#and after all her bitter comments to stephanie harper comes here and sees this

[unavenged-robin]

Family portraits

Batfamweek 2017, day #1: family.

Read on AO3

It starts with a casual comment, one that shouldn’t bother him so much. And it doesn’t. Not right away.

“You don’t have any photo on your desk”, the new girl says. She started working at WE two weeks ago and Tim thinks her name is Kathy, or July, or something like that. He’ll pick it up eventually. Now he just blinks up at her from behind the pile of reports he’s working on.

“Sorry?”

She bits her bottom lip, now looking embarrassed at her own straightforwardness, and vaguely gestures at his desk again.

“No photos”, she repeats. “People usually have photos on their desk. Family. Girlfriends or boyfriends. You know?”

Family, girlfriends, boyfriends. Yes, Tim knows.

“Well”, he smiles politely. “I’m just trying not to look like I’m fifty and live only for my work, to the point to spend all my time in my office and need photographic reminders of what my family looks like.”

Kathy or July or something like that frowns at him.

“Beside, my family is really ugly”, Tim continues, going for less subtle sarcasm, but the joke doesn’t really comes out his mouth as a joke, and KathyJulySomethingLikeThat looks more confused than before.

“Mister Wayne Senior is not ugly”, she argues.

Tim doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or scoff at that.

“No, Bruce is not ugly, I suppose.”

“And he has a lot of framed photos on his desk”, KathyJulySomethingLikeThat points out.

“That he does”, Tim agrees weakly and there must be something in his voice, an undertone of, what?, bitter irony or hidden resentment, something Tim’s too tired to keep in check and away from other to see, and the result is that they look uncomfortably at each other for a moment and then the girl blushes.

“My apologies, Mister Wayne”, she says. “I didn’t mean to-”

“Tim. And don’t- it’s okay, really”, Tim sighs. “You do have a point, Kathy.”

“My name’s Ju-”

“July, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Jude”, the girls finishes.

“Right. Jude. Uh”, Tim feels like he’s blushing too, now. “Great talk, Jude. I hope you like working here.”

“I’d say so”, Jude agrees, settling a box full of documents against her hip to open the door of Tim’s office. “I’ve been working here for two years now.”

Tim doesn’t know how to answer to that so he just buries his face behind a ledger and wishes to never meet her again.

*

He forgets about the awkward conversation for a couple of days, until he comes back to his office and cleans out the last pile of documents waiting for his signature.

That’s when he finds out that they now bothers him, the empty corners of his desk.

He stares at it in its entirety: files folder and memo holders, laptop and mouse pad perfectly aligned, dozens of different pens stashed in their pen pots depending on their color, the gold plate with his name engraved in it in elegant cursive and… well, nothing else without the skyscrapers of pending work.

Tim’s never had a desk so organized before in his entire life. He supposes that it marries well with his professional image, and yet it still bothers him to no end.

Also, he used to love photography. Having pictures all around like little windows on the past, familiar faces keeping him company during long nights and exhausting days. When did he lost that? When did he start to have empty corners and empty walls?

Probably when you started losing people to fill them with, he answers to himself, then shakes his head.

He asks for all the review files of their new acquisitions to be brought into his office. It’s basically half of the current year archive, enough stuff to keep an entire department busy for a month. He dismisses his secretary’s frown at the dozens of boxes now decorating his office with a tired smile.

*

The next week he’s already breaking even with the work, so he brings a photo of Stephanie for a test drive.

She’s not doing anything particular in it, just fixing her hair with one hand, barely smiling, looking like she’s a million light years away, but it’s still one of Tim’s favorite. And it’s nice to have it there. Really nice.

He keeps it.

*

He tries adding a photo of his parents on their wedding day. Has to take it off right away and hide it in the bottom drawer. It still hurts too much.

*

With Kon he doesn’t even bother to try. He has dozens of photos of him and he never even looks at them, only smiles at their memory. No way he could bear to have that painful reminder framed and displayed on his desk like that.

Beside, most of them are not appropriate to be shown in a professional environment anyway.

*

Stephanie sends him a photo of her and Cass wearing ridiculous crazy hats and laughing like mad women, and Tim smiles, prints it and adds it to his desk without thinking too much about it.

Now he has two photos of his girlfriend and one of his sister, and it feels right. Normal-right. Enough not to make him look like a sociopath to his coworkers, at least.

