Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It sounded like a joke when Dick took on the Batman mantle.

It sounded like a one of many, because Bruce was dead and Gotham was turning, unfolding over herself, and her streets felt unfamiliar as they were familiar. Jason had seen what she could do—the long shadows painted by her blood-slick fingers stretching out in alleys, her constant hum of engines and pollution scouring through her darkest nights—and the fact that they all fought for the cowl in a single huge mosh pit brawl seemed like the greatest punchline of all.

But, anyway, Dick got the mantle, Jason got chucked into the Arkham Asylum for a few lovely days, and everything seemed to be going downhill in a heaping pile of trash.

(It wasn't the kind of joke you'd say to anyone.)

Jason still flew, despite it all, because there was an uptick in crime as though the rouges knew the man donning the bat wasn't the one they were familiar with. Dick Grayson as Batman was nothing but a joke except that Jason felt a kind of pity for him as well, considering the uproar in Gotham’s underbelly, and even more so when he himself was stretched nearly thin trying to fix up the rotten mess that was Crime Alley.

Right now, there seemed to be nothing but hell on loose on the best days. On the worst days, well, it was—

Snowdrifts covered the ground in white. Gotham’s winters were always ferocious, tucked along together with death and desperation in its alleys, but this time there was a certain bite to her wind: a storm brewing, obvious to the naked eye, and for the men and children who had grown up where Jason Todd had, this was a clear sign to hide.

Hide, maybe, if he wasn't Red Hood. But here was the obvious: Jason was the Red Hood, and that meant braving the worst of Gotham’s snowstorm to do whatever it took for the city not to explode within a single night.

Oracle had informed him of an illegal weapons trade that would take place any moment now just east of the docks, the depot area where containers were stored. Or—Barbara hadn’t exactly messaged him, per se, considering how he wasn’t on the best relationship with the bats yet, so it was safer to say that Jason nicked the information from a frightened light-duty goon and assumed Barbara had gotten the same information, which meant right now Jason was racing against the clock to stop this trade before Batman arrived.

(See, he would really rather not meet Dick Grayson at the moment.)

The night sky was pitch black, and the only thing illuminating the docks were faint flickering portlights.

Jason jumped down from a container easily, his boots crunching lightly on the snow. He threaded along the path somewhat far off from the main containment area, the loud, sharp wind covering his movements as he rounded another corner that eventually led to a dead end and a single open container by the right. There was too much snow rolling down to make out the features of the moving shadows, but Jason didn’t need exact confirmation to know that this was the trade he was after.

Jason crouched before the corner, watching those shaky blurred shapes of men move around inside the container as they seemed to be unloading crates after crates. His fingers itched, imperceptibly, and Jason knew from feeling alone that it was Lazarus coursing through his veins, urging him on as their targets were so, so close.

(And Jason could succumb himself in the feeling if he wished to, for Lazarus wasn’t madness but more of a child wanting to have its toy: a low shimmering voice magnifying Jason’s current desires, and it had gotten easier to manage it compared to the years when he first breathed the green toxic that was the Pit.)

Except Jason bode his time, now. The weather was terrible and there still weren't any visuals on the main weapon the goon said they were to be trading. A kind of alien tech, the man said, and Jason had made it perfectly clear that he only wanted honesty.

And honesty he did receive.

A deep rumble reverberated throughout the air, a heavier undercurrent to the whizzing storm. The ground shook for a second, moving in the unmistakable beat as a lifting equipment. The men were gone from view, all of them clambering inside of the open container, and that was the signal Jason took to start moving in, fingers curled around his guns.

When Jason peeked into the container, it was to a sleek chrome rifle-shaped weapon mounted on a platform, the size of it almost twice the average man.

Well, anyway, this would've been an easy operation. Sneak in, shoot some no-name dealers, and either return the tech to GCPD or take it for himself for research. (He hadn't figured out the last part yet.)

And yet, this was the part where everything came down into a single ball of bullshit, because—

“What are you doing here?” A voice came behind him, forced deeper and awful like all the things that weren’t.

“Always told you to use a modulator instead,” Jason muttered. He could recognize those steps blind: the grace adorning each footfall, each jump and turn, and he could recognize those very same steps even when disguised behind heavy combat boots made for men who preferred to lean to strength instead of agility. “You’d be better off if you had a voice changer,” Jason added, and he was glad that the wind began to pick up speed, masking their conversation.

“What are you doing here, Red Hood?” Batman pressed, gauntlets in a fist, and the sight was so horribly disproportionate that it looked almost like a poor afterimage to the actual Dick Grayson, Nightwing.

The image was so terrible that Jason couldn’t help but bark out a laugh, hearing it become garbled by his own modulator.

“Where’s your fucking bird, Batman?” He asked instead. “Ran off already after you took on the mantle? Is the job really that bad?”

And that had been the wrong thing to say—quite obviously, in hindsight—but Dick was slower in this suit and he had none of the ease he had with all of the armor bulking him. Jason dodged the fist that was aimed at him, letting it crash to the metal behind him as he rolled smoothly on the snow.

Ah—except now the problem was that Dick’s fist had caused enough vibration within the container to alert the goons dealing with the trade.

Great.

There were hurried barks of orders inside and Jason swore, cold biting through his jacket and thermal and his guns felt like ice even to his gloved hands. “Fuck — and look what you’ve done!” He shouted, sprinting into the closest crate he could find and avoiding the guns aimed at him.

Dick was still—Dick was still infuriatingly silent as he ducked behind a packed shelf somewhere across Jason.

