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1 – SMELL
Tim’s solving a case in the cave when Superman flies in with Bruce in his arms. They’ve been on a mission together, and Tim assumes that Clark’s just bringing Bruce in and staying to hang out for a while, but when he turns to glance at them it’s obviously not the reason.
He waits for Clark to deposit Bruce on one of the med cots before asking, “Why is he unconscious?”
“He worked himself too hard and fell asleep on the flight. I’d take him to his bed but I know he doesn’t want to take the suit upstairs.”
Alright then. Tim turns back to his case files.
It’s not too long before there’s hushed conversation in the direction of the med cots. He lets his focus leave the case, and immediately his nose is bombarded with the scent of arousal.
Fuck. He pinches his nose, resolving not to breathe for the time it takes to pack up his shit and leave. He saves his files, turns of the computer, piles his notes into something that won’t be ruined if his siblings have a little fight in the cave– and for that he has to let go of his nose, and he breathes in accidentally.
And now he knows how Bruce smells when he wakes up. How Clark smells when he’s watching Bruce come to from a nap.
And, as if that’s not enough, his senses decide he needs to feel the heat, too. It isn’t nice to feel Clark’s blush, the way hot blood rushes to his–
Yeah, not thinking about that.
And also the way Bruce’s–
He’s not thinking about that.
He doesn’t need to know.
Life would be so much easier if he was a human.
It would be a lot easier even if he just had a different faunotype.
He doesn’t need to know how the warm outline of Clark’s–
He doesn’t need to know.
And he wouldn’t if he wasn’t a fucking dragon.
It’s worse a couple days later. Tim has been avoiding Bruce, and it’s been noticed.
“I woke up in the cave and you seemed to be in such a big hurry to leave there,” Bruce pouts.
Tim scowls and tries not to think about– tries not to remember the whole day even happening.
“Tim?”
“I can smell emotions,” he blurts out. “Or well, pheromones. Very strongly.”
Bruce hums inquisitively.
“You know about faunoids,” Tim states.
Bruce nods slowly.
“And you and Clark were–,” Tim gestures awkwardly. He doesn’t like thinking about it. “And I didn’t like smelling it. Or feeling the heat distribution of your bodies.”
Bruce grunts. Tim smells his embarrassment.
“Yeah. I don’t like thinking about it. So– I’m gonna. Go.”
He leaves the room like there are rabid dogs nipping at his heels.
He tries to forget about it. At least he’s capable of doing that, unlike an elephant would be.
2 – VIBRATION
Red Hood and Red Robin are on a stakeout at the harbour, waiting to intercept a shipment coming in for a gang that’s been trying to grow roots just outside of Hood’s territory.
The rising gang has been careful with their communications, and Tim and Jason don’t have any clue of the contents of the shipment, of how many people are bringing it or taking it. They just barely know when and where to expect the load to come in, and even that is a rough estimate.
Tim’s been following the vibrations in their surroundings, hasn’t been wearing his chameleon amulet to make sensing everything easier on himself. It’s difficult to do since he likes to do surveillance from high up but being on the floor gives him the best vibrational awareness. He worries his unhidden aura will bother Jason.
The longer it takes for anything to happen, the more anxious Tim gets. Eventually he decides that visual input isn’t enough, and he needs the wider input yield of feeling the vibrations of the earth. He tells Jason he’s taking a quick round, and immediately as his feet hit the ground he feels it.
There are about 15 people waiting around in an underground tunnel, pacing restlessly, and a semi truck driving in the tunnel at the edge of Tim’s awareness.
“Hood,” he calls out, “there are underground tunnels. Seventeen people and an incoming truck.”
How they hadn’t realized there were tunnels here, Tim doesn’t know, but knowing about them doesn’t give him anything if can’t get inside.
“Oracle,” he speaks to his comm as Jason climbs down from his vantage point, “where’s the nearest entrance to the tunnels beneath us?”
If there’s an entrance near enough, they might have enough time to get the welcoming committee out of the game before the truck arrives.
The answer comes quick, and soon they're in the tunnels, a pile of goons laying under them, some bound, some unconscious, some both, and they're intercepting the truck.
It's a weapons shipment. Tim leaves it for Jason to deal with, letting him make the call about the guns being either destroyed or repurposed. He wouldn't be surprised if Jason's goons had some of them later.
He gets help from Jason to haul the unconscious people out of the tunnels, and calls the location in for Babs, waiting himself for GCPD while Jason deals with the weapons.
Later, when they’re back at the cave, Tim writing his report on the weapons interception and Jason doing some regular gear maintenance, Jason turns to him and asks, “How did you know about the tunnels?”
“It’s Gotham, there’s always tunnels. And we keep forgetting about them.”
