Fic: The Sound of Solace; Tim Drake (Red Robin II)/Jaime Reyes (Blue Bettle III); R; Part 1/6
Title: The Sound Of Solace
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Part: 1/5
Pairing: Tim Drake (Red Robin II)/Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle III)
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence later
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone is more than legal
Word Count: 2,000 words
Author's Notes: We interrupt your regularly scheduled Jewel of Sakar for something that has a happy ending. First of six vignettes about Tim and Jaime. Written for prompt #9 : unrestrained for my Tim/Jaime claim on dcu_freeforall.
Part One
When Jaime was seven years old his mother had taught him not to eavesdrop, and she hadn’t done it the easy way. The first time she had caught him hiding behind her bedroom door listening to her and his father speak, she hadn’t taken Jaime gently aside and explained that it was rude to listen into conversations. She hadn’t even gently scolded him and told him never to do it again.
She had just given him a look. That look. The look that made her eyes seem more like the unforgiving gaze of a death-bot than anything that belonged on a human. She gave him that look that made it clear he had screwed up and then pursed her lips and pointed silently to his bedroom.
Jaime had thought that was the end of it. His mother made him breakfast the next day and that afternoon she took him to the park to play with his friends. It wasn’t until she started talking loudly to the other mothers about Jaime’s diaper training process, in a voice that could be easily over heard, that Jaime realized that look she had given him last night was the least of his worries.
They walked home from the park in silence that day. Jaime was red faced and furious and his mother was just quietly smug. Just before the reached the house she grasped his shoulder gently and smiled sweetly down at him.
“Now do you understand why you shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations?” she had asked in a pleasant tone of voice. Jamie had glared, nodded and rushed back into the house.
The kids had called Jaime Diaper Baby for the next two weeks. It was the first time that Jaime seriously regretted his mother’s ‘Actions speak louder than words’ policy. It certainly wasn’t the last, though.
So Jaime had spent the next ten years making a studious effort not to listen into other people’s conversations. That was, until today.
Jaime had learned, over the two years he had been Blue Beetle, that sometimes, being a grown-up, and a Superhero, meant doing things you learned not to do as a child. Superheroes used violence to solve problems. They lied. They cheated. Sometimes they stole. They shouted at people and they did not always respect their elders.
And they eavesdropped.
Jaime would like to have been able to take the moral high ground here. To say his eavesdropping, in this case, was for the greater good, but he knew that would be another lie. Or, at best, a partial truth.
So he consigned it to the long list of things he had done as a Superhero that his mother would not approve of and committed himself to it.
He leaned back in the chair where he sat in front of the large bank of computers in the Titans’ Tower Control Room. He reached behind himself and flicked the door locked before he plugged a headset into the speaker jack and turned up the volume.
The screen in front of him displayed the footage that the camera in Wonder Girl’s bedroom was picking up. He had found it accidentally as he clicked through the computer looking for old training footage. That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
Wonder Girl was sitting on her bed in a pair of pajamas. Her hair was wet from a shower and her mouth was pursed with worry. Her eyes looked sad and every few minutes Jaime could see her lips tremble slightly.
She also wasn’t alone.
Robin was in the room with her. It had taken Jaime a few moments to recognize him. He wasn’t wearing a mask and he looked so shockingly innocuous in jeans and a t-shirt that it took Jaime by surprise at first. While Jaime hadn’t seen him at all in the several weeks since Robin had left the Titans to work fulltime in Gotham City, Jaime was sure it wasn’t just the change in wardrobe that made Robin look so thin and pale and small.
Robin was lying on the bed with his head resting in Wonder Girl’s lap. His eyes were closed and his face was blank and his voice was so low that Jaime needed to turn the volume all the way up on the speakers to catch what he was saying.
“…that’s when I walked out. I had to. I wanted to argue the point with him. I wanted to explain that he couldn’t take being Robin away from me because Robin was mine now and not Batman’s. But I couldn’t even look at him, let alone form a coherent sentence,” he said and as he spoke his eyes stayed closed and his facial expression never changed.
“He really made Damian Robin?” Wonder Girl asked.
“Yeah,” Robin nodded before shaking his head in disbelief.
“Why?”
“He said that Damian was his responsibility now and that he needed to be Robin,” Robin’s nonchalant shrug contrasted sharply with the tight tone of his voice.
They were both quiet for a long moment during which Jaime’s panicked mind tried hard to process the fact that Robin wasn’t Robin anymore. While Robin had become increasingly busy over the past few months he was still the one person in the Superhero Community that Jaime felt he could trust. There was a reason he worked with Paco, Brenda and The Posse rather than the rest of the capes. Jaime knew them and knew for a fact that they didn’t have another hidden agenda like the capes.
