Work Text:
“Explain it to me.”
Seated opposite Bruce in the study, Tim crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you want me to say, B? I failed the class.”
“I understand that,” Bruce replies, his tone perfectly even. “What I am asking is how.”
“Same way you fail any class, I guess,” Tim says with a huff. He’s really not in the mood for an interrogation right now. It’s been a thoroughly shitty day.
“Tim,” Bruce says, “it’s driver’s ed.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“It’s a graduation requirement.”
“I know,” Tim snaps. “And you know why I know? Because two different counselors and the freaking P.E. divisional head sat me down and explained it! I know.”
“Then how did you–”
“Because I wasn’t going to class, alright?!”
At Bruce’s impassive expression, he goes on, “Look, it was eighth period. It was the end of the day, and since Mr. Burnmeister is so freaking senile that he didn’t even notice Anthony Kafarski was running a blackjack circuit in the back of his classroom all semester, I figured he wouldn’t notice if I logged into the system to alter a few attendance reports.”
“But he did notice.”
“He didn’t,” Tim defends. Bitterly, he adds, “...Ms. O’Riley did.”
“The attendance secretary.”
“The new attendance secretary,” Tim grumbles. His plan would have worked perfectly if Ms. Johnson—the secretary he’s been paying off in Wendy’s gift cards to turn a blind eye to his occasional… administrative adjustments for the duration of his high school career—could have simply maintained her position for one more semester.
(Figures she had to go and die on him...)
“You’re lucky the school was so quick to write the discrepancies in their system off as computer error,” Bruce goes on gravely. “You could have been expelled, Tim.”
Tim sighs heavily. “Look, I know I messed up.” Given Johnson’s considerable age and the sheer number of double Baconators she’s been known to consume in a week, Tim really should have had a contingency plan in place for this. That’s on him. “But it’s not like I actually needed that class. I know how to drive already. I’ve been doing it since I was thirteen.”
“You’ve been driving the Batmobile since you were thirteen,” Bruce counters, “which was permitted in certain emergency situations only because it basically drives itself.”
(Also because of the massive blood loss you were incurring at the time, Tim thinks, but wisely chooses not to voice. Let it never be said he doesn’t know how to read the room.)
“Aside from the fact that you skipped”—Bruce checks the paper printout on the desk—“twenty-seven classes, there’s also the matter of your practice logs.” He flips open the DMV-provided booklet, displaying Tim’s driving hours in one column and a neat row of initials in another. “I had no idea Jack’s been so involved lately.”
Tim shifts uncomfortably. He’s been forging his father’s signature on parental permission slips and homework completion folders since early elementary school. It’d been second nature for him to sign off on his own driving logs as well.
“...Especially considering three of these dates fall within the week he was in the Cayman Islands.”
(Whoops.)
“The school is requiring you to retake the classroom portion of driver’s ed with a private instructor,” Bruce informs, “and this time I will be personally ensuring that you get in all of your required practice hours.”
Tim groans. “B, c’mon. I know how to drive already.”
“Do you?” Bruce raises an eyebrow. “Because according to Alfred, you haven’t been particularly eager to demonstrate this knowledge.”
“I’ve been letting Duke get his hours in!” Tim defends, which is part of it. The other part is that Alfred only ever offers to let them drive on their morning commutes, and Tim usually takes advantage of those twenty minutes to work in a little before-school power nap. He’s loath to give that up, especially when “Jack” has been so willing to pick up the slack where his driving supervision is concerned.
Bruce’s eyes narrow. “How many times have you actually used your learner’s permit, Tim?”
“Loads of times.”
“List five.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “Fine. First there was…” He trails off, trying to call any such instances to mind. “Well there was the drive home from the DMV.”
Bruce holds up a single finger. “Four more.”
He thinks some more. “There was that time I went with Duke and Steph to get milkshakes.”
