Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

                The Lazarus Pit spits Jason back into the face of the world, and he comes up gasping, caught somewhere between newborn and reborn. Half as holy, twice as raw.

                He remembers dying. He’d died scared and hurt, trying to shield his mother. Young, and desperate, and afraid.

                But, in the vacuum of unmaking, there’s nothing to sustain fear. There’s nothing left to be afraid of. Like a flame deprived of air, all that fear flutters briefly and then flickers out, and there’s a darkness that settles in its place, bleeds out to cover everything that once offered brightness and light.

                He comes out of the Pit with a rage that feels eternal, kicking in his chest like it’s going to rip right through his ribs. Every nerve screams with it. The beat of his heart is heavy with hate.

                If he got his teeth locked around any vulnerable thing, he’d rip it to pieces.

                He runs to Bruce, a lost lamb bawling its way back to the false safety of the shepherd, and the realization that the Joker is still alive, that Bruce did nothing – nothing, not a single Goddamn thing – to avenge him, to settle the debt of what the Joker took, sets that hateful creature in Jason’s chest free.

                He almost kills Bruce. Plants the bomb, and waits. Has the chance.

                But it’s not enough. Jason’s been dead. He knows what it means. It means being made into meat and bone; it means rotting. It means nothing. All the suffering Jason ever did, he did while he was alive to feel it.

                It’s not enough to kill Bruce Wayne with shrapnel and fire. He needs to kill him with his hands. He needs Bruce to know, needs him to die like Jason died, choking on blood and betrayal and pain.

                He’s unmoored, set free, a feral child in a feral world, a loose tooth in the all-consuming, bone-gnawing mouth of humanity. He goes to train, to get shaped and honed into the kind of weapon that can kill the Batman.

                Some of the men who teach him are evil men. Jason uses them up and puts them down.

                In this unasked-for, undeserved second life, the only way Jason knows to do good is to do evil to evil people, to bring all that violence back on itself, like a snake eating its own tail.

                There are some people who are corrupted, irredeemable. Toxic. To protect what’s good in the world, it’s necessary, sometimes, to cut the cancer out of it. And Jason has learned that it doesn’t do anyone any Goddamn good to be conservative with the knife.

                Bruce Wayne sets himself up as a bulwark, a shield. It’s not enough. Shields break. Walls are overrun. It is not enough to stand against evil. The smart thing, the right thing, the only thing to do is destroy it.

                Jason finds he’s hungry, always. All that hate, all that rage. Like fire, it can never get enough, eats and eats and burns and burns, and is never satisfied.

                Jason hates and rages and consumes and kills, and it is never enough.

                The Pit brought him back from nothing, put his mind and memory back in him, but it kept some crucial bit, some critical puzzle piece for itself.

                Jason isn’t scared of anything. Jason doesn’t care about anything. Jason doesn’t want anything.

                Sometimes, Jason thinks that the magic of the Pit has its price, and it kept everything good in him.

                Other times he thinks there are some shades of dark that can’t ever be illuminated, that defy all brightness, devour light. Go too far into that dark, he thinks, and you can’t ever find your way home.

                Assuming you ever had a home to begin with.

                Jason has a mother who sold him and a father who let his murderer walk. Jason’s never had a home, not in this life or the last one.

- - -

                The first time Jason sees Phil Coulson, he sees him in the soft, flickering light of a warehouse fire. It’s romantic, he thinks, later. Like candlelight.

                “There were children.” That’s the first thing Jason hears him say, and he’s yelling it into a radio. “There were kids. I can’t---”

                “Got ‘em.” Jason says. He doesn’t have to say a damn thing. He could let this man burn in the warehouse, choke out on the smoke and die here. But he doesn’t think that an inglorious end from smoke inhalation, being identified later by bone fragments and dental records, is a fair reward for a man who runs into a burning building, trying to find the children Jason liberated an hour ago. Seems shitty, letting this man’s body get mixed up with those of the criminals Jason’s left all over the building.

                “The kids are fine.” Jason says, as the man swings around. “Get the hell out.”

                In half a second, the man’s dropped his radio and pulled a gun. Jason smiles.         

                “Who are you?” The man says. “Where are the kids?”

                “They’re safe. I’ll show you.”

                Jason’s got a mask on, but it’s just a modified gas mask, meant to keep the smoke out of his lungs, not to hide his face. He’s a dead man, so he can’t see how it matters, getting identified.

                “Okay,” the man says, and he must notice Jason’s body armor, because suddenly he’s aiming at Jason’s mask instead of his chest. “Show me.”

                Jason leads him out. There’s a man at his back with a gun aimed at his head, and maybe that should bother him, but Jason figures the type of man who’d run into fire to save children isn’t the type who’d shoot another man in the back for no Goddamn reason.

                Jason knows how heroes are. So long as he doesn’t rely on this idiot to save him from a serial killer, he’ll make it out of this interaction just fine.

                About halfway out, the man starts coughing, and, eventually, when Jason looks back, he sees him slumped against a wall, gasping and weak.

                “Fucking tourists,” he mutters, rolling his eyes.

                He doesn’t have to do anything. Saving grown men isn’t his thing anymore. He puts the bad ones down, and lets the others handle themselves as best they can. He’s not a hero. He’s an exterminator.

                On a bad day, Jason would’ve left him there to die. He knows that. He accepts it. Sometimes there’s so much rage in him that it feels like his blood is boiling in his veins, and he doesn’t give a fuck about saving anyone; he just wants to hurt whoever he can justify hurting.

                It’s not a bad day.

                He takes his mask off and slides it over the man’s face. The man stumbles a few resolute steps forward and then wavers, almost hits the ground. Jason slips an arm around his waist, ducks neatly under the arm the man throws around his shoulders, and half-carries him out of there.

                He drops him outside, on the dirty concrete by his bike, and takes his mask back. He cuts off the man’s stupid tie and yanks his shirt open, gives him room to breathe.

                “Kids are at the German embassy.” He says. The man blinks at him and fumbles for his radio.

                “German embassy.” The man reports. “The kids.”

                “For fuck’s sake,” Jason says and steals the radio. “Your boy’s around back. He’s got a lungful of smoke and no Goddamn common sense.”

                It’s hard to hear over the general cacophony of an uncontained structure fire, but Jason thinks there’s some kind of answering ruckus around the front of the building.

                “Gotta go.” Jason tells the man, who’s gasping and heaving but doesn’t seem charred anywhere important. “Been real swell getting to know you.”

                Jason leaves on his bike, and the man’s out of his thoughts as soon as the firelight fades from his rearview.

 - - -

                He sees him again in Kiev, when Jason’s up on a perch with a rifle, ready to pick off an arms dealer that’s pissed him off. The man from the fire walks right through Jason’s sights, shakes hands with the arms dealer in question and smiles, polite and a touch deferential. When Jason picked this spot, he hadn’t thought there would be any damn reason he’d care about having to shoot right through the buyer to make his kill.

                Jason hesitates, tries to figure out if he can still make the shot if he shoots through the man’s shoulder. It’s not a great angle. He waits for a clearer shot.

Jason watches as the would-be firefighter wraps a hand around the man’s arm and shuffles him a neat half-step to the side. A heartbeat later, a bullet punches straight through the arms dealer’s forehead.

                A fire ants’ nest of agents swarms out of nearby cars, and, suddenly, everyone who isn’t dead is getting arrested. Jason stays where he is and watches the man issue commands to attentive agents. As someone zips a body bag around the arms dealer, Jason watches him comb gray matter and skull fragments out of his hair.

                There’s a flutter of something in Jason’s chest. It’s odd, unexpected. It isn’t rage.

                He doesn’t know what the hell it is.

 - - -

                “We have got,” Jason says, when they finally speak again, “to stop meeting like this.”

                “Oh, you’re here.” The man says, unsurprised. “You were in Cape Town two months ago. Took a while to clean up that mess.”

                “And I was Kiev six weeks before that.” Jason tells him. “It was a nice show, but you took my kill.”

                The man shrugs, but he’s assessing Jason like he’s thinking about upgrading his threat level. “If we worked together,” he says, “we wouldn’t step on each other’s toes like this.”

                Jason laughs. He stands up and uses his shirt to wipe the blood off his hands. “This who you’re after?” He asks, kicking the corpse at his feet. 

                “I think it was.” The man squints appraisingly at what remains of the dead man’s face. It’s possible Jason took this one a little personally. “Might have to run fingerprints to verify.”

                “Yeah, sorry,” Jason says, and he isn’t. He smiles, bright and wide. He’s calm, the way he only ever gets after he’s beaten his rage into someone else’s body.

                “My name’s Phil Coulson.” The man says, unprompted. He holds up a business card. “I’m with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. If you’re looking to stop freelancing, I’m interested in recruiting you for more stable employment.”

                Jason laughs again and leaves without the card.

                After Johannesburg and Riga and Mogadishu, Jason can’t tell which of them is tailing the other. He’s at loose ends all over again, having murdered his most recent mentor, and he’s not ready for Gotham, doesn’t want to go crawling back to Talia just yet, either.

                So when his work is done in Mogadishu, and Coulson is waving that card around again, Jason says, “Tell you what. Get me a ride out of this city, and you’ve got me. I’ll work for you.”

                He figures it’ll be another short-term thing. Coulson seems decent, inclined to goodness, but Jason’s got a healthy distrust of all shadowy government organizations. He doesn’t intend to burn SHIELD down as a favor to Coulson, but, if he has to, it’s an unintended consequence he can live with.

 - - -

                Coulson brings his first stack of documents back to him within twenty-four hours. “Very thorough,” he says, “but Dereck Thomas has been dead for three years.”

                Jason fills out the entire stack again, with a better, cleaner cover, but Coulson brings those back in three days, looking annoyed.

                “I checked with Alex Mueller’s middle school theater teacher.” He says. “She has cast pictures from their production of The Secret Garden. Puberty can change a lot, but, I assure you, it can’t make brown eyes blue.”

                “Fuck.” Jason says, laughing. “I can’t believe you went to Ohio. Jesus Christ.”

                Coulson gives him a steady look. “If you need me to sit next to you and remind you how to spell your own name,” he says, “I’d be happy to.”

                “Look,” Jason says, “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I’m just an intensely private person.”

                Coulson raises an eyebrow. He pushes a fresh stack of documents across the table. “You get one more shot.” He says. “You’d be an asset, but I’ve spent enough time trying to get you clearance.”

                “What if,” Jason says, batting the documents idly between his hands, “I do contract work, instead? You don’t need to run all these background checks. Just give me shit to do, I’ll do it, and then you pay me.”

                “We like to know who we’re working with.” Coulson says, which is not a no.

                “C’mon,” Jason says, grinning, “I can’t commit to a goldfish. I’m not giving you my entire life story before we’ve even worked together. Buy me a drink first.”

                “I’d like to know your name.” Coulson says. “Your real name.” He assesses Jason’s expression and then shrugs, looks exasperated but not angry. “Just the first one’s fine.”

                “Jason.” He thinks about lying. He’s lied to everyone else since he came out of the Pit. But, in that moment, it doesn’t seem like a high price. And it’ll be nice, he thinks, to have someone call him by his actual name. Something of a novelty. “I’m Jason.”

                “Jason,” Coulson repeats, tips his head to the side. “Nice to meet you.”

                “Bullshit,” Jason says, but it makes him smile.

 - - -

                Jason figures they’re going to leash him. He expects it. He’s worked with men like Phil Coulson before. Those sharp, neat edges only ever seem to be skin-deep.

                Jason knows heroes. The whole damn city of Gotham is scared of Bats, and, at his heart, Bruce is barely half as dangerous as a schoolkid with a knife and a grudge. People who fight because it’s the right thing to do tend to balk at the wrong things that fight requires.

                Predictably, the first time Phil Coulson gives him a job, it’s a bullshit waste of his time.

                “You want this asshole alive?” Jason says, scanning the file. They’re at a coffee shop in London, right in the City, and Coulson’s business suit is effective camouflage, but Jason’s ripped jeans and combat boots are attracting some attention.

                Jason grins wolfishly at every banker that glances his direction, kicks his legs out and leans back against his chair like an invitation.

                “Well,” Coulson says, smiling pleasantly, taking Jason’s antics in stride. “We’d certainly prefer it.”

                Jason rolls his eyes and takes the file.

                Coulson gives him two weeks to locate the asshole in question and report his whereabouts to SHIELD. Jason spends the first week getting drunk and prowling around London, finding a few low-level thugs to bash around, and, on the eighth day, he gets to work. On the tenth, he breaks into Coulson’s hotel room while Coulson’s in the shower and leaves the guy in Coulson’s closet, handcuffed, gagged, and unconscious.

                Coulson’s in the lobby of Jason’s hostel the next morning, waiting patiently with coffee when Jason emerges, freshly showered and only a little hungover. Jason grabs the coffee and pretends like he’s not surprised to see him.

                He waits until they’re outside before he takes a sip. It’s perfect. It’s exactly what Jason ordered at the last coffeeshop, and it occurs to Jason that a man with the attentiveness to memorize his coffee order and the skill to track him down in a city the size of London is a man he should be careful with.

                But that’s Bruce’s voce in his head, so Jason immediately disregards it.

“Got more work for me?” He asks.

                Coulson nods. “Yes,” he says, and gestures to their right. “I’ll explain on the way.”

                Jason shrugs, takes another sip of coffee, and follows Coulson. They walk side-by-side, incongruous, catching the confused looks of their fellow early-risers. They’re in a rougher area of Camden, and, this time, it’s Coulson’s business suit that sticks out.

                “Do I get to kill someone?” Jason asks.

                “If you’d like.” Coulson says. “Or you can find him, and we’ll take care of it.” He stops next to a car, some silver, understated sedan, and opens the trunk, holds it open expectantly until Jason tosses his bag in the back.

                “Tell me about him.” Jason says. He grabs his guns out of the bag and flashes them to the whole damn street as he walks around. He doesn’t mind being half a car away from his toothbrush and underwear, but there’s no way in hell he’s climbing into a strange car unarmed.

                Coulson does not seem especially dismayed or alarmed by Jason’s behavior. He studies the street for a second, smiles reassuringly at a very wide-eyed young mother, and then honest-to-God holds the passenger door open for Jason.

                “The fuck,” Jason says, genuinely confused. “Are you my butler?”

                “If you get in the car,” Coulson says, cajolingly, “we can get out of here before that nice woman calls the cops.”

                “They call ‘em bobbies.” Jason says, as he climbs into the car. “I saw that on PBS.”

                “No, they don’t. And no, you did not.” Coulson says, but he’s smiling, a little, when he slides into the driver’s seat and pulls into traffic.

                “Who am I killing, Phil?” Jason asks, as he drinks more coffee. It really is amazing. He refrains, for the sake of Coulson’s delicate sensibilities, from making pornographic noises of appreciation.

                Coulson reaches behind him without looking, grabs a folder from the backseat, and drops it in Jason’s lap. “This man,” he says. “If you’re amenable.”

                Jason looks over the file, and finds that he really, really is.

 - - -

                Two weeks later, Phil Coulson comes shouldering into the dingy basement right as Jason opens the target’s throat with a straight razor.

                “Holy fuck,” Jason says, grimacing as the arterial spray gets Coulson in the face. “Shit, Phil,” he says, “I didn’t know you were gonna be in the splash zone, or I would’ve turned him the other way.”

                Coulson just stands there for a second, gun in hand, and stares at Jason.

                Fresh blood, Jason notices, really brings out the bright blue of Coulson’s eyes.

                “You’re alright.” Coulson says, matter-of-fact, and holsters his gun.

                “What?” Jason says, and drops the body to the floor. “Of course I’m alright. I’m a fucking professional.”

                “We recovered some teeth.” Coulson says. “At your hotel. There was also a nontrivial amount of blood.”

                “Not my teeth.” Jason says, and then shrugs. “Some of that blood was mine.”

                “Next time you get yourself kidnapped on purpose,” Coulson says, “please remember to let me know beforehand.” He’s dabbing at his face with the sleeve of his suit, but he takes the time to give Jason an irritated look, which only sours further when he notices the way Jason’s smirking at him.

                “Jesus, Phil,” Jason says. “Were you coming down here to save me? My fucking hero.”

                Coulson rolls his eyes and reaches into his pocket. “Here.” He says, holding out a small, unwelcome gadget that Jason, unfortunately, recognizes. “If you’re going to work for us, you’ll need to wear this on your missions.”

                “An earpiece.” Jason says, like Coulson’s asked him to put training wheels on his motorcycle. “For fuck’s sake, Coulson. I don’t need you babysitting me the whole time.”

                “Wear it,” Coulson says, falling back into his obnoxiously placid mannerisms, “or don’t get paid.”

                “Goddamn it.” Jason says, but he brings the earpiece up, checks the fit in his left ear. “I fucking knew you SHIELD suits were gonna put a leash on me.”

                “Disappear like that again,” Coulson says, smiling a polite smile that pairs eerily with the blood still splattered across his face, “and it might be a literal leash.”

                “Promises, promises,” Jason says, ignoring the weird twist in his belly. “Get me outta here, Phil. Take me to payroll.”

                Coulson takes him back up to street level, which is crowded with SHIELD agents, and makes him suffer through the indignities of being checked and cleared by medical before he’ll let him into his newest, unbearably nondescript sedan.

                Coulson offers to have SHIELD buy him a hotel room for the night, but Jason’s keyed up from the job, wants to get paid and shake free from SHIELD for a while, find some trouble or let trouble find him. He follows Coulson up to his hotel room and comes trotting back down a little later, counting his cash and winking at the startled desk clerk.

                “Hey, Phil,” Jason says, thumbing on the earpiece as he steps out onto the streets of Stuttgart. “The desk guy thinks you picked me up on a street corner.”

                “Don’t be ridiculous.” Coulson’s voice is quiet over the comm, but just as calm and competent as ever. “That’s too much cash for a street corner pickup. He thinks I found you online.”

                “Fair point.” Jason says. He looks around, wondering where people even find trouble in a nice German city like this one. He scans the skyline for any hint of neon and then for the first bit of architecture that reminds him of Gotham.

                “Hey, Phil,” he says. “What’s the range on this thing?”

                “Considerable.” Coulson says. “If you stay on this continent, someone from SHIELD will be in range.”

                “Good.” Jason says. “I’ll check in when I need more work.”

                “Check in by Thursday.” Coulson says. It’s an order, probably, but his tone makes it sound like an invitation.

                “Yeah, sure,” Jason says, “if I’m out of money by then.”

                He thumbs the comm off and then shoves it into his pocket. There’s probably a tracking chip buried in the circuitry, reporting his coordinates. He should take it apart and address that. He will, when he feels like it. Tomorrow morning, probably.

                He should make Coulson wait til next Sunday before he checks in. Just to remind him that Jason’s not his, not SHIELD’s, not anybody’s.

                But later, when he’s washing blood off his hands in a shitty, low-pressure sink in a terrible bar after an entirely predictable fight over absolutely nothing, he looks in the stained mirror and sees a little bit of blood, splattered across his face.

                He thinks Coulson wore it better.

                He thinks, maybe a little dazed and definitely a little drunk, that Coulson wore it better is a really fucking weird thing to think.

                He takes the earpiece out and stares at it for a second. He considers popping it into his ear, turning it on, and waking Coulson up. He’s not sure what the hell he’d say, though.

                Remember that time you ran into a burning building to save some kids you didn’t know?

                Remember when you picked that arms dealer’s brains out of your hair?

                Remember how you looked, with blood all over you face?

                “Nah,” Jason says, shoving the earpiece back into his pocket. “Fuck that.”

 - - -

                On Friday morning, Jason dissects the earpiece on the roof of the Silberturm. He smashes the tracking chip under his boot and then pieces the rest of it back together.

                “Hey, Phil,” he says, when it clicks back to life. “I’m in Frankfurt. Come buy me coffee.”

Chapter Text

                SHIELD has good intel. It’s nothing Jason couldn’t get on his own, or from Talia, but it’s nice to get it for free. He still double-checks all his kills, but Coulson never makes a bad call. If anything, Coulson’s too cautious, likes to err on the side of mercy. Jason falls on the other side of that divide, and, sometimes, it causes problems.

                “That,” Coulson tells him after the shitshow in Moscow, “was entirely unnecessary.”

                “Yeah?” Jason can tell he’s pissed because he’s not helping with the cuts on Jason’s knuckles. Usually, Coulson’s all over him when he’s injured, crowding him when he doesn’t need to, trying to patch Jason up when he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself. “Which part?”

                “The part where you shot four men that we promised to apprehend alive.” Coulson’s pacing. It’s not a big plane, so he has to keep walking past Jason, but he is very resolutely not looking his direction. “You didn’t need to. They were unarmed. That wasn’t the mission, Jason. That was an unlawful execution. That was murder.”

                Jason shrugs. “What’re you gonna do, Phil? Arrest me?”

                “You could be arrested, Jason.” Coulson finally stops pacing. He turns to face him, hands on his hips, eyebrows pulled together. He looks exasperated and pissed off and still entirely too put-together. “You’re not our agent. As far as I know, you’re not even an American citizen. You don’t exist. If they wanted to put you in prison, they could take you, and I don’t have any legal way to get you back.”

                “So find an illegal one, Phil. Fuck.” Jason can tell his cavalier attitude is not winning Coulson over, but when he looks back at how the mission played out, he can’t find a single thing worth getting upset over. “They wanted to blow up a school bus. I’m not fucking sorry for killing them. I’m never gonna be sorry for killing shitheads like that.”

                “I don’t want you to be sorry.” Phil snaps, and it’s the first time he’s raised his voice since the night they met. “I want you to be careful. I don’t want you to get taken away for some bullshit technicality that I could’ve prevented if you’d just told me what you were planning to do before you did it.”

                “You would’ve said no.” Jason says. He’d had time to tell Phil. He’d worn the stupid earpiece; he’d talked to Phil throughout the whole damn mission, right up until he’d made that last call and gone radio silent to do it. “You would’ve quoted the fucking mission parameters at me and bitched about non-lethal methods and told me not to do it. So I didn’t ask. So it’s not your Goddamn fault what I did, and I don’t know why you’re being so shitty about it.”

                “That,” Phil says, even louder than before, “is exactly why I’m angry. I didn’t order you to make those kills. You weren’t following orders. If those were my orders, they’d demote me for it, pull me from field duty, maybe arrest me, but if I went to prison, it’d be as an American citizen. Do you have any idea what the Russian government would do if they got you? Or how little bargaining power we’d have, since you won’t even tell me your country of origin?”

                “Phil,” Jason says, and he can’t keep the smile off his face. “Are you worried about me?”

                “Oh, for God’s sake,” Phil says, and throws up his hands, and doesn’t talk to Jason again for the rest of the flight.

