Chapter Text
Red Robin materializes back at home in his Nest (and isn't it wild that he has to go out of his way to be specific about which Nest he's referring to now, what the fuck) with plans to faceplant on his couch upstairs and just dissociate for a few hours about all of the everything that today has been. After that, maybe he'll get up long enough to call his friends and tell them about what happened, and when he's done explaining he can go back to lying down. If (when) they all show up at his house, they can just yell at and around his half-conscious body.
Yeah, that sounds like a solid plan.
Is this a healthy strategy for emotional processing? Eh.
Does it work for Tim most of the time? Yes.
Has he done his emotional processing worse ways in the past (i.e. by simply continuing forward without acknowledging the presence of any emotions whatsoever until they all just sort of explode all at once)? Also yes.
Ergo, this is a good, solid plan for his mental well-being. Harley had even given him a thumbs up when he told her about it the last time they saw each other. (It had been when Ivy's plants were being a little bit too indiscriminate about who they ate during an attack on a company she deemed to be environmentally harmful. Red Robin and Spoiler had to fight both Harley and the plants so that the civilians had enough time to evacuate.)
There's a green light filling the Nest when Red Robin steps out of the nook designated for his personal Boom Tube coordinates (his Boom Nook, as the purple paint above the alcove proudly proclaims).
He mentally marks his facedown dissociation plan for postponement. "Hey, O," he calls, walking across the room to where he stores his armor. "Was there something else you needed me to do today to finish up the work we did on the Watchtower?"
"Nope." Barbara's voice comes through his speakers unmodulated, which means she's signed off for the… day? Night? (Red Robin just teleported from a space station into a cave, and he threw his circadian rhythm into a Crime Alley dumpster when he first put on the tights; he has absolutely no clue what time it is.)
Tim taps the sequence on his mask that removes the suction, then takes it off. "Oh? Alright, is something up in Gotham, then? Anything I can do to help?" He pulls off the few pieces of armor he'd worn up to the Watchtower ("you never know when you might come under attack; if you are Robin, you are a target. Be prepared at all times"), places each of them into their molded spaces in his cleaning rig, and sets it to run.
He flops down into his (personally designed, red and gold, ergonomic, super-duper comfy) chair in front of his monitors, and spins around to face Oracle's mask on his screen.
The image flashes, and suddenly he's looking at Barbara Gordan, sitting in front of her own computer terminal in the Clocktower. Her red hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her headset is resting around her neck, and she's holding a mug of tea in one hand. There's a suspiciously self-satisfied smirk on her face.
Tim's eyes narrow. "Hey, Babs? I recognize the irony in what I'm about to say, considering the company you keep," he says. "But what's got you looking like the cat that got the canary?"
"Oh, nothing much. Just wanted to be the first Bird to offer my congratulations on The Robin's Nest." Barbara's smirk breaks into a genuine smile. "The League made the right call. Diana was right; you deserve this, Tim."
Tim closes his eyes, sighs softly through his nose, and thunks his head back against his chair's headrest. "You were listening in, weren't you."
"Just until she made the offer. I cut out before you could start interrogating her about the League's motives."
Tim lifts his head back up and squints at her. "How do you know I interrogated her if you stopped listening?"
Babs raises an amused eyebrow. "Because I've spent more than twenty minutes in your presence? And I've seen the kind of bullshit Bruce has pulled on you over the past few years? Obviously you would've had questions. That's why I told Dick to make sure Diana was the one to talk to you. You trust her to know what she's talking about and to tell you the truth when you ask for it."
"You told…" Tim's mind is reeling. "You knew?!"
She snorts. "You know Dick can't keep a secret to save his life. He told me as soon as he got back from the meeting. You're lucky the whole family doesn't know; I've had to basically keep his ass on a full communications-lockdown." She rolls her eyes fondly. "He's incorrigible."
Tim slumps down in his chair and throws an arm over his eyes. "What the fuck," he mutters to himself.
