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Jason's had a nagging suspicion that Bruce keeps stalker-esque levels of tabs on all the places he’s lived, so when Tim Drake shows up at his apartment door, it takes only a half second for Jason to level his gun directly at Tim's stupid face and to say, bored, “Give me one reason not to shoot you.”
Honestly, he knew Bruce had a problem, but sending a bat to his doorstep? This is just ridiculous.
“Look,” Tim says with a huff, and he must not have any remaining survival instincts, because he barely eyes the gun before his expression turns sour. “I don’t want to do this any more than you do, so let’s just get it over with.”
Jason narrows his eyes. “What're you talking about?” he asks.
“What're you talking about?” Tim parrots, and adds, irritated, “The bakery? Alfred’s birthday party? Remember?”
“Alfred’s birthday party isn’t for another three hours,” Jason says, cocking the gun. “Want to try this again?” Except now his neighbor is coming down the hall, giving him one of those shitty, fake-polite smiles like he’s above their current level of discourse, like he didn’t once – three days after meeting Jason for the first time – spend two hours drunk crying in Jason’s apartment because the girl he slept with to make his ex-girlfriend jealous went and slept with that ex-girlfriend too.
“Damn it,” Jason mutters, and pulls Tim into his apartment, slamming the door behind him. It’s been a long day already, and whatever reason Tim is here has to be something disastrous, he’s sure.
“All right,” he says, sighing and taking in the annoyed twist of Tim’s mouth with a feeling of dread. “What did Bruce do now?”
- - -
When Jason finally decided to stick roots down, when he was settled back into his body and in desperate need of a permanent place to live, there had been no other option than Gotham.
It was inevitable, a foregone conclusion, because while neither he nor this damn city could ever be described as peaceful, he was drawn to it the same way he was drawn to protecting people, to small bookstores tucked between unassuming businesses, to the sound of the rain at three a.m. – something intrinsic, some instinctive part of his soul he never bothered dissecting. He’d chosen a walkup in a relatively quiet building in a relatively quiet neighborhood where no one would look twice at him coming and going. The paint on the walls had needed to be redone and the whole thing reeked of mildew until he deep cleaned it, but the way the light came through the windows reminded him of Sunday mornings as a child in the kitchen with Alfred, and he’d even bought a little plant for the windowsill from the market down the street.
The nearest station’s a four-minute walk – the other, equally important reason he picked it – which right now Tim is taking in unusual stride mostly because he's one-handed thumb-typing on his phone and not paying attention. He only looks up when Jason starts leading him down a set of stairs, and then he squints around and says, “You don't wanna take a cab?” in a tone surprisingly less bratty than Jason expected.
“I'm not shelling out eighty bucks to sit in traffic for half an hour,” Jason says. “I do have standards.”
Tim, because he's a little gremlin wearing designer jeans and bright red crocs, replies, unimpressed, “You have framed guns on your apartment wall.”
Jason points a finger at him. “That’s called interior design, you uncultured shit,” he snarls, and Tim just shrugs and starts typing on his phone again, pulling up his already downloaded transit app – what the fuck? – and stunning Jason into a moment of angry silence.
Reasonably, Jason allows himself one second to brood over the unfortunate circumstances that led to him meeting Bruce Wayne and therefore led to him standing in a subway station with Tim Drake, on their way to pick up Alfred’s birthday cake because Bruce wouldn’t tell Tim where it was, demanded he take Jason along (who does know where it is), and then threatened them both via Tim the messenger by explaining the baker wouldn’t hand over the cake unless they were both present and were brotherly bonding and shit.
Jason thinks it’s only fair he gets this one second to hate Bruce and his scheming with every inch of his heart. Then he pushes through the turnstile and goes to find their train.
The bakery, a little mom-and-pop shop with red bricks and a charming sign above the door that reads “Bake My Breath Away,” is in a small list of storefronts on the border of Newtown. It’s a five-minute ride there, and then another five-minute walk until they come up on a sign in the window that says “Closed – be back shortly.”
“Well,” Tim says, unhelpful, his hands shoved into his pockets. “What now?”
Jason ignores him, which he honestly thinks he should get a medal for because the alternative is shooting him, and glances down the block. For as nice a day as it is, there aren’t many people out – an old man crossing the intersection at the end of the road, a mom and daughter carrying ice cream cones, a couple laughing and ducking into an antique shop. Jason catches the eye of a middle-aged woman across the street stepping out of her business to smoke and she tilts her head at him.
“If you’re looking for Mr. Giordano, he’ll probably be a while,” she calls. “He’s looking for toes.”
Jason lifts an eyebrow and says, “Excuse me?” the same time Tim says, “He’s looking for what?”
The lady’s mouth twitches and she brings a hand splattered with yellow paint up to her mouth to take a drag of her cigarette. “Not from around here?” she says, not really a question, and waves her free hand – this one covered in splotches of pink paint – at the bakery. “Toes is his cat. Got out earlier. He’s been running around trying to find her.”
