Electra Rose
patreon
Cuckoo Bird 3
🕑 Added 2024-05-20 10:00:06 +0000 UTC
Yeah, the guy who lived here was never going to be able to scrape Tim out of the building. He would come back like Trichoderma spores, he would insinuate himself underneath the wallpaper like Aureobasidium. They were going to have to coexist, because it was like this place was a theme park that had been designed and built to thrill him in specific.
This was without a doubt the best day that Tim Drake had ever had. It was probably the best day any Drake ever had, actually. He was never going back to elementary school. He would use a laser on anyone who tried to take him there. There was probably one here, actually. He set off looking for one.
The laser did not turn up immediately. He found a notebook and a clicky pen with six different colors that he used to take a note about everything he found, to get his thoughts in order. After he had inventoried all the coolest stuff in the secret hideout, he went back upstairs. He was yawning too much to do a lot tonight and anyway, he had to be up in the morning to help Miss Fox. He had important responsibilities to uphold, just like Mom.
Going to bed presented a little bit of a challenge. He dug through the drawers to borrow pajamas, nose wrinkled up at how terrible these clothes were. Most of them were boring. They were way too big, of course. It troubled him.
He dug under the sink and found some super concerning things that he supposed might be useful if your blood and stuff was on the outside, but he didn’t really know the details. Tim put that box back. He looked in a plastic box in the bathroom closet – more medical supplies– and eventually found a package of spare toothbrushes in the kitchen of all the places. Tim felt a little gross about borrowing toothpaste from a stranger's tube, but he didn't see a way around it. He brushed his teeth, washed his face with something he found in the main bathroom, and took a fast shower.
Tim stood in the main bedroom for a while, pursing his lips. It was where he found all his cool stuff, but it was probably personal space. “I think it would be presumptuous to sleep here,” he decided. He gathered up the electronics and their cords and hauled it all into the next bedroom. It was generic. The walls were off-white, the bed smelled like air freshener, the painting was an inoffensive reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s House by a Pond. This was a room for a generic guest, not even designed with a friend or relative in mind. That was the kind of place that Tim belonged.
He crawled into bed and tucked himself in. Then he gave himself his bedtime affirmations, since Mom wasn’t here and neither was the tape deck where she reminded him that he was brilliant and that she loved him. He was out in a matter of minutes, even though the hallway light was still on.
He woke up when he woke up, because he totally forgot that he didn't have an alarm set here. Oops. Tim had a sinking feeling in his stomach as he crawled across the bed to check the time.
It was 9:34 already!?! He was late for Miss Fox! Tim scrambled to open up the email- and breathed a sigh of relief. There weren’t any emails yet. “Thank gosh,” he said. He put the phone in his pants pocket and shuffled to the kitchen.
The weight of the phone pulled the pants down to his knees.
“Ugh!” Tim shouted, because he could. He took the phone out and hiked the pants back up with one hand. He kept complaining, because it was fun. “Terrible pants,” he scolded them. “Falling down, in this economy?” His voice went up way too high when he quoted his dad's favorite complaint while reading the news. Tim cheerfully waved his hands around and channeled his Mom next. “As per my last email!” He ended it with a foot stomp.
Wow, that one was fun. He felt powerful. He decided he was going to use that one today. Tim put the phone and tablet on the table and made sure the volume was up. Then he tried to find breakfast. He knew alllll about breakfast, and so did the guy who lived here.
Usually Ms. Mac made it if his parents were gone, or Dad made it if they were home. But Tim knew the formula. For breakfast, you pick a piece of fruit, a carb, and two drinks. If you're fancy, you have a hot serving of protein.
And Tim? Tim was fancy.
He picked a banana out of the fruit bowl and cut it up with a big chopping knife he found sitting in a wooden block, like his personal kitchen Excalibur. He forgot to take the peel off first, so that was annoying.
For drinks, he found a carton of milk that actually smelled pretty bad. “Boo,” Tim said sadly. He poured it down the sink and then got out a can of Zesti. It was grape, so it was probably the best substitute for fruit juice available.
