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He takes careful steps down the fire escape. It’s the first afternoon in days where the weather has climbed above freezing, and he’s hauled himself off his couch to get groceries. He is all unsteady movements and hot flashes, but his fridge is empty. He grips the railing tightly, though the cold burns his fingertips.
The weather has been shit these past few days, and every notable Gotham surface has frozen over. A thin layer of ice coats the sidewalks and streets, and Jason only has to slip once on the slick grating of his fire escape to be sent down the last flight of stairs. He barely registers the full-body throb of pain as he lies sprawled over on the icy alleyway bricks. His cloudy head pounds. Sunlight peaks through the overcast sky, and Jason groans as he throws a hand over his eyes to block it.
The roaring in his ears is tumultuous, and the fever is a bitch.
Jason’s bundled in every layer he could find in his closet. The only skin he's left exposed are his face and his fingers, but the fall knocked his hood off his head and now he can feel the cold radiating off the ground on his neck. His face feels impossibly hot and his hands are impossibly cold.
“What the fuck,” he mumbles.
“Baby,” coos Life, "I'm not yet done with you.”
Jason’s apartment building has always been empty. Four flats, and the top two floors are legally occupied by him. Mid-November, a couple moves into the second floor. He mostly avoids them, begins to take care to shut his blinds completely every night, but he pays attention to their routine. The shorter one leaves every morning with a thermos of some steaming liquid handed to her after a kiss goodbye. The blonde, tall one goes out at night. Their living room lights are nearly always on, casting shadows on the building across the alley. Potted plants line their landing.
On the morning of Thanksgiving, Jason receives a text from Tim: r u coming over
Jason brews tea instead of answering. He sips it slowly, one flight down from his apartment on the landing so he can stretch out. His phone is face-up on the grating, the message bared to the world. Eventually, Jason will respond. In a few hours, at least, he’ll send back some vague text that can be boiled down to maybe. The minutes will tick down as he does nothing, and Jason himself will not decide to come till half an hour before dinner, and then wallow about how he should have prepared something to bring.
The mug keeps his hands from going numb. Jason leans his head back on the brick before he hears the tell-tale creaking of the bottom apartment’s old door opening.
“. . . come home soon.” The tall one’s voice is smooth, like thick honey or butterscotch.
“You could come with me.”
“Mmm. Don’t forget the cornstarch.”
Jason watches the shorter one, a woman with dark eyes and rings twinkling in the sunlight, step out onto the porch. She catches sight of him instantly, eyes locking onto the mug. She nods at it. “What’s in that?” she asks, tone flat and somehow conversational.
“Black tea. Earl grey.”
Her nose wrinkles before she descends the stairs. Jason has not passed the test. The tall one pokes her head out to find him. She’s got thick blonde hair and bangs cut to her brows. Her bare shoulders flex as she shrugs a consolatory, “Tough crowd.”
His phone buzzes.
When are you getting here?? Dick.
Jason sighs.
It’s nine in the morning.
The reply is instantaneous. I know the time man
“Got Thanksgiving plans?” the tall one asks him.
“Maybe,” says Jason. She snorts.
“Getting a lil’ late for that, no?”
Jason stares at his mug, still half-full. He shakes his head. “It’s nine in the morning.”
The tall one huffs and heads back inside.
Jason raises himself to his elbows. The ice has begun to chill him through the layers of long sleeves and tee shirts and sweatshirts. The horrors do persist. You’ve gotta get up, now. You’ve been down long enough.
His chest heaves with the effort of inhalation after he uses the railing to sit up entirely. He wonders where the fuck his snow jacket went. Did he leave it at the Manor? Maybe he tossed it after it got ruined and he can’t remember. Perhaps it’s still somewhere in his apartment, discarded in the back of his closet.
Can Jason even make it to the corner store, now? Does he have the ability to walk the three blocks over, shop, and walk back with his groceries? Jesus, will he even be able to make it back up the stairs? He glances up. His door looks miles away. There’s no turning back now, he thinks, But from what? His head spins, the turbid blanket settling heavier in his head. Fuck.
Shirin and Bennie, as it would happen, are succulent lovers. He learns bits and pieces about them through Bennie, who sometimes makes conversation with him as she waters their plants and he drinks his morning tea. They’re about his age; Shirin is a law student and Bennie is a barista at a downtown club. They’re been together for two years, and their next anniversary is in March. He wonders how much they know about him. The rational part of him knows the answer is very little: his first name, what tea he drinks, his loathing for extreme weather. But Bennie has advised him through texting Dick and Shirin has seen Damian climbing through his window, so they know more than he would like.