- - -

                They change planes in Munich, moving from their little jet to a massive plane Jason thinks is usually meant to carry about two hundred troops. It’s definitely Army, instead of whatever shadow-branch SHIELD falls into, and Jason gets the distinct feeling that Coulson called in some kind of favor to catch a ride with these guys.

                They’re running, he realizes. Coulson is covering their tracks, and they’re moving fast to get somewhere safe.

                Jason doesn’t know what to do with all of this, so he stretches out across a row of seats in the center aisle, and he tries to sleep it off. It’s a long damn flight, though, and he’s buzzing from the kills and Phil’s anger and the way he’d sounded when he’d said I don’t want you to get taken away.

                Like he meant it. Like it’s something he’d stop, if he could. Like he was, right now, taking steps to make sure it didn’t happen.

                A couple hours into the flight, Jason sits up and looks for Phil. He finds him at the very back of the plane, tucked in a corner, as far away from Jason as he can get in a confined space. He’s asleep, and those near-invisible lines of tension he always carries have been smoothed away. The tightness of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the lift of his chin, they’re all eased into softer angles, and Jason finds it inexplicably fascinating.

                Coulson’s attractive, but not in a way that’s ever really appealed to Jason. It’s interesting, Jason thinks, the way that can change.

                He unties his boots so they won’t clatter across the metal floor and then pads over in his socks. He stops right in front of Coulson and stares.

                “Hey, Phil,” he says, but gets no reaction. He must be tired, Jason realizes. Exhausted. Jason had been dropped into Moscow three days ago, and he’d slept maybe eight hours since. And every time he’d talked into that stupid earpiece, Phil’s voice had come back, steady, calm. Alert.

                Jason’s younger than Phil by about seven years. He wears sleep deprivation a little lighter.

                “Phil.” Jason says. “Hey.”

                He reaches out, and, just to be an asshole, he runs his hand down Phil’s face.

                Phil moves a hell of a lot faster than Jason expects him to. One second he’s dead asleep, and the next he’s surging up, forearm jamming into Jason’s throat, shoving him around so Jason’s back is to the wall.

                Jason goes to push him back, and then he feels the cold press of Phil’s sidearm, burrowing into his throat, right under his chin. Angled up to blow his brains out, if he pulls the trigger.

                “Holy fuck,” Jason says, voice taunt with wonder. For half a second, he’s too surprised to feel anything except amazed, and then he realizes Phil’s pinning him to the wall with his body weight, has a gun on him, finger on the trigger, and that weird flutter in his chest that hits, sometimes, when he spends time around Phil, kicks awake and drops low in his belly.

                “Jesus Christ, Phil,” Jason says, and Coulson’s just starting to come out of it, blinking and frowning like a sleepwalker fumbling to consciousness. “That’s the hottest fucking thing. Holy shit.”

                “Jason.” Phil says, like he’s reminding himself. He blinks one more time and then comes aware all at once, flinches away from Jason so hard that Jason thinks he’s going to topple right over.

                Coulson takes several quick steps away and then looks down at his gun, activates the safety, holsters it. He takes a few deep, careful breaths. “Jason,” he says, again. “I’m sorry.”

                “No, hey,” Jason comes up behind him, wants to touch him. Wants to touch him a lot. Jason can’t remember the last time he’s wanted something like this at all. “Don’t apologize for that. That shit just made my year.”

                “It’s not funny.” Coulson tells him, and his voice is harsh, loud all over again. “I almost shot you. What the hell were you doing?”

                “Just fucking with you,” Jason says, with a shrug. He fucks with Coulson all the time, but usually only over the comms or through his fanciful interpretation of report writing. He can see now how it’s a little weird, him touching Coulson like that. Jason doesn’t really touch anyone unless he’s hurting them. “When’d you get all dangerous, Phil? Someone bully you in accountant school?”

                “I’ve never been an accountant.” Phil tells him, absently. “Jason, don’t do that again.”

                “Well, how the hell else am I gonna get you to manhandle me?” Jason says, incredulous in the face of this order. He’s been working with Phil, off and on, for something like eight months. He’s not waiting another eight months.

                “You’re not.” Phil says, sharp. He turns around, finally, and frowns at him. “We’re not doing that. You’re, what? Eighteen?”

                “Oh, c’mon,” Jason says. “I can murder people, but I can’t get fucked? What the hell kinda bullshit age policy does SHIELD have?”

                “No one,” Phil says, with pretty significant emphasis, “is getting fucked. Watch your mouth.”

                “I cannot believe,” Jason snaps back, “that you are gonna throw me around like that and then walk away. You are such a fucking tease.”

                Phil’s jaw locks, and his eyes narrow. He looks pissed. Pissed, and disappointed. For a split second, Jason sees Bruce’s face layered over Phil’s, and he thinks he’s going to throw up or punch a hole through the plane.

                “I think you and I have done enough work together.” Phil says. He says it coolly, calm and even, like there’s not a single thing about it that hurts or upsets him. “I’ll find you a new handler.”

                “Fuck you, Phil.” Jason snarls. “Fuck you, fuck SHIELD, fuck your Goddamn Victorian sensibilities.”

                Phil doesn’t say anything. He looks at Jason for a second, and whatever emotion he’s had on his face disappears under a mask of professional indifference. He goes to sit up with the pilots, and Jason sulks in the back of the plane.

- - -        

                When they touch down, Jason leaves.

                “Jason,” Phil calls after him, “you have a report to write.”

                “Yeah, your report can suck my dick.” Jason shouts back, and all the nice military boys on the landing strip freeze. “Since apparently,” Jason yells, louder, attracting all kinds of attention, “you don’t want to.”

                Phil works his jaw like he wants to yell right back, but he doesn’t say a damn thing. Jason storms off, and he probably would’ve left Phil and SHIELD behind entirely, but Nick Fury intercepts him as he’s climbing over a fence, trying to be careful about the razorwire.

                “Son,” Fury says, frowning up at him, “you are a Goddamn shitshow.”

                “Yeah, you can suck my dick, too,” Jason tells him, but he’s too focused on not slashing himself open to put much heat behind it. “Phil’s an asshole.”              

                “Phil Coulson is probably the only man I know with the patience to put up with your bullshit.” Fury says. “But, as you are not entirely useless, I’m gonna do you the favor of trying to find someone else. Now get the fuck down from there, get your ass to medical, and write up your fucking mission report.”

                “I’m not a SHIELD agent.” Jason tells him, as snottily as he can. Something about grim men in dark clothes, swooping in and bossing him around, sets him on edge. “You don’t get to give me orders.”

                “It’s not an order. It’s life advice.” Fury watches him for another five seconds and then heaves a loud, aggrieved sigh. “Kid, stop being a fucking idiot. You’ve got work to do. So get down from there, and do it.”

                Jason thinks about it. He could go over this fence, over the next one, and disappear. He could find his own jobs, or go back to Talia. He doesn’t need Phil. He doesn’t need Nick. He doesn’t need SHIELD.

                But the truth is that he’s been better. Working with SHIELD has worn smooth some of his sharper edges, has jarred the machinery in his chest that roars and kicks and catches on the softer parts of him. He can sleep. He can go a week, three weeks, without heaving awake in the middle of the night with so much rage that he can’t sleep until he rips his knuckles open on someone else’s teeth.

                He drops down onto the asphalt and levels a scowl at Fury that doesn’t seem to faze him at all.

                “I’m not working with Coulson again.”

                “Great.” Fury says. “Super. That’s just peachy, because, kid, he’s so pissed at you that he threatened to quit if I tried to make him keep you. And, trust me, whatever you’re worth, it’s not half of what Coulson is.”

                The shittiest part of the whole thing is that, if Jason had to make that same call, he’d make it the same way.

                He’s a killer, and he’s good at it. But, whatever he’s worth, he’s not worth Coulson.

 - - -

                Fury can’t seem to find anyone who wants to put up with him long-term, so Jason gets loaned out to whoever needs a killer. Jason says no to some jobs and fucks up a few of the others.

                “I can’t fucking help it,” he tells Nick once, louder than he needs to, “if all your other handlers are shit.”

                It’s not true. Some of them are fine. And, if he’d worked with a handful of them first, he could’ve worked with them permanently. It’s Phil’s fault. He ruined him for mediocrity, and he made him leery of skill, worked all those abandonment issues just a little deeper.

                For a while, Jason thinks it’s going to be fine. It’s not as good as it used to be, but it’s still better than it was before. He’s got some kind of anchor, something holding his focus, keeping him in check. Then the mission in Saint Petersburg goes absolutely tits up, and Jason’s handler, Cruz, doesn’t just send him into a deathtrap but goes silent afterwards, cuts his Goddamn mic and leaves Jason alone, running blind on rooftops, with some really pissed off, well-armed Russian intelligence agents right behind him.

                “Jesus,” Jason says, laughing, as a bullet misses his head by inches. “Jesusfuck.”

                “Jason,” Coulson’s voice comes over the mic, steady and calm, but unusually urgent. “Get off the roof.”

                “Oh, hi, Phil. I’ll do that, sure.” Jason takes a flying leap off the roof.

                “Not what I meant.” Coulson says as Jason catches the next roof with his fingers, heaves himself up and over, onto the next one. “Get down, Jason.”

                “Down’s a long way, Phil,” Jason says. He hears a thump and a scream, but doesn’t look back to verify that he’s just dropped from three agents in pursuit to two. “I like up.”

                “There’s a copter in the air.” Phil tells him. “Headed your way. It has a machine gun.”

                “Down is great.” Jason says. “Down is fucking swell.” He spots a fire escape on the next building over and hurls himself at it, drops a full story before he catches the railing, which shakes so hard he thinks he’s going to rip the damn thing off the building.

                It holds. Barely.

                “Headed down.” He says, and a bullet ricochets off the bricks above him. “Headed down quickly.” He amends.

                “Evac’s at the bridge.” Coulson tells him. “Four blocks north. You’re looking for a painter’s van. Medical’s waiting.”

                “Medical?” Jason says, baffled. “I only got shot once, Phil. In the fucking shoulder. I’m fine.”

                “Medical,” Coulson says, and, wow, he is pissed, “is waiting. Hill will take you through the rest.”

                Maria Hill takes over the comm, and, if he can’t have Phil, he’ll take Hill any Goddamn day. She gets him to the van, where a med team strips him to the waist and discovers he’s actually been shot twice.

                “Oh, hey, Maria,” he says, because they haven’t taken his earpiece out, “I got shot twice.”

                “Yeah,” Maria says, “we know. I think Phil’s waiting on the final report so he can shoot Cruz in the same spots. Wants to get it exactly right.”

                “That’s sweet.” Jason says, and grins up at the top of the van. “Maria, I think that’s real sweet.”

                “I think,” Hill says, so dry that he almost can’t hear her smiling back, “that medical’s been real sweet with the morphine.”

 - - -

                After that, Jason knows he can’t stay with SHIELD. He trusted Coulson not to get him killed, or at least not to waste his life for some shitty diplomatic bullshit, but he can’t trust the rest of SHIELD the same way. He’d almost died in Saint Petersburg, half a Goddamn world away from Gotham. He’d almost died again, without Bruce ever realizing he’d come back.

                He weans himself off of it. Tells Fury he’s picking up other work, when he’s really just kicking around Europe, putting down small-time criminals, getting a taste for finding his own jobs again. He takes fewer and fewer SHIELD assignments. Finally, he picks up what he knows will be one of the last ones.

                It’s an easy job. SHIELD doesn’t fuck him over, and his handler doesn’t fuck him over. Jason, in traditional fashion, fucks himself over.

He makes a series of stupid mistakes. He’s in Bucharest, working on gathering intel on a trafficking ring. He’s supposed to hand that intel back to SHIELD, but he’s got a temper, always has, and he’s on his way out, so he doesn’t see any reason not to burn bridges as he goes. He comes across a shipment of young kids, years younger than he was, way back when he stole the tires off the Batmobile, and everything in his head goes red.

                When he comes up for air, there’s no more trafficking ring. So, he calls it in and takes himself to a bar to drink it off.

                Jason likes what he does, but he doesn’t like having to do it. In a perfect world, all the criminals and creeps and killers would be dead, and Jason could catch his last bullet with his own face, put himself down before that all toxic shit inside him corrupts and corrodes and spreads.

                He drinks more than he means to. That’s the mistake that fucks him over, but it’s not the first one he makes.

                The first mistake is that he thinks killing the ring kills the trade. That shipment of kids had been prepped to transport. He forgets about the people waiting at the other end of the deal.

                The second mistake is that he miscalculates how desperate those people would be, when they arrive in Bucharest to find their cargo’s been stolen. How they’d panic and try to make up for the loss, how they’d grab anyone they could find.

                His third mistake is that he forgets how young his body is. He feels forty, easy. But his body is barely eighteen. He forgets he’s young, forgets he’s still some kind of pretty, and he doesn’t watch his Goddamn drink.

                When they take him, he trashes the whole damn bar on the way out. Overturns tables, grabs civilians, throws glasses and punches and threats.

                But they take him anyway.

 - - -

                They take him, and they don’t even know who he is. When Jason kicks awake, they’ve got his hands tied with rope. They took his jacket, boots, and sweater, but they left him in his undershirt and pants and socks.  They were smart enough to find his guns and his knives, but they missed the tiny razorblade sewn into the hem down by his left foot.

                Jason works his hands in front of him, grumbling the whole time, because this shit used to be a lot easier back when he was fourteen and bendy and didn’t have these broad shoulders, and then he gets the razor free and cuts the rope away.

                He’s in a closet. They didn’t even bother to lock him in. He is fucking insulted.

                He sneaks through the warehouse, trying to get his bearings. This building hadn’t been in any of their intel. Or, if it had been, he’s still a little too doped up from whatever they slipped him to realize it. He’s not so high that he can’t fight, but he’s high enough that he might not win if he’s fighting anyone with real skill.

                Better to be quick than vengeful, he thinks. Better to get out, regroup. Come back, and burn every one of these bastards to ash.

                He’s standing in the dim light of an exit window, staring up at the street, when he hears someone crying. Soft and muffled. Scared. Whoever it is sounds small.

                “Fuck,” Jason says. He sways a little. He’s got one, maybe two bruised ribs. Half the skin on his knuckles has already been torn away. “Fuck.”

                He goes back. In the first room, he finds three girls. The oldest is maybe fifteen. When she sees Jason, she pushes the other two behind him and lifts her chin, eyes wet but narrowed, determined.

                “Nah, kiddo. That’s not why I’m here.” Jason holds his wrists up so she can see the way the rope burned rings into his skin. “C’mon.” He jerks his chin, and, after a second, she follows him out, cautious, with the other two creeping along behind.

                He takes her down to the window at the end of the hallway and then breaks it with his fist. He’s got almost nothing to keep them from the glass, so he ditches his shirt and uses that, instead, folds it up so it covers the jagged edges of broken glass down by the sill.

                Thank God he always layers before a mission. Thank God Bruce taught him that much.

                He unties the ropes around their slender wrists and then lifts them carefully so they can slither out of the basement, up onto the pavement.

                “Go,” he says, when the oldest girl goes belly-down on the ground and holds her arms down to him, like she thinks there’s a chance in hell she can haul him out. “Go.” He says, louder, and points over her shoulder.

                She stares at him for a long second, but, in the end, she’s a good kid. She goes, dragging the other two along behind her.

                Jason goes back. He finds nine more. The youngest is so small he sets her feet on his shoulders so the boy who’d been locked in with her can lift her through the window. She can’t weigh more than forty pounds. She is, maybe, five years old.

                The last one’s a skinny blonde boy who takes a swing at him. Jason thinks that’s endearing, likes his pluck, but he doesn’t have time for it. He drags him out into the hallway and shows him the window, and the kid, bless him, takes off running.

                He’s loud. He’s too loud.

                Jason knows they’re fucked when the kid jumps for the window, misses, and yells when he crashes back to the ground. Jason hears footsteps over his head. More than one set. More than two, or three, or four.

                “Shit.” Jason says, and he’s out of time. He can hear them getting closer, coming down the stairs.

                He grabs the boy around the waist and throws him. The boy screams, probably because he catches some of that glass Jason’s been so careful about with the others, but then he’s squirming through the window, dragging himself to freedom.

                For a second, Jason thinks there’s time. He thinks he’ll get out, too.

                Then something heavy crashes into his back, and Jason’s face smacks hard into the wall. He feels his lip split and twists around in time to see a man wrap a hand around the boy’s ankle, try to haul him back into the basement.

                “Like hell,” Jason says, and shoulders into him, digs his fingers into the sensitive tendons of his forearm, rips his hand away and kicks him, hard, in the chest.

                The boy heaves himself free, and disappears in a clatter of running footsteps.

                Jason is alone in a basement with five very angry men. He’s hurt, and still a little high. Unarmed. Doesn’t even have that little razorblade anymore.

                I’m going to die, he thinks. I’m going to die again.

                It’s going to hurt. He knows that. He remembers. It’s going to hurt so fucking much.

                He spits blood, brings his fist up. “Fuck you,” he says. “You shitheads owe me a drink.”

Chapter Text

                Jason’s out of his head on blood loss and benzos when he feels someone touching him. The hands are gentle on his shoulder as they turn him over onto his back, but he lashes out anyway, all panic and fury. His chest locks up sharp and cold when they pin his hands like it’s nothing, like he’s just a flailing paper doll.

                “Shh,” the man says, and Jason snarls in what he thinks is the right direction. He can barely keep his eyes open. The hands feel so warm on his wrists that he thinks they’re burning. “Jason,” the man says, “stop it. Stand down. It’s me. I’ve got you. You’re fine.”

                “Coulson?” Jason says and then laughs, faint and high, because he cannot believe that his brain picked Coulson to hallucinate instead of Bruce. But he stops struggling. If his brain is giving him something soft, he’ll take it.

                He’ll keep fighting, in a minute. He will.

                “Jason,” Coulson says, quiet. He lets go of Jason’s wrists and runs careful hands down Jason’s arms and chest, feels along his ribs. Jason’s breath catches a few times at the pain of it, but he holds still, lets it happen. Feels mostly nice, anyway. “Sorry I’m late.”

                Jason hums and forces his eyes open, smiles up at the hazy face he can just barely make out. He wonders if he’s concussed or dying or just took a few too many whacks too close to the visual cortex. He wishes he could see Coulson’s face a little clearer.

                “Hey,” Coulson says, and Jason catches the faint flash of white that means a smile. “Look at that. Eyes open and everything.”

                “Wouldn’t miss,” Jason says, talking on the exhale because he can’t fucking remember how this works, “your pretty face.” He takes a breath, and then another. “For the world.”

                “That’s right.” Coulson says. He shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around Jason, and it’s like he just tucked the whole sun around him. Jason feels nerve endings he’s pretty sure got smashed flat flicker back to life just to sing at the sensation of being warm again. “You just keep looking at my pretty face a little while longer. Evac’s five minutes out.”

                “Sure,” Jason says, eyes already slipping closed. “Will do.”

                “Jason,” Coulson says, and he runs his fingers through Jason’s hair and then curses when his fingers catch on a half-formed scab, reopening a scalp wound. “Jason. Stay awake.”

                “Fuck.” Jason says, breathing through the sting of the new pain. He huffs a breath and opens his eyes so he can squint up at Coulson. “If I knew that all I had to do to get you to pull my hair was get beat to death,” he mumbles, “I’d’ve told you I already did that.”

                “Yeah,” Coulson says. “Crazy ramblings are fine. Those are great. Let’s keep that up.”

                “I always wanted,” Jason says, wistful, “to blow you at your desk.”

                “Ah.” Coulson says. “We really don’t need to do deathbed confessions, Jason. You’re going to be fine.”

                “Not confessing.” Jason tells him. “I’m hitting on you. And,” he continues, “I’m totally fucking dying, Coulson. Come on.”

                “No,” Coulson says, and he sounds far more upset about it than Jason feels. Granted, Coulson’s got a lot more blood on the proper side of his skin. Emotions come a little fainter when you’re down about three pints. “No. You’re not dying. Not with medical three minutes out. You are not dying.”

                “Felt this before.” Jason says. “Cold, like this. Right after the bomb.”

                “And you didn’t die then.” Coulson argues. “So you’re not going to die now.”

                Jason laughs and laughs, and he fades out that way, head tilted into Coulson’s hands, and Coulson’s voice, growing faint and frantic, following him out.

 - - -

                Jason’s fighting before he’s even awake. He rips the cannula out of his nose, pulls the IV tube out of his forearm, and grabs the IV pole, smashes it into whoever’s leaning over him.

                “Jason,” Coulson says. “Stop it.”

                Jason goes still, chest heaving, and blinks at the nurse on the ground. “Shit,” he pants. “Sorry. Give me that oxygen back. Fuck.”

                “I think you’re fine without it.” The nurse says, a little shittier than necessary, and picks herself back up. “I’ll tell the doctor you’re awake.”

                “I’m awake.” Jason says and turns to look at Coulson, who is sitting in a chair beside the bed, looking rumpled and tired. Jason laughs. “Holy shit, Phil, I’m awake. I thought I was totally fucking dead.”

                “You were.” Phil says, and rubs at his face. He has bags under his eyes. He looks wrecked. “You did die, Jason. You were resuscitated in the Air Vac.”

                “No shit?” Jason falls back against the pillows. His chest hurts. His everything hurts. “Third time’s lucky.”

                “I’m not sure I even want to know what that means.” Phil says. He clears his throat and reaches for a cup of coffee sitting on the bedside table. “You’re benched,” he tells him. “For the foreseeable future. For months, Jason.”

                “Yeah, sure,” Jason says and then blinks. “Oh, wait, no. I quit. That was my last mission. I’m quitting.”

                Phil puts his cup down, which strikes Jason as a little odd, because he hasn’t even take a sip yet. And then Coulson leans forward, frowns, and he fucking looms in a way that even Bruce would admire.

“You,” he says, low and serious, “are not quitting. You’re on medical leave. You will finish your medical leave. After that, you can go wherever the hell you want. But you’re not leaving SHEILD until you’re cleared for field duty. Do you understand?”

                “Wow.” Jason says, entranced.

                “Do you,” Phil repeats, “understand?”

                For a second, Jason feels pleased and, inexplicably, very warm.

But then his brain kicks over a few unwelcome memories, and everything sours all over again. “Well, what the hell do you care, Phil? You’re not my handler. You quit me, remember? You don’t get a say. Where’s Fury? He’ll let me quit.”

                “No. He won’t.” Coulson stands up, looking exasperated. “I’m not having this fight with you, Jason. You’re benched. You’re going to get better. I will lock you in my basement if I have to.”

                “Oh, shady, locked basements. Those have been going great for me lately. Hey, are you gonna try to whore me out to European businessmen on vacation, too?” Jason asks, and it’s supposed to be a joke, but Coulson’s whole face pales out like someone just decapitated a baby in front of him.

