i wish more people would get past the over the top dialogue in most of the harley & tim team-up bc the bits where she’s trying to psychoanalyze him and he shoots her down super aggressively, even bringing up Joker, is such a neat look at his mindset. please can we talk abt this instead im begging.
does anyone care at all abt how much he does not want to talk abt his problems to the point of unnecessary aggression.
A weight landing directly on top of him rends Tim the rest of the way from his sleep.
Dick is lucky Tim caught a hint of his aftershave as he was coming in through the window or it would’ve been a much ruder awakening for the both of them.
As it is, Tim only sighs and starts patting him down for injuries, hands dragging and drowsy. Nightwing wasn’t supposed to have been out tonight, but it’s always better safe than sorry when it comes to Dick. It’s not like he was supposed to have been in Gotham either, yet here he is.
He doesn’t seem to be injured, but this isn’t exactly the kind of wake up call Tim is used from him. Not nowadays.
A nightmare, maybe? It’s a little early for Dick to have been asleep, woken up, and made the drive from New York, but his sleep schedule always gets a little wonky after a long mission off-planet.
Dick makes a noise that could either be reassurance or complaint. It’s hard to tell from where his face is shoved against the side of Tim’s neck.
Tim runs his fingers through Dick’s hair, scratching lightly against his scalp in apology.
… A birthday?
No, Tim’s already passed. They don’t typically keep track of other dates, though. Well, except—
Shit. Did Tim forget their anniversary?
Dick gropes blindly up Tim’s body until he finds his mouth and lets his hand fall over it, uncoordinated and probably harder than he meant to.
God, Tim should not be thinking about groping while Dick Grayson is pressed so completely up against him like this.
With palpable reluctance, Dick pulls away from Tim’s neck. “Shhh. Can hear you thinking.”
The newly waning moon is hidden behind a cloud, but the lamps on the street outside the (still open—damn it, Dick) window are just enough to see the contours of his face by, only a few inches from Tim’s own.
In the few seconds it takes Tim to make up his mind about licking his boyfriend’s palm where it’s still covering his mouth, Dick drops his hand back down onto the bed. Curse his years of honed brotherly instinct.
Any indignance melts away the moment Dick replaces his hand with his lips.
It’s an odd angle, but Dick doesn’t seem terribly interested in moving, even if it would likely take some of the strain off his neck. His hand on the pillow settles over Tim’s neck, covering his pulse. The kiss stays slow and sweet, like the taste of syrup in Dick’s mouth.
Hm. Pancakes at this hour? Definitely a point in the nightmare column.
Dick huffs against his lips. He kisses Tim again—once, then twice—before pulling back.
“What am I gonna have to do to get you to stop thinking, kiddo?”
Tim own hand comes up to lace together with the one playing with the little hairs at the nape of his neck. He pulls Dick’s hand up to his cheek instead and tips his head to the side to press a kiss to his palm.
“Tell me what’s wrong?” he requests.
That’s an expression he’s never seen on Dick’s face before. Tim spends—probably too long memorising it.
“It’s nothing important.”
The tone, however, is one Tim has heard a million times and hated each and every one of them. Dick may have been able to fool Tim when he was younger, but they’ve been through too much in the years since for it to work anymore.
He sighs. “You’re hiding an injury.”
“Tim—”
“You haven’t been on patrol since you got back.”
“Tim, that’s not—”
“I should’ve known.” Tim pushes to his elbows, dislodging Dick from his position sprawled a little too bonelessly atop his chest. “You got hurt while you were in space—”
He’s nearly reached the switch to turn on the light by his bedside when Dick hooks his legs around the back of Tim’s thighs and rolls with his full weight, flipping them.
Tim yelps and scrambles to catch himself before he can fall on Dick, lest he aggravate whatever injury has kept Nightwing off the streets for the past few nights.
“I,” Dick says, enunciating clearly, “am on my period.”
Huh.
Tim… honestly, didn’t know Dick was still capable of getting those.
Then again, it’s not like Dick talks about this stuff very much. Up until a really horrifying incident during No Man’s Land that Tim, Dick, and Babs have an unbroken pact to never speak of ever again (and not even because of the zombies), Tim hadn’t even known Dick wasn’t fully transitioned.
Something about surgery recovery time. Tim was a little distracted dodging hellfire at the time to fully listen to what Dick was saying. One of the zombie gangster’s many sins.
“You’re thinking about the skels again, aren’t you?”
“They were zombies!”
“You’re lucky we didn’t let you tell Batman that.”
“It was the truth,” Tim protests, a bit too loud in the dark of the room.
“Batman doesn’t want the truth.”
“Oh? Is that the official word from the Bat himself?”
Dick’s lips quirk up. “You can ask, you know.”
He’s not talking about Batman anymore.
Outside, the moon has just broken the clouds, diffusing pale light throughout the room. The harsh, contrasting shadows cut over the line of his jaw, the ridge of his nose, the spill of his hair. Just like the night they first met, Tim can’t bring himself to look away from Dick Grayson for even a second.
Always, the camera is elsewhere, and always, Tim’s focus is right here.
“What do you need?”
Dick’s expression, now, is familiar enough to be Tim’s very own north star. The intensity in his eyes never truly fades, but the edges of it soften when they land on Tim.
“I told you, it’s nothing important,” he says in a low voice.
This time, it isn’t a lie, but Tim isn’t assuaged. Some part of him, he thinks, will never outgrow the need to take away Dick’s pain. There’s a gap a mile wide between what Dick needs and what he’ll allow himself to ask for.
