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Timothy Jackson Drake has learned many things in his eleven years of life.

He’s learned long division, piano playing, three different languages (if you count English), and every possible way that a chess game can end in a draw. He’s learned that he prefers donuts over cupcakes, computer science over history, and being called Tim over Timothy. He’s learned he has an eidetic memory and that he hit his growth spurt three years too early so he’s probably going to be short forever, and that both of these facts annoy his father to no end.

He’s also learned that no matter what he does, he can’t seem to stop learning. Stop discovering things that he maybe, probably, definitely should not know. 

Like how his mother has no contact with her mother because she married Jack Drake instead of some guy named Isaac, who apparently had more money. Or how his second-grade teacher used to hide a flask of tequila in her desk for the days she fought with her boyfriend.

Or, most world-shatteringly important, the identity of the Dark Knight himself. 

And, honestly, it’s not like Tim tries to figure this stuff out! He’d have been content imagining that his grandmother wasn’t stingier than Ebenezer Scrooge, or that his teacher hadn’t been an alcoholic, or that Batman was just some mysterious cryptid of the night. 

He’d have been content — like he always is — being an observer and nothing more.

Of course, regardless of his desires, when Tim watched Robin perform a quadruple flip on patrol during his first year following the crime-fighting duo, his brain had been mauled by two thoughts. 

The first: Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!

And the second: Oh my God, wait, no, I’ve seen that before.

It took him two days to place where he’d seen the flip, and after Tim managed to weasel his way past the heavily repressed memories of rope snapping and the Flying Graysons not flying anymore and people screaming and blood, so much blood, he remembered Dick Grayson. 

Dick Grayson, who had performed that exact flip the night his parents died at the circus. Dick Grayson, who Bruce Wayne adopted shortly before a small red, yellow, and green sidekick started accompanying Batman on patrols.

(Dick Grayson, who hugged Tim once)

(He still has the photograph)

From then on, the puzzle started to rapidly click together above Tim’s head without bothering to even ask him for permission. He, for better or worse, has always had a detective’s mind, and like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Batman himself, mysteries have trouble staying mysterious around Tim.

So, Dick Grayson was Robin. Dick Grayson was Robin, and Bruce Wayne was Batman, and if that isn’t to this day the craziest, most awesome-mest thing Tim has ever learned, he doesn’t know what is!

Briefly, Tim debated giving up his night hobby once he realized the gravity of, oh, no, he knew Batman’s secret identity. 

He really, really didn’t want some villain to link the boy with the camera to the vigilantes and try to… extract information from him like the villains always do to the good guys in his favorite shows.

(Tim was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to withstand much torture, and if knowing he was a liability in the field wasn’t enough of a reason to think of retiring, he also knew that his parents would not appreciate him having chopped off fingers during galas because that would be awful press.)

Unfortunately for Jack, Janet, and Tim’s fingers, the fear of being tortured was quickly overruled by Tim remembering that knowledge, when ignored, becomes stupidity. Backing down and doing nothing about his revelation would’ve been a wasted opportunity to protect the heroes of Gotham and. 

And wasn’t keeping Batman and Robin safe more important than some random kid anyway?

Mind made up, nine-year-old Tim got to work.

For the past two years, Tim has done everything he can to protect Dick and Mr. Wayne. He scours the web daily for anything related to quadruple flips and deletes everything that could be even remotely incriminating. He starts a blog where people talk about all of the ridiculous things Bruce Wayne does, and posts (on multiple burner accounts) about how he thinks Bruce would be the first to die in a horror movie because he has no survival skills whatsoever.

He talks, for lack of a better word, a lot of shit. And, for the most part, it works. With Bruce consistently giving him fresh ammunition, Tim and several news outlets make sure that everyone knows Bruce could, in no way, ever be a functioning member of society, let alone the Dark Knight himself.

(It’s also kinda fun)

When Nightwing debuted in Blüdhaven shortly after Robin quit (or was… fired?), and then a few months later, a new Robin, younger with a strong Gotham accent, showed up, Tim simply added Bruce’s newest son, Jason Todd, to his list of people’s identities to protect.

And that.

That is what Tim had been doing tonight.

Protecting Jason Todd. Protecting Robin.

He just. Well, Tim hadn’t realized that in all four thousand one hundred and seventy-seven days of his life, he had never learned how to swim. Why would he need to? Gotham may be surrounded by water, but it’s water that’s more polluted than Los Angeles and the Mississippi River combined. 