                “Damn it, Jason,” Coulson says as he walks to the door. He stops, with his hand curling around the door frame, and there’s a second where it seems like he has something important to say. But that moment passes. He shakes his head. “Try not to piss off the doctors. I’ll be around.”

                Jason opens his mouth to say something. Thanks for showing up, maybe. Or You’re the first one who didn’t leave me to die. But he doesn’t say anything. He lets Coulson walk out.

                A minute or so later, he grabs Coulson’s coffee. When he takes a sip, it’s cold.

                He wonders exactly how long Phil had been sitting there, waiting for him to wake up.

 - - -

                Jason hates hospitals. He can’t stand the monotony. But SHIELD, at least, is pretty decent about keeping him down when they don’t need him. It might be entirely self-interested. When they put sedatives in his IV drip, he doesn’t get so shirty with the nurses.

                He sustained, he’s told, two broken ribs, four bruised ones, three broken fingers, a dislocated shoulder, a collapsed lung, and some seriously alarming internal bleeding. It was that last bit that’d caused all the problems. He’d died of exsanguination. When they got him breathing again, he burned through all the blood they had on the Air Vac, and a SHIELD agent had donated their veins to get him from Bucharest to a SHIELD facility in Greece.

                “No shit?” Jason says, when Maria Hill tells him all this. “Someone gave me their blood?”

                “I think,” Maria says, carefully, “that, if they hadn’t given it up willingly, Coulson would’ve taken it. So. Depends on your definition of give, I guess.”

                Jason is fucking charmed by the image of that: Coulson barking at the available agents, demanding their blood types.

                He tips his head away from Maria so he can grin at the opposite wall.

                “Seems like he got there pretty fast.” Jason says, after a beat of silence. “To Bucharest, I mean. Or was I just out longer than I thought?”

                “We mobilized when you took your earpiece out.” Maria tells him, and there’s a whole heap of disapproval in there that Jason just lets go right by him. He’s on bed rest; he doesn’t have to be sorry about a Goddamn thing until he can walk again. “We got to the bar they took you from about half an hour after it happened. They were still sweeping up all the glass you broke.”

                “Would’ve broken their fucking necks.” Jason says. “But I was—you know. I was kinda high.”

                “Yeah,” she says, “we know what they gave you. The doctors say you shouldn’t have been walking for another five, six hours.”

                Jason shrugs. “High tolerance.”

                “Clearly.” Maria says. She sounds like she feels conflicted about that.

                “What was Coulson doing in Europe, anyway?” Jason asks. “Figured he’d be back in the States.”

                Maria drums her fingers on her paperwork and then heaves a sigh. She pins Jason with an intense, troubled stare. “Coulson was in Europe,” she says, slowly, “because you were in Europe.”

                “What.” Jason stops fidgeting. After a moment, he tips his head to the side. “What, like, in case I went rogue and he had to--”

                “After Saint Petersburg, he took lead on all your missions. The rest of us played middleman so you wouldn’t find out.”

                “What.” Jason says again. “Why the fuck would he do that? He was there the whole time? What the fuck do you mean he was there the whole time?”

                “You two have got to work your shit out. You work well together, and our work is important. So figure it out, get back to work, and, whatever you did to piss him off, don’t do it again.”

                Jason doesn’t have anything to say to that, because he’s still back on the part where Coulson has been there the whole Goddamn time. Coulson didn’t just come back for him. Coulson never really left in the first place.

                He has no idea what the hell to do with that. But he likes the thought of it.

                “And Jason,” Maria says, as she gathers up her papers and her coffee, “try to stop getting injured. My office is next to Phil’s, and he’s unbearable when you’re down here.”

                “Sure thing,” Jason says, and he’s smiling again. He feels stupid, but he can’t make himself stop. “I know no higher purpose than peaceful interoffice dynamics.”

                “Fuck off,” Maria says, but she sounds fond. She pauses in the doorway and smiles, shaking her head at him. “Get better.” She tells him, in her that’s an order handler-voice.

                “Just to spite you.” Jason says, and waves as she turns to go.

 - - -

                Jason waits until they take the IV out of his arm and start talking to him about physical therapy and rehabilitation before he breaks himself out of medical. He figures, if he left any time before that, Coulson would’ve just hunted him down and thrown him back into his hospital bed.

                He’s in D.C., which is a long way from Gotham, but not so far away that he doesn’t have a safehouse less than an hour out, on the outskirts of Baltimore. He weighs out the pros and cons of running, and he steals cash and civilian clothes from a SHIELD locker while he makes up his mind.

                He can’t think of a single reason to stay that isn’t Phil Coulson, which is a pretty clear indication that he needs to disappear. Phil Coulson’s already following him around Europe. Jason doesn’t want him to follow him back to Gotham. He doesn’t want Coulson to see that, to see what Jason knows he needs to do.

But, in the end, he doesn’t want to disappear yet. He has a few things to settle first.

                Jason’s been handling more of his own jobs, but they’ve been easy, almost accidental things. He’s gotten lazy. SHIELD does research so well that he’s fallen out of the habit. It takes him hours to break into SHIELD’s personnel records to find what he needs.

                He hears a fair amount of noise and chatter for an hour or two after he leaves medical, but things are all quiet again when he sneaks out of SHIELD headquarters a few hours after that, dressed like a civilian, with his sleeves tugged down and his hood pulled up to hide the bandages and bruising.

                He gets a cab to Coulson’s place, makes the guy stop a couple blocks away so Coulson won’t get tipped off before he’s ready. He pays with the stolen cash and then steps out onto the sidewalk of a quiet neighborhood.

                He walks around the block twice, eyeing Coulson’s house, trying to decide what to make of it. It’s a neat, two-story building, with a small, well-kept lawn, zero furniture on the front porch but some healthy potted plants stationed near the windows, probably hiding pressure sensors or cameras.

It’s functional and understated in a way that fits. Jason wonders if any of the people who live in this neighborhood have even the faintest idea what Phil Coulson does at work.

                As Jason crosses through a neighbor’s fenced backyard to get onto Coulson’s property, he realizes he can see Coulson. He’s standing the kitchen, back to the window. Jason watches him for a few seconds, but ducks down and crosses to the side of the building when Coulson turns his way.

                He spends maybe five minutes finding an open window – on the second story, and thank fuck that Jason’s wearing black on a mostly moonless night or the cops would’ve absolutely been here by now – and another sixty seconds disabling the alarm sensors, and then Jason jogs silently down the carpeted steps to join Coulson in the living room.

                Coulson turns at the sound and blinks when he sees Jason. He’s still for a moment and then sighs heavily, leans a hip against the kitchen counter, and runs a hand down his face. Jason thinks it’s weird. He’s been in medical for over a week, but Coulson’s the one that still looks exhausted.

                “Jason,” Coulson starts, and then just shakes his head. He takes a healthy sip out of the tumbler in his hand.

                Jason’s never seen him drink before. He’s also never seen him in what must constitute loungewear for him: gray sweats and a white t-shirt. The sight of him like this – off-mission casual, dressed-down – leaves Jason off-kilter, weirdly giddy.

                “Hey, Coulson.” Jason says. He pushes his hood back and smiles at him. “Miss me?”

                “I figured you were gone.” Coulson says. “I looked for you. Maria and I spent the whole damn afternoon looking for you.”             

                “Sorry.” Jason says. He isn’t. “I got bored down there. You never visited.”

                “So you ask the doctors to tell me that you want to see me. You don’t sneak out and then come to my house, Jason.”

                “I missed you.” Jason says. And he has. He’s felt stupid about that, wrong and young and so fucking stupid, but Coulson’s been with him on every mission. Coulson was in Europe because he was in Europe. “I’ve missed you since Moscow. I’m sorry I shot those guys. I won’t do it again if you come back.”           

                “Yes, Jason. You will.” Coulson shakes his head again and finishes his whiskey, sets the glass aside. He looks conflicted, and tired.

He looks softer here, under the warm kitchen lights, and Jason doesn’t even know what to do with how much he wants to get his hands on him.

                “Yeah, probably.” Jason admits. “But I’ll try not to. I wouldn’t fucking try for anyone else.”            

                Coulson sighs. “Jason,” he says, as Jason makes his way closer, “we can talk about this when you’re better. You need to get back to medical. What are you doing here?”

                Jason stops a foot or so away from him, and he just looks at him. He’s not used to this feeling. He remembers getting hits of it, back before he died, but nothing like this. This feels desperate and hungry, like rage, but it winds him up in different directions. Makes him want to touch, which is normal. Makes him want to be touched, which is not.

                “Jason.” Coulson says, again. His tone is warning now. It’s the one he uses when Jason’s doing something reckless on a mission. It’s the one that means consider your actions; they are probably ill-advised. It’s not the tone that means stop or what the hell are you doing? or cut that shit out right now.

                And after he says it, for just a split second, his eyes drop to Jason’s mouth.

                That’s all the encouragement Jason needs. He’s pulled stupider stunts with shitter intel.

                Jason steps right into Coulson’s space, gets his hands fisted in Coulson’s shirt, and presses his mouth against Coulson’s. For a second, Coulson is stiff and unresponsive, and Jason’s stomach lurches and curls in on itself, aches sharp and mean with disappointment.

                And then Coulson makes a quiet, choked-off noise in the back of his throat, and he’s kissing him back. He’s gentler than he needs to be. Sweet, almost, until Jason gets his teeth around Coulson’s lower lip and nips, just hard enough to remind him who he’s dealing with. And then Coulson crowds him back against the opposite counter, pins him like he did on the plane months ago, and Jason has to tip his head back and gasp, because Coulson’s warm, and steady, and everywhere, and he can’t fucking breathe for a second because of how much he wants it.

                “Fuck,” Jason says, and tugs Coulson even closer. “Jesus, Coulson.”

                “This is a bad idea.” Coulson tells him, earnestly, as he drags his teeth down the long line of Jason’s throat and then tugs his shirt down, sucks a mark under his collarbone, where no one will see it.

                Jason squirms against him, seeking more contact, and Coulson pins him harder, one of his legs sliding between Jason’s, and Jason whines like this is the first time he’s ever fooled around.

                It isn’t, of course. But, in the past, it’s always been related to his work. He’s never wanted to, otherwise, and if he didn’t want to, what the hell was the point?

                He wants this, though.

                “Coulson, c’mon,” Jason says, not even sure what he’s asking for. Coulson’s holding him in place with his body weight and both hands on Jason’s hips, keeping him pressed tight to the counter while he works leisurely at that mark he’s making on Jason’s skin with his mouth. “Coulson.”

                Jason arches against him, and Coulson’s grip tightens. He pushes Jason back against the counter, not hard, but hard enough to make Jason hiss his breath in against his teeth. His ribs are better, but they aren’t fixed, not yet.

                “Shit.” Coulson says, and, suddenly, he’s gone. He’s all the way across the kitchen, and he has that you’re going to medical look on his face that Jason never likes but has never hated quite this much before. “Jason, we can’t—damn it, you need to get back to--”

                “If you try to send me to medical,” Jason says, low and threatening, “I’m going to tell them I’m dying of blue balls and make them prescribe you, because--”

                “We’re not doing this.” Coulson says, but the stern look on his face softens at whatever’s on Jason’s face. “Jason, it’s not a good idea.”

                “I want to.” Jason says. “You want to. What’s bad about that?”

                “I’ve already lost objectivity with you. I can’t--”

                “Fuck objectivity.” Jason says. “No, nevermind. Just fuck me.”

                “Jason,” Coulson says, and now he sounds guilty. Like he regrets whatever he thinks he needs to say next.

                “Coulson,” Jason says, “I’m not a SHIELD agent. I came back for a reason, and I’ve almost died, twice, working with you people. I’m out. Your objectivity doesn’t fucking matter. We aren’t working together anymore.”

                Coulson’s jaw closes and tenses. His eyes cut over Jason’s shoulder. “We are not doing this.” He says, and, this time, he uses his cut that shit out right now voice. “We aren’t.”

                “Goddamn it.” Jason says. “Why not?”

                Coulson levels a look at him that makes Jason feel stupid all over again. “How are those ribs, Jason?”

                “Jesus Christ, Phil, is that the problem? My ribs? So maybe don’t get especially fucking acrobatic about it tonight.” He throws his hands up, because, honestly, what the fuck. “They don’t hurt that much, anyway. And maybe I’m into it if they do.”

                “Yeah,” Coulson says. He turns away like he’s going to pour himself more whiskey. He picks up the bottle, but never quite gets to the next step. “I don’t think you have the first idea what you’re into.”

                That stings, and Jason’s glad that Phil isn’t looking at him when he says it. God only knows what crosses his face before he regains control. “Hey,” he says, “fuck you.”

                Coulson sighs. His shoulders are a sharp, tense line. For a second, Jason marvels at his own ability to fuck up everything he touches.

                “Stay here tonight,” Coulson says, turning around.

                “Wow,” Jason says. “Okay.”

                “Not-- no.” Coulson shakes his head. “See? This is what I mean. This is why it’s a bad idea.”

                “For fuck’s sake, Phil,” Jason says, “do mixed signals work for you? Is that what we’re doing? Because at least one of us should be getting off, and all I’m getting is whiplash.”

                “I meant,” Coulson says, “that you should stay in the guest room. Instead of going back to medical. Or disappearing entirely.”

                “Oh,” Jason says. He has that safehouse in Baltimore, but it’s late, and he’s tired, and he’s sure as hell not going back to SHIELD.

                He could call Talia. She’d send someone to pick him up. But he hasn’t been in contact with Talia for months now. He hasn’t wanted to explain about SHIELD, and, if he calls her, she’s going to ask him where he’s been.

                A significant part of him wants to leave. He’s not sure what the hell is going on in Coulson’s head, why he’s saying no when he kissed him like he wanted to say yes. But it’s hard to read this as a full rejection when Coulson’s letting him stay, letting him sleep in his house, which Jason broke into with no warning or invitation, because he’s a fucking lunatic sometimes who can’t run into any kind of boundary without wanting to smash it to pieces.

                Coulson was in Europe, he thinks, because you were in Europe.

                Stop it. Stand down. It’s me. I’ve got you. You’re fine.

                You’re not dying. Not with medical three minutes out. You are not dying.

                He thinks about Coulson’s mouth on him, about the mark that’s probably still darkening just under his collarbone. He thinks about the noise Coulson had made, when he first started kissing him back.

                He thinks he’s been pretty shitty to Phil Coulson. And that’s who he is. He’s shitty to everyone, especially the people stupid enough to get close to him. But it’s not much to ask, one night spent in a comfortable bed, even if he does have to spend that night alone.

                “Fine,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Just don’t put me in your basement.”

Chapter Text

                Coulson’s guest room is neat, clean, and tastefully decorated. It is also boring as hell and strongly reminiscent of a hotel room, and Jason should probably hate it, but he finds it funny, instead. He wonders if Coulson ever stops layering nice and normal over every dangerous part of him. He wonders how many people in the world know SHIELD Coulson and suburban Coulson.

                He wonders how many people have slept in this room, and how many of them noticed the small, discreet cameras monitoring the doorway and the window.

                “Did you know I was here? In your house?” He asks, as Coulson bustles behind him, bringing him towels and a toothbrush, still in its packaging.

                Coulson follows his eyes, frowns at the cameras, and then shrugs. “Someone at SHIELD did. Any unusual entry triggers an alarm.”

                “And no one called to warn you?” Jason can’t believe that SHIELD is so careless. Especially not with someone like Coulson. “Christ, I broke in. I could’ve been armed.”

                “Is there a reason I’d need to be worried if you were armed?” Coulson says, in that deliberately patient tone he uses when he’s feeling a little too polite to tell Jason he’s an idiot to his face.

                Jason rolls his eyes, but chooses not to argue the point. Instead, he grabs the toothbrush, pops it out of its package, and heads toward the bathroom across the hall. When he comes back, Coulson’s gone, and the light under his bedroom door has gone out.

                Jason wonders, idly, if the door is locked. He considers it for a moment, standing barefoot in Coulson’s hallway. Trying the door is probably a good way to get himself kicked out, or find himself suffering through another incredibly awkward conversation about appropriate behavior, but he’s tempted anyway.

                It’s not worth it. He knows that.

                Still, he stands there for a few seconds, thinking about it, before he goes back to his own room.

                He nudges the door shut behind him, leaves his shirt, hoodie, and pants on the floor beside the bed, and then crawls under the sheets. He’s tired. Even by a former Robin’s standards, it was an active first day out of the hospital.

                He doesn’t always sleep well in strange places, but he’s out in minutes.

- - -

                He sleeps through Coulson walking into his room. He doesn’t wake up until Coulson sets a cup of coffee on the bedside table, and then he’s flailing, throwing himself off the bed in a panic when he reaches under the pillow for a gun that isn’t there.

                “Jesus Christ,” Jason says, glaring at Coulson from the floor on the opposite side of the bed. “What the fuck, Coulson? I could’ve shot you.”

                “Not with those reflexes,” Coulson tells him. His tone is insultingly mild. “Your reaction time is triple what it should be. This is why you’re benched.”

                “You’re an asshole in the morning,” Jason tells him, wrapping an arm around his ribs, trying to catch his breath. If he doesn’t count all the times he’s been heavily medicated, that’s the closest anyone’s managed to get to him while he was sleeping since Talia pulled him out of the Pit. “I’m never staying over again.”

                “You also would’ve had some difficulty shooting me,” Coulson continues, unbothered, “without a gun.”

                Jason huffs and climbs to his feet with a bit more care than he wants to acknowledge. Ribs, he thinks, are bullshit. The finger that got broken barely even hurts now, but his ribs are still a shitshow. “Yeah,” he says, “next time I’ll be sure to bring a gun, so it’ll be easier to shoot you in the face.”

                “Hm,” Coulson says, eyes dropping to the fading bruises on his chest. “I should take you back to Medical.”

                “You should fuck right off.” Jason offers, as a perfectly reasonable counterproposal. “Jesus, Coulson, c’mon. I don’t need medical attention. And I’m not in SHIELD anymore. Remember? You really gotta learn to let things go when they’re over.”

                Coulson raises his eyebrows. “So, what’s your plan then, Jason? You’re going to go back to what you were doing before you started working for us?”

                “Yeah, I guess.” Jason clambers across the bed to grab his coffee and takes a sip. He does his best not to get shitty about how good it is. “It’s not your problem, Coulson. I’m not a SHIELD agent. I never was. I signed fuck all obligating me to---”

                “I don’t give a damn what you did or did not sign, Jason,” Coulson says, and Jason has never in his life heard Phil Coulson talk that way about paperwork. He’s been operating on the assumption that everything printed on 8.5” x 11” in Times New Roman qualified as some kind of gospel for Coulson.

                “You’re my agent,” Coulson says. “You got injured on my mission. You are going to get better under my care. That’s how this works.”

                Jason groans. “Phil,” he says, “come on.”

                “My agent, my mission, my care,” Coulson repeats, turning away. “Put some clothes on. There’s breakfast.”

                Jason makes a face at his back and stays in bed, in his boxers, until he’s done with his coffee. He tries to remember the last time anyone did something like this for him, bringing him any kind of breakfast in bed. Alfred, maybe. The last time he was sick at the manor.

                Don’t read into this, he tells himself. It was a test.

                And maybe that’s true. Maybe Coulson was just testing his awareness, his response time, his fitness for duty. But if that was all it was, Coulson could’ve just walked in. He didn’t have to make coffee first.

                When the cup’s empty, Jason fishes his pants off the floor and steps into them. He leaves the shirt and hoodie on the floor, because any breakfast with a dress code is a bullshit breakfast he wants no part of, and then he heads out into the hallway and down the stairs, cup in hand, hoping for a refill.

- - -

                On the way to the kitchen, Jason gets sidetracked by the picturesque view through the patio windows. The neighborhood looks sleepy, and Jason doesn’t know if it’s a weekend morning or if this is just how these people live, relaxed and casual and quiet. There are honest-to-God newspapers on people’s lawns, and he watches what he’s pretty sure is someone’s nanny herding three kids in different sports uniforms into a minivan.

                “Holy shit,” Jason says, transfixed.

                He hears a small clattering in the kitchen. “Jason, what--”

                “Just looking around, Phil,” Jason says, ducking through the front door before Coulson can catch him and keep him safely quarantined away from all these nice people with their pleasant, perfect lives.

                He steps quickly out onto the patio, kicking the door shut behind him, and goes to lean against the wooden railing. It’s cold enough that Jason should’ve either saved some coffee or worn that shirt after all, but he doesn’t mind so much. It’s interesting, the feeling of cold air against bare skin. He doesn’t go out often without body armor or at least a heavy jacket.

                He stands on the porch, one hand shoved in his pocket, the other cradling his still-warm cup, and he beams across the hedges at the next door neighbor, who is sitting on her own porch, drinking coffee in her bathrobe and staring directly at him.

                “Hey,” he says, brightly, “how’s that upper middle-class life treating you? You work from home? You work at all?”

                “Sorry, Sheryl,” Coulson says, as he emerges from his front door. “He’s heavily concussed.”

                “Phil, this is amazing.” Jason says. He gestures around him, but can’t quite find the words to express how bizarre this place is. “You’ve got a fucking ficus on your porch.”

                “It covers the pressure sensor by the window,” Coulson says, in a hushed, you are embarrassing me undertone that reminds Jason unpleasantly of Bruce. He curls a hand around Jason’s wrist. “We’re going inside.”

                “Sure,” Jason says. He waves at the neighbor with his free hand. “Bye, Sheryl. Enjoy your credit score.”

                Coulson pulls him inside, and Jason knows he’s being an asshole, but it amuses the hell out of him that Phil Coulson lives in this charming, inoffensive neighborhood and then goes to work and talks Jason through killing people.

                “Sheryl works for SHIELD,” Coulson tells him, which shatters the illusion a little. “But not everyone in this neighborhood does. And, in the future, I’d thank you not to go out of your way to cause problems for me. You cause plenty without trying.”

                Jason shrugs. He’s still grinning like an idiot. “Sorry,” he says, but doesn’t mean it. “You’ve got a nice house, Phil. Great neighbors. Good for you. You got a mortgage? The whole thing?”

                Coulson’s eyebrows pull together, and Jason recognizes his puzzle-solving face and suddenly isn’t sure that it was worth it, going outside to enthuse about this place. Maybe he should learn to keep things a little closer to the chest, even with Coulson.

                “Where did you grow up, Jason?” Coulson asks, confirming, yet again, that Jason is the source of most of his problems.

                “Refugee camp outside of Morong,” Jason lies, easily. “Where’s this breakfast?”

                Coulson frowns at him but then tips his head toward the kitchen. “I put your plate in the oven to keep warm.”

