#but Tim ���commit to the bit” Drake Would NEVER

[stickyvoidpaper]

hc that Tim has a false sleep disorder diagnosis from when he was younger because he refused to tell his parents he was awake for most of the night.

[deadsetobsessions]

What’s in a cape, but the hopes and dreams of the one who bears it?

What’s in a cape, but shelter and warmth for those that receive its protection?

What’s in a hero suit, but a person that’s determined to die in it?

——

Long before Danny Phantom died in his hazmat suit, Bruce Wayne donned his cowl to dive between Gotham and the bullets with faces engraved on them. His cape began to signify fear, for those that harmed Gotham knowingly. But for the rest, it became a sign of protection, of promised vengeance against the crime committed.

And for a select few, the cape was a shelter during cold and rainy patrols. For Tim Drake, the third Robin, it was a warmth he’d never experience past those moments.

When Danny Fenton became Danny Phantom, he’d had wanted to have a cape like the crusader.

Danny wasn’t sure if he wanted to shelter or be sheltered.

But eventually, as things escalated and Danny found himself with less time for normal, personal things, that wish shuddered to an ember. After all, Danny had learned that he doesn’t get the luxury of protection. Not anymore. Which meant he had to be the one doing the protecting. A thousand miles away, as Danny came to terms with it on a clear Amity night, Robin was huddled beneath Batman’s cape to shelter from the pelting rain that came often with Gotham’s gloom.

When Danny got pulled along, invisible and attached to Robin’s side as the vigilante got thrown into a prison, he witnessed Robin talk to his evil older Batman self.

He’s visible again before he knew it, startling the two versions of Robins. Ice slammed into the Robin that became Batman as memories rung through Danny’s head. Where Robin was, stood himself. Where the Evil Robin Batman laid on the floor, covered in glowing ice, was Dan.

Danny died, and became a hero. He just had the unfortunate luck to live to see himself become the villain.

He would never allow Robin to go through it alone, not when Danny had his family and friends to fall back on. Robin, in this cage, ripped away from his team and in the midst of an argument with Batman, was painfully so.

“I’m Phantom.” Danny introduced himself. “Looked like you were in a bit of a spot. I’m sorry for butting in, if you wanted to take care of him yourself.”

“Robin.” Robin was wary. That’s okay. “How are you here?”

“That one’s on you, actually.” Danny glanced around. “Let’s get out of here before edgy future you wakes up. The ice won’t melt, and it’ll be hard to break, but I honestly don’t want to stick around for him to wake up.”

“Can you move him?” Robin eyed their cell contemplatively.

“Sure.”

——

“That seemed personal, earlier.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. Had the displeasure of meeting an alternate evil version of myself that lost everyone I loved. Kind of hit a sore spot there.”

“…right.”

“No worries, you’re good. My friends and family promised to stay away from explosive sauce.”

“That’s good. So… where do you live?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy?” Danny somersaulted in space next to Robin’s jerryrigged space ship. “Anyways, we’re friends now, so I’ll make sure you don’t live to see yourself become a villain.”

“See, that sounded like a threat.”

“It’s not! I don’t kill! And besides, if you were dead, you’d probably be a ghost, and you’d kick my ass for killing you!”

“Are you implying you’re dead?”

“Not an implication. I’m dead. Kind of. Half. I’m still breathing even if I kind of don’t need to. So, where are your friends?”

Danny will be damned before he let his new friends die in their suits, even if they make the job incredibly hard for him. After all, there’s only room for one dead hero on the team, and that’s him.

[bluejaysandblackbats]

Keepsafes

Fandom: Batman, DC Comics

Summary: AU where Martha and Thomas survive, and they adopt the batkids.

Chapters: 38/?

Characters: Bruce Wayne, Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Harvey Dent, Dick Grayson, Cassandra Cain, David Cain, Talia al Ghul, Damian Wayne, Jason Todd, Tim Drake

Relationships: Thomas Wayne/Martha Wayne/Alfred Pennyworth, BruHarvey, BruTalia

Additional Tags: Canon Divergent AU, Hurt/Comfort, Bruce Wayne is Not Batman, Angst, Alfred Pennyworth Knows All, Bruce Wayne Only Has One Child, Bruce Wayne is Not An Only Child, Bi Bruce Wayne

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Nameless

Dick slumped over in the backseat while Thomas drove and Bruce fiddled with the radio. “I forgot to ask. How was your OB-GYN rotation?” Thomas asked. 

Bruce rubbed his palms against his eyes. “I cried in the supply closet almost every day,” Bruce replied. 

Thomas nodded and reached over to pinch Bruce’s cheek. “I had a hard time with that, too. It’s the ultrasounds, huh?” Thomas questioned. 

“Yeah… It got me thinking. Are you ever disappointed in me because I might not ever give you grandkids?” Bruce questioned. 

“Why would I be disappointed in you for something so trivial? It’s more impressive to me that I had a hand in raising someone who became such a thoughtful and unique individual. You are enough. It doesn’t matter if you have kids or not. It doesn’t matter, Bruce. I promise there is no pressure for you ever to have children. That’s a lifelong commitment, and I don’t think you should bring a child into the world to please anyone,” Thomas answered seriously, “You and Dick and Harvey are my world.”

Bruce looked out the window, watching as the sun rose. “I don’t wanna be an OB, Dad,” Bruce whispered. 

“That’s alright. I wasn’t hoping for it, Brucie,” Thomas reassured him, “Every rotation affects everyone differently. I had a friend that used to get the shakes during the overnights in pediatrics because it reminded him of the time he spent visiting his older brother.” 

The two of them sighed and stared straight ahead. “Martha threw up on me when she went into labor. I remember it vividly because we were sleeping downstairs at the time. She walked into my office to ask me if I was hungry, and her water broke. Your birth was an extremely dramatic experience from start to finish… But uh… I got up from my desk and she threw up all over me,” Thomas laughed. 

“Contractions?” Bruce asked.

“No. She said her water breaking felt yucky ,” Thomas replied. 

Bruce chuckled. “That sounds like Mom. Is that why she never had any others?” Bruce questioned.

“It wasn’t for lack of trying, Brucie,” Thomas answered as his smile faded. 

**

Martha pulled Thomas aside and pleaded with him. “Thomas, I know we’ve never had a little girl before, and I know it won’t be easy, but—.”

“Martha—.”

“I don’t think she’s deaf, but Alfred and I have tried to ask her name in every language we know. Nothing. There’s nothing. I don’t think she understands language at all. She’s a little girl. Thomas, she saved my—.”

“Martha—.”

Martha picked the nameless girl up and she wrapped her arms around Martha’s neck. “And Thomas, she saved my life the other day… And I—. I think—.” 

“Martha, I need you to breathe for a second,” Thomas whispered, “What’s her name?” 

Martha awkwardly smiled. “Martha? Alfred?” Thomas questioned. 

Bruce looked at Alfred and cocked his head before pulling Alfred aside. “What’s wrong? What happened?” Bruce asked. Alfred embraced Bruce without uttering a word. “What’s Mom talking about?” 

“I’m alright… Perhaps I’m a bit peaked but otherwise I’m fine, Master Bruce,” Alfred lied. 

Bruce wrapped his arms around Alfred tightly. “I love you… And I’m glad you’re home,” Bruce whispered. Alfred smiled as he took in Bruce’s gentle scent. Bruce always smelled so clean. Fresh and crisp, memorably so, like clean linen and green tea. 

“I love you too, Master Bruce…” Alfred pulled away and looked Bruce in the eye. “You’re shaking.”

Bruce smiled with tears in his eyes. Something felt wrong, but he couldn’t get an answer out of Alfred. In the pit of his stomach, he felt something resurface in him. Years worth of dormant anxieties rising up like bile. “I’m just tired… Just tired,” Bruce sniffed. But he wasn’t the only one feeling upset about the strange goings on.

Dick hugged himself until Alfred noticed him and ran to embrace him. It caught Dick off guard, but he melted into it. “I missed you so much,” Dick whispered. 

“I always miss your company, Master Dick,” Alfred smiled.

**

Dick followed Bruce to the home gym and quietly did his morning drills. “Something’s strange,” Bruce announced. Dick stopped and stared into space at the parallel bars. 

“They’re gonna forget about me,” Dick mumbled.

“They’re scouting you for the Olympics… Dick, you’re a star in this family. No one’s gonna forget you. You’re my baby brother—.”

“But now they’ll have a girl… And Mom’s crazy about her. I just started calling them Mom and Dad, Bruce—.” Dick’s phone rang, and Bruce motioned for him to answer. Dick answered and put the phone on speaker. “Hey…” 

“Dick, sweetie, where are you?” Martha asked.

“I’m in the gym with Bruce,” Dick answered. 

“Can I talk to you in the living room in a minute? It’s important,” Martha whispered. Dick looked at Bruce. 

“I’m sending him over right now, Mom,” Bruce replied. Dick frowned at him. “He’s going. Right, Dick? ” Bruce hugged him and sent him away. 

Dick sighed as he kept Martha on the phone. “Dick, I failed to realize something important this morning. I forgot to give you your gift. I got you something while we were in Dakota City, and I know green is a big nono in the circus but this is just for gymnastics,” Martha replied, “I was thinking about that story you told me about your mother, and I—. There was this ballet and gymnastics store, and I saw the cutest little—. Oh, Dick, you’ve just gotta see it.”

“You got me something? You didn’t have to get me anything, Mom—.”

“Nonsense. You’re my baby boy. I couldn’t come home for you without a gift. I got something for Bruce, too, but he’s preoccupied. I can tell,” Martha replied. 

Dick entered through the foyer and took off his shoes before meeting Martha in the living room and hanging up his phone. Martha smiled and gave him a gift box. He sat on the arm of the couch next to her and tore off the wrapping paper before removing a yellow and green gymnastics singlet and a color block sweatshirt. It was beige with a round burgundy collar and cuffs and little yellow letters for the logo. “Alfred helped me stitch on the letters on the back. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t—.”

Dick choked back tears as he read the big letters on the back. “Robin,” Dick whispered. 

“If it’s not okay for me to call you that—. Is it too—?” 

“You can call me Robin. I love it, Mom,” Dick whispered as he embraced her. 

**

The little girl followed Alfred to the gym, holding a glass of juice in one hand and his arm in the other. She had one of Martha’s college sweatshirts on as pajamas. Alfred stopped by the door and crouched beside her, taking a single finger to tap her nose. “How I wonder what you are,” Alfred whispered in a little sing-song voice. Her lips twitched into a little smile. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you, but I’m very grateful that we crossed paths.” 

He stood up straight and escorted her to the gym where Bruce worked on the heavy bag. She set her juice on the ground and tugged the bottom of Bruce’s shirt. Bruce pointed to the heavy bag, and she pointed to him and held her fists up. Bruce threw a playful punch and she blocked it before sending a punch his way. He caught her fist, smiling at the shock of the force behind her tiny fist. Bruce got low and tried to see if she could hold her own as well as Alfred said. 

“Master Bruce!” Alfred exclaimed.

“It’s alright. I won’t hurt her,” Bruce reassured him. 

Bruce tried to knock her off balance and after a few minutes of sparring with him, the nameless girl knocked him on his back with such force that it knocked the wind out of him. She curled up by his side on the floor, and he smiled once he could breathe again. He turned toward her, and she stood up and helped him up. “Well, I think I found out what language she speaks,” Bruce half-joked as he squared up.

[zahri-melitor]

So I've read the opening story of Tim Drake: Robin.

The opening issue is solid, highlighting a lot of Meghan Fitzmartin's skills as a writer. She picked up threads neatly from her earlier stories, showed her hand to the audience, and did do a fair amount of subtle character work. If I'd picked it up with no background knowledge of the fandom conversation about the title, I'd have been very excited for where it was going.

I liked the links back to how part of what prompted Tim to move out was Bruce being fussy over Tim having been shot in the throat in Batman #125. That felt realistic and a nice little link between titles.

As far as a story goes: I didn't mind it. Parts of it were very obvious, especially when you clued into the themes - if I'd actually been reading it as it came out and had a month between issues for things to soak in, I probably would have been tapping my toes over the reveal of who Moriarty was disguised as.

I would like to specifically dunk on both Meghan Fitzmartin and Moriarty for the detective novel writer selections, because...hmm. Kinda misogynistic there. Fitzmartin uses 6 writers for this, and 6 specific stories/franchises:-

Edgar Allen Poe – Murders in the Rue Morgue

Mark Twain – The Stolen White Elephant

Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes

Raymond Chandler - Goldfish

James Gelsey – Scooby Doo

Wilkie Collins – The Moonstone

What do you notice about this list, that I immediately noticed? They're all men. Who is an immediate name that comes to mind, who even had public domain stories as of 2022, who probably should be on a list like that and who also has incredible influence over the direction of the genre? Oh, I don't know, maybe Agatha Christie? (Also Dorothy L. Sayers is also right there and available, but skipping Christie?)

And once she'd built up this "it's all the detective stories" premise, Fitzmartin then went for a book code (cool!) from non-existent books (not cool). If you've just spent all this time glorying in how this is all related to Specific Classic Detective Stories, why not...use a real book code and refer to their actual stories? You've already done it for the plots! Commit to the bit!

