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You were burned, you were about to burn, you’re still on fire.
Tim thinks, if this is what dying feels like, maybe it’s best to let go. Stop grappling with consciousness, with reality, with living through this, Tim thinks, if this is what dying feels like, maybe he should stop fighting so hard.
The pain splinters and he breathes.
–
“Aw, c’mon, replacement, you can do better than that,” Jason’s taunts are distorted through the helmet but the metallic voice still has a bite to it that Tim can’t seem to shake, no matter how many rooftops he leaps over. It buries itself under the suit, under the stitches from last night’s escapades, under the scar tissue that knots itself across his skin. It burrows and digs and claws itself a place inside his ribcage, protected weakly by the bones he’s broken too many times to hope that they can keep much safe anymore. It wraps around his heart and constricts and Tim feels ten years old again, scraping across cement ledges, desperately hoping for a shot of that smile in the dark.
Jason catches up to him, like he always does, the shadow of something Tim doesn’t dare to name trickling down his back, trailing along his spine. Jason catches up to him and pins him to the wall, breathing muted through the hood but chest heaving all the same, and Tim closes his eyes to breathe in the smoke and gunpowder that seem to make up the very essence of Jason Todd. He breathes as he feels Jason’s gloved hand (so much larger than his own) come up to circle his throat, the barest threat of a squeeze in the way he flexes his fingers across the muscle, sinew, and bone, the hint of what Jason could do to him hanging in the air. Tim’s breath doesn’t catch at the feel, but it is a very near thing (he has too much control over himself to let that happen, even in the face of– well, whatever it is that Jason might be).
“Gotcha,” Jason whispers, and Tim shivers.
–
You said Will you love me even more when I’m dead?
and I said No
Tim remembers the before. The moments that encapsulate the time between the funeral, between Tim’s desperate pleas of Batman needs a Robin , between his first fight, the first time he felt his fist connect with something solid and have that something solid give. Between the nights when Bruce couldn’t look at him, shining and beautiful, only a child playing a game meant for adults, flying high above Gotham, wrapped in a magic only Robin could provide.
(Being Robin gives me magic! Bruce can hear the echo of the voice in the back of his mind and buries the feeling of pain that seeps through his chest)
Tim remembers a glass case and the schematics for an upgraded Robin suit that has more protection than Tim could have dreamed of, no more scaley briefs and bare legs for him.
(Bruce remembers joyrides and nights out when he was convinced to play tag on their way back to the manor, leaping across rooftops never quite managing to keep up with teenaged enthusiasm)
There’s a room in the manor whose door never opens, where no light shows from underneath and even Alfred slows his steps when he passes by, and Tim swears he sees Dick hold his breath– during the few short visits Dick has made to the manor since Tim had taken over his former title. Bruce, well, Bruce doesn’t walk down this hallway anymore. He doesn’t have to, Tim supposes, his own bedroom in a different wing of the house, framed by his office and a private entrance to the Cave that Tim hasn’t quite figured out yet. Bruce doesn’t come by here and Tim feels as though he’s living next door to something he will never fully understand but god does he want to.
(In Bruce’s dreams, he can still hear Jason’s laughter. Still remembers the way he’d look after a long patrol, drooping across the island in the kitchen, packing away whatever Alfred had put out for them to eat before he fell back into bed for a few hours before school. He remembers catching Jason reading in the tall-backed, green velvet chair in the library, sinking lower and lower against the seat until his long legs splayed across the floor the more engrossed he was in his book. He remembers that cold night when he caught some punk trying to strip the tires of the Batmobile and how the sheer nerve of it all struck him so bone deep that the feeling of Jason’s dramatic burst into his world is something he thinks will never leave him. Bruce remembers Jason, mourns the loss of the boy he barely knew, the boy who was supposed to be his son)
–
I wanted to fall down right there but I knew
you wouldn’t catch me because you’re dead
Tim has to remind himself to breathe, has to remind himself that the world will still go on turning after he’s gone, it did after Jason, and it sure as hell will after him. He reminds himself to breathe and listens to the sounds of Gotham breathing with him.
–
I said kiss me here and here and here
and you did.
He wakes up to the wash of four am lighting spilling out from the windowsill and across Jason’s bare back. His eyes trace over the valley that lies between Jason’s shoulders, the small shadows that are born from the hills and planes that scar tissue provides. The starburst of a bullet hole that pepper his skin in a way that Tim is intimately familiar (you shot me once, he thinks idly), a smatter of constellations formed in the most painful of ways across the expanse of skin in front of him. The sheet’s all tangled up around Jason’s hips, gripped tight between his legs and fisted in one hand, even in sleep. Tim watches the gentle way Jason’s chest rises and contracts as the streetlights lose their brightness and dawn begins to bleed in, eyes following the sharpness of his cheekbones against the nose that has been reset so many times that Tim’s surprised that there’s any bone left there to heal.
