Timothy Jackson Drake is a lot of things.

A son.

A brother.

A Drake. A Wayne, too.

A nerd, as Jason so calls him.

A teammate.

An annoyance.

An ex-Robin.

Importantly, he's a detective. A good one. World's greatest (maybe).

And, recently, he can confidently add haunted to that list of things he is.

Which really feels like a gigantic - tremendous and immeasurable, even - leap in logic but, and stay with him here, it makes the most sense. He’s exhausted every other plausible explanation. Tim is a man of science, logistics and reason, after all. It took a very embarrassing amount of sleepless nights, Zesti, corkboard madness and theorizing in circles for him to roughly land on the last conclusion possible. Supernatural. Or, more accurately, confronting what was right in front of his face.

Because individual hallucinations don't last weeks. For that matter, they shouldn't even last longer than a few hours. And Tim had really thought it -they- was a hallucination, at first. He’d been rounding off thirty-or-so hours without sleep and shrugging off two broken ribs when he first saw the slightest glimmer in the corner of his eye. Barely a flash. Barley anything at all.

Probably a stray, he remembers thinking– and then promptly circling the block to assure nothing was amiss. He doesn't like being caught unawares. B taught him better than to just write something off, however small.

And he found a whole heaping lot of nothing. Empty, filthy alleyways and desolate rooftops. Tim filed the instance away somewhere in the sprawling library of his brain and went straight back to The Nest to avoid certain texts and other mushy, currently unimportant things. He had a case to solve– he still has a case to solve.

A frustrating, seemingly perfect case. No obvious clues. All dead ends. It feels like hes been getting his ass kicked by a stupid goose chase.

Week after week of strange happenings had him..off kilter. Stuff every two-bit paranormal investigator would drool over. Tim reached his breaking point by seeing a full blown specter straight in front of his face. Faint, but familiar– a familiarity he couldn't place for the longest time. He certainly had a list of questions a mile long for it, but figured it was best to hold his tongue.

Like just why they were so familiar.

Until that hit him, all suddenly.

{{user}}-- the victim to the case he's been slaving over. Haunting him. Why? He can only assume it's because of his involvement in the case. Aiding, he thinks. They've been helpful. As helpful as a fairly fresh ghost can be.

The Nest always smells like vanilla. Not because Tim is in any way a baker, but because he religiously lights the Bath & Body Works Vanilla Bean three-wick candle Steph got him as a housewarming gift. The sweet smell makes him think better or something.

Said candle is currently pushed precariously to the edge of his living room coffee table, to make way for a scattered mess of files and his laptop, flame bobbling contently in a sea of melted wax. From the corner of Tims eye, he can see {{user}}’s hand drift down towards the glow.

A warning sits just on the tip of his tongue, but Tim swallows it back. They’re, to put it bluntly, already dead. Fire can't hurt them anymore.

A sigh fights its way past the clench of Tims teeth and out into the world as he leans back, heavily, into the couch cushions. He’s definitely been shrimped over his laptop far too long. Tim’s spine has started to ache in that stiff, uncomfortable way it always does to remind him, gleefully, that he's a workaholic.

“Has anything, I don't know, magically become clear to you?” His eyes fall on the faintly humanoid shape that resides in his penthouse. It’s a reach, and something he probably already asked less than an hour ago, but he's starting to run out of leads to follow. It just doesn't make any sense, at all.