Chapter Text
It’s 3AM on a blustery October morning and Tim’s in the middle of studying for her Crisis Communication midterm when Dick calls. She thinks for a few seconds about not answering the phone, but there's a decent chance that he’s contacting her about a genuine emergency. Ever since they started dating again, Dick’s gotten weird about asking Barbara for help on cases that he perceives as being unworthy of her skillset. Tim would be offended to have her time described as the less valuable asset, but he’s not necessarily wrong.
“Hey,” he says when she picks up. “So, uh, how’s school?”
“Neither of us cares about the answer to that question,” Tim says, tucking her phone into the crook of her neck and putting the cap back on her highlighter.
“Right,” Dick agrees. “Uh, fair enough.”
“Do you need help with something?” Tim asks, probably a little too eagerly.
Disappointingly, Dick says, “No, not really. I’m actually calling about Jason.”
Tim deflates. “What about her?”
“Have you seen her around?” Dick asks.
“You do realize I live in Philadelphia, right?” Tim says.
“Don’t pretend that you don’t see her,” Dick replies, with mild easiness that Tim always finds slightly unsettling. “I don’t want you to rat on her or anything, I just want to make sure somebody’s got eyes on. She and B had a blow-out about defenestration a few weeks ago and she took off.”
This particular song-and-dance is an extremely familiar one to Tim. It had become rapidly apparent to her upon making their genuine acquaintance that Bruce and Jason enjoyed their frequent screaming arguments about ethics—it’s obvious that they share a profound interest in moral philosophy, as well as an inability to effectively communicate with one another except at a full-throated bellow–and while the emotionally healthy thing to do would probably be to start a weekly book club, in lieu of that they’ve settled for yelling at each other every few months about whatever latest bloody judgment Jason has seen fit to enact on her enemies.
Tim has never gotten involved in one of these fights, and never will. She finds philosophy tedious.
“It’s been a few weeks,” Tim finally admits. Jason had shown up near the first of the month with greasy hair pushed straight back from her forehead, a wild-eyed stare tinged distinctly aquamarine, and the knuckles of her nylon gloves creaking. When two cups of espresso and an hour of complaining about the idiots with which Tim shared an MBA program had failed to fix any of those things, Tim had taken her down the street to Smokey Joe’s to watch the Knights smoke the Flyers, six to two, which had given Jason the excuse to talk shit and goad a pair of belligerently thick-necked Temple undergrads into a back alley fistfight over Gritty’s honor. Jason had been gone the next morning when Tim had woken up, but she’d left half a grilled cheese in Tim’s fridge wrapped in aluminum foil. In the end, as Tim had chewed through the cold sandwich without bothering to reheat it, she had elected to interpret this gesture as a positive sign; if Jason was hungry enough to cook, probably she was feeling better.
“She seemed fine,” Tim decides to say in lieu of providing actual details.
“Well, if you see her, could you tell her to stop screening my calls? I’m starting to get a complex about it,” Dick asks, in that gently good-humored griping at which he so excels.
Two years ago, these kinds of comments offered in this kind of tone would have made Tim bristle, but she’s gathered enough evidence now to reject the hypothesis that Dick is just pretending to like her. Even if his reasons for doing so remain opaque, he’s been remarkably consistent in his approach. He’d shown up in Philadelphia half a dozen times during Tim's first term at Wharton, on either real or fabricated errands, and he’d insisted on taking Tim out for dinner every time. Reminders that Tim was very far from a starving college student had fallen on obnoxiously deaf ears. He’d even teamed up with Joe to plan a week abroad with Tim and Jess for spring break last year, although that had ended up horribly backfiring when Tim had gotten lost in Willemspark trying to find the Van Gogh Museum and had accidentally walked into the middle of what turned out to be the professional assassin World Cup finals.
“If I see her, I’ll let her know that you called,” Tim says. “But I won’t any time soon, so probably you should do your own reconnaissance.”
Dick coughs out a laugh. “Don’t you think you might be a little overconfident there? Jason’s made a professional reputation of being unpredictable.”
It had taken Tim exactly three impromptu visits to figure out the logic that drove Jason to show up at her door. The reasons were, in ascending order of importance: grievous bodily injury, fights with Dick, inane crime lord managerial crises, fights with Bruce, and Knights at Flyers games. Thirteen-dimensional chess with Batman, Jason’s motives were not.
“None of you are unpredictable,” Tim says. “It’s cute that you think that, though.”
~
Tim staggers home from Crisis Communication the next afternoon in a tired haze, stopping only long enough to pick up some chicken shawarma and an Americano from Manakeesh. Although her first year of business school hadn’t turned out to be particularly demanding, Tim has found the second-year curriculum an exhausting slog, mostly because it necessitates a seemingly endless array of group projects. Tim has never enjoyed working with others, mostly because she resents the loss of productivity inevitably wrought by democracy. Even though her coursework is objectively less demanding than undergrad, Tim ends each day feeling like a dirty sponge that’s been thoroughly wrung out. Occasionally, she can hear Susanne’s phantom presence cackling from over her shoulder: One day, puberty will hit you like a brick and all of that energy? Poof! Gone!
The doorman is holding a flower delivery for her when she pushes her way into the lobby of her condo building. Erupting out of a hypnotically awful crystal vase is a riotous spray of gardenias and calla lilies nestled in amongst fronds of greenery. There are two perfect stems of white phalaenopsis arching above the rest of the arrangement, adding both structural interest and ostentation. Because there’s exactly one person who’d send her a $300 arrangement, Tim doesn’t bother doing more than a perfunctory scan of the card and a single, desultory sniff of the bouquet when the doorman pushes both across his desk for her inspection. “Evening, Miss Drake,” he says. “You want these ones?”
“I’m good,” Tim decides, leaning back. Ugh, gardenias. They’re so cloying. “You can keep them, if you want.”
