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For once, the world has mercy on Tim.
Tam opens the door. “Hey.” She smiles. It reaches her eyes, skin with a little more lively glow since the last time he saw her. “You’re early, we’re still getting set up.” She opens the door wider anyway, allowing entry into the Fox household.
Tim keeps his face affable, the friendly demeanor he learned from Dick. He toes off his shoes, easily balancing the vinaigrette atop the ceramic bowl of chopped salad.
Her fingers flair out anyway, ready to catch the glass bottle. Of all his exes, Tam’s always had the hardest time remembering his vigilante status.
“Can I set this down in the kitchen?” he asks, just shy of charming. He’s easing into Timothy Drake-Wayne tonight, the approachable, hip CEO. Tam spots this a mile away and her eyes narrow in disapproval. She’ll let it slide at the office, but not in her mother’s home.
“Please,” he tacks on, in defiance of every lesson his mother ever taught him.
That jars her just enough to drop the building rebuke.
She tucks her braids behind her shoulder. (One of her late night comments about having to straighten her hair to keep her professionalism out of question led to a serious revamp of company dress code.) “Sure.”
His eyes catch on the high ceilings as he follows her deeper into the Old Gotham house. Restored quite beautifully by the local historical society, a well trodden area of small talk anytime Lucius catches Tim in the executive elevator.
The kitchen is largely sealed off from the rest of the house and in a second unlikely bout of luck, it’s empty. He silently places the bowl amid the cooling dinner rolls and sparkling ciders. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Can you afford a favor?” Her raised eyebrow informs him he cannot. Still.
He tucks his shoulders in just so, lets TDW droop into something more classically Tim. “Can you make sure Bruce and I aren’t left alone together tonight?”
Tam’s jaw tightens, sharp eyes acknowledging his manipulated posture and accepting it anyway. (One of the reasons they broke up. She always knew when he was lying.)
Her arms cross over her chest and her back straightens to allow her one extra inch of height to tower over him. (One of the reasons they broke up. He wouldn’t back down without a threat.)
His wet-cat patheticism passes judgment.
“Fine. But don’t bring your bullshit into my parents’ house.”
He nods sharply. He resettles his bones into the smarmy version of Tim that can keep that promise. She loosens her shoulders into the easygoing version of Tam that will be hurt when he fails anyway.
He opens his mouth. To thank her. To apologize. To try to piece together their broken dynamics with his steady, sand-coated fingers.
There’s a knock at the door.
Show time.
(Jazz hands from Dick, curtain furrows from Jason, centered gravity from Cass.)
(He wishes Steph would brain him with another brick. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy be damned, he just doesn’t want to do this again.)
Lucius’ voice echoes in warm greeting. Bruce laughs like they’re not all playing the same game tonight.
Damian snipes out something practiced, earning chuckles from every entryway adult.
Tam quirks an eyebrow, eyeing the door. From the opposite direction, he hears the balanced gait of her mother approaching. Wish me luck, he thinks, then steps out from this bubble of homemade safety.
“Tim.” Bruce smiles against hard eyes. He braces for the large hand clapping against his shoulder. It doesn’t rock his foundation just yet.
“Tim!” Lucius echoes, farceless happiness. “Good to see you, young man. You’ve all dressed up so nice,” he comments, gesturing meaningfully at the coat and shoe racks. “I promise it’s just dinner. No ulterior motive.”
On the other side of the fathers, Damian locks eyes with Tim. His scowl is smoothed, his skin is moisturized. He’s wearing an unfamiliar shirt straight out of a JC Penny’s catalog. His hands are in his pockets. The right one is wrapped around his phone, squeezing at musical intervals. The left one holds something unidentifiable. An emergency beacon, maybe. Or a fidget.
He stares at Tim with mission-parameter eyes and a parade-rest jaw. He stares at Tim like, for the first time, they are allies.
They both keep their dinner jackets on.
Deeper in the house, Tiff and Luke are bantering indistinguishably. He sees Tam carrying his ceramic bowl toward the dining room, beckoning with the other hand. Her mother’s obedience-demanding voice outlines additional orders.
Bruce cradles an early twentieth century vintage. (He’s the only one here who likes red wine.) Lucius tells him where to find a bottle opener in the kitchen.
