Chapter Text
It was about 4PM on a Wednesday when Dick got the first call, the one that started everything.
It was an unknown number but he and Babs had managed to block practically all of the scam callers in USA (it had been a very boring spring break), so he answered.
“Hello?” His voice was groggy, it was a late patrol the night before and he’d only woken up a little while ago. He had the phone propped up on his shoulder as he made some cereal.
“Seriously, old-timer? You only just got up?”
It took him a couple seconds to place the voice. “ Jason? ”
Dick had said to call him when he needed someone to talk to, but knowing that Jason was being raised by Bruce bottle-up-your-emotions-and-speak-to-no-one-about-anything-ever Wayne at the moment, he hadn’t expected the kid to actually do it.
“What? You told me to call you.” Jason’s voice was sharp and defensive in response to Dick’s incredulity. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no. I just wasn’t expecting you to call right now!” Dick backtracked quickly.
It’d be miraculous if he could get another member of the family to be even a little bit of a talker, and he couldn’t let the kid go now when there was a chance of that.
“...Okay.” The disbelief was clear, but to Dick’s relief, it seemed like he wouldn’t hang up.
“So is anything wrong? Why did you call?” He tried to probe a bit, but was quickly shut down.
“Nothin’s wrong! I just wanted to know if you’d pick up. Curiousity, that’s all.” And if Dick were anyone else, he probably would have believed it. But he noticed how Jason answered a little too quickly, how his voice was slightly defensive again. And most of all, he had been raised by Bruce as well. He knew that there was almost always something wrong when you were living with the man.
Dick tried a different avenue instead.
“Alright, well I answered, so you could at least talk to me about something. What did you get up to today?”
“Well, last night we finished patrol pretty late,” Jason started, and Dick couldn’t believe his ears for a moment. Bruce clearly hadn’t trained him on resisting interrogation yet.
He tuned back in quickly and made sure he was paying attention.
“Even though I was real tired this morning, I managed to get up at my normal time. But I was looking for my uniform, and I couldn’t find it! I went downstairs to ask Alfred and he looked surprised to see me! He told me that Bruce said I wasn’t gettin’ up for school this morning and he should take the day to wash my uniform.” He got more indignant as he kept speaking.
“I mean, Alfred’s a miracle man so he managed to get my uniform dried in time and I wasn’t actually late, but I almost was! What the hell is up with Bruce? Does he think I can’t take both school and being Robin? I wouldn’t miss a day just because we had a late patrol.”
Dick winced a little as he realised what was going on, and though he would have loved to throw Bruce under the bus a little, he couldn’t in good conscience let Jason keep assuming that Bruce thought he wasn’t good enough.
“Little Wing,” He ignored the mutter of “Little Wing? What the hell is that?” , “Bruce doing that might actually be my fault.”
There was a long silence before Jason spoke up in an almost stable voice. “You told Bruce I couldn’t handle both Robin and school?”
“What? No! No, that’s not what I meant, oh my god, no . I meant that I used to take the day off of school when we had late nights sometimes and Bruce probably assumed you’d do the same! I would never say that you couldn’t handle it,” he hesitated for a second before adding, “you’re doing amazing.”
“Oh.” Jason paused, “You think I’m doing amazing?”
“Of course!” Dick bit his tongue and made sure he didn’t let any resentment through, “You’re a great Robin, Jay.”
“I’m, uh, I’ve got to go do my homework. I’ll call you later.” He stuttered out before hanging up right away.
Dick cursed himself a little, praying that he hadn’t ruined anything and that Jason actually would be calling him later.
He cursed a little more when he realised his cereal had gotten soggy while he was talking.
Dick had just finished taking a shower after a rather normal night out when the phone rang. He picked up as fast as he could once he saw the caller ID. “Jay! You called!”
“I said I would,” Jason mumbled in response. Dick bit back the urge to respond that it had been a week-and-a-half already, “You saved my number?”
