Chapter Text
Tim wasn't exactly a beach bum, he wouldn't even go so far as to say he enjoyed the beach. It was hot, sand carried in the dry; warm wind, not even mentioning that sand got everywhere and stayed, or for the simple fact that it was boring. The waves crashing against one another was soothing, he'll give it that, but he couldn't think of much else for the positive section. All of the bars on the beach were loud and crowded, families left their trash, and the cacophony of screaming children made him want to, ironically, bury his head in the sand and never come back up for air. The only reason Tim found himself frequenting the beach was after he was given the gentle nudge that was actually a thinly veiled order from Lucius Fox. "Gotham is made up of three islands, Timothy, plenty of beaches to walk along and give your mind a break. Who knows, maybe it will do you some good to not stare at a screen and sit hunched up like a gargoyle. Least I tell Mr. Wayne of your hermit habit."
So Tim found a pair of swim trunks, sandals, a tank top, and started scouting the beaches of Gotham City.
It took a few trips to finally find an empty, relatively quiet area. He didn't have much company besides a few elderly men trying their luck at fishing before packing up and leaving after some success or some failure, depending on the day. Maybe it wasn't so bad, when he could manage to sneak a tablet into his bag with Lucius somehow getting around even him and swiping all electronics out. He had tried to argue that what if there was an emergency, Lucius was essentially marooning him, to which Tim had only received a knowing smile and a lifted eyebrow in response. Sometimes he hated that Lucius knew of his extracurricular self.
Tim sighed through his nose as he peered across the water, dark and churning like the city it surrounded. He checked his watch, now groaning when he realized he still had well over an hour until he was to return. If it wasn't nearing ten in the morning, he would be pulling on Red Robin and patrolling the city, but Gotham liked to behave when the sun was out.
"It's rare to see someone so begrudgingly at the beach."
A voice had Tim sitting up and squinting through his sunglasses before pushing them up into his hair. A man was submerged in the water just a few feet away from him, an amused smirk pulling at his mouth. He scanned quickly over his bare torso, littered with an impressive smattering of scars, and not much else. Had he crawled up onto the shoreline, why was he perched on his palms otherwise? "I don't like the beach," he finally answered, "I don't like getting unnecessarily wet and sand is a pain in the ass to get rid of."
"Then what are you doing here?" The man asked, his amusement only growing, causing Tim's haughtiness to grow twice as much.
"You're awfully nosy for someone I've never spoken to before."
The man laughed, a splash of his legs causing large drops of water to sprinkle onto Tim's own. "You're fiery; I like it. I'm Jason, I frequent here often so I see you around a lot, and each and every time you look more and more miserable."
"My boss ordered me to get less screen time and more sun, otherwise you'd have never seen me in my life. I'm Tim." He offered his hand and the man pulled himself with what seemed like great effort, offering his hand to shake it. "I don't think I've seen you around. I see the same three old men here, sometimes a runner or two, and neither of them are you." He would recognize a guy as broad as Jason was, and that body was definitely not one of a runner.
"Now who's being nosy?" Jason asked and dropped his chin to rest in his palms, feigning innocence.
"Isn't that the way most first conversations go? Trying to chip away at the person you're -- " Tim's words died in his throat when a shadowy fin lifted behind Jason, stealthily and silently dripping back into the water. He scrambled to his feet in a panic. "You might want to get out of the water, like, now. There's something behind you." He forced his voice calm, not wanting to send Jason into a frenzied panic and splash around, anything stupid, really, that could draw more attention. It wasn't a shark fin, it was rounded at the sides more akin to a dolphin or orca. Were there orcas in Gotham? He wasn't sure, nor had he ever heard, but he wasn't about to chance it.
Jason, however, only looked confused, looking over his shoulder and even twisting his upper half slightly until Tim could see a small dorsal fin in the middle of his back. "You mean this?" He hauled himself sideways and a large, sleek, dark grey, just tipping towards black, dolphin-esque body was attached at his waist.
Surely Tim was dreaming, or having an extreme case of heatstroke. He would bet more on the latter. He had seen mermaid tails made out of silicone and intricately painted for things like renaissance fairs or even at some aquariums, mermaid shows for kids to actually show an interest in keeping the building afloat by having parents give more money for the "interactions" with underpaid men and women alike to pretend their lungs and eyes aren't burning. But a dolphin tail? That wasn't a thing, or maybe it was, Tim wasn't well versed in the mermen world. There was Orca in Blüdhaven, but she, and much like Cheetah and Gorilla Grodd, they were all fully anthropomorphic, not this half-and-half situation as Jason appeared to be.
