Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The invitation had not been Tim's idea, which was the first thing he wanted to be clear about, internally, for the record, in the part of his processing that kept records.

It had been Bruce's idea. Bruce had come to dinner on a Thursday with the energy of a man who had been thinking about something during the day and had arrived at the table ready to act on it, and the something had turned out to be Lena Luthor.

"I'd like to meet her," Bruce had said, between the salad and the part of the meal Alfred considered the real meal. "Conner's aunt. You've been tutoring him for two months. He's been to the house twice. It's appropriate."

Tim had set down his fork. He had run a fast internal calculation on how much Bruce knew, which was the calculation he ran whenever Bruce announced a decision that intersected with Tim's life, and the calculation had returned: not enough. Bruce did not know that Conner had kissed him under the portico in the rain. Bruce did not know that Conner had not answered a text in twelve days. Bruce did not know that the chair next to Tim's at lunch had been empty for two weeks, or that the Tuesday tutoring sessions had stopped happening, or that Tim had spent four of the last fourteen evenings lying on his bed with his shoes on, looking at a ceiling that had no poster on it, having named a thing about himself and then having no one to say it to.

Bruce knew that the tutoring had produced a ninety-three. Bruce knew that Tim had said yes to a winter formal. Bruce's information was three weeks stale and Bruce had no reason to suspect that it was stale, because Tim had not told him otherwise, because telling him otherwise would have required assembling sentences Tim had not been able to assemble.

"It's supposed to be warm Saturday," Bruce had continued, in the tone of a man who had checked the forecast and incorporated it into a plan. "Unseasonably. seventies. You could invite them over. The pool's been heated since last week—Dick wanted it open for the season. The kids could swim. It would be relaxing ."

The kids. Tim was fifteen and Bruce had referred to him as one of the kids, which was accurate and which Tim did not object to, and which currently sat in the conversation like a small landmine, because the kids in this scenario included Conner, who would have to be invited, by Lena, who would have to be called, by Bruce, who did not know that the entire arrangement had gone silent and cold two weeks ago and that Conner was, per the available evidence, never going to set foot in this house again.

"I can ask," Tim had said, which was true and also a deflection, both of which Tim was aware of simultaneously.

"Alfred has her contact information," Bruce had said. "From the formal logistics. I'll have him reach out directly. You don't need to manage it."

And that had been the end of Tim's input, which was how most of Bruce's decisions concluded—announced, integrated, executed, the relevant Waynes informed of their roles after the roles had already been assigned.

The thing about the silence of the last two weeks was that Tim had built a routine around it without meaning to, the way he built routines around most things, and the routine had a shape he could describe. Tuesdays were the worst of it, because Tuesdays had a hole in them now where the tutoring had been. He still left school at the same time. He still got in the car. He still drove the route that took seventeen minutes, and he did not run any lights, because there was no three-second loop of conversation running in the part of his brain he did not supervise, there was only the absence of one, which turned out to be a different thing and not an easier one. He arrived home at four-fifty-one. He did homework. He ate dinner. He lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling, and the thing he had named about himself sat in the middle of his attention, fully resolved, completely useless, because the person it was about had stopped being reachable.

He had stopped sending texts after the third one. Not because he had decided to stop, exactly, but because the act of sending had begun to feel like applying pressure to a thing that had made its position clear, and Tim did not want to be a pressure, and so the texts had tapered the way a process tapered when the inputs stopped justifying it. Three texts, all delivered, none read. Conner. Please respond when you're somewhere dry. I want to talk. Are you okay. The first two from Sunday night, the third from Monday afternoon, eleven minutes of drafting for three words. After that, nothing, because nothing was what the data supported, and Tim tried to let the data govern even when the data was unpleasant.

He had thought, more than once, about going to find Conner in person. He had stood outside Ms. Alon's classroom one Wednesday at the start of lunch, far enough down the hall that he could see the door but not be seen, and he had run the calculation on whether walking in would help or hurt, and the calculation had returned hurt, because Conner had retreated to that room specifically to avoid the situation that Tim walking in would create, and forcing the situation into Conner's chosen refuge was the opposite of giving him the room he needed. So Tim had not walked in. He had gone back to his own table, where the chair beside his was empty, and Steph had passed him a granola bar with a T on it in Sharpie, one of his own granola bars that she had taken from his cupboard at some prior point and was now returning as an act of care, and the loop of that had been complicated enough that Tim had simply eaten the granola bar and said nothing.

Jason had been right about it. You don't get to go fix it until you actually know the answer. The answer about you. And then, once Tim had the answer—once he had run the diagnostic and named the thing and set it down in its correct place—Jason had been right about the second part too. People like him don't disappear. They just get careful. You'd know. You're the same.

Tim was the same. He knew the carefulness from the inside, which was how he knew it was carefulness and not absence, which was how he knew Conner was somewhere being careful rather than somewhere having decided Tim did not exist. But knowing he was being careful and being able to reach him while he was being careful were two different problems, and the second one had no solution that Tim could engineer alone, because every move available to him applied the pressure he had decided not to apply.

So he had waited. Two weeks. He had named the thing and learned the difference between knowing it and saying it, and he had no one to say it to, and the not-saying had started, somewhere around day ten, to feel less like decency and more like the same stalling he could recognize in himself the way he recognized the uhm in Conner.

Tim had gone back to his room after dinner and laid on his bed with his shoes on and looked at the ceiling, the plaster, the crack near the east corner that had been there since before he arrived, and thought: she's going to say no.

