Chapter Text
Jason doesn’t talk to his dad anymore.
He doesn’t know why it only just hits him. He’s in the horror section of his favorite book store downtown. It’s his lunch break, and the shift lead likes him, so he gets a few extra minutes to window shop. He’d seen the new Stephen Graham Jones in the display case, an ominous orange red, a record needle stretching across a bleak expanse, and he’d gone in, listening to the far off chime of the door bell.
He’s just got it in his hands, the feel of the velvet dust jacket on his fingertips, the smell of warm pastry from the instore cafe, when it hits him.
Jason doesn’t talk to his dad anymore, and he hasn’t really talked to him in years.
Jason has three roommates. He lives in an apartment downtown that's probably too small for one of them alone, but also too expensive for one of them alone, so they get by. Jason works two jobs: one at the mechanics, greasing up his hands with filthy engine oil, and one at the city library, restocking shelves and directing elderly tourists to the nearest sightseeing points. Every other school semester, when he can afford it, Jason takes classes at the university. He should go for something lucrative—college is an opportunity that he never imagined he’d be able to have, growing up—but Jason’s always been a dreamer, never much of a realist, and so he’s halfway through a Lit degree, set to finish in three more chopped semester cycles.
And he doesn’t talk to his father, or really, any of his family, and he hasn’t been back in Gotham since he was 17.
These days, when people ask, Jason usually says he’s an orphan, and it’s true enough. Catherine’s been cold in the ground since he was ten, and whatever Willis was to him, in the end, it wasn’t exactly a father. It works until it doesn’t: until they google his name or remember exactly what his familiar face reminds them of, and all of a sudden he’s not Jason anymore, he’s Jason Todd-Wayne, and all they can ask him is, why?
And Jason asks himself that, too. Why give it all up. He got everything he ever wanted, everything he could ever dream of, for a moment. A steady source of food, a stable home, and a family, even, maybe. A father, even, maybe.
He’s still standing there holding the hardcover when his watch beeps the end of his break. It takes him a second to register, and the cashier shoots him a glare. He fumbles with buttons until the alarm shuts off and, with a moment of hesitation, sets the book back on the shelf. Out of his budget anyway. The air is crisp and cool as he walks out, not really the same type of cold, not really the same type of crisp, but it reminds him of Gotham anyway.
At the AutoShop Jason’s thoughts keep drifting. He’ll get his hands on a pair of rims and remember when he first met Bruce, or get elbow deep in an engine and think back to lazy afternoons spent in the Wayne family’s extensive garage. He wipes his hands on his overalls and remembers Alfred teaching him how to get grease stains out of denim.
It’s the same when he clocks out, when he takes the bus home and remembers how Bruce picked him up from school every day after the papers were signed. He looks down at his phone’s cracked screen, and doesn’t call anyone.
It’s his week to make dinner and he’d had oxtail boiling for stew before he left. The smell, which has crept into every corner of the apartment, doesn’t remind Jason at all of making it for the first time at the manor, or his mother’s face, or Bruce’s. It doesn’t remind him of anything. He adds boiled hominy and pinto beans, salt, bouillon, and strips of green pepper.
It tastes delicious, and it isn’t even ruined when his roommate Mer asks, mid-chew, “You okay, Jason?”
He is. He’s fine. He’s happy with the way his life is now. It’s just, it’s nothing like what kid Jason could have imagined, and it’s also nothing that teen Jason would have believed.
He goes to bed early that night. Jason looks at his phone, the only light in the dark room. At 9:50, it’s past midnight on the East Coast. He knows a concerning amount of his siblings would still be awake. It’s an intrusive sort of thought: that he could just—call. Press a button, listen to the ring, and—he doesn’t know.
Because Jason doesn’t talk to his dad anymore, and he hasn’t talked to him in years, and as much as he thinks about it, after hard weeks and harder weekends, he doesn’t really want to talk to him anyway.
Jason shuts his eyes, and he doesn’t dream, but he doesn’t really rest either.
“Hello?” He says into the phone, and his broken screen scratches the shell of his ear.
