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“What are you doing here?”
As soon as the words leave her mouth, Steph hates how she feels baited into sneering them, hates how that little emphasis on you, oh so telling, has slipped in. She’s partway out of her Spoiler costume, utility belt dropped onto the bed, and has been dreading the thought of reaching up to peel the fabric itself off her torso for a solid few minutes – enough lag time for Robin to be following the Spoiler into a residential neighborhood without too much risk of someone seeing both vigilantes. Her entire back feels like one massive bruise, courtesy of Clayface bodily slamming her into a wall earlier in the evening.
The fact that Tim barely hesitates at her words just irks her further. He clambers in through the window, neatly folding his legs up almost to his chest on the sill in a movement that gives his overworked muscles an easier time keeping him stable. And also makes him look perfectly graceful, in contrast to the undignified sprawl she had adopted in her own entry. His domino mask is off, she realizes idly, unconsciously zeroing in on the remnants of pink spirit gum left on his angular cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. An oversight in his exhaustion. What a dork.
A dork with hot eyes and unfair thighs, but a dork nonetheless. Unbidden, she gives him a once-over for wounds — it’s so normal now that she doesn’t realize she’s cataloguing his injuries until she catches herself wondering if she has any splints left for that leg he’s favoring.
It’s been a long moment of silence, but it’s not uncomfortable. It never is with them in these downtimes, even with the bang and clash of the lives they lead. His reaction to her becoming Robin. Her apparent death, his grief. Her return. Tim doesn’t look awkward, though he does duck his head a second to scrub at his face — he still misses a spot of spirit gum, the loser — before far too belatedly answering her question, as though it weren’t rhetorical, as though it weren’t just her lashing out.
“It’s been a rough night,” he says, then after a moment’s pause clarifies delicately, “You’re hurt. Let me help.”
Those damned blue eyes. Honest and well-meaning, unwavering in their infectious calm. She watches them guardedly without intending to, long enough that he sighs and in a few strides closes the distance between them. When he stops just within her personal space, she’s surprised to find her already strained muscles are tensed again, and shaking from the small exertion.
Actually, that’s just shaking. Her shoulders are shuddering in her uniform and her face is wet. She’s crying. Huh.
He’s right, it has been a rough night. Too many close calls, too many moments she glanced around at friends and allies who looked increasingly tired and injured. Her breath hot and loud in her ears, gushing with her racing pulse, muffling out Tim as he called her name again and again. It’s been a while since she’s dealt with the abrasions of the lives they choose to lead.
Tim spares her in that he makes no comment about the tears, just watches for her nod of permission before he starts slowly undressing her. He pays close but discreet attention to her subtle tells: the stifled hisses and unconscious squirming away. He does such a good job of absorbing himself in the task that for a ridiculous few moments she honestly ponders the possibility that he can’t hear her stilted sobs. She would try to stop crying, but in her experience the strangled whimpering that might result would be even more pitiful.
Then he’s removed the mask from her face, along with all her weapons, and all that remains is the full-body suit, and he unnerves her when he looks up finally, at her eyes, at her grimy, sweaty face streaked with tears, and gently, mindful of her bruising, reaches around to hug her.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he murmurs into the nape of her neck, and they’re so close that she feels more than hears his voice, a low vibration that thrums through her. There’s nothing romantic about the entire sequence of events so far; she feels nothing other than platonic care and chaste concern in his manner or the atmosphere. Even now, as he purses his lips and clumsily deposits a kiss on the spot of hair behind her ear, it’s not hot, just warm, relieved. His lips bear a small split and they leave a tiny smudge of his blood on the back of her earlobe.
She reaches up to card her fingers through his hair, and winces as she realizes how limited her range of movements has to be if she wants to avoid jilting her much-abused back muscles. She swears she can feel each tendon bruising. “What, old man,” she teases anyway, because he sounds far too weary for her liking, “Poor old heart can’t take the strain?”
This is where he should pull back, distanced by the humor, and end the moment with some emotionally stunted goodbye in archetypal Bruce style. But he doesn’t, because he’s Tim, he’s always just Tim when the mask comes off. She should have figured that from the outset. So Tim just stills a moment, before burying his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of her salty exhaustion and her shampoo – that never gets squashed out no matter how dirty she gets, somehow.
It’s her wincing that makes him withdraw, although at least he does so without apologising, as if he owed her anything. That would be unbearable. His eyes are fixed on hers as he nudges her in the direction of her bathroom, and there, gingerly removes the rest of her costume. She doesn’t miss the sharp intake of breath when he sees her bare back, and wobbles for a moment imagining how bad it must look based on the way it feels. His hand at her elbow steadies her briefly.
Also, at some point in all this the tears have stopped leaking from her eyes. Again: huh.
He settles her under a hot stream of water before disappearing like the Bat he is, and she’s almost disappointed staring at the little blue and purple ducks on her off-white shower curtain. The water soothes away the pain to some extent, though, so she indulges in a long minute of letting it work its magic without thinking about the painful process of reaching around to lather herself in soap, or worse still, the prospect of washing her hair. Somehow he’s gotten the water to just the right temperature, which is, again, unfair, considering how the temperamental thing usually alternates reliably between Arctic snow and volcanic lava for her. Maybe it’s some advanced part of Bat-training. Maybe it’s just Tim magic. She does long for water that’s a little hotter, enough to numb her skin for a moment; but it would also probably put her at risk of actually passing out, so.
