Chapter Text
In retrospect, it's probably a good thing Tim's working from home today.
There's a time and a place for scraping yourself out of bed on half an hour of sleep to drag yourself to the office for an 8 am meeting, and the time is not now, and the place is not here.
Instead of heading for Wayne Enterprises, Tim puts on a pressed button-up and doesn't bother changing out of his boxers from the waist down. He brushes his hair and slicks it back, wrinkling his nose when his hand brushes his forehead and it's running approximately the temperature of the sun. He sets his laptop up in the living room for the video call, where the sleek white furniture is hardly ever used but does achieve that magazine-perfect home decor show chic for the backdrop of his pitch meetings.
Then it's showtime, and Tim alternates between his gala smile and his placating-Bruce-in-a-brooding-mood serious face, and he nods his way through twenty-seven slides from Community Outreach about the expected fiscal impact on the surrounding neighborhoods for the proposed new locations. He greenlights three new projects, and he keeps a running list of addendums on things he wants tweaked before they go live, and he tells everyone how impressed he is with their proposals, even if talking kind of feels like someone's scraping away at his throat with a cheese grater.
By the time the meeting's done, Tim feels like he's gone five rounds with Killer Croc in the harbor with no backup. He might be wheezing a little, he thinks idly, as he ends the call and stands to pad barefoot to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
He gets about two steps before his screen is chiming a happy little jingle at him. God, he needs to change his incoming call sound effect. That is entirely too cheerful for this hour of the morning.
Tim leans over to click accept without bothering to sit back down.
It's Tam, and she hisses, "Where the hell are you? The investors from Medcorp are touring the building. I can only keep them busy for so long." She pauses for a beat, and then she demands, incredulous, "Are you still in your boxers?"
"What?" says Tim. "No, of course not." He swivels the laptop screen upward at an angle, so that his business-ready half is in frame.
Tam gives him a look that she absolutely learned from her dad telling Bruce off, which really isn't fair. "I need you here in like ten minutes," she says.
What Tim wants to do is get a cup of coffee and become marginally more human. What he wants is to poke around Reddit for ways to make a throat feel less like it was assaulted by unfortunate kitchen appliances, because he's pretty sure "slap an ice pack on it" is not in fact the correct answer.
What he says instead is, "I can do fifteen."
Tam's eyes dart off toward what he presumes are the Medcorp investors. "Make it a fast fifteen," she hisses, and then she ends the call before he can ask her what that's even supposed to mean.
He's there in thirteen, thank you very much, properly dressed, tie in a neat half-Windsor, with only half a dozen traffic laws broken to make it happen.
Tam takes one look at him and says, "You look like death warmed over."
Then she slaps a concealer stick in his hand — his skintone, of course, and it probably shouldn't surprise him anymore that she a) knows the exact right shade and b) apparently keeps one on her person — and shoves him toward the bathroom.
A minute later, he's staring at his reflection in the mirror and realizing he does, in fact, look like death warmed over. The dark smudges under his eyes are so deep they look like bruises, and there's an actual bruise on his jaw from last night. His cheeks are blotchy and red the way they always get when he's running a fever.
So much for looking professional and put-together on the meeting call this morning.
Well. If anyone's an expert at covering up when he's half-dead on his feet, it's Tim. Joke's on everyone else: he got the bootcamp crash course on this the first time his parents dragged him out to a museum open at six years old while he was running a fever of 102.
In a minute and a half, the blotchiness is gone, and so are the dark smudges, and so is the bruise on his jaw. When he steps back out of the bathroom, Tam gives him a once-over and says, "Better," in the sort of tone that suggests there's more she'd be saying if they weren't in so much of a hurry.
Then she shoves a coffee cup into his hand, and she steers him toward his office, and she hisses, "You've got two minutes. Get your game face on."
"Why are you still here?" says Tam, leaning in his office doorway.
Tim blinks up at her, midway through running numbers for next week's company-wide all-hands meeting. "What?"
"You," she tells him. "Here. Why?"
He blinks up at her again. He thinks there was probably a good reason he came in, but for a long couple of minutes, he can't seem to make his brain switch gears and figure out what it was. Everything feels thick and heavy, like he's trying to think through cotton padding.
Then he remembers, and he shoots her an accusatory look. "You asked me to come in."
"Yeah," says Tam, frowning. "Ten hours ago."
"Shit," Tim mutters, and checks the time on his laptop. He saves what he's working on and paperclips the report he's reviewing to stick in his drawer. He locks it with the thumbprint scanner, because infosec, and then he's closing up the laptop and shoving himself up to standing.
