Six months passed. Tim kept his affairs to himself as much as possible, and for the most part found that he could ignore the strange angst that had been cyclically stalking him. Every great once in a while he allowed himself to reflect that the time line that had been laid out on that high summer rooftop meant that his ill feeling had begun roughly when Damian had arrived on the scene and begun attracting Dick's attention. Unwilling to look the truth of his jealousy in the face for more than a second at a time, however, he restricted such instances of insight with a rigid authority that would have made Batman proud. His denial of fact, which had always been something he needed with the same desperation as he did food, water, and oxygen, served to worsen his overall outlook, and by the end of December he was beginning to receive curious looks from all quarters of his acquaintance.

As a result, the knock on his door after the Christmas Eve patrol came as no surprise. Would it be Bruce with a probing question, he wondered, or perhaps Alfred with a gentle request that he either spill the beans or keep a smile plastered on through the following day's activities? Finding Damian on the other side of the portal wouldn't even have shocked him at that point, although he couldn't imagine the kid announcing his presence with something so civilized as a tap on the frame. "...Oh," he faltered when he discovered Dick instead. "I thought you were asleep."

"I was on my way to that, but...there was something I wanted to do first. Do you have a sec?"

"Yeah, sure." Turning away from his visitor, he padded to his bed and sat cross-legged atop the covers. "What's up?"

"Well, I was going to save this until morning," Dick confessed, holding his hands behind his back as he came into the room. "The more I thought about it, though, the more I figured we should probably talk after you open it, and I don't want you to have to wait to do that. So..." A gaily wrapped package was pulled into the open, the hand holding it shaking slightly as it was held out. "Merry Christmas, little brother. I hope you like it."

He took his present quickly, not wanting to strain the quaking limb with a delay. While the baseball-bat wielding thug of half a year earlier hadn't broken any of the bones in Dick's wrist, his glancing blow had caused a nasty case of acute compartment syndrome from which he was still recovering. Tim could all too easily remember the husky agony he had heard in his brother's voice when he'd gone down to the kitchen early the morning after the fight and found him in tense discussion with a dressing gown-clad Alfred. An emergency visit to Leslie's clinic had followed, and had led in turn to the family spending the afternoon in one of the many waiting areas of Gotham Memorial.

The surgical attempt to keep the swollen internal tissues from causing any permanent disability had worked, fortunately, and Dick had flown through his physical therapy with flying colors. He had only been back out on patrol for a few weeks, though, and after several hours of heavy use his wrist was showing fatigue. "What is it?" Tim asked now, trying to distract himself from the awful tremble he'd just seen. "You can sit, if you want," he added, gesturing to a chair.

"Thanks. As for what it is, I'm not going to ruin the surprise. Open it!"

"Alfred's going to be upset that you raided the tree, you know." He wasn't really that worried – if anyone could win the butler's forgiveness for such a heinous Yuletide crime, it was Dick – but rather nervous. What could possibly be under the pleasant green-striped paper in his hand that was controversial enough to warrant not only a private opening, but a talk afterward? Special gifts from Dick had a well-deserved reputation as emotional landmines, and if he was going to trigger one tonight he wanted time to prepare himself. "I mean...maybe we should do this tomorrow."

"Timmy..." A pout appeared. "Please? Don't worry about Alfred; I never put this present downstairs, so I didn't technically touch the tree. No one else even knows about it yet. It's important, though, and...and I think it will make you feel better about something. So...open it, okay?"

He blinked at him, then sighed. "Okay. If it's that important." It felt like a book, he decided as he slipped his finger under the first flap and lifted. He couldn't even begin to guess what book Dick would think was so important that it deserved to be unwrapped early and by itself, let alone how a story was supposed to make him feel better about anything, but if it was that meaningful to the other man then he would take the bait.

His brows drew together curiously as the tome flopped from its holiday disguise and onto the mattress. "...'Remote Hikes in the American West,'" he read out loud, tilting his head in order to make out the words sprawled across the glossy cover. "Dick, what...?"