Also I spent a good chunk of issue #4 staring at the page going "Carol Donovan? You mean Deb Donovan's judge daughter who recently appeared in Mariko Tamaki's 'Tec run? Tim, how are you missing something this straightforward? Also she's dead?" and then it never came to anything. Maybe do a quick check if anyone else has been using the name you just invented for the story.

"I even tried making a new costume for myself. It doesn't fit." - I did find it interesting that Fitzmartin was once again playing with the "is it time to move on" themes for Tim that were popping up around here in various conversations. Especially given she had Tim and Dick relitigate their conversation from Urban Legends #10 and similar themes in DC:YJ. It does suggest to me that she was working her way around to getting Tim into a new identity, but cancellation has once again left that in the 'not happening' basket.

In terms of the art: Riley Rossmo was the wrong pick for the title, but I do see the thought process that led into him getting the nod for the opening story, given the whole claymation villain set. It was very 2D animation style. I don't mind Rossmo (and interestingly he's developing a whole line up of detective stories he's done art for, given he's also had a Martian Manhunter book and got Wesley Dodds, he did one of the Batman/The Shadow crossovers...) but his highly malleable art style loses a lot of background detail or makes what is there harder to parse.

I did very much appreciate the way Rossmo drew Tim's detective work, though. I liked the technique for highlighting details and clues, and it actually very much reminded me of how some computer games present clues (including how it's done in Gotham Knights, in fact).

I know everyone has said this, but Bernard needs to develop a personality AND to commit to whether or not he knows Tim is Robin. Because sort of hinting that he knows, while Tim worries about hiding things from him, but not actually confirming either way is only really acceptable if you actually do build up to a big reveal moment where the whole drama has been paid off.

I did appreciate that MegFitz had clearly taken feedback and returned one of Bernard's two pre-existing personality traits (conspiracy theorist who thinks the Bats are urban legend cryptids), because one of the weaknesses of using Bernard, a side character with 6 preboot appearances, is that at lot of his existing personality was sketched in. He was a conspiracy theorist, and he desperately wanted to be popular but wasn't, so he presented himself as having a Cool Guy's Personality (see: 'your step-mom is hot'). Now, Meghan Fitzmartin wants us to read into that second trait as a facade that Bernard was putting up to deal with the fact he was gay and hiding it, probably even from himself, at the time. Which, fine, it's a perfectly reasonable reading of Bernard (and to her credit, MegFitz has Bernard spell it out a little on page in TD:R), but the problem is...you've just lost one of the two identifiable traits of 'Bernard' and it hasn't been replaced with anything else. And while 2004 in comics was still trying to hold onto the Urban Legends reading for the Bats to an extent (though it was failing), 2022 comics has so long since abandoned it that Bernard having kooky theories about Batman's connection to Mothman or whatever is very...why?

And because both of these pre-existing personality traits are under strain from the context, it really is sort of necessary to give Bernard something else about him for people to latch onto for his personality. And it doesn't really seem to be there yet (as of #6). It's the same complaint that people have about Jon/Jay and a whole host of other partners for recently out superheros: they're generically pleasant, supportive and bland, with about the depth of a mirror. Give me some of the toxic drama the 30 year old lesbians are allowed. Where is my breakup over custody fights with an ex and one of the two getting seduced by a vampire.

[iliadicjasontodd]

Hello! 👋 I just wanted to know what your Tim Drake WIP was about if you'd like to yap. You had some thoughts on his character in general and I'd be happy to hear them! What are the issues in canon and what nuances you'd like other people to consider. Thank you!

Hi!! I've been thinking about this ask for days I'm thrilled with it tbh!!

So, from my notes on the WIP, tentatively entitled too much will cause damage:

keep the basis. the wealth, the parents, the genius intellect and the thrusting himself into the role of robin. he thinks little of it. jason in his memory is an unobtrusive, quiet, and mostly unremarkable- if disruptive due to others’ reactions to his class and race- when they crossed into each others’ vicinity in high society and in school, and jason served his purpose until he’d clearly fumbled and outlived it. because robin is a job and a role and tim simply believes he can fill it best. Bruce never entirely forgives this trespass and it weighs over their relationship and, assuming steph and cass and damian still come in in this verse, does colour his ability to trust that jason’s worth is not somehow being degraded by their presence and his ability to trust that he himself does not actually view children as somehow fulfilling a utilitarian role. anyway, tim is driven by a belief in his own self-worth and invulnerability and a fundamental desire to exercise that self-worth in order to mold what he can of the time he lives in in his own image; he has a gd complex, in other words. he wants to be robin because he desires more strength- he desires to be chosen (and so he will never truly be satisfied with having taken the role himself, even if he does get satisfaction from taking and winning things). i enjoy the idea of this cold and irritating and mostly uncompassionate child putting himself in a position that eventually does push him to gain a desire for selflessness, and a desire to not be the best but to be good, even though it never comes naturally to him. he learns from bruce, he learns from dick, and he learns from jason, who, while not literally, does haunt him throughout his robin run as tim learns about him in bits and pieces, at first on accident, and later on purpose. i would keep his mission to find bruce and his altercation with the league of assassins but just have him be absolutely bodied. just fucking destroyed, trying to fix something he doesn’t fix anyway: bruce comes back on his own, and in the course of this he learns the real manner of jason’s death, learns the fact that jason did not die from mistakes tim is simply better than him for not making, and when steph “dies” in part due to bruce and tim’s treatment of her, most of his beliefs about himself crumble under the weight of all of this, and he is forced to build himself back up, but he is never going to be the naturally nice, hopeful, altruistic Robin through his nature. so he puts in the effort to discard as much of himself to fit the role he so naïvely took, believing it was suited for him, that it was his when it wasn’t, but he made a commitment. basically, i want him to be a tragic figure. he will lose little externally- his parents won’t die, he gets the job of his dreams, friends and status- but internally he won’t be at all unscathed or unchanged. i want him striving for this very imperfect goodness, faltering, and then trying again anyway. i want a statement in inherited wealth and main character syndrome, and on the choice to be compassionate and selfless when that does not come easily and must be chosen again and again. i want him cold and egocentric and entitled enough that when he feels guilt, true guilt, it’s nearly, nearly a novel feeling, and it changes him. I want him to have come from a place of devaluing and stepping over the still-warm corpse of a dead boy and i want that to haunt his entire narrative inescapably like an original sin.

Very long. But basically the idea behind this was, for me, turning Tim into something that could be, for me, and for many of the people I know who take issue with him as he is, satisfactory. The goal is to span his Robin days through Jason's revival and Bruce's 'death'. I'm aware he will not fully or even very much resemble the canon Tim Drake because the idea is to take the groundwork and adjust. Because, tbh, the groundwork lain is something that I could find really interesting, but the way he is written and his existence in and of itself is something I find difficult to swallow.

under the cut because I got caught up in the joy of talking shit about Tim Drake:

You asked about my issues with Tim in canon and I have panels from his Robin run that I criticised him for in DMs and other panels saved here and there that I might reblog this and add later but it's almost 2 am now and I have class in like 8 hours, so for now we'll take my word. Basically, Tim was created to be the quintessential perfect unproblematic Robin after Jason was killed basically for-- existing while poor. For having poor parents, for coming from a poor area of Gotham, for having been homeless, for being traumatised by any of this. But not Tim, no. Tim can be equal to Bruce, of course, in a way Jason never could! Tim is everything Robin should be- he is wealthy, and he is white, and he has normal high school problems. Never mind that he cannot pack his own bag, that he has beef with an eleven year old, that he will eventually steal Jason's mantle- not Robin, but Red Robin. He's the best Robin! Tim is a genius and he is a disciplined hero and he goes to beat up Asian people in Paris.

I will admit, a lot of my annoyance with tim stems from his fanon interpretation, which betrays a lot of misogyny and classism, ableism and racism in the fandom, which obviously shouldn't be a surprise. But yeah, in short- in fanon, he often replaces Barbara as a coder or technological genius or genius point blank, often replaces Jason as having experienced homelessness, food insecurity, and even death or torture at the Joker's hands; the amount of fanfiction I have read in which some form of the phrase "Jason suffered, but Tim had it so much worse," has been unironically uttered- often by Jason himself!-in some fucked up trauma olympics that everyone will bend over backwards to have their favourite rich boy win somehow even though no one else was really trying to play is ludicrous. In these cases, Barbara's own Joker-related trauma is hardly ever even brought up. In every case, Jason must repent endlessly for the unforgivable sin- not of murder and desecration and attempted patricide or any of that, no, but of kind of beating up his sort-of brother that's like a year and a half younger than him at most. Tim was neglected, no one loved him, he is neurodivergent and a minor. He is a little helpless child with glass bones and paper skin.

Basically, I think Tim is a deeply flawed character who actually starts from a point in the narrative rich in potential: Bruce has just lost his son, Gotham is going darker by the issue, and the Batman symbol is more haunted than ever, and Robin is never meant to fly again- after all, it's difficult to use wings six feet under. Tim is positioned as different from Jason in every way, which canon used to turn him into some prejudiced cardboard cutout teenaged hero but could be used to make him effectively an extremely particular boy who, for all intents and purposes, is still rather singular to this moment, and could be used to examine being Robin and growing up through an entirely novel (to Batman, at this time) angle. Blood had to be spilled to make space for Tim in the story; I just want to see what happens if I take that and run with it.

[beingsuneone]

Part Two!!

Memories… or Delusions? PART TWO!!

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

SYNOPSIS: You know Jason is alive know, you aren’t sure how just yet and you aren’t how exactly you’re going to keep his cover and also still see him regularly. There’s still too many complications to deal with.

FANDOM: DC

PAIRING(S): Jason Todd x fem!reader

RATING: G

MENTIONED: Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, Alfred Pennyworth, Barbara Gordon, Joker, Ra’s Al Ghul

GENRE/AU: Uhhh a little bit of fluff I guess. It’s pretty subtle on the romance, mostly plot following I guess. Nothing overly angsty. Mentions of being committed to Arkham (just a joking conversation) and Jason is trying it get over the Lazarus pit.

WORD COUNT: 4.4K

WARNINGS: swearing, slightly graphic descriptions of Jason’s murder from him. Not proof read

A/N: jjjajsjakkskskshdhshjsjsis brain

DEDICATIONS: my dumb hyperfixating brain for coming up with this concept at least three years ago. And putting it into words only recently.

CREDITS:

“Why are you being so dodgy lately?” Dick asks skeptically, eyeing you up.

You shrug, trying to play it cool. Jason doesn’t want them to know yet so they won’t. “What do you mean?”

He narrows his eyes at you. “Last week you were losing your mind and now you’re just… fine.”

You take a deep breath in and sigh. “I guess I realized that I was being delusional. I was just missing Jason.” Dick is about to say something else but you wave him off. “I have to go to meet my friend, so I’m heading out.”

Your ‘friend’ was Jason.

You stop to look at yourself in the mirror by the door, toying with your hair and smoothing out wrinkles on your clothes.

Somewhere behind you, Dick mutters: “See, Bruce, she’s being Dodgy.” And Bruce hums in agreement.

You’re apparently not as convincing as you’d like to be.

…..

“How do you plan on breaking the new to Bruce?” You ask, fidgeting with your fingers while he goes through some stuff on his computer. He shrugs in response. You continue. “Or is it that you don’t want to tell him at all?”

Jason's eye twitches subtly, something that you’re surprised you catch. He shakes his head. “I don’t know, Y/n.” He pauses, chuckling dryly. “It’s not like he’d care much to know.”

You recoil. Is that really how Jason thinks Bruce feels about him?

All you can recall is Bruce kneeling in front of his grave, sobbing like you’d never seen an adult sob; or the way he would walk into Jason’s room and stand in the doorway with a forlorn look mocking his features.

You remember the way he’d stare for several minutes before sighing deeply and walking away; he’d usually proceed to lock himself in the batcave and would snap when anyone disturbed him.

“Jason…” you say reluctantly. “You don’t think that Bruce would care if you were alive?” Jason remains silent, so you continue, missing the way his fists clench. “Bruce was… heartbroken for months after your death— we all were.”

Jason stands abruptly. “And yet, none of you were willing to kill the man who brutally murdered me!” He snaps, his voice raised. You flinch a little but try to retain composure; bite your tongue when you have the urge to remind him about your goals when he first died. He continues with a strange expression on his face. “Do you know what it was like to feel a crowbar splitting my skull open while I was still alive?”

The thought makes you sick. Makes you so utterly devastated for what he’s been through. “No, Jason, I—”

He cuts you off by holding his hand up. “If Bruce was ever going to kill someone, it should’ve been Joker; and if he’d really loved me so much it should have been for me.” His tone is much calmer but there is still a chilling effect in his voice that makes your spine straighten.

The look behind his eyes is flurried with an internal battle you can almost see. “Jason, I shouldn’t have—”

“Just go.” He says, finally sitting back. He doesn’t bother looking up at you.

“What?” You stammer, your eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

“Just get out, Y/n.” He snaps once more and that’s all it takes for you to turn on your heels and walk out the door.

…..

You’d been moody and upset for the past three days— you knew you were. You were upset at Jason, upset that he had so much sway or your emotion, and even upset at yourself for bringing something up that obviously triggered him in some way.

