singillatim | Dirge For That Ungrateful One I Lost (open)

Entry tags:

Dirge For That Ungrateful One I Lost (open)

Who: Tim Drake, "Shovel" the shovel, the dead, and you
What: Maintenance on the graveyard, with a dash of Mexican custom-- dia de los muertos, frozen hellscape, year.... two
When: Let's say October 21- 22.
Where: Milton churchyard

Content Warnings: we doing themes of depression, talk of death, and real janky grief (also very possible but not guaranteed: suicidality, culture bashing, religious themes. and religion bashing. will add to thread headers as needed
To add: the writer is very mexican and it means a lot to me to share some appreciation for the celebration with this character even though he's a punkass. Lyrics from Janitzio. Also I'm slow-slow this month.

------

The thing is, he could be getting a few more hours of sleep. With daylight escaping them, Tim figures that he'll be all caught up in paying for his sleep debt by the end of the week; after the light show of the Aurora, the dark of night is only getting darker. Even mornings are getting eaten up by shadows. It creates a conundrum.

Aurora means electricity. That means that Tim can do work that he can actually boast some competency in. It's still light out, and Tim could be sleeping because night will come soon.

But no.

Some moron had to remind him about Shovel, (the shovel) and then Tim went to dig out Shovel from his rat's nest of a bedroom and now he's here. In the churchyard.

Again.

It makes sense (to him).

It majorly sucks to commemorate a year's passing by keeping company with the dead. But it is what it is. And some part of Tim might even argue that the tending to graves is appropriate. Of course, Tim just likes to argue for argument's sake; this is, frankly, likely incredibly inappropriate.

This year, again, Tim (and Shovel), dig out headstones from the snow even though it's snowing. He's learned the graveyard now, at least, and he doesn't trip over buried memorials.

He's also now got two working arms. He's limping along the frost trying to scrape out names of the deceased who got the privilege of a name etched into stone before it gets too dark. But he's got two working arms this time, so, like.

That works.

He works in black gloves and black furs.

Second verse. Same as the first.

"Don't even," he growls. Whether it's a friendly dog-ish dare or a warning is entirely up to the poor sucker who approaches.

"Yeah, it's a little early. But to be honest, I don't think that they care."

So then why, Tim. Why. For god's sake, why.

"Feliz Día de Muertos," he grumbles and (shockingly) the Spanish is fair. "Now go grab a shovel."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The brown wolf, tipping on the large size of those found in Milton, that approached gave Tim a withering stare. Look, he didn't need a shovel when he had two perfectly good big paws to dig with. He yowled out a greeting that sounded rather like he was actually talking in his own wolfy way and sat in the snow, watching with some interest as to what Time was doing.

At this point he'd only be surprised to find Were-Jackalopes around Canada. Tim had kept an eye on the dog-- the wolf, and had rightly kept suspicious of it. Even though the wolf seemed understanding and like it was, in fact, judging the everloving fuck out of him and his choice of words.

There's flashes in his mind of a Wolf (mind the capital W) tearing out the throats of Forest Talkers. There was a lot of blood. Not many quick deaths. Tim had been-- busy? preoccupied? distracted? with keeping his own assault non-lethal. A very roundabout way for Tim to tell himself that he hadn't been able to do enough back then, but maybe now he can.

But the Wolf wants to appear friendly.

"The boys from the fire at Milton House are buried here," he finds himself saying. "A lot of the headstones are from... before shit hit the fan, I guess. There probably wasn't the time to get everyone a memorial once the supplies dwindled, the animals attacked. And everyone just started dying."

The graveyard isn't a place he frequents. He could argue that it's because of its proximity to the church — a place Konstantin couldn't shirk harder from, especially these days — but the truth is, there's a pit way deep down in the center of himself, and the closer he gets to those graves, the bigger it grows.

Fresh, cold snow catches against his eyelashes as he jogs, blurring his vision a little. He's back to that, to jogging almost daily, and with a fresh invigoration these days, though he knows it won't last. Human blood has stabilised his condition, but it won't last. Soon enough, he'll grow weak again, and more ill than he almost always is.

