Archive of Our Own ^beta

Nothing was different.  

Yeah.  

Definitely.  

Nothing was different, everything was exactly the same, and Tim could function exactly like a normal human person could. It was fine. Good. Great.  

Yeah.  

Okay. No. That was a lie. Tim was an absolute mess.  

He’d thought way too much about the not-date (that might have been a date?) and he couldn’t stop peeking over at Conner and Conner’s earrings (they were little gold hoops, this time) and he was practically vibrating inside his own skin with unasked questions (that he wasn’t going to ask in front of the Team, holy shit, no).  

Conner seemed fine. But Conner was… Conner. He was stoic and put-together and frustratingly unreadable. What did he think of the probably-not-a-date date (that might have been a date)?  

“Robin, are you listening?”  

Tim’s eyes shot up from the floor. Right. Briefing. He gave a slow nod.  

Dick – Nightwing – gave him a slow nod in return, but a slow nod paired with that little, knowing smile that Tim really hated. (Had Tim been caught looking at Conner?) But then Nightwing went back to giving the mission brief, so that was kind of a win. Sort of. Not really.  

Tim was going to have to suffer through one of those teasing “big brother” type talks, later, actually.  

Tim glanced over at Conner. Alarm bells and maydays went off in his head when he accidentally met Conner’s gaze. Tim definitely didn’t startle or anything, but vibrating bones ceased vibrating for a split second and he looked away too fast.  

Oh god, he was his own full-body tell. And he didn’t even know what he was a tell about.  

--  

He survived the brief.  

But.  

He’d lied. He hadn’t been listening. Too much of his brain CPU was being taken up by thoughts of Conner, which wasn’t normal at all, and the entirety of the brief had gone right over the tips of his gelled hair. So, sure, he survived the brief. But he wasn’t about to survive the mission without brushing up on what was supposed to be going on, first.  

And he wasn’t going to ask Nightwing. That would just expedite the big brotherly talk thing that Tim was intent on avoiding.  

He could ask Conner?  

No, that was a bad idea. Absolutely not.  

He’d just do the easy thing. Hack Mount Justice’s computers and look at the mission brief files. Definitely the easier, better option than talking to the reason his brain CPU was taken up. He didn’t even know why Conner was taking up so much of his brain.  

He didn’t particularly want to know.  

“Robin?”  

Tim jumped a little. He’d never done that, really.  

“You okay?”  

Tim swung around to look at Conner. He’d been so wrapped up in his own head that he’d been snuck up on. That was. Annoying. Also a bit concerning. Maybe he should beg off the mission, if he was that distracted? Could he manage that without tipping Nightwing off about what was going on? Dick was annoyingly perceptive, sometimes.  

“Uh,” Tim tried to put his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t wearing jeans, though, so the motion failed. “Yeah, fine.”  

“You seem a bit lost,” Conner shoved his own hands in his jeans pockets. Unlike Tim’s attempt, Conner’s was successful. “You sure you’re okay?” He didn’t say anything about the summer heat or Tim’s vacant stare, but there was a concerned quirk between his brows.  

“Yeah, fine,” Tim said.  

Conner nodded.  

Tim nodded.  

Conner stepped back, with another nod, and looked ready to leave Tim to it.  

“Fuck.” Tim sighed and ran a hand over his mask and down his face. “No, I’m. Look, I’m fine – I think? But I’m. Distracted.” Honesty was the best policy, right? And Conner was so easy to be honest with. It was like he didn’t judge, that judging didn’t even cross his mind.  

Conner nodded. Again. And stepped back into place. “Anything I can help with?”  

Yes, absolutely. “No,” Tim forced himself to say. It was a lot easier to let the contradicting answers roll out, though. “Maybe? I don’t know.”  

Conner snorted, glancing at the ground. “Okay. Uh,” he looked up. “You want, like.” He shrugged. “You want me to go over the brief with you…?”  

Tim was halfway to a ‘no,’ then he remembered that he missed the brief thanks to his inside-his-own-head vacation. He huffed out a breath. “You don’t have to.”  

“Like I mind. But,” he shrugged. “Up to you.”  

It wouldn’t be too hard to get into the Mount Justice computers, no. But it would be a lot quicker, and easier, to just… “I’d really appreciate that, actually,” he said. “But please, for the love of – for the love of Batman. Don’t tell Nightwing I wasn’t paying attention in the brief.”  

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Conner smiled.  

Tim felt weirdly warm and happy, right down in his gut. He caught himself smiling back, too. Weird.  