"If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure Bruce didn't tell anyone."
"It does not."
"Yeah, didn't think it would." She takes a sip out of her mug.
They sit in silence for a minute while Tim collects himself for what feels like the eighty-third time today.
So, Babs knows. Dick knows. Bruce knows, obviously, along with the rest of the old guard of the JL.
The caped community is full of notorious gossips. If Tim actually wants to be the one to share his own news with anyone, he'll have to get on it pretty much immediately.
He peeks an eye out from beneath his arm. "Thanks for the warning. And also, uh. For telling Dick to send Diana. And for saying…" He shrugs uncomfortably. "Yeah. Thanks."
Barbara’s face softens. "Of course, kiddo. Figured you'd want to know that the hero with the biggest mouth is about to start bragging to anyone in earshot about how amazing his little brother is."
Tim groans as Babs grins.
She sets her mug down on her desk and stretches her hands back behind her head. "I'm heading off to bed," she says. "You should do the same. It's been a long day of tech work, even for the likes of Oracle and Red Robin."
Tim lifts his arm in a brief wave of acknowledgment, then drops it back down over his eyes.
The light on the monitors, which had been somewhat visible through his eyelids, goes dark.
He sits there for a minute or five in the silence of his underground bunker, then comes to a decision. He knows he's not going to be able to get any rest until he unpacks a little bit of what's swirling around inside his mind.
"Bunker code KLSBWF31996," he calls. Nothing around him seems to change, but roughly forty feet above Tim's head, a three-foot long lead tube slides into the wall. As a result, the roughly one-inch wide crevice that runs from the ceiling of the Nest to the opening of a faux-sewer drainage pipe on the Gotham sidewalk is left open to the sky.
"Hey, Kon," he murmurs. "No emergency, no rush, but if you could grab Bart and Cassie and come up to my place above the Nest, as soon as you're able, that'd be… real nice. I could really use you guys right now."
A moment later, his phone buzzes.
Konald L Kenton
you got it wonder
i'll do a fly by to let them both know
be there in five at most ❤️
"Thanks," Tim smiles. "Love you too. See you soon."
He calls out the code to close his Super-speak tube as he moves over to the elevator, pulling off his sweaty, armor-wrinkled shirt as he goes.
When the doors open to his apartment, Tim's not surprised to find Kon already there.
There's a stack of five coffee mugs sitting atop one of Kon's hands. At the sound of the fish tank moving, he looks up from where he's grabbing a few more that are lying scattered around the plush carpet in front of Tim's couch.
As Tim watches, Kon gives the two mugs he's just grabbed a light toss, and they both settle gently on top of the stack.
He gives Tim a beaming smile. "Hey, Robbie! Don't move. Gimme just one sec." His words are accompanied by the feeling of his TTK aura sweeping up from the floor and wrapping around Tim's body.
Tim lets his muscles go lax, basking in the weightlessness.
Kon always seems to know when Tim comes home feeling a deep desire to become a puddle of goop on the floor for a few hours, and if he's there when Tim walks through the door, he'll give Tim the exact amount of pressure he needs to just let his body become dead weight supported by TTK. Even as Kon's aura is projecting a perfect Tim-shaped silhouette, the tower of mugs on Kon's palm remains perfectly stable. (Little-Robin would be so disappointed in Tim for thinking this, because little-Kon was kind of insufferable, but Kon's TTK really is just… dope as hell. Little-Robin would be doubly disappointed in Tim for thinking this about Kon using his TTK to do chores.) He floats over and loads them into Tim's dishwasher.
Less than a second after that's done, Kon is directly in front of Tim, maneuvering an oversized black t-shirt over his head.
Tim barely has time to notice that the shirt is one of Kon's many (many, many, many) old Superboy t-shirts before Kon is pulling him into his arms, his TTK doing the rest of the work to squeeze the two of them tightly together.
