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luvly-writer · 1 year

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“But oh..Cara mia”

Ch. 3: I want context

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Dick Grayson x Latina! Readers

Status: Ongoing

Warnings: none

Author’s note: Ages of the group in the present:

Barbara - 28

Dick - 27

Yn - 25

Jason - 23

Tim - 19

Steph - 19

Duke - 18

Cass - 17

Damian - 11

Dick is two years older than Yn.

Enjoy the story!

Taglist: @lorosette @nanas-teatime @prettyacademia00

Series Masterlist:

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Yn stiffened at the question, she felt as if the air had been punched out of her lungs. Damian noticed the girl pale a little. She lets out an uneasy laugh and looks down at her notes, where she fiddles with her pen. “Nothing has happened between Richard and me, Damian, what makes you say that?” she mutters and Damian deadpans, he clears his throat making her look at him and answers, “You have an inconsistent relationship in comparison to the rest. It’s...” he trails off, looking for the right word, “concerning, Grayson is awfully bright and annoyingly charismatic. You are very kind and overall tolerable to be around. The problem is both of you get along like oil and water when one would assume the opposite based on your personalities. Why is that?”. The young woman was stunned, to say the least. She didn’t know how to answer. She bit her lip unsure of what to say.

Thankfully, the engine of a car and various motorcycles were heard in the cave. Everyone had arrived; Yn had never been more relieved of seeing everyone. Giving Damian a tight smile, she told him, “That’s a discussion for another day” and she stood up, walking towards the rest. Once again, Damian noticed her eyes find Grayson in relief that he was alive. What the hell had gone down between them?

During the week, Damian tried chasing Yn down, wanting an explanation, and seeing as the girl was successful in avoiding it he decided to track down the next suspect on his list. Grayson. This one had been easier to identify seeing as Grayson liked any excuse to spend time with his siblings, yet, when asked the very same question, Grayson had avoided it completely, much like YN. He had tried a few times until he realized he wasn’t getting any help from either of them. Why were they avoiding it so much? It frustrated Damian to no end having absolutely no progress in his investigation. Bruce was out of the equation knowing that he would not offer any amount of clarity and he couldn’t ask Alfred because he would get berated for intruding on other people’s business. His next target was Gordon. From what he had observed, Barbara and you seemed to be best friends. You were constantly together. Although you spent time with all of them, having movie nights with Cain and Thomas, playing video games with Drake and Brown, and going to the library with Todd, the person who you seemed to be closest to was Gordon. It would make sense the most seeing as Gordon, Grayson and you were the eldest, with you being the youngest of the three. He sought her out during the day and found her and Drake discussing something in the Batcave. The only other people in the cave were Jason, Duke, Cassandra, and Stephanie. Bruce was at work, Alfred was running errands, Yn was in New York visiting Diana, and Grayson was God knows where. He thought for a second if he should question in front of everyone but he figured that they could also help to provide information since they had been around much longer than he had. He went down the stairs and called her out, making everyone look at him. “Gordon, I have a question that I believe you would be the best for assistance,” he said. Cass and Steph were sparring, Jason and Duke were working out, and Tim and Barbara just looked at him curiously. “What is the relationship between Ln and Grayson?” he asked and everyone stopped what they were doing. They all looked at each other, then at Barbara, who was staring at Damian with wide eyes. “What do you mean, Damian?” she asks nervously. Cass, Steph, Jason, and Duke neared, intrigued by what was going to happen. “You are the one that has spent the most time with them, what happened between them? Every time they interact, something is off. Sometimes they bicker lightheartedly and other times there’s this coldness from both of them. As a matter of fact, Grayson is known to not behave that way with any of us, why are they so hostile with each other one second, and the other they share looks of fondness. It is infuriating and confusing” answered Damian, and everyone stayed silent for a moment. Then, Stephanie spoke up, “You know, I’ve always wanted to know myself what went down between those two. I guess over time, I got used to the lack of context and just dealt with their weird-ass relationship.”, Tim nodded in agreeance. For all he had investigated about them before he was Robin and everything he had come to know after he became Robin, the mystery of the hostility between them two was something he never figured out? He just had gone with it because of the lack of answers. Then Duke spoke up, “Honestly, thank everything that Damian brought it up. Seeing as I got here last aside from Damian, their relationship is super fucking weird.” Cass nodded in agreement. Both Jason and Barbara looked at each other. Both of them had witnessed a good amount of that hostility and were wondering who was going to speak up first. Another silence engulfed them and, Jason was the one to break it. “Their relationship is rocky at best. To be fair, you guys haven’t witnessed the messiest fights between them” at that Tim spoke up, “OH! I have seen a few, even Bruce knew not to get in between them” and everyone else’s eyes widened. Finally, Barbara stood up, and spoke “Fine. I will tell you all that I know, but not here. We need a more secluded place.” and all of them agreed.

