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The singing was off-key, lilting, and slurred.
And loud. Very loud.
Bruce stumbled down the stairs half-asleep with the heels of his hands pressed to his eye-sockets to quell the throbbing pain. He needed another eight hours of sleep and a narcotic cocktail if he was going to survive being awake for whatever this was. Nothing good came of being woken out of a dead sleep to a crappy impersonation of Frank Sinatra. If he’d been expecting the singing to stop with his sudden arrival in the kitchen, he’d been sorely mistaken.
“Bruuuuuce!” the perpetrator bellowed, oblivious to the time or the indecent amount of noise coming out of him. “Bruuuuce. Come’ere.”
Bruce lifted a single brow, blinked sluggishly, then turned his gaze to the second witness to this debacle. Dick was sitting at the breakfast nook with a cup of tea lazily steaming around his face and didn’t look much more awake than himself.
He needed answers. And he needed them fast before he started hitting whoever was nearest to him.
“What. Is. Happening.” Bruce mumbled, gesturing a hand at a clearly intoxicated Jason Todd. He could smell the alcohol in the air like a fine bouquet of inebriation death. It reeked. Alfred would throw a fit if the fumes remained by morning.
“Jason is drunk.”
Bruce scowled, skirting a pair of sloppy lips as they tried to make contact with his face, “I can see that. Why?”
He was forced to hold Jason by the scruff to keep him from trying again.
“I dunno. He called me. Sounded crazy on the phone so I talked him into coming over.”
For a brief moment, there was a bolt of panic in Bruce’s middle at the notion of Jason having driven any sort of motor vehicle in his current condition.
“Did he—”
“Cab. I called it for him.”
“Good,” Bruce gave Jason a little shake to get him to snap out of his fifth attempt at kissing him. Jason scowled in response.
“Bruuuuce, I love you.”
Bruce sighed, “I love you too, Jason. Why are you standing in my kitchen like this?”
He shrugged both shoulders, then smiled wide and dopey, “I’m sad.”
The air in the kitchen felt about a thousand degrees colder with such tiny little words. Jason said them so quietly, they were barely audible, but they carried the weight of a thousand sorrows. They made Bruce’s throat tight and his eyes water.
“You don’t get drunk like this, when you’re sad, Jay,” Dick murmured, “You come to us. Come talk to one of us.”
Jason huffed out a breath, but it sounded watery and dark now. Any traces of the bellowing joy were quickly vanishing. “You don’t wanna hear it.”
“Yes, we do,” Bruce said quietly, reaching to steady his second eldest son as he swayed dangerously on his feet. “Sit down Jason. Before you fall down.”
“M’kay.”
He lumbered over to the breakfast nook across from Dick and heavily flopped over, taking up the other bench. Dressed in what looked like remnants of his Hood uniform, Jason appeared to have gotten drunk shortly after patrol.
Bruce remained standing. Near enough to study, but not close enough to crowd. He needed to understand. He needed to understand what was going through Jason’s head.
“Tell me about your night.”
Jason pursed his lips, staring blankly up at the ceiling, “Stopped a couple busts. No biggie. It was boooring.”
“Okay. Did something happen after?”
Jason shrugged, “Not really.”
“That’s not a no, Jay.” Dick was leaning over the table now, both elbows planted beneath his steepled hands. “What happened?”
There was a pause. A long one. It was so long Bruce wondered if Jason had passed out and they’d be better off throwing him in a guest bedroom to sleep off what he’d done to himself till morning. Then Jason hiccupped and started laughing.
But it wasn’t a funny laugh. It wasn’t a funny laugh at all.
It was more of a laugh that was really a sob and both Dick and Bruce stiffened in alarm when they heard it. Because it sounded godawful. It shredded a man’s insides and made him feel helpless. It made him want to respond in kind and drop to his knees and weep. Because pain called to pain and they all understood that beast intimately. Because this young man belonged to him and shouldn’t sound like this.
Bruce ached hearing Jason like this.
“Jason,” Bruce whispered, his voice strangled with emotion. But Jason was lost to the throes of his laughing sobs and was curled in on himself, cackling with tears running down his cheeks. “Jason talk to us.”
“Issss so funny,” Jason wailed, holding his sides, “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. And it’s funnnny.”
“What?” Dick was standing now, trying to get Jason up off the bench seat, “What are you talking about?”
“Can’t sleep,” Jason choked out, rocking back and forth. “I’ve been awake for days. I’ve t-t-tried everything.”
“Nightmares?” Bruce asked, because he could think of nothing else to ask.
Jason simmered down a little and swallowed convulsively, wiping at his eyes, “Yeeeeaahhh.”
“I have something I can give you to sleep Jason.”
“Bruuuuce, you gonnna drug me?”
Bruce lifted a brow, “Maybe. Is that something you want?”
Jason started cackling again and Dick cast him a helpless pleading look. They’d deal with Jason’s anger, if there was any, in the morning. Or whenever it was that Jason woke up. Until then, the man was out of his mind with exhaustion. Even drunk as hell, he wasn’t even close to passing out.
Bruce had been there a few times in his life. It was as if once the body got past a certain point, it refused to be put to rest. Alfred had syringes of sedatives stashed in the study safe for such occasions, should they ever arise.
This was such an occasion.
When Bruce returned with a capped syringe of phenobarbital, he wasn’t expecting Jason to be cooperative. In fact, he was considering the possibility that he might even fight him. Sloppy drunk or not, Jason could probably do damage like this. So, he’d need to be careful.