Dick Grayson, as a rule, was never silent.

(Maybe perhaps that was another thing that Batman had changed him into. There were years worth of venom and poison mixed up so incorrigibly into the suit which Dick had volunteered to take on. There was a city’s worth of burden etched into the cape, the pain and fear of normal men, and Jason knew knew knew—just as well as he could read Dick by heart, an ability born from being a kid who was all too eager to understand his new brother—that Dick shouldn’t take on the mantle. Couldn’t bear the mantle. Batman was vengeance and yet it was a prison for its user—a condemnation for an eternity without peace.

But Dick still took it anyway, despite Jason’s worst attempts at forcibly taking the mantle for himself, and now he was just. Silent.)

A single bullet landed a little bit too near, hitting the crate he was hiding behind, and woodchips flew in splinters.

The alien tech stood proudly in the middle of the commotion, and fuck could’ve he had gotten it easily if it weren’t for Batman arriving far too quick.

Jason rose, shot a man, then another. His bullets dug flesh—real rounds, yes, but Bruce had trained him and Talia’s summer camp had trained him some more and Jason knew when his bullets would kill and when they wouldn’t.

Dick didn’t know that, going by the sharp Hood! he threw from across the room, and Jason was, in a way, satisfied that he managed to pull on Dick’s nerves even during a fight.

There weren’t a lot of enemies against them, probably twelve at most. Jason leapt up from the crate and tackled a man to the ground, hitting the back of his gun squarely to his head before firing a round at another that came too close.

Dick fought close to him, and from his periphery Jason saw him disarm a man with the sharp knives on the back of his gauntlet. There was a split second where Dick aimed too far and it was still a moment too long nonetheless because it cost his balance to shift with the unfamiliar armor that he donned. A man came up to grapple him from behind, and—

Jason shot the goon in the hand and watched him recoil in pain, blood spurting weakly upwards then to the ground.

They didn’t say anything. Dick’s nod was stiff at best and Jason had better things to focus on.

There were five left. Jason disarmed two in quick succession, then leaped backwards to avoid the spray of bullets targeted at him. These were not Penguin’s men, nor were they Black Mask’s. Finding out who the hell was behind this trade was a whole other problem completely, but even without research it was obvious that it wasn’t anyone who held that much power in the underworld.

These men were weak, and Jason even felt sort-of bad for beating them into pulps.

It didn’t take long until they were all down, the air smelling faintly metallic as it passed through his helmet’s filter. Some of them were still groaning on the ground, clutching the parts of their bodies that were lodged with a bullet that Jason oh-so-kindly placed.

He could feel Dick’s judgment before he even saw the man’s expression.

“They'll live,” Jason shrugged, and immediately Dick turned towards him, taking a few steps closer until they were face-to-face and just close enough that Jason could sense the contained anger rippling beneath Dick’s cowl—the slight raise of his shoulders and the tense line of his muscles.

Oh, Jason knew that anger well.

“Why are you still in Gotham?” Dick—Batman asked.

(Jason had to remind himself that it was indeed crucial to refer to him as Batman in his head—because Bruce was dead and the empty cowl was taken by his eldest. Because Dick Grayson wasn't Nightwing anymore and he had changed.)

“Regardless of popular belief, this city is still my responsibility,” Jason answered, and despite all the lies that had poured themselves on his tongue, this was one of the very few truths that hadn’t been diluted.

“You hurt Robin,” Batman hissed, and vitriol was a charged bullet that was aimed straight at him. “That kid wasn't at fault and you nearly killed him.”

I wanted to rip the fucking mantle off your hands, was what he nearly answered in turn, except the shrill noise of a machine starting cut his own building anger completely.

There was a man standing behind the alien rifle.

There was—shit, there was a single man that they somehow managed to miss and there was a whole fucking ferocious white energy gathering at the rifle’s muzzle, electricity crackling in tandem along each harsh scrape of winter wind against the metal walls outside, and worst of all it was aimed straight at them.

Fuck, Jason thought, and he hadn't even received the chance to say it out loud before his vision blanked white, bleeding at the edges like a terribly burnt film strip.

He felt his body be pulled into a freefall, and there was nothing.

*

(This was the exact reason why he hated alien tech so much.)

*

The first thought Jason had was: oh, I’m not dead.

The second, however, was: Jesus. That’s loud.

Jason woke up to the loud echoing chime of a grandfather's clock and the blacked-out, glitching display of his helmet lenses. There was a faint sizzle that oozed out the metal gaps as soon as he took it off, and Jason swore there was almost a loud sharp crackle of the circuitry the moment his gear touched ground before it fizzled completely to a dead stop.

And, well, the ground was certainly not the industrial shipping container they were in.

Beneath him were wooden planks, polished almost perfectly so that they had a sheen along each shift of the fading embers of the fireplace next to him, its grates and sides so ornately crafted that it reminded him of the one they had in the Manor years ago. The room itself was strange: neither a drawing room nor a living room, and in fact from a first glance it almost felt like an awkward amalgamation of the two, mixed with a heavy wooden study desk and a single garden chair.

Dick was still out cold not far from where he woke up, also in an ungracious heap. Jason saw that the LED in his cowl was turned off, and while he briefly entertained the huge probability of them getting the (un)fortunate bit where they bashed their heads against something somewhere along the fall, Jason was proven otherwise when Dick’s communicator came up as nothing but static when he tried to dial Oracle. It was dead in his hands, lifeless just like his helmet and Dick’s cowl.

Electronics were busted here, then.

