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A knock pulls Dick’s attention up from mindlessly scrolling on his phone. It’s a vice he so rarely has time to indulge that he forgets how easy it is to lose hours to it, and he’s startled to find the Monte Carlo sun has already started setting. Golden light washes over the silk sheets and overtly expensive decorations of the hotel room
And to think, he’d almost forgot what it was like travelling on Bruce’s dime.
He’s not surprised to find Tim hovering in the open doorway between rooms of the suite, lit by the sun through Dick’s windows in front, and the overhead lights behind. There’s no one else it would be. Bruce is on day eighteen of his super-mega isolation Thögal Ritual in Nanda Parbat, becoming the bestest bat he can be, or purging Batman’s darkness, or whatever it is he’s trying to do.
Alright, that’s a little flippant. For all Dick doesn’t go in for the pseudo-spiritual rituals, he’s glad to see Bruce making genuine efforts to improve—not just for the Mission, but as a person. This trip, just the three of them; retracing the original creation of Batman, yes, but also reconnecting as an unofficial family…Well, Dick would’ve said it was too good to be true, if it hadn’t already proven true.
“You busy?” Tim asks, leaning against the doorframe.
“Not at all,” Dick replies, and tosses his phone to the gold bedspread.
No hesitation, if Tim wants his time. If Bruce is getting better, after the latest crisis threw his unhealthy paranoia in his face, then Tim is just trying to hang on. Dick thought he had a bad year, between Blockbuster and Tarantula, Haley’s circus being burnt down, his apartment building blown up, not to mention getting on Deathstroke’s bad side and watching Bludhaven decimated.
Tim is giving him a run for his money, though. Losing his dad and Stephanie in the same week, and then his step-mom and Superboy not long after…Dick is kind of amazed by how normal he’s acting. Mourning, definitely, but handling it so much better than Dick remembers dealing with his own parents’ death.
Dick is doing his best to be around and supportive without pressing too hard. It’s a fine balance.
Remembering how much he hated the pity after his parents, he forces himself to keep his expression casual instead of overly sympathetic.
“Is this you prodding me to get up for dinner?” The magic of Hotel Time has seriously ruined Dick’s schedule, but Tim balances it out by being a perpetually hungry teenage boy.
“Uh, no,” says Tim, shifting weight. Uncharacteristic hesitance for him. “Um…”
Dick sits up straighter.
Here it is: the inevitable breakdown, the weeping and hugs, the dramatic movie moment in the midst of grief. He’s ready. He’s got his big brother hat firmly on and arms prepped for hugging.
He’s so ready, in fact, that he’s completely blindsided when Tim says, “I got you something, actually.”
Big brother hat off. Unprep hugging arms. Situation misread.
“And it’s not even my birthday,” Dick quips.
Instead of joking back, Tim’s eyes drop, and he lifts off the doorframe. When his hand, hidden behind the wall, emerges, there is indeed a package in it.
Rectangular, flatter than it is long or wide. Wrapped in simple brown paper and tied in twine. Dick almost goes into full detective mode, like he’s examining a bomb instead of a gift, before he catches himself.
Still, it’s not what he expected. On the occasion Bruce gives gifts, they’re usually Bat-related, unwrapped or in simple boxes or carrying cases. New suits, new sticks, new tech—all the cool toys that say, “I don’t know how to give gifts, but I have money and I want you to be safe in this thing we both care about.”
When Alfred gives gifts—whether from himself, or pretending to be from Bruce while clearly still managed by Alfred—they’re perfectly presented, wrapped from a specific set of paper and ribbons that quietly became a staple of Dick’s childhood. Not the mass-purchased wrapping paper they use for charity drives and holiday parties, or the dignified patterns for friends and acquaintances. The special paper, those half a dozen rolls of various designs Alfred keeps in neat stacks in the closet off the east wing, just for family.
Holiday and birthday gifts Tim has given him in the past follow Alfred’s example more than Bruce’s. Dick distinctly remembers the thought that Alfred had finally managed to covert one of them when he saw Tim’s pristine wrap-jobs the first holiday all four of them spent together. (Dick himself prefers the simplicity of gift bags.)
Of course, halfway across the world, Tim wouldn’t have access to that special wrapping paper, so. Brown paper and twine.
“Seriously,” Dick says, taking the package when Tim steps forward to offer it, “what’s the occasion?”
“No occasion.” Tim hovers a foot from the bed, watching Dick’s fingers make quick work of the twine. “I mean, I could have waited, but I just now got the last of it, and I know…Just. After the, um, the apartment fire, and everything in Bludhaven, you lost a lot of your stuff, so…”
Dick glances up at him, paper ripped away, but Tim trails off.
It looks like a book at first, with a padded cover, until Dick realizes the covers overhang the pages by too much, and the pages themselves are far too thick. When he pulls it into his lap, he hears the plastic of picture sleeves brushing against each other. A scrapbook?
