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The grip around him was tight. Choking. He could feel his lungs collapsing inwards, the cage of his ribs digging into his fragile organs. His vision was going black. It was the end of the road for him. Everything he’d survived, everything he’d endured– his childhood, his time on the streets, meeting and moving in with the Batman– it was all for nothing. He was going to die here.
“K– Starfire, for heck’s sake, put him down!”
The air rushed back into Jason’s lungs as the arms around him abruptly released their hold. He dropped back to the ground, stumbling for a moment as he regained his balance. His heart was pounding and he pressed a hand against his chest as he squinted up at the redhead in front of him.
Floating in front of him.
Okay.
“Oh!” The redhead– Starfire, who Jason dimly remembered was one of Dick’s old teammates, fuck– blurted. Her hands came up in front of her, clenching and unclenching. “My apologies. I am very sorry. It is just that I am not used to humans being so– small. It is. . .”
She paused, eyebrows drawing together. Jason had just long enough to note their unusual shape– more dot than brow, like facial punctuation– before Dick was stepping up to her shoulder. Literally to her shoulder. It might just be the fact that the girl’s feet weren’t actually on the ground, but she seemed taller than Dick.
Impressive.
Also scary as fuck.
“I think the word you’re looking for is adorable,” Dick said. Jason bristled, but Starfire clapped her hands together, a look of delight crossing her face.
“Yes! He is adorable!” She beamed down at Jason, and Jason quietly cursed the number of tall jackasses in his life. “What is your name, small one?”
Jason hesitated. Glanced at Dick. He’d expected him to be shaking his head, or better yet, reprimanding Starfire for asking, but instead he just shrugged at Jason as if to say what can you do? That was. . . unsettling. Did Dick trust him to remember enough to keep his own ass safe, or was he just that unconcerned? It wasn’t like Jason couldn’t look out for himself, but the lack of support felt like missing a step when going down stairs in the dark– his foot landed on the ground, but not when he wanted it to, and his gut dropped out of his body on the way.
Okay. Dick was in civvies, lacking even the sunglasses he usually threw on in front of mixed company. Starfire, too, was out of uniform– not that Jason remembered what the Teen Titans uniform was, but he was pretty sure purple denim shorts and a Skate Dog crop top weren’t it. Batman had been training him to use hero names in costume and civilian names in pants, but.
But.
He swallowed. Looked back into Starfire’s expectant green eyes.
“I. . . Alfred told me not to give my full name to the fey,” he said. He said it as politely as he was able, but still felt the need to compensate with an additional, “Sorry.”
Starfire blinked. Even the whites of her eyes were green. It was radiant in a very literal sense but real fucking unsettling.
Then Dick burst into laughter and her bewildered gaze turned from Jason to him.
“What is so funny?” she asked. “And why should Alfred have told him not to introduce himself? I believed this was polite when meeting for the first time?”
“It’s not you, Star,” Dick said. “He just– he thinks you’re a fairy.”
“He does?” She asked.
“She’s not?” Jason echoed, slightly more incredulously. He sputtered a bit when Dick turned that amused look on him, holding out his hands and gesturing aggressively at the distance between Starfire’s feet and the goddamn ground.
“Don’t give me that! She’s flying! She’s fucking flying! She’s flying, she’s gorgeous, her skin is orange, her name is fucking Starfire, and– and she’s flying!”
“Alfred doesn’t fly,” Dick said– he still looked far too entertained. “And his name is Alfred.”
“Pennyworth,” Jason said defensively. “And– that’s Alfred. It’s different!”
The guy probably didn’t fly because he thought it was impolite. Or it somehow broke the Butler Code that Jason was sure existed, even if Alfred had yet to admit it.
Starfire was looking between him and Dick with an increasing amount of confusion. Her eyebrows, for what they were, had nearly climbed up past her bangs.
“I am. . . unsure of much of what this conversation is about, but–” she said, turning definitively to Jason and making freaky, entirely-green eye contact with him, “–I am not a fairy. I am a Tamaranean.”
At Jason’s blank, uncomprehending look, she continued, “I am from another planet.”
“That’s a thing?” Jason asked.
“ Jason,” Dick hissed. Jason spluttered.
“ What? I’m serious! I had no idea! You and the Bat don’t exactly keep me in the loop!”
“You’re literally training to be Robin!”
