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Tim has never particularly considered himself much of an actor.
His mother had always told him he could be a little stiff— too stiff for a child, too relaxed for an adult. There’s a middle ground, Janet had told him, not entirely without sympathy (or what classed as sympathy for Janet), and to be quite honest, Timothy, you’re not all that good at acting.
And really— he isn’t. Subtle emotions don’t come terribly easy to him— the big ones do, like bouts of laughter that leave him hiccupping for breath, or huge, wailing sobs in the dark comfort of his room, or the kind of heart-pounding, eye-stinging tidal wave of anger that flushes blood into his cheeks and curls his fists. Big emotions are easy, almost too easy. It’s the smaller ones that slither through his fingers, like almost every single emotion Bruce Wayne seems to make.
Now, for example: Mr. Wayne looks over the t-shirt Tim’s picked out and offers it a sort of cursory glance, his eyes tightening at the corners.
“Hm,” he grunts, his sixth one of the evening, and Tim wants to take him by the shoulders that seem to span a football field, shake him, and go, “what does that MEAN?” On top of that, it’s one of those days where Tim’s skin just refuses to settle, where his head buzzes like a swarm of locusts in a restless frenzy. The world feels like a room in which all the furniture has been shifted a foot to the left, enough to put him on edge but not enough for him to raise his concerns to Mr. Wayne. The clothes, their lunch before they’d come shopping, the crowd.
He isn’t actually sure what he wants Mr. Wayne to do, anyway.
Well, actually, he’d really appreciate it if someone could shut off the store’s speaker system, because the rhythmic static burst crackling every nine seconds on the dot is driving Tim absolutely mad. He hasn’t been able to focus on what Mr. Wayne is saying between the “hm”s and the “take a look at this”s, if even he has been saying anything, because all he can think about is how many seconds have passed since the last static burst.
The speaker crackles again. Nine seconds, predictably. The tag against the back of his neck scrapes rough. Mr. Wayne says something again, which Tim does not register again.
The thing is, he thinks as he turns to rifle through some polo shirts aimlessly, Mr. Wayne has never known Timothy Drake as anyone other than Gala Timothy Drake, a person who is always put-together, always smiling, and always knows exactly what to say— even if he is a little stiff. For the period during which Bruce Wayne graciously agreed to watch Tim while his parents are on a two-week, no-electronics archaeological retreat in the Pyu Cities of Myanmar, Tim’s determined not to let the Gala Timothy Drake veneer slip while he’s with Mr. Wayne. He’s under strict instructions not to inconvenience the man in any capacity, potentially under the threat of death (if Janet’s expression had been anything to go by).
“Tim? Is everything alright?” Mr. Wayne asks. He extends a hand, and despite the way every one of Tim’s nerves twists itself into a knot and pulls at the touch, Tim lets it rest on his shoulder. He channels Gala Timothy Drake.
Through a smile and perhaps one too many teeth, Tim says, “I’m fine, I just…” Please take your hand off, he thinks, but not without guilt. Any other day— well, almost any other day —Tim would have been absolutely starstruck to be spending time with Batman in any capacity. A pat on the shoulder would have been like shaking a celebrity’s hand. He should have been enjoying his time at Wayne Manor, should have been figuring out as much as he could about the elusive vigilante and his partner, but he’s already overwhelmed after just two days around Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd.
“You just…?” Mr. Wayne trails off, arching one eyebrow like the hitch of a wing.
Skkrrrtch. The speaker crackles, and the count begins. The tag itches. Some of Tim’s hair was ruffled a little too much when he pulled the last shirt over his head, and he feels the tuft like a hot coal against his ear.
One, two —
“I just don’t think this tag— shirt,” he hastily corrects himself, “is really my color.”
Three, four —
“Maybe we can try a higher collar,” Mr. Wayne says absently, selecting three more off the rack. “Unfortunately, it does have to be yellow… And trust me, I’m not thrilled about it myself.” There’s a sort of formality to his words when he speaks, which Tim imagines is Gala Brucie Wayne peeking through. Maybe Tim should be a little wary that Bruce Wayne isn’t exactly being as open with his emotions as he could be, but actually … He’s a little relieved. Like he’s not the only one that’s acting, like they’re acting through this conversation together. Like they’re both keeping their cards close, somehow.