Tim leans his full weight onto his partner. He tucks his head under Kon's chin and buries his face in Kon's ocean blue Kaua'i sweatshirt.
Bart gave Kon this hoodie on his birthday ("test tube hatch day!") a few years ago. Tim's pretty sure it was meant half as a gag gift and half as an expression of genuine care and consideration (as are most gifts from Bart Allen). Only a week before that birthday, Kon had been complaining offhandedly about all the touristy shops in Hawai'i that sold hoodies: " Like anyone's gonna get to freaking Hawai'i and say 'oh man, I did a bad job packing for the weather, and it's just too darn cold here. Good thing there's this pop-up stand right here on this sandy beach by the ocean that'll sell me a comfy cozy hoodie so I can survive this chilly weather.' It's ridiculous!" When he opened the gift, Kon laughed his ass off and then immediately dragged Bart into a hug. (Kon's memories of his time in Kaua'i might've been fraught, but the island had been his home, and he had loved living there. Tim knows his partner misses it, sometimes, even if he prefers the life he lives as Conner Kent to the life he lived as Superboy.)
Tim feels a nudge against his head. "Hey, there, Wonder Boy." Even though he can't see Kon's face, Tim can hear the grin in his voice.
"Mrrnph," Tim grunts into the chest of Kon's irony/memory sweatshirt.
Kon makes a sort of happy-contented sound in his chest. He plants a kiss on the top of Tim's head and begins to drift them away from the faux fish tank and deeper into the apartment. "Busy day, huh?" he asks softly. "Hero stuff, or just lame business stuff?"
Tim turns his head to the side just enough to free his mouth and says, "Wazzat th' Watchtower. Crawlin' in Reddy's new brain."
"Sounds gross," Kon says brightly. He begins to card his fingers through Tim's hair (even though it's probably greasy and disgusting from the time Red Robin spent working on his back beneath a desk in a space station still under construction) and Tim somehow manages to melt even more.
He huffs out a laugh against Kon's chest. "He's a android 'n you know it. 'Sides, he's all data now anyway. No weird wiry body like he had when he lived wit' us."
"Whatever you say, Robbie." Kon lands beside the couch he'd recently relieved of its bountiful harvest of coffee cups. "Still seems gross that you're crawling around in our old babysitter's wiry thoughts. Who knows what sorta weird shit goes on in there." He looks around critically and seems to judge the space acceptably tidy.
When he looks back down at Tim, his expression is so fond it makes Tim want to dissolve into the floor or something. "So, hard day of tech work," he says. "What do you need, Robbie? You wanna talk about it, you wanna talk about somethin' else, you wanna cuddle, you wanna cuddle?" the last word is emphasized with an obnoxious eyebrow wiggle, and Tim kind of loves him so much that he wants to promise to pull the moon from the sky if it would make Kon happy.
Instead of voicing that (slightly unhinged, he is self-aware enough to note) thought, Tim tightens his arms around Kon's back. "Crush meee," he demands.
Kon's laugh is loud and bright as he rotates the two of them until they're horizontal. He settles them down onto Tim's (incredibly expensive, absurdly deep, obscenely comfy) couch so that Tim's entire body is pinned beneath his.
Tim wriggles until his head is poking out from under Kon's shoulder, then goes boneless with a blissful sigh of contentment. "Mmm… Love you."
"Yeah, yeah, you're with me for my body and my fantastically amazing tactile telekinesis because it's perfect for squishing you into a Flat Timmy. We all know."
Tim opens one eye to glare at Kon, who's looking down at him with an indulgent smile. When Kon sees that he's looking, he ducks down to plant a kiss on the top of his nose.
Tim huffs. "Mean to me." He closes his eyes again.
"Mean to you!" Kon says with a dramatic gasp of outrage (though Tim can still hear the bright grin in his voice). "I am the one providing you with the pressure you so crave! How dare. This injustice must not stand. Mayhap it is time for me to take myself and my incredibly impressive and uniquely awesome trademarked tactile telekinetic services elsewhere."
