Re: quicklog: Steph &Tim
Tim wouldn't have begrudged Stephanie a night of heavy drinking. It was only that Tim, personally, didn't partake. He'd done a little experimenting while in college, but he hadn't developed enough of a tolerance to get anything more than a bad case of the spins and puketastic nausea after a few rounds of shots. Besides, it wasn't like Tim didn't have his own brain-altering preferences. He liked caffeine in every form that the FDA had approved thus far: pills, five hour shooters, coffee, fizzy drinks in a can. He'd been going at all of those things since he'd been a teenager, so his adrenals had to of been totally shot, but it seemed like a bad idea to change the routine this far into the game. Besides, given everything that they'd been through and all of the funerals he'd attended, Tim was a little surprised to have lived this long.
He managed not to say anything to disrupt the moment when Stephanie came in close to stack herself against his chest. He hadn't hugged her in more than a decade, and it wasn't like Tim was having a nostalgic flashback in that moment or anything, but he recognized the passage of time. It wasn't anything worth changing, the way he'd left her behind to go off and try to become something more than Bruce had never taught him how to be. It might have taken a while, but from what Tim could surmise, her life had gotten a whole lot better without him around too. She'd fallen in love, she'd dropped the cowl, she'd gotten married… that was the functional dream, wasn't it? Even if some of that dream was collapsing around her now, she'd had it. Happiness and wholeness wasn't impossible for her to find again. More than anything, Tim wanted her to know that… he just didn't know how to put that wanting into words. He'd never been very good at transcribing the emotional stuff from his heart to his head to out of his mouth, not unless the words were laced without enough sarcasm to defeat the purpose entirely.
No, he didn't know what to say, but he knew how to do this. He'd held her enough times in his life to remember the basic outline. He'd held Stephanie so many times in so many ways that there was no real protocol or instruction book. After she'd given up the baby, he'd held her gently, more of a support beam for her to lean on than anything that threatened to grab her too tight. It was the family fights that had made his hugs braver back then, when they'd barely been more than kids. He'd held her with confidence and strong arms that promised everything would be okay. He'd held her hand on rooftops and swing sets. And when he knew he loved her, really knew, he'd held her so tight that he lifted her off the ground despite her laughing protests.
Tonight, he wrapped his arms around her when she did the same. Her fingers dug into the leather of his jacket and Tim regretted not taking it off, not because of the quality of the material or anything, but because he would of liked to have had a better memory to hold onto for later. When she pulled back enough to look at him, Tim looked down at her with a small smile of reassurance. He caught her eyes with his, blue on blue and both a little red(his from exhaustion, hers from emotion). "Hey, you want to talk about it?" He whispered the words into her hair when she dropped her head down again. "About Damian? About any of it? I'll even listen about Eddie without judgement." Well, without vocalized judgement.