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“So,” comes a flat drawl, “What story am I looking at?”
Tim draws up, brushing off the dust at the knees of his jeans, just as the lock gives away to the prowess of his pick. It falls with a decidedly loud clang, and he turns around.
Steph stares, a cigarette caught between her lips.
“Before you start, this is your fault,” she says, taking a fledgling drag then throwing the bud down, snubbing it out with her steel-toed boot. “Your bullshit has driven me to nicotine.”
He snorts in response.
“I literally bought you your last pack. Why would I care?” Tim unlatches the door (because latches were still a thing of necessity in Good Ol’ Gotham), twisting the mechanical knob to let himself in like it was his own flat. In a lot of ways, upon introspection, Tim had come to realise it was partly true. Steph’s flat was as close to home as it got for him. For the longest time he’d considered it to be the penthouse, but then he’d walked in on Bruce fitting a bug into the dining table, and that was that.
The Manor, as always, was out of question entirely.
“Take your shoes off, I just mopped the floor,” says Steph, flinging her bag carelessly next to her own decorated collection of shoes and sneakers. Tim can tell by the coil of her shoulder and her limp ponytail that Steph wasn’t in the mood to fuck around, so instead of pushing his luck, he dutifully does as she’s asked.
She collapses on the couch. Sighing, Steph angles her neck, and waves an arm impatiently.
“What?” Tim asks.
“Out with it, then,” Steph smiles thinly. “What’s the latest shitstorm cooking up in the House of Drake?”
Tim stares.
Then, he makes an aborted motion towards his right pocket, suspiciously full and puffed up.
“Oh,” says Steph. “Oh!”
“Go get the paper,” Tim mutters, already making his way to the dingy little fire escape where they had their sessions.
Steph leaps off the couch almost instantly, and calls out, “It’s your turn to roll today!”
His answer is swallowed up by the rusty shutter finally giving away to Tim’s patented Strength Regime.
It had started off fairly innocuously, given the circumstances that parried the life of one Timothy Jackson Drake.
He was no stranger to substances– if anything, it’d be considered stranger if he was, having been brought up in the higher echelons of society and filthy rich social circles. He’d grown up with a drunkard father, whose favorite past-time was doing lines in the bathroom of the very many galas he attended, and an absent mother, who, Tim had come to realise later on, was actually absent in the throes of codeine and champagne. Any memory of their sobriety was bunched up under the blanket of the scarcity of their presence, and although Tim wondered how he might’ve turned out had they not engaged in a litany of drug abuse, he’d decided it didn’t make that much of a difference.
They wouldn’t have been around regardless.
A part of him was glad for it. A brief look into his family history would tell you just exactly the sort of life the Drakes led, and a lot of it involved a pick-me-up handed down discreetly by their parents to keep up appearances. The smile, no matter how doped up, would have to stay on.
His first true exposure came to him at the edge of 15, when Ives accosted him in the hallway before Mrs. Cathay’s English Lit II. His signature douche-y smirk had slid right off his face when he’d noticed the bruise marring the entirety of his left cheekbone.
“Shit, dude, you good?” Sebastian had mumbled, using his fingers to tilt Tim’s bruise into a better lighting for inspection. When Tim had batted his hands away and bared his teeth at him angrily, hackles raised, all Ives had done in response was raise an eyebrow and drag Tim to the washroom in the southeast hall. The same southeast hall that, rather famously, was used by all his peers to suck onto their metallic vape pens and trade the latest pill for a baggie of pot, because it was the farthest from the staffroom, and because all janitors were paid very well for their discretion.
Tim had shoved Ives’ off the minute it had come into view. He’d always known better than to get sucked into that crowd, not wanting to test his luck and see if he’d inherited the infamous Drake gene of crippling addiction, but then Ives had opened his stupid mouth and told Tim in hushed tones that he’d feel so much better, and that Ives’ wouldn’t make him do it if he didn’t want to, but it’d take away the pit that was churning in his stomach ever since Jason had left him battered and nearly dead at the tower.
“Look, man,” Ives had said, hands held up placatingly in response to Tim’s growl. “We won’t even do anything hardcore. Just enough to help you with-” he’d made a vague motion towards his face, “this. You can’t go out there and get your ass beat when there’s better ways to cope.”
And Tim, well. Tim had been exhausted beyond his capabilities, crushed by the weight of everything that had transpired so far in his life. Try as he might, with the right amount of nudging from Ives’, he’d given in.
A week later, Tim had his own little pen.