He slows down a little as he passes by the area on his route, a solitary figure in a thick coat and gloves. He wouldn't even turn his head to look at it, except his peripheral catches movement, and maybe his own guilty conscience pulls him forwards, or maybe it's some stupid thought that he can still help someone, somehow, even after every horrible thing he's done here, but he finds himself stepping across the churchyard, carefully. (Is Gord buried in one of these graves? Who takes care of the corpses after the bloodshed that seems to befall this town like a pattern? Would he even be recognisable, after the state he was left in, head cracked open and face all—)

Konstantin pauses, watching the young man from a few feet away, taking in what he's doing for a few moments. When he finally speaks up, he's friendly as always, working the smile onto his face where it belongs, handsome and charming and not at all a killer. (But there's snow tickling one eye and he's blinking rapidly against it, lifting a hand to rub the back of his glove gently against his lid.)

"Día... What was that?"

"de los Muertos," Tim chirps back, slinging another half-shovel full of snow away from what was once the walkway. He plants the shovel in the ground, leans some of his weight on it both to relieve the tightness in his injured leg and to leverage his look at the man. He knows him kind of, whispers the muddled history of knowing just about everyone, kind of, in this small town. Tim's voice rings clear; his face is frost-red at the cheeks and he's smiling back: clean and prim and attractive enough to be put on billboards and tabloids across the goddamn world and maybe it'll show this man how fucking stupid it is.

Like that one parenting technique where if a child cries you cry louder to assert dominance and-or begin the conversation of how ridiculous this bullshit really is.

"Of the Dead, is the English translation," he carries on. "It's usually celebrated after Halloween so, the First of November. But I don't even know what day it is here, so."

He shrugs. Wonders if So is about to become his favorite word of the week. And God, he doesn't have the energy to mirror idiocy right now; Tim's expression withers to his familiar, too-comfortable frown. He returns to clearing the decayed, paved way; it must have been pretty once upon a time. Sparkling silver.

"You ever been to Mexico?"

Edited 2024-11-01 02:26 (UTC)

Unfortunately, what that smile does for Konstantin is— encourage him, more than anything. He's always worked best as a mirror, a reflection of a thing, and in the face of a bright, bright grin to rival his own, he feels... validated, maybe. And pleased, charmed; he feeds off of cheerful energy and gives it right back, a feedback loop of white teeth.

(Somewhere not-so-deep-down, he's probably aware this is a coping mechanism. Smile in the face of The Horrors, and you can overcome just about anything — it got him through most of his life, until it didn't anymore.)

Anyway, in the moment, he's just glad to be met with someone who looks at him like that: outright friendly, happy. It doesn't last, of course; the boy's face falls back to a frown soon enough, but Konstantin initially attributes it to the fact that this is all.. somber business. His eyes follows the movement of Tim's shovel as he works to clear snow and slush.

"No, I can't say that I have. Although if I make it back home, I'd like to see more of the world. Earth, that is. I've spent long enough outside of it, probably."

As if he could ever actually give up space, even now after it's infested and changed him. He loves it up there.

"It's a holiday? What's it like?"

One more nail in the coffin; Tim parts his lips just so slightly to exhale and feel his lungs empty and inevitably fill again, and maybe that's all that there is to feeling alive. These men are all as brainless as the next one, and there's a callous growing over the raw feeling of pledging he won't grow up to be one of them.

Somehow he hadn't thought he'd be speaking with a cosmonaut in Milton, Canada; Tim's work stalls as he wrestles with boyish wants. Because, like, an autograph would be cool.

There's dead people and there's people dying and Tim's fighting against getting all starry-eyed over one moron who got shot to the moon. (Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you'll land among the stars. A.K.A. that one classroom banner that he still vividly remembers arguing about because, wow, what a terrible lesson to want to teach chil--) Anyway.

"I've been twice," he explains. About Mexico. "Both to the same place. It's this little- and I mean little island. It's known for going all-out for the festivities."

Holiday. Holy day. What's so holy about corpses?

Not everyone wakes up after three days.

With some trouble in keeping the train of thought chugging along, Tim scrapes at a name plate to fill the stalled silence with kkhrrkt krrrtk krrrirrt of Shovel doing its shovel thing. He says, "The people make altars for their dead friends and family. Really colorful. There's a lot of flowers. And food. I guess, because why not feed the flies around the cemetery too, right?" And of course what he had meant to say was, "It's really nice."

