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The man’s eyes flicker over Jason’s shoulder – just the slightest hint of movement – and there’s the feeling of displaced air behind him. Fuck, too close, Jason thinks and gets his hand up just in time to block the worst of a wire wrapping around his neck, lodging between where his armor ends, and his helmet begins. The thin metal digs into a gap in his glove, slicing through the thick leather inch by slow inch until it’s hitting flesh. Jason grits his teeth against the burning pain, blood already pooling in his glove.
He’s being pulled down, so his attacker is shorter than him. The strength behind the pull is above average. Jason doesn’t think hard about it, he knocks his leg back, tangles it with his attacker’s and drops them both to the floor. His fall is cushioned by the other guy’s body – there’s a wheezed grunt right in his ear as all of Jason’s not inconsiderable weight lands on his chest and an audible cracking noise as at least one rib breaks.
Jason rips the garrote wire away as he stands. He attempts to drop it but it – he wrinkles his nose, it sticks to his hand, dug deep into the lines of his palm. Well, the new line that’s there. That’s gonna be a pain in the ass to deal with later. He hopes he doesn’t need stitches. He peels it out carefully, keeping his stance casual as the man on the floor groans through the pain – amateur. It’s only one rib, get over it. – and the man in front of him stares with wide eyes that look between Jason and his downed man.
“That was rude,” Jason drawls, dragging out his accent the way he knows makes men like this nervous. The man flinches and stumbles back, hitting the desk and sagging into it. “I suggest, as an apology, you stop tryin’ to feed me bullshit.”
“I don’t know anything!” the guys says all wobbly like – the fear is the only thing that’s real and Jason relishes in it. He lets his hand drift to the gun on his thigh, tapping his fingers languidly. Most of Gotham’s underbelly knows he doesn’t kill anyone unless it’s an extreme circumstance – the price he pays to be a Bat and all – but that doesn’t mean they’re safe. That doesn’t mean he can’t decide what an ‘extreme circumstance’ is. “I swear! I’m low end. I got nothin’ you’d be interested in. Swear on my mother’s grave!”
Jason barks out a laugh. “Fuckin’ forreal? Pullin’ that card? I believe you even less now.” He looms over the man, using the three inches of height he has on him and intimidation training to really make it work. His eyes narrow and his lips pull back into a snarl as a thought finally occurs to him. “Are you…fuckin’ stalling?”
Like a cue, the door slams open and Jason’s whirling around, already taking shots at the goons spilling through the door. The recoil is a bitch on his palm, but he grits his teeth and rolls away from a splatter of gunfire. He’s had worst – hell, he’s shot with a fully broken hand before. This is nothing.
As much as he’d prefer to take kill shots, he magnanimously doesn’t. Shoulders, knees, one memorable moment with a hand. Twenty-ish goons. One not-so-big room. The chaos of close quarters that they’re not prepared for gives Jason the advantage for the first half – he gains a few grazes here and there, but years of dealing with the Families of Gotham means he’s better at dodging gunfire than he should be for a baseline human. Eventually he has to shove his guns away and pull out a pair of knives.
The first wave is unprepared for him to go into melee – the second wave is much better trained. He grits his teeth as a perfectly aimed jab makes it through his chest armor, landing a blow that makes him grunt and stagger. His opponent’s smile is a flashing, feral thing and he meets the intensity with gusto, swinging out and getting blocked. He drops his knife midair, twists his hand, and catches it in an underhanded jab that catches their shoulder with a satisfying squelch.
Jason laughs, and something in the tone makes another guy take a step back. He whirls on that one, like a dog catching a scent, and lunges – and falls to the ground as something tangles his legs. The woman he stabbed is grinning at him, her legs tangled with his from a weird-ass baseball slide. He kicks out, catching her between the legs, and she rolls away with a sharp gasp.
It’s enough of a distraction –
Pain blooms in the gap between his armor and helmet. He’s gonna have to patch that at some point. He can’t remember the last time someone actually took advantage of it and yet he’s got two takers in the span of not even twenty minutes. Jason grabs the offending syringe and throws it to the side, gritting his teeth against the burn.
