Tim stepped out of the bathroom the next morning to find his brother blinking blearily at him from the comfort of his bed. "Morning," he greeted, scrubbing a towel over his hair.

"Hey. Is that your day one trail outfit?" Dick joked.

He glanced down at the pair of boxers that were all he put on so far. "It would save on laundry, that's for sure."

"The bug bites would be atrocious, though."

"Ugh," he cringed. "I'd prefer not to think about trying to subtly scratch certain areas when we get home, thanks."

"Aw, you don't want to spend the day imagining Alfred's disdainful glare?"

"Nope. Definitely not." Tossing his towel aside, he lifted his pack onto the mattress and began to dig through it. "What do you think?" he asked, pulling out two pairs of pants. "Convertibles for the first day?"

Dick dissolved into laughter. "...I want you to know that I'm picturing you wearing a Ferrari right now."

He snorted. "That would be a little heavy to lug into the backcountry."

"Yeah, but if we got tired you could just take your pants off and drive them."

"The Park Service might have something to say about that. Seriously, though, help me. What should I start with?"

"Okay, okay. I'd go with the solids. We've got that orientation thing before we can start out, and the first part of the trail is forested besides. The mosquitoes will probably be the worst today and tomorrow, in which case you're not going to want shorts."

"Cool. Thanks." He shuffled halfway into the selected garment, then broached another question. "...Did you sleep okay?"

"You ask that like you think the answer's going to be no," Dick frowned.

"I think you had a couple nightmares. You were kind of thrashy."

"Oh. Sorry," a bashful shrug apologized. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"I know. It's okay, I just wanted to check." Bad dreams were something that no one in the family was immune to, and as such he could hardly hold the events of last night against the other man. "What were they were about, anyway?"

"Hmm...you know, I don't remember anything about them."

"That's weird." Bruce had trained them all to be able to recall their dreams more or less at will under the pretense that solutions to tricky questions sometimes presented themselves only during slumber. As the eldest Dick had had more practice utilizing that skill than the rest of the Robins, so for him to be unable to pull up any details whatsoever was worrisome. "What's with that?"

"Eh," the concern was waved away. "Who knows? Maybe I'm just so relaxed and ready for vacation mode that my brain didn't bother trying to focus on what was going on in dream-world. Or maybe I just knew it wasn't anything important. Either way," he sat up and pushed his blankets aside, "it doesn't matter. It was just a bad dream, and it's gone now."

"...Okay," Tim let it go. If Dick wasn't going to fret over it, neither was he. "At least I shouldn't have to worry about you having more of those in the tent," he jested. Plenty of multi-night stakeouts had taught him that Nightwing didn't tend towards nightmares if there was someone he could reach out and touch for reassurance. Their beds had been too far apart for that last night, but in their narrow two-man trail tent they'd be hard pressed to avoid even unintentional contact.

"True, but you might have the opposite problem instead. You know I'm a cuddle monster in my sleep. In fact, I think I killed one of the hotel's pillows last night with an over-squeeze."

"Heh. At least I won't have to worry about getting cold. Besides, you can only invade my space so much from the confines of your sleeping bag."

"Good point." Standing, Dick yawned. "...You done in the bathroom? There's no way I want to hit the road without a shower under my belt."

"Yeah, go for it. I'll run and get us coffee from downstairs."

"Awesome. Thanks."

"You're welcome." He rolled his eyes good-naturedly as his brother walked by and scraped his hand over the top of his still-damp head. "Thanks for ruining my hair, by the way."

"The hair you hadn't combed yet? You're welcome."

"I was going for a bedhead look," he retorted.

"Then I didn't ruin it, did I?" They smirked at one another for a moment. "...See you in twenty, little brother."

Tim shook his head as the bathroom door shut. He didn't know what it was about Dick that made him so damned easy to get along with, but he supposed it didn't really matter. They were together, he smiled as he pulled on a t-shirt, and that was all he intended to care about for the next eight days.

Several hours later they left their briefing with a packet of paperwork in hand and a spring in their step. The three-decades-old film they'd had to sit through had only sharpened their eagerness to get going despite its dire warnings about bears, flash floods, and rock falls, and the ranger who had checked their gear afterward had been pleasant, too.

Tim had enjoyed that part of the orientation in particular; the girl was cute, and her review had given him one final opportunity to obsess over every piece of equipment they'd brought before they struck out on their own. Seeing the neat line of check marks running down the side of her list had given him the same sense of satisfaction that perfect scores on essays and exams imparted, and he had swelled with pride.