“Jason,” the voice on the other line says, and Jason freezes. Behind him, one of the apprentices sets off a car alarm on accident, and the noise echoes loud even over the sound of revving engines and industrial grinding wheels. Jason winces, cups a hand over the receiver to muffle the noise.
It happens like this, every few months. A call from an unknown number, and the sound of Bruce’s voice. It’s always from a number Jason doesn’t have saved: it’s the only way to get him to pick up anymore.
Jason takes a deep breath, pressing at the crease of his eyebrows, but he doesn’t hang up. “I’m at work,” he says. “Do you need something?” It comes out sharper than he wanted, annoyed. Jason has been nothing but polite to the man since he left for good.
There’s a pause on the other side. Bruce has always struggled with finding the words. He takes his time before speaking and half the time still chooses wrong. Jason waits, motioning to his team over his shoulder that he’ll be a minute.
“It’s been a while,” Bruce says finally in slow, measured words, “since we’ve spoken. Since you’ve visited.” Jason rolls his eyes when Bruce adds, “Alfred misses you.”
Just say it, Jason’s mind whispers. Say that you miss me, too.
He doesn’t.
Jason sighs and says, “I’ve got a lot going on. Work, school.” The silence on the line changes imperceptibly, and that's when Jason knows he’s slipped up.
“School?” Bruce questions, and it's the most emotion he’s had in his voice by far. “You never told us you were in school again.”
Jason shuts his eyes and winces silently.
It’s just this: college was something he was doing. It’s something Jason made the decision to pursue, and then worked his ass off for years to make feasible. It’s something he’d never wanted the family to find out.
Why the secrecy, Jason doesn’t really know. Just that he is a very private person, and they’re not part of his life anymore. And he’s been so good about not letting it slip for years. He must not be sleeping well.
There’s no point in hiding something once they know what to look for. Instead of denying it, Jason props an elbow on the threshold in front of him and huffs out a breath. “Yeah,” he says, only mostly bitter. “Junior standing. Lit degree.”
Jason can practically hear Bruce’s eyebrows rising, his eyes filling with surprise, with confusion, with something else Jason can’t interpret and doesn’t want to.
“You never told me,” Bruce says, and there's the hint of an edge to it.
Why would he? All that would lead to is Bruce offering to pay, or forcing his way into Jason’s finances. All that would lead to is Jason feeling like a selfish prick for taking the money, or Jason feeling like the world's biggest idiot for not. All that would lead to is more long distance conversations, more “Did the school receive the check I sent?” and “How are you paying for amenities?” and “Stop this all already, Jason. You’ve clearly proven your point.”
It would lead to more contact, and more guilt, and Jason’s had enough of both of those for one life.
“Slipped my mind,” he tells Bruce, and, “Look, I gotta get back.”
Bruce takes a breath, and this time Jason can hear it through the phone. He clearly wants to ask a thousand more questions, and is weighing his desperate, innate need for answers with the prospect of ending a mostly benign conversation without bloodshed.
What he says is, “That’s great, Jason. I’m glad you’re able to do that. I know it was always your dream.”
And Jason’s not crying — Jason’s not even sad — but that doesn’t explain the way his voice cracks just slightly when he says, “Yeah.” He clears his throat and says, “I gotta go.”
“Your siblings miss you,” Bruce says, like he’s trying to think of something else to say, of something a real father and son would say to each other if they were having this phone call instead of Jason and Bruce. “Dick moved into a new apartment. Cass was selected for a solo in her next performance. Damian is doing very well in school.”
“Tell ‘em I say hi,” Jason says, and he wonders if Bruce was always so formal, if the softness in his voice was only Jason’s memory. Maybe it’s new and Jason just hasn’t talked to Bruce enough in the past few years to notice. A different apprentice picks up a toolbox that isn’t fully closed. A hundred tiny wrenches scatter across the concrete floor. The sound echoes through the phone and out the speaker on Bruce’s side, and Jason cringes at each sharp noise.
