was an odd sort of dynamic. Bruce could be so protective of all of them in his own way, but only with Tim he seemed to understand the need to never admit to weakness or show any injury even to those people he was supposed to trust. He knew it was because he privately considered Tim the most like himself.
“No new injuries,” Tim said quietly. He knew that Bruce would read between the lines. They all had old injuries that hurt, that always hurt and would never heal right. Commenting on them was taboo, so nobody did it. Instead they all acted as if they were invincible and hoped that if they believed in it hard enough it would become true.
“Then why?” Bruce bit out. The anger was coming closer to the surface. Tim knew it would before he had ever committed to having this conversation, but it still got his back up like nothing else. He wanted to snap at Bruce, he wanted to ask him why he couldn’t ask for this, why he couldn’t just take a break, but he knew why.
Bruce never took a break, so why should any of them? Maybe some of them could have allowances here or there, but not Tim. He would never give Tim an allowance he wouldn’t give himself.
Tim had to give Bruce something for this conversation to do what it needed to do for him. Tim realized that he had to let on about what was really going on, at least a little bit. He had to give Bruce a chance to do the right thing, so that when he did the wrong thing Tim could feel justified for leaving. One last chance, that was all it was. But, it had to be real. Bruce had to have a real chance, or Tim would still hope.
He couldn’t have hope if he was really going to leave.
“I’m messing up,” Tim choked out. The words literally tasted like vomit on his tongue. Tim viscerally hated admitting to being wrong about anything, but he pushed it out.
Bruce froze at the words. Tim liked to think that Bruce knew him well enough to understand how big of an admittance that was. “Just little things, but if I don’t do something,” Tim cut himself off. That was enough honestly, “I have to do something. I think a break would do me good,” he finished quietly, not able to meet Bruce’s eyes. He wasn’t sure if he could handle looking at whatever expression he would see on the face of his mentor of so many years.
There was a long silence. Tim wanted to fidget, wanted to dig his fingernails under his cuticles, he wanted to crack his knuckles and scratch at his scalp, but he did none of those things. He forced his breathing to stay even and stared at a scuff mark on the floor near the edge of his boot. He counted in Mandarin, a type of relaxation technique that had served him well in the past.
He was at thirty when Bruce finally broke the silence to ask, “What kind of mess ups?” His voice was gruff, but the anger was gone.
In the list of probable replies to Tim’s confession, this one was probably the worst one Bruce could have picked. Rather than being concerned about what caused the mistakes or what could have happened to make Tim ask something so out of character for him, Bruce wanted to know what he did wrong . It was so typical and hit so close to Tim’s own guilt complex that the anger that had so far been sleeping beneath his ever present anxiety rose to the top immediately.
Did Bruce just want to know so that he could lecture Tim about grapple hook safety? The thought made Tim incandescently angry. Did he think that Tim was just stupid and forgot how to be a vigilante? That Bruce could just sit him down and walk him through how to prioritize his caseload and everything would just be fine and dandy? How useless did he really think Tim was?
Before he could say or do something he would later regret, Tim squashed that wrathful feeling viciously. He took his outrage and he folded it up and folded it and folded it and shoved it in a cramped little box and shoved the box down deep. He could take out the anger and the outrage and look at it and experience it later, but he couldn’t do it then. If he got angry right then, then the conversation would stop, Bruce would shut down, and that little seed of hope would remain in Tim’s heart. Tim had to let the conversation play all the way out, even if he already knew how it would end.
“Just little stuff,” Tim said quietly, a warning in his voice like an echo of that anger that wasn’t totally tucked away. Tim ran a hand over his face. He couldn’t let himself be angry and he couldn’t sound defensive. Bruce would jump at the chance to fight instead of talking about anything as nebulous or uncomfortable as feelings. “I’m missing things: warnings, clues, grapples,” Tim listed off, his voice fading out at the end. He could taste Gotham bay water in his mouth as he remembered missing his grapple and landing in the freezing cold water and he hated it.
“I can ask one of the others to take your patrol with you,” Bruce said while scrunching his face up in a way that Tim interpreted to mean that Bruce knew this was a reasonable offer, but also knew that it wouldn’t work. The others all had their own territories and their own cases. Pairing up for a few nights would probably be fine, but nobody had the bandwidth for a more permanent assignment except for Robin and Tim was fairly sure that Damian would probably rather lose a limb than patrol with him on a regular basis.
Not to mention, “It’s not just Red Robin. People at WE are starting to notice,” Tim adds wryly. He thinks of Lucius’ pitying face every time he had to give Tim back a report that wasn’t written correctly, because Tim had thrown it together at three in morning while trying to ice a sprained ankle. He thought of Tam when she had to jump in to spare Tim from saying something stupid at an investor’s meeting, because he didn’t have time to read her notes before he got there.
The anger floods Bruce’s posture again, his fists clenching in their gauntlets hard enough to make the kevlar squeak. Tim watches them carefully, but keeps any trace of stress from his expression. He could feel himself freezing up and he let it happen. Better to freeze than to make a move that could exacerbate the problem.
