The Diagnosis
Ah. Keep forgetting that I'm on LJ. Bit of a backlog of content to upload, whoops. Anyway, have some vaguely comedic dramatic irony.
Title: The Diagnosis
Fandom: Batman
Characters: Tim/(Kon), Damian, Dick
Rating: mostly PG (with a flash of NC-17)
Word Count: 4,203
Summary: The mystery is simple enough; it's the blind spots that are the real challenge.
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He first notices it towards the end of November. A roughness to Damian's voice. Raspy, with the pitch dropped down a few notches. Almost sluggish. And there's the way he touches two fingers to his throat, almost unconsciously, as he swallows.
The winter has been relatively mild this year, and Damian has always been more resilient against the seasonal bugs, but it's still not a surprise. The next time Tim is out, he stops by the twenty-four hour drugstore for a package of cough drops. He grabs the cherry ones at first, but then he remembers that Damian really hates cherry-flavored medicine. He balances it in his hand, contemplating whether he should buy it out of spite, but he's not going to waste his time and money on something the kid will flat-out refuse. In the end he trades it out for the honey-lemon ones, carefully threading the cherry cough drop package back onto the hanging display.
“I don't understand,” Damian says later that afternoon, as he examines the contents of the proffered drugstore bag. Then narrows his eyes. “If this is some kind of obtuse joke-”
Paranoid freak. Tim balls his right hand into a fist, barely managing to keep himself from throwing the punch. Squeezes tight enough for his knuckles to crack. “Can't I do something nice for you without there being an ulterior motive?”
“That's not how this so-called family works,” Damian replies smoothly. And granted, Tim can't really push the issue without looking like a hypocrite, thanks to that whole debacle with the secret hit list, even though that had been ages ago.
By this point, Tim's fingernails are etching crescent-shaped bruises into his palm. “Fine. But I expect you to take more responsibility for your health. It's not like you to let yourself get sick.”
“I am not ill,” Damian says.
Tim opens his mouth to argue the point, but then closes it in reconsideration. It's true enough that throughout this conversation, Damian's voice has sounded perfectly normal. Not a single one of the earlier symptoms; just the usual half-growl he layers on whenever he's got his hackles raised. Moreover, the kid seems honestly confused. So Tim drops it.
“Think of it as a precaution against the Gotham cold,” he amends.
Damian tuts. “I have been living in this city for years, Drake. Any warning-had I ever needed one in the first place-has long since been made moot.”
But he still tears into the bag, picking out a single lozenge to unwrap and pop into his mouth. It's not an apology. That's a particular interaction that is not likely to ever occur between the two. But in the language of mutual contempt, that system of veiled gestures and barbed phrases that they have cultivated through their begrudging acceptance of one another, it's close enough.
The strange situation passes but of course, Tim cannot simply let a mystery go, however small. He's certain he hadn't been imagining Damian's symptoms and is ready to chalk it up to the teen's remarkable recovery rate when, in the following week, it happens again.
That same roughness. That same rasp. It reverberates against the cave walls, joined by Dick's easy laughter.
Tim continues facing his laptop, fingers clacking out nonsensical phrases on auto-pilot while he observes his brothers by peripheral vision. The two are coming out of the training room after their weekly joint training session. Dick mops his neck and face with a hand towel, then throws the soiled cloth over Damian's head. The brat sputters indignantly, and in a flash he's on Dick's back, using the sweaty towel to strangle the man. But the fondness isn't hard to miss.
Even in the midst of his assault, the hand on Dick's shoulder clutches with a kind of neediness. And surely if Tim were to get closer, he'd see that smirk on Damian's face. Not his fighting face, not that bloodlust grin. This one is completely different; something you could actually call a smile. It happens sometimes with Bruce and Alfred, but most often with Dick, and only when they aren't looking. Damian always stands ahead or behind, where they can't see his face, keeping this happiness to himself. Tim manages to catch occasional glimpses of it, probably because Damian thinks he wouldn't notice; Damian always thinks Tim is ignoring him.
Eventually Dick manages to peel off their younger brother, though he achieves the task with greater difficulty than he used to now that Damian's getting so much bigger.