They had settled for the library, where they would hear if someone would enter and could talk lowly just in case. They had all settled on the couches and thus, Barbara began her story. The rest were so ready to hear everything and didn’t even try to hide their curiosity. Finally, the context of the real mystery would be revealed and maybe, together, they would figure out what really happened between Yn and Dick.

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kittymaine · 2 years

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Early Retirement Ch. 3

// Summary: Tim grows a lot of pumpkins and thinks about the last time he spoke to Barbara Gordon. //

Fall came and with it the last big harvests of the season.

It was a ton of work. Corn and pumpkins and squash and sunflowers all ripened within days of each other. Tim felt like he spent every waking hour harvesting and loading produce into his truck. He gave food to his neighbors and he gave to food banks and he sold produce like crazy at his tiny roadside stand, but he still had pumpkins rotting in his fields by the time October was coming to a close.

The little farm was beautiful in the fall blush when the thick woods that his land butted up against turned a ruddy red and the grass started to turn brown and crunchy. With the cooler weather, he started enjoying sitting on a rusted out lawn chair by his back door and working through some ratty novels he picked up at the local church yard sale.

His apple trees gave up loads of small hard apples. They were barely the size of his palm and tart and sweet. He thought they were perfect and his neighbor lady took baskets full and made him probably half a dozen apple pies for his trouble. They were so good that he ended up asking for the recipe and probably made another half dozen himself. He found that the precision needed to make beautiful pie tops was too time consuming, so he just rolled out one big piece of dough, poured the cooked apple filling inside and then folded the edges toward the center and voila! He called it a galette and no he was not taking notes. It tasted delicious and that was about all he cared about.

To his shame, he just about lived off of apple pie, roasted butternut squash and corn pudding for almost two months. His stomach was very happy with him, though a part of his head still screamed about carbs and too much natural sugar and whatever else he had trained himself out of eating when he still lived only for being a vigilante.

Then one day just a week before Halloween, there was an alien invasion just off the east coast and it was all over the news.

Out in rural Pennsylvania, they didn't see any of the action. The neighbors all talked about how they had seen fighter jets streak across the sky from a nearby airbase, but otherwise there was no notable change from every other day before. But, you couldn't turn on a TV or a radio without hearing wall to wall coverage of what was happening.

Despite knowing better, Tim carried a portable radio out into the fields and listened to the live coverage of how the Justice League, aided by various other Gotham vigilantes, fought to take down the invaders. The main invasion force had touched down on the Delaware coast, so close to Gotham that it sounded like most of the bats and birds had responded, in addition to some nearby atlanteans and the on-call Justice League force.

Tim's stomach remained tied in knots while he pulled ripe pumpkins and laboriously loaded them into his truck until he had a full load. By noon the truck was full, so he jumped in and switched to the truck radio while he drove the pumpkins into town. His hands shook where they clutched the steering wheel the whole way there.

In town, Tim delivered the pumpkins to a big harvest festival in the town square. Somehow, networking still came naturally to him even way out in the sticks. He had struck up a conversation with the organizer of the festival a few weeks ago on a quick trip into town for supplies about how he just couldn't get rid of his pumpkins quick enough and had ended up selling her a truck load.

