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“Great. Just great!”
“No worries, we still have time.”
“That’s what you think!” Tim slammed the car trunk. “We have time assuming I-95 isn’t backed up around Baltimore and assuming we can get this tire changed in under fifteen minutes and assuming the spare isn’t flat and assuming that blow-out didn’t damage anything else in the car and assuming we can find the restaurant without any issues and are you filming me?”
Steph grinned over her phone at him. “You’re gonna have to stop being so funny if you want me to stop sharing you with the internet.”
“Grrrrahahaaaa!” Tim threw the lugwrench at the ground, then followed it onto his knees, picked it up, and started levering at the hub cap with the pointy end. “Fine. Whatever. Be like that. Hi internet, here’s how you change a tire. Observe how I wedged the rear wheels in place for safety’s sake before getting started.”
“Tch.” Steph saved the vid, locked her phone, and stuck it in her jacket pocket before squatting down next to him. “It’s not actually a life-or-death issue whether we make our reservation on time. You could stand to relax a little. We’re on vacation.”
The hubcap popped off. Tim got up, rummaged in the equipment box for a few seconds, and came up with the jack. “Not like you take things any more seriously when it is a life or death issue.”
“I do so!”
“Fine. You do. But you still give me a hard time about—fretting. Like I’m making problems more real by trying to solve them before they have consequences!” He wrenched at a lug nut, probably over-loosening it.
Steph rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, still crouching. She kept her knees close together because this skirt wasn’t all that long. “Are we really doing this right now?”
“Why not?” He’d finished with the nuts, and tossed the lug wrench underhand back into the equipment box.
“Because you’re in a snit and we won’t get anywhere useful, we’ll just get in a shouting match and wind up extra-late and in shitty moods for our dinner date with your geriatric crush.”
Tim shot a poisonous look over his shoulder before going back to wriggling the block of wood that went under the jack for stability into place in the roadside gravel. “He’s just cool, alright. He did a lot of hero work in Gotham before Bruce was even born.”
“I know. I think it’s really cute how you’re still such a fanboy.”
Tim slid the hydraulic jack into place where it needed to be under the belly of the car, and stood up, clutching the handle of the thing. “Would you not do that.”
Steph grinned up at him. “What?”
“Talk like that. It…when you say nice things so they’re insults. It really gets to me.”
“Wow. Okay.” Tim started pumping the hydraulic jack, careful long smooth strokes, like he had for some reason taken the time in his busy busy schedule to practice changing a tire. Steph’s eyebrows climbed as she watched. “…this is why they call it ‘jacking off,’ isn’t it?”
“Oh my god.”
“I thought you weren’t religious.”
Tim turned his face away, but he couldn’t hide the warmth in his voice. “Shut up. I don’t want to laugh right now.”
“Why not? Laugh!” Steph stood up, waving her hands in encouragement. “Relax! There is literally nothing that matters on the line! Mr. Scott isn’t going to think less of us for having a bad tire any more than he would if we missed dinner completely to save a bus full of schoolchildren being taken hostage.”
Tim didn’t argue, but his smooth rhythm on the jack didn’t stutter either, and the set of his chin looked mulish. Steph folded her arms. “Why can’t you enjoy not being under pressure for once? Why do you have to waste every second of your life worrying about some other second you can’t control? It’s exhausting! It pisses me off! Hey, look at me!”
“I thought you didn’t want to do this now.” Tim lowered the jack handle to the ground, carefully.
“Shit. I didn’t. But for real! It’s bullshit, Tim! You already decided calling triple-A wasn’t efficient enough so you were doing things yourself, I don’t see how dwelling on all the things that might slow us down later is supposed to help anything now.”
“How is deciding everything’s going to be fine, so you don’t have to make any effort to consider the steps necessary to counter all the reasons it might not be, ‘helping?’”
“Because you can’t plan for everything! When you try all you do is make yourself and everyone around you miserable, and when a thing happens you’re just going to have to improvise anyway!”
Tim flung his hands out, time a-wasting now with no progress on the blown tire. “You think you can just do whatever works for you, right now, and leave other people to deal with the fallout.” Steph’s fist clenched, because they never talked about her ‘death’ but that couldn’t not be referencing it. “You never take any responsibility,” Tim rushed on. “No matter how many times it goes wrong, you think you can just take action in the world without having to deal with what that means.”
Steph refused to get drawn into the same old argument. “I’ve been getting better about that. I’ve been working at it. But you? You’re just getting worse! You used to know how to have fun!”
They’d actually had a lot of fun so far, since leaving Gotham, but of course at the first hint of things going wrong he had to fly off the handle and lock down, and go into a snit fit when she tried to be optimistic. “Wasn’t this trip supposed to be about finding yourself and all that crap? What’s that worth if all you do is keep turning into Bruce?”