"Check out the marked section," his brother urged, his suggestion coming out as if he was holding his breath in excitement.

As he picked the guide up and thumbed to the folded piece of paper that stuck out midway through, Tim felt a tiny flame of interest flare in the pit of his stomach. A suspicion was growing in the back of his mind as to what this mystery gift might turn out to signify, but he pushed it aside. It would just turn out to be a wild goose chase with something dorky at the end, he was sure. It was just a little mystery that Dick had set up to amuse him on Christmas. There wasn't time for it to be anything more than that.

"'Asperity Falls,'" he murmured the chapter heading. "It's beautiful," he went on, examining the photo of a huge, cascading wall of liquid on the opposite page. Maybe he was missing something, he mused as he scanned the picture, the text, the page number, anything that might give him a clue as to what this was supposed to be a reference to. 'Asperity'...what, is the water bitter, or the trail ridiculously hard? He shook his head, puzzled. If this was the first piece of a bigger puzzle, he wasn't off to a very good start. "But I still don't understand," he confessed finally.

"Look at the bookmark," Dick, who was now leaning forward in his seat and tapping one foot eagerly, encouraged.

His confusion growing, he retrieved the page he'd set aside and unfolded it. As his eyes skipped down the itinerary, everything came together. There were their names – and only, he noted with rising giddiness, their names – alongside dates, times, and airport codes. At the bottom were the details for a rental car, followed by serial numbers that claimed to be for backcountry camping permits. "Are...are we going to this place?" he whispered. "This Asperity Falls, we're...we're going there?"

"Do you want to?"

"Do...do I want to? I...well..." He trailed off, unable to speak as a dozen different emotions contested for dominance.

The mattress sank beside him as Dick moved closer. "I know hiking isn't really something you've ever done outside of missions," he said quietly, "but I thought it might be fun to make your first civilian camping experience a big thing, you know? We'd be out of the city, away from people...it would just be you and me, Timmy. I know...well, I know I don't have as much time to hang out as I used to, and...and I'm sorry, little brother. I really am, because I miss it just as much as I think you do. I miss you. Now it seems like it's never just you and me, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time, and that sucks. So...yeah.

"We can go somewhere else if you want," he offered. "This just seemed like kind of a cool idea. Bruce hates sleeping on anything that didn't used to be attached to a bird, and Dami would probably complain half the time, but...well, if you want to go, and you like it, I thought maybe hiking could kind of become a...a thing we did together. There are a lot of trails out there," he smiled, "and I can't think of a better partner to explore them with. You don't have to answer right now, I know it's a big idea, but-"

"Yes," Tim cut him off. He had been staring at the behemoth cascade in the book as Dick's monologue washed over him, and although he'd been listening to the words they really hadn't been necessary. All the feeling he needed had been conveyed by the silent hours that must have been spent in the planning of this proposal, in the careful research and reasoning that had led to the selection of this place, and of this time, and most importantly, of him. If Dick wanted to hike into the middle of nowhere to look at a waterfall, he had a hundred friends who would say yes with barely a second thought. But Dick hadn't planned this trip for any of his friends; he'd planned it for him, for them, and that was all the impetus Tim needed to throw caution momentarily to the wind. "Yes. Let's do it. I'm in."

"...You're sure?"

"I'm...ninety-nine point nine percent sure," he nodded. "I know I'm going to have a million questions and hesitations between now and when we leave, but..." But this, he realized suddenly, was what he'd been missing for so long. The hang time, the little things that only he and Dick did together, the in-jokes that even Bruce hadn't been privy to...there had been so little time for any of that since Damian had arrived, and even less after Bruce had 'died.' The billionaire's return had reset things somewhat, but it had taken months for the strain that had come into their relationship in their mentor's absence to relax. Even with that improvement, though, the painful sense of rejection he'd carried for the last three years lingered.

But now...now there was time, and the chance for solitude. That was the real gift under the trip and all of the trappings that were sure to come with it, he knew. He wanted nothing more in the world than for things to be the way they once had between him and his brother, and nothing was going to make him pass up an opportunity to make them so. "...But let's do it," he finished as a watery grin spread across his face. "Let's hike the hell out of this trail together."

