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Tim is midway through his AP chemistry homework when he hears the tap at his window. It’s too dark outside to see much of his intruder besides a vague outline and a ghost of blonde hair, but he doesn’t need clarity. He’s already running over and sliding the window open. His dad doesn’t know Tim knocked the screen out months ago, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
“Would it have killed your parents to assign you a room on the ground floor?” Robin complains, reaching a hand out for Tim to pull her in over the sill. “This climb is going to kill me one day.”
Tim’s heart does a quadruple somersault every time he sees her. He hastily brushes Cheeto dust off his hands from his late-night snack and fixes his hair. “I think typically, parents don’t want burglars climbing in through their kids’ windows in the middle of the night.”
Robin laughs. Her eyes are tight with pain behind the mask as she clutches her left shoulder under her cape, but her smile when she looks at Tim in his pajamas is genuine. “Is that right? I wouldn’t know. My dad’s idea of proper childcare was giving me whiskey to chill me out whenever I cried. Are your dad and Dana asleep?”
Tim closes the window behind her. “They’ve been out for hours. Horror movies always make them tired for some reason.”
“Weird. Good thing, though. You might need to dash downstairs for some towels.” Robin moves her cape aside to reveal her bleeding upper arm.
Tim fumbles for the lamp. “Holy hell, Steph, what happened?”
Stephanie peels off her domino mask to reveal pained blue eyes. She sits down carefully on the edge of Tim’s bed, doing her best to keep the blood gushing from her arm off the bedspread. “Got into a scuffle with some other kids on the playground.”
Tim dives under the bed to retrieve his first-aid kit. It’s become exceptionally well-stocked since he and Stephanie started seeing each other. It’s too often that her nightly Peter Pan visits to his window start with blood. Tim’s become surprisingly adept at patching up injuries for a fourteen-year-old.
Steph surrenders her arm to him, holding back a wince as he peels off the torn fabric to get a better look at the wound. “What did this, a chainsaw?” he asks. There’s an extensive gash running along the back of Steph’s bicep, bleeding like a stuck pig now that her sleeve isn’t holding pressure on it anymore. Tim frantically presses a gauze pad to the wound.
“Machete, actually. It was actually pretty cool to sword-fight for once instead of just flinging birdarangs around. I felt like a pirate.”
Tim looks over his assortment of supplies. He’ll need a massive restock after this. “You probably should’ve gone to Alfred with this one.”
“This saves me a trip. And you’re a much cuter nurse than he is.”
Tim snorts. He hides the blush ravaging his cheeks by focusing on unspooling his roll of gauze instead. “Thanks, I guess.”
They didn’t used to be so frivolous with names. Tim didn’t even know Stephanie existed a year ago, and vice versa.
He’d known the truth about Batman and Robin since the first one, Dick Grayson, performed that quadruple somersault on the news. It didn’t take much legwork to make the jump from Bruce Wayne, and then, later, to Jason Todd.
Figuring out Stephanie’s part in it all was purely coincidental. Tim had already noticed that Batman had become colder since losing Jason. More violent, less predictable, careless. Clearly Tim wasn’t the only one who noticed how far Gotham’s hero had fallen because a new masked vigilante, the Spoiler, started popping up in the news shortly after, solving her own cases and bagging her own criminals.
The Spoiler disappeared two months later, and in her place rose Robin again—blonde this time.
Tim had been picking at the mystery for weeks. Figuring out Bruce’s identity was easy because he was the only man in Dick Grayson’s life with a similar build as Batman and the financial means to make a vigilante career work. Jason Todd was Bruce’s new kid who showed up conveniently around the same time as Robin grew several inches shorter and noticeably younger.
This new Robin, though, was a case Tim couldn’t crack, and it nagged at him endlessly.
It all came together when a group of kidnappers broke into Gotham Academy to take the Drakes’ son for ransom. While everyone ran around panicking as gunshots echoed down the halls, it caught Tim’s attention that the blonde girl in his math class—a new girl on some scholarship no one had ever heard of—was steady. Unafraid.
Tim lost track of her in the violence and the, you know, kidnapping part. But Tim wasn’t afraid for a single moment. Robin would save him.
