#also i can't believe i have TWO mint doubles. i love them

[shiftingexpanse]

I'm super duper mega dragon broke now, but check out all the projects I just finished!

Plus I dressed Reverie, still would like to make an accent for him someday:

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

A continuation.

When Stephanie Brown was fourteen, dressed in green tights and red body armor, she was on a short solo patrol when she caught sight of movement in her periphery. She caught sight of it again a block later and knew, in her bones, that she was being followed. Whoever it was was doing a good job of matching pace with her, anticipating her movements while keeping a careful distance.

So she ducked down one alleyway and then doubled back, cutting sharply towards the path her mysterious stalker was taking. Stephanie placed herself in their path, just ahead of where she expected them to come bursting out of their own alley, and she bent down to pretend to adjust the laces on her combat boots.

The fall of her cape obscured the motion as she silently grasped the brick on the ground next to her left foot, and quick, quiet footsteps suddenly rounded the corner. Stephanie came up swinging.

The black-haired kid who'd been following her went down in a heap. He'd looked up at her with big blue eyes, blood leaking out from between his fingers, and wheezed out, "I thibk my bose is broken."

It was love at first sight, more or less.

When Tim Drake was fourteen, he was hot on the trail of the freshly-minted Girl Wonder, and she broke his nose. With a brick. (Six years later, she still refused to apologize.)

He'd explained, begrudgingly, that he was just trying to take pictures of her being a hero, and she'd gotten them milkshakes from McDonald's and helped him shove the napkins up his nostrils.

"I can definitely get you some good shots," she told him. Her blonde hair had way too much hairspray in it to waterfall down over her shoulder when she leaned forward, smiling so big that he knew her eyes must be sparkling behind the lenses of her domino mask, but he liked the way it spiked around her headband. She looked cool. She was cool.

Tim, on the other hand, was having to eat his milkshake with a spoon to not put too much pressure on his tender sinuses. He was also, occasionally, holding the cup up against his aching face.

"I dob't thingk Bahman's gonna 'prove of you posin' for pictures," he had pointed out.

Robin's grin had only gotten bigger. "Who said we were gonna tell Batman?"

It was love at first sight, more or less.

"This is going to calm down eventually, right?" Tim asked, dryly. His phone was sandwiched between his ear and his shoulder as he juggled leftover takeout containers and kicked his fridge door closed with the heel of his left foot. "I've had three different vigilantes crash my stakeouts over the last two weeks. Robin gave me a shovel talk at katana point, even though, A) you broke up with me, and B) our entire romance practically happened before he was born. Then Nightwing wanted to know if that story about you egging Boyfriend's car was true--"

"It is."

"Not the way you tell it."

"I saw the tears with my own two eyes, Boyfriend. You ain't foolin' me."

Tim dumped the remains of his beef fried rice into a bowl and scooped some sesame chicken on top of it. "I'm not having this argument again."

Stephanie laughed, the big, delighted one that meant she was throwing her head back and scrunching up her nose, and at least three-quarters of Tim's annoyance faded away, just like that. Still, for the principle of the thing, he added, "I can't believe you blew up our spot on a whim. We'd obfuscated the details of our friendship for six years. World record holders of lying to Batman."

"Naw, I bet Nightwing's still got a couple secrets packed away with his pixie boots." A pause, then she admitted, "Maybe nothing this big, but Wing's definitely got some secrets. Besides--" the rasp of fabric on fabric as she rolled over in her bed-- "it's your fault for not telling me you hired a fake authority figure in your life, again. I couldn't help it. There was no hiding my reaction."

Tim rolled his eyes, sticking his spoon into his mouth as he transferred the bowl of Chinese food to the microwave. "I still don' ge' wha's so funny," he said around it. He pulled out the spoon, brandishing it as he switched ears with the phone. "It makes perfect sense. I need to have five years working as a Private Investigator on the record before I can get a license. I also need to be twenty-five. I am also not willing to actually work for another PI and end up spending the first couple years fetching coffee and reading police reports instead of solving cases."

"So obviously, you hired a fake boss through a shell company, gave him a fake PI license, and then had him hire you," Stephanie said, still sounding like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard.

"Again, I don't understand why you're laughing. Alvin Draper may not exist, but he has a totally real PI license; the State of New Jersey just didn't know they were giving it to him." Tim shut the microwave, punching in 3:00 and hitting start. "You know I don't need any more training. You were my tutor for The Art of Private Detective Work 101 through 401, Batman Edition."

"All I really had to do was smuggle you the course materials," Stephanie pointed out. She sounded fond. "You taught yourself."

"Nah," Tim said softly. "We taught each other. Everything always makes more sense when I'm working with you."