Hood clears his throat, and the helmet emits a staticky noise that earns him a curious look from Nightwing. They’re laying low on a rooftop, staking out an abandoned market in Chinatown.
“How’s the cough?”
“Perennial,” Jason replies, voice flat and dull. With a lurch of his chest, he tugs the helmet off and coughs into his elbow, wheezing enough that Dick hits his back once with intent, and once to soothe once the fit dies down. “Ugh. God.”
“Come over for dinner tonight,” says Dick quietly. “Alfred’s making soup. Might make you feel better”
He bites back the immediate urge to say decline. “I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too hard.”
Jason does end up going to the Manor that night, pulling up in a motorcycle and an old sweater. He’s welcomed at the door by Tim, whose eyebrows raise slightly in surprise. He frowns. “Dick didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“No, he did. He just failed to tell us how much you look like shit. I thought that cold was getting better.”
Jason shoulders his way inside, kicking his shoes off neatly. “Weather’s shit.”
“Always is,” Tim says agreeably. “You’re early, too.”
“Gonna make a trip to the Cave.”
“Bruce’s down there.”
“Always is,” Jason parrots.
He pads down into the Cave, feet making light thuds on the stairs that Bruce picks up on immediately. Bruce turns away from the computer to greet him, and his eyes track Jason across the Cave. Jason doesn’t let himself look bothered: just makes his merry way to the medbay and rifles through the drawers.
“Are you looking for something, Jason?”
Bruce picks up on a muffled cough, before, “Yeah. You still keep saline down here?”
“I believe so.”
“Great.” When Jason finds the bottle, he frowns at the content. He then picks up a second, identical bottle and holds the label up the light. “I knew we altered the composition.”
“We found that-”
“I know what we found; I was there,” Jason reminds him, thinking about the nights spent in the Cave with Alfred and Bruce as they trial-ran different percentages of sodium in their solutions.
Bruce grunts. “You were too busy talking about that Fitzgerald article to pay attention.”
Jason remembers that, too. He places the right bottle back and nudges the drawer back closed. Walking back up the stairs, he says, “Oh, Bruce. You kill me.”
Behind him, Bruce’s eye twitches. Dinner goes well, all things considered.
On one fateful occasion, Jason witnesses Bennie shove a guy off the second-floor balcony.
He hears loud banging on their front door at ass o’clock in the morning and opens a window, glancing down through the grating to keep watch. Shirin answers it, and the guy on their doormat pushes his way through the door only to be pushed back out by Bennie, who towers above him.
“Get the fuck out of here, man,” Bennie snarls. One arm moves to the doorframe, effectively blocking Shirin from the guy’s path. Jason shuts his window. In seconds, he’s slamming his front door shut behind him.
“You know what you owe him,” the guy threatens, moving in close. “You know-”
Jason’s only halfway down the stairs when Bennie plants her hands on the guy’s shoulders and shoves, and he tumbles over the railing and lands with a pained yelp. They both watch the guy roll over and collapse on his stomach, groaning. Bennie wipes her nose on her wrist. Jason lands beside their door.
“You guys okay?”
“Depends,” Bennie replies. She peers over the guard rails to find the guy staggering to his feet. At her exhale, Shirin wordlessly hands her a wooden bat from inside their apartment. Bennie holds the taper with familiarity.
“Do you want me to-”
“I got it, thanks, man.” Bennie stomps down the stairs and approaches with malicious intent. Without hesitation, she whacks the guy across the ribs, sending him into the neighboring wall. “I told you what would happen if you showed up at my fucking house, remember? Do you remember what I said?”
“B-” Whack!
“I said I’d knock your teeth out and mail them to your mother.” Whack-whack!
Shirin sighs. Jason says, “Jesus.”
“-but you don’t seem to remember that, so I’ll let you keep a few.” Bennie looms over the heap of what used to be the guy and pats his face with her foot for good measure. The guy groans in response. “Stay the fuck away from here.”
Bennie marches back up the stairs, bat still tightly gripped in her hand. Shirin takes the bat away and Bennie disappears into the apartment with her face in one hand, leaving Jason with Shirin.
