What’s your guilty pleasure Tim in the pear wiggler scenario
For example is Tim getting stuck outside in weather and having to be wrapped in a blanket
this is a dangerous question. one time i spent an hour-long car ride describing a tim pear wiggler scenario to fey and when we parked i was like “so anyway that’s the prologue. then in part one—” and fey was like mercy, please
(my favorite pear wiggler scenarios are the ones where the pangs require complicated and internally consistent worldbuilding. it’s like 90% worldbuilding and then a series of pangs. gotta get up the chairlift before you can ski down. or something)
lately i’ve been kicking one around in my head that’s simultaneously a tim-joins-the-family-early au and also a tim-joins-the-bats-late au, with the interim time being as much pear wiggling as possible. it’s set during jason’s robin era, while bruce is working to adopt jason but running into some official red tape (possibly due to the revelation, in an adoption process functioning 1% more above-board this time, that catherine wasn’t jason’s birth mother). meanwhile, in this world tim’s mom dies and his dad is in a coma early, and due to the high-profile nature of the situation, bruce wayne (who has the means and established personal security/team of media lawyers) is considered the best foster placement for 12 y/o tim drake.
(see what i mean about needing a whole setup? i’m trying to be so brief here, and yet.)
anyway. the thing is, bruce doesn’t exactly WANT to take in another kid right now. nothing against this kid personally, but he’s in the middle of an adoption process, and also, you know, the secret night job. but he has to keep up appearances for the aforementioned adoption process. and meanwhile jason, who has not been officially adopted yet and is still settling into the wayne family, feels incredibly insecure about this little polished rich kid coming to stay with them. like, some part of jason is a bit convinced that bruce will realize it would be so much easier to have a kid like tim instead of a kid like jason.
tim, meanwhile, is quietly grieving and quietly starstruck and quietly just like. Going Through It. especially because he’s been getting targeted/bullied at school (by other kids, by a tennis coach, a few options here). he doesn’t tell anyone, but it’s getting worse, and it puts him on edge around everyone at the manor, too.
bruce, during this time, can sense the tension in the household; one night jason’s irritation boils over and bruce sees jason snap at tim over something. when bruce talks to jason about it—the two of them in the study—he reminds jason that they need to keep the foster situation drama-free because of the adoption process. also tim is a kid who just lost his parents, but—no, jason, he’s not here to replace you. he’s not a better model. jason. we couldn’t say no, do you understand? i want to keep you. this is how i get to keep you.
and of course: tim is outside the study to hear this. he had been hovering, finally working up the courage to tell bruce about the harassment at school. but he hears this, and realizes: 1) he’s already an unwanted obligation. and 2) telling anyone would be the opposite of drama-free. it might interfere with his placement, or even jason’s placement. (and whoever is targeting tim knows this, too. they’re banking on him being afraid of it. maybe they’ve even implied that they’ll get jason in trouble if tim tells anyone. so.)
tim takes matters into his own hands and comes up with a solution for everyone: he asks bruce to send him to boarding school. and for the next few years that’s where tim is—as jason’s adoption finalizes, as bruce reconciles with dick, as life goes on for the wayne family. tim is conveniently out of the way, finding excuses not to accept bruce’s invites back for school breaks. (on more than one occasion he fakes a school trip or an invite skiing with friends, and spends his spring break or winter holidays eating cereal in his dorm room, learning how to hack most gotham databases. on other occasions he actually does go on a trip, but not the school-sanctioned summer programs he’s supposed to be on. somehow he ends up with lady shiva for a summer, anyway.)
a few years later a new vigilante enters the gotham scene—almost entirely out of sight, mostly slipping the bats intel and never directly engaging. (tim. obviously.) and, around that time, damian shows back up in gotham, and ends up being the catalyst for tim coming back to the family as tim, too.
(i have so many more thoughts on this, and left out a lot of the more upsetting details here so far, but that’s the gist. i have been yearning for stories where tim joins the family early and isn’t immediately accepted/comforted; where bruce / dick / jason don’t immediately sense and understand tim’s trauma or aren’t perfectly situated to provide comfort/healing yet. don’t get me wrong, i enjoy a good hurt/comfort, but when i want pangs i want to see them reject/misunderstand tim at first, and i want tim to internalize that and act accordingly. that’s very juicy to me. get thee to the emotional pear wiggler!)
