Work Text:
Jason had been off the streets and living at Wayne Manor for a few months when it happened.
Alfred, it turned out, actually did have days off, and would disappear entirely when he did. Jason strongly suspected he got the hell out of the Manor entirely so that Bruce wouldn’t continually assume he was going to wait on him hand and foot. He liked Alfred, but it made him feel uncomfortable when he just did everything for Jason. Alfred was old! He shouldn’t be wasting the time he had left picking up Jason’s socks off his bedroom floor.
The days without Alfred were great, because Jason got to eat cereal for breakfast the way he did growing up, soggy with milk and without all the fresh fruit and yogurt that Alfred tended to add to the breakfast table. Bruce would join him, and there was something about watching Batman eat Fruity Pebbles that put Jason in a great mood.
Last time Alfred had a day off, he’d spent time the day before preparing meals for Jason and Bruce to heat up in his absence. This time, Jason cornered him beforehand and said, “Y’know, it defeats the purpose of taking time off if you spend so much time preparing for it. We can feed ourselves.”
Alfred had raised an eyebrow the way he did when he thought they were full of it, and Jason had insisted that yes, he could feed him and Bruce. Worse come to worse, Bruce would have to shell out for some takeout, and they all knew that he could afford it.
Alfred had agreed to the terms, and now, with two days stretched out without a single Alfred-prepared meal in sight, Jason took to the kitchen.
Breakfast went fine, it was impossible to fuck up cereal. Lunch was okay, because while Jason was disappointed at the lack of pizza rolls in the freezer -- his mom had sometimes bought them as a treat, and he’d somehow assumed that rich people would just have everything on hand, but it turned out that the freezer was full of gelato and sea bass?? Jason was going to have to badger Alfred into letting him go with him to the store so that they could get some actual food.
He made do with sandwiches -- fancier than he would have liked, given the ingredients he had to work with, but he had to admit they tasted good. Alfred at least bought his favorite flavor of chips, so that was something familiar and good.
Bruce even gave him a one-armed hug when he presented him with his sandwich.
It was at dinnertime when things went south.
Jason had cooked plenty, okay. Fixing food at home was pretty much all he knew growing up -- takeout was expensive and saved for special occasions or when the pizza place was offering a special. His mom had taught him how to make food. He knew how to use a stove. He was almost a teenager, for christsakes.
The problem was that rich people? Totally sucked. They couldn’t just have normal things. No, they had to have stoves which had actual fire instead of normal burners.
All he’d been trying to do was to heat up water to boil pasta, and after accidentally sloshing a little water on the counter, had left the dishrag lying there to soak up the water for just a second, and suddenly the fucking counter was on fire.
Well. The counter was made of marble, so it wasn’t burning, but the dishrag sure as hell was. And somehow the box from the pasta. And flames were shooting up alarmingly close to the wooden cabinets.
Jason stared, aghast. Probably this was it. Probably burning down a mansion’s kitchen was an offense even Bruce, who was stupid-generous and had taken him in for no reason at all, couldn’t ignore.
He’d known this was too good to last.
He didn’t know what to do -- he had a fleeting thought about a fire extinguisher, but he didn’t know where it was or even if they had one in the kitchen, his mom never had -- so he grabbed Alfred’s apron off the hook near the door and began to beat at the flames. He had no idea how the fire had grown so quickly, and now a fire alarm was screeching, alerting everyone in the house that he had fucked up.
The flames stubbornly refused to die, but they didn’t seem to be getting any bigger, so Jason kept trying to hit them with the apron.
He was totally focused on his task -- don’t burn down the mansion, don’t burn down the mansion -- that he didn’t even notice Bruce entering the room until the sudden spray of the fire extinguisher startled him, causing him to stumble and end up on his ass in the floor, still holding Alfred’s now-scorched apron.
Bruce calmly lowered the fire extinguisher. “Are you okay?”
Jason stared at the smoke and wreckage. “I’ll just go pack my bag before I leave, if that’s alright.”
Bruce shook his head. “Uh-uh, you don’t get to ditch me to Alfred’s wrath alone, kiddo. Come on. We can fix this.”
He surveyed the counter. Jason wordlessly opened a window to allow some of the smoke to escape, and kept-- kept waiting on it. But Bruce never got mad. Didn’t even seem that perturbed, honestly. He was already sweeping the burnt items into the trash can.
Which was suspicious in and of itself. Jason narrowed his eyes. “How many times have you set the kitchen on fire, Bruce?”
Bruce didn’t answer that particular question, but his shoulders hunched upward in a very telling manner. “There’s a cleaning solution under the sink that should get these marks off the counter.”
Suddenly, Alfred’s meticulous instructions and prepared meals made perfect sense. Jason began to laugh. They spent the rest of the afternoon before patrol scrubbing the kitchen clean of any trace of fire, eating pizza and making sure they left no evidence behind of the incident.
(They forgot the apron. Alfred never said a word, but one day Jason was brought into the kitchen for an intensive lesson on kitchen safety. When questioned about Bruce’s absence from the lesson, Alfred sighed and deemed him a lost cause. Jason had a lot of fun bringing that up to Bruce.)