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Knitting isn't something Jason's really been around at any point, just one of those things he's heard of in relation to little old ladies sitting on porches. It's not something he ever even considers doing himself. But then everything changes.
They're on an Outlaws mission in Alaska, bringing down a trafficking ring that thinks taking vulnerable kids from rural communities is a good idea, as if those communities don't have deep ties and a need to protect what's theirs. They destabilise and eradicate, just like they've been doing since they started, and then hit one of the local food joints to capitalise on a free meal. It's the first time in over a week they've had signal beyond their satellite phones, so it's inevitable they'll get a barrage of texts, but they're not quite prepared for how many Roy gets this time.
It's how they end up on a chartered jet courtesy of Ollie back to Star City before they've even had time to properly wrap up like they usually would. Roy is a mess on the plane, all Jason and Kori can do is keep him centred.
Then they're standing in Ollie's hallway and Dinah's handing Roy a tiny bundle that looks even smaller in arms conditioned through years of archery.
Everything changes after that.
The Outlaws disband, Roy gets an apartment of his own in Star City so he's still close to Dinah for help with Lian, Jason moves into his spare room under the guise of helping (but they both know it's just because he doesn't want to head back to Gotham yet - the time's coming, but he can't handle it just yet), and Kori takes off after saying something about home and her sister.
They adjust. Or they try to.
Jason's good with kids, always has been, which means he can show Roy the tips and tricks he picked up when he used to help the moms in his old apartment building to try and earn some loose change to help his mom. Lian's a bubbly baby most of the time, with a wide, toothless smile and her dad's eyes. But Jason can't stand it when she cries.
He doesn't know what it is, if it's something left over from his childhood or the clown, amplified by the pit. Whatever it is, it makes the crying grate against all his nerves and causes panic to start clawing its way up through his chest. He can't deal with it. So every time it happens, he's not proud of it, but he leaves.
Today he barely makes it out of the apartment before panic seizes his chest and ends up folding down to sit halfway down the stairwell. He digs his hands into his curls and forces himself to breath through Bruce's techniques, trying to ground himself in the routine of the old motions.
" Oh, dearie, that isn't any good ."
He has a half hysterical thought that he should be worried about someone calling the police on him in this state, before the footsteps of whoever spoke move up the stairs past him.
He goes back to focusing on regulating his breathing, which means he nearly jumps out of his skin when someone sits down next to him with a crack of bones and a huff.
"Here, take them." The old woman who lives across the hall says as she practically forces a pair of knitting needles into his hands, the bare one in his right and the one with a half finished something or other on it in his left. She adjusts his grip on the needles so it's higher than before and then instructs him through the motions. "So, start by slipping the right needle underneath the top stitch, just like that. Then you bring your wool around from the back and in-between the needles like this. Then pull the right one back and up under the new loop you've created to transfer it over to the right needle. Then you keep going for the rest of the row."
Jason does, not exactly sure why, but he's started now, so he might as well finish. She adjusts his grip on the needles and the yarn, and patiently explains again the few times he stumbles and nearly misses a stitch.
"Switch hands and go again." She instructs as he gets to the end of the row, and he does. "My granddaughter has suffered from an anxiety and panic disorder since she was fourteen. When she was nineteen, she got interested in knitting so I taught her. It doesn't always help with the worst attacks, but it helps ground her and keep her present in the others."
Jason swallows to try and find his voice again. "Most people would have just walked past me."
She hums and smiles. "I try not to be like most people. I see the way you help your roommate with his daughter, you're not the kind of person to just walk past, dearie."
He smiles back and finishes the row.
"You can keep those. There should be enough wool for a full scarf on that ball." She smiles and pushes herself up, bones once again cracking. "If you need any more help, please come and see me, or my granddaughter tells me there are lots of helpful videos on youtube ."
Jason snorts at the way she says it. "Thank you, seriously, thank you."
She touches his shoulder. "Anytime, dearie.”
