❤︎| You've had a long day, and he won't get off his computer. (req)

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It had been a long day. An excruciatingly long day, actually, and that was saying something considering the kind of life you led. Work had been exhausting enough on its own, but apparently the universe had decided that a perfectly miserable shift wasn't quite sufficient punishment. No, it had graciously followed it up with patrol, leaving you running on a dangerous combination of caffeine, stubbornness, and whatever scraps of energy your body hadn't already burned through.

Patrol itself hadn't been particularly eventful at first. A few minor disturbances, the usual Gotham nonsense, and a couple of criminals who had apparently decided that attempting to outrun someone trained to chase down people for a living was a brilliant idea. Nothing you couldn't handle. Nothing you hadn't dealt with a hundred times before.

And then, somewhere toward the end of the night, you'd gotten sloppy.

It was a stupid mistake. An avoidable one, which somehow made it all the more irritating. Your attention had wandered for half a second at the wrong time, and you'd paid for it with a particularly nasty blow to the ribs. It wasn't anything serious, probably. You could breathe, you could move, and nothing felt broken. But the bruise was already beginning to darken beneath your clothes, and every little twist of your torso served as an unwelcome reminder that perhaps you weren't as indestructible as you'd occasionally like to pretend.

Fantastic.

Just what you needed.

By the time you finally finished up and made your way toward Tim's apartment, all you wanted was a shower, something vaguely resembling dinner, and the opportunity to collapse directly onto your boyfriend until further notice. Preferably for the next twelve hours. Longer, if circumstances permitted. You'd even settle for being used as an armrest while he worked, provided he occasionally acknowledged your existence and allowed you to steal some of his body heat.

You weren't particularly demanding. You didn't think so, anyway.

Unfortunately, Gotham's general disregard for your well-being apparently extended to the universe itself, because the moment you stepped into Tim's apartment, your carefully constructed plans began to fall apart.

The living room was empty.

No Tim sprawled across the couch with his laptop balanced precariously on his stomach. No familiar dark head bent over a cup of coffee that had almost certainly gone cold an hour ago. No boyfriend to greet you with that distracted little smile he always seemed to reserve for when he was happy to see you but trying very hard not to make it obvious.

Instead, there was the faint glow of a monitor spilling out from the doorway of his bedroom.

You stopped in the hall.

Of course.

Of course he was in his room.

You made your way toward the doorway, only to find Tim hunched over his desk, shoulders drawn forward, one hand resting against his chin while the other moved rapidly across his keyboard. The room was dim except for the light from his monitors, which illuminated the sharp lines of his face and the faint shadows beneath his eyes. Several tabs were open across the screens in front of him, displaying what looked like surveillance footage, police reports, and enough lines of code to make the average person develop a headache just by looking at them.

There was a half-empty mug of coffee beside his keyboard. Judging by the lack of steam, it had been there for a while.

Tim, meanwhile, appeared to have fused himself to his chair.

You knew that look.

You knew it very well.

It was the Red Robin look. The stubborn, single-minded, infuriatingly determined expression that meant Tim Drake had found something interesting and would sooner personally dismantle the entire computer than willingly walk away from it. He got it when he was investigating a case, when a piece of evidence didn't line up, or when he was convinced that he was one search away from figuring something out.

It was the look of a man who could be informed that the building was on fire and would probably ask whether anyone had checked the security footage first.

Getting him to move when he was like this was an exercise in futility. You could try asking nicely, of course, but that would only result in a distracted promise that he'd be there in five minutes. Five minutes would become fifteen, fifteen would become an hour, and by the time he finally looked up from his screen, he would somehow be surprised to discover that you were still waiting.

You could practically hear the excuses forming already.

Just let me finish this.

I'm almost done.

Hang on, I need to check something.

Tim had an impressive ability to make the phrase almost done mean absolutely nothing.

You remained in the doorway for a moment, watching him work. Your ribs gave an unpleasant little twinge when you shifted your weight, and you instinctively adjusted your posture to compensate. All you wanted was to crawl into his bed, bury your face against his chest, and let the world cease to exist for a while.

Was that so unreasonable?

Apparently, it was.

"Hey," Tim greeted, his voice casual and distracted as he clicked through another window. "How was patrol?"

He barely glanced away from the monitor.

There was a brief pause, during which his eyes flicked toward you and then immediately returned to the screen, as if the movement had been more of a reflex than a conscious decision.

"Quiet night?" he asked, already typing again. "Or did Gotham decide to collectively lose its mind while I was busy?"

He hummed absently, the sound barely audible beneath the soft tapping of his keyboard. Whatever answer you might have given him, it was becoming increasingly obvious that he wasn't in any position to absorb it. His attention was somewhere between a grainy security recording and whatever string of numbers had currently captured his interest.

Tim had always been good at multitasking. Unfortunately, his definition of multitasking seemed to involve performing three separate investigative tasks simultaneously while acknowledging the existence of everyone else in the room approximately once every ten minutes.

"Mm-hm," he murmured after a moment, nodding to himself. "Yeah, that makes sense."

