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“What the fuck,” Jason says. He looks incredibly displeased. But he opened the door, so that’s a start.
“I had nowhere else to go,” Tim grimaces. Jason’s clearly not happy about this. It’s not like Tim’s happy about it, either, though. “Are you gonna let me in or not?”
“How bad are you hurt?” Jason asks, like him letting Tim into the safehouse is conditional on whether he’s going to die or not. Tim’s kind of sick of Jason’s whole big-bad-better than you act, though, so he ends up shouldering Jason’s considerable bulk aside and storming into the apartment himself.
“Nice place,” Tim says, and he immediately begins rooting around in Jason’s cabinets for a first aid kit. Jason, for his part, closes and locks the door, rearms the security system, and crosses his arms.
“Why are you here?” he asks. “No, scratch that. How are you here? No one knows about this place.”
“Exactly,” Tim says. “Needed somewhere to lay low that had no chance of being compromised. I could’ve broken in, but I figured I’d be polite.”
He pulls a first-aid kid out, victorious, and starts setting it up to give himself stitches, laying out needles and gauze on the counter. Jason keeps watching him, unamused. He doesn’t ask what happened.
Tim and Jason are not necessarily friends. They’re hardly brothers. The only thing connecting them is Robin, and even that is tenuous at best. Jason’s not actively trying to kill Tim anymore, but he’s still hostile. Tim wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t literally his last resort. He tells Jason as much as he starts shrugging off the top half of his suit.
“I’m putting a lot of trust in you to not kill me right now,” he finishes, barely a warning and more of a general statement. Jason huffs and disappears down a hallway.
Tim realizes fairly quickly that he’s not going to be able to stitch himself up. The cut on his side is long and ragged and he couldn’t possibly get into a good position with his dominant hand. He takes a few deep breaths and considers his options: bleeding out on the kitchen floor of Jason’s safehouse. Going back out on the streets and letting Scarecrow fuck him up. Trying and probably failing to get back to the Manor.
There’s a fourth option, though, and that option is Jason walking back into the kitchen with latex gloves and a heavy frown. He shoves Tim none-too gently toward the counter. Tim manages to get himself up on it, tilted so Jason has access to the wound.
“Anesthetic?” he asks.
“No,” Tim replies. He’s bleeding out and it’ll take too long and honestly, he’d kind of like to get out of here as quickly as possible. Because Jason doesn’t like Tim, and Tim doesn’t like Jason, but he still doesn’t want Scarecrow to track him down here and lose Jason a safehouse. He figures that would make Jason like him even less.
Jason gets to work quickly. He sews Tim up with the same kind of efficiency as Bruce, not attempting to stem the pain like Alfred would. Tim bites down on the inside of his cheek and he can feel blood filling his mouth. He swallows, and Jason must figure him out, because he’s a little more careful on the next few stitches.
“You gonna tell me what happened?” he asks, his voice gruff and his tone barely conversational. Tim hesitates. Jason might have good insight on the case. Jason also hasn’t really been cleared by Bruce yet in terms of ‘people they can trust.’ Tim bites the bullet and tells him.
By the time he’s explained the entire situation, Jason is tying off the last stitch. He bandages the wound, and Tim doesn’t protest that he could do that part himself, because Jason seems intent on doing it. Like stitching up this wound will make up for all the other ones that were at his hand. Tim waits for him to throw away the gloves, but he keeps silent, doesn’t say anything about the case or Scarecrow or whatever.
“Thanks,” Tim says eventually. He slides off the counter and he’s a little dizzy from the blood loss, but he’ll manage. “I’ll get out of your hair.” Because that’s it, isn’t it– he just needed somewhere to go to lick his wounds, and now that he has, he can get back out there and back on the case. He hasn’t slept in four days, unable to go to any of his safehouses because he doesn’t know if they’ve been compromised. The lack of sleep is probably why he got the wound in the first place. Sloppy.
“What do you mean?” Jason asks, and he looks almost angry. “You’re not going back out there.”
“I–” Tim starts, and Jason cuts him off.
“You just lost a shit ton of blood. You look like you haven’t slept in a week. You’re shaking and who knows when the last time you ate something substantial was. Get on the couch and take a nap, and I’ll make you something to eat.”
Jason, unsurprisingly, does not look happy as he says all of this. Thanks to excessive experience with Dick, however, Tim knows when someone is entering ‘big brother’ mode. It’s clear Jason has hit that point right now. With Tim.
He bites back a smile and lays down on the couch, careful to angle his injured side away so he doesn’t get blood on it. He’s out fairly quickly. It’s bright outside by the time he wakes up. Jason is in the kitchen, humming under his breath. He’s wearing an apron that says kiss the cook. Tim almost laughs.
“Don’t,” Jason says, pointing a spatula at him. “It was a gift.”
Tim wonders, briefly, who Jason is close enough with to be getting gag gifts from. Roy Harper, maybe, he thinks he remembers Dick mentioning Red Hood and Arsenal work together a lot. He goes to the table and he eats what Jason puts in front of him. Jason doesn’t say anything about him taking another nap on the couch, and this time when he wakes up it’s dark again. He puts his suit on and gathers his stuff and gets ready to leave, but Jason stops him again with a simple, “Wait.”
Tim stops and waits, unsure of what Jason’s doing when he disappears down the hallway again. He reappears five minutes later, suited up in all of his Red Hood gear, guns strapped to his sides.
“Come on, then,” he says.
“What,” Tim says blankly. He can’t see Jason’s expression with the helmet, but he assumes it’s deadpan and unamused, like usual.
“If you’re insisting on going back out there already, you’re not going alone,” Jason says. “Don’t worry, babybird. I’ve got your back.”
Tim doesn’t necessarily like Jason, and he doesn’t think Jason necessarily likes him. But when Jason says that– well. Tim believes him.