Jason was complexities locked inside other complexities, and you were beginning to learn that; what was once simple and easy with him, was now difficult and anxiety-inducing:

You weren’t sure where you laid in his eyes now.

Were you still the same teenage girl in his mind, or, were you the grown version of the girl he liked that had betrayed him.

Did he see you the same way he saw Bruce and Dick? Or even Tim? Was he just holding on the bond you used to have despite his bitter feelings for you now?

And, what made him this way? You know he must have gone through a devastating trauma, but, how far did that really go?

What were the details that Bruce never told you, and just how gruesome were they for him to lock the knowledge away and not let anyone else know the details.

He told everyone that Jason had died, and he had died by the Joker’s hands; when you or Dick had pressed for more information, Bruce had simply told you it was ‘Brutal’ and ‘Something you should never have to know’

But Jason's little outburst must’ve only told the smallest of details about his horrible, horrible death. If that was just the beginning, you couldn’t even imagine the depths of Joker’s cruelty.

You’re brain won’t stop trying though, even as you sit at the kitchen’s bar with a soggy bowl of cereal. You’ve been sitting there for an hour, pushing the stuff around in the bowl but you haven’t actually taken a bite.

“I think we need to send you to Arkham.” Tim says from the other side of the island, breaking you from your Jason-induced trance. You know he’s joking, but you’re pretty Bruce is genuinely considering committing you for your behavior these past few weeks.

You’re more hot and cold than faulty thermostat. Hysterical, and then Happy, and then violently depressed and introspective.

“I do not need to be locked up with a bunch of criminals, Tim. Rehabilitation is clearly not actually happening at Arkham.” You say back, appreciating his giving you something to banter about.

He’s the only one that didn’t know Jason, and that makes him refreshing to be around.

“They aren’t stupid, Y/n.” Tim says, completely unrelated to your response. “Bruce knows you’re still losing it over Jason, you can act fine all you want but Red Hood clearly got into your head.”

You shrug. “If anyone knew him as intimately as I do— uh, did, they’d lose their mind too.” Your eyes drop to the bowl in front of you and scrunch your nose in disgust. You push it away from yourself.

Gross.

Tim shrugs back, because, what else can he really respond with? “I didn’t know him at all.” He pauses, looking out the kitchen's open door. “Wouldn't Bruce have known him as well as you did?”

You shake your head. “No, Tim, me and Jason were… different, I guess. I had a crush on him when we were teens.” You shift in your seat and instinctively reach for the pendant around your neck. “And Dick was doing his whole Titans thing at the time, so they weren’t as close.”

Your sadness subsides and that familiar warmth runs through you as you imagine yourself and Jason laying on the roof, reading your favorite scenes from the book and enjoying the cool summer air.

In the winter, you would go out with a few blankets and huddle extra close; eventually, when your hands would get to cold to read, it would end in the two of you huddling close for warmth (something that Jason had always produced a lot of) and staying there until Bruce would start calling for you.

Your lips twist into a soft smile.

Tim stares at you. “You need help.”

“Speak for yourself, Mr. Force Batman To Have Another Robin.”

….

A tapping at your bedroom window stirs you from the near-sleep state you had been in; your heart pounds as you shoot up and look towards the window. Your heart slows only a few beats per minute when you see a familiar red helmet through the window.

You stand up and unlock your window, letting Jason climb through one side of the double doors.

He sighs through his helmet as he goes to remove it; you hear the familiar series of click and whirs and then he places the helmet on a chair in your room.

“Nice Pajamas.” He says, in a playful sort of way. There’s a healthy dose of something else though, that you can’t quite place.

You look down at yourself. You’re wearing a very thin tank top and some comfy PJ shorts. Not exactly appropriate in front of other people.

“Uh, thanks?” You say as you grab a hoodie from beside your bed and throw it on.

Once you’ve covered up a bit more, you turn back to Jason. “Why are you here?”

He stares at you, his eyes traveling your body for a few moments before they meet yours. “I just wanted to apologize. For the other day.” He takes a step closer.

You cross your arms. “I want to know why.”

Jason cringes. “I snapped yesterday because I’m just not right in the head yet. I still lose control and say things I shouldn’t. My perception of things is so fucked up sometimes I can’t tell what’s real.”

You nod slowly. “But why, Jason? How are you alive, why is your brain messed up?”

He sighs deeply. “I did die.” He says simply, like that really explains anything. You wait for him continue. “I died, and Ra’s Al Ghul threw me in the Lazarus Pit because he owed a favour to Bruce.” The words are spoken so plainly but you understand the pain behind them. “I’m only alive because of a favour.” His tone is so downtrodden, devastated.

You’ve heard about the Lazarus Pit, how it could drive someone to madness— you guess that must’ve happened with Jason.

It was the theorized reason for Gotham’s problem, after all; or rather, theorized by Barbara Gorden.

You supposed that made sense. “My God, Jason, you’ve been through so much.”

Your heart aches for him, for all the things you should have prevented.

“I’m sorry, Y/n.”

“It’s okay.”

…..

The morning light shines brightly through your window, usually your curtains are drawn but there are quite a few unusual things about this morning.

First and most importantly, you have a suited up Jason, sleeping at your side; his arm is wrapped protectively around you.

He looks so beautiful when he’s sleeping; you’re not sure if he ever has restless sleep, but he seems so peaceful and at ease— relaxed, even. It’s nice to see his face unplagued by any of his troubles.

However, according to your clock, it’s almost the time when Alfred would come to wake you for breakfast, meaning Jason had to leave— and fast.

“Jason.” You say his name softly, nudging him awake. He stirs, and his eyes shoot open.

He looks panicked for a moment before your face processes in his mind, then he visibly calms down.

“I fell asleep.” He states, disentangling from you and laying into his back.

You hum, still looking at him. “Yes, you did.” The air is thick with some sort of easy tension, a fading smile, a far-off laugh— a general sense of mundanity that you want to keep forever. “But you have to leave now, if you don’t want anyone else to know your identity.”

“Right.” Jason gets up from the bed and stretches slowly, causing you to do the same.

He turns to grab his helmet— or rather, you see him stop, stare at it for a moment, and then spin back around.

Before you can process it, he’s caging you on your bed. Your eyes close as he closes the gap between the two of you, a swift movement that leaves you barely anytime to think.

When he pulls back, off the bed, and flashes you an easy smile, you think you very well might swoon like you were right out of a 60s television show.

Jason slips his helmet back on and closes it before unlatching the window and stepping out. “Bye, Y/n.”

“Bye.” You stare at the spot where he was standing for a while longer before laying back down in your bed.

…..

“Hey.” You say nonchalantly, coming up behind Bruce.

He’s working on the Batcomputer right now. “Hello.”

“What’cha Doing?” You scan the contents of the screen, and it just looks like feed from the Manor’s many cameras. You aren’t too worried about Jason being seen on them, because he always hacks the cameras and scrubs himself from the data.

“I’m just doing the weekly camera check, Y/n.” Bruce looks back at you momentarily, and then returns to the feeds.

You screw around behind him for a while before you hear a small hum. You look up at the camera, trying to see what has caught Bruce’s attention. The timestamp says it’s from a few nights ago.

You watch as he replays a specific moment.

He replays it a few more times before you finally see it. A familiar flash of red, and then a motorcycle driving away from the manor.

Worse, the flash of red comes from right outside your window.

Bruce enhances the footage and zooms in on what you’re sure is Jason.

“Red Hood was at the Manor three days ago.” He states, looking back at you. “He appears to be leaving your bedroom, did you know about this?”

You pause for a second but shake your head. “No, of course not, I was sleeping.” You pretend to shudder. “That’s creepy to think that he was in there while I was sleeping.”

Bruce eyes you suspiciously but doesn’t protest or question any further. “We’ll have to heighten security in your room. Red Hood obviously chose it for a reason.”

You freeze. “That’s not necessary, Bruce, he didn’t screw with anything, obviously.”

“Even if he isn’t intending to hurt any of us, Y/n, there are several very bad things that could happen as a result of his being able to get into our house. Not to mention, I’ve noticed several discrepancies in our camera feeds over the past month or so.” He gestures to another frame, showing what looks like normal footage, but it’s the same five minutes replaying, according to the timestamps. “If you watch carefully, every minute, on the dot, a bug flies in front of the camera. It’s the same bug and the same flight pattern. If that’s Red Hood’s patch job, he’s not very good at this.”

Your lips purse, and you chew on the inside of your cheek. “That is weird.” You can’t really say anything else without making yourself look suspicious. You’ll have to let Jason know before he thinks about coming around here again.

He goes back to the previous footage, of Jason at your door, and enhances it even more— your window is clear now, and the floor behind it. Bruce rewinds it to the moment that Jason reaches the window. He presses play again, and lets the video play slowly, analyzing Jason’s every movement.

You cringe when you see Jason knock on the window a few times, and you’re terrified for Bruce to see what you know is coming next.

“Bruce!” You blurt, just before you’re about to come into view. “Tim just texted me and said he needed you to come upstairs right now.”

Bruce turns to you, confused. “Did he say what about?”

You shake your head. “No, he just said it was urgent.”

Bruce nods and leaves you alone in the batcave. You have maybe ten minutes until he comes back, knowing that you lied.

You try to fiddle with footage and delete that part that incriminates you, but without Bruce’s password you can’t do that.

Fuck. You don’t know it.

You panic for a minute and then abandon your mission to delete the footage, instead you race upstairs and into your bedroom, throwing together a bag of clothes and other essentials, as well as some sentimental items.

You’re about to sneak out the window when you see the old worn book. You snatch it quickly, along with your phone and car keys.

Bruce’s voice comes from down the hallway, calling your name; it doesn’t matter, you don’t stop until you’re outside and in your car.

You know he’s watching as you speed off, tears welling as you disable the tracking devices in your phones and car. When Bruce finally watches that footage, he’s going to think you betrayed him and you’re going to lose the one place that you’d ever felt at home in.

You’ve never felt so low before.

…..

Tears fall pitifully from your cheeks; you really shouldn’t be this upset.

Jason watches uncomfortably from his chair in his office; you knew he never liked you crying, and he was never great at dealing with it.

All he ever needed to do was be there, though.

“Please stop crying.” He says gently, as he walks over to you. “What happened?”

You shrug, which makes no sense because you know exactly what happened. “I can’t go back to the manor.”

Jason scrunches in confusion and a hint of anger at the conclusions you know he’s jumping to. “What did he do?”

“Bruce didn’t do anything.” Wiping the tears from your eyes, you pull back from him. “He was going over security camera footage and found a camera you forgot to wipe… he hadn’t watched the full thing when I ran out of there but he’s watched it by now, I’m sure.”

“And that matters…why?” Jason obviously doesn’t understand what you’re implying.

You absentmindedly drum your fingers against your wrist. “I very clearly let you in the window in the footage. You didn’t break in, I let you in. Bruce knows that now too.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Jason looks around the office, like there’s something that would help on the walls. There isn’t. His eyes settle back into you, but you’re not looking at his face. “You can stay with me.”

He says it so easily, like it’s only natural— you suppose it is. Nothing had ever been more natural than being with him.

You also think you’d probably like that. “Do you live in this building or…?”

He laughs and then shakes his head. “No, I hijacked one of Bruce’s warehouses a long time ago and have been living there. We can go now, I’m done for today anyway.”

You step out into the hallway and he takes your hand in his; you think that he feels protective around his lackeys, because he doesn’t really like them. He would rather they all fell off the face of the earth, but he knows that won’t happen so he’d rather control where their product is being pushed.

Or that’s what he told you, anyways,

You go down a different set of corridors than you’re used to, and it leads to a garage.

The unsettlingly beautiful woman is standing at the door, she says nothing when Jason pushes the door open and leads you through.

It’s not her job to ask questions, you suppose.

“Do you want to take your car? You can follow me in mine so you know where we’re going?” He suggests, raising his eyebrows at you. “Or I can drive it over for you later and we can just use my car for now.”

“I don’t really feel like driving right now.”

He nods. “Okay.”

…..

“When you said warehouse, I was not expecting this.” You gape, looking around at his ‘apartment.’ “It looks more like a pent-house.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, well, that's kind of what it is.” Jason runs his finger along the surface of his counter. “I believe it was catalogued as a safe house and a warehouse.”

You shrug. “You wiped it from the system, so I wouldn’t know.”

There’s a sort of awkward reluctance dancing around the two of you, like you aren’t sure what to do with yourselves now that it’s just the two of you alone. You haven’t been truly alone with him in such a long time.

“I guess there’s not a whole lot to do here.” He starts again, looking around. “I’m not here much. I usually just end up passing out on the couch in my office.”

You laugh dryly and look around; the whole apartment looks clean and modernist— you personally can’t stand this type of decorating but you don’t think Jason cared much to change how the place had looked when he found it.

There’s a TV, which you’re pretty sure works but it’s gone unused. There is a short hallway with three doors down it right off the living area. It’s mostly open concept besides that small hallway. You lift your gaze upwards, following the tall in-wall bookshelves; you find that there’s a small loft above the two of you and a ladder that leads there.

“What’s up there?” You ask, walking over to the ladder.

