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Somebody approaches him at the bar.
It takes him mere seconds to figure out what type this one is. There’s the slightest pause, a moment of suspended hesitation, before their steps continue until they’re pulling out the bar stool next to him and sliding into the seat. The ones that just see a pretty face drinking alone, that don’t know him, never hesitate. He apparently has a kind face and approachable energy, at least according to Louise, the bartender, who has been witnessing these occurrences and supplying him the necessary alcohol to get through for a few nights now.
Only the ones that know him—knew him—hesitate.
He keeps his eyes trained on his glass. He still catches flashes in his peripheral. A quirk from before, he presumes. Whether he wants to or not, he’s always scanning the room. Taking in the most information possible. He’ll make note of things and only become aware of the information existing in his head later on: the position of the clock hands when somebody enters or exits, the dustiness of somebody’s clothes, the amount of ventilation in any given room.
Brown skin. A headscarf. Weathered hands. A solid, bulky presence, but not clumsy or uncontained. Careful, assured. It is easy enough to guess that they once shared an occupation. He’s never seen this one before, but he’s learnt over the past weeks that his social circle apparently spans half the fucking globe.
Louise greets the newcomer, and they pronounce in crisp, exact syllables, “A seltzer, please.” A rustle. Movement out the corner of his eye. They’ve turned to look at him. “And a refill for the gentleman here.”
Louise raises an eyebrow at him. Dick looks—actually properly looks—at his drink and finds it mostly ice.
Louise’s expression remains dubious even after he shrugs, but she acquiesces and sets the drinks in front of them. She’s already voiced her opinion that he should just tell his visitors to fuck off from the get go instead of letting them draw him in like this. She’s probably right, but personally, he figures that if the awkward histrionics are unavoidable, and they always are, he might as well get a free drink.
With one last sympathetic look his way, Louise wisely makes her escape to the other side of the bar. Nobody’s giving her free drinks in exchange for dealing with awkward histrionics after all.
He picks up his glass and sips at it. Smiles a bit to discover that she’d used the good gin.
In a fit of whimsy, he reaches over and picks up his visitor’s glass as well, and samples the seltzer. Definitely the cheapest type. Louise deserves a raise.
“I see memory loss didn’t improve your manners at all.”
Caught off guard, he actually snorts at that.
“The attitude’s bone-deep,” he replies. He turns to properly take in this latest caller and finds— ah, fuck. He’s beautiful.
Alongside his social circle being headache-inducingly expansive, he’s also discovered in recent weeks that he almost exclusively hangs out with hot people. Under normal circumstances, this is probably a good thing, but as it stands, it’s only adding to his woes. It’s so much worse making people cry or rage or despair at him when they also have faces that look like they should be immortalized in stone.
He wishes, not for the first time, that Dick Grayson hadn’t lived such a charmed life. It would be easier to not want anything to do with it now.
His visitor watches him for a moment. His gaze is solemn but unconcerned, giving nothing away as they stare at each other.
He says, his tone even, “Hello, Dick.”
“Don’t call me that,” he snaps immediately in reply. “I’m not— I don’t— that’s not my name anymore.”
Or, it is. After all, he responds to it well enough, recognizes it in the pulse of his subconscious when he hears it said aloud. The name itself isn’t the problem. What’s in a name? He just can’t bear how everybody else says it. It’s too obvious every single time that they’re calling for a person that he isn’t anymore.
“What shall I call you, then?”
He curls his fingers around his glass. Tracks a bit of condensation as it slides down from the rim. Strangely embarrassed at his outburst.
“...Rob.”
His visitor thinks that over.
“Robin,” he says, eventually, and Robin starts a little in his seat. He shoots his visitor a surprised glance and finds him looking back, face carefully even. Perhaps a little friendly.
“I will never understand the need to shorten a name that is already only two syllables long,” he continues, and Robin snorts in response.
It’s the first time anybody has managed to call him that without it sounding bloodied. It had almost been enough to make him give up, at the start, go by Richard or something instead of trying to navigate whatever stupid fucking minefield he’d walked into, but he’d held on. Rob is a compromise. He can’t remember being Dick Grayson and he sure as hell doesn’t want to be Richard Grayson but Rob, Robbie, Robin— he remembers Robin.
He nods. Watches this strange man for a moment, properly studying him, finally coming to realize that this one is… different, somehow. For one, there’s been a surprising, and refreshing, lack of awkward histrionics so far. There’s something in the way he looks at Robin as well. A familiarity that regardless, for once, doesn’t feel suffocating.
