Chapter Text
"Alright, asshole," says Jason and plunks a folder down directly on the keyboard of Tim's laptop. "I'm calling in that IOU."
Tim doesn't startle, not visibly. But all at once there's a batarang in his hand, the blade gleaming sharp. It takes him a second to register who the intruder actually is before he gives Jason a lingering, suspicious sidelong glance and tucks it away again.
"What IOU?" says Tim. "And how'd you get in here?"
He looks like shit, frankly. There are dark smudges under his eyes, and he's lost weight since Jason's seen him last. From the coffee cups scattered around the desk, it's probably even odds that he's on at least 24 hours without sleep.
"I work in mysterious ways," declares Jason. "By which I mean your window's open. You get kind of careless when you haven't slept, Timbo."
"I do not," says Tim, offended. He twists around in his fancy computer chair, to turn back toward the window. And then, just to prove how long it must have been since he last saw a pillow: "Was it really?"
"Hah," says Jason. "Nope." He fishes in his pocket for a set of keys, twirling them around one finger. "Lifted your keys off Dickiebird."
Tim fixes him with a scowl that would've done Damian proud and makes a grab for them. Schoolyard-bully style, Jason holds them up above his head. "Nuh-uh," he says. "IOU."
"You never said what IOU," Tim grouses. He helps himself to a coffee cup — scowls at it like it's personally wronged him when he finds it empty. He switches to another, and then another, and finally gives up, decidedly deflated.
"From you crashing at my safehouse on Fourth Avenue last month." Jason fixes him with a sharklike grin. "You're welcome, by the way."
Tim goes still for a second, a momentary hitch of a pause. "I restocked your ramen," he says, and there's something a little cagey in the tone. Jason wonders, idly, if he wasn't supposed to have known Tim came by at all.
"Yeah," says Jason. "And?"
"And replaced the bandages."
"Truly a top tier house guest," says Jason. He flicks a finger toward the documents he dumped on the keyboard. "Now read the fucking file."
Tim sighs the sigh of the long-suffering, and he swivels back around in his chair to open the folder. Jason plops down on the corner of the bed while he does it, easing off the mask and ruffling a hand through his hair to save it from the world's worst case of hat-head.
After maybe five minutes, Tim says: "You're thinking it's orchestrated?"
"Has to be," says Jason. "It's only hitting a bunch of rich bitches."
Tim hums, noncommittal, and shuffles through more paper. A few pages later: "You're sure it's not viral?"
"Or bacterial," says Jason. "They tested them post-mortem." He flops back on the bed, to stretch his back out. It's been a long night. "Nice comforter. What is this, eight thousand thread count?"
Tim ignores him. "Only five victims so far?"
"That match the symptoms," says Jason. "Could be more, if it's not a one-to-one match." Then, because he's an asshole like that, he says: "You're no fun when you're sleep-deprived, anyone ever tell you that?"
There's a rustle of paper from somewhere over by the desk, presumably as Tim pages back to double-check something. He snorts, dismissive, and a single hand appears above the back of the chair in a middle-fingered salute.
Jason huffs a laugh.
The hand disappears again, and Tim makes a considering sort of noise. "Do you have any reason to believe the victims have been consuming human flesh?"
Jason sputters and shoves himself right back up off the bed. "Been what?"
"Consuming human flesh," says Tim, deliberately. He swivels the chair again so that he can meet Jason's eyes over the top of the folder.
"What the fuck kind of zombie nightmare scenario —" Jason starts to say, but Tim talks right over him.
"Because it looks like the symptoms of a prion disease," says Tim. "The victims aren't genetically related, so that rules out the hereditary angle. We're probably looking at ingested human brain matter, similar to the confirmed cause of kuru disease or the suspected cause of some cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob."
Jason stares at him for a long, long moment. "You have some very weird, very niche special interests. You know that?"
The corner of Tim's mouth quirks upward. "They come in handy, in this city." He tips the folder closed and tosses it back over to Jason. "Start with grocery stores," he says. "Or restaurants."
"Upscale ones, considering the victims," says Jason, thoughtful.
