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Who: Dem Wayne Boys (Tim Drake and Dick Grayson)
What: Tim needs let off some pressure before he pops. Dick has a pin.
Where: Tim's room moving to the highest balcony available.
When: Immediately after the Council.
Warnings/Notes: Discussions of sexuality in ways that will not always be healthy.

At the first sign of movement towards the doors, Tim left the Council. He thought about staying until the end, to watch who leaves with who and pay attention to any last minute conversations, but guaranteed privacy is hard to come by, and he wants to check his bandages and see how well the heal he did earlier today has taken.

Without being able to close the windows to the outside walkways, he wants to do it when everyone else is busy. Hence ghosting the party so he could get back to his room and poke at his side, frowning that the color doesn't look as good as he would expect it to, for how exhausted trying to use his healing power on it made him. It's still dark pink, although it's now healed over enough that he doesn't have to worry about re-opening it. He's already been feeling the difference the past few days; it's easier and easier to move normally. Now, touching his side doesn't set off any sharp pains.

Tim drops his shirt back down. The miruvor has him feeling good enough to try a second heal today, but he'll wait until he's about to sleep in the wee hours. It's not late enough to assume that no one's going to come to rip apart what was said at the meeting today. Tim's money is on Dick, or Elle.

For now, he just stretches out on the bed and starts running through the meeting again in his head, trying to commit certain phrases to permanent memory.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tim wishes Dick didn't know. But, then, he doesn't know that Kon went looking for him to try to get insight into Tim.

"I've had friends come back from the dead too, Tim. I know it can be...odd." He'd stepped down as leader of the Titans because of Donna's death. Mourned Garth. Probably would have given Arthur a piece of his mind if he'd been in a good position to do so.

Wally hadn't died, but they'd lost him all the same for a time. That had been nearly as hard to deal with as losing Donna.

Joey had returned. Hank had, but Don hadn't. More names than he wanted to remember right now.

"It's okay for it to be odd. Especially when you can't get some space to sort yourself out."

Calling his little brother out? Just a little.

Edited 2022-03-14 20:32 (UTC)

“I’m getting used to it. This the. Fourth time in less than 18 months. More, if you want to count Jason and Jericho and a few others.” Can they ever be old hat, at something like this? Tim doubts he’ll be able to cut himself off enough to the point of not caring, but he might get ground down to it. Inoculated against the pain of death. He might be okay with that.

“I already sorted it out, back home. I admit I skipped the first welcome back party because - I couldn’t make it.” He was busy looking for evidence of Bruce being alive. “But I’ve seen Kon at least four times and Bart twice - I’m fine with it. I accepted it before I got here. Bart raided the Manor pantry and everything.”

A speedster raiding a pantry is like peanut butter and jelly. It’s peak normal.

(And Bart is, as ever, a great distraction. Tim owes him a Coke for this.)

"Uh-huh." Dick does count Jericho and Jason and some of the others. Even if Jason is a bit of a sore spot at the moment. "So why did Kon track me down, trying to figure out why you'd gone so weird on him?"

A raised eyebrow before he adds, "Don't worry. I didn't explain everything."

“Why would he do that?” He avoids echoing the statement (Kon tracked you down?) because it’s a huge stalling tell, but Tim stops breathing anyway.

His respiration, like his resting heart rate, is ridiculously low. Most people wouldn’t notice one or two skipped breaths while Tim’s brain scrambles to get all of his thoughts indexed and in order, so that he doesn’t have to invent. He needs to just respond.

He resumes a normal breathing pattern on queue, like the others weren’t missed at all. “I’ve been hurt. That’s not as weird as I’d like it to be.”

Were it anybody other than a member of the family, Tim stopping breathing would probably just be passed off easily.

But it's Dick. And Dick knows him all too well. Especially since he was watching for this exact reaction.

Which is why he nudges Tim's with the toe of his boot. "Don't," he says after a moment. "What's the phrase? 'Don't bullshit a bullshitter'? You know I know when you're lying."

And it's not that he's entirely lying. But Dick can also tell when he's leaving out the truth, too.

He might as well have tried to lie to Cass. This is a nightmare, and he doesn’t have a grappling hook.

(If this were Gotham, he’d already be jumping off the balcony. If Dick wanted to talk he’d have to work for it.)

“Don’t kid a kidder, if you want the PG version.” Tim sighs, resigning himself to … whatever this is about.

(It’s about Tim avoiding Kon.)

(Or it’s about how Tim went to pieces in the garden.)

(Please, not that. Please just be about his lack of sleep.)

He gives the edge of the balcony another look. He could manage a vine. “What did he tell you, and what did you say?”

Tim’s resigned to it, but he’s not giving up anything Dick doesn’t know.

At least he's not running away.

Not that he COULD run that well, even with as healed as his side is.

"I haven't told him anything other than to try to put himself in your shoes," Dick promises. "And reminded him that you're bad at emotions."