When he rose, there was the temptation to wake Dick up with a kick.

There was—and Lazarus nipped at his desire like some fucked-up puppy that made it especially hard not to—except in the end Jason figured that a recon job was better than having to deal with a pissed-off Batman who had a faulty cowl on his head.

Besides, the whole place was looking even stranger the more his eyes scanned for detail. This place was like a funhouse—a grandiose house made of wooden flooring and high ceilings that contained furniture which didn't suit the setting in the slightest. A coffee-stained striped rug was placed next to a rich velvet rug, and on top of them were shelves lining the long hallway outside of the room they were in. There were books and trinkets and vinyls, and at a glance it was a sight so terribly mundane, except—

Except that—the realization ailed with a tinge of hysteria—Jason knew that very collection of vinyls perched innocently on a shelf.

That was his collection. His vinyls which he had stored in the shithole he called home back when he was barely seven and have yet to received the (mis)fortune of jacking Batman's fucking tires. The very vinyls which he had stolen from a record shop downtown just because he wanted to feel what it felt like to have something nice for a change.

Now why the hell were they here?

And the more Jason thought about it, the more the items in this place made more sense to him. He recognized them.

This wasn't just a house. This was a poor imitation of the Wayne Manor with items Jason recognized from back in his childhood.

He glanced at the colorful striped rug beneath his boots and dared to think that maybe, maybe this place wasn't made just for him.

(He didn't know what to feel about being trapped in a place that also had items that surrounded Dick’s life since he was young. There was something intimate about the thought of it: the small useless trinkets that could possibly be far more integral to Dick’s life than what Jason ever was.

It was shameful too, and disgust rolled on Jason’s skin like slick tar at the reminder that Dick could see what kind of fucked-up life Jason had had, reflected in all the items that had more grime on their surface than polish, more blood and desperation—too much and yet just perfect for a boy who had died at fifteen who came back with toxic green in his veins and eyes that were teal instead of sky blue.)

By the time Jason walked back to the initial room, Dick was already up, frowning at his cowl as he stood next to the low coffee table. He tensed when he saw Jason come in, blue eyes narrowing just slightly. There was a small unreadable glint in his eyes, made known by the small bit of light that the fireplace made, and it wasn't quite anger nor suspicion.

Weariness, perhaps.

“Where are we?” Dick asked, and his voice was melodic as Jason remembered it to be—devoid of Batman's forced brashness and venom. It rang clear in the air, and Jason had to admit that even he was missing Dick’s actual voice.

“Somewhere. Nowhere.” Jason shrugged. “Wherever that alien thing took us, it's a damn mess of a place.”

Dick frowned. “What do you mean?”

Jason leaned against the doorway, arms crossed.

“Look for yourself. Anything in this room ring a bell?”

Dick was silent as he took his surroundings in, and Jason could see clearly how understanding dawned on his eyes: brilliant blue widening just a fraction as it roamed every nook and cranny before finally falling on the absurd garden chair that stood out like a sore thumb.

“What the hell,” Dick said, “that's my chair.”

And really, all Jason could do was stare at him.

“You live in an apartment,” Jason said. Last time he checked, there wasn't a fucking garden in Dick’s apartment building.

“No it's—” Dick’s cheeks colored, movements going stiff as he gestured at the offending item. “My actual chair broke a couple of months ago. There was a garage sale that I passed on work and I, uh. Needed a replacement. That’s my dining chair.”

“You bought a garden chair because it was on sale and used it as a dining chair.”

Dick closed his eyes. “Yes. Whatever. What's the status report other than the one earlier?”

“Nothing,” Jason answered, and he tried not to bristle at the sudden hint of cold professionalism in Dick’s tone in contrast to his previous. “We’re stuck in a single floor replica of the fucking Manor, and electronics are broken.”

“Great,” Dick muttered, and he glanced one last time at the garden chair before meeting Jason’s eyes. “We should try and bust our way out.”

“That’s the thing,” Jason said, and he was reminded of the long spacious hallway he had been in—its doors leading to dead-end rooms full of even more random items but had zero paths to the actual outside. There were windows, sure, tall and decorated with iron grilles, but there was nothing but the vast blue stretch of an afternoon sky beyond its glass. Jason had broken one, causing wind to rush in and caress his face and there was only an endless drop waiting for him below. “We’re trapped,” he finished.

Dick’s mouth twisted, a furrow in his brows. Jason could see him better now that Dick had carefully disentangled himself from the Batman persona during this conversation, and the suspicion that lined the undercurrent behind blue eyes was even more palpable.

Dick Grayson didn’t trust him. Jason thought it was one hell of an understatement.

Dick was rigid, muscles tense and ready to bolt. He had witnessed what Jason had done, had been present for all the moves Jason had taken during their unceremonious rush for the cowl. There was a huge, empty space between all of them in the shape of a fathe—a mentor—and Jason had done nothing but to rip the rift further apart with his bare hands, sharpened nails embedding deep and causing even more fissure to a canvas that was already stained a terrible black and blue.

(And it was because he was grieving. Bruce Wayne was dead and the fact somehow made it feel as though the world was crumbling around him: Gotham’s most loyal knight, finally dragged six feet under in his neverending conquest to save her. If one asked him, Jason would say that he was grieving, but despite being the truth it still sounded like nothing but a poorly-made excuse that fell flat on his tongue.)

You hurt Robin, Dick had thrown in Jason’s face not even an hour ago, and now they were stuck in God knows where.

Leave it up to Bruce’s two eldest sons to get caught up in this kind of mess.