He had been almost certain Lena would say no. Conner had been avoiding him with a thoroughness that Tim, who knew something about thoroughness, had to respect. Conner had ditched two tutoring sessions. Conner had eaten lunch in Ms. Alon's classroom for two weeks, which Tim knew because the chair next to his had stayed empty and because Steph had confirmed it by sneaking by Ms. Alon’s on her way to the bathroom during lunch. Conner had not opened a single text. The read receipts had stayed dark for twelve days, which meant either that Conner had not read them or that Conner had turned the read receipts off, and Tim had spent some amount of energy he was not proud of trying to determine which, before concluding that the determination changed nothing and was therefore not data collection but the something else, the something else he tried not to do when he could identify it.

So Lena was going to say no. Lena was protective of Conner in the practical, calendar-clearing, three-kinds-of-pizza way that Tim had observed and catalogued and privately admired, and Lena was not going to send her nephew into the house of the boy he was avoiding for a pool party he had not asked for. Tim had been certain of this.

Alfred had reported, the next morning, over the coffee Tim was not technically supposed to drink and that Alfred poured for him anyway with a small disapproving precision: "Ms. Luthor has accepted. Saturday, one o'clock. She and Master Conner will be joining us."

Tim had looked at his coffee.

"She seemed glad of the invitation," Alfred had added, in the direction of the toast he was buttering rather than at Tim directly, which was the Alfred method of delivering information he had opinions about. "She mentioned that the fresh air would do her nephew good. She used the word moping." A pause. "I did not inquire."

Tim had absorbed this.

Conner was coming. Conner, who had not answered a text in twelve days, who had been eating lunch in a chemistry classroom to avoid a cafeteria table, who had walked into the rain rather than wait the thirty seconds Tim's brain had needed to come back online—Conner was going to be at Tim's house on Saturday at one o'clock, in the pool, because Bruce wanted to meet Lena Luthor and the forecast was unseasonably warm and Lena had decided her nephew needed fresh air more than he needed to keep avoiding the boy he'd kissed.

Tim had not finished his coffee. He had gone to school and gotten through the day and come home and laid  on his bed and looked at the ceiling, and the thing he had named about himself two weeks ago had sat in the middle of his attention the way it had been sitting for two weeks, fully resolved, completely settled, and without anywhere to go.

He had figured out his own wiring, the way Jason had told him to. He knew what he was. He knew who the folder was about. Both of those were true and named and not going anywhere.

He still did not know what to say.

He had been telling himself that the saying would come, that he would get around to it the way he had gotten around to the naming, that the right words would assemble when the conditions allowed it. But the conditions had not allowed it, because Conner had removed himself from every condition in which the words could have been said, and Tim had spent two weeks being careful and patient and not applying pressure, and the carefulness had started to feel less like decency and more like its own kind of stalling, the not-saying that he could recognize in himself the same way he could recognize the uhm in Conner.

Saturday was going to put Conner in his house. Tim had two days to figure out what to do with that, and he was aware, lying on his bed, that two days was both adequate lead time and no time at all.

—

Saturday arrived the way all Saturdays arrived, which was to say on schedule.

The weather held. Bruce had been right about the forecast, which Bruce usually was. The unseasonable warmth settling over the grounds in a way that felt borrowed from a later month, the bare trees along the drive still bare but the cold gone out of the air, the sky a high pale blue with the particular thinness of February pretending to be April. Tim had checked it himself at seven that morning, then at nine, then at eleven. Three checks of a forecast that had not changed between any of them, which he noted and did not address.

By noon Alfred had organized the pool area with the efficiency he brought to organizing things, which was to say completely and without any visible evidence of effort. Towels stacked. A table with drinks and a bowl of cut fruit and a plate of the cookies that smelled like they had been made rather than purchased— because they had been. The pool itself was doing the thing a heated pool did in cool air, steaming faintly at the surface, the water very blue against the grey stone of the deck.

Dick was already in it. Dick had been in it since approximately ten-thirty, on the logic—Tim assumed—that he had wanted the pool open for the season and was now going to extract the maximum available value from that decision. He was doing laps, or a version of laps, the swimming equivalent of the thing he did with grocery carts, the small unnecessary flourishes that had stopped being choices and become characteristics.

Jason was on a deck chair with a book, in swim trunks, which was notable, because Jason in swim trunks meant Jason had been told he was going in the water at some point and had decided to negotiate the timing rather than fight the premise. Cass was beside him with her own book, the Cyrillic title, in a black one-piece, her feet in the water, reading and tracking the pool simultaneously the way she tracked most things. Duke was in the shallow end with Isabella, who had been invited because Duke had asked and because the household had reached a settled place about Isabella being around. Damian was not swimming, on the stated grounds that competitive aquatic recreation was beneath him, and was instead sitting at the edge of the deck with a magnifying glass and a jar, examining something Tim suspected was an insect and that Alfred had not yet noticed.

Tim was in swim trunks too, because the day required it, sitting on a deck chair with a towel over his shoulders and his attention on the gate that led from the house to the pool area. Which was where Lena and Conner would come through when they arrived, which would be at one o'clock, because Lena had said one o'clock and because Tim had built his entire morning around the number one.

At twelve-fifty-eight, the gate opened.

Tim's attention did the thing it did, the thing it had always done, the shutter catching everything in the frame at once. Lena first, because Lena entered a space the way she entered most things, with the composed authority that reorganized the proportions of a room around her. She was in a linen something, summer-weight, sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair, and she took in the pool and the deck and the assembled Waynes with the fast complete read Tim had come to recognize in the Luthors, the assessment made and filed before anyone had said hello.

And then Conner.

