Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They sit on the grass in the Manor grounds, the cool damp of the night curling around them, and they look up at a sky absolutely drenched with stars.

That's always how it starts.

Jason closes his eyes, his head tilted up towards the sky. He can faintly hear insects chirping, shrill and rhythmic. It's a cool night, everything quiet and soft. In the dream, he is always fifteen years old.

“Cassiopeia,” Bruce says. He's sitting beside him, cross legged in the grass. He's wearing a white shirt, slacks, his tie loosened a little. Work clothes. He’s just got back from work. The wind runs through his hair a little, making it flutter in the breeze.

Flutter. The leaves flutter in the trees. Except they don't make any noise. It's a quiet night. Quiet and cool and soft.

In the dream, they're both looking at the sky.

Jason opens his eyes to look over at him. Bruce is pointing to something high up.

Jason looks at the stars. “I see it,” he says. It's five stars in a cluster. Looks kinda like a weird looking W.

Cassiopeia. The seated queen. She compared herself and and her daughter to the Nereids, calling them equals in beauty, and was tortured by Poseidon for all of eternity for her arrogance and vanity.

Seems a little unfair, to Jason. All she ever said was that she thought she was pretty.  

“It's just a story,” Bruce says from beside him, quietly amused. The wind makes his hair flutter some more. Jason keeps looking up, looking at the stars above them. “Someone made that story up three thousand years ago, so their daughter would stop talking about how pretty she thought she was.”

“That's a mean thing to say,” Jason says, but he's laughing a little. Bruce is smiling too, the corner of his mouth tugging up. Like he can't help but smile.

Jason can feel the grass under his palms, the cool breeze on his face. He can smell the scent of the honeysuckle that Alfred planted two weeks ago. He can see the sky full of stars above him. The night is soft and cool and quiet. Jason smiles. It's a good feeling.

They look at Cassiopeia and Orion and Cygnus, and Bruce puts a hand on Jason's shoulder.

It's a good night.

And then the night dissolves away into the dirt that's packed on the floors of the fighting pits where the people gather to watch Jason fight Talia's champions, watch him bring them down one by one by one, their crazed yells and jeers mingling with the metallic smell of blood and sweat. The dirt is stained red with blood. It's wet with it. Jason kills at least a dozen men there. The league watches warily as Talia trains her finest warrior. He's so tired, he thinks, as he watches yet another one of her apprentices run towards him, yelling and screaming for his blood. He's so tired of fighting. He raises his bloodied fists. At least it isn't the other Pit.

At least it isn't that.

He knows how to fight. It's what he does best. He knows how to hit a man with just the right power to feel his bone snap underneath his knuckles. Talia’s apprentice goes down fast. Talia nods, her face remote. He never knows what she's thinking. The man in the pit starts to crawl away, towards the edge of the circle, but Jason knows what he must do. He drags him back in and snaps his neck. It's done quickly, without preamble. A permanent death. Something he knows he wouldn't be graced with, had he been the one to lose. For him, it would be right back to the Pit. And he is not going back to the fucking Pit. Never again.

Kill or be killed. Jason knows what he'd much rather do.

The man gurgles and foams at the mouth. And then he dies. It's not very dramatic, but the crowd goes mad anyway.

Jason sort of wants to throw up.

Fighting. It's what he's good at.

They're always fighting.

“I don't see why you can't be better. You got three innocent people killed at that shootout,” Bruce roars at him, and Jason yells back about it being none of his business, and that he can handle things on his own, and then Bruce gives him that look, that look like he isn't even worth his time, that disappointed line of his jaw that makes Jason so angry, that makes him fight harder. Fight better.

“Push yourself. Be better,” Bruce would always say while training him, back when he was Robin.

The Joker laughs. “Come on,” he says, when Jason goes down after the very first blow across the shins. The crowbar gleams nastily under the harsh glow of a tubelight. “Push yourself. Is that the best you can do?”

Yes. Yes it really is.

Bruce puts a hand on his shoulder. He can feel the warmth of it through his shirt. They're sitting on the grass in the lawn outside the manor, and they really should be going back in; Jason has school tomorrow, but Bruce just got home from a meeting that dragged on for hours, and he's teaching him all these new constellation names that he's never heard of, so can't they just stay outside for a few more minutes?

“Of course we can,” Bruce says, his hand on Jason's shoulder. Jason wants to hug him. Jason wants to punch him. Mostly, Jason just wants to cry.

“Why didn't you save me?” He says, and Bruce stops smiling. He gets up, off of the grass, walks away.

The night is starless and cold.

Push yourself. Be better. The Pit is green and viscous and dark. He breathes it in. Chokes in it.

Every night in his life is a starless night now. He thinks of Cassiopeia's eternal torture. She didn't deserve that, did she?

The stars are all gone. He tries to find them again, sifting through smoke and dirt and pits and the screaming, but he can't find any. Just dark skies and empty nights.

He doesn't care. He screams in the face the dark. He isn't afraid of it anymore.

“Come on. Is that the best you can do?” The joker says in his ear, and there's blood trickling down his head, over his eyes. He can't see because of the blood in his eyes. He dies in the dark. Soft and cool and quiet. So quiet.

Bruce is holding him in the rubble. Bruce is holding him, and they're sitting on the lawn, the stars above them. “Cassiopeia,” he murmurs softly to Jason, pointing up. “Ceypheus. Lyra. Aquila.” Hundreds upon hundred of constellations.

The stars are infinite in the endless skies of his mind. It's never dark. He hates the dark.

Bruce wipes his tears when he cries from nightmares. He is thirteen, and Bruce is whispering to him, his hand carding through Jason's hair, “You don't have to be afraid,” he says. “The dark isn't scary.”

But it is scary, and he is afraid.

In the dream, everything is soft and cool and quiet.

But there are no stars in the sky.

*

He wakes up all at once, gasping and choking. There's– there's something going down his throat. His windpipe. There's a tube in his windpipe. He starts to breathe fast, except he can't because of the tube, and it's choking him, and–

“Goddamnit,” he hears a voice say above him, “Jason, no! Stop it. Don't rip it out. Someone help me put him back under again!”

Jason starts to freak out, because he doesn't want to go under again, whatever that means, because that would mean more dreams. He doesn't want any more dreams. He starts to thrash around, trying to get rid of the tube in his mouth and the tube going into the inside of his vein in his wrist.

“Jason!” The voice says again. He can hear footsteps rapidly approaching. Someone’s coming. He can't tell who. Jason tries to look from the corner of his eye, but all he can see are the machines around him and the goddamned tubes stuck in his body and the stretcher he's lying on and oh god he doesn't want to go under again–

“You need to calm down. Please. It's just me, Leslie.”

Jason gasps through the tube. He wants it out. Leslie. He knows Leslie.

“Out,” he tries to say, except it doesn't come out that way. It comes out more like a wet gasp from the back of his throat. There's a pair of hands holding him down now, trying to stop his thrashing. Hands bigger than Leslie's.

“Jesus, why didn't you tell me the anaesthesia wouldn't work on him?” Leslie hisses.

“I didn't– I didn't know.” The other voice says.

Jason can't stop choking. Choking on air. On the thick scent of antiseptic and medicines. He realises belatedly that his leg feels like it's on fucking fire. And his ribs. But mostly his leg.

“Leg,” he tries to gasp out, but he can't speak because of the tube.

“I know, sweetheart,” Leslie says, crooning soothingly. To the other person, she says, “I have to give him some morphine. You need to hold him down. Keep him still.”

But Jason doesn't want to hold still. Doesn't plan on it. He thrashes around, trying to shake off the hands on him, but they're strong. Stronger than him. Solid.

Solid, like the hand on his shoulder. Like that hand that pointed out all those constellations, a lifetime ago.

Jason whimpers. It hurts so much.

“I know, sweetheart,” Leslie says again. He can hear drawers opening and closing. The sound of her tapping a syringe.  

“High tolerance for local anaesthesia. Dammit, these are the kind of things you should know about your own son,” he hears Leslie whisper fiercely.

Bruce is silent. Jason closes his eyes as he feels the needle go in. He doesn't even know where he is, he realises. Certainly not his apartment. Leslie's clinic? Maybe. But that wouldn't explain why Bruce would be there.

Bruce wouldn't want to waste all that time coming across town to Leslie's clinic just to see him. He has better things to do.

Jason looks around, blinking through the pain and haze of the drugs. It's all too bright and dark at the same time.

“Where?” He chokes out, but the tube makes it hard to speak, and they don't understand what he says. He wants to go back home, away from the bright lights and away from the pain and away from Bruce.

“You're going to be just fine,” Leslie says again, soothingly. She's stroking his hair, or brushing it, or something. It feels good. He closes his eyes. He can feel himself going deeper into the warmth of the morphine. Leslie keeps stroking his hair.

“Don’t worry now. We're going to take good care of you,” Leslie says. “Aren't we, Bruce?”

Bruce is silent.

*

The next time he wakes up, it's much less abrupt and painful.

He swims slowly to consciousness, waking bit by bit, until he's aware enough to realise that there's someone sitting next to him.

Jason turns to look.

It's Dick.

“Hey,” Dick smiles. He's sitting in a chair next to Jason’s bedside, his hand wrapped around a mug of something that's steaming. “Thought we lost you to the other side for a while, there.”

Jason turns to look at the light coming in through the windows, but the curtains are drawn. The room is dark. The room's all big and swanky. Shit. They're in the manor.

“What time s’it?” He rasps.

Dick checks his wristwatch. “Two fifty-six.” He says.

“AM?”

“AM.”

“Shit,” Jason says, closing his eyes. “I've been out for like, six hours?” In Bruce's house, too. He's not wanted here. He feels that familiar trickle of humiliation go down his back.

“Jason,” Dick says, putting his mug down on the bedside table. He sounds kind of surprised. “You've been unconscious for four days.”

Jason blinks his eyes open. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah.”

Dick goes over to the windows, pulls open the curtains even though it's pitch dark out. Opens a window, letting the cool air in. It's September, not cold enough to be frigid, but it's not muggy either. It's nice. Cold and soft and quiet, he thinks.

Jason sits up. “I gotta get out of here,” He says.

Dick looks at him, surprised. “You're not really in the condition to walk right now.”

“I don't want to stay here anymore.”

Dick looks even more surprised. “Jason, you can't even walk.” He says.

Jason looks down at his leg. It's got a cast on it. And his ankle has a splint on it. He can't feel anything, though.

“You didn’t notice anything? How many pain meds did they put you on?” Dick says incredulously.

Jason tries to move his leg. It doesn't move. “What's wrong with it?” He says, staring. Fuck. If he can't even walk– fuck.

Dick sits on the bed, next to him. “You broke your tibia. A really nasty break, and one hairline fracture on your ankle. Leslie had to perform emergency surgery, at like two in the morning. Plus extensive soft tissue damage in your left leg. And you bruised three ribs on your left side,” Dick says, scrubbing at his face. He looks tired, Jason realises. Like he's been sitting here for a long time.

Jason looks out of the window. It's dark. No stars out. “I don't remember anything,” He says. “There was an ambush, and then we started to retreat, and then–”

“One of the guys shot at a crate of ammo right next to you. I think the idiot was trying to hit you, but he missed. Nearly took the whole place down,” Dick says.

“Shit,” Jason says. He stares at his useless leg.

“Yeah.”

“So I guess I'm fucked, then.”

“Nah,” Dick says. He's smiling, even though it looks a little worn around the edges. “Alfred's gonna make you do some extensively painful physical therapy, and then you'll be up and kicking in no time at all.”

Jason looks around the room. It's bland. Featureless. One of the guest bedrooms in the East wing, then. Probably as far from Bruce's room as can be. It has a skylight though. So that's nice.

“How long?” Jason says, preparing himself for the inevitable.

Dick's grin flickers. “Three months. Minimum.”

Jason doesn't say anything. Just lies back down, and stares at the skylight. He can't even lie down right, because of his stupid fucking cast and his stupid fucking ribs and his stupid fucking brother taking up all the room on the bed.

“Get off,” he says.

Dick just looks sad. “Jay, come on, don't be that way. You know he really cares about you–”

Jason closes his eyes. “I'm tired. I want to go back to sleep.”

Outside, he can hear the wind whistling in between the trees. The sound of an occasional car passing by. The muted flappings of wings. Bats. Jason remembers finding those sounds comforting when he was younger.

Dick gets off the bed. A short pause. “He was worried sick, you know, when it happened. He was the one that found you, in all that rubble. It was scary, Jason, seeing you that way, with Bruce holding you like that. Reminded all of us of something else, from long ago.”

One of the bats screeches faintly, in the distance. A distress call, maybe. The wind blows the curtains up slightly, and then back down again.

“I’m tired,” Jason says again, quieter. “I'd like to sleep now.”

Dick looks at him, and Jason can barely make out his features in the darkness. It occurs to him that neither of them bothered to switch the lights on. Dick leans over and smooths Jason's hair back from his face. Jason closes his eyes.

“It's going to be okay, Jay,” Dick says softly.

And then he leaves, shutting the door behind him quietly, a soft click.

Jason looks up through the skylight, at the dark and empty night.

Chapter Text

The first two weeks are the worst.

They slowly start weaning him off the pain medication, and the pain in his leg is like nothing he's ever felt in his whole life.

Even worse than when he was fifteen and about to die. At least he died , and there was no more pain. Now all he can do is lie in bed and try not to pass out.

It's not that he's alone all the time, or anything. People visit him constantly. Almost so many people come to see him that sometimes he wishes he was alone. Except then it gets quiet, and he's left alone with his thoughts.

So that's not fun either.

Dick visits every day, almost. Or whenever he can.

“I applied few days’ leave from the precinct. Told them my brother had died. Again,” he says one morning, watching as Jason eats his breakfast.

“Ha ha,” Jason says, crunching down on some toast. “Death jokes. So original.”

Dick grins, unfazed. “Breakfast in bed everyday, huh?” he says, “that's a pretty sweet deal.”

“Yeah,” Jason says, “all I had to do was break my leg in two places for it. Fun.”

Dick grins, stealing some toast from his plate. Jason glares at him. He doesn't even know why Dick's here, cracking jokes and stealing his food.

“Anyway,” Dick says, “Alfred said that you'd be off bedrest in like, two weeks. So you don't need to worry.”

“Yeah, two weeks of sheer boredom,” Jason says.

“Are you kidding?” Dick says, pointing to the hundred and eight inch plasma TV nailed to the wall in front of them. “Reacquaint yourself with some classics. Or hell, even some newer movies. How much did you miss 'cause you were six feet under, anyway? There's this movie that came out when you were dead, it's called Frozen, about these two–”

Dick laughs when Jason smack the back of his head, and politely pretends not to notice when Jason winces because of the pressure it puts on his ribs.

“I know what Frozen is, jackass. Everyone knows.”

“Right,” Dick grins, “well. You can watch it again. Or I can watch it with you! Hey, I have some free time on Saturday, 'cause Babs is going to be out of town, so maybe we can get together, find the kiddos, and hang out together, huh?”

“Sure,” Jason says. “I'm hanging out with Replacement and Demon brat. That's a thing that's totally happening.”

Dick shrugs. “I don't see why not.”

Jason looks at him incredulously. He can't tell if Dick is joking.

“What?” Dick says.

“I tried to kill Tim,” Jason says. “I can't watch Frozen with him.”

“I'm sure he's going to be fine with it. If you just try and m–”

“Look, why are you doing this?” Jason says, scrubbing at his face. He doesn't care if he sounds blunt. “We don't even know each other any more. You don't– you don't have to sit and watch stupid movies with me, or come visit me everyday. You don't owe me anything.”

Dick’s shoulders slump slightly. “We're family,” he says. “It's what we're supposed to do for each other.”

Jason stares. “What? Since were we family?”

“You've always been my brother, Jason.” Dick says, slowly, like he can't believe where this is going.

“Yeah, maybe for a while when I was fifteen, and then I died and came back and tried to kill your dad.”

“ Your dad.”

Jason laughs, and then stops abruptly because it hurts his ribs. “Yeah,” he says, after a while, “Right. Tell me another.”

Dick sighs, “Come on, Jay,” he says.

Jason pushes himself up, so that he's sitting up now. “He hasn't come to see me once. Did you know that? It's been five days. Not once. And we're staying in the same goddamn house.”

“Jason, he–”

Jason holds up a hand. His leg hurts like crap. He wishes Leslie hadn't discontinued those mid morning pain pills.

“No, I get it,” he says, “I really do. It's cool. I tried to kill him and his son, and he doesn't want to come talk to some murderer who's squatting in his house. Fine with me. What I don't get, is why the fuck do I have to stay here? In some stupid manor where I can feel the loathing people have for me.”

“No one feels–”

“Tim hasn't come to see me,” Jason says, ticking off a list with his fingers, “or Damian, or Stephanie, or Cass, or–”

“Steph and Cass are on a mission in Star city,” Dick says. He almost sounds like he's pleading. “And Tim's gonna come around eventually. He's just scared, for now. None of them knew you before. Please, Jay.”

“I don't care,” Jason says, “I don't need any of them to like me. But you know what I really can't stand, Dick? It's this fucking feeling of disapproval that's practically permeating from every wall in the house. No one wants me here, except maybe you and Alfred.” He moves to a side of the bed, swinging his leg over to one end so he can try to stand. “I want to leave,” he says, decidedly.

Jason, stop it, you're going to hurt your leg, you can't–”

“I want to leave.”

Dick sighs, running a hand through his hair. “I just– fine. I'll speak to Leslie. Just stop trying to walk out of the room.”

They don't let him leave.

Obviously.

Leslie says it would be inadvisable, from a medical standpoint, since his apartment is too small to house all the equipment that his recovery requires.

“I could just go and stay in your clinic,” Jason says one day, when she's visiting him for one of his regular check ups.

Leslie levels him with a stern look while walking around his bed to check on his cast. “My clinic is a non-profit. I don't have the kind of money to house your butt in it 24/7 for three months. Stay here and suck it up. Not everyone has a large mansion and enough money to pay for medical bills to fall back on when they get sick, you know.”

Jason sighs, “I know,” he says. “But these people don't like me. It's kind of obvious they don't want me here.”

Leslie fiddles with the cast a bit, “Have you been keeping any pressure on it?”

Jason looks at his left leg. It still hurts like hell. “I haven't been getting up other than to piss or shower,” he says. “Not that I got anything else to do, Doc. I'm dying of boredom.”

“Watch a movie,” Leslie says, pointing to the TV, “that thing is bigger than a lot of the stretchers we have in the clinic.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Jason says. “I don't want to see a movie. I want to go home.”

“Well, you're not. I don't care if Bruce is being mean to you. You two sort it out between yourselves now, you hear me? Or don't. I don't care, as long as you're staying here, and receiving proper medical care.”

Jason stares glumly at his cast. “I hate this,” he says.

“Hmm,” Leslie says, patting the leg that has the cast on it. She almost seems fond. “Take care of yourself. And don't complain to Alfred too much, you'll give him an ulcer, and then I'll have to come over and treat that too.”

“Sure thing, Doc,” Jason says, feeling kind of resigned.

At least he tried.

Roy and Kori come to see him one day, maybe after he's been in the manor for a week.

“Dude, your dad's pad is so cool,” Roy says, grinning, looking at the king sized bed and the inbuilt fireplace and the dumb TV on the wall.

“He's not my dad,” Jason says.

“Whatever,” Roy says, and flings his butt onto the bed. Jason scowls. What is it with people stealing his bed?

“Your injuries, how long will they take to heal?” Kori says. She's looking kinda shifty, Jason notices.

“I really fucked up my leg. Ribs should be fine in another week and a half, but the leg’s going to take at least three months, with physical therapy and all,” Jason says.

“Oh,” Kori says. She looks crestfallen. She sits down at the foot of the bed.

“What's wrong?” Jason says, sitting up a little.

“Well, I am sad that you are so hurt. But also,” Kori blushes, “also, it will be hard for me to visit frequently as I will have to avoid your brother.”

Jason sighs, flopping back down onto the bed from his upright position. “Even my near fatal injury somehow manages to become a subplot in the Dick Grayson daily show.”

“That's not true, dude,” Roy says, nudging him good-naturedly (on his good side). “ I've never fucked Dick.”

“Roy!” Kori says, throwing a pillow at him with deadly aim, and Roy laughs, taking the hit.

“I'm not lying!” He says. “I've only ever gone on one date with him, and we all know I never put out on the first date. I denied all his advances like a pro, even though my heart yearned for him. I was strong, Kori. You gotta be like me,” Roy says. Kori pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Shut the fuck up, Roy,” Jason says, but he's grinning too.  

Maybe not everything in his life is shitty.

“How are the other brothers?” Roy asks.

“They're not my brothers.”

“Yeah yeah, whatever. How're the little devil baby and the other emo kid? What's his name, Tom?”

“Tim,” Jason says, rolling his eyes. “You know him.”

“Sure, sure, Tim. Whatever. How are they?”

“I wouldn't know. He hasn't come to see me yet.” Jason says.

“Really?” Roy says, raising an eyebrow. “That's kinda cold, dude.”

“He's scared of me,” Jason says. “kind of. I tried to shoot him, once.”

“Your lives are like telenovelas,” Roy says, grinning. “Anyway, I'm sure the little squirt will come 'round. Hey, you wanna watch anything on this ginormous TV?”

“Can everyone stop telling me to watch TV?” Jason snaps.

Roy raises an eyebrow again. “Woah, chill out, dude. You okay?”

“You were yelling,” Kori adds, helpfully, “you never yell at us.”

Jason scrubs at his face. “I– sorry,” he says, “sorry. It's just this place. It's kinda driving me crazy. I'm sick of being in this room, and watching TV and looking out the window at the same stupid garden.”

“Don't worry, Jason,” Kori says, “you'll be better in no time. And I will take you flying somewhere. Have you been to the great state of Arizona? I hear they have some kind of mighty canyon. I was Google searching about it on the internet, last week.”

Kori had discovered the internet, recently. She was very excited about it.

“You know,” Jason says, “I know a person who's really into computers and all that. I could give you her number.”

Kori perks up, “who?” She says

“Uh,” Jason scratches his head. He might have just now realized that this might actually be awkward. “her name's Barbara. She's Dick's current girlfriend.”

“Oh,” Kori says, her brow wrinkling, “perhaps she may not like me.”

“Nah, she doesn't really hold grudges. Might freak Dick out a little if she starts giving you IT classes, though.”

Kori smiles, slow and wide, “Good,” she says, “I enjoy unnerving Dick. I shall befriend this Barbara.”

“Go for it,” Jason says, “I'm all for freaking Dick out, too.”

Roy gets up, checking his wristwatch. “Sorry Jay, but Kori and I have a plane to catch. We tracked down a shipment of illegal diamonds to a distributor near Sierra Leone. They're making kids do the mining for them. It's practically slave labour.”

Jason looks at them dubiously, “The two of you are actually doing something good for humanity?”

“Hey,” Roy said, outraged, “we do plenty of good. Kori feels very strongly about slavery, don't you Kor?”

Kori nodded earnestly. “After I was made a victim of it, I swore to myself to never let another being have it inflicted upon them, and that I'd bring my wrath upon all men who dared to make their brothers toil and suffer in such cruel and unjust ways.”

“Plus,” Roy adds, “I get to try out my new crossbow. Custom made. Shoots a little high, but I figure we'll need headshots to take the fuckers out anyway, right?”

“Right,” Jason snorts. “So that's why you're really going. Target practice.”

“I care,” Kori points out, “even if Roy doesn't. Goodbye, Jason.” She says, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. She smells nice, like jasmine shampoo and sunlight. Warm. He realizes with a sudden pang in his chest that he really misses his friends.

“I'm not kissing your cheek,” Roy says.

Jason rolls his eyes.

“Okay, what the hell, I'll do it,” Roy says, getting up and leaning towards Jason, making smooching noises.

Jason swats at his face, grinning. “Get off me, you bloodthirsty psycho.”

“Hey,” Roy says again, standing up straight again, and walking out of the room with Kori, “If this is about the the whole blood diamonds thing, let me just tell you that it's cool to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Isn't that what your dad does every night?”

“He's not my dad,” Jason calls out.

“Whatever, dude!” Roy yells from down the hallway. “Catch you later!”

Jason sighs.

The only good thing about all of this is Alfred.

Alfred makes him a full breakfast and sends it up everyday to Jason's bedside at eight in the morning, without fail. And it's always got sausages– Jason's favourite. Every single goddamned day.

“You are incredible, you know that?” Jason says, wolfing down the pork sausages. Alfred made some baked beans stew kinda thing too, and he mops it up with the toast, and starts chewing.

“I see your appetite hasn’t changed,” Alfred says dryly, “Alongside your propensity for breakfast foods.”

“Uh,” Jason says, while chewing, “you mean my propensity for your food.”

“Mouth closed while you chew, Master Jason,” Alfred says. But he smiles anyway.

Jason grins.

They talk a lot, mostly about stuff from back when Jason was a kid. One day Alfred brings out some old photographs.

“I was searching for Master Damian’s sweaters in the attic, when i came upon these,” he says, handing the photos to Jason. “I thought you might find them amusing.”

Jason doesn't exactly find them amusing.

“Are those. . . my old Halloween pictures?” Jason says, half-horrified, half-fascinated.

“I do believe so,” Alfred says, wryly. “You took it upon yourself to make a C-3PO costume for yourself.”

Jason looks through the pictures, grinning a little. “I dressed up like him cause I felt bad that no one wanted to be him for Halloween. Everyone just wanted to be Luke or Han Solo or Harry Potter or something. I made you paint my face gold. And I asked you to teach me how to speak in a British accent.”

“I remember you being quite adept at it,” Alfred says, pausing, “for an eleven year old.”

“Aw, you're just being nice. It sucked,” Jason says, flipping through the photos.

“Indeed,” Alfred says.

Jason snorts. He finds a picture of him standing next to Bruce. He's grinning in it, as wide as his mouth can possibly open, gold paint all smudged up around his eyes.

“Oh man,” Jason says, the corner of his mouth twitching up, “look at how embarrassed Bruce looks.”

Alfred leans over to take a look. “He seems to look more resigned to me, master Jason.”

Jason snickers. “Yeah, I guess he got used to it after Dick's costumes, huh? Now that was a whole new level of bad.”

“We do not talk about the October of the superman suit,” Alfred agreed.

“Damn straight,” Jason says, grinning down at the photos. “At least I never brought shame upon the family name by dressing up like a guy who enjoys wearing red trunks, huh?”

“At least you didn't at that, Master Jason.”

Jason grins a little more, and then his smile fades. “It's September. What were you doing looking around in the attic for sweaters for?”

Alfred smiles tightly, walking around the bed to gather up the photographs, “Damian gets cold. He's not used to the weather here.”

“That's bullshit,” Jason says. He lets the photos drop out of his hands and onto the bed.

“I see,” Alfred says. He's avoiding his eyes, gathering up the albums quickly.

“Yeah. You were trying to get me to change my mind. About not wanting to stay. You think photographs are going to change that? What, just 'cause I was chummy with him back when I was eleven means we're cool now? After he chose the goddamn Joker over me?”

“He did not–”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, I don't care. Differences in ideology is just another way of him telling me that he thinks I'm an asshole now. Okay? And I feel the same about him. So you can stop showing me stupid photos.”

After Alfred leaves, a quiet click of the door as he shuts it behind him, Jason stares at his clenched fists. That was dumb. That was a dumb thing to do. He closes his eyes shut tight. Fuck it.

“Alfred,” he calls out, loud enough that Alfred can hopefully hear it though the other end of the door. Not like he can fucking walk to the door. 

The door opens slowly. “Master Jason?” Alfred says.

Jason looks down at his fists some more. “I'm sorry,” he says. “That was mean. I shouldn't have said it like that.”

Alfred walks back over to the bed. Jason can't look up from his hands. “I'm kind of a dickhead, sometimes,” Jason says.

“You most certainly are not,” Alfred says sternly, in that voice that would make Jason go red and feel ashamed, back when he was younger. The “I'm scolding you and you sit your butt down and take it,” voice.

Jason shrugs. “I kinda am,” he says.

Alfred sits down on one end of the bed, and very deliberately puts a hand on Jason's shoulder.

Jason tries not to flinch. Alfred pretends not to notice.

“Apology accepted,” Alfred says.

Jason nods. “Okay,” he says quietly.

“Okay.”

That night he dreams again.

It's not unusual or anything. He has them at least a couple times a  week. He isn't a stranger to nightmares. At least, not since the Pit.

He's sitting on the grass in the manor grounds. They're looking up at the stars. He can hear insects faintly. A bat flying somewhere, far above them. There's a dampness to the air. It's summer, but the night is cool and quiet.

Orion's bow shines breathtakingly in the night, the sky dotted with innumerable stars.

“How was school?” Bruce says, his voice soft and quiet. Everything feels sort of. . . hushed, maybe. Muffled. Above them, a solitary bird flies through the night, slicing the sky into two halves.

“It was okay,” Jason says.

They look up at the stars some more. Jason breathes in slowly. The air is cool. Almost liquid-like, in the way that the breeze washes over them. The stars are pinpricks of light in an infinite mesh, trapping the dark. Containing it.

“Just okay?”

Jason turns to look at Bruce.

“You're not talking to me,” Bruce says. He isn't looking at Jason though. He's still looking up, at the sky. Jason can't tell what he's thinking.

“I'm talking,” Jason says. He rubs at his scrawny shoulders a little. The air is cool. Maybe too cool. He shivers.

In the dream, he is always fifteen.

Something warm is draped over him. A blazer. A hand on his shoulder. He remembers it so well.

“Good,” Bruce says, adjusting the blazer around him.