At some point, Tam's crossed to his desk. Now she's peering down at the unfinished cup of coffee on his coaster, expression decidedly suspicious. "Jesus, are you dying? Or a pod person or something?"
Tim shoots her a flat stare and takes a gulp of the coffee to prove a point. The acidity feels like knives going down, just like last time he tried to take a sip; his throat clicks when he swallows. "I've got to go," he says, instead of acknowledging her not-really-question. "I'm late."
Or, well, maybe not quite late, but he's definitely not going to have time to catch his breath before patrol, not like he'd planned to. He'd been hoping for an hour to take a nap, down a couple of fever reducers, and maybe make some instant noodles. But it's pushing nine apparently, and he was supposed to be backup on tonight's stakeout. He's got about half an hour to get to the manor and get suited up.
Tam is fixing him with a strange, flat expression, but Tim doesn't have time for that right now. So he says, "Thanks for this morning, you're a life saver," grabs his laptop and the coffee, and slips back out the door.
The thing is, he should probably cancel.
Tim knows that.
His brain's a little swimmy, the way it always gets when he's running a high fever, and he hasn't been able to swallow enough to reach the amount of caffeine needed for his usual levels of faking it.
But it isn't very often that Dick asks for his help, anymore.
It feels like forever since they've been on patrol together. Not since Tim took a nosedive out a skyscraper window. Not since that disaster year running frantic all across Europe and the Middle East, scrambling to put together evidence and ignore his own shattered heart. Not since Tim walked downstairs into the Batcave one night and found the boy who'd tried to kill him wearing his suit, Dick busy trying to explain why that was a good idea.
It still stings, honestly.
Damian's gotten better, with time and people to walk him through what it means to be a non-stabby member of society, but he still sort of eyes Tim like he wouldn't mind making an exception to the stabbing rules in Tim's case, specifically.
The last time they'd hit the streets together, Damian'd cut his line and watched him plummet twenty stories toward the pavement below — nostalgic, maybe, for when he'd left Tim crumpled and bleeding on the Batcave floor from a different fall, impaled on broken glass.
And that's on Tim, really. He should have known better than to let his guard down.
But, well, Tim's not exactly a fan of bleeding, however much circumstances seem to conspire to make it a regular occurrence, and he's just had a year's crash course on the appropriate levels of vigilance around people who want him dead. Needless to say, he hasn't been on a mission with Damian since.
If Tim ever needs a place to crash for the night, he makes sure his fallback option is never the manor, well aware that the kid could walk in with a knife and make sure he never wakes up again.
He stays at his base of operations, or at his own apartment, or a time or two at Red Hood's safehouses, when Jason wasn't around to occupy them. He leaves a thank-you note and enough supplies to replace what he uses and a little more besides, and Jason hasn't given him shit for it yet, so he guesses it's working out alright.
It probably says something about Tim's standards that his fallback contingencies to avoid a would-be-murderer involve staying someplace that belongs to another would-be-murderer, but it's been a good year and a half now since Jason's last tried to leave him a bloody smear on the ground, which is more than he can say about Damian.
So — he's taking pretty reasonable precautions, all things considered. Unfortunately, those precautions mean that he hasn't really seen Dick, lately.
And for the most part, it's fine. For the most part, Tim keeps his feelings about it all bricked up in the back of his mind, hidden away with everything else he doesn't think about. He's built those walls carefully, made sure the grout set. In a couple of places, here and there, he's added a couple extra layers of bricks, just in case, just because the metaphorical sound-proofing wasn't quite up to standard.
And so it's fine. Really, it is.
As long as he pushes himself until he's ready to drop, there aren't any of those lingering moments spent lying awake in bed, nothing to distract him from the dark, stagnant well of his own thoughts.
And if, maybe, his breath had caught a little when Dick called him the other day — if something in his chest had twisted and turned over, when Dick said he needed help — if something that felt traitorously like hope had risen up, when his brother had told him that Damian was away visiting Jon, and this stakeout couldn't wait — well. No one could pry that information out of Tim with literal torture.
So he can't stay home tonight. He can't.
He absolutely cannot cancel.
He hasn't seen his big brother in going on two months, now. If he flakes on this, who's to say the next chance he'll get?
So thirty minutes later, he's there in the Batcave, suited up and waiting.
He should probably eat something — grab a protein bar, at least. He feels jittery and strange, and his head is swimming, but the thought of trying to choke something down past the solid line of pain in his throat sounds like an exercise in agony.
