Chapter Text
The beginning
He’s sneaking along the ledge, looking for a better angle. If he can just get across this gargoyle, he knows he’ll be in the perfect spot. As he starts to tip over, losing his balance and knowing that this time, this time he’s going to fall, clutching his camera harder so it won’t drop, he feels a gloved hand grab him by the shirt collar and haul him back onto the roof.
The hand is too small to be Batman’s, not the right shape to be Robin.
Tim turns around.
Catwoman is standing there, eyebrow raised and arms crossed.
“What’s a little kitten like you doing out here at night?”
Tim keeps his mouth shut, tries to unobtrusively hide the camera. She sees it anyway, and it’s out of hands almost faster than he can follow.
“Oh, Batwatching are we? Or should I say bird watching,” she says, flipping through the photos, “Hey, these are pretty good. How long have you been doing this?”
He doesn’t say anything and she sighs.
“Look, kid, I’m not going to hurt you. I like to watch those guys as much as anyone. But you’re parents must be worried about you.”
He can feel himself blushing, ducks his head and hopes she doesn’t notice.
She does.
“Oh. So it’s like that, is it?”
He hates the tone of her voice, the same as the nanny and the teachers at school and the lawyers whenever his mom and dad go on a trip.
“They never hit me!” he protests.
This, for some reason, makes her smile.
“I see there’s some fire under there. Stalking the Bat, sneaking out, talking back to criminals. I like you. I may even keep you.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to just keep people, Miss Kyle.”
Her eyes widen and Tim realizes his mistake too late.
But then she smiles and it’s a very pretty smile.
“Scratch that. I’m definitely keeping you.”
Not the first lesson
It’s not that he’s bad at the lessons. (He’d be insulted if anyone suggested he was bad at learning.) It’s just that he doesn’t feel it the way he knows she does. The way he’s supposed to. Selina says he lacks proper motivation. He thinks she’s going to tell his parents or his nanny or take away his computer. Something like that. Something normal.
He comes over after school one night and Selina is out. He goes to prepare himself a snack, because after school snacks are normal, and he understands the value of appearing normal. The fridge has been converted into a safe. So have all the cabinets with food in them. His tools are laid out on the counter where he always eats his after school snack.
Tim is not nearly stupid enough to miss this message.
The set of locks are harder than anything she has had him working on so far. He works until he can’t see straight, and then he leans back against the seemingly unassailable fridge. Selina still isn’t back yet. Tim has told the nanny that he’s at a friends all weekend. He could leave, of course, but he promised Selina he’d spend all weekend working on his lessons with her. He’d even finished his schoolwork early in preparation.
He keeps working. Eventually, he falls asleep on the kitchen floor. The next morning, he wakes up on the couch, with a glass of milk and the raspberry fudge cookies he was planning on eating laid out on the coffee table next to him. Selina is sitting on the chair opposite.
“I’m not sure I understand the point of this lesson.”
She cocks her head in the way that really does make her look like a cat. Tim thinks it’s lovely.
“You can’t do this just to please me or because it’s a challenge or for shiny things you could just buy. You have to be hungry for something.”
She pauses, waiting for Tim to understand. He’s starting too, he thinks.
“Why do you follow a little bird around Gotham when you should be in bed.”
Tim can feel his body tense up all the way down to his toes. Selina nods, then holds out a key on a chain.
“Ready for breakfast?”
When Tim goes back to the kitchen he takes the milk and the cookies, but not the key.
The first gift
The first gift really is sort of an accident.
He’s on an assist with Selina, mostly hanging out and watching her work, when he sees the tiny jade bird in one of the display cases. He does the math and decides it’s an acceptable risk. Selina doesn’t even see, or if she does she doesn’t seem to think it’s important enough to comment on. He keeps it in a box in his backpack for days, even though it’s dangerous to be carrying around stolen goods so casually.
But the bird is so small, carefully carved but with a small chip in one wing, edges worn down. Nobody will notice.
He doesn’t even realize why he took it, or what he’s planning on doing with it until he watches Robin get winged by a bullet through a telephoto lens. Then he carefully wraps the jade bird in tissue paper, places it a small gift box wrapped up with red paper and yellow and green ribbons. It’s tricky to arrange for him to have access to the school and the locker, but Tim is nothing if not resourceful. It’s a pity he can’t be there in person to see the look on Robin’s face when he sees the gift, but Tim is very good with cameras, and that’s almost enough.
The statue is back in the museum only a few days later, and Selina says Batman is asking some veiled questions, but Tim is pretty sure he got away clean.
And he’s got the footage of Dick holding Tim’s prize in his hands.
It’s worth it.
The next meeting
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Tim spends a lot of time making sure he’s rarely surprised. The voice coming from behind him is a genuine shock. Still, he only tenses for a second before composing himself and turning around.
“Excuse me?”