The stars quiver with their own incandescence. There is no moon.

“There,” Bruce says, “can you see that bright one in the corner? That's Sirius. Part of–”

“Canis Major,” Jason says. “I remember.”

“Yes,” Bruce says, and he's smiling, even if it's just a little bit, and he looks so proud and fond, it makes something in Jason's chest convulse and then the breeze picks up and it becomes a howling wind, more and more liquid until it's wet, it’s dripping, and Jason's trying to swim out of it, trying not to drown, but it's so much, so much pain and heat and he can't breathe. He's choking in it, he's drowning in the green of the Lazarus, and no one's going to come to help him, just like no one came when–

He wakes up with a start. There's a pair of hands on his shoulders. Like someone shook him awake. He's breathing hard. Too hard.

“Calm down,” Alfred says. His face looks drawn and tired and afraid.

“I had a dream,” Jason gasps. The room feels too warm. His skin is still crawling. It feels wet and oily from the Pit, but when he touches his arm, it comes back perfectly dry. Like if never happened.

“How did you– how did you know?” Jason pants. He wipes at his eyes, his movements jerky and quick. He can't stop trembling. There's something in his chest that feels like it's roaring. It feels like the cry of a dying animal.

“You were screaming,” Alfred says quietly.

They sit in silence for a while, until Jason starts breathing slower. He can feel the dream dissipate slowly, like a wave receding, pulling away sand from the shore as it goes.

Funny, sometimes it feels like the dreams dredge away pieces of his sanity as well.  

He puts his head against Alfred's chest, sniffling a little. Alfred puts a hand in his hair.

“How come he won't come and see me, Alfred?” Jason whispers.

“Oh, my dear boy,” Alfred murmurs back. He's stroking Jason's hair.

Jason wipes at his eyes again with a balled up fist. “He doesn't– he doesn't care anymore, does he?”

“In many ways,” Alfred says, “master Bruce is still a very foolish little boy.”

Jason sniffles. “So am I, I guess,” he says, his voice quivering maybe too much for his tone to successfully pass off as nonchalant.

Alfred keeps stroking his hair. Jason closes his eyes.

“Can you stay a little while longer?” He whispers. Sometimes, he doesn't like being alone. Actually, maybe he kind of hates it.

“Of course,” Alfred says.

Jason lies down. Alfred stays, sitting on the side of the bed. Jason doesn't really feel like letting go, so he grips his hand tight.

“Can we talk,” Jason whispers. That phantom thing inside his chest is still roaring.

“About what, master Jason?”

“I don't know. Anything.” He kind of hates the quiet too.

“What did you do today?” Jason asks him.

Alfred shifts a little, but doesn't let go of Jason's hand. “Ah, this and that,” he says, “I prepared lunches for master Damian and Master Tim, I tended to the rose bushes in the garden, I brought you your lunch. In the afternoon I cleaned the house china, because the house maid keeps going about it the wrong way. Master Bruce reached home at six, and went down to the cave right after, so I made him some coffee and sandwiches. And then dinner for everyone.”

“Oh,” Jason says. The roaring thing in his chest has subsided, a little. “What was for dinner?”

“Hamburgers,” Alfred says.

“Wow,” Jason says. “You’re spoiling those kids. I never got Hamburgers for dinner when I was a kid.”

“Is that so,” Alfred says.

Jason smiles a little, looking up at Alfred. “Well. Maybe once or twice.”

“Hmm.” Alfred says, in way that somehow manages to sound highly skeptical and somewhat amused. “I see.”

“Yeah. No hamburgers for little Jason. It was all, uh, cucumber sandwiches and broccoli.”

Alfred looks at him, his mouth quirking up. “Go to bed, master Jason.”

“You'll stay 'til I'm asleep?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

He sleeps dreamlessly, and wakes up the next morning with a hamburger on a plate on his bedside table.

That afternoon, Damian Wayne walks into his bedroom.

“Uh, your room's the other way,” Jason says, putting his book down.

Damian sniffs distastefully. He's in his school uniform, and he drops his backpack down on the floor with a thud.

“What did you do to Father?” He says.

Jason blinks. “What?”

Damian crosses his arms. “Father. What did you say to him.”

“Say to him? I didn't say jackshit to him, kid. I haven't even seen him yet.”

Damian frowns. “Impossible. You have obviously affected him in some way. Ever since you came here, he's been angry.”

Oh. Jason snorts, picking his book up again. “What's new,” he says.

Damian scowls. “You must have insulted him. Or disrespected him in some way. Last night I stayed out an hour past my curfew and he didn't even say anything. I don't think he even noticed.”

“Yeah, or maybe he's just a shit dad. Ever thought about that?”

Damian’s scowl darkens. “Be careful, Todd. If you weren't injured I wouldn't hesitate to fight you for your idiotic words.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Look, kid. I haven't said anything to him. I haven't even seen him yet. Whatever shitfit he's throwing is his fault alone, okay?”

Damian is silent for a second. “You haven't seen him yet,” he says.

“Nope.”

“That is impossible. All he talks about –when he talks, that is– is you. And the night of that explosion.”

Jason puts his book aside. “Really,” he says lightly.

“Yes,” Damian huffs, “and it's been getting annoying. He spent all of last week tracking down the men at the site. There wasn't even Patrol for the rest of us. It's like he's gone insane.”

“All of last week tracking– hang on,” Jason says, holding up a hand. “You mean he didn't go to work or anything?”

Damian shrugs. “Not that I saw him go.” He scowls again. “And it's all your fault. Last Monday, Father and I were supposed that practice Judo drills together and he completely forgot. He never forgets,” Damian says, looking at Jason balefully.

Jason pauses. That doesn't make any sense. “Did he catch them? The guys that shot at me?”

Damian rolls his eyes. “Of course he did. He's Batman. They're in Blackgate.”

“Huh,” Jason says.

Damian rolls his eyes. “Unbelievable,” he mutters. “No one is of any help.” He turns to leave.

“Hang on,” Jason calls out, for some reason.

Damian turns around. “What,” he says, sourly.

“I can't really help you with the Judo drills,” Jason says, gesturing to his cast, “but we can watch a movie or something, if you like. Unless you know, you're busy or something.”

Damian looks at him suspiciously. “Is it going to be Frozen?”

“Uh,” Jason says, “no. I was thinking you could pick.”

Damian looks a bit relieved. He climbs onto the bed. “Fine. Grayson keeps trying to make me watch Disney movies.”

“That. . . sucks,” Jason says. He doesn't really know what to say. What the right thing to say to an eleven year old kid? What do they like? Is Damian even like an average preteen? He has no idea. He doesn't even know why he asked Damian to watch a movie with him.

“What are we seeing?” Damian says, “can it be R rated? Can it be a crime documentary? Father doesn't let me watch R rated movies. I've seen people being shot in the head, but apparently R rated movies are off the table,” Damian says, and then proceeds not to stop babbling until the movie is over. For a tiny assassin vigilante, he sure does like to talk a lot. Maybe even just like a normal kid.

His leg isn't hurting as much as usual, so he sits up for the most part, watching the movie in a distracted sort of way, all the while thinking of what Damian said to him.

All he talks about is you.

He thinks about that for a long time. Long after Damian is gone.

Days pass. He gets progressively more and more bored. He isn't allowed to walk for another week, because Leslie said that putting weight on his leg would fuck up his ankle again, and ruin all the healing it's done so far. Which is fine and all, it just doesn't help that there's only so many crime documentaries he can watch with Damian before they both kind of want to bash each other's heads in with the remote.

“You should make a list,” Dick says to him, the next morning. He's watching Jason eat breakfast again, and stealing bits of his sausages every once in a while.

“A list of what,” Jason says, his mouth half full.

“Things you want to do. I don't know, like a bucket list maybe. You know, go skydiving, visit every continent, something like that.”

Jason snorts. “I've been skydiving. The Italian mission, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Dick says. “Scuba diving, then. Or going in a submarine.”

“Check and check. That week in Atlantis when I was thirteen, when Aquaman needed Batman's help.”

Dick scratches his head, “Okay, so maybe not regular bucket list stuff, that's you know, made for regular people. Maybe you should write down stuff that you always wanted to do, but never got to.”

“You mean like before I died?” Jason says, eating more sausages.

“Yeah, I guess.” Dick says. “Got any ideas?”

Jason thinks for a moment. “Guess I could learn how to drive. Never got my license.”

Dick stares. “You've gone skydiving but you don't know how to drive?”

Jason shrugs. “Bruce taught me how to drive the batmobile when I was a kid, for emergencies. Oh, and I learned how to operate a tank when I was on a mission, once. But not normal cars, no.”

Dick’s eyebrows are still dramatically raised, but he's nodding. “Okay, this is good. What else?”

Jason thinks. “I wanted to graduate high school,” he says. “I never got to do that.”

There's a bit of a silence after that.

“Okay,” Dick says, his voice softer. “We'll add that to the list. Anything else?”

“I don't know,” Jason says. “I haven't thought about it.”

“Come on,” Dick says, scavenging a piece of paper from one of the bedside tables’ drawers. “Let's write this stuff down. You can tick it off one by one. You have a pen on you?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Dick, this is dumb. Just let me eat my breakfast and leave me alone.”

“Uh huh,” Dick says, totally ignoring him. He finds a pen from somewhere, and starts to write. Jason rolls his eyes again.

“Get – driver's – licence,” Dick writes, “Finish – high school. Let's see: watch – new – movies.”

“Okay,” Jason says, “what is it with everyone and watching TV? Did I miss some kind of extraordinary renaissance in film while was gone?”

“Have you seen the new Star Wars movies?” Dick asks, looking up from the list.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you missed the renaissance,” Dick says, looking back down at the list and scrawling “STAR WARS!!” in the margin.

Jason pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, I can barely walk. I don't think I can think of driving, or graduating, or anything like that yet.”

“Which is why these are long term goals,” Dick says. God, he sounds annoyingly excited. “Maybe you can even go to college after high school. Get a master's. Become like an academic, or something.”

“Right,” Jason says, unconvinced.

“You totally could! You're smart enough, littlewing.”

“Don't call me that.”

“Don't call you what? Littlewing?” Dick says, and Jason smacks him. Dick laughs, his dimples showing.

“Okay, okay, let's get back on track. Next on the list: first kiss. Actually kiss a girl. On the lips. Talking to her first would be preferred.”

His leg might be out of commission, but that doesn't stop Jason from shoving Dick with all his might. Dick just laughs harder.

“I've kissed a girl before, you idiot,” Jason says, blushing, “I'm nineteen.”

“Sure, Jay,” Dick says, grinning. “If you say so.”

“Stop talking before I stab you with my fork, dumbass.”

Dick grins some more, and gets back to the list.

In the end, they have about ten things written down. Most of them are dumb things Dick wrote down as jokes, like: “Learn how to shave when you finally hit puberty,” or “have your first ever alcoholic drink”

(He'd thrown a sausage at Dick for that one. Dick had just laughed.)

But some of them are surprisingly good. Things like finishing high school. And getting a driver's license.

He'd thought about what Kori had said, about the grand Canyon. About how he'd always wanted to see it as a kid. His mom was too poor to take him, and then with Bruce and being Robin and the excitement of it all . . . there'd just been no time.

“The Grand Canyon,” he says, and Dick looks up from whatever idiotic thing he's scribbling onto the piece of paper.

“What?”

“I wanna go see the Grand Canyon. In Arizona.”

“I know where it is,” Dick says, rolling his eyes.

But Jason's thinking. “And I'd go by road. I'd get my driver's license and drive all the way across America, see it, and drive all the way back.”

Dick whistles. “That's ambitious,” he says.

Jason snorts. “Not as ambitious as wanting to finish high school.”

Dick shrugs. “Fair enough,” he says, and puts in on the list. “Anything else?”

Jason shakes his head.

“Really? You don't want to meet a famous person, or learn a new language or anything?”

Jason shakes his head.

“Suit yourself,” Dick says, and puts the pen down.

“Wait,” Jason says, “I've got one more thing. A dog. I wanna get a dog.”

Dick starts to laugh.

Jason stares, offended. “What?”

“Most people want, I don't know, a street named after them or something. You want a dog.”

“What's wrong with a dog?”

“There's nothing wrong with one, it's just that it's such an – ordinary thing to put into a bucket list.” Dick says, laughing. “I don't get you sometimes, Jay.”

“Just write it down, okay?” Jason says, trying not to go pink again.

So yeah. He makes a shitty list of things he wants do. And then Dick tucks it in the drawer of the dresser by the bed, and Jason forgets all about it by the next day.

Or, he would have. Except Bruce comes to see him the next day.

It's early. Early in the morning, when he wakes up, and finds someone sitting by his bedside.

Jason squints, rubbing at his bleary eyes. And then he realizes who it is, and suddenly feels very wide awake.

Bruce looks straight at him, something in his jaw set and tight. He doesn't speak for so long that Jason doesn't think he will, until he says, “Good morning.”

Jason stares back. Bruce just said 'good morning.’

“Yeah, I– yeah,” Jason mumbles. “Good morning.”

“How's your leg?” Bruce asks. His tone is polite, if a little formal. He's acting like nothing is out of the ordinary. Jason just keeps staring.

“Fine. Better. It's fine.”

“Been taking your meds?”

Jason nods mutely.

“And the ribs?”

“Uh, Leslie said the bruising was gone, but I still needed to be careful.”

Bruce nods thoughtfully, like this is all new, interesting information to him.

Jason keeps his hands still, trying not to fidget under Bruce's uncomfortable gaze.

“Damian's been spending some time with you lately,” Bruce says, suddenly.

Jason looks down. “Yeah, I'm sorry about that. He just wanted to see some movies, so,” he trails off, not sure where he's going with this.

Bruce looks confused. He's frowning. There's always a notch in his brow when he frowns.

“Why would you apologize?”

Jason shrugs. He still can't really look up at Bruce. “You know why. Cause of the whole bad influence thing, and all.”

Bruce tilts his head. “That's not what I meant.”

Jason brushes some non existent lint of off his blanket. “Oh,” he says, his voice small.

“I meant I was glad he was making friends.” Bruce says.

“Yeah, I– I kind of got that,” Jason says.

A silence. Jason looks keenly at his fingernails. He can't really see what Bruce is doing, but odds are that he's probably looking dead straight at Jason's face.

“Dick told me you made some kind of list,” Bruce says.

Fucking damnit, Dick.

“Yeah,” Jason says, swallowing. “It's just dumb stuff. Mostly I played along ‘cause Dick seemed excited.”

“Oh,” Bruce says.

Jason nods. “Yeah.”

Another pause. Jason sort of wants to shrivel up and die.

“I thought it was good,” Bruce says, kind of quickly. “The idea, I mean. Of doing things you never got to do.”

Jason looks up at him. Bruce looks the same as always, his face impassive and his eyes remote. Except there had been a time when Jason had known Bruce pretty well, and he knew that when Bruce was nervous he did this weird thing where he'd study his hands.

And Bruce is studying the shit out of his hands, right now.

Jason turns towards Bruce a little. “You think so?” He says.

Bruce nods.

“You'd– you'd help me with some of the stuff?” Jason says, his chest pounding.

Bruce looks at him. “Of course,” he says.

“Oh,” Jason says.

There's a breakfast tray on the table next to the bed. He hadn't even noticed.

“Where’s the list?” Bruce says.

“It's in the dresser, I can't–”

“I'll get it,” Bruce says, getting up.

Jason watches as he gets the list. What the actual hell is happening.

“The only thing I can do on that list right now, is watch movies,” Jason says. “Can't drink either, cause Leslie said it might interfere with the meds.”

Bruce looks up from the piece of paper that he's reading through. “I should hope not. You're not old enough anyway.”

Jason stares. “You think I haven't had a drink yet?”

“No I,” Bruce pauses, “That was a joke.”

“Oh,” Jason says. Bruce is trying to crack jokes, albeit badly.  

What in the actual fuck is happening.

“Damian was talking about some kind of crime documentary last night.” Bruce is saying, looking back at the list.

“Yeah, we could see that,” Jason says, slowly. It feels like he's dreaming or something.

“Okay,” Bruce says, “I'll turn the TV on.” He says, and puts a hand on Jason's shoulder briefly before he turns to go towards the TV.

Jason thinks of the constellations, and the cool night and the warm hand on his shoulder. He thinks of the Pit, and the fighting and the emptiness of the night, and he flinches. Really fucking obviously.

Bruce steps back like he's been burned or something.

“Sorry,” Jason says, “I'm– shit. Sorry.” he says, kind of lamely. Fuck.

Bruce frowns again, that notch in his brow. “No, Jason. It's okay.”

Jason takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says.

Bruce puts that crime documentary on, something about cartels, but Jason doesn't really watch it. He mostly just looks at Bruce through the corner of his eye.

They sit in silence. Bruce doesn't try to touch him again.

Chapter Text

“Slowly, now. One more step,” He hears Alfred say.

Jason shakes his head. He can feel the sweat dripping down his back. “I can't,” he says.

“One more, and then you can sit down again,” Alfred says. He sounds wholly unsympathetic.

Jason inhales fast, and moves his leg forward. The pain comes quick, steel needles pressed into his flesh, tearing at it. “Fuck,” he breathes, closing his eyes.

But he takes the step. And another.

“Well done,” Alfred says.

Jason slumps back into the wheelchair, and Alfred starts to push him back along the garden path. It's a beautiful evening. The trees are lush and the birds are chirping. There's water splashing on the marble of the fountain in the centre of the decorative hedge garden. Things are annoyingly chirpy. 

Alfred wheels Jason back towards the manor. Jason tries to rub the soreness out of his leg.

“I hate evening walks,” Jason says decidedly.

“I'm sure, master Jason,” Alfred says, his voice conciliatory.

“And I hate physical therapy,” Jason grumbles.

“Which is precisely why we took a short break and decided to spend some time in the wonderful outdoors,” Alfred says. He wheels Jason up the ramp, and opens the front door with a key from the inside pocket of his waistcoat.

“Yeah, where you made me walk around, for like half an hour,” Jason says, exasperated.

“Don’t get so worked up, master Jason. It was simply a few minutes. Not more than ten, certainly.”

“Not more than ten? Al, you were training me to be quarterback out there. The Knights should take you on as their coach. We'd finally start winning a little.”

Alfred only shakes his head. Jason grins.

Alfred opens the door, and wheels him through the foyer, towards the hall.

Dick’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the middle of the room. Damian’s sprawled on the couch, and they're watching something on the TV. It's even bigger than the one in Jason's room, if that's possible to believe.

“Hey Jason, how was boot camp?” Dick says, and Damian snickers a little.

“Boys,” Alfred says severely, “behave.” He looks at the TV and frowns. “Master Damian, I hope that isn't any sort of inappropriate content?”

Damian looks at Alfred with overly wide eyes. “Pennyworth, we’re watching Frozen,” He says, pointing to the TV, and sure enough, the blonde chick in the blue dress is singing her lungs out.

“Hmm,” Alfred says, his eyes narrowed, “I'm going to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I can only hope that once I have left the room, the channel isn't switched back to whatever violent movie the two of you were watching.”

“Alfred, I have no idea what you're talking about,” Dick says, his eyes glued to the screen.

“Hmmm,” Alfred says again. His eyes are still narrowed, but he leaves the room.

Dick waits until he's out of earshot, and then changes the channel to some zombie flick.

“Now we're talking,” Jason says, pushing off of the wheelchair and flopping down onto the couch a little ways from Damian.

Onscreen, some dude shoots a zombie in the head and his head explodes in the grossest way. There's brain parts splattering everywhere.

“R-rated movies,” Damian whispers, as though in awe.

“Special effects got a lot better when I was dead, huh?” Jason says, watching in avid interest as the dude takes down another zombie, this time with a machete, hacking away with satisfying squelching noises.

Dick makes a vague noise in assent. “This is my favourite part,” he says dreamily. Jason looks at the screen.

The dude takes the machete hacks off the zombies head, holding it up like a prize. Some of the brain goo drips onto his hands.

“Eww,” Damian says gleefully.

“What are you guys watching?” Stephanie says, and all three of them jump. Jason winces. His leg’s still sore from Alfred's insane exercises.

“Steph, keep your voice down,” Dick hisses. “Alfred thinks we're watching Frozen. God, you scared me.”

“Nah,” Steph says cheerfully, “Alfred knows you're not watching Frozen. He sent me here to check up on you guys.”

She sits down on the couch next to Jason, dropping her legs on his lap. Jason's so surprised he just stares at her.

“What's up?” Steph says, leaning over to shake his hand, “I'm Steph. We met before, but you had that plastic red bucket on, so you might've not recognized me.”

Jason takes her hand limply, “I know who you are,” he says, a little lamely. He looks down at her legs. “My tibia is broken,” he says.

“Am I putting my legs on your tibia?” Steph says.

“No.”

“Then there's no problem. What are we watching?” She says, looking over at Dick.

“Zombie flick,” Dick says. “Don't tell Alfred.”

Steph looks at the screen, where the protagonist dude runs over a zombie with his car. It looks something akin to toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube.

“Gross,” she says, making a face. “You guys have issues,” Without pausing, she turns to Jason. “Dick told me about your list,” she says.

“Dick doesn't know when to shut his big mouth,” Jason says. Dick just grins.

“I came up with a few things. Well, me and Cass,” Steph says.

“Where is Cass?” Dick says.

“Over in the kitchen, with Alfred,” Steph says. She turns her attention back to Jason, tilting her head and studying him. Jason tries not to squirm.

“You should visit every state in the country,” Steph says, “and watch a sunset and sunrise in the same day. Oh, and eat gas station beef jerky. It's gross. And try out every Baskin Robbins flavour there is. I've got a lot more ideas, hang on,” Steph says, taking out her phone. “Most of the bucket list websites I checked said tame stuff, like break a rule, or learn self defense. Which is fine and all for regular people, but you can't really be a vigilante operating only at night and not break a few rules, you know? So I was thinking that you could start travelling. Go to the Maldives, learn how to surf. Maybe go hiking in Tibet. Oh, and I was looking at these low cost tickets for this cruise in the Caribbean that's–”

“Wait,” Jason says, “what?”

“What do you mean what? You don't want to go to the Maldives?”

“I– I mean, not particularly,” Jason says, feeling confused. “I thought this was like, easy stuff. Like watching new movies. Like, things I could do.”

Something in Steph's eyes softens. “It's your list. You don't have to do anything you don't want to,” she says.

“I don't really want to go on a Caribbean cruise,” Jason says, a little afraid of hurting her feelings. Sometimes he feels like he's on such thin ice with these people.

“That's okay,” Steph says, that same soft thing in her voice.

“Okay,” Jason says.

They all watch TV for a while. Jason's leg doesn't hurt at all anymore. The sun falls by a few degrees, until there's a warm, pinkish glow spilling into the room through the window. Jason slouches back against the sofa after a while, closing his eyes against that warm light, the muted sounds of the TV slowly fading away into the background.

After a while, he hears a quiet murmur.

“I think he fell asleep,” Steph is saying.

“Let him be,” Dick says. “He barely gets any sleep at night. I can hear him scream, sometimes.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“Bruce talk to him yet?”

“I don't know. He's being weird. Staying holed up his study all day.”

“Maybe he isn't taking it so well,” Steph whispers.

“I don't know,” Dick says, “but I know Jason’s not taking it well, that's for sure.”

There is a long silence. The muted sounds of the TV continue in the background. Jason tries to breathe slow. In and out. In, and out.

“He still cares about him,” Dick says after a while, with conviction. “I can see it. I know it for sure.”

“Who?” Steph whispers. 

Jason tries not to shift. It's quiet in his mind, but if he fell asleep and had a nightmare now, it might not be so easy to explain to everyone. 

"Both of them," Dick says. "Both of them still care."

*

The next week goes better than the first two. Alfred makes him go on nauseatingly painful evening walks everyday, until one day it feels like there's just regular knives being drilled into his leg, instead of poison tipped ones.

So that's progress, he supposes.

The wheelchair helps with his whole lack of mobility thing a little, but he doesn't like using it much. It makes him feel kind of useless, people having to push him around like that. He can't always do it himself, because his arms get tired. He mostly tries to go places on his own feet, even if it takes a long time.

Damian comes to his room a lot, which surprises him a little initially. Mostly they watch movies Damian's not allowed to see when Bruce or Alfred are around. Sometimes they play board games, or cards. Sometimes, they just talk.

“Today we started algebra in school,” Damian says to him, one day.

“That sucks, kid,” Jason says, moving his Monopoly piece up to Pall Mall. “I gotta pay you rent?”

Damian nods, looking smug. “Cough it up,” he says. Jason rolls his eyes and gives him the fake money. Kid's getting a little too carried away about Monopoly.

“Whatever. It's just Pall fucking mall, okay? No big bucks.”

“Sure, Todd,” Damian says, smirking, “oh, and Father doesn't like that kind of language.”

“Yeah, well, Father can go suck it. Your turn,” he says.

Damian rolls the die. “Nine. I land on Trafalgar Square.”

“I don't own that, do I?” Jason says, weakly.

“No,” Damian says, crisply taking the property card from the inside of the box, “I shall buy it. Like I have bought everything else on this board.”

Jason shakes his head. “Not my fault I was stuck in jail for so long,” he says.

“Your turn, Todd.”

Jason sighs, and rolls the die. “So you like Math?” He says.

Damian looks up sharply. “It's. . . fine.” He says.

“Cool. Hey, I get free parking. That's better than jail, right?”

“I like art more,” Damian says suddenly, and then looks up at Jason again, looking an odd mixture of embarrassed and defiant, “But you can't say anything. Father doesn't know.”

Jason looks up. “How come?”

Damian shrugs, looking down at the board. “It's dumb.”

“Art is dumb?”

Damian shrugs again. He fidgets with his property cards some. Finally, he says, “It's not doing anything. It's just sitting and scribbling on paper. It's not helping anyone.”

“Art isn't dumb just cause it's not fighting or engineering,” Jason says, “Your turn.”

Damian rolls.

“No,” Jason says, looking at the board.

Damian’s face breaks out into a full-on grin. It's kind of nice to see, actually. Makes the kid actually look his age, for once.

“Yes,” Damian says, moving his piece up to Mayfair.

“This game is stupid, anyway,” Jason says, and Damian giggles a little.

Jason rolls and lands on fucking Chance. Has to pay income tax. Fuck that shit.

“Art helps people, I think,” Jason says, “or at least it makes an impact.” He scratches his head. “I don't know. At the very least, Bruce would be thrilled to have an artist in the family. I don't know about Tim, but Dick and I couldn't do jackshit when it came to painting, and all that creative stuff.”

Damian shrugs again. It's clear that he doesn't really want to talk about it, so Jason changes the subject.

“Anyway,” he says, looking down at the board, “I'm fucked. And bankrupt.”

Damian smirks again. “Yes,” he says, “and I'm building a house on Mayfair next time I come to it,” he says.

Jason shakes his head. “You are a cruel, cruel boy,” he says, pointing a finger at Damian.

Damian giggles again. “Pay your taxes, Todd,” he says.

Jason pays his goddamn taxes. “I'm so broke it's not even funny,” he mutters, “Your turn.”

But Damian doesn't take the die from Jason's hand. He's looking at a particular spot on the headboard of the bed behind Jason's head very keenly, like it's something extremely interesting.

“What?” Jason says.

Damian clears his throat. “When, when I had first come to the manor, around a year ago,” he pauses, “never mind,” he sighs.

“No,” Jason says, sitting up straighter. “What is it?”

Damian bites at his lip, looking uncomfortable. “When I had first arrived at the manor, I was– well. Sometimes I was a bit of a brat.”

“Was?” Jason grins, but Damian doesn't crack a smile, or glare, or anything. He just stares at the headboard instead of at Jason, and continues.

“I didn't listen when they told me to not go to that room. And I went in anyway. And everything was– nothing was unchanged, it was so strange. It was like you'd gone out for the day, or something. Your clothes were hanging on the hangers, your posters were on the wall. Your schoolbag was on the chair next to the table. It was– it wasn't normal.”

Jason goes very very still.

“When Father found me, it was already almost night. I was going through your things in the closet. He kept all of it, Todd. He kept your postcards and your old phone and your CDs. Even the paper trashcan next to the door was full. He was so upset when he found me. More angry than I've ever seen him. Because I touched things in his dead son’s old room.”

Damian is quiet for a bit after that. Jason slouches back against the headboard. The silence is so long that he's about to speak when Damian stands up.

“Wait here,” he says, all serious, that same half-embarrassed, half-defiant look on his face, “I'll be back.” He runs off.

Jason stares at the door that he left out of. After a while, he puts his head in his hands.

It's maybe five minutes after that, that he feels someone tapping his shoulder urgently. 

“Here,” Damian is saying eagerly, jabbing something at his side, “here, I found it.”

Jason looks up. It's his old CD player.

He takes it from Damian's hands, looking over it slowly. “Holy–” he looks at Damian, “Cow,” he says, finishing kind of lamely, “Where'd you get this?” He whispers.

“I told you. Your old room.”

Jason looks at him. "Thank you," he says. He's not sure what else to say.

"It's fine," Damian says. He looks more uncomfortable than anything, when faced with gratitude. A little eleven year old assassin who likes to draw in secret, and finds old CD players for his previously dead brother. Where does Bruce find these kids? 

Jason pops open the CD player. He looks at the CD that's inside it and grins.

“Hey, kid?” He says.

“What?”

“I'm gonna introduce you to the 2012 hip-hop scene. You ready?”

Damian scrunches his nose. “Not really.”

“Oh, I think you are,” Jason grins, and hits play.

*

Bruce takes him out for coffee one day.