“You sure?” he asks, forking over the rest of her mail. Tim can’t help but notice that there’s no actual reluctance in his voice.
“Absolutely,” Tim says, rifling through the pile. About half of them are from the Yale alumni association, who are always begging for donations as if they’re not sitting on one of the largest endowments in the country. “You have a good one, Jimmy.”
“You too, Miss Drake,” he calls after her.
Upstairs, after she’s locked the deadbolt behind her, Tim carts her fistful of junk mail and Styrofoam container of grilled chicken and cucumber salad over to her desk and flops down into her swivel chair. She takes a few minutes to inspect Ducky’s terrarium, which she does daily this time of year, to make sure the over-wintering process is proceeding smoothly. As she sips in long pulls from her Americano, she opens up the top of the terrarium and uses a pair of small stainless-steel scissors to snip off a few withered pitchers. After she’s replaced the terrarium lid and moved it back into its optimal position on her desk, she shakes her mouse to wake up her computer and leans over to type in her password.
“Hey,” someone coughs behind her, and Tim recognizes the voice fast enough that she doesn’t even physically startle. At this point, not doing so is a matter of pride.
“Dick called yesterday, looking for you,” Tim calls over her shoulder, ending her twenty-digit password with a flourish and a hard stab at the return key. “He implied that you threw someone out a window, but in that way he does, you know— no judgment, just checking in .”
“Great,” Jason mumbles flatly. “Let’s make it a whole fucking family affair.”
Tim uses her toe to push her swivel chair around 180 degrees. Jason is struggling to get the latch closed on the French doors to the balcony, probably because her left arm is hanging strangely. The bulky mass of it under her leather jacket looks like there are a few extra joints than there had been the last time Jason had broken into Tim’s apartment. “You look like you were the one defenestrated,” Tim tells her.
“You should see the other guy,” Jason says, a little too wearily. “You still got that kit, don’t you, princess?”
“It’s in the master bathroom,” Tim replies. “You need a hand?” But she doesn’t wait for Jason to answer, because it’s obvious that Jason is going to lie to her. “Never mind, come on. Can you get that thing off?” She briskly ushers Jason down the corridor to the master bedroom, which mostly functions as a cave where Tim keeps her various piles of clothes. Tim shoves Jason down onto the bed and goes into the bathroom to dig up the first aid kit from the back of the closet. Calling it a kit is a little ridiculous; it is in fact a suitcase that exceeds most international airline carry-on regulations. The only thing it doesn’t have is an X-ray machine, and Alfred had told Tim to her face that that was because he didn’t trust her to use one responsibly.
For her own physical flesh, Tim has only ever raided the first aid suitcase for small things--band-aids for her skinned heels after long days in five-inch stilettos, ibuprofen for when she loses track of the time and spends too long squinting at her computer, icy-hot packs for the mornings after a particularly brutal work out—but on Jason’s behalf she’s had to dig up everything from sutures to burn gel. Jason in general seems to be fairly impervious to bodily injury, which means if she comes crawling for somewhere to recover for a few hours, it’s for something objectively ridiculous. Like, for example, an arm broken in five to twelve places.
“You didn’t ride your bike like that, did you?” Tim calls from inside the bathroom cabinet.
Jason only offers a muffled grunt in response.
Sometimes, when she’s in the middle of knotting a few sloppy stitches into the skin of Jason’s shoulder or caking a half-inch of lidocaine gel over a dark red burn on Jason’s back, Tim will remember an Echo chart with fourteen pages of notes submitted by an increasingly perplexed Gotham General intake nurse, and her fingertips will go ice-cold with dread. Jason’s been blown apart and pulled together too many times to count, and in many ways it’s worse that she’s so resilient. Tim is hardly a religious person, but Jason’s resurrection straddles the line between scientifically inexplicable and a genuine miracle, and Tim doesn’t enjoy the lack of certainty implied by miracles. Can Jason die, permanently? Sometimes it feels like she wants to push herself until she gets a definitive answer.
Tim lugs the suitcase into the bedroom and has to use both hands to heft it up onto the bed next to Jason. In the intervening two or so minutes, Jason has managed to pull her leather jacket off, but she’s fumbling to unlatch her body armor. Tim swats her hand out of the way. “Is there a funny story to go with this disaster?” Tim asks, sliding her fingers up to hook into the latch secreted under Jason’s left armpit. It’s only the third time that Tim’s had to help her do this, but Tim’s memories of the first and second times are permanently seared into her mind. She would feel gross about it, but she is providing Jason with free medical aid. And it’s not like Tim has ever let herself betray anything other than brisk professionalism when faced with the various vulnerable stretches of Jason’s body.
“Tale as old as time, princess,” Jason wheezes, a pained exhale hissing out of her as Tim eases off her chest plate. “Went to see a man about a horse. You know how it goes.”
“I’m thinking that you’re the one who would benefit from taking a class on Crisis Communication,” Tim tells her. “Since your usual method of communicating during a crisis just seems to involve shooting people. Don’t move .”
Jason does not stop trying to wriggle her broken arm out of the crook of her pauldron. “Unless you got a welding torch in there, princess, there’s only one way it’s coming out,” she says.
“I wouldn’t put it past Alfred,” Tim snarks, but of course Jason has made a reasonable point and subsequently followed it to an unreasonable conclusion—her classic modus operandi, really. “Just sit still. Which one of us here has two functional hands?” As carefully and quickly as she can, Tim unhooks the gauntlet around Jason’s forearm from the thermal bodysuit underneath. Jason’s flesh moves with an unpleasant grinding noise under Tim’s fingertips. “Stop flexing, you’re making it worse.”
“I’m not flexing ,” Jason says, offended enough for it to audibly break through the pain in her voice.
“Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it,” Tim says through her teeth as she carefully slides the loosened gauntlet over the swollen hook of Jason’s hand. “What’ll cut the bodysuit?”
“Knife in my left boot, probably.” Jason can now pull her arm through the pauldron without further contortion, which she does immediately.
Tim trims off the sleeve of Jason’s bodysuit at the shoulder and then starts the unsettling and disgusting work of putting her arm back together. “I can’t help but feel like there are a lot of people more qualified to do this than me, and most of them don’t live in Pennsylvania,” Tim observes to Jason, who just grunts.
Close to two hours later, Tim’s back hurts and she’s hunched like a waterspout gargoyle over Jason, whose arm is now almost entirely splinted back into a vague approximation of the right shape. Jason deeply inhales apropos of a particularly rough jerk that Tim has to use to realign two segments of her humerus. “Sorry,” Tim mutters as Jason spits out a breath and gulps in a mouth of air.
“What is that? Gardenias?” Jason says, sounding perplexed.
For a hot second something distinctly unprofessional slithers down the back of Tim’s neck, and then she gets with the program. “What?” Tim says, faintly, and then, “Oh, yeah, Seppo sent me flowers. Can you seriously smell that?” Another bizarre trait to add to the Lazarus Pit phenotyping list.
“A better question,” Jason bites out, “is why the hell is Seppo Falcone is sending you flowers?” Almost every word in her sentence gets its own unique emphasis. The only other person Tim’s ever heard manage that kind of complex inflection is Svetlana.
“I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions,” Tim says, already preoccupied by taping an L-shaped splint into place along the inside curve of Jason’s elbow to stabilize the joint. “It’s obvious that Sonny’s completely forgotten I exist, especially now that he’s in Mānoa, but Seppo seems to have gotten attached to the idea of me being his sister-in-law. He has flowers delivered to me sometimes, you know, Sonny sends his regards .” Tim has to dig through the suitcase for another split, for Jason’s pinky finger. “It’s annoying, but he’ll give up eventually. I have no intention of ever living on the same continent as Sonny ever again, let alone the same state.”
Never let it be said that Tim doesn’t learn from her mistakes; making the Falcones tediously miserable and too busy to bother her is the number one non-school-related use of her time these days. Sometimes, when she’s in the middle of sabotaging Sonny’s law school applications to everywhere except the University of Hawai’i, or putting Seppo on the No-Fly list, or flagging Piccola Trattoria for health code violations, Tim feels like whatever the bitter, vengeful version of a fairy godmother is. A gremlin, probably.
“I’ll deal with it,” Tim says. “Okay, I think that’s as good as this is going to get.” She steps back and inspects Jason’s arm, which now has the structure integrity and general profile of a pile of Legos. “How does it feel?”
“Like it’s been dipped in the fires of Mordor,” Jason says flatly. “Don’t you think you ought to know better by now what you can actually handle on your own? Falcone’s in another fucking weight class and you know it.”
“Here’s an idea,” Tim suggests. “Why don’t you stop insulting the person who just put your entire jigsaw puzzle of an arm back together and lay down. Do you need help with the pillows?”
Jason sneers at her, but any genuine threat in it is mitigated by the way she pathetically flops back into the nest of Tim’s bed. Her face is flushed from pain and exhaustion, her hair pushed back from her face so that Tim can see the beads of sweat dotting her hairline. “Can you, uh,” she says, and she kicks a foot out in Tim’s general direction. It takes Tim a second to realize that she’s asking for Tim’s help pulling off her boots.
“Seriously?” Tim says. “It’s fine, I’m going to wash the sheets anyway.”
“You don’t put shoes on the bed , princess, were you raised by fucking wolves?”
Since it seems like a stupid waste of time to keep arguing about it, Tim helps unbuckle Jason’s boots and pulls them off, one at a time, followed by the Smartwool hiking socks that Tim strongly suspects Alfred buys for her. Tim makes Jason her own little pile of belongings on the floor, leather jacket and socks and boots, and then drags the first aid suitcase off of the bed to lessen the likelihood that Jason will roll over in the middle of the night and bang her arm into it.
“Hey,” Jason says muzzily as Tim clicks off the overhead lights. “Thanks.”
“Please express your gratitude by not dying in the middle of the night,” Tim says. She immediately slams the door to the master bedroom shut behind herself, to make sure she gets the last word on the subject. For three or four seconds Tim stands there in front of the door like she’s the one with an object permanence problem, suddenly deeply worried that Jason will have dissolved like mist upon no longer being directly observed, and then Tim reminds herself to get a fucking grip and goes back out into the living room to eat her lukewarm coffee and stone-cold shawarma.
~
By the time Tim crawls her way out of the guest bedroom at eleven the next morning, Jason is already gone. She’s left a pile of splints and a white paper bag on the kitchen counter; when Tim unfurls the top of the latter, she finds a wax paper-wrapped pumpernickel bagel inside, with a solid inch of cream cheese plastering the two halves together. Jason’s scribbled C U on the side, with a crude little pictogram of a tiara. Tim has to physically force herself to throw it away after she’s finished eating her bagel.
~
When winter break had rolled around Tim’s first year at Wharton, she hadn’t bothered to make any plans. Her parents had decided to winter in Nairobi, with the intention of dipping their toes into prehistorical archaeology and expanding a site near Olorgesailie, and they had accordingly passed on the holiday party circuit for the year. Tim had toyed with the idea of it being her responsibility as the future of Drake Industries to go and make a solid showing for the family, but the second week of December had dumped two feet of snow on the New Jersey Turnpike and Tim had decided the better part of valor would be staying in Philadelphia. Surely even Julius Winters couldn’t leverage a handful of Christmas parties into a successful takeover of the Drake Industries board? Or so Tim had assured herself as she’d clutched an enormous mug of black coffee and peered out at the snow rapidly accumulating on her balcony.
