metalogs | grab your hat, get your coat, the cellar door is an open throat (open/closed)

Tim's not dumb enough to think that TJ inviting him out is just about being shown the cool stores and hanging out. The Jasons fight ended horribly, and he's fully expecting a debrief of some kind at some point, though it doesn't happen immediately. They take some time to play normal big brother/little brother, and Tim's carrying a few things TJ insisted on buying him even though he's still on the Guild's credit card and there's not much he thinks the Guild could glean from him getting a couple roleplaying books.

To anyone else, the two of them settling down finally with some ice cream in a semi-secluded area would just look like a couple brothers taking a break from shopping and enjoying the weather, but Tim is aware that this is the first time today that they've been strategically stopping in a place where eavesdropping isn't a major concern. He's feeling polite enough to let TJ start the conversation, though.

Edited 2023-05-10 00:35 (UTC)

If TJ wants a full debrief, he’ll strongarm it out of a Jason (figuratively). Tim is not the right person to ask, given how he’d reacted before TJ lost track of the conversation.

He’s been giving space for Tim to say something - anything - to open up dangerous topics, but they’re both too careful. He’ll have to do it himself.

“We always have sundaes or shakes for movie night,” he says as he swirls the hot fudge into his ice cream. That puts family on the menu. “I miss it.”

"Well, Alfred makes everything extra-good." Tim's not entirely sure how he manages to make just ice cream amazing. He doesn't think Alfred makes it himself. Maybe he just gets the really good stuff? Tim's never looked into it.

Oh. He might’ve known that would come up. Still, it’s not like Tim hasn’t heard a lot of talk about Alfred since he died. With Dick’s charity, the Pennyworth name is hard to avoid. “Yeah. He does.”

Alfred made everything better, not just food. He spoke everyone’s language. “And it’s nice to have that time together. We all complain about making time, but … no one misses an invite. I’ve been thinking about asking Dick to organize one.”

He's a little tempted to ask why it has to be Dick organizing and not TJ, but then, Dick is Dick. He gets that.

Though. "Who do you think would come?" he asks somewhat dubiously. Things with the Jasons haven't exactly been going well, and he still isn't 100% convinced that Damian even exists given that he's been practically a ghost as far as Tim is concerned. So that mostly leaves Kon and Bart, maybe?

Dick is Dick, and a Tim doesn’t have quite the same pull. People listen to Tim; they follow Dick.

“Us, him, Jay, Jason, Steph, Bart and Bolt.” Tim mentally ticks them off as he recites them. “We could put it to a vote if anyone else is invited, but it would have to be someone everyone is comfortable with. It’s nice to be able to relax and not pretend we’re something different for an audience.”

"Do you think the Jasons would come?"

Cause. Well. His interactions with them have been iffy at best. It would be a neutral occasion, not high risk for tension or arguments, but he'd still potentially want to stay away to avoid setting anyone off.

“They might. I can’t promise what anyone else does, but I’m done giving them an opportunity to get to know you without you osmosing my opinions. Jason needs family; he just doesn’t always want it.”

He tried to protect them, and they wasted it. Tim is clearly the more vulnerable person. “Do you want them to come?”

He shrugs up a shoulder and glances down at his ice cream cone. "I don't know if they'd want me there." His first conversation with the non-Red Hood Jason hadn't gone badly, but that doesn't mean recent events haven't changed things.

"What... are your opinions?" Because he'd like to know more from someone who's spent more time with them, if TJ's willing to share now.

“That’s not the question I asked.” Sorry, Tim, but TJ invented that game of steering the conversation by answering the questions you’d prefer rather than what was asked.

“The older one is my brother, but it took awhile for that relationship to take shape. A less nuanced interpretation would be that he was antagonistic, but the truth is that Jay was working through a number of internal and external issues and almost none of them were categorically his fault. He wasn’t doing his best when we met, but I don’t think anyone could have.” He’s still trying to be fair. To introduce the bad history as neutrally as possible.

He’s settled on distinguishing them as Jay and Jason, when they aren’t in earshot. “Obviously, I met Jason a year ago. I treated him as I would Jay - like a brother - and we’ve started on a much better foot. I don’t know if he’d agree, but I consider him family. Do you know why Jay was upset that night? Jason’s timeline is different, so I can’t guess your world’s.”

"I assumed it was because it's the anniversary of his death."

Which is also why Tim was surveilling him that night. A hunch that it would all go to shit, etc. etc. And he was right, so that's neat, he guesses.

(Is he also still avoiding the original question by carrying on the rest of the conversation? Maybe.)

“And you’ve connected that to your assumption that they wouldn’t want you there, which I think isn’t necessarily correct. I’m Jay’s successor, and Jason’s only preconceptions of Tim Drake are from the past year. If anything, your Exhibit D in their off-again-on-again argument with B.”

Exhibit D, potentially as damning as Exhibit C after he froze up, but not Tim’s fault. “And you can’t take that on your shoulders. Their relationships with him are … strained, and it’s hard to not get caught in the crossfire.”

"So I should avoid being in their crossfire," he points out, reasonably. As far as he's concerned, TJ's just laid out a good argument for keeping his distance. If he's potentially a trigger, why push it? It's just safer this way.

“B isn’t here. What happened the other night wasn’t crossfire.”

And now here they are at the vestibule of what he actually wanted to discuss, but that last step is a doozy.

