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“Master Dick, if you can, I ask you to please come to Gotham. It’s not an emergency, but it is important.”
This is Alfred speak for, “Dick, get your ass home now .” Dick knows not to ignore that voice, so he’s headed towards Gotham within fifteen minutes of getting the message, unsure of what he’s going to find. By the time he pulls up to the Manor, his heart is pounding furiously. It’s not an emergency which means that no one is dead or injured, but it’s important so that means . . what?
He parks and literally runs into the Manor, wanting to rip off the band-aid. Alfred is in the foyer, dusting one of the many tables there, only raising an eyebrow when he hears Dick. He takes a deep breath to inform Dick what happened, and he tenses, ready for the shoe to drop.
“Master Bruce was affected by something that I think can only be called a cuddle pollen.”
Dick’s brain decides to record-scratch, and he can’t stop the smile from slowly appearing on his face.
“What? ”
Alfred has a smile much like Dick’s on his face. “It is only directed towards master Tim however. He cannot bear to stop holding him. They are both in Master Bruce’s bedroom, watching true crime documentaries.”
God is real and Dick trips running up the stairs to see this.
He bursts through the door, and his heart melts when he sees his little brother watching TV while Bruce is fast asleep right next to him. Tim turns to glance at him, and then presses himself even more to Bruce’s side and Dick takes the hint.
He lays down on the bed next to Tim, wrapping an arm around the young boy, burying his face in Tim’s hair as actor’s recreate gruesome murder scenes onscreen.
Raspberries and cinnamon and snow and roses and omega. It’s the softest, most comforting scent in the world.
"Cuddle pollen?" he whispers into Tim's hair. "How the hell did he get infected with cuddle pollen?"
"Ivy," Tim whispers back. "She infected Bruce, and it apparently only takes effect on the next person he sees, which was me."
"Sooooo?" Dick asks, truly unable to control the wide grin on his face, because he can't believe how lucky he is right now to be witness to Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake having to cuddle each other. "You've been forced to fall asleep in his arms?"
"Bruce is the one asleep," Tim pouts. "I'm awake."
"Barely," Dick points out. "You literally can't keep your eyes open."
"You know, you're cuddling with us just as much as me and Bruce are forced to be."
"I'm not afraid of physical intimacy." Dick points out. "You know, I think this is actually a really good thing for you too. You can hold each other and know you won't be rejected."
"Hate you," Tim mumbles.
Dick smiles as he adjusts his hold on Tim, making sure it isn't interfering with Bruce's at all. "No, you don't."
Tim's only response is a yawn, and it's only a moment later before he's joining Bruce in dreamland, leaving Dick the only one awake and present to rate just how well they caught the murder in this case. (It's always in the negative numbers.)
*
It took Bruce thirty-seven minutes after waking up to figure out while that there will never be an exact cure to his cuddle pollen, but he can make the pollen go dormant and undetectable in his system and that he won't be bothered by it at all.
Except apparently when Tim becomes extremely distressed.
Which is why one night when Dick comes back from patrol, he finds a decowled Bruce holding a crying Tim in his lap, looking extremely uncomfortable and disturbed.
"Dick?" Bruce whispers, unsure apparently how to do anything without disturbing the teenager in his lap. "I think the pollen's been reactivated."
Dick could choose to be helpful. Or he can choose to live up to his name, which is promptly what he decides to do. He sticks both of his thumbs up in the air and smiles brightly. "Enjoy cuddle time!" He begins to head up the stairs even though he knows that Alfred will be annoyed that he doesn't have his uniform taken off, but he'll forgive him when he knows that Bruce is holding Tim.
"Dick ," Bruce hisses. "Dick, don't leave me here!"
Tim just cries harder, and that's the only thing that makes Dick turn around to help his little brother, because fuck it all, he's not going to let Tim be stuck with a man that's making him cry.