“That’s my cue,” he says. “Goodbye Bruce.”
“Goodbye,” Bruce says, and then, “son.”
Jason doesn’t know how to answer that. He hangs up, and thinks about Bruce in his home office, phone pressed to his cheek, listening as the line goes dead. Jason sighs and turns back to the garage, barking orders and obscenities in equal amounts.
He wrangles the newbies, but just barely. Keeps them from burning down the shop on his shift. When it’s time to close, they file out in front of him. Honestly, for the most part—when they're not currently fucking everything up—Jason likes them. They’re mostly young, apprenticeship types, 18 and 19, and they all call him Boss even though Jason is only one paygrade up. He sees them out, tapping fists with a few of the one’s he’s friendlier with, and it occurs to him that they’re around his brother’s age. Steph’s too, if he counts her.
There’s a weird feeling in his gut as he pulls the roller doors down and locks up for the night. It sticks with him on his way out, and it sticks with him all through his Voices of LatAm Literature lecture and his GenEd precalc class.
He’s too exhausted to think of much when he gets home, shoveling half warmed leftover stew into his mouth, broth dyed red with sriracha. He showers, brushes his teeth, pulls at his hair in the mirror to check the roots of his white-dyed streak.
He doesn’t think about Bruce’s call. He doesn’t think about his siblings. He doesn’t think about how they’ve grown so much he barely knows them anymore. He doesn’t think about how he’s changed so much they’d barely know him.
Jason’s on his smoke break when the next call comes in. It’s another unknown number, and Jason has stopped hoping for scammers.
He takes a drag before answering, smoke coming out with his breath. “Yeah?”
“Jaybird!”
Jason hangs up.
He leans back against the cinderblock, and waits. When the call comes again, he cancels it on the second ring. When it comes again, he cancels it on the first. Smoke in the air from his mouth, smoke curling off the lit end of his cig. He waits for the last call, because Dick always does things in threes, and he lets this one go all the way to voicemail.
The tone sounds, and then it’s Dick’s voice coming through, tinny from his phone's shitty speakers and the thousands mile distance. “Hey, Jace. Heard you were talking to B again.”
Jason regrets letting his phone ring. He regrets having a phone. He regrets being born in the 21st century. Leave it to the Waynes, though, to find a way to harass him over telegraph.
The message continues. “I just figured I’d reach out, since it seems like you’re open to that again. You’re back in school, too! That’s great.”
And of course that piece of information is already making its rounds.
“I—I wish you’d talk to me. We miss you, Jace.” There’s a long, drawn out pause, voices and shuffling in the background. Jason wonders if Dick is also at work, if he still does the whole personal trainer gig, if he ever started up that gymnasium like he planned to. He could look it up, find any number of his family's personal details in near any gossip site. But Jason doesn’t check, because Jason doesn’t really care, and he doesn’t want to start. The pause ends with, “Call me back sometime, kay?” and the lull of the dial tone.
Jason deletes the message. He stubs out his cigarette on the rubber sole of his boot, and he gets back to work.
He doesn’t care. And he’s not going to start.
The message reads: “Tim is considering colleges in California.”
Jason is restocking the ‘S’s of YA when it shows up. He reads the text, the same unknown number. He hasn’t been addressed directly, so he resolves not to answer.
The second one comes in around a minute later, a Schwab red and black paperback in hand. It’s from a different number, one Jason doesn’t have saved either. It reads: "i might swing by California soon. lemme see the digs”.
Jason turns his phone off.
At the end of his shift, when it powers back up over five long, buffering minutes, he has six more messages from numbers he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to figure out and two from his roommate asking him to pick them up a chalupa.
Jason gets the chalupa.
He’s nursing a Baja Blast in the cramped little living room when his other roommate Lupe walks in, stops dead in her tracks, and gasps in mock horror. “Jason, what are you doing?!”
He looks down at his drink, at the TB bag next to him, and shoves his cup away from him. “It’s not what it looks like,” he says. “It was a moment of weakness,” he says.
