Work Text:
Together
“There’s nothing I’d rather do than stay here and help you have your baby,” Robin said.
It was the look in his eyes when he talked about her baby – her baby, not the baby, like he’d always said before – that made Steph start thinking of all those possibilities again. Steph just looked at him. At that moment, he wasn’t Robin, he was whoever-he-was-without-the-mask-who-wasn’t-named-Alvin. He was just a boy, and she was just a girl, but together they were more than that.
Or they could be. The unrelenting pressure inside of Steph to ‘do the right thing’ finally fell under the crushing weight of what her heart yearned for. She didn’t really believe that babies needed both a father and a mother – they just needed at least one person who gave a damn.
But Steph did believe that she couldn’t raise this baby on her own, and she needed more help than her mom. “And what if I said I didn’t want to go through with the adoption?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper. “What if I said I wanted to keep it?” She bit her lower lip and raised her eyes to his.
Robin froze and just looked at her for a long moment, unblinking. “Are you sure?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
Steph nodded, and prepared to tell him the whole truth; about how she felt, and about what she’d seen. “I want this baby…Tim.”
Robin stared at her for a long, long moment, jaw gaping as he came to grips that she had recognized him that afternoon at school. He visibly swallowed, and then Tim’s gaze lowered to her stomach, and he reached out with one hand, fingertips brushing softly across the growing swell under her T-shirt. “I…I want the baby too,” he admitted.
Eyes bright – and she wasn’t sure if the emotion was heightened by hormones or not, but the tears she was definitely blaming on her pregnancy – Steph said, “Really?” It had been her dream from the first time Robin had kissed her after she’d found out about her pregnancy; that they’d stay together and maybe move in together, but that they’d definitely raise the baby together. That was what she wanted more than anything. Maybe it was selfish, maybe letting her baby be adopted would be better for it, but in Gotham City, that was all but a certainty.
What was a certainty, was that from the moment the little stick had turned blue, she’d loved her baby. And it would break something inside her to give it up.
Robin looked her in the eye and, his left hand still on her and the baby, reached up with his other hand to take off his mask. “Really.” He let out a shuddering breath. “You, and the baby. I want…I don’t know how we’ll make it work, but I want to.”
“I want to, too,” Steph said, wrapped one hand around the one he held on her belly. “Together, we can do anything.”
Tim’s smile turned soft, and he squeezed her hand. “Yeah, we can.”