Tim, still so, so unhelpful, mutters, “Who names their cat Toes?”
Jason rolls his eyes. “Is he around here somewhere?” he asks, since someone needs to be responsible and it clearly isn’t going to be Tim.
“Yeah, somewhere,” the woman says, and brings her cigarette back to her lips before adding, in a horrible sign of things to come, “You’ll probably find him before he finds Toes.”
It’s exactly what happens. Two blocks over and under the awning of a pet store with an aquarium that takes up half the entrance, Mr. Giordano introduces himself and frantically tells them about the customer who left the bakery door open too long and Toes’s daring but ultimately lazy escape.
“She likes to wander,” he says, in a thick Italian accent, friendly and warm, and it triggers some far-off feeling of nostalgia in Jason. “You know, to take a stroll.”
For a second, he feels a painful ache somewhere deep between his ribs, pulsing. When he was younger, the handful of times he came here with Bruce in the soft burnt-orange glow of the sun rising, leaving so early Alfred and the world were still asleep, Mr. Giordano would smile at him and let him ramble non-stop about the books he was reading in class, about the impossibly huge library in Wayne Manor, about the magic of Huckleberry Finn and Matilda and Oliver Twist. He’d slip Jason two cookies when Bruce wasn’t looking – one to give Alfred for his birthday, and one for Jason to keep all for himself – and he must have known how much it meant to Jason, especially in those first couple months with Bruce when the world felt rocky and sharp beneath his feet, but he never let on.
Jason doesn’t look the same anymore. Neither does Mr. Giordano with the silver-gray of his hair, the deep lines around his eyes, his mouth. There’s no possible way he remembers Jason, and Jason has to swallow down the surprising bruise of that, the sudden fury at Bruce for sending him here.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do the cake until I find Toes,” Mr. Giordano says, his eyes wet and his fingers searching through his pant pockets where he pulls out a wallet photo of Toes that folds down to reveal six other, similar-looking pictures.
Tim, with an odd glance at Jason, accepts the mosaic when it’s offered out, a thoughtful but fucking suspicious look on his face, and then he says, after staring at the calico cat dressed up like a showgirl, “What if we help you find her?”
“What?” both Jason and Mr. Giordano ask.
“You could go back to the shop to get Alfred’s cake ready and we could find Toes,” Tim continues, because it seems he does want to die, after all.
“Tim –” Jason starts, a low warning, but Mr. Giordano absolutely beams at the offer and snatches the photos away to shake Tim’s hand.
“Yes, yes,” he says, grateful. “You would do that? Oh, molto bene! Thank you, thank you. Oh, but you will have to call her by her full name or she might not respond.”
Jason shoots Tim a murderous glare, one he knows won’t help the situation now and also makes him feel a little bit like shit based on the hopeful way Mr. Giordano is looking between them. But Tim just angles his watch at Jason, a silent reminder of their miserable, inescapable doom. Bruce has forced them both into this task (like an asshole), and he’s made sure to do it with a strict deadline (like a rich, corporate asshole, but an asshole all the same).
“Fine,” Jason says on a sigh, admitting defeat and knowing he’s gonna regret this either way. “What’s her full name?”
- - -
In the grand scheme of all things awful and shitty, Jason thinks it’s only fair that he gets to allow himself another, even longer moment to mourn the circumstances that led to his eventual death at fifteen years old and have now somehow resulted in him roaming the streets of the district of Newtown, yelling, “Toes! Tostitos!” while Tim fucking Drake is ten steps ahead of him, calling out, “Tostitos with a Hint of Lime!”
Sometimes he wishes he was still buried under the ground.
They find five other cats who are not named after a specific tortilla chip and someone’s pet ferret that looks like it has been alive far too long and is now going to make that everyone’s problem, which Jason finds both admirable and relates to on a personal level. The few people willing to talk to them are cagey about whether they've seen Toes, but an alarming amount of them refer to her by her full name like they already know who she is.
“Mr. Giordano did say she likes to wander,” Tim points out when Jason stops a college-aged guy in a Gotham University sweatshirt who says, “Oh yeah, Tostitos with a Hint of Lime. Sorry dude, haven't seen her.”
Tim is an obsessive little stalker, so of course he’s using his phone to hack into CCTV footage to look for any traces of the cat. Jason, like a normal person, checks common hiding places instead – underneath cars, behind dumpsters, glancing up fire escapes. He bangs a closed fist on the top of an old pickup truck just to hear it rattle, empty.
“Fantastic,” he mutters, and then to Tim, “Can you be useful for once and fucking help me find this cat?”
Tim scowls. “What do you think I’m trying to do?” he answers, a hint of sharpness in his voice, tension in the line of his shoulders. The sudden defensiveness sparks curiosity in Jason, heightened by how Tim’s phone starts ringing in his hand, loud and insistent, and he takes in the name on his screen with an ugly turn of his lips and shoves it into his pocket.
