Cold
by betty

Cold

betty

Summary

Some species remain colonial year round while others only gather together for winter hibernation.

Notes

Set during No Man's Land.

Thanks to [info]thete1 and [info]__marcelo for beta duty.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 61281.

Chapter One

Tim has a lot of vivid memories of the time when Gotham was cut off, but what they all feel like is cold. That's his main recollection of No Man's Land. During the day he could keep warm by moving; running for his life, fighting for his life, or just patrolling to stay warm. But at night it was always cold. Heating was the first thing to be turned off, to conserve the dwindling reserve power. At first it was just waking up a little stiff, and a little more tired. As the mercury dropped, he curled into tighter and tighter balls each night, heaping on more blankets, and laying out all his clothes on top of himself.

But there finally came a night when he was so cold he couldn't stop shivering to fall asleep. It was an almost endless night, punctuated by brief periods of shallow dozing which the cold woke him from each time. The next morning it felt as if he hadn't slept at all; every muscle ached, and he was exhausted, and still cold.

The next night he couldn't face it. Alfred had pulled the curtain and gone to bed an hour ago, but Tim kept working on fixing their water distillation system's leaks rather than turning in when the low light and exhaustion started to make him fumble. The floor was chill, but at least he was moving. Finally, however, he opened up a gash on his arm with the monkeywrench and had to face the fact that returns for effort had diminished until they approached the limit of zero.

He thought about his cold bed, and barely even thought at all, before changing into the shirt and boxers he thought of as his pyjamas and slipping in next to Alfred. The mattress was only a thin foam pad, so his weight hardly moved it. He lay in a straight line, near the edge of the single bed, and soaked up Alfred's heat, all along his left side. He slept all night.

When he woke up in the morning, Alfred had moved over to allow him half of the bed. Tim got out of bed, and started the water boiling for whatever they were going to have for breakfast, and went to splash as little water as he could get away with onto himself to clean up. When he came back, Alfred was up, wearing a pair of slippers and a housecoat over his striped pyjamas and gave him what, if they had both been awake, would have been a sharp look.

"Timothy," very dryly. "You have extremely sharp toenails."

Tim wasn't awake enough to feel embarrassed, and he hadn't really thought he could get away with it without being noticed. "Sorry. Should I cut them?"

"You should keep them to yourself." And then Alfred turned the boiling water into porridge and tea.

Several times he had ended up sharing a bed with Bruce. The first time, he and Batman had returned from a late night visit with Poison Ivy to discuss her broad interpretation of the borders of Robinson Park. When they returned to the Bat-Hole (as Tim thought of it) Alfred was gone, helping out Leslie downtown. Bruce had noticed Tim's sleeping arrangement with Alfred, and Tim didn't see any need to discuss it with Bruce when he climbed in next to him. Bruce put off heat like a furnace, so there was no need to lie close, but little choice: he took up a lot of room.

Bruce went to sleep almost immediately, and then thrashed the entire night. Tim woke up, it seemed, every twenty minutes, with an elbow in his kidney, or a foot in his gut. It was better than being cold. He woke up in the morning, huddled in a small protective ball in the space behind Bruce's knees. Bruce had, in the night, reached back and clamped one hand around Tim's wrist so hard that Tim had to wait for him to wake up to escape.

It's given him a new perspective on why Bruce Wayne never lets his girlfriends sleep over. They'd all wake up with black eyes. Not quite the playboy image Bruce is looking for.

black eyes

A couple of times, Tim and Dick shared a bed. The first time, Dick was spending the night in the Bat Hole, and they only had the three mattresses. "You can share with young master Tim," Alfred had proclaimed, Dick had looked at him and raised an eyebrow, and Tim had shrugged. In bed with Dick, Tim had been more aware of the small space than he had been with even Bruce. He lay carefully with his back to Dick, and Dick's sour breath on his neck.

"Sorry to squeeze into your bed like this, kid," said Dick into his ear.

"I don't mind. You're warm."

Dick chuckled softly. "I knew you wanted me for my hot bod," which irritated Tim so much, because god, was Dick twelve, that he had replied:

twelve

"Well, it's not for your sense of humour." But luckily Dick had only laughed and gone to sleep.

He had woken up with his mouth pressed against Dick's collarbone, on a moist spot of drool, and his... hips pressed into Dick's leg. He had moved his face off Dick's chest, and his hips from Dick's thigh, and lain there, enjoying the warmth. He actually fell back asleep, and came awake again with Dick's hand on... He tried to decide if that counted as a hand on his ass or if it was more properly his lower back He shoved it up into unambiguous territory, and went back to sleep again. They had both been very tired.

One night, Batman sent him over to the clock-tower to keep watch for Oracle. Batman had heard a rumour that a mercenary was in the city, to take out "the archive," which might have been a reference to the Oracle. Oracle had accepted his presence with very ill-grace, but after telling Tim exactly what she thought of Batman she gave up, and went back to studying age-curled municipal planning blueprints. When he thought she would accept it, he came over and offered her his help. Finally she said, "I'm turning in. Can I offer you my couch?"

Tim shivered. "How warm do you keep this place at night?"

"Well, pretty cold, actually. The solar panels are really more useful in the day. But it's either the couch with all the afghans Aunt Barbara gave me, or sharing the bed with me."

"Well, would you mind?"