“We’ll find a way out,” Dick said, a few beats too late. He moved past Jason in the doorway, body swerving last minute just enough for their bodies not to touch.

Jason pretended not to notice it. “Sure,” he said, non-committal.

Dick didn’t reply, the click of a door opening being the only indication that he was still somewhere near him.

Yeah, right. Leave it only up to them to get trapped together.

*

Jason was cleaning his guns when Dick came through the door.

He wasn’t staying in the first living-drawing room anymore. Sometime in between he had found a door that led to what surprisingly was a library. Bookcases lined up high, various books filling them almost to a brim, accompanied by stacks of papers and reports that did nothing but clutter up the space. Dusted tomes were piled in stacks on the floor, and some of them Jason recognized from the kind of works Alfred used to read during slow Sunday afternoons.

Jason sat in a maroon wingback chair, a cloth damp with gun oil held in his right hand. His spare ammos were lined neatly on the table in front of him, as well as the few grenades and smoke bombs which needed cataloguing. He wasn’t going to be rushing head-first into danger without knowing how many items he had left. No way.

A subtle wind swept through the room along the creak of a door opening, and Jason kept his eyes resolutely on the work he was doing.

“So?” He asked, placing down his gun.

“Nothing,” Dick said, the word worn to a frazzle. Jason looked up then, stared at the approaching man.

Dick didn’t exactly end up sitting in the chair next to him. Or any of the chairs that were around the table, for that matter. Instead he stood just a little off from a small bedroom cabinet that had elephant stickers pasted on its side, pages of a child’s doodles inside it when Jason inspected it earlier. Close enough but still with a great deal of distance between them.

Something sour climbed up Jason’s throat at the thought.

(This wasn’t the grounds to think about their fucked-up relationship.)

“There’s barely anything useful in any of the rooms,” Dick continued, forcing Jason out of his head. “There’s food in the kitchen, for some reason. For a weapon designed to kill, I don’t think it’s doing a very good job.”

Jason placed his gun down, a dull thud as it met wood. “Or it could just be a weapon to imprison.”

“Could be,” Dick agreed. “But to what end? There are resources for us to sustain here, and the whole thing has the same energy as transporting a criminal to a theme park. I don’t see the point of it.”

Still, with the dim, washed lighting painting Dick’s features in shadows, the furrow of his brows was obvious. Hesitation lingered in the air—a new kind of waver in the oppressive static air since the first they had arrived to this place. The thing was that they had been trained by only the best, and it meant that no matter how big the wool they tried to pull over their eyes, they were still prone to see the truth of it all: this was a prison molded by their own memories, their own lives, cut into pieces and sewed together haphazardly. This was a tech designed to drive them up a wall, keeping them surrounded by their past and present but never the future—a space suspended in place, fixed and unchanging.

The thing was that Jason knew that Dick knew, and here they were still trying to pretend.

But you do. I do. We could see the point bright as day.

This was a prison designed to drive them insane.

“A theme park,” Jason repeated, glancing at all the random items around him, a part of him guessing which had once been his and which had been Dick’s. “Yeah. Guess that feels about right.”

*

It had turned into a game of waiting, somehow, because after the next few hours, both of them had finally ended up in a different room, sitting across each other on the floor with an almost bizarre truce hanging over their heads.

They didn’t talk for a while, and Jason found that he sort-of preferred the quiet. There was too much history between them spanning back from months to years to really have an actual, honest conversation, and all that history was volatile and venom-filled, green toxic waste and dulled sky blue interlinked by fate.

Jason’s gun was a solid weight around his fingers as he mulled over his (their) current predicament. For all the faults she had done, Jason found himself thinking about Talia and the magic she so revered, about the webs she had spun with the help of her tools and her certainty of archaic magical theory. She had once talked of spatial dimensions, he remembered, and it was a kind of wickedness drawn forth with the help of a runic array sewn by a wizard to keep either items or living beings in their place until their magic dissolved or the spell ended.

Jason had been young, then, Lazarus still so fresh he could’ve sworn it pooled in his mouth and dripped down his fingers. Anger had been a constant that curled in his guts, heady in his veins. Back then, Jason didn’t understand why someone would rather use a spatial dimension to keep a living being in place when they could just kill them outright.

Now, though.

He kind of wished that Talia was here.

Then again this was an alien tech they were dealing with, not magic. It was highly probable that the theory behind it all was different despite walking on a nearly parallel path.

Or—fuck. Jason really didn’t have the emotional capacity to do this.

Dick was across him, still as a statue with his eyes closed, head leaning against the wall.

For a second Jason wanted to start a conversation, except he didn’t dare risk starting a whole fight all over again if he were to say one wrong word. It felt as though he was walking a tightrope: just a single misstep away from plunging to the vast depths of Gotham’s unending darkness no matter that he had spent most of his life jumping from rooftops to rooftops.

Dick, however, didn’t have such qualms. He had always been one of the best acrobats.

“Why were you there, anyway?” Dick asked, and Gotham’s winter wind and frozen docks seemed like such a distant thing.

“Had to stop them, and I thought I could use the alien parts for my own project.” Better honesty than deflection.

“I thought you left Gotham after Arkham,” Dick said, and the calm, restrained indifference in Jason’s chest melted away into anger at the mention of Arkham.

“And whose wonderful idea of a holiday was it?” Jason shot back, so full of bitter, rotting acrimony loaded into his question as one would a gun. “Gotham was always my priority. Arkham, however, fucking wasn’t.”

Dick’s eyes were sharp as they bored into him.