“‘Course I did! So what’s up?” Dick set the phone to speaker-mode and started drying his hair
“Nothing’s up ,” then, quieter,“...couldn’t sleep.”
Dick made a sympathetic noise. A former Robin, he knew what that really meant. Whatever Jason had seen on patrol, it had been especially gruesome. “Want me to distract you?”
Jason let out what sounded like a sigh of relief, “Yeah, I’d like that.”
Dick started rambling about whatever came to his head, finishing drying his hair and moving on to cleaning up his room a bit since he couldn’t sleep yet with Jason on the line.
He eventually went to the kitchen and started making himself a cup of tea.
When there was a lull in Dick’s stream of ranting, Jason spoke, “Are you really Dick Grayson?” His voice was absolutely drenched in drowsiness– in a way that made Dick involuntarily grin– and he was clearly talking nonsense.
Dick sat at his couch and began sipping his tea.
“Well, who else would I be?” Dick had a hard time keeping the amusement from leaking into his voice too much. The kid had trusted him enough to call him when he needed sleep, Dick wasn’t going to betray that trust and make fun of him.
“Dunno, but Dick Grayson is so cool… So cool… Wanna be like him…”
Dick hoped his voice wasn’t too bitter when he asked, “You looked up to Robin, did you?” He knew it wasn’t Jason’s fault that Bruce had given him Robin, and he tried his best not to treat the kid badly for it, but he couldn’t help resenting him a little. That was his name. The name his mother had given him. One of the few things that had still connected him to the circus–
“No… Not Robin,” Jason interrupted his train of thought in a drawling manner. He was practically asleep already. “Dick Grayson- the… the circus boy… he’s so cool. Watched him once… wanted to be like him. So free .”
Dick’s heart stuttered in his chest, and his mouth suddenly felt dry despite the tea he’d just finished. Jason admired him , the real him. He didn’t quite know what to do with that.
“You- you’re almost out, Jay. I’ll hang up now,” he stammered out and hung up halfway through Jason’s “‘Kay…”
Dick sat there for a while with the empty mug in his hands, not thinking about much, and not sure what to do with the strange twisting tightness in him.
When sunlight began bleeding into the sky, he set his mug in the sink, went to bed, and fell asleep to the memory of “The circus boy… he’s so cool.”
The urge to answer the phone, just so he could curse out whoever was calling him, came upon Dick when his ringtone woke him up just as he was drifting off after an especially hard patrol.
He fumbled around for his phone without opening his eyes and brought it near his ear after answering it.
“ Dick. ” He jerked awake immediately. That was Jason. That was Jason and he was crying . Dick forced his panic down.
He began questioning in rapid-fire, “Are you okay? Are you injured? Where are you?”
Jason sniffled a bit and hiccuped, “Shut up . ‘M fine , at the Manor. I jus’- I just wanted someone there, or somethin’.”
A wave of relief of washed over Dick, Jason wasn’t hurt. But worry still ached at him. Dick hadn’t known the kid for long but he felt that Jason wouldn’t cry over nothing.
“Do you… want to talk to me about what happened?”
“ No. ” Jason rejected sharply, then hiccuped again.
Dick rubbed the bridge of his nose, “Do you want to talk about anything?”
“Not really.”
He accepted that and mentally mourned any sleep he could have gotten, impossible after that shot of adrenaline, and his gnawing concern right now.
The minutes passed in silence, only interrupted by Jason’s hiccups and sniffling. Dick finally sighed deeply and said, “Little Wing, blow your nose.”
“Why?” Jason’s voice was becoming hoarse now.
“And drink some water, geeze. If you’ve been crying then you should blow your nose instead of sniffling, otherwise it’ll just be stuffy and uncomfortable for ages. And water will make your throat feel better.”
“Wasn’t crying,” he mumbled, but Dick heard shuffling and then Jason blowing his nose.
“Doesn’t that feel better? You should go down and drink some water.”
