bakerstreet | ( picture prompt meme )

It's summer vacation. Not that Tim subscribes to high school like a normal kid, and not that his patrols are any less crime-y than usual, but it's the one time of year Bruce has an excuse to ship him off without the press noticing he's missing from charity events. It's not every year that this happens, but this past May culminated in Batman tripping over a case that Red Robin was operating on independently--a big one. Technically, it's not Tim's fault that the Big Bad Bat didn't notice it going on under his nose. But technically, maybe he should have been more forthcoming with sensitive information. If he'd gotten help earlier, maybe it wouldn't have blown up in his face and gotten him sent to music camp for five weeks while Bruce sorts through all the loose ends.

So here is Tim Drake, Wayne family ward, learning piano for the entire month of June and into July. That is to say that he learned piano in the first week, and now he's just doing reps to fine-tune. His instructor tells him repeatedly that he has no feeling to his playing, but that seems like woowoo bullshit if he's ever heard it. Kind of like the woowoo bullshit he finds a few days before the end of June, taped to the stairwell door.

It's not that he doesn't believe in ghosts. It just seems like one of these kids got a little over-excited after toking up and slipping on the stairs. Seems like if management really thought there was a ghost problem, it could be dealt with more efficiently than slapping a "haunted stairwell" sign on a window. He concedes the existence of the paranormal, it just seems like this is woowoo bullshit.

But after a week of testing it (not removing the sign, not seeing efforts made to relieve the situation), he needs a second opinion.

He knocks on Beth's door because he's seen her around. Practice room hallways, cafeteria, weekly speaker assemblies, and the socials that fall somewhere between a mixer and a pep rally. She seems steady--or at least like she can take a mental blow. They know each other's names. He's smoked weed in front of her in one of those high-school student after hours parties that falls somewhere between a sleepover and a kegger--didn't notice if she partook. He's seen her enough to get an impression.

So Tim knocks on her door, greets her with a tight smile and force it to loosen up some as he slides his hands into his pockets. "Tell me you're not doing anything right now."

Going to summer camp feels like an elaborate game of pretend for Beth. She's only been around this place--this universe, apparently--a few months, and there's still so much she doesn't know about it. How superheroes ended up being an actual thing, for one, and most of their names, besides the really obvious ones. (Even they were new to her, too. Hearing well, Superman accidentally punched a hole in the universe, so now you live here was a crazy way to wake up. All she could think to ask was who's Superman?) How far it is from Empire City to Gotham. Stupid little things, too, like what songs were big last summer and who's probably going to run for president next time there's an election.

Never mind that it's the kind of summer camp where everyone lives in dorms at a college and nobody has to build their own fire. And then there's the fact that she's here for piano and guitar, not singing--because she can't stop weird things from happening when she sings. She can only control them, and only sort of. (Not that piano and guitar are disappointing, exactly--it's nice, being able to lose herself in old skills and realize she still remembers what she's doing with them--but she can't help feeling jealous of all the choir kids.)

Most of the time, she's just quiet, in a way she wouldn't have been two years ago. Conversations happen around her, and she tries to keep up, asking questions that won't sound too braindead. She's Beth Greene, don't worry about where she's from or who's paying for her to come here or why she's going to be an eighteen-year-old junior in high school next fall. It's becoming easy to disappear into this weird shadow of who she used to be, making friends and going to parties where she watches everyone else get drunk or high, listening to drinking games and laughing at dumb jokes.

She's fussing with a hair straightener when one of the other piano kids knocks on her door, so she answers with half a head of wavy hair. It's Tim--you can't not know him after a while, if only because he plays the piano like a really talented robot--looking like he doesn't want to be there. Shrugging one shoulder, she answers, "Getting ready for the dance. Why?"

He snorts and tries to cover it up by clearing his throat. "Ah--I forgot people...go to that. Look--" He squints around the room from the doorway to see if she has an alarm clock with the time. "--I need help with something for, like, half an hour. I can help you finish that, if it makes a difference." A gesture at her half-done head. "I'm Tim. By the way. I don't know if you remember me."

"I remember you." It's quiet, neutral, as she watches him, the straightener forgotten in one hand. His explanation's not enough to convince her--mostly because it's not enough to count as an explanation, really. They've barely talked to each other over the last couple of weeks. Why is he coming to her? "What is it?"

His teeth pinch around his tongue as Tim looks for a sensible lie, or something easier to lure her out with. A second of thought, though, and he just goes with the truth. Fingers fishing in his pockets, shoulders ducking meekly. "Just--there's this thing in Barton Hall. I kind of need someone to tell me I'm not..nuts."

Her brows furrow as she considers it. A thing--does he mean the ghost? Because she's pretty sure that was a joke someone came up with when they were sick of sitting in a practice room for hours on end. She's seen the sign, and she's ignored it, for obvious reasons. (She, at least, isn't tired of being down in those stupid basement practice rooms. Sometimes she tapes paper over the skinny little window in the door and sings.)