It starts out like a normal day: he eats breakfast, does some physical therapy, walks all the way to the garden without using his wheelchair and feeling stupidly proud of himself, sits there for a bit while Alfred does some gardening, and then he comes back to his room, and sits back down on the bed.

Bruce is already there, and he notices a shade too late.

“Holy shit,” Jason says, getting back to his feet quickly, and then cursing when his leg starts to give out at the sudden pressure.

“Sit down,” Bruce says.

Jason sits, rubbing at his leg.

“Are you alright?”

Jason shrugs. “You scared me, is all.”

Bruce shifts minutely. Something passes over his eyes. Something a lot like discomfort. “I'm sorry,” he says.

“It's fine.”

Bruce sits down on the bed, next to Jason. Jason stares. 

“I was thinking,” Bruce says, pausing, “we could go out for some coffee.”

“Huh?” Jason says, eloquently.

“Alfred– he tells me you like hot chocolate, these days.”

Jason shrugs. “It's okay.” 

“Maybe we could go get some.”

Jason looks at Bruce. Bruce is looking at his hands. It occurs to Jason for the first time that Bruce probably has no idea what he's trying to do.

“Okay,” Jason says.

Bruce looks at him, like he can hardly believe he agreed. “You'll come?”

“I said so, didn't I?”

“Yeah. Yes, you did.”

“So let's go,” Jason says, getting up, “oh, and I'm not taking the goddamned wheelchair to Starbucks, okay?”

Bruce gets up quickly. “I'll get the crutches,” he says.

In the coffee shop, Bruce orders him a hot chocolate. Tells the waiter his order for him and everything. Jason kind of feels like a little kid again. It's weird.

He taps against the glass of the table with his fingers. The sounds of the people around them are quiet, unimportant. All Jason can hear is himself tapping against the glass, and Bruce breathing. The silence makes him more uncomfortable still. One of them should probably say something. He should probably say something. Bruce is probably bored already, he's just going to drive them back home, he's–

“I heard you play some of your old music, yesterday. From down the hall.” Bruce says.

Jason looks up. “Yeah, it's just some old CDs Damian gave me. He's a good kid.”

Bruce nods in a distracted sort of way. “It– when I heard the music, I thought you were back, for a second. Back at the manor.”

“I am back,” Jason says.

Bruce frowns. “That's not what I meant,” he says. He looks up. “I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

Jason shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “It's okay.”

Another silence.

Their drinks come. Sometimes he thinks that he's forgotten how to talk to people.

Jason takes his hot chocolate and sips it right away, burning his tongue. He puts the mug down, his eyes watering.

Bruce is– he can't describe it. Bruce is smiling, the corner of his mouth turned up. Jason wipes at his mouth, and catches him looking.

“What?” He says.

Bruce shakes his head, looking down at his drink. He's ordered a plain espresso. “You used to do that when you were a child. Drank hot drinks too fast.”

“Oh,” Jason says. He looks down at his drink. “You still remember that stuff?”

“Of course,” Bruce says. “how could I forget?”

Jason shrugs.

Bruce scrubs at his face. “Dick,” he says, “says that I should be working on my communication skills more. What do you think?”

Jason keeps looking down at his hot chocolate, stirring it with the plastic thing they give at cafés. He shrugs. He's so fucking useless at conversations like this.

“Okay,” Bruce says, like he's squaring up to do something. To say something.

Jason looks up.

“When you died,” Bruce is saying quietly, his voice barely even audible across the table, “there was a part of me then, that part of me wanted to die too. And it wasn't a small part.”

Jason stops stirring his chocolate.

Bruce is still looking down at his drink. “I couldn't– I don't think I could process it. At least, not in the right way. Sometimes, I'd go sit in your room. Just sit, for what I thought would be five minutes, and the next morning Alfred would find me there, asleep."

The waiter comes and asks them if they want anything else. Bruce shakes his head. Jason can't even look at him. After the waiter goes away, Bruce stsrts to talk again.

"I went to a therapist for a while. Alfred made me go. It didn't really work. I don't think I wanted any help, back then. I just wanted to stay the way I was. Slowly choking. Choking on grief and guilt." Bruce shrugs. "I wanted to be gone, too."

"Mainly I just worked. I patrolled a lot, and then I went to your room, and fell asleep there, and the next morning I'd wake up and go down to the cave again.” He stops talking. “It wasn't any way to be living life,” Bruce says quietly, “I recognize that now. But back then, I didn't care, Jay. I didn't give a shit about anything.”

Jason's hot chocolate is going cold.

“Dick said you wanted to leave. I thought that maybe if that's what you wanted, it was for the best. We don't always get along anymore anyway. And then I heard you playing your old CDs in your room, and I–” Bruce stops talking all of a sudden, and looks away.

When he starts to talk again, his voice sounds different. It sounds raw. 

“Don't go,” he says. “Please. This– this incredible gift was taken from me once. I won't let it go again.”

Faintly, Jason can hear traffic outside the cafe. Trucks and cars passing by on the main road. The sound of clinking forks and cups and people talking. Incredible gift. Bruce said incredible gift. He said that.

After a while, Bruce leans back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “This is the part where you say something,” he says.

“I'm not leaving,” Jason mumbles. “Can't. Leslie said no.”

“Oh,” Bruce says. He looks at his espresso, frowning. Then he downs the whole thing in one go. “Okay.” He says, finally.

“And, I– it's– I don't want to leave,” Jason says, “anymore. Changed my mind.”

He looks up to see Bruce looking at him.

“Good,” Bruce says. “I'm glad.”

Jason nods.

A slight pause. “Drink your chocolate,” Bruce says. “It's getting cold.”

Jason drinks it.

They sit across the table from each other, in that nice, upscale cafe. Jason thinks of constellations and the night. Bruce asks him about the list. Jason asks him about work. About Damian. They talk for a bit, and it's only a little awkward.

It's okay. It's more than okay.

Incredible gift, he thinks.

Chapter Text

They sit on the lawn, looking up at the night. Jason's legs are outstretched, his palms flat against the grass.

The sky dotted with tens upon thousands of stars. Cassiopeia. Orion. Cygnus. The pole star. Venus. He can see them all. Bruce taught him all the names. Infinite in number and infinite in age, shining with the never-waning light of Yore. Of things mysterious and undiscovered. Jason sometimes thinks that maybe he'd like to be a star.

The darkness is cool and soft, and the night is quiet. Alfred's gonna be mad, a small part of him thinks. He's getting grass stains on his jeans.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees a single firefly. It glows as bright as the stars.

In the dream, he puts his head on Bruce's shoulder. In the dream, he is always fifteen years old.

Two weeks away from the end of everything. From Ethiopia, from the warehouse. Standing on the edge of the world, blind to the abyss ahead. Take a step. One step forward, and you fall forever. Hold your father tight and think not of the future. Willfully ignorant in the face of the darkness. Don't think. Close your eyes and wait for it to be over. Dancing on the edge, the void waiting for them to trip. Wanting them to trip. Hungry for it.

They look at the stars. It's a nice night. Bruce presses a kiss to his forehead.

This time the dream doesn't turn into a nightmare. Jason realises why, afterwards. The stars, the waiting, all of it.

This is the nightmare.

Jason wakes up slowly, opening his eyes.

Cass is sitting next to him.

“Hello,” he says, blinking away the last wispy dregs of the dream.

“You were dreaming,” Cass says.

“Was I– was I screaming, or something?” Jason says, feeling hot around the back of his neck. He's a fucking wreck, and everyone in this house knows it.

Cass shakes her head. Her eyes are the colour of almonds. The ones that Alfred used to crush up and put in his milk. For vitamins, or something. Jason hated it. “Then how'd you know?” Jason says.

Cass looks at him with those almond coloured eyes like she can actually see something in him. Like she can see the dreams in his head.

After a long while, she shrugs. “I just know,” she says.

Jason leans against the headboard of the bed. “You’re just gonna sit there, staring at me?”

Cass shakes her head. Shifts, so that she's sitting cross-legged now. “Alfred. He wants you to come downstairs.”

Jason looks out of the window. It's mid afternoon, as far as he can tell. Must have taken a nap after lunch.

“He sent you?” Jason says.

Cass nods.

“Okay,” Jason says, getting up. He rises to his feet, except he puts a little too much pressure on his left leg and it gives out.

Cass moves like lightning, catching ahold of an arm and hefting it up. She swings it over her shoulders, pulling him back up.

“Okay?” She says.

Jason stares at her. It's almost like she'd known what was going to happen before he did. Like she'd been prepared for it. Prepared for every possible outcome. He whistles.

“What are you, like a superhero or something?” He grins.

Cass’s almond eyes look almost translucent in the mid morning sun. Like she can see too far into him. She grins back.

“I'm better,” she says. “Let's go.”

Downstairs, the weirdest fucking thing is happening. The Wayne family has gathered in the kitchen to make baked goods.

“Why?” Jason says, staring at the assortment of baking pans and measuring cups. Everyone's here: Dick and Damian and Steph and Bruce. Even Tim, who looks up when he hears Jason's voice, his brow wrinkling.

Steph is trying to separate egg whites or something. Looks like she sucks at it, ‘cause she keeps frowning and picking up bits of shell from the bowl.“There's a charity bake sale at the Kanes’ place. But like, a rich people version, you know? Like one cupcake selling for the price of a small car, kind of rich.”

“That's an exaggeration, miss Brown,” Alfred says, and then, frowning at Damian, he says, “Whisk, boy. Don't stir.”

“I am whisking!” Damian says, furiously stirring the contents of a large bowl. “It's not my fault it isn't doing the light and fluffy thing.”

Alfred sighs. “Go line the baking tins, master Damian. You can do this,” He says, gesturing to Jason.

Jason picks up the whisk. “You could just buy stuff from the bakery. No one would know,” he says.

“I had certainly hoped I had raised you better,” Alfred says, his tone sharp.

“Yeah Jason, didn't you know?” Dick says, laughing. He’s mixing something vaguely goopy looking. “It’s the most important rule of the house. Thou shall not lie about the source of thy brownies to thy cousin.”

“Kate doesn't care,” Bruce says. He's staring at a sack of flour with a look of trepidation on his face. “She said to come with a pie from the store, and that would be enough.”

“Nonsense,” Alfred says, “if we are to do anything at all, we are to do it the right way.”

“Hnn.” Bruce looks at a piece of paper pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet. “How much is three-quarters of a cup?”

“Um? Wild guess here, but I'd assume it's about, I don't know, three quarters of a cup,” Steph says, rolling her eyes.

Bruce frowns. “Yes, but what kind of cup? Cup sizes can vary. They ought to have given the instructions in terms of mass.”

“Bruce, this isn't a chemistry lab. Just approximate things.” Dick says.

Bruce looks mildly horrified at that.

Meanwhile, Jason has been looking at Tim, who's keeping his head down and texting someone on his phone.

Jason shrugs, and goes back to whisking.

They end up making some kind of big cake, with a bunch of layers and cream and all that. Alfred lets them lick the bowl. Alfred never let him do that when he was a kid. He's been getting soft lately, if you ask Jason.

Bruce has to go drop off the cake at the benefit before eight, and by the time they finish it's already around six, so he goes upstairs to get ready. The others trickle out slowly, until it's just him and Tim left.

Tim's still texting someone on his phone.

“Who're you talking to?” Jason says, and Tim flinches.

Shit. It's not fun to be on the receiving end of that.

“No one,” Tim mumbles, “just a friend.”

“Oh. Okay,” Jason says.

Tim goes back to texting. He won't meet Jason's eyes.

“You're not– scared of me, or anything, right?” Jason blurts out.

“What? No,” Tim says, real quick, like he might actually be.

“Good,” Jason says, “‘cause I won't. . . hurt you, or anything like that. I swear.”

“Okay,” Tim says, his voice kind of quiet. He's not looking at his phone anymore.

“Okay,” Jason says.

“I have– I have photos of you,” Tim says.

“Huh?”

Tim blushes. “That came out weird. But– but when I was a kid I took photos of the two of you. Batman and Robin.”

“Oh, yeah, Dick was saying something about it.” Jason says. He shifts a little. He's like, Bruce levels of bad at talking to people. “I was a pretty big fan,” Tim says after a long while. He sounds kind of shy. “You were really cool.”

“I don't know about that,” Jason says, “not with those uh, hot pants.”

Tim's mouth tugs up in a grin, “Yeah, maybe not the costume, so much."

Tim's phone buzzes a couple of times, but he doesn't check it.

“I could show you the photos, sometime,” Tim says, after a while. “If you want to see them, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Jason says, “yeah. I'd like that.”

*

His leg gets better to the point that he can walk all the way to the other wing of the manor without breaking a sweat. So one day he goes to Damian's room.

“Hey, you busy?” He says, knocking on his door.

“Drake, is that you?” He hears from inside, “for the last time, I didn't take the charger, yours has that dinky wire that never works anyway and–”

“No, it's me, Jason,” he says.

The door opens and Damian looks at him, surprised. “Where are your crutches?”

Jason grins. “Walked here all by myself.”

“Hnn,” Damian says, but Jason can tell he's impressed. “Come sit. I can't have you collapsing in front of my door.”

Inside, Jason looks around at Damian's room. It’s got a fireplace. A fireplace.

“Okay,” he says, kind of annoyed, “my room was never this big.”

“I require more space,” Damian says simply, “for my dog.”

“What dog–” he starts to say, and then he sees the full sized tank of a hound lying on Damian's bed. “Goddamn.” He says. “You sure that's a dog? And not like, a werewolf or something?”

“Don't insult Titus,” Damian says, “he's very sensitive.”

“Right,” Jason says, trying to sit on a small, unoccupied portion of the bed. “Titus, as in Titus Andronicus?”

“Yes,” Damian says. He's going through his drawers, looking for something.

“Jesus, kid. Don't kids your age read, I don't know, Harry Potter, or something?”

“Harry Potter is okay,” Damian says, pulling something out of the bottom of his drawer, “I made you this.”

There's a sketch pad in Damian's hands. He flips through the pages until he gets to a specific one, and shows it to Jason.

It's a sketch of him in his room. His real, old room. The one with the posters and CD player and schoolbag.

Jason looks up at Damian, who's looking decidedly anywhere other than at Jason.

“You made this?”

“Who else would have?” Damian says. “Titus?”

“Have you made any drawings for anyone else?”

Damian shifts a little. “For Grayson, a few. One time I made something for Alfred, but I never gave it to him.”

Jason stares. “Damian, this is incredible. You have to tell people.”

Damian shrugs irritably. “I don't have to do anything, okay? Just take it.”

Jason looks at the drawing. He thinks he remembers seeing a small boy in the fighting pits in the League. He was always with his mother. It's all so hazy now. It can get that way, once they've put you in the Pit again and again. He doesn't always remember everything. Mostly he remembers being angry.

But he remembers that little boy.

“I should've gotten you out of there,” Jason says.

Damian shoves Titus aside a little, and sits on the bed. “You were barely alive yourself,” he says. “And they never treated me like they treated you.”

Jason shakes his head. “When I left, I should have taken you. I don't know. Helped you, at least.”

“I should have helped you,” Damian says. He's close enough that their arms are touching.

“I like the drawing,” Jason says, after a long, warm moment. “It's really nice, Damian. Thank you.”

Damian nods.

In the drawing, Jason is smiling.

He gets back from Damian's room, and walks back to his to pick up his CD player. He stares at it for a long moment, and then makes up his mind.

He walks back to the other wing, to the second floor. Second door on the left. He still remembers after all this time. Remembers which floorboards to step over because they creak, remembers that you have to jiggle to doorknob to the left if you want the door to open smoothly. It's an old house, and sometimes it groans and creaks before it settles back down.

He looks through the closet, going through his old clothes. He checks the very back of the closet, where he always kept it, and his hands close around that familiar softness of fabric. He pulls it out from the back of the closet. His red sweatshirt. Bruce picked him up while he was wearing that thing. Wore it everywhere, back when he was eleven. Wouldn't let Alfred wash it. He clutches at the sweatshirt now. It's so small.

It feels strange doing this. Like he's going through someone else's life, and not his own.

He opens the drawer in his closet where he kept his Nintendo. It's still there. He barely ever even used it. Bruce just bought it for him because he had the general idea that that was what you bought for kids. He closes the drawer.

He puts the CD player on the study next to his old textbooks from high school. He runs a hand over the spines of the books. Biology. American history. Trigonometry. What was his Math teacher's name again? Mrs. Novak. She liked him. He remembers being good at school. At studying. He opens a drawer and sees his notebooks. The shelf opposite the study has all the books he read. The first one Bruce ever bought him. Black Beauty. Bruce totally didn't get that it was meant for girls. He was weird that way.

“It's about horses,” Bruce had said, exasperated, “not girls.”

“You don't get it, horse books are for girls,” Jason had tried to explain.

He had loved it anyway. He loved everything Bruce got him. Even the Nintendo, and the stupid skateboard. Every book. He remembers reading like he was physically hungry for it.

He presses play on the CD player, goes to lie down on his twin bed and closes his eyes.

Bruce really kept all of it. The posters and the textbooks and the dumb blue wallpaper and notebooks and Black Beauty and the clothes and his stupid CDs and that skateboard he never used.

The room makes his insides hurt. Makes them ache physically, like something is gnawing on them. It's all too much. Too real, somehow. He had accepted within himself, sometime in the past year that he would never have this kind of life again, and now the universe is fucking with his mind. Making him hopeful again.

He gets up, scrubbing at his face. He needs to go out. Go for a smoke, maybe. He hasn’t smoked in a while. His hands won't stop shaking.

When he looks at the doorway, he sees Bruce standing there. Just looking. He's in a suit. Probably all dressed up for the benefit. Jason has no idea how long he's been there. Could've been five minutes. Could've been twenty.

“Jesus,” Jason says, starting, “what is with you people and sneaking up on me?”

“It's a habit,” Bruce says, he stays where he is, just leaning against the doorway.

“I was going to go, anyway,” Jason says.

Bruce is still.

He looks around the room again, and maybe it's stupid, but a part of him feels angry. Angry at Bruce. This isn't normal. Keeping his room like that. He isn't that person anymore, that person that has posters and blue wallpaper and a CD collection. That's what Bruce made him, in his death. This room is a shrine for a person that's not coming back. A teenaged boy who listened to whatever Dad said and never did anything wrong. That's the image that Bruce has of him, still.

God, he really needs a cigarette.

“You wouldn't like me,” He says, all of a sudden. His voice sounds harsh to his own ears. “If you knew me. Who I am now.”

Over at the doorway, Bruce tilts his head.  

“I've done things that I– that you wouldn't be proud of. Things you wouldn't even believe.” Jason says.

“Try me,” Bruce says.

Jason shakes his head, laughing wetly. “No, thanks. I'm not doing that to myself, okay? That version of me, that- that incredible gift of yours? He's not there anymore. I don't want you to have any doubts about it. Trust me, you'll just be disappointed.”

A long silence follows. Jason walks over to the study table and switches the music off. Shoves his sweatshirt back into the back of his closet. Bruce is still leaning against the doorway. He's just looking at Jason, his expression unreadable.

“What are you mad at me, or something?” Jason says, and he knows he's being loud now, but he can't help it. “I'm sorry I didn't live up to your expectations, Bruce. So you can just go ahead and kick me out now, okay? There it is. The other shoe fucking dropped. I feel really fucking relieved now, don't you? Because–”

“Sit down,” Bruce says.

Jason stops yelling. “What?” He says.

“Are you done?” Bruce says, crossing his arms. Come to think of it, he looks kind of pissed off too. Jason sits back down on the twin bed.

“I–”

“You really think that I care about the things you've done? That I'm going to throw you out of my life because we have different life experiences?” Bruce says, his eyes hard.

“I've killed people.” Jason says, his voice quiet. “Dozens of them. I know how you feel about that.”

“It's an issue. We work around it. We compromise. We don't stop talking.”

“And what if we can't? Work around it, I mean.”

Bruce looks at him. “We will.”

Jason wipes at his eyes. “You don't know that,” he says, his voice small.

“No,” Bruce says. He sighs, sitting down next to him. He looks older. More tired. He always looks tired, these days. “But we have to try.”

Jason doesn't have the slightest idea about how to go about doing that. Neither does Bruce, he suspects.

“How come we're not fighting?” Jason says, feeling sort of confused. “This conversation usually ends in a fight.”

When Bruce replies, his voice is soft. “I had a son a long time back, and we fought so often I got a little tired of it. Is that okay?”

Jason nods, sniffling.

“Tell you what,” Bruce says suddenly, “let me see that list.”

“What?”

“The list. The one with all the–”

“Yeah, I know what you're talking about, Bruce. It's just that I don't keep that dumb piece of paper in my pocket at all times.”

“What did it say about the Grand Canyon?”

“Uh,” Jason says, feeling confused, “that I’d drive to it? But I don't even–”

“It's fine. I'll drive.” Bruce says, getting up.

“What?” Jason says.

“We'll drive there. We'll start tomorrow. And by the time we get back, we’re going to have worked around this issue, okay?”

“What?” Jason says again.

The corner of Bruce's mouth tugs up. “Pack your bags, Jay. We're going to Arizona.”

“Don't you have work?” Jason says, getting up too, “You can't just– just leave.”

“I own the company. I can take a few days off.”

“Bruce, this is crazy.”

“You want to take the Bentley or the Range Rover?”

“The Range Rover. Bruce, my leg is broken.”

“You won't be doing any walking.”

Jason tries really hard to find a valid argument. He really does.

“Okay,” he says faintly, hardly believing what's happening. “Okay, I guess.”

“Good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a charity benefit to attend.” Bruce says.

“Leslie's going to be royally pissed,” Jason says.

“I'll explain the situation to her. And Jason?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't pack those CDs, okay? They're all godawful.”

“Okay,” Jason says, feeling a little hysterical.

The door shuts behind Bruce, and Jason sits down on his bed and stares out of the window, at the dying evening light.

Holy fucking shitsticks.

Chapter Text

“You packed your medicines?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, putting his charger into his bag. He's in his room, and he's almost done packing. His leg feels fine. Ish.

“And the prescriptions, in case you run out?”

“I won't run out, but yeah.”

“And the emergency painkillers?”

“Yep.”

“And your crutches?”

“Bruce put them in the trunk.”

“I really do think you ought to consider carrying the wheelchair, master Jason. It's foldable, and it won't take up much space.”

“I don't need it anymore, Al,” Jason says, zipping up his backpack. “And you need to stop worrying. I'm carrying everything. It's cool. Can you pass me those socks?”

“Is your phone charged?” Alfred says, handing him his socks.

“Yep.”

“And you're carrying sunscreen?”

Jason turns around and stares, “Why would I need sunscreen?”

“Always err on the side of caution, master Jason.”

“It's September, Al. And we'll be in a car all day.”

“I'll pack it for you,” Alfred says.

Jason sighs. “I'm going to be okay, you know. I'm pretty sure Bruce already plotted course for the nearest hospitals at any given point and optimised travel routes and all that. He's Bruce.”

“Hmph,” Alfred says, “take the wheelchair.”

Jason doesn’t take the wheelchair, but he takes the sunscreen.

Small compromises.

He’s putting his backpack in the backseat when Damian plods up to the car. It’s early in the day yet, and Damian is still in his pajamas. They’re plain and blue. Jason remembers having space pajamas. Ones with rocket ships and planets all over them.

“What's up, kid?” He says, closing the car door.

“How long will the two of you be gone?” Damian asks.

Jason shrugs. “Depends. Probably around ten days, I'm guessing. Maybe lesser.”

Damian nods. “I will protect Gotham in father's stead,” he says, solemnly.

“And mine,” Jason says.

Damian snorts. “Right,” he says.

Jason narrows his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Todd.”

“Hey,” Jason says, drawing himself up to his full height, which is definitely a foot and a half more than Damian's, “I take care of Gotham too. Remember all those trafficking joints in the Narrows? No? Yeah, that's because I handled them. And all the–”

“Don't let him work you up,” Dick says, walking up to them. He's in only his boxers, his hair sticking up on one end. “I set an alarm to see you guys off, but I think I snoozed it too many times.”

“Grayson, go put some clothes on. We're out in the open, for god's sake,” Damian says, looking disgusted.

Dick ruffles Damian's hair. “Aww, and lose a chance to show off my abs? No way, Dami. Hey, do me a favour and go help Bruce with his bag, okay?” He says.

Damian looks at Bruce, who's coming down the steps of Wayne Manor, a duffel bag in hand. “He doesn't need any help. He can lift heavier.”

Dick rolls his eyes, “Dami, I'm trying to talk to Jason alone for a bit, okay? Just go help Bruce.”

“You could have just said that,” Damian grumbles, stalking off.

“You pissed him off,” Jason says, watching as Damian runs up the driveway, towards Bruce.

“He'll come around in a while,” Dick says, smiling. “Damian can't stay mad at me for long.”

Jason snorts. “I don't think anyone can stay mad at you for long. What did you want to talk about?”

“Right,” Dick says, looking serious now, “Listen, I know you and Bruce aren't. . . on the best terms, right now. And I just want you to know, if anything happens, and you wanna come back home, you just call me, okay? I'll handle it. You can just call to talk, if you want. Even if you have a nightmare.”

“I'll be fine,” Jason says, his face feeling hot. “You don't have to worry.”

Dick grins then, rocking back and forth casually on his feet. “You can't stop me, Littlewing.”

Jason shakes his head. “Stop calling me that.”

“Stop calling you what, Littlewing?” Dick says, and Jason punches his gut half-heartedly, and Dick starts to laugh, holding his stomach in a weak defense.

“Abs of steel, Littlewing. I didn't even feel that.”

“Call me that one more time and I'll make sure you feel it,” Jason says. And yeah, maybe he's grinning a little too.

“Feel what?” Bruce says, coming up to the car. Damian is walking beside him, and they're each holding onto one strap of the duffel bag, even though it's clearly obvious that Bruce doesn't need any help carrying it.

Bruce did that kind of stuff with him when he was a kid all the time. Made him apprehend petty criminals and handcuff them, even though Batman never actually did that kind of work. But it made Jason feel useful, and kids liked feeling like they were useful. Bruce figured that one out pretty quick.

Then again, Bruce always figured out everything pretty quick.

“Oh, nothing. Just me and Jason talking about childhood nicknames,” Dick says, grinning.

“Where are your clothes?” Bruce says, frowning.

“Jumped right out of bed to say bye to you guys.” Dick grins.

“Hnn. Tim?”

“Super asleep. He pulled an all-nighter yesterday, for some school project or something.”

“Okay,” Bruce says, checking his wristwatch, “we should leave.”

Jason feels weirdly nervous. In his defence, he is going to have to spend twelve hours in a small metal box with Bruce. So maybe it's not that weird to be nervous.

Bruce hands the duffel bag to Damian. “Go put this in the trunk,” he says, and Damian scampers off.

Bruce nods at Dick. “I’m leaving you in charge. Take care of things around here.”

“Are you talking about Gotham or the Manor?”

“Both. Take care of Damian and Alfred. Make sure Tim gets some sleep. Don't go for patrolling alone. Make sure Cass goes with you. Is that understood?” Bruce says.

“Yeah,” Dick says.

“Good,” Bruce says, and then pulls Dick into a hug. For a second, Jason is shocked at how casually he does it. At how normal it is, for the both of them.

“Aw, Bruce,” Dick is saying into the collar of Bruce's shirt, and Jason can tell just from the tone of his voice that Dick's grinning, “you're getting sentimental on me.”

“Be quiet,” Bruce says sternly, and Dick grins some more, “and go put some clothes on.”

“Yes sir,” Dick says, his eyes light with mirth.

“Damian, come here,” Bruce says, and Damian comes around from the other side.of the car.

“Be good. I expect no complaints from Alfred while I'm gone. And you are going to be finishing your homework everyday, or no patrol. Even Algebra. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Father,” Damian says, rolling his eyes.

“Hnn,” Bruce says ruffling his hair, and Damian scowls in annoyance, “And try not to watch too many R rated movies while I'm gone.”

“I would never,” Damian sniffs.

“Right,” Bruce says dryly, and there's something so warm about his voice, something so wonderful, that it makes Jason's chest hurt. Bruce presses a kiss to Damian's hair. “I'll call everyday. Don't get into any trouble.”

“I can take care of myself,” Damian says, waving him off. “Aren't you getting late?”

Bruce checks his wrist watch again, and turns to Jason.

“Ready?” He says.

Jason nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I'm ready.”

*

It's still barely light out when they hit the highway, and they drive in a silence that's only punctuated by Bruce tapping his fingers against the steering wheel once in a while, or Jason shifting in his seat.

Jason looks at the empty road ahead in front of them. It seems very long, all of a sudden.

“Do you want to take the fast route or the scenic route?” Bruce says, breaking the silence.

“Uh, what's the difference?” Jason says.

“The fast route means I can get us there in three and a half days, and we won't stop anywhere for long. You might have to sleep in the backseat once or twice.”

“And the scenic route?”

“We'll stop more. Spend nights in hotels. It'll take five days, maybe six. I could– I could teach you how to drive, a little. If you wanted.”

Jason's not sure what to say to that. The fast route would probably go smoother for both of them. Still, it feels like the wrong answer to give.

At Jason's silence, Bruce's jaw goes tight. If he didn't know him better, Jason would say he almost looked disappointed.

“Either way,” he says finally, “we need to get to Nashville by tonight if we want to make good time. You can decide then.”

“Okay,” Jason says.

Bruce nods.

The drive is long and silent. They leave Gotham soon enough, and eventually the gray, often sordid-looking buildings get fewer and farther between, until they're completely outside the city limits, and there's only grass and weeds and some shitty looking houses every couple of miles.

