Chapter Text
They’ve been playing capture the flag in PE for all three of the days he’s been here. He’s starting to wonder if hiding and finding flags are the only physical activities rich people deem worth educating.
The first few times, it felt like it was anyone’s game, but after playing round after round, the patterns became a lot more predictable. With 6 teams, spread across Gotham Academy’s expansive field, if you hadn’t found a flag within a few minutes you were probably already screwed.
Jason hates the limbo of hearing some kind of commotion across the grass and not knowing if it was his team or someone else’s about to lose. He knew he couldn’t take the time to try to find out, he had to just keep searching for one of the other flags, knowing he was probably already dead in the water.
He winces at the shriek of Coach’s whistle.
“Yellow Team Is Out!”
Live to fight another day. Jason keeps scouring the field, fruitlessly kicking around the plastic cones Coach lets them use to up the difficulty of finding a bandana on a relatively flat stretch of grass. There’s still time to win this.
“Red Team Is Out!”
Never mind.
It’s frustrating to be out of the game, but better than waiting for bad news. Lately, that’s what he feels like all the time. Like he knows any second now, the game will be over, but he’s stuck just playing along until then.
Until one of his teachers finds out he doesn’t belong here, and not just because he sticks out like a sore thumb.
Until Bruce knows.
The threat lives in his gut, jumping up now and then to loom in the back of his mind in the form of endless hypotheticals.
Maybe Bruce will kick him out. Or maybe he’ll get mad. Maybe he’ll start getting all condescending and pity Jason, or maybe he’ll think it’s not even worth being upset over and stop listening to Jason altogether, because clearly he’s too stupid to have anything worth saying.
Maybe Alfred will stop having tea with him when he realizes Jason is lying through his teeth about planning to read all the Shakespeare plays Alfred performed back in England. He wonders if it’ll be his lack of intelligence or lack of honesty that Alfred finds most distasteful.
He wonders whether Dick will rub it in his face, or whether Dickhead will realize there’s no point in being jealous, because there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of Jason being Bruce’s favorite, no matter how much of an asshole Dick is.
Maybe Jason won’t be kicked out, but maybe he’ll still leave anyway. Beggars can’t be choosers, but Jason still has his pride. He doesn’t think he could handle staying if Bruce stopped looking at Jason like the things he says matters, just because he can’t write them down.
And he doesn’t want to watch everything fall apart.
He’s already gotten so lucky. He got to skip the placement test for Gotham Academy because he came so late in the year, and no one really expected him to be caught up on much. Bruce gave him a phone, but the man only texts a few words at a time.
He knows his luck won’t hold, but he’s got to keep trying, even though he knows it’s pointless.
He’ll keep doing his homework at night on the laptop Bruce got him, praying that the dictation feature is accurate. He’ll keep listening in class to fill in the gaps, while pretending that he only turns in a few of the assignments because he just doesn’t care.
He’ll keep lying to Alfred and sneaking into Bruce’s office when no one’s around, using the paper shredder to destroy his Kindergarten-level attempts at writing. They’re trash anyways.
There’s always the chance that if he can stall long enough, he can actually learn enough that he can get by. He knows the chances are beyond slim, but until the ax really falls, he has to keep trying.
Bruce knows Jason is keeping secrets. Of course he is. Jason has every reason to distrust adults and Bruce spends a lot of his time pretending not to be a detective when it comes to the boy.
Alfred found the first stash of food while he was vacuuming, but Bruce was more worried by the stash of food in the bushes just outside of Wayne Manor. He thinks that if they searched Jason’s room, they’d find all kinds of stashes, but they aren’t going to build trust by refusing the kid basic privacy.
Bruce had been halfway relieved when he spotted a nicotine patch on Jason’s arm. His sleeve had ridden up while playing video games with Dick, and Bruce was so proud he was trying to quit. Alfred had washed Jason’s hoodie three times to get the smell of cigarettes out. Someday, they would need to talk about it, but Bruce hoped to gain a little more rapport with Jason first.
Alfred had quietly stopped serving celery, because whether it was an allergy or just distaste, Jason had very clearly pulled a face when it had been on his plate. He then vehemently denied pulling said face.
Bruce knows that Jason paces in his room at night. He suspects it’s something he does when nightmares wake him up. Bruce will hear the familiar creak of the same few floorboards as Jason does laps. Without fail, he’ll still sit down to breakfast in the morning and claim he slept fine.
Sometimes, Jason quips something at dinner that lets Bruce see a taste of the wit and the mischief that lays in wait. Every once in a while, Jason will really talk about something that matters to him, and there’s passion there. There’s so much creativity, and curiosity that Bruce can’t wait to see more of.
For now though, Bruce is trying to meet Jason where he’s at. He hopes that with enough respect, consistency, and patience, he can prove himself worthy of Jason’s trust.
One secret however, is driving Bruce bonkers.