Five, six, seven, eight—
The issue of the yellow is the entire reason they’re shopping to begin with; Tim doesn’t own a single piece of clothing in the color, but he can’t exactly turn up to a Wear Yellow to Support Mental Health charity gala in anything but yellow. Actually, yellow has always been one of those colors he finds a little too bright, a little jarring— the only yellow he’s ever appreciated has been the dandelion-yellow of the Robins’ capes as they leapt uninhibited over rooftops and fire escapes. Jason had made an effort to donate a few of his shirts to Tim, but given the rate at which the second Robin was bulking up, they’d hung rather lamentably off of Tim’s frame.
Looking at the selection in Bruce’s arms, in various shades of lemon and Kraft cheese singles, Tim feels a little ill.
Nine.
“Right,” he says, pulling the collar back to keep the tag away from his nape. He wonders if he sounds as strained as he feels as the speaker crackles again. This one is particularly loud, particularly fire-ant-itchy, and goosebumps rise all along his arms and legs like hornets punching at his skin from underneath it. He thinks he feels the Gala Timothy Drake mask start to tear, revealing just Tim Drake underneath, and Tim Drake is about to burst right through the tattered remains and lose it, in a terribly undignified manner.
A stroller bumps into him as a lady walks by, and Tim seizes his tongue between his teeth. He thinks she apologizes, he thinks Bruce says something to him, but the words come through like they’ve been fried and dunked underwater. He registers exactly none of it, but he thinks he manages to make some sound of approval as Bruce holds the shirt up to Tim’s torso to see how it looks.
The speaker crackles. He’d let go of his collar when the lady had bumped into him, and the tag prickles. It’s too much. It’s so much. Tim doesn’t know if Bruce actually says anything, but he snatches the shirt out of his hands, thinks (hopes) he mutters something about going back to the dressing room, and closes himself into the stall with a harsh, heaving breath.
He yanks the shirt over his head (or claws it off, maybe), and pitches it into a corner of the dressing room before ducking down in one corner and cocooning his head between his arms and knees. It does little to drown out the everything around him— like the temperature of the store, hovering somewhere between being too warm for a long-sleeved shirt but too cold for a short-sleeved shirt, but the ask of a jacket had been so much to handle today on top of everything else—
He presses his hands against his ears until the blood doesn’t roar quite as loudly, until it’s more of a tide lapping at the shore of Tim’s brain. Even still, the crackle of the speaker shocks at his nerves, and he finds himself buried into a heap of discarded clothes like an ostrich trying to bury itself into the sand.
He can— He can go back out there, he can. He can find the Gala Timothy Drake mask, plaster it over the cracks, and go back out there. He can. He just. He just needs a— He just needs a minute—
He still has goosebumps. When the speaker crackles again, each one feels the size of an ostrich egg.
It wasn’t very Gala Timothy Drake of him to ditch Bruce back there, even if Bruce didn’t know he’d been ditched. Underneath the overwhelm, the blood pounding in his ears, the way his skin is just this side of too-tight around his bones and muscles, he still has enough wherewithal to regret having slipped up like that. It’s hardly been two days of his two week stay, and he has no doubt that Bruce is already having regrets—
There’s a bang on the door, and his brain rattles around like a pinball as he pools the clothes tighter around himself. A cocoon, a casket— one way or another, all the same to him at the moment.
Bang. Crackling speaker. Hair against his neck. Room temperature. Tim has something between his teeth and his instinct is to bite, so he does.
“Tim?”
Bang. Crackle. Hair. Temperature.
“What’s wrong, can you tell me what happened?”
Bang. Crackle. Hair. Temperature.
“Tim?”
Crackle. Crackle. Crackle.
“Too much,” Tim croaks around a mouthful of something, like he’s pulling teeth. He doesn’t want to speak (his voice is too loud, too sharp), but he doesn’t have a choice, because someone is banging on the door and he thinks they’re going to break in and find him vulnerable in a pile of clothes. It’s a horrifying thought no matter how Tim spins it. Gala Timothy Drake is long gone; it’s just Tim Drake and whatever hell this has to be—
“Tim,” the Voice outside says, a little tense. “If you could choose between having super sight or super hearing, which would you pick?”
The very thought of having even more sight or hearing than he currently does fills Tim with a sort of cold, sick dread. “I can’t,” he says, almost a plea. “The speaker is—” He wants to tell him, he wants to explain why it’s so difficult, but he can’t. The words stick like barbs into the inside of his throat and hold, refusing to come out.
