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Never, ever, in her entire life Y/N would have thought she would be in this position.
Of everything she had been through, of everything that surrounded her—all the amazing, supernatural things—it was never even a passing thought that death wouldn’t be permanent. Because the hole that Death had left in her felt really permanent.
He was her everything. Even in her sweet 16 years in life, Y/N had known that she would never meet someone as unique as Jason. Even in her craziest dreams, she never imagined that she would meet someone that was her half, that complimented her in every way. Fate had really been kind to her, she used to think.
They met at the library in Gotham Academy. He was the new kid, and everyone in their class seemed to want to stay away from him. She knew better than trust the judgement of entitled rich kids. Y/N wanted to make her own conclusions.
Their friendship blossomed from there. Bonding over books, helping each other with homework. Her friends didn’t like him, they used to say that he looked too rebellious for someone like her—someone who was born in a rich family, someone ‘proper’. She called bullshit every time they said something about Jason. Because he was the best person she had ever met, with the purest heart, and Life hadn’t handled its best hand to him, so she was to be the kindest and most candid around him. It was what he deserved.
From friendship grew love. Y/N still remembers the day Jason nervously asked her to be more than his friend—it was so unlike him to be so nervous, she thought it was cute—because he somehow knew his feelings were mutual. They had kissed right there, in the Gotham Academy library, right until the librarian had kicked them out. They left giggling, headed to the gardens to kiss under the most beautiful trees she had ever seen. They stayed out until it was dark, then he took her home and kissed her once more under the stars.
Everything was amazing for a while. Until it wasn’t anymore.
Jason had many secrets. Y/N knew that some he couldn’t tell her, and spite of all the fights and arguments, she understood that somethings were better left unsaid. She wished she could turn back time. It was because of the secret—the only one he was adamant on not telling—that Y/N died with Jason.
Now, standing there, on the place that haunted her in her dreams, the only one Jason had once called home, she didn’t know what to do.
Bruce called her and Alfred guided her through the grandfather clock that carried such bleak memories. She went down, avoiding looking at where she knew Jason’s memory would forever rest. She shouldn’t be okay with this; she shouldn’t be so calm with the idea of what ended Jason.
She sat down shaking when Bruce told her the news. He hadn’t even changed; he was still in his armor. The tears sprouted in her eyes, and the guilt rose in the pit of her stomach. How was Bruce feeling? Was he feeling the same crippling guilt? Had she mourned for a living man?
Alfred rested a hand on her shoulder, as Bruce explained what Jason had been up to. It was still so surreal, Y/N thought. He was alive, but it didn’t look like her Jason. Bruce put up a picture of what he called ‘Red Hood’ and what he had claimed was Jason.
He was so much bulkier than the last she saw him. She couldn’t see his eyes nor his face for that matter, but she felt in her bones that person was haunted. Tears started to roll again. Fate had not been kind, no. Fate was a cruel existence. And it felt especially cruel now.
Bruce said that he had seen Jason’s face underneath the blood red helmet. Y/N asked if it wasn’t a hallucination. Bruce said he was sure it wasn’t. That he wanted to tell her in case he contacted her. That he was dangerous.
Y/N stopped listening after that. Only one thing mattered: Jason was alive.
Life moved on since then. Y/N moved on with her life, because she couldn’t sit and wait for Jason to come knocking on her door.
That being said: she should have expected him to come in through the window.
There he was. Laying lazily on her couch, helmet still on, as if she wouldn’t recognize his posture anywhere. As if she didn’t use to know his body like the back of her hand.
She was a considerable mess. Her hair all tangled up in what she wanted to call a messy bun, week-old pajamas with tea stains on it, her hands all dirty with ink from the pen she had been using since that morning. On her hand, her tea mug, long empty, one Jason had gifted her before he died with the saying ‘That’s the Tea’.
Y/N figured she shouldn’t say anything to him about her knowing. If she had imagined right, and rare were the cases when she was wrong about something regarding Jason, he would rather break the news himself. Even if he knew Bruce probably had already told her. So, instead of saying ‘Hi, Jason, I missed you like I would miss my own heart,’ she chose the much more classier route of:
“Would you like some tea?” she said, her back turned to him, washing her used mug, the kettle already on the stove.
He grunted. “I didn’t realize I had company.”
She tried not to snort, tried to remain impassive. “I’m used to it, believe me.”
He sat up straight, and Y/N felt that, if he could, he would have run his hands on his hair, just like he used to do. “I’d take that tea,” he said, getting up.