Still, his lack of competency would’ve been useful to remember before he decided to leap off a boat pier in an attempt to escape a very angry, very trigger-happy Falcone Family enforcer. 

Oh, well. Mistakes happen. 

At least Tim succeeded in distracting the enforcer from filling Robin’s unsuspecting body with a spray of bullets.

“Batman!” he hears someone scream so loudly, so desperately, that their voice shatters around the edges and the word comes out as a terrified, childish whine.

Was that Tim? He doesn’t think so, but who else is around?

It definitely hadn’t been the enforcer.

Tim hits the river with a splash that swallows him in glacial cold water. As the filthy gray waves close over his rigid muscles and he feels debris from a recently flooded harbor nick him in the side, he forgets someone screamed at all.

There’s another splash, but it’s muffled against his ears and his terror and Tim doesn’t have time to figure out whether it even existed or if his brain is malfunctioning from the river of ice.

His first instinct is to bat his arms against the water, to get out— out of the cold, out where it’s dry, out where he doesn’t even care that there’s a man on the pier who wants to kill him. But then. Then it’s so cold, and he can’t swim, and his arms aren’t listening to him, and he is sinking so fast.

He keeps trying. He can’t give up. He needs to protect— he has to— people need him. People… people like Robin and Batman and— and. And what is Tim even doing?

It’s so cold.

Nobody even knows that he exists. Nobody cares.

Tim, the world’s most forgettable nobody, lets himself sink.

Like a long overdue embrace, like an apology for all the people who never wanted him, the current curls around him. It’s gentle, in a way, guiding him away from all the gasping and the struggling, dragging him deeper and deeper under. Tim feels how he imagines a child whose parent is leading them across a crosswalk might feel. 

Scared, but also comforted and in awe of the water’s certainty. Tim has no choice but to follow, but even if he could oppose, he almost certainly wouldn’t. 

His lungs seize, protesting, begging, and Tim knows he should swim, should move, or struggle, or do anything to just stay alive, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know how. Nobody ever taught him, and he never learned, and he doesn’t. 

He doesn’t even want to.

Tim must’ve done something wrong, because before he can even notice how far from the surface he’s sunk, the water gets mean. Intense and violent as it flings him around like he’s nothing but a ragdoll and his head is spinning because his body is spinning and he is being dragged down, down, left, down, left. 

Tim starts to cry, at least, he thinks that he does, but he can’t tell because his tears just become more water and he’s choking on water and he’s drowning and there’s so. Much. Water and he can’t do this. 

Down.

Down.

Left.

Somewhere amidst the cold and the fear and the yearning (for his mom, for his dad, for someone to love him, hold him, walk him across the street, for just one more warm, loving Dick Grayson hug), Tim hears a roar so deafening that the world itself shudders in trepidation.

It gets louder. 

Louder. 

Tim isn’t just sinking anymore; he’s being dragged. Yanked. Thrusted downward at a speed that makes his ears feel like shattered glass, and between the pain, he thinks of all of the things he still wants to learn. Like karate, and how to drive, and how to develop photographs in a darkroom, and—

—and it doesn’t even matter. 

What’s the point in learning something when there is nobody to tell?

His body slams into concrete. 

Outflow pipe, his brain explains reflexively as his body is bent into a tight, stiff, unnatural ball and sucked inside a gaping metal opening. With a final exhale of murky bubbles that he can feel but not see and a deranged spark of amusement, he realizes, I’m going the wrong way.

Tim knows not to make a scene.

It’s something that his parents never had to teach him — something nobody had to teach him — because being insignificant has been as much a part of Tim as the body he was born into. He is and has always been two parts nothing, one part heir to Drake Industries. 

He has spent his entire life being good and polite and quiet.

He’s used to it.

He’s used to it, but perhaps not as much as he thought, because one moment he is drowning, and the next, Tim is screaming and he is thrashing around and he is making a scene that puts all other scenes to shame.

It’s a terrible, unfortunate, unforgivable thing, but Tim doesn’t have time to be sorry about it because he is being crushed into hard clay and choking on mud and sludge, and he is in so much pain. So, sure, he’s sorry. Sure, he knows better. Sure, he was always prepared to die, insignificant and silent and polite.

But he just. Can’t. 

Tim can’t.

