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The odds are against Jason as he stands with Dick in the paint swatch aisle, holding a chip of what could be Sherwin-Williams Waterloo or Bunglehouse Blue.
“Might even be Blustery Sky,” Dick says. Jason frowns at him.
“Are you fucking colourblind?”
“Red-green deficient.”
“Not helping your case, here.”
“What about Tin Lizzie?”
“You just like the name.” Jason looks at it anyway. “I don’t want grey.”
“You said you wanted a dove grey.”
“Yes, but dove grey has a soft blue undertone.”
“You could’ve said soft blue.” Dick picks out a colour befitting a newborn's wall, and Jason promptly puts it back. “We could look somewhere else.”
“No, it has to be here.”
Jason tells himself that it is a mutually beneficial agreement that he and Dick live together, that Dick has a place to stay in Gotham that isn’t the manor, and that the both of them reap the benefit of a rental discount because their landlord has a soft spot for sob stories.
Except they’ve been standing here for an hour, and the panic in Jason’s chest that tells him Dick is bored is very suddenly aware that Dick would spend another hour humouring him. It’s just a wall, a wall Jason wants painted a fucking colour he saw in the apartment of a guy he had a hit on, but it’s the colour he wants—and Dick keeps saying stupid platitudes, like whatever makes you happy makes me happy, like let’s get lunch after we get a few tins of paint and then go back and start priming the wall. Except they've been standing here for an hour, and Dick spends more time in Gotham now than Blüd and New York combined, and when he takes Haley for a jog in the morning, he takes Jason along too.
Dick purses his lips and picks out a shade called Upward.
“I like this one,” he says.
Jason, as it seems, likes it too.
How close they are is an impossible architecture undefinable by even them.
One of Jason’s jackets hangs by the door while his shoes keep space beneath the mantle by Haley’s bed. He knows how to make Dick his matcha lattes, and if he saves himself some, no one is the wiser. They are long past second-guessing and tiptoeing. Jason will be there tomorrow, and Dick will not wait up anxiously, thinking Jason won't. The Walkman by the bed that Dick refuses to give up stays there, and the temporary tattoos Dick stuck to their cheeks still gather dust in the bathroom from the Fourth of July.
And, in still re-learning the more sinister mundanities life must bring, Jason’s awake the week before his 24th birthday Googling how to just be.
The hypotheticals drag on: hypothetical people with their hypothetical problems and hypothetical advice. He has stopped relying on dreams for guidance and cannot remember the last time he had a real adult to turn to, so he is left with this: a forum detailing the ways to perfectly pretend you are a very normal, very personable individual and have no underlying issues at all.
“The weather’s nice today, huh?”
Dick’s fork pauses halfway to his mouth. By the gas-lit fireplace, Haley stops licking her stomach to stare.
“Are you joking?” Dick asks. “Is this joking?”
With perfect timing, lightning crackles in the sky and Jason buries his face in his palm.
The thing is, he’s anxious all the time already, and with enough planning and preparation and scripting, does that anxiousness quell to a quiet voice—look left, look right, tie your shoes twice. Dick continually surprises him, never abiding by Jason’s internal script, and for as much as he hates it, for as much as it sets him on edge, Jason follows without question.
It is a pre-birthday dinner. It is the only way Jason can rationalise it: they’re not Richard and Todd right now, residents of apartment 23; they’re Jason and Dick, and Roy has the most awful, shit-eating grin on his face.
Jason kicks him.
“Why did you kick me, Jason?” Kori asks. Jason slumps his head in his hands.
“That was meant for me,” Roy smirks. He kicks Jason (successfully) and juts his head toward the exit. “Smoke?”
“I thought you quit,” Dick complains. Jason wants to slump further.
“It’s a treat,” Roy explains. “We’re all allowed a little treat now and then. It’s not like you’ve got to kiss the guy.”
“I hate you,” Jason tells the sky. Roy blows a plume of smoke in his face and offers the end. Jason takes it dutifully.
“Have you considered”, Roy says, “that Dick is a serial monogamist, and you are severely on the spectrum?”
“Have you considered adult acne isn’t cute?”
“Have you considered you are on a double date with two of Dick’s exes, who are also two of your exes? Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything. I’m freezing my ass off.”
“It’s like 85 degrees out here and you’re in a sweater.”
The bell above the diner door rings bright, and Jason and Roy both look up as Kori ducks through the doorway, Dick beside her.
“I have to get going; some lab work I’ve been waiting on is finally done.” Dick has a perky grin as he smacks a wet kiss on Roy’s cheek and gives a tight hug to Kori, tucking his face in her hair and kicking his feet when she lifts him into a hug.
“Are you going to be home later?” Jason asks. Dick looks bemused for a second—fond, even, and nods.
“I plan on it.”
“Cool. See you then.”
Dick bumps into him good-naturedly and takes leave. A passing bus advertises the latest instalment in rom-com horror.
“You desire him sexually,” Kori says, and Roy splutters out in inane laughter.
Later turns into never as soon a handful of termites the size of school buses wreak havoc on the business district's yachts.
Nightwing swears as a termite spears through a particularly fancy Beneteau. “Lift me up.”
But without warning he has already launched himself up into Jason’s arm and off his shoulder, propelling further upwards to catch the collapsing mast, using the momentum to send him barrelling at a termite’s face. The comm crackles in their ears.
“Looks like that ship has sailed.”
A chorus of groaning overwhelms the call, followed with Nightwing’s cackle.
