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Down there Dad looks like Peter Sagal. Bald, the hair on his head burned off, or buzzshaved for access—all bushy eyebrows, only bushy eyebrows, left. He’s tan, boiled-over tan from Haiti and the fire, veins bulging from the jimson root.
Tim is sitting on the black plastic arm of the chair beside Dad’s hospital bed, his fingers twisting in the pockets of his whispery red windbreaker.
Sometimes when Tim comes, Dad’s eyes are open.
“He can hear you when you speak,” the nurse had promised when Tim, wordless with shock, first crept inside the room with Bruce weeks ago. “He just can’t respond.”
They aren’t open today.
“How’d that exam you were all worked up about go, squirt?” the nurse asked today, when Tim quietly signed in on the clipboard. The metal clip had been gummy, the wood board rainbowed with stray yellow highlighter streaks. Tim had looked over his shoulder and smiled, or something-like-smiled: “Overprepared.”
Dad’s sleeping today.
Tim scuffs his tennies on the floor. The soles are worn very smooth. They don’t squeak, not at all. But there’s the plastic-shell-mask breathing, musical performance clocktime EKG, metronome, metros measure, nomos law. Jack-o-lantern teeth shaped lines on the glowing screen. There’s a fistfight, the first so far this visit, going on in the hallway, distant sneakers squeaking against the vinyl. If this were Gotham Regional, it would probably have been the third fight by this juncture; but Gotham Memorial is different. Gotham Memorial, everyone says: the best.
“They’re turning you over,” Tim says at last, eyes flickering toward the door through which the nurse finally with a weary look disappeared. “At least I hope. Cause they weren’t last time, and it’s important. Cause your bony prominences, that’s what’s supposed to—” he trails off. Sighing, Tim ticks his mouth to the side. “Cause pressure sores,” he finishes lamely, very softly.
Gingerly, Tim reaches for Dad’s wrist and turns it over; he checks. Lifts the sheet and inspects Dad’s ankles, hipbones, pulling up the gown and quickly lowering it again. Tim awkwardly pats the sheet.
“Good. They are,” Tim reports, trying to inject an upbeat note into it. Dad can hear him. Just not now. There’s a sound like a body hitting the wall outside; somebody squeals. “Course they are. They’re the best.”
When the elevator comes down to the Cave, Tim is stacking mats back up. “How was the flight?”
Bruce leans against the just-closed elevator doors. “Fine.”
“How was Russia?” Over his shoulder Tim glances back at Bruce for the first time.
Bruce’s cheeks are both five-o’clock-shadowed. One is ecchymosed. For a second Bruce just watches Tim haul the training mats off the floor and back into place in their respective stands, and Tim feels, retroactively, cringing to himself, as if he has just been caught, although in exactly what he has been caught he knows not.
Is Tim not supposed to be down here on his own outside of explicitly sanctioned trainings and cases? If he isn’t, he’s been fucking up for a while now, not a big deal to Tim who will grovel pro re nata but very possibly a large deal for Bruce, who dragonishly polices the very abstractmost proposition of Robin, much less Tim’s grubby hands’ real access to it.
Despite the now-increasing sinking sense of caughtness, Tim stays on what he’s doing, stacking the puzzle-piece black mats back up, not hiding, or attempting (it of course would be useless) to hide that he had been training.
But: Going about things in secrecy is problematical because it produces an undeserved feeling of guilt and performance-damaging paranoia; and it is harder to look at the target if you’re looking over your shoulder; and anyway fortune favors the brave; but just now, here, Tim isn’t, exactly, certain that he hasn’t crossed some new audacious sort of line, one he should’ve known, but didn’t know, existed.
Tim is a guest here. Tim knows that.
But then there was the semi-permanentification of the Tim-guest situation, what with the whole fatal Caribbean Economic Frontification of Tim’s mom and critical Gotham Memorialization of Tim’s dad—and over breakfast, once, after Alfred had spent 25 whole minutes ticking off on his fingers all of the different minutia of where Tim might go in the manor and which sites might be of use to him, Bruce, rough-voiced, sleepy, and subconjunctival hemorrhaged, had interrupted to say in passing, mid-reach for the carafe, almost absently, as if he didn’t even have to think that hard about it, a wave of the hand, a true kingly nothing: “Help yourself to anything.”
