Cuckoo, part 1/2
Title: Cuckoo, part 1/2
Fandom:Batman
Summary: Tim thinks that cuckoos have always got an unfair deal. Because really, it’s not their fault.
Warnings: This…isn’t all that happy.
Ratings: PG
Characters: Bit of an ensemble cast. In this part: Tim, allusions to Dick, Jason and Bruce. Appearances in part two.
People do not love cuckoos. People cannot love cuckoos. It is not compatible with the parts of people that are supposed to be sacred. It rubs, grates against some deeply held instincts that cannot simply be shoved aside.
People love birds. Little birds, fluffy birds, birds that cheep and flutter. Birds that are soft and cute. People like those birds. People like bluebirds and finches and sparrows. People like robins.
Tim has yet to meet anybody who likes cuckoos.
Cuckoos…in and of themselves, there is nothing offensive about them. They are fluffy. They are cute and round. They are just as birds should be.
But then…then you look at them as they sit with their…family.
And suddenly things begin to change.
They are different.
They do not look like their siblings, nor their parents. They are…huge. Bloated and swollen like greedy, pilfering monsters, settling into the crib, now become a coffin to the memories of the real children that had to die in order for this one to thrive
So out of place in a tiny, feather-quilted nest, barely able to fit into it, and they sit, all day, not-cheeping, screeching in the nest, screeching and squawking to parents who cannot keep up.
Parents who are thin and emaciated in their half death-like state, because this monster-child, he always cries. He always cries for more, more, more of things that parents do not have to give.
And so now, they are drained, husks far outgrown by their anomaly offspring, this monster that has infiltrated their home, snuck in during the darkest part of the night, slowly killing off the true songbirds in the silence. A new and hideous silence, so desperately striven for but now filled with the sound of jealousy, vicious and sharp - yes, silence, silence the pretty songs, silence the pretty little bells from the throats of proper little birds. Please. I only want silence.
Maybe jealousy is not as loud as their singing. Maybe cuckoo can be heard over that sound.
So cuckoo does the only thing that cuckoo knows how. He was put here to get what mother could not give. He was put here to take for himself what will not be given freely.
So Cuckoo pushes and pokes with a sharp, shiny beak, creeping nearer and ever nearer, glinting in the darkness. Watching all the small, soft bodies, the proper birds, the proper sons, shifting and peeping, blinking blearily, unknowingly - they have never known one like you, they do not know of bad birds, they do not know what it is to want, these pampered chicks who stay in the home they are given - shifting, shifting ever closer to the edge, only starting to flutter naked, spindly, half-formed and useless wings uneasily.
Only beginning to blink restlessly, chirps only ever sounding the very first octave that tipped from curious to alarmed when their helpless, tiny pink twig feet, began to feel something cold, something new and - no, no, not yet, please - wrong beneath them.
Air.
Air, and then they were falling, falling until cuckoo sat, alone and blinking into the sun. Blinking, blinking just like them. Just like they had, unknowing, impossibly unknowing and somehow unaware. Because really, he is a baby just like them. Just like they were, except he is still a baby, the only baby and he has no brothers or sisters, only parents’ eyes that blink slowly, solemnly - and why should baby be punished for living? Why should he be punished for being strong where others were weak? Why, why, why?
And so cuckoo has only the puzzled and faintly aggrieved gaze that at once knows everything and nothing at all. Will never know quite why the sight of this, their only child, makes something inside them creak and splinter, and will forever know that the creaking, the splinters that stick into their soft, vulnerable insides, stick for the best reason in the world.
Imposter. Intruder. Traitor.
One who sits and takes. One who leeches all the life out of the only other living thing that cares for it. Leeching, draining, killing without even trying, and it makes people angry. But it makes Tim more angry. Why is it babies’ fault? Baby can’t help it. He kills the ones he loves without even trying. Without even moving. It isn’t his fault. He does not try.
At least, not at that. He never tries at anything that would not please. But if there is the promise, in the silence, of a glance in his direction, a smile, perhaps even the fleeting contact of leather on Kevlar, then - oh, for that he would try until he had nothing left to for.
He tries so hard. So hard to be the delicate little bluebird, the chaffinch, the wren; tries so hard for that bright and shiny plumage, the trilling, happy song. Tries so hard to be the vivid, life-blood plumage and tenacious song of the robin that Batman needs. Tries, tries with everything in him, but he is just a cuckoo, the colours are not his to grow, and the song is one that gets stuck in his throat, one that he chokes on when it is halfway through. The feathers don’t stick, and the song always does.
He is too small. He does not have the grace or agility of Dick, nor the power of sleek muscles honed over a lifetime - a lifetime, it sometimes seems to Tim, spent in training for a destiny that was his and his alone, a destiny and a place into which his tanned skin and sleek limbs slid with the ease of the already initiated.
He is quiet and skinny, angles and edges that poke painfully at his paper-skin, threaten to break through, with none of Jason’s brutal strength and awesome speed.
He has none of Jason’s iron will that bends to nothing but the quirk of his lips, a smirk that compels, that whispers secrets of life and death and such power that it makes you dizzy, secrets of powers that Tim would give his very self to know.
That smirk - the one that twists and mutilates Tim’s face into something broken and disfigured when he tries it - that metallic glint in the eyes, they hold back the power of arms forged in the maker’s image, hands that could warp and crush, and possess a power known only to one other, the power that people like Tim can only dream of.
The power to control, to gain, to have, to take, for just one day. To take all that he has ever wanted.
To gain, to have that gaze, that touch - and it makes Tim’s eyes sting with humiliation to learn that, really, it all comes down to some desperate and deplorably childish desire for attention.
That’s all he wants? That’s what he would choose? He has one hypothetical day where he could take whatever he wanted most in the world, and it is a child’s desperation for attention?
He understands why he is not the same. He can see it, on days like this.