Tim Drake had in many ways never been an ordinary child. Looking back on his youth as an adult he often found himself wondering if that was part of why his parents had always been somewhat distant. They had loved him, he knew, but the way they spoke to him and their reactions to his responses had all suggested that they were a pair of good-intentioned people who operated on a different level than their offspring. It wasn't anyone's fault; it was just how things were.

Lottie, on the other hand, had understood him from the start. She was an old woman hired in a moment of desperation by his frantic mother, who was set to leave on a couples' cruise to Barbados mere days after his fourth caretaker quit, but she fit him far better than any of the nannies who had gone through extensive interview and meet-and-greets ever had.

Satisfied enough with their last-minute choice, his parents had left for the docks. Six-year-old Tim, meanwhile, had gone to the Christmas tree, crawled deep beneath its branches, and cried. It had been explained to him that the holiday wasn't until after his mother and father got back and that he would be bored on the ship with them, but he didn't care. He wanted to be with them, but they didn't seem to want to be with him; that was what mattered.

He fully expected to be dragged out of his hiding space and given a gentle lecture on running away from his problems once Lottie found him. When her worn but polished shoes appeared at the edge of the conifer's circumference, he braced himself. But lecturing wasn't Lottie's game, as it turned out, and neither was yanking small children away from spaces they were comfortable in. Instead she bent down, searched him out, and smiled. Without speaking a word she sat her popping and creaking joints down on the floor. A second later a rainbow of colored pencils rolled onto the floor. After that came a small stack of paper, and then the unmistakable sounds of coloring.

In his cocoon, Tim frowned. He'd seen adults color idly for a few minutes when they thought that it was what he wanted them to do, but Lottie appeared to be fully engaged in her task. Minutes ticked by, and soon he couldn't stand it anymore; he simply had to know what kind of a picture a grown up could possibly find so interesting.

"Ooh," he cooed once he could see what was going on. His new caretaker was carefully filling in a bright star-burst pattern, and judging from the number of spaces that were already filled she had started on it long before he had crawled beneath the tree. If only he had such interesting designs to color, he thought, he would pickup his pencils a lot more frequently.

"Well hello, Timothy," Lottie addressed him without looking up from her task. "...Would you care to join me?"

"Um...I could just watch you," he suggested, crossing his legs beneath himself. "I don't mind watching."

"Are you sure? It's much more fun if we do it together."

"I...I don't have any pictures I want to color," he confessed.

"No?" Her face turned down in a frown. "Why not? I saw your coloring books in your playroom; there's nothing in one of those?"

"Huh-uh. I don't really care about coloring in animals and scenes from history and stuff like that." His gaze slipped to the pile of pages stacked nearby. They were made of fine, thick paper that reminded him of the blank stuff his mother practiced her terrible watercolors on. Lottie's papers weren't empty, however; instead they bore complex geometries that made his heart speed up. "...Superheroes are okay to color, but I ran out of those."

"Hmm." A clever, knowing look came into her gaze. "Well, would you like to look through my coloring pages and see if you like one of them?"

His jaw dropped. "I...I can?" he whispered. "I mean...mom has paper that looks like this, but I'm not allowed to touch it."

"These aren't your mother's papers," Lottie said firmly. "These are my papers, and I would be very happy if you wanted to color one."

"Okay," he nodded eagerly. A smile started across his tear-stained face. "I'll pick one. Thank...thank you."

"Oh, don't worry about thanking me. What's a pretty design between friends?"

Tim and Lottie spent hours upon hours coloring during his parents' absence. After that first afternoon on the floor they moved up to the playroom, where a table and chairs made thing less uncomfortable for the old woman. They talked while they colored, discussing what Tim wanted for Christmas (a fingerprinting set, his own computer, and a model train), how he liked school (not much, but at least his teacher wanted to skip him a grade in math next year), and things of that nature.

