Chapter Text
The thing is, Tim has always made a habit of jumping.
It wasn’t always a bad thing. It was good, even, when he was younger, normal. At his very first boarding school, he never even bothered climbing down the slats of his lofted bunk, just trusted that his favorite ratty beanbag would catch him.
And then as Robin, it was more like flying, really. He’d leap off of a rooftop whooping, a grin on his face and grapple gun in hand. But now?
It had been almost a year since his fight with Ra’s. Bruce had been back long enough for it to feel real again. Everything was fine.
He couldn’t get it out of his head, the feeling of the wind whipping through the broken cowl as he hurtled towards the ground. The certainty that the ground would catch him before he could be saved.
Everything was fine.
It was the certainty he missed most. For a moment, Tim had made his peace with not getting back up.
And then Dick had swooped in, grabbed him out of the sky, and Tim had to smile-talk his way out of the fact that he’d known he was going to die.
Everything was fine.
So why he was standing on the tallest rooftop in Park Row, staring down the asphalt, he really couldn’t say.
He’d do this, every so often, when things got particularly bad. Pick a quiet rooftop on a night when he knew patrol had already wrapped up, walk to the edge, and let himself imagine.
He’d never let himself jump, of course. Jumping was too much action, too much of a choice, and he’d made enough of those to know that what he really wanted was to stop making choices. Tim just missed the way it felt to fall, that was all.
He shivered.
It was a cold night out, and he really should’ve put on a coat, but he hadn’t been thinking about it when he slipped out onto his apartment’s fire escape at three in the morning.
He hadn’t been thinking about anything at all, really, except that he’d broken a locket that had belonged to his mother when moving furniture around earlier that day. And then on patrol, Damian had made some snide comment about Tim breaking everything he touched. And when Tim had gotten back to his apartment alone he’d stared foggily at the bathroom mirror for god knows how long before he decided that he needed to be on top of something very tall very fast.
He hadn’t even put on his shoes, he realized, staring down at his feet. The fuzzy polar bear socks Dick had given him for Hanukkah a few years back stared back at him.
“Hey, kid,” a low voice caught him off guard, breaking him out of his musings, “what are you doing up here?”
A familiar voice. Tim stilled, keeping his eyes on the ground. Red Hood wasn’t supposed to be on patrol today, Tim’s notes had him recovering from a broken arm for at least another day or two. He must’ve gotten the math wrong somewhere, or messed up a date in his spreadsheet, or—
“C’mon, kid,” there was a hand on his upper arm, twisting him away from the sixty-eight story drop, “what’re— Tim?”
“Hood,” Tim replied levelly, his mouth working two steps ahead of his brain, “here to give me a push?”
Hood just stared at him for a minute.
Or at least, Tim assumed he was staring. He shouldn’t have said that, especially not when it was impossible to read Jason with that ridiculous metal helmet on. He tried surreptitiously to wriggle away.
The hand on his arm tightened.
It would probably be best to say something else, anything else, Tim realized. He took a breath, slipping into a cooler, more casual tone. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I saw a kid about to commit suicide. I came to stop him.” Jason’s voice was stilted, wrong. He sounded angry, almost.
Tim gulped.
“No, I meant like—“ he probably shouldn’t reveal that he’d memorized Jason’s patrol routes, Tim realized, “never mind. Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, fighting back a nervous laugh. “I wasn’t going to jump.”
Hood was silent.
Tim tried again, unsuccessfully, to worm his arm out of Jason’s grasp. It was starting to hurt. “Listen, we’re both clearly out of our depth here. Can we both just go home and pretend this never happened?”
“I saw a kid about to commit suicide,” Jason repeated in the same, strange cadence, “I’m here to stop him.”
“Oh my god, I wasn’t going to— look, it doesn’t matter, okay? Just let me go.”
“No.”
“What? Hood, just—“
“Jesus Christ, I’m not letting you run off and kill yourself, okay?”
“What do you care? You want me dead anyway.” The awful tension that had been rising exploded out of Tim’s mouth in a shout. “Or did you just want to finish the job yourself?”
There, that made Jason angry enough to loosen his grip. Tim wrenched his arm away, intending to dart around Hood’s other side and make his way to the stairs.
Instead, a shoulder collided with Tim’s chest before he could get his bearings. For a second, Tim expected the weightlessness of tipping backward off of a ledge. Strangely, though, he went up instead of down.
He kicked futilely at Jason’s back with the leg not locked down by the fireman carry he was now stuck in.
“If you don’t fucking stop that, I’ll tell Oracle to sic B on you,” Hood warned, low and threatening.
Tim groaned. “Put me down.”
Jason just snorted, rattling the rusty door that led to the stairs of the building until it opened, and started down the first flight.
Just as Tim was about to wonder aloud if Hood planned to torture them both with the other sixty-seven flights down, Jason turned at the landing, walking to the elevators instead.
The building was quiet. Tim had known it would be— nobody lived here, and very few worked in it during the daytime.
He’d researched it when he was younger, eager to catalogue every building in Gotham. Most of the building had been bought up by an out-of-town residential partner that jacked prices up so high no one had been able to rent from them in years.
Still, it was unsettling.
Jason was quiet too, stepping onto the elevator without saying a word. Tim stared at their reflections, distorted by the panels and seams.
“I really wasn’t going to jump, you know. I wouldn’t do that to—“ he hesitated, knowing better than to list Bruce or Dick’s names among the aggrieved— “anyone.”
Hood ignored him, not even shifting to acknowledge Tim had spoken.
“Hood. I wasn’t going to jump.”
This time Jason moved, tilting his head slightly to the side. “How old are you? Like fourteen?”
“I’ll be eighteen in literally two months.”
Jason hummed.
Something about the response made the annoyance Tim had been feeling boil over into anger, prickling in his fingers and behind his eyes. He clenched his fists.
“I was fourteen the first time you tried to kill me. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.”
They spent the rest of the elevator ride in silence.