Dirge For That Ungrateful One I Lost (open)

[ployboy]

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."

Comments

cw emotional harm, disordered eating

[ployboy]

"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."

cw: mention of dead animal

[sputnik]

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?"

[ployboy]

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."

[sputnik]

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.)

cw graphic death And Other Issues

[ployboy]

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."

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

[sputnik]

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?"

[ployboy]

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."

[sputnik]

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."

[ployboy]

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."

[sputnik]

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?"

[ployboy]

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."

[sputnik]

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?"