“Is she-Are you good?”
Shirin makes a noncommittal sound. “It’s just…This is our third apartment.”
Jason’s mind races to think about what the hell that could mean, but it’s interrupted by another groan. He juts his chin in the vague direction of the noise’s source. “Do you mind if I take the trash out?”
Shirin snorts. “Be my guest.”
The dealio, Jason supposes, the dealio is that I miss my dad.
Isn’t that a bummer thing to figure out?
Jason has come to the devastating realization that the person he misses the most has also caused him the most harm (sans Jason himself). Of all the things, he wants to be twelve years old and napping on the couch in the study while Bruce does paperwork. He wants to be in the passenger seat of the batmobile. He wants a side to tuck himself into because Jason is very, very sick. Both physically and mentally. Sick because he’s had a triple-digit fever for the past three days; sick because Jason remembers in excruciating detail the way his eyelashes glued together as he laid in a pool of his own father-spilled blood.
What he wants more than anything is his dad back, and maybe a good night’s sleep. What he gets is a cold shoulder and a burning forehead. Everything is fucked.
He’s on the precipice of nothing. Doom is always impending and permanence has forsaken him. If the fever never fades, Jason could lie here for days, months, decades and survive if undisturbed. The thought just gives him a bigger headache.
“Damn it,” he whispers, and Jason feels tears begin to well up in the corners of his eyes.
Thanksgiving.
Jason falls asleep in the afternoon only to wake up an hour before dinner. He watches the third hand of his clock move for a bit before snapping into action. He showers: scrubbing his skin red and breathing steam in until he swears his lungs have begun to melt. He prepares cookie dough and stores the little balls of it in a glass container to bake at the Manor. He puts on the cleanest pair of jeans he can find and the nicest sweater he owns and stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Don’t fuck this up. Do not fuck this up, he demands. Not this time.
But inevitably, he does.
Jason gets off to a good start. He arrives on time—early, even—and greets Damian at the door by ruffling his hair. He slides the container of cookie dough into the fridge and mingles. He learns that Alfred is thinking of investing in an air fryer and that Stephanie is teaching Tim and Cass to roller skate. He helps Bruce set the table quietly, taking the plates Bruce hands him and arranging them neatly across the dining table.
“It’s good to see you,” Bruce says politely.
“You don’t gotta lie.”
“I’m not lying, Jason. We’re glad to have you here.” Jason doesn’t respond. He feels exposed, standing in the dining room with bare arms and socked feet. He feels too broad for the occasion though his skin is pulled tought across his face. His uncomfortability must be apparent, because Bruce purses his lips and retreats back into the kitchen.
The dining room table is lively. Short vases of red and orange sunflowers line the middle of it. The mac and cheese is passed around like a hot potato, and Duke’s mashed potatoes are a smash hit. Jason has very little appetite for food, but he watches with satisfaction as Tim fights Stephanie for bread rolls and Damian picks at green beans with a childish distaste. Jason had heard second-hand about Damian’s presentation on 1) the horrors occurring in turkey plants, 2) the dispensability and history of turkey Thanksgiving, and 3) who even likes turkey in this family? After such a thorough lecture, the only objection to a vegetarian feast was Bruce. Dick suspected Bruce was only against it because preparing it was the only contribution to the dinner he could dependably execute, and Jason was inclined to agree with him.
“Feeling okay?” Dick leans in to ask him.
“Yeah. Getting over a cough.”
Stephanie yells in triumph; the last bread roll lands successfully on her plate. Tim frowns, but his distress is directed towards him and Dick, not the toppled dish of butter. “Still?”
“Who made the brussel sprouts this year?” Jason asks Alfred, pretending not to hear Tim, who adopts an irritated face.
“You could get a sinus infection or bronchitis.”
“Father and I did the brussel sprouts,” announces Damian. “They are honey glazed.”
“They’re great.”
“Clearly, since you’ve eaten so much of them,” Tim aggressively remarks, gesturing to Jason’s half-full but untouched plate.
“Let’s not-”
“Fuck off, Tim.”
“There’s no need for that sort of language,” says Bruce without looking up from his plate.
“Fuck you, too,” says Jason. Dick makes a dying animal noise, Duke chokes, and Bruce rolls his eyes. “Pass the potatoes.”
Tim hands them over silently.
“Father almost forgot the garlic, but I remembered,” Damian continues. “They are over-baked, but I believe they’re still good.”
