Chapter Text
Jason loves his sister.
It's that easy, really.
Jason loves his sister.
It was inevitable, really, with his nasty habit of planting roots in the people he loves, always losing a piece of himself after they were gone.
Jason loves his sister, he loves her so deeply that he even kept his double surname, after turning eighteen, because, for as much as Bruce wasn't his father anymore, he liked having the simple connection of a shared name with Dixie, the legal, tangible proof that what they had always been was real and it was a kind of forever.
Jason loves his sister.
Jason loves his sister, but he isn't blind to her faults (his sister is larger than a mountain and stronger than steel, but she is also broken and fragile, in some ways, and he is never gonna let himself forget it, because he loves her).
Jason loves his sister, but their relationship isn't perfect (it's normal, it is, no relationship ever is).
Jason loves his sister but he is the only one of his brothers who ever fought with Dixie (like fought-fought) outside of training exercises.
It's normal.
It's normal, because they were eight and eleven, at first, and siblings roughhouse.
It's normal because, for four years, from when she was eleven to when she was fifteen (from when he was eight up until he was twelve) they shared the same house.
It's normal because, for three more years afterwards, it was still just him and Dixie, trading back and forth jabs and punches and chocolate bars and her cherry chapstick and his hand cream.
He and Dixie are siblings (the first and, in some ways, the last too, because with Dixie going all mama hen on Tim and Damian sometimes it's difficult to say if she views herself as their sister or as their mom).
They are a too-deep swimming pool and a pretty coordinated set of a bikini and a pair of swim-trunks, and two sure hands leading him into the water, at first, and later on supporting his back, teaching him how to stay afloat.
They are chocolate candy bars exchanged under her covers, when her period cramps hurt her so bad she could only stay in bed, curled up on herself.
They are races to the bathroom while on vacation, when they were so little Bruce preferred for them to share the same room, and death threats he shouted from outside the door, because Dixie had taken the nasty habit of putting her make-up on in the bathroom instead than at the room's vanity (“the lighting is simply better in the bathroom Jaybird, It's not my fault you are slow”) and he really needed to pee.
They are his icy hands shoved in the neck of her ski suit with the sole purpose of annoying her.
They are practice drills on the training mat and impromptu math lessons while on the parallels.
They are home-cooked meals lovingly stocked into tupperwares before being shoved in her arms and literacy analyses declaimed in the library, while she listens to him while walking on her hands because inaction has made her hatsy.
They are nightmare-filled sleepless nights and the comfort of knowing the other was there.
They are Talia taking him from Bruce's arms and throwing him in the pits, before telling him that his sister has tried to avenge him.
They are a burst of pit rage and eight corpses hitting the ground and his feet leading him to his sister's apartment.
They are his trembling fingers ringing her doorbell and her hands leading him inside, no questions asked, before untying his shoes and unlatching his bloody uniform and discarding her own pajamas and leading the both of them, only clad in their underwear, into the shower.
They are her hands on his forehead while he was puking his guts out in her bathroom, assuring he wouldn't bump his head on the toilet seat, and a still packaged teethbrush on the edge of the sink.
They are bar hauls with the Sirens and bi-weekly bitching sessions about Bruce.
They are him posturing as Wally's biggest antagonist while holding back Tim-Tam's, Damian's and Grandpa Alfred's more violent tendencies.
They are a request to be her man of honor/ best man/ “You Americans have really strange gender rules for weddings” and the knowledge that she would always be there for him, just like he would always be there for her.
They are him bodily slamming her to the ground when Wally started to disappear, the ice and the snow freezing his very core, her pointy elbows almost breaking one of his ribs trying to get free and to run to her death.
They are crying sessions and cocoa cups and bourbon shot directly from the bottle and too constricting suits at her work's galas.
They are, not were, and that's the important part, that's the thing that really matters.
They are, because Dixie is back, and conscious of not being human anymore and wrapped up in Talia's arms (and that's a can of worms Jason isn't going to try to open, not now, possibly not ever).
And Dixie knows she isn't human anymore, but she doesn't know what she is (he doesn't know it either, and it's driving him mad and making him plan to smash Bruce's head on the concrete wall, but he doesn't, because he has more important things to do), and how much she has truly changed, appearance-wise.
And there is no superfluous gentleness between him and Dixie (there is no superfluous callousness either), because they are siblings, but he makes sure his voice is careful, soft, when he asks her for a moment alone.
