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It was one a.m. and Jason was baking. Batches and batches of cookies. Chocolate chip cookies, Alfred’s recipe. Music was playing softly from his phone on the counter.
He hadn’t planned on making cookies so soon, hadn’t planned on doing anything more than taking a shower and sleeping when he got back from patrol earlier, but nightmares interrupted that last thing. Nightmares also had him itching to do something with his hands.
Something that would end in death. But he couldn’t do that. Not until he went out on patrol.
He got up, headed out into the kitchen, and pulled out the bag of flour from behind the tin of onions. Jason also grabbed the sugar and chocolate chips.
So here he was, standing in sweatpants and Roy’s hoodie, rolling cookie batter out into balls with music playing softly.
A dark shape in the corner caught Jason’s eye as he placed another ball of dough onto the half-full tray. A shadow was lurking in his kitchen. With the overhead lights on, there shouldn’t have been any shadows. Not that much, at least. But there the shadow was, in the far corner where the kitchen met the living room that was also closest to the window.
He pretended he had not noticed the shadow and rolled out three more balls, only looking at the shadow from out of the corner of his eye. Trying to work out if this was what — who — he thought it was, or if it was actually some shadow and a trick of the light.
The crime lord turned around to slide the now-full tray of cookie dough into the oven. When he turner back around, he could have sworn that he saw two faint pin-pricks of light.
He was right.
“Dami, I know you’re there,” Jason called out across the room.
The current Robin melted out of the shadows with a scowl. He was dressed in dark blue sweatpants and a black long sleeve top.
“You’re getting rusty, Todd, you took four minutes and seventeen seconds to notice my presence here,” Damian told him.
“Nah. I noticed your ‘presence’ as soon as you arrived, just had more important things to do,” he gestured to the bowl of cookie dough and packet of chocolate chips on the counter.
“Ah. You are baking,” the eleven-year-old nodded as he crossed the room to stand on the opposite side of the bench. Damian took a tentative seat there. “Chocolate chip biscuits…Pennyworth’s recipe, yes?” he asked.
“Yep,” Jason confirmed as he reached into the packet and added a handful more chocolate chips into the dough.
Silence passed between them for a couple more minutes as Jason shaped more dough into cookies and Damian watched.
After he had done two more, Damian spoke again. “May I assist?”
“Sure,”
Damian hopped off of the chair and came around to stand beside Jason, who placed the bowl between them.
He scooped a handful of dough and began rolling it into a ball between his hands.
The two of them worked side-by-side together, filling another tray.
“How did that showcase on Tuesday go?” Jason asked as he slid this second tray into the oven.
At Sunday Dinner last week, Damian had mentioned that he had an art showcase coming up at school that week.
The kid glared intently at the dough in his hands as pink dusted his cheeks.
“The showcase went well, I won first prize in the middle and high school categories,” he told him.
Well damn.
The two of them chatted a bit more until there was no more dough left in the bowl.
“What are you doing here, Damian? It’s a school night, isn’t it?” Jason asked, as he set the first tray on a wire rack. “Does B know you’re here?”
Damian frowned.
“Father does not know I am here, he believes I am in my room asleep right now,” He opened his mouth as if he was going to say something else, only for nothing to come out. “…I could not sleep,” Damian told him. “Father is still out on patrol and Bludhaven is too far for me to reach through my shadows…”
“So you came to me?” he asked.
The kid nodded. “Yes,”
“You didn’t just come here because I was making cookies?”
“No — well, that is part of the reason that I stayed,”
Jason slid the baking spatula underneath the edge of one of the cookies to check if it was cooled enough and found that it was, as it came up off the baking tray with little protest. He transferred the cookies onto another wire rack before turning around and getting out a mug from above the sink.
“I’m gonna make tea, you want some?” he asked.
“Do you have peppermint?”
“Yeah, should be somewhere in there if I do,” The crime lord nodded in the direction of the box of tea in the corner of the bench.
By the time both of their teas were ready, the first batch of cookies had cooled enough that it wouldn’t crumble into pieces when they picked it up.
They gravitated towards the sofa.
Damian held his mug in both hands and glared daggers into it. Thinking.
“You can stay here ‘till you’ve finished your tea but you have to go back to the manor after that, it’s a school night,” he decided.
“You sound like Richard,” Damian grumbled into his mug.
Jason had been reading when the sound of ceramic rolling to the floor made him look up.
Damian had fallen asleep. Because of that he didn’t end up going back to the manor that night —morning, really. And he got a phone call at a more reasonable hour from a very panicky Daddy Bats whose youngest son had seemingly disappeared.
In response to that, Jason simply switched it to a video call and flipped the camera around to face the sleeping eleven-year-old curled up on his sofa.