Primary Colors
All aboard the angst train!
Title: Primary Colors
Characters: Tim+(Kon), Dick
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,481
Summary: He never could fly.
*******
Note: This fic springboards off Tim's civvies in Robin #148. It's the first issue of that series since Kon's death in IC and the jacket Tim wears has certain distinct features to it. Primary colors. Yellow bands. Standing collar. Look familiar?
Obviously not an exact match, but the style is uncanny. And I can't imagine Tim buying such a similar jacket without some level of intention.
*******
--
He drifts. It's easier where the crowds are. The sounds and smells, the jostles and pickpockets-they don't capture his focus. But they provide some distraction. Like white noise, the sensations slip through all the holes in his head, coating his brain, the backs of his eyeballs. Add another layer that separates himself from reality.
Open air markets, bazaars, gigantic shopping malls. These are the places where he can go and linger between being and being nothing. He slips into the mass of people, lets the flow guide him. They walk with purpose; even the casual window-shoppers have more assurance of themselves it seems.
--
When Bruce forces them to train, he can concentrate. He can lift away from his heart and become his fist instead. Can become the amorphous pattern of the bruise against his hip, can become swivel of his ankle as he sweeps a low kick. It's when his body stops moving that living becomes the problem again. Bruce has them traveling the globe to learn, to get their heads straight, but they might as well have stayed in Gotham; he's less of a danger to himself when he's fighting than at any other time. The irony is not lost on him. But logic has given up its meaning when his whole world's been flipped around.
He can't clear his mind enough to meditate; Bruce and Dick watch too closely for him to even consider certain other options for release. So it's best to keep where his mind can grow duller, move like the world is underwater, slow and sluggish and half-distorted where the light bends.
--
Every so often he'll buy a trinket or two, to get Dick to stop making those faces. Each purchase means another small step, as if to say he still searches for happiness, little pockets of gratification for himself, even if it's in something as small as a leather satchel from Milan, or a wristband in Lagos. They are gestures towards healing. They are also lies. He wonders if Dick knows that, too.
In these past weeks and months, Tim's never felt more grateful to have an older brother. The talking helps. Some conversations can last hours, soft voices bouncing against the hotel ceiling as they lie parallel in their beds. Sometimes they are only a few words traded. And other times they stretch across weeks, short hurting bursts where Tim will intentionally obfuscate his meaning; he often finds himself hoping Dick will get tired, stop stringing the pieces together and let them fall to the ground. Scatter beneath their feet. Of course he never does, and the love that Tim feels in response is frightening.
The depth of that mutual reliance gives him peace while it scratches at his insides. Scratches like nettles in his stomach, scoring the gentle tissues of his organs, bleeding him drop by drop until he drowns in himself.
He still needs to escape, and so he continues to find places to wander in anonymity.
--
In Johannesburg he sees the back of a man's head, a line of grey curving around the circumference of his skull from temple to temple. Tim's seen plenty of older men like that, many of them even in the same charcoal suits that his dad preferred, golden cufflinks at all. But for some reason this is the one that makes the ground shake.
It's that unpredictability that Tim hates most about his grief. The way it creeps all around him until he thinks he's grown accustomed, learned to limp on his good leg to avoid further pain. But then he sees a man that looks a shade too familiar and he's shocked and breathing too hard, and time pinches to hours later and the sky is getting dark.
Bruce finds him sitting stiffly on the floor of a phone booth and his face is wet. And Bruce's expression softens like he wants to carry Tim, but he hesitates for a second and that's all the time Tim need to shrug him off, even when he hasn't wiped the tears away.
The reminders don't always have him in a wreck. Sometimes they bring him blinding glimmers of happy. And sometimes they are far more confusing than either.
--
He sees the colors from a hundred feet away, and almost thinks he is hallucinating. He blinks in the hope that the image will disappear or at least waver like a desert mirage and betray itself. It doesn't. He moves closer, still at a distance but now able to regard with greater clarity. The stream of the crowd parts around him to flow past.
The sounds of hundreds of shoppers and workers echo inside the mall, bouncing all around to provide that sensory haze, that layer of numbness that staves away the sadness. But the red-blue-yellow pierces through. It's uncanny.
The fabric doesn't have the same ratio of stretch and strength when he tests it in his hands. Not that he'd expect a normal civilian jacket to feel the same as combat gear. And the pattern itself isn't exact, and probably not even intentionally similar. But it's enough.
Enough for what, he doesn't know. But he's already at the register, sliding his cash across the counter. And with the bag tucked under his arm, he walks through the mall with a renewed sense of urgency, as though he were carrying a bomb and not a new piece of light outerwear.
--
He pulls it over his arms as soon as he steps outside, even under the blaze of the Dubai sun. It hangs a little loose for his frame and he tries not to think about whether he did that intentionally.
He runs his fingers over the bands of yellow.
A tingle starts beneath his fingernails, but rapidly spreads until it's covering all of his skin and even his scalp starts to prickle. He feels hyperaware of everything that touches him and he wonders if this is what having TTK felt like; then he realizes that he never asked.
He…he would have filled the jacket out nicely. It would have wrapped against his muscles in all the right ways. Would have hugged the line of his cocky posture.
Tim can almost hear the joke at his expense, and oh how hard Tim would have been teased if he'd been caught trying to dress like him. Tim can imagine it so clearly that he almost laughs. He doesn't, though.
The world goes on. Without him. Because of him. Because he let himself die.
No. Sacrifice is the preferred euphemism.
Doesn't matter. Either way still means gone.
--
He's flying backward and his brow furrows, because no, no, he was trying to go forward! Then he feels the pressure of fingers digging into his torso, right under his sternum, and realizes he's being pulled. The arms around his middle are familiar. Two bodies tumble backwards, away from the edge and into the opposite wall, just next to the sliding door, crashing down to the ground in a tangle.
“Oh, hi Dick,” he says quite mildly, as though his brother hadn't just caught him on the hotel balcony railing.
Dick's breaths are ragged and dry. “What the hell were you doing?!” The question sounds angry, but paper-thin. Then Dick's hand moves and circles one of the yellow bands on Tim's bicep. “That-that jacket…”
Tim swivels his eyes to the side to look at Dick, suddenly too tired-or maybe too bored, or maybe something else, what does it matter-to even turn his head. But he's not too anything to peel Dick's limbs away.
He stands and moves back towards the edge. The sky is beautiful today, sunny with just enough clouds to keep the blues from getting monotonous.
“I was wondering if I'd be able to fly.”
He curls his fingers on the railing where his feet had been; there are ghost impressions in the dust, in the shape of his sneaker treads. He leans over a few inches. The street below seems very far, like he's closer to the sun than the earth. A desert gust whips his bangs up into his eyes. He doesn't blink.
“That would've been a very long fall,” he says, as if in consideration. “I wasn't going to jump anyway.”
He turns around, slotting his hands into his pockets. The jacket engulfs him so completely and there's something wonderful and satisfying about that. His mouth strains a little like it's trying to smile.
Dick is still curled on the floor against the wall, eyes wide and staring wildly back at him. The image is a little blurry and the wind feels a little colder on Tim's face than it should.
Oh. His face is wet again. He doesn't know how long it's been like that. A drop rolls off the side of his jaw and hits the balcony flooring, soaking into the concrete.
.end
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(A/N): Going to go lie down with the covers over my head. Apparently I don’t ship TimKon as hard as I ship TimSadness.