"Mm-hm," Tim agrees. He lifts the final coffee cup, the only one that he hadn't checked before, hopefully. It, too, is empty.
"Why don't you actually go to sleep," says Jason, with a snort.
"Can't," says Tim. "Busy."
He swivels his chair back around to face his laptop, and Jason says, "Well, you better be awake in time for dinner tomorrow."
"What's dinner tomorrow?" says Tim, already leaning forward over his keyboard like a gargoyle to start typing.
"Mr. Drake-Wayne's going to be ordering takeout from about seventeen fine dining restaurants," says Jason.
Tim snorts. "Awful expensive IOU."
"It was awful expensive ramen," says Jason. "Did it up right, with the dollar-a-pack kind."
"Fancy," Tim deadpans. He spins in the chair again, probably just so Jason can see when he does that thing with his eyebrows, the one that crams a whole volume's worth of subtext into a single expression. He must have learned it from Alfred; Jason's never met another person who can quite pull it off.
"I'll come by the Nest," says Jason "You've got most of the biochem scan equipment Bruce does, right?"
"I've got more," says Tim, with a flippant wave of his hand.
Jason's already heading back toward the window, file tucked under his arm. "Remember to actually go to bed at some point," he says. "If you pass out on me tomorrow, that IOU's rolling over."
"Oh, now you're just milking it," Tim calls after him.
"Damn straight I am," Jason declares, and he ducks back out the window.
A new day; a new desk.
Three more cups of coffee stand scattered around Tim like the debris after a grenade goes off.
He sips from a fourth, cradling it in one palm, and doesn't look up from his screen as Jason lets himself into the frankly cavernous metal monstrosity of walkways that counts as the business end of Tim's base of operations.
"Oh, good," says Tim. "You're right on time."
Jason snorts. "I never gave you a time."
Tim does that thing with his eyebrows again, and the doorbell rings from somewhere up on ground level, where the remains of the Monarch Theatre are busily pretending to be a fancy high-end renovated apartment for a CEO with more money than God.
"Doordash," says Tim, and sips from his coffee again.
So Jason trudges back up the stairs — pulls his mask off so he can accept an entirely-too-fancy insulated takeout bag from an entirely-too-fancy steak house in Gotham Heights. He thanks the guy for hauling it all the way out here and starts the trek back down the stairs.
He's halfway there when the doorbell rings again, and Jason sighs, heartfelt and put-upon, and turns back around to go get it. Then he just throws himself onto a couch and waits.
It's a really shitty couch, Jason reflects. Sure it probably costs more than most people make in a month, but it's that specific kind of rich-people shitty, where you can just tell it's made to go in a magazine's pages instead of actually get used. Jason wonders, idly, whether Tim's ever actually sat on it. Surely he'd have swapped it out by now if he knew exactly how tragic it really is.
Then he stops wondering because the next Doordash driver is there, and then the next, and then the next, trickling in one after another, all seventeen of them. At one point, ten minutes in, three of them arrive at once, and the drivers stand there in the doorway like very confused members of rival gangs, just staring.
"Having a party," Jason tells them. "Nobody could agree on what they wanted."
That seems to do the trick, and off they go, leaving their obscenely expensive takeout behind them.
When Jason has seventeen bags, he steals a laundry basket from the hall linen closet — his arms are big, but not carry-seventeen-bags-down-three-flights-of-stairs big — and dumps the takeout bags in to walk the whole thing down.
Tim doesn't look up from his screen when Jason reappears.
"Biochem stuff's over there," he says, and waves a hand. At some point, from somewhere, he's obtained another cup of coffee, though Jason will be damned if he ever set foot into the kitchen.
"What, you're not even a little curious?" says Jason. "Your couch is ass, by the way."
"What's wrong with my couch?" says Tim, and spins around in the chair.
Jason crosses over to the biochem scanner and toggles it on, starting to unpack the first of the takeout meals. "It feels like they sculpted a torture device out of the world's hardest plastic exclusively to look aesthetic on some home-décor show. Have you ever actually used that thing?"
Tim blinks at him, the dark smudges beneath his eyes making him look vaguely raccoon-like.
"Of course you fucking haven't," Jason sighs. "That would mean you having to exist anywhere but in front of your computer."