"Looking a little pale, Tim. Come on, don't tell me a half fish man is where you draw the line with all the things you've seen in this city." Jason was grinning, slapped his tail in the water again, and Tim couldn't think of anything else to say, so he bolted, turned tail, and ran.
His intrigue would pick up later, but for now? Shock and confusion won out.
It took Tim a few days to return to the same beach, having half convinced himself that Jason had been an illusion, that he hadn't been drinking enough water that day. The other half of him had to agree with Jason. Would it be so ridiculous for there to be such a thing as mermen? Tim had fought against werewolves, vampires, aliens, and worked alongside humans with actual superheroes. Why would it be so out of the world for there to be humans with half animal bodies? Besides, it would be the perfect chance to study something new, at least new to Tim, not that he found any sort of concrete evidence of mermen in his research.
He found his usual spot on the beach and sat on his towel, keeping himself from looking around too eagerly for Jason -- if he even showed. There was the chance that in Tim's running away, he found no point in coming back to that spot. Admittedly, maybe just a tad cowardice on Tim's behalf, but he didn't have anything on hand to fight if he needed to. Lucius seemed intent on making Tim go out with nothing to help defend himself. Was it training, did Bruce help put him up to this, to make Tim think more on his feet, use his surroundings better?
"Do you always think this loudly?" Jason's voice broke through Tim's thoughts once again. "I didn't take you to be so skittish, but I've been proven wrong before."
"What are you?" Tim's question made Jason's eyebrows raise, so he quickly backtracked. "You're not any sort of normal dolphin that I could find, and you aren't a shark because you have horizontal and rounded fins, so you're clearly belonging to the dolphin category. I guess I meant to ask what species are you?"
Jason shrugged, rolling onto his side with a comfortable sigh. "I just am. It isn't like your parents told you what you were when you were growing up, did they? "You're a human, Tim, now you know." I'm touched you wanted to research me, though, can't say I've ever had that much attention." He grinned where he laid in the sand, letting Tim look at him with intense focus.
"What do you eat?" Not that the question would help Tim too much, dolphins and sharks often had similar diets.
"Meat. Fish, squid, and no, I don't eat other mer-people before you get your trunks in a twist. That'd be similar to cannibalism and I'm not into that, so your typical fishies." Jason watched as Tim typed away on his phone. "Are you trying to figure out what I am?"
"Until now, I didn't know mer-people existed, so yeah, I am. How fast can you swim, or would you be willing to wear something that I can measure your speed with?" Tim asked, frowning when Jason snickered.
"Why don't you find out for yourself how fast I can go? If I don't know what species I am, do you think I'm swimming around trying to gauge how fast I am or how deeply I can go?" He rebutted, stretching his back and swaying his tail in the water as he did.
Tim nodded slightly. Fine, he had to give Jason that point. He supposed he could look up a list of dolphin species and look down the line until he found the one that looked like Jason, but there was hardly any fun in that, even if it would satisfy the itch in Tim's brain. Just like the rest of Jason's human body, his lower half had scars, white slashes versus the pink and red ones on his flesh, and Tim wanted to ask about how he got them. Did he know Aquaman? Did he and the other mer-people hear his call? He had an endless amount of questions, none of which Jason seemed inclined in answering. "I have one more question that I think you'll actually answer: why do you want to hang out with me?"
It was Jason's turn to now think, swaying and slightly smacking his tail in the waves behind him as he did. "You're cute? Like I said when we first met, you're possibly the only human I've seen look annoyed and miserable on a beach, so I wanted to see what that was about, and here we are." He shrugged, as if it was as simple as that.
"Huh," Tim hummed, "is it your mating season?"
Jason cackled and Tim quickly covered his phone as a huge spray of water was smacked his way, soaking him head to toe.
"I think I've figured out what it is you are." Tim said in lieu of a greeting when he dropped onto the sand nearly a week later, just as Jason breached the water and shook water from his hair.
"Do tell," he dug in the sand, Tim watching the action curiously until Jason flopped onto his back, dorsal fin dropping into the newly dug hole, and Tim went back to his phone.
"Pseudorca crassidens, meaning "thick tooth." You're part of the dolphin family and often called "false killer whales" due to the fact that your body is more on par with that of an orca than of a dolphin, but still a dolphin nonetheless." He started to recite the facts, watching just how quickly Jason put his arms beneath his head and shut his eyes, skin and some of his tail quickly drying under the sun. "You don't seem to live in a pod, otherwise I probably wouldn't see you around here, also considering you are most comfortable fifteen thousand feet, which doesn't seem likely as you have the lungs of a human and not that of a dolphin, and the pressure of fifteen thousand feet would definitely not be livable for your human half."