Tim is scared. He’s so scared, and he doesn’t want to die like this. He doesn’t want to die cold and alone and in the dark or die at all, and he wants his mommy or his daddy, or he’d even be okay with Mrs. Mac or one of the boarding school teachers or—

“Tim? Tim, can you hear us?”

—Or Batman?

Despite being uncertain the voice isn’t just a figment of his imagination, Tim lets out a choked, frantic, “Help!”

The pain of forcing words past the crushing sensation in his chest is worse than anything Tim has ever experienced before, and his shout splinters into a devastated whine that he actually does feel embarrassed about this time. After all, if Batman really is here to save him, he can’t be annoying. Tim is eleven, and that means he is old enough to know how to behave around adults. 

He’s old enough to know that flailing around against cold stone and crying, “Bat—Batman, please! Please! I c-can’t— I can’t!” is the wrong thing to do.

Batman doesn’t appear to care, doesn’t seem inconvenienced or upset by Tim’s screeches and indecorous demands; he doesn’t even comment on it. The man just shouts back, promising, “We’re coming!” 

It only takes a few seconds for his savior’s voice, distant and discombulated, to become steady and calm, and as it floods back into existence near Tim’s ear, he can feel a (literal?) rock lifted off his chest. “Breathe, honey…”

Obediently, greedily, Tim sucks air into his sore lungs and is rewarded by a gloved hand smoothing under his chin. Checking his pulse? He wonders what it’s at. “You’re alright, Tim. We’ve got you. We’re going to get you out of here. You’ll be okay.” 

Tim knows that adults lie. They lie about anything they can, and they lie a lot, but most of the time, they lie about everything being okay.

He knows this.

He knows this, but Tim still wants to believe.

Tim wants to believe, but eleven years of life have taught him that he can’t. He can’t, but he’s also very, very tired. And confused. And he hurts, and the hand on his face is so loving that he thinks if he did die now, if his body just gave up and out, he would be content in knowing that at least, for a little while, he felt precious.

Maybe Batman is lying about everything being okay. Maybe Tim is going to die. 

Maybe that’s alright.

“Hey!” a new voice, pithy and alarmed, cracks like a whip into the darkness. “Don’t you dare check out on us now! Open your eyes!”

Batman (because, regardless of how crazy that is, Batman is here) grunts out a cautionary, “Robin,” and Robin mutters something too quiet to hear before he speaks up again, tone still spiky, but also noticeably kinder around the edges, “Kid, please keep your eyes open.”

Before Tim can ask how Robin knows he’d closed (and then opened) his eyes in the pitch black abyss that swamps them, his body is being hauled gently upwards. The gloved hand from before smooths through his hair and then holds his trembling body firmly against strong armor plating in an unfamiliar hug/hold/clutch. 

Oh my God, Tim thinks, because Batman is carrying him, and it’s simultaneously the best and most embarrassing thing ever. 

No matter how nice it is to be held, to be cradled like he’s something invaluable, Tim has legs. He can walk, and he doesn’t (nor has he ever) need to be babied. He opens his mouth to inform Batman of this and let the vigilante off the hook, but his body chooses that exact moment to seize up, and instead of words, the only thing that falls past his lips is a fountain of water.

Miraculously, Batman still remains unbothered as he soothes, “You’re okay, honey. Get it all out.”

Even more miraculously, Robin starts rubbing circles into Tim’s back.

It’s all so terribly strange and foreign that against his better judgment, Tim, again, starts to sob. He doesn’t think it should be possible for his body to lose as much liquid as it currently is, between the tears and the wet coughing, but he must’ve inhaled more water than he thought when he fell into the river because it all just keeps spilling out.

“Good job,” Batman praises softly, and Tim doesn’t know what he’s doing right, but it’s so nice to be told that he just cries harder. “You’re doing great, Tim.”

Robin chimes in, right after, only a little awkwardly, “There, there, buddy,” and keeps rubbing his knuckles into Tim’s back. 

Tim, between violent coughs, wonders where Jason learned the consoling action. Not on the streets, Tim is pretty sure. Before, then? Or after? Tim finds it a little difficult to imagine Bruce or Batman rubbing someone’s back, but before today, he would’ve found it hard to imagine Batman calling someone honey, so weirder things have happened.

Weirder things like getting eaten alive by an outflow pipe.