Tim's attention logged him the way it had logged him in the detention room, in sequence, involuntarily, before Tim could redirect it. Height, the way the space noticed height. A dark t-shirt and swim trunks and the boots he had apparently worn to a pool, which Tim filed under the category of things that were so specifically Conner that they did not require explanation. His hair was longer than it had been two weeks ago, the dark curls falling further into his face. And his hands—Tim's attention went to them automatically, the way it always went to them—had paint on them. A green this time, a deep one, dried into the creases of the left knuckles, with a thinner wash of it along the side of the right thumb. He had paint on his hands, which meant he had been painting, which meant the version of him that painted had not packed up and left, which Tim had no way of knowing he'd been worried about and was relieved by anyway.

Conner did not look at Tim.

This was a measurable thing and Tim measured it. Conner's eyes did the sweep he did of every new space, the whole-before-the-parts intake, and the sweep passed over the pool and the deck chairs and the Waynes distributed across them, and the sweep included the deck chair where Tim was sitting, and the sweep did not stop on it. It moved past Tim with the deliberate evenness of a decision made in advance—Conner had settled where his eyes were going to go, and they were not going to go to Tim.

Tim understood the decision. He had made versions of it himself. It did not make the not-being-looked-at land any differently, which was its own piece of information, filed.

"Lena," Bruce said, rising from his chair, crossing the deck with the easy warmth he allowed himself with people he had decided to be glad to see. "I'm glad you could come. Thank you for accommodating the short notice."

"Of course," Lena said. They shook hands, the two of them, the heads of two companies that Tim was fairly certain had been on opposite sides of at least three acquisitions, doing the thing that powerful people did where the entire history of their professional antagonism was acknowledged and set aside in a single handshake. "It's a beautiful day for it. Thank you for thinking of us."

And that was the entirety of the negotiation, two adults who knew exactly who the other was, deciding by mutual instantaneous agreement that today they were just two adults at a pool while the kids swam. Tim watched it happen and filed it, the way he filed most things, and his attention went back to Conner, who was standing at the edge of the deck with his bag over one shoulder and the deliberate evenness still in his face, not looking at Tim, looking at the pool, looking at Dick doing his version of laps, looking anywhere that was not the deck chair where Tim sat with a towel over his shoulders.

"There are towels by the table," Alfred said, materializing in the way Alfred materialized. "And refreshments. Master Conner, it's good to see you again."

"Hi, Alfred," Conner said. His voice was the one Tim had heard him use in the cafeteria the first day, the trying-to-be-casual one, the one that was a fraction too smooth. "Thanks."

"Of course," Alfred said, with the warmth that was not performed, and Tim caught the way Alfred's eyes moved—briefly, completely—from Conner to Tim to the careful distance Conner was keeping, and the way something settled in Alfred's expression that Tim recognized as a conclusion being confirmed. Alfred said nothing about it. Alfred was good at saying nothing about it.

Conner went to the table. He set down his bag. He took off his t-shirt hesitantly, glancing around a little before bending over and untying his boots, and Tim's attention logged this the way it logged everything involving Conner, involuntarily, thoroughly, before he could redirect it.

Conner got into the pool at the far end, which was the end furthest from Tim's chair, which Tim noted, and which told him that the avoidance was going to continue here, in this space, the way it had continued in the cafeteria and the library, and that Bruce's accidental engineering of an afternoon was not going to do the thing Bruce did not know he was hoping it would do.

Tim watched Conner settle into the water at the far end. He was doing the inventory whether he wanted to or not, the involuntary cataloguing he had never entirely been able to turn off. Conner's hair was wet now, pushed back off his face, which made him look different, younger, the way wet hair made people look younger. The paint was coming off his hands in the water, the green at the knuckles fading the way it always faded when he got his hands wet, except for the part that never came off, the part under the right thumbnail that Tim could not see from here but knew was there because it was always there, the last color his hands refused to give back. 

Conner held himself in the water like he had grown up around it— Metropolis, the weddings he had described once at the formal, the enormous events with bands where he'd learned to dance by copying the adults until it worked. He moved through the pool the way he moved through most spaces, with an ease that Tim had revised his understanding of over two months, the ease that had been arrived at rather than simply present, the ease of having found or built a place to belong after a stretch of not having one.

Tim filed all of this. He had been filing things about Conner for two months. The folder was full and the folder was labeled now, and the labeling did not stop the filing, it just changed what the filing felt like—less like collecting evidence for a case he had not let himself try, more like the simple looking he did at things he wanted to keep looking at.

The next forty minutes were, by any objective measure, fine.

Lena and Bruce sat at the table and talked, the low productive conversation of two adults who had found, against the odds of their professional history, that they had things to say to each other. Tim caught fragments of it—something about Gotham infrastructure, something about a charitable initiative, something that made Lena laugh, a real laugh, the dry one Conner had described once. Alfred refilled their drinks and contributed occasionally and otherwise conducted the periphery of the event with the calm of a man who had run larger gatherings than this.

Dick had recruited Duke and Isabella into some pool game with rules that appeared to be improvised and contested. Cass had gotten into the water and was doing something efficient and quiet at the deep end, swimming with the economy she brought to everything. Damian had been discovered with the insect jar by Alfred and the jar had been confiscated and Damian had filed a verbal appeal that was, per Alfred's flat report, under review. Jason had not gotten in the water. Jason was on his deck chair with his book, watching.

Conner stayed at the far end.

He had relaxed slightly—Tim could see it, the low-level readiness coming out of his shoulders by a few degrees, the version of him that occupied a space settling into the occupying of it. Dick had said something to him at one point and Conner had said something back and Dick had laughed, and Conner had almost smiled— the involuntary one, the small real one, and Tim had watched it from across the pool with the part of his attention that he could not turn off and had felt the thing he had named two weeks ago do something in his chest that he no longer had any interest in pretending was not what it was.