Jason takes out two more goons before the drug makes him stumble then drop. His vision wavers, his teeth water. Each limb feels like there’s fifty-ton weights tied to them. He fumbles for his gun with sluggish hands then gives it up as a bad job. Then, because he’s not stupid – he grabs his emergency beacon, thumb shaking as he presses down and holds even as darkness encroaches then pulls him down into nothingness.
—
Awareness comes back in fragments. Piece-by-piece, until Jason knows everything – and all he knows is pain.
He gasps and that’s agony. He attempts to surge up from where he’s laying down, instincts telling him to fight, damnit, and it’s like fire coursing through his whole body – something. Something keeps him down – blazing heat wraps around his arms; strangles around his throat so every time he breaths, every time he swallows, moves, twitches he’s just feeling painpainpain. He opens his eyes, lashes sticking together like glue, and he tries to tilt his head to see what’s going on only – fuck, it’s a grinding, slicing pain all at once. His eyes flicker and he can just barely make out one arm – and he stares in horror, automatically trying to lift his head to see it better and, and, fuck, no that continues to be a bad idea.
Wire wraps around his wrists, twists up his forearm just under his elbow. Thin, deadly. Pinning his arm to the table so tightly it’s cutting into his skin. Natural tan is inflamed red, swollen, oozing fresh blood. It doesn’t take much to figure out that’s the case with his other arm and –
Jason swallows thickly and chokes, lips parting involuntarily as the wire around his goddamn throat digs into his flesh. He’s aware, now, of the slick warmth of blood sliding down his neck and pooling under his head.
Oh fuck. This isn’t – This is – What the fuck, which sick freak decided that this was an even in the realm of an idea? He just wants to talk, promise.
“Oh good, you’re awake.”
The voice comes out nowhere from the side. He flinches, nerves ramped up high, and he can’t stop the whine that crackles through his teeth when the wire tugs. A figure steps into view, shadowed slightly by the lights in the ceiling. They lean over him, glasses flashing, and grin. Jason scowls at her, leveling the best glare he can muster. Normally, it’d have people flinching, but the woman just smiles wider and pats his cheek condescendingly.
It rocks his face, and he sucks in a sharp breath, biting the inside of his cheek.
“They’re not even that tight,” she says conversationally, trailing her fingers from his cheek down his jaw then to his neck where her fingertips rest lightly over the mess of wire there. “You were just so uncooperative that you made them worse.”
Press X to Doubt.
Jason swishes the blood in his mouth and pushes it out with his tongue until it trickles out the corner of his lips. He can’t afford to swallow any and make his stomach revolt. “Yeah,” he murmurs so quietly, carefully, that if she hadn’t been leaning over him, she would’ve heard nothing. “All my fault.”
She laughs. Her breath smells like mint. “Exactly. Exactly. You are smart, I’d been worried.” Her fingers finally move from his neck only to trail down his bare chest, leaving behind streaks of blood. “Of course, it would’ve been easier to catch you if you hadn’t been smart. It’s a shame you took out so many of my men.”
Jason tracks the movement of her shoulder with his eyes, breathing evenly. He can’t watch her hand, can only feel when she reaches the end of his ribcage and lingers, pressing her nails into his skin. “Your men?” he asks, then, through his teeth. “Tried to garrot me – didn’t seem to want me alive.”
“Yeah, well, he’s dead now, so doesn’t matter.” She seems to like laughing because she laughs again at the look on his face. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Hood. You didn’t kill him. I did. Obviously, he can’t follow orders, so what’s the point of keeping him around?”
Fuck.
Jason swallows slowly, blood coating the back of his throat. “You caught me,” he breathes out. “What do you want?”
She hums, finger walking back up to his neck. She’s incredibly close – close enough he can see the color of her eyes despite the glare of light. They’re an off-putting bronze color. Meta, he wonders faintly, or just a quirk of genetics. “I regret putting them around your neck so soon,” she says conversationally, not a hint of regret actually in her voice or on her face. “I love the sound of your voice; you have such an interesting accent. Crime Alley, right? I hear you sound divine when you really get angry, like a spitting cat who doesn’t have a single thought towards anything but violence and obscenities.”
His lips pull back in a snarl, hands curling into fists even though it make his muscles and tendons shift and the wire cuts just a little bit deeper. Red trickles over his skin, pools on the table, and dripdripdrips to the floor. Her eyes flicker to the movement, amusement twisting her expression.
