Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tim tries, tired and a bit hazy, not to feel too jilted by you leaving right now. He can hear you in the kitchen, opening cupboard doors gently and flicking on the stove, something like a plate or a mug clinking as you put it on the counter.

He shifts to crane his head from where he's lying on the couch as if he'll be able to see you through the doorway, but the movement pulls at one of his bandages, and he winces instead. 

"You're supposed to be resting in there," you shout from the kitchen, and he sort of wonders if you can see through walls. "Will you relax for just a minute, please?"

Tim exhales deeply, his fingers fidgeting with a bandage that's stretched across his abdomen. Everything aches, he finds. Something about the bruises and the cuts and how they'd mixed with the frigid, wet winter of Gotham has everything throbbing in a way that it doesn't normally.

As he lets his head loll to the side so that his cheek presses against the pillow, the lights on your shared Christmas tree twinkle in bright little specs that make him dizzy.

Or maybe that's the concussion, he thinks wryly. What a way to spend Christmas.

"Can you make a noise or something?" you call from the kitchen. "I don't like it when you don't answer me, it makes me think you're dying or something."

"I can't be dying," he calls back, admittedly a bit more winded and wavering than his voice usually carries. "You did too well."

"Well, as fond as I am of flattery, you know anything could happen, still," you point out as you make your way back into the living room.

You really don't mean to do it, he thinks - you don't say it to crack open his chest and build a home for guilt there, but he can't really help it, and neither can you. He remembers it sort of reluctantly, the nights that you'd sleep pressed up against him, your hand on a bandage as if your touch could make him whole.

He still thinks, every now and then, when something awful creeps in, about the night he'd woken up to you sleeping on his chest, your ear against his heart and your fingers pressed against his inner wrist.

I just couldn't sleep, you'd said. I wanted to make sure you weren't…

"Hey," you tap his forehead ever so gently as you sit down on the coffee table in front of him. "How's your head?"

"What's that?" he asks in lieu of answering, eyeing the mug in your hands. It's hot chocolate, he thinks vaguely, with whipped cream piled high, cinnamon sprinkled on it, and a candy cane delicately leaning on the edge of the mug.

"Can you sit up?" you ask - and it's not much of an answer, he thinks, but his body seems to move anyway. He wonders, as he shifts slowly and your hand hovers nearby to help him, when he started acting like this - when he started leaning into whatever you ask of him.

"It's for you," you say once he's settled with his back against the armrest, legs stretched out across the cushions. You take one of his hands in yours to wrap it around the handle of the mug, then meticulously take his other hand to press it against the warm side of the ceramic.

"I'm not dying," he reminds you, thrown a bit off kilter by it all - by the kindness and the tenderness. 

"I really don't want you to drop it," you respond sort of sheepishly, and he levels you with a look over the whipped cream.

"Seriously?" he quips. "I'm steady, baby, really."

"You tripped on your way in here," you point out. "Drink it while it's hot."

"I was bleeding out," he retorts as he brings the mug up to his lips obediently.

"Yes," you agree wryly. "Very recently. Doesn't give me a lot of faith."

Tim's sort of quiet at that, then, letting the heat of the mug seep into his palm as he watches the whipped cream melt and pool into the hot chocolate. He's not sure what to say, very often, when this comes up - when he stumbles in from the balcony, bleeding and battered. 

He's not sure how to assure you that the inevitable won't happen. He's not sure how to assure himself.

"Where's yours?" he asks instead.

"Hm?"

"Did you only make one for me?" he clarifies, tapping the edge of the mug.

"Oh," you straighten where you're still sitting perched on the coffee table. "Yea. I might have one later."

"You feeling ok?" he asks gently, his eyes flickering over your face as he does his best to focus, to zero in on you.

"Are you?" you throw back at him, and he exhales sharply, sipping again.

"I don't want to drink alone," he says softly, and you melt a little bit, reaching to brush some of his hair out of his eyes.

"You're not really drinking. And you're not really alone," you point out, but he doesn't budge. He stares at you, still, until you roll your eyes and pluck the candy cane from his mug, and then he watches as you scoop some whipped cream up with it and put it in your mouth.

"I didn't think you really…" Tim drifts off, and his eyes track your movements as you twirl the candy cane through the whipped cream again, stealing more of it for yourself. "Did things like this."

"I know how to heat up milk on a stove," you say pointedly, and the laugh he answers with tugs on his injuries with a twinge and a flinch. 

"I meant… Christmas. Candy canes and cinnamon sprinkles," he says gently as he stares down at the whipped cream.

"Yea," you acknowledge, abandoning the candy cane in his mug and watching as it slips down further into the hot chocolate. "I probably wouldn't do it for myself."

"Then why for me?" he asks, and your brows lift.

"Do you not like it?"

"No, I do," Tim insists, curling the mug a bit closer to his chest like you might try to take it away from him. But you just smile, a self-assured sort of thing that he thinks, dazed and wavering from his concussion, looks very at home on you.

"It's Christmas," you say pointedly.

"Not yet," he retorts gently.

"It's Christmas time," you correct yourself long sufferingly.

"I don't think vigilantes really get Christmas off, baby," he murmurs, and as he leans his head back a bit, the lights from the tree reflect in his eyes and shimmer in a thousand different colours. The snow outside drifts against the windows and sends streaks of shadows and light in, painting him in the silhouette of the holiday.

"No, they don't," you acknowledge easily. "But they can still have this, can't they?"

"Maybe," he murmurs, because it's supposed to feel wrong, he thinks - it's supposed to feel like it doesn't belong to him. But the mug is warm in his hands, and the pillows that you've stacked up for him smell like pine and winter, and he finds that he can't really find any reason to deny himself something so kind.

"It's still Christmas," you murmur, smiling at him like you think he deserves it all. "Even for you."

And Tim thinks, as he closes his eyes and feels you gently pry the mug from his fingers to set it safely on the coffee table next to you, that he might not mind Christmas so much after all. He thinks that he might not mind this life of his at all.