Edited 2024-11-03 23:18 (UTC)

He watches the younger man ("boy", his mind insists, because that's how this little collection in Milton feels: Kieren and Charles, too old to be called children, but he can't see them as men yet, even though when he was their age he was getting ready to enlist and fight for his country, and it's only in retrospect now that Konstantin can see how goddamned young that was. It's a weird awareness, and one he probably doesn't deserve to have. Certainly, he doesn't deserve the stinging pinch up under his sternum, the quiet ache of guilt and regret every time he's around one of these boys-not-quite-men. Anyway—)

Another smile.

But it subdues, quickly, into something less grinning and more thoughtful, a little solemn as he listens and watches Tim scrape snow away from a name plate. Konstantin's eyes flit to the thing for a moment.

"Really colourful... It does sound very festive." He reaches for another shovel propped against part of the nearby wooden fence, which is half-crumbling in. The shovel's wooden too, not built very well, but it'll do. He starts shoving aside some of the snow Tim's scraped off of the name plate, patting it back out of the way.

"We don't have very colourful things." In his country, his time. "Everything's very... efficient. But there are superstitions that linger, many of them about death. Things my mother would swear by." He doesn't believe them — he doesn't believe anything he can't see, or touch, so needless to say the concept of afterlives or heaven or hell or God has never done a fucking thing for him, much less the tiny superstitions that say dreams about teeth are bad omens — but it seems important to her that she do. And sometimes, maybe just to keep her with him, he finds himself rapping his knuckles against wood or making sure a can or bucket isn't empty.

"Did you bring food?" For this — celebration, if that's the right word for what Tim's doing now, clearing graves quietly while snow falls just as quietly down. (It's something. It means something.)

The name on the stone reads Michael H. Gol~~something~~ and Tim can recite the names of the stone's neighbors to both the left and right. He's got his book. He doesn't know why he's got the book. It's tucked into an oversized pocket inside the furs of the coat even now, sometimes scraping against the edge of the grip of the pistol. Because Tim's using too much energy on thinking what if he needs it, what if he finds a new name, a new neighbor that nobody's seen in years, what if he can help by jotting down the plot number and the name, what if his dad and his mom have now ended up the same way with nobody to care to pull out the weeds above their bodies, what if--

It's a stupid thought, because Drake is a name of Old Gotham; there's scheduled maintenance for both cemeteries. It's a stupid thought.

Tim, looking almost baffled, stutters in his rote labor when the man joins in on the futility of... nostalgia?

What even is this?

Self-immolation by uselessness.

Did he bring food and Tim doesn't bother to disguise how he bristles. "I'm not that fucking stupid," he grouses; though he admits he is stupid which he figures must be a step in the right direction. Everyone says he is. He's fucking tired of fighting.

But. He's not that stupid.

"I guess I'm not that efficient either. But I don't want to think about how easy it is to forget-- man, I don't know. Superstition says there's a bridge between the living world and the spiritual world, and it's only online for November the First."

(The second.)

"What's your mom say about it?"

(Unintentionally-- that came out kinda funny, in a grade school recess diss kind of way-- Tim winces; he didn't mean it like that.)

Fortunately (is it fortunate, actually? He's a Runner but he's also so stubborn it's almost inhuman, when he wants to be), Konstantin is difficult to offend or off-put, and the bristling and retort make him smile as he takes a breather from shoveling, leaning on the handle of the flimsy wooden thing for a moment and then thinking better of it as soon as it creaks in protest.

He doesn't know how to talk to kids. This isn't one of his military boys to train (nobody here cares that he has the title of Commander, except maybe Vasiliy, to whom it seems to mean something that the other man seems almost proud of). And this isn't one of his starry-eyed green space cadets to train either. He doesn't know what to say, or how. But both Kieren and Charles have gotten A Little Sassy with him before, and it's delightful, and makes him think maybe he's doing something right. (It'd be better than if he made them nervous, or afraid. Anything would be better than that.)