Lupe covers her eyes dramatically, leaning her shoulder against the hallway arch. “Whatever happened to ‘Taco Bell is poisonous to Mexicans?’” she asks. “This is traitorous. You’re a traitor.”
Jason snorts, lip corners turning up. He remembers his mom telling him that, a secret, snide smile on her face. He remembers saying it to Dick on a late night food run, one of the few times Dick let him hang around his friend group. He’d only been off the streets a few months at that point. Afterward, it was the first time he meant the manor when he asked Dick to take him home.
Jason never got to do that with Tim, not really, and not just because Jason never really had friends like Dick did. They just weren’t close at first, and then things were weird, and then things were bad, and now Jason is sitting in a rent controlled four bedroom shoebox three thousand miles away, and Tim might be coming to tour colleges. His smile drops, and he pushes the bag towards Lupe.
“Can you bring this to Mer? Apparently I’m their delivery driver now.”
Lupe wrinkles her nose and takes the bag in two delicate fingers, curls falling over her eyes and a smile trying to fight its way onto her face. She pauses after a few steps, presses a palm against the wall of the cramped walkway. She’s still looking away when she asks, “Hey, is everything good? You’ve just been a little, off, recently.”
Jason takes a sip to put off answering, and when he does, he just says, “School stress, you know how it is.”
She doesn’t. Lupe only got her GED last February. She nods anyway, gives him a tight, closemouthed smile. “Don’t burn yourself out, ‘kay?” She tells him.
“Yeah, yeah, thanks for the advice mom ,” he brushes off.
She rolls her eyes, turns, heads down to Mer’s room at the end of the hall.
Jason’s drink has left little rings of condensation on the wood of the coffee table. He runs his finger through them in looping circles, and when he’s had enough of moping around, he gets up to start an essay due next week on the Women of Magical Realism.
They seem to be coordinating an attack.
At least, that’s what Jason thinks when Mer jogs in and thumps a package addressed to him on their kitchen table. It’s round and wooden and wobbly, and it tips a little with the added weight. Jason has to lift his cup so it doesn’t splash; his roommate Yaanik practically dives to save his cereal.
“The fuck man?” Yaanik says, accent, like him, half dutch and all irritated.
Mer doesn’t even look at him. It’s her day off, and she’s just come back from a morning run, sweat beading on her forehead, long black hair frizzed and tied low on her neck. “Since when are you getting care packages from home, Jay? Though we were all in the same boat in that department.”
Jason looks at her. Blinks a little. Looks down at the package, stamped and official, return address to the Gotham manor bright as day. He decides, for the hundredth time, that he hates rich people.
“Yeah,” he says, going to open it. “So did I.”
Inside is a textbook Mommyblog top 10 list of “Gifts to give your college student.” Laundry supplies and gift cards, a keychain bottle of pepper spray, even a day planner fit with lowlighters and transparent note tabs. It would be cute, endearing even, if Jason was someone who talked to his family.
If he had ever told them his address.
If not for the gifts at the bottom of the package: electronics, top of the line, airpods and noise canceling headphones and a brand new laptop, widescreened, probably chock full of data and storage and RAM, all the important computer things Jason has no clue about.
It would be cute if this wasn’t always how Bruce works. Takes it a step too far, does something shit and awful and unforgivable, and then appeals to the starving street kid in Jason using shiny new toys with big price tags.
Jason’s brain shorts out.
When it comes back, he’s pushed away from the table, past Lupe coming out of her room with tired eyes, made his way down his apartment stairs, too angry and restless to wait for the elevator. He hasn’t quite caught his breath by the time he breaks out into the cool morning air.
In the alley beside his building Jason punches in Bruce's number, cutting his finger on the cracked glass of the screen. He shoves it in his mouth to suck the blood away while he waits for the call to go through.
“Jason,” Bruce answers on the third ring, his voice all surprise, all begrudging hope.
“How did you get my address?” Jason asks through his teeth, all courtesy out the window.
Silence on the other side of the line. Jason starts pacing. This isn’t cute. This isn’t funny. Jason feels like a deer caught in crosshairs. He feels like itching out of his skin.