"What's the matter?" Dick demands as he walks towards them, eyeing Bruce with distrust. "What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything," Bruce whispers. "Tim just gained a concussion." He shifts awkwardly on the pallet. "A lesser-known symptom of concussions is uncontrollable crying, and Tim might be an unfortunate statistic in that matter."
Dick stills, and looks at Tim, who nods, before dissolving into tears. Dick blinks. "All right. I'll set up the IV."
Bruce takes a deep breath and his shoulders slump in relief. "Thank you, Dick."
"Yeah, just keep enjoying your cuddle time."
Bruce's face turns uncomfortable. "Yes . . . I think that the pollen might not be kept as dormant as I feared."
Dick looks up from where he's getting the IV ready, his brow furrowed. "Why the fuck not?"
The older alpha looks down at Tim. "As soon as I smelled his distress, I had to help him. Hold him. I believe that it set off the pollen in my system, and therefore, whenever Tim's scent becomes distressed, I will be powerless to do anything aside from hold him and comfort him. I am . . . struggling on how to process this information. Dick, I would appreciate it if you would stop smiling."
He literally can't. Love and joy is filling his heart because he could be so lucky as to have a Bruce who is going to be at least partially emotionally available to his son? Yes, he's not the son in question, but Dick has never been afraid of demanding from Bruce the love and comfort he wants. He had a happy childhood with good parents, something that Tim has not been so lucky to have. "Just be glad that you have a good excuse when someone accuses you of going soft, okay? And take care of the kid."
Tim's sobbing has petered out, but tears are still falling out of his eyes, and Dick does feel bad because he can smell how distressed the concussion is making him and then how distressed the crying is making him and then, Dick presumes, distressed because he's afraid that he's a burden to Bruce because Bruce is being "forced" to cuddle him.
Yeah. bullshit.
Bruce might only be cuddling him because he has cuddle pollen in his system, but the way he's holding Tim tells Dick that Bruce desperately loves being able to hold his child and hold him close. Tim's eyes are closed as he's turned into Bruce's shoulder, and Dick wants to hold Tim a little himself.
"Do you think the pollen would accept it if you and Tim got showered and changed?" he whispers, "or will it keep you stuck together?"
Bruce frowns. "When this happened before, it was . . . very anxiety inducing. My shower was as quick as it could possibly be, and it was all I could not to interrupt Tim's shower as well. It ended up with me having to pull myself back from hyperventilation because I couldn't bear the thought of not touching my son." If he were any other person on Earth, Dick knows that Bruce would be blushing right now. "It was a hard experience, not so much because of having to tell Tim, that's not a great hardship in the least, but because I was constantly afraid of him being taken away from me."
Tim's blue eyes open, and he nuzzles his head into Bruce's neck, purring slightly because even though he has his own pain and discomfort, he still wants to comfort his father.
Dick smiles at the scene in front of him. Perhaps it's wrong, but there's a part of him that never wants Bruce to be cured completely of this cuddle pollen because Ivy might have inadvertently blessed them with the exact thing both Bruce and Tim need in their life. "Why don't you go take one as quickly as you can, and then help Tim with his? Can you even stand, Timmy?" he asks, and Tim frowns, and then shakes his head. "I- hic- feel too dizzy."
Welp, that settles it. Dick suddenly has Tim pushed into his arms as Bruce dramatically aways to the shower, and he has a feeling that a record is about to be set. He sees Bruce's hands twitch as they walk, and Dick knows that he's fighting everything inside him not to suddenly turn around and grab Tim again.
This pollen is fantastic.
*
The third hit of the pollen comes when Tim goes into heat.
With his parent's home.
Dick hates Jack and Janet Drake because of how they've utterly fucked up their son's self-worth. Tim is nothing to them except someone they can marry off in the future because he's an omega, and they make sure he knows how much they wish he was an alpha. Of course, despite this hatred, Tim is forced into making them happy by being the traditional omega son that they never wanted, but if they're going to be "cursed" with him, they might as well make the best of it.
