Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The words Bruce had said to him – yelled at him, because that was how the two of them primarily communicated these days – kept ringing in Jason’s ears.

He was on his motorcycle, whipping through the streets of Gotham. It was so late it was early, the first fingers of dawn reaching onto the horizon. The only people out at this time of day were workers headed to early shifts – Gotham’s criminal element had finally all gone to bed – and the ones who were awake and aware enough to recognize the figure on the bike speeding past them, his all-black costume and gleaming red helmet, flinched away in terror.

Good people, people who didn’t commit crimes, didn’t react that way when they spotted the Batmobile cruising through town, or Nightwing vaulting across rooftops, or Robin tailing after Batman. They waved or cheered or, if they were more sensible, hastened their way toward their destination and prayed for the Bats’ success in catching whoever they were after.

But good people knew enough to fear Red Hood. He had some fans, people who agreed with him that Batman’s methods were too tame for this city where the fight against darkness had always been a losing battle, but these supporters were few and far between. Most people treated him like a demon, risen up from hell, and they didn’t know how right they were.

When he’d first returned to Gotham, guns blazing, with a mind only for vengeance and chaos and hurt, Jason had relished the way these people feared him. It had felt like something he’d earned. But the more time that passed from his dip in the Lazarus Pit and his training with the League of Assassins, the less Jason wanted good people to fear him.

Maybe it had started when he’d shot four men in an alley one night, and when he’d looked around to see if they had any backup, he’d spotted a kid hiding behind a dumpster, looking about the same age as Jason had been when he’d slept behind a dumpster (because if he stayed nearby he could snatch the food people threw out when it was still good, and he just had to make sure he was out of sight on trash day).

Jason had frozen, gun in hand, four men bleeding out at his feet, and his first instinct had been to offer the kid something, money, food, a place to stay (he refused to think about how similar this made him to Bruce, whose first impulse upon meeting Jason had been exactly the same). But when he’d taken a step toward the kid, the kid had gone white and started crying, and begging for his life, and Jason had felt sick to his stomach and he’d turned and ran away.

(He came back to the dumpster in the morning, with his helmet off and his street clothes on and a bundle of cash in his pocket and a canvas bag full of food slung over his shoulder, but the kid had been gone, and there wasn’t any trace of him.)

Or maybe it was more complicated than that. Maybe it hadn’t been a single moment that had flipped a switch in Jason, from hardened killer to… something else, something he couldn’t figure out, a young man who wanted to do good more than he wanted revenge but still couldn’t stand the thought – the injustice – of murderers and rapists and predators wandering the city, alive. Maybe that transition had happened more gradually, and maybe he was still in the middle of it, and he would come out on the other side someone he didn’t even recognize, and he couldn’t decide if that was something he dreaded or something he wanted more than anything else.

Because if he wasn’t the hardened killer the Joker had beat into him and the League had trained him to be, who was he? And was that person someone who was going to regret everything that he’d done over the past year, attacking his family and sending countless people to their graves?

His argument with Bruce, then, had come at the worst possible time, as Jason was grappling with this fresh, ongoing identity crisis.

It started like this: Batman and Red Hood were going after the same criminal. Batman wanted him captured. Red Hood wanted him dead.

It was the same old song, again and again. They would run into each other sometime in between starting the chase and apprehending the criminal. Bruce would tell Jason to “let me take care of it.” Jason would tell Bruce to “stay out of my way, and what you do doesn’t count as ‘taking care’ of shit.” Bruce would ask Jason, rhetorically, frustration already beginning to color his tone, whether Jason ever considered any alternative to cold-blooded murder as an acceptable method of “taking care of it,” and Jason would defiantly answer “no.”

They would start yelling. Jason would start brandishing a gun, not like he was intending to shoot Bruce but just to remind him that he had it, because he knew Bruce hated that almost as much as he hated the killing. Bruce might even tell him to “put that thing away,” and Jason would shout, “Or what? What are you going to do to me?” and the unspoken implication would be, What are you going to do to me that could possibly be worse than what you have already done?

This was usually around where the argument ended. They knew they had both run out of things to say, recycled the same lines and gotten nowhere, as per usual. Bruce would disappear like an angry shadow, or Jason would turn on his heel and storm away.

Today it didn’t end there. Today Bruce pushed Jason farther. Jason would never know why. All he knew was that Bruce wouldn’t let it go this time, the fact that Jason wanted to kill this man, and he’d shouted, no longer using the Batvoice, like he wanted to make it clear to Jason that this wasn’t Batman, his former mentor speaking; it was Bruce, his former father.

“This isn’t who you are!”

Jason’s hands fisted at his sides, because what did Bruce know about what kind of person he was? He’d known Jason, fifteen. And that was still the boy he saw when he looked at Jason now. But that boy didn’t exist anymore. He was dead.

Bruce kept trying to bring him back, but there was no coming back from what Jason had been through.

That was when Jason had stormed away. And gotten on his bike, and sped off down the streets, past good people who looked at him like he might be the last thing they ever saw, past kids who slept behind dumpsters and didn’t know that once upon a time he’d been just like them.