“This is such a massive fucking overstep. What made you think this was okay?” he says, and he doesn’t really expect an answer. “Fuck.” Jason runs his fingers through his hair, braces his hands on the back of his neck and cranes his head back.
He stops pacing, leans an elbow on the wall. “You know what? I don’t care how you found it. I don’t care what excuse you have. I want you to forget my address, and I want you to block my number, and next time you think about reaching out again, don’t.”
Another long, silent beat. Jason’s breath comes out short and strained.
Quietly, Bruce says, “I’m trying to be a better father to you, Jason.”
“Yeah well, too late.” He puts a hand over his eyes. “You can’t just bribe me for love anymore, Bruce . I’m not twelve years old. I’m not living on the streets, and I don’t need your charity.”
“It’s not charity, Jason.” Bruce sighs. “You’re my son.”
Between the brick of his building and the next, Jason can see just a sliver of California blue sky. He stares at it and says, “Not anymore.”
He ends the call.
He lights a cigarette and doesn't take a single hit, just holds it and holds it until the flame reaches the filter, burns his fingers. Then he lights another.
Back in his kitchen, he packs the planner and pens into his bag, keeps the gift cards, the detergent. He can’t look at the laptop without feeling nauseous, without his vision swimming, so he gives it to Lupe. It takes him the better part of the week to get her to accept, but when her third-hand shitbox breaks down on Thursday and doesn’t start up again no matter how much charge or how many times they all take turn hitting it on it’s side, she takes it on the condition that she owes him big.
And Jason is all on his own again, just like he always has been.
Jason uses his favor with Lupe and gets a third job.
Lupe works at a high class sort of restaurant in the city. It’s the type of expensive slop that rich folks think is authentic, brag to their friends about to seem cultured. Lupe has a few roles there, everything from working tables to kitchen porter, and she’s tight enough with the owner to get Jason a job dishwashing.
It’s rough, humid work, back there in the dish pit. Jason’s hands are always double chapped from the grease of the engines and the blistering dish soap. A woman named Paola works on the line with him. She’s around sixty, an immigrant from Colombia. She’s kind to him, with a wicked sense of humor and a steel work ethic, and every now and again she says a word exactly the way his mother did. On good days, Jason gets a little over 6 hours of sleep.
There's a feeling he gets after a shift at the shop, classes, shelving at the library, a long dinner rush in the kitchen: past exhaustion, past dread, past everything. An out of body sort of feeling where he’s not Jason, not Jason Todd-Wayne, not Jason Todd-no-longer-Wayne. Where he’s just hands holding a sponge, blistered from the heat of the water, callused from his metal wrench. Where he’s just a back against a brick wall, just eyes watching cigarette smoke drift into the cool, smog-cast sky.
And then it’s almost like everything that’s happened these past ten years has been a dream. And Jason’s gonna wake up in his own bed in his old apartment, hear his mother cough from the other room, smell the beer on his father’s drooling breath, and everything is gonna be okay again. Okay in the way that wasn’t good, or nice, or easy, but at least it was familiar.
Jason never wakes up. He just keeps going, and going, and going.
Catherine had a saying, Sundays after mass when she was at her most religious and Jason was always, paradoxically, at his least: The devil finds work for idle hands. She always worked so hard, and then she got sick, and then she was dead. Jason thinks all the worst things in his life have happened to him right as he got comfortable. So he doesn’t. So he works until he thinks his hands will dry out and shrivel up and fall off his body, and then he buys better lotion and keeps working.
With the extra money, he can afford tuition next semester. No waiting, no saving up. And then he’ll be a senior, and then maybe Jason will be able to graduate before his hair is grey. More grey, anyway. And then… Jason doesn’t know yet. Maybe he’ll move. Maybe he’ll stay. Maybe he’ll dig himself in deeper with grad school. His world is so big, so open. The thing about being on the bottom is, you can see the whole sky above you. The thing about being a continent away from who you used to be is, you can be anyone you want to.