It was taken everything in Dick sometimes not to show up on their doorstep and punch the living daylights out of them.
But in the past year since Tim became Robin, they have made sure that they will never have to spend a moment in Gotham when Tim is in heat. It's absolutely awful because it shows the length of their neglect and abuse towards their son, but it at least means that Tim can have his heat in the comfort and safety of the Manor. In the years before he became Robin, Tim was forced to spend a heat in an empty house and utterly miserable over his mistreatment by his parents and the abandonment he was suffering.
But sometimes, omegas go off-cycle and Tim is no exception.
Dick wakes up at two in the morning after a shift that ended at eleven because of his phone ringing. With a groan, he forces himself to roll over to look at it, frowning when he sees that it's Tim calling.
Why the fuck is Tim calling so early? He answers quickly and raises the phone to his ear, his blood going cold when he hears Tim's hitching breaths.
"Baby bird, what's going on?" he asks.
"My parents are here," Tim whispers, "and I went into heat."
Oh God no.
Tim continues. "They're so mad. They were barely here for my presentation, leaving as soon as they could. I'm just reminding them right now about what a disappointment I am."
"What did they do?" Dick growls, and Tim lets loose a sob. "They locked me in my room. They told me to stop crying." A moment of silence and then in smallest voice, Tim admits, "My mom slapped me."
Dick's mind clears and his breath stills and his heart erupts with anger. Someone hurt his little brother. Someone dared to hit him for being an omega. "She slapped you because you were crying?"
Tim just sobs harder. "Yeah. And. . . ."
There can't be an 'and.' There cannot be a fucking 'and.'
Tim sniffs. "My dad took off his belt." He dissolves into sobs again. "Told me to toughen up when all I did was flinch when he raised his voice. Beat me when I kept flinching." His sobbing gets harder. “Dick, I don’t want to be here. I really don’t want to be here.”
Dick is going to tear their throats out with his teeth. The Drake's had actually looked at their sobbing child and slapped him and beat him just because he was a scared omega in heat. And why was he scared because he was around his parents in heat? Oh yeah, because they were never fucking there.
"Call Bruce," Dick forces out of his mouth. "Call Bruce and tell him to come get you."
Tim takes a deep breath. "I'm bleeding," comes out of his mouth. "He . . . he beat me hard enough. . . . God, it hurts."
He will make them suffer.
"Please, Tim," Dick begs. "Please get Bruce. Don't stay another minute there."
Tim takes a deep breath, and then lets a small "Okay," escape him. He hangs up, leaving Dick to scramble for clothes and keys as he leaves for Gotham, fury forcing every part of his body to shake.
He arrives at the hospital at three-thirty in the morning, going straight to the room that Bruce had next him. Dick had felt Tim's distressed over the phone. He can't imagine what it must have been like for Bruce, and he knows that Tim won't be let out of his arms for days.
The scent of a young, terrified, distressed omega fills the hallway and Dick opens the solo room to see Tim laying on top of Bruce, fast asleep with dried tear tracks on his cheeks. His chest is pressed against Bruce's, and he has his nose buried in Bruce's neck. Bruce's hand is resting carefully on Tim's hand, and Dick notes that he's very careful not to touch his back.
"Where are they?" he growls, stepping into the room.
"Jail," is Bruce's only response.
Dick looks at the teenager. "How bad?"
The scowl that crosses Bruce's face is fearsome and terrible, and Dick loves it. He wants to make sure that the Drake's lives have been salted and burned. He wants them to die fifty years in the future in squalor and despair while Tim is living happy and fulfilled and never spending a moment's thought on them because they aren't worth it.
"The skin was broken on his back. Three ribs cracked. Sprained wrist. Black eye. Hyperventilating when I arrived, and Dick . . . I have rarely smelled an omega as distressed as he was. He was almost in critical heat, luckily they were able to sedate him before that happened."