Jason gestures up the ladder. “I’ll show you.”

The two do you climb the ladder and you pull yourself onto the loft, feeling a little unsteady.

You notice immediately that the roof looks a little strange just above the platform.

Jason clears his throat and walks over to one of the walls. He hovers in front of a small silver panel. “You know, there’s a reason I chose this one.” He presses a button on the panel while he looks over at you.

A few creaks sound and then some loud mechanical noises sound before the roof panels recede to reveal the setting sun. The sunset is so beautifully visible from the sunroof.

“Jason.” You breath, dumbfounded.

He picks a book off of the floor of the loft. “I used to try to recreate our moments on the roof, but it just wasn’t the same without you.” He flips the book a few times in hands. “And this wasn’t quite right either.”

“I couldn’t handle the rooftop without you.” You whisper, not sure if he even hears you; you try to speak a little louder. “The first time you showed up at the house was the first time I had done it in years.”

“Huh.” Jason responds, sounding nonchalant but you know it means something to him.

“Wait here.” You rush back down the ladder and grab your book, and then head back up. Jason stares at it for a while. You hold it up, and pass it to him. “For Old Times Sake?”

…..

You had sat there with him for hours that day, you watched as the day melted into night and felt as you slowly fell asleep. You and Jason were tangled together, cuddled so close it was like you had never really been apart in the first place.

At some point, you’re drifting in and out of consciousness. Your hands twitch gently and you adjust yourself a bit but you don’t open your eyes.

You’re pretty sureJason still thinks you're asleep because he presses a kiss to the top of your head and then quietly speaks. “I want to do this with you for the rest of our lives.” He pauses and sighs a loaded sigh. “Not just for Old Times Sake.”

You decide it’s probably better to just try to fall back asleep, despite the way your stomach churns. You wanted to respond, and tell him that you wanted to fall asleep like this every night.

Tell him that you wanted to spend every day with him too.

…..

“I just want to know where she is, Red Hood.” Bruce’s voice comes through a little speaker in Jason’s office— it’s a line that Jason had hacked into and clearly Bruce knew that.

Jason scowls and you can’t help but think about Bruce when he does.

When nobody responds to him, Bruce continues. “I want to talk to her.”

You gnaw your lips, wanting to pick it up and say you’ll talk to him but dreading confirming his suspicions.

Jason slips his helmet on and picks up the microphone. He presses the button and says, cooly, “Where would you want me to bring her, Batman?”

You can hear Bruce’s sigh of relief. “The abandoned warehouse near Arkham. You know which one I mean.”

Jason hums. “The one that Joker blew up last month.”

Bruce confirms and then Jason looks at me. “Anything you want to say?”

You shake your head, and Jason picks up the mic again. “Give us a time and we’ll be there.”

And just like that, you were going to see Bruce again.

Great.

…..

“I just don’t understand, Y/n.” Bruce says immediately when he lays eyes on you, despite the fact that he wraps you in a tight hug. “Why would you work with him?”

You pull back and look back to Jason, who’s all suited up, of course. “I—” you have no idea what to say in your defense. “I wasn’t working with him, Bruce.”

Bruce gives you a sort of ��disappointed dad’ look. “I saw the footage, I know that you let him into the manor.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“So you were working with him.”

“No! It’s not like that!”

You’re starting to get irritated because you know Bruce has absolutely no reason to believe you.

“First, you lied about Tim needing me, and then you tried to delete the footage and then I saw you wildly speeding away from the manor. Do you understand how suspicious that looks? Obviously, you are working with him, Y/n. You don’t have to lie.” Bruce sounds sure of himself. It makes you want to tear your hair out.

“Fine. I was working with him, since you’re so sure.”

Bruce looks between you and Jason, and you can see realization dawn on his face. “Unless… don’t tell me you fell for him just because he reminds you of— Y/n, please tell me I'm wrong.”

Jason steps in this time. “Don’t worry, you’re wrong. Just not in the way you think you are.” Your head snaps back to look at him as clicks his helmet open and pulls it off.

This was the moment. He was finally showing Bruce.

You look frantically between the two of them, trying to decipher the moment.

Bruce stands frozen for a good long while, just staring at Jason’s face before he suddenly locks his arms around Jason's shoulder/neck and hugs him tighter than you’d ever seen Bruce hug anybody.

Jason looks thoroughly disturbed and taken aback. This wasn’t the reaction he was expecting, and honestly, it wasn’t what you were expecting either.

“I didn’t fall for him because he reminds me of Jason.” You say quietly. “I fell for him because he is Jason.”

Bruce pulls back and nods slowly before turning back to Jason. “I’m so sorry, Jason.”

All content belongs to @beingsuneone , do not repost, copy or post on other platforms without my permission.

[peppermintmagicianlynn]

TimBer Week 2024: Lazy Days

TimBer Week 2024 Day #4: Lazy Days

Bernard was never one for ‘cozy’ video games, but he’d gotten as a birthday present from his little cousin so he was making an effort to get into it. At the very least it was a cooking game and it flet appropriate for how his day had turned around.

At midmorning, Bernard had been up in his room, bored put of his gourd, when he’d gotten a text from Tim Drake. His classmate had asked about his plans for the day and given they were in a mutual state of ennui, they decided it would be more profitable to hang out. Bernard invited the other over to his house with a warning that he had better commit to a quiet day of nothing at all productive. Drake agreed and rolled up before noon.

What Bernard had not warned him of was that they wouldn’t be lazing around inside of the Dowd house. Instead, they would be in the camping tent Bernard has set up in the backyard which had also been a gift from his extended family. He’d practically been living out there and was excited to show it off to someone who could appreciate his efforts to make a comfy spot.

Drake had given him an appropriate amount of praise and after a few minutes to restock the space for the extra company, they’d both settled into their chosen activities. With the game volume turned off, Bernard was content by the sounds of clicking buttons, Drake’s occasional page flipping, and the whir of the portable heater that tirelessly defended them from hypothermia.

“How can you even see what you’re reading?” Bernard asked when he noticed how far Drake was from the heater. He was tucked so far into the beanbag chair that none of the red-hot coil’s light should have reached the pages of his book.

“It’s in braille,” was his response. “I’m teaching myself to read it, trial-by-fire.”

Which seemed sort of random and yet so very Tim Drake, just quietly picking up a new skill set like it was no big deal.

“Kudos to you, then.” Bernard went back to his game, stirring the pot of stew and tossing in another clove of garlic even though it made the overseeing chef yell about ‘waste’. It needed more garlic, okay?

The wind picked up outside, rattling the tent but not enough to upset anything on the inside. Bernard had been sure to secure the extension cord outside, so as long as it was still powering their heater, they were still safe to stay put. It was like living in a micro-world, away from the rest of the human population and free from everything about it. Just the two of them.

Bernard felt a bit of pride when the food critic showed him his final score – ten out of ten! - and decided that was enough for now. He set the system aside, stretched out his hunched back, and turned his attention to the other occupant of his micro-world.

Drake had his eye closed, giving all his focus to the ridged pages under his hands and whatever information he was getting from them. He was so immersed in his task, Bernard almost felt bad by his own compulsion to bring the boy back into the realm where they were still aware of each other’s presence.

Almost. “What are your reading?”

“The Odyssey. We analyzed it to death at my last school, so i know it by heart. I figured if I flubbed it trying to decipher the braille, I’d still understand most of what was going on and just guess my way through.”

“How much of it are you actually ‘reading’, then?”

“About 70%.”

“That’s pretty impressive. By our school’s standards, that’s practically a B+.”

Drake smirked. “Thank God for that.” Still with his eyes closed, he reached out his ‘reading’ hand in a fist for Bernard to bump.

The blonde laughed. Then on a wild impulse, asked “Read it to me.”

Drake cracked open one bright eye. “Have you never read The Odyssey before?”

“We got the abridged version back in middle school. They made us do so many book reports and even had us act out some of the scenes. It’s one of the only things we read that year that I that actually enjoyed.”

Drake had both eyes opened now and squinted them across the space at Bernard, humming in thought. “Only if you give me more chips. Barbecue-shrimp flavored, please.”

Bernard sighed like it was a great inconvenience, but he dug out one of the fun-sized bag he’d kept in his Bear-Den just for when Drake came over. “How can you stand these things? They’re gross.”

“You’re gross,” Drake retaliated before upending he bag and shaking a healthy amount into his mouth. Bernard watched him do so, amazed that neither loose chips nor crumbs landed on the open book pages. Once Drake got his fill, he set the bag aside but also bookmarked his page to set the volume down, too. The red blanket he’d stolen from Bernard’ lap was pushed aside so he could lean close to the heater, rotating his thin fingers in front of it with an obvious greed.

“Were your hands cold this whole time?”

“Yeah, it’s genetic. My mom hated the winter because her hands would freeze just from passing by an opened door.”

Bernard thought that over for a moment. Then he pushed off his own blankets and with a call of “Hold on to the book, I’ll be right back” he opened the tent flap and slipped out into the cold. He had something up in his room that could work well.

When he got back to the tent, Drake looked almost asleep in his chair, though the sudden blast of December chill brought him around immediately. Bernard did feel bad about that; Drake looked so wiped out when he showed up at their door. “Here, try these.”

The raven-haired boy must still have been a little groggy because he stared at the gloves in Bernard’s hands with a dazed look. “I can’t read braille with those on, Bern. The fabric gets in the way.”

“These ones won’t.” Bernard tossed them into the other’s lap. Once they were at touching radius, the other could finally realized why Bernard had been gone so long.

“Did you cut the fingers off?” he asked, holding up one black leather glove to see the tips had been removed. “Why would you do that? These look like an expensive brand!”

They likely were, but that meant very little to Bernard. The blond returned to his seat and once the blankets were tucked around him again, he shrugged. “I figured you could put them to better use than I would.” Then, with a smirk, “Plus, you’ve always had that ‘sickly orphan’ vibe going on. Fingerless gloves would work well for- hey!”

Bernard laughed as the balled-up chips bag was chucked at his head, bouncing of his temple because his hands were wrapped in his blankets.

“Ass.” But even as he said that, Drake slipped the gloves on with a smile. “Last chance to back out on my read-along. It’s going to be stilted and clunky the entire time.”

“Entertain me,” Bernard said. He made a big display of bringing the blankets up to his chin and sinking deeper into her beanbag chair. The picture of comfort and patience.

Drake laughed softly, then the sound of flipping pages as he returned to her previous spot. Bernard felt his heart pick up a little as Drake’s voice took on the same orating tone he slipped into when he had to read a passage in used in English Lit.

“The sun rose on the flawless brimming sea into a sky all brazen-all one brightening for gods immortal and for mortal men on plowlands kind with grain.”

Water and wheat danced behind Bernard’s eyelids, sweeping him away to the town of Pylos where he would follow Telemachus and Athena on their search for Odysseus. But while he did love this story, it was less the words that captivated him so much as the voice that brought them to life.

Drake had been correct about his recitation being clunky; he stumbled through every other sentence. But there was such beautiful honesty in how hard he was trying. He’d hesitate at complicated words, double-back when he used the wrong pronunciation, but that just made it all the sweeter when he did succeed. Bernard could hear the touch of pride that coated his voice whenever he made it to the end of a stanza without stopping.

With blankets and snacks and a familiar voice to fill the space, there was no better way to spend an afternoon in December.

[paladin-of-nerd-fandom65]

1: What is the starburst duo biggest mistake? one that they look out to never do again.

2: You know how Older! Jon Kent took the title of Superman when Clark went to war world? Did Chris & Jake ever have to take their father's title of Superman & Nightwing?

3: If Jake & mar'i were in canon, when do you think they were born? Most likely right after their parents wedding :)

4: What is something the Starburst duo thinks they are good out but aren't?

5: What is something the Starburst duo is legitimately bad at?

1)

Chris: Leading Jake, Jasper and Lian on a small mission to bust what seems being a regular drug dealing (almost regular as the contraband content was replicated Fear Toxin) by Blockbsuter without properly checking to see who his business partner is and how much of their power they’ll need; this let them completely off guard when that business partner tuned up being Mongul, who proceeded to pounded them all brutally, nearly killing both Lian and Jake in the process. The deal was stopped but Chris has made himself a promise that for now on, he’ll always double check the intel for cases like this and make sure they’re still properly prepared for surprise attacks like this

Jake: Once letting his temper get the better of him when he encountered a bank robbing criminal he was searching for a good bit and always came up frustratingly short every time he has a lead on him. Once he finally had the crook cornered, he fail to notice the desperate and scared eyes of the crook and definitely not noticing they were outside the criminal’s house, revealing his wife and two children who no doubt were spooked by the green fury glowing eyes Jake had as he was pounding the desperate criminal to a near pulp. He eventually snapped out of it when the crook’s wife begged him to stop and Jake then looked around realizing he wasn’t beating up a major super villain but a man who only resorted to his criminal acts out of desperation further his family. Even since then, Jake has made it a considerable effort to try to temper and control himself against petty crooks and those who hadn’t committed the more grievous crimes.

