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Dick hadn’t gone much more than half a block before the comm in his ear was buzzing. With a sigh, he slid to a halt and tapped to answer the call. “Tim,” he started, because Tim was annoyingly stubborn on the subject of Bruce, but he usually could take a hint better than this, “sometimes you just have to let Bruce be, all right? You don’t need to run around trying to –”
“It’s not about Bruce!” Tim blurted out. “Uh. I mean. That is. I have to tell you something."
"Tim," Dick said cautiously, but Tim was already barreling forward.
"Or, I mean, I guess I don’t have to tell you, but I thought it was – I wanted to – and I guess maybe I should have led with it but I thought the Bruce stuff was more important -”
“…Tim.”
“ – although actually, now that I think about it it’s not really, I mean it’s not urgent or anything and if you’re busy we can talk about it later or, you know, neveratallactually or –”
“TIM.”
The rambling ground to a halt. (That had probably been too loud to shout your brother’s real legal name on a Blüdhaven rooftop, whoops. Hopefully no one had heard.) After a moment, there was a cautious, “… yeah?”
“You know I always have time for you.” It was very Tim to classify Bruce brooding a little more insistently than usual as ‘very urgent, must come all the way to Blüdhaven to bother my brother about’ and anything relating to his personal life – even something that was clearly eating him up inside – as 'not urgent at all.’ Dick, however, had his own set of priorities. “Let’s talk. Are you still on that corner?”
They made a quick stop back at the apartment to shower and change – Dick let Tim go first, then sent him ahead to grab a booth at the diner around the corner, because it was getting to be dinnertime, and feeding the kid had become an ingrained habit at this point. Which conveniently gave him a shower’s-length worth of time to speculate about what Tim was trying to work himself up to tell him.
He had run through all the obvious clichés – Tim was having a baby? No, he’d broken up with Steph, hadn’t he? Was he going to college? Was he definitely not going to college? Had he discovered a secret relative? – and was mulling the possibility that this had all been a very convoluted way of working them back around to the Fix Bruce Project (Dick was going to be seriously annoyed, if so), as he rounded the corner to the diner.
Tim had staked out a booth near the back of the restaurant, and was furtively sipping at a milkshake – which, prior to meeting Tim, Dick had not known that was a thing you could do furtively, but Tim managed. He was hunched over, as if trying to make himself smaller, and he’d apparently refrained from ordering them anything stupider than two milkshakes, so Dick mentally upgraded his Mysterious Personal Crisis Index up one or two notches.
“Little brother,” he said casually, sliding into the booth across from Tim, and Tim actually flinched. Barely, and he hid it well – Dick doubted that anyone who wasn’t a Bat, or who wasn’t watching Tim closely, would have noticed – but to Dick it was clear as day.
Maybe giving Tim any more time to get worked up about this had been a mistake.
“Hey.” He caught Tim’s eye. Tone light, posture open and nonthreatening. Wait for him to look at you before continuing. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”
It had the intended effect, sort of – Tim turtled further, but less like he was expecting the third degree and more like he’d noticed what Dick was doing and was embarrassed at being read that easily. One arm dropped from the table into his lap. “I know,” he said, with a quiet assurance, and then brought his hand up to scratch his head. “Um. I know – this isn’t really that big a deal. I know I’m making it seem really dramatic! I just, uh.”
It clearly was a big deal, no matter what Tim said – but at the same time, it was something that Tim could plausibly convince himself “wasn’t that big a deal.” And it was something that made him feel, unconsciously, uncertain about his place in the family.
Theory one -- look, Dick couldn't just turn it off, okay? -- Tim was quitting vigilantism. (It would put his fussing over Bruce in a new light.) Dick would miss seeing him around, but he’d be happy for Tim, if that was really what he wanted to do – but he thought, on the whole, that recent evidence trended against it. Theory two –
“So I'm dating this guy,” Tim said, all in a rush.
Ah. Yeah. That, more or less.
He was absolutely not going to mention that he and Babs had had a betting pool on this exact topic for a while, but Tim seemed to read it in his face -- or read something in his face anyway, because before Dick could so much as open his mouth to say something supportive he was shifting uncomfortably and continuing, "Like I said, I know it's not that big a deal, it just -- seemed like the kind of thing you tell people, I guess. So I told you! Um."
"Tim," Dick started.
"Sorry for dragging you all the way out here just to say that."
"Tim."
Tim was fiddling with the menu again. "Do you want a cheeseburger?" he said, with a just-this-side-of-manic brightness. "I'm starving."
Dick resisted the urge to rub his temples.
("You know it's okay if it is a big deal, right? It doesn't have to be. But it's okay if it is."
" . . . so, these milkshakes are really good, huh? I wonder what they put in them."
"Tim."
" . . . yeah, I know. Thanks, Dick.")