Tim tightens his arms around Kon's back with a low whine of protest. "Noo." He knows he sounds like a petulant child. He doesn't care even one little bit.
An exaggerated sigh heaves through the body on top of him, and the TTK field squeezes just a bit tighter. "If only I were capable of denying you anything," Kon says, false regret coloring his tone.
Tim buries his smile in Kon's shoulder.
He fucking loves his partner so fucking much. And Kon loves him so fucking much. Tim is very, very carefully not thinking about it right now, but it's really fucking nice to be able to come home from a space station where he had a conversation that upended his personal concept of his place in the world, and find that nothing here has changed, that the way he loves and is loved in return is still the same.
A tendril of TTK nudges against Tim's cheek. He opens his eyes and allows Kon to turn his head until their noses almost touch.
"Hey, Wonder Boy," Kon whispers.
Tim can feel the air from the words brush against his lips. He stares up at Kon, with his brilliant blue eyes and his tanned and freckled skin and the adorable dimples he gets when he's smiling as wide as he is right now. "Hey, Clone Boy," he whispers back.
Kon's eyes sweep across his face, his gaze still impossibly fond. "You're so fuckin' pretty, you know that?"
Tim feels himself blush, and when he scrunches his nose, it bumps up into Kon's. "Says you," he grumbles.
Kon laughs, and leans down to intentionally boop their noses together. "Yeah, says me, that's how you know it must be for real. I know pretty when I see it." Kon's wearing the grin he uses when he's on the news, when he's pulling out all the stops and playing up the image of the charming and suave Superboy he was trained to be. (There was a time when Tim had thought that meant the smile itself was fake, just another part of the mask Kon put on to become Superboy. Eventually though, he realized that 'Kon-El' and 'Conner Kent' and 'Superboy' were not distinct for Kon the way that 'Timothy Drake' and 'Robin' were for Tim. Kon had started out learning how to be a person when 'Superboy' was all that he was. It wasn't fair to judge his public persona as "less genuine" than the person he was behind closed doors. Kon is the most genuine and honest person Tim has ever met—he is all of himself, all of the time. No hidden layers, no secret motivations, no ulterior motives. To say it's one of the things Tim loves most about him would be both 100% true and entirely misleading—there isn't a single aspect of Conner Kent that Tim Drake doesn't adore with everything that he is.)
Tim just lets himself bask in the ray of sunshine beaming down at him.
"Hey, Tim?" Kon whispers after twelve seconds.
"Yeah, Kon?"
"I'm gonna kiss you now."
Tim says, "Okay," and then he's being kissed, and he almost can't reciprocate because of how hard he's smiling.
Fuck, he loves his Clone Boy so much.
Kon has just begun to deepen the kiss (licking into Tim's mouth and shifting his weight so his elbows are resting just above Tim's shoulders so he can slide his hands up Tim's neck and tangle his fingers in his hair, slotting one of his impressive thighs between Tim's legs and beginning to ripple his TTK up and down Tim's sides in the way that makes him feel like he's going to vibrate apart at the seams) when a gust of wind blows through the apartment and Bart's voice says, "Blech, not in front of my pizza!"
Tim pulls away from Kon with a breathy laugh at the dazed expression on his face. (It never won't be endearing, the way Kon can flirt shamelessly with Tim in front of Zues and the entire Justice League, but as soon as they so much as kiss, he'll be so caught up in the moment that the rest of the world may as well not exist.)
Tim moves to sit up. Kon—seeming to snap back to himself—lets him, floating backwards with a perfunctory pout. Tim settles beside Kon on the couch, and Kon brings an arm around Tim's shoulders.
Tim looks at where Bart is sitting on the floor on the opposite side of the coffee table.