“Excellent,” Bruce agrees. “Tim, would you mind showing me the way?”
“It’s just through there.” Tim points through the half-opened door that cherry cabinetry can be glimpsed through. “I’m going to introduce Damian to Tiffany.”
“Sure thing, sport.”
Lucius lets a smile spread at the idea of their families getting to know each other. What he doesn’t know…
Bat-typical, Damian studies every nook and cranny of the house as they move through it. Assessing vents, numbering cobwebs, appraising artwork. They don’t converse, but the usually heavy layer of suspicion between them is only a thin sheet tonight.
Having already met Tiff when Dick brought him to visit Tim at work earlier this summer (and drop off some forms with the legal team), Damian instead takes his seat. He eyes the second exit of the kitchen, listens a moment, then pulls out his phone. It’s sullen teenager behavior, except that he’s not scrolling through Twitter.
Dutifully, Tim keeps lookout. Tanya is being charmed and Lucius is jovially blocking Bruce’s faux advances.
During a chorus of laughter, he glances at Damian’s screen. Steadfastly, the kid confirms to Dick that he made it to the Fox’s.
(It doesn’t burn, the spike of jealousy. Tim drew his line in the sand years ago. Dick doesn’t get to check in on him anymore. He doesn’t get to text Tim’s friends to check on him anymore. He doesn’t get to ping Tim’s trackers. He doesn’t get to reach out on comms.) (That’s how Tim wants it to be.)
Tiff curls her arm under her chin, leaning her elbow dramatically on the table. “Did you hear what Carleson emailed Lettie?” All the rolled maroon napkins have been neatly placed around the table, the final order that rang out from the kitchen.
Luke groans at the shop talk and promptly drops into his own seat to scroll Twitter.
Timothy Drake-Wayne isn’t one for office drama, but he did see what Carleson emailed Lettie and this is a sleeves-rolled-up affair.
They dive into it. (He did not know Sheila in marketing was CC’d. Yikes.) Luke is drawn in by the fact that Carleson is Lettie’s ex-husband. Damian is drawn in by the fact that Bruce emerges from the kitchen.
Lucius is smiling about something, still-bubbling casserole dish between two shoddily crocheted pot holders. Tanya, Tam, and Bruce carry out all of the sides. It’s a strange sight, Bruce serving someone.
“Don’t be shy,” Lucius encourages, waving at the food as everyone settles. The Fox siblings on one side. Lucius at the foot near the kitchen, Tanya at the head near the stairs. The Waynes in name on the other side, backs vulnerable to the front door. “Dig in.”
Butter is passed, sparkling grape juice is poured. Wooden serving spoons and metallic tongs. He spreads his napkin on his lap and compliments Tanya for the spread. She smiles like she wishes him well, like she wants him in her home. (Like she doesn’t know how many people have died because of him, like she doesn’t know his whole family hates him.) (And if she doesn’t, well. He won’t be the one to inform her.)
He takes a breath.
The walnut chair he sits on doesn’t wobble. The four legs are cushioned with felt strips to prevent scrapes on the hardwood floors, but they’re years old. Compressed. Dust and crumbs and fur from a dog that passed last fall all catch in the ring of sticky residue bare to the world.
The five columns of decorative wood dig into his charcoal dinner jacket. There aren’t arms to rest his elbows on, so they hover uselessly in the air as Lucius passes the butter-warm basket of rolls, matching napkin and all.
There’s soft jazz calling from a vintage record player that straddles the dining and living rooms. It almost succeeds in blending Tanya’s question into meaningless scat.
Almost.
“Are you having a good summer, Damian?”
Tim’s thumb digs into his roll, yeasty heat curving around his nail. His eyes don’t flicker between Bruce and Damian. The clean-shaven jaw of Timothy Drake-Wayne doesn’t drop. He barely pauses in dipping his roll in the smear of creamy sauce escaping the scoop of casserole on his plate.
The same cannot be said for Bruce. His corded shoulders stiffen and straighten and shadow. His face, which has been slack with Brucie’s pleasantries thus far, clenches as if he’s been cracked over head with a crowbar.