“That doesn’t mean I know things! Most of what I do know I had to work out for myself!” Jason folded his arms. “You took me in and I learned that vampires were real, abruptly followed by an introduction to the fae. Tell me it wasn’t a logical leap for me to make that anything about aliens was tabloid garbage printed by people who’d misunderstood some supernatural happening. I mean, shit, there are people that think the Batman came from space!”
“I– okay, that’s fair,” Dick conceded. Jason didn’t have long to feel smug about the victory. “But to be fair to us, it’s not like you asked.”
Jason bit his tongue. How was he even supposed to respond to that? He hadn’t asked, not about a lot of things. Not for a lot of reasons. Most of his information on the supernatural had been freely volunteered, like Alfred chatting with him about fae courts while they made sufganiyot. He’d asked more than a few questions about the vampire thing, especially early on when he’d still been certain he was going to be eaten alive the moment he dropped his guard, but as his (fear) hostility towards Bruce and Dick had faded he’d pried less and less. Tried to stitch together what timeline he could from old newspapers, dug into the coverage of the superheroics in Gotham as far back as he could. Sometimes he’d bring up what he’d discovered– Dick, is it true that ‘boner’ used to be slang for mistake– but more often than not he’d keep it to himself.
It wasn’t that he thought they’d be mad about him prying. It wasn’t that he didn’t think they’d give him a straight answer if he asked. Dick loved to talk, and he’d gone off on a lot of tangents about his job and his time with Bruce. If it was the information alone Jason wanted, he’d have gotten it already.
But there was something about staying up late into the night, huddled under the tented sheets of his bed and scrolling down a google rabbit hole while he waited to hear Bruce’s voice echoing through the manor halls when he returned from patrol. Something about the way his gut clenched when he saw how effortlessly and smoothly Bruce and Dick talked, their shared past so easily implied in every bit of conversational shorthand. Something about how, whenever Jason spoke up during training with one of the facts he’d learned in his research, Bruce’s lips would quirk upwards in that small, private smile he never shared with the cameras.
Starfire, thankfully, saved him from having to find a way to articulate his pride, jealousy, and love.
“You are training to become Robin?” she asked.
Dick grinned, baring every one of his teeth, and slung an arm over Jason’s shoulders, dragging him into a headlock that he futilely– and very briefly– tried to squirm free of.
“Heck yeah he is!” Dick said. “I’m so freaking proud of him!”
Starfire clapped her hands together. She looked just as excited as Dick, if not more so, and Jason watched as she pulled her knees up to her chest and practically vibrated with delight before throwing her limbs out once more in a joyous burst of movement. It made her t-shirt sleeves puff up with air and sent one of her sneakers dangerously close to Jason’s nose.
“Oh, how wonderful!” She cried. “It has been so long since you were Robin! Tell me, small one, are you wearing the same costume Dick once did?”
“Kind of,” Jason said, swallowing down a scowl. Small one. “It’s similar, anyway. A bit updated, but it’s got the same general design.”
“What, you miss seeing me in my old threads?” Dick asked. There was something odd in his tone. Jason squinted up at him, only barely able to make out Dick’s expression from this angle, but he caught the tell-tale smirk and those– ugh– lowered eyelids. Dick was flirting.
Jason stepped on his foot.
Dick released him from his headlock, hissing something under his breath and shooting Jason a betrayed look. Jason resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at him, if only barely. It would be unbecoming behavior for a Robin.
(Oh who was he kidding, Jason was never going to have any kind of decorum and the Robin persona would just have to survive some childishness. He refused to believe Dick had never made an idiot of himself either)
Starfire sighed. She reached out and pressed a hand to Dick’s cheek, and Dick immediately stopped glaring at him and instead gazed up at Starfire with a mushy expression.
“Of course,” Starfire said, but before Dick could even finish puffing himself up with pride she continued, “I always thought you looked so adorable!”
Jason snorted, burying his laugh in his fist. Dick must’ve fed recently because the tips of his ears flushed red.
“What?” he said, “No you didn’t. You thought I was hot!”
“I thought you were cool,” Starfire corrected, “If I am remembering your temperature slang correctly. And I still do! I can think you looked cool and also adorable.”
“Just take what you can get, Dick,” Jason said in mock-sympathy, patting Dick’s shoulder. When he’d first gotten here, the murderous glare Dick shot his way would have scared him shitless, but now he knew it was more of an I’m-going-to-hide-your-socks kind of glare. Besides, he had more important questions, like the one that’d been rolling around in his head ever since Starfire had needed Dick to remind her of a word.