He has no problem being this honest about it with Tim. Tim knows, after all. And Dick has said the same thing to Bruce as well, so it's not like this is entirely new ground.

"That said. He told me about how you guys went for a walk. Stopped for a moment and he saw a seed pod on your shoulder, so he went to brush it off. You turned at just the right or wrong time and he brushed your cheek as well. Which he thinks weirded you out.

"That he took you down to get a look at Rivendell as you should have seen it coming in. And you got to talking about the future. And he started getting emotional and you promised him that he'd never get hurt by losing his best friend like that."

Because that's a promise Tim can make. They all know it isn't true, but...well, it's a promise that they all try to make, really. So that, at least, Dick can't blame Tim for. "He righted himself emotionally, you guys went back to joking a bit...then you got weird again and 'used your Starfire voice'--" Complete with air quotes because he's a LITTLE amused by that. "--because you were lying about being okay, but he brought you back up like you wanted and left you alone. Then came looking for me because he felt like he'd failed the conversation."

Then he settles back, letting Tim digest that for a few minutes.

Son of a bitch.

Kon told him everything?!

Holy smokes, Kon told him everything.

Kon told Dick Grayson everything like he was nothing. Like he has no self preservation and doesn’t care about shielding Tim either.

(No, that’s too harsh. Kon would shield him; he just doesn’t know how Tim feels. He doesn’t know that there’s anything to protect.)

It’s a bit before Tim says anything. “Just at the wrong time. I wouldn’t have moved if I knew what was going to happen.”

Dick has understood everything else perfectly well. Tim just wants to make it clear that he wasn’t trying to test the waters. It was an accident. “I’ve talked to him since then. I handled it. I reassured him without the ‘Starfire voice’ - which isn’t a thing - and I won’t let things ‘get weird’ again.”

Right now, he's not sure if he should tell Tim that he also had to explain what bisexuality is, because public school systems in the midwest. That may come up later.

For the moment, Dick slings his arm around Tim's shoulder, giving him a half hug. "I know it was an accident." Because Tim wouldn't have frozen up if it hadn't been an accident. If it had been testing the waters, he'd have felt more in control. "He also explained what the Starfire voice was, Tim. Don't worry, I won't tell her about it."

Tim looks completely away. It’s starting to feel like Dick’s got Tim figured out, too (Of course he does). He’s not sure he can face that judgment. Better to put it off indefinitely.

“There’s no Starfire voice,” he says, in the Starfire voice of composed neutrality that is confidently blameless rather than performative innocence with exaggerated naivety. “And what did you tell him? I need to make sure it’s all counteracted.”

Dick looks up, considering. "I had to explain that that sort of face touch is sometimes considered a romantic gesture, though obviously you knew it was an accident. It just threw you a bit and that was probably why you got weird. And that him not needing to be reassured the way he used to also threw you and meant you needed some time to reassess the way you interact with him. Not in a bad way, but in a 'we both grew up, now what' way."

Because, yes, Tim. He knows that one, too.

That explains why Kon was so strange when Tim told him he was straight. All that ham-fisted stuff about acceptance was because Dick painted everything with a muddied romantic brush.

Tim should’ve known that Kon had no reason to stumble on anything non-hetero. He’s tried to be so careful.

“I told him I’m straight. Leave the whole thing alone for a week and everything will go back to normal,” Tim says flatly. “Short of making the girls play strip poker with him again, I can’t make him forget faster.”

The moment Tim says he told Kon he's straight, there's a definite jerk to Dick's arm and shoulder that are around or against Tim. Accompanied by something that sounds a lot like a strangled sneeze. Or some other expulsion of air from the nose.

Dick coughs, trying to cover it up.

Oh.

Dick knew that part of ‘everything’ too. Tim doesn’t know why he’s surprised, really, but he’s almost disappointed in himself for not camouflaging better. If he’d tried harder, Dick wouldn’t be twitching so hard.

Kon’s death is the reason. It screwed up everything. Made it so much harder to hide one stupid crush when everything was flattened by the blast like the trees in Tunguska.

Tim puts his head down. Whatever the spasm was, that’s the involuntary response. Dick has a choice, and he can just choose to support Tim’s narrative. Then no one has to be uncomfortable or deal with anything. “The only truth that matters is the one everyone wants to hear.”

Dick huffs a breath, then pulls Tim into a tighter hug and kisses the crown of his head. The same way he had back on the edge of a Lazarus Pit years ago. "Tim. You're about as straight as I am."

Which...honestly, Tim has to have noticed? That while Dick's mostly straight, there's certainly been a couple of crushes. And a fair amount of flirtation.

He hasn’t. Being that scared of rejection for something over which he has no control made it very hard to see what may already be known in his family. So now he feels stupid, and he wasn’t feeling too bright before this particular anvil clanked on his head.

Tim hugs Dick hard because maybe muscle tension hides the way a body shakes when it cries because the dam is leaking and about to bust. “I screwed up so bad. I kept trying to course correct, and I just keep making it worse so I left. And then I tried to talk to Kon about the homeless thing, he started saying he could set me up with people.”