Tim had reasoned with himself that marijuana was considered medicinal in many countries, and that the negative effects didn’t hold up so surreptitiously against the good ones if he regulated his use. He knew just how he was testing his luck by allowing something like this into his vicinity, given the sort of life he led. If Bruce ever found out, Tim would be fucked for life. He’d lose Robin, lose Dick, lose Alfred, lose everything he’d worked so hard to hold onto.
And then a voice in his head, which sounded suspiciously like Steph’s, murmured that what Bruce did not find out would not hurt him. And if there was something Tim was good for besides Robin, it was hiding things from Batman.
So, that was that.
“My question still stands, you know,” Steph says as she settles next to him, lighting up another cigarette. Tim motions her to pass it to him, drawing up her shawl a little tighter. He disliked cigarettes outside of when he was drunk, but it served its purpose of preparing his lungs for the thick joints he had rolled. Steph, who had technically started later than he had, was still much better at rolling. He supposed he had his old pen to blame for it, which was now rusting away at the bottom of Gotham Harbour.
He takes a drag, blowing up a cloud towards the vague direction of the Batsignal. If only Commissioner Gordon could see them like this.
“And what question was that?” Tim inquires with childlike wonder, eyes comically wide.
Steph smacks his shoulder, and steals the cigarette.
“Don’t be a wimpy little bitch, Timmy,” she mutters, before giving up on the cigarette altogether and throwing it off the railing. She reaches for the joint, examining his handiwork. She raises a critical eyebrow.
“Hey,” Tim throws his hands up, prematurely offended. “At least it's not lumpy."
“Yeah, just fat enough to char our lungs beyond repair,” Steph snarks, holding it between her lips, the motion familiar enough to Tim that he reaches for his lighter on autopilot.
“Complain anymore and I’ll throw it away,” Tim grunts and holds up his bic, lighting the end. She draws a puff, then another, and blows it right over Tim’s face.
“What the fuck, Steph,” he sputters, startled. “What was that for?”
Steph grins, and something unspools in his chest immediately.
He’d missed her terribly.
Tim had last seen her in the Clocktower a week ago, writing up his latest batch of tracking code when Steph had stumbled in and ambled straight to Barbara’s office. After accounting for her irate body language within the first five seconds of seeing her, Tim waved at her before booking it out of there as fast as he could. And it was fortunate, really, considering their ensuing fight had made waves big enough to reach even Huntress, who operated out of her shitty family estate at the edge of Bristol.
Steph wouldn’t have left him like that, but Tim never denied his cowardice.
“So,” she starts, watching him like a hawk. “Are you gonna fess up, or shall I start the 20 questions?”
Tim considers his options. He brings the joint to his mouth, delaying what’s to come for approximately another 10 seconds. He relishes in the familiar burn in his lungs, exhales, and coughs mildly. Steph makes an irritated noise.
“Can’t I just want to see you?” Tim questions, not facing her yet.
She lets out a long suffering sigh.
“Look,” says Tim. “I’d really rather not talk about it.”
There’s a pause, and Tim can tell Steph’s figuring out what to say to him.
“Could’ve led with that instead of ruining my high,” Steph finally mutters. “Quit hogging the fucking joint, Drake!”
“What’s up with you, anyway?” Tim passes it to her. He turns to face her, taking full stock of her appearance. Her eyes are already bloodshot, bags purpling under her lashes, and she looks worn like she hasn’t been sleeping enough.
Tim knows she hasn’t been sleeping enough. He knows Steph like the back of his hand, intimately familiar with her loops and behaviours in a way that transcends friendships and families. He’s not in love with her anymore, but when he was, he’d made sure to learn her like a book and decode her like a puzzle. That was probably what had ruined them. It comes in handy now.
There’s another pause.
“You saw me, that day,” Steph starts haltingly. “At the Clocktower.”
Tim nods.
“How much did you hear?” She inclines her head towards him, as if trying to appraise the depth of his awareness by studying him.
“I left as soon as I saw you.”
Steph gives him a look, taking another hit. Tim’s starting to feel loose-limbed, and comfort settles over the pair of them like a blanket. Steph gives him a dopey smile.
And then that smile turns acrid.
“Me and Babs fought. It’s the usual bullshit– for all that she preaches about not being Batman, she loves dispensing his brand of wisdom on us.” She gives him another one of her looks, and says, “You’d agree with her. Probably.”
Tim raises an eyebrow, quizzical.
“I’d really, really like to get into it with you,” Steph says with an expression that indicates anything but. “But I simply do not want to waste such good quality pot by talking about Barbara and her bullshit.”
“You do realise that I could just get more of this, right? Like I always do,” Tim observes lightly.
“It’s a matter of principle, Timothy,” Steph wheedles.
“What principle?” Tim asks sardonically. “We’re literally doing drugs.”
