Chapter Text
“It’s hot as hell today, Roy,” Jason says. The setting sun’s burning a hole through his shitty, advertised as UV proof, sunnies and the glare on the bitumen is creating waves in the air. “Looks like everything’s underwater outside. Like I’m driving at the bottom of the ocean. A big one, the Atlantic. One with no fish and waves rolling up from the sand to break at the surface.”
There’s sweat beading at his hairline and dripping down his skin. Jason feels like he’s melting.
“Should’ve grabbed something to drink before heading out. Aircon in this is busted and yes, I’ve tried hitting it.” The black box under the dash on the passenger side had started making an ominous rumbling sound when he turned the air on. Kicking it hadn’t done anything. “Think it’s blowing hot.”
“I miss winter,” he says, wiping sweat from the top of his lip. “I know I’m just gonna start complaining about the cold when it hits but at least blankets don’t need wiring to work.”
"I have a love-hate relationship with all my seasons. Spring has pollen, winter has cold, autumn has trick or treaters and summer has heat. None of them are great but anything is better than this fucking heat. Feels otherworldly."
A blast of warm air hits him. Jason groans and fiddles with the knobs again.
"I can't drive like this."
-
“I’ve never told you this. Was always worried I’d talk about the time before Bruce too much and you’d look at me differently." Jason worries about it with everyone. That one day someone will peel back his layers and see how 'street trash’ and 'charity case' are engraved into his damn bones. "But hey, with the help of liquid courage anything can happen.” Jason taps the bottle of beer against the hood of the car. He’s leaning back on the windscreen, arm over his eyes blocking out the night sky as he thinks back. “Okay, here we go. There's a moral to it, promise." Jason shifts, steeling himself.
“Back when mum was alive Gotham had one of her coldest winters in centuries. It snowed for weeks and at least half the neighbourhood came down with hypothermia. About three-quarters of them died later on from it. There was this girl down the hall. I knew everyone we lost but she was the only one I cared about. She used to crash at our house when her dad got back in town and we used to crash at her's when mine did.
"Sometimes good people are taken for no fucking reason, Roy. She was one of them." Jason had learned about her death a week after the cold snap through her dad breaking down their door and demanding to know where she was.
He gives himself a moment before speaking again. “Mum got sick because when wasn’t mum getting sick? She got sick real bad, spent her days shivering and her nights sweating out of her skin. Nail beds were going black, lips blue, eyes dull. It was the first time I’d seen her so close. Scared the shit out of me.
“I tried to take her to the free clinic and she refused. Said if she went outside her dealer on the corner would get her before the cold got the chance. I was seven. You’ve seen pictures of me as a kid. I barely came up to her waist and as much as I wanted to drag her down to see Leslie, I couldn’t. Had to sit there, tucked up against her side as she froze.
“I went to the clinic after she passed out. The nurse at the front was nice, offered to get me checked with the doctor and some hot chocolate. I let her and broke into the medicine while she was making it.
“I had no idea what the fuck I was looking for. How do you treat hypothermia? Gotta get them warm again. I’d just left my mum in that shithole studio with no heat. I’m reading all these labels and my mind’s going a hundred miles an hour because none of them say shit about hypothermia.
“The nurse comes in, mug in her hands and sees me surrounded by all these bottles of pills. She asks if she can help and I just start crying. I tell her my mum’s dying and that we’ve got no heating and that I don’t want my mum to die.” Jason snorts. "What kid wants their mum to die anyway? I was panicking. Snot running down my face. Crying like if I stopped the nurse would leave."
-
Jason props his feet up on the dash, one foot on either side of the steering wheel. It’s a tight fit. He crams the last bite of a sugared doughnut in his mouth and picks up the receiver from the radio sitting on his lap.
“Hey Roy,” he says. “And whoever’s eavesdropping. I know there’s someone.” He leans the seat back and stretches out. “I just ate and I’m gonna go to bed soon. Starting to see double.”
“Just wanted to say goodnight.” He stares up at the push pins holding the fabric to the ceiling. If he squints and lets his gaze blur, he can pretend it looks pretty. “I think I’m getting used to sleeping alone again. The nightmares aren’t so bad.”
Jason wakes up crying and out of breath most nights, hours before sunrise. Sleeping alone is and always will be hard.
“Wonder if you can still tell when I’m lying through my teeth? You used to be able to.” Roy could pick up on tells Jason didn’t even know he had. He thought he’d been trained out of all ticks when he lived with Bruce.
“Not important,” Jason says, words getting interrupted by a yawn. He’s parked in a big empty field next to one of the country’s great superhighways. As safe to sleep as any other spot. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodnight.”
-
Jason curls inwards, breath coming too fast. He laughs into the mike. “I haven’t had a panic attack since I was a kid but now that you’re missing…” He stops to get enough air to speak. “I have them all the fucking time, you piece of shit .”
They make him feel like he’s suffocating.
-
“This nurse crouches in front of me, grabs my hands and promises my mum isn’t going to die. Says hypothermia is treatable. Common,” Jason tweaks his voice, lowers it to mimic the gentle tones of the nurse subconsciously.
"She's right. I take her to my mum and they get her back to the clinic. Dealer doesn't show up and she makes a quick recovery."
"Little girl down the hall is still dead, of course. Couldn't help her like I helped mum because I didn't know she needed help."
Jason wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and gets off the hood of the car, radio tucked against his chest. "Something to think about."