Jason puts a sliver of steak, a tiny dollop of mashed potato, and half a floret of artfully charred, parmesan-crusted broccolini on the scanner platform.
Tim watches him do it, expression thoughtful — or at least, as thoughtful as someone can look half buried in sleep dep. Actually, he's just sort of staring like a zombie.
"You didn't actually sleep, huh," says Jason.
"Can't," says Tim. "Busy."
"Oh yeah?" says Jason, and slides the platform back into place. "What's the big to-do?"
Tim hesitates a beat; he's protective over his cases, like the private little gremlin he is. But he must be in a sharing mood, because he says, "Couple of escape rooms opened up down south. I suspect Riddler's involvement, but I can't prove anything yet."
Well, that explains it. Give the kid a puzzle, any kind of puzzle, and he won't stop worrying at it till it comes apart. Riddler's practically catnip for him.
"You been to check them out yet?" says Jason. Behind him, the biochem scanner beeps. He scrolls the readouts, idly.
"Still doing my homework," says Tim. He sips at his coffee — tilts his head toward the panel. "Anything?"
"Since when are we lucky enough to get a hit on the first try?" He rotates out the scanner and clears off the residue — wipes it down again, this time with an anti-microbial wipe. It's sort of nice that Tim's got everything set up the way it is in the Batcave. He doesn't have to ask where anything is.
"Stranger things have happened," says Tim, with an offhanded shrug. "You standing here using my equipment, for one."
"Hah," says Jason. "What can I say? Maybe I'd rather hang out with a caffeine-fueled cryptid than get into it with B again."
"Low bar," says Tim, completely inflectionless, and something about the tone makes Jason look up from carefully placing tiny bits of sushi on the platform. But Tim's expression is completely inflectionless, too, because this asshole's learned way too much from Bruce.
Once he sees the similarity, he can't unsee it, and for some reason it pisses him off. All at once, he hates how much this place is like the Batcave — hates how much of their adoptive father he sees in the boy crouched in front of the laptop.
Something buzzes in his ears; something acid green curls its tendrils through his chest.
"What?" snaps Jason. "Sometimes I want a night where I don't have to fucking fight while I'm doing busywork, okay?"
He adds a bit of seaweed and cucumber, and he slaps the scanner platform back into place a bit too hard. It beeps as it starts reading.
Tim regards him with those tired eyes for maybe a couple of beats too long. Then he says, "So don't pick a fight while you're doing busywork," and swivels back around in his chair.
Jason's midway through opening his mouth to ask what the fuck that's supposed to mean, why Tim's assuming it's always Jason's fault in the first place, when it strikes him that maybe he's not talking about Bruce.
He pauses, words caught on his tongue — takes a long breath in, and lets it out slow. He counts the seconds as they pass, and the venom-pulse of green subsides, slowly, by degrees.
At length, Jason digs the sushi bits back out of the scanner and checks over the results.
"Steak, or sushi?" he says, gruffly.
"What?" says Tim.
"They're clear. So steak, or sushi?" He picks up both to-go boxes and crosses over to Tim's desk, setting them down next to the keyboard.
"Really?" says Tim. "On the cannibalism case?"
Jason rolls his eyes. "I said they were clear. Pick your fucking dinner already, or are you going to tell me you've had anything but coffee today?"
Tim opens his mouth, like he plans to argue. Pauses. Closes it.
"That's what I thought," says Jason, triumphant.
Tim scowls at him, but he does help himself to the sushi, so honestly, it's a win. Jason presses a pair of chopsticks into his hand and takes the steak for himself, plucking it up with two fingers like he's playing the world's messiest claw machine.
"They didn't send utensils?" says Tim, expression morphing into wry fascination.
"Like a plastic knife's gonna do fuck-all," says Jason, and dangles the meat into his mouth like feeding time at the zoo, taking a bite off one end. He chews, thoughtful. It's a damn good steak. "Not like you've got a table down here to cut it on, anyway."
"I've got a desk," says Tim. "I can share." He breaks apart the chopsticks and helps himself to the closest nigiri.
"Yeah, sure," Jason snorts. "A desk and exactly one chair."