Beth glances over at her alarm clock. If they're going over to Barton Hall to do...whatever it is they're doing, she's probably not going to finish straightening her hair before the dance. And that basically means not going to the dance, because she kind of looks crazy as it is, but there's another one next Friday. And it's not like she's going to miss much besides watery punch and songs she has to pretend she knows. She likes the friends she's made here, but she won't die if she doesn't crowd into a meeting room with them tonight. "Okay. Hold on."

Setting her straightener back on the dresser, she digs around in search of a ponytail holder and drags her hair back into a messy ponytail. Should she bring anything else? Her cell phone, maybe. As always, she'd really like to pull out her hunting knife, but the rules about carrying weapons around are stricter here than at home; she always leaves it in the bottom of her suitcase and pulls it out at bedtime. The boot knife she picked up a month ago will have to be good enough.

Once she's got her cowgirl boots on (knife safely out of sight against her calf) and her dorm key shoved in her jeans pockets along with her wallet and phone, she lets her attention shift back towards Tim. The whole time, she's kept him in the corner of her eye, but hopefully it's been casual, like she hasn't been paying attention at all. Her mouth twitches up a little at one corner. "No promises you aren't nuts, though."

He'd be struck by her keeping an eye on him if he had given her a little more credit. Tim doesn't though. Distracted with the mystery at hand and frankly disdainful of his peers, he spends more time getting the scope of her room than noticing how she keeps him neatly in her periphery, or how she pauses a beat for something extra beyond wallet, keys, phone. His attention doesn't come back till she comes for the door, talks right at him.

The wry warning twists an actual smile out of him too. This is why he came to her. "Well. That's par for the course." Tim steps out of her way, walking backwards a few steps just to see that she's following before he turns to lead. "So do you have a date for this thing or what?"

Over the last couple of weeks, her room's ended up as decorated as any she's stayed in for a while, even though she knows the whole form thing is temporary. It just seems like a waste to have wall space, safety, and spare time and not use it. Besides the rumpled bedspread, with its pastel swirls of color, there are a few books stacked up on a desk and cutouts from magazines taped to the walls, along with a few doodles of flowers and butterflies. No snapshots, though, or photos she could've taken herself. Drugstore makeup and a pair of earbuds litter the top of her drawer.

"Oh. No." She locks the door behind them and times her steps to stay at his side. "You...don't really go to them, do you?"

He grimaces. "Not really. We do a lot of charity functions in my family. I get all my dancing out at those. Floor four." One hand pats the floor sign before shoving the door to the stairwell open. There's an elevator, but he's making a point here. He holds the door long enough for her to pass through. "How sorry should I be for dragging you away from this one?"

"Don't be." She breathes out, sort of like a laugh, one corner of her mouth pulling up. "I just meant, they're not really date things."

You show up, you eat snacks and dance and maybe if there's someone cute, you dance with them instead of with friends--but it's not exactly prom. (Not that she really knows. She's never gone to prom.) If he's been off doing...whatever it is he does, that's why he sounds so clueless.

She takes the steps quickly and, more importantly, quietly, on the balls of her toes the whole time. Her voice softens as they climb the staircase. "So what're we doing?"

"They're definitely date things. You spend the weeks leading up wondering if you'll have a date, you don't go if you don't get one, or you go and make a point about hanging out with your dumb friends because you don't care about getting one. By the time you've reasoned away your date situation, you've practically already danced competitively. We're ghost-hunting, by the way."

He taps the next floor sign as they ascend. "Floor five. Where are you from anyway? I didn't get to ask at the last not-a-date thing."

"It's different when it's summer camp." Sure, some of it's the same--you hope someone's going to ask you, because that basically guarantees a good night and maybe some makeouts, but it's really not a big deal. Proof positive that he's been skipping all the camp-mandated social events. (The after-hours ones that happen in dorm rooms with open windows, or out in the little copse of trees people here call the woods, even though you can hear the cars on the road from the center of it, are obviously a different story. But those really, really aren't date things.)

The way he talks, it's easy to get carried along in his narrative, jumping from dances to ghosts to where they are to 20 Questions before she has a chance to get much of a word in edgewise. She furrows her brow, not at the question--her accent's so light, she wouldn't blame him for missing it--but at a thought a few sentences back. "Georgia. Is this about that sign?"

Georgia,, and he didn't hear an accent? Tim scowls a little when she says it, and does a quick mental inventory--no, it's been there the whole time and he missed it. He isn't paying enough attention here.

He shakes his head, skips the last few steps on their way up to the next landing so she can't see him before he can shake this frown. "Sixth floor." Taps the plastic sign and holds the door again. It opens onto a glass tunnel that leads to the next building over. "Yeah...this is about that sign. You don't know who put it there, do you?" Once she's past, he lets the door drop, skips a step to walk at her side now. "I'm learning all about you right now. I didn't even think to ask if you put it there."

"Why would I put it there?" There's a muted sort of amusement in her voice. Ghosts are the least of her worries--especially considering that they don't exist. (If they did, she'd like to think she'd have seen one by now. There's more than enough dead people in the world, this one or home, to make it possible.) "I thought it was a joke."