In the end, though, Tim had not spent Christmas in Philadelphia. At some ungodly hour the morning of December 24th, Pamela’s Hyundai had screeched to a halt halfway up the sidewalk in front of Tim’s condo building and Harleen had clambered out wearing a bright red snowsuit, yelling something at the top of her lungs about Christmas miracles. All three of them had braved the snow to spend the holidays in New Haven with Faduma and Susanne, where they were plied with soft gingerbread, mulled wine, and a truly astonishing array of spiced squashes, each one of which had been more delicious than the last. On her way out the door the day after New Year’s, Tim had been squished into Faduma’s arms for nearly ten long seconds, at the end of which Faduma had furiously whispered, “We always want to see you,” before she’d pulled away and cleared her throat.
Tim would gladly spend her second Wharton winter break the same way, and is in fact planning on it, up until the first week of December when her mom’s assistant CC’s her on an email confirming acceptance to the annual Wayne Christmas party on the 24th. Over the next twenty-four hours, a flurry of CC’d RSVPs flood Tim’s inbox: the Hammerstein-Schmidts’ party on the 19th, the van der Bergs’ on the 20th, the Gallaghers’ on the 21st, the Yangs’ on the 22nd. Tim plugs them all into her calendar, feeling increasingly mutinous as she braces herself for the New Year’s gauntlet, but she instead receives a delightful stay of execution: a BCC on a quick confirmation from Ron on behalf of the entire flight staff that the Drakes’ private jet will be prepped and fueled for a 11:00 departure to Jomo Kenyatta on 12/26.
Tim calls Faduma and Susanne and tells them she won’t be able to make it up to Connecticut until the evening of the 26th.
“That’s fine!” Faduma assures her, while Susanne loudly grumbles in the background about how all the cookies will be gone by then and Tim will have to subsist on crumbs. “Give your parents our best, won’t you?” Faduma continues, with what is clearly fake enthusiasm.
“Of course,” Tim lies.
So instead of spending Christmas Eve in Connecticut eating her weight in gingerbread and playing increasingly vicious rounds of Bananagrams, Tim layers a scarlet silk button-down under her ivory Chanel pantsuit and makes the fifteen-minute drive over to Wayne Manor with her parents. Alfred has had the chandelier cleaned; its thousands of crystals scatter dazzling prisms over the colorful rugs and huge vases decorating the marble foyer. It doesn’t even look like the same room to which Tim had retreated after her erstwhile kidnapping, although the polite smile on Alfred’s face when he welcomes them and takes their coats is familiar. “Miss Tim,” he murmurs as Tim unwraps her scarf. As her parents disappear up the stairs to the second floor, a much warmer smile changes the planes of Alfred’s face. “Happy Christmas.”
“You too, Alfred,” Tim whispers. She wants to linger down here with him, trail after him to the blue-and-cream kitchen and sit together at the table to share a warm cup of his disgusting tea that tastes like smoked fish, but she’s conscious that he’s working tonight. “Everything’s okay?”
“Extremely well, thank you,” Alfred says, accepting her scarf and gloves. “Up you go, then.”
The second-floor ballroom is packed to the gills with wretchedly familiar faces, so Tim grabs a cranberry and soda and starts the circuit. Loretta Winters is engaged to some pediatrician who is twenty-seventh in line for the Swedish throne and she is literally glowing with triumph, although some of that is probably due to her having excessively contoured and highlighted her cheekbones. Her fiancée looks like she would rather be literally anywhere else, including Mars, or Siberia.
Tim’s nearly done with her first round when she spies Cassandra and Damian, who are whispering to each other over the dessert table. Tim briefly considers going over to say hello, but when Damian catches sight of her he shoots her one of his trademark dark glowers, very Son of the Demon. Tim gives him a cheerful wave and a bright smile, which only makes him glare harder. Cassandra waves back.
Before Tim has to decide if she wants to further cement her status as Damian’s least favorite human being on the planet by interrupting whatever plotting he and Cassandra are doing, Bruce materializes out of a knot of geriatric Gotham Philharmonic Platinum Tier sponsors to Tim’s left. “Tim,” he says, very warmly. “I’m glad you made it back from Philadelphia to see us tonight.” He shakes her hand, and then reels her in to kiss her cheek. He has to bend down so far to do it that for a second Tim is confused by his body language—the shoulder angle makes it seem like he might be going for a hug--so she automatically shifts her arm to accommodate it and she ends up awkwardly hooking her elbow around his back for about half a second before she realizes that it’s not, in fact, a hug. She skids backwards like a scalded cat, her cheeks starting to burn.
“Thank you for inviting me,” she says, more shyly than she’s ever said anything to Bruce in her entire life. For a few long, oxygen-deprived seconds she feels like a dizzyingly intimidated eleven-year-old again, and then she sucks down a mouthful of air and is able to clear her head of embarrassed panic. Get a grip! “Dick said you spent Thanksgiving abroad—Prague, wasn’t it?”
As a matter of fact, Batman had spent the second half of November on some Justice League business that had apparently only just barely kept the planet from dissolving, or blowing up, or some other physically improbable deadly fate—none of Tim’s usual sources have been able to agree on what happened—but Dick had made a point of taking Tim out for lunch around the corner from the Metro Philly office and loudly complaining about Bruce’s suddenly hankering for smažený sýr, so she is well aware of the party line.
“Oh, Prague’s great,” Bruce says, pure Brucie. “You ever been?”
“No,” Tim says. “I’ve heard it’s beautiful.”
“It’s one of those places everybody should go at least once,” he tells her, smile quirked in the corner of his mouth. Most of the crowd is drinking champagne, but he has a glass of something amber-colored on the rocks. Tim suspects iced tea, with a dash of well whiskey to give it the right smell. “How is school treating you?”