Jason, who is and always will be an instigator at heart, drawls out, “Girlfriend problems?”
Tim bristles at that, and it’s a colossal mistake – Jason can see he knows it, that he knows he shouldn’t have reacted at all if he didn’t want Jason to dig his nails in and make it a capital T Thing, but still he says, “I don’t have a girlfriend,” and starts walking down the sidewalk.
“Boyfriend?” Jason offers then, trailing after him just to watch Tim’s ears go pink and to hear him say, vehemently, “No.”
Jason grins. “So what?” he goes on. “Trouble in paradise? Honeymoon not everything you dreamed?”
“I – that’s not –” Tim sighs a rough sound and shoves his hair back from his eyes. It's an agitated gesture Jason is all too familiar with, and one he’s intrigued to see now. “I don’t have a boyfriend. Can we just find this stupid cat and go?”
“Whoa, hey,” Jason chides, all sugar-sweet and mocking disappointment. “Don’t take your relationship problems out on Toes. She’s done nothing wrong. Besides, this whole thing was your idea, remember?”
“Yeah, well,” Tim replies harshly, “I guess I was just trying to be useful for once,” which is an insane thing to throw back at Jason considering it’s not even what they were talking about and not even what Jason was poking at to get a rise from.
Truthfully, it's almost too much of a reaction – a wild thing to say in regards to Tim – and it makes Jason irritated in return, an equally wild notion when he knows he started it in the first place.
“Whatever,” he says, and spins to lead them down a side road. “Let’s find Toes.”
Because Tim has decided to be a giant baby, he keeps up his brooding for another three blocks, emitting a palpable, mopey energy so strong Jason wants to punch him a little to break through it, to make him knock it off. He gets another call he ignores, angry types on his phone for a solid minute, and then eventually must silence or shut it off entirely because Jason doesn’t hear it or see it after that.
By the time they stumble on buildings with bars on their windows and boarded-up doors, the lead-in to Crime Alley, Tim has gone from silent sulking to agitated muttering, saying things like, “This is great,” and, “On today of all days,” like he isn’t causing Jason physical suffering right now from his obnoxious mood and like Jason could possibly understand what he’s talking about at all.
He tolerates it for all of two minutes before he snaps, “God, can you shut the fuck up?” at Tim's ramblings, whirling around to face him and stopping them outside a worn-down theater with a dusty sign for a one-woman show in the lobby. “Why are you saying that anyway?”
Tim steps back, startled. “Saying what?”
“‘On today of all days,’” Jason quotes, and it sounds taunting in his ears, unkind. “What the hell does that even mean? What’s today?”
He’s expecting Tim to frown at him, to lecture him on the importance of Alfred’s birthday or something equally as stupid since they both know today isn’t actually Alfred’s birthday, it’s just the one day close enough to it that Bruce could round everyone up to celebrate.
What he’s not expecting is for Tim to go three shades paler, for his eyes to round in surprise, in shock.
“You don't –” he starts, but seems unable to finish. He just stares a long moment, his mouth opening and closing, nothing coming out. For someone with as solid of a poker face as he has, he’s apparently a tragic liar, because he thinks Jason will just let it go when he says, rough, “Never mind. Let’s go back. I bet Toes probably went back to the bakery at this point.”
Jason gives him a flat look. “You gave Mr. Giordano your number. He would have called. Try again.”
Tim messes with the collar of his t-shirt, not meeting Jason’s eyes, and it feels like all his anger has disappeared as suddenly as it came on. “Jason,” he says weakly, but then he jerks his head to the side, and Jason’s doing it too, listening as the sound of someone yelling comes from down the block.
“Do you hear that?” Tim asks, and Jason says, “Yeah,” despite the fact they’re both already rushing toward it like a siren song, like something they can’t resist.
“Karl, you piece of shit,” a woman is saying when they round the corner. Sandwiched in the narrow space between two buildings, there’s a man in a two-piece suit with a sleazy comb over who has a hand around her upper arm, yanking her along with him. Jason has enough experience from living on the streets to guess by the general gist of the situation, by the blonde wig on the woman and the coat done halfway up, that the man probably pulled her from the local strip club when she was coming in for a shift.
“Lana, baby, you know we share something special,” Karl says, like a piece of shit. “We just need somewhere more private than that whorehouse.”
Lana twists enough to drive the deadly spike of her heel into Karl’s foot, hard, and Karl yelps in pain right as Jason and Tim are getting close. “That whorehouse is my job, asshole. Let go.”
Jason slants a look at Tim, because despite how much he pretends to hate him sometimes, they actually make a fine team. But Jason is nearly sure Tim doesn’t have his bo staff on him – not that he needs it, really, just that Jason is packing heat one hundred percent of the time and desperately willing to use it for any minor inconvenience. The look he gives Tim is one Tim takes in with a small incline of his head, understanding, and while Jason pulls a pistol from the hidden pocket inside his coat, Tim sneaks up behind Karl and claws his fingers into his wrist in the precise spot needed to make his grip open. He shoves Karl back, putting himself in front of Lana and putting Karl in the perfect spot for Jason.