Stephanie huffed a quiet laugh. "Don't get sappy on me now, Boyfriend," she cautioned. But she sounded a little sappy herself. She cleared her throat, audibly rolling over once more, and asked, "So who was number three?"

"Number three what?" Tim asked, distracted, as he poked at his leftovers to make sure they were warm the whole way through.

"The third vigilante who crashed one of your stakeouts. You said Robin wanted to threaten you-- right of passage, by the way-- and Nightwing wanted to get the dirt, but who was number three?"

"Oh." Tim grimaced. "Batman."

Stephanie sucked in a breath through her teeth. "Shovel talk part two?" she guessed.

"Uh, no, actually. He never actually said a word; just posted up by a gargoyle on the apartment building next to the one I was set up on, and brooded menacingly in my direction for like four hours."

"Drama queen."

"I got sick of it, eventually, so I ordered a pizza up to the roof of that apartment and told them I'd pay cash on delivery."

Stephanie sounded giddy. "You're kidding."

"What? I knew he could afford it."

She burst out laughing again, that bright Robin laugh that Tim had developed a Pavlovian response to sometime around the third time he'd heard it, and he smiled to himself as he dug into his dinner, letting her laugh herself out.

"I'd feel bad for the delivery guy because he looked like he was about to shit himself when he realized he was looking at the Batman, but I'm also pretty sure he's got the greatest pizza delivery story of all time now. And Batman didn't grapple over to my roof to lecture me or anything, so he must have taken it in good humor." Tim paused, wincing, and added, "Relatively."

He'd been typing up the case report at the office a few days later when a pizza guy showed up with two mushroom-and-black-olive pizzas, to be paid cash on delivery. Tim didn't even like mushrooms; he'd just chosen them because he knew from Stephanie that Batman did.

He didn't have to say anything else for Stephanie to guess the implications. After all, she'd been Batman's Robin for over four years. "B-man always gets the last word," she said dryly. "Even when you think you've gotten away with it, suddenly a week later he'll launch a new offensive."

"That's consistent across identities," Tim muttered. Wanye Enterprises was good at coming out of things with the upper hand; he remembered his dad complaining about it more than once as he worked late into the night in his study, quietly existing alongside Tim as he did homework while sprawled across the couch on the other side of the room. Tim had even experienced it a couple times himself, too, although he'd never really had much involvement in Drake Industries' day-to-day operations.

He had kept just enough of his inherited shares to be able to throw his weight around when he needed to, making sure that DI was earning itself a reputation as a generous and ethical place to work. But Tim certainly didn't work for DI; his time-- and his passion-- were entirely invested in Red Bird Investigations.

"As Vicki Vale has learned time and time again," Steph agreed.

They fell into companionable silence for a minute, Tim putting his phone on speaker and dropping it onto the kitchen island next to where he was sitting, cross-legged, to dedicatedly work his way through his dinner. Stephanie had been intending to catch a quick nap before she jotted out on patrol until he'd called, but he knew she'd have hung up on him by now if she really needed the sleep, so he didn't worry too much about it.

"You know we wouldn't have been able to hide it much longer anyway, right?" she asked, finally, and Tim made a noncommittal grunt. She huffed, and he knew the noise went along with a roll of her eyes. "It only took you like six months of working as a PI before you sought out the Red Hood. Did you really think you were going to stay under the rest of the Bats' radar for long?"

"Over eight months, actually, and yes," Tim said stubbornly. "Practically anything else I could have taken to you or Black Bat. But I was working in the Alley, and everybody there looks to Hood for guidance in one way or another. I kept getting stonewalled. Conversely, I have no reason to seek out Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Batwoman, the Signal, Bluebird, or anybody else I'm currently forgetting."

Actually, Tim was pretty sure he'd end up working with the Signal eventually. As a perfectly legal PI-in-training (so long as nobody looked too deeply into Alvin Draper), Tim didn't limit himself to either daytime or nighttime investigations, and Signal was intelligent, competent, and fun to hang around. But there was no reason to think Signal would assume there was anything unusual or Bat-related in Tim's past; they'd already run into each other a few times during the Robin Gang era. Tim Drake was just another piece of the Gotham scenery for him.

"Yeah, and that works great, until Commissioner Gordon or one of the GCPD detectives you've been working with decides to ask Batman about you," Stephanie pointed out. "You're already starting to make a name for yourself, and Batman doesn't just ignore the presence of new players on the board. There are other private investigators around Gotham, and he has files on all of them. That's pretty much what I stumbled onto Hood and Oracle throwing together, anyway."