For the family? For their night work? He knew Tim had at least a passing interest in photography when Dick first met him at thirteen, but he didn’t think Tim was so sentimental. Either way, Dick is touched, if surprised.
Brows furrowing, he turns the front cover, patterned in wide stripes of red, deep green, and gold. Inside is not a family photo of them and Bruce and Alfred, or even a daring action shot of Batman and Robin.
It’s a circus playbill with the Flying Graysons.
Dick stares at it. Tim is right—he did lose most of his possessions, including pretty much every single one of his prized momentos, in the explosion. Coupled with the fire at Haley’s Circus, as far as he was aware most of the Flying Graysons memorabilia in existence is gone, just like that. No one prints playbills for a show that stopped over a decade ago. And who saves a scrap of paper from the circus?
His finger traces the curve of the inner circle, framing where he and his parents leap through the air. It’s old, edges a little rough, but it’s still in shockingly good condition. The one he has—the one he had—was more faded, maybe because Dick regularly took it out to look.
“Sorry,” Tim says suddenly, making Dick realize how long he’s been staring. “I’m—Crap. I knew it was too…” He rubs the back of his head, trying to affect a joking tone. “I should’ve just gone for the new escrima sticks.”
Dick is barely listening, though, busy turning to the next page.
Somehow the shock jars greater this time. Maybe because he doesn’t even recognize the picture, or maybe just because it’s real. Candid. It’s a photograph backstage at the circus, in that half-ready state just before a show Dick knows to his bones.
By most standards, it’s not a very good picture. The lighting is too dim, and the colors muted in a way that throws him to the nostalgia of waiting for film to develop, in his early years before everyone had a phone camera on-hand.
The framing isn’t spectacular either, not nearly wide enough to really show the backstage area, but not centered in close either. Haley, in his ring master costume, is half cut-off on the left side. And the posing—His mom’s face is turned, profile half-hidden by her hair. The four-foot-nothing version of Dick is twisting away from his parents, grinning at something unseen, arms awkwardly in the midpoint of a motion and blurred from the speed of it. His dad’s face is partially darkened by a strangely-shaped shadow.
But it’s them. It’s them, just standing there like ordinary people, captured on film head to toe. He can see the curl of his dad’s mustache; his mother’s bare feet, despite the risk of stepping on something on the fair grounds—God, he’d forgotten that she used to—
“How did you get these?” Dick asks around a hoarse throat, head pulling up to look at Tim.
“It—Well. I went to a lot of places, actually.” Tim rocks on his feet in an aborted motion towards Dick. A moment’s hesitation, and then he launches into that quick and relentless rhythm that Dick knows so well. “That one’s from—Okay, so there were articles about you, right? I mean, about you guys specifically, or about the circus in general, or whichever. Some of them are even archived online. And I was going to just find paper copies of some old articles and clip the pictures they used, but then—and I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier—but the people who took those pictures would have grabbed a whole roll of film, right? Like, for every great, article-worthy picture of the clown or the ringmaster, there were probably like ten that they rejected. Or more; I mean, they didn’t put a lot of pictures in.
“So I figured, longshot, but maybe some of that other film was still out there. And most of them weren’t, but that one was from an article this guy wrote right here in Gotham when you were…like six or seven; I don’t remember; I wrote it down there.”
Sure enough, when Dick looks down again, he finally pulls his eyes from the photo long enough to note the neat text beneath it marking the month and year, and Dick, age seven.
There are so many pages behind it. He somehow forgot he was holding an entire scrapbook, but now that he’s remembered, Dick can’t stop himself from flipping through.
“Anyway, I got in contact with the reporter,” Tim continues above him. He’s like that: reserved when he’s not sure what he has to say is important, but an unstoppable object off his own momentum once you get him started. “He’s in Metropolis now, but he still remembered the photographer he worked with—because the paper didn’t write it, which is really terrible crediting, you know—and he put me in contact with him. And that guy is retired, but he’s retired in Gotham, and it turns out he actually does have a lot of his old, unused film still stored.”
There are a few more pictures that look like the same day, and even more besides: 8-by-ten photos, some polaroids, a few more playbills and fliers, and even a delicate pencil sketch. Dick finds himself wanting to linger on every page, yet needing to flip through and see them all.
“So he let me come by and look through it, and all the film he developed for the paper stayed with the paper and is probably long gone, but they actually spent the whole day there for the article, and he took a bunch of rolls, and he never even developed some of them. So he gave me those—I tried to buy them off him, but when I told him why he insisted I should just take them—and then I developed them myself. It’s really impressive that they’re still so clear, because he stored them so nicely, and…Okay, well one of the rolls I ended up with was actually from some other article and was just a bunch of guys in suits, but the others were the circus, so I developed them as best I can for such old film, and then I picked out the ones that were, you know. You or your parents.”
There’s one of Dick surrounded by the clowns, another with his dad jokingly posing like he’s about to knock a stilt out from under Torrance the stilt-walker.