“Exactly, so angry, so violent, that not even pain keeps you from trying to lash out.” Her hand hovers over his face, showing off the red clinging to her fingers, smeared down her palm. “I don’t want anything extravagant, not really. I’ve seen how you fight, how you rage, how you act, but I’ve seen very little of how you react. I want to know more about that.”
…react? Jason grits his teeth and doesn’t say a word – he forces his hands to uncurl and his nostrils flare as the wire unsticks from inside his skin. More blood oozes out, slow and unhurried.
“You’re already in pain,” she says. She brushes a hand over his forehead, into his hair, and rests it there. “And you’re helpless. Absolutely helpless. It’s delightful, really. You’re so very pretty like this, Hood. But I hear you’re even prettier afraid.”
Oh – oh fuck.
She grips his hair and yanks his head back, pushing his shoulders against the table, throwing his throat forward. His mouth parts in a shout, but there’s no air. Pain slices through his neck, pressure chokes him, his unbound feet kick out and that just jerks his body, cutting the wire up, not just down. She laughs breathlessly into his ear, holding him there for a long moment – too long – how long – his vision is blurry with unwanted tears, but he can’t stop them. His fingers scrabble at the tabletop.
All he knows is pain –
– and pain –
– and burning, blistering agony.
Then his hair is released and he’s slumping down, gasping wetly. His entire body shakes with fine tremors. His skin is drenched in sweat and blood. She hums, petting through his hair as he smothers a sob in his chest and whines through his teeth.
“Pretty, pretty birdie,” she sings. He closes his eyes, and she doesn’t make him open them. “I could get information out of you – what would be the point of torture if I didn’t get information out of you – but I don’t feel like it.” Her hand slides down to cup his jaw, thumb pad dragging across his bottom lip. He twitches, eyes squeezing shut even tighter. “I might get in trouble for it, but this is too good to be true. I can probably just catch another little bird. A not as pretty a bird. And get what I need from them.”
She abandons him then, her heels clicking as she walks away. Jason keeps his eyes shut as he listens past the blood roaring in his ears, the thunder of his heartbeat. There’s a clatter of plastic and metal as she messes with something across the room. The shuffle of at least two men standing at the wall. The buzzing of the lights. The clicking of the HVAC. The air conditioning turns on, blowing cool air from a vent directly above him, and he shivers, gritting his teeth.
It doesn’t take a genius to know he’s been moved – where he’d been captured was just an apartment building, not anywhere to keep him. They stripped him of his helmet and upper armor but kept his domino and his pants. Even his boots are gone, and he curls his toes as he thinks.
Jason has no way out of this. He’s fully aware of this. If he were tied with rope or even medical restraints, he’d be outta here in no time flat, don’t even have to worry about the Bats and their habitual tardiness because he has it all under control. But no – between the wire itself and whatever he did to cause the damage done between the apartment and here, before he regained full consciousness, he’s completely and utterly screwed. He has no tools for a situation like this. He’s pretty sure no one could get out of a situation like this.
That doesn’t keep away the prickle of humiliation at being brought so fucking low. He pushes it to the side, shoves it down deep. Now’s not the time.
Instead, he turns over in his mind something she said – “I might get in trouble for it.” – which means there was a plan to torture him for information. Information concerning the Bats considering she’s willing to catch another one for her scheme. It also means she’s not the boss, she’s a lackey. A high up on the food chain lackey who’s gone off the rails and seems to be obsessed with him.
She appears again out the corner of his eye, walking like she doesn’t have a care in the world. Jason wants to wrap his hands around her delicate looking throat and murder the fuck out of her. She grins in delight at the murderous look on her face, hand coming up to over her mouth as she laughs like some high society bitch despite the open mouth laughter she’d been swinging around before.
“Oh, love it. I love that so much. You look like you want to kill me,” she says gleefully. She grabs a chair with her foot, and it screeches across the ground. She settles in it, elbows on the table near his head, rests her cheek on her fist. “You were made for that, Hood. All that anger and rage. But I don’t want to see it anymore. Be a dear and let me see how you react to this.” And she holds a syringe in the air, the contents swirling a sickly green.