Scratch that—they burned into him with an obvious mocktail of disbelief and Dick’s own rising temper and something else entirely, not quite horror nor pity but bordering on grief. It was the picture perfect mirror of the look Dick sent him the night he shot Damian right in the damn chest.

(It made an unpleasant thing crawl at the back of his mouth.)

“You forced me to put you there,” Dick said, and his words felt so loud in the overwhelming silence encompassing them. Suddenly Jason saw nothing but Dick Grayson—the room around them falling away, plastic footstools and tattered posters washing into darkness and leaving only the man that sat across him, dressed under Batman’s impenetrable sleek armor and sharp gauntlet knives.

“I did what I had to do,” Jason spat, rising from his spot. His grip on his gun began to border on pain.

“You keep saying that,” Dick threw back, and oh, he was certainly pissed now. He rose, crossed the distance between them and fisted the leather collar of Jason’s jacket. “You did what you had to do,” he mocked, harsh and nasty and vile—”You did what you had to do. Let me take a wild fucking guess, Jason: it was necessary for you to ruin Nightwing by stealing my mantle? Or, ah — it was necessary for you to take up Batman and turn absolutely fucking insane?”

The air was charged, and Jason might as well have tasted blood on his tongue. He knew, to some degree, what Dick was saying was justified, except indignation had its claws sunk deep into his ribcage and there was Lazarus fanning the fire, letting it grow grow grow—

His gun fell to the ground as loud as a war drum, and Jason punched Dick before he even realized what he was doing.

Dick staggered backwards, clutching his cheek and the faint smear of red at the corner of his lips. He stared at Jason as though Jason had just confirmed all of his worst suspicions.

(See, they knew it. This place was nothing but a problem for the two of them, and yet for some reason they still tried. What it resulted was blood on the floorboards and a truce broken once again.)

“I thought you died,” Jason said, mouth running on its own as adrenaline flooded his body, Lazarus singing in his veins after the punch he did. “The chemo — you died.”

Dick’s answer was a mean hook to his sternum and a bloodied snarl aimed his way. “That didn’t mean you were allowed to take my name and taint it, you sick fucking fuck!”

There was—Jason didn’t know what there was. Dick had thrown him a kick that he countered and Jason was too high on his fury to notice anything else but the fight. They fought and they brawled and it felt like a mimicry of what all their interaction seemed to be nowadays. Dick’s fist broke blood and there was now a persistent sting on his jaw that was definitely going to bruise later on, and Jason tackled him to the ground to aim a quick punch to Dick’s nose.

The crack beneath his knuckles was satisfying as it was deafening.

There was blood and there was iron, heady in the atmosphere and spurring Lazarus on.

“I wanted revenge, okay?!” Jason shouted in between, breath lodged in his throat like a lump of tumor. Dick was pinned and struggling against the floorboards when he continued with: “You were dead and Bruce was dead and someone had to fucking pay—”

“And you’re that someone, aren’t you?” Dick snarked, blood running down his nose and staining half of his face red, his voice slightly muffled from the injury he had gotten. “The most virtuous Jason Todd, ever the fucking savior. Did all his best to steal Batman just to curse the name with shit.”

Jason felt himself still, the twisting ugly rage in his chest turning to blank static.

(Again, there was still truth hidden behind all the lies Jason had told throughout all the long tirades he had gone on. It was undiluted, pure, and pristine, hidden behind a wall of pride that was indiscernible from shame. It was something Jason never bothered to say, for it meant splaying his heart out with a shrapnel for someone to examine as they would an animal.

There was truth, hidden painstakingly so in the soft underside of his palpating heart, except they were now sprawled on the ground and drenched with blood, surrounded by items that had once been and never again, and Jason unwittingly felt it bubble up up up his throat, and he—)

“I wasn’t going to allow you to take up the mantle,” he said, and it was softer than anything he had uttered in the past few hours of the day. Dick paused abruptly in his struggle, staring up at Jason with disbelief and still with the same tinge of grief that adorned his eyes earlier, hesitation crystalline clear in each shift of his muscles. “The mantle is suicide. I wasn’t going to let you take it after you — he—” There were words that choked him from within, wringing his emotions dry. “Fuck,” Jason cursed, getting off of Dick to sit heavily on the floor with his head in his hands.

His anger had fizzed out, leaving behind an empty wound that left him feeling raw and chafed, torn at the edges.

The world seemed to return then, as sudden as it left earlier. The room looked just the same, spots where they hadn’t fought in irritatingly unchanged, dressed in ornaments of their lives.

“Jason,” Dick called, slowly, tentatively, a long few beats later.

Ever the fucking savior, Dick had mocked, and Jason was clear-headed enough now to accept it for what it was. He used to be a savior, Jason thought, before all the rage and the pain, before Lazarus’ playful hold, before anything, really, back in the time where he was just Robin. Just.

Except he wasn’t now, not with the blood he had spilled and the sins he had committed. Men feared his name and Jason knew he was doing good in his own way, but he was nothing close to being a savior. Reaper felt more fitting for him, so tangled up with death, both his and other people’s.

Jason looked up and met Dick’s gaze.

“I wanted to take the mantle because none of you deserve that kind of punishment,” he said quietly, the confession ringing waves in his eardrums.

He saw Dick open his mouth, but Jason was already headed to the door before he could hear what he had to say.

Chapter Text

There was a record player in one of the rooms.

It was a bedroom, with three beds instead of one placed absurdly next to each other up against a wall. There was a desk with a blue night lamp on it with the record player next to it, a little bit banged up and looking just like the one Jason had bought second hand with nearly all the money he had collected for a little over a month.