                “Hell, a plate and everything,” Jason says. He wanders into the kitchen and pulls the oven door open, goes still at the sight of pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon. “Hey, Phil,” he says, “I changed my mind about never sleeping over again. I’m never leaving.”

                “Oh, how wonderful. Will you be wandering topless through the neighborhood every morning?” Coulson says, and he sounds long-suffering, but the coffee cup he’s drinking from doesn’t quite manage to hide the smile on his face. “Should I warn the neighbors?”

                Jason snorts, grabs the plate out of the oven, and turns to face him. “Sure, if by warn you mean sell tickets.” He gestures down at himself. “This is a gift to the world, Coulson. It’d be selfish of me to keep it from the public eye.”

                Coulson snorts and rolls his eyes, but his smile grows into a full grin. Jason grins back at him and then sets the plate down on the kitchen island so he can grab silverware. He takes a piece of bacon with him as he explores the kitchen, and, when he turns back around, fork and knife in hand, bacon devoured, he catches Coulson looking at him.

                Coulson’s eyes are on his chest again, but his eyes are higher this time. Jason’s confused for a second before he realizes that Coulson’s looking at the mark he left with his mouth the night before, right below Jason’s collarbone.

                It’s the fresh red of a new bruise, not the mottled browns of the older ones from Bucharest. Jason brings his thumb up to press against it, and Coulson’s face stutters through an incredibly interesting array of expressions before settling, finally, back to blank.

                “I’m going into work,” he says, suddenly busy with the oddly intricate process of transferring his coffee into a travel mug. “Are you coming?”

                “Hell no,” Jason says. “I set one foot in that building, and Hill’s gonna drag me back to Medical by my balls.”

                “Absolutely not,” Coulon says. “Maria is a professional. She’d drag you back by your throat.”

                “Okay, admittedly, better than my balls, but still not fun.” Jason shrugs. “I’ll eat, and then I’ll go out, find something to keep myself occupied.”

                Phil looks up from his travel mug, and he has that stern, disapproving look on his face that should absolutely not have the kind of effect it has on Jason, especially at seven in the Goddamn morning.

                “You’re still injured,” Coulson tells him, while Jason’s tries not to do something stupid like smile or bat his fucking lashes at him. “Don’t do anything strenuous.”

                “No,” Jason says, with a shrug and another crunch of bacon, “figured I’d just go see what Sheryl’s up to. See if she wanted to get boozed up at the kids’ soccer match this afternoon. Maybe sneak some vodka into the gym and hit the ellipticals until we puke.”

                Coulson just blinks at him for a second and then shakes his head. “Your concept of what working adults do on a Tuesday is really telling, Jason.”

                “Oh, is that what people do around here?” Jason says, smirking a little. “Tell themselves they work for a living?”

                “If you think Sheryl doesn’t work for a living,” Coulson says, “then I’d like to invite you to settle the next international lawsuit you cause without her, or the rest of Legal.”

                “Lawsuits?” Jason says, grinning again. “Me?”

                “So many,” Coulson says. His tone is a mashup of consternation and admiration, and Jason wants to kiss him, but figures now is probably not the ideal moment.

                Restraint, he tells himself. Good for you.

                It sounds mocking in his head, but it’s some kind of growth, and he knows it.

                “If you won’t come in with me,” Coulson says, “then at least be here when I get back.”

                Jason stops shoveling eggs into his mouth just long enough to level a look Phil’s direction. “Coulson, Dr. Dre has some advice for you about hos and housewives.”

                Phil grimaces. “Don’t call yourself that.”

                “What, a housewife?” Jason shrugs. “Yeah, guess that was a little uncalled for.”

                “If you’re not at SHIELD and you’re not here,” Coulson says, stubbornly refusing to be derailed, “then I’ll have to go looking for you. It’s been a long couple of weeks. I’d prefer a night in.”

                Jason’s never kept a curfew in his life. Not even for Bruce. Not even for Alfred. He has no illusions that he’ll be keeping this one. He doesn’t want to make any promises to Coulson, because the part of him that makes that promise may not be the part in control when it’s time to keep it.

                “Just check in,” Coulson says, after a long moment. He reaches into the spice cabinet, plucks an earpiece from where it’s taped to the side, and holds it out to Jason. “If you don’t come back, at least let me know you’re safe.”

                “Okay,” Jason says, because that’s easier. He grabs the comm out of Phil’s hand. “I’ll check in.”

                “Thank you,” Coulson says. There’s a strange, still moment, where they’re both standing too close together, and Jason’s looking at Phil’s mouth and Phil’s looking at the mark he left on Jason’s skin, and then Phil turns and heads for the door.

                “I left an extra key on the coffee table,” Phil calls to him, as he leaves. “Don’t break in again. I don’t need to give Fury free reasons to gossip.”

                “Sure thing,” Jason calls back. “Break in every time. Got it.”

                Phil sighs and pulls the door shut behind him, but Jason can hear him, laughing quietly, as his key turns in the lock.

- - -

                Jason finishes breakfast, drinks the rest of the coffee right out of the coffee pot, and then does the dishes, for the sheer, surreal, domestic thrill of it. He stacks them carefully in the dish drainer next to the sink and then tries some of the whiskey Phil was drinking the night before. It’s smoky and complicated, but finishes cleaner than anything Bruce ever drank. Jason doesn’t like it much, but he memorizes the label on the bottle, in case he ever needs to buy Coulson an emergency apology.

                After breakfast, he takes a shower. The soap and shampoo Coulson that keeps in the guest bathroom don’t smell anything like him, which Jason thinks is bullshit, but he uses them anyway. He towel-dries his hair, finger-combs it into place, and then pulls on the clothes he wore yesterday.

                In an effort to abide by Coulson’s request not to go out of his way to cause problems for him, Jason gets a cab out of Coulson’s neighborhood before he steals a bike and leaves town, with Coulson’s spare key tucked into his boot and the earpiece – GPS locator disabled – in his front pocket.

                He goes to his safe house in Baltimore, picks the pockets of the surliest looking assholes he can find until he’s got a decent stack of cash, and then he buys himself lunch and eats it while he checks the safe house for any sign of activity.

                He finds a note taped to vodka in the freezer. It’s a message from one of Talia’s people, telling him to call her. If she’s annoyed enough to send people out to toss his safe houses looking for him, he figures it’s probably about time he calls her before she does something drastic, like rat him out to Bruce.

                “Hey,” he says, fifteen minutes later, as he leans against the warped plastic of a payphone booth. “Give her the phone, yeah? Tell her it’s Jason.”

                There’s a long silence on the other end, and then she picks up. “Who is this?” It’s Talia’s voice, but not her accent, which makes Jason feel like every kind of asshole.

                “No, it’s really me,” he says. “Haven’t even been kidnapped.”

                “Jason,” she says, dropping back into her accent. “You haven’t contacted us in months.”

                By us she means me, because Jason sure as hell isn’t talking to anyone else in her circle. “Yeah, I know,” he says, “sorry. Got a little distracted.”

                “I’ve been trying to track you,” she says. She sounds annoyed, but something else, too. Something that has Jason kicking his boot against the stained pavement, feeling worse and worse. “Was that you in Moscow?”

                “Yeah, that was me,” he says.

                “The reports indicated that you were shot.”

                Jason sighs. “Only a little,” he says. “Just twice.”

                “And that was also you in Bucharest?” Her tone is getting worse. She’s disappointed. “Did you really get drugged in a bar, Jason? What are you doing?”

                “I was just—I had some business to take care of.” He runs a hand through his hair, and he’s glad, suddenly, that she’s not there to see the tell. “I was working with some people.”

                “And these people,” she says, low and serious, “got you shot, twice, and then picked up by a trafficking ring?”

                “Well,” Jason says, “most of that was actually due to me being an idiot.”

                “After Bucharest,” she says, “we lost you entirely. No word. Nothing. We were told the ring was dissolved, but no one knew what happened to the last shipment.”

                “Oh, shit,” he says, letting his forehead thunk into the payphone casing. “Sorry, Talia.”

                “I’ve been looking for you,” she says, “in very unpleasant places, Jason.”

                It hadn’t occurred to Jason that Talia would look for him. He knows she’s invested in him; he thinks it’s because she feels responsible for him. She brought him back, as much as anything else, and he knows that it doesn’t always sit well with her. Sometimes, when they’re sitting across from each other, he can read her discomfort, can feel the way she sometimes regrets the part she played in his resurrection.

                He doesn’t know if she looked for him because she was worried about him or because she was worried about what he could do, if left unsupervised. He doesn’t want to know, really. It’s nice that she looked; he doesn’t need to know her motivations.  

                “Sorry,” he says, again. “I was injured. The people I’m working with, they had me in a hospital. Got out yesterday.”

                She’s silent on the other end of the line. Talia, like Bruce, knows how to weaponize silence.

                “You’d probably hate them,” he tells her. “These people. But I don’t mind them. One of them, he sets up my jobs for me. He’s—he kind of saved my life. A little.”

                “If you needed anyone to save your life, Jason,” she says, “then you are being careless with the gift I gave you. Do you need me to remind you what that gift cost me?”

                Jason knows something about alienating your father, but only in the theoretical sense. Ra’s, for all his lunatic bullshit, seems to care about his daughter, and Talia’s always been devoted to him. Jason knows what it cost her, bringing him back. But he’s never been sure how to show gratitude for a gift he never asked for in the first place.

                “But,” she says, “he saved your life?”

                “Yeah,” Jason says. He gets a flash of bleeding out, being cold and faint, feeling Coulson’s hands on him, warm and steady. He swallows. “I got—in Bucharest. I got taken. He took me back.”

                “Ah,” Talia says, and settles into another silence. The first had been edged, but this one’s baited. She’s trying to draw him out, but Jason’s not convinced that she needs to. He feels like he’s already given too much away.

                He waits her out, and she finally redirects. “And what about your plan, Jason? Baltimore is not far from Gotham. Are you headed there next?”

                “Oh,” Jason says. “No. Not for awhile.” There’s another pause, and, this time, Jason gives her the information she’s waiting for. “I’m gonna stay until I’m healed up. Probably another week, maybe two. He asked me to, and I’ve been pretty shitty, so. Least I could do. After that, maybe.”

                Talia goes quiet again, but he can hear movement on her end of the line. He waits. “I’d like to see you,” she tells him. “I’ll be in D.C. on Friday.”

                “Okay,” he says, because he can’t think of any reason to say no. Jason could make it on his own, but Talia’s regular deposits into his various accounts have been helpful. And he still feels shitty about dropping out of contact for so long. He didn’t think she’d look for him. “Friday?”

                “There’s an event,” she says, which is Jason’s first indication that he’s been duped into something he wants no part of.

                “C’mon,” he says. “Talia, don’t make me play dress up. Can’t we just meet in a shady basement somewhere? Why do we have to--”

                Talia clears her throat, pointedly. “Months, Jason. I went in person to some of these places.”

                Jason sighs, but he knows he’s been outmaneuvered. “Fine,” he says, mulishly.

                Talia lists off the details and then concludes with a distressingly calm, “And bring this man. The one who saved your life. I’d like to meet him.”

                “Talia,” Jason starts, but he knows, even before he finishes her name, that he isn’t going to win this. Talia isn’t the kind of woman that anyone ever says no to.

                “It will be lovely,” she says, with a tone that anyone who didn’t know her would describe as pleasant, “to meet him.”

                “Fine,” Jason says. “Fuck. But there better be an open bar.”

                “Jason,” she says, “I would never invite you to a party without one.”

Chapter Text

                Jason empties everything useful and interesting out of his safehouse and loads all of it in the back of the van he keeps in the garage, along with the stolen bike. And then he spends a full hour crawling around inside and under and on top of the van, making sure Talia’s people haven’t hidden any trackers. It’s paranoid, maybe. She’ll sure as hell find him eventually, if she wants to. But that’s no reason to make it easy for her.

                When he’s sure the van’s clean, he leaves and drives in circles around Baltimore until he knows no one’s following him. And then he goes to another safehouse on the north side of the city, one of the places he’d never actually used, kept empty just in case he needed to get out of Gotham and go somewhere no one, not even Talia, would know about. It’s one of four just killed Batman safehouses, and, like all the rest, the only thing in the damn place is a bottle of celebratory whiskey sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting.

                Jason stares at the bottle for a long time when he first gets into the apartment unit. The further from it he gets, the more he feels like he should’ve just taken the easy out with the bomb in the Batmobile. It’s not as personal as Jason wants, but there’s a certain poetry to blowing up the Batmobile with Bruce inside, a neat way to bookend their first and last meetings.

                Jason leaves the whiskey on the counter and grabs the essentials from the van. By the time he’s settled, it’s just past 7:00pm, so Jason digs up the comm unit, pops it into his ear, and activates it.

                “Hey, Phil,” he says, when the unit hums awake in his ear. “This is me, checking in.”

                “Jason,” Phil says, immediately. He sounds irritated, the way he always does when Jason’s late with an update. “I was about to drive to Baltimore to get you.”

                “How the hell do you know I’m in Baltimore?” Jason’s more surprised than annoyed. That’s something he should pay attention to, probably. Something he should correct. But, instead, he’s just impressed and a little flattered. He’s maybe an hour late, and Coulson’s already tracking him down.

                Hell, if Bruce had a reaction time like that, maybe none of this shit ever would’ve happened.

                “Yeah, I’m not answering that,” Phil says. He probably doesn’t mean for it to sound like a challenge, but that’s absolutely how Jason hears it. “When are you coming back?”

                It’s interesting, the way he says the second part. When are you coming back? Expectant, but a little guarded, like someone who’s trying not to get his hopes up.

                “Tomorrow,” Jason says. He’d planned to stay another day, but he doesn’t want to, suddenly. He wants to get back to D.C., maybe terrorize Phil’s neighbors some more, see if he can sweet-talk Phil into bringing him something over than coffee in bed.

                “Good,” Phil says. There’s a pause where Jason tries to figure out how to tell Phil about Talia’s bullshit party, but then Phil’s talking again. “Did you steal a motorcycle?”

                “Oh,” Jason says and then laughs, because of course Phil Coulson noticed. Jason steals one bike in the sprawling, crime-ridden city of D.C., and Coulson probably knew about it before the owner did. “Yeah, I maybe did that.”

                “Thought so,” Phil says. Jason can hear something in the background. Small, domestic clatterings, like Phil’s in his kitchen, making himself dinner. That would’ve been less distracting, probably, before Jason had been in Phil’s kitchen. Before Phil had pressed him back against that kitchen island and kissed him, left marks on him. “The owner’s been compensated.”

                “No shit?” Jason says, still thinking about Phil in his kitchen, in his comfortable civilian clothes. “Does that mean it’s mine now?”

                “It’s SHIELD’s,” Coulson corrects. “Stop stealing things. We have our own cars, and motorcycles. If you’d come in, you could pick one out, without committing any felonies.”

                “C’mon, Phil,” Jason says. “You know I like the chase.”

                “Is that what you like?” Phil says, tone so flat, dry, and precise that Jason wants to be there, in Phil’s kitchen or his office or wherever the hell he is right now, to mess him up, draw him out.

                Jason clears his throat. “Hey, Phil, wanna come to a charity gala with me on Friday night?” He asks, because it’s better than asking what Phil’s wearing.

                “What?” The background noises stop. There’s a brief pause and then, “Sounds a little public, Jason. Who’s the target?”

                “Uh, no,” Jason says. Although, if he gets a chance to peruse the guest list, he could probably pick out one or two. “This isn’t for work. This is for fun.”

                “Fun,” Coulson repeats, slowly. He sounds suspicious, although Jason’s not sure if that’s because he thinks Jason’s lying or if it’s because he’s never had fun in his life. In the background, Jason hears those quiet, knife-on-cutting-board, silverware-against-plates noises start up again.

                “Yeah,” Jason says, “fun. There’ll be girls risking indecent exposure charges with every sneeze. Drunk, grabby assholes spilling Scotch on the waitstaff. All these fucking rich people, standing around, jerking each other off for giving less than half of one percent of their wealth to whatever cause is the trendiest this season. It’ll be fucking thrilling, Coulson. C’mon.”

                “Wow,” Coulson says, voice gone dry all over again. “Sounds like a great time.”

                “And,” Jason says, because he can see how maybe he isn’t selling this very well, “there’ll be an open bar. And me. I’ll be there.”

                “Slightly redemptive,” Coulson says. “Why are we going?”

                Jason hesitates. “This woman,” he says, finally, “she wants to meet you.”

                “A woman wants to meet me,” Coulson repeats, deadpan.

                “I mean, not like—Jesus, Coulson, I’m not trying to set you up with her. You’d fucking rule the world together. It would be shitty, and terrifying, and very efficient.” It would also probably really, deeply piss off Bruce Wayne, but even that’s not enough to tempt Jason to try to start something between them. Talia is Talia, but Phil Coulson still deserves better.

                Phil sighs. “Why am I meeting this woman, Jason?”

                “She, uh.” Jason goes quiet for a second, tries to think through who she is to him, exactly. How the hell do you explain to someone that a person is responsible for bringing your brain back from nothing? “I had sort of a bad time awhile back. She helped me get better. Anyway, she wants to meet you.”

                “Oh.” Everything goes silent on Phil’s end again. After a moment, Jason hears the soft intake of breath. “Alright,” he says. “Yes, I’ll go.”

                “Great.” Jason grins at nothing, just stands stupidly in his safehouse kitchen and smiles down at his sink. After a second, he clears his throat again. “Hey, Coulson,” he says, “what are you wearing?”

                “Goodnight, Jason,” Coulson says. That quiet, careful tone is gone, and they’re back to exasperated amusement. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

                “Sure,” Jason says. “Tomorrow.”

- - -

                Jason breaks into Coulson’s place when he’s reasonably sure Coulson is still at work. He flips off every camera he’s spotted so far, and moves a few bags from the van up into the guest room. He surprised, when he gets there, to see that Coulson left things the way they were when Jason skipped town on Tuesday.

                It’s weird, but the sight unmade bed feels somehow comforting. Lived-in, welcoming. It feels a like the place was waiting for him to come back. Like Coulson was waiting for him to come back.

                He dumps most of the bags on the bed, hangs a few things in the closet, and then puts the comm unit in his ear when he’s on his way back down the stairs.

                “Anybody home?” He asks, into the silence.

                “Oh, now you want to talk?” Hill sounds like, maybe, she’s taking his disappearing act a little personally. “Nice of you to check in.”

                “Hey, Hill,” Jason greets, a little warily. “You pissed?”

                “Why would I be pissed?” Hill says, and Jason easily translates that to: Absolutely, you little shit. “You just wasted my entire afternoon when you decided to leave your hospital bed without telling anyone where you were going. I had meetings, Jason. I had a mission planned.”

                “You canceled a mission to look for me?” Jason laughs and goes to stand in front of a camera just so he can wink it at. “Hill, are you sweet on me?”

                “I canceled a mission because Coulson asked me to,” Hill says, which wipes the smirk right off Jason’s face. He ducks back out of the camera’s line of sight.

                Hill makes a quiet, frustrated noise. “Do you know how many favors Phil Coulson has asked me for, in the years we’ve worked together? Do you know how much he worries about you? Will you stop screwing him around?”

                “I’m not screwing him,” Jason says, defensively. He pauses. “Wait, that’s not what you said.”

                 There is a long pause and then Hill sighs, heavily. “I cannot fucking believe,” she says, “how dense the pair of you are being.”

                “I can’t believe you canceled a mission because Coulson batted his fucking eyelashes at you.” Jason’s learned, over the years, that the best way to cover a weakness is to attack, aggressively, whenever one surfaces. “You got a crush, Hill? Does Fury know? Is there some kind of workplace romance training you’re supposed to go to? Do you have to fill out a form?”

                “I’ll check into that for you,” Hill says. The mock-helpfulness in her town sets off alarm bells in Jason’s head. “You and Coulson can fill one out together.”

                Jason knows a lost cause when he sees one. He wonders if anyone ever actually wins an argument against Maria Hill.

                He takes out his comm unit, flashes a few more offensive gestures at the cameras, and goes to see what the street crime’s like in D.C.

- - -

                Every day Jason wakes up in Phil Coulson’s house, he grows more confused as to why the hell Coulson lives alone. Phil brings him coffee in the morning, three days straight, and, when Jason sleeps in on Friday morning, grumbling about late night and rich people and gotta be fresh as a fucking daisy, Coulson, c’mon, Phil just leaves and comes back a few minutes later, sets an insulated thermos on the bedside table, and disappears off to work. When Jason forces himself awake a couple of hours later, it’s still warm.

                Phil handles dinner, too. He cooks on Wednesday night and brings something home on Thursday, and he seems genuinely thankful when Jason does the dishes, like, somehow, in his head, there’s been an equitable division of labor.

                Phil likes to watch the news at night, and Jason doesn’t, but he likes sitting on the couch next to him, reading Phil’s books while Phil toggles through about six different simultaneously-running news shows.

                “Doesn’t that shit give you a headache?” Jason asks, the first night, when Phil jumps from one mid-sentence newscaster to another without blinking.

                “No,” Phil says, a little distantly. “Sometimes, on your missions, I’ll have five audio feeds running at once.” He brings his focus away from the TV for half a second, glances at Jason, and then raises his eyebrows before turning back to the TV. “Is that Jane Austen?”

                “Yeah,” Jason says, with a shrug. “Five feeds?”

                “Didn’t figure you for a fan,” Phil says. “There’s you, and your handler. Legal usually sends someone to monitor. Medical, if you’re likely to be injured, which, since it’s you, is almost always. A translator, if necessary. Other departments, if they’re relevant.”

                “All for me?” Jason says, grinning at the thought. “Jesus, Coulson, didn’t know I ranked a five-person team.”

                Phil’s brow furrows up, and he looks over. All hints of divided focus are gone, and he’s staring at Jason like he’s the only important thing in the room. “Jason,” he says, “you’re one of the best field agents we have. And you’re not even officially ours.”

                Jason blinks. He’s good at what he does, and he knows that. It’s not something he needs acknowledged, and, before Phil said it out loud, Jason would’ve said he didn’t care how he rated, compared to actual SHIELD agents.

                But it hits like a whiskey shot on an empty stomach, leaves him warm and jittery and smiling a little too much. “You don’t have to sweet-talk me,” Jason tells him. “I’m a sure thing.”

                Phil’s face goes blank, and he turns back to the news. Jason figures he’s fucked things up, the way he normally does, but, when he sprawls out a few minutes later, kicks his feet out across Phil’s lap, Phil just curls one hand, warm and loose, around Jason’s calf.

                Doesn’t push him off, doesn’t say anything.

                Jason’s going to miss this, when he leaves. He’s never lived anywhere like it, where everything’s comfortable and quiet and secure, where silences aren’t baited, and expectations aren’t constantly rising above where he can reach.

