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“Drake,” Damian states, climbing bodily onto a stool at the breakfast bar. He shoves aside the stacks of paper Tim has sprawled before him.
“Hey—!”
“Father says you must do as I say.” Damian continues, procuring a packet that he places grandly on the same spot Jason eats Lucky Charm.
An audible sigh comes from the other room. “Damian!” Bruce’s disconnected voice calls. “I told you to ask your brother for help nicely.”
Damian ignores this. He places a pencil beside the packet and scooches to the seat next to Tim. “Father has informed me you have also endured these courses.”
Tim stares first at Damian, blinking at the perennial scowl he finds there, and then at the packet that’s replaced his case files. Tim raises an eyebrow.
“...Math?” he says, picking the packet up to thumb through its contents.
Damian releases a hissing breath between his teeth. “Obviously,” he spits. “Mrs. Mclaughin has assigned a weekly homework packet.”
“I can see that,” Tim says, dropping the packet. It’s familiar—he had his own. “I’m a little more stuck up on what that has to do with me?”
Damian’s lips press together. “Your experience in these matters makes you an optimal resource. Tell me, what do you remember of logarithmic functions?”
“Enough,” Tim says. He sits back in his chair, arms crossed.
Damian pulls the packet closer and opens to a specific page. He points sharply at the first equation, where the gray impressions of half-erased work is smudged beneath. “Specifically this problem,” Damian says.
Tim pulls the packet back to his side of the table, appraises the page, and nods. “Oh yeah,” he says. “I definitely remember how to do this. Have fun with it.”
Tim reaches to reclaim his case files, only for a hand to smack down on top of them—Damian’s hand. Pinning Tim’s work hostage.
Tim turns to the Demon Brat, eyebrow raised questioningly.
Damian’s face remains pensive, but a light red dusting floods his cheeks. “Drake.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “If you wanted help with math you probably should have gone to Dick—he was a mathlete you know. And Jason was like, an honor role freak.”
“I am aware,” Damian huffs. “But Grayson and Todd are not in the manor and Father says I must finish homework before I am permitted to accompany him on patrol and—” and then Damian frowns. “And I don’t need help. I am perfectly capable of completing this math on my own.”
“So you didn’t ask Bruce for help? And he didn’t tell you to bother me with it?”
Damian does not dispute this. Instead, still red and frowning and glaring, he disentangles himself from the breakfast bar with great dignity and stomps upstairs.
Tim is content to let him leave–he’s got more than enough case files he wants to review tonight. He glances at the clock. With a start, Tim realizes it’s late evening. A second look out the window confirms the dark has blotted out the gray, smoggy sky. Bruce will be leaving for patrol soon. And, judging by the number of unfinished homework problems Tim glimpsed in Damian’s packet, Robin won’t be joining him.
Tim is…very surprised by the guilt he feels at that revelation. Immediately Tim shoves that feeling away. He has enough to worry about without picturing Damian’s frustrated, pinched expression as he pulled himself away from Tim’s side, homework packet crumpled and clenched in hand.
Tim goes ahead and does a quick edit of a file. Proofreading isn’t difficult, but it’s when Tim turns to a case for the next night that he pauses. His thoughts drift from the night in question…to the empty stool at his side. The clock ticking away on the wall refuses to slow down. Damian hasn’t returned from upstairs.
Tim throws down his pen.
Stalking upstairs, scrubbing the red itch to his eyes, Tim laments Jason and Dick’s absence. Hell, he’d take Steph. She’s patient enough with the brat to help him out with homework.
But Jason and Dick and even Steph aren’t here. Cass is training downstairs, but GED or not, her education has been far from conventional, and pretty removed from homework packets. Duke would be a fantastic help. But he’s fast asleep and Tim’s not about to mess with that.
That leaves Tim.
Tim, who’s reached Damian’s bedroom door, and doesn’t bother to knock. He slams the door open. A Bat-A-Rang flies through the air, aimed between his eyes. Tim catches it and shoves it in his pocket. “Not a very warm welcome Demon Braaaa….at?”
Tim jerks to a stop at the bedroom door, mouth open.
“Drake!” Damian hisses. “Get out.”
But Tim is too busy staring at his eyes to be focusing on his words. “Are you crying?”