So he leans against the wall instead and considers seeing if there's a Gatorade or something in the Batcave's mini-fridge.
He's still thinking about it when the roar of a motorcycle down the tunnel has him turning toward it, automatic, something brightening in his chest.
But it's not Nightwing's bike, sleek blue and black, that comes screaming down the tunnel. No — this one's broader, chunkier, seated with a man in a leather jacket and body armor.
Tim eyes Jason, evaluating, as he guides the bike in to rest — as he pops the kickstand and swings over the side. His steps are ambling and even as he approaches, nothing in the body language proclaiming a threat.
He's suited up, Tim notes — armed and in the Batcave. That can only mean one thing, really, assuming he's not here to put a bullet in anyone's head, and Tim doesn't think it's that.
Things have been better, these last couple of months, and not just the safehouse crashing.
They've been having actual conversations, instead of snarking matches. A time or two, Tim's dropped in unannounced when Jason radioed for backup. Once, when a stakeout ran long, Jason shoved a protein bar at him and told him he was built like a goddamn toothpick.
Tim munched his way through it and didn't realize, until some hours later, that he hadn't even thought to check for poison.
So it's not perfect — but it's better. Tim's estimated likelihood of the Red Hood trying to put him down again has dropped all the way to 16%.
"Hood," he says, by way of greeting, and then immediately regrets it. The pain runs down his throat like liquid metal, and he sounds gravely and strange.
Jason tilts his head. "You trying out voice mods, Red? Pro tip, don't go with that one."
Tim gives him a sidelong glance — raises a brief middle-fingered salute that earns him a snort of amusement.
A second later, Jason's throwing himself into the Batcomputer chair, proprietary, like he's daring anyone to tell him he's not allowed. "Guess it's all hands on deck tonight, huh?"
"New mob boss out in the Diamond District's pushing some new pollen strand of Ivy's," Tim manages, through the cheese-grater awfulness in his throat. "Lowers inhibitions, loosens up the tongue. Not on the streets yet, but if it hits it'll be bad news."
"Fuckers," says Jason, with heat. "No wonder Dickface was so pushy with the timeline."
Even those couple of sentences have his throat screaming for him to shut up, so Tim offers a shrug in reply. He thinks again about looking for some Gatorade, and then he thinks about having to actually swallow it. He's honestly not sure if the payoff will be worth it.
For a moment he just stands there, wavering. When he glances up again, he sees that Jason's got him fixed with a focused sort of a stare. It's impossible to gauge what his face is doing, through the mask, so Tim turns away toward the mini-fridge, using it as an excuse not to be studied like a bug under a magnifying glass.
"Yo, Timbo," Jason starts to say, but whatever he means to follow up with is cut short, because just then Dick appears at the top of the stairs to the Batcave, taking them two at a time.
"Alright!" he chirps, brightly, stretching up overhead to crack his knuckles. "Who's ready to roll? I vote we take the Batmobile."
"I've got my bike," says Jason, dry and decidedly flat.
"Same," says Tim. He hooks a thumb in the direction he parked.
"Well, sure," says Dick, and waggles his eyebrows, then stops waggling his eyebrows so that he can carefully press his domino into place. "But how many times is Bruce not around to tell us no?" Domino firmly affixed, he does the eyebrow thing again. "Besides. If we carpool, I can brief you on the way."
"We've got comms," says Tim, reasonably.
Dick loops an arm around his shoulders and steers him toward the car. Tim's gotten better, since he was young, at not leaning into every offered scrap of physical affection, but it's still a near thing. After the year he's had, it's been a very long time since anyone's touched him like this — kindness instead of blades, a casual half-embrace instead of broken bones.
"Where's the fun in that?" says Dick, and goes to loop his other arm around Jason's shoulders.
Jason swats his hand away — reaches out, casual, to lift the keys straight from Dick's belt pouch.
"Alright," says Jason. "Deal. But only if I'm driving."
"Bruce is gonna kill us," says Tim, mildly, because he feels like it should be noted, however much his throat screams at him when he puts the words out into the world.
"Eh," says Dick, and pulls the passenger door open. "Who's gonna tell him?"
It's a valid point. Tim considers it for a long beat, brain buffering like a video struggling to load. He wonders, vaguely, if the fever's creeping higher. It kind of feels like the fever's creeping higher.
But he can't tap out now. He's not about to give this up: the arm around his shoulder, and the casual banter, and the almost-normal quality to the night.
It's been a long, long time since he's had anything like normal.
So all he says is, "Shotgun," and he slips into the passenger seat over Jason's crow of laughter and Dick's sputtering protests.