Generous! Characteristically generous! In fact as far as these things went, as far as almost everything went, Bruce is practically downright permissive, detached and laissez-faire. Only with his real thoughts and feelings, with Batman and more especially, most especially, most of all, with Robin, which Bruce hoards almost jealously, which he doles out so hesitantly, so deliberately, so pulling-teeth-fully, with nothing less than the rigor of Kriegsspiel, is Bruce any different.
But when Bruce said it—help yourself to anything, anything, anything—Alfred’s face had crinkled such that Tim should have known that he should take it as a very nice nicety, and not an I-meant-that-ty. Fuck.
Now Tim’s nails dig into his palms even as he lugs the next mat and swings it up onto the stack. Now Tim is going to be eaten alive by Bruce. The problem is not even Bruce yelling at him, per se, but the way all of this will set Tim back even further from Bruce trusting him, letting him be a fully fledged, real partner, and now Tim’s resolved to weather it but it still is like: fuck, nevertheless.
At least now Tim will have clarity, totally proven a posteriori certainty that “to anything” was an exercise in extraordinary politeness and forbearance, just not something to take seriously, to take literally. At least now Tim will know, because if Bruce is unhappy with Tim for being here now (as the way Bruce’s eyes darkening and deepening and far-away-from-hereing when Tim asked the question How was Russia? indeed suggested he was), he will most certainly make that clear. The long, extraordinary quiet is like piano keys.
“Like one of those bad dreams,” says Bruce only, distant, soft, and almost dreamy, as if he were a million years away.
The next day Bruce and Tim play tennis on one of the manor’s dark green courts, which is surrounded by dark green hedge. Tim’s still antsy from last night. And also: It feels as though all this King Snake shit is inchworming through, and over, all the gyri and through, and over, all the sulci in Tim’s dumb dummy head. Also: Tim is sweaty in the sunshine, not from the exertion, but Bruce is not sweaty at all. Which is frustrating. These are all of the reasons that Tim is underperforming against Bruce right now, although these aren’t the reasons Tim is losing against Bruce right now. That reason is that Bruce is very, very good. The best. Of course.
After one of Tim’s hits, Bruce stops and says, “Good.”
This is a reason that Tim’s jaw drops open. He quickly closes it, clumsily getting back into position, and then a little-less-clumsily getting into position.
“Could have been better,” Tim says, catching Bruce’s gaze, and Bruce catches in one hand with one light, soundless catch the next ball that Tim shoots his way, and Tim’s throat goes very, very dry.
Tim is unwrapping a stick of cinnamon gum, and Dad’s looking at it longingly. But to give it to him would be: a chewing hazard. It would be a bad idea due to: muscle weakness. Jack Drake the University of Chicago collegiate wrestling star of 1989, president of the tri-state area’s second-largest medical supplies company, brought so low, too weak for cinnamaldehyde mastication! For mastication of the even most basicalist variety!
Still too weak. Even now. Even though now it’s been whole days, three whole days, since Dad woke up, really woke up: woke up, as far as the fine men and women of Gotham Memorial AND TIM are concerned, for good. Even though Dr. Kinsolving has started saying sometimes, with an almost bored tilt of the brows, like it's obvious, like it goes without even saying, “Looking good, Mr. Drake,” when she comes and peels through Dad’s inches and inches of paper charts.
Tim shoves the gum in his mouth and wishes he never even ever brought it out.
So well, here is the verdict on: Dad. Dad’s getting better. He is. Better and better. But just now, just right now, he’s tired, and he’s lying on his side. Mask off, awake if sluggish, hair grown out whole greasy centimeters. Dad can even talk. Just sounds weird. Not bad, not like you hear Jack Drake talk and your stomach plunges and you go, pitifully, mercifully: oh, no. But not so good, either, not like someone you’d think capable of even clapping their hands together and producing a sound.
Tim’s mouth tastes like cinnamon, and now something else hot and sour, too.
“Hair’s looking good,” Tim blurts, chewing. Face burning.
“Yours is so,” Dad’s voice: okay, not just not so good, but really not so good, but it sounds like this here pause is for some other reason than indiscriminate laryngeal coordination problems, some reason Tim cannot immediately discern, “spiky now.”
Tim rakes a hand through it. “Gel.”
“Why the…change?”
Tim pauses chewing. Why the change? Identity reasons, as much visual separation as possible between Tim Drake and Robin (Robin! Who is Tim! A fact still not old, a fact that will never, ever, not ever, get old).