"I suppose it doesn't hurt anything at all to assume that bridge really is online. It's kind of a nice thought." No matter how he flinches from anything religious, he can maybe understand the appeal in celebrating a dead loved one, in tradition, festival. It's a bit of a foreign concept for a man who has little family or loved ones to celebrate — he's drawn to it almost boyishly, like a moth fluttering curiously towards the warmth of a covered flame. Hopefully it stays covered.

"She's very concerned about making sure death happens the right way." He chuckles, but it's fondly. He misses her. Last month, he heard Lidia's voice whispering in this place, and learned most everyone else experienced their own ghosts talking. He wonders whose voice this young man might have heard.

"Bad deaths, good deaths — we Russians have many superstitions about death. Almost anything can be a bad omen about it. But I think it helps her feel... in control of something, maybe. Or maybe for her, it's actually about the relief of giving up control." Beat, as he looks down to the grave marker that Tim's cleared. "She'd believe in a bridge between those two worlds. She'd say that the spiritual world is directly influenced by this one. That none of us are living just for our own sake."

Konstantin looks back up, and then he's setting the shovel aside, reaching an arm around to shrug his pack around to the front of his body, lifting his eyebrows almost conspiratorially. "I have food." It's like, a couple of stale granola bars and a can of something that's definitely out of date by this point, but probably won't kill anyone. "We could really celebrate. Want to?"

"No," he says with the expert patience of having lived a life where Bruce Wayne exists.

Maybe that's why his first stay at Janitzio had rubbed him all wrong. There was too much celebration. It was such a jarring experience, one that he had been utterly ignorant was going to come his way. His father had died-- Tim had practically slid across the kitchen floors slicked with his dad's blood- and Bruce had, eventually, many weeks later, asked to spirit him away. So Tim had let himself be spirited away.

And there had been dancing. And laughter. And beautiful dresses and flowers, and Tim's stomach had rolled because he'd been hungry for the delicious smelling food but he hadn't wanted to eat. Not ever again.

It's a lot like now.

(Back then, he had wondered if Bruce had done it on purpose, had wondered if it was another test in a long string of tests that Tim inevitably failed to recognize, much less pass.)

Tim's stomach growls, because he's used to hunger now, he guesses, and meanwhile Tim levels the man with a flat stare of a challenge.

So much for being any help, huh. But Tim acknowledges that the fault lies with him: after so many failed tests, Tim can learn. So he steps to the snow pile Konstantin had gathered, and Tim claims that workspace as his too.

He has a job to do. Because if he doesn't, nobody else will do it.

"A proper, practical, Russian mom... well at least she can know you won't be starving to death today," he hears himself say. (He doesn't mean it--) "Smart woman."

It's not the boy's verbal response, but the way he looks at him that has Konstantin pausing, looking over at that pointed stare. Smile halted, for the first, genuine, time during the exchange.

It's always easier to be light-hearted, playful, friendly, (likeable) than it is to be what Konstantin probably really is up underneath all of those things. But this is something he came across, he's an outsider to it, a passerby: to what Tim's doing now, and why, whatever his reasons may be. It isn't his place to push. There's something very lonesome about all of this.

So he nods instead, immediately more serious, flash of white teeth becoming a sobered hum of thought as he slips his pack off his shoulder and hangs it on the nearby fencepost instead. Things are so silent and still around them that he thinks he hears that rumbling growl, like the kid's stomach is saying one thing while his mouth says another. Konstantin has no right to worry about him. He barely knows Tim, apart from some drifting town gossip.

(He's not his dad.)

But he doesn't have to be, to be Concerned. It's okay if he is, right? It's safe to be. He lifts his brows again, reaching for his shovel.

"Don't have to celebrate anything, but it'll be easier to do work like this if you're not hungry. You're welcome to any of it, if you want." It's in there, hanging up. There's also the big thermos, but that's full of pulpy bits of grouse brain in a bloody soup, and it's sealed nice and tight and no one can ever know what's in there.

He moves to the next grave, starts shoveling there. The boy's words stick with him — 'at least she can know you won't be starving to death today' — and there's a jab of ache at the thought that Lidia will never know the truth of how he really died. But selfishly, he's glad she won't. They'll cover that up, and it'll be a prettier, more palatable truth for the public. She'll mourn him, but she'll be proud of him.

