Chapter Text
There is something deeply unsettling about how Tim has and hasn’t changed.
Conner shrugged it off, at first. Tim was grieving, distraught in that shut-off way of his, and Conner hadn’t been around to help him get his Batman-level emotional constipation dealt with. So yeah, Tim needed a haircut, and a shower, and like a dozen good meals, but it was whatever.
And Tim hugged him. A real, honest to God hug, like Conner was the only lifeline he’d been thrown in a year – even if Conner knows that’s not true, ‘cause he’s spoken to Dick and Cassie, and he’s seen pictures of Tam, and-
The point is, Conner thought Tim was gonna be alright, even if his best friend wasn’t back then.
Three months on, he isn’t so sure.
Tim smiles, now. They’re brief flashes, quiet and almost kind of absent, but it’s more than Conner remembers seeing since Tim’s dad died. Which, he guesses, is allowed to hit a guy pretty hard. He imagines. Not that he’d be all that torn up if Luthor suddenly pegged it, but hey, Conner knows he’s not the poster boy for functional family relationships, even compared to Bats. And really, it’s not like smiles ought to be a bad thing. They’re just…unexpected. Kinda nice, really. Tim has a nice smile.
It’s just that sometimes, Conner catches one of those soft smiles when Tim has his bo staff rammed in some dude’s jugular, and- well, okay. That’s a slightly more worrying kind of smile. But sometimes they’re when Tim is in his room at the Tower, knees curled up to his chest and looking at Conner like the break of dawn, and it sends an altogether different twist to Conner’s stomach that he hasn’t- can’t- think too deeply about.
Tim’s told him some of what went on. Dick and Cassie have filled him in on most of the rest. The pit, and the cloning, and the thing with spider assassins that Tim can swear down wasn’t a suicide mission, but-
But Conner’s not so sure. And he thinks, okay, maybe that’s almost logical, ‘cause it would be hard to live without the people closest to you, but they’re mostly back now and he doesn’t know whether or not that ought to fix things.
Nor, as it turns out, does WebMD.
There’s a bunch of stuff that he finds through Google about ongoing studies into trauma and meta abilities, but Tim’s not a meta even if he’s superhuman smart, and the few scraps that Conner can find about grieving people who aren’t dead turn out to involve dumbass life insurance scams, not A Dummy’s Guide To Coping When Your Friends Come Back To Life.
It makes sense, kind of, that it would be a trauma in itself as much as a potential path to recovery. Like, if he and Bart had come back straight away, no harm done, maybe. But they didn’t. They were gone a whole year, and Tim had to grieve, and he coped, and he changed.
Conner’s trying to accept that.
-
“Hey, Rob.” He knocks on Tim’s window even as he floats in, uninvited and totally at ease. It’s cool. It’s just a part of their friendship, really. They invade each other’s personal space all the time. Or- okay, thinking on it, Conner’s always the one invading Tim’s space, but usually it’s to check on him, and it’s not like Tim has ever minded, plus Tim totally invaded his privacy that one time with the whole DNA thing-
“Do you hate when I don’t knock?” Conner blurts out, his initial reason for visiting temporarily forgotten.
Tim looks up from the microscope he’s using to investigate tiny glass slides, and glances over at Conner. It should probably be weirder, Conner thinks, that his best friend is kind of a mad scientist. Like, he literally tried to clone Conner. Conner is pretty sure that’s blood on at least two of those slides. But instead of feeling creeped out, he actually feels kinda comfortable in Tim’s lab. Maybe it’s the bed in the corner, piled up with blankets that Conner just knows Alfred is responsible for somehow.
“You do knock,” Tim says, after a short pause. “It’s just more to announce that it’s you than it is asking for permission. I guess the fact that I have to think about it means it can’t bother me that much. And I could keep you out of my lab if I wanted to, so.” He shrugs.
“Dude.”
Tim blinks at him. “What?”
Conner rolls his eyes. “In some other universe, you’re definitely like, an evil scientist.” He heightens the pitch of his voice in mockery of Tim’s. “I could keep you out of my lab if I wanted to, Superboy.”
“Okay, firstly, that is not my voice. Secondly, you made that sound way creepier than when I said it.” Tim turns his attention back to his microscope, swapping one slide out for another and adjusting the magnification.
“Duh, that’s because it’s evil alternate universe you. Evil people are always creepier. Look at Lex. Look at Ra’s.”
Even with one eye closed and the other hidden, squinted down a microscope, Conner can tell that Tim is somehow rolling his eyes. “I’d rather not.”
“Right, because looking at blood is so much more appealing.” Conner rolls his eyes.
“Only a handful are blood samples,” Tim says, calm and matter-of-fact. He adjusts the magnification again. “The rest are tissue.”
“Gross. Also, evil scientist.”
“Did you come here for any particular reason, or was it just to tempt me into throwing bits of a dead man’s liver at you?”
Conner huffs and folds his arms across his chest. “They’re trapped in glass. And yeah. I came to ask if you wanted to hang out. Didn’t realize you were busy on a date with John Doe.”
“You don’t want to hang out with John Doe?” Tim pulls back from the microscope, and there’s one of those stupid little smiles again, changing the whole shape of his face somehow. “He’s a real conversationalist.”
“You are so weird. Why are we friends?”
“Desperation on my part, I promise,” Tim says coolly. He scoots his chair away from one workstation and into another, where his open laptop awaits. “Give me ten minutes to send off this report and then you can have me for the rest of the night.”
“Don’t you have patrol?”