But Conner did not come to Tim's end. And Conner did not look at Tim. And the careful evenness held, across forty minutes, with a consistency that Tim recognized as effort, because keeping your eyes off a specific point in a space took work, and Tim knew exactly how much work, because he had spent two weeks doing the same thing in a cafeteria and a library and was doing a version of it right now.

This was, Tim understood, not going to resolve itself. Conner had built a structure of avoidance and the structure was holding, and the structure would continue to hold through the entire afternoon and Lena and Conner would leave at some point with the careful distance fully intact, and Tim would have had Conner in his house for an afternoon and would have said none of the things he had named two weeks ago and had no way to say.

He was running the math on this—on whether there was a move available, on what the move might be, on whether crossing the pool to Conner, who had deliberately positioned himself at the maximum available distance, was a move that would help or a move that would apply the pressure he had spent two weeks refusing to apply—when Jason set down his book.

The math had not been returning a clean result. Every version Tim ran ended the same way: crossing the pool was pressure, and pressure was the thing he had decided against, and so the correct move was no move, and the correct move was going to result in Conner leaving in a few hours with the careful distance fully intact, and Tim having had Conner in his house for an afternoon and having said none of the things he had named two weeks ago. The correct move and the move Tim wanted were not the same move, which was a position Tim had been in before and disliked every time. He had been turning it over, looking for the version where the two moves converged, and had not found it, and had begun to suspect there was no version, that this was simply a thing that was going to not happen, and that he was going to have to be fine with it because the alternative was being a pressure.

Tim noticed Jason set down the book because Tim noticed most things, and because Jason setting down a book was a measurable event. A thing Jason did when he had decided to do something other than read.

"Conner," Jason said. Not loud, but pitched to carry across the water—Jason had been on enough teams to know how to project without shouting.

Conner looked over from the far end. "Yeah?"

"There's sunscreen in the pool house," Jason said. "On the shelf by the door. Can you grab it? Alfred will have my head if Damian burns and Damian refuses to apply it himself unless physically supervised."

"I am right here," Damian said, from the deck. "I can hear you. And I do not burn. I tan evenly, which is a function of discipline."

"Get the sunscreen, Conner," Jason said, ignoring this completely.

Conner, who had no reason to suspect anything, because Conner had no information about what Jason did and did not know, said, "Yeah, sure," with the easy compliance of a guest doing a small reasonable favor, and pulled himself out of the pool at the far end, and grabbed a towel from the stack, and walked toward the pool house, the low stone building at the edge of the deck with the door standing open to the warm air.

He did not look at Tim on the way.

The second the pool house door swallowed Conner's shape, Jason turned and looked at Tim.

And started pointing.

It was not subtle. It was the opposite of subtle. Jason was pointing at the pool house with one hand and at Tim with the other and his face had the expression of a man executing a plan he had been waiting to execute, and his mouth was moving in an aggressive whisper that carried farther than Jason probably intended, "Go. Go. Go." The three words delivered with escalating urgency and an accompanying jab of the finger toward the pool house door each time.

Tim looked at Jason.

Jason looked at Tim with flat patience, the look of having set up an entire pretext and now watching its beneficiary fail to capitalize on it. "Go," Jason mouthed again, with a final, definitive point.

Tim understood, with a delay of approximately one second, that there was no sunscreen in the pool house. Or there was, but the sunscreen was not the point. The point was that Jason had created a sealed room with Conner inside it and was now ordering Tim into the room with a directness that did not leave room for the calculation Tim usually applied to these things.

Across the table, Lena Luthor had stopped mid-sentence. She was looking at the pool house, and then at Jason, and then at Tim, and her composed expression had developed the edge of something Tim recognized as the same thing he'd seen on her face the first Friday, the comparison-she-decided-not-to-voice expression. She did not say anything. She picked up her drink. But she also, very slightly, with the smallest possible motion of her head, tilted it toward the pool house, which was Lena Luthor, head of LuthorCorp, sitting at Bruce Wayne's pool, telling Tim to go.

Bruce was saying something to Alfred and had not noticed any of it, which was the one mercy of the moment.

Tim stood up.

The towel fell off his shoulders. He left it. He walked across the deck toward the pool house, past Jason, who gave him a single final point that was somehow both encouraging and threatening, past Cass at the deep end who had surfaced and was watching with the precise complete attention she gave to things she found worth watching, and Tim was aware of the eyes on his back. His entire family, plus Lena Luthor, watching him walk toward a pool house with a boy in it, and he found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he did not care about the eyes, which was unusual, which was data.

He went into the pool house.

He was aware, going in, that he had just done a thing he did not usually do, which was act on an instruction without finishing the calculation behind it. He had been running the math for forty minutes and the math had returned no move, and then Jason had pointed and Lena had tilted her head and Tim had stood up, and the standing up had not been the output of the calculation, it had been something else, something that had bypassed the calculation entirely, which was the thing Conner did. The moving-before-the-brain-weighs-in thing, and Tim noted, crossing the deck, that he had apparently just done the Conner thing, and that he did not have time to examine what that meant because he was already at the door.

It was dim inside after the brightness of the deck, the light coming in through the open door and a single high window, and it took Tim's eyes a second to adjust. The pool house was the size of a large room—pool equipment along one wall, a shelf of supplies, folded loungers, the smell of chlorine and sun-warmed stone. Conner was at the shelf by the door with his back partly to it, going through bottles, and there was music coming, low, from the phone he'd set on the shelf, the bright shimmering production that Tim had heard coming from Conner's direction in the cafeteria over the last two weeks, the band Tim had looked up and identified and not mentioned looking up. Paramore.