Tim almost starts to make a face before she catches herself. They are, after all, still in earshot of the Philharmonic Platinum Tier sponsors. She settles for a rueful smile instead. “Almost done,” she tells him. “Thank God. I’m ready to join the real world.”
“It’s a great accomplishment,” he says earnestly, lifting his glass a little and tilting it towards her. “Your parents must be really proud of you.”
“Oh, yes,” Tim agrees. Probably. And then, for the benefit of their audience, she elaborates: “They’ve always been very invested in my future. I’m glad that they’re ready for me to step up and take a little more responsibility in the company.”
“Well, you’re a very responsible young woman,” he says, with Brucie’s dazzling sincerity. “When are you starting at Drake Industries?”
“June,” Tim says brightly. “It can’t come soon enough!” To make sure she sounds like she means it, she imbues this statement with her very real desire to come back to Gotham. She misses it more and more every day. Even the grimy, labyrinthine, cobblestoned streets of Philadelphia can’t compare.
For a very brief second, Tim sees something in his eyes that shades more Bruce than Brucie; an intense emotion seems to dagger through him, and he opens his mouth to say something. Unfortunately, whatever it is remains a mystery, because at that moment someone’s sharp elbow drives into Tim’s back and about half a cup of soda and cranberry sloshes down the front of her suit jacket.
“I apologize,” Damian says from behind Tim with palpable insincerity. “I did not see you.”
The look that Bruce sends over Tim’s head is extremely unimpressed. “She’s not that short,” he says, but the corner of his mouth twitches betrayingly. Tim has never been able to determine why Bruce thinks it’s so funny that Damian hates her, but his inability to hide his amusement has served as a kind of inadvertent permission and accordingly ensured that Damian keeps being a brat.
Tim sighs and shoves her glass at Damian. The scant half-inch of its remaining contents slosh dangerously. “Hold this,” she bites out as she unbuttons her suit jacket and strips it off. The ivory wool has already wicked up most of the juice; it now looks like something more suited to a GCPD evidence locker than the annual Wayne Christmas party.
“Send us the dry-cleaning bill and we’ll make sure it comes out of Damian’s allowance,” Bruce assures Tim, like Damian isn’t independently wealthy half a dozen ways and financial punishments have no real meaning to him.
“Indeed,” Damian agrees coldly.
Tim sighs. “Right,” she says. “Thanks, Mr. Wayne. Damian, as always, it’s been a pleasure that we should do our best never to repeat.”
“Farewell, Drake.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Tim,” Bruce says. His mouth keeps moving for a very brief second, as if he’s chewing on more words, and then it shifts into a charming smile. “Enjoy your break.”
“I will,” Tim says, and it’s not even a lie, since 48 hours from now she’s going to be tucked up on a couch in New Haven, listening to Nat King Cole while Harleen destroys Faduma and Susanne at cribbage. “Happy Holidays, Mr. Wayne.”
Not for the first time, Tim recognizes that Bruce is trying to tell her something with eyes, and she has no idea what it is. There’s something about the set of his jaw, or maybe the way he’s holding his shoulders, that reminds her of a very specific Batman of her childhood: the one who had loomed over her on various rooftops of the Bowery, staring at her in hard silence for sixty, seventy, eighty seconds, before just as silently turning around and leaving. What do you want? Tim thinks at him, tinging just a little towards hysteria. If he asked, she’d probably even give it to him. All he has to do is reach out.
“Merry Christmas, Tim,” he finally says.
~
Tim moves back to Gotham before the ink even has a chance to fully dry on her diploma from Wharton. The entire day is an exhausting slog and she spends most of it eagerly anticipating the second that she can stagger into the bedroom of her new condo and collapse face-first down on her bed. Instead, a surprising wave of giddiness sweeps over her after she’s finished unboxing all of her monitors and cutting the bubble wrap from around Ducky’s terrarium. Sleep feels like something happening at a distance, to other people.
Instead, Tim pulls on her windbreaker and sneakers and tucks her greasy hair under a beanie before setting off into the night with her camera bag looped over her chest. It’s a half-hour walk at Tim’s meandering pace, with her short legs, and she enjoys every minute of it. It’s an extremely typical May night in Gotham–humid, unpleasantly cool, the air smelling of a mixture of gasoline, bleach, and rotting leaves–and Tim has to choke down the urge to do something horrifically maudlin like hum to herself.
She lifts a cheerful hand to the security guard in the front lobby and calls, “Evening!” in a lower tenor than her usual speaking voice as she fishes her fake ID out of her camera bag and swipes for access to the elevator bank.
“Late one,” the security guard observes, barely pulling his gaze from the Goliaths game he’s watching behind the desk. Tim can hear the frantic squeaking of court shoes on linoleum and the roar of the crowd. “Don’t work so hard!”
“You know me,” Tim laughs, “I just can’t quit,” and then she scuttles off to press the button to call the elevator to the penthouse offices.
At this hour, the PFSG penthouse is a shadowy, deserted landscape of mahogany desks and glass-encased offices. Tim confidently navigates the warren of hallways and cubicles even in the dark, pausing at Marcia’s desk to swipe two paper clips from the magnetic Bulbasaur bobblehead that she keeps next to her desktop monitor. Marcia Lai, 64, has worked for PFSG for over forty years and has been threatening to retire with increasing frequency the last few months; her eldest grandchild has just turned four and Marcia is thinking about moving to San Diego so she’ll be closer to her daughter and daughter-in-law when they pop out kid number three. Tim hopes she goes–her grandkids are really cute–although she’ll miss Marcia’s superior taste in office supplies.
Three minutes later, Tim’s on the roof proper. She stands in the middle of the flat stretch of it, tilting her head back to stare up at the sky. It’s too cloudy to see the stars, even if the light pollution wasn’t so bad, but she can make out the pale face of the waxing moon. “Hi,” Tim whispers shyly, and then, feeling ridiculous, she shakes her head and makes her way over to the west-facing railing.
