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Insta-Worthy

Preface

Insta-Worthy
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/48151252.

Rating: General Audiences

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:M/M

Fandoms:DCUBatman - All Media Types

Relationship:Tim Drake/Jason Todd

Characters: Tim Drake, Jason Todd

Additional Tags: Photography, Korean Tim Drake,technically half korean half american, Latino Jason Todd, Tim Drake has his life together, Tim Drake Has a Crush on Jason Todd, Food, Food as a Metaphor for Love, this is a very recurring theme for me lol, Cook Jason Todd, Instagram, Social Media, JayTim Week 2023, Insecure Jason Todd, tim drake has a horrible sense of humor, tim also can't recognize when someone has a cruh on him

Language: English

Collections: JayTim Week 2023

Published: 2023-06-26

Words: 2,464

Chapters: 1/1


Insta-Worthy

Summary:

To be a photographer, is to be a certain type of lover. Distilling the essence of a moment, of wonderfully complex emotion into a single, clear moment that you can cherish forever, never marred by the ravages of memory.

Tim Drake packs his cameras and photos away after the worst of year of his life. It hurts too much to love anything then. Through a series of incidents, he rediscovers his love for photography and a budding new romance for the man who inspires it.


He had always captured the things he loved in photographs. 

 

His parents had gifted him a polaroid for his fifth birthday, immediately taking a family photo with it. He still has that worn photo years later, the only moment of his parents where they hadn’t been portrait-perfect, but real, imperfect people who had loved him.

 

He’d been enthralled with capturing moments ever since. As a child, he snapped pictures of butterflies resting on flowers, dinosaurs scattered on his bed, Mrs. Mac’s hands busy with cooking a meal, the stray cat that lingered outside the gates of his school. These are the things he loved and he wanted to remember them like this forever. 

 

There is a certain mindset, a power if you will, when you place yourself behind the lens of a camera: you must love the thing you are photographing because you are looking at something for what it truly is and choosing to remember it forever. Tim drops down to the ground, uncaring if his white suit gets dirty, to peer through the hole to capture a moment of a beetle climbing the grass, from the perspective of a bug. He runs outside without a jacket to try to portray the essence of streetlights reflected on wet asphalt after a heavy rain in a single photograph. 

 

You begin to love the mundane. You view the ordinary as extraordinary. 

 

To be a photographer, is to be a certain type of lover. Distilling the essence of a moment, of wonderfully complex emotion into a single, clear moment that you can cherish forever, never marred by the ravages of memory.

 

After becoming Robin, after having Bruce die, his best friends die, friends leaving, after faked deaths and just everything … it becomes too hard to look at those pictures and remember the good times, the happiness and the good times that were actually bad times.

 

He hides them away. Packs them up in boxes like he's moving and puts them in a little used safehouse in Nova Scotia.

 

That love that drove him to capture every moment burns too hot now, tears choking him as he stares at a Core-4 selfie, at the blurred image of Batman and Robin jumping from roof to roof, of the sunrise over Gotham.

 

It hurts to love.

 

So he packs it, buries the moments in boxes and hides the photographs all away in a little used safehouse up in the wilderness of Maine.

 

Tim puts his camera down for the last time.

 

---

 

It's no secret that Dick is Tim's favorite. He was his favorite Robin, the compass needle upon which the hero community looked towards. Like Superman had said, Dick Grayson would always be a symbol of hope in whichever universe they were in.

 

But it's not Dick that reignites Tim's love for photography, it's Jason and it was over avocado toast of all things. 

 

---

 

Despite what most people assume, Tim can in fact cook. And no, he won't poison other people if they try it. He might not ever make pancakes from scratch but that's why pancake mix exists.

 

Jason apparently has not gotten that memo and has gone to the effort of making breakfast after the two of them passed out after looking over case notes and harbor shipping data.

 

Tim wakes up with a crick in his neck and numb legs, having fallen asleep sitting over the coffee table.  With the smell of coffee permeating the area, along with the dribble of the machine, he knows it's already seven am. He can hear someone moving around, water bubbling, and the ding of a toaster.

 

Tim cracks open one bleary eye, that blurrily focuses on the couch in front of him, blanket kicked into a heap at one end and pillow smushed at the other. Damn, he wishes that he made it to  a couch last night. They're big, squashy things picked out specifically for comfort and late nights.

 

He sits up, cracking his neck and drawing his legs out from underneath him. His whole body hurts much more than usual from its horrible sleeping position. Leaning back against the couch, he watches Jason move around his kitchen. He's smooth and languid, sure and efficient in his movements, a certain ease within his body that Tim has never had. He's never quite been able to move without thinking, to not calculate the aim of his hand, what to do next. He's never been able to trust himself that he knows what he's doing without double-checking. 

 

It's a pleasant sight to start the morning. Not enough to make him a morning person but it's just a tad bit less unbearable.  Based on the coffee pot, it's only a couple minutes past eight but he only has forty-five minutes to get ready before his commute to work. 

 

He gets up, shoulders and spine and hips cracking with the movement.

 

"Morning sleeping beauty," he smirks, not looking like spent a night on the couch at all.

 

"Mmmm," He yawns, drawing a hand down over his scruff. Great, he'll have to shave. "Morning." 

 

He shuffles to the coffee pot, the liquid below the fill-line, showing that Jason had already indulged. Snagging a mug, one with a google sheets background and icon that boldly proclaims "Freak in the Sheets", he fills it up.



He doesn't quite savor that first cup of coffee. It's too hot to chug so he takes a few gulps and then kind of airs his mouth out, watching Jason fry bacon and poach an egg simultaneously. 

 

Once finished, he hits the showers. He spends some time under the hot water, letting it warm up his sore muscles. It's a quick shave, facial hair still kind of patchy even in his twenties.

 

Within fifteen minutes, he makes his way back into the kitchen, antsy now that he's fully awake that he's left a guest all alone in his kitchen.

 

"Thanks for making breakfast." Tim lays his suit jacket over one of the island chairs, careful to not wrinkle it.

 

"Ah, now I get a thanks," Jason doesn't turn around from where he's lathering something green on toast.



"I'm not much of a morning person. Don't expect manners from me until the coffee kicks in." Tim reaches for the same mug again, pouring another cup but leaving space for milk this time.

 

"Coffee addict much?"


Afterword

End Notes

wheres the gif of kermit slammig his puppet hands on a typewriter? because that's me trying to finish this before midnight because i thought jaytim started tmrw

i cut a scene out and im still in a love-hate relationship with my writing but :) i do really want to do something for jaytim week

Please drop by the Archive and comment to let the creator know if you enjoyed their work! Or email me at annnonymous07@gmail.com !