Chapter Text
Timothy Jackson Drake was six years old the first time he’d been left at home alone for an extended period of time. It was early September, chilly and rain-ridden, his parents were already in a bad mood, and even at his young age he’d learned that when his parents were annoyed he was meant to stay out of the way, silent and poised, waiting for instruction from them or his nanny.
On the early September morning when his parents were scheduled to leave for Albania on a dig to recover an item from a recently discovered buried town, his nanny- Ms. Anderson- had quit unexpectedly. His parents had sat him down at the large table in their hall and spoke to him. This, in and of itself was something of an infrequent occurrence, he could remember only rare occasions where his parents had actually looked at him, opened their mouths, and spoke. They had told him, inconvenienced and agitated, that he was mature and old enough to stay home by himself for once, while they went on their trip. They had expressly stated, in their poised bristol accents, that groceries would be delivered once a week, and that they would only be gone for half a month.
That half a month had quickly turned into two until he saw them again, and the next time they left they hadn’t bothered to rehire a nanny for him.
To be perfectly clear with you, Tim knew how to speak English, of course he did, after all, his parents wouldn’t have tolerated any less of him, and he was a smart child. The thing was, Tim didn’t like speaking english. There were gaps in his knowledge of the language that hadn’t been filled, to the point where he knew words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and ‘preposterous’ and ‘abundant’ at the ripe age of six, but he didn’t know words like ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ or ‘dog’ or ‘cat’, the reason for this, Tim would later speculate, was because they had never bothered to teach him such trivial words, in fact, they had never bothered to teach him at all. His old nanny taught him what most words meant, the easy things like ‘I’ and ‘like’ and ‘name’.
His parents, his nanny had explained with a pained sort of look on her narrow face, didn’t know how to be parents. They didn’t know how to teach him, or talk to him properly, or anything of the sort. “They just don’t have the paternal instincts for those sorts of things, Tim, do you know what that means?” He didn’t, but his parents didn’t like when he didn’t know things, or spoke aloud, so he just nodded his head once scuffled over to the library when his nanny thought he was down for a nap, and took one of those thick dictionaries out of the shelf that he always looked through when he didn’t know a word, and he figured it out, because that was what Tim was good at.
He didn’t like English because of his forced, high class accent, or his imperfect speech, or when he mixed up words that he had heard his parents say with ones that sounded similar. English was a task that had to be executed perfectly, lest his parents start berating him with a click of their tongues and a swift pinch to his face. English was a chore, and everytime he opened his mouth he felt like he was in a test, speaking like some kind of emotionless being with their hands folded perfectly at their front and their head held up tall and their hair slicked back.
So when he was six years old and his parents had left for Albania, he’d stopped talking. It was like a reprieve from everything he’d ever been forced to learn and do, and he had loved it. He still learned more English, he’d had to, but he did it with a sour taste on his tongue and sore vocal chords.
On his seventh birthday, his parents were at home hosting a dinner party with some of their business partners, and Tim was sanctioned to his room to stay unseen until it was over, with tears in his eyes and a pink face, he stayed locked up in his bedroom for all of an hour before he got bored, under-stimulated and ever-curious he slid down the stairs with socked feet so quietly you might not have believed he had ever come down at all.
The formal dining hall was just a corner turn away from the large staircase that led up to the family wing of the house that Tim was perched on, listening intently to the conversations to be had while everybody ate.
The Drakes’ dinners were a silent affair, if one at that, where his parents ate and conversed quietly while Tim sat on the other side of the table, back straight and vocal chords unused unless explicitly asked a question, in which case he was supposed to respond in as little words as possible as politely as possible, and stop speaking. He was never exactly sure why his parents disliked him speaking, but in any case, he kept his mouth decidedly shut until given contradictory instruction.