Jason finishes the scarf in two weeks. It's a little wonky and there's one or two holes somehow, but it's his . It's something he made with his bare hands - the first thing he's made rather than destroyed in a long time.
Once the scarf is done, he goes round to Mrs Talis' again and learns how to make a baby blanket and bonnet for Lian. They take longer, but he's determined to do it, and even if they end up a little wonky too, the look on Roy's face when he hands them over is worth it.
It settles him.
He starts to feel like himself again, and like he can face the past.
"I'm going back to Gotham on Saturday." Jason says, flicking his needle between his fingers.
Roy stops and turns around from where he's sterilising baby bottles. "I figured you'd be going soon. Look, I'm not going to try and stop you, I know you've got as much unfinished business there as I have here. But you'll always have a place here, I need you to know that. If things get bad again, if they get out of hand, you come back, or you call me to come and get you."
"I will, promise." Jason says, and means it. He's not going back as some form of self-destruction, so he's happy to agree to Roy's wishes.
"And you come back and visit. I want Lian to know her godfather." Roy demands, but it's with a smile.
"I'll need to keep coming back to give her all the new knitted garments." Jason smiles.
"Did I say godfather, I meant grandmother." Roy says with a shake of his head as he goes back to the baby bottles.
"You say that, but I've seen how many pictures you take of her in the stuff I've made so…" Jason points out.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Roy waves him off. "Go see if she's awake yet?"
Jason rolls his eyes with a smile and gets up to head into the nursery.
Gotham, it turns out, has six yarn shops. Six . Jason's surprised because Gotham doesn't seem like the place with a thriving crafting community beyond the street artists. He's not complaining though, his reintroduction into the family isn't the smoothest so he spends most of his free time knitting to make sure he doesn't start spiralling.
Bruce greets him with lectures, Tim with wariness, Damian with an aloof indifference, and Cass with almost violent condemnation. Alfred at least brings him a platter of cookies, Steph keeps swinging by the alley for a chat, and the new kid, Duke, seems cool the few times they cross paths. The main spanner in the works, as seems to always be the case with Jason, is Dick .
Now that Jason's no longer blinded by his rage and plans, and on semi-decent terms with the family, he's forced to confront the fact that his childhood crush on the original boy wonder never really went away.
Which Jason realises as he starts tackling more and more complicated patterns; every single thing he makes, no matter the size, he finds himself imagining what Dick would look like in them. He starts picking colours he knows compliment Dick's tan tones, the blue of his eyes and black of his hair, and starts choosing patterns there's no way anyone he knows other than Dick would wear.
The longer he spends in Gotham, the more garments begin to pile up that he automatically refers to as Dick's. To the point where it starts becoming a problem because his apartment only has so much available free space.
He's not sure when he makes the decision to start leaving them in places for Dick to find; it just seems to happen.
The first couple he leaves directly in Dick's apartment, before realising that might be a bit weird, so he switches to the many safehouses Dick keeps across Gotham and New York. He does it for three weeks before he's woken at the crack of dawn after a rough patrol by his phone ringing.
"What?" He snaps, answering the fourth time it rings and shows no sign of stopping.
" I wasn't aware you were actually an eighty year old grandmother ." Babs' voice comes through the speaker, and he can practically hear the smile in her tone.
"What?" He repeats, more baffled this time.
" Knitting, Jason. I don't think I've ever met anyone under the age of sixty that knits ." Babs says with a laugh.
"Well, you clearly don't get out enough." Jason shoots back, rolling over onto his back and running a hand over his face.
Babs snorts. " And you do? "
"Now, I never said that." He can practically see Babs shake her head with a fond smile. "How'd you know about the knitting?"
" You need to be more careful of cameras when you're leaving your little gifts. " Babs says.
"Fuck." Jason says with a groan. "Have you told him?"
" Not yet ." Babs says, sounding far too amused. " I'm enjoying watching his confusion as much as I'm going to enjoy holding it over your head. "
"He spoke to you about it?" Jason blurts out.
