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“...so, yeah, that’s why I don’t understand this whole”—Tim moved his hands wildly—“brotherhood shit. Like, I get it, I almost get myself killed, but. Was it really necessary to fill my bedroom with Lightning McQueen balloons?”
His part time therapist, part time masked heroine ‘Black Canary’, Dinah, kept looking at him.
“I think I’m not being very clear here, but Dick had already given me one.”
“Yes, back in the hospital,” Dinah (finally) supplied (something).
“Right!” Tim nodded, grateful to not be the only one talking nor falling into an awkward silence because he suddenly got self-conscious of himself and everything that the environment implied. “And Jason knows me but…not really? So, I’m assuming that Dick told him about how much I hate Cars, and this grown-ass man decided that it’d be funny to, I don’t know, PTSD’ me or something.”
“Is that the only reason you think he decided to do that for you?”
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Tim frowned. “I don’t know.”
“What other reason comes to your head right now?”
“I…don’t know?”
Dinah blinked, nodded and slightly leaned forward. “Let me ask you something. How did you feel when you saw Dick with the Lightning McQueen balloon?”
“I thought he was stupid,” Tim chuckled (totally not intentionally replacing ‘feel’ with ‘thought’.)
“Did it make you laugh like you’re doing right now?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. “He often makes me laugh like that.”
Dinah smiled—which still made Tim double-take. “Ok, so, what I understand is that Dick’s peculiar gift made you feel very happy?”
“Yep.”
“Do you think that was your brother’s intention? To make you feel happy?”
Tim felt his lips twitching upward. (Man, this therapy thing was like dissecting a case letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence. It was pretty cool. He understood why Dinah did it as part of her JL contract. She was practically doing detective work and getting paid for it. What a dream.)
“Yes, I think that was his intention. Dick is very…quick to anger, I guess. But he’s also very eager to help. To make people feel good. So, yeah, I guess he thought I’d hate it so much it’d make me laugh.”
“Ok, Tim,” Dinah quickly wrote something on her iPad. Tim avoided the Batman-y part of his brain that urged him to stand up, snatch the thing away from her hands, and reset it to factory settings. “You can tell me if I’m wrong but, could it be that that was Jason’s goal too?”
Tim blinked. “What was?”
“Could it be that Jason’s goal was too to make you feel happy too?” Dinah reframed.
Could it?
“He called me ‘Mr. Lobotomy’ the other day, before everything went to shit, which I think was pretty clever and funny. So, that means Jason’s funny, right?” Dinah nodded, looking amused. Tim pursed his lips, thinking. “And, I don’t know, I guess our dynamics are like that. We tend to poke on each other’s arms until we explode but, like, in a funny yet destructive, I’m-worried-about-you way.”
“Do you think Jason likes to follow that dynamic, Tim?”
Of course Jason liked that dynamic. He’d been Jaybin. He’d grown up surrounded by Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth. Being a mischievous, annoying, ridiculous, smart ass and pathological worrier piece of shit was practically ingrained in him—and that’s without counting his previous experiences in the streets that for sure reinforced his personality.
“Yeah, I think he finds comfort in it. We all do.”
“So, in this case with the balloons…?”
(Jason’s intentions were clear; he’d wanted to make him feel happy. Contrary to popular belief, Tim wasn’t an idiot but, fuck, sometimes he felt like one.)
“He just wanted to make me laugh,” Tim replied, smiling to himself.
(He decided to keep the ‘to make me feel happy’ realization close to his chest for privacy and not for emotional reasons.)
Dinah looked obviously gratified by the epiphany she’d guided him through but quickly got herself in line.
“Do you think it’d be something good for you to have a session with Jason, just so we can talk about his motivations and thoughts about you? And give yourself more context about your brotherhood, like you called it earlier?”
He didn’t know if Dinah had already assumed his chore personality traits just by the fact that he’d been Robin and that he was one of Batman’s children, or if she just learnt fast (probably both), because, good God (another of Alfred’s expressions), two sessions were all it took for her to clock his need to know everything and use it against him.
“It’d be cool, yeah,” Tim replied, ignoring the part of his brain that begged him to do a second background check on Black Canary in case she’d been hiding any mind-reading meta’s abilities.
“Amazing. We’ll talk about the arrangements in a second. First, Tim, it caught my attention something you said earlier, that ‘you almost got yourself killed’,” she said earnestly. “I’d like to delve a bit in it. In these…twenty-five minutes we’ve got left. What do you say?”
Ah, yes: the therapy part he didn’t enjoy as much.
He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “I will not lose my spark, right?”
Dinah chuckled at the, surely, strange question (but Tim knew she was also Damian’s [and Jason’s, and Dick’s, and Bruce’s, and Cass’s and Alfred’s] therapist so, maybe not the strangest question). “I don’t think so, Tim. Improving, getting better, facing the things that make us fall into hurtful patterns, that’s very difficult and not as nice as many people think. It can make you feel angry, sad, frustrated…but I think that, at the end of the day, your spark will be there, just waiting for you to reconnect with it again.”
He let Dinah’s words linger in his brain for a second and took inventory of his current stage. Tim thought this was a good idea, and his brain and body were fine, so, yeah, he was in the safest zone mentally and emotionally speaking. Also, he’d promised himself in front of the Gotham General restroom’s mirror to be better and more gentle with himself (and with his mind and his body and his poor sleeping cycle) which gave him triple bonus points by his commitment alone, in his opinion.
He thought of this therapy thing as just another day out on patrol: he’d be facing known and unknown threats; he’d be coming back home grinning with pride or crying from pain; he’d be assured that his family and he were alive and trying, and he’d be training daily to be and do better next time he went out.
(Still, Tim gave himself 10 seconds to fantasize about a world where he didn’t have to think and talk about important stuff.
What a great world that’d be.)
Tim sighed, embracing the faint echo of a voice inside his mind (‘take the risk and fly, baby face!’), and said:
“Ever since I was a kid I had this thing about doing everything myself. But it wasn’t until a couple of…years back that I thought, ‘if I don’t protect the ones I love, who will?’ So, I decided to take more calculated risks…”