“What about yours?” he asks.
The corner of his visitor’s mouth quirks up in something that’s almost a smile.
“Tiger.”
Robin stares at him.
“Seriously?”
Perfectly so, Tiger—Tiger?—nods.
When it becomes clear that Tiger really isn’t joking, he blinks to himself a few times, then huffs a laugh.
“Great. We’re the start of a fucking Aesop’s fable.”
Amusement lights up Tiger’s eyes. He smiles in response, properly.
Robin keeps staring. He really is beautiful. Features regal, proud, like some kind of faraway prince. He still half-suspects that he’s being suckered in some way or another, but regardless, he finds himself warming to this strange visitor.
He turns back to his glass, feeling not shy but— something, he doesn’t know, at this turn of events. He feels how Tiger’s gaze remains on him throughout.
He takes another sip. Notes that Tiger hasn’t touched his own drink once. Maybe he can guess it’s cheap.
“So,” Robin says, eventually, glancing back at his new un-drinking buddy, “is this a need-to-see-it-to-believe-it kind of visit, or do you have a reason for being here?”
“Both,” Tiger replies. The word is just slightly raw around the edges, and for the first time all night something that isn’t measured distance surfaces in his demeanour.
He knows it’s stupid, knows that it’s just the moodiness that he’s found himself completely incapable of dealing with, but Robin immediately wants to bristle. He feels like a fucking powderkeg sometimes. Ready to blow up at anything.
Swallowing down the feeling, he wraps his fingers around the glass a little tighter and counts his next breath. One to ten. Ten to one. Louise has already told him he’s not allowed to start any more fights. It’s bad for business.
Then Tiger continues, “I also have a job opportunity for you.”
Robin turns to look at him, eyebrows raised. He’s gathered a pretty good idea of the ballpark he used to work in now, and he’s emphatically not interested. He can’t say that taxi driving is particularly fulfilling, but it’s still more appealing than— than—
Bruce Wayne’s voice pops up in his head, a more frequent occurrence than he would like, saying vigilante heroing. Robin likens it more to running headlong into the world’s problems in the hope that’ll fix them. Like a fucking idiot.
Something holds him back from voicing any of this. Tiger takes his lack of protest as a go-ahead.
Uncaring of the fact they're in public, Tiger says, “I am the patron of an… international intelligence agency. Spyral. You once worked for it.” His smile softens with both reminiscence and something that looks like regret. “Alongside me, actually. Before I took over.”
Robin turns those words over in his head, teasing out the subtext from the strange, stilted phrasing, trying to figure out what the fuck Tiger was getting at.
Eventually, he hiss-whispers, “I was a spy?”
Tiger nods.
Robin blinks in bewilderment. Maybe he’s getting used to finding out insane things about his previous life, however, because the shock doesn’t stay for long. What follows it, and what he can’t help but blurt out, is: “How the fuck did I find the time? ”
Tiger snorts.
“It was during a hiatus, of sorts, you were taking from your… usual life.”
Robin eyes him. Even if that hadn’t sounded massively suspicious, there’s a sudden shiftiness to Tiger’s demeanour that points towards something being up.
“Are you telling me I’ve— I’ve already once lost my memories? And I, what, ran off to be a spy with you?”
“It wasn’t memory loss,” Tiger says. “But the circumstances are not dissimilar.”
“What the fuck,” Robin says, with heart. He takes another drink. Unfortunately, even the good gin isn’t enough to calm his racing thoughts.
“Look,” he starts, “not that I don’t, uh, I guess appreciate the offer, but I don’t think I’d be any use to you. I don’t really have access to the relevant skills for that kind of work anymore.”
Things would resurface, every now and then. Robin doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the moment he first sat down in his taxi and realized with perfect clarity that he knew how to hotwire the thing. But, then again, he probably thought he wouldn’t forget a lot of things in his lifetime, and look at him now.
He readies himself for the inevitable disappointment. For it to finally sink in for Tiger. That he isn’t who he once was.
Instead, Tiger shrugs.
“You weren’t a very good spy the first time, either.”
Robin’s kneejerk reaction is offense. He whips his head up to glare at Tiger before he really wraps his mind around what the words mean, after which his gaze melts into incredulous confusion.
“Then what the fuck do you want from me?” he snaps. He’s not sure why his voice is raising. It’s just— nothing about this has gone the way he expected it to. Welcome to life, says a voice in the back of his head. Not Bruce’s. He’s not sure whose voice it is. He’s a little worried it’s his own, somehow unrecognizable.