"Well, I'd say you're ready for just about anything that could possibly happen out there," she had commented, and he'd agreed. Their formidable nightwork résumés alone would have been enough to see them through everything short of a full-blown apocalypse, but with all the tools they were carrying besides he was confident that they could build a suitable semblance of civilization if need be. She hadn't known that, of course, but that didn't make her praise of his job-well-done any less flattering.

A friendly nudge snapped him back to the present. "Thinking about Ranger Jane back there?" Dick teased.

"No," he blushed slightly. "And her name was Karen, not Jane."

"So you weren't thinking about her, but you noticed her name."

"It's common courtesy, Dick."

"Aww…" Tim glanced over to make sure that he hadn't actually hurt his brother's feelings with his pun, and received a reassuring wink. "That's okay. One of these times you'll say yes, you are thinking of someone, and that will be a good day, so I'm gonna go ahead and keep on asking."

"You're playing a dangerous game there, inquiring about other people's love lives," he replied. "…Is this the path to the bus stop?"

"Um…" Dick peered at the sign they'd drawn up to, then nodded. "Yeah. Camper bus number…7? That's what the paperwork says, right?"

Rifling through the thick packet Karen had given them, he found the instructions on how to get to their start point. "Yup. Number seven. Leaves in fifteen minutes."

"Great. Plenty of time to walk a quarter mile." They turned in the proper direction. "To return to your less-than-subtle comment, it might be a dangerous game, but at least by playing it I might hear some positive news about someone's love life."

"…Still batting zero on that front, then?"

"Oh, yeah. Every time I manage to connect with the ball, it goes foul. But," he bucked himself up, "I've just got to keep swinging. Babs is stubborn, but sooner or later I'll at least manage to get on base."

"I guess the question is, how long do you keep trying to tag the same baseball before you pick another one out of the bucket?"

"Hmm…I think the better question is, why go back for a lower-quality ball when the first one you picked was top of the line?"

Because you might connect with one of the 'lower-quality' ones without wasting years of your life in the attempt, he bit back. Saying something like that really would hurt Dick's feelings, he knew. Besides, his brother deserved a 'top of the line' woman, and in his opinion it was a slightly wonky ball, not a lack of skills or effort on the part of the batter, that had so far prevented the home run the other man was questing for. "I guess it's like anything else in life that's really worth having," he said slowly. "You've got to work for it."

"Exactly!" Dick tried to sling an arm over his shoulder, but his load got in the way. "…I just found a major problem with this whole 'carry everything on your back' idea."

"No half-hugs until we take a break?"

"Yup. No half-hugs. Oh, well." A hand landed on Tim's head without warning and ruffled his hair for the second time that morning. "There. That'll work."

"Because you couldn't have waited until we got to the bus," he pointed to the large green vehicle that had just come into sight through the trees, "and just hugged me there."

"Ah…no. Apparently not. But hey, that bedhead look is really working out for you!"

He laughed. "I take it you're going to be my stylist for the next week, then?"

"Ack, dahling, you're fabulous!"

They boarded their shuttle wearing matching smiles and took up seats across the aisle from each other, thinking to have views of both sides of the road. Tim pulled his camera out of his bag before it went into the luggage corral at the rear and held it on his lap, hoping that he would have a reason to use it during their two-hour journey into the park. "Is no one else coming?" he wondered out loud when the driver started the engine after a few minutes. While they were the only people who held the coveted Asperity Falls passes this week, the bus was scheduled to stop at several other trailheads and campgrounds beyond the end of the public road. "I can't believe we're the only people on board."

"A lot of them might have gone out early this morning," Dick postulated. "…Wait, here comes a group. Aaand now they're running towards us." A minute later three middle-aged couples climbed aboard, settled their gear, and sat down near the front, chattering all the way. As soon as they were done arranging themselves the door shut and they pulled away from the curb. "…Hey, Timmy?"

"Yeah?" he answered, his voice trembling slightly. Everything up to this point – the dozens of hours spent preparing their bodies and their kits, the flight and the drive yesterday, even the briefing and the jaunt to the bus stop they had completed only a short while ago – suddenly felt like nothing more than prelude to the grand adventure ahead. Now the only form of transport they had any control over was their own feet; in a few minutes they would pass out of good mobile range, and their communication options would drop to almost nil. Such isolation wasn't a situation that either of them was unfamiliar with, but to enter into it as civilians and with no end goal other than enjoyment made Tim's scalp crinkle with excitement. "What's up?"

"It's for real now."

His own enthusiasm was reflected in his brother's eyes, and he suddenly had the inexplicable urge to squeal. He held it back with effort, substituting an unusually broad grin in its place. "It is. It's…really real now." Pausing, he turned back to the window, where the visitor's center and its many parking lots had already given way to a wall of trees. "…We're on our way."

Author's Note: We'll be back to Dick's POV and on the trail tomorrow. Happy reading!