“No, I mean– How did you know there’d be seventeen people? And a truck.”
And that’s when Tim remembers he only explained the obvious stuff to Jason. Fire breathing, faster healing, the aura thing. But not the less obvious things. His sense of vibration and temperature, the whole thing about being able to smell people’s emotions, stuff like that.
“I can sense the trembling of the earth. I could feel the people’s pacing and the truck coming in.”
He’s learned to use it to recognize different types of cars, and he’s proud to say he’s pretty precise. It helps in fights, too, being able to feel easier if his opponents are favouring one side to the other.
“Christ, Replacement, would’ve been useful to know that earlier.”
Tim just shrugs in response.
3 – FIRE
It’s a hard fight.
Normally, in a fight like this, Tim’s would be on civilian evac, risk management or strategy. Things he can do outside of the scuffle.
This time the fight is so spread out, there are so many beasts, that all hands are needed to keep the perimeter of the fight.
Civilian evac and other jobs that are usually done by the human members of the Justice League have had to be delegated to local law enforcement. Even though it would be easier on the JL to always leave those jobs to civilians (by their standards), when the threat happens in a random city, there’s no guarantee of the skills and resources of police, fire departments and EMTs.
Now they have no other option than to hope it’s enough. The people that are only present in comms are also on the lines of the local police radios and other comms to get them where they’re needed.
Everyone is doing everything they can to get through this with minimal damage, and stretched thin.
Tim’s one of the people fighting on the perimeter, beating up the beasts of mysterious origin as best as he can, while following what everyone else is doing, what seems to work best.
The beasts are bipedal, upright animals, fur-covered with four short claws protruding from their torsos, in different places on each beast. Their faces are long, split by sharp-toothed maws and there are different amounts of the organs they’ve deduced as their eyes and ears on each beasts head and neck. They aren’t using any clothes, weapons or respiratory equipment. Distantly, they remind Tim of mutated werewolves.
The fight has proved their sensory organs tough and reinforced, but the spots where arm connects to torso weak.
They think the beasts are either from a different dimension, aliens, or both. First, they’d heard reports of a weird structure that looked vaguely like a starship. When they’d sent Superman to investigate, the structure had disintegrated, and the beasts had flowed out, hostile and ready to fight.
Every Justice League affiliated hero had been called to help, and everyone available had come.
So here Tim is, poking weird mutated beasts in their armpits with his bō. Not his favourite activity to be doing on a Saturday evening, if he’s being honest.
He pokes one monster in its pit, avoids another one’s jaws and smacks its torso, gets down when there’s a huge bang from the centre of the biomass.
Superman, who was previously looking for the leftovers of the vessel they’d arrived in, has risen over the beasts, and his eyes are beaming red.
Momentarily Tim huffs at their similarity, his eyes would be red, too, if it wasn’t for his amulet, when he notices something.
The beasts are doing their best to get away from the red beam. The ones the beam has hit are aflame, and the cries of agony carry through the mass of bodies and the sounds of fighting.
Of course they’re flammable.
Tim considers it for a moment but the decision is clear. Their opponent is flammable, he’s a lighter. He takes off his amulet and stows it in his utility belt. It hinders his abilities, makes pushing fire harder work.
Immediately the world in front of him filters red, smoke spilling from his lips. Dick, fighting some beasts at the edge of Tim’s vision gapes at him momentarily.
He smirks at Dick, and lets the fire burn.
The fight is over quickly after that, the panicking beasts causing each other to catch fire, and everyone with any way to set the beasts on fire doing just that.
They capture the beasts that survive, clean up the burnt bodies, check collateral damage and look for civilians in the wreckage.
The vessel the beasts appeared in reappears, empty, and the Lanterns are left to take care of it, decide what to do with the captured beasts.
It’s late Sunday, by the time the Bats pile into the plane to get back to Gotham.
“Jesus Christ, Tim. What the fuck was that during the fight?” Dick starts, immediately as the plane takes off.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Did you– Tim! You burnt half of those beasts!”
“So?”
“With fire breathing!”
“And?”
“And? And?! Tim! Since when do you have fire breathing?”
Oh.
“Since birth, pretty much, I think.”
There are a few surprised gasps around the plane.
“Since birt–” Dick cuts himself off, takes a deep breath. “Who in here knew before this fight that Tim can breathe fire?”
Jason’s the only one to raise his hand.
“And would you like to enlighten us as for the reason you didn’t think to tell us about this little skill of yours?”
“I mean, it’s in my files.”
Dick lets out a great, heaving sigh.
+1 – TEMPERATURE
It’s a cold winter patrol.
