#arei writes

[areiton]

Fic Idea in which Tim is a lot less morally grey and firmly in amoral. He isn't a villain but he is determined and the methods he uses to work his way into the Wayne family are less than legal and sometimes lethal.

He's obsessive & possessive & more than a little unhinged.

Good thing Jason is into that.

[areiton]

The problem is that Bruce feels the constant press of time.

Most parents get 18 years and that can feel like a lifetime.

But he doesn't--he doesn't have his children's infant and toddler hood, doesn't have anything of their early years and that eats at him, a longing he can't put into words. He wasn't there for first words or first steps or first days of school, wasn't there for bedtime stories and splash fight baths and teaching them to ride a bike.

He has this instead--training them to be investigators, training them to fight, training them to fly, watching them fall.

Most parents get 18 years, but he loses Dick earlier than that, to the costume and his own fear, loses Jason earlier than that to his war and the Joker and then he's gone, lost in time and losing a precious year with Tim and Damian and everything is different, when he comes back, and Tim is no longer in the Manor.

It feels, always, like water slipping through his fingers, something he tries desperately to hold on to, to keep, these short sweet years with his children, and desperation makes him over correct, makes him controlling in a way that drives them away and all he wants to do is scream, stay stay stay, you're safe here stay.

He doesn't. Can't put into words how desperately he wants to keep the years they are children.

There is something painful and beautiful, though, about watching them grow, watching them become adults, even with the distance between them, even when a part of him long, always, for the days when they were small enough to carry, small enough to shelter in the shadows of his cape, small enough that all the years he had to keep them, all the days felt endless and infinite and utterly precious.

[areiton]

I think the best thing about cherry picking from movie casting is I can make Superman (Cornswet) & Batman (Affleck) have a delightful mess of age gap and daddy issues.

And they fuck it out.

[areiton]

i am so excited that we'll be carrying each other is almost done, I cannot WAIT to read it. maybe even i'll get to read it on vacation in a few weeks!!

[areiton]

Fic Idea:

No one is a vigilante. Tim comes to live in the Manor when his parents' pass in a plane crash. He's this quiet, manic boy who is brilliant and beautiful and furiously grieving.

Nothing Bruce does works--he isn't interested in being distracted with physical activity or books or the legal system working on his parents case, or using Bruce's endless fortune to make changes and charities to make sure it never happens again.

He gets along with Dick, when he comes home from Bludhaven, but Dick keeps his grief close, hoards it to himself, even now--he doesn't want to share something so personal and so profound, even with his brother, even though he adores Tim.

Nothing, no one, is connecting with him, really.

Until Jason comes home from where he's been studying literature at Oxford, and takes one look at this tiny, quiet, grief carved boy who he remembers--a shadow from his senior year at Gotham Academy, a ghost haunting him in libraries and charity galas and museums, this tiny stalker he'd never really talked to but always was aware of.

And it's not instant, is the thing. But Tim starts spending more of his time out of his room, always lingering around the edges of where Jason can be found, and one day Jason finds him in the library, staring at a vase and silently crying, and he picks him up and cuddles him in his lap as Tim falls apart, and when Tim finally stops sobbing, he starts talking, telling this little boy about his mother and how she died and how it hollowed him out. And how it took time, and his family, to put him back together. He tells Tim that he has that, now, a family who will put him back together, if only he will let them.

Bruce finds them there, later, Tim exhausted and asleep in Jason's arms, Jason with tears dripping silently into his hair.

And Jason tells him he's going to put off going back to finish his Masters, because this--being here for Tim--matters.

And eventually, when he does go, it's with his brother at his side and maybe Tim is still grief stained, prone to quiet bouts of depression and maybe Jason will always be that little boy who found his mother dead, but their broken edges match and that matters.

[areiton]

Batman being the paranoid protective refuse to talk about his kids workaholic that he is? Really resonates with the single parent in me.

[areiton]

I have a lot of feelings about Bruce and watching his children grow up and the time he doesn't have with them and someone remind me to explore it when im not half asleep even the fucking Bats are in bed by now (not tim tho)

[areiton]

Sent @meidui a snippet of the year you were mine and her reaction was perfection.