This was who Jason was. He was a killer, a demon, a nightmare from the dark. Maybe it wasn’t who he wanted to be, but since when had the world ever given a shit what he wanted?

As long as Bruce kept looking at Jason and expecting to see the boy he’d once known, the son he’d had and lost, Jason was always going to feel like this. Worse than a disappointment; the embodiment of all of Bruce’s worst fears.

Jason couldn’t stand it any longer. He couldn’t live with this horrible, twisted feeling in his gut. And the only way he could think to solve that problem was the only way he knew how to solve any problem.

He had to kill that fifteen-year-old boy, the one who’d already died but lived on in Bruce’s memory and Bruce’s words and Bruce’s expectations. He had to destroy the only thing that was left of him.

Jason waited until the following night, when he knew Bruce and Tim would be out on patrol and Alfred would be down in the Batcave supporting them. He snuck into the house, a house he hadn’t set foot in for four long years. He swallowed his aching sadness and longing and homesickness, dismissed them as yet another remnant of the boy he was finally about to be rid of.

He went upstairs. Down the hall. Found his old room, next to Dick’s. Dick didn’t live here anymore either, but his room had been cleaned, sanitized of anything left of the child he’d once been, because Dick still visited sometimes, so the room had been updated to accommodate him. Old posters taken down. Clothes hanging in the closet that were actually his size. Photos of him and Bruce on the dresser replaced with new photos of him and Bruce, him and Barbara, him and Tim, him and Wally and Donna and Kory and the multitude of other people who cared about Dick and wanted the best for him.

Jason’s room wasn’t like that. Jason’s room hadn’t been touched. Same old bedspread. Same old posters. Same old photos, books, clothes that no longer fit. Unfinished homework, socks that hadn’t made it to the laundry hamper, an empty glass on the nightstand; whatever liquid it had once held had long since evaporated. Alfred was fastidious about collecting dishes the kids and Bruce left around the house, but this one had remained where it was.

Jason tried to summon his year-old rage, the rage that had taken him to Gotham and fueled his initial rampage. He tried to hate Bruce for leaving this sick shrine to a boy who was dead because of his mistakes and unavenged because of his shortcomings. But instead, Jason felt an overwhelming feeling of emptiness and loss.

This had all been his, once. Everything in this room, Bruce had given to him. Jason had sometimes had a hard time accepting it, but Bruce was more stubborn than he was: “You’re my son. I’m allowed to buy things for you.” “You’re part of the family. You don’t have to pay your own way.”

This was the life Jason had run away from. This was the life that had been taken from him. He wanted it back, but he knew he couldn’t have it, and he didn’t want anyone else to have it either. There was already a boy who’d taken things that had once belonged to Jason. Tim had taken his costume, his alias, his place by Bruce’s side. Fine. Tim could have those things. Jason didn’t want them anymore.

But the fifteen-year-old ghost of himself couldn’t have shit. It was his fault Jason had lost everything.

Jason had brought a bat. He could have brought something heavier, more destructive – a sledgehammer, perhaps – but it wouldn’t have been as satisfying to swing.

He started with the bookcase, because that was what his fifteen-year-old self had treasured the most. He pushed it over, hard enough that the wood cracked when it hit the floor. Books tumbled across the room, some of them still unread, many of them read so many times that their spines were creased and pages were falling out.

His movements were disjointed, like he was a puppet and someone else was pulling his strings. He felt outside of his body. He ripped the sheets off the bed, then the mattress itself. He’d slept here. Hundreds of nights.

He knocked over the nightstand, and when the empty glass bounced off of it, unbroken, Jason threw it at the wall. He tossed aside his old desk chair and shoved the desk onto the floor, papers fluttering into the air, and when it didn’t crack like the bookshelf had, he kicked it until one of the legs came off.

He went into the closet and tore all the clothes off their hangers, left them in piles on the floor. It didn’t feel like enough. He opened the window and started throwing things outside. It was raining. The ground below was muddy. The books would be ruined. He ignored his twinge of regret.

He went into the bathroom, hoisted the bat over his shoulder, and swung it at the mirror. It shattered like an explosion. Shards of glass sprayed across the room. He swung again to get what was left.

He pulled the shower curtain down as hard as he could, breaking the rings that held it up. He threw that outside too.

Standing in the middle of the wreckage, breathing heavily, Jason finally came back into himself. His face was wet and he wondered if he’d cut himself on the mirror glass, but when he reached up and his hand didn’t come away red, he realized he’d been crying. His throat felt rough and he wondered if he’d also been screaming.

A wave of emotion hit him and he collapsed to his knees and the tears came fresh. He hadn’t cried once since coming back from the dead. He’d been starting to wonder if he even still could, or if that part of him had been broken too, along with his conscience and his morals and his ability to love.

He stayed there so long, on the floor surrounded by the pieces of who he used to be, that he wasn’t surprised when he felt a presence behind him and turned around to see that it was Bruce.

Jason had wanted to be there for the look on Bruce’s face when he saw what Jason had done. The dawning horror, the outrage, the grief.

But there wasn’t horror or outrage or grief in Bruce’s expression. And he wasn’t looking at anything else in the room. He was only looking at Jason.

