(23) “Rainy Day”

redrobinfection:

JayTim Christmas in July 2018 – Day 23 “Rainy Day”

“No,” said the little prince, “I’m looking for friends. What does tamed mean?”

“It’s something that’s been too often neglected. It means, ‘to create ties’…”

“ ‘To create ties’?”

“That’s right,” the fox said. “For me you’re only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you I’m only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we’ll need each other. You’ll be the only boy in the world for me. I’ll be the only fox in the world for you…” ^[1]

Tim sunk into the cushion of the window seat and let the words wash over him, his mind wandering as Jason’s voice coaxed the story out of yellowed, musty pages. He gazed out at the rain sheeting down from the steel-grey sky in shifting, incessant torrents, and let the noise of it wash over him as well, letting himself drift off to both steady, soothing streams of sound.

“…So I’m rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps will send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don’t eat bread. For me wheat is of no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you’ve tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I’ll love the sound of the wind in the wheat…” ^[1]

Jason paused to turn the page and Tim hummed. The older man, sitting facing him on the other end of the seat, looked up inquisitively.

“Hmm?”

“I was just thinking,” Tim began softly, “ ‘To create ties’…’a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes’…’wheat fields’…well…” He trailed off and wriggled his toes under the blanket Alfred had thrown over them, tickling Jason’s leg as he looked up to meet his gaze playfully. “What are our ‘wheat fields’, I wonder?”

“Are you trying to insinuate that you’ve tamed me?” Jason teased, clutching a hand to his chest melodramatically and recoiling as if offended. Tim smiled.

“Well, you’ve tamed me, at the very least.”

Jason huffed a quiet laugh, eyes soft, then looked away, a fond grin tugging at the corners of his lips. Tim followed his distant gaze out the window – through the deluge, across soggy Manor lawns, and into the dark void of the forest beyond – and lost himself once again in swirling eddies and the hushed roar of the rain. This line of storms didn’t look like it would be letting up anytime soon; patrol would be a miserable sodden mess tonight.

Silence stretched between them, comfortable and warm, like the blanket they shared, and Tim relaxed into it, wrapping himself up and sinking into the feeling, languidly reveling in this rare moment of tranquility – rare in lives such as theirs.

“The sky,” Jason blurted out suddenly, turning back. Tim tilted his head in confusion.

“What?”

“You know how the sky gets sometimes?”

“Uhhh…”

Jason chuckled and looked down at his knuckles. He rubbed a thumb over the rough, calloused skin absentmindedly as he explained. “In mid to late summer, when the humidity is up but the clouds have cleared out for once, and you look straight up, usually right before dusk, sometimes at dawn, the sky turns this hazy, steely-purpley blue that is somehow deep and intense, but faded and hazy and ethereal at the same time…

“That is the color of your eyes,” Jason told him quietly. He looked up, meeting Tim’s wondering gaze, and nodded, as confirming it to himself. “Every time I see that now, and, heck, even when I don’t – every time I look up at the sky now, it reminds me of you.” He huffed an embarrassed laugh and shook his head.

“I’ve never been much of a ‘blue-skies-and-sunshine’ kind of guy, even back when I wore the short shorts and shitting sunshine was practically part of the job description” – Tim ugly snorted, slapping a hand over his nose and mouth, but not before Jason heard him and grinned – “Give me a dark stormy night any day of the week, but more and more these days I cherish each and every sunny day Gotham spares us, and I stay up past dawn more now than I’d like to admit, hoping to see that certain blue. Because it reminds me of you.”

They stared at each other for a long moment before Tim cleared his throat and looked away, heat rising to his cheeks. It was hard not to mirror Jason’s sappy, slightly teasing grin, but Tim took care to keep his expression serious as he considered his response.

“Hmmm, well, I guess… trees?”

Jason squinted and leaned forward. “Trees?”

Tim fought down a smile. “Yeah, you know the trunks. Every time I see a thick, strong trunk I’m reminded of your thighs-”

Jason burst out laughing, completely obliterating the quiet, contemplative mood they’d had up until then. “Tree trunks remind you of my legs?”

“So thick,” Tim teased, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. Jason howled.

When their mirth had died down, Jason stood and announced his intention to go and see what Alfred was cooking up for dinner. Tim smiled to himself. Jason liked to act as if he was only going down to pester Alfred and mooch the food, but Tim knew – and Jason knew that he knew – that that was his way of playing the good son while holding on to his bad boy image; he was deliberately throwing himself into Alfred’s path with the full intent of getting himself conscripted to help – and of course Alfred knew it too. They all knew, it but, just like a magic trick, no one would ever address the illusion. He’d never say it out loud, but Tim loved that hidden side of him.

He acknowledged and replied that he’d be down in a few minutes, then turned back to the window and pulled the blanket up over his chest and curled into the residual heat, hoping to savor the mood for just a few seconds longer.

As he stared out at the rain, his thoughts turned to the roof on the Gotham Cathedral and to the walls of the GU School of Architecture^[2]. Both were covered in copper sheeting that had oxidized over time, taking on a patina that could look blue on some days and green on others – perfectly beautiful, unpredictable and organic. That train of thought led to thinking of the time they had once burned copper in high school chem class, to the resulting blue-green flame that had burned into his memory in the dark room, that surreal, electrifying light.

The color of oxidized and oxidizing copper was not very far off from robin’s egg blue, he realized with a sense of irony, but, at the same time, one was so much heavier, weighed down by the years of wear it took to form, and the other more intense, from having been born of the heat and the violence of rapid change.

Tim had a feeling he’d be turning to stare at the copper roofs around Gotham more often from now on. There was that one roof he always ran across on his patrol route, the color of it so bright, but so deep, and in the right light almost as vibrant as copper on fire. Sometimes dark, some times bright. Always intense. Just like his eyes…

“The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I’ll love the sound of the wind in the wheat…”

~*~

[1] All Italicized excerpts are from Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s (1900-1944) Le Petit Prince, trans Richard Howard

[2] I based this off a real-world building; the Penn State University School of Architecture.