It's strange, though. The symptoms are clearly there in Damian's voice, in the way he seems more conscious of his throat, as though it pains him. And it's true that he often pushes himself unnecessarily, sometimes going so far as to fake thermometer readings to avoid being committed to bed rest. But regardless of his stubbornness, when he's sick, he's never this playful. Whatever's going on with Damian, it's not the usual cold or flu.
Tim mentally crosses all the conventional maladies off the list. The unusual nature of the situation calls for a change in strategy: a few weeks of nonintrusive observation.
While focusing more on his actual cases, he keeps tabs on this other curiosity, passively collecting data as the time passes. The pattern emerges quite easily and Tim is boggled as to why no one else has noticed, especially as all the other residents of the manor are much more inclined to worry about Damian's well-being.
There's something going on in that training room, something affecting Damian's respiratory faculties. It only ever happens on Thursday nights after his workout session with Dick-not every week, but frequently enough to be almost obvious.
Going by the teen's medical stats, he isn't suffering any abnormalities to his larynx, or his trachea, or his lungs. Moreover, the attritional damage is lower than the expected levels, considering all the smog and chemicals and second-hand smoke they encounter in their work. There's nothing of note, even when Tim filters through the more obscure parameters. For a while he suspects it might be some weird mid-puberty developmental thing, but he can't figure out how that would make any sense.
While the others are cleaning up after the New Year's Eve party, Tim escapes to swab different areas of the training room, and even grabs a few vials of air. He brings all the samples back to his lab in the Crime Alley HQ, but despite his fastidious collection, the results are far from fruitful. After separating out his brothers' DNA, the phospholipid analysis finds nothing but the usual microbes.
So it's not pathogenic.
The next week finds Tim in the cave archives, gathering blueprints for the training room, as well as equipment receipts, and notes from engineers; he leaves with a comprehensive list of every material used during construction. He also makes his way into the Batcave's tissue bank, pulling Damian's samples from the cryogenic locker. Before he leaves, he makes sure to cover his tracks, clearing out his access codes from the security logs.
Once he has everything, he sets up a two-week trial, testing each of the construction materials against the tissues, observing for any unforeseen allergic reactions. But it yields nothing but two weeks of wasted time.
Each dead end leaves him tense, and when the weekend comes he can't shake off this latest failure. When he gets to the Tower, rooms fall silent every time he enters, and his friends have trouble looking at him directly when he has the cowl on. At one point, Cassie even takes him aside, offering to kick Conner's ass if Tim needs her to, but he quickly reassures her that it's not that kind of problem.
Honestly, it's not that Tim really cares that much. Damian still appears to be at the peak of health, so there's no visible reason for concern on that front; and his disposition has also been more tolerable than ever. But the idea of not knowing, the idea that something is going on right under his nose that he cannot explain-it's like a splinter in Tim's thumb, digging in deeper and deeper each time he tries to pick it out.
He's spending so much time at the manor lately, it's almost as if he's moved back in. Alfred and Bruce interpret the trend with optimism, and encourage him to stay around more often; it leaves Tim feeling slightly guilty that he's only there to ponder over the training room. But he's spent far too much effort on this deceptively complex mystery to just let it go.
The next lead comes while he's in the middle of a workout. He's devising a plan to trick Damian into giving him a throat swab, when he tips off the balancing beam and lands on his ankle. He doesn't sprain it, though it does start swelling up a bit.
Revelation comes like a brick in the face.
He feels like an idiot. He's been focusing so hard on biological causes, he hadn't even considered all the other likely etiologies-namely, injury and strain. The brat is always pushing too hard, trying to exceed the limits of reason, and Dick is the only one who would cave into the brat's demands. He's probably forcing their older brother to include freaky assassin tricks in their training. It would certainly account for why Damian's symptoms only appear on Thursdays.
Later, at his Crime Alley HQ, Tim clears out all the failed lab experiments, filing away his notes and soaking the petri dishes in sterilizing solution. Takes out the recycling and flips his calendar to February. He's warming up the incinerator to dispose of the bio-waste when he pulls out his cell phone and hits the speed dial for Dick.
A lot of people sound different on the phone or through the comm line. Oracle, for instance; even when she'a not using her voice filter, she always gets a little more robotic, a little colder. With Bruce, his low baritone turns into a purr instead of it's usual dark rumble; and Tim knows his own voice goes extra nasal. But Dick, Dick always sounds unmistakably the same as in real life. It's like his very identity is an anchor. Steady, unbreakable, something you can always feel certain about. Makes you feel safe. But it also makes lying to him over the phone a strangely difficult task-difficult but not impossible.
