Title: It's All About Being A Teenager
Author: Kezzy
Pressie for:
calliopes_penRating: PG-13 for language, themes
Summary: Tim is a teenager vigilante and sometimes, a vigilante with very teenaged moments. This could be one of them.
Sometimes it is easy to forget he’s a teenager-between the bruises and general daily aches he has from his night ‘job’ to becoming far, far too used to seeing gorgeous women in next-to-nothing spandex. Both Bart and Kon have decided it is a travesty and have commented, both loudly and colorfully, that Tim needs to embrace his inner teen.
For one reason or another, they are both entirely convinced that one skirt-chasing Robin wasn’t enough.
Except he definitely isn’t Dick-he doesn’t have the easiness with people the other does and he most assuredly does not have the natural charm that draws in every female within a two mile radius. Even Lian is bound to grow up half in love with Dick.
Robin has the slickness Batman does-the girls that like him are the ones that shimmer between moral edges, the ones that are hell-bent on self-destruction and the ones that are . . .
“Look, you work with a girl who is completely, one hundred percent clad in the tightest spandex I have ever seen. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed how many miles of legs Batgirl has,” Kon comments over the phone, voice tempered between amusement and resignation.
“I have work to go do,” Tim answers back in his very best ‘I Am A Bat-Brat, Fear Me’ tone and decides, once and for all, to start braving longer stares at Starfire to save some face. “Why don’t you work on cow milking or sheep herding?”
Both Kon’s laughter and protest get cut off when Tim hangs up on him.
An hour later, Tim decides that the problem with being mostly a vigilante and partially a teenaged boy is that the teenaged boy section sometimes requires that he be a teenage boy. Mostly on purpose but sometimes purely and one hundred percent on accident. He doesn’t bother wondering how getting his ass kicked by Shiva can still manage to be a pleasing memory, it is just one of those things that every male vigilante can relate to and it is-
Hm. She really, really does have mile long legs, Tim notes absently, head cocking to the side slightly as he watches Batgirl work through a training routine in the Bat Cave.
Batgirl is a general in a war-as much a general as Batman is and Robin is ever the foot soldier next to her. He knows this and despite random bouts of heavy competition they all suffer (or thrive) under, is comfortable with it. He knows where she came from, how she got to be this good and couldn’t want to trade it for the world. Even in a war she moves like life is a ballet, every motion perfect grace and perfect ease.
He knows she is working on a personal life, on establishing an identity that she’d never gotten to have, on what being Cassandra means or should mean. He knows she has the emotional maturity of a five year-old and just about that amount of comprehension when it comes to the way things work between ‘normal’ people. Perhaps that’s the reason he keeps himself from watching her the way teenage boys watch teenage girls shaped like her. He does feel guilty, a little, like he’s taking things a few steps too far and like he needs both her and Batman’s written consent that it’s okay to look.
She does a series of flips around the bars that sing of Dick-he must have been here recently-and lands with the most graceful-sounding rush of air.
“You were looking,” she says, voice tinged in female accusation that he knows no one but Barbara could have taught her and smile edged with a smirk sharp enough to cut himself on.
It just isn’t right how many embarrassing connotations someone could push into a single word when months ago she was practically incapable of stringing together a sentence.
“Just watching,” Tim stresses back, giving her an affronted look and reminding himself that co-Bats aren’t allowed to make the other flush.
“Liar. Been watching television. OC.”
And that idea is more mortifying than most others Tim can imagine and it is right then that he decides Cassandra isn’t allowed any extended period of alone time with Dick. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Even if the rest of them were dead.
Being a teenager is a mortifying and even being a vigilante can’t quite interrupt the process of necessary shaping events that must take place. On that theory, he bears her rough, pleased laughter at catching him being normal and doesn’t quite beat himself up as much when she turns around again and he double-checks the mile-long-legs theory.
After all, she’s been watching the OC, she can forgive him a moment of boy.