Title: A Fly in the Honey
Author: Slipstream
Rating: G (genfic)
Summary: In which Stephanie Brown doesn't dream about her firstborn child.
Spoilers: Mixed spoilers to the Spoiler!pregnancy storyline that appears in bits and pieces throughout in Robin#59-65 and misc.
Notes: I'm not the biggest Steph fan in the world, but I do identify with her enough on some levels to pull off the occasional sympathetic fic. This one was inspired by the gorgeous cover for Robin #65 and a friend of mine who's also a teen mom. Her little boy is about the age Steph's would be in cannon.
There's a fly in the honey
And baby's got a baby with me
-REM "Me in Honey"
Sometimes, more often than she'd like to admit, Stephanie Brown dreams about her baby.
Or…not the baby, really. She's never even seen it, so why would she dream about it? she asks herself. She doesn't (doesn't doesn't) ever dream about that. She dreams about being pregnant. Because that was…yeah, very weird—so hard to get used to and then so hard to get unused to. For months afterwards she would wake up and touch her belly and not be sure or she'd throw up and think about whether she could get pregnant from fighting crime. Because it would figure that someday she'll get struck by a ray-gun and two eggs in her uterus would fuse and start multiplying and she'd have to go through it all over again.
Batman is paying for her ortho tri-cyclen prescription. Again, weird, but at this point she can't exactly lie to the Bats about her lack of virginity.
She'd never really blimped out when she was pregnant. Sure, she gained some extra baggage and her butt and thighs were the consistency of cream cheese for the last month or so, but she never looked like she'd swallowed a whale. More like a smallish watermelon. God, are those stretch marks ever going to go away? They speak more about her lost virginity than any Bat-sponsored birth control ever could.
Did Batman ever make Tim carry condoms in his utility belt? They'd never gone far enough for her to find out.
Tim has seen her baby. Stephanie never saw him/her/it outside of an ultrasound monitor and Tim has held her child that she doesn't (doesn't doesn't) dream about. And that's something she'll never let herself forget. Tim (who wasn't Tim at the time, just a mask and a soft pair of gloved hands that held hers) sitting at her bedside in the dark, a sliver of light from the hall making the white-out lenses glow like small suns, and telling her very gently that the birth had gone well and that she had a healthy little—
"No," she'd said, tired and hurting and knowing how awful she probably looked and sounded. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
Tim had looked slightly sad, but then again she was never good at reading him correctly, especially with the mask. But he tucked all of the details of her baby that she didn't want to know—it's gender, weight, length, eye color, hair color, number of fingers and toes, pattern of the blanket they'd wrapped it in to take its identification photo—deep inside of himself and never mentioned it again, just like she'd asked.
Just like she'd asked…
Stephanie doesn't (doesn't doesn't) dream about Tim holding her baby. About him standing there in the Robin suit that she (stole) would later call her own and cradling something small and wrapped in a fuzzy blue blanket. Rocking it. Singing to it. A simple tune, a simple dream, and when she wakes from not-dreaming she's happy and sad all at the same time.
She sometimes (sometimes sometimes) wishes the baby had been Tim's, because then things would have been so much easier and so much harder all at once. Because maybe (maybe maybe) he would have loved it enough to keep it, instead of her loving it enough to give it away.
Stephanie knows she's not the first person ever to have a child out of wedlock. Definitely not the first teenager. Probably not the first superhero. She's a child of wedlock herself. And with the way her life is heading, giving it up was exactly the right thing to do. And hadn't she taken an oath to always do the right thing, even when it hurt? Especially when it hurt?
But still she wonders where her baby went, whose loving arms took it home, what home was. The adoption agency she'd used had been pretty hoity-toity, so it was almost assured that the parents were at least comfortably well off, but you never knew. People fell on hard times. As far as Stephanie knows, any of the screaming 2 year olds they see every night on patrol could be hers, and that's a terrifying thought.
Tim had always tried to keep her from seeing the babies, the ones with crack head mothers or negligent fathers or a bad twist of luck that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. He would always find a discreet way to send her to direct the cops or do surveillance or beat the crap out of thugs (which she loved) while he handed the tot over to child services.
Tim is very good with young children. He used to claim it came from working with Impulse for so long. Despite his intimidating presence, he could calm a screaming child in moments. He always cradled them gently, always sang to them, always kept them safe…even the dead ones.
Especially the dead ones.
As much as she wants to, Stephanie will never forget the first time she came back after one of Tim's subtle attempts to shoo her away to find him stroking the cheek of an eerily still infant.
The way Tim looked when he stared at their cherubic dead faces, the way he held them as carefully as if they still lived and breathed and suckled, the way he hummed so low and quiet their last lullaby…
Stephanie will never forget any of it.
Her hero. Her protector. And he was the one who needed protecting all along. Did Batman ever do the same for him?
Maybe…maybe it was best that Tim was the one to see her baby alive and well and into loving arms and not her. Tim's seen so many dead children, seen so many who were sick or dieing or malnourished or missing limbs and hope, and yet he cares for each of Gotham's babes with the same tragic lovingness. Tim deserved…no…Tim needed to see a baby born happy and healthy—her baby. Stephanie's desires to see her child stemmed from selfish reasons, or so she tells herself. Wasn't it the Stones who sang about not always getting what you wanted?
Stephanie Brown has never seen her only child, and at night she doesn't (doesn't doesn't) dream about it.
She never sees Tim anymore, and she doesn't (doesn't doesn't) dream about that, either.
She dreams about flying, she tells herself and her diary. She dreams about being Robin and beating up thugs and what it feels like to soar 20,000 miles above everything she used to be.
She tells herself this, this and other things, over and over and over, and maybe (maybe maybe) one day it will all be true.
-fin