He is indeed munching on a slice of pizza, a half-empty box sitting on the table in front of him. Six more are stacked up beside it. (Tim doesn't have to look inside to know that two more have Bart's preferred pepperoncini and green peppers, two are Kon's margarita, one is Cassie's meat-lover's, and one has Tim's Canadian bacon, onions, and artichoke hearts.)
Despite how disgusted his words had seemed, Bart's expression is mild as he grabs another piece out of his box.
Tim rolls his eyes fondly. "Sorry to offend your pizza, Imp."
Bart nods seriously, taking another bite. "Your apology is appreciated and accepted."
Tim grins, and begins to bend forward to sort through which box on the table between them is his own.
He's stopped by a band of TTK around his waist.
"I got it, sweetpea," Kon says from over his shoulder, so Tim settles back against him and watches as two boxes slide out from the middle of the pile and drift over to settle on their laps.
Tim catches a glimpse of the logo on the top of his box before Kon opens it, and has to swallow the lump in his throat.
After discovering that Brazil ate the most pizza per capita, Bart had spent a year visiting each and every one pizzaria in the country. He brought the best options back for Young Justice to try until they'd narrowed down their top ten, then each of them selected a favorite. Bart had brought this pizza from Tim's.
"So," Bart says. He's already finished his first pizza and is a third of the way through his second. "What's going on, Rob?"
Tim shakes his head, grabbing the first slice of his own pizza. "Is it cool if we wait for Cassie? I don't wanna go through it more than once."
Bart shrugs, setting aside his third and final empty box. "You got it, dude." He flops onto his back, his legs spread-eagle beneath the coffee table and his hands tucked under his head.
"So guys, get this: I was at Grandpa Barry's area in Star Labs the other day, right, and they're looking into what happened to make Grogg, you know, like that, and–"
Tim tucks his feet beneath him and leans against Kon, methodically eating his way through the entire box of pizza Bart brought him. (Most of the time, Tim's appetite isn't big enough for a whole pizza—usually there's enough left over for a clutch cold pizza breakfast—but apparently working on an android brain for a double-digit number of hours without a break for lunch makes a guy real hungry. Go figure.)
When they're both finished, Kon tucks a blanket around Tim with a kiss to his forehead and gathers up all the empty boxes, bringing them over to the recycling bin.
Tim rolls off the couch and fwumps onto his Lovesac (a birthday gift from Steph after he'd laid on hers for the first time and immediately proclaimed it to be the closest humankind would ever get to manufacturing a piece of furniture that felt like Kon's TTK aura) with a contented sigh.
Bart is still talking, going on about the ethics of animal experimentation when applied to sentient megalomaniacal apes.
Kon has started cleaning out the old takeout containers from Tim's fridge. He's occasionally calling Bart and his "insane Speedster constitution but human concept of ediblity" to judge whether something he grabs should go into the garbage bag. (Tim's judgement on this matter has been deemed 'no longer trustworthy' because one time Cassie walked into the kitchen at the Tower and found him eating takeout from a container that had moldy food inside of it. Tim maintains that the mold was not on the food that he was actually eating, so it was fine. Cassie maintains that the fungus you can see is just the part that spreads the spores and there's no way to know how deep the actual fungus has spread into the food, and besides, isn't Tim supposed to be their science expert? No consensus has been reached, but Tim is no longer permitted to judge the safety of his own food, which seems like bullshit if you ask him.
The external entrance to the Nest beeps once to indicate an accepted biometric key, and suddenly Tim's vision is occluded by a puffy red jacket sleeve.
Think of the devil and she shall appear, it seems.
"Omigod, Tim!" Cassie yells. "Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!"
When she pulls back with a huge grin on her face, Tim is giving her a baffled look. "What? How do you–?"
"Diana told me! Ooo, is this meat-lovers?" Cassie grabs the last remaining box of pizza off the coffee table and throws herself bodily onto the beanbag beside Tim, her puffy red Wonder Girl windbreaker rustling where it brushes up against his skin.