The conversation begins as usual. Dick trying to recount a funny thing from reality TV. Tim humming along and laughing even though Dick sucks at explaining it. Eventually Tim finds the proper opportunity to start directing the conversation toward his request.
Despite taking care to segue into the topic, when he mentions his interest in Damian's weekly training sessions, he practically hears Dick's eyebrows raising.
“He's still a Titan, even if he hardly ever comes to the Tower. I'm just trying to cross-reference of all our skill sets,” Tim explains, trying to sound purposeful but also casual.
“If you say so, Timmy,” Dick responds.
As he waits for the file to come, Tim bandies around the idea of just telling Dick outright about Damian's strange condition. But it feels too much like cheating. And pride be damned, but Tim's simply not willing to spoil the puzzle by letting someone else solve it for him.
When the email shows up in his inbox, he opens the attached document immediately. Skims it once, twice, three times. Taps a fingernail restlessly against the side of his laptop in mild distress, trying to hold in the urge to throw the damn thing against the wall. “Is this really-this is everything you two do in training?”
There is a pause on the line before Dick answers. Eventually he chirps back, “Uh yeah, that's all. Every Thursday night!”
Tim bites the inside of his cheek. “Can you excuse me for a minute, Dick?” He doesn't wait for an answer before hitting the mute button and unleashing a violent stream of expletives.
Nothing! Nothing in this schedule that could explain Damian's affliction. Yoga, gymnastics, calisthenics… He almost thinks he's found it when he sees the training block for escaping restraints, but the listed maneuvers only pertain to the limbs, and not for dealing with ligatures around the neck. Tim's been haunted by this for months, and here he is, at yet another dead end!
He's tempted to simply cut the line, but with a long-suffering sigh, he hits the mute button again and resumes the conversation. There's a bit of small talk, but Tim drops a few firm hints to bring it to a close.
Trying to calm himself, Tim traces back to the very beginning of his investigation, milling through Damian's medical records yet another time. He brews up a pot of strong black tea and sips it as he leafs through his copies of the files. Maybe there's something he missed, or-maybe there's something being deliberately covered up.
If there were something truly wrong with Damian, what would the kid do? Would he ever lie about it? He normally doesn't hesitate to report any medical problems when they come up. But if it were something that Alfred, or even Dr. Thompkins couldn't handle? If he were truly in grave danger, then the Al Ghul facilities would be his only hope, and Dick wouldn't hesitate to send him if it meant saving his life. But the kid would rather die than let that happen.
Tim closes the files. Sips more tea. Tries to convince himself that this is just wild speculation. That his mind is sensationalizing an otherwise mundane sore throat. But he can't shake the idea. He even starts to consider turning his evidence over to Bruce, if only so that the man can confirm that his suspicions are blown out of proportion.
Of course, it's just Tim's luck that Bruce announces he'll being going on one of his globe-hopping trips. He's leaving for the kind of mission that take weeks or even months, this time in western China, and Tim knows that he can't say anything now. Because if Batman's going to be fighting in an Uyghur township halfway around the globe, he can't do a thing about his son's mysterious condition. Nothing but be distracted, and as Bruce's brutal (and kind of corny) aphorisms go, In the field, distractions are deadlier than bullets.
After Bruce departs, Tim decides to cool it on the investigation. It's messing with his head-got him wasting so much time chasing after the cause of a sore throat, of all things. He tries his best to stop thinking about it. Pushes it all the way to the back of the mental shelf for perusal at a later date.
It's easy at first, keeping himself occupied with other things. When Valentine's Day swings by, Conner comes flying into the manor grounds with one of Ma Kent's apple pies and no less than four awful pick-up lines involving Cupid's arrow. Tim dutifully pretends to be surprised by his boyfriend's arrival, and tries unsuccessfully not to melt into a puddle of goop. He spends the rest of the week after the holiday feeling hopelessly and ridiculously charmed, despite himself.