Damian doesn’t answer. He turns around in the desk chair, facing away from Tim, back seized with tension. Tim doesn’t know what to do.
He expected the kid to be frantically pouring over online tutorials for calculator use, to be fighting against the eraser marks on his page, maybe chewing on a pencil end. He wasn’t expecting the red flush crawling up his neck and saturating his cheeks. He hadn’t expected a foreign moisture to dampen his eyes. For frustration to furrow his expression.
Sure…Damian has cried before. As Robin. As a deadly assassin turned vigilante, kneeling in his big brother's blood as Nightwing bled out on the street. Watching Steph hang like tied, swaying meat from rafters as the burns and bruises came one after another. Crawling into Batman’s lap as fear toxin lapped his senses into a gnarled and stinging mess.
But over homework?
For a second, Tim wonders if it’s too late to turn around. A voice in the back of his head that sounds a lot like Dick tells him very firmly that it is. Which leaves one option.
Tim steps into the room. “Damian?”
“Get away,” Damian snarls.
“Is this about the math packet?” Tim presses, coming around to stand beside the desk, bending down to look his little brother in the eyes. Damian drops his face into a hand and stays there. “Listen Dames, there’s still time to get this finished before patrol—”
“There is not!” Damian’s head shoots up. The tears are gone but his face, his eyes, are still stained red, his expression contorted into a familiar scowl. “I do not understand the premise of these questions—this is the third day this week that I have been unable to accompany Father or Richard on patrol. And there is a test on this material Monday. If I do not perform sufficiently my grade will decrease and Father will bench me permanently—”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Tim says, nipping that right in the bud. Acting on instinct, he drops a hand on Damian’s shoulder in a move neither are used to experiencing together. Tim removes his hand as Damian frowns at it. “Calm down.”
Damian scowls at him. “I am calm.”
“Shh,” Tim says, kneeling beside the desk so they’re on the same eye-level. As scarily fast as Damian is shooting up, he’s still the smallest of Tim’s siblings. Small mercies. “Let’s focus on the real problem then—this homework packet.” Tim drags the packet closer to him. “What part is confusing?”
Damian does not look like he wants to answer. His teeth are squeezing his bottom lip and the fingers wrapped around his pencil are a bloodless white. “There is…” Damian shakes his head, looking like he’d prefer to crawl back into his arms. “There is too much I do not understand of this process.”
Tim nods. “We’ll start with the first problem then.”
“You…” Damian swallows thickly. “You’ll help?”
Tim reaches up to brush some eraser debris that’s landed on Damian’s hair. “You said it’s been three nights this week, right?”
Damian nods.
“That’s too many nights,” Tim tells him.
“I know that,” Damian says hotly. “I’ve tried completing the homework—”
But Tim can hear that tight, cornered quality crawling back into the tone of his voice, and he interrupts. “I know you have—this isn’t your fault.”
Damian looks like he doesn’t expect that. He looks confused, but that’s okay. Tim will take care of it. He reaches out and taps the first homework problem instead. “Okay, gimme the pencil,” Tim says. “I’ll show you how to start.”
“Red Robin,” Damian says a few hours later, masked up and looking after Tim in confusion. “Are you not accompanying Batman and I?”
Tim, grapple raised gun, shakes his head. “Nah, got something to take care of.”
“What’s that?” Bruce asks, modulator hardening the question.
“Nothing.”
Wrong answer. Bruce tenses, probably assuming all the worst things that Tim could be hiding. He’d never guess the truth. “Red Robin, report.”
Tim sighs. “It’s fine B—I’m just patrolling with Hood.”
“Hood?” Bruce repeats. Tim can’t blame him for the confusion. Jason is the solo act wannabe of all solo acts. He takes after Bruce like that.
“Call it bonding,” Tim says, because that’s the kind of thing Bruce fawns over. What do you want for your birthday? For you and your siblings to get along.
As if.
Tim grapples away before Bruce can ask any more questions. Tim will explain again later anyway, when Damian isn’t in earshot. For now, he gets moving.
Jason is on the other side of the city tonight—Tim called in a favor with Babs to get his location, and of course Dick was all for meeting up for a patrol together. Tim might not have let Dick in on the fact that Jason would be there. Additionally, he might not have told Jason that either of them would be there. Oh well.