"Uh... I guess not. No kicking, and the right side is mine."

Tim stripped off the outer layer of his uniform, and got in bed first. He turned his back to the bedroom door so that Barbara could have her privacy getting into bed. He heard the faint whir of wheels coming into the room, the sound of someone grunting in effort, and then a pause.

"Robin, are you wearing your mask in bed?"

"Uh... yeah."

"Okay, sleeping with underage vigilantes is sexy: sleeping with jailbait wearing a mask is kinky."

Tim felt a brief flare of panic that she had radically misinterpreted his request to share her bed before he recognised the old chicken joke. "Well, I do have a secret identity."

"Wow, you make Batman's conversation seem like over-sharing. Look, I'm turning off the light. I can't see anything. Just take off the mask."

Tim took it off, rolled it up, and slipped in into his boot by the side of the bed. Barbara's bed was queen sized, but he slept closer than the bed required to feel the heat of her body. Barbara didn't move. He tried not to.

When he woke up it was light, but his face was pressed into the pillow, and he waited until Oracle had left the room to raise it and put the mask back on.

Tim never slept with Batgirl. They spent one night together doing surveillance of Two Face's group. The moon rose, the temperature dropped, and he moved over a little, to sit with his arm pressed against hers, a warm line down his body. When the moon set again, he got up and left, because their shift was over. There was no point in saying anything, but he gave her a nod. Then he went back to the Bat Hole to sleep.

When Tim's father got Tim's face on the news, it all was falling apart. Well, not in the larger sense: everything was going well, Batgirl's territory was settling down, Ivy was cooperating, the GCPD seemed to have shaken themselves out. But in the smaller sense, it was all falling apart. The Bat Hole had flooded, and they hadn't been able to salvage very much of their food. Tim had eaten a meatloaf made with dog food and stale cheerios for lunch, and supper had been hot water, in which Alfred insisted some broth was dissolved. That night, they were camped in an abandoned apartment while waiting for everything to dry out, too tired to do much in the way of scavenging bedding or food. Everyone was dog-tired. Alfred had gone to beg some mattresses from Leslie. Nobody could stay on their feet, but Batman kept going anyway, bringing sodden artifacts out of the hole, up to their nest, and returning, while Dick and Tim leaned against each other, too tired to move. Tim realized, after a long period of blankly staring at the ceiling, that they were lying on the floor, and prodded Dick up long enough to put his cape underneath them, because he wasn't too tired to be grossed out by the floor. Then he pulled Dick's arm under his neck for a pillow and determinedly went to sleep. He woke up again when his pillow moved.

"Wha..?" Dick was saying, to a dark and looming figure above them.

Reassured, Tim closed his eyes and tucked his head under Dick's chin.

"I said, do you know where you put the wool blanket?"

"No?"

"Hmm."

Then Dick was moved around a little more, as Bruce spooned behind him, and Tim moved his head up enough that Dick could make himself comfortable again. Bruce pulled his cape over all of them. He woke up stiff, but warm, and he and Bruce got up and started sorting out the electronics that could be salvaged while Dick huddled in both their capes and made pathetic morning noises.

When the helicopter lifted off, EMTs wrapped him in emergency blankets, as if he'd just been pulled out of a river. The helicopter was ridiculously over-equipped, as if they'd expected him to have contracted pneumonia, and broken two legs. In the short hop across the Gotham River, he used the noise of the rotors as an excuse not to talk. By the time the helicopter touched down, he had the right face on, his "grown-ups sure do over-react" face, and he used it on the gathered reporters as well as Dana and his dad. It was a long day, and at the end of it, he would have rather gone two rounds with the Killer Croc.

After his dad had yelled at him, the examining doctor had reproved him, and Dana had explained to him how very worried his father had been, he was finally allowed to fall into the back seat of the car while they drove home. A neighbor had brought over a casserole, which Tim found hilarious, but managed not to giggle over, because he didn't want to try to explain about the dog food.

While Dana cleared the dishes, his dad sat there and scowled. Tim knew he was supposed to be penitent, but... He was so tired. He curled up in the recliner and tried to read one of Dana's magazines, but it was too inane, so he just looked at the ads. Dana came into the livingroom and bumped up the thermostat, because she said he "looked cold," and Tim was almost overcome by the novelty of heat that came out of vents. He sat on top of a vent in the living room for a while until it began to be unpleasantly warm.

Then he remembered that they had heated water. He showered for half an hour. For the first time in his life, he actually rinsed and repeated. He didn't want to get out after that, so he took down Dana's conditioner, and was thinking about following the directions on the back, but the scent, when he checked, was too powerful, so he put it back.

heated water

When he got out, he realized how much he missed well laundered clothing. Everything in Gotham was either dirty or gray from washing in cold water. Even the Bat-suit's cape had begun to look dingy. His pyjamas were soft and clean, as were his sheets. His bed was bigger than any bed he'd been in since that night at the clock-tower. The quilts were soft and warm, and he actually had a pillow. He hadn't used a real pillow while he was in Gotham.

Tim turned over. His neck felt like it was at an odd angle with the pillow under his head. He tugged it out and threw it at the foot of his bed. The street sounds outside his window were familiar and relaxing, but his bed didn't feel right. He was warm, but... It wasn't the right kind of warm. He turned over again. Pulled his pillow back up and curled around it. And he did fall asleep. Eventually.