“Sure.” Tim shrugs, fingers tapping away at the keyboard. It should be more frustrating, Conner thinks, because he knows Tim doesn’t have to look at where any of the keys are, he could look up at Conner and hold a proper conversation, but that’s never been Tim. He’ll glance up once or twice, sure, but Conner’s pretty sure he only knows how to use direct eye contact as a form of intimidation glared through a mask.
“Uh. Okay. I guess I could join you.” Conner scratches the back of his neck, wishing Tim would give him a little more to work with. “Has Batman gotten tired of the ‘no metas in Gotham’ rule?”
Tim smirks, then, and Conner knows it’s directed at him even if Tim’s gaze hasn’t faltered from the screen. “Have you gotten tired of breaking it?”
…His best friend knows him too well.
-
They go for ice-cream. There’s still a couple of hours of daylight left – or what passes for it in Gotham, anyway – and Tim doesn’t seem in any hurry to slip his costume on. Another weird little way that things have changed. Conner isn’t sure if Tim enjoys his civilian life more now, or if the two have just blurred together the way they have with Batman, until the costume is real and the person is just a mask.
Conner wants Tim to still be real.
“You should come to Metropolis.”
Tim stares at him for a moment, mouth half full of strawberry sorbet. Conner feels himself start to turn a similar shade of pink.
“I mean, you said yourself that Wayne Enterprises is doing well, so Bruce can’t need you for the business stuff, and I know for a fact that there are more Bats than usual in the city right now. Take a break. Hell, dude, take a holiday.”
“I don’t need a-“
“You need a holiday,” Conner cuts across. “Somewhere sunny. You can bring your ridiculous SPF sun scream, and you can hide behind shades, but we’re getting you some vitamin D and a full helping of Ma’s finest apple pie.”
Tim’s lip twitches thoughtfully. “She does make better pie than professional chefs.”
Heh. Victory. “I’ll make up the spare bed for next weekend.”
Tim’s eyes narrow slightly at him. “I’m sure you picked up the ‘frame it as a non-question’ thing from me.”
Conner shrugs. “Probably. Works, though.” He leans over and steals a spoonful of Tim’s sorbet, having finished his own sundae several minutes ago.
-
They fall back into rhythm with almost too much ease. Conner knows the score – knows this is Tim’s city, Batman’s city, and hangs back while Tim takes the lead. It’s not the same kind of teamup that Tim would have with Batman, or Nightwing – even with Superman, Conner’s fairly sure. This is something special to the two of them, developed unconsciously over years of watching each other’s backs and knowing each other inside out, and Conner can’t express the warmth he feels at knowing it’s still there. He hadn’t even realized he was worrying it mightn’t be.
Fighting in a team is different. With the Titans, everyone is watching each other, but while there’s an overall game plan, stuff shifts according to the tide of battle. Being one on one – or technically, right now, Conner guesses, two on four – allows for something a lot more intimate, discussed in minute shifts of body language.
Conner could watch Tim work for hours.
Honestly, he’s not doing much more than that, and acting as a second pair of eyes and ears. Catching anybody who tries to run when Tim lands in the middle of a drug trafficking operation, or whatever.
Tim is the one in the epicentre of it all, bo staff slamming hard enough to crack bones when he needs answers, voice low and seething. Conner has never seen the Batman so much in Tim before, but it’s smaller and contained, not quite as deadly as Black Bat but somehow almost as terrifying. Cass doesn’t talk much, especially when she’s fighting. Tim stops fighting to talk, except maybe he doesn’t, maybe it’s just a continuation of it, because Tim’s words carry the same level of threat as his bo does.
Conner knows that this always had to be grown into, that it would have been impossible for any fourteen year old to make grown men piss themselves with a growl the way he’s pretty sure Tim is doing right now. But still. It’s another change to get used to. He doesn’t know what it says about them, about him, that the two of them still work together seamlessly.
“Did you catch the runner?”
Aaaaand Conner is totally paying attention. He jerks back to reality. Tim is tightening the zipties around the last of the three smugglers left at the scene.
“Uh. Yeah.” He floats back down to street level, no longer needing a higher vantage point. “I think he was trying to swallow something, so I knocked him out cold.”
He can see the frown behind Tim’s cowl. “…Hm. I thought we’d stomped out the bigger rings. Do me a favor and help me check for any identifying tattoos.”
Conner obliges, using his TTK to push up the sleeves of the nearest goon. Tim beats him to it, though, apparently. Conner hears him mutter a swear. “Rob?”
“Can you call these in with the police? I have to-“ He’s crouched next to one of them, their pants shoved up to expose a mark on the back of their lower leg. It doesn’t look like much beyond a black smudge, like a super amateur tattoo, but obviously it’s recognisable as something, because Tim’s face looks even paler under the cowl.
“Rob? You okay? What is it? This isn’t like, League underlings or anything, right?”
Tim shakes his head minutely. “…No. It’s nothing. Nothing big. I just want to confirm some things with Oracle.”
Not for the first time in their friendship, Conner gets the impression he’s being lied to.
Not for the first time, he lets Tim get away with it. “…Sure. I’ll meet you back at yours?”
Tim shakes his head. “I could be a while. It’s boring stuff, anyway. Looking through old files. I’ll be back at the Tower in a couple of days, and I’ll fill you in on anything we find then.”
Conner bites down on the inside of his cheek. Tim promised him the whole night, but Conner’s used to playing second fiddle to Gotham, and it’s only a couple of days. He can wait. “Sure. See you then, Rob.”