Dixie gaze tries to catch his own, her head tilted to the side, looking more like a bird than Jason can ever remember her looking (more like a bird than what Jason could ever hope to) and she seems confused, on edge, like she has been ever since he dug her out of her horrible grave.
So he takes out his helmet and he peels off his mask, even if it hurts to do it dry, and he offers her his hand before wisphering a quiet “Dixie, please”, all the while maintaining their eye contact, hoping that she'll catch his ernesty and his urgency both.
She does, of course she does, because she is his sister.
And maybe it's just curiosity, maybe something closer to concern, but it still outwins whatever demons are lurking just behind her eyes, and she takes the hand he is offering her, letting him lead the way (it’s strange, off-putting, wrong, because in all things of life, death notwithstanding, Dixie had always paved his way, her warm hand in his, his eyes to her back, while she lead the way towards the unknown).
His sister's hand is freezing in his.
It's wrong.
And so they end up in one of the floor's bathrooms, her hand still in his, his own heart hammering inside his ribcage.
He makes sure the door is locked.
He barricades it to the best of his abilities too.
He turns around towards his sister.
He takes a fortifying breath.
He tries to ignore the way Dixie flinches looking at him breathing (looking at him doing something so mundane, so human…something whatever she has awoken as has taken away from her).
He takes her hand back in his and he squeezes it, before whispering "I know everything has been overwhelming and you just want to scream, but please, hold still for just a little bit longer, I need to show you something”
Dixie doesn't reply to him. In fact, she doesn't say anything at all, she turns around and she perches herself on the marble countertop of the sink instead.
It always was a habit of hers, always reaching for the higher ground (even more so when she was stressed, or scared, or in pain).
Jason supposes it came from not only being raised by acrobats but spending so many of her formative years running across rooftops. He would never tell Dixie this, but he always found his sister’s fascination with heights morbid at best and downright disturbing at worst, considering the woman’s other parents died falling.
But perhaps it was a way to reclaim her own trauma, a way to make it a part of her, impossible to forget (different from all the other things she HAD to forget, simply to go on), or it simply was a side-effect of the fact that his sister has never been one to let herself be grounded (once, when he was nine or ten, she told him that she was afraid that, if she ever stopped flying, if she ever stopped running, if she ever stopped, period, she would disappear, and Jason never really understood her, not about that, because he NEEDS grounding, it makes him feel corporeal, real, alive).
After climbing up the countertop Dixie looks at him, her face unmoving, but her hands do a sort of a wave motion he knows means ‘Go ahead’.
And so he rummages through the first AID kit he knew he would find in the overhead cabinet of the bathroom, and he soaks a cotton pad with hydrogen peroxide, before gesturing towards her mask. Dixie simply nods. The simple normalcy of that gesture puts him on edge, somehow.
When he is done he looks at her, almost as if to confirm himself that everything it's normal (even if it isn't, it can't be), that, other than her abnormally pale skin and her new black veins and her golden eyes and her elongated pupils everything else is in place. It isn't.
His sister, for as long as he has known her, had been littered with scars.
He kept a tally of his own, when he was a kid, wondering when he would become as roughed up and as badass as her.
He got what he wanted at fifteen, emerging from the pits, his body whole and healthy in a way it had never been, and yet littered with a myriad of unfamiliar scars.
They made them look the same, he remembers thinking back then, but now...now Dixie's skin is perfect, unblemished, no trace of scars or beauty marks on sight.
He checks, just to be sure.
Her right shin, then her left wrist then, as a last resort, he tries to rub away what little make up she still has on her face, to no avail.
His sister's skin is like white canvas, like the one of a porcelain doll.
Not for the first time since Dixie awoken, unprompted, from her grave, he wonders WHAT happened to her, what kind of substance Bruce put inside her, powerful enough to resuscitate the dead, powerful enough to cancel her scars (in a way not even the pit is capable to do), but unable to give her back breath and heartbeat.
Dixie looks at him, her unblinking golden eyes staring into his very soul, like she has done during their whole exchange, uncomprehending.
And Jason…Jason doesn't have enough words to explain what happened, so he simply taps her shoulder and gestures to her to look behind her, in the mirror.
Dixie turns around, far more quickly than what it's humanly possible (it's jarring, in a way, but Jason grew up around Wally, so it's probably less strange than what it should be).
She looks at her reflection, her expression once again indecipherable.
And then she snorts.