Bruce shakes his head. “That doesn’t count. Duke was driving. He logged it on his practice sheet.”
“Yeah, but I was the one giving him tips,” Tim points out with a snort. “He sucks at parking. We nearly lost both side mirrors.”
“Still doesn’t count. Four more.”
Tim racks his brain. It’s not like he never drives—between the Batmobile and his Redbird, he’s driven plenty in uniform. But as far as civilian transportation goes, he’s been pretty content to stick with his skateboard and Alfred’s chauffeuring.
“I drove with Burnmeister,” Tim says finally. “I went to all of my behind-the-wheels.”
“I mean outside of school,” Bruce clarifies. “With family.”
Tim scoffs. “Who? Everyone’s busy. No one has time for that.”
“How do you know that? Did you ask them?”
“Well, no, but–”
“Or me? Have you ever once asked me?”
(It’s a trick question, of course. They both know Tim hasn’t asked a soul.)
“I know how to drive,” Tim insists.
Bruce gives him a stern look. “Then we should have no issue, should we?”
Two weeks later, Tim charges into the family room, flops face-first onto the couch, and screams into a pillow.
Duke, who is fully immersed in a Minecraft session on the PS5, doesn’t even glance up. “So… how’s driving with Bruce going?”
“Awful,” Tim groans, flipping over onto his back. “Terrible. He doesn’t use any words! I’m sitting in the middle of an intersection on a green light waiting to turn left, and there’s a gap so I’m like ‘I’m gonna go now’ and he’s like ‘hn’ and I’m like ‘what?’ and he’s like ‘hnn.’ So I start to turn, and suddenly he’s jerking the wheel out of my hands and glaring at me because apparently that grunt meant ‘no, don’t turn yet, that weird-looking rock in the road is actually a freaking turtle that you’re about to run over!’”
Duke frowns. “A turtle?”
Tim flaps a hand dismissively. “Some D-list villain broke into the Bristol Petco last night. Not the point.”
“Is the turtle okay?”
“The turtle is fine,” Tim snaps. “But if I have to put up with another nineteen hours of this bullshit, I’m gonna start wandering off into traffic too.”
It just figures Alfred had to pick this week to finally get that cataract surgery he’s been putting off for almost a decade. He’s been temporarily relieved of all driving duties for the duration of his recovery and has taken to sitting out by the pool with his eyepatch and sipping piña coladas in the afternoons.
“Honestly, I think driving with Dick is worse,” Duke remarks.
“Oh god,” Tim moans, recalling his lesson with his eldest sibling just two days prior. “Dick never shuts up. He’s all, ‘You see that truck up ahead, right Tim? You see him changing lanes, he’s got his blinker on, slow down, slow— Brake, Tim! BRAKE!’ and the whole time we’re like two hundred yards away!”
“And then he stomps the floor of the car, right? Like he thinks he has his own pedals?”
“Yes! And he clutches that handle above the door any time I take a turn faster than ten miles an hour.”
“He broke the one in the SUV clean off!” Duke says, laughing.
“God,” Tim groans, balling his fists up to press against his eyes. “I believe it.”
For the next few minutes Tim just lies there watching Duke continue to build. “What are you making?” he wonders, watching as the rows of staggered seats extend upwards. “Is that a stadium, or…?”
“It’s Principal Park,” Duke answers, as if those words should mean something to Tim. At his brother’s blank expression, he adds, “You know, where the Iowa Cubs play.”
Tim blinks. “Okay, I may not be much of a sports guy, but even I know it’s the Chicago Cubs.”
“Not in the Minor Leagues.”
Tim gives him a funny look. “Since when do you follow Minor League Baseball?”
“I don’t.”
Tim stares at him, waiting for an explanation.
It doesn’t come.
Adding a few flags to his stadium for garnish, Duke asks, “Have you driven with Jason?”