“Man, what the hell –?” Karl whines, and Jason takes the clear opening, aims right at the ground between Karl’s legs, and fires.
“Next one goes higher,” he promises, unmoved by the way Karl screeches and leaps a foot back. “Stay away from her.”
In her heels, Lana’s got a good five inches on Tim, which is amusing solely for the reason she’s still letting Tim act as a bodyguard in front of her, leaning around his shoulder to say, “You’re a scumbag, Karl. If you ever try to come back to the Velvet Rhino, I’ll send Marcus after you.”
Tim scrunches his nose. “The Velvet Rhino?”
“Seriously?” Jason asks. “You didn't say anything about Tostitos with a Hint of Lime, but this is where you have a problem?” Absolutely ridiculous.
“Could be worse,” Lana supplies. “I once worked for a guy who wanted to name his joint the Hoedown Throwdown.”
“Gross,” Tim mutters.
“Baby, please,” Karl begs, pathetic and shameless and interrupting the hilarious “best of both worlds” joke Jason was about to make, so Jason drags the gun up until Karl realizes where it’s pointing and scrambles backward, crying, “Okay! Okay!”
To Lana, Jason says, “You want me to shoot him?” and watches the way she considers this, taking in Karl’s cowering form, the curve of him bent over to protect himself. He knows what her answer will be, but he always asks anyway.
“Nah,” she decides. “Leave him for the rats. I don’t think he’s gonna be bothering me again.”
In the end, Karl goes scampering off, free from any bullet holes, and Jason and Tim walk Lana back to the halogen glow of the strip club where she starts halfway up the steps of the private entrance before she turns to face Jason and says, “You mentioned Tostitos with a Hint of Lime earlier. She get out again?”
Jason makes a face. “Does everyone know her?”
“She likes to wander,” Lana explains, eyeing Jason up and down, and something shifts and settles in her features – like recognition, a weird kind of understanding. She asks, “You from around here?” and it makes Jason pause.
“No,” he says, except that’s not right, not true. He feels the need to clarify, “I used to be,” because he knows how people act about that street and its people and he refuses to be ashamed.
But Lana just says, “Yeah,” like this is the answer she expected, like she already knew. “Thought you might.” She fixes her wig, tidies up the front of her jacket, her lipstick. “Toes likes the mice,” she says, gesturing toward the heart of Crime Alley behind them, “near the old bistro with the yellow tags,” and, waving, heads up the rest of the steps. “Good luck. And thanks.”
The door closing behind her creaks a horrid sound, locking shut with an even worse groan of metal grinding on metal, but underneath it, Jason still hears the way Tim murmurs, “Shit.”
- - -
The thing about growing up in Crime Alley is that it stays in your blood no matter how far away you go. It’s a part of Jason like anything else – like blinking, like breathing, and the hard edges of it that once kept him safe in this neighborhood, that kept him alive after his mom’s death catapulted him out on the streets, have morphed into the hard edges that make him good at fighting, at protecting people.
He follows the line of the street the way he's always done, with the same sense of something bigger beneath his feet, because before this was Crime Alley, it was Park Row. It was townhouses and theaters and little restaurants, bustling with life and hope. Now the few people on the street around them keep their heads down and walk fast, and the bistro with the yellow tags has smashed-in windows, a cracked door. Jason has never known it for what it once was, but he's always felt the remnants of old life in all these decayed buildings, even as a kid.
“I don’t see her,” Tim says, but does it peering into the bistro, pressed up to where single shards of glass still hang onto the window frame for dear life. His voice takes on a disgusted note when he adds, “I see the mice though.”
“You’re gonna get typhus,” Jason says, leaving him to his rodent diseases while he smartly keeps walking on. “There are lots of things around here a cat would be interested in. Keep looking.”
“I don’t have service here,” Tim says, his phone suddenly in hand. He has to jog to catch up to Jason, his appalling crocs making appalling slapping noises on the broken pavement. “Let’s start back toward the bakery so I can see if Mr. Giordano called,” he says, and then said phone starts ringing in objection.
Jason purses his lips. “No service, huh?”
Tim doesn’t say anything to that, just swipes the call away with an irritated flick of his wrist, hints of his previous nasty mood resurfacing. Jason chooses this time not to press on whatever the hell is happening there – he really doesn’t want to deal with Tim’s surly attitude again.
Instead, he says, “So what is it with you and Crime Alley anyway? Why are you so dead set against coming here?”
“I’m not,” Tim counters, but there's unease in his voice and he keeps darting his gaze around and he must, for some mystifying reason, think Jason is stupid.