It’s just this: Once is an episode; Twice is a coincidence; Three times establishes a trend.
Since he left, Bruce had gone and gotten himself yet another urchin from the streets of Gotham.
His name is Duke, or so Jason hears from tabloid magazines and clickbait ads on the sides of wikipedia articles. He’s from the Narrows, not the Alley, and he’s sixteen, not twelve, and his parents are still alive, if unconscious in a long-term care facility in the upper west end.
It’s just this: according to the media, Jason was only ever a publicity stunt, and this new kid? PR cleanup. And it’s this, too: Jason’s not entirely sure they’re wrong.
And look, things could have gone so much worse. Jason knows this. Things could have been so, so much worse. He got to eat food. He got to go back to school. He got a little nook in a corner of the library, warm and dark and the perfect distance from the fire.
And it wasn’t enough for him. Sometimes now, Jason looks at their empty pantry, checks his precarious bank account. Why couldn’t it be enough for him?
Jason tells himself it was just culture shock. That maybe Bruce found him too late; he was already set in his ways, a thief, a street-kid, a slum-rat. That people like him can’t be given good things. because they always end up right back in the mud. He knows it’s not true, but it helps a little.
He knows he tested boundaries. Jason knows he was not an easy kid to raise, an easy kid to love. But he had to. Sometimes, you just have to. Push against the walls so you know how much they can bend without breaking. For that, at least, he doesn’t blame himself. Try telling a man without eyes that you could make him see. Try telling a kid with no father that you could be that for him. See how well that goes.
Jason catches his reflection in his coffee mug, yellow lights, fan blades above him. This well, apparently.
He’s shoved into the corner booth of their favorite diner on his one night off.
Lupe sits across from him, writing and deleting different sections of her college applications ad nauseum. Yaanik sits next to her, a far off look in his eyes, quietly suggesting synonyms to every word she deletes three times in a row. He’s got a permanent tan line stretching across his forehead from long hours in the sun wearing a hard hat. It’s almost invisible against the dark of his skin, but still manages to give him the look of perpetual concern.
Yaanik works on the docks, mostly loading and machine operating. According to him, he’s always kind of worked on the docks, even back on the east coast, when he went to school and had a family that still talked to him. He doesn't tell them much about then. He doesn't tell them much about himself. He tells them that some days, up in the crane operating booth hundreds of feet in the air, lugging around crates that weigh more than a house, you kind of feel like a god.
Mer is there next to Jason, eating half the menu like they always do, hair falling into their eyes, being brushed away, falling again. Mer’s like Jason in a lot of ways—street-adjacent, never enough to eat growing up—but unlike Jason, they never got a wealthy benefactor or his horde of nutritionists. They got overfull foster homes and an eviction notice on their 18th birthday. They’ve been coasting through jobs and cities ever since.
Yaanik is tapping the side of his mug in a nervous tick. Mer looks up from their food every few bites to cast a nervous glance between Lupe and Jason. Lupe types away.
The waitress makes to come over, but Jason waves her off with a strained smile. She’s new here, and Jason has no proof, but he thinks she recognizes him. The ones that do are always a certain type, have a certain look in their eyes. It doesn’t happen much anymore—his claim to fame was five odd years ago—but people still approach him sometimes on the street. He doesn’t want this one getting any ideas about trying it.
The waitress turns to another table instead. The silence stretches on.
Jason sighs and breaks first. “What?” he asks, staring at Lupe from over her screen.
She doesn’t look up when she says, casually, after a loaded moment, “We’ve just been talking.”
Jason groans and hits his head against the booth seatback. Mer rolls their eyes. “Oh my god, we haven’t even said what we’ve been talking about.”
Jason stares at the ceiling, the overhead fan turning lazy circles, and says, “Nothing good.”
Yaanik, blunt as ever, tells him straight out. “We think you should talk to your family.”
“Well, this was fun,” Jason says, going to leave and being blocked in by Mer. “You’re all off the lease and I’m getting the locks changed.” He tries to leave again, but Mer sticks their leg into his path.