(By her constant glares, Tam’s reiterated her opinion on the presence of the cool professionalism of TDW to her family’s home. Now, the way her eyes widen at the sudden tension, he hopes she won’t chew him out at Monday’s senior staff meeting.)
Poised on the edge of his lacquered seat, Damian wipes his clean fingers against the cloth napkin. Maroon. Tim keeps getting flashes of blood in his lap. “Yes.”
Like a gun shot.
Really, Tim wishes he could’ve sicced his PR team on the Foxes. What friendly dinner party has ever stayed a friendly dinner party? If they’d been vetted, briefed, and trained by Lettie, the bomb currently launching small-talk shrapnel all around the table would’ve been disabled.
Instead, Tanya is a normal person with normal expectations for how conversations go and normal understandings of the consequences of said conversations. She tightens the silky scarf holding her coily hair into a stylish updo and follows up. “What fun things have you been up to?”
Tanya and Lucius are too happily married for any of the Foxes to redirect the building pressure, so Tim sips his sparkling grape juice and releases a verbal valve.
“You came to visit me at work a few weeks back.”
In the split second of pause before social rules dictate a response, Damian looks to Tim. His eyes are unnaturally round and he blinks once. Cat rules. Acceptance.
They might not be friends and Damian would never call them brothers. But tonight, sitting on either side of a tightly wound Bruce Wayne, they are aligned.
“It was interesting seeing my future office.” The words aren’t sharpened to eviscerate. In fact, after the third time Tim replays them in his head, they sound like a joke.
Across the table, Luke groans. “Not you too.” He’s spent half the night glancing at the soft glow in his lap and suppressing a smile. Girlfriend, Tim assumes, then remembers that he’s the last person who should be assuming such things. (Population statistics and progressiveness war in his hind brain.)
The high schooler spears a piece of chicken. “I swear, I’m the only person on the planet who doesn’t want to work at that stupid place.” He blanches. “Uh, no offense, Mr. Wayne.”
Some amount of Brucie returns to Bruce’s features. The distraction was a success. “None taken,” he assures with a precise amount of humor in the words. “What do you want to do instead, Luke?”
And oh. Oh no. Abort, abort.
Something cold and toxic and fearful cracks through Tim’s heart. He knows that look. Appraising. Like the kid is one horrible trauma away a yellow cape.
Unaware of Tim’s rising panic—and how could he be aware, when Tim shows all the signs of active listening as he takes reasonable bites of burning casserole—Luke launches into all of his future plans. The words wash over Tim’s ears, a roar, a fire.
This whole dinner needs a rescue. The sturdy, unstained table with two leaves extending it. The navy table cloth, freshly laundered. The dusty vents, the screen-printed family portrait, the cracked door leading to the kitchen.
Diagonal from him, Tam demonstrably looks to the front door. Prepared to make good on her favor. It follows that she can sense his mounting discomfort, even though Tiff sits closer and works with him on a more regular basis.
Tam’s walked in on him crying in his office too many times to miss the places where the TDW mask’s cracked. She’s seen him bleed out. She knows what he looks like when the world has spun wildly out of his control.
(Tim has had a strange amount of luck with exes. Everything is a steaming mess when they’re dating, but the second they break up, suddenly everything is hunky dory.) (This is one of the many things his psycho-analyzing friends like to blame on his parents.) (Tim doesn’t correct them. It’s fun pretending like there is a root cause to his neuroses.)
“Tim,” Bruce says. Tim quickly takes a bite of casserole. Tam sets down her fork. “That actually reminds me—” What, exactly, in the conversation reminds Bruce of Tim’s existence is beyond him. Luke has started complaining about reading The Great Gatsby. (And the kid is really digging himself out of an early grave with that one. Bruce prefers his soldiers well-read.) “—I was hoping you could pass along a message for me.”
Between his teeth, each fiber of chicken and grain of pasta is ground into a fine smear. The finger he holds up has been broken six times and it doesn’t quite straighten despite his rigid adherence to his occupational therapy exercises. The embarrassed puff of his cheeks was taught by his father, who was always caught out for his mother’s public demands. (He preferred to exert his pressure in private.)
The casserole is chased into his stomach by a generous gulp of sparkling grape juice and he hopes the carbonation will accelerate digesting the smacks of food that otherwise leave him uneasy. Bruce’s hand has encroached on his walnut chair and there is a strange thrill of victory that neither Damian nor Luke are in his visual field just now.