Tim lets out an incredulous scoff. “Define ‘driven.’ He wouldn’t even let me in the car until I could tell him how many cylinders the engine had and the pros and cons of one trim level over the other.”
“Man, you got off easy. He made me prove I could change a flat tire first.”
Tim frowns. “I mean, I guess that’s useful, but—”
“After he shot it.”
A sharp bubble of laughter erupts from Tim’s chest. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”
“Just whatever you do, don’t drive with Cass,” Duke warns gravely. “Now that was actually scary.”
“You drove with Cass?” Tim thought it was pretty common knowledge that the ex-assassin, while definitely capable of driving, has been indefinitely banned from operating civilian vehicles for very good reason.
Duke nods miserably. “She kept telling me to speed up and that I needed to go faster because the other cars were ‘winning.’ Before I knew it, we were doing 75 in a 40. I swear, I thought I was gonna shit myself.”
“Well at least she’s not treating you like her personal chauffeur service…” Tim grumbles. “Steph’s version of driving practice is making me take her to Target anytime they have a BOGO sale.”
“Yeah, but at least there are perks. She always buys me Starbucks.”
“What? No fair!” Tim balks. “She made me pay for her cold brew yesterday and she got like five extra pumps.”
Duke quirks an eyebrow. “Aren’t you rich?”
“It’s the principle!” Tim flips himself over on the couch, groaning into his pillow. “This whole fifty hours thing is such bullshit. The only thing I’m learning is how much everyone in this family sucks.”
Duke snorts. “Harsh.”
“Is it, though?” he mutters bitterly, thinking of his drive home from Cass’ dance recital last night with Babs in the passenger seat. He thought Jason’s knowledge of creative profanities was extensive, but that guy’s got nothing on Barbara Gordon during rush hour. “I’m pretty sure making me take lessons from these idiots counts as cruel and unusual punishment…”
“There, there,” Duke says in mock consolation. Putting a few final touches on the stadium’s scoreboard, he saves his game and closes out. “Wanna play something?”
“Sure.” Tim sits up, trying not to look too eager as he grabs the extra controller from the bin under the coffee table. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Oh I dunno.” Duke grins. “I was debating between GTA and Mario Kart...”
(He ducks as Tim hurls the controller at his head.)
The worst part is, Tim almost made it.
He endured over forty-nine hours of his family’s grunts, lectures, anxiety attacks, road rage, goading, and mooching—and that’s not even touching the absurd amount of terrible music he was forced to listen to. He only needed thirty more minutes.
Then he got himself kidnapped.
Now, it’s far from Tim’s first time being knocked unconscious, abducted, and held in an abandoned warehouse (it’s his eighth, to be precise), but it is his first time having it happen as a civilian. Even worse, they’d managed to snag him right in the middle of their annual all-school field trip to the Gotham Natural History Museum, which was a hit to his pride more than anything.
To top it all off—because God hates Timothy Drake-Wayne specifically—he wasn’t abducted alone.
“You couldn’t just wait for backup, could you?” Tim gripes as he and Damian sprint out of the warehouse, Damian gritting his teeth as he clutches his unnaturally angled right arm against his chest. Both of them are still dressed in their school uniforms, now thoroughly wrinkled and Damian’s jacket torn. “You just had to go picking a fight with those assholes!”
Damian is seething. “That bald one was making derogatory remarks about Father!”
“So do eighty percent of the tabloids! You gotta just let that shit go, Dames!”
Their stint in captivity started off pretty much par for the course. The two Wayne heirs were roughed up, bound, gagged, and parked in a warehouse with an armed guard. Then, once they were deemed sufficiently shaken up, the kidnappers attempted to force them to film a ransom video for Bruce.
(To say Damian did not take kindly to this is a bit of an understatement.)
They managed to get a decent head start, but Tim knows the rudimentary barricades they constructed to slow the kidnappers' pursuit won’t hold them back for long. Skidding around a corner, Tim fishes the key he’d managed to swipe off the leader’s belt from his pocket and quickly unlocks the doors to a large white van.