This shouldn’t have happened. He was doing okay. He’d always managed to sneak under the radar, so why— why is everything falling apart? Why is he being asked questions when everything is falling apart?
“Okay, how about— hm.”
Tim realizes his nose is runny. He sniffles, flinching at the snapping, crackling pop of the speaker before lifting his head slightly in time to see Bruce’s phone slide underneath the door.
He tilts his head, surprised; the screen is full of pictures of different LEGO sets.
“Which one is your favorite?” Bruce asks mildly. He says something after that about Jason and picking books, but Tim’s having trouble focusing on both Bruce’s phone and his voice, so he just focuses on just looking at the LEGO sets. It doesn’t seem like Bruce expects him to say anything, and that’s confirmed when he adds, “You can tap on the one you like, you don’t have to say anything.”
Tim pulls his arm from his mouth, reaching a hand down to tap through the images. He doesn’t actually need to look through them to know which one he’s always been drawn to— the LEGO depiction of Rivendell, sitting at an astounding 6,167 pieces. He’d always found it to be one of the coolest sets he’s ever seen, beating out the 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon by a narrow margin. He wonders how Bruce knows that he enjoys LEGOs, but there are just some things Tim chalks up to Bruce just knowing by way of observation— tiny LEGO keychains on Tim’s backpack, LEGO-printed pajama pants Tim had worn the first night in the Manor, a conversation he’d had with Jason, entirely unaware that Bruce had tuned in. Things that he’s starting to realize a guardian might… care about, with little to no benefit to themselves.
He pushes the phone back underneath the door wordlessly, resting his head sideways against the scarf; guiltily, he realizes he’s almost certainly unraveled some of its threads, but it’s the closest thing to any sort of comfort that he can feasibly find in the dressing room. Bruce hums thoughtfully.
“That’s a good choice,” he says. “Did looking through them make you feel better?”
It’s still a little hard to verbalize; Tim tries regardless, because he realizes he actually does feel a little more grounded. “The speaker,” he starts, and then stops. “Everything’s— wrong. The air, and the… clothes, and. The food, the squash… it’s the texture.” He exhales shakily, threading his fingers through the loops in the scarves. “Too squishy.”
“The squash?” Bruce echoes, surprised. “You mean— lunch?”
“Everything,” Tim croaks.
The speaker crackles, as if to punctuate his point. Bruce is quiet for a long moment outside the door, and Tim’s worried his declaration may have scared the man off. Maybe he’s just going to walk out of here, and leave Not Gala Tim behind. Maybe, maybe—
There’s a soft whump of a sound, as if Bruce just sat down on the other side of the door, right onto the laminate floor of the dressing room hallway. When he speaks, Tim’s theory is pretty much confirmed— Bruce is sitting down on the other side of the door.
“I don’t like steamed cauliflower,” Bruce tells him, off-handed. Tim grips the scarf tighter; he understands what Bruce is doing, he just isn’t sure why he’s doing it. It would be much easier to just leave him to his tantrum— words he’s heard muffled from outside the door of his room, from the backseat of the car, from the corner of the hall where Brady Watkins had had his seventh birthday party with the 37 balloons that he and his friends had all popped simultaneously—
But Bruce keeps going. “He used to give me soggy steamed cauliflower sometimes, when I was growing up. I never told him I didn’t like them, really… I was always taught to clear my plate. And then—” He pauses. “And then once, he asked me why I always saved it for last. Why I scarfed it down without chewing. It all just came out, then, the truth— I didn’t like them. The texture is horrifying. It feels like expanding foam in my throat, choking me. I still shudder to think about it. And… I thought he would think I was dramatic.”
He stops for a longer moment, this time. Tim tilts his head so he’s leaning against the door.
“What happened?” he asks, uncertain if he’s allowed to ask. He feels as if he’s learned more about Bruce Wayne in the last few minutes than he’d learned for the entire time he’d known him prior.
Bruce makes a sound as if Tim had just stopped his train of thought at the station. “Never had it again.”
Tim’s brow furrows, and he plucks lightly at the stitches of the scarf. “Really?”