2) I would say….maybe or maybe not. As grown ups, their mantles simply either grew up with them or they change into complete new ones as either their children and/or fixture apprentices take over the Skybird and Nightwing Phantom mantles. Maybe Jake can take over the Nightwing mantle his father has once Dick does retire though it’ll be a tall sell as Jake feels no one can truly be the same Nightwing Dick. As for Chris, the Superman mantle is evenly split by both Conner and Jon, Red and Blue respectively.

3) Oh for sure; Kory became pregnant with Mar’i about a few months after the wedding, likely her being conceived during the Honeymoon itself. Jake followed up a mere two years later. Oh in my version, they get married much sooner, around when Jason was Robin therefore Jake would’ve been about maybe 1-2 year when Jason was blown up by the Joker.

Bonus: for how Tim Drake can still be a teenager when Jake is ten; simple, he got hit by a de aging ray which not only tuned him back into a 14-16 year old but moreso allows him to age much slowly. Or at least if he ages normal, he still looks very young even as a teen…and small

4) Chris: Playing Soccer and Tennis. In both sports he keeps forgetting which way is his half of the court to defend and which one is to score points

Jake: Naming all the Star Wars characters from every show, tv series or animated show even if he’s otherwise good with memory. The problem lies with how many of them sometimes are background characters despite the lore behind them

5)

Chris: Learning how to use VR headsets. Those things are just confusing and where to go, how to move inside the game and what buttons to press while his hands are in motion

Jake: Much to his surprising delight, being able to hold in his laughter, cackles and giggles anytime his sensitive spots are even as so much as brushed softly or gently poked. It’s something both Dick and him have inherited from Mary Grayson, jokingly what’s referred to as a curse in their lineage, all because Mary’s father, Jake great grandfather, took a career as a dentist rather than as a mortician like the rest of that family line.

Thanak for the asks @pin-crusher2000 ! These are fun XD

[misspickman]

mossy could you provide a ranking of Timothy costumes

i mean i CAN but why would you ask me this. yes i will

1. red robin

1.5 this is a joke but i do think the artist for batman blackest night making a little mistake with the rr suit and giving it the underwear over pants thing is fun. its a classic

2. unternet suit bc its a cute homage to nightwing.. i do miss the cowl. britta said this suit cant be real bc it makes tim look too cool for who he is and i agree. sick tho. i think we should bring the insane halberd/morning star/(?) back

3. one year later/kon mourning suit

4. his original robin one :) this feels too low but its hard to rank.. i think its a perfect costume for tim at that point in his life i wouldnt change a thing

4.5 winter fit

5. mr sarcastic ok people use this as an example of tim having a bad sense of fashion or whatever and thats missing the point bc the point is this was a bit. and its a great bit. he killed it. rule number one u have Got to commit to the bit. i dont know what the fuck is going on here but its funny as hell

6. the current robin suit. its whatever to me like its very similar to the original one i guess they tried to upgrade it a little bit. as a costume on its own its fine its nice but i cannot divorce it from the fact that they made tim robin again so i do always go :/ when i see it. you are never going to be her (original robin suit)

7. that red robin suit from rebirth thats just the robin suit with two Rs on it? what is that. thats just sad. on one hand i appreciate that he wasnt just straight up robin but like design wise thats the saddest attempt i have ever seen 0 effort whatsoever

8. drake costume. i just think the brown color is ugly and they shouldve let him keep the cape. i do think the whole concept of tim going by drake is kinda goofy but i dont have as much hate for it as i know most people do.. the execution was simply not good tho

9. arkham knight tim.. i feel like people mostly hate this bc of the buzzcut and his build but its like. whatever. i dont like tim with a hood thats a damian thing and feels off

10. the n52 costume? i just dont like it its too busy and ugly and i dont care about that man who is he

11. whatever the fuck was happening in gotham knights

[that1badassbitch]

He sounded hoarse, was the first thing Tim noticed. Not like a smoker, or like the Bat Growl, more like he was thirsty or had a sore throat. More importantly, he didn't look upset or hostile at Tim's presence, just a bit surprised.

He'd blame the delay in response on his exhaustion. "Where is 'here'?"

The boy shrugged under his blanket. "It's kind of Nowhere. An in-between."

"And, who are you?"

"I'm..." He paused, looking unfocused for a long moment, then nodded slightly. "I'm Danny."

That... felt strange. A somewhat ethereal being, humanoid but also obviously Other, going by a common American name. Though it might have been picked to make him more comfortable, like the humanoid form might be an illusion or a disguise.

Anyway. The briefings that Justice League Dark provided- well, the ones that didn't say "don't interact at all, run and wait for a magic user" that is- warned firmly against lying to the sort of beings that would be strong enough to help him.

"I'm looking for someone. I just- need to see the timestream. He must have made ripples or something to show where he went."

The boy nodded slowly, frowning a bit. "I guess that explains half of it. Um. Who are you?"

Ah, right. He had skipped over that. Giving his civilian name was risky, he was fairly sure, but if he was offended by being given a vigilante name he might be even more at risk-

"Red Robin," spoke someone else, and he turned around- he couldn't think too hard about how that worked, when he wasn't really standing- to see an old man. Blue skin, red eyes, one with a jagged scar, a full white beard that reached his belt, purple robes, and instead of legs he had a whispy, billowy tail. "Vigilante of Gotham. Also Timothy Drake-Wayne, and the Third Robin. Most importantly, you are a good man, and one who needs something."

Oh, he hated that he knew who he was. Before he could say anything, though, Danny behind him grumbled, "I hate that you make all these plans and never tell me anything about them."

"Calm yourself, highness." The blue man shifted suddenly, in an instant becoming toddler sized. "You know it would put you at risk if I visited too often, and I know exactly how to prune universes for the best outcomes." He turned his gaze to Tim, who felt uncomfortably seen. "You can call me Clockwork, Red Robin. Overseer of the Timestream."

Which was too convenient to be a coincidence. "I assume you know what I want, then. What do you want for helping me?"

He chuckled, nodding. "I do appreciate the timelines where you are so straightforward. You, of course, want the Batman returned. That is within my power. What I want, in return, is for my King to recover. And for that, you are perfectly suited."

Well. That sounded. Bad. His first thought was that he was being asked to give up his body, or maybe his soul. How else would he be able to heal an extraplanar being? And king? That had some mildly terrifying implications. But he'd already committed himself this far. And Gotham needed Batman. More than it needed him. More than the rest of the Bats needed him. If his death was what it took to get him back, then...

"No." Tim turned back to Danny, a bit startled by the vehemence of that refusal. His voice seemed to echo slightly, even as it rasped, "Don't you dare. If you can't get an honest agreement then I'm not doing it. I'm- I won't force this on anyone."

Clockwork looked at Danny with a sort of pitying sadness. "It's fine," Tim blurted, in case he was actually going to retract his offer. "I'll do it, whatever it is-"

"No!" Danny lurched towards them, his blanket slipping even as he stalled out after just a few feet. "You can't- please, don't- you're exhausted. You look more work out than I am. At- at least sleep first, and hear the whole thing. Don't blindly agree to this. You should know what you're signing up for."

He looked to Clockwork with wild eyes, and the blue being shifted again, this time into a young adult shape. "Of course, highness. Rest would be good for both of you. I will return later to discuss properly."

In a brief flash, he vanished, leaving Tim and Danny in the vague nothing of Nowhere.

Danny didn't look thrilled, but he shuffled his blanket back up to cover his shoulders. "You can take the bed. I don't really need it right now." He nodded to the side, where surely enough, there was a bed.

And Tim... was tired. He was close to a crash, anyway. And he couldn't risk leaving without finding B.

It took a few seconds to figure out how to really move- mostly he had to not think about it- and he settled himself in the bed. He only had a moment to look at Danny's back, and a sort of black-blue white-speckled swirl that appeared in front of the boy, before his brain fully checked out.

Just a little idea

What if when Tim went off to look for Batman when he was lost in time he bumped into Phantom.

They made a Deal

Phantom knowing CW helped him find Bruce and how to get him back safely, Phantom in return for reasons (hurt badly & recovering, or evolving in power) needed someone very ecto-contaminated (Ra's fault) like Tim, to be contained in.

From a magic user point of view, knowing very little of the GZ and how they work, Tim made a very powerful Deal with a powerful death being (High Ghost King Phantom: Hello!) and is now somehow pregnant (not really but they don't know that)

Danny while inside Tim inside his core can still hear the world outside normally and can share his emotions with Tim to communicate. Which looks a lot like Tim is speaking to his belly just like expecting parents do.

This could be angst or crack

or

my personal favourite, different genres for different pov's

Tim's would be happy, just regular getting his life back together being a total BAMF, coming of age type of vibe

The rest of the Batfam and other heroes pov would be angst, paranormal, psychological horror.

Misunderstandings galore

Dick regretting heavily his decisions which caused Tim to run away because he did not believe him and he has many Regrets.

Bruce feeling guilty that Tim felt the need to make such a decision as to make a Deal and end up pregnant just to bring him back.

Meanwhile the magic users have told the other heroes about Tim's situation and now think that he's going to give birth to the child of a very powerful death being and if something happens to Tim to risk the baby it would cause all of their worlds destruction.

so pretty much-

Tim-Girl Boss, Gatekeep, Gaslight

Batfam- Much Angst

Others- *panicked chicken noises*

~

Just an Idea

[britcision]

I have not slept more than 5 hours together this whole fucking week and not more than 7 hours a day

It is therefore appropriate today to give you TIM! And TUCKER! All aboard the Lore Drop!

Chapter 14’s nearly fucking done I swear I was waylaid but I think I have solved the problem. Now the new second secret much bigger problem is my intense desire to commit Dragon Age crimes

Soooo chapters will probably stay a lil slower here for a bit, but hopefully not this slow again until June, when I will be Busy As Shit

————-

A Good Excuse To Be A Bad Influence V

It was a weird feeling to have his body shaken while his consciousness was so far from it.

Feeling his face pull into a frown not quite mirroring what he felt it should be. Tucker could never have explained precisely what part of him entered his devices; just that it was him.

Quintessential, pure essence of Too Fine. Everything he was without the meat he was born in.

But then he did have to slot back into that meat, and trying to do that without matching positions always left him feeling weirdly off kilter the next day. Like he’d put on a shirt but the shoulders were skewed too short.

So despite not being conscious of a face on his extended form, Tucker tried to form it into a frown anyway, sliding back under his own skin like a teen sneaking back through a window after curfew.

Hadn’t those been heady days?

Eyes slowly opening, it took Tucker a moment to remember how to focus them. That they weren’t cameras. But then Tim Drake-Wayne came into focus, and the frown changed to a grin even before he fully “woke up”.

“Morning,” he mumbled, rolling and stretching, getting used to the feeling of a body again. It was a little weirder each time, which he might have worried about if he didn’t see himself as an extension of his PDA anyway.

“You were singing in your sleep,” Tim told him without preamble, returning the smile.

Tucker hesitated for a moment, suddenly embarrassed. If… well. If he’d been singing along, that…

Look he’d picked songs that’d embarrass Danny, he wasn’t gonna give a fuck about it. The only actual question was, did he tell Tim?

Who else would ever understand better just what it meant to interact with tech the way he could? Could get excited with him about how cool it was?

He wasn’t fucking gushing to Technus. No way. Tuck was easily the one winning that ongoing hackathon, but it was the principle of the thing.

To the zone with it. Tim knew about Amity Park, he knew about the ghosts and the liminal tech. And while they hadn’t exactly discussed liminal people, it’d come up.

Tim could have a sneak preview. As a treat.

Decision made, Tucker gave the younger man another broad smile because yeah, bragging about your super powers to a very cool and impressive person? That felt good.

Tim might be a vigilante too, but Tucker was pretty sure Jason was the only souped up Robin. Most of the bats were famously power free.

“Oh, yeah. I was bullying Danny,” he explained with a light chuckle, glancing up to find his beloved PDA, Ida. She was half under a blanket now, so he tugged her back out.

Tim chuckled softly, leaning back and stretching himself.

“Good dream?” He asked and Tucker snickered, stroking gently across the screen.

“Danny wishes it was a dream.” Tucker paused, frowning a little at the confusion on Tim’s face. “So you remember we kinda talked about the whole liminal thing?”

That seemed to jog Tim’s memory, confusion fading into an analytical frown that Tucker was already becoming familiar with. That good ol’ geek face.

“The humans with budding ghost powers,” he agreed, and Tucker had to wonder if maybe he just hadn’t put the right pieces together yet.

He hadn’t exactly said that most of Amity Park were liminal, but it was a little hard to remember he had to. Like, they lived on a portal to Hell.

Maybe he shoulda.

Well, at least it was a cool way to introduce it to him.

Tucker pulled Ida into his lap, flipped her over, and tapped the plain plastic backing to demonstrate.

“Mine’s a low level technopathy at the moment,” he explained as the PDA hummed and then began playing… well, still Montero, so he flicked it again and changed it immediately to Country Roads.

Tim was watching him with a kind of hungry fascination, and Tucker turned the music off with a thought, then passed her to Tim so he could check for secret touchpads.

“It’s not something I can do with anything,” he explained with a modest shrug, grinning with pride as Tim immediately got to scanning the casing.

All simple plastic, not even biometrics; what would be the point? Even touching the PDA was pretty much a formality at this point. She was a part of him.