It’s not quite clear enough to see to the other side of the river, but Tim can make out the dark shapes of barges moving across the water. She unpacks her camera, screws on the wide angle lens, and takes a few practice shots to get a sense of the light.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, she catches something dark and blurry in the viewfinder, like the industrious little spiders that craft their webs on the outside of upper-level skyscraper windows. When she lowers her camera, she can only just discern the shape of a muscular body contorting on the edge of a grappling line.
Tim cups her hands around her mouth and calls, “Isn’t this a little south for you?”
At the very end of her grappling line Jason executes a neat little somersault and plasters herself against one of the crenulations hugging floors seventy-five through seventy-nine of the Pinkney Tower. She pauses for a few seconds to get her bearings before she swings her way up to the very top of the roof, closing the forty-foot gap in less than ten seconds.
“Isn’t this a little south for you , princess?” Jason retorts as she pulls off her helmet. She’s not even winded, of course.
“Moved back this afternoon,” Tim says. She reaches out and flicks her index finger against the folded-over collar of Jason’s leather vest. Jason’s wearing body armor underneath it, but her arms are bare. There are a few scars on display, but none that indicate that her entire arm was shattered less than six months ago. “What’s with the new look? Is this Petty Crime Boss Spring/Summer?”
“It’s cute when you pretend you know things about fashion,” Jason says, extremely hypocritically for someone who dresses like an extra pulled out of 80s butch central casting. “You like it? Got it off some idiot in the Village 16s who thought he was ready for a little lateral promotion.” She turns and points her thumbs at the back, where THIS LIFE CHOSE ME is spelled out in silver spikes, circling an embroidered cartoon of a grinning red skull. “Apropos, right?”
Tim puts a hand over her face, just for a second, because she can’t bite back the delighted smile. “Incredibly,” she says, struggling to keep it deadpan. “You did, uh, clean it first, right?”
“Your girl Svetlana, she hooked me up,” Jason says as she turns back around to face Tim. “Basement of Elm and Beecher?”
“Oh, Andrej!” Tim says, pleased. “Yeah, he’s incredible. He’s the one who got the cranberry juice out of my Chanel pantsuit.”
As predicted, the $250 bill had not been enough to discourage Damian. Tim can’t help but feel like at fourteen he’s getting a little too old for tantrums and Stephen King-esque shenanigans, but she’s not his mom and she’s definitely not interested in auditioning for the job. If Bruce wants to raise a spoiled brat who can’t even machinate with subtlety, that’s his problem.
“The man’s a fucken wizard. It doesn’t even smell like blood anymore,” Jason says happily.
Tim bites the inside corner of her mouth to keep from smiling. “It looks nice,” she finally decides to say. “I imagine your recruiting amongst 12 to 18-year-olds is going to see a real boost.”
“Yeah, well, speaking of Jack Dawkins, he’s not gonna come out and say it but he’d like to see you,” says Jason, barreling right past banter into a genuinely serious conversation. Perhaps in recognition of how awkward a turn it’s proven to be, Jason averts her face so she’s looking somewhere over Tim’s left shoulder and fusses with the collar of her vest, popping it so it’s standing upright. “Make sure you still have all your limbs on straight, whatever.”
“Nothing about me is straight,” Tim says.
Jason’s head twitches a little. Even though she still has a domino affixed to the upper half of her face, obscuring her expression, Tim can tell that Jason’s now wearing a narrow-eyed glare. “You can yuk it up all you like but the man’s got a point.”
“You lose one spleen to one totally random accident and suddenly you’re a baby who can’t take care of herself,” Tim gripes.
Jason says, “‘Stabbed by ninja’ ain’t a random accident.”
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you know that technically they weren’t ninjas –” Tim tries, and then she gives that up. “Whatever, that’s beside the point. Isn’t that advice a little rich, coming from you?”
“I’m not saying you should talk to him, I’m saying he wants you to,” Jason says. “Feel free to ignore what he wants, I know I always do. It’ll just feed his martyr complex, so he’ll be satisfied either way.”
“I’m not ignoring anyone,” Tim insists. “I was busy!” Between buying a condo in Gotham, finishing up her coursework, onboarding for her starting position at Drake Industries–special assistant to the vice president of production planning, which was nepotistic hair-splitting at its finest–and trying to talk Faduma and Susanne out of driving to Philadelphia for the Wharton MBA graduation–she’d failed miserably; Harleen and Pamela had come, too–Tim’s been up to her eyeballs in aggravating minutiae and endless reply-all email cascades for the last two months.
“Really? You ? Too busy to take B’s calls?” Jason says. “That’s cute.”
“Obviously I’m cute, that’s besides the point,” Tim says flatly. “I wasn’t screening his calls. He’s just been really strange since Christmas and I didn’t have the bandwidth to investigate. Is he still being weird? N told me it was just a space thing.”
“You’re all dumbasses,” Jason marvels. “You, especially. It’s almost inspiring, very Chicken Soup for the Reanimated Soul .”
Not a space thing, then. Tim had identified that straight off as a magnificently stupid excuse, but she hadn’t known enough about space or things therein to call Dick’s bullshit. She ought to have just trusted her instincts and goaded him until he folded. “Well, if it’s not a space thing, what is it?”
“He wanted to go to your graduation,” Jason says. The humor drains out of her a little bit; college is a sore point for Jason, who unlike Tim is a genuinely enthusiastic student of many subjects and probably would have, in another life, gleefully spent her twenties getting advanced degrees in bizarre and useless disciplines like English Literature, or History and Philosophy of Science.
“Wait,” Tim says. “What? Why?”
“If you think the baby psychopath’s going to college, you’ve got a highly inflated sense of that kid’s attention span for things he thinks are bullshit,” Jason says, bizarrely.