He paused.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard for a second, his brows drawing together as he stared at something on the screen.

"Wait. No, it doesn't."

And just like that, whatever conversation might have existed between you had been abandoned in favor of a problem that had apparently offended him on a personal level.

Tim leaned closer to the monitor, his expression sharpening with renewed concentration. He clicked through a few more windows, muttering something under his breath about a timestamp that didn't match the original report.

"That's annoying," he informed absolutely no one in particular. "That's really annoying."

You could practically feel your patience draining away.

A groan escaped you, deliberately dramatic and thoroughly deserved, but Tim either failed to notice or had decided that whatever was happening on his screen was more pressing than the unmistakable sound of his exhausted partner suffering in the doorway.

You stared at him for another moment.

Nothing.

Not even a sympathetic glance.

Wonderful.

You weren't about to beg your own boyfriend to stop working long enough to give you a little attention. You weren't going to stand there and explain that you were exhausted, that your ribs hurt, or that you'd spent the better part of the evening imagining how nice it would be to have his arms around you. You wanted him to want to spend time with you, not have to be reminded that you existed.

Besides, you knew Tim. If you asked him to stop now, he'd probably apologize, promise he'd only be another ten minutes, and then proceed to lose track of time so thoroughly that sunrise would become a legitimate possibility.

So you turned away without a word and headed for the bathroom.

The shower was hot enough to loosen some of the tension knotted between your shoulders, although it did absolutely nothing for the ache in your ribs. You stood beneath the water longer than you probably should have, letting the noise drown out your thoughts while the exhaustion of the day settled heavily into your bones.

For a little while, at least, you didn't have to think about patrol, work, or the fact that your boyfriend appeared to be in a committed relationship with his computer.

When you finally emerged, dressed in comfortable clothes and feeling marginally more human, you made your way back toward the bedroom.

Tim was in exactly the same position.

Same hunched shoulders. Same narrowed eyes. Same hand propping up his chin as he scrutinized whatever fresh mystery had apparently landed in his lap. If the mug beside him had been any indication, he'd barely moved since you'd left.

He hadn't even taken his headphones off.

You paused in the doorway again, looking at him with the sort of tired disbelief usually reserved for people who did something spectacularly stupid and then had the audacity to look pleased with themselves.

He was so absorbed that he didn't notice you immediately.

Then, as though sensing movement somewhere in his peripheral vision, Tim glanced over his shoulder.

"Oh. Hey."

His eyes flicked over you briefly, taking in the change of clothes and damp hair, before returning to the monitor.

"Shower okay?"

He waited half a second, apparently satisfied with whatever answer he'd imagined you giving him, and turned back to his work.

"Good. You should probably drink some water, by the way. You looked pretty wiped earlier."

There was a faint crease between his eyebrows as he spoke, his tone still distracted, but the comment carried the unmistakable implication that he'd noticed more than he'd let on. Tim was annoyingly observant when it came to the little things, even when he seemed incapable of paying attention to anything else.

Unfortunately, being observant and actually doing something about it were apparently two separate skills.

"I'm just trying to figure out why this footage doesn't match the report," he continued, mostly to himself. "Because either someone changed the timestamp, the original report is wrong, or Gotham's finest have somehow managed to make a mistake so spectacular that I'm going to have to reconsider my faith in basic recordkeeping."

He clicked his tongue.

"Which, honestly, feels a little unfair to me. I already had very low expectations."

Another few seconds passed.

"And before you ask, yes, I know what time it is."

He said it with the defensive confidence of someone who had absolutely not checked the time in at least an hour.

Tim leaned back just enough to reach for his mug, took one sip, and immediately grimaced at the cold coffee.

"God, that's disgusting."

He set it down again.

"Anyway. Five more minutes."

There it was.

The infamous five minutes.

He didn't even look up to deliver the promise, apparently trusting that the sheer force of his sincerity would make it believable. His fingers were already moving across the keyboard again, his focus snapping right back to the screen.

Five minutes, you thought, staring at the back of his head.

Sure.

You could wait.

You were perfectly capable of waiting. You had, after all, survived an entire day of work, a miserable patrol, and a bruised set of ribs. You could survive a few more minutes in the company of your own boyfriend's complete and utter lack of situational awareness.

Probably.

With that in mind, you crossed the room and dropped onto his bed, settling against the pillows with a carefulness that was less about comfort and more about avoiding another unpleasant twinge in your side. The mattress dipped beneath your weight, but Tim didn't turn around.

You watched him for a while.

He shifted in his chair, muttering something about a corrupted file. His fingers flew over the keyboard. A new window opened on the monitor, and he leaned forward with the kind of intense concentration usually associated with bomb disposal.

You let your head fall back against the pillows.

Fine.

If Tim wanted to spend his evening staring at a screen, then you could spend yours staring at him.

You had no intention of making the first move just yet. No asking for cuddles, no pointed little sighs intended to draw his attention, and certainly no dragging him away from his desk by the back of his shirt, tempting as the idea might have been.

You'd simply sit there.

Quietly.

Patiently.

And perhaps, if you frowned hard enough, the universe might finally take pity on you.