“I’m just growing up. You know, Bruce uses it too. Not to make it look like—” Tim flutters a hand at his head, Bruce has classic 1930s side-part Executive Contour hair whenever he actually leaves the manor or washes the sweat and hardened blood out of it on the rare occasion he leaves the house, “this, but—”
“Ah,” Dad scrapes out, as if this explains everything. “Bruce.”
By this Tim is startled, for some reason. He blinks, listing his head abruptly. Something is underfoot, underneath. “Yeah,” Tim says, eyes narrowing cautiously. “Bruce.”
Bruce is sitting at the other end of the breakfast table with arms folded, his face submerged in his own biceps and the long smooth silk black sleeves of his pajama shirt, the thick slab of today's Gotham Gazette underneath his elbows.
Tim thinks Bruce might be asleep over there. Bruce stumbled in here, settled down into the chair at the end, and slumped over. Missing out. Because today Alfred is making banana pancakes. And also today for whatever reason Alfred’s coffee doesn’t taste (as) burnt (as usual). Could it be? A fair sign? Day of days? Winter made glorious summer by this son of York?
Alfred comes in finally with the pancakes, covered with a silver dome, for which Tim has been waiting—and abruptly stops beside Bruce.
There Alfred clicks his tongue, almost slowly.
Tim cocks his head.
Alfred snags the Gazette out from under Bruce’s sleeping face, a face which does not seem to notice even at all, and crisply flips six pages in, at which point Alfred hisses, like a snake. Like a real snake. “What ink-stained, ungrateful wretches.”
“What?” Tim asks.
Alfred scowls. “No one.”
“Who,” says Tim, sitting up in his seat to try and get a peek at the pancakes. But—shining silver lid. Reflecting back the glowy-turned-on teardrop chandelier. The light stretching.
Alfred’s mouth tics.
“The Gazette’s so-called journalists. Namely that nasty Miss—” Alfred catches himself. “Hm,” he finishes snippily, exhaling sharply through his nose. Tim can hear his teeth click together. “No matter.”
Tim stretches his hand out for the newspaper.
Shaking his head, Alfred turns his face back down to whichever article he’s reading. One of Alfred’s wrinkly fingers traces down the text column.
If Tim cranes his neck, sits up a little, folds his legs under him for more height a little, he can make out a dark matte picture of a tuxedoed Bruce surrounded by women with bared thighs and knees and oilspill, rainbow shiny satin dresses.
“What they say about him—” Alfred says suddenly, and Tim says softly, “Oh, Alfred, I know,” and Alfred’s eyes spin furiously to meet Tim’s. And at first Tim thinks Alfred is mad at him, is going to use that brittle, hard, furious tone he has, the one that sounds like a backhand to the face.
Instead Alfred wets his mouth and wilts for a second.
Then Alfred says, pained like it’s himself, and not Bruce, who’s being libeled: “What they say about him, it isn’t true.”
“I know,” Tim says again.
“If they knew what—”
Alfred cuts off. The heels on his oxfords sink deep into the carpet.
Alfred abruptly sets the pancake tray, and the newspaper, down in front of Tim. It makes a rustling noise against the fabric tablecloth. The pancake tray hits Tim’s OJ. Dings the glass. Alfred rips the silver cover off the tray, and leaves hastily.
Tim glances over at Bruce, still sleeping across the table. Glances over at Bruce’s spine, Bruce’s ridged spine, rising-falling, under the silk, where Tim can picture the shiny pale scar tissue, fishscale triceps brachii underneath as Bruce breathes in and sleeps out.
The newsprint in front of Tim is smeared in the indistinct shape of a human face. Bruce’s cheek is probably covered in 11pt helvetica.
Ex-Lover: No One As Entitled, “Totally Unstimulating” As “Blowhard” Wayne Enterprises Billionaire Bruce Wayne. Clearly. Insight, penetrating. Tim’s teeth feel cold against his tongue as he scans the lede, then the whole of the text.
“‘Wretches,’” Tim muses quietly to himself. He carefully puts the paper down and stares up at the chandelier over the table for a second before finally cutting into the pancakes, with his silver knife and fork. Wretch, wrecca, banished person, the German Recke, warrior. “Wretch. El wretcho.” He smiles, stabs a bite into his mouth, and chews.
He slowly opens his mouth and lets it drop back off his tongue and smack the plate, half-chewed, less than half.
The pancakes are as unrecognizable as pancakes as the Bruce inside the two-columner is to real Bruce, the Bruce who will pretend to catch the kisses toddlers throw him in his hand all while wearing the cowl and an impenetrable, serious expression: The pancakes are almost inedible. Maybe not even “almost.”