Dixie snorts, all un-lady-like, like she has always done behind closed doors, when they were still kids and she would take out her heavy earrings and kick out her ballet flats before helping him take off his tie after a gala.
His sister snorts, like she always did when they were finally alone in either one of their rooms and she would mutter some utterly vile remark about one or another of their guests.
Sometimes he wonders how people so often end up describing his sister as “nice”.
His sister has never been nice, not once in her life.
Good, sure, but never nice (it always was a too delicate word for her, one too fragile to be applied to her, far too sharp, far too jaded, person).
And the bitter truth about it all is the fact that, no matter how not nice Dixie is (which he actually likes, because he isn't nice either), no matter how she screws up (even if her screws up are minor, stupid things, born out of a lack of understanding or impossibility rather than a malicious nature), she'll always be his older sister, one of his favourite people in the whole world, the golden to his silver.
And that's the real problem, isn't it?
He is the real problem.
Because he loves his sister (his larger than life, nearly-perfect, newly resurrected sister) but, sometimes, he hates her too.
He hates her, to his own burning shame, when Roy is in the picture, always when Roy is in the picture, only when Roy is in the picture, and he is like a capricious god, like THE capricious God, who only favours her, ignoring every single one of his own attempts for his heart.
When Roy and Dixie are together (he won't think about what happened at the Watchtower, he won't, he can't) he understands Cain.
And yes, she is the eldest, but God always loved Abel better, and that's what truly made Abel, not his birth order (that was what truly made Cain too, but he tries not to think about it too much, because he will never dirt himself with the markings of a sororicide, because he loves his sister much more than what he could ever hate her, much more than what he can love Roy too, as nonsensical as it may seem).
Anyways, Dixie snorts, un-lady-like and definitely not nice.
“Fuck. I look like Slade.”
The absolute insanity of her statement (of the whole situation, really) finally crashes down upon him, all together, and he ends up giggling like a little kid, before Dixie joins him too and it evolves, for the both of them, in full-blown nervous laughter.
After a while they stop, because he has completely lost the ability to breathe.
He wipes his tears with his fingers.
He missed laughing to tears with his sister.
With the corner of his eye he also catches Dixie jumping off the countertop before mirroring his action, but equipped with a newly ripped square of toilet paper, trying to not look at the black goo the paper absorbed, and failing miserably.
She stiffens, even if minutely.
The reminder of her own condition somehow more monstrous in her tears than in her irises.
She brings a hand up her neck, playing with the ends of her half undone braids.
It's a nervous tic of hers, Jason knows, one she left behind when she was twelve and she was made the leader of the Titans and decided she needed to act “more adult”. Jason didn't know he could miss something as stupid, as mundane as that, but he did.
She talks, a non-sequitur just to break the silence.
“There should be a brush in the drawer. I left it there last mon…I left it there”.
He rummages through the drawers.
He finds the brush.
Wooden.
With soft-looking bristles.
An unholy monstrosity that was probably meant to be an elephant drawn with blue sharpie on its back.
He hands it to her.
Dixie takes it with stiff fingers, she sits on the toilet lid and puts the brush on her lap, before starting undoing her braids.
Her movements are precise, automatic, mechanical in a way that's more stiff than anything else.
He doesn't call her out on it.
He is sure his movements are the same, after all.
At some point, after taking down her second braid, Dixie's hands fall on her lap, her fingers trembling.
“I think…I think you need to call Wally.”
She mutters, and her shoulders are hunched over, her tone small and Jason feels the encompassing urge to wrap her in a blanket and hug her close and never letting anything else in the world hurt her.
He doesn't.
She is his sister.
His proud, maddening, strong, exceptionally fragile older sister.
He nods, instead, before turning around and un-barricading the door and opening it and fencing Wally.
When he and Wally re-enter the bathroom Dixie is sitting sideways on the toilet lid, her face to the wall.
Wally approaches her carefully, like one would with a scared animal.
Jason doesn't have such qualms.
He marches in, puts himself between his sister and the wall and waits for their gazes to meet before asking her if she wants him there or not.
The corner of her mouth rises up, her hand searches for his hand and squeezes it once, twice, thrice.
Jason exits the bathroom.
Before closing the door behind himself, he catches a glimpse of Wally, his uniform's gloves discarded, his bare hands already buried in Dixie's hair, untangling her braids like Jason remembers him doing since forever.
And everything is wrong, truly, it is, but Jason can still laugh about it with his older sister, and Wally and Dixie are still alive, still together, still in love, and maybe, everything can be right again.