Babs hums. " He was worried about someone breaking into his apartment, so I assured him it wasn't someone I'm concerned about and he's going to have to try harder to get me to reveal who it is. "
"You'd make a good supervillain, you know that, Barbie?" Jason says.
" I think that could be said about most of us ." Babs laughs. " You should also know he mentioned how his mom always used to say that handmade gifts were a sign of true love. " Babs says it so casually, as if she's not outing Jason's decade old crush that's slowly been growing into something deeper over the past year or so. " Anyway, I'll see you for brunch on Thursday and we can discuss it further then. "
She hangs up before Jason can protest that there's no way they're discussing it any further so he covers his eyes with his arm and groans. He tries not to dwell on what Babs said about handmade gifts being a sign of true love; he's just managing his anxiety and distracting himself from his unrequited crush, nothing else.
He sighs and gets up for the day - if he keeps repeating that to himself, maybe it will make it true.
Not long after Dick gave Jason one of his first Robin suits and explained the story behind the name and suit colours, he took Jason to his first little rundown studio in Bludhaven for a couple of days just the two of them, without Bruce. Jason is pretty sure he spent the whole weekend following behind Dick (and Nightwing) like a little duckling with stars in his eyes. But it had also been his first insight into who Dick really was: how he could cook, but rarely had ingredients because he was so busy they'd often go bad; how he lived in an organised chaos that would look like mess to everyone else but he always knew where everything was; how he cared so deeply about people, no matter their background or if he knew them personally, but also hated the psychos and sadists they had to deal with with a burning passion.
It also gives Jason the inspiration behind his next project.
They'd been talking one night about the colours in the Robin uniform and Dick had pulled a bunch of memorabilia from the circus out to show Jason where the inspiration behind the colours came from. Amongst the eye-catching posters and actual uniforms, there was a knitted kid's blanket-poncho in the same colours that looked well loved and well used. Dick gained a wistful look when he talked about his mom knitting it, including pointing out some of the little mistakes in the colour changes in the pattern that made it special.
It's the poncho that Jason wants to replicate; mistakes included. It's difficult, most patterns for the type of blanket-poncho Jason can remember it being are specifically for kids and sized as such. It's a bit of a leap in his skill set to start sizing patterns up, so he heads back to Star City to see Roy and Lian, and to ask Mrs Talis for some help.
"This is a very specific idea." Mrs Talis says with a raised eyebrow as she looks up from reading over the pattern Jason's given her on a tablet he 'borrowed' from Bruce.
Jason drags a hand through his curls as he tries to decide how much information to give. "Yeah, it's a gift for someone… special ."
"Oh!" Mrs Talis gets that look all mothers or grandmothers seem to get when finding out about a younger person's love life. "Well then, we better get to work with the measurements."
They do, and Jason heads back to Gotham with a handwritten pattern with all the details he needs.
The poncho takes Jason longer than anticipated; both because of how big it has to be to fit a grown man, and because it's more complicated than the vast majority of patterns he's tried before. He also spends extra time purposefully trying to replicate the few little mistakes Dick pointed out all those years ago (he even goes as far as breaking into Dick's apartment again, not to leave something, but to take pictures of the poncho that's still kept carefully in Dick's bedroom, just to make sure he gets everything completely right).
When he's finished, he shows it to Babs and she gives him a soft, knowing smile that makes him want to jump out of a window. But at the same time, he knows what he's doing with this in particular - knows what he's confessing and knows Dick will know as soon as he sees it.
So he doesn't let himself overthink it. The next night, Babs lets him know when Nightwing is on the other side of the city and Jason uses the opportunity to once again disable Dick's security system and break into his apartment.
Dick's apartment is still as cluttered with things on every available surface, but it's also still clean and, when Jason checks, there's more food in his fridge than there used to be. Jason only checks because he worries; it's hard to do what they do as is, but harder if you're not eating right, especially because Dick's not as young as he used to be.