“Technopathy? So you can control it with your mind? Why not with anything?” Tim asked eagerly, hands stroking over the plastic, eyes darting between it and Tucker.

Like he wasn’t sure which was more interesting, Tuck or tech, and Tucker absolutely took that as a compliment.

“It has to be a device I’ve really gotten into. Like, down to the source code, or something I’ve cracked before a couple times, and then I can just feel how all of it works.”

Tucker wiggled his fingers demonstratively and the PDA beeped to life under Tim’s hands, making the other man gasp. And yeah, totally envy in those cute blue eyes he turned all balefully on Tucker.

“How many of the functions can you use? Anything the PDA can do, or…” Tim trailed off, clearly thinking of everything he’d already seen the PDA do.

The real question would have been what couldn’t Ida do. And honestly? Yeah, Tucker remembered the trial phase.

He gave another shrug.

“Technically? Yeah, anything it can do, but I still prefer hacking the old fashioned way. Most of the network stuff too, cuz I’m only really “in” the PDA. Or Danny or Sam’s phones.”

Tucker hesitated, wondering how best to really explain the difference. Danny had never been any good at it, Tucker’d had no idea what he was talking about from the video game thing right up until he’d been sucked in himself.

Which… was probably gonna be a next-hangout adventure for Tim and the bats. And Oracle, if he could swing it.

For now he gave up, giving Tim a hopeless grin.

“Honestly it’s something you’ve really gotta feel for yourself. Danny’s great at the transition from real world to code, but he always just punches things, y’know? Turns out knowing how code is actually supposed to work doesn’t translate well to being part of it,” he added with a sigh.

Because frankly? It was bullshit unfair. Tucker could code an entire other galaxy around Danny with his eyes closed, but put them in the same metaphysical layer as a firewall and Danny could just.

Punch it.

Which, theme for the week, was also not how firewalls fucking worked. At some point Tuck figured he’d either gain a new level of understanding through liminality, or give up and ask Technus a couple questions.

Technus was currently Tucker’s subject instead of Danny’s anyway. They’d made a bet.

Which meant Technus shoulda told him about their shenanigans in time, which was probably what Tucker would hold over his head for the whole firewall thing.

It was so nice when things just worked themselves out.

Tim looked a little disappointed, but mostly still intrigued. Tucker could see his fingers just itching for his own tablet to take notes.

“Do you think that’ll change?” He asked, blurting it out like he couldn’t hold back now that Tucker stopped talking, “I mean, if you become more liminal? Or just practice your abilities more?”

And see, this was what Tucker loved about Tim Drake-Wayne. They were on the same wavelength. He grinned back.

“Probably. But I mean, it’s kinda cheating too. For now I kinda like that I have to do things the way I always used to first, before any ghostly powers kick in. It’s more me, y’know?” And like hell he’d let anyone think his code skills were just some meta ability.

He’d worked damn hard for those skills, and he was damn good. One of the best, and he was also good enough to know he still wasn’t actually top of the charts.

That was the Oracle, although knowing they still hadn’t cracked his servers felt really good.

Tim was all but vibrating, clearly full of questions, but they were both interrupted by a loud growl from Tucker’s stomach. Immediately echoed by Tim’s, so at least he wasn’t alone.

The two shared sheepish grins, and then Tucker stretched.

“So, breakfast and then Twenty Questions?” He offered cheerfully, and Tim nodded at once, thrusting the PDA back and rolling off the frankly massive bed.

——————

Tag List: @welcometosasakiworld @kyrianclawraith @someonebored0100 @stealingyourbones @starkcravingmad @frostedthroughghost @akikkobara @rainbowbunny0159 @littlefeather345 @violet-catsarelife @serasvictoria02 @wolfjackle @blacksea21090 @secretdestinywerewolf @anime-hipster-the-amazing @undead-essence @skitscratched @blackroserelina @snoodly-boop @trickerdi @mayoota-blog @xysidhe @idkmrpianoman @little-apricot-the-writer @chaoticmistake @the-legal-shipper @bun-fish @aroranorth-west @demon-cat-goes-woof @perfectwastelandcreation @onyxlightdragon @larks-and-katydids @peachesandcreamfemboy @jesus-camp-the-sequel @may-rbi @mothman-the-mothman87 @viyatrix @stargirl1331 @idfk-man10 @thedepressedrobin @skulld3mort-1fan @rootsmudge @ravenshadow17 @cankoking @phantom-dc @mentalcarebear @magic-pincushion @redamancyardor @lyra689 @itsparadoxlacuna @alcorbearson @asphyxia778 @why-must-i-be-like-this @tkiesai

[our-happygirl500-fan]

Steph’s Different Origins

When a comic character is around long enough you start to see different takes & variations of their backstories & origins as the character appears in different stories, continuities or media. As long as a core aspect of the character remains the same (e.g Bruce seeing his parents die, Peter being bit by a spider, Krypton blowing up ect) everything else can be fair game.

Steph’s core aspect to her origins seems to be ‘she wants to stop her dad’ but Steph has been around for nearly 30 years & she’s managed to get a small handful of her origin told & retold in that time.

1. Post Crisis Origin: The original

Stephanie Brown is a girl from a low income household where her father abuses her & her mother, she watches her father go in & out of jail her whole childhood & goes up with an admiration of Batman for being able to put her father in jail. At age 15 she decides to become a vigilante named Spoiler believing it is the only way to stop her father after watching the system fail her family so many times. Steph continues helping people joining the Batfamily becoming Robin & later Batgirl.

2. World Without Young Justice Origin

In a world where Jason Todd & by extension Tim Drake never becomes Robin, Steph becomes Batman’s partner a lot sooner than in the main universe. When she was 13 she watched her father (in this universe going by Crypto King) kill her mother, she begins interfering with his crimes eventually confronting him about her mothers death. Bruce sees her take down her father & takes her in as his Robin 

3. Young Justice cartoon origin

Stephanie Brown was a 12 year old runaway from Bludhaven who gets caught up in the world of superheroes when she gets kidnapped by The Light to be given for experimentation to the Reach, ‘the Team’ ends up saving her & at some point in the two year time gap Steph has joined the Team herself & at age 14 she works under Batman.

This origin is an odd one out as far as Steph origins go as Arthur does not play a part in it.

4. N52 Origin

My personal least favourite of all Steph’s origins. Stephanie Brown is an ordinary girl whose parents divorced sometime in her childhood, her father is a more successful as a criminal than his post crisis counterpart & Steph does not know about his villainy until she walks in on him meeting with other criminals. Arthur then tries to kill Steph & Steph goes to her mother for help. Unlike Crystal’s preboot counterpart who was a victim of Arthur, Steph’s mother is revealed to also be a criminal & accomplice of Arthur. Finding out her family are criminals Steph resolves to stop them herself becoming Spoiler. When her mother flees Gotham city & abandons Steph & her father supposedly dies at the hands of the Court of Owls Steph is taken under Batman’s wing.

5. CW Batwoman Origin

Throughout her childhood Stephanie Brown’s father Arthur would use Steph to test his clues, looking for flaws & only using the puzzles she couldn’t solve to commit his crimes. This activity caused Arthur to give Steph the nickname ‘his little pointer’ as she would point out the weak points in his clues. One day in her teenage years Steph sees one of her father’s clues in the paper & gives the solution to Sophie Moore an agent of Crows Security begging her to stop her father. During the time her father is in jail Steph would graduate from MIT, while there, she joined a club where deciphering code was a hobby. When her father gets out of jail he tries to use Steph in a scheme to get revenge on Sophie Moore only for Steph to reveal she was the one to solve his code. Arthur then tries to kill Steph & himself as ‘he couldn’t live in a world where she was smarter than him’ only for the two to be saved by Luke Fox

[motleyfam]

I posted 2,267 times in 2022

36 posts created (2%)

2,231 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@desperatecheesecubes

@mooitstimdrake

@batshit-birds

@sohotthateveryonedied

@sun-moon-stars-jedi

I tagged 454 of my posts in 2022

#the batman - 25 posts

#fave - 18 posts

#batfam - 9 posts

#atla - 9 posts

#bruce wayne - 8 posts

#dick grayson - 7 posts

#damian wayne - 6 posts

#this sparks joy - 6 posts

#amen - 6 posts

#tim drake - 6 posts

Longest Tag: 137 characters

#thinking of that ‘superman wrecking a whole ass train to save a child on the tracks who he could have just swooped away from danger’ post

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

hey! so its 4am and ive just finished my, um... fifth(?) reread of world's saddest breakfast club and like! aaahhhh!!!

do u got abything to tell us abt this story? like sbt the writing proccess or things u thought that did not make it in or hc or anything really. i dont have a question exactly, just wanted to hear you talk about it. im a bit. well. obssesed.

Oooh cool question! I definitely do!

World's Saddest Breakfast Club: Fun Facts

The opening line is a result of me angsting to @batmoniker about how I couldn't figure out how to start my fic, and her jokingly being like "I got you, bro. Ready? 'It was a dark and stormy night'" and then me just being stubborn and committing to the bit.

The story started with a vague idea of "everyone in the kitchen at 3am for different reasons and Jason channeling his inner short order cook." All I knew going in was the order I wanted people to appear, what was wrong with them (sick, hurt, insomnia, etc) and what food Jason would be making for them. Everything else I made up as I went.

If I could go back and change one thing about this fic, I'd reduce how long Jason was kidnapped to like, 6-8 days, max. 16 days seemed funny when I wrote it, but in hindsight, I feel like he'd be a little more fucked up in the story if he were really escaping from that many days of captivity lmao

I headcanon Dick as the kind of person who straight-up forgets to eat when he's preoccupied, and Jason as the kind of person who cannot FATHOM this concept. Jason absolutely will miss a meal if the situation calls for it, don't get me wrong, but he's aware the entire time he's doing it and it makes him super antsy. (This once turned into A Thing™ when Jason was like, 13 years old and staying with Dick for the weekend for some brotherly bonding and Dick forgot about lunch and by 5pm, Jason maybe sorta kinda had a minor panic attack about it. Dick was a lot more mindful of that moving forward)

Bruce's favorite food being lobster thermidor is a reference to the Lego Batman movie

I wrote this whole fic with Julia Child's recipe pulled up in one tab and my google doc in the other

At some point I realized that since I started with fresh lobsters, I was going to have to write Jason killing them, and it derailed me so hard that the fic nearly became about meatloaf instead. (Never mind the fact that Jason canonically kills human beings — that's totally fine. I just draw the line at him killing lobsters 😰)

(in the end I just kinda glossed over it and made sure they were already cooked before Damian appeared so I wouldn't have to address it 😬)

Dick's reoccurring shoulder injury is a reference to the DCAU where I swear that man has dislocated his shoulder/injured his arm at least 4x

The line about Tim being allergic/throwing up when he eats eggs was inspired by a line in chap 11 of @goldkirk's fic Hymn, which I've reread about 37x

Jason is correct— grits are fucking delicious and definitely not baby food.

My favorite line is "Okay there’s self-sacrificial bullshit, and then there’s whatever the fresh hell that is."

The idea for Cass being a big meat-eater comes from a comic panel where Steph offers her a plate of rice and beans and Cass says needs meat and starts mischievously eying Steph's hamster. Can't find the panel to save my life, but I promise it's out there.

EDIT: finally found it!

Steph's nickname of "Zombie Boy" for Jason is borrowed from @audreycritter's Cor Et Cerebrum series (which is a fucking masterpiece, btw)

This fic was gonna be called "Creatures of the Night" until batmoniker said Steph's line made for a better title

Several people have asked me whether Jason was really cooking Bruce's lobster to spite him, or if he was actually intending to make it for him all along. The answer is... both? Like Jason's kind of an unreliable narrator in that he's trying to convince himself that he's just doing what he's doing to be a little shithead when deep down it's all stemming from his need to take care of his family, you know? Like he'll never admit it, but that's where his heart is at.

To everyone who's asked for a part 2 where the family finds out Jason was kidnapped, I'm gonna be honest: the main reason I don't think I'm ever going to write that scene is because I can't come up with a good enough joke for him to make to accidentally out himself ☠️

90 notes - Posted September 18, 2022

#4

Imagine Bruce starting therapy and learning about all these cool new tricks and gadgets that can help with emotional regulation and getting super invested (because I mean, c’mon, the dude’s like the king of gadget hoarding, he’s got a utility belt for goodness sake)

Then imagine the learning curve of him realizing that just because something works great for one of his kids, doesn’t mean it works for all of them, as illustrated by this memorable incident:

Jason gets really upset and starts having a minor panic attack about something

Bruce, proud owner of 14 new weighted blankets (in various styles, weights, and sizes), tries to wrap his adult son up in one to ground him

After all, Bruce himself finds them super comforting because it’s basically a socially acceptable alternative to wearing a massive Kevlar cape 24/7 like he’d do if he could

(Tim loves them too, so like, kid tested, parent approved™️)

Ends up totally backfiring when the added weight & restricted movement sends Jason into a full-blown flashback of digging out of his own grave, taking this panic attack from like a 4 to a 10

Whoops

130 notes - Posted December 6, 2022

#3

Sometimes I get really hung up on trying to make all the logistics and time frame work out in my fanfics

Then I see how the professionals handle this dilemma:

211 notes - Posted March 12, 2022

#2

I have a headcanon that Dick doesn’t actually like cereal nearly as much as he pretends to.