Tim chugs juice and wipes his mouth and tongue with a napkin, gagging a little and then grinning. His laughter wakes up Bruce. Who looks up groggily.
“Oh, God,” Bruce mutters when his heavy-lidded gaze lands on the pancakes Alfred made, as if he understands instantly what has transpired. Tim laughs even harder, choking. Raising his eyes to Tim’s face, Bruce's expression lightens, or clears—and he doesn’t laugh but his eyes crinkle at the very corners.
One thing about detective work in the new millennium is that lots can be figured out by way of der Computer or die Überwachungsbänder but the most luminous and satisfying of all is good old being there in-person to watch people and see if you can physically toggle any switches and press any buttonkeys. This is the only way really, for example, to find out things like when a mailman makes it round your neighborhood.
A fun adjunctive fact uncovered through being-there experience: When he is checking Tim, seated on the edge of one of the medbay cots in the Cave after patrol, out for concussions with a penlight to the eyes, Alfred will smile luminously, although he huffs about it, and laugh when you kick his shins, like a patellar reflex, when he clicks the pen and shines the light into deine Augen.
Another, less fun, adjunctive observation: Alfred will not smile when you do that same trick after you paper-shredder some of your armbones during patrol.
Dad is furious at the sight of Tim’s white plaster cast. The machinebeeps go symphonic, EKG Dies Irae from Requiem. “What happened?”
“Bruce and I were playing tennis and I—”
A sharp, disbelieving scoff, and Tim cuts off, blinking.
“...What?” says Tim.
“Nothing,” says Dad, but if it were nothing, it would cease there, which it does not. It only pauses because the nurse is slipping into the room, Beetlejuiced by Dad’s cardiac ruckus.
Pulling at the cuff of her scrub jacket, the nurse glances frustratedly toward the wall against which Tim leans. “Out,” she mutters, and Tim blinks again at the hostility, but it’s Dad whose cheeks turn sour-cherry red.
“Excuse me?” Dad’s shreddy, weak-shrill voice raises; he sits up on his palms. “You do not speak to my son that way. He will stay here as long as he fucking likes.”
She blinks.
It dawns on Tim to look behind him. Sure enough all three small, medium, and large boxes of Durable Oatmeal Nitrile Exam Gloves on the wall are empty. “Dad,” intervenes Tim softly, face flushing with embarrassment, but a little touched, endeared, nonetheless by Dad getting so riled up on his behalf. Tim waves his fingers through the air like, ix-nay. “Sorry. He’s just high-octane cause I didn’t tell him about getting a fracture in my playing hand. I’ll go. Dad, I’ll—” Tim hesitates because they aren’t really those kind of people but things are different now so Tim uncertainly ducks to press a kiss to Dad’s temple but Dad jerks his cheek away so his face is facing the wall, at which Dad stares sternly, “be seeing you,” Tim finishes lamely, face hot with humiliation.
Two days later: Back from school, Tim’s backpack slips down from his shoulders to his elbows.
For a second he just stares at the boxes neatly pyramid-stacked, two bottom, one top, on his neatly made bed.
Tim slowly backs out of his bedroom and tracks into the hallway. He hangs onto the doorjamb and calls after Alfred, who is at the end of the hall, just about to turn down another corridor. Tim has caught him just in time. “Alfred?”
“Yes, sir?”
Tim lilts, a 45-degree angle from the floor, holding himself up by the jamb with one hand. With his other hand he gestures silently, almost vaguely, at the bedroom. “There’s—” Tim gestures again. Alfred’s expression is so excessively blank Tim thinks Alfred must absolutely deliberately be pretending not to know what Tim is talking about. Must want Tim to spell it out. But Tim is sort of too stunned (suspicious?) to articulate whatever he should be saying here. The silence tumbles around.
At last Alfred’s left eyebrow ticks up. Alfred sighs out a quasi-scoff type-thing.
“I have too much experience dealing with creatures of habit like yourself to think you would submit yourself to such a thing voluntarily, but you needed new shoes, Master Tim. Desperately. Those were selected specifically because one thought they would be to your liking.”
Tim’s face, Tim can tell, Tim knows this with total certainty, would ordinarily be burning red with embarrassment. Tim would ordinarily be curling his weight onto the toes of his feet to hide the elf-y upturn of his old bald-tire-smooth sneaker soles, totally humiliated. But instead of embarrassment, some hot boiling feeling, or defensiveness, Tim’s stomach, and the space under Tim’s tongue, is only full of low-intensity, cold, wet strange tingling static. And his body feels almost light and empty.