                After the news, Phil goes to bed, and Jason usually goes out to wander D.C., beat up a few criminals, charm a few free drinks off strangers. When he comes back, there’s always some kind of snack on the kitchen island for him, and a note, with a place for Jason to mark, so Coulson can see, when he comes down in the morning to make coffee, that Jason made it back, isn’t bleeding out in an alley or sleeping things off in the drunk tank.

                It’s easy, and it’s nice. It’s not the sort of thing Jason deserves, and it’s sure as hell not the kind of thing he could ever keep hold of. But Jason enjoys it, while he has it.

- - -

                Coulson doesn’t drop anything or double-take when Jason walks down the stairs before the gala, but his eyebrows fly up and his head cocks to the side in that way it tends to do when someone manages something either very stupid or very impressive. Or, as is usual in Jason’s case, both at the same time.

                “So that’s why you didn’t need a suit,” Coulson says. His eyes drop slowly over him, and Jason smirks, barely suppressing the urge to laugh or wink or just generally make an ass out of himself.

                “I know, right?” Jason says, gesturing at himself. “I’ve been secretly hot this whole fucking time.”

                Well, so much for not making an ass out of himself.

                Coulson rolls his eyes and looks down at the phone in his hand, like he thinks maybe it’ll have some answers for him. “Right,” he says. “Secretly.”

                “Just think of all the honeypot missions you didn’t send me on.” Jason’s smirk just gets wider at the surprised, skeptical look Coulson shoots him. “Wasted potential, Coulson. But I should be up for it in a week or so. Ribs are almost all better.”

                Coulson shakes his head, but the uneven tilt of his mouth suggests he’s fighting not to smile. “Are you ready?”

                “Absolutely,” Jason says. He leans a hip against the kitchen island and grins at Coulson. “Hey, Phil?”

                “Yeah?” Phil says, expression cautious and confused and a little closed-off, like he’s not sure he’s going to like what comes out of Jason’s mouth next.

                Jason grins at him and lets himself look, obviously and directly, at Phil Coulson, in a tux, neat and put-together, and Jason still likes rumpled, dressed-down Coulson better, but this is a very close second. “You look great,” he says.

                Phil blinks, and he’s looking at Jason again. He’s been doing this, more and more, the longer Jason sticks around. Jason doesn’t think it’s fair that Phil keeps looking at him like this, like he wants to put his hands all over him, but won’t actually touch him, ever, beyond the casual, short-lived touches that come with sharing a living space.

                “Hey, Phil?” Jason says, again, and Coulson tips his head to the side, eyes thoughtful, and Jason knows it’s just his quiet way of asking what? but it seems, for a second, like he’s going to kiss him. “Are you not sending me on honeypot missions because you’re handling them yourself? Because I’m pretty sure, if you bought me a drink, I’d tell you every nuclear launch code I know.”

                Phil blinks again, and then he blushes, just a little and only across the blades of his cheekbones, and, for fuck’s sake, Jason can suddenly feel his pulse in his chest, and his wrists, and the pit of his stomach.

                “It’s an open bar, Jason,” Phil tells him. “Let’s go.”

- - -

                The party is fine, at first. Well, it’s terrible, but, then, Jason’s always hated these things. Even back when he lived with Bruce, excessive displays of wealth used to set him on edge, and it’s not like death, or the Pit, or the time alone has nurtured much patience or sympathy in Jason. But Coulson’s there, people-watching beside him, and he doesn’t resent the rich like Jason does, but he regards the worst of them with a sort of quiet, dismayed contempt that Jason finds unreasonably endearing.

                Talia appears after they’ve been there for half an hour. Jason’s three drinks in, and Coulson is still sipping the same flute of bone-dry champagne he’d picked up within the first five minutes.

                Talia, of course, is stunning. Her hair is pulled up into something intricate, several braids weaved together in a thick crown around her head, and he assumes that’s where her knives are hidden, because she’s sure as hell not hiding much under that dark blue gown of hers. She’s maybe managed to fit a thigh holster on the inside of her left leg, but she’d have to flash half the party to get to it, unless she intends to rip that slit up her right leg even higher.

                 Jason laughs, amused and admiring, and tracks her approach by the heads turning in her direction. He can’t blame them for staring, but it bothers him, a little, the way some of these people size her up like she’s something they could buy.

                 “She’s here,” Jason says, when Coulson makes a curious noise beside him. “Hide the hookers. And the blow.”

                “They’re already in the trunk,” Coulson says, without missing a beat, and Jason laughs again, louder, and tells himself it’s ridiculous to be nervous. It’s not like he can stop things at this point anyway.

                “Jason,” Talia says, when she comes to a stop in front of him. She’s not smiling; she rarely smiles at him, because they’ve passed the point where they regularly lie to each other. But there’s a light in her eyes that suggests she’s happy to see him. “You’re looking well.”

                “Bought with your money,” Jason tells her, gesturing down at the suit. “Thanks.”

                She slides her eyes toward Phil, and Jason nods. “This is Phil,” he says. “Phil, this is Talia.”

                “Nice to meet you,” Phil says, offering his hand. His mannerisms are uncharacteristically friendly, and his smile is entirely too bright and far too empty, and Jason realizes, in that moment, that Phil knows exactly who Talia is.

                Shit, he thinks, a touch desperately.

                Talia smiles at him, that small, elusive quirk of lips she uses when she wants men to work for more, and Jason understands that Talia, for her part, knows that Phil knows.

                Shit fuck, Jason corrects.

                “You’ve been helping him,” Talia says, to Phil. “Jason says you saved his life.”

                “He saved mine,” Phil counters, with an easy shrug. “It seemed fair.”

                “Is that why you did it?” Talia asks. She gives him a tolerant, knowing look over the lip of her wine glass. “Out of a sense of obligation?”

                “I hear you did something similar,” Phil says, sidestepping the question. “Jason says you helped him, when he needed it.”

                “If we’re both interested in helping him,” Talia says, “perhaps we should work together.”

                “If we have shared goals,” Phil says, “I don’t see why not.”

                This is a disaster, Jason realizes. He should’ve known, all along, that it wasn’t going to go well. He feels like he’s trapped on ice, watching two wolves circling the same carcass, and he’s not sure which one he’s rooting for, because, honestly, the only way this kind of fight ever seems to end is poorly, for everyone involved.

                In desperation, he drains his entire glass in one long swallow. “Gotta run,” he says. They both turn to blink at him with identical expressions of polite incredulity, and Jason gestures over his shoulder. “Open bar,” he explains. “The bartender looks lonely.”

                He gets the hell out of there, without looking back, and he practically climbs into the bartender’s lap when he makes it to the bar.

                “Another already?” The girl says, crinkling up her nose at him in playful dismay. “Date not going well?”

                “Hard to say,” Jason says, gesturing over his shoulder. “Does it look like they’ve figured out where they’re gonna hide my body yet?”

                She looks behind him as she slides the glass over the counter. He watches her face as she gets a read on the situation. “Seems like they’re working on it,” she says, sympathetically. “But who’s the other guy?”

                “Who’s what guy?” Jason asks, taking the glass. “Oh, fuck, does he have an eyepatch?”

                When he turns around, Bruce Wayne is half a room away, staring right at him.

                For a second, Jason’s heart stops, and Jason has enough time to think that it is deeply, unbelievably unfair that Bruce Wayne gets to kill him twice and he doesn’t even get to kill the fucker once, and then his heart starts up again, jackhammering madly in his throat.

                “Fuck,” Jason says. Without taking his eyes off Bruce, he drains the drink in his hand.

                “God. That bad?” Behind him, the girl sounds concerned. “Want me to call security?”

                “I appreciate the thought,” Jason says, “but no rent-a-cop on this planet is gonna be able to help me right now.”

                For another long moment, neither one of them moves, and then Bruce starts his way, and Jason is off, running without even thinking about it, navigating through the crowd at an actual sprint, seeking the exit like there’s still some chance he’ll get away.

                Bruce doesn’t yell for him, doesn’t run, because Bruce is here as Bruce Wayne, and Bruce Wayne wouldn’t chase someone like Jason through a charity gala.

                Jason breaks through the crowd, slams out the door, and heads for what is, objectively, the fastest way out of here: the balcony. There are a few couples clustered on the western side, enjoying the night air while their lives don’t fall to pieces around them, but, on the other side, where there are some friendly-looking trees, branches outstretched just ready to catch him, there is absolutely no one.

                It’s just a one-story drop. It’s gonna be a bitch in these clothes and these shoes, but Jason’s dealt with worse. He makes it to the railing and jumps, one hand braced on the metal to help lift himself up and over.

                He’s an inch from freedom when Bruce’s hand closes tight around his wrist and pulls, and Jason’s jump is caught short. He twists in midair, slams his bruised ribs against the concrete, and dangles in the air, kicking his legs and trying to catch the breath that just got knocked out of him.

                “Who the hell are you?” Bruce growls down at him. And, Jesus, he is pissed. Jason’s not sure he’s ever seen him this angry. “And what the hell are you playing at, wearing that face?”

                “Fuck off,” Jason snaps back, breathlessly, trying to get his legs braced so he can kick against the balcony. If he kicks hard enough, Bruce will have to choose between letting him go or taking a tumble himself. “It’s mine. My mother gave it to me.”

                “Who are you?” Bruce says again. He pulls Jason up, one-handed, and, fuck, Jason forgot how strong he is.

                He really should’ve brought a gun, but all he has is a knife in a sheath at his back, and there is no graceful way to pull it, not while he’s dangling one-handed from a fucking balcony.

                “Let me go, you fucking asshole.” Jason fights, kicking and twisting, but Bruce pulls him up, resolute and sure, and gets his other hand in Jason’s hair.

                “No, hey, fuck you,” Jason says, a half-second before he figures out what he’s doing. “Don’t you fucking dare, you fucking--”

                Bruce tugs, pulls out his hair so he can test it later, verify who he is, and Jason is so pissed that he almost heaves himself back up onto the balcony just to kick his ass.

                But he doesn’t want to fight him. Not here, not in front of Phil and Talia. Not without a plan and a purpose. He just wants to get away.

                “Let me go,” Jason yells it this time, hooking his free hand around the railing so he can he push against Bruce’s leverage.

                He looks up, looks right at Bruce, and he goes still, stunned by the look on his face. He’s seen this man bruised and shot and stabbed, watched him stitch himself shut after a dozen bad nights, but he’s never seen him look like this, never really knew what it looked like, when something hurt Bruce Wayne.

                And then, before Jason can figure out what to do, Phil Coulson shows up, at a run, and punches Bruce right in the mouth.

                It’s a hell of a hit. Bruce’s head snaps back on his neck, and he drops Jason, turns to face the threat, and Jason should throw himself backwards, take his chances with the trees, but Phil’s up there, squaring off against Batman, and Jason’s up and over the railing before he can think about why he’s doing it.

                “Touch him again,” Phil says, like it’s an offer. In the second it took Jason to get back on the balcony, Phil Coulson has pulled a gun. It’s aimed right at Bruce’s face. “Try it.”

                Behind them, the happy couples on the balcony are starting to make quite a racket. Jason can practically see Bruce measuring everything out.

                There’s a moment, where Bruce is still Batman, and, in the next, he’s all Bruce Wayne. He holds his hands up and steps back. “I think,” he says, “there’s been a misunderstanding.”

                “If you touch him again,” Phil bites out, “I will shoot you. I’d suggest not misunderstanding that part.”

                “Who are you?” Bruce asks. His eyes flicker, briefly, to Jason, and Phil steps sideways, puts himself between them, and keeps the gun leveled between Bruce’s eyes. “What do you want?”

                “Bruce,” Talia says, stepping up beside him. She considers the three of them, eyes lingering the longest on Jason, and Jason can’t read her, doesn’t know how much of this she planned, if she planned any part of it at all. “Come inside.”

                “Talia,” Bruce’s whole face shutters closed, and Jason thinks, if he’s very lucky, Bruce will just dismiss this whole thing as a cruel League of Shadows joke. “What is this?”

                Behind them, Jason sees security finally getting their shit together. Four men, big and serious and not at all prepared to fight a single one of them, head their way. He watches Coulson’s shoulders tighten as he catches sight of them.

                Coulson turns without saying anything, dropping his gun to his side but not holstering it. He puts his free hand on Jason’s shoulder and turns him, herds him toward the fire stairs on the side of the building.

                Jason doesn’t look back. The way out is a blur; everything seems to happen at once, and he goes from being on the balcony, feeling Bruce’s eyes on his back, to being in the passenger seat of the car, with Coulson buckling his seatbelt for him.

                Jason wants to go back. He wants to throw Bruce Wayne off that damn balcony. He wants to cut off the wrist Bruce grabbed, wants to smash and cut and hit, wants to get himself bloodied up so that there’s an outlet for all the rage beating against his chest.

                He wants to burn the memories of Bruce’s face out of his mind. He wants to burn every memory he has of Bruce. He wants to regress to that stupid, mindless, helpless pre-Pit husk of skin and muscle. He wants to be nothing, to be anything other than what he is right now.

                He wants, for some stupid, ridiculous reason, to throw up.

                “Fuck,” he says. He’s breathing too fast, or maybe not at all. He hunches forward in his seat, just in case. Probably better to puke on the floorboard than on himself. “Fuck, fuck.”

                “You’re alright,” Phil says. The tires squeal in counterpoint to the even, measured tone of his voice. Jason hears gears shifting, feels the jolt of Phil putting as much space between them and Bruce as he can, as quickly as possible.             

                “Shit,” Jason says, for variety’s sake. “Fuck.”

                “You’re alright, Jason,” Phil says. He puts his hand around the back of Jason’s neck, heavy and reassuring, and his thumb moves in soothing circles across the skin of his throat. “Breathe. I need you to breathe.”

                “’m fucking breathing, Phil,” Jason mumbles. He takes in a deep gasp of air, just to prove the point, and the tightness of his lungs indicates that maybe that’s the first breath he’s taken in a while.

                Fuck.

Chapter Text

                Jason’s not tracking the car; he’s too busy trying not to puke all over it. But he gets the feeling, from the fact that they haven’t stopped or slowed down and from the echoing car horns and shrieking tires, that Coulson runs several red lights in a row as they leave.

                When they finally stop, Coulson’s puts his hands on Jason’s shoulders, pulls him into a more upright posture. “Jason,” he says, “sit up a little. Let me--”

                Jason doesn’t know how that sentence is supposed to end, what he’s supposed to let Phil do, but he follows along without fighting, falls back against the seat and holds still while Phil’s hands move quickly and efficiently at his throat.

                In seconds, Phil’s got his stupid bowtie off, thrown in the backseat, and then he tugs at the buttons on Jason’s shirt, pulls the top three open.

                “There,” he says. He settles back into his seat and floors it, puts his hands on the wheel a second later, like an afterthought. “Breathe, Jason.”

                “I am fucking breathing, Phil,” Jason says, but the truth is he’s not doing it very well. He’s not sure if it’s his ribs, if the hit he took trying to jump of the balcony was harder than he thought, of if Bruce Wayne is so Goddamn toxic that he’s going into anaphylactic shock just from being grabbed by him.

                “You’re hyperventilating,” Phil says. “Deep breaths, Jason. Count them out. Five seconds in, five out.”

                “Fuck your five seconds,” Jason says. He feels dizzy, like his heart isn’t doing such a swell job of getting blood to his brain. “I am fucking breathing, Phil. I am.”

                Phil makes an annoyed noise and then reaches over and grabs Jason’s wrist, right where Bruce grabbed him earlier. Jason almost flinches away from him, but it’s nice. It’s better, having Phil’s hand where Bruce’s was, like Phil can erase whatever Bruce may have left behind.

                “Like this,” Phil says. He puts Jason’s hand low on his chest, right where the true ribs transition into the false ones. Jason can feel Phil’s heartbeat, elevated but still slower than his own, and he can track his steady, regular breathes.

                He does his best to match Phil’s breathing pattern, but his heart jerks in his chest like it’s going to pound through his sternum and find sanctuary with a better host. “The fuck is wrong with me?”

                Phil glances over at him, mouth flat and eyes dark with concern, and then he looks back out the windshield. “Jason,” he says, “you’re having a panic attack.”

                Jason makes a low, disgusted noise. He is not having a fucking panic attack. “Oh, fuck you,” he says, “I haven’t panicked about anything since I was fifteen.”

                “Yeah,” Phil says, with a nod, like it makes sense, like he knows something. “That’s about the last time you saw Bruce Wayne, isn’t it?”

                Everything in Jason’s head flicks to static, whites out. All his thoughts crash into each other, like a train careening off its tracks, all the cars piling up, all motion stopping.

                “What?” Jason says. “Coulson, what?”

                Phil’s jaw locks. The streetlights outside erase all of his tells. Jason can’t read anything on his face.

                “Coulson,” he says, again, a little desperate. “What the fuck?”

                Coulson doesn’t say anything. Jason pulls his hand away from his chest. He’s breathing fine now, like Coulson’s words hit some kind of reset switch in his brain. He looks down at his hands, which shake for two, three seconds and then go still.

                There’s a kick and a loop in the pit of his stomach, that half-second of pressure before a hit becomes pain.

                “Let me out,” he says. “Stop the car.”

                “Jason,” Coulson says, accelerating instead. “Don’t do this.”

                “Fuck off, Coulson,” Jason says, hand wrapping around the door handle. “Let me the fuck out.”

                Phil glances over at him. He pushes the gas pedal lower, and Jason can see the speedometer climbing over ninety. “Jason,” he says, “calm down.”

                “Calm down?” Jason says, wondering if anyone, ever, in the history of human life, has reacted positively to being instructed to calm down. All that Pit rage is screaming in his chest, in his head, feels like hot bile building up in the back of his throat; he needs an outlet now.

                “You touch that gas pedal one more fucking time,” Jason says, “and I’m gonna break your Goddamn foot off and beat you to death with it. Let me out, for fuck’s sake.”

                “Jason,” Coulson says, and it is deeply, unreasonably unfair that Coulson’s quit that shit right now voice still has some effect on him, still cuts some of the rage in Jason’s head.  “We’ll talk about this at home.”

                Something about the phrase at home makes every muscle in Jason’s body tense up, and he nearly slams the door open and jumps onto asphalt at ninety miles an hour, because the need to get the fuck out of this car almost overwhelms whatever semblance of sense he has.

                He wants to scream. He wants to take a rock or a brick or a fist to someone’s face. He wants to go back and smash every single one of Bruce’s teeth out of his head. He wants to slam Phil’s face into the steering wheel until there’s nothing in it Jason recognizes.

                He wants out. He wants to get the fuck out of here before he does something he won’t be able to set right.

                The Pit didn’t make him a monster, but it damn sure didn’t make him any better.

                “You know who I am, Coulson?” Jason asks, instead of launching himself out of the car. He’s not sure that staying is going to do anyone any favors; that rage in his chest is going to find a target, and, if Coulson keeps him trapped in here, that means he’s the only available option. “You know about Bruce?”

                “Jason,” Coulson says. He doesn’t look at him. His hands tighten around the steering wheel. “We can talk when we---”

                “What’s my name, Coulson? My last name? What is it? You know it, don’t you? How long have you known who I am?”

                “This is SHIELD, Jason.” Phil slams one hand against the steering wheel. On a better day, that display of anger would’ve calmed Jason, but fire feeds fire, and, right now, Jason just wants to break him to pieces. “You’ve had profilers assigned since you pulled me out of that warehouse fire. We confirmed it in Saint Petersburg, when Medical took your blood.”

                “Confirmed what?” Jason says. He wants to hear Phil say it. He wants to know exactly how much they know. “Who am I?”

                Coulson’s jaw tightens, and Jason doesn’t think he’s going to answer. They’re decelerating rapidly, and Jason looks out the window, to gauge how much skin he’d lose jumping, and realizes they’re in Coulson’s neighborhood.

                “You’re Jason Todd,” Coulson says, as they pull into his driveway.

                Jason’s in the car, breathing in, and then he’s halfway up Phil’s driveway, breathing out. His heart is thudding in his chest, elevated but not racing, steady, the kind of pulse he gets when he’s fighting.

                There’s no one to fight. No one he’ll feel good about fighting, anyway, when he wakes up tomorrow morning. But there have been times in the past when that didn’t stop him, and Jason’s too keyed up to call the odds on his control winning out.

                “Jason,” Phil says, “come inside.”

                “Suburbia is bullshit,” Jason tells him, scowling at the empty streets. There’s no one around. Not even some idiot pulling some low-level breaking and entering. Jason’s hands twist in useless fists at his sides. “I fucking hate this place.”

                Twelve hours ago, he loved this place. And now he wants to burn Phil’s house down. And, honestly, that might be for the best, because Bruce is going to find him, and Phil’s never going to be able to come back here again. If Jason burns it, at least Phil can collect on the insurance.

                “I kinda wanna set your house on fire, Phil,” Jason says, just to clarify where they are right now. Just to give Phil some warning about where his head is.

                “Okay,” Phil says, with his hands in his pockets and his voice low and tired. “Will you come inside before you do that, or do you want to have this conversation in the middle of the street?”

                Jason throws his hands up, wide and challenging. “I want you to blow me in the middle of the street, you fucking traitor. You asshole.”

                “Alright, Phil?” A woman calls, and Jason wheels around to see Sheryl, from Legal, stepping out onto her porch in her button-down flannel pajama set.

                “Fine, Sheryl,” Phil says. “Go back inside.”

                “Call the cops, Sheryl,” Jason says. “People are yelling after eight pm. It’s fucking anarchy out here.”

                Sheryl gives him a slow, considering look. After a moment, she settles onto her porch swing and fishes a cigarette and a lighter out of her pocket.

                “Un-fucking-believable,” Jason says, as he watches her light up. “Phil, I’m gonna fight her.”

                “Jason,” Phil says, rubbing at his eyes. “Just come inside.”

                If he wants any of his stuff, Jason’s going to have to go inside. If he wants to leave in something other than the thoroughly disheveled formal wear he’s got on right now, he has to go back into Phil’s house to get it.

                But if he goes inside, he and Phil are going to fight. Jason can feel it. He’s no good for anything else. Not when he feels like this.

                He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to have this fight with Phil. He doesn’t want to know how much Phil knows, or how long he’s known, or what the hell he thought he was doing, keeping Jason around after he found out who he was. He doesn’t want to know if the reason he kept Jason around was because he found out who Jason used to be.

                Jason can see how he would be fascinating to an organization like SHIELD. As young as he is, with the skills that he has, and his unusual resilience to death. He knows why someone like Nick Fury would assign Phil to keep an eye on him.

                Maybe that’s why Phil didn’t let him quit SHIELD. Maybe that’s why Phil kept such a close watch on him. Maybe that’s why Coulson was available to rescue him. Not because he was worried about losing him, but because he was worried about losing SHIELD’s latest research project.