You also need a hot drink for breakfast, so he made a whole pot of coffee and bounced on his heels while it dripped, feeling very adult. He looked at the coffee packaging for a while, lost in thought with his tongue sticking out slightly between his lips. It had a great picture of an atrocious cat thing on it, and said it was AUTHENTIC FANALOKA COFFEE. He liked the cat. It looked like it was designed by an evil scientist who had never seen a cat.
Tim didn't know what Fanaloka meant in this context, though he surmised it was the cat’s name. He moved on with his day.
It was harder to find a carb. There was cereal, but that was yucky without the milk. He found two bagels, but there wasn't any cream cheese! What was wrong with this guy?
He eventually gave up and toasted a bagel. Morosely, he got out butter. Maybe that would be good enough.
The piece de la resistance was bacon. He found a package of it in the freezer. It was all frozen. It was way too hard for him to take off two strips.
His first thought was to cut it up with Excalibur and then fry up just a little. But the frying pan was super duper heavy. So he just microwaved the whole thing for 5 minutes.
It smelled great!
The bagel in the toaster was actually really cold then. He heated it one more time and then frowned at it when it came out too brown. “You get what you get and you don't throw a fit,” he grimly quoted Ms. Mac, and climbed up the tall stool to sit at the counter. He buttered the bagel. Like, he buttered it a lot. Maybe that would help.
It was still kinda hard to eat. He peeled open the bacon package and fished some out with his fork. It was all wiggly. Tim tried it. “That's good,” he said, pleased. He had another strip of bacon. Oh! The coffee!
He hopped down from the stool and ran over to find a mug. He filled it with coffee and tasted his creation. Hm. He had another sip.
“It tastes bad,” Tim said contemplatively. Steam waved up over his face.
Did that mean he used too many beans or too few beans?
The only way to find out was experimentation. He dumped out all the coffee, threw away the wet beans, and made it again with like, twice as many beans. He went and ate his banana and about half of the bagel while the coffee percolated itself. Then he tried the coffee again. He took a slow sip. His nose wrinkled. “Maybe this coffee is just disgusting?”
Mom always gave it to him with sugar and milk, like how she had it. Obviously the loser who lived here had let his milk expire (Mom would never) so Tim gave it up as a bad job.
His first email arrived with a ding during breakfast. Tim opened it with a slightly greasy finger and read it while he gnawed at the bagel.
Hmm. Miss Fox was concerned about something going on in R&D and she wanted him to replicate an experiment by the notes the scientist was using. She didn't want to bias him by telling him her suspicion, so that was all the information she was giving him.
Tim used one hand to laboriously type back an okey-dokey message, in business language.
When he finished eating he dumped everything in the sink. That was probably good enough. He grabbed the phone and the tablet. Then he went to bother the fish, so that he could use the laboratory downstairs.
The phone buzzed while he was going down the stairs. He felt it against his chest where it was stuck between his body and the tablet. Hmm. It buzzed again. “Just a minute,” Tim said crossly. It kept going off! Wow, that was so annoying.
As soon as he got downstairs he put down the tablet and scowled at the phone. He was getting like a billion messages from someone named Dick. “I am WORKING!,” Tim said to himself as he typed up and sent the same message.
Dick sent like 42 crying faces. Tim groaned and scrolled up to see the last couple of messages, just in case they were important.
Uh.
“These messages don't look important,” Tim said, raising his eyebrows at babble about how Dick missed him and he hadn't checked in last night and “the family” was afraid that he had fallen in a hole or been eaten by a lion. Apparently someone called Dami had thoughtfully drawn up what they thought that scenario might look like, in case they needed to show the police. Dick had included it as an attachment.
Tim clicked on it, curious even though he knew he really shouldn't open attachments from weird people. These were definitely weird people.
It was a really good picture. He told Dick as much and then blocked the number. He needed to get stuff done today.
Comments
ElectricMaehem
So happy that you like it! Tim doesn't get caught yet haha
carmino
haha, tim is going to go WAY too long without anyone finding out what happened. this is great! tim is so cute… thank you for sharing!!