Dick's mind stutters over what they would have done if Tim had come into critical heat. He refuses to go there.
"You can't let him go, can you?" Dick whispers.
Bruce nods. "It's impossible."
Dick pulls up a chair, and sits down next to them. "Good. He needs to know that you're always going to be there. I'll kick your ass if he doesn't."
Bruce smiles. "Good to know."
(Dick had a very successful talk with Jack and Janet Drake that ended up with them signing over custody of Tim to Bruce, their company to a trust for Tim to inherit at the age of eighteen, and to take a plea deal that'll get them ten years in prison.)
(He didn't actually do a lot of talking.)
*
The fourth time it was activated was when Tim was attacked by Jason, and Dick ends up snarling at Jason, pinning him down to the ground while Jason tries and fails to get him off and Tim shakes in Bruce's arms.
Jason didn't attack Tim in the heat of the moment in battle. He didn't attack him as Robin.
He fucking kidnapped Tim from his school and pinned him to the wall while he placed a knife to his throat and Dick will not tolerate that. He's so angry that he sees red, and he only trusts Bruce right now to take care of Tim.
Dick realizes in the back of his mind that he might be going into rut. "Why the fuck did you do that?" he roars in Jason's face, who looks at Dick with gritted teeth. "What the fuck did Tim do to you?"
"He replaced me!" Jason yells. "He fucking replaced as Robin, and you just fucking went along with it. Everyone! You fucking forgot about me." His voice cracks on the last word. "And you got someone better." He turns to look at Bruce and Tim, devastation clear in his eyes. "He never would have held me like that."
Tim turns away from Bruce's chest to look at Jason. "B," he mumbles, looking up at his father. "Please."
Dick doesn't know what he means, but Bruce seems to know. He helps Tim over to Jason. "Dick," he commands, and he stands up, still ready to stop Jason is he makes a single move on Tim. Before Jason can collect himself, Bruce manages to pull Jason close to him, placing Jason's face on the side of his neck, letting Jason curl into the scent of his father.
The heartbreaking sobs erupt from Jason before Dick knows it, and Tim raises his hand to thread it through Jason's hair. Bruce stands, hunched over for both Jason and Tim to be embraced thoroughly in his arms, eyes sorrowful as he tries to make-up for all the pain he had inadvertently caused Jason.
It doesn't sit well with Dick for them to forgive Jason so quickly after he got a knife pressed to Tim's throat, but he bites his tongue and doesn't breathe a word. He'll keep watch, and hopefully, he'll be wrong.
*
Jason doesn't disappoint him.
The little fucker know as Damian Wayne does.
Dick knows that the kid has had a hard life, and he does want to help him. But Damian is distressing Tim to the point that activates the pollen in Bruce's system, which has the backwards effect of making Damian distress Tim even more. And Bruce isn't going to kick a kid of his out of his ass, but it's clearly stressing him out that he has two sons against the other and while Dick will be the first to talk about how Bruce can fuck things up and pit kid against kid, he's not really at fault for this. He literally can't stop himself from holding Tim, and even if he could, Dick really doesn't think the best way of resolving the situation is to give into Damian's demands.
So there'll be a fight between Damian and Tim, and then Bruce holding Tim, and Damian sulking, and then Damian picking another fight, and on and on it goes. It just gets worse and Bruce getting worried and stressed and Dick trying to talk to the brat and none of it works at all. Damian can't seem to understand that a) Bruce can love his children equally and b) Bruce literally can't not hold Tim.
It makes Dick want to drink. Which is what he's doing in Bruce's study, holding the bottle of tequila close to him as he eats strawberries and crunching on ice after every few drinks, which is basically a margarita. Bruce is fast asleep on the couch, and Tim is right next to him. He could probably move, but better not to risk it.
Bruce has literally sleep-walked to find Tim to cuddle him when he smells Tim's distress.