                “Your agent, your mission, your care, huh? Such fucking bullshit.” Jason steps up onto the porch and waits, arms crossed, for Phil to open the door. “You’re a real asshole, Phil.”

                Phil doesn’t flinch, but his eyes close for a second and his jaw tightens like he’s biting something back. Jason doesn’t like the way pain looks on his face; it reminds him too Goddamn much of Bruce.

                When Coulson finally gets the door open, Jason shoulders his way in first and then moves quickly for the stairs. He can hear Phil following along behind him, but he doesn’t look back as he fishes his backpack off the floor of Phil’s guest room and starts shoving items, at random, into the bag.

                “What’re you doing, Jason?” Phil asks, from the doorway. “What’s your plan?”

                “You’re the one who makes the plans, Phil,” Jason says, pulling all of his weapons out of their hiding places and dropping them on the unmade bed so he can try to get his head around choosing which ones he’s going to take with him. “Figured I’d just make it up as I go.”

                Phil sighs. “You’re leaving?”

                Jason snorts and gives up on strategy; he grabs the meanest assortment he can make and dumps them into his bag, as quickly as he can go without losing any fingers in the process. “Yeah, Phil, I’m fucking leaving,” he says, “because I kinda feel like I need to kill someone, and, if I’m still in this house in five minutes, that’s gonna be you.”

                Phil crosses his arms over his chest and looks insufficiently concerned. “Who are you going to kill?”

                “I don’t fucking know, Phil,” Jason says, grabbing his clothes out of the closet and throwing the whole tangled mess onto the bed. “Why? You wanna pick a last target, for old time’s sake? You got any neighbors you don’t like very much? Want me to take care of Sheryl on my way out of town for you?”

                “Tell me about Bruce Wayne,” Phil says, and Jason almost throws a bullet proof vest at him.

                “Fuck off,” Jason says.

                “Jason.”

                Jason looks up at him. Can’t help it. That tone still has some kind of hold over him. “What?”

                “Tell me about Bruce Wayne.”

                It hits, all of it. Batman, towering over him in the alley, and Jason, squaring off, tire iron in hand, hungry and skinny and already so Goddamn angry. And Bruce, who was soft, sometimes, in the mornings at the breakfast table or in that long stretch of stillness after a patrol, when he took his cowl off and stared at nothing. Bruce Wayne, the first person on the planet who thought Jason was worth something, and it’s not Bruce’s Goddamn fault that he was wrong, just like it’s not Coulson’s fault that he was wrong, too, but Jason’s just twisted up enough that he hates them both for it anyway.

                He gets a flash of Bruce Wayne, half a room away, face cracked open with shock. Bruce, looking hurt.

                Bruce, who didn’t save or avenge him, who replaced him with a better, richer, cleaner version as soon as he could.

                Jason should’ve detonated that bomb he planted in the Batmobile. Killing Batman would’ve be easy. Batman always knew that Jason Todd was trouble, but Bruce Wayne used to treat Jason like he mattered anyway.

                It didn’t hurt to see Batman. It just pissed him off.

                But seeing Bruce Wayne reminded him of being fifteen, feeling the crow bar smashing bone and ripping skin, hearing the mad clown’s laughter. He remembers screaming a thing that wasn’t a name but desperately wanted to be. He remembers hoping, hysterical and naïve and so fucking stupid, that Bruce was going to save him. He remembers holding onto that hope until the bomb’s counter hit zero, and he remembers exactly what it felt like, in that half-second before the explosion, when he realized it was over, that Bruce wasn’t coming to save him.

                “You tell me about Bruce Wayne,” Jason says. He’s having that weird trouble breathing again, and he’s pissed at his stupid, bullshit body for dying in the first place and for fucking itself up now. “Tell me what the fuck you think you know about him.”

                Coulson stares at him for a long second and then settles into his mission prep stance, like shrugging on body armor. “He took you out of a boarding school,” he says. “A school run by a woman who was eventually arrested for neglect, endangerment, and inducing her charges to commit various felonies.”

                Jason snorts. “Yeah,” he says, “sweet woman. Guess I’ve got a history of letting other people tell me who to hurt.”

                “He kept you, as a ward in his home, until your death,” Phil continues. “Congratulations on your recovery.”

                “Thanks,” Jason says. “Clawed my way out of my coffin all by myself.”

                “Yes,” Phil says, “we found the fingernail marks.”

                Jason blinks. There’s something eerie about the tone of Phil’s voice, something that damn near makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Fuck’s sake,” he says, not looking at him, “you dug up my coffin?”

                “We wanted to see whose body he’d put in there,” Phil says. “Murder’s a nice charge. Tends to stick. But we can get him for attempted, if you’ll testify that he put you in the coffin.”

                “Tempting,” Jason says, “but I don’t want him locked up.”

                “You want to kill him?” Phil asks. Jason finally looks up at him, searching, and he can’t read Phil’s face, because there’s not a damn thing to read. “Give us the justification, and we’ll help you do it.”

                “Okay,” Jason says, dropping his bag on the bed, “what the fuck do you think Bruce Wayne did to me?”

                Phil raises his eyebrows, and Jason can read that part, at least. “No,” Jason says, pointing at him. “Fuck you. I’m not giving you any hints. You’ve been keeping secrets for months. It’s your Goddamn turn to talk. Give me your fucking theories, Phil. It’s the least you can do, since you’ve been running around behind my back, digging up my fucking coffin.”

                Phil’s jaw tightens, and he breaks eye-contact to look at the pile of weapons Jason’s left on the bed. “You,” he says, slowly, “are the second of three adolescent boys Bruce Wayne has kept at his home.”

                “Holy shit,” Jason says. He gets it, suddenly, and he wants to laugh, but Phil’s expression is grim, and so, somehow, it’s not funny at all. “You think he was fucking me. Jesus Christ, Couslon. You think Bruce Wayne’s a pedophile.”

                “We don’t have any evidence it’s sexual,” Phil says, words clipped and harsh. “The medical records only indicate physical abuse.”

                “Oh my God,” Jason says. “You think he was fucking me and beating the shit out of me. That’s what’s in your head. That’s what you’ve been thinking for months.” Jason marvels at that for a second before another, significantly less hilarious thought occurs to him. “Oh, for—is that the reason you got all weird when I hit on you? Is that the problem? Goddamn it, Phil, are you kidding me with this shit? We could’ve been fucking the whole time?”

                “Okay,” Phil says, “you want to explain to me why else a wealthy bachelor would take in two consecutive impoverished orphans, keep them until their mid- to late-adolescent years, and then remove them from the house and replace them with other, younger boys?”

                “First of all,” Jason says, “Grayson left on his own. And second of all, don’t talk to me about Tim fucking Drake.”

                “Or,” Phil continues, “why one of boys would grow up to join law enforcement while the other disappears for years and then resurfaces in Europe with a grudge against human traffickers?”

                “Oh, shit, it gets better,” Jason says, awestruck. “You think Bruce faked my death and sold me. Holy fucking shit, Phil, that’s what you think of the guy, and you were just letting him walk around? He’s still alive? You left a kid in his house?”

                Coulson’s face darkens. “Thought you didn’t want to talk about Tim Drake,” he says.

                “Blow me,” Jason says. “Or don’t, because you keep cockblocking yourself with all your bullshit theories.”

                “Drake wouldn’t talk to us,” Coulson says. “Neither would Grayson.”

                Jason stares at him. “Did you—Coulson, did you really corner Dick Grayson and ask if Bruce ever tried to get into his tights?”

                Phil just frowns at him. “Tights?”

                “Nevermind,” Jason says, waving a hand. “But if there’s video of that, I want a copy.”

                “I couldn’t get authorization,” Phil says. “Bruce Wayne’s not some low-level smuggler that no one would miss. I couldn’t get authorization without evidence, and Grayson and Drake wouldn’t talk. So, if you want us to kill him, give us a reason.”

                It would be funny, Jason thinks, to have SHIELD murder Batman. Like something the Joker would set up.  

                “Yeah,” Jason says, “Bruce Wayne’s not a pedophile. And Grayson and I, we were just real accident prone children. Don’t know what’s up with Drake, but he’s a rich kid, so I figure he runs to the ER every time he scrapes a knee.”

                “The last time Tim Drake with to the emergency room,” Phil says, “he got six stitches, in his neck.”

                “Sloppy,” Jason says, rolling his eyes. “Should’ve stitched that up at home. What, were both his hands broken, too?”

                “Why are you protecting him?” Phil says. “Jason, I just watched you run away from Wayne. You don’t even run away when I order you to.”

                “Well, I’m shit at orders, Phil. We both know that.” Jason needs to get out of here. As enlightening as this conversation has been, that rage is still kicking in his chest. Thinking about Bruce never exactly calms him down.

                He doesn’t want to set Phil’s house on fire anymore, but he needs to find a fight, and soon.

                He zips up his bag, grabs some clothes, and starts stripping out of his suit. He figures that’ll send Phil running, but Coulson holds his ground, even if he drops his eyes.  

                “Jason,” he says, “explain it to me.”

                Jason rolls his eyes and tugs a shirt over his head, pulls a sweatshirt on right after. “Oh, sure, like you explained it to me, when you started digging through all my shit? For fuck’s sake, Phil, why didn’t you just ask me?”

                “Fine,” Phil says, biting out the word. “I’m asking. What did Bruce Wayne do to you? Where were you for those years we can’t track? And how the hell do you know Talia al Ghul?”

                Jason buys himself time to think while he pulls on a pair of jeans. The easiest thing to do, he knows, would be to leave without answering. The second easiest would be to lie.

                But, whatever his reasons, Phil Coulson saved him when Bruce didn’t. And Phil let him stay in this house, made him coffee and breakfast, kissed him in the kitchen and went to a bullshit black-tie gala because Jason asked.

                Phil punched Bruce Wayne in the face, for him. Phil sent people to talk to Grayson and Drake to try to scrape up a reason to murder Bruce. And it was all based on bullshit and flawed assumptions, but it still compares pretty favorably to Brue, who didn’t even try to kill the Joker when he knew he was the one who killed Jason.

                “He made me Robin,” Jason says. Hell, he’s done worse things than rat out Bruce Wayne. “He’s Batman. Bruce Wayne is Batman, and I was Robin, until the Joker fucking murdered me. And the reason you can’t find records of me is because I was dead, for a while, and then I got a little better, and then Talia put me in a Lazarus Pit, and I got the rest of the way better. Mostly.”

                “You—what?” Phil blinks, and this is maybe the first time Jason’s ever seen him genuinely nonplussed. “Bruce Wayne is Batman?”

                “Surprise,” Jason says, shouldering his bag. “And I’m gonna kill him. That’s what I’ve gotta do. That’s why I need to leave SHIELD. Because Bruce Wayne is Batman, and I’m gonna fucking kill him.”

                Phil looks like he’s struggling to follow. That’s a new look, too. “Why are you going to kill Batman?”

                Jason grabs his keys, holsters his guns, and starts for the door. “Christ, Coulson. Weren’t you listening? The Joker killed me, and that shithead just used it as an excuse to get an upgrade.”

                “Wouldn’t it make more sense,” Phil says, following him down the stairs, “to kill the Joker?”

                “Oh, trust me, he’s on the list, too.” Jason stops at Phil’s door and turns around to stare at him. Some part of him wishes he were better, wishes he could stay, wishes he’d never gone to that stupid fucking party and let Bruce see him.

                But he didn’t come back to play soldier for SHIELD. He has a purpose, and, however distracting Phil’s been, he’s not going to fall into the same trap as before. He’s not going to waste his life following another hero-type that doesn’t trust him.

                “Batman’s gonna show up here soon,” he says. “He probably already has your name. He’ll be after you, and SHIELD, and he’s gonna be a real fucking asshole about it. But I’ll handle it. Give me a week, maybe two. Then he won’t be a problem.”

                “Jason,” Phil says. He stops, frowns, and then crosses his arms over his chest. “You don’t have to leave.”

                “Yeah,” Jason says, “I do.”

                “You weren’t exactly overflowing with honesty, either,” Phil says, suddenly defensive. “You lied to me twice about who you were. This is SHIELD, Jason. We had to know who we were working with.”

                Jason almost spits in Phil’s face. He thinks about it, weighs it out. But they’re standing in front of one of the cameras, and Jason figures it’s probably a lost cause, but he doesn’t want Hill to know exactly how shitty he really is.

                “Yeah,” he says, instead, “because all I ever was to you was work, right?”

                “Jason,” Phil says, face closing off all over again.

                “I get it, okay?” Jason says. “I’m fucked up. Even more than I used to be. It’s my own fucking fault for thinking it was ever anything else.”

                Phil starts talking, but Jason doesn’t have any time left. He needs out. He needed to be out minutes ago. He shoves the door open, and he’s on his bike and headed up Phil’s street a minute later.

                He looks in the rearview, just once, but Phil’s not there.

Chapter Text

                Jason leaves bodies in Phil’s streets. Five of them. He wants to leave more, but he’s on a tight schedule. Five is barely enough, bleeds out just enough of the rage to let him leash it, but he walks around feeling like he’s got his tongue in a socket. He’s buzzing, bees under his skin, blood in his mouth. He wants to get his fingers under someone’s ribs and pull, wants to crush throats and skulls and fingers.

                He’s glad, even as he’s leaving a mess for Phil to clean up, that he got out of Phil’s house without hurting him.

                Phil Coulson is a liar and a traitor, but he’s still the only man alive who saved him when he needed it.

                “You alright, son?” Someone asks, as Jason drags himself through the streets, stripped down to an undershirt and jeans because he got some idiot’s blood all over him earlier.

                “Mind your Goddamn business,” Jason spits back.

                Bad luck that it’s a cop. He should’ve paid more attention.

                He leaves five bodies in the streets and an unconscious cop halfway up a fire escape in a decent neighborhood, where he’ll probably still have his shoes when he wakes up.

                Fuck it, he thinks, as he finds his way to a train station. One more mess, for old time’s sake. Something to remember me by.

- - -

                Jason spends ten days doing nothing but running. He could call Talia’s people, have them pick him up, let her handle his getaway for him, but he needs space from her, too. It’s possible that she didn’t know Bruce Wayne would be at that party when she invited Jason, but there was no damn way Bruce made it inside without someone tipping her off. She let that happen. She let Bruce see him before he was ready.

                Phil saved him from bleeding to death in Bucharest, and Talia saved him from spending the rest of his life functionally lobotomized, but they both fucked him over, in the end. He needs a few days to get his head right about that.

                He hops freight trains for a while, rattles away from D.C. as just another untraceable piece of unregistered cargo. He guesses, afterward, that he was feeling a bit dramatic.

                He ends up far enough south that people start to talk funny. He hitchhikes for a couple of days, hoping someone will do something shitty, but he runs into a string of people who are nothing but polite, and that just serves to piss him off more.

                He pays cash for a Greyhound up to Chicago, where at least he knows how to find trouble. He spends an evening collecting the corpses of bad men in the back of a florist’s van and then sets the whole thing on fire before he heads out of town. He figures Phil will know that was him, and he hopes, as he heads toward Gotham, that Phil will go looking for him in the wrong city.

- - -

                It’s a strange feeling, being back in Gotham. Not quite a homecoming. He feels restless, and uneasy. The bones of the place haven’t changed, but there’s been some extensive and ill-advised cosmetic surgery. The whole first night, he walks around, exploring old haunts, and he gets an anxious, unsteady feeling in his chest like some unholy mashup of déjà vu and uncanny valley.

                Gotham, he thinks, is not a place meant to sustain life. It sure as hell didn’t sustain his.

                He stays up for forty-eight hours, because he can’t find the edge of his wariness and can’t sleep until he calms down. In the end, he buys a bottle of that whiskey Phil likes, and holes up in an empty, unfurnished apartment for the night. He drinks until he sleeps, and, when he wakes up, the hangover is mean enough to kill the rest of Jason’s unease.

                He moves, which is a pretty straightforward process, given that all he has right now is a duffle bag full of weapons and a stolen sedan. He doesn’t go to any of his old safe houses. He wears clothes that remind him of Grayson. He thinks about bleaching his hair, but, honestly, he doesn’t care enough.

                If Talia, or Phil, or Bruce, or all three together find him, then so fucking be it. If he has to, right now, he could kill all three.

                He keeps quiet. He steals cash and weapons from criminals, but he doesn’t take enough of either to make any real noise. He sleeps during the day, drinks in the evenings, and then, at night, he tracks the new Robin around Gotham.

                Tim Drake is a decent Robin, fast and clever, resourceful. Smarter than Jason was, but shyer about the hits he lands. Jason wants to tell him that mercy is a sucker’s shield, that it’ll shatter to pieces when he needs it most, but he can’t ever figure out if he wants to use words or a bullet to hammer that point home.  

                He goes to watch Nightwing out in Bludhaven for a night, too, but Dick’s harder to fool than baby Drake. He catches his shadow early on in the night, and Jason spends three hours playing a bullshit, high-stakes game of hide-and-seek before he finally manages to ditch Grayson on his way back to Gotham.  

                He doesn’t kill anyone. From the day he hits Gotham, he lets all the rage and violence build up inside him. Last time, when he’d almost killed Bruce, he’d shied away at the last second. He doesn’t want to have any room for shyness in him now.

                He starves himself of it. Goes out at night to watch the worst parts of Gotham, and doesn’t do a Goddamn thing about it.

                Finally, on accident, he sees Bruce again. He’s Batman, so it’s easier to look at him. Jason watches him swoop down on a beating Jason’s been watching, and Batman ends it, quickly and competently, but there’s nothing satisfying in the handcuffs he clicks around those criminals’ wrists. It’s build-up and then freefall. Jason realizes that he’s maybe pushed himself a little too far.

                Batman steps away, probably to contact GCPD, and Jason pulls his guns.

                Three bullets, three headshots, and the men Batman put in handcuffs are lying sprawled on the concrete, heads haloed with blood. It’s beautiful.

                Bruce, of course, has no Goddamn appreciation for art when he sees it.

                He chases Jason halfway across Gotham, and Jason’s trying to talk himself out of having the confrontation now, trying to remind himself that he needs a plan, when the Bat-signal flickers on. When he looks back over his shoulder, Batman’s gone.

                Can always count on Bruce to save people, Jason thinks, as long as he doesn’t know them.

- - -

                Talia finds him on his sixth day in Gotham. He wakes up when she steps into his motel room, and he rolls over immediately, aiming a gun right at her face. He doesn’t lower it until she finally bothers to put on an expression of vague contrition.

                “I didn’t know he would be there,” she says, as she shuts the door behind her.

                “Sure,” Jason says. “And did you come alone, or do you ‘not know’ that he tailed you here?”

                “He doesn’t know I’m here.” She looks around, mouth skewed up in an unimpressed little sneer, and he can’t blame her. He’d had to explain to the desk clerk, twice, that he wanted the room for the night, not the hour.

                He sets the gun down on the nightstand and rubs at his eyes. “What do you want, Talia?”

                “What do you want, Jason?” Talia approaches the chair in the corner like she intends to sit in it, but she veers away after getting a better look at the rust-colored stains on the upholstery. She tugs the curtains back and blinks at the bars on the window.

                “What else is there?” Jason says, gesturing around him. “Lap of luxury, Talia. I’m living the dream.”

                Talia turns back to face him, arms crossed over her chest. “You can afford better hotels, Jason. You haven’t touched any of the money I put in your accounts.” She gives him a dark, considering look. “Are you punishing yourself?”

                “Christ,” Jason says, flopping back onto the bed. “You fucking rich people. This isn’t punishment, Talia. There’s a free breakfast and everything.”

                “You can’t honestly intend to eat anything that comes out of that kitchen.” Talia looks legitimately alarmed by the prospect. “Jason, they only thing they process in that kitchen is human remains. And drugs.”

                “Good,” Jason says, “I like a little protein with my morning oxy.”

                Talia narrows her eyes at him, and Jason looks away. He hates seeing disappointment on her face. “Jason,” she says, “are you here to kill Bruce?”

                “Yeah,” he says, with a shrug. “That’s the plan.” Although, if he’s honest, it’s more of a general inclination than an actual plan.

                “Then why is he still alive?”

                Jason rolls his eyes at her. “For fuck’s sake, Talia. You can’t just--”

                “I don’t understand you, Jason.” Talia gestures around her, like this shitty motel is somehow indicative of Jason as a person, which Jason finds pretty damn offensive. “You spend years training to kill the man, and then you work for SHIELD for months, without telling me, and then you disappear from D.C. and surface back in Gotham, and Bruce Wayne is still alive. What are you doing? What is your plan? What are you trying to accomplish?”

                Jason rubs at his face, digs his thumbs deep into the bruises he’s developed under his eyes. He’s exhausted. He feels like the last decent rest he got was at Phil’s place, the night before the party. “Goddamn it, Talia,” he says, “I’m figuring it out, okay?”

                “Figure it out faster, Jason.” Talia stalks across the room, and Jason pulls back when she gets within reach. It’s not quite a flinch, but it’s closer than he’d like to admit and, apparently, closer than she appreciates. “Jason,” she says. “It’s me.”

                “I know who you fucking are, Talia.” Jason gestures at the gun on the nightstand. “You’ll notice, you walked in on me, asleep, and you didn’t get shot in the head. Big fucking clue that I know who you are.”

                “Then why are you acting like I’m a stranger?” He hates the look on her face, hates that he put it there, hates that he can’t shake the idea that she deserves it, that he deserves it. “I pulled you out of the Pit,” she tells him. “I brought you back.”

                “Yeah,” he says, “and who fucking asked you to do that? Who fucking asked for that, Talia? You think you did me some Goddamn favor? You didn’t do me, or Bruce, or anyone any favors by bringing me back. You should’ve left me as I was.”

                “Jason,” she says, and her hands move, toward his face, like she wants to touch him but isn’t sure how. “You don’t mean that.”

                “I know you’re in the family business of dragging life out way past its sell-by date,” he says, dodging away from her hands, “but some of us have done our fucking time, Talia. Some of us don’t need round two of this bullshit. Some of us are better off in the ground.”

                “Jason,” she says, sharper, and, this time, she moves too fast for him to dodge. She gets a hand in his hair, fingers curling around the back of his head, and she tugs him forward, pulls him against her. “Stop it,” she says. “Stop it.”

                She’s warm and steady, smaller than he remembers. It’s strange, being this close to her. She’s never been physically affectionate with him in the past. He’s only ever seen her be physically affectionate with people she’s trying to control, and he wonders what she wants from him.

                He should pull away. He should put space between them. He doesn’t want this from her. Everything Talia does has some kind of price, is some kind of manipulation, and, even when she’s trying to be benevolent, she has a bad habit of ripping people apart so she can piece them back together in a configuration she finds more pleasing.