Tim’s never done this for Dick before, but he does have the experience. Steph was never shy with talking about it when her period came around, and Dana was more than happy to give him advice on how best to help.
Vigilantism, as in many ways, may actually have prepared him better than he thought for something like this. They all have their own stock of painkillers, sealed food and water in easy reach of their beds, heating pads for soreness. He’ll probably need to go shopping in the morning. Dick’s mission went on a lot longer than originally anticipated, so Tim hasn’t restocked some of his favourites yet…
Dick reaches up and taps Tim’s forehead twice. “Thinking again.”
“Just trying to figure out what I have already,” Tim says distractedly.
Eyes narrowed, Dick tenses in a way that means nothing but trouble. Tim can almost sense the next flip coming and, out of habit more than anything, lets his entire weight drop down onto Dick.
Instead of following through with it anyway, Dick’s body goes totally loose beneath him.
“Just this,” says Dick.
It’s quiet, but the vibrations from his voice spread throughout Tim’s body, like the shower of sparks that still make an appearance wherever they touch, even after all these years. One of Dick’s hands, almost too hot, slips under Tim’s shirt and just past the line of his waistband, rubbing little, absentminded circles against the bare skin of his hip.
Tim brings his own arms up to wrap around Dick and hold him close.
Dick: I am going to come up with a number in my head, here we go. Got it.
Tim, immediately: Four.
Dick: Yup.
[Both immediately break out in laughter]
Dick: How the fuck did you do that?
Anonymous:
Hi fic rec admin! Do you have any Dicktim recs? Preferably any that are more like their preboot canon dynamics? (Sorry Idk how specific you want people to be but I saw a ship and fanon section in your doc so I'm shooting my shot)
Of course! I’m actually not a huge shipper myself in general, but I am in a discord with a bunch of Dicktim fans, so there are a lot of “haven’t read” recs in here. (Any level of specificity is fine, I enjoy the challenge of a more specific search!) Recs are below the cut.
“It’s all wrong,” Dick says. “This isn't—I knew you when you were a kid—” “I know,” Tim says. “Isn’t that so hot?” “Tim,” Dick says seriously. *** Dick moralizes. Tim suffers. Nobody is normal about anything.
I love this one. Dick is having a moral crisis and Tim is being a little freak about it. I really love the characterization here, it feels so comic-typical despite being about incestuous sex.
After months of the Bats snooping around, threatening to unravel all the secrets Tim had hoped to leave buried and dead with the rest of his former life, he finally returns to his apartment above the car shop just to see Robin waiting for him, staring at his photos with an expression he can’t place. Tim expects a lot of things. The conversation that follows is not one of them.
Very cute snippet of a fascinating reverse robins au where Tim is Orphan. And also an orphan.
Dick is the one who helped train Tim. Dick is the one who made sure Tim had somewhere to go and someone to talk to when Bruce was being Bruce. Dick is the one who made Tim comfortable with casual touches after a childhood of touch starvation. And Dick might not have purposefully tried to break up Tim and Bernard- but like hell is he letting Jason be the one to swoop in and mend Tim’s broken heart. — or basically, Dick is possessive of his little brother, and doesn’t like it when others touch what he thinks he has a claim on.
Like A Virginby paragraph (ebcdic). Explicit sexual content.
Summary:
Thinking about even the possibility of having sex gives Tim heart palpitations.
When Tim started testing a machine that could rescue Bruce from the timestream, he was expecting to hit some roadblocks. What he wasn’t expecting was for a malfunction to launch him through the timestream, putting him face to face with Dick… about six months after he became Nightwing. Now, all he has to do is wait for the malfunction to reverse itself and to send him back to when he’s actually from. And to not mess up the timeline via some sort of butterfly effect. And to somehow manage that while the guy who he’s been a little bit obsessed with for his entire life won’t stop flirting with him for more than three seconds. Easy, right?
garth being raised by arthur but never being fully viewed as his son and worrying about his place in arthurs life 🤧 koryak not being raised by arthur and although he should have a place in arthurs life he is still not fully viewed as arthurs son 🤧
As Halloween approaches, I’ve been seeing many very talented makeup artists recreate the face of the bride in Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride.” I thought this would be a good oppertunity to make some art and remind one and all that the “The Corpe Bride” (known in some tellings as “The Finger” or “The Demon in the Tree”) is a beloved Jewish folktale. Folklorist Howard Schwartz traces the orgins of “The Finger” to 16th century Levant. Aftrer hundreds of years of retelling, the story, like all folktales, has undergone many iterations and also became highly informed by the violence of life in the Pale of Settlement (specifically towards women and young brides).
And if you’re not familiar with the story of The Finger:
A young man and his brothers were out in the woods, celebrating the man’s upcoming wedding, which would be the next day. They came across what looked like a finger poking out of the ground and as a joke, the man placed the ring on the finger and recited the wedding blessing three times. To his shock and horror, the finger began to move and a dead woman clawed her way out of the soil. She looked at the man and proclaimed that since he’d said the wedding blessings, they were now married. The man and his friends ran, not daring to stop until they were home. They vowed never to speak of the night’s events again.
The next day, during the man’s wedding to his original betrothed, the dead woman appeared and demanded that their marriage be consummated. Everyone was horrified. The rabbi stepped in and questioned both the man and the corpse woman, and established that the man had essentially married the corpse woman.
The rabbi convened a beit din to discuss the matter. Eventually it was decided that since the man was already betrothed and the dead have no claim on the living, the marriage was null. The dead woman then collapsed and became lifeless again. This time she was given a proper burial, and the man married his betrothed.