They dance in front of eachother for a second, Jason searching for an opportunity, trying to wrestle his way out of this booth and this diner and this fucking conversation, and Lupe kicks his shin hard under the table. Jason falls back against the seat, letting out a “Fuck,” clutching his leg. Lupe finally looks up, somehow both unamused and sympathetic all in one suffocating glare.
“Jason,” she says, and he decides he hates her, just a little bit.
“I swear to God,” he starts and doesn’t finish, letting the threat ring out unfinished and empty. He breathes out through his nose, places his palms on either side of his plate on the table. “We’re not doing this. Not now, not here, not ever.”
Lupe sighs again. “Jason—”
“What?” He snaps. “Jason what? Say what you’re gonna say.”
“Say what I’m gonna say? Okay, alright,” Lupe says, rising to his challenge, half closing her computer and straightening her spine. “I think that you are being belligerent and shortsighted.” Each word is carefully chosen and precisely enunciated. On her face is an expression he’s seen her practice a hundred times in the mirror. “I think that you are getting in the way of your own happiness. I think that you're blinded by your emotions and react impulsively. And if you just stopped for one second and thought about what you want in the future instead of what happened in the past—”
“ I get it, ” Jason cuts her off. His lip is curled into a scowl and he’s narrowed his eyes in a way to stop them from doing anything to betray him.
He looks out the window at the diner parking lot. The streetlamps are out all along this block. The only light comes from the yellow windows and the teal and pink neon of the sign.
Lupe huffs a breath through her nose, opens and closes her fists in controlled, regular intervals. She presses her lips together and Jason knows she's trying to keep herself from hitting something. Not another person—she's not like that, could never be. Words, speeches, heart-to-hearts—they’ve just never been her strong suit. Knowing her, she planned out exactly what she wanted to say and somehow got out none of it.
Mer’s fork scrapes hard against their plate in the quiet. Yaanik contemplates his coffee. And Jason understands exactly and intimately why they all feel so strongly about what he does about his family. He’s the only one of them who has one.
Lupe breathes out hard again, presses her fists, closed now for good, to the inner corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, all in one hushed, terse word. And Jason knows she is, and he doesn’t even really blame her. A few months before Lupe was kicked out, the doctors had given her mother four years to live. As of September it’s been five.
“I love you, Jay,” she says, a little stilted like it always is, like her mouth isn’t used to the shape of those words. “So I don’t want you to make decisions now that you’ll regret in the future.” I don’t want you to end up like me .
Jason drums his knuckles in sync on the tabletop, his mouth a hard line. Outside a car rolls up to a stop sign, its engine hitching before spitting out smoke. Jason wonders unconsciously if he’ll be the one working on it on his shift at the shop in the morning.
To the silence, Yaanik says, “He calls you on a strict schedule. Varied, to keep you from expecting it, but precise. I keep track.” And, first, how typical of Bruce to keep a schedule for calling his estranged son, just irregular enough that no one would notice if they weren’t paying attention. Second, how typical of Yaanik to pay attention.
What Jason knows of Yaanik’s parents is this: that his father is Dutch and his mother is Indian; that they’ve never once called; and that they have never been anything but precise. Neatly slotted schedules, meal prep every week, a 30-year plan for their best and only son. Yaanik once told him that, in their minds, they only had one son; they couldn’t afford to fuck it up. And that he guesses they did anyway.
Control, Jason thinks. That's what it all boils down to. Control, because it’s easier to stomach than concern, and easier to blame when it backfires.
“The least you can do for yourself is to hear them out,” Mer says, uncharacteristically serious. He turns to see them staring steadily back at him, fork and knife crossed over their plate. “Very least, you can check if they’re the same assholes you cut out years ago.”
Jason props his elbow on the table and his temple in his hand.
“Plus,” Mer says, snapping out of it. “If you work all your shit out, we can get more free shit from the rich man.”
Lupe takes that as a sign to ease off. The right corner of her lip lifts a little and she darts a look to her laptop, it’s terabytes of data or maybe RAM, its 23-hour battery life.