“For crying out loud, Steph, don’t make this about him.”
“How can I not?”
“Because it’s me! These are my personal hangups about my personal screw-ups! I can’t just offload it all on Bruce! Do I go around blaming anything about you on Cluemaster? Or your mom? Or even Barbara?”
Well, no. Bruce did, sometimes, because of his bullshit ideas about heredity that were sometimes honestly one step short of the outright eugenics Damian had been raised on, but that wasn’t really Tim’s bag. He was a critical jerk, but his criticisms tended to be about her, personally. If they were tangled up with where she came from, it was only at the deep subtext level.
“I’m not doing it to...score points or something,” she told him, “I’m saying you’re like this because he’s a bad influence, and you need to chill the fuck out. Before you alienate everybody you know and give yourself the cardiovascular issues of a dude three times your age!”
“Rrgh!” Tim turned his back on Steph and went back to twisting off lugnuts, with his fingers now. It was a few seconds before he spoke, low and through his teeth. “Do you know how many people died in that war you started? Really died, not just fake died and ran away to Africa?”
The tight line of tension up his back was no match for the sick swoop in Steph’s gut that he would even bring this up. “That was not my idea.”
“Do you know?”
“It’s not like all your scheming and plotting means no one ever gets killed!”
“No. No, of course it doesn’t. But—fewer. That’s the whole point! That’s why I do it, why we do any of it! If I do everything right, fewer people get killed. That’s the point. And if I mess up, more people die. That’s what happens. When we mess up. So we have to do everything we can to not.”
His right hand twitched as he talked, not quite trembling but not able to maintain a consistent grip on the nut, either. Maybe he hadn’t loosened this one enough. His hand slipped off, twice, before he managed to get it turning.
Steph fought to even out her breathing. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for him to turn every little thing into a giant drama and then talk like it was his moral obligation to do so, like she was flawed as a person for not being as screwed up as him.
She didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything close to it that covered up her own vulnerabilities better, either. She breathed. She’d been practicing this, ever since the months after her so-brief-it-counted-as-fake death when everything had made her too mad and scared to see straight. She’d done a lot of reading about ways to be okay. She’d even talked to a couple of people.
Besides Leslie, who hadn’t been in a great place to advise her even if Steph had been able to listen.
“But…” she said finally, getting back to the core of the issue instead of reacting. “Nobody’s going to die, if we’re late to dinner.”
Tim’s hands still weren’t steady, as he smoothed his hair back, almost definitely getting some sort of grime or grease in it. “That…I know. I do know that.”
“So why are you being a dick about it?”
“Hah.” It was a ragged sound, not entirely unlike a laugh, but mostly just a word. “Don’t know how to stop, I guess.”
“So you’re gonna stop now?”
“I’ll try.” He twiddled the last lugnut free, then gripped the blown-out tire by the rim and heaved it loose, sliding it free of the fixed bolts. The jack held. This was good, as either the car didn’t come equipped with jackstands or Tim had decided to dispense with them for this operation, since he wasn’t going under the car himself.
Steph frowned, watching him bend with his arms full of wheel, to set it down in the gravel by the road. Something about how that had been resolved didn’t feel right. His emotions that had been making him lash out had been acknowledged, categorized as misdirected, he’d conceded the point.
She’d won. With logic. So what was wrong.
She was trying to be better about this stuff. She still thought the amount of responsibility these batboys took for everyone else ever was condescending and bullshit and also basically a form of self-harm, but she could acknowledge that even if her normal approach was good for her mental health it led to her dropping the ball, sometimes, when she really couldn’t afford that. Or other people couldn’t. So. Middle ground. What was missing, in this conversation. What had they skipped.
While she thought, Tim had retrieved and now carefully hefted the replacement tire—not the normal mini-spare deal, this ride was kitted out with the assumption you might need to change a tire yourself and then immediately engage in a high-speed carchase across several hundred miles of terrain. It wasn’t flat, either. As he fed it onto the waiting lug bolts, Steph got the problem to click. “No one’s going to die,” she said. “But…you’ll be sad if we miss dinner with Mr. Scott. Or if turning up late just makes us look bad, and he doesn’t take to you. You want to impress him, and you’re worried about it.”
Tim finished getting the wheel into place before grumbling in his throat, shoulders hunched up toward his ears. “Yeah, okay, I’m an inveterate suck-up. You’ve got me. I give in. Let it go. Where the hell did I put the lugnuts?”
“Windshield wipers.” He’d laid them out there in a row, apparently having auto-selected a flat surface without consulting his conscious mind. Steph felt her mouth draw in like she’d bitten a lemon. “Also, no, shit, I’m not actually trying to give you a hard time.”
The look he shot her was dubious, before he went back to screwing on lugnuts.