His body still hurt like a bitch even with Lazarus accelerating his healing, but more than that, the only thing Jason wanted was to take his mind off of what happened earlier.

He glanced at the record player, then to the vinyl he held in his hand. A part of him was convinced it wouldn’t work—their electronics died the moment they landed here, after all—though he only dared to because there was still electricity running through this place, as seen by the light bulbs that lit each room and hallway, however dim they were.

“Would you look at that,” Jason whistled, low, when the player did start working the moment he moved the stylus to the top of the vinyl. Testament began playing after a few scratchy seconds from the worn stylus, and Jason relished in the loud drums and guitar that filled the room with its quick rhythm.

He dropped himself on one of the beds, the mattress dipping beneath his weight.

Despite the music, fatigue was a constant that pressed obsessively at his eyelids, the type of exhaustion that turned his limbs into lead and his joints into rust. There were pin-prick needles that scratched the muscle walls of his lungs each time he took a breath, the sharp ache working in tandem with the heavy dull throbbing that came with the bruises Dick had left him with.

Jason had imagined tearing this room apart with his anger. His body felt tightly wound and jittery; the last dredges of adrenaline still sticking persistently by. He wanted to crash a bookshelf to the ground. He wanted to break a mirror, to claw at a mattress ferociously enough to forget the nauseating shame that gnawed at his core for how much he had let slip during his fight with Dick.

Jason wanted to hurt, and this was the looping path he always took when he spiraled. Instead of welcoming it, Jason pushed his pain away—his grief—and with it meant that he busied himself with things where he thought the end could justify the means he had taken.

(Like the Nightwing mantle he had stolen after Dick’s presumed death, and like the Batman mantle he had worn just shortly after the news of Bruce's death. Jason had never been the greatest with coping, so it seemed.)

But this time, shame churned his guts instead of encouraging him to move. His body protested with every move he did, and his teeth weren't itching for cruelty in the way they usually did. Violence was the cloying disgusting treacle that filled his gums, his mouth, and yet it was subdued, tampered down under the weight of Dick’s heavy unmoving gaze on him.

The player had moved to the second track of the album, its frantic opening beat dragging him back to the present, gravity pulling the tides back to the ocean.

There was no way he was getting rest, though Jason tried anyway.

He placed an arm over his eyes and allowed the thrash metal to deafen him.

*

Uncertainty had never been Dick’s strong suit.

Uncertainty—and, by relation, hesitancy—had always been the first to get rid of when you grew up in the circus. There was no need for it when you would be dancing along with gravity, surrendering yourself fully to its push and pull, and so it was the main reason why Dick had stored anything along the lines of uncertainty deep into the recesses of his mind, tucked away for as long as the time he would be braving skyscrapers and high rooftops.

It was truly the whole reason why he was so off-kilter now, wrong-footed and awkward, as though the stage beneath his feet wasn’t his.

Jason had stared at him with vulnerability Dick hadn’t seen since his untimely death.

They were different now: grown into their bodies and faced the worst the world had to offer. They were men, born from the injuries Gotham had given them like an ill-considered gift, except Jason had stared at him with such open vulnerability and suddenly it didn't matter that his eyes were smeared with toxic green, because all Dick had seen at the moment were sky blue eyes belonging to the boy that had once been his brother.

The sight had hit him hard enough to suck the oxygen away from his lungs and wrench him out of the acrid pool of anger he was drowning in, something akin to ice immediately dousing his spine from top down. It left him breathless, an old closed wound reopening.

It reminded him so much of the tangible feel of his heart breaking, one afternoon in Spring when they had all just gotten back from their mission somewhere far across the universe. I think Jason Todd was killed, a friend had said, and Dick felt the Earth beneath him twist and turn, collapsing with the magnitude of the sentence. It was pain that stuck to him throughout the years—the balance of his body never quite right whenever he thought of it, but then Jason Todd was miraculously revived, and Dick had to face the horror that seized him when Bruce said he was danger.

Red Hood was the wraith that swept through Gotham like a reaper, and Dick had been so sure that he wasn’t going to see his brother ever again.

Except, today. Now.

Jason had already left the room when Dick fully registered what he said, and it was only because the pain in his nose had gotten so unbearable that Dick didn't follow. Instead he sat there, on the ground dumbfounded with his own blood staining his skin and armor.

It was as though the room was laughing at him, band posters and cupboards with cheap veneer angled just perfectly to meet his banged up face. His armor stuck to his skin like tar, and distantly he missed the light suit he used to wear, colored blue and black that was more to wings than a man-made prison.

It felt like several long hours when Dick finally took it upon himself to stand.

He could hear faded music blasting from a room down the hallway. He wanted to get closer, maybe knock on the door, but right now there was only venom and the ashes of an argument filling the obvious tension in the air, and Dick knew better not to press into a growing bruise.

And so he went to a kitchen, bee-lining for the fridge for a pack of ice.

(Here was the truth: Dick felt uncertainty only when it came to Jason. There were a hundred, thousand things that were left unaddressed in the space between them. Dick had grieved for his brother and broken down from the pain that it gave. Years later Jason had returned dressed in rage and Dick thought that he couldn’t really understand the man and the things he did, painting the streets in red in a stark contrast to Batman’s rule of conquest. Then afterwards Dick had gotten himself caught in the chemo and Nightwing was stolen and Bruce died and things kept piling piling and piling—

And here was the painful, honest truth: Dick didn't think he hated Jason as much as claimed.