“You actually couldn't be doing a worse job of hiding it,” Jason says tactfully. “I mean, you could try, but you probably wouldn't succeed.”
It's Tim's silence, the way he's doing that thing again where he won't look at Jason, that persuades Jason to finally consider something might actually be wrong. This is Tim, who once went through an entire mission without telling anyone he'd been shot because he'd apparently found some crucial puzzle piece for a case and couldn't be bothered to request backup or medical care before he solved it.
That's to say, he's not usually this bad at hiding his emotions, and it prompts Jason to ask, “Seriously, Tim. What's going on?” as he steps on what appears to be a plastic rose that crumples and snaps under his shoe.
“Oh,” he says, bending for it, and Tim rushes out, “Wait, don't –” like he's reaching for a bomb, but Jason's fingers brush against the stem anyway, too late, and then he sees it and comes to an immediate halt.
On the bottom step of a creaky old hotel, in a faded black frame, is a hand-drawn picture of Robin. There are other fake roses scattered around it, like some fucking shrine, and Jason is annoyed and amused all at once, because –
“This is why you didn't want to come here?” he questions. “Cause someone made a creepy altar to – what, worship you? Hex you?”
It sounds beyond crazy out loud, but Tim's eyes have gone huge, and he looks a little like he's seen a ghost. “Jason – it's – can we just go?” he pleads.
“Are there more?” Jason asks cheerfully, because Tim still has that haunted Victorian child look to him, which means yes. And, well, there's just no way Jason is turning back now when he has plans to hold this over Tim's head for at least the next three years – maybe four, if he plays his cards right.
“Ooh,” he fawns over the child’s drawing on the next stoop.
“Quite fancy,” he critiques the cardboard cutout of a domino mask on a windowsill, gleeful over the way this must be so embarrassing for Tim, who keeps up a whining litany of, “We’re gonna be late,” and, “Jason, please,” and, “We’re supposed to be looking for Toes,” all the way up until Jason’s eyes land on a picture of himself from a newspaper article framed on someone’s doorstep.
He wouldn’t normally think anything of it – most people have no idea there’s been three different Robins, and it’s exceptionally common to see each of them get confused for each other when all their suits look so similar. He means to just glimpse it, use it to add something to his outstanding colorful commentary ribbing at Tim, but the picture is his Robin and someone has written RIP in block letters using the R on the front of his suit. They’ve even placed a cheap little battery-powered candle next to it.
Come to think of it, now that he’s paying attention, there are a lot of candles everywhere – in windows across the street, on the sidewalk surrounding pictures, in front of signs that he has to get closer to read: “Never Forget” and “RIP our Robin.” With a sick jolt of his stomach, the realization clears before him.
None of these pictures are Tim – they’re all Jason.
“What the hell is this?” he croaks, barely a whisper, because he thinks he might crack apart, split right down to his toes if he speaks any louder.
Tim is deathly still behind him. His solid presence at Jason’s side makes Jason feel claustrophobic and strangely comforted at the same time, and after an impossibly long moment in which the entire city feels like it’s levitating in space, gone quiet and weightless and confused, Tim fidgets and finally admits, “They’ve done it every year since you died.”
Jason swallows. “Done what?” he pressures, childish and stubborn in denial – he knows, he knows what – and has to rest a hand on the railing next to him for how fast he feels all the blood leave his body.
Jason knows this neighborhood like an old friend, has traversed the hidden secrets of its soul not even Batman knows about. He’s seen life and death. He’s stolen and cried and loved here, lost here, and the culmination of every black eye and skinned knee has narrowed down to this – standing in the face of a small boy he isn’t anymore, of a hero he isn’t anymore, in a community mourning his death. It feels a little like the first time he stepped into the great expanse of Wayne Manor, and a lot like the time he woke up in his own grave and had to dig himself out.
“Jason,” Tim says, concerned and reaching toward him, and it’s all Jason can do to say, “Don’t,” low and dangerous, desperate, eyes on every single memorial stretching down the street.
- - -
The how of it doesn’t make any sense – how Crime Alley could know Robin died, how they could know when he died, how they could possibly know Jason used to live there – but he can’t stop to think about it, has to keep them moving at a brisk pace back toward Newtown or else he fears he might do something foolish like have a total mental breakdown or punch Tim in the face.
It’s not Tim’s fault. The rational part of Jason, the one who talks people down from bridges and teaches street kids how to defend themselves, knows that. But the other part, the bruised, tender part that just stood near his old home and looked at a fucking graveyard filled only with his own face, sees the way Tim’s phone lights up again with a call he rejects and absolutely snaps.
“Who the hell keeps calling you?” he demands.
Tim doesn’t look upset this time, probably because he’s busy casting worried looks at Jason that make Jason want to hit him even more. He shakes his head wordlessly and goes to brush past Jason and Jason just won't have that. He jerks Tim into the empty alleyway next to them with a binding grip around his wrist, and it gets a little of the reaction he wants – anger, a burning heat that isn’t his own. Tim goes to expertly break the hold, but Jason knows a Dick Grayson move when he sees one and uses Tim’s momentum against him, spinning him around and wrenching his arm behind his back to shove him face-first into the brick wall, pinning him in place.