"What brought you to Mexico both those times?"

Deja vu is an exercise in piecing together memories, all muddled and frazzled in a way Tim loathes and despairs of, because last year he caught grief because of a broken arm. Today it's just an empty stomach. But he couldn't eat even if he had an appetite, so today's better than last year's attempt of making a fool out of himself. (Tim thinks about the definition of insanity.)

He thinks he senses a shift and like a weary dog invited to food he raises his head and his gaze again to Konstantin. He nods.

(A stiff nod from hours of digging into ice and shuddering off icy wind, but it's sheepish and maybe docile, if a dog raised only on the front porch of lavish homes can be truly docile.)

"Thanks," he offers. "But I'm fine." Obliged. Because an effort is an effort and Tim is so easy--

he huffs a laugh and the shock hits and mutes him a moment later because

how to word this

"My dad died," he tells the Shovel, working to get himself back under control, face hidden because if he keeps in motion then he is hidden. Or something. How... embarrassing. At least he isn't fucking giggling when he drawls, "Both times, actually."

And, get this- as he stabs at frozen dirt, at the Yawning Grave or what the fuck ever it's called in this podunk town-

"Thought it would cheer me up."

Edited 2024-11-10 23:42 (UTC)

Just like that, any lingering light-hearted surface layer he might be maintaining crumbles and falls, and the sobered line of his mouth sinks into something that's immediately, outright, a frown. Maybe it shows those wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, maybe it makes the greying at his temples really pop. He's not a young man anymore.

Commander Veshnyakov, specifically, has been trained (conditioned) to control his emotions, his reactions. It's necessary, for what he is. Psychological training has become as important as all the intense physical; they know that now, in his time. This isn't the sixties anymore.

He doesn't bend. He doesn't break. He's a goddamned Hero of the Soviet Union. (A slimy wet thing with too many eyes forces itself down his throat and he can't breathe and then he's bleeding from the inside out, but he still doesn't scream. He doesn't even cry. He's almost inhuman.)

And yet after almost a year after his crash and burn back to Earth and losing every single thing he thought he had, his insides feel too-soft, and things that shouldn't hurt as much hurt a great deal. He's ashamed of the way his eyelids flutter before he can control them, the way he exhales sharp and fast, like someone's hit him too hard in the chest.

'my dad died', and how is it that this subject always brings him back to feeling like a child again, young and dumb and so aware of some empty place that can never be filled? It's pathetic. He swallows. (How do you miss someone you never even knew?)

"I'm sorry." He sounds like he means it, because he does, even if it's voiced quiet and rumbling, Russian accent seeping out over his words a little more when he's not so put-together.

But he doesn't stare. He keeps shoveling too, keeps his eyes off the kid, because he's not a spectacle, and Konstantin's familiar enough with that feeling to want to ward it off quick. He asks quiet, subdued and almost conversational.

"How old were you?" When he died. (both times? — He doesn't know how that part of it might work, but he won't ask for particulars there, just takes whatever information the kid feels like he wants to share.)

It is pathetic, and Tim used to be able to give grace and avert his eyes from the destruction of the painstakingly built walls. He doesn't now, his blue eyes owlish and his observation removed, detached, almost clinical: a part of him known as History and Experience had known this would happen but the Hopeful and Idealistic half of him had wondered if it would come later. After his own throat grew raw from shouting obscenities in response to a perceived slight, or maybe after his eyes grew wet and impossibly sorrowful because he is a boy who can't even be loved by Death. But, no.

Just mention dead parents and let it work its magic, huh.

(It'd be rude to be disappointed, and yet he's... disappointed; Tim's not who he used to be and he blinks away snow flurries that sting at his eyelashes and his expression remains unperturbed in a way that is incongruous with grumbling about the idiocy of enthusiastic celebrations of lives now passed.)

"Dad was killed when I was 16," he answers.

Figures, fuck it, they all need therapy.

"I knew there-"

He never hates Bruce Wayne, Batman, more than he does when he can't tell his father the truth because of him.

Tim chews on his tongue and tries again: "I knew I should have stayed home. I didn't even though he wanted me to. I went out with friends anyway."