All this to say that as he listened he became decidedly jealous, mouth downturned in a decided frown (not a pout, that would never be an acceptable expression of emotion for a Drake) as he listened further, his frown dissolved into a face of curiosity, eyes glittering the way they always did when faced with interesting information or a new puzzle. He listened with furrowed brows from the carpeted marble steps,
“-Haha! Jack my good man we have to have another game soon, I haven’t played with you in so long, mate,”
“Well of course, Daniel, I have missed our sundays together, you know,” He said, barking out a laugh, Tim leaned closer,
“Say, Elizabeth, how is your eldest daughter? Still studying French at Brown, I presume,” Janet said, nails clicking on the crystal glasses Tim had seen in their nice China cabinets,
“Ah, you know her, always the smarty, when she came home for the summer she quite rubbed it off on us, you know, amie,”
Tim liked to think she said the nickname with a little wink before she did that grating, high-class laugh that ringed at his ears, shrill and high before descending off into a little giggle. But he hardly paid a thought to it as he stared at the corner that led to the dining hall, eyes alight and brows furrowed, lips upturned, extenuating the little baby fat he had on his cheeks.
French?
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When Tim was Seven years old his parents left on another expedition, and the first thing he did when their car left the driveway was run as fast as his small legs could go into the large, pristine library on the first floor. He hadn’t been so excited in a long time, but he stole his fathers old laptop from his bag after the dinner party three nights ago, and learned that there was such a thing as different languages.
There were so many, after all, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese! All from different parts of the world, like the places his parents visited. He found of places to learn them, online, but his parents always cut off the internet when he wasn’t here, so he would have to learn from the books in the library (there had to be some, at the very least, after all, his parents traveled a lot).
After scouring the library for two hours, a large assortment of books of all sorts of languages were stuffed under his bed (he had to take two trips, and he grabbed every book on every language he could find, even though he was only planning on learning French).
By the time Tim was eight years old, his parents noticed his presence enough to realize that he hadn’t been going to school whatsoever for the past eight years, and was taught solely by his nanny, who he hadn’t seen for two years.
He was enrolled in the third grade that year, and he found that every single kid in the school were simple and plain idiots, who annoyed him by simply speaking.
He wondered if this was what his parents thought about him sometimes.
He didn’t speak to them, and they didn’t speak back. He decided he didn’t like school very much, and spent near every second thumbing through a thick book on French with his little fingers, and ignoring his teachers when they tried to talk to him in a voice akin to the kind you’d use with a dog (Tim knew what that word meant now, he knew what a lot of words meant now, even if he didn’t like using them).
He aced every subject, until halfway through they moved him up a grade after giving him a little printer-paper made certificate with balloons and giraffes inked on it, he later threw it away, after trying to reach his parents to tell them about how well they did, but they never ended up answering, and he threw away the dumb little certificate in a fit of anger, and kept focusing on his french.
By the time he was nine, he’d found something fun to focus on that wasn’t languages, Batman and Robin. He had finally ran out of French books in the first floor library, and had snooped up to his fathers office that he rarely used, remembering that he had multiple large, ornate bookshelves lining the walls, and figured that one of them must have another book on French stuffed on the shelves. He didn’t find any other books on French, but stuffed in the back of an old filing cabinet he found a large, sleek camera, the kind that you could find in one of those nice shops while window shopping in the diamond district.
Tim had just found a new hobby, and three months later he had seen a clip of Robin on the news late one night, and- with widened eyes- watched as he did a quadruple backflip, landing perfectly on the pavement below, and that was when he figured out Gothams best kept secret.
Niquer, Batman and Robin are my neighbors.
Two months after he figured it out, he set off for the streets in all black, a certain camera swinging from a lanyard attached to the belt loop of his jeans, and because he couldn’t learn any more French? Well, Tim wasn’t opposed to learning Italian or German next, pulling out the thick volumes that were still stuffed under his bed, each one covered in a dense coat of dust, and he started learning that afternoon.
When Tim was ten years old he had his stalking routes down to a T, and his parents hadn’t been home in several months. He had flown through every book on German and Italian (there weren’t nearly as many as they had on French, sadly) and now he was onto Russian and Japanese, deciding he’d learned enough european-central languages, and wanting a challenge, of which he’d decided Japanese and Russian were a worthy contender.
