Tim knows he’s not doing it right.
Having dead parents, that is.
He’d know better than most people, being surrounded by orphans. There’s supposed to “not be one right way to do grief”, or some bullshit like that, but while that may be true - Dick and Bruce do it differently - there’s definitely wrong ways to do it, and Tim’s doing one of them.
He can’t even just put it down to having not-great parents, because Jason’s parents were objectively worse, and Jason still got himself fucking killed for Sheila.
No, there’s just something wrong with Tim.
It’s not that he’s numb - he knows all about being emotionally numbed by acute trauma, that’s fine, that’s normal. This is different. He’s not a painfully blank slate; he’s just carrying on feeling all the same things he normally does, with only the addition of, if anything, a bit of distant relief.
When he was trying to figure it out, he did a pros/cons list, and determined his life was objectively better now that his parents weren’t in it. He’s aware that that makes it all way worse. What kind of fucked up psychopath makes a spreadsheet about being orphaned? And what kind of pre-supervillain freak makes the spreadsheet, and then comes to that answer?
Tim looks up at the joint grave, large and elaborate and clean, “beloved parents”, and feels nothing, and thinks that it tracks, now, that he’s a supervillain in so many futures.
Jason may be sorta kinda a supervillain in this one, but even he’s not this fucked up. Explains why Bruce is willing to let him back in.
Bruce would never so much as let him back in the house if Tim said any of what he was feeling, Tim knows. Because if there was a right way to do grief, instead of just wrong ones, Bruce would be doing it right. He’s got a hole in him, where his parents were, a hole so big and strong that it’s stayed the driving force of his life even decades later.
Tim looks inside himself, and he’s got a hole there, alright, where his parents should be. The problem is he knows it’s been there all along, since long before they died. Maybe since always.
Just a hole, right in the middle of him, that he’s been trying to hide this whole time. Only now it’s supposed to show, because now he has a right to have it, but now he’s been hiding it so long he’s not sure how to stop.
He pulls his throat tight to make a tear drop delicately from his eye - he’s always been good at crying on command - and looks up at Bruce. “I think I’d like to leave now,” he says, and puts some wetness into the sound, so that Bruce assumes it’s because he’s too sad to stay, instead of because it’s getting rapidly harder to pretend he’s not some sort of empty husk.
Bruce nods solemnly, and puts a hand on his shoulder, and the hand makes Tim feel more than the entire gravesite ritual had hitherto, than the flowers or the “telling his parents what they would want to know” (nothing, he knows secretly, they wouldn’t care to know anything), and Tim bites his lip and drips another tear and tries to look like he’s not just another supervillain-in-waiting.
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