Jason felt torn. He wanted to run away; he didn’t want Bruce to see him like this, falling apart. He wanted to stay; he wanted his dad.

He’d never stopped wanting his dad, as much as he hated to admit it, as much as it felt like weakness. He’d never stopped missing that comfort he’d once felt in Bruce’s presence. Bruce used to make him feel safe. He’d thought nothing bad could happen to him as long as Bruce was around. He’d actually believed that.

Bruce hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said anything.

“This isn’t who I am,” Jason said, and he’d meant to shout it, but his throat was still hoarse and it came out pleading.

“I know,” Bruce replied. Jason still didn’t feel like he understood.

“No, this.” Jason got to his feet and held out his arms, encompassing the room around him. “All this stuff. This is who I used to be. I’m not that person anymore. I’m not that kid. I’m not your son.”

Jason had meant the words to hurt, but Bruce didn’t flinch away from them. “You are my son,” he said, with a certainty Jason wished he could feel. “You’ll always be my son. No matter what you do, you’ll always be my son.”

Jason’s first reaction to this was anger. (Wasn’t it always?) He summoned a glare that was probably far less effective if he looked like he thought he did: eyes red, cheeks wet. Feeling insecure and vulnerable, he fell back on his old faithful argument, the one question that could shut down any conversation with Bruce: “Then why didn’t you kill the Joker?”

The question came out different from how Jason had ever asked it before. Before, Jason had yelled it, screamed it, thrown it in Bruce’s face. He couldn’t muster that same volume and outrage right now. He’d put it all into destroying his childhood bedroom.

Bruce looked at him sadly for another moment, then looked away. “Ask me for anything else, Jason.” His tone was hollow. Tired. “Ask me for anything else and I’ll do it for you.”

Anything else. “We both know that’s not true.”

Bruce sighed. “Ask me for anything but to kill the Joker or fire Tim.”

“There it is,” Jason said, trying to make it sound like a taunt and hitting close enough to the mark. “The two people you care about more than me.”

Bruce took a step into the room, finally taking it all in: the bookshelf, the bed, the desk, the broken mirror. He still didn’t look angry. He bent down to pick up one of the books that hadn’t made it out the window. The Road. About the end of the world and a father who would do anything for his son.

It struck Jason what a pitiful shadow of their usual confrontations this was. He was used to standing in front of each other in costume, screaming, trading insults, waving a gun around. And yet here they were, wearing their civilian clothes – Bruce was in his fucking pajamas, for Christ’s sake – Jason’s voice hoarse and a baseball bat hanging limply at his side, Bruce looking, more than anything else, tired. After a long night of fighting crime. After a long year of fighting Jason.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said, flipping through the bent pages of the book before setting it gingerly down on the ground again, treating it with more respect than Jason had treated a single thing in this room. Jason frowned at the words, suspicious of them. Bruce hadn’t apologized to him once since Jason had returned. He rarely apologized to anyone.

Bruce looked up and caught Jason’s gaze. He did look regretful, and Jason could tell – because he’d known him well enough once that he’d learned how to read him – that it wasn’t performative.

“Not for letting the Joker live or taking on Tim. I can’t apologize to you for those things. You know that,” Bruce clarified, and Jason’s heart hardened again. He hadn’t expected an apology for either of those things, but a small part of him had still gotten its hopes up.

Bruce continued, “But I’m sorry for keeping your room like this. I didn’t think how it would affect you. I was only thinking about myself.”

Jason… wasn’t sure what to do with that. So he glared again – his nose was stuffed up from crying but he was not going to sniffle – and said, “Seems like you do that a lot.”

Bruce didn’t argue with him. Jasn’t wasn’t sure what to do with that either. “I know.” Before Jason could pull another insult out of the air between them and try again to stir something more than this dull anguish that was all he was getting out of Bruce, Bruce added, uncharacteristically honest, “I wanted to keep it like this because—” He cut off, like he didn’t know the real reason, and then said, “Because it felt wrong to do anything else.”

Jason thought about another room, down the hall. Bruce kept the door locked. Alfred went in once a week and dusted everything. No one else was allowed in. Everything in there had once belonged to Thomas and Martha, and it remained exactly as they’d left it.

Jason had always assumed that Bruce had done that, had purposefully kept his parents’ room the way it had been when they’d died, the same as he’d later done for Jason’s. It had felt morbid to Jason, like Bruce was keeping the spirits of the people he’d loved and lost trapped in this house with him forever. But Jason realized now, for the first time – and felt stupid for not realizing sooner – that Bruce had been ten years old when his parents had died. He wouldn’t have been making decisions about the house.

Alfred had left Thomas and Martha’s room the way it was. And Bruce had done the same for Jason’s room not because he was trying to keep the ghost of a dead boy alive, but because that was how he had learned how to grieve.

“Once you came back,” Bruce continued, oblivious to Jason’s epiphany, “I didn’t think about how it would be painful for you to have everything the way it was.” He paused, looked down at his feet. “I never wanted to make you feel like I love you any less than I loved you then.”

That wasn’t why I destroyed the room, Jason wanted to say. I destroyed it to hurt you. But he knew, as soon as Bruce said the words, that that wasn’t the whole truth.