“You saved the dish, Damian,” concedes Bruce, and the easy conversation carries on.
Jason lets Damian bake his cookies while he clears the table. He piles utensils into the empty casserole dish and is stacking plates when a hand settles on his shoulder. He drops a side plate, and it shatters on the floor in his surprise. Jason hisses in dismay. Not bothering to see who’s beside him, he crouches to collect the pieces of the plate. “Warn a guy, Bruce.”
“Sorry. Jay, don’t-We can get a broom.”
“Then go get a broom,” he retorts.
“Ja-”
“Shit!”
“-son!”
Bruce sighs. Jason holds his hand closed where the glass has cut in and glares up at him. “I had it.”
“Clearly. Stay there.” Jason does not stay there. He finishes placing the big shards on the tablecloth and sits back in his chair. When Bruce comes back in with a broom and a first aid kit, he exhales slowly. “Jason.” Jason gives him a baleful, miserable look. He watches Bruce sweep up the remaining pieces and set the pan aside before settling down next to him. “Hand.” He inspects the wound and Jason bites his cheek, the stretch of his skin stinging. The blood does not well.
“You won’t need stitches.”
“I know that.”
Bruce shakes his head. “Do you remember—I think it was a of couple weeks after you were legally adopted—when you slipped on your way out of the kitchen holding that teacup?”
“I don’t,” Jason says, but it’s a lie.
“Hm. You used to hold teacups when they were full,” he mimics the way Jason would pick up cups of hot drink with both hands and hold them to his chest, “like this. But one shattered under you, and you lay on top of that teacup so still like it was a grenade. So still it made me scared. And then after a few seconds, you got up so slowly, and you looked around to find me, and you held out your arms because you were so proud of how careful you were being.”
He dabs at the cut gently with a cotton pad. After a moment, Jason asks: “What’s your point, B?”
(Jason often has these points in his life where he feels too hard and realizes that everything comes down to despair. He is not at all a well person. He is fracturing constantly, and while this is nothing new, being forced to confront this tips every low point lower. And this feeling most often occurs when he is alone. When he is waiting for the kettle to whistle in the silence of his apartment, just before a fight in the Alley, right after a conversation with Dick. Jason is most dangerous to both himself and others when he is lonely, and unfortunately, Jason is a very alone person. But as Bruce fixes him with a searching, critical gaze, looking up from the handiwork of bandages, Jason has a brush with the chasm.)
“There isn’t one.”
“Yeah, there is. I’m sorry I’m not your twelve-year-old son anymore, Bruce, but it’s been a while since I have been.”
“You’ll always be my son,” chides Bruce with a neutral tone. “Even when you don’t want to be.”
What an asshole, Jason thinks.
Jason is a crime lord for a reason. Occasionally, it's a good one. After Shirin and Bennie’s lights flip back off, Jason hauls the guy around the corner and holds him up against the wall. “Spill, buddy,” he orders.
“What…the hell-”
“Who sent you?” The guy wheezes in pain. Jason suspects at least two cracked ribs and a concussion, but if the guy is conscious, he can still answer questions. He shakes him once, twice. “I won’t ask again.”
The guy is unprepared and untrained. He’s not a goon, and therefore has no loyalty.
“Owner of the Grid. Somethin’ Caldwell.”
“The Grid?”
“S’ in the diamond district. A club.” His sneer morphs into a pained gasp. “Your friend’s got a helluva commute.”
Jason clicks his tongue and knocks the guy out. He’s got a long day ahead of him.
He starts by dragging the guy the four blocks between his apartment and Leslie’s clinic. He drops him off and leaves without a word. Then, he treks back home and dons the Red Hood suit, because if the Grid is the kind of place that sends thugs after debtors at two in the morning, they’re the kind of place that stays open till three. The commute is hell, even by motorcycle, but Jason’s been known to have a one-track sort of ambition. He breaks in through the back and slides his way up to the VIP floor.
“I’m looking for Caldwell,” he says to the first man in a three-piece he sees. Wordlessly, the guy puts one hand up in surrender and points in the direction of a closed door across the terrace. Hood storms across the crowded aisles. A guard moves to block him, and Jason shoots him out of the way and shoves into the room. At one glance, a young blonde woman and a server exit quickly.