--  

The mission went by alright. Tim managed to stay focused long enough to hack into the systems mainframe at a sketchy LexCorp subsidiary building while the Team scouted allegations of (another) underground lab.  

Lab? Check.  

Sketchy experiments? Double check.  

Backup computer system not attached to the mainframe? An unfortunate triple check.  

So, yeah. They set off the alarms and everything, which was par for the Young Justice course, but everything else went relatively to plan, and none of the slips or mistakes were inherently Tim’s fault. Which meant he was still on the good side of his game, even if he was still distracted.  

They made it out as planned, too. Everyone got to the right rendezvous points, and everyone made it back to the bioship, as planned.  

It wasn’t necessarily distraction, he was realizing. It was a realization that hit him as M’gann was parking the bioship in the landing bay of Mount Justice.  

What he’d been thinking of as “distraction” was something a little more dangerous: obsession. He was obsessing, and obsessing tended to lead to bouts of anxiety and paranoia. (Sometimes it was the other way around and anxiety and paranoia lead to bouts of obsessing, but that’s just how his anxiety went, sometimes: same hallmarks, different orders.)  

If there was one thing Tim wasn’t, it was “good at operating while paranoid and anxious.” He was good at operating under stress and pressure, sure. But when there was an emotional (or chemical) imbalance in his brain, when he could feel anxiety attacks just over the horizon… yeah, he wasn’t that great. He could manage, but managing wasn’t the same as prime operational standards.  

(Was it normal to think of oneself in terms of machines…?)  

God, too many mental parentheses.  

“Nice job, Rob,” Nightwing said. He caught Tim as the rest of the Team filed into the belly of the Mountain. Most of them had an air of a job well done about them.  

Tim didn’t really feel that. Job well done feelings were only achieved when jobs were actually well-done, not half-done through a haze of being almost too distracted to do a job properly. Inadequate. Insufficient. He could do better.  

Tim made a face and avoided the high-five he was offered.  

Besides, e wasn’t ‘Rob,’ Nightwing was ‘Rob.’  

“Could have gone better,” Tim said. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, glanced back at the bioship, then turned to Nightwing fully. There was no escaping him, usually. But maybe, if this was one of the all too rare lucky days, he could get past Nightwing and into whatever Team social situation was going on. Nightwing didn’t do “personal” around anyone but the Original Six. And sometimes not even around them.  

Tim gave walking past his pseudo-brother a go.  

“Yeah, well. You’re working through a crush, you can’t expect perfection on every pass,” Nightwing said.  

Tim stopped walking. “Uh.” Eloquent.  

Nightwing raised his hands, smiling. “Sorry, too direct?”  

“I don’t—”  

“Yeah, too direct,” Nightwing laughed. “Look, don’t worry about it. You’ll be back on the ball in no time. And if you give communication and emotional honesty a go, unlike someone we both know, you could expedite the process. And maybe find a little corner of something happy. It’s a familiar arena, and I fucked it up last time I had a shot at the whole communicating-with-your-crush thing. Don’t do that, if you can help it.”  

“I’m not…” Tim’s voice tried to strangle him from inside his throat.  

“Not what?”  

“I don’t have a—no, I just.” Tim felt himself stuttering through his attempted denials. Then he let his eyes widen a little and his expression soften and slacken. “Wait, is that what… oh my god.” Tim looked at the ground. What if it wasn’t that he didn’t know if it was a date that was bothering him? What if it was that he wanted it to be? Oh, god, that was a whole new angle from which the could look at his recent flurry of emotions, and he wasn’t liking the picture it painted. “Ffff…”  

“T… Robin, you okay?”  

Oh, lovely, Dick sounded concerned. And almost slipped.  

Tim rubbed the back of his neck and wheezed out a bitter-tasting laugh. “Um.”  

“Okay…” Nightwing moved over to his side and threw an arm around his shoulders. “You didn’t get that far, did you? I figured you’d have figured it out, because it’s kind of obvious, how you look at him, you know? But if you didn’t, that’s okay, too. Teenager stuff is weird. And complicated.”  

Teenager stuff? Tim’s brain screeched to a halt. He wasn’t going to get The Talk from Dick Grayson. That was a thing that wasn’t going to happen. Oh god, what if he told B? Maybe it was better to get The Talk from Dick – at least Dick wouldn’t prepare a PowerPoint or something. His brain took a screaming left turn, away from the topic and to something else Dick had said.  

“I look at him how?” Tim looked up sharply. His voice sounded thin and high-pitched to his own ears. “Oh god.” Oh god.  