He should. He should.

But Jason had talked with such blatant honesty and told him that Batman was suicide as though he knew of the weight that sat on top of Dick’s shoulders each time he placed the suit on. Jason, who was so iron-sure the end could justify the means, wanted to wear the suit himself as if he was a man trying to hold on to the last frayed ends of a bygone repentance—none of you deserve that kind of punishment, he had said, and it rung loud in Dick’s ears like the shrill shatter of fine china.

Then again, Dick thought that he couldn’t ever hate Jason, all things considered. Anger was still going to cloud him, sure, but not hate. Never hate.)

Dick pressed the ice pack to his nose bridge and winced.

Shit.

*

(The silence that greeted him the moment he took the stylus off the record was even more deafening than the music he played at full blast. Jason’s fingers twitched, thrummed along with the ants that crawled beneath his skin, and he ignored it in favor of opening the door, fully intending to find where Dick had holed himself in.

But,

The hallway didn’t look quite right, Jason thought. It felt shorter, as though a couple doors were taken out without warning. Spatial dimensions were always fickle when not fed magic properly. Sometimes they would weaken just enough to disperse, leaving the beings trapped in them to be freed, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they would just collapse in itself, turning into a burlesque of a black hole before finally dissipating.

Jason’s steps grew faster, and he hoped the case was the former.)

*

Jason didn’t find him until an hour later, when Dick was still gingerly nursing the ice pack on his face.

Dick would hazard a guess that he made an almost pitiful sight right now, hunched over a kitchen island while trying not to grimace each time he pressed the pack too hard on his bruised nose bridge. He had taken off his suit a while ago, kevlar parts placed neatly on the ground, and it left him nothing but the dark full body garment which he wore underneath to face Jason who seemed to still be armed to the fucking teeth, sans the leather jacket which he hooked around his arm instead.

Dick felt oddly naked, then.

He didn’t say anything when Jason took a step closer lest the writhing thing that had bubbled in his chest get spilled over.

(Dick didn’t think he hated Jason.)

Jason himself had a faint twist at the end of his lips, an old habit from his childhood carried over until the age he was now. It was the same look he had when he had once accidentally hit one of Bruce’s priceless vases during the time Dick had come to visit. Guilty, a tinge bit sheepish.

It was a wonder how death didn’t really erase these kinds of things.

Jason’s jacket landed with a soft thump on the island as he moved to sit on the stool across Dick, the one which he was fairly sure was Haley’s favorite rickety barstool back in the days. The air was awkward, barely short of unpleasant. Dick had begun tracing his free fingers on the table’s wood grain pattern when Jason spoke up, short and curt: “You okay?”

It was probably the worst olive branch Dick had ever received, but it took the edge off him.

“Will be,” he muttered. “Listen, about earlier—”

Jason’s expression tightened as though he knew where this was about to go. “No.”

Dick sighed. “At least let me finish.”

“If you’re going to apologize, then no. If you’re still going to fight me—” Jason paused, briefly, no doubt noticing the melting ice pack in his hand. Dick wondered if the stinging wounds on his face looked as bad as they felt. “You’re terrible at this,” Jason said, and instinctively Dick had to bite down the terse retort of yeah. Whose fault is that?

“I didn't bring my medkit,” Dick admitted, figuring it would be far beneficial for them if he didn't answer with snark. And it was true anyway—Dick had left the Manor in haste for patrol. He had fought with Damian earlier, as they always did after Dick took up the Batman mantle, and it was embarrassing in retrospect how much that fight had affected Dick’s reaction to Jason’s taunt.

Where's your bird, Batman? Ran off already?

Jason’s gaze was strange when it fixed on him. He moved, silent for a man his size despite the creaky mess that was Haley’s battered barstool, and Dick involuntarily tensed when he came to stand next to him.

“What,” Dick said.

“Stay still,” was all Jason answered with, and suddenly he began taking out some of the medical supplies stashed away in his utility belt, a few band-aids and a bottle of antiseptic. Dick watched, in a certain confused daze, the ice pack in his hand being pried off and placed on the table, swapped with a new one which Jason took from the fridge in less than a minute.

“Keep your pressure even, don’t put too much force,” Jason murmured, and the sheer difference of his attitude compared to how he acted before all this happened was big enough that Dick nearly got whiplash.

Working alone in Blüdhaven meant that Dick only had himself to rely on for post-patrol healing. He didn’t want to burden Alfred—perhaps that was one other thing Bruce had handed down to him, the absolute stubbornness of not wanting to be cared for, and also because Dick knew that Damian needed Alfred more; the man who had taken care of Bruce before his demise, perhaps the only man that Damian could still receive closeness with—and so he had sort-of forgotten how it felt to be sat down and treated for minor injuries that wouldn’t kill him the next morning.

It was a hard thing to sit through when the one treating him was his once lost, now estranged brother.

Dick could feel the heat radiating from Jason’s skin from how close they were. Jason seemed to pay him no mind as he worked through the wounds on Dick’s face, dappling them with cotton dampened by antiseptic.

This close, Dick noticed the lingering after-effects of Lazarus on Jason’s body: the faint glowing ring of green around his irises and the bruises on his skin that were already fading, looking days old despite Dick’s knuckles still aching from the punches he had given. It reminded him that Jason wasn’t exactly human, not anymore, and it was another addition to all the dissimilarity they had gotten in the span of time they were separated.

(And Jason had grown, that much was more than obvious. The skinny malnourished boy had disappeared, and in his place was a man full of scars and muscles, strength radiating from the sharpness of his jawline and the confidence in his features.)

