PRETTY HOT IN PINK

for Ri

by Tombstone Kidd

Tim knows that joining the Teen Titans was a good idea, but he hates it sometimes. He misses Young Justice and knowing that, even if his orders were ignored, at least his advice would be considered. He misses the trust that the others had in his ability to handle all of the weird shit that happened every time two or more of them got within ten miles of one another.

(He misses his friends. Cissie, Anita, Greta, Lobo, Traya, even Snapper and Ray. He misses Red Tornado and the Supercycle and...)

And Kory doesn't trust him. No, that's not right. Kory trusts Tim, but she doesn't trust Robin. Because Dick was, is, and always will be Robin in her mind. (But Jason was Robin, and Steph was Robin, and he's...) And he's just the new kid, playing dress-up in his big brother's clothes. (He'll always be the new kid. If only...)

If only Kory would listen to him, he wouldn't be in this situation now. But she ignored him because the Titans know how to handle a minor metahuman disturbance, thank you very much. But they didn't and they couldn't. The disturbed meta hadn't caused much property damage, but Tim had been doused in paint. Obnoxiously bright, pink paint, like a Barbie doll box, and it won't come off, no matter how hard he scrubs.

(He's couldn't dodge, couldn't avoid it. He's too slow, too hesitant. Too ordinary and human for this team. He's...)

He's the only Titan still at the Tower. It's just after five and he's been in the shower so long that his skin is soft and wrinkled. He looks like an old man and the paint still won't wash off. It will probably take days to wear off, but he can miss school. Maybe he can convince Bruce to let him redesign the suit if enough criminals laugh themselves sick over the new and improved, glaringly pink Boy Wonder.

(He feels old. Older than his friends, older than Alfred. He is old, too. He's older than Jason ever got to be, and he won't be a boy very much longer. How old is too old to play dress-up? Is it eighteen, like Dick? Is it...)

Is it six o'clock already? Tim sighs and turns off the shower. He hates the communal showers near the gym, but Kory wouldn't let him go up to his own room while he was covered in paint. No, he had to use the communal showers and dump his entire suit in a container marked "Biohazard" after he peeled it off. (He's always hated communal showers. He was always the smallest and least mature guy in gym, and now he's the smallest and most dangerous guy in gym. And the scars. He has so many scars. He's...)

He's very nearly scrubbed his skin raw, but the pink isn't gone. At least he isn't completely covered in it. The few inches of skin on his arms not protected by either his sleeves or his gauntlets are pink. His neck is pink, except for the areas covered by his cape. His hair is fine; it's hard to turn black hair Barbie-pink without bleaching it first.

His face is the worst. His mask protected his eyes, but he has a weird, reversed sort of raccoon-eyes pattern now. Gar thought that was so funny that he spent the better part of the afternoon as a raccoon, until Vic took him to see a movie.

Now, Kon and Cassie are on a date, and Kory and Raven are shopping. Bart's run to Gotham to explain the situation and pick up Tim's spare suit. Vic and Gar are seeing a movie, are most emphatically not on a date, and certainly aren't necking in the back of a dark theater. Except that they almost certainly are.

Everyone is gone, though to be fair, Bart is doing him a favor. He's spent all afternoon showering in the Tower's gymnasium showers. And he's still pink. It's faded now, so that it looks more like a pastel, Easter egg sort of pink than a neon, Barbie doll sort of pink. But it's still pink, and Tim hates it.

(It might not be paint, next time. It might be a bullet, or an explosion, or any number of things. He's human. He can be hurt. He could be killed, but he knows how to be careful, how to avoid the danger. He knows what he can handle and what to leave for the others, but Kory won't listen to him. She doesn't understand that all he can offer this team is his intellect. Normally, he...)

Normally, he wouldn't dream of walking around the Tower in nothing but a towel--unless he was having a nightmare. But he's tired and pink, there's no one here, and no one was willing to brave their way past his assorted booby-traps to bring him a change of clothes. He has a full-length mirror in his room that he never uses--it's hard to be concerned about his appearance when he spends most of his time wearing body armor--and he uses it to check for paint that he might have missed.

Adolescent male, between fifteen and eighteen. 5'5" and 125. Black hair, blue eyes, and Caucasian, except where he's cotton candy pink. He has his mother's face, and his hands are so wrinkled that they look like his grandmother's. She was a tiny, brittle woman with a harsh laugh and a complete lack of culinary skills. (He's always looked more like his female relatives than the males. It's just another annoyance, that he's become a cliché: Faggy little mama's boy with no strong, sane male role-model. He doesn't remember his Gran's funeral, and he's trying to forget his mother's. There have been so many funerals and they all blur together. He really should...)

He really should just get dressed. The paint isn't coming off tonight and looking at his scars is depressing. He's sixteen and Tim already has so many old scars that he knows it will rain tomorrow, just because of all the aches and twinges.

(They're all war wounds, his scars. The government is fighting a war on crime, but it's his family and his friends with the scars. Does Bart's knee hurt when it rains? He'd ask tomorrow, but he's going to crawl under his quilt and not come out until Sunday night. He's exhausted and embarrassed and someone else can save the world this weekend, because Tim just wants to sleep. He's just...)

He's just wearing his boxers when Bart barges in, without knocking. Dick follows him, carrying a package that's undoubtedly a suit with full-body coverage. No, not Dick. Nightwing, because he's off the crutches and back in costume again. Tim would be ecstatic, if he wasn't too tired to care. It's not even seven o'clock yet.

"You look like an Easter egg." Dick grins at him and, fairly obviously, checks him over for new scars. (Liar, liar. He isn't checking for scars, he's checking Tim out. But plausible deniability isn't just a defense mechanism, it's a way of life. It always has been, for Tim.)

"I hate pink."

"I don't know," Bart says, "You look pretty hot. Ididnotjustsaythatpleasedon'tkillme."

Dick just stares. Tim sighs.

"Dick, this is Bart. We're dating. Don't kill him."

"Batman's going to maim him."

"Eep." Tim suddenly has a very warm Kid Flash hiding behind him. A very warm and very hard Kid Flash.

And Dick's giving him this Look. No, he's giving both of them the Look. He flips up his lenses and raises and eyebrow at them. Bart feels every bit as interested as Dick looks. What the hell. He can always blame it on the paint fumes.

End

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