“Hey, uh, Starfire?” he asked. She nodded, pulling her hand away from Dick’s cheek and setting her feet on the floor. She eased into it, toes to heel, like she was stepping down off a short ledge. Even fully grounded, she still had a good handful of inches on Dick.
Wicked.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering. . . how do you know English?”
“Jason,” Dick snapped, and Jason threw his arms up in the air in a gesture he hoped communicated fuck off, I’m doing my best!
“What! I’m not trying to say she’s stupid or something! Just, y’know, we needed the goddamn Rosetta stone to learn how to translate some of the fucking earth languages we have and she’s a goddamn alien! Is it so wrong that I wanna know how that worked!”
It had mostly been Starfire’s stumble over the word adorable that had got him curious. Adorable was, all things considered, not that unusual a word, not compared to words like temperature or training. Jason wasn’t going to lie, most of his alien knowledge came from sci-fi books, but he still had the kind of brute-force streetwise logic that had gotten him this far. Starfire missing words meant this wasn’t some kind of instantaneous telepathic translation (and thank fuck for that, Jason didn’t want anyone in his head). Training could be brushed off as having been relevant a lot in daily conversation, but temperature? No way was that more useful than adorable, no matter how often villains turned up with weather-themed powers. That seemed to rule out just straight-up memorization, too, but what did that leave?
“It’s still rude,” Dick grumbled, but Starfire laughed.
“It is fine. I think I myself would be curious if I were him!”
She braced her hands on her knees, leaning down to be on Jason’s eye level and, yep, okay, he hated that. He supposed it broke even with her not being offended, though.
“My people have the ability to absorb other languages,” she explained, “Through physical contact with those who speak them. The process is imperfect, though, as the translation depends greatly on the individual and their understanding of the language, and also I am. . . less good at it, than others of my species. Always there is some information lost, though the amount varies.”
Jason nodded. “Like burning a copy of a CD, but like. Depending on how gunked up your disk slot is.”
Starfire glanced up at Dick. Dick nodded, apparently agreeing that this was an acceptable metaphor. Starfire turned back to Jason.
“Indeed. This translation. . . it is not truly knowing a language, as the knowlege is– softer? Than other knowlege?”
Her voice faltered, and Dick stepped in. It was easy, the way he picked up where she left off. If Jason had thought it was shockingly intimate that she knew Dick’s real name, this was the final nail in that coffin.
“Short-term. Like cramming for a test. Some of it’s gonna stick, but not a lot, especially since you’re probably not using it a bunch. Pretty soon it starts to fade.” He grinned and punched Starfire’s shoulder. It looked hard, but Starfire didn’t even flinch. “But Starfire’s kept working at it! Pretty much everything she knows now she knows for real, even if she forgets words sometimes or mixes up grammar rules.”
“English is kind of a crapshoot anyway,” Jason said. He watched as Starfire’s cheeks flushed a deep orange and she punched Dick’s shoulder in return. It actually rocked Dick on his feet slightly, and Jason’s eyes widened. Fuck, aliens were tough. He’d tried the same thing more than once and all he’d had to show were smarting knuckles.
Then Starfire and Dick made that adoring, mushy-goey eye contact again and Jason started to feel awkward. He cleared his throat, wondering why the fuck Dick had introduced them at all if he wanted to be alone with this chick.
“Guess you had a lot of time to practice, huh,” he said, a somewhat shitty attempt at humor. “I mean, you’ve been on earth since. . . uh. . .” he trailed off, trying to do the math in his head.
“It has been quite some time, yes,” Starfire agreed. If it was an attempt to spare him the headache of straining to remember dates off of newspaper clippings, Jason was grateful. “And yet it does not feel like much time at all. Right, Dick?”
Dick shrugged. His lips were smiling, but his eyes seemed noncommittal.
When Jason had first found out that Dick had been a part of a team, a part of something other than the dynamic duo, he’d wanted to ask about it. Wanted to ask what it was like, why he’d left Bruce, and if the team had anything to do with his decision to become Nightwing. He’d held himself back, ultimately, for one reason and one reason alone.
Time.
He’d seen an old picture of Dick’s team. Smiling big for the camera– or, in the case of one of the girls, glowering into it. None of them had looked normal, exactly, but they hadn’t looked entirely inhuman, and Dick– well. Dick had looked young. He knew how Dick had turned, and he knew it had happened after he’d joined the Titans.