Bruce grunts affirmatively— or what Tim thinks is affirmatively, considering he still has a little trouble interpreting Bruce’s brand of language. “Really,” he says after a moment, huffing out a small laugh. “He never made me eat steamed cauliflower again. And…” Bruce’s weight shifts noisily against the door. He’s a broad figure, after all— Tim can’t imagine it must feel comfortable to be folded up into a pretzel on the floor of the hallway. “... It never occurred to me to ask him not to give it to me. Because being polite means finishing what’s on your plate. Or…” His voice lowers slightly, and Tim holds his breath. “...Dealing with yellow, or annoying speakers, just because you want to maintain decorum.”
As if on cue, the speaker scratches noisily. It’s still a sound that makes Tim’s teeth hurt, but he braves the discomfort a little better this time— now that his ears aren’t ringing anymore, at least. He pulls his original shirt back on, one that he’d cut the tag out of, and the smooth fabric of the collar moors him back to the earth.
“It’s not Gala Timothy Drake appropriate,” Tim says abruptly, and he’s tired. His face stings and his cheeks feel swollen and itchy and his eyes hurt and all he wants to do is go back home, to his room, and finish the three hour documentary about Japanese spider crabs he’d been watching.
“Gala…” Bruce starts to say, and then seems to come to a realization. “Hm.”
“It was going okay,” Tim says, because he feels like he needs to defend himself, defend what happened. He’s always had to, after all. “Everything just felt … A little wrong today. I don’t— I don’t know why.” He trails off, still sensitive, still uncertain, still raw.
And then Bruce says, “You’re not at a gala, Tim. You don’t have to be Gala Timothy Drake. You can just be Tim.” He hesitates, and then says, “You don’t even have to be Gala Timothy Drake at a gala.”
And.
And—
And it feels obvious, and silly. But maybe, Tim thinks, he’d been waiting for that— for permission, to not have to— be.
“Okay,” he says with little other elaboration, because he needs some time to process what he’s just been given.
“I’ll be right back in just a minute,” Bruce says, and Tim hears him standing up. “If you want to stay inside, you can, but if you come out, don’t wander too far.”
Tim cracks the door open a few moments later when he hears Bruce’s footsteps approach again, and he’s surprised to see him holding a plastic bag and a receipt. When Tim opens the bag, he sees noise-canceling headphones, and his face starts to prickle anew.
“Go on, put them on,” Bruce says, low and encouraging. “Might help you out at home, too, if Jason’s being a little too noisy.” Tim thinks this might be a joke, or sarcasm, because Bruce is offering him a little smile when Tim looks up at him. Jason can be noisy, but it’s not actually a noisiness that Tim terribly minds, all that much. Sometimes, it’s nice to watch Jason take up space in the Manor, with his energy and his voice and his passion. It isn’t something Tim’s particularly used to in his own home.
He can still hear Bruce’s muffled voice after he pulls them over his head, but the crackle of the speaker is blissfully tolerable under the padding. It’s like Tim’s under a heavy, warm blanket, listening to Bruce speak in the corner of his periphery, experiencing the world through a lull. Bruce remains unobtrusive; he keeps space between them as they head back to the car.
It’s… considerate. And Tim hadn’t thought Bruce Wayne— Batman, really —wouldn’t be considerate, but he also figured he had enough on his plate to be worrying about Tim’s issues, as well. The surprise isn’t unpleasant, though, and Tim even finds himself overcome with something even more than that— something he doesn’t have words for —when Bruce opens the door to the backseat and offers him something enormous and fluffy and blue.
“It’s Dick’s, actually,” Bruce says, hovering for a moment as he runs a hand along the edge of the weighted blanket. Tim presses his cheek against the soft fabric, imagines the first Robin cocooning himself into it, and feels some of his anxiety ebb away. “Jason’s also used it before… and I’ve used it too, actually.” Bruce rests his hand against the doorway and tilts one shoulder upward. “It’s a good way to just… wind down.”
Tim’s already meticulously folded himself into it, content to vanish into the downy depths and revel in wrapping himself into the same comfort item used by Batman and the Robins. Between the headphones and the blanket and the low, familiar, consistent hum of the car, his senses stop firing off disquieted alarms. He barely notices when Bruce closes the door, barely notices when the car even starts moving.
It’s not very Gala Timothy Drake to be cocooned into a weighted blanket in the back of Bruce Wayne’s car.
But, he thinks as he leans his head up against the window, being just Tim Drake feels like it makes enough sense in the world right now.
(And it feels even better when he walks into his room two days later to see Jason with a brand-new, 6,167-piece Rivendell set and a bright, feral, ear-to-ear grin.)