“When you’re worried about something, and I tell you you shouldn’t be, you feel like I’m saying your emotions are dumb,” said Steph.
“Aren’t you?” He didn’t sound sulky so much as guarded, and trying not to sound even that. Why was this dork so bad at pretending not to care except when he was too damn good at it?
“Well…sometimes, yeah.” Because his feelings were dumb a lot. Except that was actually an asshole attitude, wasn’t it; just because his opinions were stupid didn’t mean his feelings were. She guessed. People were always acting like her feelings were stupid, though, did she owe them any better. Ugh.
Was she really trying to have a psychological breaththrough while yelling at her ex who was changing a tire on the side of the interstate.
Tim snort-laughed again. His shoulders were coming down. He spun the second lugnut into place. “Okay.”
“But, uh…mostly I just want you to stop being such a downer. Just because you want to feel like crap doesn’t mean I’m obligated to join you.” Wow, so understanding. “Uh. Your feelings aren’t actually dumb. It’s fine if you want people to like you. Even if you should maybe get used to the fact that sometimes they don’t.” He was actually kind of spoiled, to be so used to approval that not getting it scared him, to expect people to help him just because he made a good impression. He was such a child sometimes. Such a man.
“I am used to that,” Tim said. “People dislike me all the time. I’m not all that likable.”
At least he didn’t sound self-pitying about it, but Steph rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
“I know I have unfair advantages when it comes to making a…strong impression,” he continued, rather irritably, “but I’m sure you hear the same about being a gorgeous blonde. Advantages just means it must be more your fault when you fail.”
“Owch.”
“Generic you.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
The last lugnut as snugged as he could get it by hand, Tim turned a handle and the hydraulic jack depressurized, letting the car sink gently onto its new wheel. They both watched it in silence.
Tim glanced sidelong at Steph. Gauging something. “I’m sorry I yelled at you?”
“I’m…sorry for making fun of your anxiety because it made me feel bad.”
“I’m…sorry for making you feel bad?”
“Okay, let’s stop there,” said Steph, because this felt like something that could get out of hand. Infinite apology recursion.
Tim nodded. “Could you pass me the lugwrench?”
She went and fished it out of the box he’d thrown it into, while he got down on one knee next to the car again.
“You messed up your nice pants pretty bad,” she pointed out, passing the wrench over. “That’s actually probably worse than being late, in terms of making a good impression.”
“I was sort of thinking you’d drive the rest of the way,” Tim said, bending to his task. “So I can change as we go.”
“…well played.” She’d avoided getting involved in the wheel-changing because she was mad, and because it wasn’t so much a two-person job, and because he was the one who wanted to do it in such a rush and she wasn’t destroying this dress in the attempt. But she couldn’t really argue it wasn’t fair to expect her to drive, now. She even liked driving.
The prospect of facing possible traffic jams and trying to find the right street address and park near an unfamiliar restaurant in an unfamiliar city during rush hour was a lot more intimidating now she had to do it herself, though.
Tim smirked. Ooh, he knew exactly what she was thinking. “Fuck you,” she told him, but nicely.
It caught him by surprise, and he snort-laughed. Didn’t make a dirty joke, because it was Tim and he could be prim like that—Steph was like 95% sure he was still a virgin—but clearly thought about it. The atmosphere lightened as he continued making sure the new wheel wouldn’t fall off. The sound of passing vehicles going 70 miles per hour was much louder when they weren’t making any noise of their own. Good thing the interstate shoulders were so wide.
Tim tightened the last nut, and sat back on his heels. Steph smoothly traded him the shiny hubcap for the lugwrench, and walked over to shove the tool back in the kit. She was pretty sure this box had been well-organized when Tim took it out. Oh well, he could reorganize it at the next motel, or next time he got a burst of OCD energy. Better than going through the cold-case files on his laptop. Tim finished forcing the hubcap into place and came after her, stooped sideways under the awkwardly balanced weight of the jack.
It went into the box, too, with its little foundation block and the wheel wedges, and they wrestled the lid down and the emergency kit as a whole back into the trunk, on top of the spare tire compartment, now containing the ruined tire and also refusing to completely close.
Tim handed over the car keys, wiped his hands on a wet-wipe and then a paper towel because of course this car had both, and dug into his luggage for a spare pair of slacks. He was of course the sort of nerd who packed more than one pair of nice black slacks for a roadtrip vacation.
“If there’s one thing I can say for my superhero career,” Tim said brightly, as Steph pulled out onto I-95 heading south again and prepared to merge left, while he began to contort in the passenger’s seat, “it’s that it taught me to get my clothes off fast in adverse conditions.”
“I’d say ooh-lah but that’s basically the opposite of the ingredients for a hot striptease.”
“There is absolutely nothing I can say to that that does not make me look worse, good job.”
Steph grinned, and hit the gas.