Conner heard the door, or felt the change in the light, and looked over.

His face did a sequence Tim watched the way he watched things develop—first the neutral attentiveness of a person registering an arrival, then recognition, then the deliberate evenness coming back down over the recognition like a shutter, the careful nothing he had been holding for forty minutes.

"Oh," Conner said. "Hey." The casual voice, the fraction-too-smooth one. He turned back to the shelf, picked up a bottle, examined it with attention that Tim could tell was not really about the bottle. "What's up?"

He was acting, Tim understood, as though he had not spent two weeks redesigning his entire daily route to avoid Tim. He was acting as though they tutored on Tuesdays and this was a Tuesday and the last fourteen days had not happened.

“Your… stuff is still upstairs.” Tim closed the door partway behind him, which dimmed the room further, which he did without deciding to and registered after. He stood there. He had walked into the room on Jason's three-word order and Lena's tilt of the head, and now he was in the room and the words he had named two weeks ago and had not been able to say were sitting in the middle of his attention. He discovered that the conditions, which he had been waiting for, were finally here, and that he still did not have the sentence assembled, which was the problem he had failed to solve in two weeks and was now out of time to solve.

So he said the truest available thing, which was the thing that had been at the front of the folder the whole time.

"I'm sorry," Tim said.

Conner went still at the shelf. Not the deliberate evenness. A different stillness, the one that meant something had landed.

"...Okay," Conner said, after a second, carefully, not turning around all the way.

Tim ran the next part and could not get it clean, could not get it into a single sentence, and so he said the piece of it that he had spent two weeks arriving at, the result of the diagnostic, the thing Cass had told him there was no wrong answer to and Jason had given him the stupid useful test for.

"I can't pick," Tim said.

There was a pause. Conner turned around the rest of the way, a bottle of sunscreen in one hand, his eyebrows pulling together in the small genuine confusion Tim had seen before, the recalibration, the information arriving from an angle he had not expected.

"...Okay," Conner said again, and then, because Conner filled silences he didn't understand, because Conner's mouth moved when his brain hit something it couldn't immediately place, "I mean—I know there's a lot of sunscreen on this shelf, but it can't be that hard to pick one, half of it is probably expired anyway, this one says—" he turned the bottle to read the bottom of it— "this one says two years ago, so that's out—"

"I like guys too," Tim said.

Conner stopped.

The bottle was still in his hand. The music was still going, low, the bright surface over the underneath. The confusion was still on his face, but it had changed shape, the eyebrows still pulled together but the eyes doing something else now, something that was trying to catch up to a sentence that had not been about sunscreen.

"Okay?" Conner said. It came out as a question, the rising end of it, the sound of an input received before the routine for it could be located, which Tim recognized, because Tim had stood under a portico two weeks ago doing exactly that.

And Tim, who had spent two weeks being careful and patient and waiting for the conditions and the assembled sentence and the right quiet, who had figured out his own wiring and named the thing and learned the difference between knowing a thing and saying it, looked at Conner standing there confused with a bottle of expired sunscreen in a hand, and felt the part of him that took the long way to everything reach the end of the long way, and said:

"Fuck this." And crossed the room. 

Andkissed him.

It was not like the portico.

The portico had happened to Tim, an input arriving before any of the usual signals that an input was coming, his system receiving a thing it had no routine for and doing the thing a system did with an unrouted input, which was nothing. This was the opposite. This was Tim closing the distance with full knowledge of what he was doing, his hand coming up to the side of Conner's jaw the way Conner's hand had come up to his, his brain entirely caught up to the moment, the routine assembled, the calculation closed, the thing named two weeks ago finally arriving somewhere it could be acted on.

The bottle of sunscreen hit the floor. Tim heard it, the dull plastic knock of it against the stone, and did not care, which was its own data point, because Tim cared about most things hitting floors.

There was a half-second where Conner did not respond, and Tim understood it, because he had been on the other end of that half-second, because Conner's brain moved fast but it still had to receive a thing this large and locate the routine for it, and Tim was prepared to wait the half-second, was prepared to wait however long it took, had learned at cost that the slow part was worth waiting for—

—and then Conner's hands were on him, both of them, one at his waist and one coming up into his hair, the cool-from-the-pool of them against Tim's sun-warm skin, and Conner was kissing him back with the entire force of two weeks of not, his head tilting, the careful evenness gone completely, replaced by the thing underneath it, the want he had been managing and Tim had been managing and neither of them had to manage anymore.

It went on. Tim was aware of it going on, in the involuntary thorough way he was aware of everything, except that for once the awareness was not running parallel to a redirection, was not logging the moment in order to file it for later, was just in the moment, present. The chlorine smell and the dim light and the music and Conner's mouth and Conner's hands and the paint—Tim could feel it, the slight texture of the dried paint at Conner's knuckles where his hand was pressed against Tim's jaw, ultramarine or green or whatever color this week's was, the color his hands never fully gave back. Tim thought, distantly, with the part of him that never fully stopped thinking, that he should have done this two weeks ago, that he should have done this under the portico, that the freeze had cost both of them fourteen days, and then he stopped thinking that, because there was no point in re-running a calculation he could not change, and because Conner had made a sound against his mouth that Tim wanted to keep hearing.

They kissed until the kissing turned into the kind of kissing that had a different intention behind it, and then Conner pulled back—just enough, his forehead nearly against Tim's, both of them breathing in a way that was not entirely steady, his hand still in Tim's hair and Tim's hand still at his jaw.