Jason stops letting himself get distracted and makes his way into Dick's bedroom, where he leaves the perfectly wrapped package on his bed. He makes a hasty exit, not wanting to be around when Dick inevitably shows up.
Jason doesn't quite forget about the poncho, but there's an Arkham breakout the day after he left it for Dick to find that ends up taking them all a week to wrangle back under control. It brings Bruce and Jason into close proximity for the first time since he came back to Gotham bathed in blood. It proves they can still work together, but Jason still has no interest in going beyond that - not with Bruce at least - so he hightails it out of there once they're done before he can be dragged into a conversation.
But all that's to say, when his doorbell rings in the late afternoon of the following day, Jason initially draws a blank at who it could be.
He rests a hand against what looks like a decorative knife mount next to the door that is in fact one of the best knives Talia ever gifted him, and pulls the door open.
"Hi." Dick says with a wide smile that somehow manages to match the ridiculously bright blanket-poncho he's apparently decided to leave the house in. It clashes horribly with the blue and black scarf around his neck and bright blue bobble hat on his head.
The sight of the clashing colours and the fact that Dick is here , that he's wearing everything that he is, freezes Jason in place and he ends up just staring slack jawed until Dick laughs nervously.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" Dick prompts.
Jason nods and swallows thickly before stepping back and letting Dick in. "Sure."
Dick follows him down the short corridor to his living room, and Jason doesn't miss the way his eyes linger on the collection of small knitted squares stacked up next to several balls of yarn and a pair of needles on Jason's coffee table. His eyes flicker to Jason before flickering back to the table again.
"Why knitting?" Dick asks, faux-casual as he pulls off his hat, sending his hair in an array of directions, and sets it on the free edge of the coffee table before starting to work off his scarf.
Jason gives a one shoulder shrug and resists the urge to cross his arms over his chest. "It wasn't a conscious choice it… found me?"
"Found you?" Dick asks with a raised eyebrow as the scarf joins the hat on the table.
"I had a panic attack in the stairwell of Roy's building and this woman - Mrs Talis - she came out and shoved her knitting into my hands and it calmed me down. So… here we are." Jason says, rushing through the explanation so Dick might actually address the elephant in the room.
Dick's smile grows soft and fond in a way that makes Jason's heart feel funny. "I'm glad she did that for you."
"Me too." Jason agrees softly.
"Thank you. For this in particular. " Dick says, just as softly as he runs his fingers along the edge of the poncho. "I- You even got the mistakes right. I don't- I don't think anyone's ever put that much thought into something for me before."
"You deserve it." Jason says, not really thinking it through but meaning every word none-the-less, as Dick looks up at him with wide eyes. "You do so much for everyone else, but you deserve it too."
"Jay-"
"Don't even try to deny it, you do ." Jason insists.
Dick nods before crossing the room in a couple of strides and wrapping his arm around Jason's shoulders. Jason freezes up; the only people who have hugged him properly since he came back are Roy and Kori, but even then, he's still not used to it, still wants to default to the little kid who'd been taught to view touch as something violent. But Dick is anything but violent - he's soft and holds Jason as if he's something to be cherished. Slowly, Jason untenses and wraps his arms around Dick in return. Dick squeezes his shoulder lightly in response and just hangs on until Jason chooses to pull back.
Dick keeps his hands on Jason's arms though, and Jason has to resist the urge to duck his head. "Will you teach me?"
"How to knit?" Jason says with a raised eyebrow.
"Yes." Dick says with a nod and a smile. "We can order dinner and you can show me the basics."
"Like a date?" Jason asks just to clarify because part of him feels like he's living in another dimension.
Dick's smile grows wider and somehow even fonder. "Yeah, like a date. Or if you want to drop the uncertainty: it's a date, little wing."
"Okay, yeah, sounds good." Jason agrees with a small smile of his own.
So, that's what they do.