Tim grapples to the rooftop cornering the alleyway Babs directs him to and immediately overhears a full on argument below. A squabble, really. Looking over the lip of the roof confirms, Dick beat him there.
“— track me?!”
“I’m telling you I didn’t.”
“Oh, oh, oh. So you just happened across me before I could even start patrolling—”
Tim drops into the alley like a live grenade.
Jason takes one look at him and throws his hands up. “Fuck no.”
Dick turns a pleading expression his way, somehow managing to widen his lenses in an approximation of his usual puppy dog eyes. “Red,” Dick says. “You invited Hood to patrol too?”
Tim ignores both of them. “I gathered you today for an important reason—”
“You didn’t gather me,” Jason cuts in. “You dropped into my fucking alley like you own it and I want you out.”
“I have gathered you today for an important reason,” Tim repeats. “Robin.”
Immediately, Dick’s demeanor changes. His shoulders flatten, his hand twitches up in the direction of his escrima sticks. Jason crosses his arms, going quiet.
“He hasn’t patrolled three days this week,” Tim says.
“He’s hurt?” Jason asks.
Dick shakes his head. “Three days? I only held him for one. He had homework—”
“It was the same homework,” Tim says. “And he’s not hurt—B’s benched him to get his math packet finished.”
“And the kid still hasn’t done it?” Jason says, disbelief under the roughness of his helmet’s pitch.
“He can’t,” Tim snaps. “He didn’t know how.”
Dick and Jason exchange looks.
“I just sat with him for the last hour going over logarithmic functions,” Tim hisses, arms crossed. “But he needs more practice and there’s a test on Monday.”
Dick frowns. “He needed help with his homework?”
“Why didn’t Baby-Bat just ask?” Jason says.
Tim rolls his eyes. “He asked B.”
Both Dick and Jason sigh. “Oh,” they say in unison.
“The point is,” Tim says, plowing on. “You—” he points at Dick. “Were a mathlete.” He redirects to Jason. “And you were an honor roll student. Agent A has your report cards framed.”
Tim can practically see the smug grin that crosses Jason’s face, self-satisfaction trickling down his frame in the way he shifts, all pleased. “Course he does.”
Tim, again, ignores him. He points his bo-staff at both, one at a time, and adopts his most no-nonsense tone. “Test. On. Monday. Fix this.”
He grapples away.
For the first time in months, Jason drops by for Sunday morning breakfast. Stephanie pretends to have a heart attack at his appearance.
“We’ve been blessed,” she exclaims, hand over her heart. “With the presence of royalty.”
Tim rolls his eyes as Jason grins a shit-eating grin and offers a very pretentious flick of his fingers in their direction of the dining table. “Bow down,” he says.
Steph is nothing if not committed. She folds over herself, tugging Duke down by the ear.
“Hey!” Duke complains, but he’s ignored as Cass grins and gives her own solemn nod and Dick gets really into it by kneeling.
Tim rolls his eyes at all of them—it’s too early for anything other than the coffee mug Alfred drops into his hand and the bits of pre-breakfast bacon Cass slips him discreetly under the table.
The rest of breakfast continues as expected—in chaos—and lasts longer than food remains on their plates. But slowly, they reach the point where people begin to trickle away. Dick’s picked up a weekend shift patrolling in Blud, Stephanie is heading to a movie with Babs, Bruce’s sequestering poor Duke away in the cave to scan through some evidence he collected during one of his daytime patrols, and Tim…
Tim watches as Damian goes to leave, only for Jason to grab his wrist.
“Not so fast Short-Stack.”
Damian’s face sours. “Unhand me, Todd!”
“Inna second,” Jason says. “Go grab that math packet—Mrs. Mclaughin’s? I wanna take a look at it.”
Damian looks dubious, glancing in Tim’s direction.
Tim gestures. Go on.
When Damian returns with the packet of homework—alongside several other packets from previous weeks with more red ink sprawled across them than Tim expected—Jason just whistles, low, and pulls them closer.
“Shit kid,” he says. “Shoulda called me earlier.”
Yes, Tim thinks. He should have.