Robin’s only agenda, when it came to Jaime, seemed to be keeping him alive. Robin trained Jaime harder than any other member of the Titans. He set up schedules and regimens for Jaime. He helped Jaime on a few jobs that he couldn’t handle by himself and always seemed to answer his com when Jaime needed him.
Wonder Girl had told him once, when he complained about Robin working him too hard, that Robin was just tired of losing teammates. Robin had told him once that he felt that he owed it to Ted to help out his successor.
Jaime wasn’t sure which of those things was true. Maybe both were.
Ever since Robin had left Jaime had been watching the old Titans training videos, hoping to pick up another regimen to work on. He had been surprised to learn that a lot of the training exercises ended up with Robin, Superboy and Kid Flash in a laughing heap on the training room floor as Wonder Girl looked on with amused exasperation.
Jaime suddenly realized with a start that he had known Robin for almost two years and he had only seen him smile on film. Never in real life.
It made something in the center of Jaime’s chest clench.
“You’re leaving aren’t you?” Wonder Girl’s voice drew Jaime’s attention back to the screen. It was low and serious and exceptionally sad. “This is going to be just like Bludhaven, isn’t it?”
It was clear to Jaime that she was on the verge of tears.
Robin blinked his eyes open and looked sadly up at Wonder Girl. He reached up a hand and cupped her cheek.
“No, Cassie,” he said in a lightly teasing tone of voice. “Not exactly like Bludhaven. I’ll be eighteen in six weeks so I won’t need to fake an uncle.”
Wonder Girl snorted a laugh and smiled tearfully down at Robin. He gave her a slight, strained smile and she leaned over to kiss him on the forehead.
“I just don’t think you should be by yourself, just now,” she said to him gently.
Robin shut his eyes then but Jaime could see the pain in his face. It was clear in the lines around his mouth and the slight furrow to his brow and the way his eyelashes fluttered slightly against his cheeks.
“At this point, what choice do I have?” he asked bitterly.
Wonder Girl sat up straighter then and her mouth firmed into the determined line it took whenever they were about to go into battle.
“Stick around,” she told him firmly. “Prove to Dick you have just as much right to be there as he does.”
“And Damian?” Robin asked sardonically.
Wonder Girl waved her hand dismissively. “Paint his room hot pink and super glue little purple bows in his hair while he sleeps. Just generally take him down a peg. Hera knows he could use it.”
Robin snorted a soft laugh through his nose before shaking his head. “I don’t know. I just don’t think I can take being around Dick. Day, I can handle. He’s just a kid who’s looking for a little attention. Dick, though? I just don’t think I have the emotional energy to deal with all the fighting.”
“Why fighting?” Wonder Girl asked.
“I don’t even know,” Robin sighed. “It’s like ever since Bruce died Dick acts like we’re not even brothers anymore. Honestly, it makes me wonder if he ever thought we ever were or if it was just an act he put on for Bruce and I’m just the stupid kid he duped into believing he loved him.”
“You know he wouldn’t-“ Wonder Girl began but Robin cut her off.
He sat up abruptly and looked at her earnestly. “Do I? Just remember, I know him better than anyone. I’ve been watching him, idolizing him, since I was six. I saw what he did to Roy, to Babs, to all those women he slept with.” Robin laughed then, harshly, bitterly and with an edge that made Jaime wince. “And despite all of that I thought I was different. I was his brother and he would never treat me the way he treated them.” Robin’s voice tightened and Jaime could see him swallow, he could the tears in Robin’s eyes and hear the pain in his voice. Jaime’s throat tightened in sympathy as Robin continued. “And now I can’t believe how stupid I was. I feel like I should have seen this coming, but didn’t.”
Tears were pouring down Wonder Girl’s face and she pulled Robin forcefully into her arms then. He didn’t even try to resist. He just wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into her neck. His shoulders shook as he cried, silent but unrestrained.
Wonder Girl just held him as if she was trying to shield him with her own body. From what, Jaime didn’t know, but the intent was clear from her posture and her facial expression. Tears still streamed down her face and her eyes looked bleak and lost.
It was clear she wanted to protect Robin, like she did in battle, with her fists and her passion and her fury. But none of those things would help her here and she knew this was a battle she could neither fight nor win.
Jaime reached out a hand and mindlessly flicked off the screen.
His mother’s voice, still as pleasant as it had been eleven years ago, echoed in Jaime’s head.
“Now do you understand why you shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations?”
He had always thought the answer to that question had been that he shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations because he might hear something those people didn’t want him to hear. It had never occurred to him until now that it might be because he could hear something he didn’t want to know.
It had been so easy to see Robin as this crime fighting machine that had a sense of honor and was always awake and ready to help. Jaime hadn’t thought of him as a person who laughed and had fun until he watched those training vids. He hadn’t even thought of him as a person who felt and hurt and cried until he saw him there shaking in Wonder Girl’s arms.