“What are they noticing?” Bruce asked, a threat somewhere in his tone. Who the threat was for, Tim didn’t know, but he hoped it wasn’t for him.
“Mistakes, Bruce,” Tim whispered harshly, dragging his eyes away from Bruce’s clenched fists, even though it felt like turning his back on a dangerous enemy. Anxious tingles ran up and down his arms and back at the thought, but he ignored it. “I’m messing up small stuff. Lucius and Tam try to cover for me, but they can’t hide everything. People are gossiping about why Tim Drake is suddenly slipping.”
“You propose that both Red Robin and Tim Drake disappear at the same time,” Bruce said incredulously. “It would be far too suspicious,” he dismissed the thought quickly and carelessly, his hands relaxing, his body starting to angle back toward the computer already. For Bruce, it seemed, the conversation was already over.
The outrage, when it comes this time, is too fast for Tim to tuck away. “Seriously, Bruce? How many times has Batman had to go on an intergalactic mission at the same time that Bruce Wayne went on a sudden trip to the Andes?”
“The Tim Wayne persona isn’t sufficiently disarming. Tim Wayne and Red Robin are too similar. People will notice,” Bruce said flatly. His body was loose, his face blank, his tone unreadable. This was Bruce at his most relaxed, completely sure in his answer. It ignited a fire in Tim.
“Since when?” he shouted, quickly losing his temper. He could feel his cheeks flushing, his shoulders coming up, his breath coming quickly, but he didn’t try to stop it. “You’ve never said anything to me about my public persona.”
“There was no point. It would be too suspicious for your personality to change suddenly now,” Bruce said easily. He was used to his children being upset and he was used to telling Tim no and him obeying despite having voiced concerns. “I will see if I can have some of the others help with your patrol route. Perhaps we can have Leslie do an exam,” Bruce said, then turned back to the computer. He began typing rapidly, his eyes not leaving the computer screen in front of him.
Tim stood not two feet from the man who he once thought of as his father and felt a wave of cold disappointment wash over him. The conversation was over. It went almost exactly the way that Tim expected it would. Tim tried to tell Bruce that he was struggling and Bruce shrugged it off. He didn’t care.
That thought struck Tim like an arrow through the chest. His chest physically ached. He had experienced it before, but the feeling just then was confirmation.
Tim’s hope was dead. There was no point in trying anymore. It was time to leave.
There was a lot of work to do on the farm. Winter was the best time to do it, too. In the warmer months, Tim would be busy with planting, tending and harvesting crops or maybe even tending to animals if he got the barn or chicken coop fixed up. During the winter, there was none of that. The world was cold and quiet with no work to do but maintenance.
He worked on the house first, just trying to get the basics up and running. There was a well just outside the back door. He installed a pump and ran a line through the foundation of the house and up into the kitchen. Then, he converted the small bedroom right above the kitchen into a bathroom and ran water and sewer lines up there. Some of it he had to contract skilled workers for, but a lot of it he could figure out himself. If he could understand trans dimensional travel and advanced computer programming, he could teach himself how to drill and caulk.
He replaced the drafty old windows with new double paned glass and installed insulation and drywall on the outside facing walls. He sanded and waxed the old floorboards. He had someone come out to replace the chimney liner and tested the pot bellied stove for cracks. Once that was fixed, he had delicious wood heat in the front room. He put a cheap foam mattress on the floor and slept in front of the stove during the cold winter nights.
When the weather was good, he worked outside.
The barn was a pleasant surprise. The bottom level was still a barn, drafty and dirty with stalls lining the back wall. But, a set of metal spiral steps led up into a fairly new loft apartment. When Tim talked to the neighbors, they said that the previous owners had fixed the barn up quickly and rented it out to try and raise money to fix the rest of the farm, but ended up moving out before actually fixing anything. Tim briefly considered moving into the barn, but decided against it. He didn’t want to get comfortable there and then never fix up the farmhouse like the previous owners.
The chicken coop was in much rougher shape. Tim considered tearing the whole thing down and building a brand new one, but it felt disingenuous. Tim had bought this run down farm because he wanted to work hard and he wanted to stay busy. Gutting and retooling the chicken coop would take time and hard work, which was kind of the point, so that was what he did. He pulled out all the old rotten wood, he put on a new shingled roof, he built new nesting boxes and perches and built a brand new run where the chickens could peck through the grass for bugs.
The orchard was tough too. The trees were too big and old and most of the advice online suggested to completely remove them and start over. Once they got too big, the fruit would be hard to reach and supposedly not taste as good as the tree used up too much of the nutrients to sustain itself instead of feeding it into the fruit. But, Tim didn’t want to cut down the trees. They were old and knobbly, but they were alive and had been for decades probably. They smelled sweet, even in the winter, and grew in orderly lines on the hillside. It was hard to identify them without their leaves, but Tim thought he probably had two kinds of apples, a line of pear trees and a line of plum trees. He wanted to taste their fruit for himself and decide if they were good or not. After much consideration, Tim trimmed the trees a little but otherwise left them alone.