“Focus, please,” Batman requests. “Does anyone have eyes on Ivy?”
“You’d think she’d make giant bees or something,” Red Robin comments. “Termites are a major contributor to environmental degradation.”
“So, a termite walks into a bar—”
“Nightwing,” Batman interrupts.
“I want to hear it,” Spoiler pipes in.
“A mandible has exploded in my hair,” Robin says sorrowfully.
And Nightwing is beside Jason again, swinging an arm around him, throwing his focus off minutely as he shoots a smaller termite dead-on.
“Is the bar-tender here?” he asks. Jason has to laugh—a modulated little crackle that sneaks from his helmet—and Dick grins. For all the horror and anguish Gotham harbours, letting a light-hearted moment flit by feels more than necessary. Jason goes to move, but Dick stops him, a hand around his wrist.
"Jase—”
A termite explodes into a brilliant confetti of blood and viscera above them, disrupting the moment, and Black Bat gives him a passing thumbs up as she swings by.
Jason turns 24 with little fanfare and a light summer shower. Dick stood by the half-open sliding door a quarter to noon, wearing nothing but Jason’s old gym gear that had seen much better days. He looked away from the rain and smiled, kind and promising and surrounded by Upward blue.
“Hey, happy birthday. Al called and said he’d stop by later.”
They share breakfast in the kitchen, away from the rain, one plate of toast and Dick’s ankles hitting the cupboards as he swings his feet back and forth. Jason drinks most of the juice. For once, the script is empty, and his words do not fumble. He leans in Dick’s space and sleepily steals what warmth is there—it is his birthday; he can afford this. And tomorrow he’ll afford it too.
Dick’s lean is practised, an arm stretching around Jason’s shoulders and fingers trailing his spine—each scar and sunspot a new thing to document. He scruffs his chin in Jason’s bed hair.
“This okay?” Dick asks. Dick always asks first.
Jason could have been happy having Dick as a brother. He didn’t ever get Dick as one then, so coming back, he thought he could have it now. He feels owed that, at least.
Now he just likes Dick too much.
Jason likes staring at their arms tangled together—hands too tentative to reach. There are more scars than forearms, and where scar tissue flourishes, do patches of arm hair cease to grow. They look like matching monsters out for lattes with too much creamer. Dick rolls his fingertips absently on the still-healing cut from a rogue push knife, and the scabs come clean. He smells like Deep Heat and blister packs.
“It’s okay,” Jason says. It sounds too much like I love you. “Thanks.”
Dick does this pretty smile—Jason feels it against his cheek, this quiet blush that not many people see. He laughs and touches his ear, uncomfortable but pleased.
“I used to feel like Carrie at prom.” Jason keeps talking. Why does he keep talking? “I wanted to burn everything down and drown myself after.” Jason closed his eyes, and with his head so drawn back and neck so exposed, Dick wanted nothing more than to lean in and taste the remnants of his shaving cream. “I wrote you poems,” Jason scoffed. “Like, really bad poems. When I was a kid, I mean.”
“Where you going with that, huh?”
“I just—yeah, I was just thinking about it. Getting older, you know.” Jason swallows, focusing on the pressure of Dick’s knee, Dick’s hands.
“I like to think we’ve grown past how we grew up,” Dick said. “We’ve stood side by side through a lot. The bad parts of you know the bad parts of me. That counts for something, I think. It’s my turn to write you a few poems.” Jason tilts to look at him, but Dick is already gazing down. “There’s stuff about me that no one knows—that I feel like you know or that I want you to know.” Dick pauses. “That’s how you make me feel. And I get nervous because I have never felt that way before.”
Of course he knows Dick. He knows Dick's favourite meal, knows about the late-night Stargate reruns and knows about the years spent falling from A-frames because, while he could leap, he often forgot the effort of the climb. In teenage dreams, Dick reciprocates, but at the same time, Jason doesn’t quite remember those dreams. Perhaps this is all they are now—estranged memories of longing finally brought together by Dick’s attention, made to dance. That unwrapped feeling. You’ve seen the ugly wound beneath, those scrapes on my knee; how do you think I feel? How do you think I can stand it at all?
“It’s embarrassing how much I like you,” Jason confesses. “Whatever you’re imagining from me, it’s ten times worse. Like, kiss your hand as practice worse.”
Dick laughs. “It’s good to feel embarrassed. It means there’s still something to learn, and what’s life if you can’t learn something new?”
“What book did you rip that from?”
“Ah, that’s a decade of wisdom, actually.” Dick’s smile is shiny-bright, like the bottom of a well-used pan. “Trust me.”
Jason trusts. Jason trusts like no one else before, and he is formidably built on a life of faith that has been constantly fought through in his life, but Dick—Dick is so fortunate in his life. Dick is so inherent in Jason’s psychology that he thinks, even if he didn’t want to, whatever magnetic fucking pull that keeps the Earth from splitting in two is the same force that keeps him from straying away from Dick for too long.
“I learn from you all the time,” Jason confesses, quiet. “Yeah. All the time.”
Dick’s smile fades to an earnestness Jason doesn’t like the ratio of. He is Dick’s entire focus in this moment—Dick’s world. Jason knows it.
“Me too,” he promises.
The anticipation that Dick might kiss him—that just this once they might be on the same disgusting page—is entirely exhilarating.
“I’ve endured a life without you,” Dick said, grasping Jason’s cheek in his palm. “I don’t want to do that again."