Still, everything feels cleaner, more fresh. The air, devoid of Gotham's regular smoke and stink of garbage and piss, seems clearer. Sweeter, somehow. Jason rolls down the window, and Bruce looks over at him quick, before looking back at the road. Jason wonders if Bruce thinks that he might try to cannonball out of the window or something. Not actually unlikely, at this point.

He sees a couple of cows grazing in a field that they drive past, idly thinking that Damian might have appreciated seeing them. Then again, it's probably only a matter of time before Bruce gives in to his requests and gifts him a large barnyard animal, anyway. It's probably going to be a pony. Bruce spoils the hell out of him. He's a good dad.

Something inside Jason aches at that, like an old, seeping wound. Earlier today, at the manor, when Bruce showed such affection for Damian and Dick so freely. Like it was a normal thing for them. Like it happened everyday.

Maybe it does.

Jason leans back in his seat, closing his eyes. It's stupid for him to want that. It's unrealistic, wishing for Bruce to take him back in again, like nothing ever happened between the two of them, like Jason can just move back into the manor again and everything will be hunky dory. He knows it won't. It's never as simple as that, never as cut and dry. Jason's always going to be mad that Bruce never killed the Joker, and Bruce is always going to be mad that Jason kills people. Never mind that most of the time they're bad people: rapists and child-murderers and human traffickers. Men that need killing.

And what does Bruce do anyway? He tosses them in cells that they break out of in a month, and just start doing all the sick, twisted up things they were doing in the first place.

They won't ever agree on this, Jason knows. Bruce is never going to kill the Joker. Jason's never going to stop trying.

Can't really go back to your Pop’s house after that, and pretend everything's going great.

He knows that Bruce wants him to come back. To stay, and maybe join the team, do some patrols together. He thinks consolidating their assets would be smarter. And maybe. . . maybe he wants his son back again, too.

But Jason's not the same kid that Bruce mourned the death of. He's not that boy anymore, and Jason knows that it's only going to be a matter of time before Bruce figures it out.

And then they're probably going to go straight back home to Gotham.

An hour or two pass. They pass through towns and suburban sprawls, intersections and farm land. Bruce points a few towns out, ones that he recognizes. Jason nods.

They see a lake, with a couple of fishing boats in it. A family sitting on the bank. They look like they're having a picnic. There's a red and white blanket, and three little kids running around. A big, golden-haired dog. The dad’s teaching his kids how to swim. Jason can't stop looking. Bruce drives past them.

After a while it's mostly all farmland and forests. An endless expanse of greens, of lush trees and shrubs, broken up by the occasional farmhouse or a silo. Blue skies stretching ahead of them for miles. No people anywhere to be seen.

They drive and drive and drive.

Jason thinks about that day, in the cafe. Bruce being open and earnest like that. It reminded him of the early days, back when Jason was still a kid. Before the warehouse, and Sheila, and all of it. Bruce used to be like that all the time. Maybe he wasn't jokey,or loud, or anything, but he wasn't always like this. He talked to Jason all the time. He hugged him. He took care of him when he had a cold, and he gave him piggyback rides and took him to the beach and went to the library with him and there was never a time when he had to wonder if Bruce loved him. He knew the answer to that question with absolutely certainty.

He wonders if Bruce is the same with Damian, now. Probably not.

He thinks about what Bruce had said to him, in the cafe : When you died, there was a part of me that wanted to die too.

Maybe a part of him did die. Maybe something in him changed that couldn't be fixed again.

Jason risks a glance at Bruce, who's staring straight ahead, looking at the road.

“Bruce?” He says.

“Hmm,” Bruce says, absently.

“Are we there yet?”

The corner of Bruce's mouth twitches up, like he can't quite help it. “Still got about 2000 miles left,” he says. He turns to look at Jason. “Sleep. You woke up early, anyway. I'll wake you up in a while.”

“Okay,” Jason says, and looks out of the window again. More farms and forests. He sees another lake, after a bit. It’s smaller. No family on the bank, this time.

He sleeps.

When he wakes up all at once it's because he's got memories of stars in his head, and that familiar ache in his gut, like he's going to be sick. He's gasping, he realises. His hands won't stop trembling.

He looks around himself. They're on the side of the road. Bruce must've pulled over. He's looking at him now, looking like he's searching for something.

“Jason,” he says, and when Jason doesn't reply right away, he repeats himself louder.

“Yeah,” Jason says, scrubbing at his face. “Yeah, I'm okay.”

“No you're not,” Bruce says. Jason is silent at that.

“Was I– was I screaming, or something?”

“No. Do you, usually?” Bruce's eyes are sharp. Scrutinising.

“No,” Jason lies. He takes a few deep breaths. The car is silent. It feels small. Cramped. Two feet between him and Bruce, who's looking more and more like he wants to ask Jason questions that he really doesn't feel like answering right now.

“I gotta– I gotta get out of here,” Jason says, quickly. “I need to take a walk, or something.”

“I'll come with you,” Bruce says.

Jason shakes his head. “You don't need to. I'll just walk for a bit. Get some fresh air.”

“You could fall,” Bruce says. “You still can't walk all that well by yourself. I'm coming with you.”

The way he says it makes it clear that it's nothing less than a fact.

Jason runs a hand over his eyes. His face. “Okay,” he sighs. “Okay.”

Bruce parks the car a little ways off the road, on a little dirt road that looks like it leads to someone's farm. Jason gets out of the car, still breathing a little hard.

“Do you need the crutches,” Bruce asks.

Jason shakes his head.

They walk for a bit, on the side of the highway. It's noon now, almost lunchtime. They should probably stop somewhere to eat. The sun feels good on Jason's face. He turns his face up to it, closing his eyes. It feels real. He's here, on a highway. He's nineteen and he's alive.

He isn't eighteen and in a fighting pit, and he's isn't sixteen and in the Lazarus, and he isn't fifteen and looking at the stars from the lawn outside the manor.

He's here. He's okay. It's going to be okay.

When he opens his eyes again, he sees Bruce staring at him.

“I'm okay,” he says again, “really.”

Bruce doesn't look like he believes him. They walk some more. Slowly though, because of Jason's leg. There's farmland on both sides of the road. Some mountains in the distance. Miles of nothing.

“Where even are we?” Jason says, after a while.

“Pennsylvania,” Bruce says.

“Oh,” Jason says.

A bird flies by. Looks like a thrush, maybe. Jason watches it go.

“Are we stopping for lunch in a while?” Jason says.

Bruce is looking at the thrush go too. He doesn't reply for the longest time. So long that Jason is about to speak, when he finally says, “You have these nightmares a lot.”

Jason scratches the back of his neck. Suddenly, the sun feels too hot on his face. “Sometimes,” he says.

“No. You have them all the time, don't you?” Bruce says. They've stopped walking,now.

Jason shrugs.

“And you flinch when I touch you. I saw you do it. Come to think of it, I haven't seen anyone touching you while you've been in the manor. You avoid it.” Bruce says. His face is remote, but he seems. . . angry. At whom, Jason? It doesn't really add up.

“I don't avoid it.” Jason says, looking down at the asphalt of the highway.

“You do,” Bruce says. He seems more than a little upset, actually. They're not even one state over and Bruce probably already wants to go back home.

A car passes by them; a red pickup truck.

“I’m sorry,” Jason says, not sure what else to say. He looks down at the asphalt some more.

A silence. Jason hears that thrush calling out from the trees. Bruce taught him to identify bird calls when he was younger. Bird calls in Gotham, where all they ever had were pigeons, anyway. It didn't make any sense.

But now he knows what a thrush sounds like, when it sings.

“You don't have to be sorry,” Bruce says, finally. He still looks angry, though. Jason's not sure what to make of it. “It's not your fault.”

Jason is silent.  

“Let's go back to the car,” Bruce says, after a while, “you shouldn't be standing for so long.”

In the car, there is a silence again. They drive for another hour, maybe. Farmland and more farmland.

“What do you dream about?” Bruce says, all of a sudden.

Jason turns to look at him. “What?”

“Your nightmares. What are they about?”

Jason looks back out of the window. “I don't want to talk about it,” he says. Especially not to Bruce. Not after considering the way the dream always starts.

“Okay,” Bruce says lightly, “we won't. But you have to consider seeing someone about them.”

“You mean like a counsellor,” Jason says.

“Yes.”

“No.” Jason looks pointedly out of the window. Fucking farms. Nothing but farms.

“Jason–”

“Look,” Jason says, “I need to pee. Let's stop.”

Bruce exhales, really slow. Like he's trying to be patient with him, or something. It makes Jason feel annoyed.

“And I'm hungry,” he says.

“There's a town coming up. We'll find a diner there. Get some lunch. You can go to the bathroom.” Bruce says.

“Fine. Wake me up when we get there.” Jason says, closing his eyes. Except he doesn't sleep.

A minute later he hears Bruce exhale again. This time it sounds more like a sigh.

The town's small, but the diner's nice. After Jason's used the bathroom, they sit down at a booth by the window. The waitress recommends something called a triple bacon bonanza cheeseburger, and if that doesn't sound unhealthy enough already, Jason orders it with a side of cheesy fries. And a chocolate milkshake, with extra whipped cream.

Bruce orders a sandwich. Grilled chicken.

Jason starts working on his order right as it comes. He used to be able to go through a burger in three minutes flat. He might actually be better at it now.

Bruce is looking at him, something strange in his eyes.

“What?” Jason says, after he's done chewing.

Bruce shakes his head. His grilled sandwich is sitting on his plate, untouched. “That night, after you stole the batmobile's tire–”

“ Tires,” Jason says. “As in plural. I manage to take three out before you caught me.”

“Fine,” Bruce says, “After I caught you stealing my tires, plural, we went to a place not entirely unlike this one, remember?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, chewing, “I was really hungry.”

“You ate like you'd never eaten before,” Bruce says.

Jason shrugs. “I hadn't, in a while.”

They eat their lunch, and Bruce pays the bill. He tips the waitress like, fifty dollars, because of course he does.

“We could've bought lunch again with that tip.” Jason says, as they're walking out.

“You wanted more food?” Bruce says, “you should have said something.”

“No, I'm just saying, you paid her too much,” Jason says. The parking lot is empty, with only a few parked cars, here and there. The town must be really small.

Bruce is walking back towards the car. Jason follows after him.

“Can't hurt to be generous,” Bruce says.

“That's easy for you to say,” Jason snaps.

Bruce stops walking. “Yes. Yes it is,” he says. “What are we doing? Having a fight in the parking lot of a diner over a tip?”

“All I said was–”

“Look, if you don't want me to ask you about your nightmares, I won't. But don't expect me to not show any concern. Get in the car. We need to go to a gas station and refill the tank before we leave,” Bruce says shortly, and then starts walking across the parking lot.

They refill the tank and get back on the highway. Jason watches the towns roll by, and the farms, and the fields.

“I'm sorry,” he says, when they're halfway across Ohio, “I was being an asshole.”

Bruce glances at him for a second, and then goes back to driving. “No, you weren't.”

“Yeah, I was.”

“Maybe a little bit.”

“Yeah,” Jason says.

Bruce glances over at him again. “You’re okay, Jason.”

A pause.

“I– I don't avoid touch,” Jason says. “I just don't want to be caught off-guard, okay?”

“Okay,” Bruce says.

Jason switches on the radio. Some pop music starts to play in the background.

Bruce switches it off.

Jason rolls his eyes. “How far away are we?”

“From Nashville? Still a couple of hours.”

“Should've got my CDs,” Jason says.

Bruce snorts. “I don't think so,” he says.

Jason grins, just a little bit.

The fields roll by. The green of the grass and the blue of the sky. It starts to get a bit pinker though, around the evening. The sun starts to set.  

They're almost out of Kentucky when Bruce speaks. “I'm going to put my hand on your shoulder now,” he says. “And I'm telling you so you're not caught off guard. Is that okay?”

Jason goes still. “Okay,” he says.

Bruce puts his hand on Jason's shoulder, and Jason focuses every muscle of his frame into not freaking out and jumping a mile. His hand is warm, warm enough that Jason can feel it through his shirt. It feels good. It feels familiar.

Jason looks out of the window again. The sun is setting, and it's starting to get dark. There's lights on in some of the houses but the highway, but they're blurring in Jason's vision, because of the tears in his eyes. Stupid.

“Is this okay?” Bruce asks, his voice quiet.

“Yeah,” Jason says, because it is.

They drive for another another two hours after the sun sets, before they reach the hotel in Nashville. They've been driving for thirteen hours.

Jason's leg is starting to cramp up, and Bruce looks like he's totally beat. They order in from the hotel room– Mac and cheese for Jason and a salad for Bruce, who claims that everything in this state is basically a helping of a potential cardiac arrest, with a side of diabetes.

“I'm sorry you can't appreciate real food, Bruce,” Jason says, sitting on the sofa in Bruce's bedroom and plowing through the Mac and cheese. He's never had anything as good in his life.

Bruce is looking at it with what looks like a mixture of horror and disgust. “There isn't a vegetable in sight,” he says.

“And that's how I like it,” Jason says, chewing happily.

Bruce looks down at his own salad. “They put cheese in this,” he says, blankly.

“Nice,” Jason says, grinning.

Bruce starts to put the salad back on the tray.

“Hey,” Jason says, “eat it.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow.

“You barely touched your chicken sandwich at lunch today. The last thing you proper thing you ate was breakfast, and you've been driving all day.” Jason says, spooning some more saturated fats into his mouth.

Bruce's face has that strange look again, like when he was watching Jason scarf down his lunch. “You don't need to worry about me,” he says.

“Right,” Jason says. “And who's gonna drive me to Arizona once you pass out, huh?”

Bruce gives Jason a look, but he eats the salad. And that strange look doesn't leave his face for a while.

Bruce booked adjoining rooms for both of them, just like he used to book when Jason was a kid, and they went on out of town missions together. He remembers climbing onto Bruce's bed in the hotel room, after a day of casework, watching old movies with him, and then falling asleep there until Bruce carried him back to his room.

They don't do that now, but Bruce does nod at him before he goes to his room to sleep.

“Tell me if you have a nightmare,” he says.

“Okay,” Jason says, knowing full well that that would be the last thing he'd actually do. “Good night,” Jason says.

“Good night.” Bruce switches off the lights. It's almost eleven, and they need to wake up early tomorrow.

Jason turns to go to his room, before he remembers something that makes him pause.

“Hey, Bruce?”

“Hmm.”

Jason can hear some rustling in the darkness. Bruce is probably trying to draw the curtains.

“We'll take the scenic route, okay?”

The rustling stops.

Jason scratches the back of his neck. “I mean, I think it'd be nice.”

“Okay, Jason,” Bruce says, “If that's what you want.”

Jason can't see his face in the darkness, but he can tell just from his voice that Jason chose the right option. Not that Bruce would be mad if he wanted to go the fast route, but he'd probably be. . . disappointed, is the right word.

He wants to spend time with Jason. The realisation hits him full force, like a train hurtling down the tracks and colliding into him.

“Okay,” Jason says after a while, barely able to hear his voice over the sound of his heart pounding so loud. “I'll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Good night,” Bruce says, and his voice is warm, like that hand on his shoulder when they were in Kentucky, like that way he looked at him when he was eating his triple bacon bonanza cheeseburger, like he's been with Jason all day today. Warm.

Jason goes to his room and sleeps. He has no dreams.

Chapter Text

Jason wakes up the next day, with harsh sunlight in his eyes. He frowns, squinting.

“'s going on?” he mumbles.

“It's eight o’ clock. We need to leave in half an hour,” Bruce is saying, drawing the curtains open in his room, letting in more of that harsh, gross sunlight.

Jason groans, flopping back down. “How did you get in? I locked my door.”

“Yes, you did,” Bruce says. And then offers no further information.

Jason groans again. “That's so creepy, Bruce.”

“Get up and shower, or I'm leaving without you,” Bruce says, walking out the door. “I'm going downstairs for breakfast.”

Jason gets up and goes for a shower. And double bolts his room door. Just in case.

When he gets to the hotel's breakfast hall, Bruce is already seated at one of the tables near the breakfast buffet, an omelette in the plate in front of him. And some green drink that looks exactly like the kind weird, healthy stuff Bruce likes drinking. He's on his phone, talking to someone.

Jason goes to the buffet line, picks up some pancakes, and then sits down at Bruce's table. His leg sort of hurts when he bends it to sit, but he ignores it.

“–yesterday. Yes. Did he do his homework?” Bruce is saying into the phone.

A pause. Jason starts on his pancakes.

“And Tim? Put him on the phone.”

Jason looks around a bit. There's a couple of other people in the breakfast hall. It's a fancy type of hotel. Five star. It's mostly got corporate-looking types. People who look like they might have early morning meetings to get to.

“How was the meeting?” Bruce is saying, “Lucius sent over the emails, but I wanted to know what you think.” A pause. “Yes,” another pause, “depends on their topline growth.”

After that, Bruce talks to Tim about market statistics and profit margins and fancy business stuff for like, ten minutes. Jason tunes it out. He wonders, if he hadn't died, would Bruce have talked about all this stuff with him? Made him next in line to manage the company?

Thank god he did die.

After a while, though, Tim passes the phone over back to Dick. Bruce moves the phone away from his ear to talk to Jason.

“Want to talk to Dick?” He says.

Jason shrugs. Bruce hands him the phone.

On the other side of the call, Dick's voice is as chipper as ever. “Hey, Littlewing,” he says.

“Don't call me that,” Jason says, a fair bit of pancake in his mouth.

“Okay, Littlewing. How was day one?”

“Long,” Jason says, and from the corner of his eye he sees Bruce look up, “but nice. Really nice.”

“Great. Are you guys going to explore a little before you start driving again?”

“I don't think so. I can't really walk anywhere. I might check out the gift shop here, though. Buy you guys some Johnny Cash merch.”

“Yeah, I don't care about him,” Dick is saying on the other end, laughing. “Buy something for yourself. Or just leave before you guys get late.”

“Yeah,” Jason says. “How's Alfred?”

“He's fine. He's been shit-talking about the new gardener since yesterday. Apparently he didn't plant the tulips right."

“Oh no,” Jason says, grinning, “surely not the tulips, that absolute madman.”

Dick snorts. “Don't let Alfred hear you say that. He won't let you come back to the manor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jason says, and then sees Bruce checking his wristwatch for like, the hundredth time, “listen, I gotta go. We should probably get started.”

“Bye!” Dick says, chirpy as ever, “call me once you reach wherever it is you're planning on reaching today.”

“New Orleans,” Jason says, looking at Bruce, who nods. “We're going to New Orleans.”

They're maybe fifteen or twenty miles out of Nashville when it starts to look distinctly Country again. Rural land, farms and forests. The countryside is speckled with an occasional house, or barnhouse, the only clear indication that the region is otherwise inhabited.

Jason looks out of the window. Ever so often, they come across some dilapidated looking house, it's wooden rafters sagging with age, Small, sleepy looking towns, full of shops that are empty and houses that look abandoned. And the churches. So many churches. There's churches right on the highway, like they expect someone to pull over right there and go inside to pray. There's all kinds: churches with steeples, and stone walled churches and tiny churches that look no better than those dilapidated houses, with their rotting wooden carcasses, a husk of their former glory. It all feels very American southern gothic. Macabre. Like this is a land that someone forgot about.

“Bruce?” Jason says.

“Hmm,” Bruce says, not looking away from the road.

“My leg kind of hurts.”

Bruce looks over at him then. “Give me a number,” he says.

Jason almost smiles, at that. A number on a scale of one to ten, of how much it hurt. Bruce used to do this all the time, back when he was still a kid getting hurt during patrol.

How much does it hurt, he would murmur, wrapping a bandage tight around the wound, give me a number.

Ten, Jason would say, right away. Ten meant Bruce would skip work the next day and spend the whole day with him, playing board games and giving him medicines and cuddling.

Bruce would give him a look, and Jason would sheepishly mumble three or four or sometimes five.

Today it's a hard seven.

Bruce pulls over. “Where are your meds?” He says, unbuckling his seat belt and rifling through Jason's backpack in the backseat.

“You need to calm down,” Jason says, clenching and unclenching his hand. He closes his eyes for a second. The pain really crept up on him. Must've been from keeping it in one place for thirteen hours yesterday.

“I am calm,” Bruce says. “Where are your painkillers?”

“Third zip. There's a small pouch inside.”

Fuck, it hurts.

Bruce pulls out a small blister pack from his backpack and hands him a plastic bottle of water. “Here,” he says.

Jason swallows the pills dry.

“Practice,” he says, when Bruce looks at him.

Bruce takes the bottle of water back. Something passes over his face, like a shadow. The sun's right overhead them, though. It's noontime.

The heat rises, and the inside of the car feels hot, thick, even though it's air conditioned. 

They drive some more. They're well into Alabama at this point. Bruce talks to him a little bit about his friends. How he's doing with the whole Outlaws thing. Or tries to talk, being the operative word. Jason can't really focus on the conversation.

Jason can't really focus on anything.

“Bruce, we need to– my–,” he pauses. Takes a shaky breath. “I don't think the painkiller worked.”

Bruce looks at him for a long moment. “Tolerance?” He says after a while.

“Maybe,” Jason says, staring at his leg, “I only ever took 'em while I was on Percocet too.”

“Jesus,” Bruce says, under his breath.

A beat.

“Okay,” Bruce says, “let's do this. Do me a favour and find the nearest town on the map. We'll drive there and look for a pharmacy.”

“I don't think over the counter medication is going to work on me, Bruce,” Jason says. He takes another deep breath.

“How bad is it?" Bruce says.

Jason closes his eyes again, exhaling slowly. “Bad,” he says.

Cars pass them on the highway. Bruce has slowed down enough that he can look at map and still drive.

“Okay,” Bruce says, “I have an idea.”

Twenty five minutes later, they're sitting in the car, parked on the curb in some town near Tuscaloosa. His leg feels terrible. Bruce is on the phone, talking to Alfred.

“I don't see him. Are you sure he's in the right town?” he's saying.

A pause. Jason tries not to gasp out loud. Bruce looks at him, concerned.

“I'm okay,” Jason says.

Bruce smooths Jason's hair back, while talking on the phone. Like it's a completely normal thing to do. Like he fucking does it every day, or something. Jason is so surprised he forgets to flinch.

“What do you mean–” a pause. “Not that Knoxville. Knoxville, Alabama.” Bruce says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It's got a big casino. It's near Tusc– yes. That's the one. Please tell him to be quick, Alfred.”

Another pause, and then Bruce says, “Alright,” and hangs up.

“What happened?” Jason croaks. Bruce is still carding a hand through his hair. It's freaking Jason out. But he finds that he doesn't want Bruce to stop.

“Clark flew to the wrong Knoxville.” Bruce says, sounding frustrated. Jason would find it hilarious, except his leg his hurting too much currently for him to see the humour in that.

“Should have used my crutches more yesterday, huh?” Jason pants.

“Give me a number,” Bruce says again.

Jason thinks. “Still a seven,” he says, breathing a little hard. “Tell me something.”

Bruce looks surprised. “Like what?”

“Anything,” Jason says, desperately, “a story. Something to pass the time till Clark gets here. Tell me about a time your number was a ten.”

Bruce is silent for a second. The hand in Jason's hair stops stroking.

“I broke my back,” he says finally. “It was a while ago. You were– you weren't around.”

“Who–”

“Bane. It was Bane.” Bruce pauses, and the hand in his hair starts to stroke again. “I don't talk about it.”

“Oh,” Jason says.

A flash of red and blue lands on the curb next to their car. Bruce opens the car door.

“Bruce,” Jason says. Bruce turns to look at him.

“You got better,” Jason says, “right?”

Clark is coming up to their car, a plastic baggie in his hand. Beside him, Bruce's face softens a little. “Yes,” he says.

He opens the car door and takes the plastic bag.

“Thank you, Clark.” he says, passing a blister pack to Jason.

“No problem. I'm uh– sorry about the whole Knoxville mix-up,” Clark says sheepishly, “should’ve just listened to your heartbeat, but Lo says that unless it's an emergency, doing it to other people is kind of creepy. Hey, Jason,” he adds, smiling kindly at Jason through the car window.

“Hey, uncle Clark,” Jason says, kind of lamely. He hasn't talked to Superman since he was what, fourteen? Fifteen?

Clark's face lights up. “Uncle Clark. Oh boy, wait till I tell Lois he said that. No one calls me uncle Clark anymore. Not even Dick. Why is that, Bruce?”

“I wouldn't know,” Bruce says, looking at Jason, he adds, “Jason, don't swallow them dry.”

“I won't,” Jason says, popping one of the pills into his mouth, “Alfred's pill concoctions are always really weird anyway. I don't usually fuck with them.”

“Language,” both Bruce and Clark say at the same time. Jason starts.

“Sorry, Jason,” Clark says sheepishly, “it's a habit. Especially with you, because you were just a kid and ah– this is starting to bring back memories,” Clark is saying. He's also getting suspiciously misty eyed.

Jason feels alarmed. “Um, okay,” he says.

Clark smiles wetly. “Anyway, this was nice. Have a fun trip, guys. I can hear a fire in Guatemala that I should go take care of. Tell me if you need anything else delivered.”

Bruce nods, and Clark smiles again and flies off into the clouds.

They watch him, a speck becoming smaller and smaller until they can't see him anymore.

Bruce gets back in the car. He looks like he wants to say something.

They sit for a while, parked on the side of the curb. Almost five minutes, in silence.

“Clark was gone too, when Bane broke my back," Bruce says, after a while, “and Dick and Tim weren't talking to me. And you weren't there. It– it hurt so much. My body was broken, and my mind felt worse, and I didn't know what the point of living anymore was.”

Bruce looks at him, his eyes too sharp, too intense. “You don't know how grateful I am, everyday, that you're back in my life. That you all are.”

Jason stares at his leg, his face burning. “Me too, Bruce,” he whispers.

Bruce nods. They're so fucking bad at this that they're not even looking at each other.

They sit in the car. Bruce hasn't switched on the engine yet.

“We should get something to eat,” Jason says, finally.

Bruce nods slowly, like he's breaking out of some kind of trance. “We'll find a place in town,” he says. “Are you feeling better now?”

“Drugs haven't really kicked in yet, but yeah, a little bit,” Jason says. “I'll be fine.”

Bruce says okay.

After lunch, the drugs hit him for real, and Jason crashes hard. When he wakes up, they're still driving on the highway, but outside, the sun is setting.

“Shit,” he says, rubbing at his eyes, “what time is it?”

“Almost seven,” Bruce says. There's something soft playing on the radio. The Eagles. Bruce is humming along.

Jason smiles a little.

“What?” Bruce says.

“Nothing.”

“No, what happened?”

“You're listening to the Eagles. And you said my CDs sucked.”

“The Eagles are fine, what are you talking about,” Bruce says, and maybe he's smiling a little too.

“Fine if you're old, maybe.”

“I am old, Jay.”

“You're not that old,” Jason says, laughing.

“Well,” Bruce says, the corner of his mouth turning up, “that's up for debate.” He turns the volume up a bit.

Jason rolls his eyes.

“We reaching soon?” He asks.

“In another half an hour,” Bruce says.

Jason looks out of the window and realises for the first time that they're actually driving overhead a giant bay. A bridge stretching on for several miles. The sea is speckled with the reflected golden light of the dying sun. Pinks and oranges and some deep reds. In some places he can see mist collecting over the sea. It's beautiful.

“Hey, these places all make Gotham look like shit,” Jason says, annoyed. “Look at what we've been missing out on.”

Bruce just snorts.

The sun is setting in front of their eyes, a brilliant spectacle of oranges and reds over the sea. 

Jason closes his eyes. Maybe if he can remember this exact picture in his head– the sunset and Bruce and the bridge and the water, maybe he can go over it again and again, over the years.

They'll be in New Orleans in half an hour, and they might explore the city, or go to a nice place to eat, where Bruce can have a beer and Jason can have a ginger ale or something, because of his meds, and then Bruce will smile again, the way that his mouth turns up that just makes Jason's chest ache, and maybe at night they'll watch a movie again, just like they did back in the early days, and maybe before they go to bed Bruce’ll put his hand on his shoulder, or brush his hair back.

Maybe.  

They keep driving over the bridge. Bruce hums to the tune on the radio. Jason watches the sunset.

It's a good day.

Chapter Text

The evening slips into the night, those oranges and reds cooling into blues and grays. The twilight of his life.

The night air smells damp, but a good damp– the smell just before it rains, the skies opening and the air cooling. The smell of wet mud and wet leaves. Lightning and sharp, sour smell of ozone.

They look up at the stars. There's clouds in the sky today, and the sky isn't as clear as it usually is. It looks– turbulent , Jason decides. Like that feeling in the pit of your stomach when the airplane you're in won't stop shaking, the pale, drawn faces of the cabin crew when they tell you to fasten your seatbelts. When you see out the tiny airplane window that you're careening towards your death. The night is turbulent. Jason's waiting for the freefall.

In the dream, they sit and look at the cloudy skies. Bruce puts a hand on his shoulder, and in the dream, Jason never flinches. In the dream, he is always fifteen years old.

Bruce tells him the story of the constellation Argo Navis, the ship used by his namesake, Jason, and his crew– the Argonauts that sailed to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. Jason likes that story. Likes the idea of being the captain of his own ship. Weathering storms and saving the world and going on quests. It sounds real heroic. Maybe Bruce can buy a yacht. They'd go sailing and live like pirates. The sky above them and the sea below, living off of fish and dried rations.

Bruce just laughs and says that he’ll need more convincing than that. It’s started raining now.  