Steph sighs like a resigned mother of three. “There’s principles to smoking pot too, you dumb fuck.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. What, they didn’t teach you that at the southeast hall in Gotham Academy?”
“Well,” Tim considers the question.
Steph lets out a frustrated growl, but the effect is diminished significantly given the pot, making it seem more comical than anything.
“Aren’t you, like, a certified stoner? How the fuck am I the one teaching you all this?”
“Technically speaking, we’re both stoners,” Tim points out mildly.
Steph looks at him, deep in thought.
“Am I really a stoner?” She blinks at him, wide-eyed.
Tim laughs.
The fact of the matter was that shortly after Tim had started out on his histrionic journey to teenage rebellion in the southeast hall, Steph had followed his suit. They were like that, the pair of them– always stumbling after one another, never apart for far too long. He wasn’t there when Steph took her first hit, or her tenth, because between those two events everything had more or less turned into one big shitshow that had swept them both off their feet.
Then the comedown came, and he’d shared her eleventh hit.
“I counted, you know,” Steph had said to him once, staring at her ceiling like it was a thousand yards away. “Counted down the days till you’d show up in front of my door, stoned to hell and back.”
“You knew?” Tim had asked, bewildered beyond belief.
Steph had looked into his eyes, and laughed at him so hard she’d thrown up over the fuschia colored carpets back at the penthouse.
A snap of fingers brings him back.. “Earth to Timothy.”
Tim looks at Steph, only to find her watching him. Observing him. Tim did that too, sometimes, except he never could do it the way Steph did– she never saw him through the lens of analytical reasoning. Her warmth and her thoughtfulness (paired with her red brick) was what had him falling so hard and fast, both literally and figuratively. His love for Steph has little to no bounds.
He scoots so he can lie down, head in her lap. Steph’s knee falls sideways to accommodate him.
“I missed you,” Tim says, staring at the underside of her jaw. He wouldn’t call them friends– he always found the word too unfulfilling to describe them. He wouldn’t call them family, either, because families were complicated and neither of them wanted to be a familial figure in each other’s lives.
Unless she got her shit together with Cass. They’d make good in-laws, Tim thinks.
Steph looks downwards, reaching for the second joint. She huffs a laugh and looks back up towards the grimy building in front of them. “I missed you too, you bozo,” she says, and Tim can’t help the small smile that blooms across his face. If asked, he would blame it on the weed.
She slowly cards a hand through his hair, petting down the stray bits flying against the gentle wind. Tim’s eyes close, and he says, without thinking twice, “Sometimes I hate that we never got to be kids.”
Steph hums. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Tim nods, eyes drifting eastward, where he can make out the faint outline of the Sun trying to come up. He thinks of Kon on instinct, and his heart lurches in his chest. He exhales. “I know that we chose this life, but it’s just– well. It’s difficult.”
They’ve smoked up together enough times for him to know that Steph’s unusual silence isn’t all that unusual, on account of the weed. She always gets slower, steadier, somehow more careful with her words, which was funny considering her filter was nonexistent when she was sober. She’s gathering her words, aligning them into a neat little arrangement in her head that will make its way to her mouth and then, eventually, to his heart.
Steph rubs small circles into his scalp with her forefinger.
“I know what you mean,” she says quietly. “Everyday, I go to Gotham U and I’m reminded of every single way in which we’re fucked up. It wasn’t until last semester that I found out bugging your classroom to get your lecture notes because you’re busy nursing a gunshot wound wasn’t a normal thing to do.”
“How very Bruce of you,” Tim laughs drily.
Steph groans and flicks his ear in retaliation.
“Anyway,” she continues pointedly. “Here’s what I’m trying to say. We’re all weirdos and incredibly messed up and could probably do well with a therapist–”
“I’ll ring up Harley.”
“--I really do think we’re gonna be okay.”
Tim really, really meets her eyes for the first time in the night. He sees what he’s sure reflects in his own, equally bloodshot eyes. Fondness.
“Why’s that?” he asks, quietly, suddenly very unsure of his place on her ratty fireplace that could tip over any day now.
Steph passes him the joint, petting away at his hair.
“Because,” she says, gently, “We’ve got each other.”
There’s a poignant pause. A myriad of emotions draw up in Tim and leave him stifled so suddenly, that he doesn’t know what to say. As usual, Steph’s got him stumped with her words. His throat closes up unbiddingly. There’s so much fucking history here, between them, but inevitably it always comes down to this– running back to her to forget about all the lives he leads, all the Drake and the Wayne and the Robin in him stripped away bare, leaving just Tim.
He hands the joint back to her, and turns on his side.
“Go to sleep,” Steph mumbles, hands scritching away at his scalp.
So he does.