He hadn’t known if any of the Titans were still alive.
Dick had talked about them. Told stories, chattered on about what this one would do or the time he faced off against that villain with them. He’d talked about them present-tense, but Jason, in some not-insignificant way, had been sure that every other member was gone. Dick, after all, was immortal. Most humans were not. Most creatures were not.
Jason was not.
But. Here Starfire was, alive and looking just as young as Dick. What did that mean for the others?
“I think,” Starfire said decisively, snapping Jason out of his thoughts, “That even if you had not said so, I would know this one is your family.”
“Yeah?” Dick asked, a laugh already caught around the corners of his mouth. Jason felt his hackles rising, bracing himself for more teasing.
“Yes! So small but so– brash? Yes, brash, he is brash. And angry!” Starfire drew up to her full height, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “So much like you when you were younger!”
Jason blinked. “Dick? Angry?”
Dick groaned.
“Star. . .”
“Oh, of course! He was oh-so serious when we first met. Very tight-up.”
Jason blinked again. A grin started to spread over his face.
“Dick. . .”
“Jaybird, whatever you’re thinking–”
“Did you go through an emo phase?”
Starfire snapped her fingers, nodding vigorously in agreement even as Dick shook his head.
“Yes! That is the word I was looking for! Emo!”
“Raven’s emo, Star, I was just– going through some stuff.”
Jason nodded. “Some emo stuff.”
“Jason.”
“You have any leftover black eyeliner? I’d love to surprise Bruce when he gets home.”
“I– if you’re serious about experimenting with makeup I actually do have some you can borrow but Jason.”
Jason stuck his hand out, offering it to the alien girl in front of him. She blinked those large, curiously-green eyes of hers before reaching down to take it. Her skin was warm, warmer than Jason’s by a long shot. He remembered how Dick liked to snuggle up and leech body heat when he could. No wonder he was so googy-eyed about this girl, she must be like a hot water bottle.
Well, no. That wasn’t fair. From the way Dick talked to her– from the way they acted around each other– they must be family. A different kind of family than Dick was to the Bat and Alfred, sure, but family nonetheless.
That was why Jason said, “Hey. I know Dick’s already spilled the beans, but I figured I could introduce myself properly. Now that I know you’re not gonna, y’know, steal my name and make me dance until my legs fall off or something. It’s Jason. My name’s Jason.”
Starfire smiled at him. She shook his hand.
“Koriand'r,” she said.
“Coriander?” Jason repeated.
“Koriand'r,” Dick agreed.
Jason shook his head.
“That doesn’t sound any less like a fairy name.”
“Alfred’s name is Alfred,” Dick reminded him, and Jason aimed a kick at his shins. All it did was hurt his toes– his socks weren’t much protection against bone and undead-ness.
“Alfred’s weird!”
“Eh, so are we.” Dick reached down and ruffled Jason’s hair, and Jason swatted irritably at his hand. It didn’t stop Dick.
“Koriand'r came by to pick me up– the other Titans are in town and we were gonna hang out. Get some pizza, fight some crime– whatever.”
“You’re not supposed to eat pizza,” Jason reminded him flatly (but he wasn’t supposed to smoke either, so who the fuck was he to judge).
“Old time’s sake,” Dick said.
“I’ll keep him from eating too much,” Starfire said at the same time. Dick made a betrayed kind of squawk and Jason, well. Jason nodded his thanks before starting to turn and head back over to his window seat. He’d been ambushed in the middle of reading, after all, and he knew a dismissal when he heard one.
It was. . . good to hear that Dick had said Titans. Plural. Time, somehow, hadn’t taken away his team. Not yet. Jason wondered if he’d still be such a happy, jubilant person if it had. It was hard to imagine Dick as anything but upbeat, but still. . .
“Hey,” Dick said. Jason paused, glancing over his shoulder. Dick gave him a small smile. “If you’re not too wiped after training this evening. . . the team’s coming back to the manor to crash. Wanna meet everyone? No pressure if that’s too much socialization, but–”
Jason was answering before he even realized he’d started to speak.
“Yeah,” he said, then swallowed. Whoops. Too eager. He patched it up by raising an eyebrow at Dick and adding, “I wanna hear what other embarrassing stories they have to tell about you.”
“I take it back, you can’t meet the team,” Dick immediately said.
But he was still smiling.