His old room, with everything just as he’d left it, had been a painful reminder. It had made him feel like Bruce was still mourning for the fifteen-year-old boy he used to be, instead of accepting the nineteen-year-old he had become. Because why would Bruce accept him the way he was now? He was a killer. A criminal. A monster. People on the street – kids on the street – ran when they saw him. He was the opposite of everything Bruce had always stood for. He’d become that way on purpose.

For a year – for four years, actually – Jason had been trying to blame his faults on the man who had raised and then abandoned him. You didn’t save me. You didn’t avenge me. You weren’t there.

But Bruce had tried to save him. And he couldn’t have brought him back by avenging him. And how could he have been there when he’d thought Jason was still six feet deep underground?

Jason had come back, and attacked him, and attacked his new Robin – Bruce took attacks against Robin very seriously these days – and become a criminal, and now Bruce was standing in front of Jason and telling him he loved him.

There was no one Jason could blame for his current situation but himself. And he’d known that for a while now, but he was finally starting to reckon with it.

It was a painful reckoning. Jason felt on the verge of a breakdown (as if he hadn’t just had one). For the first time in a long time, instead of pushing him over the edge, Bruce pulled him back from it.

“What do you want the room to look like?”

It was so far from what Jason had been thinking about that it stopped him in his tracks. “What?”

“Obviously keeping it the way it was was unacceptable,” Bruce stated plainly. The trashed bedroom around them was evidence of that. “What do you want it to look like instead?”

This conversation had taken such an odd turn that Jason could hardly think of what to say next. He could try again to lure Bruce into an argument, but what would they argue about? What Jason’s old room should look like? Jason didn’t give a shit. “It’s your house,” he said.

“It’s your room,” Bruce countered.

“It was my room.”

“It’s always going to be your room. Even if you never sleep in it again.” Bruce wasn’t backing down. It felt like another way of saying what he’d already said: You are my son. You’ll always be my son. No matter what you do. “I don’t want this to be something else that comes between us. I’ll fight with you about the Joker or about Tim or about how to solve the problem of crime in Gotham, but I’m not going to fight with you about your room. It’s not worth it. Tell me what you want it to look like. Should I have Alfred design it like one of the guest rooms, or would you rather it be more personalized?”

Jason shook his head. Even though Bruce had acknowledged that Jason might never sleep in this room again, he was talking like there was the possibility that he would. A very small voice in the back of Jason’s brain, the one that he’d spent the past four years drowning out with violence and revenge, made a quiet suggestion: You could go back if you wanted to. You could have a family again.

He didn’t know if that was what he wanted. Until tonight, he’d never even considered it as an option. But apparently it was.

When Jason didn’t answer his question, Bruce pressed on: “You don’t have to decide right now. We can talk about it. Or you can work with Alfred, if you’d rather. I can get some clothes in your size in case you’re ever around.”

The image of Bruce buying him clothes struck Jason as so ridiculous that he had to comment on it. “You wouldn’t know what to buy.”

Bruce shrugged. “All black. Secondhand leather. If Dick would wear it, you wouldn’t.”

Okay, maybe Bruce would know what to buy. Jason would reluctantly admit that the man did know a thing or two about fashion. “You’ve never bought anything secondhand in your life,” he said, even though he didn’t actually know if this was true.

One of the corners of Bruce’s mouth twitched toward something resembling a smirk. “At the price point I’m buying, it’s called ‘vintage,’” he said.

“You’re an asshole,” Jason said, but he said it differently from how he usually did. He didn’t shout it, for one. And if there was something approaching fondness in his tone, well, blame it on the release of endorphins from all the crying he’d done and the fact that it was five in the morning and Jason was abruptly realizing how exhausted he was.

Alfred’s voice coming from down the hall reminded Jason of where he was, and who he was talking to. He startled; his grip on the baseball bat tightened and he took a step back.

“Master Bruce, what on earth are you still doing awake at this—” Alfred cut off when he reached the doorway to Jason’s room and saw Jason standing there, bat in hand, overturned furniture all around him. “Oh,” he said, and it was an impressive show of restraint from the old butler who had never been able to tolerate disarray. “Master Jason.”

“Hi, Alfred,” Jason said, a little apologetically. He’d come here to punish Bruce, and to take out his anger. He hadn’t thought about how his actions would affect Alfred.

“I apologize for interrupting,” Alfred told them.

Jason saw an opportunity to escape this emotionally fraught situation and took it. “I was just leaving,” he said, and Bruce looked briefly panicked before he schooled his expression into something more neutral. He didn’t try to stop Jason, but he did take a few steps after him, and Jason could feel his eyes on him all the way down the stairs and out of sight.

When Bruce finally snapped out of it, Jason heard him say matter-of-factly, “We’re going to be redecorating this room, Alfred.”

“Clearly,” Alfred said.

Chapter Text

Jason let Bruce go after the criminal they’d been fighting about. He’d come home from wrecking his old bedroom dead on his feet, slept for twelve hours, and woke up with just enough time to eat, get in his usual workout, and go out again. In that time, he decided he had more important things to worry about than making sure some random criminal ended up dead.