                But it’s hard to pull away. Some part of him wants to stay close, wants her to keep him, contain him, weld all the broken, jagged edges of him back into something useful. He spent so long letting her pick his teachers, set his next direction. It would be easy to let her take over again.

                “Forget Bruce Wayne,” Talia says. Her tone is soft and serious, not sweet or kind, but not angry. Pleasant. “If you wanted to kill him, you would have done it by now. You’re just torturing yourself, staying close to him. Let him go.”

                “Talia,” Jason says, stirring, trying to pull away. He doesn’t put much strength behind it. When her hand tightens in his hair, he stops fighting, lets her pull him close all over again.

                “You’ll come work for me,” she tells him. Her fingers run through his hair, and it’s nice, soothing, but doesn’t feel right. Feels like bait, maybe. Or a lie. “You’ll come work for me, like you worked for SHIELD. You enjoyed that work, didn’t you?”

                “Parts of it,” Jason says. He’s thinking about Phil. Of course he is. Hell, he’s been away from Phil for sixteen days, and he’s thought about him for the majority of every single one of them.

                “Phil Coulson is a good man,” Talia says, and Jason tries to pull away again, gets farther than last time, but Talia’s strong, and Jason doesn’t want to hurt her. “You could go back to him,” she says.

                “No,” Jason says. It comes out perfectly even. He makes sure. “I can’t go back.” The second half comes out less even. It comes out like he has to fight his way through it, and he knows better than to show any kind of vulnerability in front of Talia, but he can’t keep this one buried deep enough, not when it’s still so raw.

                Talia goes still and then finally pulls back. She stares, hard, at his face, and Jason breathes in slow and careful, keeps his eyes on her shoulders, hopes that’ll be enough. “Jason,” Talia says, lifting his head with a hand under his chin. “What did he do?”

                “Nothing,” Jason says. “Not a Goddamn thing. It’s fine, Talia. Drop it.”

                “Hm,” she says. Her eyes narrow, and Jason would be charmed by the anger in her eyes if he wasn’t so damn worried about the consequences of it. “If you’d like,” she says, “I can make sure he never does nothing again.”

                Jason stands up. Talia pulls back, watching him carefully, and Jason grabs the gun off the nightstand and then his duffle bag off the floor. “I’m going after Bruce Wayne,” Jason tells her. “Phil Coulson didn’t do a Goddamn thing to me. So if you wanna do anything for me, Talia, just stay out of my way, and let me work.”

                “And what will you do after?” Talia says, as Jason shoves his feet into his boots. “What will you do after you’ve killed Bruce?”

                “Oh, I don’t know, Talia.” Jason doesn’t bother tying his boots or hiding his gun. This place has absolutely seen worse. “Maybe I’ll go kill the Joker.”

                “Maybe you should start with that,” Talia says, following him out into the hallway, “and then see how you feel about Batman.”

                “Maybe I’ll just kill them both at the same time,” Jason counters. The desk clerk looks up curiously at that and rolls his eyes at the gun in Jason’s hand. Jason gives him a nod, for his sheer disaffected pluck. “See you around, Talia.”

                Talia watches him go, arms crossed and mouth pressed into a thin frown, and it’s not until Jason’s feet hit the pavement outside that the genius of it hits him.

                Both of them, he thinks. At the same time.

                Or maybe, if he’s really, really lucky, he can get Bruce to kill the Joker first.

- - -

                He calls because Phil Coulson is a good man. He doesn’t call because he missed his voice, but it is, he’ll admit, nice to hear it.

                “Jason?” Phil’s voice is muffled, like, wherever he is, he’s not supposed to be taking calls. “Jason, is that you?”

                “Hey, Phil,” Jason says, “SHIELD’s unemployment checks haven’t been coming through. What the fuck is up with that?”

                Phil sighs into the phone. It hits, sharp, in Jason’s stomach. He wants to be there; he wants to see Phil’s face. He wants to see the way Phil closes his eyes before he rolls them, like that somehow negates the whole thing. He wants to watch Phil struggle not to smile.

                “I’ve been worried about you,” Phil says. “You left quite a mess.”

                “Just five bodies,” Jason says.

                “In D.C., yes,” Phil agrees, “but then there was Chicago. And Gotham.”

                “Gotham?” It was a mistake, Jason knows, to call Phil. But he had to. He didn’t want to think about the consequences of not calling. He’s not Bruce, and he’s not Talia or Phil, either. He’s not careless with the people he cares about. “Who says I’m in Gotham?”

                “Oh, three dead men, and a few witnesses who saw Batman tearing across the city after the masked man responsible.”

                Jason laughs, although he’s not really sure that any of this is funny. “Phil,” he says, “you gotta stop chasing me.”

                There’s a short, heavy pause. “Who says I’m chasing you?”

                Jason rolls his eyes. “Okay,” he says, “where the hell are you right now?”

                Coulson sighs, again. “Jason…”

                “Are you in Gotham, Phil?” Jason looks around, like Phil’s going to step out of the alley right in front of him. “Are you?”

                “No,” Phil says.

                Jason’s not sure what answer he was expecting, and he sure as hell doesn’t know why that one stings so much.

                “That’s good,” Jason says. It doesn’t feel good. It feels wrong, somehow. “Stay away. The League of Shadows might want you dead.”

                “Sending your friends after me, Jason?” Phil sounds tired. He’s still murmuring into the phone. In the background, Jason can make out the sound of other people talking.

                “Fuck off, Coulson,” Jason says. “You’re not that special. They just don’t like loose ends.”

                “Well,” Phil says, “I appreciate the warning. Thank you.”

                Jason swallows and stares at the skyline. He listens to the background chatter, trying to work out if that’s Hill voice or not, and then he hears Phil take a breath, like he’s about to speak, and Jason talks right over him. “Just be careful,” he says. “Maybe go to Europe for a while.”

                “Europe?” Phil repeats it a little distantly, and Jason’s not sure if that’s because he isn’t paying attention or because he’s really not sure what to make of the suggestion.

                “Or anywhere,” Jason says. “Go anywhere that isn’t around here, because I’m about to do something that’s maybe a little stupid. Not sure what’s gonna happen afterward, but the response might be kinda dramatic.”

                There’s another long silence. “Jason,” Phil says, slowly, “come back. Whatever you think you need to do, we’ll help you. Come back, and we’ll fix this.”

                Jason laughs. “Christ, Phil, there’s no fixing me.”

                “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Phil says, loud for a second before his voice drops soft again. “Don’t do this. You’re getting a second chance, Jason. Don’t waste it on the same mistakes you made last time.”

                Jason closes his eyes. When he opens them, all he sees is the sprawling, toxic rot of Gotham, spread out in front of him, and the Bat-signal, lighting up the underside of a low cloud.

                “Don’t worry, Phil,” he says, as cheerfully as he can. “I’m gonna make all new ones.”

                “Jason,” Phil says, loud again, “don’t--”

                Jason ends the call and takes the phone apart, breaks all the important parts to pieces and throws them into the first storm drain he passes. He doesn’t regret making the call. It was important to warn Coulson.

                And it was good, he thinks, to end things that way. Better than the shitty fight at Phil’s house, anyway.

                No matter how things go, Jason knows he can’t call Coulson again. Because Coulson’s right. He can’t make the same mistakes all over again.

Chapter Text

                Gotham didn’t go to hell in his absence; it’s always been some kind of hell. But it damn sure didn’t grow into anything better. Jason can’t find much to keep him occupied, so he moves around the edges of Bruce’s world, setting a few wrong things right.

                Not that Bruce will ever appreciate what he does, or how he does it. But that’s always been the difference between them.

                Bruce sees dead dealers and pimps and killers, and he sees a tragedy, another litter of Gotham’s children he failed to save.

                Jason sees dead monsters in the streets, and he sees hope. He sees safety, bought with blood and policed with the threat of more of it. And maybe it’s sad, in its way, that these men were once children who could have been salvaged, but Jason isn’t going to put whatever guilt he might someday feel over the actual lives of other people.

                It doesn’t matter how he feels about it. It needs to be done.

                It’s just a bonus, really, that it feels good.

                Killing in Bruce’s city sets the whole Goddamn place against him. GCPD is after him, and so is Batman. That little Robin keeps turning up in his peripheral vision, and it’s harder, every time, to shake him. Dick Grayson starts regularly surfacing in Gotham, dressed up as Nightwing, and Jason knows he’s being hunted.

                It’s an unnatural thing for Jason, running away. But there’s a plan forming in his head, and he buys himself time, waits for it to settle into something he can actualize.

                It was easier to manage this step of the process when he had Phil around to handle the details. But he doesn’t have Phil. He doesn’t have SHIELD. He can’t go to Talia.

                He’s alone. That’s fine. Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead, he thinks. If he works alone, there won’t be anyone around to betray or fail him.

                Jason visits his grave, on a whim, and notices the dirt has been disturbed. He doesn’t know if that fresh dirt was from Phil’s digging, or if Bruce has been by to investigate. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing down there anyway.

                He told Talia, once, that he didn’t remember the time between dying and being pulled out the Lazarus Pit. He still doesn’t know if she knew he was lying.

                He walks away from his grave, and he doesn’t think about digging his way out in the rain. He doesn’t think about the pure animal terror, the brainstem-deep fear of running out of air in the coffin or drowning in mud on the way up. The disorienting, despairing feeling of being brought back into a world, all alone.

                He doesn’t think about it, but his fingers ache afterward. Phantom pain, he figures, for his phantom life.

                He isn’t supposed to be here.

                In this graveyard, in this city, in this time.             

                He has work to do. He focuses on finishing it.

                He doesn’t know what he’ll do, after.

- - -

                It’s a difficult task, acquiring the Joker. Jason spends three months on it. He funds the process by wrecking Gotham’s current reigning crime lord and grabbing as much cash as he can. The power vacuum means practically all of Gotham’s underbelly is suddenly squabbling for leverage, building allegiances when it’s profitable and tearing each other apart when it isn’t, and that keeps Bruce busy, trying to avoid an all-out war.

                If Bruce had a stronger stomach, he’d just take the whole thing in hand. If Jason had more time, he’d do it himself. But he has other priorities.

                He cannot find the Joker. He kills his way through a half-dozen of his followers, but none of them know where he is. No one’s seen him for weeks.

                He can’t find the Joker, but he does, while searching, find someone who’s willing to sell him the Joker. And that is exactly the kind of bullshit theatrics he’s been trying to avoid.

                “Just give me his location,” Jason says, into the phone. “Don’t get killed trying to grab him. That’d be real fucking inconvenient for me, as you’re the only person who seems to know where the hell he is.”

                “I already have him,” the woman says. She sounds, as usual, completely unimpressed with him. “So, if you want him, pay me what I’m asking for, or fuck off.”

                “It is really, really not about the money.” Although, to be fair, it is a frankly fucking ridiculous amount of cash. But Jason doesn’t have much use for money, and, between the money he stole from the deposed crime lord and the money Talia keeps pouring into his accounts, he’s got enough to cover any finder’s fee, even one this steep.

                “Why are you so against this?” She asks, and it sounds like she might actually be smacking her gum on the other side of the line. “You get off on the hunt or something? Look, I can set him loose if that’s what you’re into, but I’ll charge you double just for being a picky asshole about it.”

                “Fine,” Jason says. Some part of him wants to introduce her to Talia, but he hasn’t spoken to Talia since she tracked him to that shitty motel, and he’s not sure if she’d appreciate Jason trying to set her up with some shady woman crazy enough to kidnap the Joker and ransom him off to the highest bidder. “Where do we meet?”

                “Blüdhaven,” she says, immediately. “I’m not taking this lunatic to Gotham, and Nightwing’s been kinda sporadic lately.”

                “Yeah,” Jason says, rolling his eyes skyward like Dick will make a sudden appearance, flipping from one gargoyle to another. “So I’ve heard.”

- - -

                When he goes to meet the seller, he brings a crowbar, strapped across his back. It’s a simple, elegant solution, but he doesn’t plan to use it. He has more complicated plans.

                He wants to bring the Joker back to Gotham and make Bruce choose. He wants to see who Bruce will pick, in the end, him or the Joker. It is, on the face of it, an easy choice, but he can’t shake the thought that it will end with him bleeding out all over again to the sound of the Joker’s manic laughter.

                If Bruce can’t make the easy choice after he put Jason’s body in the ground, Jason’s not sure why the hell he’s holding out hope that Bruce will find his way to it with Jason living and breathing in front of him.

                Still, he brings the crowbar. The plan is beautiful, but Jason can see how there might be a fair bit of beauty in splattering the Joker’s brains all over the shitty, stained concrete in some leftover warehouse, too.  

                Nothing dramatic, or loud. Not the kind of spectacle anyone will ever remember or even know about. Just over. Just done. Just a bit of evil, bled out of the world.

                As he crouches on the roof of a neighboring building, the crowbar is a comforting weight against his back. He watches the warehouse for six hours before their assigned meeting time, and very little happens. The pairs of bulky men at every ground floor entrance are eventually replaced by nearly identical copies, and, at about the three-hour mark, a muscular blonde woman wanders out onto the rooftop of the warehouse to smoke.  

                She looks Jason’s direction, but, if she seems him, she doesn’t bother to indicate it. After about fifteen minutes, she goes back inside.

                It is probably a setup. Jason doesn’t mind. Frankly, he’d be a little insulted if they didn’t try to steal his money.

                He goes in through the rooftop entrance. He gets five silent steps down the stairway before the woman appears at the bottom, looking irritated.

                “Plenty of lovely doors on the ground,” she tells him. “But I heard you liked to be dramatic.”

                “Oh, yeah?” Jason says, politely keeping his gun aimed at her ankles instead of her heart. “You been gossiping to people about me? Gonna ask me to prom after this?”

                She rolls her eyes at him and jerks her chin over her shoulder. “He’s this way,” she says. “Come on.” She turns her back on him, leaving herself vulnerable to any number of deaths, and strolls deeper into the warehouse.

                Jason is baffled as hell as to how this woman grabbed the Joker, but he figures, if he had the answer to that, he’d probably know why she didn’t seem to view him as a threat.

                He holsters his gun and follows her, but he keeps the safety off and his free hand close to one of his knives.

                The warehouse is empty and quiet. For most of the walk, Jason wonders if every single one of her people is outside, watching an entrance. But then, as they get close to a closed office door at the end of a long hallway, he hears a low male voice and then, sudden and mean as a kick to the teeth, the bright, skittering, bell-ringing mess of the Joker’s laugh.

                “Have plans for that?” The woman’s voice is sharp, and Jason realizes that he’s pulled a knife.

                “Maybe,” he says. He flips the knife up and catches it. She makes a face like she thinks he’s showing off, but he’s checking in, figuring out exactly how fucked up his nerves are. His heart feels like it’s imploding in his chest, crinkling up smaller and smaller, but his hands are steady; the knife flies in a neat, clean arc and settles easily back into his hand. “Is it a problem if I make a mess here?”

                She considers him, silent and focused. Her gaze is oddly intent. Jason goes still under the weight of it, tipping his head as he tries to get a read on the intensity in her eyes. “That depends,” she says, finally, “on what kind of mess you make.”

                “The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Jason says, shifting his grip on the knife.

                She shakes her head and steps forward, stopping directly in front of him. Her posture is threatening, but her hands stay clear of her sides and sleeves. “Don’t fuck this up.”

                “Lady,” he says, “I fuck everything up.”

                She narrows her eyes at him. “Be better,” she advises, unhelpfully. There’s another tense moment and then, suddenly, she points over her shoulder, toward the door. “He’s in there. Good luck.”

                Jason means to watch her walk away, to make sure she doesn’t shoot him in the back, but the Joker laughs again, and he can’t look at anything except the door between them. The laugh cuts off with the familiar dull thawk of someone getting punched in the face, and Jason furrows his brow.

                Like hell is he going to stand here and listen while someone else gets to beat up the Joker. Like hell. He doesn’t care if it’s a trap. He’ll fight his way out of it, if he has to. But the Joker is his.

                He steps forward, knife in hand, and yanks the doorknob, pulling the door open hard and fast enough to slam it against the wall.

                The Joker’s inside, chained to a chair that has been bolted into the floor. He looks up at Jason, blinks unsteady eyes, and then bursts into a new fit of laughter that flecks the blood from his split lip across the front of his stained shirt. His hair – still that stupid, hideous green – hangs in unwashed hunks around his face.

                He twists his hands in the cuffs around his wrists, and he laughs, louder and louder. “A party!” He crows. “Three makes a party.”

                Phil Coulson is behind the Joker, wiping blood off his knuckles. “Hello, Jason,” he says. Like it’s nothing. Like Jason just wandered into Phil’s kitchen after a night beating up muggers in D.C.’s shittier neighborhoods.

                “What the fuck is this?” Jason says, looking between Phil and the Joker. “What the hell are you doing here?”

                “This is what you want, right?” Phil nods at the Joker. His shoulders are a tight, tense line. “You’ve been looking for him for months.”

                “Sure,” Jason says. “Because he was missing. Did SHIELD have him the whole time?”

                Phil considers him. He hesitates, lips parted like he’s on the verge of speaking, but the Joker starts talking first. “Wait, wait, wait a minute,” he says, head swiveled Jason’s direction, “you sound familiar. Scream for me a little bit? Let’s see if I can place it.”

                Jason catches his breath and tightens his hand around the handle of the knife. “Keep your mouth shut,” he advises, “or I’ll sew it that way.”

                “Hm, definitely familiar,” the Joker says, leaning back. “But you’re older now, aren’t you? Must’ve been awhile. Must’ve been years. Take off that mask, c’mon. Don’t be shy. Let me see you.”

                “I can drug him.” Phil points to a zippered kit on a cluttered table. He looks tired. Drained. He looks like a man who’s been waiting for hours, alone in a room with the Joker. “A full dose will knock him out. Make him quiet, easy to transport.”

                “Oh, I hate that stuff.” The Joker pouts, mouth screwed up like an angry toddler. “He never gives me anything fun.”

                “Phil,” Jason says. “What is this?”

                “Did I ruin your face?” The Joker asks, thoughtfully. “Is that why you’re wearing that mask? Take it off. Come on. I want to see what I did.”

                “Okay,” Phil says. His voice sounds like the very end of his patience, snapping, and it’s a little disorienting to realize that, after all the shit Jason pulled while he worked for SHIELD, he never met the end of Coulson’s patience.

                Phil zips open the kit, grabs one of the prefilled syringes, and flicks off the needle cover.

                “You can’t kick me out of the party. I am the party.” The Joker flails, to the extent that he can, while Phil makes his way over. “I want to see his face!”

                Phil curls his free hand around the Joker’s neck, pulls him back against the chair to keep him still, and stabs the needle into the Joker’s upper arm. Jason watches, eyebrows up, as Phil empties out at least a quarter of the dose.

                The Joker yells and writhes for a solid thirty second and then slowly, sullenly slumps into unconsciousness.

                “You know, Phil,” Jason muses, “if you hate the guy so much, you could’ve just let me find him.”

                “You weren’t thinking right.” Phil turns his back on Jason and fusses with the used syringe for a moment before tossing it, needle covered, onto the table.

                “You worried about me getting a little rough?” Jason says, crossing his arms over his chest.

                Phil turns to stare at him, an incredulous look on his face. “No,” he says, “I was worried you’d get yourself killed. Again.”

                Jason blinks. “Why the hell would you care? I’m not your problem anymore.”

                Phil sighs and reaches up to run a hand through his hair. “Jason,” he says, “you were never a problem.”

                “Oh, like hell,” Jason says. “Phil, remember when I shot those Russians and then tried to jump you on the plane ride back? Remember when I went AWOL and got beat to death? When I left medical and broke into your damn house? Or how about when we went to a nice party, and I tried to jump off a Goddamn balcony to get away from Batman? Phil, I am all problems. I am a shitshow. I am--”

                “Jason,” Phil says, loud enough that it cuts Jason off mid-sentence. He stares at him for a second and then shakes his head. “Will you take that mask off?”

                “Why the hell should I, Phil? You finally want that blowjob? Because, I gotta say, your timing’s pretty shitty, but I guess a table’s as good as a desk, and it’s not like my schedule--”

                “Jason.” Phil holds his hands up to stop him. “Take the mask off.”

                Jason heaves a heavy, aggrieved sigh. He thinks about refusing. It’ll be easier, in the long run, if he leaves it on. He knows that. He knows that looking Phil in the face – and letting Phil look at him – will only make this harder.

                He does it anyway. Fuck it. It’s not like Jason’s ever done a single damn thing the easy way.

                He puts the knife away and takes his helmet off, tucking it under one arm. “Happy?” He asks, glaring across the room.

                “You’re not sleeping,” Phil says, eyes roaming over Jason’s face with a focus that makes Jason want to put the damn mask right back on. “Jason, you look like hell.”

                “Wow,” Jason says. “Offer rescinded. You can suck your own dick.”

                Phil tightens his jaw. His hands twist up at his sides, like he wants to reach out for Jason but is holding himself back. Jason wishes, with a stab of anger twisted with regret, that Phil Coulson didn’t have such exceptional self-control.

                “So, what the hell is this, Phil?” Jason says, gesturing at the Joker. “A trap? To lure me here, and do what?”

                Phil’s eyes close for a second. “You think this was a trap? You think you’re—what? Under arrest?”

                “You’re the one who told me I made a mess in D.C., and Chicago, and Gotham,” Jason says. “You tell me what the hell this is.”

                Phil shakes his head. “No, Jason,” he says, “you are not under arrest.”

                “Then what the hell are you doing here? With him? What is this? You think I’m just gonna let SHIELD keep him?” Jason straightens up, tries to look mean enough that he won’t have to act any meaner than he already has. “You think I won’t fight you to take him, Phil? You’re a smart guy. Don’t make that kind of stupid mistake.”

                “If I didn’t want you to have him,” Phil says, “you wouldn’t be here. Don’t threaten me, Jason. I understand that you’re angry, but we’re a little beyond that.”

                “Goddamn it, Coulson.” Jason damn near pitches his mask right at Phil’s face. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

                “We took the Joker,” Phil says, in his measured, serene, pre-mission voice, “because Fury decided there was a significant risk of you being killed in the process of trying to apprehend him yourself. Fury decided that because I told him there would be, and I told him that because--”

                “Fuck you, Phil,” Jason says, “I’m not same fainting fucking flower. I could’ve gotten him. I could’ve--”

                “I told him that,” Phil interrupts, “because you told me that the Joker killed you. And it’s possible I took that a little personally.”

                “What,” Jason repeats. “You what.”

                “You’re my agent, Jason,” Phil says and then shakes his head and smiles, sharp and a little bitter. “Well, you were. And I messed that up. I’m sorry. But you were never cleared for field duty, so I wasn’t going to let you die trying to do something that I drove you to. I wasn’t going to let him kill you again.”