Jason cracks an eye open, puffing the white streak of hair out of his face before releasing the sheet and reaching up to drag Tim down by the neck. They’re kissing, the taste of something sour in the back of Tim’s mouth as their tongues circle each other and Jason nips at Tim’s bottom lip. A huff of a laugh escapes between them, and Jason takes the opportunity to slot Tim against his chest, curling around him possessively.
“Go to sleep, Tim.”
In the dreams it’s always you:
the boy in the sweatshirt,
the boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me
from jumping off the bridge.
–
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he’d do something interesting.
The pain that blooms in his shoulder tells him that his clavicle is definitely broken. It tells him that he’ll never fly quite as smoothly as before, tells him he should get used the sling he’s thrown to the back of his closet in the house he’s taken to staying at more often these days now that it’s been determined Damian isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The pain, fading from the rush of adrenaline that propels him back home, back to where he can dig the bullet out and asses the damage without having to worry about a sister strike landing somewhere else on his person, tells him everything he doesn’t need to be reminded of. That despite the magic of Robin, despite the modifications, the tests, the sheer luck he has always found himself with, Jason’s always had a little more up his sleeve.
“Replacement,” Tim hears, low and threatening, without the distortion of the helmet. His head whips around, only for a moment, to catch the all too recognizable face of Jason Todd, obscured partially by a red domino.
He’s caught by all the ways Jason has changed, the sharpness where there used to be curves, the loss of something sweet, something so fundamentally Jason that it had been present in nearly every photo Tim had taken of him. He’s caught by the nose, broken at least twice more since that day they laid him in the ground and the sky let loose a torrent that could only begin to convey the gravity of what had been lost. He’s caught by the full lips, chapped and cracked in places, the shock of white hair that starts from the center of his forehead. He’s caught by this man who’s shadow he has grown so intimately aware of, who now stands before him in a manner so untouchable to Tim that he doesn’t see the right hook coming for him until it’s too late.
–
You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you he loves you, but he loves you.
He counts the mornings they wake up together, the nights they fall asleep together. He counts the kisses, the patrols, the fights. He counts the gestures, the cups of tea and coffee, the dinners and breakfasts. He counts the number of freckles across Jason’s shoulders, and the number of scars that litter his skin. He counts the number of shirts that aren’t his that have begun to take over a drawer in his dresser, the number of books that line his shelves that he can’t remember purchasing. He counts the visits to the manor, the nights out with Steph. He counts and counts and counts and thinks maybe this is how you measure time out after all, not in coffee spoons, but in fragments.
They’re driving out to the coast, a last minute holiday on a particularly warm spring afternoon, fingers threaded together over the gearshift and the rush of wind whipping Jason’s hair into something unsalvageable. The light catches Jason’s eyes and turn them a bottle green, brilliant and exuberant in a way that Tim is still piecing together despite months of this, whatever this may be. And Tim’s been thinking about this for a while, thinking about the heavy feeling in his stomach whenever Jason’s face lights up like that, the curl in his gut when they wake up tangled together in the mornings and there’s a smoothness to Jason’s brow that Tim has only seen when he’s asleep.
Tim’s been considering this, this life that they’ve managed to piece together for themselves in the midst of everything else and thinks that maybe, Jason already knows, maybe he doesn’t need to be the one to say it explicitly. They had always understood each other better than anyone else, why should that change now?
“Hey, Timmers,” Jason says, eyes flicking over to Tim and off the road ahead of them. “Almost there.”
Tim smiles, soft and slow, curling across his face languidly, as Jason squeezes his fingers and presses down on the gas just a little harder.
–
Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this–
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood
on the first four knuckles.
If he focuses long enough, Tim can hear Babs’ frantic voice in his ear without its usual robotic timber, telling him to hold on just a little longer, reminding him to breathe, telling him Jason was almost there, almost had him. If he focuses enough, he can catalogue the injuries rippling across his body, pulling him tight from the bones to the edges of his skin, feeling flayed alive and burning, burning, burning, burning.
If he focuses long enough, Tim thinks he might just be able to survive this.
He pushes the remaining breath out of his body, feels the way it makes him swing in the chains they’ve strung him up from, the way it makes him rock back and forth, stretching the strain in his shoulders just that much further.
He thinks, I should have said it out loud. At least once.
He thinks, if this is what dying feels like,
He thinks, this is what dying feels like,
He thinks, oh
You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.
I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.
You weren’t supposed to.