After what feels like hours of ejecting bile and water and something coppery out of his body, Tim slants into Robin’s soothing touch with one final wail that’s so pained and ferocious it threatens to smash what is left of him into thousands of irreparable pieces. 

As if sensing Tim’s fragility, Robin exhales shakily and kisses Tim’s hairline. 

“Wha…” Tim’s voice is sandpaper in his throat.

“—Shut up.” The older boy grinds out, a scowl bleeding into his tone. 

Tim flinches slightly, unsure what he’d done wrong, before his body loosens when he realizes that Batman is… well, it’s not a laugh, but he exhales and it’s soft and amused and Tim didn’t think that the vigilante was capable of sounding so… fond. Tim’s body is shifted, barely, as Batman reaches out to ruffle Robin’s hair.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Batman defends casually and oh. Robin had been upset at Batman, not Tim. That’s good.

When Robin scoffs and takes a noisy step back, Tim smiles a little himself, because he’s almost certain that if he could see in the dark, he’d see Robin red in the face from embarrassment and that is a funny thought.

Batman’s arms tighten back around Tim after a moment, holding Tim as carefully as his parents hold their most expensive artifacts. Then, as if just thinking about them has placed their existence directly into Batman’s mind, the man says, comfortingly, “Let’s get you to your parents, sweetheart.”

This time, when Tim flinches, it’s noticeable enough that Robin calls him out on it with an indecipherable tone, “What’s wrong?”

“Tim?” Batman prompts evenly.

Robin comes to the wrong conclusion with the strangled warble of: “Shit! B, he’s bleeding!”

Selfishly, brokenly, Tim thinks about asking Batman to just let him bleed out or shove him back into the rocks or the river or a freaking volcano, because at least when he had been dying, he’d been able to pretend that he wasn’t alone. 

At least when he was dying pinned to the rocks, he had been able to pretend that he had family to go home to. Someone as warm as Batman or as gentle as Robin. A father pacing the hallways of their home, worrying about him, or a mother’s arms waiting to swallow him into a tight embrace. He had been able to pretend that if he could just get the words out, he could cry out for his parents and they would come running.

(That they could even hear him halfway across the world)

Only, now, in the face of Batman’s proclamation, Tim can’t pretend because he knows better. He always knows better. Flattening himself into Batman’s chest, Tim, for the second time in one day, gives up.

“Don’t… don’t take m-me back there…”

Robin’s response is immediate, “Okay.”

Batman is hesitant, but conciliatory, “We’re taking you to a hospital, Tim.”

Jason frowns down at Tim in his most severe impression of an unimpressed Bruce. “You know, Timbit, you’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears like this.”

Maybe, once, that frown would be enough to shock Tim into submission. Okay, it definitely would. But! Jason is the one who has spent the last six months practically begging Tim to grow a backbone, so Tim only smiles widely and shoots back, “Your fears? I don’t know if you remember, but I was the one who almost died.”

The young teenager makes a weak noise in the back of his throat, and Tim’s smile falters slightly when Jason mutters, “That’s the problem.”

“I’m okay, Jason,” Tim sighs, reaching out to pat his older brother on the arm. Sliding his voice into something sing-songy, he adds, “If you do this, nothing like that will ever happen again—”

“—Nothing will,” Jason promises in a steely tone.

Tim rolls his eyes dramatically enough that Jason gives him a strange look before he plays the ace up his sleeve with poorly masked triumph, “I mean… you don’t have to teach me,” he drags out the words with theatrical sadness. “My parents agreed to do things they later went back on all the time. Especially birthday-related things, so… you know… I get it.”

He doesn’t even have time to add the long, resigned sigh before Jason flicks him lightly between the eyes and snaps, surprisingly riled up, “Shut your mouth, birthday boy. I said what I said, and I’m not a swindler.”

“Yes, you are,” Tim can’t help but object.

“Am not.”

“You swindled Bruce last night while we were playing Uno!”

Jason ignores him entirely, “Are you sure you don’t want the lifejacket?”

An offended scoff spills from Tim as he crosses his arms across his chest. Pragmatically, he states, “I will drown myself if you ask me that again.” 

If it were Bruce or Dick hearing Tim say that, they would probably blow a fuse, but Jason squints at Tim, analyzing him for a half second, before just flipping him off. Still, he warns, “Make another joke like that and see what happens.”