Mud and leaves and sky. The smell of wetness. The feel of it, cool on your skin. Cool and soft and quiet. The stars in the sky.

Soon enough, the freefall does come, and he's underground, stuck in his coffin, gasping and clawing at the wooden top. He digs himself out, and it smells like mud and wet leaves and distantly he can hear the crack of thunder. There's dirt under his fingernails, his hair, his eyes and nose and mouth. They had put him in a suit, a starched shirt and a black blazer, and they're both ruined because of the water logged soil of the cemetery.

He crawls out of his own grave, slipping and falling and crawling through the muck, tottering and stumbling like a madman, and he looks up blindly at the sky, blinking away the wetness of the tears and the rain on his face. He looks up at the stars, at the rain pouring from the skies, straight, cold lines dripping onto him, dripping down his face. Wet threads of saltwater.

“Bruce,” he whispers, his voice cracking, his throat parched. He hasn't spoken in so long. He doesn't know why he says it, or who Bruce even is. All he knows is that he looks up at the sky, and something in his chest– under all that mud and grime and confusion and that tattered suit– something feels broken.

There is no Bruce. No one comes to help him. His only witnesses are the sightless, pitiless stars above him.

*

He wakes up all at once, chest heaving, breath coming in sharp gusts. It's still the middle of the night. He puts his head in his hands. Must've been those fucking painkillers. Nothing's worse than drug induced dreams.

He gets up. He needs a cigarette, he decides. Bruce couldn't find an adjoining room; everything was already booked out, so he's sleeping a couple of rooms down the hall. Good. It means he won't notice. Jason slips out of the room, shutting the door behind him with a soft click.

He finds a convenience store soon enough, buying a carton of cigarettes. Then he walks down the streets of New Orleans, where it looks like people never fell asleep at all. The hotel's in the French Quarter, near a busy street. All the lights in every window are on, the streets bright with neon signs and lit up signs.

There's people everywhere, walking, laughing, talking to their friends, a few of them stepping out of bars or clubs, swaying and giggling because of the liquor or the hour or both. The narrow streets and the number of people in them make Jason feel unnerved. Ever since the League, he's had this mental tic – he thinks of how he'd most efficiently be able to take out the maximum number of people, wherever he is. It's ingrained into him from the fighting pits, when he had to be quick on his feet and quicker with his mind. Improvise.

Not that he'd ever act on these thoughts, of course, but sometimes he catches himself watching crowds, thinking of possible choke points, or strategizing where it would be most effective, throwing a grenade to kill the most number of people. Studying faces, studying builds. Wondering how long they'd take to bleed out. How tough it would be to hurt them. Or how easy.

He has to close his eyes then, and take a deep breath. It's not his fault, he knows. It's the League, the League that made him this way. Forced him to think this way, for the fighting pits, for the missions.

Still, he wonders. Could he ever kill and feel nothing? Slit someone's throat without knowing their name, without knowing whether or not they had a family, a home. Could just stand there and watch them writhe and moan, breathing their last, feeling nothing?

He's just glad that the answer has never been yes. Even back when he was in the League, it was never yes.

Still, he goes back to his hotel room, away from the crowds. He likes the quiet, anyway.

On the way to his room, he passes by Bruce's. There's no light coming from the crack under his door. He must be asleep. A small, treacherous part of him wants to knock on the door, wake him up. Tell him all about his nightmares.

He keeps walking, though. Goes to his room, and to the balcony. Travelling with Bruce has its perks. Suite rooms, with a living room area attached, sometimes a balcony overlooking a beautiful part of town. Besides, fancy hotels like these don't let you smoke inside. They've always got smoke alarms.

He lights the cigarette, brings it to his mouth. The tip of it glowing red in the darkness. He breathes in, a throat full of smoke. Tries not to think about graves, or rain, or the Argo Navis. Tries not to think about his soiled suit, or his small coffin.

Tries not to think about anything at all.

*

The next morning, they go exploring, a little. Or at least, just to find a place to eat. They walk the streets of the French Quarter, ambling along the alleys, past all the little shops and patisseries, the buildings laden with delicate, filigreed ironwork railings and brightly painted window shutters. Buildings so close to each other they almost touch. There aren't as many people out on the streets as there were last night, though. It's a Sunday morning. They could be sleeping in.

They walk slowly. Bruce makes Jason take his crutches, after yesterday's incident.

They find a french cafe, small and cozy. A hole-in-the-wall kind of place. Bruce orders eggs, and Jason orders their buttermilk crepes. Two cups of coffee. They sit, waiting for their orders to come.

Bruce studies him. Jason studies a minute stain on the tablecloth. Minutes go by.

Then, “You didn't sleep well last night,” Bruce says.

Jason looks up. “You were awake?” He says. He wonders if Bruce had heard him sneaking out, all along. If he just let Jason think he was none the wiser.

“It's your face. Your eyes are puffy. And you ordered coffee, and not hot chocolate, or a chocolate milkshake with extra whipped cream. Not enough sleep,” Bruce concludes. His eyes are grave.

Yes, Jason thinks. That was it. Bruce always figured out whatever Jason was trying to hide. Even as a child, he remembers not being able to keep anything from. Bruce always found him out when he was trying to sneak out to patrol, or smoking in secret, or raiding the kitchen, or– or whatever he used to do, back then. Sometimes the details are blurry. Not hazy, like it is for normal people, who simply forget because it was a long time ago. No, this is more willfully blurry. More maliciously so. Large blocks of his memory are gone, from his childhood, from his years in the League. Not hazy around the edges, eroded by time. Just gone. Wiped out.

He thinks it's the Pit. He could be wrong, though. It could be something worse, something he tries not to think about. It could be his own mind covering things up, things that it thinks he might not be able to handle. A clear proof of his weakness. Mental scars from the battle he had to fight for years. What had Bruce said, day before yesterday? You should see a counsellor.

Yeah, no thanks. He isn't crazy.

Except maybe sometimes he thinks he could be. Normal people don't look at crowds and think of choke points and hurling grenades.

“Yeah, I. . . I didn't have a great night,” Jason settles on, finally.

Bruce considers this, for a moment. Jason can practically hear the  gears in his head turn. He's probably thinking of the most diplomatic thing to say. Of how to comfort Jason without scaring him off, like he's some fragile, injured bird.

The implication annoys Jason. He doesn't need help. Or pity. He frowns at the stain on the tablecloth.

Their orders come. Buttermilk crepes for Jason. Eggs for Bruce. Sunny side up. His favourite.

At least he still remembers that, after all those years. Memories of the two of them in the kitchen on Alfred's day off, trying not to burn breakfast. Sunny side up. Jason laughing and making toast. Making coffee, the memory so vivid that Jason can almost smell it. The bright, lemon yellow plates that they ate on. Bruce's mouth turned up.

Sunny.

“You had a nightmare,” Bruce says, “another one.”

Jason eats his crepes. There's some kind of syrup on them– raspberry or something. The food tastes like nothing in his mouth. Like ashes.

“I don't want to talk about it,” he says. “Please. Let's talk about something else.”

The cafe is small, and one of the disadvantages of such a thing is that it is also dangerously quiet.

The stain on the tablecloth is shaped oddly like the state of California. It should be funny.

“Okay,” Bruce says lightly. “What would you like to talk about?”

Jason shrugs jerkily, “I don't know,” he says, “we could talk about uh– about your company.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow at that. “You want to talk about the company?”

“Sure,” Jason says. “Tell me about that stuff you were telling Tim, yesterday. Tell me about the uh, topline growth.”

Bruce's face retains that dubious look, but he tells him anyway. Tell him that Wayne enterprises made the jump from petrochemicals to solar power in the American factories, last month. Tim had to go with him to some meetings to oversee the transition. Oversee the economics of it all. That's what they were talking about, yesterday.

“What factories?” Jason says.

“Semiconductor fabrication plants,” Bruce says. “They make integrated circuits. We were trying to work out whether or not the solar generators in production can supply enough power for the high energy dehumidifiers in the clean rooms of the plants.”

“Oh,” Jason says. That sounds really fucking boring. He looks up. Bruce is smiling a little.

“Still want to hear about the company?” He says.

“Not really,” Jason admits.

Bruce's smile gets wider. “That's what I thought,” he says. “Come on, eat up. We should leave soon.”

Jason eats. He feels a little bit like a little child, patted patronisingly. Go sit at the little kids table, Jay, with all the guns and the violence. Let the grown-ups talk about topline growth.

“I could care about integrated circuits,” he says defensively, between bites, “if I wanted to. I got good grades in that fancy computer programming class I was in, in high school.”

Bruce's voice is warm. “I know,” is all he says.

“And I got a B in economics. And only because I was absent for a bunch of days because of that week and a half we were in Russia, chasing down those trafficking guys, remember? Otherwise I could've gotten an A. I could've gotten an A+. Come to think of it, it was all that Robin stuff that dragged down my grades, anyway. I could talk about topline growth for days,” he says, pointing his fork at Bruce.

“I know, Jason,” Bruce says again. He's smiling properly now, with teeth and all. He looks like he's almost going to laugh. It makes Jason feel strangely on edge. Is Bruce laughing at him?

“What?” Jason says, his eyes narrowed.

“Nothing,” Bruce says, the corner of his mouth still twisted up in a fond look.

“You're making fun of me,” Jason says.

“I'm not,” Bruce says. He's looking at Jason like he's never seen him before, or something. Like he's breathing for the first time. “I just missed this,” Bruce says.

Jason frowns, stabbing his crepe with a fork. It unsettles him, when Bruce says stuff like that. He's not sure what to say.

“I could've gotten a 4.0 GPA. It was either that or let human traffickers get away, so stop grinning like that.” he settles on, finally.

“Alright,” Bruce says, not stopping.

“And quit looking at me weird. It's freaking me out.”

“Alright,” Bruce says again. But he doesn't stop.

He doesn't ask anymore about the nightmares, though. Jason's fine with that. More than fine.

*

It's just after lunchtime, the sun still high enough in the sky that Jason has to shield his eyes against the glare on the windshield. They're in some backroad in rural Louisiana, maybe an hour or two away from the Texas border.

“The key is to push down slowly,” Bruce says.

“Like this?” Jason says, and the car starts moving forward again.

“Yes. Now release the gas pedal slowly, and push down on the break.”

The car stops with a sudden jerk.

“Gently, Jason.”

Jason reddens. “Right. Sorry.”

“Okay, start it up again. Release the brake pedal and slowly push down on the gas. Don't floor it.”

Jason pushes down on the gas. The car inches slowly down the empty dirt road, acres of empty fields. Beyond that, the trees start, and beyond even that, there is the swampland.

The car is an automatic, so it picks up pace, shifting through the gears. Before long, they're cruising along the road, trees and fields blurring into a large general gradient of green on either side.

“Slow down, Jay,” Bruce says, sounding amused.

Jason slows down a little reluctantly, releasing some of the pressure on the gas pedal. The trees and fields come back into focus.

“Run me through the rules again,” Bruce says, for like the tenth time.

Jason almost rolls his eyes. “Hands on ten and two. Don't shift into Park without pushing the breaks. Don't use both feet,” he pauses, looking down at his left leg, “although it’s not like that's gonna be a problem for me.”

“Jason,” Bruce says.

“Yeah, yeah. Keep a two second cushion between me and the car in front of me. Don't reverse without checking the rearview mirror. Stay under the speed limit. Keep your seatbelt on. Be a good little boy. Anything else?”

Bruce just shakes his head. “No. You're good.”

Jason grins. They drive some more, along the narrow dirt road, so different from the highways and interstates they've been using for the last two days.

Bruce teaches him how to reverse. How to turn.

(“Use the turn signal, Jay.”

“But there's no one here.”

“Do it anyway.”)

How to parallel park, and how to switch lanes. How to take a U-turn.

Then, after he's learned everything, more or less, they go off-road for a bit and Bruce teaches him how to do full 360 degree donuts on someone's private property. Bruce can be cool like that, sometimes.

Jason isn't all that great at it, but it's exhilarating nonetheless.

That's when it happens. He stops the car right in the middle of the field after doing the donuts. He thinks he might be sick. He grins.

“Had fun?” Bruce says. He's smiling too.

“Yeah. If you consider being seconds away from sicking up in a ninety thousand dollar car fun. Then sure.” Jason's laughing, feeling breathless, the adrenaline rushing to his head and his chest and arms.

“You did well,” Bruce says.

Jason looks at him. “Yeah?” He says.

That's when it happens. Bruce puts a hand on his shoulder again, and suddenly Jason's back in the dream again, back on the lawns of the manor, back under the stars. Back in the coffin in the rain, in his old suit. The wet and cold muck surrounding him. Clawing at the lid of his coffin.

He flinches. Maybe he gasps a little too, his hands clenched on the wheel. White-knuckled.

Suddenly, all is silent. Bruce's smile fades away.

Jason closes his eyes briefly. He feels like pressing his forehead against the steering wheel, pressing hard, until it leaves a mark. Until he feels something.

“I'm sorry,” he croaks out. His voice sounds pathetic to himself. Desperate.

The field they're in is still. No breeze. The grass seems frozen in some form suspended animation. Everything seems frozen in time.

“We need,” Bruce says, “to talk about this.”

Jason looks at the steering wheel. What is there to talk about?

“I'm fine,” he says. “I just got– just got nervous, that's all.”

“Nervous,” Bruce repeats slowly, like he can't quite comprehend what Jason is saying. “Nervous is not the word for what you are.”

Jason stares. Is Bruce trying to say that he's– he's insane, or something? Mentally unstable. That would be the word he'd use. Highly volatile. Dangerous.

“And what would the word be,” Jason says, his mouth dry. He wants to get angry. He's in the mood for a fight. He's itching for one.

Bruce looks out the window, at the frozen grass, at the ossified soil. The world holding its breath. The dead silence hanging between them like a sword. Bruce looks out the window, his expression inscrutable.

“Traumatized,” he says. “That's the word.”

Jason studies the steering wheel some more, and then his shoulders slump. He sighs. Goddamnit.

“You drive,” he says. “I'm tired.”

They drive west, towards Texas. Jason digs out his old mp3 player from his backpack, and a pair of earphones that he borrowed from Dick. He listens to music as they pass the border.

'Welcome to Texas,’ the sign reads. 'Drive friendly – the Texas way.”

He wonders idly what kind of sign Gotham would have.

'Welcome to Gotham – Now go away.'

Something hostile like that. Sharp wit and ragged edges.

He feels a lot like that. Ragged, all over. Like something cut him and pierced him and drained him of all his blood and insides, and now there's nothing left. A hollow shell. Sharp edges.

He risks a glance at Bruce. He's looking straight ahead while he drives, his jaw hard. The lines of his arms, his shoulders, they're all rigid. Closed off. Bruce is mad at him. No matter how much he insists he's not.

Or at least, he's mad that Jason's been have nightmares. But it's not like it's something Jason can help. The nightmares are a constant. They happen all the time. The flinching is– it's an unfortunate by-product. There's nothing to be done about it. It's just the way it is.

Except Bruce doesn't seem to think so. Bruce takes these kinds of things seriously. Sometimes Jason feels like shaking him by the shoulders. I'm not one of your machines, he feels like saying. You can't fix me. Tighten a screw here or there, oil a joint, and all the kinks are worked out. All the problems are gone.

This is part of who Jason is, now. The nightmares, the problem with touching. This is as much a part of him as the part that likes hot chocolate, or the part that liked reading books, way back when. It's not going away anytime soon. It's not going away at all, and Bruce is just going to have to learn to live with that.

They drive through the evening. They pass by a turbine farm. Huge windmills, rotating slowly, almost leisurely in the wind. A couple of ranches, some dairy, others for meat. He sees a couple of steer grazing behind a fence. Large houses in the middle of those ranches. One time he even sees a few horses, running free. Flashes of brown running through vast fields of green.  Hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Jason keeps glancing at Bruce from the corner of his eye. Bruce doesn't talk at all.

They reach Austin after dark. There's stars in the sky. A few at least, ones he can see that haven't been blotted out of the sky by pollution or smoke or the city lights.

Jason tries not to look.

“Would you like to go out for dinner?” Bruce says. It's the first word he's said to Jason since the field in Louisiana. He sounds stiff. Removed from the situation. Like he's somewhere far away.

Jason shakes his head. “We'll just order room service.” He says.

Bruce nods. He goes to check in, and Jason sits at the table by the reception with their bags, staring at his own hands. He thinks about calling Dick. About what he'd said, about telling him right away if there was a problem.

No, Jason decides. That would be the selfish thing to do. Dick's probably got problems of his own. Stuff he needs to do. He can't drop everything and come to Austin to pick Jason up. And besides, Jason's not a kid anymore. He's not going to go complaining to Dick just because his feelings got hurt. He'll handle this on his own.

Jason frowns at his hands. Easier said than done.

After Bruce checks in, they go upstairs to their rooms. It's an adjoining set again, the rooms connected by a door. There's a balcony, Jason notes.

They eat dinner, some spaghetti dish that Bruce orders, and after a while Bruce gets up and goes back to his room.

“Get some sleep,” Bruce says, before he shuts the door behind him. He pauses, as if wanting to say something else. After a long moment, all he says is, “Good night.”

Jason nods. The door shuts with a click. Just like that, he's left alone it the room. Jason sighs. He takes the carton of the remaining cigarettes from his backpack, and steps out to the balcony to smoke.

*.

That night, he doesn't have any dreams, but he can't go to sleep for the longest time. He stares up at the ceiling fan, and he thinks of the small coffin, and the hand on his shoulder, and the word that makes the pit of his stomach feel oily and black with fear.

Traumatized.

It's only when he brushes his face with his fingers does he realise that his cheeks are wet. Traumatized. The word repeats itself over and over in his head, like some kind of fanatical chanting. Traumatized. Traumatized. Traumatized .

It scares him, he realises. It truly, really scares him. More than the nightmares, more than the Pit. It scares him that he might never be the same as before. He was wrong, in the car, when he thought that the nightmares and the flinching and the compulsive thoughts about choke points and grenades where an integral part of him. They're a disease, slowly eating into him, and he doesn't know how to stop it.

Traumatized. He shapes the word with his mouth, mouthing it to himself, softly.

It sounds strange. Ancient. Like a word uttered for the first time after a long, long time. After everyone had long since forgotten about it.

Traumatized.

Chapter Text

They leave Austin early in the morning.

Jason got barely any sleep last night, so now he dozes in the passenger seat, waking in snatches. Sometimes he glances at Bruce out of the corner of his eye. In those instances, Bruce’s face is always smoothed over, like he's a blank slate. Like he's thinking of nothing at all.

Jason closes his eyes again. Figures. Bruce is probably pretty tired of his shit at this point. Jason bets he just wants to get this trip over with, and go home. Probably never wants to see him again.

The drive is long and quiet.

They drive west. Bruce wants to make it to El Paso before sundown. The highway cuts across miles of vegetation and shrubs. The further they travel, the sparser the land gets, until it's almost a desert. Empty and endless, the last dregs of life all but dried up. The sun shines overheard, fierce and glaring.

Jason looks out of the window, his hands fisted in his lap.

When he was younger, just a kid, he remembers having gone on another road trip, one with Bruce and Dick. They were supposed to be visiting colleges, for Dick's business school ambitions. Or, more like Bruce's business school ambitions for Dick. Dick didn't seem to care much either ways, content enough to go wherever life (or in this case, Bruce) led him. He had always been pretty laid back, that way.

This had not been one of those times, however. Dick had wanted to go to some Titans’ mission with the rest of his team, in Eastern Europe.

(Jason envied that, sometimes. That he had never had a 'team’. Tim did. Damian had one, now. All with Batman's official stamp of approval. What had the Outlaws got? Just the fact that the League had agreed to look the other way, when it came to them.)

Bruce had refused, telling Dick that this college tour was much more important, and then Dick had said that if he didn't go his teammates could get injured out in the field without him covering for them. Bruce had snorted, and said that he highly doubted anyone was going to die because of his absence, and besides the college tour had already been planned, and then Dick had hotly suggested a possible location for Bruce to shove his goddamned college tour up, and soon there was a full blown shouting match in the dining room of the manor. Jason had quickly made his exit, opting to go over to the kitchen and hang out with Alfred instead. Alfred always told him everything was going to be okay.

“How come they fight so much, Al?” Jason had said, swinging his legs back and forth, sitting up on the kitchen counter.

Alfred was washing dishes, apron on, soap suds up to his elbows. Or maybe Jason just made that part up, in his memory. He'd only been what, twelve years old back then?

“Master Dick and Master Bruce both have very. . .strong personalities,” Alfred had said, “it is only natural for them to have these clashes, once in a while.”

Jason was twelve, but he was not an idiot. He snorted. “Right,” he said. “you mean, Dick's being a brat, and Bruce is being an asshole.”

“Language, master Jason,” Alfred said crisply, handing him a plate to dry. Jason took it carefully. “Besides, I'm positive that in your teenage years you will have plenty of disagreements with Master Bruce as well.”

Jason thought of the stifling silence there had been in that car, with Dick scowling in the passenger seat, and the hard, set line of Bruce's jaw. The car was dead silent. Jason almost felt scared. It reminded him a little of his days back home, of the vitriolic silence in his house, when his mom constantly had to walk on eggshells around his father, who was like a volcano, the rage building up and up and up and finally exploding. Usually on his mom. The inside of that car felt a lot like that.

They made up in like, three hours, though. They always did. Dick said something about the weather, and then Bruce said something back, and then Dick made a joke, and Bruce cracked a small smile, and then everything was okay again. That was Dick for you.

Jason had exhaled, feeling the relief flood into his chest, like wading into a cool lake on a hot day.

He told Dick the next day, in the car while they were waiting for Bruce to come out of a gas station. He told him what it had felt like.

“Aw, Littlewing,” Dick had said, ruffling his hair. Jason had batted his hands away. “we just got a little mad at each other, that's all. It's never going to be like that, you know. It's never going to be like that with Bruce.”

But Jason still thought of the shouting in the dining room of the manor sometimes. The suffocating silence in the car. All the fights they'd had, later on, when Jason grew up some. All that yelling and shouting down in the batcave.

Sometimes he still thought of his parents going at it, broken plates and bruises. Still remembered how he hid under the table, waiting for his mom to come find him. Sometimes she forgot. Sometimes she got beat up too bad to come get him. He waited for hours, once. After a while, he got old enough to get out from under the table and pick his own fights.

He didn't like fighting, but he was so good at it. It was all he knew.

It was all he had ever known.

*

“Bruce,” he says, suddenly.

Bruce looks at him.

They pass by countryside on both sides, blurring as they drive past it. He thinks he sees a hare running from one shrub to another, a fleeting dart of white on an expanse of brown.

“I'm sorry,” Jason says, stumbling through the words. His tongue feels too thick in his mouth, his words clumsy and unwieldy.

Bruce doesn't say anything for the longest time. After a while, Jason risks a glance at him.

“You're– you're not even going to say anything?” Jason says.

Bruce is looking out through the windshield, his eyes stormy.

“Really? You're gonna give me the silent treatment? I said I was sorry,” Jason says, that thing in his chest aching again. Bruce really is mad at him. Fuck.

Bruce sighs. “How many times do I have to say that you don't need to apologize?” He says, after a while.

Jason frowns. Sometimes he really doesn't get Bruce. He's clearly not happy, and yet he doesn't want Jason to apologize to him.

“Well, stop being pissed off at me then,” he says, finally.

“I'm not angry,” Bruce says, shortly. He sounds angry.

“Yeah, you are,” Jason says. “You're angry and I don't even know what I did. And I tried apologizing, okay? I tried playing along. I stayed at the manor, and went and saw my old room, and talked to your kids and–”

“My kids,” Bruce says, slowly. His hands are tight on the wheel. Jason has a feeling he's made some kind of a misstep. That maybe he can hear a crack in the thin ice that he and Bruce have been stepping around each other on.  

He swallows. “Yeah, I talked to them. Even Tim, okay? I did all that for you. To make you feel better, and so– so you wouldn't be mad anymore. I don't get–”

“I'm not mad,” Bruce snaps. “And they're not just my children. They're your brothers.”

A silence.

They pass through more of the Trans-Pecos, the land bare and dry. Jason can't hear anything other than the blood rushing through his ears.

“They're not my brothers, Bruce,” Jason says slowly. His throat feels tight. “I met Tim for the first time, six months ago, when I tried to kill him. The others? I've barely ever talked to them. And Dick only likes me because he knew me back when I was a kid and he likes everyone.”

“That's not–”

But Jason shakes his head. He speaks through the stupid lump in his throat. “You don't even like me, Bruce. Can't you see? We've been driving for the last three days and we've fought every single one of those days. You don't like having me around. You just miss the little kid who lived with you a long time back. He's the one you want back. Not me.”

“Jason, you–”

“And you know what, Bruce?” Jason says, talking over Bruce. Fighting. It's all he's good at. “I am just about fucking done with you pretending that everything is fine, and basically nothing happened. You can't– you can't take me on a goddamned road trip and fix every problem I've had for the last five years. It's almost like I never died, or got tortured, or killed people. Because that shit happened, okay? And you weren't there. You were never there.”

This time, Bruce is the one who flinches. Jason would feel bad maybe, if he wasn't so pissed off.

“They're not my brothers, and this isn't my family. You know what you're doing? You're mistaking pity for love. And you're getting pretty tired of me, I can tell. So just spare both of us the hassle and be honest with me, okay? Because I'm tired of waiting for the inevitable to happen.”

“I'm not getting tired of you,” Bruce says, his voice sharp as knives. They're going a fair bit over the speed limit, now. “I'm getting tired of your idiotic inhibitions when it comes to seeking help.”

“What?” Jason says, incredulously.

“You're the one that acts like nothing is happening. Those dreams you have–”

“Yeah, what about them?” Jason says. They're both yelling now.

Bruce's eyes go flinty. “You think those dreams are just nightmares, Jay? They're episodes. You’re the one who needs to stop acting like it's nothing, like it doesn't matter.”

“I've been doing really well on my own so far, Bruce, thanks a lot. So how about you stop giving me that condescending bullshit about–”

“Condescending?” Bruce says, his eyes narrowed. “Is that what you think this is?”

“Yeah Bruce,” Jason says loudly, “I kinda do. You hadn’t seen me for months before  this, and now all of a sudden you care and you're sitting me down and lecturing me about–”

“I am trying,” Bruce says slowly, like Jason’s an idiot or something, “to tell you that you're not okay. Listen to me for once, Jason. Is that so damn tough?”

“I'm fine,” Jason yells. He's shaking, he realises. Trembling all over. “And it's none of your fucking business anyway. Besides, you're one to speak – you take really good care of yourself, don't you?”

“I'm trying,” Bruce snaps, “and it is my business. You're my son. I'm allowed to care.”

“I'm your son?” Jason says, laughing. Except it sounds bitter to his own ears. It sounds resentful. “Right. Tell me another. Maybe when I was fifteen, I was your son. Not anymore. Not now.”

Bruce stops the car. He actually stops it, right there, in the middle of the fucking highway. He pulls over on the side of the road, and he looks at Jason.

“What?” He says, sounding more angry than Jason has maybe ever heard him sound before.

“Bruce, cut the shit, okay? Look, I totally get what you're trying to go at, here. You think you abandoned me, or whatever, and now you're trying to make amends because you feel guilty. You don't have to say all this stuff. I know where I stand with you, anyway.”

Bruce doesn't say anything for the longest time. If he looked angry earlier, Jason can't really describe how he looks now. He shakes his head, looking out the window.

“Christ,” he says finally.

He undoes his seatbelt, and gets out of the car, slamming the door shut.

A beat.

“What the fuck,” Jason says, out loud, unfastening his own seatbelt. He gets out of the car. Bruce is on the other side of the broad, empty road. Miles of desert on either side of them. The mid-morning sun makes Jason squint.

“What the fuck, Bruce,” Jason says again, yelling across the road to him. Bruce is facing the desert, his back to the car. Jason can't see his face.

“Get back in the car, Jay,” Bruce says. He sounds tired.

“And what, sit there till you work out whatever fucking crisis you're going through?” Jason yells. “No thanks, asshole. If you're going to fight, just shout at me, okay? I'm not playing any of your games.”

Bruce turns around. His eyes are resolute. “Get back in the car,” he says quietly, “I'm going to tell you something.”

“I'm not getting–”

“Fine. Then listen to what I have to say,” Bruce says, walking back to the car. To Jason. “You are my son. You've always been my son. I'm allowed to care about you. Get that through your head.”

“That's not–”

“Jason, you are not well. You need help, do you hear me?”

The sun inches up another few degrees in the sky, the heat rising. Jason can feel it though his t-shirt. Can feel the damp already collecting on the back of his neck.

“I'm fine,” Jason says again, but he's not yelling anymore. Neither of them are.

Bruce looks back out at the desert. “You believe that?”

Jason's mouth feels dry. “Yeah,” he says. It doesn't sound like his voice from before though. Doesn't sound strong or particularly confident.

Bruce looks at him. Look right through him. “Jay,” he says, his voice very soft and very quiet. The way he used to speak to hurt little children, back when Jason patrolled with him, “you're not fine.”

Jason thinks of the dreams that he has, of how when he wakes up the bedsheets are soaked in his sweat, of how he sometimes thinks random people out on the street are League members that want to attack him. He thinks of the sick feeling he got in his gut every time he’s shot someone.

He wishes there was a table to hide under, now.

“Shut up,” Jason says, but his throat feels tight again, and it's tough to get the words out. He looks away, at the car, at the shrubs, at anything that's not Bruce, and tries not to let the tears leak out of his eyes.

“Jason,” Bruce is saying, still doing that quiet thing with his voice.