“Hey, it’s normal—”  

“Oh my god,” Tim shrugged Dick’s arm off. Ugh. No. Nightwing. He shrugged Nightwing’s arm off and—and oh god oh god oh god. His carefully crafted shell. His mask. His calm and cool exterior. It was cracking without his even noticing and other people were noticing and and  

“Hey, calm—” Nightwing slid in front of him, both hands up, trying to get Tim’s flighty attention.  

Tim’s flighty attention flitted past him.  

“Ohh boy. Oh my god.” And was that an anxiety attack? Great. Tim’s gaze dropped by inches and whatevers until it was fixed somewhere in the middle-distance and aimed at the ground.  

Dick (Nightwing) made an aborted motion toward reaching for Tim. But he really didn’t know how to deal with Tim’s… well. He didn’t really know how to deal with Tim. He barely knew how to deal with Jason, from what Tim had gathered. And Tim? Fuck. Tim was a cracked and broken vessel, layers of masks and pretend and sneaking out at night to take pictures of dangerous vigilantes and then becoming a masked vigilante. Hh. Internal screaming.  

At least, he hoped it was internal.  

And ah, yes. Thinking about Jason. That was a great way to alleviate anxiety. (It wasn’t.)  

Tim got the distinct sense that he’d been left alone, in the burgeoning throes of an anxiety attack that really should have waited another hour or two, so that Tim could have ridden it out in the comfort of his room. On the receiving platform, heading into the base? Yeah, much better place to ride out an anxiety attack. (That last bit was sarcasm.)  

“Robin?”  

Great. Great! That wasn’t Nightwing. Now someone else was going to bear witness to the unravelling of a usually stoic and put-together Robin. Well, a Robin that was very good at pretending to be stoic and put-together.  

Tim had his hands on his head, now, and was trying to think his way out of his sudden burst of anxiety. It wasn’t going well. He had the feeling that he lost his grip on time, and on the pattern of his heartbeat and breathing. He kind of had this sense of hot-cold and almost-pain in his chest, too, in an unpleasant knot that rolled around under his ribs like some manic little… hedgehog. Yeah. Hedgehog. Of hot-cold almost-pain.  

He didn’t even remember when he’d put his hands there. Was it supposed to hurt, when he curled his fingers through his hair like that?  

A strong hand was put over one of his own. “Hey,” soft, comforting. “Hey, let go, please?”  

Tim glanced up. At Conner.  

No, nope. No. That was worse. Fuck. Was he hyperventilating?  

Conner looked worried. Was that about Tim? “Sorry.” He slowly, so slowly, loosened the grip he had on his hair and dropped his hands, and Conner’s hand on top of his own. The release of his hair was more painful than his grip had been, as if sensation was rushing back where it had recently vacated.  

“What? No, you don’t have to—there’s no need to be sorry, Robin,” Conner put his hands on either of Tim’s shoulders. “Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help?”  

Tim shook his head mutely. In contrast, his eyes felt like they were begging behind his mask lenses. Conner wouldn’t be able to see that, though. And Tim couldn’t bring himself to do much more than shake his head. No, nothing, there was nothing he could do. Nothing.  

Conner gave a slow nod. “Okay. Then… how about we watch a movie or something? Wind down from the mission?”  

That sounded absurdly good. And helpful. And like Conner was trying his hardest to answer the begging in a pair of blue eyes he couldn’t even see. Tim sighed, long and unsteady. He nodded and brought a hand up to put on Conner’s wrist, almost as if he was going to push Conner’s grip away. He didn’t. He just rested his hand there, fingers curled lightly around Conner’s wrist.  

“Yeah? Yeah. Cool. Disney or something. We could… I don’t know. Frozen?”  

Tim snorted. Or choked. He couldn’t really tell.  

“Okay, not Frozen,” Conner cracked a smile. “Tangled? Blue Beetle’s little sister likes that, he said. And I think he likes it, too. He was gonna… like, with Bart? So yeah, that. And it’s Disney? Disney’s always good, right? Princesses and princes and enchanted forests and all that.”  

Tim nodded again. Yeah, okay. That sounded. Good.  

His anxiety couldn’t hold up to the onslaught of kindness and distraction that Conner was offering, either. His breathing and heartrate began to even. Oh. Oh! Breathing, heartrate. No wonder Conner knew he wasn’t okay. Superhearing.  

Tim suddenly felt. Melty.  

And he was still holding onto Conner’s wrist.  

Conner returned a smile that Tim hadn’t realized he was giving.