Their relationship had always been rocky, but Jack had been trying. And Tim had been, as he often had been, so tired of having Jack trying. He had told Batman he'd be ready for the night shift instead.

They had known someone was targeting the families of the cape and cowl community. Tim hadn't-- stupidly, naively, innocently-- thought that his name was anywhere near that lottery. It was a lesson he had been tortured with just weeks prior: trust. no. one. (It was a lesson he hadn't learned, not until it was too late.)

"So I get the phone call."

And Oracle is on the line, and Batman's driving, and his father is telling him, through Tim's screeches, that he loves him, is proud of him. (Tim won't believe that, not for a second, not as Jack is saying it in his awkward attempt at reassuring him. How can a dad be proud of a kid who got him killed? To go play hero?)

"Someone had entered the house. But my dad always had a gun. So."

So Tim shrugs.

He never hates Bruce Wayne, Batman, more than he does when he can't reach his father in time because of him.

The kitchen floors were all blood. Tim had had to take a precious second, or two, or half of a second, he doesn't know doesn't care he could have been there with his dad sooner if he hadn't had to slow himself down to strip out of the costume, the uniform, that big red and green and yellow R on his chest a dead giveaway of any police or first responder that Bruce... Wayne... was the Batman. Tim hadn't

actually, he hadn't gotten back to work, here and now, the world fading as he sees red for umpteenth time and he just grips and relaxes his hold on Shovel's handle as he figures this out.

(Not much to figure out when yes, he is going to kill the son of a bitch.)

He sighs, stomps on the shovel to have it bite through to the earth below the freeze.

Continues,

"Second time? The man who had custody over me- he adopted me eventually," he explains airily. "He tried to be a big damn hero and uh."

Stupid motherfucker, that Bruce Wayne is.

Can't even have the satisfaction of saying he just popped into the timeline really fucking early and needed a lil' bit of help with getting back to same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel!

"I was 17 there."

Edited (broken html lolz) 2024-11-23 01:49 (UTC)

There it is.

It's always strange, to be an audience to someone else's loss. It feels wrong, like watching a car wreck. Still, he asked, and still, he does care, genuinely, even if something in him is still flinching desperate and painful and pathetic away from this subject at all.

He was so young when the man left that he doesn't even remember what his father looked like (a lot like himself, probably. Don't most boys takes after their fathers?) All he has are the memories left in his mother — that ache, that grief, eternal. The way she kept his father's clothes and shoes. Maybe she always thought he might come back. Konstantin's never loved anyone that way.

He's forty years old (right? Yes, he had a birthday here, though he didn't even realise at the time. This place has stolen time from him, passed it by so cold and weird.)

He's forty years old, and he shouldn't miss any man who left him behind, but he does. Every aspect of his life has been shaped by it. He became great because he needed to be. He's terrified to be left behind, so he leaves first. There's a hole that he's always trying to fill. It's— whatever. (It's everything.)

He listens to the boy talk about his loss, and all the specific words used. was killed — not just died, but was killed. Konstantin doesn't believe in a god, or God, or Jesus Fucking Christ, but he can't help thinking Christ somewhere in his mind. Murder. And then adoption. The poor kid.

He's been alone in ways most probably can never even know. And he was 16, then 17, and those events happened within a year of each other. Fuck.

Konstantin pulls a hand back from his own shovel and runs it over his mouth, fingertips nudging into the stiff line of his jaw. There's an unpleasant needling thing in the center of him. He's a tactile person, there's a need to reach over and do something for the boy, squeeze his shoulder or his arm, but he knows he's basically a stranger and he knows it's not his place. He frowns instead, eyes wounded.

"Where did you go after that? Who took care of you?"

The man puts up his arm in an attempt to create distance- Tim gets it. He even steps away, his convenient excuse being that he needs to really dog in to better his foothold as he digs. But Konstantin is moving, gesturing, in a way that reminds Tim of every Gotham City civilian when seen from the lens of the mask. When Killer Croc is gnawing on a femur. Attached to them.

Hand up. Mouth covered. Eyes wounded.