"Awh, my pizza's not warm anymore," she complains after opening the box and giving her food an experimental poke. "Kon? Could you…" the air in front of Tim's face heats up for a split second, and then steam starts to rise from the top of Cassie's pizza. "Thanks!"
"Congratulations, dude!" Bart's arms are suddenly around Tim's neck. "What are we congratulating you for?"
"Yeah, bury the lede much?" Kon floats over with a grin on his face and drapes himself across Tim's lap. "What's the good news, Robbie?"
"Wait," Tim's still trying to catch up. "Cassie, did she call you, like, as soon as we finished talking?" he asks. "As soon as she got back down to Earth? Why'd she feel like she needed to let you know? Why not just let me tell you, or let you find out later? Why the rush? What's–"
A slice of pizza with calabresa, ham, pepperoni, and shredded chicken is shoved into his mouth, preventing him from completing his line of questioning.
He shoots Cassie with a confronted look. She rolls her eyes at him.
"Calm down, Rob," she says. "Not everything is a mystery that needs solving, I promise. She talked to me before she even talked to you."
"About what?" Tim can feel Bart literally vibrating with curiosity.
Cassie turned to him and Kon. "She needed a Rob-whisperer to figure out how the Justice League could give him a gift without sending him down a rabbit hole of paranoia."
Tim finally finishes the bite of pizza Cassie used to shut him up. "Is that what was up with the grape Zesti?"
"Wonder Woman brought you a grape Zesti?" Kon demands.
"I thought it was some weird Amazon thing about giving someone a gift of a drink or something!" Tim yells, and Cassie rolls off the beanbag laughing. "Like, a hospitality thing!" he continues over the sound of her cackling. "She, like, stared at me until I drank it! I thought I was going to do something to offend her!"
He turns to Cassie, who at this point has tears streaming down her face. "You're telling me that was supposed to be a peace offering?"
"Oh my Zeus!" she says, trying to get herself under control. "You're saying she just– and you–" She loses it again. It seems Tim will not be getting any more answers from his prime source at the moment.
He turns to Bart and Kon, who are looking between him and Cassie like they're a particularly confusing game of tennis. Bart has, by this point, draped himself over Kon the way Kon has over Tim.
"So…" Kon tries. "The Justice League wanted to give you a lifetime supply of Zesti?"
Tim buries his face in the shoulder of Kon's ironic hoodie and screams.
By the Tim has explained what happened, and Cassie has elaborated on her own side of things (apparently Diana called her as soon as the meeting was done, interrogated her about Tim's favorite things, explained the situation, then hung up; Cassie hadn't told Kon or Bart because she "knew you two blabbermouths wouldn't be able to keep your mouths shut for the twenty whole minutes it would take Diana to walk to Tim") the four of them are all on Tim's couch and piled on top of one another.
Tim is at the bottom of the pile, letting the weight of his team keep him grounded. Now that he's explained, out loud, everything that happened just a few hours earlier on the Watchtower, he's kind-of-sort-of-a-little-bit freaking the fuck out.
His immediate concern—that he doesn't actually deserve what the JL gave him—is shot down with great prejudice by his teammates. ("You're Timothy Fucking Drake. You're Red Fucking Robin.") Then, they start listing all of the times Tim himself—or at least one of his plans—has saved the world and/or the universe, and Tim is left flailing his mostly-trapped limbs in an attempt to get all of them to "just stop, please, I get it, okay? Shut up!"
"And!" Bart says, his body blurring briefly so his head was now on the opposite side of the pile from Tim's hand, which half a second earlier had been holding his mouth closed. "Even if we ignore every time you've saved the world, Batman's saved the world lots of times since you became Robin, so you can basically take credit for all of those, too, if you think about it!"