“Jesus Christ, Jason,” Tim complains, cheek smashed against the wall and sort of breathless like Jason knocked the wind out of him. “What the hell is your problem?”
“You first,” Jason snarls.
“I don't have a problem,” Tim protests, and Jason tightens his grip, in warning, to stop the subtle squirming from Tim that means he's testing his options to break free. The pulpy wound in his chest feels like it’s snaking into his lungs, huge and unthinkable, and it reminds him of this: that Tim knew what Jason was walking into, that Tim didn’t warn him.
“Try again,” he says, and Tim’s answering huff of frustration turns into a small shout of pain at Jason’s thumb digging into the thin skin of his wrist, cruel.
“Oh my god,” he snaps. “Fine. It was my parents, okay? They’re pissed at me.”
Jason’s voice sounds lifeless in his ears when he asks, “For what?” but then Tim says, “For going to Alfred’s party,” and the absurdity of it has Jason loosening his hold enough for Tim to catch his advantage and twist his arm free.
He pushes away from the wall, and then he wheels around and pushes Jason too, enough force to send him back a couple steps. Jason thinks, a bit distantly, there it is. The anger he wanted, tangible and on fire, in someone or something other than himself, because it’s always been easier to see his emotions reflected in another person, to shove them off and away and watch them play out anywhere but inside the mess of his own head.
“Don’t touch me,” Tim threatens, and puts another foot between them for good measure.
Jason just lifts his hands in surrender with an exaggerated lack of enthusiasm. He didn’t realize before how numb his fingers had gone – they prickle now with the sensation of life returning.
“What does that mean?” he asks. “Why the hell would they be mad at you for going to a birthday party?”
“Because they want me to come to some stupid corporate charity event,” he bites out, which is just – what?
“Okay, rich boy,” Jason says, sarcastic and already done with this conversation. “You want to expand on that?”
Tim looks murderous. “Yeah, let’s talk about it,” he agrees, all pure venom, more upset than Jason has ever seen him. “Let's talk about how my parents are never home, and the one time they are – when they weren't even supposed to be – it suddenly becomes my fault their plans are screwed up. Even though I told them I wouldn't be there. And you know why I did?” He directs this at Jason, but Jason knows it's not a real question, and even if it was, he’s not in the mood to play games.
“Because they always do this,” Tim goes on without waiting. “They just disappear on digs for months and then show up out of nowhere and get mad at me for the stupidest things. ‘You were supposed to be here to let the handyman in at the last minute, Tim,’” he mimics. “‘Now our company's anniversary dinner is completely ruined.’ ‘We bought you new shoes and a new coat just for this party, Tim. How could you be so irresponsible to not have planned for us coming home out of nowhere?’ Literally anything they can make my fault, they do, and I am so fucking tired of hearing about how much of a nuisance I am.”
The outburst has them both go quiet for a long, expanding beat when it’s done. There are an infinite number of things to pick apart here, all of them more troubling than the last, but Jason’s brain is stuck on just one: “Your parents are gone for months at a time?”
Tim, who had started to pace along the mouth of the alleyway, stops again to look at him, his eyebrows drawing together. “Yeah? So?”
“And while they’re gone, you live with –?” Jason prompts, because by the growing confusion on Tim’s face, the way he says, “No one?” with absolutely no problem, it’s becoming clear there’s a serious issue here.
“Jason,” Tim sighs in response to Jason’s accusing look, like Jason is the one being unreasonable in this situation. Unbelievable.
In turn, Jason cuts off whatever bullshit thing Tim’s probably about to say by asking, “Does Bruce know about this?” which only makes Tim look more put out.
“That my parents have jobs?” he replies, bratty. “Yeah, I think Bruce is aware.”
“That your parents leave their teenage son alone for months on end,” Jason counters, and he’s a little caught off guard by how furious it comes out.
To be fair, Tim seems to be caught off guard by it too. He frowns and runs a hand over his face, back through his hair. “I’m not a child, Jason,” he says, in his dumb, bright red crocs. “I can take care of myself.”
The wind picks up leaves and blows them overhead. Tim’s not wearing a coat. He shivers, and Jason feels tired, suddenly. He says, “You shouldn’t have to. You’re too young.”
“I’m almost sixteen,” Tim argues, and drops his voice to add, “And I’m Robin.”
Jason pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, and you’re too young for that too.”
“You were younger than I was when you became Robin,” Tim says, as if he didn’t just witness the same terrifying thing as Jason – pictures and pictures lined along the street of a tiny, flightless bird.
He has to bite down the helpless rage, push past the useless words scraping against his teeth, demanding to be let out. It takes all his effort to say, and only say, “And I was your age when I died. You’re not making the argument you think you are, Tim.”