He needed to find that kid. The one he’d seen behind the dumpster. He didn’t know how he was going to find a single street kid in the entire city of Gotham, but he wasn’t going to give up until he did.

He went back to the dumpster again, just in case. No luck. He checked all the other dumpsters in the area, systematically.

Eventually, he tracked down where the local street kids gathered, sleeping on cardboard and huddling up without blankets. It was early autumn; in a month or two, blankets would no longer be optional.

Jason observed them from the roof of a nearby building, not wanting to spook them like he had the other kid. Who, he observed, wasn’t here. But maybe these kids would know where Jason could find him.

He came back the next night, helmet tucked under his arm, with only a domino mask obscuring his features. He approached the kids unarmed (well, not visibly armed), slowly, with both hands in plain sight. They still looked at him like he was going to attack. Jason figured he deserved that.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he announced, loud enough for even the farthest kids to hear him. “I have money. And food.”

He set the canvas bags he’d brought down on the ground and backed away from them. A peace offering. None of the kids made a move, but they eyed the bags and Jason could guess how they must have felt: the way he’d felt when he’d found something unopened in the trash, maybe a few days past the expiration date but still good. He remembered spending so much energy ignoring how hungry he was and then finally allowing himself to acknowledge the gnawing pain in his stomach, because now he could sate it, or at least take the edge off.

“Take it,” Jason said. “Seriously.”

A girl toward the front stood up. She looked like the oldest, maybe not even a kid anymore. Homeless girls were less common than homeless boys, especially the older they got. Not because girls had it easier. The opposite, actually. Things happened to them. This one must have been tough, and smart, to last as long as she had.

“What’s the catch?” she demanded. Jason’s instincts had been correct. Tough and smart.

“I need help finding someone,” Jason explained. “I thought you guys might know where he is. Another street kid. Maybe ten or twelve years old. Medium skin, curly hair, brown eyes. About this tall.” He held his hand at his side to indicate the kid’s approximate height. “You know him?”

Some of the kids – including the girl – looked at each other. They knew him. “What are you gonna do to him?”

“I’m gonna help him. Like I’m helping you. I wanna give him stuff.”

“Why?”

Because I used to be just like him. “Because I think I traumatized him. Pretty sure I owe him an apology.”

None of the kids said anything. They didn’t trust him yet. Of course they didn’t. Jason was going to have to try harder than that. “If I come back in a week,” he said, “With more stuff, do you think you guys can make sure he’s here?”

The kids looked at each other again. The girl nodded. Jason felt something like relief. “Good.” He held up one finger. “One week.”

A few days later, there was a knock on Jason’s door. He went rigid where he was standing at his kitchen counter, wolfing down lunch. He wasn’t expecting company. He never expected company. The only people who knew he lived here were his landlord and (probably) Bruce (because Jason always assumed Bruce knew everything).

Jason wondered if it was a mistake. Someone who had the wrong address. Or someone trying to sell something.

The knock came again. Jason kept a hand on the gun holstered at his side as he approached the door and checked the peephole.

Some of the tension leached out of him. It was Bruce. Standing there with his hands in his pockets. At least he’d dressed down, but it wasn’t like a pair of jeans would distract anyone who saw his face and recognized him as Bruce fucking Wayne. Jason rolled his eyes.

“Can I come in?” Bruce asked, like he knew Jason was standing there staring at him.

Jason opened the door. “You can’t be here,” he hissed.

“If you’re allowed to break into my home in the middle of the night, I think it’s only fair that I can knock on your door and ask to be let into your home in the middle of the day.”

Jason glared. His only ready comeback to that was, The Manor is my home too, but admitting that would mean admitting that Jason still saw Wayne Manor as his home and Bruce and Alfred as his family, so either way he’d be conceding a point to Bruce.

“Come inside,” he said instead, yanking Bruce roughly by the arm and shutting the door behind him. “Did anyone see you?”

Bruce gave him a look. Right. Batman, master of stealth. Still.

“If the people who live here see Bruce Wayne visiting me, someone might put two and two together and think, ‘Hey, doesn’t that guy look exactly like Bruce Wayne’s kid who died four years ago?’”

“No one’s going to think you’re Jason Todd-Wayne back from the dead,” Bruce replied dryly.

Jason Todd-Wayne. Jason hadn’t used that name for himself in a long time. But that was the name on his tombstone, wasn’t it?

“I still can’t have Bruce Wayne showing up at my place.” Jason crossed his arms over his chest. If Bruce hadn’t caught him by surprise like that, he probably wouldn’t have even let him in. (Which was probably why Bruce had done it.) “Why are you here?”

“We’ve finished clearing out your room,” Bruce said, all business. “You still haven’t told me how you want it to be decorated.”

Jason raised an eyebrow. Bruce had seriously come all the way across town, snuck into Jason’s building, and knocked on his door for the first time since Jason had come back into his life to talk to him about his old bedroom? “I don’t care,” Jason said.

“Clearly you do.”

Jason glared at him. “I cared that you kept it exactly the way I left it like I was suddenly going to show up and finish my fucking ninth grade math homework. I don’t care what you do with it now.”

“Do you want the books I managed to salvage, or should I donate them?”