Jason has been in the vigilante world – with it and against it – for the better part of a decade. He’s a Gothamite through and through, and he doesn’t even have to claim ties to the First Families to prove it.
He knows what fear toxin looks like.
The worst part. The worst fucking part is that his automatic reaction is to pull away from the syringe.
She doesn’t wait for him to stop choking around the pain to shove the needle in the meat of his shoulder, pressing the plunger and injecting the terribly cold liquid into his veins.
—
All hands-on deck – they take to the vents and split at a four-way intersection. Damian goes left, Tim right, and Stephanie goes forward. She checks each grating as she goes, listening to the sounds of fighting through the comms. Dick calls an all clear for his room, Bruce not that far behind. Babs keeps up her commentary about narrowing down Jason’s signal, frustration audible in her voice. Steph grits her teeth and keeps crawling, only just slow enough to stay stealthy. Barely.
They had been in the Batcave when the alert sounded, Jason’s picture flashing up on the screen. And, for a moment, they’d all stood there. Frozen. Jason, of all people, willingly hitting his distress beacon? The man only grudgingly lets them crash his takedowns and cases, and usually bitches about it even as he buys whoever it is food – his love languages are violence and food and touch, not necessarily in that order. He’s been shot and stab, at the same time, and still insisted on taking care of it himself. Those are not the actions of a man who’d hit his distress beacon.
Unless it was really bad.
Almost expecting a trap, they went and found absolute chaos. An apartment, trashed. Bullet holes in walls and furniture. So much blood. Dead bodies with injuries that match Red Hood’s non-lethal fights, but not his common killing blows. And they found –
They found his helmet. Laying in the middle of the room, staring right at the door. His distress beacon balanced mockingly on top.
Stephanie refrains from punching the side of the vent as she crawls over yet another useless room. The only goons seem to be in the hallway, and she hopes with all hope that they haven’t signaled their boss man. If they take Jason to a third location, they may never find him again. It took four hours to find this place. That’s an unimaginable amount of time to her.
Not to mention – not to mention. He hasn’t escaped. On his own. Which he should be able to do. They can all do it. That means. That means –
Tim sighs quietly over the comm. “Dead end,” he whispers. “Coming your way, S.”
She closes her eyes briefly. “Copy.”
And she continues on, a bit more frantic in her movements. The vents are getting cleaner, shinier, but not newer. Her heart sits in her throat, she has to force herself to breath calmly. There’s murmuring coming from up ahead, echoing in the wide vents. She crawls past two grates, turns a corner, and there! Light!
Stephanie leans over carefully, hair tucked in her hood, and peeks into the room below. She traps a horrified sound between her lips, pressing knuckles to her mouth over her mask, her stomach churning violently. Oh god, Jason. Jason. Jason. No, he can’t – he lays almost directly below her, chest bare, shoes missing. His hair is plastered to his forehead. There’s, oh god, there’s so much –
He’s alive. Is all she can think about. He’s alive. There’s a woman standing over him, touching his face, palming his chest with an open, possessive touch, speaking indistinct words to him. She can’t understand them over the blood roaring in her ears.
Steph hisses, “Found him,” into her comm and then she’s crashing through the grate feet first, landing on the woman with a heavy thunk.
The woman’s head hits the ground with an audible crack and Steph goes rolling even before she registers the presence of two other people in the room. She ducks under the table, leaping up and cold clocking one goon in the face so hard his head snaps back and his teeth clack together. She hooks her leg around his, yanks him to the ground, and punches him again and again until he’s out. She full-on body tackles the second goon and they both go sprawling. He tries to grapple her, but she hooks her legs around his shoulders and pulls and pulls on his arm and twists, dislocating it easily. He shouts in pain, and she doesn’t waste any time, she grabs his long-ish hair and slams his head into the ground until he’s not making any more sounds.
Silence rings loudly in the aftermath of sudden, brutal violence. Steph pants from her place on the floor, adrenaline coursing through her body – and it takes her a moment, a too long moment, to register the pained gasping coming from above her.