Jason was standing again, half-hanging off of Dick with that dopey smile on his face. He was in the middle of smearing wet-snotty kisses onto both of Dick’s cheeks when Bruce jabbed the needle in his ass. Jason blinked fuzzily back at him, then scowled down at the needle, being plunged into his derriere.
“Thasss rruuuuude.”
“Yeah, so is rubbing your snot on your brother.”
“I wasss kitthhhing im.”
Dick scrubbed a hand over his face to clean it, then smiled sweetly down at Jason as motor control was rapidly devolving. Jason sagged, stumbled, then went down hard on the kitchen floor. The sound of it was cacophonous. It would be surprising if Alfred wasn’t already on his way down to chastise everyone dressed in his silk robe and house slippers.
“Oooowwwww.”
“Give it a moment Jason and you’ll be asleep.”
“Is it supposed to take this long?” Dick asked softly, worriedly examining his younger brother as Jason’s eyes were starting to roll back in his head.
Bruce pursed his lips. Jason was starting to ball up on the floor and groan like he was going to vomit. Bruce sincerely hoped not. “It can take a minute if it’s injected intramuscularly rather than intravenous.”
Sure enough, not twenty seconds later, Jason went limp and silence fell like a heavy wet blanket over the kitchen. Between Bruce and Dick, the task of carrying a dead weight Jason was made easier. But not by much. Jason was tall and heavy. They lugged him to the nearest guest room, pulled back the covers, then tucked him in. Jason started snoring almost immediately and Bruce’s mouth twitched grimly up into a smirk.
“He looks so peaceful like this. Harmless.” They both knew how laughable that statement was. Even asleep, Jason looked like a threat.
Bruce clapped Dick on the shoulder and scooted him to the door, “You can head to bed. I’ll stay with him.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Dick yawned, not even bothering to stifle it as he offered Bruce a half-hug and then turned to go back up the stairs where the majority of the Wayne’s slept. When he was alone, Bruce turned to frown at Jason.
He was worried about him. More worried than he’d been in quite some time. Bruce supposed that as a parent, the need to worry never really went away. This night proved that much.
Pulling up a chair, Bruce started off the rest of his night by trying to doze sitting up. If Jason woke up and found someone else in the bed beside him, he might wake up swinging. So Bruce figured it was best to attempt to sleep elsewhere. But after a few hours of restless drifting and head bobbing, Bruce gave in and crawled to the edge of the bed, as far over as he could manage without falling off, and then fell promptly asleep.
It might have been noon, or the middle of the night for all Bruce could determine when he groggily peeled his eyes open and struggled to remember where he was. Or who he was with.
There was a brief, terrifying moment, where Bruce felt the big arm tucked around his middle and the heat at his back and thought he’d had sex with someone and didn’t recall a moment of it. And that it was a male someone.
Then there was a snickering chortle at his neck and Bruce growled low with warning.
“What?” he snapped, irritable from lack of sleep and from waking up so alarmed.
“This is nice,” Jason mumbled, tucking himself in tighter to Bruce’s back, nuzzling his nose into Bruce’s hair. It was so out of character for Jason that Bruce could only sit stiff and wait. He had no idea how to proceed or what to do.
“Stop thinking.”
“What?” Bruce croaked, squirming a little until Jason clamped that arm painfully about his midsection to stop it.
“Stop thinking. In twenty minutes, I’m going to get up and sneak out of here and you’re not going to say a goddamn thing about this to anyone. But until then, I’m going to fucking enjoy this and you’re going to lay there like a good little teddy bear,” Jason paused, sighing loudly, “and stop thinking. It’s hurting my head.”
Bruce opened his mouth to argue, to say anything really, but what could he say? It wasn’t as if he was suffering. In fact, it was quite the opposite really. It was nice, platonically cuddling with his notoriously prickly son who usually wanted nothing to do with him. It was different, but it was good. So, Bruce laid very still, waited the twenty minutes that Jason had demanded then said nothing when he kept his word and slipped out of the bed still dressed in cargo pants and the inner shell of his Hood gear to put on his boots.
Bruce didn’t roll over to watch the process, nor did he threaten the quiet film of the morning by saying a goodbye. He just waited. And Jason surprised him again when he came around the bed, and locked eyes with him. The silence between them lasted long enough Bruce wanted to sit up and go. Because he wasn’t good at this sort of thing and with Jason, it was even harder to navigate how he was supposed to behave.
Then Jason spoke and it was rough with emotion. It was dark with all sorts of things, neither one of them ever said. That they both cared. That they were thankful for each other, even on the worst of days. “Thanks, old man.”
Bruce swallowed around the cotton in his throat and made himself speak. “You’re welcome.”
“I know I said a lot of shit when I was drunk.”
Bruce didn’t disagree. He just stared, laying on his side, unable to move because he was being pinned down by Jason’s stare still. Jason looked on the verge of saying something else, but nothing came. He said nothing else.
He turned on his booted heel and left the bedroom.
Bruce waited five minutes, then slowly got up and followed. He didn’t expect to see Jason around the kitchen or hanging out in the study. So it wasn’t a surprise to only find Alfred bustling about the kitchen with the smells of breakfast—or lunch?—cooking.
“I trust Master Jason got off safely?”
Bruce hummed, moving straight to the coffee pot. “It was an interesting night.”
He was still a little about how it had all turned out.
“Yes, I heard. I think the whole house did.”
Bruce chuckled, shaking his head, “I just had the strangest encounter with Jason,” he took a long sip of the steaming coffee and it warmed his stomach right beside the warmth creeping around in chest. “Unless it was a dream.”
Alfred smirked, “Anything is possible, Master Bruce. Anything.”