The other three freeze in the middle of what they're doing. (Tim has half-twisted his body beneath Kon's and his hand is reaching out in an attempt to cover Cassie's mouth. Cassie is on her back, frantically trying to crawl away from Tim's grasping hand. Kon is lying with his arms crossed on top of Tim, his TTK aura keeping Tim's other hand from getting closer than a centimeter above his grinning mouth.) They all slowly turn to stare at Bart with expressions of confusion (Kon), exasperation (Cassie), and exhaustion (Tim).
"Because Tim became Robin to make sure Batman was able to keep being Batman?" Bart says into the sudden silence. "C'mon, it's not rocket science."
Cassie says, "That's not how that works," at the same time as Kon yells, "You did what?" and Tim just gives up and collapses back down onto the couch like a puppet with his strings cut.
Kon pokes the back of his head, because Tim is not allowed to have any peace ever. "You did what?"
"He was gonna either kill someone or get himself killed," Tim mumbles directly into the couch cushions. (Though his words are audible, so he's pretty sure he's actually muttering into Kon's TTK aura, which is keeping him suspended just above the couch cushions.) "Dick wouldn't come back. Batman needed a Robin. Blah, blah, etc…" He half-heartedly waves a hand at the room around them to indicate his current vigilante status.
"Did you really not know why Tim became Robin?" Bart asks Kon curiously.
"I mean, I thought I did," Kon says. "I didn't know you started out as his emotional-support sidekick, though."
Tim hums an out-of-tune rendition of The More You Know without taking his face out of the couch.
Cassie lays back down on top of the others. "So basically, Rob, in summary, ipso facto–"
"Not what that means."
"–you definitely deserve it. Imagine how many times the world would've ended if Batman stopped existing like, a decade ago. We rest our case."
"You can't base successes and failures around 'what-if' scenar-mfph!" Tim's sentence is cut-off halfway through by the couch cushions, which he takes to mean that Kon is not interested in the logical fallacy inherent in Cassie's argument. Rude.
Tim rolls over, and Kon adjusts everyone else to give him the space he needs to do it. "I'm also worried that they're, like… doing this to get me back in their good graces without actually…" he trails off.
"Apologizing?" Kon supplies dryly.
Tim huffs out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh. "Yeah."
"So what?" Bart says.
When they all turn to look at him as best as they can from their current positions, he shrugs and continues, "If you know they're doing it, take the cool stuff they're gonna give you and don't let them off the hook until they actually do something to fix the things they messed up."
"Ooo, yeah!" Cassie says. "Best of both worlds! You get the groveling and the apology gifts, and you don't have to feel guilty any time you do something they don't like."
"Only until they get their asses in gear and actually own up to what they did wrong," Kon points out in a reasonable tone.
When the other three turn to look at him with expressions of varying degrees of incredulity, he grins. "Which they're never going to do, of course, 'cause it's the Justice League and Batman's in charge. Rob, congratulations. They're gonna let you do anything you want, forever."
When they put it like that, it does seem like a sweet deal. It solves the potential problems he identified.
So, why doesn't he feel settled?
"Hey." There's a tap on his arm, and he looks up to see Cassie has moved so she's lying on Kon's back, her arms folded atop his shoulders. She rests her chin on her forearms and looks down at Tim. "None of this changes the fact that they all owe you a massive apology," she says. "A legion of apologies, actually."
She shrugs. "And if you decide to leave this whole heroing thing behind, like, tomorrow? None of us will blame you. In fact, we'll be right behind you."
"Really?" Tim blurts out.
"Obviously, sweetheart." Right below Cassie, Kon grins down at Tim and smacks an obnoxiously loud kiss on his mouth.
Cassie makes a face of disgust, but it's clear she's trying not to smile. "Yeah, Tim, really."
"Young Just Us rides again!" Bart yells from somewhere vaguely above the rest of them. There's a burst of wind, and suddenly he's standing on the coffee table in a cartoonishly large Napoleonic-era general's hat, a cutlass raised as though he’s leading the rest of them into battle. "Four heroes, all alone against the big, bad world! What adventures will they– hey!" This last part is due to the hat flying off Bart's head and into Kon's outstretched hand.