It's nice of him to hold the door for her, not really something she expects from boys this far north. That might be unfair, considering her brother-in-law was from Michigan originally, but it's a difference she's noticed since she ended up in Gotham. Whether it's the effect of being in a big city or the whole Mason-Dixon divide or what, people aren't always as polite. She glances over at him, one brow--and the arched scar above it--quirking up. "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?"

He laughs thinly, sucks in a breath of air and holds it as he decides how to answer. "Ah...yes. Yeah, why not? Or maybe not ghosts, but--something, at least." Tim throws the raised eyebrow back. "You don't believe in something?"

"Something, yeah," she admits, after a pause. It's a harder faith than it was when she was younger and the world was easy to trust in. But even if it's misplaced, it's something she knows she needs, at this point. There has to be something larger than people, or what's the point? "But not ghosts."

"Well I don't know how it is in Georgia, but where I'm from, we have more than enough ghosts to go around." The glass tunnel is warm from the long afternoon, and when he reaches to open the door at the end, a cloud of AC rolls out. "But I think what's going on here is more like 'something, yeah'." He taps the sign as they go inside. "Sixth floor. Head for the elevator."

"Have you seen one?" Beth asks. That's a slightly more interesting possibility than him trusting blindly that they're out there. (Maybe there are ghosts here but not at home. There can't be ghosts at home--Shawn, at least, would have found them. Or Mom. There'd been plenty of time for haunting.)

She makes a tiny, pleased noise when they enter the dim, chilly hallways of Barton Hall. It's one of those hideous buildings that're probably as old as her dad was, the kinds of things people in the 1940s or 50s thought were really modern looking. Decades later, they're always kind of damp inside, like all the A/C in the world can't fix how muggy out it is, but at least they're cold. She airfares that more than anyone here knows. "Which floor?"

"All of them, six through fourteen. Local train style." The elevator has been updated, but the rest of the building has imbued it with thick vintage air. Feels like the ghost of something in and of itself, but Tim settles in without note, hands slipping into his pockets and hips settling against the back wall. "Here--we're just going to watch till the fourteenth.

"I don't think you see ghosts. Maybe camera aberrations. Maybe ghost effects." His mouth folds into a little smile, fingers ticking in his pocket. "Usually you just talk to them."

Beth rolls her eyes. "It doesn't count if it's a metaphor."

That's just grief and loneliness. Non-supernatural ghosts, the kind you haunt yourself with, are a dime a dozen. And everyone knows camera effects are probably just the camera screwing up, however fun it might be to pretend otherwise.

She watches the door as she says it, her arms swaying back and forth in tiny arcs. They start climbing up from the sixth floor--it's a slow elevator by this world's standards, even if it's newer than the building it's in, and the door chimes a moment or two before it actually opens. From what she can see, it's more concrete and tile, the fluorescent lights flicking on when she pokes her head out. "What if the something's down another hall? We might not see it."

"It's not a metaphor--wait, wait!" He sits up off the wall to catch her elbow and tug her back an inch. "We don't need to see anything down the halls. Just check: this is floor seven, right?"

"What?" she demands, confused and annoyed in equal measure. Great job, Tim, you're going to scare all the not-ghosts away. "Yeah, of course it is. Why?"

They aren't seriously just checking to make sure it's the right floor, are they? She thought he was smart.

"Okay. Come on."

If she leans back and lets the door shut, they glide up to eight, slowly, and the door opens again. "This is eight. Stay put." They are checking each floor on the way up. Tim lets her arm go and settles back again. "I promise there's a point.

"...Can I ask about that scar? Over your eye, I mean."

She rolls her eyes again--extremely mature, definitely patient--but doesn't try to leave the elevator. She doesn't at floor eight, either, just watches the doors open and another identical hallway does exactly nothing in front of them.

His question gets her attention, though. In a moment, he's no longer at the edge of her vision--the sliding doors are, as she turns her head towards him.

"Just the one over my eye?" The one under her other eye is probably the next question, but usually people bring them both up at once. And usually she says something about an accident, or she's silent until the other person drops it, but right now, that doesn't feel quite right. Maybe she's more annoyed at being bossed around than she realizes. "Some people hit pretty hard."

Better he's asking about the scars on her face, anyway, than the one just under her jaw. Most of the time, she's got a scarf fluffed out around her neck in an attempt to hide the ragged spot, but she hadn't expected company while she was doing her hair and makeup--it's only now that she remembers her mistake. Dipping her head a little lower, she glances back at the doors. "Floor nine."

"'Tell me about all your scars' is kind of a weird way to go into it, I think." He hums. Plus that's the one that bows when she makes faces. Plus he kind of anticipated she'd spill on the rest like most would. Beth doesn't give an inch thoughtlessly though; he feels better and better about his choice of consult. "Did you hit back? Ten coming up."

( picture prompt meme )

FINALLY SMASHES THIS AGAINST THE WALL, HELLO FEEL FREE TO IGNORE BUT HERE I AM

I HOPE THIS WORKS 4 U LMK IF YOU NEED ANYTHING CHANGED

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