“Okay?” Tim says, since she agrees. “And?”
“And, I’m dead. N gave it a shot and then bowed out. BB has no interest in or respect for formal Western education, and frankly, good on her, that’s a better excuse than what the baby’s offered up. That just leaves you, princess.”
Tim stares at Jason. “That’s– absurd ,” she manages.
“Well, the man’s brain is soup,” Jason says. “Too many head injuries, probably.”
Never one to argue with a diagnosis of post-concussion syndrome, Tim decides to just let that one go. “I’m not his kid,” she finally decides to say.
“Yes, obviously,” Jason agrees, annoyed. “That’s why he’s sad.”
Tim’s learned a lot over the two years she’s spent peripherally orbiting the Batman organization. She’s picked up krav maga, and tricks to improve her firewalls, and how to roast a chicken. She’s also learned other things, harder to pin down and neatly categorize. When she’d needed to buy a condo in Gotham and had optimistically decided that she wanted to triangulate the place between the Drake Industries building in the Financial District and the ACLU office over by City Hall–just in case Jess was able to convert her back-to-back summer internships into a hiring opportunity–she’d asked Jason for a second opinion on building security. Jason had promptly broken into each of Tim’s top ten candidates and afterwards sent her a fairly comprehensive report summarizing her findings. She’d included recommendations for which windows she felt should be replaced with bulletproof plate and a ranking of how grievously incompetent she’d found the various doormen based on how easy they were to bribe with a box of cruellers from Matilda’s.
So maybe it’s fair to say that Tim’s discovered how to ask for help, and trust that she’ll get it. More than that, she’s figured out how to tell that she’s in trouble before it has a chance to bite her in the ass. (Mostly. Tim will maintain until the day she dies that the spleen thing was not her fault.)
But no matter how much Tim’s learned, she will never pretend to really understand Bruce.
“It wasn’t–personal,” Tim explains, a little awkwardly. “They only give you four tickets, and Pamela said she wanted to come, and you know Faduma and Susanne–”
Jason, who had made Faduma and Susanne’s acquaintance in Philadelphia exactly once and then proceeded to jump out of the nearest window any time the experience threatened to repeat itself, lifts a hand to stop Tim’s fumbling explanation. “Yeah, I know,” she says. “And I bet he knows, too. But he’ll just get like that sometimes.”
“Right,” Tim says, although she doesn’t know what Jason means exactly. Maybe if she ever took Dick up on one of the hundreds of times he’s invited her to come over to Wayne Manor for Sunday morning brunch, she would. “Well, I’ll–talk to him, I guess?”
It seems like it finally occurs to Jason that she’s just spent the better part of ten minutes taking Bruce’s side of a situation; she straightens up in alarm and then slouches again, like a dog shaking off an unwanted bath. She tucks her thumbs into the belt loops of her cargo pants and does something with her feet that makes her slouch look distinctly dangerous. Abruptly, her general air shifts from Tim’s friend Jason to Red Hood, Crime Lord.
“Well, whatever,” Jason says lazily. “Do what you want, I’m not your mom.”
Tim says, “Thanks, I will,” very dryly. “Anything else I can do for you, Madam Hood?”
Jason does not say anything for a few seconds. Her mouth moves as though she’s sucking on the inside of her cheek, like she’s tasting the words before she says them.
“Yeah,” she says eventually. “Guess you’ll wanna know, I paid a visit to an old pal of yours.” Is something wrong with Jess? Tim thinks in alarm, but not for very long, because Jason continues, “Friend of a friend tells me, he heard you were moving back and was getting some ideas.” She lifts a hand to one of the pouches on her utility belt and undoes the snap. “Anyway, we just had a chat. You know what those can be like, don’t you, princess?” She reaches into the pouch and pulls something out as she swaggers closer, gesturing with her cupped fingers for Tim to offer a hand.
When Tim does so, palm up, Jason drops three rings into her hand, one by one. They’re huge, cast in either stainless steel or silver–an ouroboros with rubies for eyes, a pinky signet carved with an ornate F, a band wrought in classical Sardinian beadwork–and Tim can see, when she holds them up closer to her eyes, squinting in the low light, that only a token effort has been made to scrub the blood out of their crevices.
Three rings, for the three years that the Falcones have been hassling Tim about marrying into their dynasty and legitimizing their golden boy. Because she’s been cultivating a better sense of self-awareness since her fourteenth birthday, Tim knows perfectly well that she should not be so pleased by this gesture. A normal person–a Loretta Winters, if you will–would probably be screaming her head off right now.
Tim’s annoyed, of course, because Seppo Falcone is first and foremost a Tim problem. Generally, Tim prides herself on solving her own problems. However, any incipient frustration is being smothered by something very fizzy in the back of her throat.
Jason had gone to all those condos, and bribed all those doormen with donuts. She’d come to Philadelphia every few months the whole time Tim lived there, like a feral street cat pretending not to have a preferred doorstep, and complained about the quality of Tim’s coffee grounds and the limited nature of the streaming services to which Tim subscribed even while she sprawled on Tim’s sofa with a mug of coffee and marathoned every episode of The Durrells in Corfu . When Tim had been released from the Academisch Medisch Centrum and sent home to recover with a very long list of the many ways in which her life would have to change to accommodate her lack of a spleen, Jason had come by every Monday for a month to bring Tim a week’s worth of bagels from her favorite deli in Gotham Village.
Tim tightens her grip on the rings until they bite into the skin of her palm. When she looks up, Jason has retreated to a spot by the edge of the roof fifteen or so feet away and is fussing with the neck strap of her helmet, probably in anticipation of putting it back on. Tim feels like she’s the one teetering on the edge of a tall building, the breathless anticipation bubbling at the back of her throat.