That gave Jason pause. The only thing he felt guilty about doing that night was destroying all those books. The thought that Bruce had gone out, maybe in the rain, definitely in the mud, and picked them up and checked them for damage and saved them just in case Jason still wanted them, even though he’d tossed them out like garbage—

“I’ll take them.”

Bruce pulled a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket and handed it to Jason. “I also made a list of all the books that were destroyed, if you’d like me to replace any of them for you.”

Jason took the list, didn’t look at it, but he knew he would later. Bruce continued speaking, “And I bought you half a dozen spare outfits and three sets of pajamas to keep at the Manor.”

“I won’t need them,” Jason said defiantly.

“That’s fine. Just in case.”

Jason felt overwhelmed. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

Bruce looked down at the floor between them. “I apologized for keeping your room the same without thinking how that might affect you. I’m trying to make it up to you.”

Jason felt a flash of something close to anger – finally – and grabbed onto it for dear life. “Out of all the things to try to make up to me—”

“I’m not going to kill the Joker and I’m not going to fire Tim.” Bruce only raised his voice slightly, not yelling like he usually would; annoyed, more than anything. “If you can think of anything else I can do that would make up for what happened to you, I’ll do it. But in the meantime, this was the only thing I could think of.”

Jason thought he should probably kick Bruce out, but he still had one question, something that had been bothering him ever since that night. “How did you know—” he began, voice still laced with anger, but he cut himself off, thinking maybe he shouldn’t admit to this.

“What?” Bruce prompted.

Fuck it. Bruce had already seen him crying; what could be worse than that? “How did you know why I hated that you kept my room the same?”

“You told me,” Bruce answered plainly. “‘I’m not the same person anymore.’ As if that would change how I feel about you.”

“It does,” Jason insisted.

Bruce sighed. “You frustrate me, Jason. Sometimes you make me furious. That’s part of being a parent. You don’t always like your kids, but you always love them.”

Jason absorbed this. A vulnerable part of him thought, Bruce doesn’t like me. Like this was anything close to a revelation. Of course Bruce didn’t like him. Jason hadn’t done a single thing the past year to make himself likable. In fact, he’d done everything in his power to make himself detestable.

“I can tell you want me to get out of your hair,” Bruce said, taking a step toward the door. “The room, though. You haven’t given me an answer.”

“I’ll think about the room,” Jason said, feeling strangely hollow.

“You will?”

“Yes. Christ.” Jason summoned the irritation he’d felt seeing Bruce standing at his front door, and used it to fuel him for these last final seconds before Bruce got the fuck out. “Don’t come here again. If you need to talk to me, call me.”

“You’ve never given me your number,” Bruce pointed out.

“Yeah, but you have it.”

Jason shoved Bruce out the door and slammed it behind him, leaning against it like their conversation had knocked the wind out of him. That stupid fucking room.

As much as he tried to stop thinking about it, Jason couldn’t. All day long, his mind kept drifting to the image of his old room, empty of books and posters and furniture and homework. Walls bare, floor bare. Empty inside, like Jason was ever since he’d come to the realization that he couldn’t keep living like this anymore.

He couldn’t keep living like this, but he didn’t know how he wanted to live instead.

He called Bruce. He still had the number memorized. Bruce hadn’t changed it.

“I like gray,” he said when he heard Bruce pick up, before Bruce could say anything that might make Jason want to turn this conversation into an argument before it even began. “For the walls.”

Bruce didn’t miss a beat. “What shade of gray?” he asked.

“This isn’t an E.L. James novel. There can’t be that many shades of gray.”

“You’d be surprised,” was all Bruce said. He paused, then added, “If you come over tomorrow, I can have paint swatches for you to look at.”

If you come over. Like that was something Jason just… did. Like he’d come to Wayne Manor for literally any reason other than to destroy shit ever since coming back. Like Bruce wanted him to.

“This is so much more effort than I’m willing to put into something I don’t care about,” Jason told him, and hung up without saying goodbye.

But the very next day, Jason was pulling up to the Manor on his bike, furious at himself. If you come over. The same part of Jason that had been (pathetically) dismayed to hear that Bruce didn’t like him hadn’t stopped thinking about Bruce wanting him to come over. Bruce wanting him, in general.

Bruce was the only person in Jason’s life who had ever wanted him. He’d thought he lost that. To know that he still had it…

Bruce found him standing in his room again, only at least this time he wasn’t crying. It was just as empty as Jason had been picturing it. “You’re allowed to use the front door like a civilized person,” Bruce said.

“Do you have the swatches?”

“I’ll go get them.”

Bruce left for a moment, and returned with a book of paint swatches, turned to the gray section. There were a lot of shades of gray. Jason wore an intense frown of concentration as he flipped through them all, holding them up to the light, holding them up to the walls, before selecting a cool, medium gray. Gray like the skies of Gotham. “This one.”

Bruce took the swatches and marked the one Jason had picked with a small sticky note. “What about the furniture?” he asked.

“Black furniture,” Jason told him. “Industrial style. Gray bedspread.”

“Area rug?”

“Also gray.”

“Curtains? Gray again?”

“I want everything a different shade of gray, yes.”