The radio remained on while he pulled up to the square and helped a few other older men to unload the pumpkins and artfully arrange them on hay bales along main street. If he seemed nervous and upset, well he wasn't the only one and nobody took special notice.

By the time he was driving home, the sun was going down and the radio reported that the aliens were leaving after a thorough beating from Earth’s mightiest heroes. There were not yet any reports as to who, if anyone, on the responding superhero teams were injured.

Tim parked his truck and turned off the radio. He sat in his dark truck with his forehead pressed against the worn leather of the steering wheel for a long time trying to will his breath to slow before he was able to exit the truck and make the short trek into his house.

His laptop was sitting on the old beat up kitchen table right where he had left it.

He didn't let himself think about it. He opened his laptop and started downloading the tools he would need. He went to the fridge and he cut himself an obnoxiously large slice of apple pie that he inhaled in record time and then cut himself a slightly less obnoxious slice of pie to carry with him to the table. By then, the tools were downloaded and he was ready to hack into the batcomputer.

As he steadily pulled apart the protections on the cave’s network, he told himself that he just needed to know if they were okay. The comm logs would tell him quickly if anyone he knew was hurt and, if he needed to, he could probably access the cave’s med bay remotely to check read outs. He told himself that even if someone noticed him in their network, and someone would notice, that he would leave as quickly as he entered and leave nothing to trace back to his physical location. He told himself that Babs would immediately recognize his hacking style, so they wouldn't freak out about being breached for very long.

He told himself all of that up until the moment that a small black window with green text popped up on his laptop with only the words:

Tim? Is something wrong?

Tim snatched his hands away from the keyboard like he had been burned. He slapped the laptop lid shut, like he could just put her away after she had been summoned. Then, he held down the power button until the sound of fans whirring finally stopped. Tim sat there staring at his laptop for a long frantic moment before, in a fit of panic, he snapped the laptop in half over his knee.

Tim threw the laptop as far away from himself as he could and ran up the stairs into the cold dark of the second floor and threw himself onto the queen sized bed that he never slept in. He proceeded to cry like he hadn’t since he was eight years old and his parents had just told him they wouldn't be home in time for Christmas. He sobbed and cried and choked on nothing until he finally blissfully passed out on top of the covers in the dark.

♠

It was pouring rain the last time Tim saw Barbara. It was midnight or close to it and Tim was flying high on the adrenaline of an amazing tip that he was eager to share. The rain made the ledges slippery and the edges of corners soft and fuzzed out, but Tim didn't slow down or proceed with caution. He flew to the clocktower as fast as he could on just two feet and a grapple line.

He let himself in through a window in the lower level of the tower that he suspected Barbara left unlocked because she was confident that only a bat or a bird could reach it, so difficult was its positioning. He bounced up the squeaky worn steps two at a time until he reached the top level and the slightly raised platform that acted as Oracle's command center. The lights were off, but it was bright in the room. A bank of slim and slightly curved monitors lit up Babs from every angle as she sat in the center, her fingers pecking languorously at a keyboard and mouse. Behind her, the clock face itself was lit up in soft gold light, the clock face showing in reverse from their side, and cast a soft yellow illumination over the worn floorboards and the carefully turning gears of the clock mechanism above.

Tim made sure to make noise as he approached Barbara from behind, purposefully stepping on creaky floorboards. He was sure she would have known he was there even without him doing that, but it was only polite.

Before he had taken more than a few steps, Barbara said, "Hey, Tim. What do you need?" She didn't turn around to face him or stop slowly clicking what Tim could now see was a series of security cameras pointed at an old brick warehouse, the footage grainy and unfocused. It was unlike her not to turn around or at least say she was busy if she was. Some part of Tim warned him that something was off with her, but he was so excited about the information he had to share that it barely registered.

"I have some really great information that I was hoping you could send to the rest of the bats," he said, jogging the last few steps to her circle of desks and failing not to pop up on the balls of his feet like an eager kid.