She smiled, her back still turned to him. Y/N opened the cabinet and pulled his favorite mug, one Bruce had given to her when Jason died. She looked at it one last time. The Shakespeare with the glasses was still as smug as ever, and the saying ‘I put LIT in LITERATURE’ still made her chuckle. She turned and put both mugs on the counter behind her.
She could hear his breath get caught, even with the stupid voice modulator. It was right then and there that she wanted to throw that stupid reasoning out of the window and rip off his helmet and do all the things she wished she would have done before he was ripped away from her. But she couldn’t. “Is everything okay?” she asked, and it took every ounce of self-control she had.
“I’m—I’m fine,” his voice twitched, just like it did when he got nervous around her. Somethings never change, she thought.
She smiled, small but present. His breath hitched again. “I hope you like mint tea, it’s all that I have here.”
Jason thought about one good thing about the situation he was in: at least he could feel his heart beat, that indicated that he was still alive and everything wasn’t just a fever dream he was having in… at that point he didn’t know if he would be in heaven or hell.
He stumbled on the apartment by accident. He needed a place to hide. And that one was the only one with the lights off. He should have paid more attention.
He cracked the window open—it was surprisingly easy to; Jason would have expected that, in Gotham, people would be more careful—and just lounged on the couch. He figured it would be a while before he managed to lose those fucking goons. He just didn’t take into consideration that the quietness of the apartment would be temporary.
Jason also didn’t take into consideration that Y/N still lived in Gotham, in that exact neighborhood he found himself in. In his defense, the probability was low, but he should have watched his surroundings better.
He would have seen a picture of her and the Replacement framed and hung on the wall. He would have found his entire collection of Shakespeare there on her bookcase, next to a picture of both, in love and young, unaware of the Destiny both had. He would have seen a collection of tea mugs, all dirty, on her sink, all of them gifted to her by Jason.
She was still so beautiful. She was still Y/N, she still looked like herself, even if Jason felt in his bones that she hadn’t been herself since he died. She was still messy with her pens, the ink all over her hands. She still loved tea more than coffee: ‘How can you drink that shit? It’s so bitter,’ she would say. She still only wore pajamas when she was home.
And Jason knew she knew. Because he saw the way her eyes shone, and he saw how her hands hovered over all the other mugs she had in her cabinet before resting on his favorite mug, to offer him his favorite tea. He heard about how she was used to having unwanted visitors in her apartment, because he doubted she could stay away from the Wayne’s, even if that family had shattered her heart into a billion pieces.
Jason couldn’t help but to feel like the air was stolen from his lungs. She had poured him the tea and left. Because, even if she knew—maybe, but almost certainly; Bruce wouldn’t help himself—she was sure Jason wouldn’t be comfortable with her lurking around. So she left, and he felt the same emptiness he became familiar with all those years he spent away from Gotham, away from her.
He wanted to hug her, to tell her he still loved her with every ounce of his being, that he had missed her, and that feeling was so intense that during his training with the assassins, Talia couldn’t pull from his own melancholy.
But he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready for that yet, and he doubted he would be in the foreseeable future. Because there was still so much left to be done, so many tasks yet to be completed, he wouldn’t let himself get caught up in her and lose track of what he was there to be done.
Y/N could tell he was reluctant to come back, but once he did, he couldn’t stop.
On the nights she was there when he entered, she made sure to make him some tea, or at least have something for him to eat. She knew how he forgot to eat sometimes, too focused on his mission. The tea was to give him comfort, one thing she knew he had always lacked.
On the nights she wasn’t there for him, she always left the kettle on the stove full of water, ready to boil, his favorite mug, a bag of mint tea and a note: ‘Just turn the stove on for the tea…’ and a literary quote, one from a book Jason liked.
Y/N would admit, she did put those little references just to see if she would get a reaction from him. If his love for her hadn’t died with him, if the hope she held onto every day since she found out he was alive wasn’t pointless. And, at first, the reaction was nonexistent. He left the apartment as if no one was there. He always cleaned whatever piece of dish she left him. Never left a crumb on sight.
Slowly, he started to leave little clues.
A smile on the end of the note she left. A book took out from her bookcase with a page marked, with a quote—one she knew he liked, but it was nice to see he hadn’t changed all that much. The peak was when he had gifted her a new mug, one she was dreaming of buying for a while, but she never actually had the time to stop by the shop and do it. Jason had left a note, a simple one. ‘For your collection’. She smiled when she looked at it the first time, and she still smiles when she looks at it, now glued to her fridge door.