Then the shower curtain parts and there he is, and it isn’t the first time she’s seen him naked, but it is the first time like this, intimate and chaste simultaneously. There’s a pause as their gazes lock on each other and she raises an eyebrow mock-suggestively at him... but then he breaks into an ice-breaking grin and moves closer, helping himself to a generous portion of her shampoo. Expectantly, she turns the back of her head to him.
It shouldn’t even still surprise her how gentle he is and can be, but it does. Patiently, he coaxes free the knots and rhythmically works the shampoo right into her roots. He’s let the cold lotion warm on his palms out of consideration for her, and it feels like the foam and the scent is everywhere at once. Something in her chest collapses in on itself, like a breath she didn’t know she was holding. It’s astounding to her that those same hands that could incapacitate a man about a hundred and fifty-seven different ways, are also capable of this. She has the ridiculous thought that if the vigilante thing doesn’t work out for Tim, he could go into the hairdressing business. Then of course her mind leapfrogs to the image of Robin, in full garish red-green-yellow glory, casually trimming someone's fringe with a Bat-a-rang. She ends the train of thought right there.
There’s an interlude as the hands withdraw, which makes her pout a little — thank goodness she’s facing away from him — until they return and this time exert a practiced twisting motion on her long locks. She doesn’t realize he’s done up her hair into a loose bun until she hears him rubbing her soap bar between his palms to work up a rich lather.
He starts at the base of her neck, with his open palm in case his fingers tickle her, and with a slowness that anticipates her instinctive tensing, waiting for it to subside before continuing. Immediately it’s clear why he’s bothered to bun up her hair. When the loose strands aren’t sticking to her neck, her skin feels exposed and obscurely more cleansed.
Her back is the most sore area, and he gives it special attention, massaging deep into the inflamed muscle until she gasps and at one point has to put a hand on the cool tile of her bathroom wall to support herself. But it’s a cathartic kind of ache, the kind that lifts the very bruises out of her skin. Hairdressing aside, maybe if the Robin thing doesn’t work out Tim could be a masseuse.
Tim lingers over her collarbone, fussing, almost, and she can’t pinpoint why until she remembers the sharp pain there when she slammed against the wall. He’s gently palpating for a fracture, however slight, and he moves on only when he’s satisfied she’s fine. Even then he lingers, halfway between her collarbone and her chest, until she realizes his stumbling block. Steph’s practically rolling her eyes as she reaches up and pulls his hands down so that they cup her breasts neatly. Her nipples harden at the touch, which would be more mortifying if, ahem, something of his weren’t doing the same behind her. She smirks, actually, when she becomes cognizant of this latter fact. But without discussion they ignore these physiological responses. The lack of need for words has made the entire incident a tenuous respite of sorts, one she wants to relax in if only just for a while longer.
Then he’s working his way down her chest and her hips and her thighs, and he bothers to wash her navel properly, too, all shyness apparently left behind. When she wavers a little on her feet he gives her side a light squeeze, as if silently communicating Just a while longer, then sleep. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again, he’s half-supporting her weight, drying her off semi-brusquely with a towel more large and fluffy than any she recalls owning. Again, Tim magic at work.
She lets herself be herded back into her bedroom, whereupon she dimly realizes that he’s also hung up her costume, folded his neatly and left it by the windowsill, and cleaned up any evidence of grime and blood they might have left on the floor. Huh. So maybe her relaxing minute alone in the shower earlier was more like... five. Or ten. She wonders idly if she actually passed out ages ago, and everything she thought was happening in the shower was just a fantastical dream. She pushes the thought pointedly away. It’s not safe to think such thoughts when she’s at least 98% sure that Tim magic includes telepathy.
“For your information, ‘Tim magic’ does include telepathy, but I hardly need to use it if you’re conveniently thinking out loud.”
“Oh.” She pauses, contemplating mortification but rejecting it out of tiredness. “How long have I been doing that?” She’s too cotton-wooly in the brain to do anything more than notice her own bleary voice.
“Only since the fluffy towel. I like how the pink bunnies on it match the ducks on your shower curtain.” She can just hear the promise of blackmail under his words.
“...I have good taste,” she declares in her defence, and her indignant moue doesn’t slip up even as she stumbles again and has to lean for a moment on him.
When she slips between the covers she barely even notices, she’s so tired. It’s only as he’s turning to leave that she grasps blindly at the air, and manages to catch his wrist.
She creaks an eye open. “Stay,” she says simply. It is somewhere between a command and a question.
Tim seems to seriously consider the idea a moment, but then — “Bats will want a report.”
“And I will need a bed-warmer,” she murmurs almost petulantly, letting her eyes slide shut again, and her arm fall back onto the bed. “Tell him I may be concussed. Or better still, don’t tell him anything. He’s the world’s greatest detective, and all that jazz. He’ll figure it out.”
She doesn’t need to open her eyes to feel Tim blushing, or hear him pad across the floor to hunt around in her cabinet for a bathrobe. He shrugs into it and next thing she knows, he’s clambering into bed beside her, snuggling and just as she predicted, making a very nice furnace. Very useful to have around, Boy Wonders. Very multipurpose.
Steph opens her eyes once more before falling into oblivion. “Hey,” she says, her voice is soft and sleepy and sentimental, the perfect opening for a “Thank you”. But she’s Steph, so naturally —
“You ever think about becoming a professional masseuse?”