He just knew that Bruce felt bad about his own cooking ineptitude in the early days after taking his new ward in, so whenever Alfred had the night off, the 9-year-old insisted cereal was his ‘favorite food on the planet’ because it was something that Bruce could actually handle preparing for him without setting off the smoke alarms and it made him happy to do it

372 notes - Posted April 9, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Tim hardly ever wears seatbelts.

It’s not a conscious choice at this point really, he just never got into the habit. When he outgrew his last car seat at age five, his parents didn’t bother getting him a booster and just let him sit in the normal seat, so the belt always felt like it was cutting into his neck and he hated it. He put up a big fuss about it once on the way to some important event, and his parents just huffed, “Fine, don’t wear it then. Fly out the window for all I care” and that was that. They never forced him again.

He just so rarely has to wear one that it slips his mind. Buses don’t have seatbelts. Motorcycles don’t have seatbelts. The Batmobile has them, but they’re rarely used due to the necessity for split-second drop ins and getaways.

It’s not until he’s 17 and driving with Jason somewhere that he finally gets called out on it. Not only called out, but told in a no nonsense sort of way “This car ain’t moving till I hear a fucking click. What, did they stop showing ‘Red Asphalt’ in drivers ed while I was dead??”

(They do still show it. Tim just slept through that class)

557 notes - Posted November 7, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[river-bottom-nightmare]

Nightwing #80 Review

woot woot i’ve kept it up for three issues lets gooo. i liked this issue more than the last one. there’s a lot of fanon dick characterization peppered in, but not so much that it puts me off entirely. also, i’m getting increasingly concerned about bitewing. but i did like tim in this one, very nice

look at all the blue and purple and pink. honestly at this point, i’m a broken record but come on come on come onnnnnnn. the blue and pink is very pretty though. this cover’s a bit offputting at first, and a bit spiraly, which i’m sure was the intended effect.

this is a genuine concern of mine. dick’s a vigilante, and he doesn’t have the same sprawling network and resources that bruce does. (even if he is a billionaire now, he hasn’t amassed the same collection of crime-fighting equipment that bruce has.) 

i’m not sure if he’ll be able to take care of bitewing. damian’s got plenty of pets, but alfred used to take care of them, and now bruce plus the rest of the batfam is taking care of them. as far as we know, babs only drops by occasionally, and the same goes for dick’s family and friends. will dick be able to give bitewing the love and time and affection that a traumatized puppy like her needs? i really hope so.

she does look adorable in this panel tho.

dick. richard. richie. baby. why are you shirtless.

you have scars upon scars. probably chemical burns. bullet wounds. weird fucking squiggly lines from knives that only psychos with blade fetishes use. no normal person has the body that you do. and you don’t think that showing up shirtless in front of the police is going to raise suspicion? you don’t think that the people accusing you of murder are going to look at someone who looks like they’re a fucking mob enforcer and go hmm that’s a bit suspicious?

put on a SHIRT jesus CHRIST it’s like you’re not even trying to hide your identity.

look at this pompous little princess demanding only the highest quality head pets i’d burn down latvia for her. (no offense latvians it was the first country that popped into my head.)

pretty boy pretty boy pretty boy pretty boy-

no seriously kudos to the artist here. his expression is so human i wanna cry. dick, right now, is sheepishly asking a question. he knows he’s not going to get into any real trouble, he knows that he’ll be able to talk his way out of or somehow maneuver his way off this mess. but he’ll play nice for the police, so he’s asking a friend for a favour, part self-condescendingly and part oh-well-what-can-you-do.

and his expression reflects that. rather than a stoic expressionless face most male comic characters have when asking someone for something (or all the time really), rather than the weird desperate supposedly “seductive” face that most female comic characters plus dick grayson have when asking someone for something (or all the time really), he’s making a face that i pulled like yesterday. or the day before that. it’s kind of silly, kind of casual, very much human. i like it.

thank god. proper (in character) acknowledgement for officer grayson. yea, fuck cops in general, but i like that they included this line.

obviously, he’s not talking about the actual criminals, he’s talking about the police force itself. the bpd was too corrupt, and dick realized that he wasn’t helping. not only does one clean cop not make a dent in an overall dirty force, but dick was putting his allies in danger too. not only that, but it wasn’t good for dick’s mental health either. he was spreading himself too thin, and surrounding himself with some of the worst of crime 24/7 did a number on him. dick’s got a history of self-sacrificing tendencies, and i’m just glad he’s not a cop anymore.

dick has a gotham rogues mug. they make gotham rogue mugs, and dick has one.

what kinda city looks at it’s frankly horrible crime history and long list of certifiably insane serial killers who are all still alive and actively committing war crimes and goes “oooooh yea imma put that on a coffee mug!” gotham, that’s who.

this isn’t important i just like how all of bitewing’s barks are blue

back straight, hand on his hip, cheerful smile on his face as he says he’s being accused for murder. love that for him.

they couldn’t have said “yea it’s complicated” in a better way even if they put the words “yea it’s complicated” right there on the page in bold red letters. literally all the love to the artists.

dick please. you’re KILLING ME what the actual fuck IS THAT???? WHY DO YOU HAVE A MUG OF THAT???

anyway nightwing collects novelty mugs confirmed.

this paneling is so beautiful. 

tim’s the focus, but he’s not the first thing you see. he’s placed in a way that forces the reader to drag their eyes all the way up the page in order to reach him. it us know just how high up tim is carelessly crouching, especially close to the ledge of the building too. i cannot think of a single better way to introduce a character, and this character in particular: you instantly know this is a version of tim with plenty of experience and training, is comfortable in his body and knows his limits, but still hangs onto that civilian awe of being in a high place and overlooking a brightly lit city.

absolute classic robin. i love it. 

this isn’t even that important but it made me happy. this is how you train surf.

you don’t crouch or bend over when you get to a tunnel, which is oddly enough what most people think (at least from my experience). you bend backward. that not only 100% ensures that you’ll make sure you’re low enough to make it through the tunnel (because you can see the top of the tunnel, unlike when you crouch or bend), but it also makes it easier to get up: all you have to do is push up with your arms into a bent stance, and you’ll be in a ready, moving position. from a bend or a crouch, getting up is more awkward and more slow.

on a meta level, i like that this creative team knows what they’re doing when it comes to the small, almost unimportant stuff like that, because it makes the action more real. (as real as you can get with a guy running around stealing hearts.)

on a in-universe level, it once again drives home both dick and tim’s experience and professional level skill.

regardless of who you side with in the “should tim drake be robin again?” debate, you gotta admit that tim’s rebirth robin suit is r a d as fuck. if i’m not mistaken, this is the same one he was wearing in 2019 young justice for a little bit? it’s cute and hella cool i like it.

remember what i said about human expressions? doesn’t happen as often to tim bc he’s a Child, but it’s still nice to note when someone humanizes him, too. (that’s why i love the duckboy panel so much lol.)

me, at first: that’s not a “good call” dick that’s just common sense

me, now: sprinkled throughout the entire comic we can see dick bending to tim’s instructions if only briefly, joking with him to keep the mood light while still maintaining a serious mood and retaining control over this particular outing. this implies that dick’s doing it intentionally, purposefully leaving places in his sentences blank and offering affirmations, in order to encourage tim and train him in things bruce might not necessarily touch on, such as social chameleoning and misdirection techniques and love/affirmation from a family member. dick is not only a loving and supportive big brother, but he never stops training his younger brother in better vigilante tecnhiques because he wants tim to be better than him. in this essay i will-

d o g g o

also bitewing is getting so many head pats today i’m living for it

look at him, standing on a telephone wire with ease. nice flex, dick.

also look at how he’s silhouetted. the moon’s full bright, bright enough that the sky around dick is light, too. (at least. i’m like 99% sure that’s the moon.) not like most batman comics, where it’s sometimes hard to distinguish bruce from the background, which is entirely on purpose.

gotham is a dark gritty city, and so is bruce. the two of them are one. bludhaven may be a bit of a mess, but it’s being portrayed in all these different shades of blue and purple and pink, that are all light enough that dick stands out from the background. he hasn’t been swallowed up by the city, and chances are that he won’t ever be. also, the colouring helps establish bludhaven as a city too. there’s still hope for it. the light colouring means that it’s not going to sink into a pit as deep as the one bruce wove gotham into. the whole point of this nightwing arc in particular is to turn bludhaven into a better place, and it’s (most likely) letting us know early on that dick is going to accomplish that. he’ll struggle, but he’ll do it.

so dick??? dick designed his escrima sticks with a situation like this in mind? he created his signature and most iconic weapon (other than his chatty mouth), with a built in feature that turns his escrima sticks into tim’s signature and most iconic weapon???? just so that if he and tim ever got into a situation where tim didn’t have his staff, dick could make sure tim had the thing that would give him an edge over anyone he was fighting??? he’s such a big brother oh my goddd.

also tim’s smirk in this is just *chef kiss.* a staff is something he can work with, a staff is something he wields like an extension of his arm, a staff is means that someone’s about to get their ass kicked because tim’s about to beat the shit outta them.

this is my new phone background.

they really made sure we remembered that hey, those first few months when bruce was grieving too much to be any sort of a mentor to tim and was still unwilling to properly train him to be robin out of fear that he would end up like jason, dick was the one who stepped up (once he got over himself and his own fears and hangups with bruce) and trained tim to be robin, trained him how to fight and flip and fuckin fly out there, all while changing his own style a bit to be the more experienced one in the partnership while still trusting said partner to hold their own, so dick and tim have a very unique and cohesive fighting style that makes it hell for anyone who fights them together, didn’t they?

[glorified-red]

What is the boys go to method of persuasion (read: manipulation) and how would someone persuade them in turn?

This request took wayyyy too many of my brain cells, thanks fish, you’ve killed me

Batboys Method of Persuasion

word count: 1390~

warnings: none

I’ve been wanting to write angst for a few days now and I am so close to diving into Nightmare and never coming back until the whole series is written.

Dick Grayson

Dick uses social influence consciously and subconsciously all the time

Social influence is how we are all wired to believe that if the people we admire are doing something, then that behavior is normal and we should act that way as well

He uses this to his advantage whenever he leads the titans or any of his siblings

A role model of sorts

Dick acts like the perfect vigilante and people subconsciously follow

It started with Jason when he was first learning about Robin, then with Tim, and eventually with Damian

Going out to patrol with Jason and being very careful about what he’s doing in front of him in the off chance that he picks up the habits Dick has

Knowing Tim watches him so closely so Dick might as well take advantage of it to keep his brother safe with protective patrol actions

Seeing Damians adoration for Dick and genuinely trusting what his older brother says, so why not slowly show Damian how to assimilate into the family through his actions

Theres plenty of different ways this affects Dick however

The constant pressure of needing to be perfect and make the right choices

The feeling of everyone and no-one watching him at all times

And even people pleasing tendencies, because what else is left of his self-importance without admiration?

Which is exactly why the easiest way to persuade Dick into doing something, is making sure he likes and trusts you

He couldn't care less about what strangers think of him, but those close to him? Those inside his circle of influence? Dick wants them to love him

Thats exactly why he tries to keep the family together; exactly why he takes every argument with his siblings to heart

The Liking Principle: we are more likely to comply with requests made by people we like

Ask Dick to do something and he will cross a valley for you not only because he loves you, but because he feels like he has to go through with it to make sure you still love him.

Jason Todd

Jason loves to use reciprocity

He exploits it every chance he can when he’s the Red Hood, how else would he have gotten so powerful?

Reciprocity is how we feel obligated to give back to others what we receive from them, especially if there was no cost to begin with

Jason spared plenty of criminals as Hood to use them for deals or favors later, always bringing up the fact that he could've killed them and could kill them now

He’s not afraid to say to those criminals, “Remember when I did this for you? Yea, I want compensation now.”