                Jason blinks. His eyes drop to the Joker, who’s still slumped over, unconscious. It’s hard to look at him. Jason’s brain keeps throwing old memories at him, the laughter, and the blood, and the whistle of a crowbar swinging through the air.

                “I’ve gotta take him.” There’s a piece of him that doesn’t want to. He’s not sure what it means, but some part of him wants to leave the Joker here and follow Coulson out, out of this warehouse and this town, back to D.C. where Phil will make dinner, and Jason will do the dishes, and Sheryl will judge them over the well-manicured hedges that ring her front porch. “I have to. I’ve gotta take him back to Gotham, and then I have to kill Bruce Wayne.”

                Phil stares at him for a long moment. If he asks me, Jason thinks, I’ll do it. Whatever it is, whatever he asks.

                It feels like there’s a pit at his feet, and he’s waiting for a push.

                He’s hopeless. He’s such a fucking idiot. He’ll follow anyone right into hell, as long as they don’t leave him there alone.

                “If that’s what you have to do,” Phil says, “fine. I’m not going to stop you. But I wish like hell that you wouldn’t. You were made for better, Jason.”

                Jason remembers what it’s like, when some hero-type looks at him and wants him to be better. He remembers exactly how that works out.

                Except it already had. He’d already bled out on Coulson’s watch, and Coulson came back for him, put all that blood back in him. Coulson came back for him. Coulson never left him. Not until Jason left first. And, even then, it seems like he’s found a way back to him.

                “Is this what you were talking about when you said you weren’t chasing me? Is this what you were doing? Cuz honestly, Phil, getting out ahead of me is kind of a non-traditional way to do it, but I think it probably still qualifies as chasing me.”

                Phil shrugs. “Jason,” he says, sounding tired, “you’re too smart to be surprised by this. I tried to kill Bruce Wayne for you. Batman. And, if that’s still something you need to do, I’ll help you do it. Just don’t let this be an ending. You’re too good to waste like this. Come back to work.”

                “Work,” Jason repeats. “That’s what this is about.” He spits it out, because he hates the idea, wants to fight about it, and because he’s unprepared, fundamentally, for it to be about anything else.

                “Fine,” Phil says, with another, smaller shrug. “Forget SHIELD. Just come back to me.”

                Jason’s breath catches in his chest for a second, and he looks down at the Joker to get himself grounded. This isn’t for you, he tells himself. You fuck up everything you touch. Let it go. Let him go.

                “I’ve gotta do this,” Jason says. He has to. Even if his new life has some kind of pull on him, even if he wants to walk out of this room and back into the life he had months ago, his old life meant something, too. That stupid, naive, idiot kid who died, wearing a Robin suit and trying to be a hero, deserves some kind of justice. And if Bruce won’t do it, Jason has to do it himself.

                “He killed me, Coulson,” Jason says, still looking at the Joker. “He killed me, and Bruce didn’t do a Goddamn thing about it. He just replaced me.”

                “So stop wasting your time on Bruce Wayne.” Phil’s voice is low and urgent, insistent. It takes a second for the words to hit.

                Jason blinks and looks up, and Phil’s face is cracked open with something Jason doesn’t know what to do with, has never seen before. “He didn’t look out you,” Phil says. “He wasted your life. For fuck’s sake, Jason, don’t give him another one. He doesn’t deserve it. Forget him.”

                Ever since he came out of the Pit and realized that Bruce had just shuffled another, younger Robin in to fill his place, Jason’s been orbiting around Bruce Wayne, waiting for the right chance to get even. The Pit never minded that kind of mission; vengeance and anger feed on each other just fine. But vengeance has an ending, and the Pit’s rage doesn’t have an answer for what comes after.

                Jason’s let that rage lead him around from the moment he came out of the Pit. For years, that rage was all he had, all that he could find in the roaring echo chamber of his head. Talia did her best to contain him, but Phil was the first person who found something other than rage and hate. Phil, who didn’t flinch away from the violence in Jason the way Bruce did or try to quarantine it the way Talia did, but used it and directed it, let Jason do good in the only way he’s ever known how.

                It’s like being split in two, being wrenched in two entirely different directions. He’s a wishbone, snapping. He doesn’t know which way he’ll go. Doesn’t know which way he wants to go.

                It’s hard to imagine walking away from Gotham, from Bruce, from all of it. He’d dedicated his whole life to that City, that man.

                But that life had ended.

                What the hell does he owe Bruce? Bruce never avenged him. Bruce didn’t do a Goddamn thing about him. So why should he do anything about Bruce?

                Jason loved Bruce Wayne in the last life, and he hates him in this one, but, either way, it doesn’t seem to matter. How Jason feels, it never seems to have an impact on Bruce at all.

                Jason shifts on his feet. The Joker, sitting in his chair between them, is starting to stir. He twitches, like a dog chasing dream rabbits, and Jason almost flinches.

                He can, maybe, live in a world with Bruce Wayne, if he never has to see him again. But he can’t live on this planet with the Joker.

                Slowly, Jason sets his mask on the table and draws his gun. Coulson watches him, silent.

                “I’ve gotta do this,” Jason says, eyes on the Joker. “I have to kill him.”

                “I know you do.”

                Jason’s eyes dart Phil’s direction, and Phil’s just standing there, posture relaxed, eyes on Jason. He doesn’t look upset that Jason’s about to murder a man in front of him. He looks calm, and accepting, and there’s a tilt in his chin and a light in his eyes that looks almost like a benediction, like some kind of pride.

                “Jason,” Phil says, “he’s a murderer, and a terrorist. He killed you. If you don’t shoot him, I will.”

                Jason’s staring at Phil, so he doesn’t notice when the Joker lifts his head, but he hears it when the laughter starts up, throaty and rattling, faint.

                “Oh,” the Joker says, “oh, I know you. Didn’t I kill you? Lost little Robin? Fell out of the nest, looking for his mommy?”

                Jason looks at him. He could shoot him. He should shoot him. But he’s transfixed, for a moment. Caught up in a memory of being on the ground, arms above his head, trying to stop the hits that kept landing, breaking him apart.

                “I talk to Batsy about that, sometimes,” the Joker says. He grins, wide and manic. Sick. Dangerous, and infectious, and wrong. Beyond saving. “He never wants to talk about you. Does he know you’re still alive? Does he care?”

                Does he care, Jason thinks.

                It’s not that Bruce Wayne let him die. That’s not why Jason hates him. Jason signed up for that, when he first followed Batman into a fight. He hates him because he didn’t get even afterwards. He let Jason’s killer walk around, for years, breathing air while Jason rotted.

                “Phil,” Jason says, a little soft. He clears his throat. “You want me back? Kill him for me.”

                The Joker starts laughing again. “Oh, all you Bats,” he says. “I love you, I do. Never can quite get it up. Always--”

                Behind him, Phil Coulson draws his gun, thumbs off the safety, and fires twice. The bullets blast through the back of the Joker’s skull and punch through his face, painting the floor in front of him with his blood and brains. He twitches, heaves, nerves firing, and then slumps, dead, against the restrains.

                “Holy fuck,” Jason says, staring.

                “I hope you meant that,” Phil says, holstering his gun. “Because we can’t kill him twice.”

                “You just shot the Joker,” Jason says, still staring. “For me.”

                “Jason,” Phil says, his voice all twisted up and tense, “I’ve been trying to tell you. I’d kill anyone who hurt you.”

                Jason stands there for a beat, then another, and then he takes in a breath, his first in a world with no Joker. He feels like his feet catch on stable ground for the first time since he saw Bruce Wayne across a crowded room. Maybe since the Pit spat him back into the world. Maybe longer than that.

                When he looks up, Phil’s entirely too far away from him.

                It’s a little unclear to him, how he gets halfway across the room so quickly, or how his free hand ends up fisted in the front of Phil’s shirt, but Phil’s mouth is on his the second after, so he doesn’t have time to worry about it.

                “Fuck,” Jason says, right into Phil’s mouth. “You killed the Joker.”

                “Yeah,” Phil says. He takes the gun out of Jason’s hand, still kissing him, and sets it on the table. “You coming back to work?” 

                “Sure,” Jason says. He cranes his neck to check the table, see if he can sweep enough of the clutter onto the floor to clear a space, and Phil takes that as an open invitation to start planting a line of open-mouthed kisses down Jason’s throat. “Shit,” Jason says, eyes slipping closed. “I’m going wherever you are.”

                Phil’s hands wrap suddenly around Jason’s waist, tight enough that Jason can feel it even through the body armor. “Good,” Phil says, voice a little lower than Jason’s ever heard it.

                Jason threads his fingers through the hair at the back of Phil’s head, tugs his head back up so he can kiss him, and Phil pushes him against the table, kisses him like he’s about a half second away from biting him.

                “SHIELD have any cameras in here?” Jason asks, when he comes up to breathe. Phil pulls back, collar mussed, lips wet, and Jason shakes his head. “Fuck it,” he says, earnestly. “Don’t care. Get back here.”

                Phil clears his throat, eyes dropping briefly to Jason’s mouth before he very deliberately looks away and takes a step back. “Jason,” he says, “there’s a dead body in here.”

                “Oh, come on, Phil. It’s not like he cares. He’s dead.” Phil shoots him a disbelieving look, and Jason rolls his eyes. “I’m not asking you to fuck me over his dead body or anything. I’ll put my jacket over his face if it bothers you.”

                “My God,” Phil says. He runs a hand down his face.

                “Listen,” Jason says, seriously. “Don’t fucking execute people for me if you expect me to behave afterward. What the hell, Coulson. That was the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

                “Come on,” Phil says. He nods toward the door. “Let’s go home.”

                “Can we?” It’s been months since Phil punched Bruce at the gala. There’s no way Bruce hasn’t tracked Phil down to his nice suburban house yet. “Batman hasn’t come knocking?”

                “I’ve moved.” Phil shrugs before Jason can figure out how to apologize for that. “I move every six months, Jason. SHIELD policy for my clearance level.”

                “He’ll catch up,” Jason says. It’s only fair to warn him. “He’s gonna find me eventually, Phil.”

                “Good,” Phil says. Some of that tension from before settles, briefly, in his shoulders and his jaw. “I’d like to discuss a few things with him.”

                “Shit, Phil,” Jason says, hands out, beseeching, “do you want to fuck in this shitty warehouse or not? Stop being dangerous. It’s really distracting.”

                Phil stares at him for a second and then smiles, sweet and a little crooked. He makes his way back over to Jason, crowding him back against the table again. He kisses him, slowly and thoroughly, and Jason feels hands down near his hips, thinks things are getting interesting, and then realizes, when Phil steps away, that Phil’s holstered his gun for him.

                “Let’s go,” Phil says. “Now that your secret’s out, we can get you proper clearance. And medical wants to talk to you about your reanimation.”

                “Yeah,” Jason says, “that’s way better than staying here and screwing around.” He makes himself sound long-suffering, but he follows Coulson readily enough as he picks his way neatly around the blood on the floor.

                There’s a moment, when Jason gets to the doorway, where he thinks about looking back. He thinks about turning around to see the Joker.

                He feels like he can’t leave without looking back, just once, just one more time.

                Then Phil’s hand reaches back, curls around his, and tugs, and Jason thinks, The hell with it. The Joker’s dead, and Jason’s spent enough time looking to him. His eyes meet Phil’s, and he follows him out.

Chapter Text

                When Barton is escorted into the interrogation room, his eyes settles immediately on Phil. Jason doesn’t blame him. The kid’s got an exceptionally well-developed sense of danger, and Phil screams Fed so loud that even nice, middle-class people with no parking tickets get nervous around him. Jason’s seen Phil clear entire bars, just by walking in.  

                Barton’s staring at him like he’s an armed bear trap, ready to take a limb.

                “Relax, kid,” Jason suggests, voice pitched deliberately loud. “He’s not even the scariest thing in here.”

                Barton gives him a wide-eyed look of alarm, and Jason doesn’t blame him for that either. Last time Barton saw him, he was holding Watts by the throat while he bashed the asshole’s teeth out of his face.

                “Jason,” he says. His eyes dart to Phil and then back to Jason. “What’re you—shit, Jay, did you kill him?”

                “Maybe,” Jason says. He’s not sure either way, honestly. He would have killed him, probably, if the guards hadn’t gotten their shit together in time. Jason hates being locked up, even for a mission, and, for him, stir-crazy only ever manifests one of two ways. With Phil half a city away, monitoring the mission remotely, the only option Jason had was violence.

                Watts’ status has not been made clear to him, but the dry, unimpressed look Phil sends his way suggests that there probably haven’t been any official fatalities yet.

                “What’s this guy doing here?” Barton asks, gesturing at Phil with his hands still locked in the manacles. He hesitates for a second and then, dutifully, endearingly, squares his shoulders Phil’s direction and says, “I didn’t see shit. And, anyway, Watts started it.”

                “I’m aware,” Phil says. Jason grins, smug and a little amused, because he can tell, by tone alone, that Phil’s already charmed. “Have a seat, Mr. Barton.”

                Barton grimaces at Mr. Barton like Phil’s just confirmed something terrible, and Jason could’ve told Phil not to go so formal, but they haven’t had much time to speak in private.

                “Yes, sir,” Barton says, and sits, folding down into his chair like something small.

                Jason likes him better when he’s spitting fire, but Barton’s got some kind of deep, instinctive wariness of authority that kills all his rage. He’ll take a swing at some guy twice his size, but he obeys every guard, as quickly as he can, every time.

                Jason thinks it’s bullshit, but fixable. He’s been doing his best to teach the kid a healthy disrespect for authority. It hasn’t taken quite yet, but he has hope for the future.

                If they get a future.

                “Jason,” Phil says, nodding at Barton, “the handcuffs, please.”

                “Sure,” Jason says. He moves around the table to crouch in front of Barton, who stares at him hard, trying to read his face. Jason grins at him, easy and relaxed, and takes out his lock picks. “It’s fine, kid,” he says. “This is Phil. I told you about Phil.”

                “That’s Phil?” Barton throws a wild glance Phil’s direction but drops his eyes back to Jason as soon as he sees that Phil’s looking right back at him. “You told me he was your boss.”

                “He is,” Jason says, with a shrug. The lock clicks free, and Barton brings his hands slowly up, like he’s worried someone’s going to hit him if he moves too quickly.

                “That guy’s a cop, Jay,” Barton says, in a whisper so low that even Jason can barely hear him.

                “Actually, I’m not a cop,” Phil says. Barton flinches, and Jason feels bad, but he hadn’t thought to warn him that Phil can read lips. He hadn’t thought to warn him about Phil at all. It’s been awhile since Jason felt any kind of wariness around Phil.

                “Hell, Barton,” Jason says, standing up, “I know what he is. I’m the same thing. And I wouldn’t bring you into a trap.”

                Barton looks up at him, looks over at Phil, and then looks down at the floor. He doesn’t say anything.

                “Phil,” Jason says, waving his hands, “do that thing where you reassure people.”

                “Mr. Barton,” Phil begins.            

                “No, Phil,” Jason says, when Barton tenses up even further. “Not that way.”

                Phil leans back in his chair and holds his hands out, inviting Jason to take over. Jason rolls his eyes.

                “Barton, c’mon.” Jason hooks his thumb under Barton’s chin and lifts his head. It casts the sharp fluorescent light over his badly split lip, makes him look even younger than he is. His eyes are narrowed and wary, but he’s looking up at Jason like he hasn’t lost all faith. Jason’s losing ground with every second that ticks by, but it’s not gone yet.

                “I wouldn’t bring you into a trap,” he repeats. “This is a way out.”

                “Jay,” he says, quiet and confused, almost miserable with it, “what the hell is going on? That’s a cop.”

                Barton really, really hates cops. Or he’s scared of them. Maybe it’s both, reinforcing the other.

                “He’s not a cop,” Jason says. “He’s SHIELD. It’s different.”

                “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division,” Phil says. His voice is softer now; he’s catching up. “My name’s Phil Coulson. We’re here to talk to you about a job.”

                Two weeks ago, Jason had gone into prison expecting to find a killer. The plan had been to assess him for usefulness, and then make the call between recruitment and neutralization. A sniper like that, with the aim they’d seen so far, couldn’t be allowed to sell his skills to their enemies.

                Jason hadn’t found a killer. He’d found a kid that reminds him a little of Grayson and a little of himself, if Bruce hadn’t found either one of them.

                “I’m not.” Barton takes a breath and shifts, fidgets in his chair. He looks at Jason’s face and Coulson’s hands and then his own shoes. “Not taking any more jobs,” he says, finally. “Kinda got incarcerated.”

                “Be a waste of your Goddamn time,” Jason says, “staying in prison for a decade. Come on, Barton. Come work for the good guys.”

                Barton’s mouth screws up into a small, irritated grimace. “Everyone calls themselves the good guys. And I don’t need five more years for some shitty jailbreak.”

                “We don’t do anything shitty.” Phil sounds vaguely offended. “We’re SHIELD.”

                “No one’s breaking out of anything.” Jason gestures down at himself, the civilian clothes he’d changed into after Phil showed up to spring him from solitary and end the undercover op. “This is work, Barton. Government sanctioned. You get to be gainfully employed. There’s health insurance. Dental. And, sometimes, when people are shitty to you, Phil shoots them.”

                “Jason,” Phil says, “that was one--”

                “Three times, Phil.” Jason counts off three fingers, happy to relieve each memory. “The Joker, that guy in Panama, and then the handsy brunette with the fillet knife in--”

                “The Joker?” Barton’s finally looking at Phil, and Jason smirks at the frank disbelief on his face. “He shot the Joker?”

                “Right in the head,” Jason says, turning to grin at Phil, who does his best not to smile back. “Twice. It was Goddamn beautiful, Barton. You should’ve been there.”

                Barton’s eyes slide between Jason and Phil again, and he looks dubious all over again.

                “What we’re offering you,” Phil says, all hints of a hidden smile suddenly swept off his face, “is a ten-year contract. You spend five of those years residing on SHIELD property and in SHIELD custody. After five years, you’ll be cleared to maintain your own residence, provided your work performance does not deteriorate.”

                Barton swallows. His eyes drop to his hands again. “Ten years,” he says.

                “It’ll be a hell of a lot more fun with us than it would be in here,” Jason says. “And you get to be a gainfully employed federal agent instead of an ex-con with a ten-year gap in your resume.”

                He doesn’t point out that, if Barton walks out of here, he’ll be walking back into his ten-year sentence without Jason around to handle his fights for him. Barton’s a smart kid. He’s probably already tracked every angle of this. They just have to wait for him to make the right decision.

                “You want me to kill people?” Barton twists his hands around each other, fingers pulling so hard against each other that his knuckles bleach white. “That’s what I’m good for now, right?”

                “We’re not hiring a circus performer,” Phil says. It’s not an apology. “My team needs a sniper.”

                “Your team,” Barton repeats. “Is it just the two of you?”

                Phil’s been making noises about adding another agent for months, ever since Fury finally moved Jason’s status past probationary. But Jason’s jealous, always has been. Doesn’t want to split Phil’s attention. He hadn’t agreed to adding to the team until Phil slid Barton’s file across the breakfast table and told him he got to make the final call.   

                “Just the two of us,” Jason says. “So far.”

                Phil leans back in his chair, assessing Barton carefully. “We’re looking for someone who prefers to work at a distance.”

                Jason rolls his eyes. “Phil wants company outside of the splash zone.”

                Barton mouths the words splash zone and looks faintly nauseated. Jason likes the violence in his work, so he’s not sure how to sell this job to someone who so clearly does not. But he doesn’t want to leave Barton here, either. The kid let loyalty lead him to bad decisions. Jason knows something about what that’s like.

                “We only kill shitty people,” he says, cajolingly. “Real legitimate shitheads, Barton.”

                “Right,” Barton says, to Jason’s ankles. “Because you’re the good guys.” He says it like he’s starting to question whether there are any good guys in the world at all. Jason knows what that’s like, too.

                He looks to Phil, the way he always does these days when he’s out of his depth.

                “You don’t have to commit to anything right now,” Phil says, leaning forward. “Spend the day at SHIELD. Let us show you what we do. Then you can make the call.”

                Barton looks up when Phil talks, but he never quite makes eye-contact. He watches him talk, probably reading lips again. Jason’s still not sure how bad his hearing is. They’ve never had a problem, except sometimes in the cafeteria and once, when Jason tried to talk to him from too far away on his bad side, but he knows there’s some kind of issue.

                Jason hasn’t told Phil about that yet. It’s stupid. He knows it is. But he doesn’t want Phil to know about any of the flaws until after Barton’s signed up.

                He feels like a kid, hiding the fact that the puppy’s sick until after they’ve let him inside.

                Phil would take him, even with his hearing loss and his nightmares and his weird thing about cops. Hell, Phil took Jason, and Jason hadn’t bothered to hide a single one of his flaws.

                But Jason’s maybe a bit overprotective. He knows what it’s like, to be cut adrift from the people that anchor you, to be betrayed and abandoned and tossed aside. He knows how it feels, caught at the frayed ends of a loyalty someone else took a knife to.

                He knows why Barton thinks there are no good men. But he doesn’t know how to show him that’s wrong.

                “C’mon, kid,” he says, knocking his boot against Barton’s stupid cloth slip-on. “You’re getting a second chance. Take it.”

                Barton stares at him, mouth tense and shoulders hunched and eyes narrowed. He looks like he’s looking for a reason to say no. He looks like he wants to say no. Like whatever will happen to him, stuck in this shitty place without a single friend, is better than pinning his hopes on someone else again.

                “Come on,” Jason says, one more time.

                Barton takes a deep, shuddery breath. He ducks his head for a second and then looks back up, chances a single, wary glance at Phil before locking his eyes back on Jason. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, one day. Then I’ll decide.”

                Jason grins at him, wide and sharp and happy. “Good call,” he says.

                He leans forward, claps Barton on the shoulder, and then runs a hand through his hair, fluffs it up in five different directions at once. He’s rougher than he probably should be, but he’s never excelled at gentle. Barton leans right into it like an affection-starved cat, though, so Jason figures he manages alright after all. 

                “I’ll tell the staff,” Phil says, standing up. Jason grins at him, charmed by staff, like Phil somehow thinks prison is just a really low-frills motel.

                Barton blinks and one corner of his mouth tips up. He looks over at Phil, still uneasy, and the smile doesn’t grow, but it holds for the two seconds they make eye-contract.

                Jason’s not worried about how nervous Barton is. Once they get Barton to SHIELD, show him the new bows Phil ordered and the list of hits Jason handpicked based on which kind of people seem to piss Barton off the most, they’ll get to keep him.

                Jason knows that Phil Coulson can win over anybody. All they need is time.