Steph surges to her feet, stumbling over to the table that Jason – She swallows thickly, her hands hovering over him uselessly, helplessly. She doesn’t know where to start. Wire. Wire traps his arms to the table, so tight they’re cutting through his skin even as he doesn’t move. Blood oozes and the puddles on the table and the floor grow slowly bigger. Those she can deal with. She can cut those. There’s wire cutters in her belt even if they’re made more for chain link fences than wires tying her pseudo brother to a fucking table.
The problem is, is the wire around his throat. It loops around it several times, threaded through two holes drilled into the table. It’s pulled tight. So tight. Steph clamps down on a sob. Bruising and blood, the underside of some of his skin visible. She reaches out a hand, but doesn’t touch, fingers trembling a hair’s breadth from the wire.
Jason doesn’t acknowledge her, doesn’t even seem to be aware she’s here. He lays there, these terrible, rattling gasps pulling from his lips. His lips moving with silent words – and she sees then, a pinprick of blood on his shoulder, a small coin of bruising. She glances around, just a flicker of her eyes and they land on an abandoned needle on a side cart. Every breath jerked out of him sends fresh blood spilling over the dark, grotesque lines buried in his skin. Her fingers shake as she presses them to her ear.
“I found him,” she whispers forgetting she already said something. “Oh god. I found him. It’s – It’s bad, guys.” A chorus of concern in her ear, but not quite to the levels they should be. If only they could see – there’s a sharp noise from Oracle and Steph knows she’s accessed the cowl footage.
The woman stirs on the ground and Steph slams the heel of her boot against her temple, not giving any fucks at the moment. She pulls down her mask, slides back her hood, and pulls out her wire cutters.
“Jason,” she says softly. He doesn’t twitch at her voice. Instead, his expression twists into something pained, something terror-filled, his lips parting around a keen that shatters her heart. “Shhh. You’re okay. I’m here to get you out. Okay, okay. Yeah, let’s get you out.”
As much as she wants to keep him in her line of sight, she goes under the table and lines up the cutters to the cluster of wire there. She bites her lip as it takes several attempts to get a good angle, but finally the wires snap and fall loose. Steph is still shaking as she comes back up, sucking in a sharp breath when she looks at his neck again. The wires are cut, no longer tying him down, but they’re so stuck into his skin they don’t even shift at the release of tension.
Steph digs into her belt again and pulls out a pressure bandage then hesitates. Bile climbs up her throat, acidic and burning. She has to – She has to take out the wire. She squeezes her eyes shut, already hearing the sounds echoing in her ears. Oh god, she – no. She can’t do it.
But she has to.
She rests her hand with the bandage on his collarbone, the bandage laying prepped on her open palm. With her other hand she pulls one end of the wire and – does she do this slowly or quickly? Which one is better. She doesn’t want to hurt him more. Logically, she knows she can’t get around that, but still.
Steph wants to close her eyes; she wants to look away. There’s blood smeared down his chest in a line, cupped around his jaw, pushed into his hair. And she swears she sees fingerprints in the red. Steph breathes in deep and goes to work.
Jason whines with every motion, his chest jerking, his hands curling into fists. He doesn’t try to pull away from her. His awareness is completely shot. The last wire slides through the hole and hits the ground and she presses the bandage over his throat. Her hand shakes as blood squelches and seeps from underneath. The adhesive sticks, though, and holds firm. She hunches over, tears stinging her eyes, her breaths punched out of her.
Never again. She never wants to do that again.
She still has two arms to detangle.
This close to him, she takes comfort in his breathing. The most comforting proof that he’s alive. There’s a pulse under her thumb and breaths against her forehead. She has to get to his arms, but she takes this moment to just…be comforted.
And that’s when he starts mumbling. Steph’s head shoots up, zeroing in on his face. Even with the freedom of movement, it stays up towards the ceiling. His bloodstained lips move with inaudible words first – then, slowly, get louder to no more than a whisper, but Steph doesn’t have to lean in close to understand.
“No, no. Stop. Please – don’t – stop, please,” he moans oh-so-quiet, trailing off in a string of babbled words in a language she can’t decipher. It sounds like the language he and Damian talk to each other in sometimes. Arabic, right?
“Jason,” she whispers, voice thick. “Jason, it’s me. Your favorite Bat.” She rubs her thumb on unblemished skin just above the bandage, trying to sooth away the panic taking over his tone. “I got you. You’re safe. Please. You’re safe.” She chokes on a sob at the same time he does. “Jason. Jay. Wake up.”
