Chapter Text
“Jason.”
Jason pauses, one step inside the door of his apartment, leather jacket half shrugged off, phone tucked between his cheek and armor-plated shoulder. “…You’re not the pizza joint. I definitely called a pizza joint, not a latter-day Zeno of Citium with permanent jock itch because he never takes off his furry suit.” He hears the faintest hint of a grunt on the other end of the line, the most protest Bruce will usually allow himself in the face of purely personal insults, and Jason continues ruthlessly. “You know how I know I called the pizza joint, and not you? Because Porthos’ Pizza is in my speed dial, and you’re not.”
There’s a moment of silence, and Jason lets himself relish in the burn as he shakes off his jacket and boots and heads through the apartment. Serves the asshole right for hacking his phone, anyway.
Bruce clears his throat. “Jason,” he growls, all Bat-voice night rasp, as if Jason hadn’t spoken at all. “You need to stop smoking.”
Well, that sure flipped the script. Jason stares out his little kitchen windows through the bars of the grimy fire escape. “Huh?”
“I need you to stop smoking. At once. I realize this may be difficult for you, and Alfred is fully prepared to supply you with whatever prescriptions, patches, or-“
“Hold up, hold up, woah now.” Jason claps a hand over his eyes in exasperation. “I’m not quittin’ the smokes, old man. I didn’t quit when I lived under your roof, and I sure as hell ain’t doin’ anythin’ you say now just ‘cause you say it. In fact-“ and he holds out the phone, peeks at it between his fingers with a sense of dazed marvel- “why am I even talking to you? I’m hanging up.”
“Jason, wait.”
And my, my, my. Bruce doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t sound desperate- those would be actual, literal, world-ending things- but he sure as heck sounds hasty, to somebody who knows him well. And Jason knows him better than he’d like. He frowns, suddenly suspicious. “What’s goin’ on?”
Bruce sighs. Actually heaves an audible gust of air. Jason rocks on his foundations. “It’s Tim.”
“What’d you do to him?”
“I didn’t do- he’s started smoking cigarettes.”
Jason scoffs. “That goody two-shoes? I don’t believe it.”
“I wish your picture of him were even half-way close to the truth,” Bruce grumbles, and Jason can’t help a huff of a laugh at the realization that in this moment, Bruce sounds like every exasperated dad, everywhere. “I was contacted early this evening by one of his former teachers, who wanted an explanation for the sight of my underage ward skateboarding through metropolitan Gotham, in the dark, with an appallingly large coffee in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.”
“Wow, Bruce,” Jason drawls. He’s not even bothering to hold back his snickers. The schadenfreude is sweet. “You sure fucked this one up fast. Didn’t he used to be, like, all bow ties and Model UN?”
“Tim wasn’t in the Model UN. His school attendance record was abysmal, they’d never have let him in. Jason-“
But Jason’s frowning. He’s given up on ordering pizza, and the surprise of dealing with Bruce has woken him up enough that he’s willing to wash a dish or two after all tonight. This morning. Whatever. He pulls out a sauté pan and starts it heating on the stove. “Hold up. I thought this kid was supposed to be whip smart?”
“He is. Just like you,” Bruce says casually, like that’s the kind of thing they just say, and Jason nearly drops the eggs he’s pulling from the fridge. “But unlike you, he got bored in school, and because he knew he could stimulate his mind better on his own, it seemed illogical to him to be forced into classes below his level of comprehension, or outside his areas of interest.”
Jason grins as he cracks eggs into hot oil, dropping the shells into the compost bin under the sink. Bruce said those words like a quotation, and he can just picture his itty bitty replacement pursing his little mouth and piping up with that kinda horseshit. All reasonable and calm, and logic-ing circles around poor Bruce.
Hell, he could actually learn to like this kid. He says as much.