"Okay," Conner said. His voice was wrecked, low, nothing like the careful-casual one. "Okay, that's—" He stopped. He looked at Tim. The look had presence and direction and was not performing anything, the one Tim had a folder on and had finished labeling, finally, two weeks ago. "Is this real? Because I've had a really bad two weeks and if this is some kind of—"

"It's real," Tim said.

"Because you froze. You froze and you said you didn't know if you—"

"I didn't know," Tim said. "I do now. I spent the two weeks figuring it out." He was still close enough to feel Conner breathing. "I talked to Cass. And Jason. Jason has a diagnostic involving Wendy the Werewolf Stalker. It's stupid. It worked."

A sound came out of Conner that was half a laugh and half the other thing, the wet thing, and his hand tightened in Tim's hair. "Jason set this up. The sunscreen. He sent me in here on purpose."

"Yes."

"There's no sunscreen emergency."

"There is a great deal of sunscreen," Tim said. "Some of it is expired. None of it was the point."

Conner laughed for real then, the involuntary small one, the one Tim had been cataloguing since the detention room with more fidelity than the situation had ever warranted, and Tim felt it against his own mouth, and filed it, and did not redirect.

"Two weeks," Conner said, after a moment, and the laugh had gone out of it, replaced by something more careful. He had not let go of Tim. "I avoided you for two weeks. I ditched the tutoring. I ate lunch in Ms. Alon's room. I didn't open a single one of your texts." He said it the way Tim said things, plainly, laying out the data. "I was so sure I'd wrecked it. I had a whole—Lena and Roxy both had to sit me down. I cried about it. I'm telling you that because you just told me about the whole folder and it seems fair."

"You didn't wreck it," Tim said.

"I know that now. I'm saying I spent two weeks being sure I had." Conner's hand came down from Tim's hair to rest at the side of his neck. "I knew how you worked. That's the part I keep coming back to. I knew your brain takes the long way. I'd watched you freeze at the basketball game and come back online thirty seconds later. And I gave you four seconds and decided the four seconds were an answer and I left. I knew better and I left anyway."

"You move before you finish thinking," Tim said. "Sometimes your hands move before your brain weighs in. I do the opposite. My brain takes longer than the moment allows." He looked at Conner. "The portico was a bad moment for both of our wiring at once. You acted before you were finished and I hadn't finished by the time you acted. It was a timing failure. It wasn't a verdict."

"A timing failure," Conner repeated, and the corner of his mouth moved.

"An expensive one," Tim said. "Fourteen days. But a timing failure."

"That's a very you way to describe me kissing you in the rain and then running away."

"It's accurate," Tim said.

"It is accurate," Conner agreed, which was the thing he did, agreeing with Tim not as a concession but as a conclusion he'd arrived at separately, and Tim felt the thing in his chest do the thing again, and let it.

They had moved apart slightly, by some amount of mutual unspoken agreement, because the door was partway open and there was a family and a Lena Luthor on the other side of it, and there were things Tim wanted to say that he did not want to say while close enough that the saying got lost.

He stepped back. He looked at Conner, who was leaning against the supply shelf now with his arms loose and his eyes still doing the bright wrecked thing, the careful evenness nowhere in sight, the version of him that was fully present in a space that was Tim's, which Tim had wanted and had not let himself want and was now allowed to want.

"The drive from school to my house is seventeen minutes," Tim said.

Conner blinked. The confusion came back, the small genuine one, the eyebrows. "...Okay?"

"I've timed it. My brain keeps averages without being asked. It's seventeen minutes, consistently, across two months of Tuesdays. I don't have to look at the clock. I just know."

"Okay," Conner said again, slower, the way a person said okay when they were waiting to find out why they were being told a thing.

"Every Tuesday," Tim said, "for those seventeen minutes, I think about you. Only you. The whole drive." He delivered it the way he delivered facts, flat, accurate, undecorated, because that was how he delivered things that were true and because Conner received things plainly and had never once made Tim feel strange for handing them over plainly. "I told myself for two months that I was thinking about the study guides. The session, the material, the gaps to address next week. And some of it was the study guides. But most of it was you. I just hadn't gotten around to admitting it was you."

Conner was looking at him. His mouth had come open slightly. The bright wrecked thing in his eyes had gone very still.

"I noticed everything," Tim said. "From the first detention. Height first, then the jacket, then the piercings in sequence. The paint in your knuckles in a different color every Tuesday, which I logged every time the way I log camera settings, before I could stop it. The way you explain things until they have dimensions. The way you said the most useful thing anyone said to me that week was a thing I said about not knowing things. I had a folder. I've had a folder for two months. I called it incomplete data because calling it incomplete data let me not name it. That was the uhm. You have an uhm and I have the folder. They're the same thing."

"Tim," Conner said.

"I'm not finished."

"Okay," Conner said, and his voice cracked on it.

"I said yes to the formal before the sentence finished. That's not how I say yes to things. I have a review process specifically to avoid commitments I'll find difficult to reverse, and I skipped it, and I never wanted to un-say yes, and I checked that more than once. I photographed the building on Fourth Street in October, before I knew you, and then I told you the right hour for the light, and you'd been painting the same building since October, and neither of us knew. I don't think that means anything. My brain just likes tracking it." He paused. "I'm telling you the whole thing because you've been gone for two weeks thinking the freeze was a no, and it wasn't a no, it was the absence of a procedure, and I am trying to give you all the data so that you don't have to guess at the shape of it from the shadow."