Tim shrugs with just one shoulder, the gesture a little awkward. "Never really needed more than that."
Something about the statement — or maybe the way Tim says it, dry and off-handed, like he expects Jason to be in on some joke — rings a little odd.
He's never needed a second chair? Surely Bruce comes by to stick his nose where it's not welcome sometimes, or Dick appears after patrol to pester him into a late-night Batburger run.
Maybe that's supposed to be the joke — that having another chair would invite them to overstay their welcome. Jason gets that. Bruce looming over your shoulder while you work is the best way he knows to ruin a night.
Before he can think of a reply one way or another, though, Tim's popping the fish into his mouth. He does it a little too fast, like maybe he wants an excuse to stop talking.
Or maybe, Jason reflects, as he works his way through the steak and mashed potatoes, it's just that the kid's stomach is remembering that bodies need calories every now and then. Tim goes through the food with the intense focus he usually reserves for case work; he's done with the whole plate, cucumber salad and all, by the time Jason's halfway through his.
Jason whistles, impressed. "Damn, Timmers. I'd ask when the last time you ate was, but I'm kind of afraid to know."
Tim rolls his eyes and chases down his sushi with a swig of coffee, like the heathen that he is. "Tell me when you get through with scanning the Mediterranean place," he says. "There's baklava for dessert."
If that's not good incentive to scan the Mediterranean place next, Jason doesn't know what is. He finishes off the rest of his dinner, snags one of those wipes for his hands, and then gets back to it.
Five minutes later, he plops a little plastic tray of baklava down by Tim's coffee cup. "All clear," he says, and steals a triangle of the confection for himself.
The rest he leaves for Tim, and he's gratified, over the course of the next few scans, to see the kid working his way through it, one sticky piece at a time. When he hits the end and gropes for another, brows furrowing with confusion when he fails to find what he's looking for, Jason laughs as he scrolls through the latest results.
"Go to sleep already," says Jason. "You've officially been up too long if you can't solve the case of the missing baklava."
Tim wrinkles his nose and licks the syrup off his fingers. "You just want that IOU rollover."
"Hell yeah, I do," says Jason, unrepentant.
Tim fixes him with a look, that same furrow between his brows — like Jason, too, is a mysteriously absent piece of confection.
Jason rolls his eyes. "Have it your way," he declares, and turns to wipe down the scanner again.
When he glances back, less than two minutes later, he finds that Tim's shoved the empty baklava tray to the corner of the desk, and that's honestly probably a good thing. Because he's slumped forward onto the keyboard, and the too-long crow's nest of his hair would absolutely be in the syrup, if he hadn't.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," says Jason. "I meant in a bed."
Tim doesn't answer — doesn't even twitch — and Jason thinks of throwing a jacket over his back and calling it a day. Then he thinks about making the bed thing a reality, and, what the hell. The kid just dropped a couple of grand on research for Jason's case, easy, and he's absolutely getting dragged into the stakeout for that IOU rollover.
If the chronically sleep-deprived little gremlin's going to be double-fisting cases like he does coffee mugs, he should at least get some shut-eye lying out flat for a change.
Tim doesn't so much as stir when Jason scoops him up, and that probably ought to be worrying, for someone so paranoidly hypervigilant. His head just kind of lolls against Jason's shoulder, and there's a part of Jason, buried way down deep, that stirs to life and reminds him that the very first time he ever saw Tim this vulnerable, it was because he was unconscious and bleeding on the floor of Titans Tower.
He thinks of it for an instant: that too-pale face, the hideous angle of broken bone, the slick red of blood on tile floor.
It's been a long couple of years since then; that churning, noxious green coiled through his heart rarely mutters in his ear anymore about how this boy replaced him.
It's been a long couple of years, and at some point — at some point, when Jason wasn't paying attention — he's managed to claw his way back to a spot where Tim feels safe enough to invite him into his hideout. Safe enough to turn his back on. Safe enough to fall asleep beside.
"You're a fucking idiot, you know that?" Jason tells him, gruffly. "Dumbest goddamn genius I ever met."
But his hands, he finds, are very gentle when he settles Tim into bed.