"Why didn't you radio it in?" she asked, still not turning to look at him, though a notch appeared between her two thin eyebrows.

"It's not urgent, but I think it would be a good idea to bring a handful of people in to hit multiple spots at once," Tim barrelled on, still excited. He pulled a small thumb drive, barely the size of his thumbnail, out of a hidden compartment on his suit and held it up to the light. "I was able to pull a ton of info off-"

Babs glanced over, saw the thumb drive, and frowned a little harder before interrupting Tim. "If it's not urgent, why not just email it to me after you finish your patrol?" she asked, looking distinctly exasperated.

Tim froze and found himself suddenly wrong footed. Babs was acting like he did something wrong by coming over, but had he? He ran over her words again in his head. He asked himself why he hadn’t just emailed it to her after his night was over. The answer resoundingly was because he had been excited, right?

Embarrassment washed over Tim like a wave and he knew his fair skin was easily showing how flushed he was beneath his domino.

"Well, it's," Tim fumbled, watched Babs' expression become steadily more thunderous, and quickly pushed out the only thing he could think of, "it's about the triads, so I thought-"

"The triads?" Barbara asked. Her expression shifted quickly from frustrated to intent and she snapped the thumb drive out of Tim's hand and shoved it ruthlessly into a port on the side of the nearest computer tower.

"Yeah, I remember Steph saying they've been giving you guys trouble," Tim explained as Barbara began opening files, rifling through data at a speed that impressed even Tim. "I was investigating an old abandoned hat shop that I thought was probably a storage spot for this new club drug I've been trying to trace and-"

Barbara interrupted him again, "I don't need the novelization, Tim," she said flatly. "This is a list of all their warehouses, illegal gambling dens, brothels, et cetera. This could be everything," she said faintly.

"Yeah, that's why I thought we should try to pull everyone together as quickly as possible so we can hit as many high target spots at once. I don't know if they noticed me in their systems, so the faster the better. You can-"

"Dammit!" Barbara spat, flinging her glasses from her face to clatter loudly on the counter among a detritus of keyboards and mice and empty coffee mugs. She put her face in her hands and rubbed hard, like if she just rubbed hard enough she could scour away whatever emotion she was dealing with.

"Babs?" Tim asked with uncertainty. Any remaining excitement he had was fully gone by then. He had somehow completely bungled this interaction, though he couldn't for the life of him figure out how. Not that it would be the first time.

"You know Steph has been working on the triads for months," Barbara said mostly to her desk.

"Yeah," Tim said slowly, "I know Steph and Cass have been investigating them with you at the helm. That's why I thought you would be the best person to bring this to."

Barbara pulled her face out of her hands and gave Tim a truly furious look. "This is going to crush her, you know," she said.

"What?" Tim asked, now truly lost.

"Steph has been trying to blow the lid off the triads for months and you just happen to stumble onto the golden egg that will topple their whole organization without even trying," Barbara said with scorn, real unexaggerated scorn in her voice. She pushed her fingers into her hair, pulling soft fluffy orange hair out of its previously tight ponytail. "If it had been anyone else, it wouldn't be so bad, but of course it's you," she muttered, low enough that maybe Tim wasn't supposed to hear her. But, he was standing barely two feet away from her so of course he heard her crystal clear.

He was aware that his mouth was hanging open and quickly clicked it shut. He swallowed a few times while Barbara massaged her temples. He couldn't manage to put a thought or emotion together beyond shock.

"You could give it to her and she could tell people she found it. I wouldn't say anything," Tim said quietly. It wasn't fair, but it was for Steph. For how rocky their relationship had been since the beginning, he still counted her as one of his best friends and probably one of the few people who knew him best. God, he didn't want to destroy her . If he knew that getting this win was that important to her, he would have just given it to her himself. But, he didn't know. She had never said anything to him, not in any of their late night texts or lunch time video calls or even the last time she came over to watch The Bachelorette and eat nasty take out. When she had brought it up the triads to him, it was just to vent about what a pain they were. But, she never let on that the investigation was actually getting her down.