While he still has some semblance of control, while Tim stays silent and the people out on the street walking by glance at them, nosy, going home or to the market, to check the mail, to go onward with their ordinary lives, Jason says, “You’re not supposed to have to take care of yourself. That’s the point. You’re not supposed to have to be alone.”
He sees the reflexive I’m not alone on Tim’s face, a halfhearted protest, but Jason ignores it to groan, “Of course you picked now to finally show up,” as a familiar calico cat winds its way around his legs, purring softly.
He scoops Toes up, drops her into Tim’s arms, and says, leaving, “You’re not a nuisance, Tim. You’re just a teenager with too many fucking responsibilities.”
- - -
The walk back to the bakery is slower, harder. Jason feels it like dragging cement blocks on his feet, like an ache in his stomach. There’s something plastic stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He left the rose he crushed earlier on the sidewalk in Crime Alley, and a part of him, younger, in pain, wants to go back and hold it again, wants to look around the block and plead, why why why, until something makes sense.
Then Toes slips free from Tim’s arms, takes off in a sprint, and the universe laughs at Jason and says, okay. It says, go get your why.
In the form of tracking down Toes yet again – this is becoming outrageous – Jason and Tim turn back around. Tim doesn’t ask how Jason knows Toes will be there again. From the suspicious way she escaped him, he thinks maybe Tim did it on purpose. That he hoped she’d run back to Crime Alley and trusted she would lead them on her quest – which is a downright crazy plan only an insane person could think of.
Except Toes does it. Through a trail of muddy pawprints leading away from a frankly disgusting puddle, they follow her past little tombstone reminders, and Jason stops to breathe through it, soak them in – the grainy newspaper photographs, the children’s drawings in bright crayons, the more polished drawings in colored pencil. Toes is on a doorstep getting treats from an old lady with a cane in her hand and a glock in her purse who eyes them with distrust until Jason asks about the Robin graveyard and then she eases into something nicer.
She tells him what Tim told him, that they do it every year, that it’s a sort of annual tradition.
“But how do you know when he died? Or even that he died?” Jason asks, because today isn’t actually the anniversary of his death, but it’s pretty damn close – a few weeks off, too good to be a lucky guess.
“We hear rumors,” the old lady says, still dropping treats onto the ground, laughing, sweet, at the way Toes goes chasing after the ones that bounce and roll. “We never knew for sure what day it happened, but with the talk around here, we figure we’re close. We had to do something for that poor boy. No one else was.”
Overhead, the sky has gone soft with the glow of dusk falling, casting everything around them in pink shades – the white of Tim’s shirt, the gray apartment building across the street. It makes the candles scattered through the street shine brighter, fixes Jason’s attention on them as he says, “How did you know? That he was …”
“One of ours?” the lady finishes kindly, and when Jason turns back to her, she’s taking him in with that same recognition Lana did, that same understanding Mr. Giordano had when Jason was twelve, thirteen, slipping him cookies in the warm early morning of his shop. One for Alfred, one for himself.
The lady smiles, gentle as the pastel clouds above, and says, “When you’re one of us – we just know.”
And Jason nods, numb. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”
- - -
He carries Toes back this time, stopping once when a guy in Crime Alley pulls a knife on him and arching an eyebrow at Tim, who sighs while he checks his watch and says, “Just make it fast. We’re running out of time.” So Jason beats the shit out of the guy while holding Toes in one arm – purring and untroubled the entire time – and it makes him feel better enough to stop and snatch up the plastic rose he left behind earlier before they head to the bakery.
Mr. Giordano is in pure ecstasy when they step back into the shop. He spends a minute fussing over Toes, and then a minute fussing over the cake, checking to make sure the frosting is still intact, and then an even longer minute fussing over his old laptop, trying to print a receipt despite the fact Bruce already paid for the whole thing.
He hands Tim a white box with a tasteful red velvet cake inside – roses scattered on top, Alfred’s favorite – and waits until Tim’s gone back out the door to stop Jason with a quick, “Oh! I almost forgot,” and comes around the counter to give him a small bag.
“Here you are,” he says, and gathers Toes up, muttering, “You and I must discuss boundaries, my little Tostito.”
They make it to the L train in record time, slipping in at the last second, Tim holding onto the cake box for dear life. Jason snorts at his rigid posture when the train rocks forward and sits beside him on the empty bench, watching a toddler girl on the opposite end blow messy bubbles from a blue wand while her dad dozes next to her, drooling.
Jason still feels off balance and raw, like his world has been titled and is trying to right itself again, but with the rose in his jacket pocket and the dull percussion of the train wheels bumping along the tracks, the wind rushing by outside, he finds himself able to say, “How come you didn’t tell me?”
Tim stares out the window into the darkness of the tunnel. “I thought you knew,” he says, faintly. “And then when you asked what today was, I just – I don’t know. How do you tell someone, hey, let’s maybe not go to this neighborhood cause the whole place is a shrine to your untimely death?”