“I can afford my own shoes,” Tim says strangely. “I’m not,” and here Tim freezes because poor is excessively crude, blunt, and bald if nonetheless true, financially insolvent maybe even possibly even worse, a little kid unconvincing to an Alfred who is ever-fond of reminding Tim that he is in possession of five times Tim’s thirteen years and therefore at least 2.5 times Tim’s wisdom, and at this point two things are happening and one is that what is coming out of Tim’s mouth is a hesitant, weird, fucking weird, almost Yoda-like “mmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” and the other is that Tim is realizing that the tingling feeling he was feeling was in fact the feeling of feeling very touched by a gesture, but Alfred is already imputing whatever Tim was about to say even though it was never actually said because Alfred says, gentle: “You’re hardly putting us out, sir.”
Without breaking Tim’s gaze, Alfred inclines his chin toward the porcelain on the hutch as if to say as you can see.
“Thank you,” Tim says, but this is weak, flustered. It is very insufficient, pretty much peremptory, wholly unsuited to the depth of the gesture. Have you ever received a very good, true, direct thank you? Eye contact, really meaning it, sincerity. It can bowl you over. Tim swallows quickly. This one for the money. This one for the real, true try: “Thank you.”
“Of,” says Alfred, “nothing, young sir,”
They stand there in the hallway for one, or four, silent beats, Tim still hanging, dumbly, off of the door, backpack brushing the red hallway rug. His knuckles nearly brush the ground. Tim’s fingers twitch.
“Why don’t you try them on and see if they fit?”
Another beat. “Sure,” Tim says. “Yes. Uh. Would you like to come in?”
Alfred smiles, patient, pretty much indulgent, merciful, maybe even almost, not, definitely not, it couldn’t be, but maybe almost a little, but not, not yet, probably not ever, except maybe a little in one million years from now, fond—and Alfred comes back down the hall, toward Tim.
Tim unclenches his fingers from the doorframe.
Tim falls asleep in the chair, slumped over onto the side of Dad’s bed. When he wakes up, Dad puts his newspaper to the side and pats Tim’s head. “You’re tired, son. Sleep some more.”
Tim quickly disentangles himself, flushing. He hits his head against the nurse white board and it drops down to the ground. “No, no, I’m good. I’ve slept. I may never need to sleep again. I’m awake.” Awake at first glance seems so impossibly English that it would be hard to squeeze much else out but what it is because surely what it is must have been what is always was but in actuality: a Middle English merger of Old English wacan, to arise, be born, originate, from Proto-Indo-European root weg-, to be strong, be lively. “Never been aliver.”
Tim bends to pick up the whiteboard and re-affix it to the wall then drops back down to the ground to look for the whiteboard marker. Which is not there.
“Here,” says Dad.
Tim sits up on his knees. “Oh.” Tim takes the big green Expo marker Dad is proffering. “Why’d you have this?”
“Tim,” says Dad, and Tim is most desirous of: dropping his head back and groaning.
“Dad,” says Tim in the same tone instead of doing that.
“I know I haven’t always—” Dad winces. Tim waits for him to pick it back up. But Dad doesn’t.
“What?”
Dad looks at him with his face all screwed up, like Tim is a bad smell.
“Nothing.”
Tim’s phone buzzes on the chair. Tim glances at it, and immediately regrets doing so because Dad scoffs harshly and rolls his eyes and it’s like a bombfuse. “Go,” snaps Dad, “I suppose that’s Bruce too!”
“Nooo,” says Tim. He flips his phone over.
It is Bruce.
He shuts his eyes for a second. And glances up at Dad pleadingly, squinting. This is going to be bad. “...It might be important.”
Dad’s eyes blow so wide and furious Tim can see the whites above and below his irises. “Listen, I know you think I’m some kind of idiot because I don’t know all your stupid grammar or coding or your mother’s archaeology bullshit,” he hisses. “But if you think I’m going to let some philandering cocksucker take my son and be—”
Tim blinks. “What? I don’t think that.” The rest of the words sink in. “What? How can you say that about Bruce? He would never—”
“You don’t know Bruce Wayne!”
“You don’t know Bruce Wayne!” Tim says shrilly. “Bruce Wayne is—Bruce is—”
“You know what they fucking say about him?” Dad spits. His face is so contorted and discolored with anger that it makes, trick of the light, his eyes look almost shiny. “And that’s what’s decent enough to print!” He throws the newspaper at Tim, who’s still on the floor on his knees.