"Do you really think she would do that? Take credit for something that she didn't do?" Barbara asked, shaking Tim out of his thoughts. The scorn was back. Tim felt like a little kid sent before the principal, being reamed out for something he had no idea was wrong. He no longer knew what to say to fix the conversation.

"No, no of course not," Tim agreed quietly. Barbara was right, of course, Steph would never take credit for something she didn’t do no matter what the situation.

Barbara turned back to her computer, copying files and opening up more camera feeds, dismissal clear in the line of her shoulders. "I'll coordinate with the others," she said, a coldness suffusing her voice. "I'll let you know when we plan to do the raids."

"Okay," Tim said as meekly as he could manage, which was pretty meek considering how he was feeling. He took a step back before quickly pivoting on his other foot and left the room completely silently avoiding every creaking floorboard until he got to the window and could retreat back into the pouring rain and the unforgiving blackness of night.

Barbara never called him about the raid. He read about it in the papers a few days later.

Steph never brought up the triads, though she did bring up the raid. She told him that Barbara had told everyone else he was busy with another mission and that was why he couldn’t help out. Steph asked him what the mission was and Tim was so embarrassed over whatever he did wrong that he just smiled and made up some vague story about an undercover mission gone wrong to explain away his absence.

In time, his embarrassment and shame from the encounter faded and he was left with nothing but questions. He had only done his job. He had only tried to be a team player. He had only tried to communicate well with his team mates. But, instead of thanks and approval, he had been met with coldness and anger. He had never thought of Babs as unfair, but he had to reevaluate how he saw her after that.

While Bruce had been Steph and Cass’ first adult vigilante mentor, he had a lot of shortcomings. An unusual amount when it came to the two of them and it was hard not to see the one thing they had in common and imagine why Bruce was so useless with both of them. Barbara had swept in to be the adult that the two of them needed when Bruce failed to measure up.

Tim couldn't begrudge them the tiny family they had built for themselves. He wasn't blind to the way that Bruce treated the women in their group. They deserved to have their own safe space and their own team. But, maybe that meant that he couldn't trust them anymore than they felt they could trust him (which was apparently not very much). To them, he was a threatening outsider, so they weren't going to shelter him from any storms.

Maybe, when it came to Steph and Cass, fairness went out the window. Maybe, because he wasn't one of them, he could just fuck off if he got in the way.

He crossed Babs off the list of adults he could trust.

♠

The next morning dawned and nothing had changed while he slept.

No bats had broken into his house in the night, nobody had come to haul him away to the manor or Arkham, he hadn’t received any phone calls or texts except to thank him for the pumpkins. Nothing had happened.

Tim walked downstairs and turned the corner into the kitchen. The two pieces of his laptop were still chucked onto the floor and a cold piece of half eaten apple pie still sat on the table.

Feeling numb and empty, Tim threw the broken laptop into the trash can and swept up the little bits to throw away as well. Then, he sat at the table and ate the rest of his pie.

If Barbara had traced him far enough to be able to hack him back, she surely had traced his IP back to his address. The knowledge that the bats knew where he was was scary. He didn't know what they would do with that information. But, then he hadn’t tried to make himself impossible to find when he planned out his retirement to the farm. In fact, he was fairly easy to find for someone like Barbara or Bruce. That was kind of the point of the whole gambit, he thought. His disappearance had to very clearly lack malicious intent for the bats to believe he had left on his own and not been kidnapped or something.

Even so, he had made contact, however brief, and they hadn’t moved.

If they hadn't showed up yet he suspected that they probably wouldn't ever show up. They had had nearly eight hours to get to his house since he attempted to hack into the batcave and it was barely a three hour drive from Gotham doing the speed limit.

No, they weren't coming and he honestly wasn't sure how he felt about that.

#dcu comics #batfam #tim drake #barbara gordon #fanfiction #early retirement #anxiety #depression #starting over #kittywrites

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