“I also thought about, like, circus enthusiasts, or trapeze enthusiasts, or whatever kind of big fans,” Tim says, when the silence threatens to last more than a second. “There’s a fan club for everything online, right? So I trawled those, and tried to see what people had, but I only managed buy the one playbill from them. There wasn’t as much as I thought.”
A pair of polaroids depict Dick with Zitka the elephant, his dad on her other side with mom sitting on the fence behind him. In the first, Dick is pressed against Zitka’s trunk, his dad, by posture and expression, trying to convince him to go do something. In the second, his mom’s head is thrown back in laughter as Dick scrabbles up Zitka’s side, out of reach.
“I tried to reach out to everyone who was at the circus when you were there, too,” Tim says, when he leans forward to see which page Dick has paused on. “Most of the ones who were still there lost a lot of their stuff in the fire too, and the ones who already retired were harder to track down—but I did get some. As soon as I explained it was for you, they all wanted to give me everything they had of your parents. All the polaroids are from Cirie Rhodes. She was—”
“The contortionist,” Dick says. “I remember.” Remembers her with a rotating series of brightly colored cameras that Dick was ever eager to make faces and pose and do tricks for. A natural-born performer, our boy, his dad would say.
Dick wonders where all those silly pictures that didn’t make it into the book ended up; if Cirie gave them to his parents and they were lost in the uncaring bureaucracy of Gotham Social Services, or if they fell behind in some city or another as the circus travelled, or if she lost them to the shuffle of moving after she retired. Or maybe she gave them to someone else, some other member of the circus who Tim couldn’t get in contact with, and they’re safe under the loving eyes of someone who remembers.
The idea of Tim failing to track someone down is absurd, but Dick still likes that idea the best.
He turns the page, the next-to-last picture, and freezes again. Another polaroid. Mary Grayson, beaming down at—at a tiny smudge of a baby, enveloped in a pale yellow blanket.
“That’s one of hers too,” Tim says softly.
Dick doesn’t think he can speak anymore.
The last picture he knows. He used to have a copy of it, sent by a sympathetic Gotham couple after Bruce took him in. He saw the original for the first time when a resourceful thirteen-year-old tracked him down for the greater good. And now again.
John and Mary Grayson, smiling and posing in a well-practiced way, circus tent behind them, costumes bright in the sun. Dick kneeling between and in front of Jack and Janet, with a tiny Tim Drake beaming on his lap—not at the camera, but up at him.
It’s Tim’s picture. Not a picture he tracked down, digging through the archives of a retired photographer, when I told him why he insisted I should just take them, or reaching out to Haley’s old crew, as soon as I explained it was for you, they all wanted to give me everything they had, but his. The picture he framed or held or carried with him on every move throughout the years.
“Sorry I don’t have a nice, posed one of just the three of you.”
“Tim,” Dick manages, sniffing. He doesn’t realize the dam has broken until a drop lands on the page below him, making him very thankful for the plastic sleeves.
“A family photo, I mean.”
Dick painstakingly wipes the tear off the plastic.
“This is a family photo,” he says, and—gently, carefully—closes the book to put it aside.
“Are you…upset?” Tim asks, too blunt to be shy, but too guarded to be blunt. Dick wonders if he’s ever had people cry in front of him before.
Dick grabs a handful of his shirt, and yanks him down into a hug.
He doesn’t really cry. It dries up almost immediately, a few stragglers squeezing out of Dick’s eyes before they fade off. He sniffs a few times, though, head buried deep in Tim’s shoulder. A blatant inversion of the big brother hugging he was supposed to be doing, but Tim doesn’t complain.
He lets Dick hug him for a solid few minutes, actually, sunlight fading fast now, before he shifts uncomfortably. Dick did sort of yank him down without regard for the awkward kneel he fell into on the bed. He loosens his grip enough to let Tim adjust, surprised when the boy attempts a comforting pat of Dick’s back. (Awkward, yes, but the thought could almost make Dick cry again.)
“I am actually kind of hungry,” Tim admits, after giving Dick another minute.
“Right.” Dick pulls back, shifting more side by side, though one of his arms stays looped around Tim. They carefully don’t quite look at each other, but it’s more privacy than discomfort.
His face is surely already doomed to puffy redness, though, so in for a penny, right?
“You know,” he says, “if you ever need to, or just want to, you can talk to me about anything.”
“I know,” Tim murmurs. “But I’m okay. Honestly. Just being here with you guys…”
Dick leans over, side of his head against the top of Tim’s, and nods. Strong fucking kid. “Okay.”
Tim shifts, eyes darting to the set-aside album. “So, um. You liked it?”
Maybe he shouldn’t, but Dick allows himself one more squeeze, drawing Tim in tighter than before, face pressed in again.
“Thanks,” he whispers. It’s so pathetically small a gratitude, but Tim squeezes him back, so it—It’s enough.