“You know,” Bruce snaps, and he sounds so utterly done. Jason’s getting almost giddy. His replacement is turning Bruce into an actual Done Dad, and it is so great. “I called you to take some responsibility here. His teacher may yet call Child Services if she decides she wasn’t satisfied with our conversation, and seeing as it’s significantly your culpability-“
“My culpability,” Jason squawks, and squeezes way too much harissa over the eggs frying in his pan. “How do I have anything to do with anything? I don’t go anywhere near you guys!”
“He-“ Bruce stops. Breathes. Jason can so vividly picture him sitting at his office desk in the dark, rubbing a knuckle between his eyes. “He admires you, Jason. He’s mimicking you.”
And Jason just stares at his eggs, browning now around the edges in a way they shouldn’t be, but he can’t think to do anything about it.
“You hang around certain parts of Gotham off-duty, so he wants to go there. You smoke cigarettes. Last month he tried very hard to cultivate an appreciation for Jane Austen, but decided that knowing several Jedi Apprentice novels by heart makes him literary enough.”
“I don’t like him anymore,” Jason announces, and finally slides his eggs off onto a plate. He dumps on a few scoops of the cannellini beans that hadn’t gone into last night’s soup, and a huge pile of yogurt, and splashes salsa verde over the whole thing. “What a fuckin’ twerp. So I’m guessin’ you think if I go around all reformed and clean-livin’, the kid is gonna give it all up, too?”
“That was more or less the idea.”
“Yeah,” Jason says, settling on his sofa with his dinner. Breakfast. Whatever. “Or- and here’s one I know you never would’a thought of- you could maybe just sit him down and tell him to knock that shit off?”
“I didn’t think I’d waste either of our time, considering the success rate I had following similar conversations with you. You are still smoking, after all. Which is rather the point.”
“Yeah, but it ain’t like I’m your kid now.”
There’s a moment of silence so still that Jason half wonders if Bruce had muted the line. “Regardless of what you may like to believe,” Bruce says, quiet and stiff, “adoption papers do not cancel out, or revert, or suddenly disappear in the event of a person’s death. Or resurrection, however that may come to be. Tim, however, is not now, and unfortunately never more than nominally has been, my son, and his biological parents apparently left the study of most facts of life to his own research, which has significantly colored his impressions.”
Well, that’s all just uncalled for. Jason throws down his fork and slumps back into the sofa. “You’re ruining my dinner,” he complains. “I didn’t ask for any emotional engendering or confluence, what’d I do to deserve this? I didn’t even get to shoot anybody tonight.”
Bruce sighs again. Two in one night, Jason marvels. Gotta be some kinda record. Dickie-bird didn’t even get that kind of reaction out of him when he decided he was going to practice for a place on the Olympic diving team from the roof of the house. “If you could refrain from shooting anyone in his presence until we straighten this out, it would be preferable,” he says. “His hero-worship is…unrealistic. He currently has a minor concussion from attempting a front handspring-headbutt combo he saw you perform last week.”
Jason’s nonplussed. “I wear a helmet. I mean, yeah, that one was totally badass, but…with a helmet. Hey, is he even tall enough to headbutt people?”
“He jumped. I assume you don’t get concussions. Alfred approves the helmet wholeheartedly.”
“I’m glad somebody does. Roy called it- no, never mind. Look, why don’t you just show him one’a those stupid grade school these-are-your-lungs-on-smokes slideshows?”
“I did. He gave me his exact statistical likelihood of lung cancer, based on gender, ethnic background, domicile, contributing health factors, and socioeconomic status.”
“What a little freak.”
“Jason, I have just had a varied supply of nicotine patches and gum sent to your address. If you will not stop smoking, I ask that you keep them available to use when in sight of Tim so that you can at least appear to have done so.”
Jason sits up straight, all humor gone, his face set and his shoulders tense. His free hand is twitching towards the handgun stashed under his sofa. “And just what address did you use, huh?”
“…Enjoy your eggs.”
Bruce hangs up before Jason can really get into the flow of his cursing.