But now Jaime knew all those things and now he wasn’t sure what to do.
Part Two
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Part: 1/5
Pairing: Tim Drake (Red Robin II)/Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle III)
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence later
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone is more than legal
Word Count: 2,000 words
Author's Notes: We interrupt your regularly scheduled Jewel of Sakar for something that has a happy ending. First of six vignettes about Tim and Jaime. Written for prompt #9 : unrestrained for my Tim/Jaime claim on dcu_freeforall.
Part One
When Jaime was seven years old his mother had taught him not to eavesdrop, and she hadn’t done it the easy way. The first time she had caught him hiding behind her bedroom door listening to her and his father speak, she hadn’t taken Jaime gently aside and explained that it was rude to listen into conversations. She hadn’t even gently scolded him and told him never to do it again.
She had just given him a look. That look. The look that made her eyes seem more like the unforgiving gaze of a death-bot than anything that belonged on a human. She gave him that look that made it clear he had screwed up and then pursed her lips and pointed silently to his bedroom.
Jaime had thought that was the end of it. His mother made him breakfast the next day and that afternoon she took him to the park to play with his friends. It wasn’t until she started talking loudly to the other mothers about Jaime’s diaper training process, in a voice that could be easily over heard, that Jaime realized that look she had given him last night was the least of his worries.
They walked home from the park in silence that day. Jaime was red faced and furious and his mother was just quietly smug. Just before the reached the house she grasped his shoulder gently and smiled sweetly down at him.
“Now do you understand why you shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations?” she had asked in a pleasant tone of voice. Jamie had glared, nodded and rushed back into the house.
The kids had called Jaime Diaper Baby for the next two weeks. It was the first time that Jaime seriously regretted his mother’s ‘Actions speak louder than words’ policy. It certainly wasn’t the last, though.
So Jaime had spent the next ten years making a studious effort not to listen into other people’s conversations. That was, until today.
Jaime had learned, over the two years he had been Blue Beetle, that sometimes, being a grown-up, and a Superhero, meant doing things you learned not to do as a child. Superheroes used violence to solve problems. They lied. They cheated. Sometimes they stole. They shouted at people and they did not always respect their elders.
And they eavesdropped.
Jaime would like to have been able to take the moral high ground here. To say his eavesdropping, in this case, was for the greater good, but he knew that would be another lie. Or, at best, a partial truth.
So he consigned it to the long list of things he had done as a Superhero that his mother would not approve of and committed himself to it.
He leaned back in the chair where he sat in front of the large bank of computers in the Titans’ Tower Control Room. He reached behind himself and flicked the door locked before he plugged a headset into the speaker jack and turned up the volume.
The screen in front of him displayed the footage that the camera in Wonder Girl’s bedroom was picking up. He had found it accidentally as he clicked through the computer looking for old training footage. That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
Wonder Girl was sitting on her bed in a pair of pajamas. Her hair was wet from a shower and her mouth was pursed with worry. Her eyes looked sad and every few minutes Jaime could see her lips tremble slightly.
She also wasn’t alone.
Robin was in the room with her. It had taken Jaime a few moments to recognize him. He wasn’t wearing a mask and he looked so shockingly innocuous in jeans and a t-shirt that it took Jaime by surprise at first. While Jaime hadn’t seen him at all in the several weeks since Robin had left the Titans to work fulltime in Gotham City, Jaime was sure it wasn’t just the change in wardrobe that made Robin look so thin and pale and small.
Robin was lying on the bed with his head resting in Wonder Girl’s lap. His eyes were closed and his face was blank and his voice was so low that Jaime needed to turn the volume all the way up on the speakers to catch what he was saying.
“…that’s when I walked out. I had to. I wanted to argue the point with him. I wanted to explain that he couldn’t take being Robin away from me because Robin was mine now and not Batman’s. But I couldn’t even look at him, let alone form a coherent sentence,” he said and as he spoke his eyes stayed closed and his facial expression never changed.
“He really made Damian Robin?” Wonder Girl asked.
“Yeah,” Robin nodded before shaking his head in disbelief.
“Why?”
“He said that Damian was his responsibility now and that he needed to be Robin,” Robin’s nonchalant shrug contrasted sharply with the tight tone of his voice.
They were both quiet for a long moment during which Jaime’s panicked mind tried hard to process the fact that Robin wasn’t Robin anymore. While Robin had become increasingly busy over the past few months he was still the one person in the Superhero Community that Jaime felt he could trust. There was a reason he worked with Paco, Brenda and The Posse rather than the rest of the capes. Jaime knew them and knew for a fact that they didn’t have another hidden agenda like the capes.
Robin’s only agenda, when it came to Jaime, seemed to be keeping him alive. Robin trained Jaime harder than any other member of the Titans. He set up schedules and regimens for Jaime. He helped Jaime on a few jobs that he couldn’t handle by himself and always seemed to answer his com when Jaime needed him.