Tiger looks at him. It feels like he’s the only person who ever has.
“To be a good spy, you need to be ready to leave everything behind. Even yourself.” He smiles, grim. “You’re most of the way there. It’s a profession that suits running away.”
Robin looks back at him. Something in the back of his head begins to tick. Gears that shudder and then, after atrophying in stillness for so long, slowly begin to spin again.
Tiger wraps his preternatural neutrality around himself, his hands carefully held, his gaze carefully tempered. He neither encroaches upon Robin’s space nor withdraws into his own. He fashions himself an island.
Yet, and Robin isn’t sure of how he even picks up on it, there’s something tight at the corner of his eyes.
“And what are you running from?” he asks quietly.
Of all things, that bit of tenseness gives way to something that resembles relief. It flickers, there and then gone, maybe sleight of hand, maybe trick of the light. Fascinating. The urge that overcomes Robin, to dig his fingers in and press, takes him completely by surprise.
“Only one way to find out.”
-
Chat with The All-Seeing Babs
(20:34) Hey. Thought you’d be best to tell this to. I’m skipping town for a bit.
(20:35) ?
(20:35) Ran into Tiger. I guess you probably know him. He offered me a job of sorts.
(20:35) He insists I tell everybody that I’m leaving, so if you could pass on the message.
(20:44) …right.
(20:45) And the fact he’s clearly and grossly taking advantage of your amnesia doesn’t bother you or him?
(20:45) Nope.
(20:46) …
(20:46) Right.
(20:46) I would ask if you know what you’re doing, but you obviously don’t.
(20:47) 👍
(20:47) Look… I know you won’t listen to me, but be careful, alright?
(20:48) Ask him why you went your separate ways.
(20:49) 👍
-
Twenty hours later, they’re somewhere on the Italian coast. Apparently, Robin can speak Italian. He remembers picking up a few phrases here and there when he’d been a child, but it’s still a shock when he looks at a road sign and comprehends it perfectly.
They’re having dinner in a little cottage tucked away by the beach. One of Tiger’s agents—Agent 15—is supposed to meet them later that night for an information exchange. In the meantime, they nibble at a pesto pasta Tiger made with basil picked from the back garden. There had even been a bottle of pinot gris in the back of the fridge. It’s shockingly peaceful.
Robin will have the chance to choose his own agent number, later on. When he’s been properly initiated. He suspects Tiger won’t enjoy the sentiment, but it reminds him a little of choosing a jersey number. He tells Tiger this anyway, just to laugh at the unimpressed look he receives in return.
He spins a strand of fettuccine on his fork. He wishes he could just forget about it, but he can’t push the text from Barbara out of his mind.
He says, “Why did we stop working together? That first time.”
Tiger, halfway through a sip of wine, blinks. After a moment, he drains the rest of his glass and sets it down with a light clink.
Robin raises his eyebrows at him.
Tiger clears his throat. He’d relaxed a bit, between the flight and the warmth of the summer evening, but now that curated neutrality wraps back around him like a safety blanket. He looks down at his food for a long moment.
Then, he looks back up.
“I lied to you. I betrayed you.” Hesitance clouds his gaze for a moment before he speaks his next words. “I broke your heart.”
Robin regards him.
He, of all things, laughs.
“Guess you’re pretty pleased with this whole memory loss thing then, huh?” he says, mouth curving into a smile. He doesn’t know why, but the only reaction he can muster is just— mild amusement. He suddenly finds this all stupidly funny.
Tiger looks at him like he’s the biggest idiot in the world. Robin laughs again.
“So, hoping to make amends?” he asks. “This is a roundabout ploy to get us back together?”
Tiger’s face tightens with bored displeasure. Robin instantly hates the expression.
“No.”
“Really?” He leans forward over the table, feeling, like he’s been feeling since he woke up after getting shot in the fucking head, lost and reckless and wild. “Then what? What’s the angle here? Why come back for me if I’m what you’re running away from?”
Distantly, Robin can hear the rush of the waves. His heartbeat, loud in his ears, pounding in his very fingertips, rushes alongside them.
Tiger looks at him. In his gaze, something like an abyss opens. Robin looks into his eyes and knows that in that dark chasm lies their shared history, dark and murky depths that he cannot traverse anymore. He feels the full force of it. How terrifyingly much he’s lost. He resents it more than he can contain in his body. He could spend his entire life carving it out of a rockface and he still wouldn’t be able to shape this staggering resentment.
“Because,” Tiger says, strange and solemn in the last light of the day, “nobody should be forgotten.”