There’s a soft noise, familiar enough she doesn’t flinch, then Tim swears quietly. He comes up on Jason’s other side, hands out and hovering just like she’d been earlier. Useless. Helpless. Horrified.
“Jason,” Tim says in a wavering voice. His hand is already grabbing his own cutters. And she watches him numbly as he cuts through the wires on his arm.
She feels detached from her body, floating away. She doesn’t fight as Tim comes over to her side and nudges her to take a step over. When she does, he snips the wire on that side too. Steph stares at the offered pressure bandage – and stares, unwilling to take her hand away from Jason’s throat, from feeling that rapid, thready, but there pulse under her fingers.
Steph takes it anyway. She carefully wraps the wire from around his arm, wincing with each awful noise. Tim is silent as he works, his mouth twisted in that way he gets when someone is terribly hurt, and he doesn’t know what to do but doesn’t want to admit it. She looks away from him and back at Jason’s face. Sweat soaks his hair, plasters it to his face. His expression is of fear, and it makes him looks young and she abruptly realizes that he’s only a handful of years older than her.
Everything stalls – the goons and the woman are still out cold. Jason is no longer tied to the table. His wounds are as bandaged as they’re going to get until they can get back to the Batcave. Neither she nor Tim are strong enough to lift Jason’s bulk to the car so now all they can do is wait for Batman to finally arrive. (She wonders, with a brief flash of fear, what’s taking so long.)
It’s in that moment that Jason twitches a full-body flinch. Steph lurches to attention, leaning over him to see his expression twist then smooth out, going unnaturally blank.
“Jason?” she tries hopefully. “Hey, Jay, you – .”
He surges up and off the table – Tim tries to catch him, but Jason smacks his hands down and he staggers only a foot away before he drops to his knees with a loud crack! Stephanie vaults over the table and the sound of her boots hitting the ground has Jason cowering.
“Jason,” Tim says soothingly, hands out placatingly even though his back is to them. “It’s just Steph and me – Tim. It’s Tim. You’re alright. We got you.”
Tim steps closer and Jason scrambles away – too fast for someone with his injuries. He hits the wall and hunkers down, curling into an impossibly small ball. His face tucked to his knees; arms braced over his head. Blood seeps through the bandages, smearing the side of his face. Tim crouches low, practically on his hands and knees. Steph lingers behind him, hands pulled to her chest, as she watches with wide eyes.
“Hey. Hey. I know it’s scary, but you’re alright, you’re okay. I’m not gonna let anything get to you,” Tim says in that soft, soft tone he gets when he’s talking to scared children. He’s not the best with them, not by a long shot, but he was a Robin. It came with the territory, so he had to become good at it.
It feels so wrong for him to be talking to Jason like that. Jason Todd. Red Hood. Also a Robin. Jason, who shouldn’t be freaking cowering away from them like they’re monsters or, or the Joker. Who shouldn’t be flinching when Tim scoots just a tiny bit closer. Whose words are mumbled, slurred things as he begs them to stop, to leave him alone, and, and like a mantra –
“I can’t – I can’t do this, this again.” His fingers curl into his hair, clutching the strands so hard his knuckles bleach pale. “Please – Please don’t make me, make me do it again. I can’t,” he sobs. “I can’t.”
Tim moves even closer, murmuring “Jason –,” and Jason lashes out, catching him by the shoulder and shoving him back. Jason leaps to his feet, shaking all over, his stance wavering. He can’t seem to decide between fight or flight, but then – he’s scrambling around them, heading towards the door with a desperation that’s terrifying.
He doesn’t make it. A shadow fills the doorway, looming and intimidating. Steph lets out a sigh of relief at the sight of Batman, but then panics, because, because how is Jason going to react. Shit. This isn’t –
Jason freezes, nearly colliding with Batman. He stares up at him, looking so small despite there only being a two-inch difference between them.
Then he whines, something broken and shattered, and falls into Batman, hands coming up to clutch at his cape, pressing his face against his chest despite the hard armor. “Batman,” he rasps out almost incoherently. His shoulders quiver. Sobs breaking from his chest, hitching and thick. Bruce doesn’t hesitate, he wraps careful arms around his son in a loose enough hug to let him escape if he needs to.