-
“If it wasn’t obvious by the fact that I’m still chasing your ass around the country, I lied. I looked into that man’s flat, flat eyes and told him I’d do whatever he wanted as long as he let that lady go.
“It wasn’t courage. I know you, Roy. I know you’re going to try and twist this to make it look like I was doing anything other than saving my own skin. Doesn’t make it the truth.
“I was shaking, in shock probably. Everything was getting numb. Cold. The winter back in Gotham. I pressed into the corner of the booth and was unable to take my eyes off him. Like a car crash. I just wanted him to let her go.
“This man doesn’t let go of the woman. He nods his head, once, twice, and then yanks the waitress over to his side of the table. ‘You better head back now’ he says. ‘Jason, you better not be lying’ and then he smiles with all his teeth the way dogs bare theirs and says ‘I’ll find out if you’re lying’.” Jason shudders and sinks low in his seat.
He looks out at the field around him through the rolled-up window. It’s flatland that stretches for miles. Nothing is going to be able to sneak up on him out here.
“I’m still waiting for him to catch up,” he admits, eyes locked on the dirt road he can just make out, illuminated by a faulty, yellow-bulbed street lamp. “He’s going to. Might’ve already done it. Sometimes,” Jason's voice goes soft, goes conspiratorial, like he’s telling the radio a secret, “I wake up and I swear I can feel the imprint of a hand wrapped around my throat, smell the staleness of bad breath and rotting teeth.”
-
“Couldn't sleep. I’m heading out.” Jason has been on the road for twenty-five minutes, cruising along it towards the next service station. He's going to try Kansas.
Right now he’s in a dark grey Land Cruiser with no spare tire.
“You think I could be found by the trail of grand theft auto I’m leaving?” Jason asks. “Assuming I don’t know how to cover my tracks, of course.”
Which he does. Jason’s good at what he used to do and you never quite forget how to pop the lock of older models. There’s no trace and no clues left to where these cars are until he dumps them.
“Think the only time I’ve ever been caught was that day with Dickie’s Porshe.” Jason laughs. “God, teenage me was an asshole .”
“That was our what? One year anniversary? I promised you I had a surprise prepared and then we snuck into the garage and hotwired the car together.” Apparently, it hadn’t taken long for Dick to notice it gone. Took a few hours for him to find Jason though. “We would’ve been fine if you hadn’t tried to make me drive into that fuckin’ lake.”
Jason had done it. He was seventeen and wasn’t going to miss a chance to fuck with Dick.
“Could’ve kept it for days–” Jason stops talking, eyes going wide. “Fuck!”
-
“What do I do when he finds me?” he asks the radio. “How fast and how far do I run? Do I run at all? Is there any point? Roy, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
-
“Roy,” Jason whispers. “Roy, I don’t know what to do.” He inhales and exhales, putting effort into each breath. Don’t have a panic attack. Don’t have a panic attack.
“Roy,” Jason’s saying his name a lot, he should stop. “He’s just–He’s just standing there.”
In the middle of the road, in the hours before dawn, on a stretch of highway no one should be near without a car or truck or something, is the man from the truck stop. Staring.
“He can’t see in, yeah? I’ve got high beams on and it’s dark dark out. No stars, no moon.” The man takes a step forward and Jason flinches back in his seat. His voice is small and it is scared when he speaks. “He looks… Roy, I don’t know how to say it.”
There’s blood splatter on the man’s white shirt and dripping from the tip of his nose. Not like he’s had a nose bleed, more, he’s just stood in the arterial spray of some poor son of a bitch. Gore all up his torso and Jason bets if he opened his mouth he’d see it wedged between his teeth.
The real kicker of it all is the way the man looks as if he is standing under the harsh fluorescent lights of the truck stop. As if neither of them left it. As if he hasn't so much as changed out of the clothes he brutalised the waitress in. The light reflects off his skin, makes it greyscale and yellowed and white all at once. It is, for lack of a better word, haunting.
There's something so unnerving about it. Jason can't quite pick why aside from the wrongness of it all.
Now more than ever does the man look like he belongs in a painting. They went to an art gallery once. In Gotham. All the paintings were artists' renditions of Dante's Inferno. They'd both thought it was stupid and high class and bullshit and something that'd been done a million times. The man looks like he's been ripped right from one of the canvases.
Jason half expects him to speak and let free a torrent of smoke and hellfire.
“I can't just wait for him,” Jason says. He doesn't know how long the man plans on waiting but Jason's got a feeling he knows what's going to happen when he stops. "I'm going to move." Jason flicks the lights off for a second, swallows when the man stays bathed in bright light and turns them back on. “I warned him, kind of.”
The man doesn’t react.
Jason leans forward on the horn, beeping it a few times. The way you do when ducks are crossing the road too slowly.
Still no reaction.
“Okay,” Jason breathes out, hands trembling a little as he puts the car into gear. “Okay.”
He takes his foot off the break and puts it on the accelerator. The car revs noisily. Nothing. Why is he just standing there?
Like he can here him, the man stops just standing there. He mouths a word. Jason can't make it out too well but the clench in his gut makes it look a lot like liar.
Jason tightens his hands around the gear stick and the wheel. He counts to three, jerks the gear stick into fourth and presses his foot down flat.
He thinks the man won’t move. The car’s moving too fast for Jason to really grasp the idea that he’ll be fast enough. Still, Jason has a split second to register the man darting off the road and then he hears a bang against the left backdoor.