And. Well. Jason should know better, because of all the things Tim has learned over the past half year (and he has learned so much), the one he has the least amount of control over is that he is completely and irrevocably unable to turn down a challenge. 

He goes for the jugular on impulse, “I already lost my spleen getting crushed to death in the sewers, what more could you possibly do to m—”

The rest of Tim’s sentence is lost in a yelp of surprise as Jason plants his hands against Tim’s chest and shoves him backward in the fucking swimming pool. Like a boulder, like a corpse, like an eleven-year-old trying to save his hero, Tim smashes into the water, and while not nearly as frigid as the river had been in the middle of winter, it still swallows him whole in a pit of chills.

And.

And Tim asked for this.

He’d begged Jason to teach him how to swim. He’d pushed Jason’s buttons on purpose. He’d wanted, more than anything, to be allowed in the Wayne Manor swimming pool. He’d literally asked his new family for nothing but swimming lessons for his twelfth birthday.

It’s just. 

Tim wasn’t expecting this. He wasn’t expecting the cold to crash through every crevice of his soul, and he wasn’t expecting his body to convulse in terror before he could even inhale any water, and he wasn’t expecting to feel like he is drowning all over again, and he wasn’t expecting this to be so scary.

After Bruce and Jason had taken Tim to the hospital and the doctors had given him a laundry list of injuries, Tim remembers turning to Robin and saying, rather breezily, “At least I was unconscious most of the time.”

Tim hadn’t actually known it at the time (nor would he find out until he took a shower a few weeks later and forgot to turn the heat on), but he’d been lying.

Yes, he’d passed out, but it hadn’t been until after he was spit out of the outflow pipe with a fountain of debris and pinned underneath a pile of rocks that his body finally gave out. It hadn’t been until after he’d been dragged through hundreds of feet worth of pipes and after he’d been struck by every piece of debris in a five-mile radius and after he realized nobody was coming to save him.

Except. Wait.

Tim’s brain short-circuits a little.

Because. Because someone did try to save him.

Tim hears the splash twice, once in his memory, and once in the present, and then he remembers, for the first time since that night, the scream before he hit the water. The shout for Batman that had slipped from Tim’s mind the moment he started to drown and has now, ironically, returned in the same situation.

The realization and following implication hit him like a semi-truck with cut brakes.

Back then, Jason had only been Robin for a couple of months, so Tim hadn’t yet learned that his voice shudders around the edges when he gets scared, or how he gets loud and angry instead of nervous and sad, or how, when he screams loud enough, his voice cracks into a whine. 

But now Tim has spent the last half a year living in Wayne Manor while his parents are away for work, and Tim knows his brother better than he knows himself.

Now, at his grand new age of twelve, Tim knows that Jason hadn’t just noticed Tim thrashing around in the water, like he’d explained passively at the hospital, he’d actually seen Tim fall. 

Jason had jumped in after him.

Jason had tried to save him.

—Arms wrap around Tim’s torso, secure and steadfast, and for a moment, Tim is dumbstruck by the absurdity that he’s no longer sinking, but being dragged up. 

That he’s being rescued.

His head breaks the surface of the water less than a second after the hands catch hold of him and the moment Tim isn’t submerged, his body moves on its own, frantically swallowing mouthfuls of air and coughing out phantom river water.

Fear clings to Tim like a suffocating, wet towel and he can’t breathe properly, can't think, not until his brain manages to latch onto something familiar and shuddering and loud.

Something Tim has learned means he’s undoubtedly safe.

“Fuck, Tim! Oh, my fucking God!” Jason is shouting, looking equal parts livid and terrified as he shifts Tim into a bridal carry and crushes him in a hug. “What the fuck was that?”

Instead of responding, Tim harnesses everything he’s learned from Dick thus far and tangles his limbs around his brother like a clingy, touch-starved octopus. 

His brother tugs him impossibly closer, “Don’t ever, ever do that again. Oh my fucking fuck, baby bird…” 

“I didn’t do anything,” Tim mutters distractedly, mind still reeling from how close Jason is holding him, how much Jason seems to love him, and how Jason had saved him.

“No fucking shit.”

Jason smooths a hand through Tim’s wet hair while Tim presses his face into the older boy’s sternum and grips at the wet cloth of his shirt desperately. 

Even though Tim is being so clingy, Jason doesn’t protest and whether his older brother’s lack of fight comes from knowing that he can’t escape the hug or a matching desire to just be close, Tim couldn’t care less. 