Conner made a sound. "That's—Roxy said that. The thing and the shadow. About painting."

"Roxy's right," Tim said, who did not know who Roxy was but was prepared to agree with her on the strength of the principle.

The music played, low, the bright surface over the underneath, the gap the band trusted people to feel. Conner pushed off the shelf. He took a step, closing some of the distance Tim had put between them, and his painted hand came up and Tim felt it settle at the side of his neck, the dried green at the knuckles, the warmth of him, because Conner ran warm and Tim ran cool and that had been true the first time their hands met in the detention room and was still true.

"I like you too, Tim," Conner said.

He said it the way he said things that were true, the way he had said I mostly just want to play and that's actually the most useful thing anyone's said to me this week and I’m glad you said yes—without decoration, without a frame around it, the actual thing placed on the table because the actual thing was what was there. Tim had noticed it the first day, in the detention room, before the paint or the look or any of the rest of it: that Conner said the actual thing, the way Tim said the actual thing, and that the recognition had arrived before Tim understood what it was recognizing.

Tim looked at him.

"So," Tim said. He ran it, fast, the way he ran most things, except that this time the running did not feel like keeping a thing at a distance, it felt like assembling the next step, which was a different operation. "We can date. We can—" he stopped, recalibrated, decided that the plain version was the correct version. "We can kiss more. And go on dates. Actual ones. Not tutoring."

The corner of Conner's mouth moved—the early edge of the real one, the small one, the one that was for the actual moment and not for general use. The thing Tim had been cataloguing for two months. "Yeah, Tim," Conner said. "We can."

"Okay," Tim said.

"Okay," Conner said.

And then Conner kissed him again, and Tim let himself be kissed, his eyes closing, his hand finding Conner's waist, the music going low and bright and the dim pool house quiet around them, and somewhere on the other side of the partway-open door was a pool and a family and Lena Luthor and Jason, who had set the entire thing up and was going to be unbearable about it, and Bruce, who had wanted to meet Lena and had accidentally engineered this, and Tim found that he did not care about any of them for the duration of the kiss, which was the second time in twenty minutes he had not cared about the eyes that might be on him, which was data, which pointed at a conclusion Tim had already reached.

When they pulled apart this time it was Tim who pulled back, because his brain, which never fully stopped, had logged the sound of footsteps on the deck stone outside, approaching.

The door opened the rest of the way.

Jason stood in it, backlit by the bright afternoon, with the expression of a man who had set up a pretext and was now arriving to collect on its success. He took in the scene—Tim and Conner, the distance between them not nearly enough to pass for two people retrieving sunscreen, the bottle on the floor where it had been dropped and not picked up, Conner's hand only just leaving Tim's neck—and his face did a slow, deliberate thing.

"Did you find the sunscreen?" Jason said.

"There was a great deal of it," Tim said. "Some of it expired."

"Mm," Jason said. He looked at the bottle on the floor. He looked at Conner, whose ears had gone red. He looked back at Tim. "You were in here for eleven minutes. Sunscreen retrieval should take ninety seconds."

"I'm aware of the discrepancy," Tim said.

"I bet you are." Jason crossed his arms. The flat had warmth all the way through it now, the warmth he did not usually let show. He looked at Conner. "Punkass," he said, which Tim understood by now was the closest thing Jason had to a term of endearment for a person he had decided he liked. "You good?"

Conner, whose ears were still red, who was standing in a dim pool house having just been thoroughly kissed by the boy he'd spent two weeks convinced he'd lost, said, "Yeah," and the involuntary laugh came up in it, the small real one. "Yeah, I'm good."

"Great," Jason said. "Because Lena has been watching that door for eleven minutes and so has the entire rest of the family, and Damian started a betting pool, and Cass has money on it, and you two are about to walk out into a situation." He picked the sunscreen bottle up off the floor, looked at the bottom of it. "This one's expired. Two years ago" He tossed it back onto the shelf. "Bring an actual one. For the cover story. Not that the cover story is going to work."

He turned to go, and then stopped, and looked back at Tim, and for a second the ribbing dropped out of his face entirely and there was just the thing under it, the brother thing. The loyalty that overrode his judgment and that Tim admired and would never tell him about because Jason would weaponize it.

"I told you," Jason said. "From what I'd seen of him. He's good."

"I know," Tim said.

"Yeah," Jason said. "You took two months and a portico disaster and eleven minutes in a pool house to act on it, but you got there." He pushed off the doorframe. "Come on. Before Damian wins money off your love life."

—

They walked out into the bright afternoon together, with a non-expired bottle of sunscreen that nobody was going to believe was the reason they'd been gone for eleven minutes.

The deck did the thing Tim had known it was going to do. Cass, at the edge of the pool, looked at the two of them and the distance between them and the careful evenness that was no longer anywhere on Conner's face, and the edge of a smile happened, and she said nothing, and held out her hand to Damian, who slapped a folded bill into it with an expression of pure betrayal.

"The terms were ten minutes," Damian announced. "It was eleven. I lose on a technicality, which is an unjust basis for a wager."

"You bet against it happening at all," Cass said.

"I bet on the timeframe."

"You bet against it happening," Cass repeated, "and then revised when you saw Jason point."

Damian folded his arms and looked out at the pool with the bearing of a hostage who had negotiated his terms and been cheated anyway.

Dick, in the water, had stopped his version of laps and was looking at Tim and Conner with an expression that was building toward something, the open delight of having found a thing he was going to enjoy for a long time. "Are you—" Dick started.

"Don't," Tim said.

"I'm just—"

"Dick."

"Timbert. This is a beautiful day for me personally."