*

A few days later he tries again with a second set of parents. He says to himself that it’s out of obligation and not much else. Bruce and Alfred stare at him with a serious but not unkind look, and a younger version of himself smiles at Tim from his spot in the middle of them. It’s what it used to look like, long, long time ago, when Dick was often too busy for them and Jason and Damian were both still hidden threats.

He brushes the glass with his fingertips, ready to put that one away too, but in the end he doesn’t. This hurts too, but it’s a different kind of hurt, one he can bear to look at. One that he learned to live with.

*

He debates with himself about his brothers. They’re visibly missing now, but Tim has mixed feelings about it, to use an euphemism.

Also, he discovers straightaway that he doesn’t have any photo of them. The gallery of his phone is full of memes and snapchat’s photo from his friends, Stephanie and Cass, but not much else. So, even if he’s still dubious about it, he does the only sensible thing he can think about: he hacks Dick’s phone.

And Dick doesn’t fail him, for once. There are so many half-naked selfies of him that Tim could assemble three or four numbers of a new porn magazine out of them. Which sounds like a great revenge plan, if he’d ever need one. Dick better not piss him off too badly.

But looking at the photos, Tim finds himself smiling for a reason that totally has something to do with how much he used to love this man, his first and only brother for so many years. Not that Tim doesn’t love him still, but he just doesn’t remember how it feels like, to look at Dick and feel only amazement and affection, instead of the bittersweet mix of anger and nostalgia he feels now.

Lots of Dick’s selfies include Damian too. Obviously. And the brat always looks annoyed or exasperated in them, but Tim knows better. He can see the little twitches at the corners of Damian’s mouth, the soft arch of his eyebrows like he’s really trying for a scowl but can’t feel it, no matter how hard he tries. It’s... cute. It’s also weird as hell to see, because surely enough Tim’s never had one of those soft expressions ever thrown his way. That’s why, in the end, he decides to add one of those photos to his ever-growing collection: it’s not too bad to remind himself that Damian’s changed too.

Another reason, Tim acknowledges while fixing the last framed picture closer to the Bruce and Alfred’s one, is that it’s difficult for him to think of one without the other. And strangely, that doesn’t hurt as much as it used too.

*

Adding Jason is now a question of integrity.

Dick’s photos of him are all meant to be blackmail material, so Tim has no use for them. And the photo Tim himself has of Jason date back to a time none of them like to remember, even if for different reasons.

And it’s still stupid, but it’s also a project, now. One that Tim’s liking because he’s doing it for himself, even if it didn’t start that way. So one night after patrol, when they’re hanging out in their civvies in Jason’s apartment, drinking beers and playing video games, Tim just takes his phone out of his pocket and gestures for Jason to get closer.

“What?”, his brother asks, tilting his head to get a look at what Tim’s doing, and when he sees him open the camera app, flip it and hold the phone as far away for them he gives Tim an incredulous look.

“Are you serious now?”, he asks again.

Tim only shrugs.

“It’s what cool kids do nowadays, didn’t you know?”

“Tim, you’re not a cool kid.”

“Neither are you, Jason.”

“Excuse you, you are the one begging to do a selfie with me”, Jason taunts him, but his grin is more full of fondness than mockery.

“I’m not begging”, Tim retorts. Just shut up and try not to look too emo.”

He pays the photo with a cuff on the back of his head and twenty more minutes of teasing. Overall is not too high of a price.

*

“You’re running out of space here”, a known voice says, and Tim looks up in time to spot the smile on the new girl’s face. Jude, he remembers to himself. And she’s not new.

“My family takes up a lot of space”, he agrees, shifting his gaze from her to the collection of framed photos in front of him. There are at least ten now, standing on his desk. Barbara, Duke, Harper, Titus… they are all there now. Turns out that once you start, it’s difficult to stop. The walls are getting crowded too.

Most of the new photos Tim took by himself, and nobody protested his renewed interest in photography. Well, he had to pay Damian in photos of his pets in order to make him not smash his camera, but even that wasn’t so bad in the end (and Damian’s pet are better behaved than Damian himself anyway, so win-win).

“Can I?”, Jude asks and Tim nods at her with half a smile. The girl steps around the desk to get a better look, and she’s silent for a few minutes, examining the pictures one by one.

“I have to say that they’re not ugly at all”, she comments eventually. “You actually look like a family of super models.”

“That’s what we do at night”, Tim agrees solemnly, finding it very difficult to suppress a laugh. “Just don’t go tell it to anyone, okay?”