This is a wip about banshee!Tim gradually adopting all the bats and keeping them alive. It has the possibility to be an eventual Robin pile but I haven't fully decided on where it'll go. The original intention was to eventually have it be damitim but honestly it could go jaytim, dicktim or just robin pile. If you have a preference I'm all ears.
Talia becomes aware of her father’s shadow at the age of five. A boy with skin so white she half expects him to be translucent and eyes so frigid they put the winter sky to shame. He lingers in shadows and darkened corners, ever silent and ever watching. Her father never mentions him, not even when he perches on the arm of his throne or steals bits of meat from his plate. She half thinks she’s crazy for the first thirteen years of her life but doesn’t once dare to ask. Secrets get you killed in this world and this is one she’s not willing to die for.
He never speaks to her. Never seems to speak to anyone. He’d be an afterthought if his presence wasn’t so alien.
At the age of thirteen, the night before her first solo mission, she wakes to find him sitting on the edge of her bed. No scream comes; she’s learned the only one she can depend on is herself.
He touches a finger to his lips and she remains silent as the guards outside walk past. When the lights from under the door fade, he speaks for the first time.
“Tomorrow, you’re going to die.”
Talia’s hand curls around the blade beneath her pillow. “Is this a threat?”
“A fact.” His face is cold, emotionless. It’s like looking into the depths of a still pool; all she sees is herself staring back. “You will die many times in this world and you will pay dearly for your return.”
“The pit,” she understands.
“If you’re smart, you’ll start saving what pieces of yourself you have left. You’ll need them one day.” He stands. Instead of opening the door, she watches as he finds tiny handholds in the stone of her wall and begins to climb to the ceiling. There’s a small hole six meters up, where the smoke of her fires can escape. It’s barely big enough for his head.
“Who are you?” She calls as loud as she dares.
“When the time comes, I will scream for you. Follow the sound back.”
He vanishes out the hole like smoke, body contorted into impossible shapes. Talia lays down and stares up at that dark maw of space until her eyes blur and droop.
Three days later she can’t stop the sword from cutting through her chest. She slices through her enemy but it’s too late. Her knees fall out from under her as her mouth opens in a silent cry.
Across the room, she sees a boy’s eyes turn from icy blue to black as his mouth contorts into the shape of a horrific scream; the sound rings in her ears long after it’s over.
It’s the last thing she hears as she dies and the first she hears as she comes gasping from the Pit, naked and shaking as her heart restarts in her chest.
He stands in the shadows when her father holds a hand out. Always watching. Waiting.
This repeats twenty times in the span of a hundred years. Twenty times in which she dies to a scream and returns to one. And then it stops.