He doesn't use it much to his family aside from the typical sibling drama of Jason driving to get Tim food and then bringing it up again to get a few pop tarts during patrol

The more the time passes though, the less he can use reciprocity since it'll lose its draw

So he tends to use it within a few days or weeks

Jason keeps tabs, especially when it comes to crime lords or mob bosses

With his family he kinda just remembers? He’ll see a cookie and automatically remember that Dick owes him a pint of ice cream

But reciprocity works both ways

Jason knows this, so if anyone is smart and cunning enough to see through his manipulation and do it back? He’ll comply

The best way to do this is through consistency and commitment

Make Jason commit to his morals or word by bringing up statements he’s made in the past

His word means a lot to him so twisting it or holding him to it will definitely make him cave

Especially if his word was public and other people were there as witness

But be sure to reward him and reciprocate so that he keeps doing it ;)

Tim Drake

Tim’s method of persuasion is so meticulous 

Anchoring: the tendency to rely heavily on the information presented first when making a decision

He mostly uses this at work because it works better with numbers

Having a point value presented for the company so he can appease the snarky board of directors

Twisting and manipulating how the stock market values look by prefacing inflation or previous values from months past 

Or maybe shifting employee percentages around to make it seem more successful than it really is, not by a lot but enough that Tim can get them off his back

It’s not lying, he’s just presenting the information a different way that makes it seem more pleasant for his side

Since Tim is well aware that information can be tweaked or presented in a bias manner, persuading him can be a bit tricky considering he’d much rather do his own research

The Ellsberg Paradox, a wonderful experiment that showed people tend to lean towards things they know about rather than take a chance on unknown factors

Like the true introvert he is, Tim needs to know every detail before he makes a decision on something instead of going in blind and regretting it

Want to persuade him into going to a party? He needs to know exactly who's going, what to wear, what’s being served, what’s the earliest time he can leave—the list goes on

Trying to persuade him into doing something risky? Give him the details and he’d have no choice but to sigh and go through with it

Damian Wayne 

Damian and the hot-hand fallacy

When someone experiences a success, they’re more likely to continue that streak

He uses this to his advantage when it comes to Robin

Showing his father that he is self-sufficient because Damian busted this ring by himself and took down this villain too

Setting down a steady foundation of success to persuade more privilege and independence with the cape on

It’s a way to prove he belongs as well as keep the line of success for Robin going, purifying the colors so to speak

Dami also uses it on his siblings, especially when Dick took Batman’s role

Taking a weak, low point and showcasing the success that was brought to the mantle through him rather than previous Robins

It’s his confidence, his drive, the passion to maintain success lest he break that streak and tarnish his name

He's also used it to present new tactics or weaponry to the family, stating the success rate or how it has been used in the family before

However, with the inflated importance of Robin’s role, it doesn't take much to persuade Damian back into line

That’s where his weakness of persuasion comes in, The Authority Bias

Authority figures are perceived to be correct and have a stronger influence on others because of this

Damian not only grew up being forced to respect Ra’s and Thalia, but its so deep rooted in him that it is very rare for him to speak out against someone of higher authority than him

Hence why he respects Dick so much as Batman, or even Bruce because he is Damians biological father

So the easiest way to persuade Damian into doing something is to assert authority or dominance over him

There has to be merit behind it however, or he will call your bluff and not take you seriously

Bonus

All of the batboys share one method of persuasion that can also work on them: Mimicry

Its natural for us to respond more positively to people who act, look, or sound similar to us

This comes in handy with survivors on patrol, each of the boys mimicking body language or softening their voices to appear less threatening

In Jason’s case, he likes to appear more human by taking off his helmet so his voice doesn't sound as intimidating, it sounds similar and soft

For Tim, he sometimes takes off his cape to seem less like a super hero and more like an ordinary guy, especially for younger kids

In general though, it’s an unspoken bond between them all that they can tell exactly who each brother likes just by watching mimicking body language or adaptation of speech—very easy to tease each other about it

And of course, mimicry works on each of them as well

Makes them all—in their own way—feel less outcasted

Taglist ♡

@anothertimdrakestan

@bungunz

@red-hood-redemption ​​

@missredrobin

[odos-bucket]

More Protective!Batdad Fic, With the Pretense that this is a Series Mostly Given Up

They’re returning to the cave after Robin’s first night out since the start of Tim’s parents’ most recent stay in the city. It had been a routine patrol, made noteworthy only by the return of the boy wonder. They’d gotten into a bit of a scuffle with some muggers towards the end of the night, but it wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle, and they had both come away from it unharmed. At least that was what Bruce thought at the time. And he paid pretty close attention to things.

But when the domino mask comes off he can clearly see where Tim has a black eye, and a bruise blooming over his cheek.

“What happened?” He leaves his cowl and gloves on the computer, and takes a few steps closer to where Tim is fishing his civilian clothes out of a bag.

“Huh?” Tim bunches up the shirt he’s holding into a fist, and his eyes dart around for a moment without settling on Bruce. “Oh.” Fingers of his free hand fly up to hover over his injured cheek. “Thief got in a lucky shot.” His voice is a fraction of an octave higher than usual.

Bruce’s eyes automatically narrow as he begins his mental recall of the events that had transpired less than twenty minutes prior.

“I didn’t see you get hit,” he says slowly.

Tim just shrugs.

The bruise is too dark to be less than half an hour old anyway. It had to have come from sometime earlier in the day. It had been hidden beneath the mask though, and they’d both already been in full costume when they’d met earlier that evening.

Before Bruce can say anything else, Tim is ducking into a private alcove to finish getting changed. He’s a bit slower at it than usual, and Bruce wonders if that could be indicative of other hidden injuries, or if Tim is just drawing it out to avoid further scrutiny. Several minutes go by, and he finally clears his throat.

“Tim?”

“Just a second.” The words come out quickly.

Bruce goes to change himself, only to find that Tim still isn’t out by the time he’s finished and returned. He knocks gently on the wall that’s partitioning off the section of the cave where he’s changing, and hears a soft startled gasp, before Tim’s scurrying out.

“Yep! Sorry! Sorry! Just a little spaced.”

“Tim.” Bruce hopes his voice sounds gentle. “What happened?”

“What do you mean? I told you-“

“Don’t lie to me. That didn’t come from just now.” Bruce pauses and sighs. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

Tim shakes his head.

“I won’t tolerate you hiding injuries from me.”

“I’m not.”

They stand looking at each other for several drawn out, silent seconds.

“Were you patrolling on your own?” Bruce asks after a minute. “I’m going to find out if you-“

“No.” Tim sounds even less like his normal self when he cuts in. “I promise I wasn’t.”

“All right. So what is it? Did something happen during the day?”

As much as Bruce wants to know about it if Tim’s getting into fights at school, or somewhere else, he recognizes that it may not be his place to intervene if this wasn’t vigilante related. That’s fine (at least so he tells himself) but he’d like assurance that someone’s looking out for his Robin.

“Is it something you can handle with your parents?” He tries.

Tim’s eyes widen for half a second, and then he bursts into tears.

Bruce briefly freezes, before returning to himself and rushing to Tim’s side.

“I’m so stupid,” Tim is muttering, barely discernibly. “I’m sorry. I was so stupid.” The words barely come out between bouts of gasping, shuddering sobs.

Bruce wants to beg him to tell him what happened, but settles for reaching out a careful arm, and slowly pulling him close. Tim freezes for a fraction of a second, before melting into his side, continuing to mumbled unintelligibly.

“It’s all right,” Bruce tries to sooth, very aware that he doesn’t really have the voice for that sort of thing. “You’re okay.” He desperately wishes that he could offer some more specific reassurances, but he still doesn’t know what’s going on. “I’ve got you,” he settles for, running a hand through Tim’s hair.

They stay like that for a while, Tim crying, and apologizing, and Bruce telling him it’s okay, and wishing he could be sure that it was true. Eventually the tears dry up, and the breathing evens out, and the tense body beside his goes limp with exhaustion. Bruce doesn’t let go, not until he feels Tim starting to shift around restlessly. And even then he stays close enough to be easily collapsed into again, should the need arise.

“I messed up,” Tim says, after a few false starts.

“Whatever it is, we can fix it.” A ridiculous promise, and one that Bruce normally wouldn’t be making without more information. But somehow- without Bruce meaning to allow him to- Tim has joined the narrow ranks of those capable of inducing him to speak or behave a-procedurally.

Tim shakes his head.

“Tim, I want to help, but you have to give me something to work with.”

Tim is too focused on keeping his eyes dry, and his breathing steady to respond.

“Do you want me to take you home?” Bruce forces himself to offer, forces himself to remember that this child isn’t his, doesn’t need him the way the other robins did.

Another sob escapes Tim, and he buries his face in his hands. There’s a pang in Bruce’s chest as he realizes what he has to ask next.

“Did something happen at home?”

The question is met with heavy breathing, followed by a drawn out silence, and then, finally, a slow nod.

Bruce forces down his rising anger, as Tim finally gathers himself to speak.

“I don’t know if they want me to go back.” It comes out in a hoarse whisper. “Dad was so mad at me.”

Fury coils in Bruce’s gut, and lies in wait for his next question to be answered.

“Did he do this?” He gestures to the black eye.

“It’s never happened before,” Tim rushes to say. “Nothing like this ever has.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Bruce practically growls. Tim, to his credit, seems entirely unaffected by the intensity of the tone.

“I started it,” he says.

“… There’s no way that’s true.”

“Bruce,” Tim chokes out, leaning back into him.

“I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Bruce pulls him close like he could absorb Tim into himself, like if he holds him tightly enough he can keep him safe- as if he’s actually capable of keeping any child safe. This will never happen again, he wants to say, I won’t let it. His mind is racing. He doesn’t want to let Tim back into that house, doesn’t want to let him out of his sight really. He’s never been able to fathom how the Drakes can have this selfless, determined, brilliant child in their care, and be so willing to spend all their time away from him. He’s been wary of them from the beginning. But he never imagined that they could pose this kind of danger to their son.

“This is so stupid,” Tim grumbles into Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce can’t disagree, though he’s a little worried that they aren’t on the same page about what exactly that means.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Tim continues after a minute. “I thought- I thought things were going well!”

“Telling me was the right thing to do,” Bruce says quickly. “If somebody’s hurting you- no matter who it is-“

“That isn’t what I mean.” He takes a deep breath, and leans back a little bit.

Bruce watches patiently, as Tim calms his nerves, and steadies himself.

“I… told Mom and Dad about Connor,” he breathes. “Not the alien clone thing, obviously. But, I told them that I was seeing someone- a guy- and I don’t even know why I did it! In the back of my head I knew there was no way it was going to go over well. I knew that. I was just, I don’t know, feeling happy, and okay for the first time in a while. So I thought-“ He shakes his head. “I mean I didn’t think; that was the problem. And Mom reacted the way I knew she- the way I should have known she would. And I got mad, and I started yelling at her, and Dad, when I yelled at her, Dad, that’s when he- he…”

Bruce’s heart breaks. It’s not like he’d imagined that Jack Drake would have a good reason for lashing out at his son, but this was nothing.

“I’m still not hearing anything that you did wrong.” He forces himself to stay calm.

“Trying to come out to them was dumb! I didn’t need to do it. They were leaving soon anyways, it shouldn’t have mattered!”

“No. They shouldn’t have hurt you,” Bruce says fiercely. “This is part of who you are, so it should always matter. It’s not stupid to assume that people who are supposed to care about you would want to know more about what’s going on in your life. Tim, you did nothing wrong.”

He runs a hand up and down his back, like he’d done when Dick had nightmares as a child.

Tim glances at him out of the glassy corner of his eye, and scrubs his hands roughly over his face, before mumbling something that Bruce doesn’t catch.

He waits for a beat, before quietly asking if Tim will repeat himself.

“They don’t want me coming around here anymore,” he says more clearly, voice suddenly empty. “They- they saw that interview you did a couple years back, where you came out as bisexual.” His face is tinged pink, ashamed to even be repeating his parent’s words. “So they think that I, I don’t know, caught it from you, like it’s contagious or something. But I didn’t know where else to go! And I- I don’t want to give this up…“ He gestures broadly to the cave around them as hiccuping breaths overpower his speech.

Bruce just holds on as Tim continues to cry, softly repeating that he didn’t do anything wrong, carefully keeping the furious voice raging, ‘those bastards won’t take you away from me,’ under wraps. He doesn’t let himself think about every other instance of his sexuality being cited as a factor making him an unsuitable guardian that he’s committed to precise memory, the vicious arguments that his children should be taken away from him, the fact that if he hadn’t been born so lucky in so many other ways they might have been. Tim doesn’t need him to be angry, Tim needs him to be smart.

They wait out the tears again, until they’re not falling so heavily, and Tim is shuddering occasionally, rather than continuously, and can compose himself enough to speak.

“I didn’t mean to dump all this on you,” he says once he’s mostly calmed down.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Bruce threads his fingers through locks of lightly tangled hair. “I’m so glad you told me what happened. You’re going to stay here tonight, okay?”

Tim is with them often enough when his parents aren’t around that they already have a room made up for him, a room which after less than a year has come to show more evidence of his personality than his bedroom at the Drake’s mansion.

Tim nods.

“Thank you.”

Bruce squeezes his shoulder.

“Do you still have pajamas here? Or do you need to borrow a pair of Dick’s?”

It’s something easy in a moment where everything feels impossibly difficult.

“I brought them with me when I went home.” His breath catches on the last word, and it only half comes out.

“That’s all right. Dick won’t mind.”

Now it’s just a matter of getting themselves upstairs. There will be more to worry about tomorrow, much more, and it will undoubtedly only increase in the days that follow. Bruce will have to figure out whether or not Jack and Janet Drake are looking for their son, and he can’t quite decide which the worse option is at this point. He’ll also need to make sure he understands what exactly is within his power to do to keep Tim safe. Bruce stops himself before he can begin preparing for the future too obsessively. He brings himself back to the present moment, stairs, pajamas, bed, all very manageable tasks.

He just really doesn’t want to let go of the child in his arms. The realization that Tim might need him more than he thought is overpowering, making him feel violently protective, and a little bit terrified.

Some of the strain of the moment breaks when Tim uses the side of Bruce’s arm to stifle a yawn, but it’s still a little while longer before they’re ready to head upstairs.

When they do, Tim wanders up to his room, where Bruce hopes he’ll find easy rest. He stays awake and finds Alfred. There’s a lot they need to talk about.