It’s just as well that Tim is already on the ground: Dad’s throw is feeble. Tim grabs the paper and stands up to his full height, and once he’s there, it’s not that the righteous fury or possessive protectiveness of Bruce dissolves, or even dilutes, but suddenly Tim is overcome with a strange cooling pity over seeing something sad and wrung-out, not seeing the heroes, not believing what the heroes believe, in great things or love or something below the newspaper headlines, caught on the ebb and coast of something else entirely, something much less great than Batman, than Bruce, who has singlehandedly redeemed, singlehandedly saved, more lives than Tim could even comprehend at nothing except tremendous personal cost because he cares for every fucked-up soul in Gotham to the bottom of his being.
Dad doesn’t even care for Tim.
“When I get out of here, you are not going to be—”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Tim repeats quietly, stricken. “You don’t understand.”
The next day Tim’s skipping first-period to get a Red Bull at the corner store a couple blocks down from school when someone walks up and shuts the glass refrigerator door on him. Tim knows who it is from how damn silent they are, and from the pleasant clean ozonic smell, and the well-loved black wayfarers that get pressed onto Tim’s face. Before Tim can push the sunglasses off of his face onto his hair, his face is already aching from grinning so big. “Dick!” he says breathlessly, laughing. “What are you doing in Gotham?”
“Territorial of thy territory already, huh?” Dick half-smiles, leaning against the glass. He’s deep tan; the toothpaste-blue butterfly bandage on his temple jumps out, and his hair, longer than usual, also looks sun-lightened. “You’re a lot like him.”
“Hey,” says Tim.
“It’s not all a bad thing.” Now Dick smiles fully. He has the same kind of knowing, luminous, benevolent smile as Alfred. “He’s the best. The greatest.”
“You know I think you’re—” Tim falters. “Well, you know what I think about you.”
Dick ducks his head, the smile dipping, and rubs the back of his neck. “Those the shoes Bruce picked out for you? Pretty sweet.”
Tim smiles over the abrupt change in conversation, glancing down at the shoes before meeting Dick’s gaze again. To think Tim gets to make smalltalk with Dick Grayson? “Alfred picked them for me, actually.”
Dick raises his eyebrows. “That’s not what I heard.”
“What do you mean?”
Dick gazes at Tim evenly for a couple seconds. Then gently he reaches over and pushes the sunglasses down over Tim’s eyes again. Tim can feel the warmth from Dick’s skin radiate even if they never touch for even one second.
“...Did Bruce tell you that?”
Dick smiles wryly again, and sticks his hands in his pockets. “Alfred. God knows I’m not the big guy’s favorite person.”
Tim laughs loudly, and Dick looks at him strangely. Tim’s giggles quickly subside. He leans his cheek against the refrigerated glass and stares big-eyed at Dick, studying him: Dick is being totally sincere.
Dick flicks Tim under the chin. “What’s that look for?”
“I think you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” says Tim quietly. “Here. You want anything?”
Dick tilts his head. “Do they still have the pineapple-flavor Red Bulls?”
“See for yourself,” Tim says, and Dick says, “Okay, I would if someone weren’t blocking the display,” and Tim elbows Dick and Dick shoulders Tim out of the way and Tim shoulders back so hard that Dick lets out a loud, high beat of laughter and Tim feels like he’s riding so high and hot on the sun that he could parch grain.
Dick pays for both of them. “I was only going easy on you back there cause of your cast,” he tells Tim as they push out of the double doors. “You’re already benched at nights, I didn’t want to cut you another loss.”
“Uh-huh,” Tim says. His face hurts from smiling so big. “...You want to sign it?” he asks shyly.
“Obviously,” Dick says, grabbing Tim’s elbow with one hand and digging through his denim jacket pocket for a pen with the other. Through the dark glasses tint, Dick looks especially young. Dick tilts his head again, and goes quiet for a few seconds. Dick spins the pen between his fingers over Tim’s cast while he thinks. “Your dad stole what I would’ve written, minus a character or two, but give me a second. You like words from Late Middle English, yeah? Gest of Robyn Hode would be fitting for you.”
“I love Gest of—” Tim is so flattered it takes him a second to register what Dick said before that. “What do you mean my dad wrote something?” Tim asks. Dick twists Tim’s arm back in a weird position to show him the green writing just above the back of his elbow.
Tim
Your the best ever.
Love
Dad