It's a fair guess that Bruce knows. But Dick gets being so scared of something that you don't see anything other way but struggling through for fear of the worst. He'd faced it after Blockbuster, after all. Only to have Bruce give him a much needed verbal smack.

He's more gentle with Tim. Tim doesn't need the smack. He needs support, especially with the way that he's trying to cry but not cry. "It's okay, Tim. What's happened isn't irrevocably broken. We'll sort it out and get you through it, okay?"

“I just need everything to go back to how it was.” Before Kon died, when it was a manageable crush. He’s had other crushes, and none of them crushed him like this.

But when Kon died, everything got blown out of proportion, and when his world finally started to clpiece itself back together, all the proportions were off, and the space in his heart for Kon was grotesquely out-sized and refuses to shrink. It’s his fault that things aren’t normal. That he can’t just goof off and be normal the way Kon wants. That he’s a freak. “I don’t need to go through it, I need to go back. I just need to try harder. I can be what he wants me to be again, and we can go back to how it was.”

"No, Tim. You can't go back. That's not how this works." But he hugs his brother tighter to help support him. "Well. Short of time travel and I think you'd have trouble convincing Booster to help."

Dick rubs his hand over Tim's arm, comforting. "And he doesn't want you to be what you were. He wants you to be who you are. You've both changed, Tim. It's a disservice to you both to think you can only be friends the way that you were."

“Booster takes sponsorships and endorsements,” Tim tries to lose a sniffle or two in all the S’s. “I bet you Tim Wayne can put it in the contract that he gets to fly the time machine for a day.”

He’s kidding. Mostly.

“He wants me to be who I was. He doesn’t know who I am, and everyone who does spent months trying to ‘bring me around’. Even you.” He’s not hurt; these are just the facts. Everyone was worried about Tim and his questionable decisions. They would all prefer the old Tim. “Nobody else needs to know that I’m - “

There’s the tiniest stumble. “Bisexual.”

There. He said it. Now he has the agency to say what is done with it, right? It’s acknowledged. “Nothing’s going to come of it, and it’s not a change because I always was, so I don’t see why I can’t just work on being myself. The old myself that everyone wants back anyway.”

"I'd be interested in seeing those negotiations." Dick keeps Tim close, letting him have a safe spot to deal with his emotions.

He keeps quiet for a moment, closing his eyes as he considers Tim's statements. "It's not that I want your old self back. I know that's not something that can happen." People change. It's a fact of life. "I know it doesn't feel like that. I don't necessarily want the old Tim back. I want you to be happy. I want you to have a life that's not just about the family. I worry."

No reaction is good. Not being pushed aside is better. He said it, and Dick’s… he’s really okay with it. Tim wants to stay here in this acceptance for awhile, but that’s too needy for his own comfort. He carefully sits up enough to not be leaning, but doesn’t so much as jostle Dick’s arm around his shoulders. The half hug is still welcome.

“It’s borderline bribery. I show up with a briefcase of cash and an offer to do a Neon Gold promotion for the Neon Knights, but, please Mr. Gold, we can’t do it without you. I need a hero that won’t make the at-risk teenagers of Gotham City feel threatened,” Tim says earnestly. “They say the Batman never smiles, and, wow, I need to save this for Vicki Vale.”

He smiles as a deliberate choice. He isn’t unhappy, or like Batman.

(Romantic relationships complicate happiness, and everything else. The only guaranteed reward is a very unromantic breakup.)

“And I have a life. I have too much of a life. I’m always busy.” It’s not his fault that he has essentially three jobs, four if you count occasionally stealing art to keep his fake identity useful, and all of them are family-related.

"Batman doesn't smile. I have that on very good authority."

Which is a lie. They've all seen Bruce smile. And Dick as Batman has more trouble NOT smiling, even in uniform. "Though you should totally save that for Vicki. She'd have absolutely no idea what to do with it."

He lets Tim shift, but as he doesn't move away from the half hug, Dick is content to leave it at that. "You know burn out is still a thing, right? This enforced fantasy land break is probably going to be good for you. Maybe let you relax a little bit."

“I heard he has incisors that touch his chin and spiky, protruding elbows.” Obviously, it’s a lie. Winding up people about Batman rumours is a noble art. “Maybe it would seal the deal and she’d finally accept that I’m not Red Robin.”

Okay, so he’s making like Hansel and Gretel, with some choice breadcrumbs to lead the conversation home to Gotham. Tim is feeling the fading rush of hormones from a fight-or-flight response where the trigger simply evaporated. Moving the topic away from Kon will get the adrenaline out of his system.

“This is only a vacation when I go a week without an injury or a new metahuman ability.” He got stabbed less than a week ago. This isn’t a vacation. “But I don’t think I’m in danger of burning out. I’ve been easier on myself lately.”

Dick looks at him, raising an eyebrow. Because he really doesn't quite believe that Tim's been easier on himself lately.