Lottie shared a little of her past, as well, explaining that she had once been the child of rich parents just like Tim's. They had gone on many long, distant trips, often leaving their children at home with the help. Her sisters had envied their mother's jet-setting, and had striven to have that kind of life for themselves as adults. But Lottie, for all that she liked to travel a great deal, remembered the long, lonely afternoons she'd spent under the watchful eye of a disinterested governess. No little boy or girl should have to feel like she had on some days, when it seemed like she was nothing but a nuisance who could only please the adults in her life if she grew up a bit quicker. It was for that reason that she had studied education and child psychology in college. As soon as she graduated she began putting her name out as an au pair for the youngsters of Gotham's upper crust, and many decades later here she was with him.

By the time he heard that story Tim already liked Lottie a great deal. Finding out that she was so much like him, and that she had once felt the same way he did sometimes, only drew him closer to her. When Christmas came a few weeks after their introduction to one another, he received the train, laptop, science kits, and myriad other items that his mother had sent the staff out to buy off of his list; but it was his nanny's gift of new colored pencils and his very own set of coloring designs that he loved above everything else under the tree.

She made it a special point to give him the same gift every Christmas and birthday, and his joy never slackened. Coloring calmed him after bad days at school and gave him something to do while he tried to work through a tough brainteaser or solve the latest mystery he was reading. In later years he was careful not to mention his habit to other children, who had largely moved past such activities and weren't above teasing him for it. It wasn't until he overheard his father telling Lottie that she needed to give his son more 'adult' gifts, however, that he felt a need to truly hide his hobby.

Lottie, being who she was, didn't stop giving him what he truly wanted. Now there was always an 'adult' gift from her beneath the tree or on the gifts table, but later on when they were alone in his playroom his real present would come out. In a way Tim preferred it that way; it was fun to have a secret from his parents. His time with Lottie was quickly coming to an end, though, and shortly after his fourteenth birthday she was let go. He was old enough and responsible enough now, his mother explained, to look after himself when he was home. Besides, Lottie was ready to retire; surely he didn't want to keep her working longer than she really desired to?

The old woman did a much better job of soothing his upset than his mother did. She was going to retire, although she professed that she would gladly come back to him if she was still able when he had children of his own who needed looked after. In the meantime she was going to finally go to all of the places she'd ever wanted to. She would send him pictures, and maybe the occasional trinket. Most importantly, she swore, taking his hands in her own, she would always send him his coloring pages and fresh pencils at Christmas and his birthday.

She hadn't lied. As the years went on his packages came from more and more exotic places – Quito, Kathmandu, Alice Springs – but they always came. When he found that he was spending more time at Wayne Manor than at home, he made sure to put in a change of address form so that Lottie's packages would reach him without falling into his parents' hands. He didn't think they would keep his mail from him, but he could imagine the lecture he would receive if they knew he was still coloring with as much interest and joy as ever. He should be making his own designs and selling them, his father would press; he should go to architectural school if he was so interested in straight lines and repetitive patterns, his mother would urge. It would be too much for him to bear politely, so he took steps to avoid the confrontation all together.

And then, almost a decade after the old woman had been dismissed, his birthday passed without any word from her. He worried, but with no way to contact her all he could do was write it off. She was practically ancient by now; maybe she'd just lost track of the date and had posted his gift at the last minute. Maybe she was in the Amazon or somewhere equally as remote, and hadn't been able to find any pages to send him. It was okay; there was bound to be something at Christmas.

Sure enough, Alfred called him downstairs a few days before the 25th. A large box sat in the foyer, its brown parcel paper wrinkled and stained as if it had been on a long journey. The return address read Bangalore, and had been sent from the Estate of Miss Lottie Carver.

He fell slowly to his knees before the package and ran his hand over those deafening words. 'The Estate of Miss Lottie Carver'. It didn't leave much room for him to question what had happened; his old friend was gone, lost forever, and that was that. This was, he mused, the last Christmas present he would ever receive from her.

