Chapter Text
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The first week of Kes living with Tim had admittedly been a little hectic, what with all the schedule complexities and new routines and habits, but the second had gone so smoothly that when Tim fell into his bed at 6:30 am Sunday morning after taking the first bus home it was with a smile on his face. He woke up peacefully around noon, mostly because he was hungry, and sat up and scratched his head and smiled at Kes where she sat across from him in the green-striped pajamas that used to be his. “Good morning!”
Kes waved at him, but also straightened the coverlet between them and pulled out her envelope of pictures. Tim sat up straight. She laid out seven day/night pictures, and used the pictures of Mrs Mac and Batman and Tim’s school to lay out the schedule like they had been following. Tim nodded and gave her a thumb-up. Kes then wiped that out and reset it. She used the Mrs Mac and Batman and school pictures like before, but then set out the train and Gotham city pictures above the days of the week. After checking to make sure Tim was paying attention, she held the train and city pictures together in two fingers, slightly spread like a hand of cards. She tapped her own chest, then the pictures, then the fourth and sixth days.
Tim felt an uneasy crawl down his spine. He repeated her motions, but tapped all the days Wednesday through Saturday, which she gave a thumbs-up to. “OK,” he said slowly. “OK. So you want to go to Gotham on all the days the trains run there. OK.” He then tapped his own chest and shrugged.
Kes replaced the train picture in her hand with a bus picture. She tapped Tim, the pictures, and then the schedule on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
“Oh,” Tim said, a little roughly. “I mean, of course, you can do what you want. Will you watch Batman on those two extra nights?” He asked the question with the papers, and Kes nodded, shrugged, and shook her head in quick succession. She found the paper with a picture of binoculars and held it over Wednesday and Friday, then to the side where there were no pictures she traced long winding paths on the coverlet. He nodded. It made sense. She was probably bored here compared to being able to look at everyone and everything in Gotham, so it made sense for her not to be here on the days he had to stay in because of Mrs Mac. “Will you be okay?” he asked when he was sure he could do so without doing something stupid like tearing up (for no good reason! It wasn’t like she was ditching him!). He mimed ‘Tim and Kes apart’, touched the picture of Gotham, pulled around his pillow and squished it and mimed sleep. Kes snorted. She tapped Tim on his breastbone, almost bruisingly hard, and then folded the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday papers so only night showed. She pointed at him again and mimed throwing away the pillow.
Tim had it in him to laugh a little. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t exactly sleep comfortably through the night on those days either. Point taken.” He looked down at the pictures, nudged the train picture absently, then made himself meet her eyes. “I’ll miss you on those days, is all.”
Kes looked at him evenly for a moment. She neatly packed away her pictures, and gestured for him to scoot closer to her on the coverlet. When they were nearly knee-to-knee she lunged at him and his back hit the mattress with an oof. “Kes!” She squirmed on top of him into a more covering position, squishing him down into the mattress like an extra-heavy weighted blanket. She linked their elbows, tricky to do with her lying on top of him, and kissed his cheek. She presented her own cheek to be kissed and he did, feeling a little teary but also smiling. She gently head-butted him then rolled over and elbowed her way upward (completely ignoring his protests) until her butt was planted firmly in his gut and her back squished his head. “You are so weird,” he complained.
He didn’t actually try to move her, though.
It was weirdly peaceful, lying in bed with nowhere to be, with Kes’ weight gently holding him down. He talked himself through his unreasonable upset, and tried to remind himself that it was good, actually, for them to not be together all the time. When he was five, and he had woken up from deep sleep shattered by a nightmare of how red the dirt had been at the circus that day, he had tried to crawl into his parent’s bed. Janet had led him down to the kitchen and made him warm milk with cinnamon: and as he drank it she had gently and patiently explained to him about codependency, and how dangerously it could sneak up on people and ruin their relationships, and how she knew her bright and independent boy could stand on his own two feet. The next time he’d had a nightmare he’d warmed milk in the microwave himself, though he couldn’t reach the cinnamon: and even though he had forgotten to put the mug in the sink, when his mom saw it in the morning instead of scolding him she had kissed his head and made sure there were extra blueberries in his pancake. So it was good, honestly, to be sure that he and Kes weren’t always together.
Besides, even though they hadn’t been friends for that long, he knew Kes better than he had known anyone else in his whole life. When he really thought about it, with his brain and not other treacherous chest-dwelling organs, he could not think of any logical reason to be worried. Kes was tough, and smart, and while Tim did his best to help her she didn’t
need
him, not really; but she kept coming back to him anyway. He decided to trust that that was something that wasn’t going to change.