However, he can only stay distracted for so long. With Dick taking the cowl while Bruce is away, the joint training sessions increase in frequency, and in turn, so do the occurrences of Damian's symptoms. It's impossible to ignore. Impossible, and the more Tim thinks about it, also downright irresponsible. He knows it's unlikely that the kid is harboring some secret fatal illness, but there's still something clearly wrong with him.
Tim doesn't know how started paying attention to Damian like this. It's not that he used to be unobservant, but this is different. He'll walk into the kitchen and notice Damian reaching for a high shelf. Won't immediately think to calculate arm span, or make mental estimates of close-range striking abilities; instead, he sees the way Damian always taps the side of the box before pulling it down. The way he scratches at the back of his neck when his hair starts growing longer, and how he mumble-hums the theme song to Scooby-Doo while he draws. The shapes his mouth makes when he's chewing something crunchy.
When Tim gathers these details, it's not out of wariness, and it's not out of strategy. He's just watching.
He knows he hasn't been a good brother to Damian. And Damian's been beyond horrible himself, but what does that matter? Shouldn't always be waiting for a fair exchange. That's not how families ought to work, not even ones as strange and broken as theirs. When Tim looks back and thinks about his mother and father, he knows objectively that they were far from perfect parents. But he still wishes he could have been a better son.
He turns back to his files with a renewed passion, lays out all his case notes until he can't see the desk beneath. There's a printed copy of the training regimen Dick had emailed, and Tim's attention is drawn to the half-hour of free sparring at the end of every session. On the one hand, it's the only part of their weekly routine that Tim has yet to account for. On the other, Bruce would be furious if he found out they were using neck strikes during sparring; it's one of the many types of maneuvers that he forbids them to use on each other, unless they're doing specific training for it.
He's fairly certain he won't find his answer here, but he decides to check training room's security footage anyway. At least he can check another hypothesis off the list. When he pulls up the video on the Batcomputer, he ends up with even less than he'd expected, thanks to the faulty cameras. Internal motors might be busted, or it could just be that the mechanism is clogged with dust; either way, there's a corner of the room that they keep missing during their rotation.
It's no surprise that those particular cameras would have fallen into disrepair. After all, the training room is the least of the manor's security risks. Still, it's no good to have holes in surveillance, and Tim knows it's going to bother him if he doesn't get the problem fixed. He sticks around the cave, and later that night, when Dick and Damian come back from patrol, he tries his best to casually mention the need for camera repairs.
Dick, in the middle of peeling off the cowl, stills for a second before fully retracting the garment. But he seems almost reluctant. As though he wishes he could pull it back over his face instead. “Must've looked through a lot of tapes to notice that,” he says very evenly.
Tim feels his cheeks color. “Oh. Not obsessively or anything.”
“That's a pretty small detail. Even Bruce overlooked it,” Dick continues. He's probably trying to spin it as a compliment, but Tim knows what his brother must be thinking.
“It's no big deal,” he says, raising his palms in defense. “Just, uh, putting the 'vigilant' in 'vigilante,' haha?” Oh God, that was terrible. “I mean, it's not like I'm trying to stalk you, or anything. Again. Haha. Um.”
He really ought to stop digging his own hole. Every failed excuse is just making him look and feel more like a creep.
Worse yet, he's no closer to an answer despite all the footage he's scoured. Despite all the experiments and the sneaking around and the stress. In fact, he's right back where he started. There are significant swathes of time where his brothers disappear out of camera range, but as far as he can tell, they are adhering strictly to Bruce's sparring rules. Whatever's going on with Damian, his training habits likely have nothing to do with it.
Just to make certain, though, Tim can't help but ask.
“So, you two…in your sparring sessions, you don't do any weird stuff, right? Stuff that Bruce maybe wouldn't approve of?”
Dick and Damian's eyes meet in a moment of silent communication, and the both of them go rigid. It's a very subtle hitch in tension, but Tim knows them too well not to notice.
Yep. They totally think he's a freak.
By now his ears are burning, and he can't bring himself to look either of them in the face. He excuses himself with a half-mumbled, “Uh, never mind,” and heads to the upstairs door.
As he makes his ignominious retreat, Damian quips, “If only he put half the effort of his voyeurism into designing a less disgraceful uniform…”
The pithy parting comment stops Tim in his tracks, but it's not the words themselves that give him pause.
He blinks.