“Get in!” Tim orders, yanking open the driver’s side door. For once Damian doesn’t argue, hauling himself one-armed up into the passenger seat, his teeth clenched in obvious pain.
That’s when Tim sees it.
“Shit,” he says, staring in horror at the extra pedal on the floor below him. “We’ve got a problem.”
Damian’s breathing heavily, head tipped back against the seat and eyes squeezed shut. “What.”
“It’s a stick shift.”
“So?”
“So I’ve never driven a stick, okay?” He’s seen Bruce drive his sports cars enough times to have a basic idea of the concept, but he’s never had any cause to try it for himself. Why make things more difficult than necessary?
“Do you mean to tell me,” Damian grits out as Tim shoves the key into the ignition and steps on the brake, trying in vain to turn it over, “that after forty-nine hours of mandatory driver’s education, you were never once taught to operate a proper vehicle?”
“I can drive just fine,” Tim defends, repeating the process but this time with the clutch pressed to the floor. The old van sputters to life, but when he steps on the gas, only revs in place angrily. “It’s just this stupid car!”
With a colossal eye roll, the twelve-year-old reaches over with his good arm and releases the parking brake.
Tim blinks. “Oh.”
The kidnappers are stumbling out of the warehouse now, shouting profanities as they limp across the massive parking lot. Stepping on the gas, Tim lets up on the clutch, immediately killing the engine.
Damian makes a frustrated sound. “You must release pressure on the clutch, slowly, while engaging the accelerator.”
“You think I don’t know that?!” Tim slams the clutch down and turns the key over again. This time the van makes a small lurch forward before stalling out.
“Move,” Damian orders. “I’ll do it.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “Your arm is broken, pea brain!”
“Yet clearly my feet are more functional than yours!”
“Shut up, brat.”
Twice more Tim restarts the van and attempts to accelerate and twice more he kills it. Glancing back over his shoulder, he sees one of the kidnappers stumble and go down, hard. Hot on his heels, his accomplice has no opportunity to change course and trips over his fallen companion.
“Drake.” The sharp snapping of Damian’s fingers jerks Tim’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Focus.”
“This fucking thing won’t—”
“Focus,” Damian grits out. Tim slams the clutch down and turns the key for what feels like the hundredth time. This time he manages to release it at just the right timing with the press of the accelerator and the car shoots forward with a whiplash-inducing jolt.
“CLUTCH!” Damian bellows, reaching over with his unbroken arm to shift them into second gear. “GAS!”
“Oh my god,” Tim breathes, the engine revving horrifically as the van struggles to pick up speed, “I’m doing it!”
“CLUTCH!”
While Damian barks out instructions, Tim works the pedals, shifting clumsily from third, to fourth, to fifth. The car shudders and shakes with a nauseating force, but Tim couldn’t care less. They’re finally moving.
That’s when the next challenge presents itself: entering the highway.
Tim has always struggled with merging into traffic, and recovering speed after the required downshift to turn onto the on-ramp only compounds the problem. Between attempting to time his entrance with the approaching traffic and Damian shouting out instructions, sweat is pouring down Tim’s back.
“Commit!” Damian orders over the click-click-click of Tim’s turn signal as he aborts his merge for the second time, another vehicle blowing past them. They’re rapidly approaching the end of the ramp. “You are a Wayne, dammit. Do not bow to these plebeians' wills. Claim your rightful place on the road and take it!”
“I can’t just—”
“MERGE!”
Three hours later, Damian and Tim are sitting in the waiting room of Gotham General, the twelve-year-old’s arm braced in a temporary cast while Bruce speaks to the doctor. It’s a nasty break; he’ll require surgery just as soon as they can schedule it.
Luckily the heir of the Demon Head was raised to be ambidextrous, as it’s with his left hand that Damian signs off on his brother’s final practice log.