“Shut up,” Jason says again, looking away, wiping at his eyes. “I don't want to talk anymore.”

“Okay,” Bruce says.

They're both silent. It's starting to get real hot. Jason leans against the hood of the car. He studies the thin soil collecting on the side of the highway. The scrappy weeds growing along the sides of the road. His chest aches. It aches.

“I'm sorry,” Bruce says, “I didn't mean to– hurt you.” He's looking at the wetness in Jason's eyes.

Jason shrugs– a jerky movement. When he was a kid and he had nightmares, Bruce always held him through the worst of it, gentling him and stroking his hair. Then they'd go to the library together, the great big one in the manor.

Pick a book, he'd say.

Any book?

Any book.

Bruce would read him stories until he fell asleep. No more bad dreams.

Meanwhile, the mid morning sun rises overhead.

“I dream about stuff that happened a long time back,” Jason says.

Bruce looks up.

“Things I did in the league,” Jason says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “The Lazarus pit. I dream about that one a lot.”

Bruce is silent, waiting for him to finish.

“Sometimes I dream about stuff– stuff from before.”

“From before?”

Jason looks down. That way he can't see Bruce's face. “The warehouse, and the– Him. Sometimes I dream about that.”

Bruce is still, next to him. Jason risks a glance at him. Bruce looks someone told him his dog died, or something.

“What?” Jason says.

“You have these dreams every night?” Bruce says.

“No, It's uh– it's not that bad.”

“It's bad,” Bruce says.

Jason shrugs.

No cars pass by them. It's almost as if no one else exists. Just the two of them in this big, deserted world.

After a while, Bruce shifts. “I'm glad you told me,” he says. “Thank you.”

Jason shrugs again. He needs to stop fucking shrugging.

“We should get back in,” Bruce says, “ I don't want you standing on that leg for–”

“They always start out the same way,” Jason blurts out. “They always start out with you.”

A pause. Then, “I'm in your nightmares,” Bruce says, with a complete lack of any tone, so Jason knows he's hurt him.

“No,” Jason says, shaking his head, “it's not like that. It's– they always start out really nice. You're in– you're in the good part.”

“What’s the good part?”

Jason scratches the back of his neck, looking around them.

“You don't have to tell me.” Bruce says, after a while.

“No it's– it's stupid. You uh, might not even remember. You know how you taught me those constellations, when I was fifteen?”

Bruce looks at him then. “You still remember that?’ he says.

Jason nods. He thinks of that cool night, the stars and the grass and the manor and Bruce. Cassiopeia. Aquila. Argo Navis. Canis Major. The hand on his shoulder, warm and sure.

“Every detail,” he says, his throat feeling tight again.

“Jason,” Bruce says.

“And the nightmares, they get worse when I'm on painkillers or anaesthetics, and–”

“Jason.”

“–and sometimes I wake up feeling this fucking horrible pain, like some kind of a phantom ache that the Lazarus gave me, so the first couple of months I took meds for it, but it never worked, so I took more, and more and more and now none of the pain meds work on me, Bruce, and that's why stuff in my backpack didn't do anything, and why I woke up when Leslie was stitching up my leg, and I don't know what to do.” he's dangerously close to tears again, and it's all coming out like a river that's been behind a wall all this time, and now that wall is broken, and there's this flood, this gushing of–

“Jason,” Bruce says again.

Jason looks away, willing himself not to crumple.

“Yeah,” he says, once his stupid throat allows him to speak.

“Come here.” Bruce says, his voice soft.

“What?” Jason says, turning around.

“I'm going to hug you,” Bruce says, “I just thought I'd give you a heads up, okay?”

Jason looks at Bruce, his heart pounding. “What?” He says again.

Bruce pulls him into a hug, his arms around Jason. He's warm and sure and he smells like that same old aftershave he's been using for like, the last ten years, and under that he smells like home.

“Jay, it's okay,” Bruce says, and Jason realises he's crying into Bruce's shirt collar. He can't stop. The arms around him tighten.

“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” Bruce is saying. Jason's face is pressed into Bruce's shoulder, like it's frozen there. Bruce puts on hand in his hair, smoothing it.

“I hate it,” Jason says, through his tears, “I hate feeling like this.”

“I know,” Bruce says, still rubbing Jason's back. He sounds devastated.

“I don't– I just want–” Jason starts to say, his voice choked. He stops. He doesn't know what he wants. He wants to a be kid again. He wants to get out from underneath that table and pick a fight. He wants to be able to look at the stars and not have it ending with everything burning down, just for once.

Bruce holds him tight. Doesn't let him go, not ever.

“It's going to be okay. We'll fix this.” Bruce says, and he sounds so sure.

Jason says okay.

Chapter Text

“Jason,” a voice says, and Jason blinks, squinting. It's bright. Too bright.

“Switch the lights off,” he groans, and he hears a soft laugh.

“That light is the sun,” Bruce says. “Wake up. We need to start now if you want to be at the canyon by tonight.”

Jason sits up, rubbing at his eyes. His eyelids feel like they're glued together. “Five minutes,” he says, sleepily.

“No.” Bruce is walking around, picking up Jason's clothes, putting stuff into his backpack.

“Six,” he says.

“Four,” Bruce says.

Jason grins lazily, and flops down on the bed.

Six minutes later, he's woken up again.

“Breakfast,” Bruce says. “Let's go.”

“Bru-uce,” Jason says, stretching. He's only pretending to be sleepy at this point, and Bruce knows it. Except Bruce is playing along too. Jason smiles.

“No excuses. Get up. I'll count to five.” Bruce says.

Jason snorts. What is he, eight or something? “Yeah? And what's gonna happen when you get to five?”

“One,” Bruce starts to say. “Two. Thr–”

“Shit,” Jason mutters, crawling off the bed. “Fine.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can swear that he can almost see him smile.

*

This time, before they start to drive, Bruce hands Jason the keys.

“Why don't you take over,” he says, “I'm getting a little tired of driving all the time.”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Me? I’ve driven like, once. You want me to drive for another nine hours?”

“This will be practice for you,” Bruce says, getting into the passenger seat, “and I can always take over if you're getting tired.”

“Uh, okay,” Jason says, getting into the driver's seat. “Right. How do you start the engine again?”

Bruce levels him with a look.

“I was joking, B,” Jason says, rolling his eyes.

“If we make good time,” Bruce says, looking at his wristwatch, “we should reach the South rim in nine hours. Be there by eight o’ clock.”

Jason starts the car. “We're not stopping for lunch?”

“We'll get some snacks from a gas station on the way.”

“I'm telling Alfred,” Jason says, and Bruce's mouth twitches up, just a little bit.

“No one's telling Alfred anything,” he says and Jason laughs.

They drive out of Texas and into New Mexico, into more desert and scrubland and rocks. Once in a while Jason sees a lone cactus, sticking out of the ground like a ghost ship on an undulating wave in a sea of sand. There aren't any towns nearby. No gas stations either. Nothing for miles and miles. The sun shines overhead, beating down hard.

“Bruce,” Jason says idly, “you know how you have a winter batsuit? The one with all that extra insulation and stuff?”

“Hmm,” Bruce says absently, checking the map on his phone.

“Do you have a desert batsuit? With some kind of cooling system inbuilt, and like, a pee-to-water conversion system in your utility belt?”

“Don't be crude,” Bruce says, not looking up from his phone.

“Me, crude?” Jason says grinning, “Never. I'm just picturing you in a desert camo batsuit, is all. Light beige would be a good look on you. It might bring out your eyes.”

“I'm sure,” Bruce says dryly.

“Didn't you train for a bunch of years in the desert anyway? With Talia and the others? What did you wear then?”

“Whatever they told me to,” Bruce says. “I was a trainee. I didn't have much say.”

“Okay, so what you're saying is that Talia made you wear a beige batsuit,” Jason says.

Bruce sighs. “No.”

“A tan batsuit.”

“No.”

“Warm taupe.”

“It was not warm taupe, Jason.”

“Ha! So you admit that it was some variation of beige.” Jason says, grinning.

Bruce sighs again. “We wore body armour. Kevlar reinforced.”

A pause.

“Sometimes it was beige.”

“I knew it,” Jason says, triumphant.

“Eyes on the road,” Bruce says.

“Right. Sorry.”

“It was only for stealth missions.” Bruce says, after a while.

“Sure,” Jason smirks.

The desert on both sides of the road blurs into a strip of brown as he drives. The sky above them is clear, the bluest thing he's seen. There's not a cloud in sight.

“Talia said it looked good,” Bruce says, and Jason starts to laugh.

“What,” Bruce says. He looks slightly offended.

“Uh, she was trying to get into your pants so that she could have a genetically perfect son, Bruce. Of course she said you looked good in your khaki bodysuit.”

“It was not a bodysuit. It was armour.”

Jason snorts. “Okay, B.”

“It was,” Bruce insists.

“I'm not saying it wasn't, am I?” Jason grins.

“Hnn,” Bruce says. He sounds skeptical. He looks back down at the map on his phone.

Jason looks around some.

“Hey Bruce?”

“What.”

“Is there a gas station anywhere nearby? I kind of need to pee.”

“I don't see any on the map.”

“Shit,” Jason says.

“What, no urine-to-water converter in your suit?” Bruce says.

“Fuck you, Bruce,” Jason says.

An hour later, and they're still driving through the desert. Jason really needs to pee.

“Bruce,” he hisses, “I'm going to die.”

“You're overreacting,” Bruce says. “I'm sure we'll find a gas station in fifteen minutes.”

Thirty minutes later, and there's still no gas station. Just more and more desert.

“Just pull over,” Bruce says, “and go behind a bush.”

“I can't do that,” Jason says, scandalised. “That's not– that's not environmentally friendly.”

Bruce snorts. He's reclined his seat back, so he looks more like he's lounging. “I think the desert can handle it, Jay.”

Jason thinks about it for a second, but then he has to stop because thinking makes him want to pee more. “Fine,” he says, pulling over, “fine. Just don't– don't mention this to Dick, okay? Or Alfred.”

Bruce shrugs. He almost looks amused, the fucking asshole.

Jason shakes his head, undoing his seatbelt. “Don't drive away without me.”

“I won't,” Bruce says, and he's pretty much smiling now. “Now go.”

Jason goes. In both senses. And then he sees a fucking rattlesnake.

“Oh fuck,” he hisses, zipping up his pants, “fucking shitsticks.”

The rattlesnake looks like it's mad. If rattlesnakes could look mad. Maybe it's just looking bored. Jason can't really tell.

“Bruce!” He yells, hoping that he can hear him from over the rocks and bushes and thirty feet of desert that Jason walked through because he was fucking pee-shy. Great. He can almost imagine the headlines. Man dies for second time in desert because he was embarrassed and didn't want to pee near the car. Shit. Fucking goddamnit. He should have peed in a bottle or something.

The rattlesnake flicks its tongue out idly.

“Bruce!” He whisper-shouts again, backing away slowly.

Bruce can't hear him. Obviously.

Jason keeps backing away. The rattlesnake doesn't follow him. Maybe he was right, and it does look more bored than angry.

He eventually reaches the highway again and gets into the car real quick.

“Here's some hand sanitizer,” Bruce says, handing him a plastic bottle.

“I don't want hand sanitizer,” Jason hisses. “I almost got bit by a rattlesnake.”

“What?”

“I could've died out there, B. And then who'd you take to the Grand Canyon, huh? The goddamned hand sanitizer?”

“I don't see why you're attacking me for this. Or the hand sanitizer, for that matter,” Bruce says, his mouth twitching up.

Jason stares at him in disbelief. “You're laughing at me.”

“Certainly not.” Bruce says, and he's definitely laughing now.

“I hate you,” Jason says. He takes the hand sanitizer. He doesn't know if there's any way to clean his hands angrily, but he sure does give it his best try.

“Where's the snake?” Bruce says, peering out the window.

“I don't know. I don't want to know.”

“Damian wanted one for his birthday. I got him the new Xbox instead. He was very disappointed.”

“We are not getting a snake for your son. And especially not one that tried to kill me.” Jason says.

Bruce snorts. “Fine. Let's go.”

They drive. And they come across a gas station fifteen goddamned minutes later.

Jason makes sure to make a very rude hand gesture as they drive by.

*

Around lunch time, or perhaps a little after, desert changes abruptly into forest. Bruce is eating yogurt that he bought from a gas station. Jason is eating the beef jerky that Steph said was good. It's not half bad.

“We're at a national park,” Bruce says. “Want to stop?”

Jason looks outside. There's a hiking trail going into the woods.

“Aren't we supposed to be driving non-stop?” Jason says.

“We've been making good time,” Bruce says.

“What about my leg?”

“You weren't complaining too much when you ran back into the car because you thought you saw a snake.” Bruce says dryly.

“I really did see that rattlesnake, and it was a matter of life and death, okay?”

“If you don't want to go we don't have to go.” Bruce says.

Jason sighs. “Nah. I'm tired of driving anyway. Let's just go.”

They park by the side of the road, and walk by trail. Bruce makes Jason take his crutches, not that it does him any good. The ground is all soft because of the soil and the leaves falling, and his crutches sink right into it. He just carries them with him, after a while.

“I'm thinking,” Bruce says, as they walk slowly through the trail, the leaves crackling underfoot, “that we should add seeing a therapist to your list.”

Jason looks at him. “We're not beating around the bush at all today, huh?”

“It would help.”

“Have you ever been to see a therapist, B?” Jason says, scoffing. “'cause you shouldn't really be the one to–”

“I go,” Bruce says, cutting Jason short. “Occasionally.”

Jason stops walking. “Really?”

Bruce shrugs with one shoulder. He's looking off to a side, like he's thinking about something. “There's a very qualified psychologist that Leslie recommended. I went once. I didn't. . . hate it.”

“Huh,” Jason says.

They walk some more, through brush and undergrowth and past a stream. There's sunlight streaming through the foliage of the trees overhead, spilling onto the tops of leaves and grass and Bruce's hands shoved into his pockets.

“Don't look at me like that,” Bruce says.

“Like what?”

“Like I'm some kind of alien who replaced your father, Jay,” Bruce says, laughing softly. “It's okay to ask for help.”

Jason raises his eyebrows. “Okay, I know I've been dead a while, but what happened to you?”

Bruce shakes his head. They walk some more. They find another stream, a bigger one. Jason can see some fish in it, silver and small, the sun reflecting off of them in strange and inscrutable patterns. The trees beside the stream are tall, taller than most Jason has seen. Old and strong, their barks mottled and marked with furrows and notches that birds have made in them over the years.

They sit by the stream, on a log that's fallen by the banks. Bruce points out a bird with blue wings that's perched on a twig right next to the water. It looks like it has a black mohawk. It's a cool-ass looking bird.

“Guess what it's called,” Bruce says.

“What?”

“Steller’s Jay,” Bruce says.

The bird tilts its head, looking at the two of them, and then looks away again, content enough to just enjoy the scenery.

“Did it help?” Jason says.

Bruce is studying the stream in front of them.

“I admit that it would have helped more if I actually cooperated,” Bruce says, his voice soft.

Jason smiles. “What you didn't tell the shrink that most of your trauma arose from having to run around at night dressed like a bat?”

“No,” Bruce says, “I didn't tell her about that at all.”

“What did you talk about, then?”

Bruce shrugs. “Things. The death of my parents. My son.”

“Oh,” Jason says, looking at the bird perched on the twig. Jay bird. He remembers Bruce would call him that when he was a little kid. He blinks hard.

“Jason,” Bruce says, his arm outstretched, and the meaning in his words is clear. Jason sidles along the log and Bruce puts an arm around him.

They watch the bird for a while, the stream gurgling and frothing as it flows along. Jason puts his head on Bruce's shoulder.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Bruce says.

“I know,” Jason says.

*

They drive into Arizona, and the forest becomes desert again. In the distance sometimes, he sees mountains. Large structures, undulating and surging above the horizon, eroded and pitted by the wind. The rock looks almost red in the dying rays of the sun.

They reach Flagstaff before sunset, and the mountains in the back start to look bigger. Some of them are snow-capped, even. It's beautiful.

They check in to a hotel near the city centre. The receptionist, a nice lady with her glasses propped up on the very edge of her nose, tells them that they're lucky it's off-season, or the place would be booked full. There's a gift shop in the hotel, just a small one, but Bruce buys him a grand canyon postcard.

“Write a letter to Dick,” Bruce says, “or he'll feel bad.”

But Jason keeps it in his bag. He's going to put it up on his wall when he gets home.

Bruce gets them adjoining rooms again, and they go outside to get some dinner. Jason even manages to get Bruce to go to a McDonald's.

“This is not real food,” Bruce says, eating his burger with a fork and knife.

“Stop embarrassing me in front of everyone,” Jason says, “and eat your burger like a normal person.”

“I am eating like a normal person,” Bruce says, his face perfectly smooth and innocent, the little shit.

Jason shakes his head. “You’re buying me like, twenty chicken nuggets for this.”

“For what?” Bruce says. He start to slice the burger into quarters, like it's a goddamned steak or something.

Jason just sighs, and drinks his coke.

*

That night he has a dream. He can't really remember it, just the sharp, metallic feeling of fear and anxiety when he wakes up, his chest heaving and his sheets soaked in sweat.

He looks over at the door connecting his room to Bruce's. He sighs.

He sits up and scrubs at his face. A shower. That'll make him feel better. Okay. He can do showers.

He goes over to the bathroom, turns on the shower. Watches the spray for a moment, running his hand under it. He feels cold, too cold. He watches his hand tremble slightly under the spray of the water. Watches it until it gets worse and worse, and then he clenches his hand into a fist.  

Fuck. He turns the shower off.

He leans out the window and smokes instead. The rooms don't have balconies, and he doesn't want to trigger any fire alarms in the dead of the night. He looks outside, at the town. The streets are lit dimly by streetlights, and if he squints he can still see the mountains in the back, looming over the town, their crowns a ghostly white. The match flares up brilliantly when he lights it, a flash of white against the dark of the night.

The tip of his cigarette glows red against his fingers, bright enough to see through them. Maybe if he looks close enough he'll be able to see bone, bare and ivory white.

He breathes in, and he breathes out. He looks at the door again. It's not locked. Bruce wouldn't lock it. 

He breathes in.

He looks out the window, at the stars.

He breathes out.

Fuck. He puts out the cigarette before it's even half over.

The room is quiet and dark, but Bruce wakes up before Jason even comes close to the bed, even though Jason knows that he's good at being quiet.

He sits at the very edge. Bruce sits up, watching him.

“I had a nightmare,” he says, roughly. He probably still smells like smoke.

“Okay,” Bruce says, slowly.

Jason looks down. He thought Bruce would say something. Something like he'd said at the national park, or in the desert when they were coming up to El Paso. It's okay. It's going to be alright.

Sweetheart.

“I don't feel good,” Jason says suddenly, a little desperately. “And my hands were shaking.”

Maybe Bruce doesn't want to put up with his shit all the time. Maybe he just doesn't care.

“Come here,” Bruce says, and Jason almost sobs with relief, crawling into the bed beside Bruce. Bruce wraps his arms around Jason, and Jason presses his face against Bruce's chest, his eyes shut tight.

Bruce is stroking circles onto his back like he's a kid again, slow and steady.

“Shhh,” Bruce says, smoothing his hair back, “Just keep your eyes closed. It's okay. Everything's okay.” It’s like he's gentling a horse or something. It's a goddamn stupid way to comfort someone, but it makes Jason feel better anyway.

After a while, Jason's breathing slows down. Bruce is still stroking his back.

Jason rubs at his eyes.

“Feeling better?” Bruce whispers. It's still dark out, and for some reason it feels more appropriate to be whispering.

Jason nods against Bruce's shoulder.

“Good,” Bruce says.

Jason curls up tighter. It feels strange now, to be doing this. The last time he hugged Bruce like this he was only about half his size. But now he's as tall as him.

Bruce shifts a little, letting Jason adjust. “Don't think,” he says, his voice warm and fond, “that I don't know that you've been smoking.”

Jason sniffles a little. “Sorry.”

The hand on his back doesn't stop stroking. “It's okay, Jay. Go to sleep."

“Here?”

“If you want,” Bruce says, his voice quiet.

Jason nods again.

Outside, the first hints of pink are pushing through the night sky. Dawn.

“You know I love you,” Bruce says, after a pause. It doesn't sound like a question, but Jason knows Bruce well enough to know that it is one.

“Yeah,” Jason mumbles.

Bruce presses a kiss into his hair. "Nightmares can't do anything to you," He says, "Not when I'm here, okay?" 

Jason closes his eyes again. “Thanks dad.” He mumbles.

The hand on his back pauses, and then starts stroking again.

“Go to sleep,” Bruce says again, except there's something in his voice, something different, and it makes Jason's chest feel thick and warm, like a hot day on a beach.

Jason goes to sleep.

*

They drive to the canyon the next morning. Well. Mid-morning. They both sleep in, and they get up well after the morning wake-up call.

In the car, Jason rubs at his eyes. He's much too sleepy to drive, so Bruce has taken over again. He looks out the window, at the rock structures and trees and snow capped mountains in the hazy distance. He yawns.

“We there yet?” He says.

“Another five minutes,” Bruce says.

“We finally got here, huh?” Jason says. “No one died or lost any legs or anything.”

“No one got bit by any rattlesnakes,” Bruce says, and Jason scowls.

“Or went into cardiac arrest because they had to eat at a McDonald's,” he interjects.

“Fair enough,” Bruce says. He seems almost amused.

“So the bottom line is, we got here fine.” Jason says.

“Yes,” Bruce says, “yes, we did.”

Jason has no idea what the nice receptionist lady meant by 'off-season”, because there's a shit-ton of people at the skywalk. And a lot of them recognise Bruce.

Jason stands kind of awkwardly to the side as they take their selfies with him or whatever. He looks at Bruce, grinning and talking some chick who's holding out something for him to sign. Why would anyone want Bruce's autograph? He's the most boring-ass person on the planet.

“Thank you!” Some kid with a camera says, waving goodbye, and Bruce smiles affably. After he's gone, Bruce walks back over to Jason.

“I'm sorry about that,” he says.

“It's cool,” Jason says. They looks down from the railing, at the four thousand feet drop to the canyon floor.

“So– so how are you gonna explain to people that I'm back?”

Bruce looks at Jason. “What?”

“People like the shrink, you know. You're gonna have to come up with a convincing excuse. 'We thought he was dead’ isn't gonna cut it.”

Bruce's face softens. “You'll go see the therapist?”

Jason scratches the back of his neck. “Maybe,” he says, “If you come up with a valid enough reason as to why I'm walking around Gotham and not six feet under.”

“We'll figure a something out,” Bruce says. “And we'll make sure you can go to high school and get a driver's license and use your name legally again. Does that sound good?”

Jason leans against the railing, his elbows on the metal. “Yeah,” he says.

It does sound good.

They find a place to eat in the park, and they go back to the hotel room, where Jason crashes for like, three hours. If his leg was any better, and his sleepless nights fewer and farther between, they'd probably go for a hike, or something. But it's not very likely in Jason's condition, and besides, he doesn't think Bruce is much of a hike person anyway.

Which is why is surprises him when Bruce wakes him up around twilight, handing him his sneakers.

“Where are we going?” Jason says, feeling soft with sleep, his brain not fully switched on yet. He puts on his sneakers groggily.

“I talked to the woman down at the reception,” Bruce is saying, putting his own sneakers on, “and she told me about this spot that's– Jason, wake up.”

Jason jerks up, his eyes opening. “'m awake.”  

Bruce pulls him up to his feet. “Come on,” he says, “it's a long drive back. You can sleep in the backseat.”

“We're going back to the canyon?” Jason says, as they walk down the hallway, and into the elevator. “But it's gonna take us an hour. It's going to get dark.”

“Yes,” Bruce says.

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Okay then,” he says.

Jason sleeps in the backseat all the way to the Canyon. He wakes up shortly before they arrive, sitting up and blinking slowly, until his eyes adjust to the darkness.

They get out of the car at clearing of sorts. They're at the floor of the canyon, and Jason follows Bruce through the brambles and scrub until Bruce stops. He realises that they've climbed up a bit, and the clearing where Bruce parked the car is below them, now.

Jason is noticeably out of breath when they reach whatever spot Bruce wanted them to reach. Bruce looks apologetic.

“I'm sorry,” he says, “I should have remembered to get your crutches.”

“Bruce,” Jason says, “it's like, nine in the night. We can't see anything. We're going to fall and then some kind of James Franco 127 hours shit is going to happen to us.”

“Nothing is going to happen,” Bruce says, “Sit down.”

“Uh, here?” Jason says.

“Yes.”

Jason sits. Maybe Bruce is slowly going crazy or something. “You know, we could always do whatever this is tomorrow morning,” he says.

“No we couldn't,” Bruce says, “Now look up.”

Jason looks up, and sees a sky soaked in stars.

“Oh,” he says.

Bruce sits down next to him. “I thought you might like it,” he says, but he sounds uncertain.

Jason can't look away. “I like it alright,” he says.

“You still remember the constellations I taught you?” Bruce asks.

“Some of them,” Jason says.

“Look up there,” Bruce says, pointing. “Can you see Cygnus?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, “and Aquila.”

Bruce smiles. “You do remember,” he says.

“I couldn't forget,” Jason says, looking up. There's more stars out here than he's ever seen in the city. More than he's ever seen anywhere.

Jason closes his eyes, his head tilted up towards the sky. He can faintly hear insects chirping, shrill and rhythmic. Cool and soft and quiet.

“This better not be a fucking dream,” he says.

“It's not,” Bruce says. He puts a hand on Jason's shoulder and Jason doesn't even flinch.

They look up at the stars.

“Bruce?”

“Hmmm,” Bruce says.

“As awesome as all these places have been, and as shitty as Gotham is–”

“You miss it,” Bruce says.

“Yeah,” Jason says.

Bruce snorts. “I know. God help me, but so do I. We'll start driving home tomorrow.”

“Oh, good,” Jason says, leaning back, his palms flat against the ground.

“You're driving,” Bruce says.

“The entire way?”

“It's practice,” Bruce says, “to pass your test.”

“You just don't feel like driving anymore.”

“I did it for ten hours everyday for four days,” Bruce says. “You drive this time.”

Jason shakes his head. “As long as we get to stop to eat more burgers on the way. And you eat them with your hands.”

“I'll think about it,” Bruce says, the side of his mouth pulling up in a smile.

“It's a deal,” Jason says, and they sit at the floor of the canyon and watch the stars glow in brilliant and infinite permutations across the endless sky.

Chapter Text

The next three months are pretty much the best time Jason's had since way back when he was fourteen and he saw Bruce trip over his cape one night in the batcave.

Back in Gotham, Bruce goes back to work and patrol, and Jason goes back to physical therapy. His leg starts to get better – much better than it was earlier. He barely ever needs the painkillers now. And he gets along with the family better. Pretty much.

The only things that don't really change are his nightmares. They're as persistent as ever, but at least now Jason knows he can go to Bruce when he's feeling like shit. Still, most nights Bruce is at patrol, and he has to resort to sitting around and finding something else to do to kill time. Sleep doesn't come easy, after nightmares like his. Especially not when he's alone.

He's sitting in the living room one night, his foot propped up, watching something on the TV, when Tim and Damian walk in from the kitchen, their phones in hand.

“I feel like someone's following us,” Damian says.

Jason sits up straighter. The last dregs of the nightmare haven't left him yet, and his chest starts to feel tight again, “Who?”

Tim spares a glance at Jason. “Oh, not real life. In the video game,” he says, indicating to his phone.

“Drake, get back here, I found a car,” Damian says, looking at down at his screen.

Jason scoots over to get a look. “It's two in the morning,” he says.

“It's not a school night,” Tim says, frowning down at his phone. “Where are you?”

“In the car. I told you, Drake. God, you're a dolt.”

“Is this like, a multiplayer game or something?” Jason says, scratching the back of his head.

Tim snorts. “You've been gone a long time. Video games are way better now,” He looks up from his screen, sitting next to Jason. “Couldn't get any sleep?”

“Not really,” Jason says. “just waiting for Bruce to get back from patrol.”

“It's going to be a while,” Damian says, “he radioed back saying that there were some reports of trafficking in the Narrows. He's going to go investigate. Drake, will you get in the goddamned car.”

“Oh,” Jason says.

“C'mon,” Tim says to Jason, “I'll teach you how to play. See those arrows on the left? It's how you move forward and backward, and this is to jump. That one's to crawl. You try it,” he says, handing his phone to Jason.

“Drake,” Damian says.

Tim rolls his eyes. “No one's coming for us, Dami. It's cool if we sit here a minute.”

Damian groans, sitting down on the sofa on Jason's other side. “Fine. But we're going to die, and I hope you're happy then.”

Jason tries the controls. He's not too bad at it, actually. He gets into a car with someone that he assumes is Damian's avatar.

“Damian and I are in a team together,” Tim says, “and if we survive until everyone in the map is dead, we win. There's a hundred people on the map. You and your teammate have to be the last men standing.”

“This sounds a lot like Battle Royale. You know, the movie?” Jason says.

“What movie?” Tim says.

“It’s about–” Jason stops. Suddenly there's a blood spatter on his screen and then it goes dark. “Hey, is that supposed to happen?”

“Drake, I told you there were people following us,” Damian says, scowling.

“Alright, fine whatever,” Tim says, rolling his eyes. “it's just a game. Get over it.”

Damian looks outraged. “I will not. I repeatedly insisted that we seek cover and instead you–”

“If you want to win all the time maybe you should just play by yourself,” Tim snaps.

