Tim is walking to his house after school when he spots his parents car in the drive and feels a flash of panic. He runs through a checklist in his mind of how he left the house and whether he’s done anything lately that his parents could be here to pick him up on. After a moment he’s certain that everything should be fine and the worst thing that’s about to happen is a far too formal conversation about whatever areas his parents feel he’s slacking in and he opens the door. When he doesn’t see either of them waiting for him he heads up to his room, dismissing the unease he feels when his door is slightly more ajar than he left it.
His initial flash of panic is nothing compared to the alarm he feels when he walks in to find his mother holding the robin costume in a perfectly manicured hand.
The look on her face is a sight to behold. Her normal expression of mild disdain suits her, it turns a face that would normally be described as pretty into something beautiful. Something that could be carved from marble. Now her face is twisted with enough anger to make her ugly.
Tim is struck for a moment by how this might be the first time she’s cared enough to look at him with real anger since that night at the circus when she told him to stop crying and he couldn’t deliver, no matter how hard he tried.
“This was not the plan Timothy.” she hisses through gritted teeth.
Tim takes the subsequent verbal thrashing with all the grace expected of him as a Drake. By the time it ends he thinks there might be a couple of cracks in the facade but he manages to keep it under control.
The only reason he doesn’t break down is because during her whole scolding Janet never once tells him to give up Robin. He can tell from the curl of her lip, the set of her spine, that she wants to. That she aches to. But Janet Drake has never once entered a battle knowing she would lose.
So she doesn’t tell him to stop. And in the face of such favour? Tim can handle anything.