When Worlds Collide

5) Ghost Kings Back ALRIGHT

A/N: ITS LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNG (like 2.5k words hehe) also I drew the picture and I'm only slightly proud of it. I feel like it's mid. 

-Tim POV-

It had been a long 3 months. Nico had died in October and they hadn't heard from until mid December. Obviously it was amazing to hear his voice again and they were so thankful that he had called, but it felt different. They had been told what they could can couldn't talk about a head of time and they were worried what it meant. When they talks, he sounded broken, but it was different than how it was when he would have a bad episode. When they spoke on the phone, it was almost like he was scared of them. They didn't know what was going on with him, but the way he sounded, on top of all the restrictions about what they couldn't talk about, made them nervous.

Part of them wanted to believe that is was just because he was tired of talking about medical stuff, but they all knew it most likely wasn't the case. They might not have known a whole lot about demigod physiology, but they knew enough to be sure that if it had taken Nico three months to recover, then it was bad.

I mean... he died. That was bad... obviously... but three months was a long time in demigod terms. Tim had estimated that demigods healed up to 4 times faster than the average human and that was without godly food. Three months of recovery was like a whole year of recovery for humans. Even if you took away the month that Nico was in a coma, that's still two months which meant it was equivalent to eight months of recovery.

Summary: it was bad.

The manor had felt weird without Nico there. It was like when he had disappeared after Bruce asked to adopt him all over again, except much worse. Jason had thrown himself into the Outlaws, filling his days with missions. He'd spent more nights in his safe houses than he did in the manor. Damian had done the same with the Titans and Super Sons. The only reason that he still went to school without much complaint was that Jon had transferred to GA. Dick was trying to keep them all together, but even he was being hit hard by Nico's absence. He was spending more and more hours on patrol each night, but avoiding the mountain whenever he could.

Tim had originally tried to throw himself into his work: spending extra hours on his cases, reopening old investigations that had gone cold, and putting in as many training hours as he could. He wanted to go on missions, but, after the fight in Rural Markovia against what they had been calling the Rouge Regime, missions were rare and far between. With Bruce as the one in charge of assignments, they were barely getting anything. Every mission was done by League members unless it absolutely couldn't be done by an official member and even then, they were mostly given to the senior members sans Dick.

It also didn't help that everyone was looking at him like they were waiting for him to break. It was no longer a secret that Nico was Ghost King and with so many League and Team members with super hearing, it wasn't a secret how bad Nico's condition was when Will and Percy shadow traveled away with him. Bruce had told them that he was alive, but that was all he had said. Tim could feel their eyes on him, itching to know how Nico was doing, but too scared to ask. They had all lost too many people in the past and the fear of loosing another one weighed on them.

He couldn't even throw himself into his school work because the stares followed him there as well. Nico only went to school one day a week, but after he missed the first two weeks, people began to ask. Officially, Nico was in California with his biological sister after they had experienced a death in the family. It had worked well enough at first, but the media had begun to get restless and it was only a matter of time before they began speculating about what had really happened.