Robin snarls from the back of his throat. Lost and reckless and wild. Like a half-tamed animal that’s been turned out.
“I’m the one who’s doing the forgetting. You—you remember. That’s the problem here. You remember somebody who doesn’t exist anymore. Fuck, maybe it would be easier if everybody forgot me as much as I forgot them. At least then, I’d be—”
He cuts off, his mouth caught halfway between free and alone. He thinks they might be the same thing. He thinks neither of them would be right.
The fight goes out of him. With a sigh, he slumps back in his chair. Runs a hand over his face a few times and tries to get his breathing under control.
“Forget it,” he mutters.
Tiger raises an eyebrow. After a beat or two, Robin realizes, and manages a half-hearted snort.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
This is so fucking ridiculous. As quickly as his temper had risen, it wanes. His fucking moodiness. He vaguely wishes that he could run some kind of study. Sit in a room with a psychologist. Get somebody to open up his own brain. Chart the numbers and crunch the data and pull together some kind of hypothesis on the effects of this whole amnesiac brain damage thing. The way he gets winded experiencing his own emotions cannot be normal.
Aware of Tiger’s eyes on him, Robin exhales and shoves a forkful of pasta in his mouth. The tension that had threatened to drown them both just moments prior seeps out of the air.
Tiger’s demeanour is as calm as ever, but Robin can see the way his hands twitch at the change in atmosphere. Every day he discovers, or rediscovers, new tells about him. He wonders how long they’d worked together. He can’t remember knowing anybody like he seemingly knows Tiger, but of course, that hardly means anything.
Tiger sighs. After a moment, he reaches over and picks up Robin’s wineglass. Takes a sip from it.
“Your problem,” he says, swirling around Robin’s wine, “and also my problem, and also everybody else’s problem, is that you are impossible to leave behind.”
A silence.
Robin is reminded that he finds all of this stupidly funny. Unable to help himself, he laughs into his hand. He doesn’t need to see Tiger’s unimpressed look to know it’s there.
“That was... incredibly romantic.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
He laughs harder.
Outside the window, the setting sun turns the sky gold. Inside, it thickens the light into honey, marmalade. Cast underneath it, Tiger is a relief of bronze, of gold. He’s beautiful. Robin doesn’t ever stop noticing it.
In the following silence, Tiger says, “I remember you different. I thought that might be enough.”
Robin’s breath catches.
It isn’t, but the fact that he thought of it anyway, that he wanted to try; somehow, that is. It hits Robin that when Tiger had said impossible to leave behind, he hadn’t simply meant it in a romantic, passionate sort of sense. He’d meant it not in the common refrain—don’t leave me, I need you, I can’t live without you—but on a grander, truer scale. He’d meant it resolute, meant it forgiving. I will not turn my back on you. I won’t leave you in the dark.
Because nobody should be forgotten. He'd really meant that.
Robin doesn’t remember knowing anybody like he knows Tiger, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Robin doesn’t remember wanting to know anybody like he wants to know Tiger.
For the first time, he wants it back. The mind he had. If only to understand the man in front of him more.
“There’s no chance I would’ve agreed to this if I had my memories, right?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered asking.”
“Barbara thinks you’re taking advantage of my memory loss.”
“Do you feel taken advantage of?”
“No.” Robin puts his hands over his face. Something is bubbling up from his chest. One million somethings. It’s an unceasing and uncontrollable flood; he can’t tell if he’s going to laugh or cry. “I think you might be the only person who gives a shit about me and not just who I used to be.”
Softly, Tiger says, “You’re one and the same.”
Robin’s eyes sting. He mutters wetly, “No way. That guy had way too many friends. I have a headache thinking about it.”
Tiger laughs at him. It’s maybe the world’s most beautiful sound. Robin feels like he’s losing his mind. Then he remembers he’s already lost it, so he can think crazy things about the laughter of a man he’s only known for twenty hours all he likes.
He thinks he could get Tiger to kiss him. He thinks he wants him to. He recalls again that strange new urge from the first time they met, the desire to dig in his fingers and press, and suspects it’s probably not so strange nor so new.
He asks, “If I promise not to be angry about it when-slash-if I get my memories back, will you kiss me?”
Tiger looks at him. Something on his face reveals itself to Robin: he wants to. Nothing has ever been clearer.
“Remember how to pick a lock and then we’ll talk.”
Bastard. Robin laughs and laughs and laughs. He breathes through it and, for the first time since he woke up, it comes easily, the air clean and clear in his lungs.