Damian-his voice! There it is again, that roughness. But he hasn't been training; he and Dick just came back from patrol, which means he hasn't been anywhere near the training room in the past few hours. Which also means that the one clue that Tim has been hinging on for the past few months is possibly a complete coincidence, perhaps entirely irrelevant to his whole line of inquiry. Or perhaps whatever cold-like affliction Damian is suffering is turning chronic.
The combination of humiliation and worry and frustration is too much to bear. That night, Tim leaves a note for Alfred on the bulletin board in the kitchen.
'Taking sabbatical from Gotham. Staying at T Tower until further notice. Also, leftover curry in fridge, if anyone wants.'
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A sigh groans into the air like cigarette smoke, and Conner flops his head back against the bed. His usual indication of brain-melting satisfaction.
Tim pulls off slowly, relishing the slippery pressure of his boyfriend's spent cock, running against his throat, his tongue, out his lips.
Conner props himself up onto an elbow, breaths heaving. Sweat mists his muscles, tiny droplets clinging to the almost invisible hairs across his abs. Tim watches the way his chest expands and contracts. Already has so many similar images in his memory from all the past times they've been intimate. He keeps staring, memorizing. Adds one more image to the mental cache.
Tim had intended to spend his time away trying to formulate the proper message. An explanation for his creepier-than-usual behavior. A way to let Dick know that there's something possibly troubling going on with Damian, without making the man feel guilty, or otherwise raising an unnecessary fuss. But in the past few days he's been focusing more on…stress relief.
He can feel a dribble of cum resting at the corner of his mouth. Conner reaches over to blot it with his thumb, smearing it across Tim's lower lip. Tim swirls his tongue around the digit, eliciting a gratified moan in response.
Tim feels like he's vibrating. So warm. His whole body flushing with accomplishment. He loves it. Loves letting Conner take his mouth, loves hearing his boyfriend pant and scream. Loves everything about these moments, from heady scent of Conner's musk, down to the residual ache in his own throat-
…Wait.
Tim freezes. It's like his mind is going blank, but not because he can't think. No, it's that he's thinking too fast to process all the facts and details properly.
“Hey. Still in there?” Conner asks softly, but Tim barely hears him through the frantic thrum of revelations.
It had never been the cold weather. Had never been an infection, had never been a consequence of overly aggressive sparring.
Tim purses his lips, dread bubbling up inside of him as he places two fingers against his neck. His throat feels sore and battered, and when he swallows, he can feel the stickiness of sex inside of him. And it's a familiar feeling, kind of like…kind of like he has a cold.
Tim can see where this path is leading; he's trying to slam the brakes on his thoughts, but his mind has never been obedient in this regard. It continues to race, connecting point after point, clearing each logical leap, until this newest hypothesis becomes nigh-unassailable.
“Tim,” Conner murmurs. His voice sounds very far away. “You alright?”
The common denominator had always been right before Tim's eyes. Maybe he had realized before, but just refused to let himself believe it. But now, he can't outrun this fast-emerging truth.
The unifying factor to Damian's mysterious throat affliction, all this time it had been Dick.
Everything is falling into place. The strangeness of the timing, the way the symptoms would simply disappear, often within a few hours. And the training room, it had been involved…and, oh God, the security cameras, they must've deliberately sabotaged them so that-ugh!
“It's just something I remembered,” Tim finally answers, and immediately wishes he hadn't. Because hearing himself speak is the final nail in the coffin. His voice. He sounds rough. Ragged. Rasping, almost sluggish. And most of all, he sounds thoroughly, thoroughly fucked-out. “Don't worry about it, Kon.”
Tim shuts his eyes and rests his forehead against his boyfriend's thigh. Tries to ignore the vertigo of his world spinning out of orbit.
He fails spectacularly.
.end
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(A/N): Hope you liked it; it was a lot of fun to write. I've never indulged in situations where both my OTPs get to gay it up.
I gotta say though, I've never struggled so hard with a fic description before. Everything felt like either a lie or a spoiler, haha. Like the rating-I didn't want to have to qualify it like that, but only having an NC-17 label would've been false advertisement, while on the other hand, I still had to warn that there would be smut.
And then the pairings, that was the worst-because technically there's the established TimKon relationship, but the story's not about them. In fact the story is relatively gen. Except, in the end it's actually a dD fic in disguise, HAHAHA.