Bruce didn’t remark on this. He didn’t call it “boring.” Dick would have called it boring. (Dick would probably still call it boring, once he saw it.) But Bruce shared Jason’s affinity for neutrals. “What about the bathroom?”

Jason hadn’t thought about the bathroom. “The only thing you need to replace in there is the shower curtain, right?”

“And the mirror,” Bruce reminded him. “I can make any other updates you might want.”

Even though Jason was still convinced he would never use this room or the attached bathroom, ever, for the rest of his life, he tried to imagine what he would want if he did. “Can you put in a sliding door instead of the curtain?” he asked. The shower in his apartment had a glass door, and Jason liked it because he could see if someone was trying to sneak up on him, Psycho-style.

“Sure,” Bruce responded easily.

“I think that’s everything,” Jason said.

“I think so too.” Bruce had been taking notes on his phone. He put the phone away and met Jason’s gaze. “I’ll let you know when it’s finished.”

Jason scoffed. Like there was any way he could pretend he didn’t care after giving Bruce all of his preferences. “Whatever.”

It was a week after Jason had first approached the street kids. He came back with more money, more food, and plenty of other supplies. And it was a good thing, too, because the kid from the dumpster wasn’t the only new kid who’d showed up this week. Apparently word had gotten around that Red Hood was giving shit away. There had been six or seven kids last time. Now there were a dozen. The kid Jason had been looking for stood in the middle of them, apprehensive.

“Hey,” Jason said. He’d come helmetless again. Domino mask only. Set the bags on the ground, only this time he didn’t back away. The kids who’d been there last week approached him tentatively and started digging through what he’d brought them.

Jason made eye contact with the dumpster kid, who at least looked a hell of a lot less scared than he had last time they’d met. “Remember me?”

“I watched you kill people,” the kid said, an accusation.

Jason shrugged, feeling a little bit guilty. He’d seen plenty of shit during his time on the streets, and he remembered the way it had stayed with him, haunting his dreams for years to come. “Yeah. Well. Sorry.” He gestured to the bags. “I brought you shit. I have enough for everyone. Blankets this time too. And clothes. I wanted to get shoes but I didn’t know what sizes.” He looked around at everyone. “Anybody here know their shoe size?”

The kids finally all gathered around him. The ones who knew their shoe sizes gave them, and Jason nodded, and then turned to the kids who didn’t and had them compare with the kids who did so they could make their best guess. He’d never been good with numbers, so he wrote them down on the back of the list Bruce had given him, which for some reason he hadn’t stopped carrying around. (It was the only thing Bruce had written him since the note he’d left in Jason’s lunchbox, not that long before Jason ran away. Usually Alfred left notes, because he made Jason’s lunches, but this time Bruce had. Have a good day, was all it had said. Jason had thrown it away. He wished he’d kept it.)

He made a promise to come back in another week and told the kids to “be good” and “share.” Like a fucking uncle or something.

Jason was standing in his old bedroom, which no longer looked like his old bedroom. The walls were repainted. There was new furniture. New clothes in the dresser (Bruce had, impressively, nailed his style; they were all things Jason would actually wear).

“Looks fine,” Jason said noncommittally. But the truth was, it looked more than fine. It was exactly what Jason had been picturing.

It looked a hell of a lot better than his shitty apartment.

“Feel free to add any personal touches,” Bruce said, and when Jason looked at him like that was a crazy thing to say, he shrugged. “Or not. It’s your room. Decorate it however you want.”

“You realize I’m not actually going to live here,” Jason said flatly.

“I realize that,” Bruce said. “But you could visit.”

“Why would I do that?”

“We’d like having you around.”

Hadn’t Bruce just a few weeks ago told Jason he didn’t like him?

You don’t always like your kids, was what he’d actually said. Jason had only interpreted it as I don’t like you. But there had been a time when it hadn’t seemed like Bruce had liked Dick, hadn’t there? And there were probably times when he didn’t like Tim very much either. People didn’t always like each other all the time. Especially family.

And he’d also said, But you always love them. And he’d said, No matter what you do, you’ll always be my son. And he’d said, I love you.

“Who is ‘we’?” Jason asked, skeptical. “Not Tim.”

“Tim will warm up to you when you spend more time around him without trying to kill him,” Bruce said with an arched eyebrow.

“I don’t give a shit if Tim warms up to me,” Jason spat. Tim’s name no longer left a sour taste in his mouth, but he didn’t like being reminded of his existence.

“Alfred and I would like having you,” Bruce said, swiftly diverting the conversation away from Tim. “I’m sure Dick wouldn’t mind seeing you either.”

“You don’t seriously think that would be an enjoyable experience.”

“We would have to set some ground rules,” Bruce conceded. “I promise not to talk about your methods” – meaning murder – “outside of work, and I ask that you not bring any guns in the house.”

He said this as Jason was currently standing in his home, armed to the teeth. “You expect me to just leave them outside, lying around?”

“You could leave them at your apartment,” Bruce suggested. When Jason opened his mouth to argue, Bruce said, “Or I could put a safe in the garage for you to store them in while you’re here. I think I have a spare in the Cave.” One of the Kryptonite safes, Jason presumed.

Jason didn’t commit to anything, but he did tell Bruce to go ahead and bring up one of the safes.