Jason elbows Mer a little harder than necessary and says, “Yeah, that's how they get you. You’d take candy from a white van.”
“Depends what candy,” Mer replies.
“Just consider it, Jay,” Lupe says, tapping his wrist across the table. Yaanik nods to back her up. Mer has already gone back to their food.
“I’ve considered it,” Jason says, brushing her hand off. “Don’t bring it up again.”
Lupe sighs, but she backs off, sits back in her seat.
Jason sips his coffee. It has three sugars but it still tastes bitter. Lupe types away at her new, shiny laptop. Mer eats. Yaanik stares. The overhead fan turns round and round.
When the bill is paid they walk to the bus stop a few blocks down. Yaanik lights a cigarette on the walk, blows smoke into Lupe’s face until she snatches it from his hand and takes a drag herself. It’s gone by the time they get there, passed between the three of them because Mer doesn’t smoke. Jason’s twitching fingers still with the nicotine.
At their stop, Yaanik and Mer stand, but Jason shakes his head. “I gotta pick something up. I’ll be back later,” he says, and nothing else. They leave, and Lupe stays where she’s sitting, same row but opposite sides of the aisle, both of them pressed against their windows.
They sit, the last row back going to the last stop on the rotation. The seats in front of them fill and empty. The night streaks in warm and cold colors through the windows. Jason doesn’t say a word.
Hours pass. In the morning they have work. Jason has school. Jason has assignments that are closer to the deadline than to being done. His phone dings, telling him to sleep, and he turns it off completely.
At the end of the line they shuffle out, take twin seats under the awning of the last bus stop. Edge of town, where the city streets fade into waves of yellow fields, into wide sky. Lupe is next to him now, boots tapping rhythms into the ground where tar mets dirt.
Jason turns his hand palm up where it lays in his lap. Lupe takes it.
His head leans to rest on her shoulder. He’s so much taller it hurts his neck, but that is how they stay.
Jason is staring straight ahead when he speaks.
“It’s just that Bruce feels more like a collector than a father. It’s like I got lost, somewhere along the line, and now he’s—” Jason balls his hands into fists, squeezing Lupe’s where it rests in his palm. “Trying to put me back on the shelf.”
He turns his head to press his cheek further to her shoulder. “Sometimes I don't know if he took me in for his sake or mine.”
Lupe stays quiet for a good, long while. The crickets are out in the damp plants around them, loud and sharp in regular intervals like their own little click track, waiting for the music. The sun isn’t rising but the sky is a few shades lighter this near dawn.
And she gets it. Jason knows she does. The kind of love Bruce has for him. All the conditions that come with it. She knows what it's like to have a family who’s love stops the moment you step out of line.
Lupe clears her throat and says, “I guess you just have to ask yourself if this time feels genuine. And you gotta ask if that even matters.”
She brings her hand to his far shoulder, shakes him lightly in the closest she can get to a hug. “Guess what I'm saying is, you gotta ask yourself if he deserves to be forgiven, and whether or not you want him to be.”
Jason thinks about Mer, who has no one. Jason thinks about Lupe, who lost everyone. Jason thinks about Yaanik, who once told him he’d give anything for his mother to be able to look him in the eye.
Lupe says, “You don’t have to do this, Jay. And you don’t have to do it all at once, even if you want to.”
Jason sets his jaw. He says, “And if I do?”
“Then I think you start with a call.”
Jason sits up, groaning, leans his back against the bus stop cover. His face twists up in a pantomime grimace. Lupe straightens, too, huffs out a breath at his show. She hits him with her shoulder before standing, hands on hips.
“C’mon,” she says, “Is there no one you can stomach one conversation with? No favorite second cousin or somethin’?”
Jason sighs, rolling his eyes and leaning his head back to look at the waning stars. “Or something.”
A hint of a smirk, slapping his shoulder with the back of her hand, Lupe says, “Then call them, you dramatic asshole.”
He sighs again, shifts his head a little. “She’s going to give me so much shit.”