“Probably like that,” Jason confirms, earning him an exasperated eye roll. He laughs and concedes, “All right, maybe not exactly like that, but you still should have told me.”
“I know,” Tim says, somber, growing hushed. “I’m sorry.”
The train dumps them off back at the station by Jason’s place, only it does so into a large crowd of college students who look like they’re on their way to some kind of rave, pretty girls and boys dressed in ripped clothes with glitter slathered all over. It’s difficult for Jason to elbow through them as they push toward the platform – for Tim, holding the cake, it’s impossible, and a well-placed knock to his arms is all it takes for the box to go flying.
Jason manages to get back to him, the crowd thinning as people smash tightly into different train compartments, and he finds Tim hunched over the box, protective. He’s managed to keep it from getting trampled on, and he drags it up with him as Jason hauls him to his feet and out of the way.
“You good?” Jason asks, while Tim sets the box on a chair to open it, his face perfectly blank, vacant.
“It’s broken,” he says.
Jason leans over to see the split down the middle, slicing the cake into two jagged parts. “Oh,” he says easily, “it’s fine. I doubt Alfred will even care. It’s no big deal.”
“It’s not ‘no big deal,’” Tim protests, and it comes out suddenly wretched. He swipes hastily at his cheek, embarrassed, and Jason freezes.
He remembers the words “useful” and “nuisance” coming from Tim’s mouth, and he knows now, from this response and that one back in the alley, that Tim’s unexpected rant about his asshole parents must have implications far deeper below the surface than what he subjected Jason to.
”Hey, Tim, it’s okay,” he assures, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, Dick is a pro at fixing stuff like this. He’ll get this cake looking perfect in no time, okay? Let’s just get it to him and let him work his magic.”
Twenty minutes later, outside the manor in an Uber that Bruce sent to drop them off here, Jason shoots a quick text to Dick to meet them in the hallway and climbs out after Tim, passing him the cake box.
Dick, overachiever he is, meets them on the porch in a Nightwing-themed sweater and black jeans, grinning ear to ear until he takes one look at Tim and his smile fades.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, meeting them at the first step, checking Tim over like he’s post-patrol checking for injuries.
Jason bats his hands away. “Everything’s fine. We’ve just got a small issue with Alfred’s cake,” he says, careful, because Tim still looks fucking devastated about it. “It just needs a little TLC.”
He sends Dick a meaningful do something, fix this right now look, which Dick interprets immediately and accepts with a small nod, clapping his hands once for show and declaring, “All right, let’s go see what I’m working with.”
In the kitchen, under the soft yellow lights, they prop the box on the counter and view the damage. It’s not bad, and Dick confirms this, out loud, directed mostly to Tim, and then has Tim fetch him his required utensils – a silicone spatula, a fork, a glass of chocolate milk.
“Fuck off,” Tim says to that, but he’s laughing, and it eases something coiled tight in Jason’s chest.
There’s no escaping Alfred – in the place where his word is law, he has full jurisdiction, and he must have a crazy keen sense of when chaos is happening in his kitchen. He slinks in beside them before they’re even close to finishing, and Tim bites his lip while Alfred looks over the cake, calculating, and says, serious the way only someone with a lifetime of English theater experience can be, “Ah. A simple fix, but I’m afraid we’re going to need a glass of chocolate milk.”
“See!” Dick yells, and this time they’re all laughing – bustling around, pulling whatever random tools they can find in drawers, in cupboards, a sudden contest to see who can come up with the craziest solution to mold the cake back together.
In the shadows, like a freak, Bruce is pressed up against the wall near the breakfast nook, watching them with a smile, his white dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, and Jason wanders over to him, the look on Tim’s face in the subway station still burned into his retinas.
“I hate you,” he informs Bruce quietly, but slides up beside him anyway.
Bruce just hums, and this close, Jason can hear the way it rumbles through him, high with amusement. “I know.”
“You’re a terrible person,” Jason keeps on. “The worst person, actually.”
“I know,” Bruce says again.
“And we need to have a talk,” Jason adds, this time in the kind of tone to let Bruce know he’s serious, that he’s not going to let this part go.
“Mm,” Bruce says, which is Bruce speak for yes, I’m aware, but he keeps his eyes on the three in the kitchen, on Jason in his peripheral. “Later,” he says softly.
Jason huffs and jams his hands into his pockets, feels the things he’s left in there – the last-minute gift from Mr. Giordano, the crumpled-up rose. He pulls them both out, senses Bruce glancing over at them, curious, and opens the small bag.
“Yeah,” he says after a moment, gone awfully hoarse, staring down at the two cookies Mr. Giordano slipped him – one for Alfred, one to keep. At the counter, Tim and Dick are still laughing, and the lights reflect on the inside of the windows, the rest of the world dark, asleep. “Later,” he agrees.