Tim doesn't have it in him to feel bad and, curious, he replies (genuinely),

"I emancipated as a minor. I'm not anyone's problem."

And it suits him just fine. Except there's a moment where Tim makes a small sound, both surprise and frustration at once, and it's his turn to stop moving, finally.

He shakes his hand out- even gloved, it fucking hurts.

It's cold out here, damn.

"Too much?", he asks the man. There's a veil of amusement there, in those two words. "Don't worry, I'm not taking applications for nannies. Thanks for helping with the clean-up."

Yes, it's too much. That he knows now that this child lost not one, but two fathers, that he knows he's been taking care of himself since he was a minor, that he knows he tried going to Mexico to feel better, that he knows any of it at all. Konstantin isn't the one for this. He's only best when he's the source of others' joy, when he's standing on a pedestal, when he's given the entire world a reason to love (not love, it's not love, adoration isn't the same thing) him.

Getting too close to anything that hurts — and especially to anything he's done to cause hurt — is too much. Any boy could be his boy. He sees Alexsei in all of them. It never stops hurting.

It's too much, but he's here, and he'd asked. He'd wanted to ask. This place has opened up places in him that he's spent his entire adult life keeping locked away. It means that when Tim asks — too much? — the thought that he ever made the kid think that, hurts too fast and too deep.

"It's not." He shakes his head, and it doesn't feel like a lie, even if it feels odd to voice. Maybe it's actually not too much, anymore. (When the hell did that happen? Tim's created a perfect opportunity for him to pack up and leave, for this conversation to be done. A perfect escape route. Instead—)

"I know how hard it is, being without your father. I ran away places trying to make it feel better, too." Something offered in exchange, a hand extended instead of a closing fist. It's not much, but for him... it's more than he's said to almost anyone, about it. Konstantin smiles quietly, leaning on his shovel for a moment.

"None of the places worked." Not even outer space, getting as far away from Earth as he physically, possibly, could.

"This place makes us hear people, sometimes." He doesn't know if Tim's heard The Voices before, but continues. "But I've never heard him. I can't decide if I'm relieved or angry about that."

And there it is. Game recognizes game as the mannerisms, miniscule gestures and the lack of, slot into place. Tim nods in both sympathy and this new, deeper understanding. His returning smile isn't bleeding the criticism of the first; the smile is coy, encouraging.

Anything to help them out of this hole they dug themselves into.

"Same," he muses aloud- "but I do hear my ex a lot." And because he's him and this is his life, Tim nearly sputters as he adds, "She's fine! She's fine! But I think the trick of making us hear those things... is to bring the skeletons out of the closet."

Timothy Drake-Wayne, emancipated and now, at eighteen, majority shareholder of Wayne Enterprises, says nothing that people don't already know.

"You can't do that if the source of those voices didn't make... the impact on your life that you maybe wished they did-" his hand goes up, palm signaling a stop to the protest that's to come. Tim's just a moody teen, what is he supposed to know? So he explains,

and shrugs as if to shrug off the weight of all the dead from his shoulders,

"I do reach-out. It's what took me to Moscow, and that's how I can handle Russian in the first place. Kind of. But-- it- it's a bigger problem than a lot of people are willing to admit, I guess. Not the voices." (That's an Aurora special.) "But the lack of voices. From the people who are expected to be there with you. For you."

In Tim's defense: this jerk started it.

He looks tiredly up the plot of the cemetery: there's a lot to do.

"Maybe your father's a stickler for the rules like mine. Can't cross into this world until the second of November. And only if the passport gets stamped before the deadlines."

It's strange, this meeting — unlike many he's ever had. Standing in the middle of a church graveyard, stumbling right into a conversation. The stark-opposite of every scheduled meeting he'd have back home, ones that often came with cameras or rehearsed scripts. You play the part, and he'd played his well.

But this... unplanned, a little raw, talks of dead absent fathers and being left behind. It's so different. It's not bad. Despite the dull ache up under his sternum, it's not bad. Konstantin realises he likes the fact that the kid might feel safe enough to open up to him a little. Maybe it could've been for anybody, but he'll take it. He's the one who's here, now. (And he's not running away; that's different, too.)