Jason scratched over his chest, having been nodding every now and then to things Tim said. "Those sure are a lot of words," he eventually responded, lifting and dropping his tail lazily in the water that washed over him, looking at Tim upside down, "how long did you let this bother you; not knowing what creature I'm part of?" He smiled and Tim instantly looked to his teeth. Very much human, save for the few teeth in the back that looked sharper than what could be called normal.
"I've seen a lot of things in my life but mer-people? Not one of them, and even then, they've always been said to have fish tails not dolphin or shark tails." Tim pointed out, stuffing his phone into his bag and pulling his sandals off to push his toes into the sand, nowhere near as deeply as Jason had his dorsal fin.
"There's crazier shit in the ocean, kid. I don't think I even count as scratching the surface if this weirds you out." Jason waited for another wave to crash over him to once again send a spray of water over Tim, who had quickly gotten used to him and dodged out of the way. "Come on, I'll show."
Tim had missed when Jason rolled back onto his front and lunged himself further onto the sand, grabbing Tim's ankles and dragging him towards to ocean despite his shouts to stop. He hated getting wet when it was in his control. Having to patrol in the rain? It sucked but nothing he could control, but stepping into the ocean when he didn't need to, he could control, but the grip Jason had on his ankles meant he had no way of escaping without trying to hit him. He threw his shirt off and onto his bag, glad he was at least in swim trunks as cold water hit his body. He almost feared that this was going to be a clever way for Jason to kill him, to drag him out into the depths and be done with him. Was he a little paranoid? Maybe. They had seemed to be hitting it off, so Tim had thought, and it seemed now that had changed.
Except Tim's head never ducked under the waves.
He looked down to where he was sat on Jason's... hips? The space where skin met tail and Jason's human half was gliding comfortably over the waves, and a smug smirk tugged at his mouth.
"You can swim upside down?" Tim asked, reaching a hand behind himself to feel that indeed, Jason's tail was moving them through the water like a hot knife through butter, unbelievably smooth.
"I assumed you'd have known that, brainiac, you're the one who did research on me. Sharks can't swim upside down, otherwise they're paralyzed, but I know I can, so." Jason trailed off with a shrug, hands moving to rest on Tim's knees to presumably keep him in place.
Tim looked over his shoulder to see the beach getting further away, then ahead to the vast nothingness that was Gotham's surrounding waters. "You ever seen an orca that has a human face?" He asked curiously and shook his head at Jason's raised eyebrow. "Never mind. Do you do this often? Befriend guys on the beach and take them out for an unassuming swim before they end up missing because they can't beat your speed?"
"You flatter me," Jason smiled.
"I mean it! I need to know if I need to start believing in a higher being and pray."
Jason rolled his eyes. "No to both of those. I hardly come to the beach unless it's to people watch and that gets boring pretty quickly, too many screaming kids, adults trying to fish, lots of litter. And the last fucking thing I wanna do is swim through all the piss that's around that area. Seriously, what is it with you humans and taking a piss in the ocean? I would have thought by now you would have some sort of toilet system." He scowled and it was Tim's turn to laugh.
"We do, but I honestly can't explain why humans piss in the ocean. I guess it's easier than traveling back to said toilets and take our shorts off." Tim shrugged, amused from the disgust evident across Jason's face.
"How lazy. Glad I'm not a gill-breather so I'm not breathing it in." Jason shook his head.
They didn't speak for a moment, the only noise being the roaring waters around them, of course, and Tim worried his lip briefly. "Then why did you pick me?" He asked. Maybe it was vain to ask something like that. He shouldn't be questioning whether or not Jason had simply befriended him and wanted to show him part of his life, but he wanted to know what made Jason want to come to the surface and reveal himself to Tim, to take him out for a swim. He couldn't help but feel the slightest bit special about it.
"Do you ever stop thinking and overthinking?" Jason asked, turning around and gliding even faster as he was moving with the waves rather than against them. Tim held onto Jason's shoulders. "I like being around you, simple as that. You're interested in me as I'm interested in you, and you're not half bad to look at either." Blunt as it was charming, and Tim couldn't combat the smile that tugged at his mouth.
Once back on shore, Tim squatted so he was eye level with Jason as he perched himself on his palms, a lazy half smile on his mouth. Tim leaned in and pressed his lips to his briefly, not surprised to taste nothing but salt. "I like you too, Jason. I'll be back tomorrow." He didn't miss how wide Jason's eyes were as he stood up, grabbing his clothing and bag, ignoring the warmth in his own face and writing it off as sunburn and definitely not a blush.