“Jay should’ve backed off when you got upset, but he’s got a minus 4 perception when he’s emotionally compromised. And you - you don’t act as much like me as I would’ve thought.”

Tim went into what looked like a full blown panic attack. Jason knows what it looks like, and, with any other kid on any other day, TJ is sure he would’ve handled it differently. “If I’d known, I would’ve told you more about them in advance. I’m sorry.”

“If it wasn’t crossfire, then what was it?” he asks, a touch on the snappish side, before abruptly pulling it back. It’s not - snapping at TJ will not help anything. Two people being pissed off at each other and Tim being stuck in the middle is a situation he is intimately familiar with. It’s best to avoid it, and if you can’t avoid it and you can’t mitigate it, you make yourself small and less of a target.

It’s not supposed to happen in the Robin suit. It’s never happened in the Robin suit before. Bruce, Dick, and Babs, they - they have arguments sometimes, everyone does, but they’re not explosive like Jason’s and they don’t usually put Tim in the middle.

If TJ wants to talk about it, then Tim wishes he’d stop circling it and land already. “If you want to tell me I screwed up, then just tell me already.”

“You were in the blast radius,” he says softly. Kinda like he is right now, but TJ is used to things in his life exploding around him. Maybe Tim isn’t.

There’s some personal semantics at play, but he’s not going to offer a dissertation on how it can’t be crossfire if no one else is fighting back. “You didn’t screw up. People being worried about you does not mean you’re wrong or that you’ve made a mistake.”

When exactly did he figure that out? Sometime before Darkseid shot Bruce, but after his father died. Tim’s not… there, yet. “I just want to understand.”

“I did, though. Screw up. When I - spaced out.” There’s a very slight hesitation before he says those words. It’s the kind, euphemistic way of describing what happens, because he doesn’t want to say anything more clinical.

He’s not stupid. He knows what dissociation is. He doesn’t like applying it to what happened to him because it means acknowledging a problem, but he knows what it is. “It shouldn’t have happened while I was Robin.”

Oh, he wants to say that they’ve all made mistakes. He could list them out in brutal detail, but that would affirm Tim’s assessment that he screwed up.

He’s right that it shouldn’t have happened when he was Robin. It’s dangerous when he’s Robin. Two Jasons and another Tim - they might yell, but Tim should have been safe in that room. “You didn’t hurt anyone, and there’s an opportunity to work on the underlying issue. You don’t know Jason yet, so … I have to guess who he reminds you of. And none of them are here to judge you.”

It’s Bruce, or else… Dad.

(He would rather it be Bruce.)

“This conversation doesn’t go further than us. I just want to know you’re going to be safe, because I know you’re not going to stop being Robin. I need you to tell me what triggered you.”

“You don’t know already?”

The truth is, he’d assumed TJ already knew. They have the same parents and the same upbringing, right? He should know what their parents are like. He should know what it feels like, being caught in their arguments. He’s supposed to understand.

“Our timelines diverged at some point in your past.” He sets his ice cream cup down neatly beside him on the bench. “I don’t know how far apart they actually are, and what happened in my world isn’t always transferable to yours.”

(Stalling. Clearly evasive.)

Why is it so hard to talk about this, six years later? He accepted it a long time ago. It’s fine. “Mom died when I was thirteen, and I already told you I don’t remember fighting the Reach.”

Janet Drake’s murder means that, if it’s their parents, Tim has at least a year’s more memories to contend with.

For a moment, he wants to yell you’re lying and throw his ice cream like a little kid having a tantrum. Except that would be stupid because it’s not like TJ would lie about something like this. He wouldn’t. So if he - if TJ’s mom died, then. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know what that means.

He feels - grief, even though it’s not his mom that died. And. He’s not sure what else. Maybe. Maybe horror, too. If. If his mom was gone, then it was just TJ and his dad. And. And maybe that would have been okay. Maybe it would.

“What happened?”

The urge to physically move away is squashed immediately before he can recoil, but he’s keeping himself still and his voice even with a delicate tension.

Details are being pruned even as he answers. “She was poisoned by the Obeah Man.”

Snip. Not mentioning the kidnapping and ransom attempt. Snip. Not a word about his dad being comatose and paralyzed. Snip. Batman didn’t get there too late.

(Again. For the first time.)

“But your world is different. I don’t know if it’s better or worse.”

“I don’t recognize the name.”

It’s information offered just to clarify that no, Tim’s parents didn’t go through that. No one was poisoned. It’s a clear point of contrast between them.

He’s not going to ask for any more details, because it’s clearly not something TJ wants to talk about. “I’m sorry.”

The appropriate answer is a polite thanks, and he knows that. But it would keep him from saying something ambiguous and perhaps more important. “It was never your fault.”

Certainly not his fault that Janet Drake died somewhere in the multiverse. Not his fault about anything related to her. “What are your parents like now?”

Let him think what he wants. If he thinks it’s just because TJ’s thinking about his mom, fine. If that’s his way in, he’ll take it.

Up til now, he’d been thinking that their home lives were - the same, pretty much. That their home life was similar enough that he could just assume that TJ knew what things were like in the Drake household and leave it at that.

But that’s not a given anymore. And that’s why Tim finds himself defaulting to the Usual Description of his family. “They’re okay. They’re still pretty busy, with the company and their digs, so they’re not always around that much but it’s okay cause their work is important.”

go over every inch of space with the patience of a saint (closed | mostdangerousbird)

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