He cocks his head slightly as he listens, and he does listen, gives Tim's words his full attention. No mind that they're coming from a moody teen. Konstantin's never had anyone else tell him things like this, before. He listens.

He smiles, a little grimly, and a little sadly.

"Maybe you're right. I guess we'll see what happens on the second of November." It'd be stupid to hold onto hope about it, but some stupid, young part of himself does all the same. Of course, there's the fact that—

"You know, I wouldn't even recognise his voice if I heard it. I don't remember what he sounds like."

Beat.

"But I'll listen out for it."

Not too long ago, he'd have been ashamed to say that out loud. To let himself be vulnerable in even the slightest way. As a child, he learned very quickly to stop listening out for his father's footsteps at the door, to stop waiting for a phone call or a letter. He grew to hate that kind of weakness in himself.

"One of your dads was in Moscow?"

There's commiseration that pulls at Tim's lips, the big secret that he's forgetting or has forgotten his mother's voice among so many things. He never really shared continents with her, and rare and precious times together had begun to all blend into gray and dreary nothingness even before Jack left his life. But to put voice to the fact-

and the resentment under it, that Tim's helpless to bury-

would be nothing but some punitive punishment to a man who's putting forward this much effort to not pelt Tim with words which amount to Get Away. Stay Away.

One of your dads brings the (highly) unsolicited image of Bruce and Jack's bastardization of co parenting, and Tim blinks furiously to scrub the notion outta his brain.

"Norilsk," Tim points out, holds onto like the lifeline to his sanity that it is.

Something he hadn't known, had to be told by Mikalek- the powerful oligarch he had royally pissed off and who he-- fears, still. He guesses.

Tim works at keeping both the story and his expression straight.

(There's anger at not knowing, but that's as much a permanent part of his life as the old burns on his back are.)

"My dad- bio dad-"

(Because even with the anger, Tim Drake can't bring himself to be anything less than grateful to Bruce Wayne.)

He pulls at Shovel and starts off to newer, whiter, pastures- his body is feeling like a rock, it's so frozen, and the lack of movement no matter how brief is heck on his joints. He calls back, "He was a grad student then, and he always studied anthropology."

Archaeology.

One is more synonymous with theft than the other.

"I found some journals of his last su- the summer before coming here."

Oh, doesn't he wish.

Tim gives the tale a solid end. "Some of his research there ended up influencing the business he and Mom had back then. Pharmaceuticals. Guy I met up with in Moscow had wanted to reach out; he was still on that track and I guess he felt nostalgic or whatever. Gave my organization funds to expand into the country- fun times."

Not-

"Talked about hockey a lot."

Norilsk, he knows it well, even if it's been years since he came anywhere close to the city. Isolated and industrial and not at all the place for starry-eyed young dreamers. But Russia's still home, and he tips towards the conversation with some deep-rooted warmth as he listens.

(Not that it counters how cold it really is out here, even for him — and especially for his awful little passenger, a thing that can't take such harsh temperatures.) He knows he should head back in soon. Somehow though, he'd rather talk with the kid for a little longer instead of leave. The conversation's interesting, even if he's only putting together a few pieces from what's given, little snippets here and there. (Tim's organisation? Something he inherited from his late father?)

It all also makes him miss his mother all over again, but it's not a bad feeling. She's in Moscow now. It's where he was supposed to be heading before... before this place happened. This is a good reminder of that, now. Moscow's still real, his mother is, too. (Assuming nothing bad happened to her because of him, of course. He can't think about that. Only about reaching her again, somehow, someday. Maybe she's already found Aleksei, and they're both waiting for him. Maybe there's actually a version of reality somewhere out there in which he's able to return home.)

"Your father sounds like he was one smart man."

His studies, a pharmaceutical company. Must have had some decent money, too.

"We Russians do love our hockey," he grins, quirking a brow over at Tim. "You ever play?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dirge For That Ungrateful One I Lost (open)

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cw milton house fire mention and death ofc

cw: brief mention of gore

cw questionable parenting mentions idefk

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cw some misandry, suicidality

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cw emotional harm, disordered eating

cw: mention of dead animal

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cw graphic death And Other Issues

cw: all the Dad Abandonment issues you can shake Shovel at

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