"We're not setting off on our own now," Kon says. "Where'd you even get this, Imp?"
"I know that. And the local theater." A moment later, the hat and cutlass are gone and Bart is looking down at Tim from Cassie's back, his cheeks propped up on his fists. "But for real, Rob, say the word and I'm gone with the wind. And with the you."
Tim looks up at his three best friends.
Their faces are stacked on top of each other almost cartoonishly, and they're promising they'd choose Tim over their mentors, the rest of their team members, their friends, their families, and it's–
Tim is bowled over, yet again, by just how lucky he is to have all of them.
"Thanks," he manages to get out after a moment. "I'm not planning any grand escape right now, but… yeah. Thanks."
Bart reaches down to boop his nose. Cassie squeezes his hand. Kon's TTK wraps around him tightly.
The worries inside Tim's mind settle.
Tim has no idea when he falls asleep, nor does he know what time it is when he wakes up. He's not sure why he woke up, either, until he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.
He looks up from where Bart's fluffy head of hair is buried on his chest to find his sister lying on top of them all.
Cass must have come to Tim's place in her Black Bat armor, because she appears to have raided his closet. She's wearing a pair of his leggings and a purple sweater that Steph left in the Nest sometime last year that Tim has claimed as his own (he has a feeling it won't be his anymore after tonight).
When she sees that he's awake, she gives him a huge smile and lifts her hand in a small wave.
He smiles back, then takes inventory of everyone else's positions.
Bart is asleep half on top of Tim with his legs hanging off the couch. Kon has moved to curl up on his side next to Tim and has his arms wrapped around Tim and Bart both, holding them against his chest like the world's first and second largest teddy bears. Cassie is pinned at an angle between Tim and Kon's legs and Bart's torso, but her head is resting atop one of Kon's enormous thighs, so Tim figures she's plenty comfortable. (Kon's thighs make excellent pillows. Which Tim knows because of… totally G-rated reasons.) They're all still fast asleep. Bart and Kon are snoring.
Tim looks back at Cass with an eyebrow raised. So much for all the situational awareness training, huh?
Cass raises her eyebrow right back, the corner of her mouth tilting upwards. You didn't hear me either.
Tim gives her an admonishing smile. My subconscious doesn't see you as a threat. Duh.
Cass scrunches her nose at him, then whispers, "Congratulations for the important room, little brother."
Tim can't help it. His mouth drops open, and the slightest noise of frustration slips out. (None of the others stir.) "Okay, how do you know?"
Cass just wiggles her eyebrows.
"I categorically refuse to believe you can read 'the Justice League is about to name their satellite base's nerve-center after Tim's Nest' off of anyone, no matter how expressive they are," Tim whispers furiously.
Cass keeps wiggling her eyebrows.
"Cass," he whines as quietly as he can, and she finally breaks out into a fit of giggles.
"I did not read it on anyone," she says. "Barbara told me." She mimes zipping her lips. "Can keep a secret."
Tim narrows his eyes at her. She narrows hers right back.
Finally, he sighs. "Does Steph know?"
"Steph cannot keep a secret. Told her before I came."
Tim feels his eyes go wide. "Wait, you mean she–"
He's cut off by the door to his house slamming open.
This causes several things to happen at once.
Bart, his reactions always faster than anyone else's, vanishes from their pile and reappears halfway across the room.
Cass, who had been resting on top of Bart, thumps down onto Cassie, who jerks awake with a sound somewhere between a shriek and a battle cry.
Kon's eyes shoot open, and he instinctively wraps everyone (who has not yet used superspeed to escape the pile of bodies) tightly to himself, shielding them with his TTK and simultaneously crushing the breath from their lungs.
Finally, Stephanie Brown, who had been the one to kick down the door in the first place, screams at the top of her lungs:
"BOYFRIEND HOLY FUCK!"