By this time in his life, he hadn’t had a true conversation in English in months, and had started speaking aloud to himself in the house when he was thinking, he had originally only started doing this in French, but he didn’t know all the words and he was only partially fluent in it, so whenever he didn’t know a word, he found it in German or Italian or Russian or Japanese.
He didn’t really have a good word for what it was at this point, but soon enough he started only speaking in this mixed jumble of languages, and eventually it turned into something of a challenge to him, as so many things did. Whenever he couldn’t find a word we needed in any of the languages he knew, he would make up his own, using mixes of root words and sounds in other languages to completely create a new word. He knew it didn’t make sense, it wasn’t like anyone else knew what he was really saying, with the way he would sometimes start words in French and finish them in German, or the rest of his speech being a mumble of every language he knew.
He supposed the best word for it was a creole, or maybe cryptophasia. He didn’t have a twin, so really, it couldn’t be described as cryptophasia, but he’d made up his own sort of jumble or languages, more than two, so it wasn’t really a creole either.
He couldn’t find a word for it, so he did what he did best, he made his own.
Cèorliü e: the act of creating ones own language, whether it is a mix of multiple or your own entirely, or a mix of those two.
When Tim was eleven he’d added Romanian and Arabic into his language, sometimes having to warp the words to make it all fit in cohesively, seeing as they were mostly completely different languages with completely different rules in how they were spoken, but Tim could hardly care more.
When Tim was eleven, Batman got a new Robin, and Dick Grayson plagued the streets of Gotham no more, unless he was visiting by on the weekends. The new robin's name was Jason Todd, and Tim figured that because he’d learned Romanian primarily for Dick Grayson, he would learn Spanish for Jason Todd just like he did for his brother, and dug out those volumes from under his bed as well.
His parents had stopped by for a gala two months ago, and left a day after without a single word to Tim, they had forgotten to sign him up for the next year of school, which meant that when Tim Drake was eleven years old, he stayed home from Gotham Academy, unable to start seventh grade with the other kids he oh so despised.
He learned how to code and hack into things that year, and had forged the documents the government needed to legally let him stay home from school- thinking that he was being homeschooled- with a smile on his face.
When his parents had come back one day in December and saw that he was home- despite it being their fault that they’d forgotten to sign him up for school- he got the expensive, imported cigar from Europe’s foot- still lit- shoved right on his arm, and he set a reminder with teary eyes to sign himself for school up next year, not wanting to test his parents temper.
When Tim was eleven years old, he started to run around Gotham not only to take pictures of the Bats, but also to take pictures of assorted crimes around Gotham to send to Commissioner Gordon in tan colored folders, all the evidence collected in perfect order to be sent to the man's doorstep.
It was something of a hobby for him at this point.
And by the time Tim Drake turned twelve, he had a steel lockbox hidden in the upper vent of his bedroom, filled with photo upon photo upon photo of his favorite hyperfixation. The best part? The lock electronic and in his own little language:
Vе ت учváяt мышьرجل unд الPпporápáЯроjaridчvep
It meant Batman and Robin, atleast, to him it did.
By the time Tim Drake turned twelve, he was back in Gotham Academy, but not in eighth grade, like he was supposed to be, instead he had emailed the academy, pretending to be his parents, and had- luckily- gotten himself bumped up to tenth grade. The same grade that Robin will be in, his thoughts mentioned. Nowadays, he mostly thought in his own language, not english, but sometimes there were pieces and parts of english, crumbled within all the others, he was never completely able to get the bristol english out of his thoughts, even though now when he spoke english aloud it sounded more like a Park Row accent than a Bristol one, on account of him not hearing his parents speak to him in around a year, and he had heard people in Park row speak to him often enough that his accent shifted over time, though he didn’t have the same word shortening and vowel excluding that most people in Crime alley had, still having Ms. Anderson's English teaching forced into him to the point where it was something he just couldn’t do, no matter how much he tried.
When Tim Drake was twelve years old, on a sunny September morning, he finally met Jason Todd.