"So, they'd have figured out that Alvin's a sham," Tim sighed. "But--"

"I know I'm usually the first person to extoll Batman's flaws--well, okay, the second. Jason is the first. But they don't call him the World's Greatest Detective for nothing, Boyfriend, and even the surface level of your existence is pretty fucking weird. Sure, there's nothing about 'Drake heir turned private detective' that screams 'I knew Robin when she had pigtails,' but he was definitely going to start digging, and it was going to be obvious eventually that we knew each other. And maybe," Steph said, pitching her voice over his next protest, "if you were about to get sucked into the collective Batfamily's orbit, I didn't want to have to pretend not to know my best fucking friend as well as I do."

Oh. Well, Tim wouldn't have enjoyed that either.

He thought about what might've happened if Hood had tapped Batgirl in on the case Tim had brought to him, about working with Stephanie as if she was a total stranger and not someone he understood on a level deeper than he understood his own self. He probably would have given up within fifteen minutes, consequences be damned.

He took the out she'd offered. "'Best friends' is reductive," he said, a familiar mantra.

"'Platonic soulmates' would be reductive, Boyfriend," Stephanie countered automatically, a smile re-entering her tone. "But it's a little wordy to start calling you things like my phantom limb or the peanut butter to my jelly."

"Your brother from another mother," Tim mused.

"Hey, now, I know she wasn't in a great spot when your parents died, but I bet that Crystal would be happy to adopt you now if you asked."

Tim barked a laugh, caught off guard by the assertion, and Stephanie giggled, her voice growing faint amongst the rustle of her sheets. "Ugh, you wasted my prime napping window with your grumpiness. I've gotta go pull on the atomic wedgy machine so I can punch crime in the face."

Tim snorted. "I thought it wasn't that bad since the latest round of suit upgrades."

"It wasn't," Stephanie groaned. "But Cass has introduced a lot of lunges to our workout routine, and now the ass is getting snug."

"First world vigilante problems," Tim commented dryly.

"I'd wear a thong or something, but Bruce would find out somehow and I think it'd actually kill him." Tim choked on the last bite of his beef fried rice, but Stephanie just cackled. "I'd get blown up and the suit would get torn in a weirdly horny way, and then Batman would have a heart attack upon seeing my bare, burned ass waddling around the Batcave."

"Sticking out from under a piece of rubble," Tim suggested, laughter bubbling beneath the surface of his voice.

Stephanie wheezed. "Oh, god."

"Robin would have to go to therapy."

"Nightwing would just slap a hand over his domino so he couldn't see."

"Now that would be a picture I'd break out the film for."

"Shut up! I'm laughing too hard to get my body armor on."

"You started it." Tim yawned so wide his jaw cracked, and he reached up to rub at the hinge, grimacing. "That's the one downside of selling the manor," he added with a sigh. "No space for a darkroom in this apartment."

Stephanie snorted. "Isn't every room in that apartment a dark room?"

"You're just jealous of my blackout curtains."

"I'm really not," Stephanie assured him dryly. Her voice grew closer again, and the background static of speakerphone cut off as she picked her phone back up. "I gotta go, Boyfriend. Oracle wants to run over some stuff with me and the best Bat before we hit the pavement tonight."

Tim couldn't help the smile that slipped across his face as he hopped down from the counter. "Give Cassie my love. And ask Oracle to be a little less conspicuous next time she goes poking around Red Bird's systems--I know she was letting me see her in order to make a point, and I already knew that no matter how good I am, Oracle's better, but I do still have client confidentiality to maintain my plausible deniability about."

Stephanie let out a quiet huff of laughter. "I'll pass it along," she promised.

"Be safe."

"No promises."

"Break a leg."

"Two or three, even!"

Tim laughed, and Stephanie made an obnoxious kissing noise into the phone before she hung up on him. The screen lit back up, showing the nearly fifty minute call duration and the selfie she'd taken of the two of them at the lighting of the big Menorah on the Gotham University Quad the previous Hanukkah. The Menorah was in the background, two candles brightly lit, and the two of them looked windswept and red-cheeked. Stephanie had had to grapple them across the rooftops in order to make it in time to sing the first blessing, and they'd squeezed in together so tightly for the picture that Tim had been able to lick her cheek without moving. Stephanie's face was scrunched up in horrified anger, and Tim's was bright with laughter, his tongue still sticking out.

It was a good picture. It was a good memory, even if Stephanie had shoved him into a snowbank in retaliation.

Stephanie Brown had been the best Robin. Most people would argue--even Tim would have, years and years ago--but they were wrong. Batman needed Robin, and he was so fucking lucky he'd stumbled across Spoiler at just the right moment to keep himself from going down a dark path.

If nothing else, Tim mused, it was nice that he was now free to say that directly to Bruce Wayne's face some time.