Chapter Text
Spencer, no, Tim wakes up with a sigh.
If it can even be called waking up.
He doesn’t sleep, not really.
While one of his bodies rests, his mind is in the other one.
Sometimes he does get a few minutes of sleep during the time after his mind switches bodies and before his body wakes up, but it doesn’t happen often. He’s taken to meditating every so often in order to give his mind a break. It’s probably not healthy to have so little rest for his mind, and certainly not normal, but he’s used to it.
He doesn’t know why this happens, not for certain, though he does have his suspicions, but since it does happen, and strange things are normal in one of the universes he lives in, he doesn’t think about it too much, just goes on with his life. No, his lives.
He doesn’t tell anyone either.
He learned that the hard way.
When he realized that what was happening to him was not normal—that when people talk about the adventures they have in their dreams while they sleep, they aren’t talking about actually living in another universe—he decided to tell his parents.
That’s what kids should do, right?
He doubted that Tim’s parents would care, they weren’t even home when he realized the odd situation, so he told Spencer’s parents.
They… they did not take it well.
Sure, they listened to him as he told them, they asked him questions to clarify what he was talking about, and then thanked him for telling them about it.
But then they whispered together on the other side of the room for a while, and a few days later they took him to a doctor who asked him lots and lots of questions. His parents' smiles were strained every time they looked at him until the doctor finally told them that he just has an overactive imagination.
His parents were relieved by the doctor’s words, but still treated him differently for the next little bit, like he was made of glass.
It is almost a relief when he wakes up as Tim.
Almost.
While time as Tim can be a welcome reprieve, a time to be alone and just breathe, it isn’t nice for long. Knowing what it’s like to have parents who love him, despite their sometimes overbearing worry and fear, makes the distance between him and Tim’s parents that much more painful.
For years it is much better to be Spencer than it is to be Tim.
Despite his parents’ fights, and the other things that make them imperfect, he feels so warm, so loved with them.
So much so that whenever he wakes up as Tim, wakes up alone in a massive, cold house, he just rolls over and goes back to sleep.
Switching between the universes doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how long he sleeps—just as long as he falls asleep, he will switch. A ten minute nap as Tim means an entire day as Spencer.
Whenever Tim is lonely, whenever he wants to see someone who cares about him, he just takes a nap.
For years he takes multiple naps each day.
He naps through classes with no adverse effects to his grades because Spencer has already learned this stuff years ago.
The longest he stays awake as Tim during the day is when he decides to learn how to hack. He uses that knowledge to make a note in his school file saying that he has an illness that forces him to sleep so much, he can’t risk his teachers getting suspicious. And even then, he does most of the figuring out how to do that as Spencer.
But a person can only sleep for so long.
As a result of taking so many naps during the day, Tim often lays awake at night for hours and hours.
So he decides to get a hobby.
There are a number of differences between Tim’s universe and Spencer’s universe, and even a number of differences between his bodies.
Spencer is older, taller, and Casuasin.
Tim is younger, smaller, and has some Asian heritage.
Spencer lives in a small, run down house, in a bright city, with two parents.
Tim lives in a mansion, in a dark city, all alone.
For the most part, Spencer’s life is better, in the things that matter, he is much richer.
But there is one thing that Tim has that Spencer doesn’t.
Superheroes.
Tim takes to the streets, to the rooftops in order to study the local nocturnal avian life, aka Batman and Robin.
He gets so good at it that Batman himself never notices.
And he gets, for lack of a better word, addicted to it. The adrenaline rushes, the lengths he goes to get the perfect photo, it’s all he lives for.
When Spencer’s dad leaves, and his mother’s health declines, he bears it all with quiet patience, knowing that as soon as he falls asleep, he will be free.
Free to flutter and fly on the Gotham rooftops, to chase the mythical vigilantes.
He tries to sleep more, to be free more, but he can’t. Between keeping up with his advanced schooling and taking care of his mother, he barely has time for sleep every night, certainly has no time for naps during the day.
He tries to stop sleeping so much as Tim, doesn’t want to switch, doesn’t want to go from the freedom of the rooftops to inescapable schoolwork and being his mother’s caregiver.
But Tim’s body is used to naps during the day. His teachers and classmates expect him to sleep during classes, and he needs the rest after staying up all night, so try as he might, he can’t avoid frequently falling asleep during the day.
And so Spencer ages quickly, and Tim ages slowly.
When Spencer turns eighteen and makes the difficult decision to put his mother in a place where she can get the help she needs, Tim is still a child in grade school, still a small shadow stalking Batman and Robin.
When the rare occasion arises in which someone asks his name, he always has to think for a moment, double check which universe he is in before he answers.
When a teacher or professor calls on a classmate named Spencer or Tim, he has to bite his tongue to make sure he doesn’t react.
It’s infuriating and frustrating.
One night as he’s out in Gotham, stalking the rooftops and prowling through the alleyways, handing out money and food to the homeless, one of the brave street kids asks. “What’s your name?”
He hesitates so long that the kid finally says. “You don’t have to tell me, I was just curious.”
“Alvin.” It slips out of his mouth before he can think too hard about it. “My name is Alvin.”
He’s not certain why he says it, perhaps the name Alvin was on his mind after Spencer saw the movie with the chipmunks, odd since Simon was his favorite character.
But whatever the reason, it’s freeing. Not having to put himself in the box that is Spencer or Tim, Alvin can be him, all of him.
A few days later, or maybe a week, time is hard to understand in his situation, Spencer goes to a bar he has never been before, and when asked, he introduces himself as Alvin. He can talk about his photography hobby, despite the fact Spencer has never picked up a camera, and his love for urban exploring despite the fact Spencer would never willingly go into an abandoned building.
As Alvin he can send tips to Batman and Commissioner Gordon, insights about cases that Tim would never know, and he can use his knowledge from doctorates that Tim does not have.
As Spencer joins the Behavioural Analysis Unit of the FBI, Tim puts on the uniform of a dead child and tries to stop a man from self-destructing in his grief.
As Spencer protects the innocents using his brain and the law, Tim protects them using everything he has outside of the law.
As Tim mourns his parents, Spencer lets his own tears spill. They may not have won any parent of the year awards, but they still loved him. Sure they left him, just as William did, but he always knew they would come back. And sure they forgot him, just as Diana did, but they always made up for it, if only with an unlimited credit card. He was desperate for their little tidbits of parental love, holding out hope that one day maybe, maybe they will change, will improve. Knowing that he will never get another single tidbit of love, will never see them becomes better, hurts, hurts so bad.
He can’t hide his grief from his team, despite his best efforts. They see his tears fall and just assume he is reacting to the difficult case they just had.
He can’t correct them, and when they try to comfort him, their attempts fail as he doesn’t know which pain is worse, losing his parents, or lying to his team.
Spencer is consumed by solving cases and saving lives, and so is Tim. Sometimes he gets confused which universe he is in, which case he is working, but more often than not, he uses knowledge learned and gleaned from one universe to solve a case in the other universe, granting him the name genius in both.
As Tim hunts for a man, a mentor who is lost in the time stream, as he makes a deal with the devil, with the Demon Head and pays the price for it, Spencer gets kidnapped and tortured by a man with a fractured mind, a man who uses drugs to cope, and to give out his idea of mercy.
Alvin gets crushed by the double dose of the trauma.
He begins to fracture under the unbearable stress, two lives with more than their fair share of pain, two lives lived by one person.
It’s too much.
He fractures.
And then he breaks.