It were all signs that maybe he was getting ready to maybe open up to her.
Y/N hoped she wasn’t reading into the situation too much. She used to know him, but that Jason had died, and even if he hadn’t changed all that much, he still had. He still had gone through things her mind couldn’t even fathom. He was still her Jason, but was he really?
She treaded the waters lightly. Lingered longer than she should. Talked more, smiled more, looked at him more. She hoped more than ever that he still loved her, like she loved him, even when he was dead.
But he still had things to do. And Y/N tried to understand, she was patient. She had waited years, what more of a couple of months?
At least, she had him, even if he wasn’t hers.
Jason could see what Y/N was doing, and it was very hard to not fall for her all over again.
Unfortunately, he was never that good resisting her charms.
Y/N sipped her tea leaning on her counter, looking over the window. She knew he would come, somehow. And she couldn’t wait.
It was the day. She couldn’t take it anymore. It had been months in that dance they did. She was going to fold, show her cards, give him her heart once again.
He stumbled into the apartment. Months of practice, and he still struggled with the tiny window. She chuckled at the sight.
“Yes, laugh at my misery,” he said—voice disguised—on the floor, his hand reaching to close the window. The lights were off, so she could only see the bright eyes of his helmet. She rested her mug on the counter and went towards him. She closed the windows and shut the curtains. She held out a hand to him.
If this was months ago, he wouldn’t have taken it. It would have broken her heart a little more. But, that night, he took it, and she was surprised that his hand still fitted perfectly in hers. She smiled in the dark of her living room. She wanted that moment to last forever, but it couldn’t.
He released her hand first, and she could hear his tiny sigh through the voice modulator.
She didn’t linger longer than she had. She flickered the lights on, and leaned on the counter, her mug next to her. He looked at her, and she wished he didn’t have that stupid helmet on. He rested on the counter too, across from her.
“Tea?” she said, smirking and bringing her mug to her lips.
“Yeah, sure,” he shrugged off. He rubbed his hands against each other.
She picked his mug and the tea bag then poured the hot water for him. She rested the kettle on the stove once more and resumed her previous position across from him. She could feel his confusion and suppressed a smile.
“How was patrol?” she handed him his mug. Shakespeare looked smugly at her. He must have known.
“The same,” he hesitated. He played a bit with his tea bag.
“Great. I hope you didn’t beat them too badly, wouldn’t want you going without things to do,” she said, shrugging.
“Yeah, I won’t,” he said, in an airy breath. A couple of beats passed before he spoke again. “What are you trying to do here?”
Her eyes shifted from him to her tea bag. The nervousness started to appear. “Why do you think that I’m trying something?”
“Your deflection is enough to confirm,” he said lowly. The corners of her mouth quirked up, in attempt of forming a smile.
She looked at him deeply. “I’d—I wish you knew how much I love you,”
He was taken back by the bluntness of her confession. “What?” he said, confused.
She ran her hands through her hair and circled around the counter to stand beside him. He was so much taller than her, she noticed. “I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, Jay.”
He sighed. His hands abandoned the mug and went to the sides of his helmet. A weird hissing sound echoed through the apartment as he took his helmet off. He rested the scarlet equipment on the counter and ripped off the domino mask he sported underneath it.
His eyes had stayed the same, Y/N noticed. He had stayed the same. Sure, he looked older, and perhaps more tortured than ever, but he was still her Jay. She couldn’t help the tears that ran down her cheeks. She reached for his face, her thumb caressing it. His head had beads of sweat, but it looked like…like drops of Jupiter. “Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?”
Jason bent down to rest his forehead on hers. His hands found his way to her face, cupping it gently just like he used to do when they were 16. “Every single day.”
“I—I still love you more than anything. Even if you, uh, are not the same person. I don’t think I’d ever stop loving you,” she confessed.
He smiled, and Y/N could feel her broken heart being mended. “I know,” he whispered.
“Will you think of me as a boring, plain ol’Jane? Now that you returned?”
He shook his head in disbelief. “Never,” he kissed her forehead tenderly.
Jason was never one to make grand confessions of love. But with the few words he had provided her, Y/N knew. Knew that her feelings weren’t one sided. That the 16-year-old Jason had told the truth that night when they finally got together—the one time he had made a grand confession:
“I could sail across the sun, make it to the Milky Way, spend forever apart from you. Nothing would ever change what I feel about you.”
And that was enough.