Wonder Girl had told him once, when he complained about Robin working him too hard, that Robin was just tired of losing teammates. Robin had told him once that he felt that he owed it to Ted to help out his successor.
Jaime wasn’t sure which of those things was true. Maybe both were.
Ever since Robin had left Jaime had been watching the old Titans training videos, hoping to pick up another regimen to work on. He had been surprised to learn that a lot of the training exercises ended up with Robin, Superboy and Kid Flash in a laughing heap on the training room floor as Wonder Girl looked on with amused exasperation.
Jaime suddenly realized with a start that he had known Robin for almost two years and he had only seen him smile on film. Never in real life.
It made something in the center of Jaime’s chest clench.
“You’re leaving aren’t you?” Wonder Girl’s voice drew Jaime’s attention back to the screen. It was low and serious and exceptionally sad. “This is going to be just like Bludhaven, isn’t it?”
It was clear to Jaime that she was on the verge of tears.
Robin blinked his eyes open and looked sadly up at Wonder Girl. He reached up a hand and cupped her cheek.
“No, Cassie,” he said in a lightly teasing tone of voice. “Not exactly like Bludhaven. I’ll be eighteen in six weeks so I won’t need to fake an uncle.”
Wonder Girl snorted a laugh and smiled tearfully down at Robin. He gave her a slight, strained smile and she leaned over to kiss him on the forehead.
“I just don’t think you should be by yourself, just now,” she said to him gently.
Robin shut his eyes then but Jaime could see the pain in his face. It was clear in the lines around his mouth and the slight furrow to his brow and the way his eyelashes fluttered slightly against his cheeks.
“At this point, what choice do I have?” he asked bitterly.
Wonder Girl sat up straighter then and her mouth firmed into the determined line it took whenever they were about to go into battle.
“Stick around,” she told him firmly. “Prove to Dick you have just as much right to be there as he does.”
“And Damian?” Robin asked sardonically.
Wonder Girl waved her hand dismissively. “Paint his room hot pink and super glue little purple bows in his hair while he sleeps. Just generally take him down a peg. Hera knows he could use it.”
Robin snorted a soft laugh through his nose before shaking his head. “I don’t know. I just don’t think I can take being around Dick. Day, I can handle. He’s just a kid who’s looking for a little attention. Dick, though? I just don’t think I have the emotional energy to deal with all the fighting.”
“Why fighting?” Wonder Girl asked.
“I don’t even know,” Robin sighed. “It’s like ever since Bruce died Dick acts like we’re not even brothers anymore. Honestly, it makes me wonder if he ever thought we ever were or if it was just an act he put on for Bruce and I’m just the stupid kid he duped into believing he loved him.”
“You know he wouldn’t-“ Wonder Girl began but Robin cut her off.
He sat up abruptly and looked at her earnestly. “Do I? Just remember, I know him better than anyone. I’ve been watching him, idolizing him, since I was six. I saw what he did to Roy, to Babs, to all those women he slept with.” Robin laughed then, harshly, bitterly and with an edge that made Jaime wince. “And despite all of that I thought I was different. I was his brother and he would never treat me the way he treated them.” Robin’s voice tightened and Jaime could see him swallow, he could the tears in Robin’s eyes and hear the pain in his voice. Jaime’s throat tightened in sympathy as Robin continued. “And now I can’t believe how stupid I was. I feel like I should have seen this coming, but didn’t.”
Tears were pouring down Wonder Girl’s face and she pulled Robin forcefully into her arms then. He didn’t even try to resist. He just wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into her neck. His shoulders shook as he cried, silent but unrestrained.
Wonder Girl just held him as if she was trying to shield him with her own body. From what, Jaime didn’t know, but the intent was clear from her posture and her facial expression. Tears still streamed down her face and her eyes looked bleak and lost.
It was clear she wanted to protect Robin, like she did in battle, with her fists and her passion and her fury. But none of those things would help her here and she knew this was a battle she could neither fight nor win.
Jaime reached out a hand and mindlessly flicked off the screen.
His mother’s voice, still as pleasant as it had been eleven years ago, echoed in Jaime’s head.
“Now do you understand why you shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations?”
He had always thought the answer to that question had been that he shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations because he might hear something those people didn’t want him to hear. It had never occurred to him until now that it might be because he could hear something he didn’t want to know.
It had been so easy to see Robin as this crime fighting machine that had a sense of honor and was always awake and ready to help. Jaime hadn’t thought of him as a person who laughed and had fun until he watched those training vids. He hadn’t even thought of him as a person who felt and hurt and cried until he saw him there shaking in Wonder Girl’s arms.
But now Jaime knew all those things and now he wasn’t sure what to do.
Part Two