"Look, I feel terrible for the amount of shit that he's been through in his life that got him to this point, but dammit Tim, I don't know how to pull him out of the pit that he's determined to stay in."
Tim blinks at Dick. "What's the fuck his problem with me ?" You were the first. Jason's an omega too. Why me?"
"Same as Jason. It's the cuddle pollen, man. They're jealous because of how often Bruce hugs you." He pops another cube of ice in his mouth. "I mean, the cuddle pollen has just made Bruce more tactile with you because he's used to holding you whenever you're distressed, so even when you're not, he just . . . touches you. Cuddles you."
Tim frowns. "Are you jealous?"
Huh. Is he? Dick honestly doesn't know. Part of him wishes that he and Bruce were closer in that way, but Dick has never been afraid to demand the physical affection from Bruce. Yeah, he's not jealous. It's fun to see how Bruce reacts when Dick surprise hugs him.
He shakes his head. "Listen, buddy. Don't apologize. You've done nothing wrong."
Tim sighs, and puts his head on Bruce's shoulder. Bruce just continues snoring. "I always wanted a little brother, you know. And I want to want him. But it's just. . . ." Tim looks down at his hands. "I don't want him to hate me. For being an omega . I've had enough of that in my life." He grips the wrist that had been sprained. "I want to feel proud of who I am."
"You're not?" Dick sits up, blinking as the world spins. "Tim, you're amazing."
Tim smiles. "I am proud of who I am, Dick. It's just hard to stay that way sometimes, especially when you have a kid whispering in your ear about how awful you are and how weak and useless you are."
"About that," they're interrupted by Jason's deep rumble. Tim jumps, Dick blinks, and Bruce snores. Jason is leaning against the doorframe. "Look, the brat's more than a little fucked in the head, but that's a pre-req for being a Bat. But you all obviously have your issues with him, so . . . I'm going to train him."
Dick blinks, and then smiles. "Fuck, Jay, that's brilliant."
*
Tim has loved being the recipient of Bruce's hugs for years. There is nothing that makes him feel more safe than being pulled into Bruce's arms, and putting his nose in Bruce's neck, inhaling the scent of blackberries and sunshine, the one thing in this world that makes him so utterly and completely safe. For years, he's been living in the knowledge that no matter what happens to him in his life, he will always have Bruce and his hold. It's scary to think about living in a world where he can't depend on that.
And he knows that Jason and Damian live in that world.
Dick doesn't really care, or at least not as much as he probably should, because he just makes Bruce give him hugs.
He catches Jason and Damian jealous glances out of the corner of his eyes, wanting to be taken care of treated like Bruce's kid like Tim is.
He wonders how much they know about the Drake's. Dick and Bruce both were able to keep it underneath the radar for the most part, everyone thinking that Jack and Janet are in jail for insider trading than child abuse.
How they were able to do that, Tim has no idea. Tim also has no idea how Bruce can be so oblivious to the fact that Jason and Damian need his touch as much as he does, because Bruce caught on pretty quick that even when Tim isn't distressed, he's always willing to be held and touched and in general, made to feel like he's an important part of Bruce's life.
He knows that he could talk to Bruce, but his calculations predict a 63% chance of blowing up in his face, so he's forced to resort to manipulation and trickery.
Bruce would be proud of him.
He also can't talk to Jason and Damian, as they are like gentle deer. If deer also had a decent chance of shooting or stabbing you if you said something that displeased them.
Jason did have the great moment with Bruce after he had kidnapped Tim and held a knife to his throat, but aside from that. . . . Nothing. And Bruce only did that because Tim had him.
It is easy enough to curl up into Bruce's side one night after dinner. It doesn't take much to give one little nod to Dick and before Bruce, Jason, or Damian know it, they are pushed into each other and then a startled “Oof!” as Dick uses his height and weight to stretch out in the laps of the three of them, whistling innocently as he winks at Tim.
Tim smiles as Bruce sighs and his brothers argue, and falls asleep in the embrace of them all.