“Maybe I will. It beats playing with a moronic im–”

“It's R-rated,” Jason cuts in, “the movie. You guys love that shit, don't you?”

Both of them glare at him.

“What, you don't want to see a movie where a class full of teenagers fight to the death on a remote island in Japan?”

More glaring.

“Someone gets stabbed in the dick,” Jason says.

Midway through the movie, Dick comes downstairs rubbing his eyes and frowning. “Why is everyone yelling?” He says, sounding groggy, “it's three in the morning.”

“Grayson, this movie is excellent,” Damian says, his eyes wide as he points to the screen, “look.”

Dick looks. Onscreen, schoolgirls are spraying bullets at each other with machine guns.

“Oh, you guys are watching Battle Royale,” Dick says fondly. He sits down on the sofa with them.

“Outwardly it may look like this movie is about violence and bloodshed, but really it's full of heart and friendship,” Jason says.

A bloodied schoolgirl launches herself at her friends, yelling a battle cry.

“Clearly,” Tim says, entranced. He looks like he's having the time of his life.

“No, it really is,” Dick insists. “Jason and I used to watch this all the time when we were kids.”

“Huh,” Tim says, “that explains a lot about how you guys turned out.”

Dick smacks him, and Tim laughs.

“Pause the movie, I'm gonna go make some popcorn,” Dick says. Except no one pauses the movie, and so Dick doesn't go get the popcorn.

They fall asleep that way, all four of them sprawled across the sofa or the floor, and when Jason wakes up, there's a blanket on top of him. It's all tucked in, just like Bruce used to do for him when Jason was just a kid.

He rubs at his eyes, accidentally elbowing Tim in the process, who mumbles something in his sleep and turns over.

He sits up, stretching. Bruce is sitting opposite them, on the chaise lounge, reading a newspaper.

“Battle Royale, hm?” He says.

“Yeah,” Jason says, yawning.

“Damian’s not allowed to watch R rated movies,” Bruce says.

“He sees people bleed and shit themselves on patrol all the time,” Jason says. He tries to get up, shoving Damian off of his shoulder.

“Hnn,” Bruce says, like he's unconvinced. “How's the leg,”

Jason stretches it out. It feels a little stiff, but it doesn't hurt. “Good,” he says.

“Let's go take a walk, then,” Bruce says.

Outside, they sit on the lawn. It's early morning, and Jason looks up at the bright blue skies. No stars.

“I called the therapist,” Bruce says. He's sitting on the grass cross-legged, his back straight, like he's going to meditate or something. “Your first appointment is on Tuesday.”

Jason leans back on his elbows, closing his eyes. The grass tickles at his arms, in a not altogether unpleasant way. Tuesday is still three days away.

“What do I even tell her,” Jason says finally. “That I died and was resurrected and then dunked in a Lazarus pit? Oh, and my dad's Batman and we fight crime and that's how I got hurt. That's what I'd say?”

“The truth,” Bruce says, “you’d tell her the truth.”

Jason snorts. “Yeah, right.”

“She's a friend of Leslie's.”

“So?”

“So Leslie trusts her. Which means I trust her.”

Jason gets up, off of his elbows. He stares at Bruce. “What are you saying?” He says.

Bruce tilts his head. The sun is right behind him, and Jason has to squint to look at him.

“You'd give up your biggest secret so I could complain to someone about my stupid problems?” Jason says, his voice dangerously close to shaking.

Bruce shrugs, minutely. When he stares back out at the treeline beyond the lawn, his face is serene. Like he's already made his decision.

“Your problems aren't stupid,” he says, calmly.

Jason sits up all the way, so he can face Bruce properly now. “Bruce, I can't tell her this stuff. You're going to get into trouble.”

“Not if she stays silent.”

“She won't. Come on, Bruce. It's too big of a risk to take. I can't tell her.”

Bruce looks at him then, his eyes sharp. “You can. And you will.”

“I won't do it.” Jason says. “I can't– look. She'd never believe me anyway. She'd probably try to lock me up in a mental hospital or something.”

“That's not how it works,” Bruce says.

“Well I don't know how it works, okay? But I sure as hell know that this isn't a smart thing to do.”

The leaves on the trees sway in the breeze. The few that are left, anyway. Autumn is almost over, and with its departure come the first hints of the biting chill of winter.

“Maybe,” Bruce says quietly, “I am just about tired of doing the smart thing. Maybe this time I'll trust my gut.”

Jason looks at Bruce. “You'd do that for me,” he says, his throat tight with something wet.

“Jason,” Bruce says, and when he speaks, his voice is just as calm as it's been this whole conversation, “I think we both know that I'd do just about anything for you.”

*

More leaves fall as the days go by. Red and brown and orange all mixed up on the ground, the days colder, the ground redder. Sometimes he dreams about it – the red on the floor of the pits, slick and wet and mixed in with the muck. The smell of metal and salt and hurt. He dreams about men whose blood drenched the soil of the pits. He dreams about killing them, clawing their eyes out or stabbing them or shooting them or whatever he did. He can't always remember.

He wakes up gasping and choking every time, choking on nothing but air. On those nights that he can't go to sleep, he goes to Bruce's room, and they stay up and watch TV or read books. One time they go out to a 24 hour diner, and Jason eats pancakes while Bruce flirts with the waitress.

“Leave her alone,” Jason says smiling, his mouth full of pancake. “It's a late night shift and she didn't ask to get harassed.”

Bruce smiles back. He looks tired, Jason realises. He's got dark circles under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow. Jason feels a small twinge of guilt for having woken him up.

“She's the one who keeps coming back to chat even though she's served us our food,” Bruce points out. It's true enough; the waitress looks pretty much like she's in love with Bruce.

Now that he thinks about it, a lot of people look like that when they see Bruce. And all those people who wanted his autograph at the Grand Canyon too. Jason remembers Bruce being recognised when he was a kid, but not this.

“Okay, but for real, did you become like a minor celebrity or something after I– you know,” he says, looking around. The diner's empty, but he doesn't want the waitress to overhear him talking about his death. That would be hard to explain.

Bruce scratches the back of his neck. He only does that when he's embarrassed. “Shortly after you died, I had a few – relationships. They were very highly publicised. It garnered the attention of a few magazines here and there.”

“Oh my god,” Jason says, eating his pancake, “my death made you feel shitty enough to start sleeping around.”

Bruce sighs.

“Did you go out with any supermodels?”

“That is none of your business.”

“So you did,” Jason grins. “Bruce, you dog.”

“Alright, we're going home now,” Bruce says, putting down on a twenty on the table. The pancake was like, five bucks. Bruce is so weird.

“I was kidding!” Jason says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It's not like he's laughing or anything. He's definitely not doing that.

“Let's go,” Bruce says, standing up, “I'm sure we're bothering Jeanine anyway, coming here at this hour.”

“Jeanine?”

“The waitress.”

“Oh my god, Bruce you know her name too. You sure I shouldn't just leave and give you guys the room?”

“It was on her nametag, Jay,” Bruce says, and they bicker like that, going back and forth until Jason's feeling better. A lot better, actually.

By the time they get home he can barely remember the nightmare.

That's not how it always goes, though. Sometimes Bruce isn't there. Sometimes he's at patrol, and Jason has nowhere to go, and he sits and stares at a wall, his eyes burning and his heart pounding.

He goes outside, one of the those nights, to go look at the stars. He thinks that maybe they'll make him feel better. He goes and sits down on the lawn, but when he looks up at the sky he can't recognise any of them. The constellations, they're all wrong. They're asymmetrical and foreign, and they're too stark white against the darkness. Pale, hauntingly so. He looks desperately around him, but he's alone. When he looks back, there's no manor either. Just an endless field of grass, and an endless sky about him. He looks up again, and the night sky is dark. Empty. No stars and no Bruce. An infinite abyss of nothing.  

That's when he really wakes up, his chest heaving and his hair soaked in sweat. He puts his head in his hands.

When he goes downstairs, he can hear the TV humming at a low volume. There's three people huddled up on the sofa. Dick, Damian and Tim. Damian's asleep, though.

“Jesus, Jason,” Dick says, when he sees him, “you look like death warmed over. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, his mouth dry. “What are you guys doing?”

“We're watching a movie. Couldn't sleep after patrol. What about you?”

“Couldn't sleep either,” Jason says. He sits down on the sofa next to Dick. They're watching some gangster flick. A lot of twenties clothes and people waving around guns. He stares at the screen, not really looking at it. His skin feels too tight on his face.

“There was a robbery at 52nd and Park,” Dick says. “A girl got shot. We got her to the hospital, but we had to get back. She's most likely dead.”

Dick's voice is somewhere far away, and when Jason looks at him, so are his eyes. He notices that they're red-rimmed, the skin around his eyes looking almost like it's bruised.  

“Damian took it hard,” he says. “We were just watching something on the TV to get him to calm down.”

Jason looks at Damian. He's asleep now, curled up next to Tim, but when Jason looks closely, he can see dried tear tracks on his face.

“The girl was Damian's age,” Dick says, matter-of-factly, “maybe younger. She was the shop-owner’s daughter, and she was up late doing homework by the cash register when it happened. Bruce went after the robbers. Told us to go home.”

Dick looks fucking exhausted. They watch the movie for a while. Tim falls asleep half an hour later, one arm around Damian.

After the movie is over, Dick turns to Jason.

“Some days are just shitty,” he says, “but it's not your fault that they're shitty, you know?”

Jason knows.

*

On Tuesday, Bruce drives him to the therapist’s office.

“There's a coffee shop opposite the building. I'll wait there. Call me once you're done, okay?” He says, pulling the car into a parking space.

“Okay,” Jason says. He feels kind of underdressed. Maybe he should have worn something better than a t-shirt and jeans. Something buttoned-up and nice. He'd want to make a good impression, right?

“You're going to do fine,” Bruce says, as they get out of the car.

“Okay,” Jason says.

Bruce hesitates, and then gives him a quick hug. “I do love you,” he says.

Jason nods against his collar. “Okay,” he mumbles.

“Stop saying okay,” Bruce says, smiling. Except it's kind of a tight smile, like Bruce is nervous too. Like he feels like it might go wrong. Something about that makes Jason stand up straighter, square his shoulders. Nothing's gonna go wrong. He's got this.

“Okay,” he says, and Bruce just shakes his head, his smile a little less tight.

The therapist lady looks kind of like Jackie O, and she asks him a lot of questions. Like, a shit ton. And she doesn't make him lie down on any couch like in movies. He has to sit in an armchair across from her. There's a strategically placed box of tissues on the table between them, like he's going to suddenly burst into tears or something.

Her real name is Rachel Furtado, but Jason just thinks of her as Jackie O. She's a lot younger than he expected– maybe in her late twenties or something. She doesn't talk a whole lot either. No, she makes him do all the talking. It's weird, at first.

“Jason, are you listening?” Jackie O says.

“Yeah,” Jason says.

“I was asking, how do your nightmares make you feel?” She says.

“Uh,” Jason says, because what kind of question is that. “Bad. They make me feel bad.”

Jackie O is an infinite well of patience. “What do you mean, when you say bad?”

“Um, like, mad. I get angry.”

“You feel angry after you've woken up?”

“Yeah,” Jason says. He's looking at the stupid box of tissues, because for some reason he's incapable of looking Jackie O in the eye.

“And why is that?” She says.

“Because it's not fair,” He says, “I don't deserve to feel like shit all the time.”  

Jackie O takes some notes. “And how do you deal with that anger?” She says.

Jason shrugs. “I smoke sometimes. I'm trying to quit though.”

“Anything else?”

Jason tries to think. “I get kind of mad at my dad once in a while.”

Jackie O’s pen scratches down notes. “How come?” She says.

After the session, Jason walks over to the coffee shop across the road from Jackie O’s office.

“How was it?” Bruce says, when he sees him. There's a half empty cup of black coffee on the table he's sitting at. That, and an almost complete crossword puzzle. Some about that hits Jason in the chest. Bruce solving crossword puzzles for an hour at some random coffee place just so that he's there when Jason comes back out.

“It was good,” Jason says, sitting down across from him. “she asked a lot of questions.”

“And you'll go again?” Bruce says carefully, like he's preparing for the worst.

The waiter comes to get his order, and Jason asks for a hot chocolate.  

“Yeah,” Jason says, “why not.”

Bruce smiles. “Alright, well I need your help.”

“For what?” Jason says.

“Here,” Bruce says, pointing to the crossword puzzle, “eleven across. The process of taking something back or of reasserting a right. I’ve been stuck on it for a while.”

He has to think about it for a while. But he gets it eventually, after his hot chocolate is half over.

“Reclaimation,” he says.

*

He sits for a driving test two weeks later.

He studies all week before that, and makes everyone in the manor who can drive take him out to practice. Everyone who's free, that is.

Unfortunately for him, one of those people is Steph.

“How did you even get a driver's license?” He says, after Steph almost rear-ends a guy's chevy while trying to change lanes.

“Shh,” Steph says, giving the guy in the Chevy the finger as she overtakes him in a way that's totally got to be illegal, “lemme concentrate.”

“Hey, what the fuck?” The dude in the Chevy yells. The car behind Steph's is honking furiously.

“You drive like an old lady!” Steph yells back. Chevy dude looks like he's going to lose his shit. Great.

“Look, just leave it,” Jason hisses, “let's just go.”

Steph shrugs, glaring at the dude in the Chevy one last time. “Can't even change lanes in this stupid city without getting yelled at, huh?” She says to Jason.

“Uh, I'm pretty sure this was your fault.” Jason says.

Steph snorts, swerving through lanes of traffic while Jason tries to hang on for dear life, “Right,” she says.  

She must have concentrated hard enough, because fifteen miraculous minutes later they're at the driving course without having died in a fiery car crash.

“Here we go!” Steph says cheerfully, getting out of the car so she and Jason can switch seats. “Just go wild with it, man.”

“I would prefer not to,” Jason says, getting into the driver's seat, “Seatbelt.”

Steph rolls her eyes, putting on her seatbelt.

“Okay, look,” She says, “you ride a sick looking bike all over Gotham most nights, and you're worried about some stupid-ass driver's test? You're gonna pass, dude. You drove all the way home from Arizona. Chill out.”

“I can't,” Jason says, “Riding a bike is different from driving a car. And I'm not good at parallel parking.”

Steph scoffs, “No one is. Except maybe like, Bruce. And probably Cass. Cass is an awesome driver. You should've asked her to come instead.”

“She had some dance thing,” Jason says. “And Bruce is at work.”

“Oh, so I was your last choice?” Steph says, amused.

“Well,” Jason says, “yeah.”

Steph laughs. “I almost drove into some guy’s living room on the way to the manor to come pick you up, so you know what? I'm not even mad. C'mon Jason, let's do the parallel parking thing.”

“Wait a minute, you did what?” Jason says, but Steph is already ignoring him, bossily giving instructions about where to place the orange cones and how to reverse and steer.

So he practices and he drives and he practices and then the day comes and Bruce drives him to the DMV. He's in his work clothes, because he's got a meeting or something, after.

“Dick could've dropped me,” Jason says.

“It's fine,” Bruce says. They're stuck in traffic. He's tapping his fingers on the steering wheel idly.

“So I was looking up high school applications,” Jason says.

Bruce stops tapping on the steering wheel. “And?” He says.

“I can sign up for classes at a community college, but I have to provide identification and past high school records and stuff,” He frowns, “and that's a problem. Because according to the public record, I'm dead.”

“That's not a problem,” Bruce says simply, “I got the public record changed last week. Bribed a judge and told her my son was just missing all along. Still, it's public record, and it's going to come out in a while. I imagine we'll have to come out with a press release, eventually. Get ahead of the curve. Tell everyone some complicated story about how you got kidnapped and sold into slavery in some remote part of the world.”

“Huh,” Jason says.

“Yes.”

“Is that how I'm getting a license too?”

Bruce nods. “We'll have to get the story confirmed by a few people. Get a few eyewitness accounts. Make sure that we get a goat herder in Serbia or something on camera to say that he saw you narrowly escape from a sweatshop.”

“That sounds kind of dumb,” Jason says, “are there even any sweatshops in Serbia? Or goat herders, for that matter.”

Bruce's mouth quirks up just the smallest bit. “I'm just spitballing. We'll come up with something more concrete.”

The knot of traffic loosens up, and the car starts to move ahead again.

“What if I don't pass?” Jason says.

Bruce chuckles. “You've never failed a test in your life,” he says. “You're not going to start now.”

He passes the test. When he gets back home he's herded into the main hall and suddenly everyone's cheering and there's a cake and streamers and a whole lot of people.

“What's this?” Jason says, surprised.

“It's a surprise party, dumbass,” Babs says, and wow, Babs is here. She's leaning on the arm of the chair Alfred sat her down in, a smile on her face. “Guess what. You get to drive me everywhere now. It's part of your official duty, now that you have a license.”

“Oh good,” Dick says, kissing her cheek, “I'm finally going to be able to retire.”

Jason looks around. There, sitting by the kitchen island are Cass and Steph and Tim. Damian’s in one corner, talking intently to Clark about something. Huh. Clark's here, and Lois, and their little kid– the one that Damian hangs out with. He sees Diana and Kate and Leslie by a cake plate. The cake's big, rectangular, and it's shaped like a driver's license. It says “Just Passed!” in frosty white icing over blue sponge.

Jason feels a strange mix of overwhelmed and amused.

“What,” he asks, “would you guys have done if I'd failed?”

“Well,” Kate says smoothly, “Bruce would have called ahead and we'd have smoothed over the icing and thrown you a party for failing and building character.”

“Looks like you guys had it all worked out,” Jason says, smiling.

Bruce puts a hand on his shoulder. “They made me cancel my meeting,” he says, but he doesn't sound particularly sorry about it.

“Well, if they made you cancel it I guess we have to go on with the party.” Jason says.

“It would only be right.” Bruce says, “now cut your cake.”

They spend the afternoon eating cake and Alfred's special tacos and everyone makes Jason tell them about the road trip and what his plans are for school and did Bruce really eat his burger with a fork and knife, and when Jason says yes, Bruce really is that weird, it gets Clark to start telling them a story about how Bruce once bought a whole burger joint franchise once because they didn't have any cutlery and he wanted to rectify that. This launches Kate into her story about how once when Bruce was in the fifth grade he paid her a hundred dollars to go punch Katie Weisberg in the face because she'd breathed on his food during recess and he couldn't go around hitting women because it wasn't right.

“Easiest money I've ever made,” Kate shrugs, “and I'm an heiress.”

“You people are just mean to Bruce,” Lois says, eating her taco, “the man wants to eat a burger in peace. Let him be.”

“Thank you, Lois.”

“Now it's a different matter that you paid someone to do your dirty work for you. Even as a fifth grader, those are some underhanded tactics. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Thank you, Lois,” Kate claps, looking delighted. Bruce sighs.

After all of that's done and everyone's gone home, Alfred asks Jason to help him put the dishes away.

“That was exhausting,” Jason says, washing a bowl.

“You looked like you were having fun, master Jason.” Alfred's putting away the leftover bean dip. The cake's been successfully gotten rid off, divided into sections and sent off with the various invitees. Clark's kid, Jon, ate most of it anyway. Kid's got a huge appetite.

“Yeah,” Jason says, “I did. But it made me really tired too. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes,” Alfred says, and then, “don't forget to rinse the salad bowl.”

Jason starts rinsing the salad bowl.

“The idea was Master Bruce's. He planned it,” Alfred says, “I thought you'd like to know.”

Jason pauses. “But what about his meeting? I thought everyone else made him cancel it.”

“Really?” Alfred says, raising an eyebrow. “This is all news to me.”

“Wait,” Jason says, putting the salad bowl down, “so you're saying he cancelled the meeting? And he had that planned all along? How come he never said anything at the party if it was his idea, then?”

“Sometimes,” Alfred says, “master Bruce can be rather – emotionally inept. Perhaps not the most eloquent way of putting things, but it's the truth. Now finish washing the salad bowl, master Jason.”

*

“You’re asking me why I get mad at my dad?” Jason asks, sitting in Jackie O’s office.

“Yes.”

Jason scratches the back of his neck. He does it when he's embarrassed too, he's realised. “Sometimes he says stuff that's hard to hear. I mean, I know he's right and all, but it still pisses me off.”

“What kind of things?”

“He's the one who suggested I go see a therapist. It was on a road trip. And I got real mad, because I thought he was trying to say there was something wrong with me.” Jason says. “Uh, no offense. Like, I know there's something wrong with me now, but I didn't back then.”

“There's nothing wrong with you, Jason,” Jackie O says, writing something on her pad, “except your perception of the problems affecting you. And to that extent, your perception of yourself.”

“You're really filling up that notebook, huh?” Jason says. Maybe that's a bad sign. Who knows, though. Jackie O’s poker face can rival Bruce's.

“I keep notes on hand for all my clients,” Jackie O says. “We were talking about your perception of your problems.”

“Yeah, what about them?”

“We were talking about your nightmares,” she says.

*

“Students who only need to complete a couple of credits to earn their diploma may want to consider an adult high school completion program, in which students take the courses they need to graduate, like an English class,” says the High school completion advisor. Her name is Cindy. She's nice. They're sitting in her office on the second floor of the community college, and Jason is fucking freezing. He forgot to wear his stupid jacket.

“I was in some AP classes in the tenth grade,” Jason says, going through his file, “it was um, English and Chemistry, I think. And I had some dual credit classes. I don't think I need too many more credits.”

Cindy looks at his file. “If you signed up for a completion course it might take you up to nine months to finish. Maybe less, if you're a quick learner,” she says.

“I was thinking of something more – faster than that?” Jason says, pulling the sleeves of his shirt down a little. Jesus, doesn't Cindy feel the cold like normal humans?

“A GED?” Cindy says, “that's a quicker course, but it won't always get you into every college. Unless you have excellent grades.”

“Oh,” he says.

Cindy hands him a pamphlet from her desk. “We have a concurrent enrollment program you might be interested in. Only for students that already have most of their high school credits in hand. And of course, you'd have to finish up with your final exams.”

Jason looks at the brochure. “So college and high school at the same time?”

“Finishing up high school, and enrolling in one class at a college at the same time. Two at most, but in my experience most people can't handle it.”

“What options do you have? For college classes that I can take with high school, I mean.”

“Well,” Cindy says, leaning back in her chair, “we've got a broad variety. Just tell me the field you're interested in, and depending on your aggregate scores on the subject, I'll tell you if it's feasible for you or not.”

Jason crosses his arms in an attempt to hide the fact that he's actually hugging himself to try and ward off the hypothermia in this goddamn sub-zero temperature office. “Liberal arts and humanities,” he says.

“Well,” Cindy says, “we teach a few liberal arts courses here. History, Anthropology, Creative writing, English literature, Philoso–”

“Creative writing,” Jason says, “I'll take creative writing.”

*

“Alright,” Jason says. “here's the perception I have of my problem, the problem being my nightmares. They're bad. I hate them, and I can't tolerate them.”

Jackie O raises an eyebrow. “You can't tolerate them?”

“No.”

“If you couldn't tolerate them, Jason, you'd be dead.”

“I don't–”

“You are tolerating them, Jason. You're doing it now. You're doing it everyday.”

Jason frowns. He can't really argue with that.

“Yeah, well I don't like having to tolerate them,” he says.

Jackie O flips around in her pad a little. “Let’s talk about something else, for a moment. Leslie tells me that you have a high tolerance when it comes to painkillers,” she says.

“Yeah. They don't work on me anymore.”

“And why is that?” Jackie O says. That's got to be her favourite thing to say. And why is that?

Jason pauses, debating whether or not to tell her about the Lazarus pit. Leslie said she'd filled her in about his medical details, but he doesn't really know the extent of the detail that Leslie went into. Could be just that she told Jackie O that he and Bruce were really into adventure sports or something, and that's how he got injured all the time as a kid.

“I got hurt a lot, as a kid,” Jason says, trying to think of how to explain the Lazarus pit, “and then I got better. Really quick. Nothing hurt again. I didn't have scars or anything. It uh– must have been an immunity thing.”

Immunity thing. God, that's the stupidest thing he's ever said. Still, Jackie O doesn't offer any comments, so he goes on.

“And suddenly I felt all this phantom pain, it was like– I can't really describe it. It was this idea of how bad everything was supposed to hurt, except it didn't. All the places where I'd broken bones and got lacerations hurt like hell, except there weren't any scars to prove it. It drove me crazy. So I took pain pills, except they didn't work, because I wasn't really in pain, right? But it still really hurt, so I tried Vicodin, and then Morphine, but nothing worked. I stopped trying eventually, but the pills stopped working on me.”

“Did the pain stop?”

Jason blinks. “No. I don't know. I just got used to it. And then it went away. It wasn't really something I couldn't handle,” Jason smiles wryly, “I've had a lot worse.”

“So allow me to paraphrase, here,” Jackie O says, “it drove you crazy initially, and then you realised you could tolerate it, and you learned to live with it. And eventually it went away. You see where I'm going with this?”

“That was different. My nightmares are worse.”

“How so?” Jackie O says.

Jason is silent.

When Jackie O speaks, her voice is softer. “You learn to live with it, Jason. You focus on making everything else in your life better. Right now, these nightmares, they're all you think about. They've taken over your life. And maybe they'll never go away, but at least you won't spend every waking moment thing about them.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” Jason says.

“Work on things that will make you happy. Leslie said something about a list?” Jackie O says, looking back down at her pad.

Jason goes red. “Dick really told everyone, huh?”

“It's got some good stuff in it. I hear you did some things already.”

“Yeah. Got a driver's license last week. And I just signed up for some high school classes,” Jason says.

“I believe one of the items on it was getting a dog? That sounds like a good plan. Responsibility, companionship and exercise all rolled into one.” Jackie O looks at the wall clock. “Our time's up for today's session, Jason. I'll see you next week?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, getting up. “So my homework is, get a dog?”

Jackie O smiles for the first time since he's seen her. “Do something on the list. Something that makes you feel better. That's your homework,” she says.

*

October fades into November, and Jason spends his time going to school and college classes and studying and watching R-rated movies with his brothers. He's enrolled for a few classes in his old high school, just enough so that he can graduate. Bruce went in and spoke to the principal for him, and he's been allowed to sit only for classes he needs. He remembers some of the teachers there, and some of the teachers remember him. He even remembers some of the kids. The seniors are only a year younger than him, so it's not that hard to make friends. He remembers why he used to love school, remembers how goddamn great he was at studying. At being nice to teachers and paying attention in class.The teachers that remember him like him already, and the teachers that don't start to, pretty quick.

As for an explanation as to how he's mysteriously alive again, Bruce has a whole huge press conference and tells everyone this tall story about how his son was imprisoned in a cell at some terrorist compound in south east Asia for five years and how he escaped valiantly and contacted his family as soon as he could amid threats to his life at every turn.

“What a load of bullshit,” Jason says, looking at him on the TV as Bruce earnestly requests everyone to give his family the much needed privacy they require at the moment.

“Not really,” Dick says. He's sitting on the sofa next to him. Everyone is. They're in the manor, and they're watching Bruce spin an elaborate story full of so much bullshit that it's actually masterful. “the press is lapping it up. And it's a concrete story too, you know. All the legit news agencies that try to go investigate Bruce's claims won't find any holes in it. He's got eyewitness accounts and doctored evidence and everything. He made Clark go in front of the press as Superman and say that he picked you up from rural Indonesia or something. And everyone trusts Superman.”

“If Bruce wasn't – you know– Bruce, he'd probably be like, a scary good criminal.” Steph says. “My god, he'd totally rope us all in to leading a life of crime.”

“Yeah, probably,” Jason says absently, watching the live press conference. “At least we don't have to worry about the public now.”

Except it turns out they do have to worry about the public, because the story blows up. Suddenly people want pictures with him– the Kid Who Didn't Actually Die, or want his autograph or something, and some nice lady from Iowa even mails him a hand-knitted sweater that says, “Survivor!” in curlicue letters. And it's got a kitten on it. Jason mostly keeps it for the kitten. Everywhere he goes, there's people shaking his hand, or a reporter sticking his mic in Jason's face and asking him what his years in the terrorist cell felt like, and what his favourite colour is and does he think Superman is a national symbol of hope and justice, and how does he like being officially alive again, so to speak?

“Scary,” Jason says, “Red, and I prefer Batman, actually. And good. It feels good to be alive again,” he says, smiling into the flashing cameras. “Oh,” he says, “and I'd like to thank Cathy-Sue from Iowa for mailing me that sweater. I wear it all the time. It's fucking dope.”

*

“Can we get two?” Damian is asking, from the backseat.

“No,” Bruce says, from the driver's seat. They're driving down to a farm a little outside Gotham.

“Please, Father. Please. I'll feed him and brush him and walk him and you won't even have to see him. Or buy him a dog bed. He'll sleep in my bed with me.”

“You already have a dog, Damian,” Bruce says, his words so practiced sounding that Jason is sure that they have this conversation every week.

Damian pouts. “Titus is grown up. He needs company,” he says, looking meaningfully at Jason, “lots more company.”

“Titus has a veritable zoo full of animals he can be friends with,” Bruce says. “We have a cat, and a turkey. And a cow.”

Jason only discovered the cow last week, and was reasonably weirded out upon said discovery.

“And Jason's getting a dog now, so I think you can live with having only one dog of your own,” Bruce is saying.

“But father–”

“No,” Bruce says, and Damian scowls sullenly, but that's the end of that discussion.

When they reach the farm though, Damian forgets that he's supposed to be mad, and runs up ahead of them so that he can look at the puppies.

“You know, you didn't really have to do this,” Jason says.

Bruce shrugs. “I saw an advertisement in the paper. They're practically giving them away, so why not. It's not like the manor has any lack of space.”