“Not going downstairs,” Jason said with a unique mix of hurt and righteous anger, “Alfred’s on Bruce’s side.”
Dick took a second to calibrate, reminding himself that he didn’t think Alfred was always right either, when he was Jason’s age. “And what is Bruce’s side, exactly?”
Jason suddenly gave out a sob that sent another shot of panic through Dick. “He said I was a liability! That I needed to take a break and redo some training!”
Dick grimaced– that did sound like something Bruce would say, but it didn’t sound like something Alfred would agree to. “Little Wing, what exactly happened?” he asked. Then added after Jason sniffled, “and you should blow your nose again. It’s harder to talk when it’s stuffy.”
Jason did so and began speaking, once more in that mixture of pain and righteous anger, “Scarecrow had gotten out tonight, and he was targeting the mall– it’s got a popular new shop open– with some new type’a toxin. We’d gotten basically everyone out before it released, and Bruce was beatin’ Crane up, but I saw this little kid hidin’ in a clothes rack,” Dick got a sinking feeling as he saw where this was going.
“Bruce was busy with Crane, and the toxin was releasing soon, and I’d gotten everyone else out, and I panicked -” Jason paused to catch his breath, “I… gave the kid my mask,” Dick inhaled sharply.
“I don’t know much about what really happened after that,” Jason’s voice was trembling as he recounted the next part, “bein’ caught up in toxin hallucinations n’ all that. But I came to in the Cave. Bruce said some stuff about having to bring me back, and having to take down Crane later in the day, then told me I’d been a liability and let Crane to escape with my actions,” he sobbed again, making Dick’s chest ache, “and when- when I told Alfred, he looked at me all funny and said maybe Bruce was right about needin’ a break! ”
Dick took a deep breath, and tried to put himself in the kid’s mindset before answering.
(He ignored the image of the tiny, energetic Robin he’d met, being pumped full of fear toxin. He ignored the idea of hallucinations so strong that Jason couldn’t remember anything real. He ignored the thought of being Alfred in this situation, taking care of a child in agony, and the child acting like recuperation was some horrible punishment.)
“Bruce was wrong, Little Wing. You aren’t a liability,” Dick chose his words carefully, “You might have been able to do something better in that situation, but you protected a child–” (he ignored the voice in his head that reminded him Jason was a child as well, probably almost as young and small as the one he’d hurt himself to save) “–and Bruce had Scarecrow covered. You did good.”
The kid let out a small, uncertain, “ I did? ” and Dick felt like he was melting, slightly.
“You did,” he confirmed. Dick swallowed and considered how to say what he wanted to next. “Did- did Alfred say you were a liability too?”
There was a moment of quiet before Jason replied, “No… I guess he didn’t,” Dick hummed.
“I think, maybe, that Alfred didn’t agree with that part at all,” Dick spoke slowly, but not patronisingly. “What I think is that Alfred cares about you a lot, kid. He just wants the best for you, and a night filled with fear toxin deserves some rest, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Jason said unsurely. His voice was hoarse and still rife with residue pain, Dick could imagine how sore his throat was.
“Do you feel like going down and getting some water, now?”
“Don’t wanna walk all the way to the kitchen,” the kid said in a whine, and Dick felt a little lighter.
He let out a small laugh, “You’ll feel like hell in the morning if you don’t. And blow your nose, kid!”
“Stop calling me kid, old man,” Jason grumbled quietly, but blew his nose nonetheless.
There was a long moment of silence, until he asked in a barely audible voice, that was full of insecurity, “Will y’ stay on, even if I go down? ‘Ntil I fall asleep?”
Dick wasn’t quite sure what the sudden twist in his gut was, an overwhelming feeling that came over him, but he answered in a slightly choked voice, “Of course.”
There was a shuffling sound which Dick assumed was Jason leaving the room, then a few minutes of silence.
When he came back, Dick got comfortable in his own bed, but didn’t fall asleep until long after the sound of Jason’s soft sleeping breaths had started playing from his phone.