Tim hasn’t talked to Dick Grayson in person since he was four years old. He’s run into Robin first, then later Nightwing, but Selina has always been very careful about protecting her protege from the Bats. Tim has left presents, taken pictures, traded a few quips from time to time, but never had a reason to talk face to face like this.
Without masks.
“This isn’t a great part of town to be in, even at noon. And it is a school day.”
Officer Grayson is smiling, easy, ‘hey I just want to help’. Tim knows he’d smile the same way at any kid he found wandering around at here. It doesn’t feel like that though. It feels like it’s just for him. He has contingency plans in place and he’s already doing the mental math. He can plan out a near-optimal exist strategy in minutes based on several pre-arranged actions.
At this exact moment he can’t quite seem to care about all that.
“I guess I better find a ride home then. I’ll pick up a cab…”
Officer Grayson, of course, offers him a ride. Tim really shouldn’t accept.
The ride is too fast and Dick Grayson smiles, easy, as Tim talks about school and friends and the things he’s practiced to make him sound like a normal teenager. Nothing at all about standing on rooftops at night. Tim isn’t listening as Officer Grayson says something encouraging about staying out of trouble. He’s barely thinking about consequences and secret identities and drawing the wrong kind of attention.
He leans across the seat and just takes.
Officer Grayson - Dick - kisses him back for a bare second before Tim pulls away.
“Thanks for the ride.”
He’s out of the car and around the corner before anything more can be said by either of them.
It was stupid and wonderful and later he’ll worry about all the ways he might have, did, mess up. Right now, he plays the memory of the kiss followed by the look of shock over and over in his mind.
He kind of wishes he’d had his camera.
5 times Tim stole from a member of the Batfamily
1.
”So you’re Catwoman’s sidekick.”
Even if he wasn’t in the middle of cracking a safe, Tim wouldn’t respond to Robin’s deliberate provocation. He isn’t sure how to deal with the new Robin, who is so different from Dick, and until he does he figures discretion really is the better part of valor.
He finishes with the safe, taking out a few choice items and leaving the rest, locking the safe up after. As he stands, Robin blocks his way.
“You know I’m going to have to stop you, right?”
Tim looks up at Robin for a moment, then steps in closer, edging into the taller boy’s space.
“Is that so?”
Robin is just flustered enough he doesn’t notice one of his batarangs missing until Tim is gone.
2.
She’s still rough around the edges, but Tim has to admit she’s got potential. And Jason vouched for her becoming Robin, so it’s not like there’s an issue there. Apparently the only person not comfortable with this new Robin is Tim.
He snaps a few more shots of this girl, Stephanie Brown, as she winds her way through Gotham on a decal line. It’s not as if he has a right to be upset, Robin doesn’t belong to him. He’s just a thief and a stalker. Through his lens he sees her slip, nearly fall, and then land in an alley. He moves to a better view. She’s leaning against a wall, breathing just a little too deeply, lenses up and now he can see her blue eyes, shining with what might be tears.
Frustration, maybe, or pain; she took a few bad hits to the ribs a few days ago. In the time between when the first tear falls and when she wipes it away, Tim snaps a picture.
She doesn’t shed another.
3.
Tim likes the new Batgirl. She’s odd, maybe, and so very silent, but he thinks she’s amazing and well, cool. He runs into her from time to time, and he knows she could take him out easily, but she never does more than force him to return things. He’s pretty sure he always knows when he’s around taking pictures, but she doesn’t stop him.
When he finds out she’s learning to read, he picks out some books and leaves them a few places he knows she’ll come upon. She returns them after saving him from a hostage situation that yeah, he probably should have walked away from but it looked bad and there were kids involved.
Her voice, when she speaks, is soft.
“Thank you.”
He doesn’t bother covering his surprise.
“Was that…your first…?”
She nods, and Tim wishes his mask covered his blush.
4.
“You have about five seconds to give me a good reason not to take you out and deliver you to Batman with a bow on top.”
Tim turns, mind running, trying to figure out how he messed up so badly. Oracle is in the doorway, arms folded, eskrima sticks laying her lap, looking…amused?
Reflexively, he lifts his hands away from the keyboard.
“I can explain?”
“Explain why you’re breaking into my house or explain how you messed up badly enough to get caught?”
He really has no idea what to say to that, and he knows it shows. Oracle laughs.
“Tim Drake, you are something else. Get out of here, and don’t get caught next time.”
He doesn’t insult her by asking how she knows, and he doesn’t dawdle, heading out a window and into the Gotham night. Later, alone, he pulls out the custom batarang and adds it to his collection.
5.
He doesn’t stop laying out supplies when he sees Alfred come down to the cave.
“Don’t try to stop me. Someone has to go after them and nobody else will.”
Alfred merely raises an eyebrow.
“I was going to offer to show you something you might find to useful.”
A little tension melts out of Tim. A very little.