"My name is Tim," Tim said, with the reflex of a correction deployed so many times it no longer required thought, and Conner, beside him, laughed, the real one, and Tim felt it land in his chest, the thing he had named two weeks ago, the thing he was now allowed to feel without filing it for later.

At the table, Lena Luthor was looking at Conner. Her composed expression had developed the comparison-she-decided-not-to-voice edge, and then, as Conner met her eyes across the deck, the edge resolved into something she decided not to voice, just a small private smile and a single nod—the nod of vindication. She had cleared an afternoon and ordered the excess pizza and sat beside instead of across, and had been right before anyone else admitted it.

Beside Lena, Bruce had finally noticed that something had happened. He looked at Tim, and at Conner, and at the two of them standing close together with an entire family arranged in various states of reaction around them, and Tim watched Bruce run the calculation that Tim was always running about Bruce, the how-much-does-he-know calculation, and watched it arrive at a conclusion. Bruce did not say anything large. Bruce did not say large things. He looked at Tim with the complete attention he gave to the people at his table, the attention that was not performed, and he gave a single nod, the one that meant a thing had been integrated and found satisfactory and was not going to be made into a larger thing, and then he turned back to Lena and said something that made her laugh, and the moment was over, the way Bruce ended moments, by simply moving past them with the assumption that they did not need to be dwelt on.

Alfred appeared at Tim's elbow with two glasses of something cold. He handed one to Tim and one to Conner. He did not say anything. But he looked at Conner with the brief courteous warmth that was not performed, and then at Tim, with the expression of a man who had been watching a thing develop with patience across two months and one moved fruit bowl and had reached his settled conclusion long before any of the rest of them, and the expression said, without a word: I know you did. You're a very observant young man.

"The fruit," Tim said to him, quietly, just for Alfred.

"What about it?" Alfred said.

"You moved it. Months ago. The first Friday he came over. To make a point you weren't going to say out loud."

"Did I," Alfred said.

"You knew before I did."

"I generally do," Alfred said, with the small precision he applied to most things, and there was warmth under it, the warmth that did not require announcing. He looked at the two of them once more, and then went to refill Bruce's water, because there was a gathering to conduct and Alfred conducted it.

—

Later—after the swimming, after the food, after Damian had relitigated the wager twice more and lost twice more on the same technicality, after Dick had made approximately four comments that Tim had shut down with four deployments of his name not being Timbert, after Lena and Bruce had exchanged contact information with the air of two adults who had unexpectedly enjoyed each other and were going to do this again—Tim and Conner sat at the edge of the pool with their feet in the warm water, slightly apart from the rest of it, the way the two of them had always ended up slightly apart from the rest of it.

The sun had moved. It was getting on toward four o'clock, the light going low and gold across the grounds, the bare trees throwing the long precise shadows that Tim's camera-eye noted automatically even now, even here. Conner's hands were on the stone deck behind him, holding his weight, the green paint at the knuckles catching the gold light, and Tim looked at it, the paint, the thing that was always true about Conner's hands, the color they never fully gave back.

"It's almost four-fifteen," Tim said.

Conner looked at him. "Yeah?"

"The building on Fourth. Four-fifteen is the hour. You still need the afternoon to confirm the shadow drops into the recess." Tim looked at the gold light moving across the deck. "It's a good light right now. The angle's low. If we left now we'd get there in time."

Conner went still in the way that meant something had landed. "You want to go take that walk."

"I want to photograph it," Tim said. "I've wanted to photograph it at four-fifteen since I figured out four-fifteen was better than four. And you've wanted to confirm the shadow for the painting. We've both been waiting on the same forty-minute window for weeks. It seems inefficient to keep waiting on it separately."

Conner looked at him for a long moment, the bright thing back in his eyes, the careful evenness gone for good, the version of him that was fully present in a space that was Tim's and was now also, Tim understood, in a different category of space than it had been. "Are you asking me on a date," Conner said. "To photograph a building."

"I'm asking you to confirm a shadow," Tim said. "The date framing is also accurate. There's overlap."

"Can there be overlap?" Conner said, and Tim recognized it, the callback, the first session, the library, can there be overlap, and the overlap had been the photography and the applications, the things you liked also being the things that were useful.

"The alternative is doing the thing I want to do without the person I want to do it with," Tim said. "Which seems like a worse allocation."

Conner laughed, the real one, the small involuntary one, and he leaned over and kissed Tim once, brief, in front of his entire family and Lena Luthor, none of whom were any longer paying enough attention to make it a thing, and the kiss tasted like chlorine and the cold drink and the thing Tim had been not-naming for two months and had finally named, and Tim filed it, and did not redirect, because there was no longer any reason to redirect.

"Okay," Conner said, pulling back, his hand finding Tim's on the warm stone, the painted knuckles against Tim's skin. "Yeah, Tim. Let's go confirm a shadow."

They got up. Tim told Alfred where they were going, with an estimated return time, the way he always did. Alfred said he would let Bruce know. Jason, from his deck chair, called something that was unbearable, and Conner went red again, and Tim said Jason's full name in a tone that did nothing whatsoever to stop him.

And then they walked out through the gate together, into the low gold light, toward the car and the seventeen-minute drive that Tim was, for the first time in two months, going to spend thinking about the person sitting next to him instead of pretending he was thinking about study guides, and Conner had paint on his hands and Tim had blue braces that caught the late afternoon light when he glanced over, and the building on Fourth Street was waiting for its shadow to drop into the recess at four-fifteen, the same shadow they had both, separately, been trying to get right since October.

They were going to get it right together this time.

It was, Tim thought, a good allocation.