He is wrong.
Maybe.
He can't be sure.
When they come back to the cave, they do so hand in hand, Dixie's hair tumbling down her shoulders and a little bit puffy after being brushed and more serene than what he has seen his sister being since…well since Wally disappeared, really.
And everything is alright, truly, it is, up until Bruce (because it is always Bruce, isn't it?) brings up the ONE topic Jason labeled as ‘So dangerous he is not gonna touch it, not even with a ten foot pole’.
And all Hell breaks loose.
And something behind Dixie’s eyes snaps.
If he didn't know his sister better he would say that something broke inside her, but he DOES know her better, and he knows that the dam inside her, the one that perpetually held her rage at bay snapped, but didn't break.
And Jason always had trouble understanding her rage, when he was a kid, first and foremost because she was never truly angry at him.
He always had trouble understanding her rage because, for as much as life had been hard and unjust before becoming a Wayne, he couldn't phantom in himself with being angry at it, not after gaining a sister and a father and a pseudo-grandad and a roof over his head and steady meals every day and the possibility to learn everything he wanted with his heart content.
After he came back, and only then, he understood Dixie's relationship with Rage.
Dixie's rage burns hot and cold, in a sempiternal swing between freezing calm and violent outbursts that are rare and far between.
As it is, Dixie's rage is usually calm, controlled, a precise, deathly arrow at the jugular of however wronged her.
It helps that she always had the uncanny ability of always knowing where to aim, always knowing how to hurt the most.
When he was little she used to teach him how to do it, how to spot weaknesses from a mile away (he guesses that's part of what made her to be such a formidable lawyer) and exploit it.
It became a Wayne siblings’ special, along the years.
The Wayne siblings, with silver tongues and a penchant for making people lives hell if they so wished, with their uncanny ability to unravel secrets and their enormous money to back them if anything ever went awry.
Along the years, life dulled Dixie's claws, at least around family, at least around the people who mattered.
Along the years, Dixie started to skip around those weak points, trying to make everything better (Jason wonders if it was her growing up, or simply something she picked up along the way, because ‘girls are caretakers’, and other such bullshit reasons).
Along the years, after the pit, Jason learned to press on those weak points, like one would with a fresh bruise.
It's strange, now, seeing her do the same.
It's strange, jarring, but it shouldn't have been, not with the way she always carried rage in herself.
Not with the way her blood sings with the rage and the madness of the Al-Ghul's.
Not with the way he always knew that rage was such a fundamental part of who his sister is.
Because he knows Dixie is a spear used as a walking stick (he doesn't even remember where he read that metaphor) and a spear is made to cut, to maim, to kill.
And he knows so, so many things already about his sister.
His sister has the biggest heart anyone could have, but she keeps it close to her chest, loving with her whole soul, but loving few.
His sister is snippy in the mornings and she has a mouth as kantankerous as his own, but she tones it down around their brothers (half a life before she tried to do the same with him , before discovering he already had perfected his potty mouth but, after that, she gave up all pretense entirely).
His sister nicks his cigarettes, sometimes (he still has to figure out if she is trying to make him smoke less or if she smokes herself).
His sister is a portent at math and science and learning languages, but literature makes her head hurt, because the way it makes her feel doesn't have a ‘logical explanation’.
His Sister is beautiful, probably the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen come again, able to destroy Troy with a wave of her hand (able to esnare hearts with a smile, and keep them,forever, even if she didn't really mean to, and he is Oenone, waiting for a man that doesn't truly want him to just look back and see him, waiting).
And he knows so, so many things about his sister, so many things that he is sure that he knows almost all of her.
Maybe that's why her rage, while unfamiliar when directed at him, it's not unexpected.
And Dixie doesn't scream.
She has never been a screamer in her anger, except with Bruce (and Joker, but that's another story), and even that had been rare.
She just goes very still and very quiet and, when she talks next, her tone is devastating.
Her tone is devastating, even worse than how it was after her rape, even worse than it was after Wally’s death, because this time it isn't distraught. It's betrayed.
After…after there is only the clack of her heels on the steps of the cave, and the sound of Wally's (obviously) and Damian's (not obviously for anyone except for him, who always knew that Damian was her favourite, because he always was more like her son than her brother and the most innocent of them all to booth) footfalls scrambling to keep up her pace while being dragged up the stairs by their intertwined hands.