Jason snorts. “Don't let Damian hear you say that. He'll be asking for a pony next.”

“Father!” He hears Damian yell from up ahead, his high voice filled with delight, “there's eight of them!”

“God give me strength,” Bruce mutters, picking up his pace. Presumably to detach an overeager Damian from the puppies.

There are indeed eight of them, all golden-haired and tiny. And they're all cute as shit. Jason sits on the floor next to the pen, a tiny overeager ball of fur and excitement in his lap. She's licking his hands like there's no tomorrow.

“This one, I think,” Jason says to the man who owns the farm.

“She's got a couple of brothers just as feisty,” The man says, looking at Damian, who looks entranced by all the puppies. “Maybe y'all could get two. One for the little boy too.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Bruce says politely. He's holding Damian's shoulders firmly, as if any moment he's going to run away with a dog or two. “We want just the one.”

“Well, if you're sure,” the man says.

Damian looks at Bruce with the biggest, most sorrowful eyes ever. “Father,” he says, his voice small, “are we sure?”

"Yes."

"Alright," Damian says, his voice barely audible. He's looking down at the floor, blinking furiously.

Bruce closes his eyes. “Goddamnit,” he mutters. “Fine,” he says to the man, “we'll take two.”

Damian gasps and wraps his arms tight around Bruce's mid-section. Kid can't even reach up to his chest.

“Father,” he says, sounding almost tearful, “you're the best.”

“Alright,” Bruce says, patting Damian's back, “there's no need for flattery. You already got what you wanted.”

“He's a pushover,” Jason says to the man, who just grins.

“Parents with little kids are always my best customers,” he says, as he gently picks up another wiggling puppy out of the pen, “they just can't say no.”

Damian names his dog Bear. Jason names his dog Abigail.

“What kind of a name for a dog is Abigail, anyway?” Damian says, as he's giving her a belly rub. The dogs have been in the manor for a week now, and they've already wreaked havoc in it.

“You don't name a dog Abigail. You name a person Abigail.”  Damian is saying. He must have found some kind of special scratching spot, because Abigail looks like she's high, her tongue out and her eyes glazed over.

“I don't know. She kind of looked like an Abigail,” Jason says, “what kind of a name for a dog is Bear? Didn't you used to name your pets cool things like Titus Andronicus? Now it's all names like Jerry and Batcow and Bear. What happened?”

Damian scowls. “You're going to hurt Bear's feelings,” he says.

Jason looks at Bear, who's passed out in a corner. “Yeah, no. He's not coming out of the coma he's in for another hour, at least. He's been running around all morning.”

They watch Abigail fall asleep, her little chest moving up and down quick in a way only tiny puppies breath.

“I'm going to draw Father a thank-you card,” Damian says, gazing adoringly at Abigail, “It's going to have you and me and the puppies on it.”

“That sounds awesome,” Jason says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

November goes by too, and soon it's snowing and Alfred's making everyone wear five layers of clothes before they go outside. Jason keeps going to school and his college classes like normal, and after a while reporters stop shoving mics in his face to ask him his favourite flavour of ice cream.

It’s Mint chocolate chip. But that's irrelevant.

Roy and Kori swing by a couple of times, regaling to him each time their stories of liberating slave aliens in the moons of Dresicant II or something closer to home, like shooting up an illegal arms dealer’s set-up in Tampa.

Jason misses it. Both his friends and his work.

“When do you think you'll be able to get back in the field again?” Roy asks, throwing a ball after Abigail, who scurries off through the snow on the manor grounds in search of it.

“Another week, maybe two,” Jason says, “It doesn't even hurt anymore, but Leslie said to give it some time anyway.”

“And how is your father?” Kori says. She's in a normal t-shirt, like it isn't fucking freezing outside. He remembers she'd told him something about her biology, how the cold doesn't affect her like it does for humans, but it still kind of freaks him out.

“He's good,” Jason says. “Everything's good.”

And everything is good.

Sometimes when he has nightmares he goes downstairs and plays video games with Tim. Tim is always up. Sometimes Cass is there too, and they can spend long hours of time together in silence. Snow falls, his leg gets better, and time goes by.

*

“You think they'll ever go away?” Jason asks one day, sitting in the armchair and staring at the box of tissues.

“Your nightmares? They’re traumatic episodes. They might not,” Jackie O says. “But you'll learn to live with them. You've already started. And then over a course of a few years, a few decades, they might start to fade in frequency, until you only have one every few months, and one day you'll wake up and realise you haven't had one for years.”

“Oh,” Jason says.

Jackie O quirks an eyebrow. “Worried that's not fast enough?” She says.

“I mean, you said a few decades,” Jason says.

“That's an estimate,” Jackie O says. “It could be months, Jason. Who knows? It's recovery. It's not so simple. But you're doing well.”

“Yeah?” Jason says.

Jackie O nods. “You mentioned in an earlier session that your father was the one who recommended that you start going to therapy in the first place?” She says.

“Yeah, he uh– the whole being stuck in a terrorist compound for five years was pretty tough on me, I guess. On all of us,” Jason says.

“Right,” Jackie O says, looking down at her notes, her expression inscrutable. She doesn't know anything. . . does she?

“Wait,” Jason says, “how much has Leslie told you?”

Jackie O looks up. “It was good of your father to recommend that you seek help, Jason, especially all that you've been through. He's a very good man. He makes Gotham a better place for us to live in everyday.”

“Wait,” Jason says again, “you know that he's Batman?”

“I know as much as I need to,” Jackie O says. Holy shitsticks.

“Which is everything?” Jason says. “Holy shit, Leslie told you everything?”

Jackie O looks at the wall clock. “We're out of time, Jason. I'll see you next session.”

Jason gets up, off of the armchair. He feels a little numb. Before leaving, he turns back to her.

“Has uh, anyone told you that you look like Jackie Kennedy?” He says.

Rachel Furtado tilts her head. “No,” she says, sounding amused, “I don't believe anyone has.”

“Well, you do.” Jason says.

Rachel nods, smiling. “Thank you, I suppose. I'll see you next Tuesday.”

“Yep,” Jason says, pulling on his jacket. “Next Tuesday.”

*

“My therapist thinks you're a good person,” Jason says.

“Did you tell her how mistaken she was?” Bruce says.

Jason snorts. They're sitting in a bar in the East end. It's shady as hell, and he's pretty sure that's a blood stain he saw, on the floor of the men's bathroom. No reporters would ever dream of setting foot here. It's perfect.

Outside, there's a thick layer of snow on everything. Barely anyone's in the bar, given that fact that it's the middle of the day.

The bartender slides over two bottles of beer, and Bruce hands him some money.

“Believe me,” Jason says, “I tried.”

Bruce shrugs. “Well,” he says, “then there's nothing to be done.”

“I guess not,” Jason says, clinking his beer bottle with Bruce's. He takes the list out of his inside coat pocket, and looks at the last thing on the list, a recent addition. More like just a tradition. It's not like he hasn't had a drink before or anything. The list goes something like this:

go 2 grand canyon

high school

drivers license

get a dog

see a counselor

have first beer w dad

He crosses off the last thing.

“Guess that's everything,” Jason says, taking a swig out of his bottle.

“Yes,” Bruce says, “I suppose it is.”

They sit in the shady bar and watch the snow fall, and they finish their beer.  

Reclaimation. He likes that word.

Chapter Text

“No signs of swelling in tissues around the tibia, and the bone seems to have healed completely,” Leslie says, examining his leg. They're in her clinic. This is his last check-up.

“So I'm okay now?” Jason says.

“Yes,” Leslie says, going over a few of his scans, “100% recovery. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Jason says, getting off of the examination table and rolling the cuff of his pants down. It's mid December, and Alfred made him wear everything in his closet short of legwarmers. “I guess I'm ready to go back to the field now, huh?”

Leslie chuckles. “That, and go back to your apartment. Isn't that what you wanted to do all along?”

Jason goes still. “Yeah,” he says finally, “yeah, I guess I did.”

He drives back to the manor from Leslie's clinic. There's a thick layer of snow on the banks of the road, and it's still falling steadily. The blades of the windshield wiper move from side to side in his vision, clearing away the snow that falls on the screen. One of them is kind of squeaky. The sound it make annoys the hell out of him.

He feels angry with himself. With Bruce. With goddamn everyone. How long did he think this would last, this whole living in the manor, watching movies with his brothers, hanging out with Bruce at diner's at two in the morning? He was an idiot.

Now that he's fine, he's going to have to go home. They'll probably want him gone too.

He wipes at his eyes, feeling mad. The fucking windshield wiper keeps squeaking.

“Fucking moron,” he says out loud, looking at himself in the rearview mirror, “what did you think was going to happen?”

He didn't, is the the problem. He didn't think.

At the manor, he starts to pack his stuff back into his backpack. His clothes, his old CDs, Abbie's food and treats and all that stuff. That postcard from the Grand Canyon. He looks at it for a while, and then puts it in.

“Master Jason?” Alfred says, standing outside the door. Jason looks at him. “May I know exactly what is happening?”

“I'm packing,” Jason says. He puts that sweater that the nice lady from Iowa sent him in his bag.

“I see,” Alfred says. A pause. “May I know why?”

Jason shrugs. “I'm okay now. Leslie said so. Said I could go back to my apartment, no problem.”

“I see,” Alfred says again. He leaves.

Jason starts to pack in his socks.

Five minutes later, Dick comes barrelling into his room, an incredulous look on his face, “Are you an idiot or what?” He says, right away.

“Oh,” Jason says, putting his textbooks in his bag, “hey, Dick.”

“Hey,” Dick says, “are you an idiot or what?”

“Uh,” Jason says.

“Why the hell are you leaving?”

“'cause Leslie told me I was good to go. Hundred percent recovery, didn't you hear?” Jason says.

Dick sits down heavily on the side of Jason's bed. “Congratulations, dumbass,” he says, dryly. “But why are you leaving?”

Jason blinks. “Because, uh. Leslie told me I was good to go.”

“Just because you're good to go doesn't mean you have to go!” Dick exclaims, waving his hands around. He seems very worked up about this whole thing.

“Alright, calm down,” Jason says, surprised, “I just figured, y’know. You guys are busy, and Bruce doesn't really have much time what with Damian and patrolling and work and all. I thought I'd just get out of your hair, you know?”

Dick flops down across Jason bed. “No, I don't know,” he says, covering his face, “Jeez, why does everyone in this family have to be such a–” he sighs, “look, you're not in anyone's hair, okay? Just– just wait for Bruce to come back home from work and he'll tell you the same.”

Jason smiles. “It's cool, Dick. I already packed. I have to get back to the apartment anyway, it's probably got goddamn rats in it by now or something.”

Dick sighs again. “God. At least go say goodbye to everyone. And let me drop you there.”

Damian hugs him. Like, a real hug, his tiny arms tight around his mid-section and his face all squished up against Jason's chest.

“Oh, hey– Damian,” Jason says, surprised, patting his back, “I'm going to miss you too,” he says.

“Don't leave,” Damian says, his voice angry and kind of muffled, “I was supposed to give Father his present today.”

“What pres– oh the drawing?” Jason says, “well, you can still give it now.”

“It won't be the same without you here,” Damian insists, glaring. He pulls back, looking pointedly at the wall next to Jason.

“I'll visit all the time,” Jason says easily, “and I'll call, too. And you can come by, too. It's not like I'm going to live in another state or something, you know. My apartment's like an hour away.”

“I don't care,” Damian says, still glaring, “it's not going to be the same.”

“Tell you what,” Jason says, “Let's play monopoly again. One last time before I leave, huh? How does that sound?”

Damian crosses his arms, his face turned away.

“Or we could watch a movie,” Jason says, lightly, “something R rated and grisly,”

Damian shakes his head. “I don't want to see any movies,” he says, his voice stiff.

“Come on, kid,” Jason says, a little desperately, “you're gonna be mad at me forever?”

“Yes,” Damian says, even though there's no bite in his voice anymore.

“Look, I got better, okay? Bruce doesn't need to worry about me anymore, and I'll be a lot less trouble to everyone this way.”

“He doesn't let you stay in the house just because he worries about you, imbecile,” Damian says, but his voice has gone all thick, so Jason hugs him again.

“Look, don't cry, 'cause I'll feel like shit, okay? C’mon, lighten up,” Jason says.

“I will not,” Damian sniffles.

“Let's watch a movie or something before I leave, Damian. C'mon. I can't leave with you hating me.”

“I don't hate you,” Damian says. He sounds pretty mad, anyhow. “Fine. We will watch Rambo.”

“I've seen Rambo like, fifteen times, Damian. It's not even that good,” Jason says.

“We will watch Rambo,” Damian insists.

Jason sighs. “Okay, kid.”

Damian falls asleep midway through the movie, and after it's over, Jason gently prises him off of his arm, walking over to the kitchen, where his suitcase and backpack are. Tim and Steph and Cass and Dick are sitting around the island, and they all get up when he gets in.

“Are you sure you're going to leave?” Steph says, her brow furrowed.

“Yeah, at least call Bruce,” Tim says.

“I sent him a text,” Jason says, rocking back and forth on his feet. “Uh, it was nice staying here,” he says.

“Jesus, Jason,” Steph says abruptly, coming forward and hugging him all of a sudden, “I'm going to miss you. Don't stop coming by.”

“I won't,” Jason says, his arms coming around her, “who else will kill me for the second time in a fiery car crash, huh?”

Steph laughs, “I don't know what you're talking about, my driving is impeccable.”

Cass nods at him, her eyes light almond in the winter sunlight. “Take care,” she says.

Tim waves at him. “Playing video games was fun,” he says, kind of uncomfortably, “I had a good time.”

“Me too,” Jason says. Then he looks around. “Where's Alfred?”

Dick motions to the hall. “He's in there, going on a silver polishing rampage,” he says.

“What?”

“Whenever he's mad, he polishes the silver. The week that Bruce went out on patrol with a broken leg? The silverware was out every day. It was practically gleaming by the time Bruce had the balls to say sorry,” Steph explains.

“Huh,” Jason says. He goes out into the hall.

“Alfred?” He says.

Alfred looks up from the silverware. “Is there a problem?” He says, smoothly.

Jason scratches the back of his neck, “Yeah, uh, just came to say bye.”

“Well then,” Alfred says, “goodbye.” He goes back to polishing a fork, or something.

“Aw, Alfred, don't be like that,” Jason says.

“Hnn,” Alfred says.

“You just did the Bruce thing,” Jason says, amused.

When Alfred doesn't reply, Jason goes and sits on the large side table next to the cabinet where Alfred is polishing the silver.

“Al, you remember when I used to try to steal this stuff?” Jason says, looking at the forks and spoons and fancy teacups.

“In order to– what was it?”

“Make rent,” Jason says, laughing a little, “I thought you guys were going to kick me out eventually, and I wanted to be able to make.rent when that happened.”

“Well,” Alfred says, “did you get kicked out?”

“No,” Jason says, smiling, “but how was I supposed to know?”

“I suppose you could have trusted us,” Alfred says.

“Yeah,” Jason says, “I guess I could have,” he gets off of the table, “I'm going to be leaving now,” he says.

Alfred sighs, and lets Jason hug him. “Must you always be so difficult, master Jason?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Jason says, grinning.

Dick drops him off to his apartment, and he walks up the three flights of stairs with Abigail.

“Shit,” he says, when he reaches the second landing. He looks at Abigail. Abigail looks back at him, her tail wagging.

“I don't think you're allowed in the building. I forgot,” Jason says.

Abigail wags her tail some more. She's already four and a half months old,  and growing fast.

“It's okay,” Jason whispers to her, “it'll be our secret. And if the landlord finds out, we'll just show him my grenade launcher, okay?”

Abigail looks at him. Jason sighs. “Yeah, I can't threaten the landlord with bodily harm, you're right. I'll start looking for a new place to stay tomorrow, okay?”

Predictably, there's no answer.

“Congratulations, Jason,” he mutters to himself, as he and Abigail jog up rest of the stairs, “ten minutes alone and you're already talking to your dog.”

He goes up to his apartment, his suitcase and backpack in hand. Opens the door one handed, and breaths in the smell of months of dust settling on his carpet. This is going to be a bitch to vacuum.

“You like it, Abbie?” Jason says. As soon as he unclips her leash she runs into the depths of the apartment to explore.

“Look out for rats!” He calls out after her.

He looks around. There's no rats that he can see, fortunately, and everything is just as he left it. Meticulously maintained. Bare walls, with no posters on them, and no dumb CD players. No children's books about horses on the shelves. Nothing.

He sits down on his couch. It's got a thin coat of dust on it as well. He sighs, getting up again to fetch the vacuum cleaner.

That night he goes out for patrol for the first time in three and a half months.

It's cold as hell and there's snow everywhere, and he knows about twenty minutes into the patrol that going out was a mistake. There's barely any visibility, and his bike headlights don't do much to help. He really should've checked the weather reports or something, because it looks like the beginning of a snowstorm. Still, he's stubborn enough to keep plowing on.

The helmet protects his face from the worst of the cold, but his fingers and hands start to hurt real soon; the thin fingerless gloves don't do much to keep them from getting cold. The wind doesn't help much either.

There's no one outside, but he can hear sirens faintly. Criminals in Gotham don't stop when the weather is bad.

He figures the cops can handle whatever he heard the sirens for, and he heads in the opposite direction, riding his bike down the road until he reaches the Financial district. There's always some idiot trying to start shit there.

Predictably enough, he finds a whole bunch of guys trying to break into a jewellery shop. Must be about five or six guys. They start shooting as soon as they see him. In the low visibility too, where they can hardly see anything.

Idiots.

He ducks and rolls, coming up behind one of the men, and disarming him quick. He manages to get the gun out of his hand, but he gets elbowed in the helmet hard enough that it knocks against his skull.

“You're gonna pay for that,” he says, knocking the back of the gun on the man's head. The man goes down, a soft thud on the snow. He checks the gun's magazine. Full clip. Not bad.

Someone tries to tackle him from the back, and he drops the gun. He recentres himself, and flips and sweeps the man's knees out from under him, and jabs him hard in the abdomen. Takes his gun too, and straps it onto his holster.

He gets off of the ground, dusting the snow off himself, and looks around. Most of the other guys ran away. There's still one man left, and he's scrambling backwards in the snow, towards that gun with the full clip that Jason dropped when he got tackled. He trips and falls. Gets up again.

Jason walks towards him, real slow. He aims his buddy's gun at him.

“I'm don't want to hurt you,” he says slowly, “but you take one more step in that direction and I'm going to have to do something neither of us want.”

The man stops moving. He's not a man, Jason realises. Just a kid. Maybe Jason's age, or even younger.

He lifts his hands up over his head, “Please,” he says, his voice shaky, “they said no one was going to get hurt, I didn't know why we were carrying guns if no one was going to get hurt, I swear I didn't know, I swear.”

“Your friends tried to kill me,” Jason says.

“I didn't know they were going to do that, really, I didn't, I thought that maybe if we saw Batman we'd just run, but–”

“I'm not Batman.”

“I know! I know that, it's just,” the kid's lower lip is wobbling. Jesus. “I was doing it for my girlfriend. We're getting married, and her old man, he doesn't know. We're going to run away. She wanted a dress. You know, like– like a wedding dress. She wants it to be nice, she didn't say anything, but I know she does. I ain't got that kind of money, and they– they never told me anything about guns, I swear. Oh my god, please don't kill me.”

“Step away from the gun,” Jason says, and the kid steps slowly away.

“Alright, good. Now you're going to walk away slowly, and you're not going to look back until you've reached home,” Jason says.

The kid pauses. “You're gonna let me go?”

“Yes. Get out of here before I change my mind,” Jason says.

The kid practically breaks into a half-run half-sprint, slipping through the snow.

Jason watches him go. Then he picks up the other gun, and handcuffs the two other guys still unconscious at the scene. He calls the police.

When they come, he gives them the guns. One of the officers raises an eyebrow, but offers no comment. They take the two men in, and the police cruiser drives away.

He gets back on his bike, and he goes back to his apartment.

At home, he sits on his couch again, and looks at the bare walls. Abbie has half a heart attack when she sees him again, like she thought he'd never come back home or something, but she goes to sleep once she's done licking his face enthusiastically, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He takes off his gear, and then his clothes underneath, and he goes and stands under the shower, making the water as hot as he can stand it. He closes his eyes, trying not to think about that kid. How close he came to almost shooting him. Like it was a reflex, of some sort.

He feels strangely like crying.

This was a mistake, he thinks. Leaving the manor. Going on patrol. He wasn't ready yet. Maybe he won't be ready for a long time.

He stands under the water for a long time, until it starts to go cold, and Jason starts shivering again. He towels himself off, putting on his pajamas and then he goes and sits on the couch again. He can't sleep yet, even though it's almost two in the morning. He's afraid he'll have a nightmare again, and it'll be bad. Worse than it’s been in a while.

“Okay,” He says, “okay. Just go to bed. Don't be a pussy.”

Except he doesn't. He thinks about smoking instead, but he doesn't want Abbie to inhale any smoke, and he's sure as hell not going outside, where there's no heating and it's cold as shit.

He lies down on the couch instead, and tries to control his breathing. He learned that in therapy. Breathing exercises. Fuck. He can't even stop a goddamn robbery without having to do breathing exercises. He's such a mess.

He wants his dad.

He falls asleep eventually, though. And then he starts to dream.

They sit on the grass in the Manor grounds, the cool damp of the night curling around them, and they look up at a sky absolutely drenched with stars.

That's always how it starts.

Jason closes his eyes, his head tilted up towards the sky. He's so tired of this dream. He can faintly hear insects chirping, shrill and rhythmic. It's a cool night, everything quiet and soft. In the dream, he is always fifteen years old.

“Cassiopeia,” Bruce says again, like they're both stuck in a broken record. He's sitting beside him, cross legged in the grass. He's wearing a white shirt, slacks, his tie loosened a little. Work clothes. He’s just got back from work. The wind runs through his hair a little, making it flutter in the breeze.

Flutter. The leaves flutter in the trees. Except they don't make any noise. It's a quiet night. Quiet and cool and soft.

And then the night dissolves away in to the thudding sound of Jason pounding his fists against the walls of the warehouse until his knuckles are bloody and his fingers start breaking, the timer counting down to minutes, and then to seconds, and then milliseconds, and then–

– and then it stops.

Jason looks at the timer, surprised. The clock’s frozen, and the warehouse is gone. The thudding sound is still going on in the background though. In fact, it's getting louder. Louder and louder, until Jason wakes up.

It's the door. Someone's knocking on the door. Abbie's barking her ass off.

“Just give me a minute!” Jason calls out, getting off the couch and stumbling towards the door. His heart's still pounding from the nightmare. Still, it's never just– just stopped like that. Never just ended when he wanted it too.

He opens the door, and Abbie stops barking. Because of course she does.

“May I come in?” Bruce says, taking his scarf off.

Chapter Text

He sits with Bruce at his small dining table, a cup of hot chocolate in his hands. Bruce made some for Jason, and some coffee for himself.

“You've had a nightmare,” he had said as soon as he'd walked in, his eyes sharp as ever.

Jason had shrugged, looking down. Maybe Bruce could see it on his face– the terror and the confusion. 

Bruce had put a hand on his back. It was warm and large, and Jason almost crumpled.  "I'll make you something warm,” he'd said, like this was his apartment instead. Abbie went crazy when she saw him, of course. Abbie loved him. Jason had sat at the table until Bruce was done making the hot chocolate and the coffee, and then stayed silent even while he slid it over to him. 

“Listen Bruce,” he says now, “not that I'm complaining or anything, but is there any reason you're in my apartment at four in the morning?”

“Yes,” Bruce says, crossing his arms, “there's actually a few that I can think of, right now.”

He sounds pretty pissed.

Jason studies the hot chocolate. They seem to have a lot of heavy conversations while drinking hot chocolate. “Leslie said my leg was okay. And that I could leave.”

Bruce scrubs a hand over his face. He looks tired. “I was at patrol before this. The Commissioner came up to me and said something about the Red Hood calling up the police and handing them some criminals. When was the last time that happened?”

Jason smiles a little. “Maybe when I was fifteen.”

“Yeah,” Bruce says. Abbie's curled up on Bruce's lap, bundled up in his coat. He's petting her, and she's looking at him adoringly with these huge mooncalf eyes.

What a drama queen.

“The leg’s fine?”

“It doesn't hurt at all.”

“That's good,” Bruce says. A pause.

“I thought you'd like to know,” he says, “Damian made me a drawing.”

“I know,” Jason says, “he told me. Did you like it?”

“It was wonderful,” Bruce says slowly. Jason looks at him.

Bruce is scratching the back of Abbie's ears gently, looking down at her with an inscrutable expression on his face. “He's been living with me for a year now, and I didn't even know he liked to draw. My own son. Did you know that?”

“He hid it pretty well,” Jason says.

“He thought it was something I'd look down on him for.” Bruce says, “He was embarrassed. And Dick knew too. And you were at the manor for all of two weeks before he told you.”

“Well,” Jason says, thinking, “I think he just wanted to impress you. You're like, his favourite person in the whole world, you know. He probably thought it was like a weakness, or something. And no one wants to look weak in front of you.”

Bruce frowns down at the table. “Am I really so unapproachable?” He says.

“Nah,” Jason says, “you're just kind of," Jason pauses, trying to articulate his thoughts, "II don' know what it is, but everyone just wants to be the best version of themselves around you,” Jason grins a little, “you inspire that in people.”

Abbie yawns, and then jumps off of Bruce's lap, plodding over to the couch, where she circles a spot once, twice, and then lies down. They watch her.

“Hnn,” Bruce says, “but not you.”

Jason snorts. “Are you kidding? Of course me too. I'm just such a trainwreck that this is the best version you're going to get for a long while.”

“Well,” Bruce says, “I like this version.”

A pause.

“And you're not a trainwreck.”

Jason snorts. “Maybe I'm not as bad as I was three months ago, or before I broke my leg, but you have to admit that I'm still pretty fucked up. I got back home from patrol today and I damn near had a panic attack. I'm pretty sure I spaced out in the shower for like, twenty minutes or something.”

Bruce frowns again, looking concerned. “You went out for patrol alone?”

Jason shrugs, “I always go alone,” he looks down. “Maybe this time it wasn't the best idea, huh?”

He gets up to put his mug in the sink, and Bruce gets up too.

“Dick told me you said that you didn't want to be anyone's problem,” Bruce says, “well I'm telling you now. You're not anyone's problem. I– I like having you around, Jay. I don't want you to leave. Just because you're better again doesn't mean you have to go.”

Jason feels something in his chest contract strangely, at that.

“I can't stay at the manor forever,” he says, weakly.

“Why not?” Bruce says, and when Jason looks up to see his face, he looks dead serious.

He laughs, a little wetly. “Because, Bruce, I'm not a kid anymore. I got sick, and then I got better.”

“My house,” Bruce says, “is not a rest home. You don't just stay there to get better. And if you wanted to leave, you should have said so earlier.”

Bruce is hurt, Jason realises. He's actually hurt.

Jason closes his eyes briefly. He'd never thought–

“And besides,” Bruce says firmly, “nineteen is too young to live on your own. You’re still a child, Jason.”

“No, I'm not,” Jason says, half heartedly. Sometimes he just disagrees with Bruce for the sake of it. He's starting to get tired of doing that.

“You'll always be a child to me,” Bruce says, his tone careful. “And I don't mean brash, or stupid, or any sort of thing like that. I mean my child. You'll always be my child.”

Jason sits back down on the chair heavily. Bruce is still standing.

“You really mean that,” he says, his voice small and shaky, “after all that I did. All those people I killed, and the horrible things I said to you.”

“I did horrible things too,” Bruce says, “I let you leave in the first place. I should never have.”

“I just– I fucked up so bad. And you still want me to–” Jason stops, his throat too right to finish that sentence. Bruce still loves him. He still does.

“That night I found you near the docks with your leg half blown up, it reminded me of another night. The wreckage and the flames, it was– it was a waking nightmare,” Bruce says. He sounds tired. Real tired. “I was the one that fucked up. And I paid for it everyday for five years. Every hour of every day. And I'm done with – with paying the price. With punishing myself."

When he looks up at Jason, his eyes are wet, “I just want to be happy again.”

Jason feels like all the blood in his body is too thick, too thick to do breathe, to do anything. He looks up at Bruce.

“Jason,” Bruce says, “come back home. For me. Please.”

*

They go up to the roof of Jason's building once it's stopped snowing, and they clear a space in the fallen snow and sit and watch the night. It's fucking freezing, and even though Jason wore his jacket and his sweater and carried two blankets, he moves closer to Bruce so he can get warmer.

Bruce puts an arm around him, pressing a kiss to his forehead.

“Dad,” Jason says, embarrassed.

“What?” Bruce says.

“Stop it.” Jason says, flushing.

“Stop what?” Bruce says. He's smiling though. So is Jason, kind of.

“Okay,” Jason says, “but you know that if I start living at home again I'll make you take me to that diner every time I have a nightmare, right? And you'll have to flirt with the waitress every night for the rest of your life.”

“Then I suppose that's just a sacrifice I'll have to make,” Bruce says, gravely.

And maybe the nightmares will never go away, and Bruce will have to flirt with the waitress every goddamn night of the year, but Jason feels oddly optimistic. He knows for sure that he doesn't have them as often anymore. Hell, maybe in a few months he'll barely ever have them.

In the cold, sharp clarity of the night, it feels like anything could be possible. Anything at all.

Because even as they look up, the last traces of night are disappearing from the sky, and with it, so are the stars– bringing forth the light of dawn.

And with it comes a whole new day.