The garden didn’t need much attention either. It was a huge square plot of dirt overgrown with weeds. It was the work of a couple days when the weather had been above freezing for a while to dig it all up with a rototiller. He took a sample of the soil to the local mill and bought the amendments they recommended and worked them into the soil. That was it. There wouldn’t be much to do until spring came and it was time to plant.
All of that to say that Tim kept incredibly busy. His elderly neighbors, while suspicious by his strange story of an eccentric uncle buying him a farm, found him to be hard working and likable. They were mostly older couples who inherited their farms from their parents. They liked to stop by to visit and loved to listen to Tim talk about the farm and what he was doing with the house and the land and give their advice and anecdotes about their own small farms.
At night, when Tim would lay down and fall asleep on his cheap mattress in front of the pot bellied stove, his body would sing with soreness. But, it was so different from the soreness he had felt before while laying in Wayne Manor or his penthouse apartment. His muscles were sore from hard work, but they were no longer torn or sprained. If he got injuries, he got them from pulling out rotten wood or tripping over roots in the orchard instead of from being clipped by bullets or knives. He found that his appetite was better, that his hands shook less, that breathing somehow felt easier. He realized that he couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good, so comfortable in his flesh and blood body.
But, night was also when the worry would find him.
Winter nights were long and cold. The sun went down by 5 pm in the deepest part of winter, chasing Tim inside. After the first month or so there was no work inside he could do and so there was little for him to occupy himself with except worry. He had a pile of books sitting beside his mattress that he tried to focus on. He had a long reading list, an optimistic list of interesting novels and non-fiction that he had accrued for years, waiting for a moment when he could relax enough to sit down and read a book. It had probably been two years since the last time he finished one. There just was never time and when there was Tim was too wound up to sit still long enough to read. Here on the farm that was another thing that was different. That winter by the light of the wood burning stove and in the quiet of the countryside Tim probably read twenty or more books. But, it still wasn’t enough to keep the worry from gnawing at his bones.
Tim had never hooked up the internet to the house. It was too much of a temptation, so he never did it. He wouldn’t let himself look at the news, because he wasn’t sure he could handle what it said. He didn’t want to hear about battles his family fought that might have gone better with him there. He didn’t want to hear the news speculate about where Tim Wayne might have gone. He didn’t want to hear Bruce Wayne beg for anyone to provide a tip on where his wayward adopted son might have gone.
Or, worse, he was afraid to read a newspaper and see nothing. He imagined scouring news sites only to find nobody asking about Red Robin or Tim Wayne. To find out that nobody was struggling without him. To find proof that nobody cared or needed him. It was too painful to even consider, so he avoided everything outside his little farm.
He consoled himself in the thought that he had done everything in his power to make his disappearance as easy on everyone as he could. Even if he wanted to get away from his life, Tim still loved the Waynes and the bats and all his old teammates. He didn’t want to hurt any of them anymore than he had to, so he had been careful.
Tim Wayne’s life had been wrapped up exceptionally well. He had left a legally binding document with his lawyer transferring all of his Wayne Enterprises stocks back to Bruce. He had written a carefully worded letter to Lucius explaining that he found the role of CEO too demanding and was going into early retirement. That same letter was sent to three different newspapers in Gotham, as well. He had asked his lawyer to evenly disperse his wealth to all of his friends and family: Tam, Dick, Jason, Steph, and Cass. He told the lawyer that they could also have whatever they wanted of his belongings and to donate the rest.
Wrapping things up with the family had been harder. He didn’t know what to say. He had so much baggage with so many of them. Out of all of them Cassandra was possibly the only person in the bat family who had never betrayed him in some way. In the end, he had left a note in his nest for Bruce to find. It was straight forward. It just said, ‘don’t look for me.’
Tim hoped it would be enough. He hoped that Bruce would see the note and get mad and rage, but ultimately write him off and forget about him. Another smaller and more desperate part of him wanted Bruce to search endlessly for him, to burst into his tiny farm house in the middle of the night and sweep him up in his arms and tell him how much Tim meant to him, to all of them and how he would never take him for granted again.
But, that part of him was small and getting smaller every day that went by without a hint of anyone coming for him.
He didn’t even hide himself particularly well. Drako was just the Esperanto translation of the word Drake. He told his neighbors he went by his middle name, Timothy. He hadn’t made any effort to change his appearance outside of buying heavy duty outdoor clothing. He was just one state over from all of them.
If they really wanted to, they could find him. But, Tim was betting that they wouldn’t. And, that was okay. That was what he wanted. Tim knew with a heavy heart and a cold feeling in his limbs that felt like reality, that they were not good for him. He knew that, sooner or later, them and the life they insisted he live was going to kill him.
Stuck with a decision between dying uselessly and living uselessly, Tim had chosen to live. And, he was trying not to resent himself for choosing to live. It was hard some days, but he was really trying.