"Together," Dick repeated, slinging his freshly-scarred arm around Tim's shoulders and pulling him into a hug. "We'll hike that thing like it's never been hiked before."

"It doesn't know what it's got coming to it."

"Nope. But considering that only two or three dozen passes a year are given out for people to go back to the falls, you can't really fault it for being inexperienced."

"...Wait," Tim pulled back. "Only two or three dozen? Is there even a trail?"

"There's a trail. It's just restricted. Don't worry, little brother, I wouldn't make you work too hard on your first for-fun backpacking trip."

"Backpacking...I'm going to have to start getting used to carrying a pack." Traipsing through the woods in costume was one thing, but the few times he'd had to lug another person through the trees had taught him that toting a load was a completely different workout than anything he'd ever trained for. "I'm going to have to get a pack. Damn. There's a lot to do."

"Relax. I knew you'd immediately start thinking about the logistics, so I took the liberty of working most of them out for us. Probably half the stuff you're going to convince yourself that you'll need is already downstairs under the tree and waiting for you. Besides, we're not going until July, so we've both got plenty of time to get ready. You work on getting your hiking legs ready," he mock-punched his knee, "and I'll focus on getting ol' righty here back into bushwhacking condition."

"'Ol' righty,'" Tim laughed at Dick's nickname for his wounded wrist. "I don't know, ten days with your sense of humor might turn me off of camping permanently."

"Oh, please. You love my sense of humor. And you're going to love camping, too," he asserted, his eyes twinkling joyously. "I know it's a cliché, but...I just have this feeling that we're going to have the trip of a lifetime next summer. And the summer after that, and the summer after that," he joked. "Hopefully." With that, he stood. "Anyway...I'm really glad you like it, Timmy. Not just because tomorrow would have been really awkward if you'd hated it, either."

"I know." Ducking his head, he stared down once more at the sparkling, sunlit canyon that he could almost picture them standing in together already. "...Dick?" he said, stopping the other man at the door.

"Mm-hmm?"

"Thank you. This is...well." It was quite possibly the best gift anyone had ever given him short of life itself, but he knew he would choke on the words. "If I believed in Santa, I'd think you were him, you know? You've got some ridiculous talent for gift-giving."

"Nah. I just like to make people happy. That goes double for the people I love, so...there you have it. Anyway..." He yawned, then grinned. "Merry Christmas, little brother." "Merry Christmas," he smiled back. "See you in a few hours."

"You know it." Just before he shut the door, Dick winked. "Sweet dreams, huh?"

"...Yeah. You, too."

When he was alone, Tim shut off all the lights except the one on his nightstand. In the pale glow of the lamp he flipped through the chapter on Asperity Falls, reading mile marker descriptions and trying to imagine what it would be like to stand at each of them. Time and again he returned to the cover photo, and with each glance it became easier and easier to put himself and Dick in the frame. Their muscles would protest, the waterfall's roar would deafen them, the cold spray would soak them so thoroughly that Alfred would cringe from two thousand miles away, and their heads would probably ache from the way the light would refract off of the water in a thousand different directions at once, but it would all be worth it. To make such a rare, impossible journey with his brother...there were very few trials that he wouldn't willingly undergo for such an opportunity.

He passed out eventually with his hand on the book, and slept with a soundness he hadn't known in many months.

Author's Note: Acute compartment syndrome is essentially a problem where the pressure inside certain tissues increases to the point of cutting off circulation to the area. The hand, wrist, and forearm are particularly susceptible to this sort of damage, and it can occur without there being any bone fracture or other obvious damage. The risk is that the swelling can cut off blood flow so thoroughly to an area that tissues begin to die, leading to permanent paralysis or other disability. So as you can imagine, that was not a diagnosis Dick would have been happy to hear.

We'll switch into Dick's POV for a couple of chapters tomorrow. Happy reading!