All that matters is: “You jumped in after me.”

Jason makes an odd, slightly wounded noise in the back of his throat. “Obviously, I jumped in. What? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t? Did you think I was going to let you—” he hesitates, then continues with less certainty and vague, misplaced amusement. “—…drown?”

Tim shakes his head and tries again, voice steadier now that his breathing has stabilized some, “No, not just now. At the pier. You jumped in after me, didn’t you?”

His brother’s grip tightens and his short, bitten nails bury absently into Tim’s skin. “Sure, I mean. I guess. What’s it matter?” he hesitates before adding, “…How do you even know that?”

“I remembered… in the— in the water.”

“Oh,” Jason forces a small laugh. “Right. Look, Tim, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you in the water. That was a really fucked up thing to do, and I wasn’t thinking. I thought— I dunno, I thought we were just messing around, but I scared you, and it was so, so dumb. Like, I’m a fucking idiot, so if you wanna punch me or get out of the pool or have Dick teach you instead, that’s cool, he’d love to. And I’d get it. I don’t—”

“—You saved me,” Tim repeats, willing Jason to understand what even he cannot.

His brother winces, “No. I didn’t.”

“You did,” he insists stubbornly. “You tried to swim to me and you called Batman and you dug me out of the rocks and you agreed not to take me home. You saved me.”

“B would’ve taken you to the hospital no matter what I said,” Jason argues, his voice hard and stubborn and not quite angry, but something similar.

“But you didn’t let him call my parents.”

“‘Cause they’re shit! Not letting you go back to a big, stupid, empty house and your stupid, shitty parents hardly counts as saving you.”

“Yes, it does!”

Jason is quiet for a little while before a brittle, tired smile makes its way to his face. “Timmy, I love you, but you don’t get it. I tried to save you, but I failed. I wasn’t fast enough or strong enough or— or whatever. And it was too dark to see good, but it shouldn’t have mattered. I should’ve been able to save you, and I— I couldn’t. I fucked up and you almost died ‘cause of my mis—”

It doesn’t sound right, hearing Jason sound so wrecked, so Tim interrupts again, adamantly blinking away the stinging in his eyes, “—Jay, stop,”

His brother presses his lips closed.

“It’s my birthday, so you have to do as I say,” Jason opens his mouth to protest, but Tim soldiers on dogmatically, “And I say you saved me. Twice. Then, and now. And you can’t say otherwise because I’m the birthday boy and Dick told me that those are the rules.”

“I’m the one who pushed you, birthday boy,” the teenager reminds him pointedly, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, yeah, but you saved me after, and so that’s all that matters.”

This time, when Jason speaks, he sounds acutely disturbed, “Um. Okay. That is so not all that matters. You know that’s not all that matters, right?”

“Jasoooon…” 

“Like if someone shoots you and then hands you a stitch kit, you’re not gonna thank them for saving you, right?”

“Jason, stoooooooop.”

When Jason finally obeys, lips quirking into a lopsided grin, Tim wriggles impatiently in Jason’s hold. “Will you just teach me how to swim already so you can stop carrying me around like a baby?”

“Wow, you are such a little birthday tyrant. I know for a fact I never bossed Dick around this much,” comes the playful response, followed shortly by a short laugh and, “But, sure. I’ll set you down. Try not to go limp and almost drown again, ‘kay?”

Panic floods through Tim, but before he can snap that Jason needs to actually teach him how to swim before just throwing him into the deep end, he’s gently being tilted vertically and his feet are touching the ground and he. 

He’s standing.

He could freaking stand this entire time?

Tim’s voice fails him in the face of his own bafflement. “Huh?” 

“The water’s literally three feet deep over here, dude,” Jason explains with a snort of amusement. “I thought you knew that when I pushed you, but you just—” he flings his hands up. “—sank! Scared me half to death, too, ‘cause I thought you must’ve had a heart attack or a brain aneurysm or something the way you dropped like a damn stone to the bottom!”

Blushing a deep crimson, Tim takes a page from Jason’s book and goes for an offensive tactic: “You’re an asshole and I hate you.”

It sounds too cheery. He needs practice.

Jason laughs again, rolling his eyes and seemingly entirely unbothered, “Yeah, okay, birthday boy. Do you wanna learn how to swim or not?”

Of course, Tim wants to learn.

(He can’t wait to show off to Dick and Bruce later)