Why is the 12 year old acting like he’s trying to cover up white collar crime?
It’s a joke. Sort of. It was a joke and has become slightly less of a joke as Bruce has seen more odd behaviors from Jason with no explanation.
Bruce has helped Jason fix issues with his laptop twice, and while he used Batman-level self-control to keep himself from snooping. He genuinely couldn’t help noticing that there were a weird amount of documents in the recycle bin with timestamps from the dead of night. He barely snooped around and saw that the internet history wasn’t cleared, but was the kind of sparse that happened when someone didn’t want their internet history to look like it was cleared- dozens of innocuous tabs opened and closed in a period of a minute or two as the only activity for each day.
Bruce stopped himself from looking around any further. Dick had been given some rules when it came to internet safety and knew very well that Bruce was capable of catching him if he did something like post his social security number on snapchat, but Dick had also been in Bruce’s care for years before he got a laptop of his own. Bruce may not be Dick’s dad, but Dick was used to being parented by Bruce. It was abundantly clear that Jason wasn’t used to being parented by anyone. It would take time.
Jason was using Bruce’s paper shredder. A lot.
Sure, paper shredders were novel. They could entertain kids. For a minute.
Giving kids privacy was one thing, but ignoring a mystery was quite another.
Bruce had to ask Alfred to start emptying the damn thing every night so he wouldn’t break down and start playing jigsaw puzzle.
He’s well aware that there’s worse trouble Jason could be getting into than shredding papers and deleting documents. The nicotine patch is objectively more concerning.
Still… Bruce’s brain itches.
Bruce knows.
Actually, full-on, beyond a shadow of a doubt knows.
Jason got careless. He got stupid.
Jason’s already stupid. He’s always been stupid or he never would have been in this situation in the first place.
It’s been 3 weeks since he came to the manor. He’s skated by at Gotham Academy for a measly 6 school days. That was somehow enough time to make him drop his guard in the home of billionaire.
He had been sitting in the library, trying to make his way through one of the few kiddie books the damn place had. Corduroy. He doesn’t remember having it read to him when he was little, but it must have been because there’s no way in hell he would have been able to read that title correctly if the knowledge wasn’t already in his brain somewhere.
The picture book had some kind of writing in the front, but he’d learned the hard way to ignore that shit. The Golden Boy had probably written a novel on the inside cover. That was probably the only reason Bruce bothered keeping a stupid toddler book at all.
The worst part was that Jason had been starting to feel proud. His first readthrough yesterday had been enough to get the gist, but there were pictures helping him out, so that didn’t really count. He’d read the same pages again over and over yesterday, and there were still plenty of words he didn’t get, but he had a lot of them solid.
When he’d tried again today, it had taken him a couple tries to get back up to speed, but he was actually able to read some of the pages all the way through.
It shouldn’t really count when the book had pages with only a few words on them, but when he’d read Corduroy watched them sadly as they walked away, without feeling like the words were teeth he was extracting from the book, he’d felt capable. Like he was actually getting somewhere.
And now he’s frozen in the doorway. He’d left the room for like a minute to get some water and now Bruce is standing over the table, looking at the book with curiosity.
Even more damning, Bruce is looking at Jason’s notes.
Jason had forced himself to pick three words from each page in the book and copy each one down three times.
bear bear bear with with with take take take
store store store things things things green green green green
stopped stopped stopped eyes eyes eyes today today today
them them them they they they away away away
Page after page of clumsy too-big letters. Of words Dick could probably spell in his sleep. There’s no normal explanation for this. He might as well have written I I I can’t can’t can’t read read read
Bruce is looking at it like it’s going to start making sense. Jason must make some kind of movement or something because Bruce’s eyes suddenly snap up, and the man looks like he just got caught.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” Bruce says, oddly prim. Jason’s started to notice that Bruce starts to sound more like Alfred when he gets uncomfortable.
He’s looking at Jason the way he looks at the crossword puzzle on Saturdays. Jason wants to snatch up the papers and shred them with his teeth. If there was a fire actually lit in the enormous fireplace by the reading chairs, Jason would throw the whole damn book in it.
Jason wants to hide, but there’s no way Bruce will just forget. He wants to lie, but if there is a plausible lie for a situation like this, it sure as fuck isn’t coming to Jason’s head.
There’s no way to back out of it, and no way around it. There’s only through. So Jason doubles down.
“So what? Are you happy now? I may be stupid, but you’re the one paying 17 Grand a semester in tuition for a kid who can’t read a fucking picture book,” Jason says, his voice getting louder the more he talks until he’s yelling. He tells himself that’s why his throat feels tight.
Bruce is just frozen, and Jason knows that as soon as he unfreezes, he’ll be mad, or pitying, or dismissive, or something, and everything will be broken.
Jason has the childish urge to scream ‘I hate you’
Instead he stands his ground.
Bruce is unreadable.