Jason’s weekly drop-offs had only grown more popular, topping out around twenty-five kids. He learned their names and always made sure the kids who’d been there before showed up every time, and when they didn’t, he asked about them, pressed the others for details, When was the last you saw…?

He was killing a lot less than he used to. Chasing after missing street kids kept him busy.

And then there came the day when he didn’t find the kid he was looking for.

He did kill someone that day. He killed the man responsible for what happened to the kid. But it didn’t feel like enough. As long as these kids were on the street, they were vulnerable.

“I have another offer for you all.” Jason dropped off the bags of money and food. He didn’t know what the kids used the money for. He didn’t care. None of it was ever his, anyway.

The kids looked up at him expectantly. Jason was starting to feel like Santa Claus or something. Surprisingly, he didn’t hate it.

“The Wayne homes,” he said. “I have connections. I could get you all in. I know some of you – most of you – probably don’t trust the system, but these places are good.”

“How do you know?” one of the newer kids demanded.

“Like I said, I have connections,” Jason answered vaguely. “And it’s not safe out here. There are creeps out here. Murderers.”

“You’re a murderer,” another kid pointed out.

Jason shot her a look. “Other murderers aren’t as nice as me.”

“Aren’t the Wayne homes always full?”

Christ. What was it with kids and asking questions? Jason didn’t know how Bruce did this every day, for years, with Dick and then Jason and now Tim.

“What part of ‘I have connections’ do you kids not understand?”

Jason showed up at Wayne Manor for the fourth time since he ran away at fifteen. He pulled into the garage this time. Bruce had mailed him a garage opener; it arrived without warning, in a plain envelope marked only with Jason’s address.

In the garage, Jason located the biometric safe, which Bruce had set to unlock to Jason’s fingerprint and retinal scan last time Jason visited. He locked his guns away and went inside.

Tim was in the kitchen doing homework, and he looked up when Jason walked by and watched him, wide-eyed. Jason would have expected to see fear in his expression – he’d literally beaten the kid within an inch of his life – but what he found instead was closer to awe. It made Jason uncomfortable, and he walked a little quicker.

He found Bruce in the study.

“I left my guns in the safe like you asked,” he said, lifting his jacket to show off his belt, where his holsters were empty.

“Thank you,” Bruce said.

“How do you feel about knives?” He had several hidden under his clothes.

Bruce appeared to consider this. “You can keep them as long as you don’t use them.”

Jason nodded. He wondered when it had started to feel acceptable to him, playing by anyone’s rules.

Not every rule. Some rules he still felt were stupid and unnecessary and there was nothing Bruce or anyone else could say that would make Jason follow them. But rules that had reasons – Bruce’s “no guns in the house” rule, because Bruce had PTSD and guns were a trigger and he deserved to feel safe in his own home – he no longer felt as much of a need to senselessly rebel against.

A psychologist would probably tell him it was because Jason’s rebellion had always been him lashing out against a father he thought didn’t love or care about him anymore. And now he knew that that wasn’t true; Bruce had said again and again, in as many different ways as he probably knew how, that he would never stop loving and caring about Jason.

It also probably helped that Jason’s identity crisis was inching toward a resolution, and he was starting to feel more secure in himself. He wasn’t a killer, although he would still kill. He was a protector. He looked out for those street kids. He wanted to look out for all the other kids like them. And maybe other people too. He didn’t want good people to be afraid of him anymore.

“I figured out something else you can do for me,” Jason told Bruce. “If your offer’s still on the table.”

“Always,” Bruce said automatically.

Jason frowned at his shoes. “There’s these kids. Street kids. I need to get them into one of your group homes.”

“The existing Wayne Foundation group homes are currently at capacity,” Bruce informed him. “But I could open a new one. And I’m sure I could make room for them somewhere in the meantime. How many?”

“A lot. At least two dozen, if they all agree to go.”

Bruce nodded, undeterred. “I’ll see what I can do.” He turned to his computer, already starting to work on this mission Jason had given him. Jason had full faith that Bruce would make this happen.

He turned to leave, but Bruce stopped him with a question. “Should I name it after you?”

“What?”

“The new group home.” Bruce looked up at him. “I could name it after you.”

Bruce had named the first Foundation group home after his parents. Now he was offering to name one after Jason. The rest of the world would think it was Bruce honoring his dead son, but Jason would know the truth: that Bruce had named it after him because it was his idea.

“You can name it whatever you want.” He wondered which name Bruce would use, Jason Todd or Jason Todd-Wayne. Todd, the name he’d inherited from the father who had never loved him. Wayne, the name he’d inherited from the father who’d never stopped.

When Jason finally got his hand on the doorknob, intent on making his escape, Bruce asked another question that floored him: “Will you be staying for dinner?”

Jason gave Bruce a perplexed look. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

“Alfred will want to know as soon as possible whether to expect you so he can make enough food.”

Jason thought about staying in this house for a few hours longer and feeling like part of the family again. He thought about eating one of Alfred’s home-cooked meals for the first time in over four years. He thought about the boy in the kitchen who Jason had tried to kill, who still looked at Jason like he was a hero, or had been, or could be.

“I’ll stay.”