He doesn’t need to. Jason burrows closer until the cape is wrapped around him, hiding him from view, and there’s a choked, “Dad” that doesn’t make everything better, but almost – almost.
—
She hovers outside, hands clutched around her phone. The sun sets lower, elongating the shadows in the hallway. Steph can hear a voice inside and she doesn’t want to interrupt, but it’s been going on for a while now and if she doesn’t interrupt then she’s going to lose her bravo and she’s never going to be able to show her face ever again.
Crap. She takes a fortifying breath then knocks. The voice stops then, “Come on in.”
Steph pushes the door to the library open, peeking her head through. Bruce is the first person she sees, sitting on the end of the couch, a book in his lap, glasses on his nose. It take a second, but she finally spots Jason curled up next to him, head on his thigh, a blanket bundled around him. She meets his eyes, and she has to look away, glancing back at Bruce.
Bruce, who’s closing the book with a finger between the pages, so he doesn’t lose his place. “Stephanie,” and he doesn’t sound surprised. She’s not surprised he doesn’t sound surprised. He beckons her in, and she does so, still clutching her phone. “Everything okay?”
She swallows thickly. “Y-yeah,” she stutters.
Without her permission, her gaze steers back towards Jason. He’s shifting himself up now, the blanket falling to reveal the bandage on his throat, the bruising that crawled up to stain the underside of his chin and down to his collar bone. Her eyes drift down to it then snap back up to his face. He gives her a wane, but genuine smile, and tears prick the corner of her eyes.
“Ah, I see,” Bruce says. He grabs a bookmark from the side table and, with exaggerated movement, places it between the pages. Jason snorts in amusement, rolling his eyes. Bruce stands, stretching, and leans down to press a kiss to the crown of Jason’s head. He pushes up into it like a cat and Bruce smooths back his hair. To Steph he says, “Stay for dinner.”
She nods and when he walks by, he pulls her into a brief hug, tightening his arms then letting go. Steph hears the door click shut and she lets out a loud breath, her shoulders drooping. Jason pats the now empty spot next to him and she sits, shaking for some reason. He throws his arm over the back of the couch, and she feels his fingertips skim the back of her neck.
Steph leans into him with a shaky sob and he leans into her right back. “It was scary,” she whispers. He hums softly. “It was so scary finding you like that.” She chokes down another sob, chest hitching.
His arm moves from the back of the couch to wrap around hers shoulders completely and she clings to the front of his shirt as gently as she can. He doesn’t hold onto her tightly. He can’t, not with the wounds on his arms, but it’s still comforting. She cries for all the nightmares she’s had since she found him – the nightmare of finding him too late, the nightmare of hearing his screams as fear toxin runs its course, the nightmare of hearing him beg and plead through a blood flooded throat.
Jason allows her to cry and cry against him and then releases her when she pulls back, pressing fists to her swollen eyes. She lets out a wobbly laugh and she sees him smiling back when she finally looks. His hands still have a tremble to them when he raises them, but his words are clear enough.
“Better?” he asks in ASL. She looks from his hands to his throat then to his face. There’s a grimace on his lips even though he’s trying to smile.
Steph nods. “A bit better, yeah.” She snuggles a little closer. “Wanna know what will make me feel even better?” He raises an eyebrow and doesn’t bother asking with his hands. She snags the book Bruce set aside, tucking it under her thigh for later, and pulls out her phone again. “Damian helped me put together a playlist of cat videos.”
He huffs a laugh, but obligingly leans in to look over her shoulder. Jason is a line of warmth on her side, and she swings her legs over his lap. It makes an ache start up, but – she knows he likes the stability and confirmation touch gives. A hug. A hand on the shoulder. He won’t ever ask for it. So, it’s her duty to provide. If she can’t give violence or food, she can do this.
Jason slumping into her is all she needs to know, and she smiles when his forehead hits her shoulder. He’s not even looking at the screen, but she knows he’s awake and occasionally his head will twist to peek at the screen. Eventually the others will join them, and Alfred will break his rule and bring dinner up to the library.
For now, though, it’s just the two of them and that’s just perfect.