Drabble
Title: Message in a Bottle
Characters: Tim Drake, mentions of Bernard Dowd
Summary: It amuses Tim to leave them, these anonymous little hints.
Rating: G
Word Count: 326
Once a week, Tim commits an act of vandalism before first period. It's a small crime and a common one in his demographic, but it still feels makes him feel a little guilty. Tim is self-aware enough to consider that an ironic comment on his conditioning: he balks at a little morning vandalism after a night spent methodically assaulting and battering Gotham's citizens. But then sometimes Tim thinks that his sense of irony is all that keeps him sane.
Maybe that excuses the vandalism. Anything to keep that life-saving sense of irony alive, right?
And it certainly does feed his sense of irony. Each Wednesday morning, Tim scratches a message into the paint of a hallway with his blue ballpoint pen. Last week, he wrote How many masks do you wear? How many names do you bear? on the second floor of the math building. He is still deciding on this week's message. He thinks about it, during the week, but he never plans it out. That would ruin the exercise. Anything he writes must be both completely spontaneous and completely true. That's the challenge of it.
So now he stares at the blank white wall of the science wing and wonders what words will come. He enjoys this part, the blank waiting of it. But he only has fifteen minutes until Bernard arrives, so he picks up his pen and writes. He watces the letters form, dark and spidery against the blank wall, with a sense of detached fascination. .
You never know to who you're talking.
Tim underlines the word who with an emphatic sweep of his pen and steps back to read the line from Threepenny Opera. Appropriate. But Bernard ought to arrive soon. Tim tucks his pen away and makes for his locker. Yesterday, Bernard said he had a theory about the mysterious grafiti that has been appearing all over the school. He'd said that he would tell Tim about it today.
Tim smiles.
Characters: Tim Drake, mentions of Bernard Dowd
Summary: It amuses Tim to leave them, these anonymous little hints.
Rating: G
Word Count: 326
Once a week, Tim commits an act of vandalism before first period. It's a small crime and a common one in his demographic, but it still feels makes him feel a little guilty. Tim is self-aware enough to consider that an ironic comment on his conditioning: he balks at a little morning vandalism after a night spent methodically assaulting and battering Gotham's citizens. But then sometimes Tim thinks that his sense of irony is all that keeps him sane.
Maybe that excuses the vandalism. Anything to keep that life-saving sense of irony alive, right?
And it certainly does feed his sense of irony. Each Wednesday morning, Tim scratches a message into the paint of a hallway with his blue ballpoint pen. Last week, he wrote How many masks do you wear? How many names do you bear? on the second floor of the math building. He is still deciding on this week's message. He thinks about it, during the week, but he never plans it out. That would ruin the exercise. Anything he writes must be both completely spontaneous and completely true. That's the challenge of it.
So now he stares at the blank white wall of the science wing and wonders what words will come. He enjoys this part, the blank waiting of it. But he only has fifteen minutes until Bernard arrives, so he picks up his pen and writes. He watces the letters form, dark and spidery against the blank wall, with a sense of detached fascination. .
You never know to who you're talking.
Tim underlines the word who with an emphatic sweep of his pen and steps back to read the line from Threepenny Opera. Appropriate. But Bernard ought to arrive soon. Tim tucks his pen away and makes for his locker. Yesterday, Bernard said he had a theory about the mysterious grafiti that has been appearing all over the school. He'd said that he would tell Tim about it today.
Tim smiles.