“Hey,” she calls to Jason. “What you were saying before, how B’s never going to see one of his kids graduate? It’s bullshit. Obviously you’re dead now , but you’re going to get bored of being a crime boss eventually. And you’re, you know, a walking corpse that doesn’t age. You’ve got time.” She bites the inside corner of her mouth. “For lots of things.”
Tim can’t quite tell what expression is on her face, but it’s probably embarrassingly transparent. Not for the first time, Tim marvels at the effect she allows the members of this fucked-up family to have on her. Why had she imprinted on them like a baby duck? She never should have asked her parents to take her to the circus.
Jason’s head jerks up. After a few long, terrifyingly quiet seconds, she says, “A lot of things?”
Tim says, “Yeah.” She does not say for example, me , but probably she doesn’t have to, because Jason’s dad is the world’s greatest detective. Tim’s for the most part given up on having secrets.
Jason drops her helmet. They both step forward, but by the very nature of their discrepant heights, Jason covers the greater distance. When she’s close enough, Tim reaches up with her free hand to grab Jason by the back of the neck and yank her down to crush their mouths together. Jason tastes like red Gatorade and, faintly, stale tobacco.
When Tim hears the fireworks go off, she genuinely thinks for between ten and forty seconds that it’s her nervous system reacting to finally achieving something it’s desired for over a decade. It’s only when she has to pull back, gasping for air, that she realizes it’s the river barges.
“Oh,” she says, watching dumbly as a starburst of red and yellow sparks explodes in the near distance. Right–tomorrow is Memorial Day. “I forgot how good the view is from up here. Do you remember–” and then basic self-respect catches up to her and she coughs, in a fake way. “Uh, never mind.”
“What?” Jason says. At this distance, she can speak in a raspy murmur that basically liquifies the cartilage in Tim’s knees. She sounds like a NJPR reporter, and yet somehow that’s doing it for Tim. What an alarming discovery to make at the advanced age of twenty-one. “Do I remember a smart-mouthed brat sitting up here on the Fourth of July and telling me I oughta sic the teamsters local on fucking Batman?”
Tim has spent so many years with only her own counsel and company, only ever visiting her memories of Jason in the privacy of her own mind, that it’s a little overwhelming to have independent confirmation that the same events exist in Jason’s memory, too. It’s almost like having a shared hallucination. Tim digs her fingernails into the shoulder seams of Jason’s vest. The complete absence of loneliness she feels in that moment is like a black hole eating up all of the empty air in the pit of her stomach.
Dazed, Tim says, “I give great advice.”
“You’re lucky I like smart-mouthed brats,” Jason tells her, and then she presses a hard kiss to the side of Tim’s head, muffled to Tim’s sense of touch by the folded brim of her beanie. “You wanna watch the show?”
“Yeah,” Tim admits. “Do you have the time?”
“I got plenty of time, princess,” Jason says. “Decaying at an abnormally slow rate for a corpse, that’s me.”
~
On Sunday, Tim wakes up so early that it’s still dark out to catch the express 2X up to the Village, where she transfers to the 189. All of the traffic across the bridge is going the opposite way, into Gotham, and Tim watches the steady stream of rich suburbanites flood into the city, where they’ll descend like hordes of gulls in their lululemon leggings and Tory Burch sandals on every trendy brunch place in the Diamond District.
Tim doesn’t bother ringing the doorbell, or even going to the front at all. She diverges from the drive halfway up the road, cutting through the apple orchard—blossoms all gone by now, the trees covered in shiny, dark green leaves—and skirting the water garden in a wide arc aimed directly towards the kitchen.
She knocks on the back door, but doesn’t bother waiting for an answer before she pushes it open. The part of Tim that grew up a latchkey rich kid with no friends can’t believe she’s just barging into someone's house without an express invitation, but she’s done this a few times in the last few years when she’s gone up to New Haven to see Faduma and Susanne, and it’s stopped feeling awkward with them. Tim is well aware that the best way to get good at something is to practice. It's how she pursued all of her other goals—becoming a sabreuse, learning to code, improving her self-awareness, putting on six (!) pounds of muscle—and it’s how she’s planning on accomplishing the rest of them.
“Hey,” she says as she steps into the kitchen, toeing off her sneakers and pushing the door shut behind her. “Are we having pancakes?”
With the innately perfect timing of a born thespian, Alfred twists his wrist and sends a golden disk flipping through the air in a high arc. As it lands neatly back in the pan, he says, “Indeed.”
At the table, Bruce lowers the right upper corner of the Sunday Gotham Times . “Tim?” he says, bewildered.
“Morning,” she says. It feels like the words fizz in her throat. “Dick said I should come by for brunch.” She smiles at Alfred, and she can tell that it’s too much, too big, by the way the skin in the corner of her mouth hurts. Get a grip , she reminds herself, to no avail. “That’s okay, right?”
Bruce folds his newspaper and puts it down. Tim’s riding so much adrenaline that in the second or two that it takes him to react she experiences the full spectrum of human emotion. What if she’s wrong, and he doesn’t want her here? But all the evidence suggests that he does, and Tim trusts Jason and Dick, in as much as she trusts anyone’s else’s intuition. But what if he doesn’t–?
Then the two seconds tick over and Bruce says, “Yes.” Incredibly, he smiles at her. It’s only for about half a second, and only his eyes change, but Tim can tell that it’s real. Part of her wants to run screaming out of the kitchen, shrieking at the top of her lungs that she just got a smile from Batman , the world’s greatest detective! Instead, she sits down at the table and answers all of Bruce’s questions about her graduation, which are numerous, and accepts pancakes from Alfred, of which there are many, and defends her coffee from Damian’s pernicious attempts to pour salt in it, twice.
For what feels like the first time since she was a small child, Tim’s belly is conspicuously free of knots, lonely or otherwise. She fills the empty space with pancakes.