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“No need to brush my hair,” Tim scowled.
Damian, as he was wont to, hummed disapprovingly.
“You jumped through two glass windows, and you were pushed through a third. There’s glass.”
And, of course, the raw, pink wound at the back of his head, from when Tim had been pushed to the ground into the glass and beaten half to death. Damian and Alfred had worked on most of the worst wounds already. Thirty stitches in his left thigh, ice and an oral steroid for his sprained ankle, a cast (and a painful resetting) for his dislocated shoulder, and now Damian was plucking glass out of Tim’s hair like a mother hen. Alfred had since gone to bed.
It had been a bad night. It had been a long night.
Tim hadn’t spent this much time with Damian since before Tim was Ra’s project.
“I cleared the glass from the wound. I’m going to disinfect it.” Damian’s voice was distant, a murmur in the back of Tim’s mind. Tim just hummed some assent.
It stung.
And then it was over.
Damian continued to pull the glass from Tim’s hair with slow, methodical movements.
“I used to do this for Jason,” Tim said. It was probably the painkillers talking. It was definitely the painkillers talking.
Damian paused.
“Before I knew it was Jason.”
When Tim… left… Gotham, after Bruce’s ‘death,’ he never expected to find himself in the clutches of Ra’s al’Ghul. But, as is unofficial-tradition for the bat-clan, he ended up there anyway. Damian had taken up the role of Batman, and Tim—he could’ve stayed Robin, but—he knew. He knew Bruce was out there… somewhere. He just—got distracted—at the compound. Ra’s had a way of doing that—making his goals seem so above those of everyone else’s. And eventually… Tim was theirs. A knife of the League’s. A knife of Ra’s.
And then…
“Your mother brought him in. It was all hush-hush.” Damian knew all this. Tim didn’t know why he was saying it again. But with the words, Damian slowly began running his fingers through Tim’s hair again, pulling small shards of glass out and dropping them in the metal pan to his right with a tink.
“But Ra’s always hated when your mom kept secrets from him—he sent me to investigate.”
Tim can still remember the look on the kid’s face. He was drooling, and looking blankly at a small figurine of a bird resting on a shelf. There was blood matted up in his hair, dripping sluggishly onto his shirt.
When he returned to Ra’s that night, he told Tim who the boy was.
“My grandson’s robin.” Tim remembers Ra’s spitting the word out. He always thought of Batman like a cancer. “Killed by that city’s clown. Talia found him shuffling along the streets of Gotham with feces underneath his fingernails, dressed in a tattered suit. Brought the useless thing here.”
Tim had gained some standing with Damian when he returned, a year later, with a healed Jason bundled up in a car he had stolen a few hundred miles back. He lost it, again, when he refused to share with Damian what he had been doing in Nanda Parbat for the past four years.
“Timothy,” Tim felt a sharp pinch in his arm. Batcave. Yes. Damian. “You’re dissociating. Name five circles in the room.”
Oh. Tim blinked. “Speaker, medicine ball, water bottle lid, tracker, camera.”
“Four things you can hear.”
“Your disapproval, glass in the pan, batcomputer fans, and… the actual bats.”
“Three things—”
“I’m fine.”
Damian paused again.
“I’m almost done. You will stay here tonight.”
“The sun has risen. It’s barely night,” Tim said, just to be an asshole.
“It’s not like you have a job,” Damian shot back.
Yeah, okay. Point Damian.
“Done. Alfred sponged off most of the grime, but you will not be able to shower until tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
Tim hummed. The painkillers had definitely kicked in.
“Is Jason upstairs?”
Damian paused. “Yes.”
Protective bastard.
“Good,” Tim settled on.
“Let’s get you upstairs.”
Tim just hummed, let Damian pick him up and deposit him in a wheelchair. Let him push Tim to the elevator, to the family wing, to his old room, and then past it, when he saw Tim was holding his breath. Let Damian pick him up again, put him in the bed, pull the sheets up, turn the light off, leave.
Tim fell asleep before he could think anymore on the topic.