Usually Tim manages to keep them pretty short for himself, reasoning the early nights with work, pre-scheduled hangouts and team meetings. Like he did as a kid when he was out during winter, he takes breaks at cafés and other indoor establishments, buys warm meals from street vendors, and uses several heat packs.
This time he can also end his nights at safehouses which makes his route to a warm bed significantly shorter.
He’s already getting antsy about his body temperature, when Babs sends him to stop a robbery. He takes the detour.
He’s already lost his fine motor skills when he settles in to wait for GCPD.
By the time the officers arrive, he has a hard time understanding anything they’re saying.
He’s lucky that the robbery was literally on the way to a safehouse, the closest just a couple of blocks away.
He stumbles his way over, barely manages to unlock the door with his stiff fingers, and makes his way to the bed of the safehouse, picking up the heat packs they have on his way to bed.
He struggles his way out of his outer armour, pounding starting in his head, engages the heat packs, and tucks himself into bed.
The dragons welcome him to fly with them.
Tim wakes up slowly. He stops being able to keep up with the dragons, dragging behind them in flight, before he starts dropping from the sky. Every time his eyes blink open to the brightness, he drops closer to the ground.
“Tim, Tim–”
He’s dropping.
“What’s going on B?”
He’ll crash.
“Alf–”
“He’s waking up.”
Tim sluggishly shields the light from his eyes with his wing. His arm, not his wing.
His snout– His nose itches and he raises his other claw– hand to rub at it.
He huffs out smoke in frustration as he feels the IV.
“Tim?”
He’s so pleasantly warm in the place he fell to.
“C’mon, Tim.”
He opens his eyes. He’d much rather just keep following the guidance of the dragons he was flying with.
He feels groggy, becoming aware of the people around him. They’re in one of the sitting rooms, fireplace on, and Tim’s whole family is piled around him. He’s laying on a couch, covered in heat packs and blankets.
It’s so hard to come back from almost falling into hibernation.
“Tim,” Bruce calls for his attention. “Do you know what happened?”
“Was out too long.” The words come out mumbled, his tongue feels foreign in his human mouth. “Fell into hibernation.”
Bruce grunts inquisitively. The air smells of curiosity. Tim wants to close his eyes and catch up to the dragons in his dream.
There’s a hand squeezing his and then Jason’s voice, asking, “This a faunoid thing?”
“Mm-hmm,” Tim hums his assent.
“Because you’re a reptile.”
“Yeah.”
“How do we keep you from hibernation again?” Jason asks.
“I won’t be going back to hibernation now since you woke me from it and my body temp’s normal again.”
“Good.”
There’s a break in conversation, everyone checking Tim over, him getting the hang of his body again, after the vivid dream of being a dragon that comes every time he’s about to hibernate.
“You really worried us, Tim,” Dick tells him.
“You stopped responding on comms and your movement was slow. When we followed your tracker to the safehouse, you were stiff, cold and unconscious,” Babs picks up.
“You wouldn’t’ve needed to worry. I would’ve been up again as soon as my body temp got back to normal.”
“The heating in that safehouse was broken,” Bruce relays.
“Oh.”
“Do you know what would’ve happened if we didn’t come to get you?”
“I think– I think I would’ve slept. Until spring.”
The scents of shock, worry and gratefulness fill the air.
“You wouldn’t have been able to wake me up, I don’t think, if you’d come after I properly fell asleep.”
“And what, exactly, triggered this?”
“The cold. My body temp was too low.”
“Just the cold?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Tim,” Dick chastises, “this is the kind of thing you should tell us about.”
“I figured you’d know about it.”
“How could we have known that you start to hibernate in the cold?”
“It’s in my files. And you all know I’m a dragon faunoid, anyway. Dragons are reptiles, and reptiles hibernate.”
“We don’t all know you’re a dragon faunoid, though.”
Oh. Tim may have fucked up in assuming everyone was as inquisitive as him. And maybe also forgotten how hard it was to find out anything about faunoids initially.
Oops.
Once again Tim finds himself looking to Jason for support.
“So… Who all knows about faunoids?” Jason asks.
And that’s how it goes, Jason prompting questions and Tim explaining faunoids, his own faunotype, his powers. The topic comes to the dangers of being a faunoid and Tim turns the interrogation around, asking Jason about how all of the aura things and such work for hunters. They didn’t know he was a hunter, either.
It’s a long conversation, and there’s still things left unexplained. Tim knows there will be times when his family discovers something new about him yet again, Tim having forgotten to mention another one of his dragonic features before the time comes to use it.
They’ll have tons more conversations almost exactly like this, Tim answering probing questions about things he forgot not everyone knew about him.
And he thinks he’s okay with it.
He thinks his parents never even knew that he was a faunoid. His new family, his hoard taking the time to notice and ask him about it…
It’s the most loved he’s ever felt.