After that it’s not uncommon for Tim to stumble across Dick helping Damian at the breakfast bar, or Jason coming round for dinner or brunch and tugging Damian and his backpack to the closest table. Damian begins shoving himself into whatever chair is closest to Steph or Duke and requesting ‘peer reviews’. Barbara grins all afternoon when Damian asks her for help with coding—Damian’s feedback for that assignment is glowing. Once, Cass is enlisted for help with biology. Unfortunately, her insight into anatomical structures doesn’t align with the scope Damian’s class is focusing on. Tim takes it upon himself to intervene on some of the details—he has a feeling that one assignment was more interested in blood typing, not blood sprays.
The unfortunate thing about a childhood focusing on assassination schooling is the lack of actual academic work. Damian might be a bright little bastard, but there’s finding the answer to a math equation, and then there’s finding the answer using the steps outlined by the year's syllabus. Slowly, they help him come around to jumping through the right hoops.
Bruce isn’t the world’s greatest detective for nothing—of course he notices Damian’s out of character behavior, spending cordial time with his siblings, no deadly weapons involved or anything (not counting the number two pencils). Tim takes the time to pull Bruce aside and explain.
Luckily, he’s on board with all the homework help—Damian rarely misses patrol, with exception to the occasional project or paper. Bruce comes to Tim for help setting up a parent portal for his grades—Damian goes red at the exchange and Jason laughs until he chokes and an exasperated Alfred has to revive him with a glass of water. Dick insists on the password to the portal. It ends up taped to the fridge next to Duke and Damian’s report cards—both came back all A’s.
Tim is just about ready to decide the whole thing is a success—pat on the back, his part is done—when a night comes along and there’s a knock on his bedroom door.
“Sleeping,” Tim calls.
Damian lets himself in. “Lying is unbecoming, Drake.”
“What are you doing?”
Damian ignores him and climbs boldly onto the bed, socked-feet kicking Tim’s laptop away.
“Hey!”
Damian does not apologize. He sits next to Tim, leaning back onto the headboard. “I’ve come to show you this.”
Tim takes the piece of paper that is thrust into his hands. “What—oh.”
Damian does not say anything, pinning his gaze decidedly at his hands, picking along his nails as he waits for Tim to read. Tim notes idly that he should join Steph for another manicure—crime fighting is tougher on the hand than they like to explain at the Galas and interviews—and then he begins to read.
The note is from Mrs. Mclaughin. Tim recognizes it as one of the evaluations written by Gotham Academy teachers at the end of each semester. It starts off by praising Damian’s work, going on to detail how impressed she is with his improvement from the beginning of the semester. By the end she’s written how pleased she is to have him in her class and adds that she has high expectations for the second half of the year.
Tim finishes the note, and realizes a smile has crept across his face. He turns to Damian, who studiously ignores him.
“Good job,” Tim tells him honestly. He can’t even rib Damian right now—he’s flying high on how well he’s handled the situation so far, and he doesn’t want to cancel anything out. “But isn’t this supposed to be for Bruce? Or maybe Dick?”
Damian crosses his arms. “I have given Father my report card,” he says. “And Richard has made a copy.” Damian frowns, and adds, “He has made several copies. Todd and Brown both requested one. Brown has laminated hers.”
“It wouldn’t last otherwise,” Tim says, thinking of the cesspool that is Steph’s apartment. Tim’s room isn’t exactly fit for the nines, but it’s habitable, unlike the homes of select other family members. Dick’s at least got Jason coming around to yell at him and throw out spoiled milk and cultured take-out, but Steph’s alone and yet to discover cleaning supplies.
Damian hums in agreement. There’s a moment of silence, and then Damian glances fleetingly at him. “...the evaluation is for you to keep.”
Tim is going to laminate and frame it. He reaches out to catch Damian’s wrist when it looks like he’s going to hop off the bed. “Thanks, Dames. I…I’m glad you gave this to me.”
“You did assist me with the work,” Damian says curtly.
Tim still has that smile on his face.
Damian breaks Tim’s grip on his wrist and pulls himself off the bed. “You should sleep. It has been two days since you’ve experienced sufficient rest.”
“Sure,” Tim says, knowing he has several hours of work to do before he can catnap.
Damian leaves, only to double back and poke his head inside a moment later.
“Thank you…Timothy.”
Tim stares after his baby brother, holding that damn evaluation, and wonders if Damian’s planning to take any business classes. Tim’s would be pretty good at helping with those.