And she did. After the bad guys were all down, the girl wonder untied Tim and checked him over for injuries. “Are you okay, Tim?”
Mutely, Tim nodded. He recognized her voice. He recognized her smile from that time they had to work on a project together and he made her laugh. There was no doubt in his mind that it was her. Stephanie.
Naturally, Tim still needed evidence for his own peace of mind. One might call it creepy, but Tim called it reconnaissance. Steph called it a crush. Tim made a nightly habit of following Batman and Robin around Gotham to capture photos of their heroics and gather all the information he could on them. His parents never cared enough to track his whereabouts, and after Janet died and Jack fell into a coma, it only made it easier to do what he wanted without adults around to stop him.
Tim met Robin for the second time several weeks into these nightly ventures. He had climbed a fire escape to get a better shot of Batman stopping a mugging in the alley below, and his camera slipped from his hands. It was instinctive to lunge for it. The action caused Tim’s foot to slip off the rail, and suddenly Tim was falling.
Robin caught him and yanked him back onto the fire escape. He didn’t even realize she was behind him. “Are you crazy, or just stupid?”
After Tim caught his breath, he answered, “Neither.”
“You sure about that? Because odds are you’re either crazy enough to think you can stalk the literal Batman and not have that end badly for you, or you’re too stupid to realize that we’ve obviously known some weirdo has been tailing us every day for two weeks.”
Tim grinned. “I’m sticking with neither, then, because I’ve actually been tailing you for three weeks.”
Tim was certain he’d get his shit rocked for that. Any minute the Batman himself was going to show up to knock Tim out and take him back to their lair under Wayne Manor where they’d brainwash him until he couldn’t remember his own name, let alone theirs. Instead, miraculously, Robin took a liking to him.
The first time she appeared at his bedroom window, it was allegedly because she happened to be in the area—on her way next door, that is—and she was low on snacks. Tim knew it was an intimidation tactic. I know who you are, so don’t get cocky about knowing who I am. But Tim wasn’t threatened. All he could think about was the sheer thrill at the fact that Robin was at his window.
Now that he’s had more experience, Tim can confidently say that those types of visits are greatly preferable to the bloodier ones.
“I don’t have a suture kit,” Tim confesses. He lifts the gauze pad off the wound to check on the bleeding. It’s slowed to a trickle by now, but the size of the cut is what concerns him. “Dana has sewing supplies in a cookie tin somewhere, but I don’t know how sterile that’d be.”
“It’s okay, just wrap it up the best you can,” Steph says with a half-shrug. “At least so I can get back to the cave without dripping blood all over the place. It’s not exactly good for the secret identity thing if anyone can find my DNA willy-nilly.”
Tim obediently cleans the wound the best he can with peroxide, apologizing every time she hisses. To distract herself, Steph polishes off the rest of Tim’s Cheetos and tells him the story behind the pesky little stabbing. “In my defense, the guy couldn’t even hold the thing right. He looked like he was ready to flip pancakes with that machete. How was I supposed to know he had backup?”
Tim chuckles. “At least you got ‘em, right?”
“Come on, who do you think you’re talking to?” Steph sucks Cheeto dust off her thumb. “Of course I got ‘em. I’m in for one hell of a lecture when I get back to the cave, though. I wasn’t exactly supposed to be going solo tonight.”
Tim starts wrapping gauze around her bicep, being careful not to aggravate the wound itself. “Is he going to be mad?”
“Nah, Bruce is an old softie at heart. He likes me too much to fire me.”
“You are very charming,” Tim agrees.
Steph picks up one of Tim’s homework packets lying on the bedspread and skims the top, her brows furrowing. “Shit, is this due tomorrow? I don’t even know what day it is.”
Tim laughs. “You’re not setting a very good example for Gotham’s youth. The girl wonder can’t even get her homework done on time? What will the media think?”
Steph pulls her sleeve back down over the thick gauze and rolls her eyes. “Lucky for me that I have a genius boyfriend who would happily give me all the answers at lunch tomorrow, right?”
Tim goes in for a kiss. “Lucky you, Robin.”