Grateful that Alfred had returned to the kitchen, Tim pulled the plain wrappings away. A letter presented itself, which he read. It had been Lottie's last wish, her lawyer informed him, that everything in this box be sent to him. This represented the total of his inheritance from her, and...

He set the letter aside. Maybe he would read the rest later; maybe not. It was far more important that he open the box and see what was inside. The flaps lifted up and were folded back, and Tim's eyes filled with tears of joy. Sheaf upon sheaf of uncolored designs were stacked on top of one another, each set shrink-wrapped to keep it from being damaged. Swirls and squares and circles and stars presented themselves as he sifted through the treasure trove, unable to believe how much Lottie had collected in her lifetime. At the bottom of the box was a heavy leather case which, when opened, disclosed an array of colors like none he had ever seen before. Some were brand new, others were half-used; all had been Lottie's.

She was gone, but here she was, come back to him for one last Christmas.

Without realizing what he was doing, he piled everything back into its box and carried it down the hall. He needed privacy and a table, but his bedroom didn't feel like the right venue for what he was going to do. The game room, located away from the main areas of the house and sporting plenty of flat surfaces, would work much better.

Once there, he picked a pattern at random and began to fill it in. As he worked he thought of Lottie, spending the last decade of her life in pursuits she had dreamed of her entire life. Rainforests, deserts, great cities...he could picture her in all of them, always wearing the same omniscient smile that he'd been introduced to when he was six. He decided that her last gift, with its foreign postmark and globetrotting contents, was an indicator that she had lived a good life. Her inclusion of him in her will, he smiled sadly, was a sign that he had been an important part of that life well lived.

"What are you doing?" a snarky question pulled him out of his reveries.

"...Coloring," he answered without looking away from the page. Heat tried to rise into his cheeks, but he willed it down. For the first time in many years, he refused to feel ashamed about his activity. It didn't matter what his parents had thought of an adult coloring, and it didn't matter what Damian thought, either. He was enjoying himself without hurting others, and that should have been good enough for anyone.

To his surprise, though, the boy didn't laugh. When he glanced up, certain that he was about to be the victim of some cruel prank, he found Damian standing at the other end of the table and surveying the piles of paper. "Where did you get all of these?"

"They...they were an early Christmas present," he explained. "From an old friend."

A silent minute went by as he shaded in a triangle. Finally Damian turned on his heel and began to walk towards the door. His pace was slower than usual, though, and Tim was suddenly hit with a strange urge. Growing up with distant parents who loved you was bad enough; what, he wondered, must it have been like to grow up with a parent who literally saw you as nothing more than a tool for revenge? "...Hey, Damian?"

He stopped instantly. "What?"

"...Do you want to do one? I have enough here for...well, for a lifetime, I guess." He pushed the heavy leather case forward. "You can use my pencils, if you want, so long as you sharpen any you make flat."

Damian took one step back towards the table, watching him cautiously as he did. "...This isn't a trick, is it?" he queried.

"Why would it be? I was coloring for an hour before you came in."

"Yeah, but...oh, whatever. I don't care." With that he closed the gap and sat down in a chair. "...You don't care which one I do?"

"No. I haven't even looked at most of them."

A quarter hour passed. "We should get Grayson in on this."

"He's not home yet."

"I know. I meant when he gets home."

"Yeah...Bruce would probably have a coronary if he walked in and saw all three of us coloring, though."

"What does he care? At least we aren't fighting."

Tim looked up and caught Damian's eye. "Heh. You're right. We're not." He glanced down at the boy's project, then extended the pencil he'd just finished using. "Here. You should use this red next to that yellow you just put down."

"Don't tell me how to color my picture, Drake, or this won't stay peaceful for long." He studied his work for a moment, then grudgingly reached out and took the pencil. "...Even if you're right," he mumbled, then bent back over his design.

The almost-companionable silence drew out once more, and Tim gave wordless thanks to Lottie. This was the last Christmas he would have a gift from her, but maybe, just maybe, it would be the first Christmas that he got one from Damian.