“What message?” Tim asks like the air in the room hasn’t tripled in density.
Bruce puts on his own embarrassed performance. The entire table is watching him, waiting. Spotlight on his wrinkles, his silver watch, his swimmer’s lungs. Bruce too is still wearing his dinner jacket.
“Could you let Dick know that Alfred has some items of his that he requested?”
People forget, sometimes, that just because Bruce’s state of least resistance is silence doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know how to perfectly manipulate every social minutiae.
It takes practice, it takes patience, to output such precise personalities. The frivolity of Brucie, the omniscience of Batman, the intimidation of Malone.
Malone should be a deep cover alias and Bruce maintains him with the barest of effort. Brucie should be unmasked with the each new ridiculous gaff, except Bruce commits so intently to the role. Batman, point blank, should not be scary. Yet the streets go prey-still when he alights on a rooftop.
He was the CEO of Wayne Enterprises for ten lucrative years. He made their research division so profitable that Lucius’ little Bat-shaped side projects are covered as ‘discretionary spending.’ (And when an auditor asked about it, Bruce needed less than ten words to wriggle out of the accusation of wrong-doing.)
When Bruce wants, when it’s necessary, he has charisma. He has etiquette.
He’s honed his social shrewdness for years to grift the entirety of Gotham.
The dinner party pressures he exerts in this moment are not accidental. They never are.
What Bruce forgets though is that while he has been crafting social contexts for the past couple decades, Tim has been doing it since he was born.
He knew the exact names to drop to get his parents to stay an extra twenty-four hours. The obtuse smile to flounder up at nannies to send them home early. The scuffed knee rambunctiousness to keep social workers out of his home.
His friends like to blame his parents’ absence on all manner of things. But if he really, really wanted to, Tim could’ve brought them back home with the threat of a scandal.
Tim emptied his house every night to follow his obsession through city streets.
His childhood was practice, a playing ground. His revolving door of nannies were his to command. Master of the house, now PR’s favorite puppet.
Bruce knows the exact social pressures he’s exerting on Tim. What he doesn’t account for, what he always seems to forget, is that they share the same space. The same air. The same pressure.
He hums thoughtlessly. “I thought you two were getting along better lately,” he comments. Guileless.
These days, Tim doesn’t fear the fire with which Bruce’s frustration is ringed. He’s already been burned.
(If he’s being honest, this particular scrape for control is embarrassingly weak. Alfred has some things for Dick to pick up? Alfred isn’t on Dick’s block list.)
The gear-clicking part of Tim’s brain—the part greedy for details, the part that slides fact against fact until it can generate motive-reason-history—curls in satisfaction as Bruce’s lips thin.
(He knows what Bruce looks like when he’s gearing up to hit someone. He knows what Bruce looks like when he’s restrained by thin social niceties.)
The five Foxes have variously wrinkled brows. Tim hopes Luke sees this and runs far far away. Tim hopes Bruce slaps him right now, in front of everyone, so Damian can call Dick to retrieve him early.
He pointedly stabs a bite of salad and chews slowly. Like he’s got nowhere else to be. Like he doesn’t know just how fiercely the rage boils that Dick got away.
His… (Tim doesn’t even know what they are to each other anymore. They’ve long outgrown mentor and mentee. They were never father and son. (He didn’t even sign Tim’s emancipation paperwork.)) (Not colleagues. Barely allies. Just two masks trapped by the shared façade. (Manic rescuer and barely tolerating rescuee?))
His contemporary forces a smile through his concrete cheeks. “Nevermind,” he retreats, dabbing his clean lips with his napkin. “Tanya, I heard you’ve been campaigning for school board.”
The Foxes take the bait, happy to leave the strange tension for which they’ll never have context.
Behind Bruce’s back, Damian stares hard at Tim. His cheeks flush with unexpected understanding. His hands retreat from his break-glass pockets. His plate is piled high with the salad Tim brought, because even the green beans have bacon in them.
Tim nods to him. He nods to Tam.
When he gets back to his stylishly appointed apartment that night, he texts Damian to make sure he returned to Blüdhaven safely. He unblocks Dick’s number.