Caldwell is a geriatric, short man with round blue eyes and a thin, pale mouth. Thumb tapping the side of a glass, he croaks, “Do I know you?”
“You will,” Jason promises.
He emerges from the back of the club with an empty clip and the beginning of a migraine, as he spots Spoiler observing him from a nearby rafter and Black Bat looming behind her.
“Hey, man,” Spoiler calls causally. “Having a fun night out?”
“I was.”
“I’m not gonna head in there and find a body, am I?” she jokes with an underlying lilt of seriousness.
Black Bat tilts her head, and Jason takes that as his cue to leave, but the question pisses him off enough that he replies, “Not if you don’t go in,” before taking off.
Later in the morning, Jason nurses his tea—black, Lipton, brewed with lili chai and mint leaves from Bennie and Shirin’s garden—and ignores the texts from Stephanie, who did indeed find the body. As the sun rises overhead, Bennie slips out of their apartment, yawning.
“Mornin’ Jason.”
“It’s a little early for you, ain’t it?”
“We don’t grow flowers,” she explains. Jason waits for further explanation. “So I gotta go buy some for Shirin. Apologize for the commotion and for waking her up. Maybe do some recon for a new apartment.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that last part,” says Jason. He coughs, thinking about the scene left behind in the Grid.
“No?” Bennie asks with a glint in her eye.
“Nah.”
“Just so you know. If you give Damian Robin, I’ll kill you.” He stretches his arms out in front of him, hands laced, but pauses in consideration. “But if you don't hand it over, there’s a good chance he’ll kill you.”
“You’ve tried to kill me before, Jay,” Bruce says with a wiry smile. “I wouldn’t live up to my reputation if I didn’t expect it once in a while from one of you.”
“You did kill me once,” snorts Jason. He misses the way Bruce stills where he stands; he forgets how something so large, so heavy in his chest can be a one-sided memory. He forgets what he once said to Damian, that his father cannot help but hurt the things he cares the most about.
“What did you say,” Bruce murmurs in a tone too soft and too sincere for him to handle. Jason just stares, something in him cracking down the middle. “Honey, I need you to tell me what you mean by that.”
His heart hammers. Like a tic, Jason tugs at the neckline of his shirt, baring the left side of his throat as a sick offering. Bruce reaches, and Jason lets him brush over the scar with a featherlight touch. “Jason,” he whispers, and Jason thinks he’s going to ask how or when it happened, or why he never said anything, but instead Bruce chokes, “I’m so, so sorry. Oh, God.”
Oh. That is not-
Jason slumps a little, leaning his forehead on Bruce’s shoulder, and Bruce turns so that his head rests over his sternum instead. His heartbeat slows. “I forgave you, maybe not that long ago, but I did. But there’s a reason why the way you care about me has never been enough,” and it’s a shock to both him and Bruce when the words are uttered aloud.
“I’ll be enough. I can- My god. Jason, I can be more.”
Jason is so fucking cold he can’t move his fingers. He can’t feel his face or his arms or his legs, nor does he want to. All he can do is watch his breath fog up in the air as the sun sets behind low, dark clouds. He has a fever, probably caused by the infection Tim warned him about, and he has frozen over. The irony would be humorous if he had the energy to find it to be. Time slides by him, the ice does not thaw; nothing changes.
His ears ring louder and he blinks slowly, eventually letting his eyes rest shut.
The world spins, and spins, and spins. Jason is a fixed point.
“-ay?”
The world stops.
“Jason!”
A darker shadow blankets him, but warmth envelops his cheeks. He cracks his eyes open to slits. Fear is Bruce’s closest companion, and it settles on his head like a chaplet of flowers. Two of Bruce’s fingers apply pressure to his carotid, but Jason doubts he is cataloging a pulse. His eyelids flutter, and Bruce cradles him into a sitting position.
After a minute of silence, nestled into the thick sweater he imagines Alfred knit for him, Jason asks, “B?”
Bruce’s hands hold Jason’s tighter, bringing them to his chest. His fingers begin to thaw. “You’re okay.”
“What’re you doin’ here?” he manages to mumble.
“It’s New Year’s Eve. I thought I’d bring you home.”
“Oh. Th’nks.”
Bruce laughs like something is compressing his chest. Maybe it’s Jason.
“Y’re warm.”
“And you’re cold, sweetheart.” Jason hums in agreement. “Are you ready to go home?”
“‘ve been ready f’rever.”