Work Text:
Dick gets adopted when Jason's thirteen. Leaves him a card Jason would've spent much longer writing.
Jason's would take up more than half a page. Would be a thousand words long by where Dick has drawn them as stick figures. He would cram the paper black with tiny, too-close cursive; have Dick squinting because he feels so much that otherwise, oftentimes, he thinks it just couldn't—
Can't possibly fit.
Dick writes his new number down when he comes back to the orphanage for what Jason knows will be the last time. He's bullshitted Bruce (his adoptive father, go figure) about leaving a trinket behind—spends a couple of hours telling Jason about the radio he's planning to set up in his room, about how he's going to hide blunts inside the speakers.
"And, hey," Dick says. Stops talking about how his new dad's skin is annoyingly pale and reaches over to pat Jason's leg. "You gotta promise me you'll stick this whole.. shtick out for a couple more weeks."
Jason nods even when he knows he won't. It makes Dick smile, though: wide and bright. He's got these dimples, and Jason—needs to get a grip.
"I mean, look at you." Dick pinches his cheeks; Jason's heart skips a beat. Maybe three. "Somebody's gonna love you."
Jason looks at the address Dick's handed him after he's left. It's in a part of town that caters to the kind of people Dick would blend in with and Jason would not.
He runs away from the orphanage not even a week later.
:::
Jason's been sneaking into a shitty public library at night for about a month when the uglier security guard tails him—wakes Jason up, and hands him a twenty instead of throwing him to the streets. He tells Jason to blow him, and maybe it's because it's raining and cold and the buttcrack of fucking dawn, but Jason does.
It's uncomfortable and bitter. Jason spits as much as he can out once it's over. He thinks it is, too, but then receding hairline offers him another ten if he watches his teeth next time, and Jason—he's never really internalized all the bullshit the orphanage workers with values kept preaching about, but he's kept Dick's number.
So he does. Reads all of Austen's works, and is halfway through Queen Margot before he's saved up enough for a burner.
:::
(215): dickhead
(215): since when do you not pick up
(215): its not like youre employed
(610): i so could be..you wouldnt know
(215): youre such a loser
(610): come over later?
(215): yeah, ok