The pads of Dick’s fingers stung, the cold ice pressing like needles. Absent-mindedly, he switched it to his other hand.

Their lack of conversation was worse than punching the absolute light off each other. It was when Jason started to place the first band-aid that Dick cracked, his mouth already running ahead of him.

“Damian isn’t fully convinced that I should be Batman,” Dick said, and Jason stilled, if only for a fraction.

“I'm guessing he's not that easy to impress.”

“No, he isn't,” Dick agreed weakly. He thought of their countless arguments and the grief that marred them, both of them acutely aware that Dick would never amount to the man Bruce had been. Damian was a kid that had just lost his father. It wasn’t the kind of position Dick was ready to take over yet. “He’s right, though,” Dick continued, and this was an open admission that came with a few months worth of stress and a single day of being trapped in another dimension due to an alien tech, “but it's his legacy, and I can't throw it away.”

“He's a good kid, all things considered,” Dick added, a touch bit softer with fondness seeping through.

Jason didn’t say anything, pulling back when he had finished placing all the band-aids. He didn’t go back to his previous stool, staying right where he leaned against the island, and so Dick had to crane his neck upwards slightly to meet his gaze.

There was a beat, two, and there was a slight contort to his eyebrows, conflict in teal eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Jason said, and the answer sounded like it had been ripped straight out his throat, bloodied and dripping. “For Damian. For you.”

It wasn’t fair, Dick thought, how Jason was doing this when Dick hadn’t even processed the things that happened in the past few hours. Jason watched him warily as though Dick had been the one to personally expose him from flesh to bone, and it didn’t feel like victory for how miserable Jason looked the moment he had said those words.

(Something hopeful began to make itself known beneath the thick layers of grief that held Dick’s heart in a vice grip. He didn’t dare think of it.)

The kitchen was warm and smelled faintly of oregano, goosebumps rising on his skin when melted ice water dripped. The stool felt like it was going to collapse any minute beneath his weight, even if it wasn’t the shitty one that belonged to Haley. Hell, Dick felt his heart leap up to the back of his mouth, his throat sandpaper thin.

It’s alright, he wanted to say, except there were a hundred, thousand things stuck to their history like rot. Instead he said, “Jason,” he said” and he wished his voice didn’t sound so clogged up as it did right now.

Jason’s face colored as he looked away. “The hallway,” he started, and Dick had to blink at the non-sequitur before accepting that this was perhaps a better route for them to tread upon. “I think it’s shrinking together with the dimension.”

“Do you want to check it out?” Dick asked.

(Distantly, Dick noticed just how close they were. He could feel the warmth of Jason’s body; could even take his hand in his and all it would take was reaching out a small distance—a leap of faith across the horizon.)

“Yeah.” Jason nodded, and Dick watched him move away, back to the door where they came from. “Sure.”

“Okay,” Dick answered, and it felt a lot like breathing out air.

*

Jason wanted to get back as soon as possible.

It was one thing to be trapped in a funhouse full of the things from the past and present.

It was a whole other thing to have that funhouse shrink in itself, cracking at the edges like a scattering hazy dream.

There were fewer doors now, and the damage to the place was clear to the naked eye. One end of the hallway was swathed with a veil of black, the borders of every visible item shifting, strangely ephemeral for how much they resembled a growing burn on a film strip. The dimension rocked, twice, and the floorboards started to groan with each movement, unstable. There was the buzz of a TV noise permeating the hallway, growing louder the more seconds passed.

Dick tugged on his arm. “We need to go,” he said, and he wasn’t even wearing his armor, all that kevlar left behind in the kitchen along with Jason's leather jacket.

Getting them back was impossible. Sometime during their conversation, corruption had spread throughout the dimension like a wildfire. It was disintegrating from the lack of magic it was sustaining on, dark webbing cracks spreading across the walls and floor.

They ran to the opposite end of the hallway, dodging fallen shelves and toys. Dick was holding his hand in his and Jason couldn’t even take the time to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of this situation: the warping world around them, their entwined hands in the middle of all the haste, and the fact that Dick seemed to fly again, his limbs moving as though he was back as the man he used to be, Nightwing.

The room they ran into was the same one they had fallen into in the beginning of this mess. The place shook heavily, various items toppling down before it went into a lull, a pause right before the corruption reached them.

Outside the door, there was nothing but pitch black.

“Well shit,” Jason muttered, raising a hand to run through his hair only to realize that they were still touching.

Dick, ever-perceptive, released his hold without a word.

Jason ignored it.

His banged-up helmet was still here, placed in the same spot where he had left it. Dick was trying his communicator by the extinguished fireplace, and the whole thick tension wounding itself into the air—an unsaid anticipation of something bad was about to happen—had managed to revert them back so quickly into professionalism that idly Jason wondered whether their adventure here was all a hallucination some sick fuck had made him go through.

It didn’t matter.

The corruption had stabled, halted in time to let them take a breather. Dick was still whispering emergency codes into his communicator while Jason stared into the endless void that stretched outside, eerie darkness spanning all across the skylines and suspending them in place. He combed his mind for anything useful that Talia had said—almost frantically, in fact—and all Jason could recall were theories upon theories taken from man-made books, none of which could apply here.

He cursed, static noise echoing in his eardrums.

“Jason,” Dick called, “stay away from the ledge.”

Dick was hunched over his damned garden chair with his nose swollen and his face fucked-up from Jason’s punches. He looked ridiculous, what with the added frustration in the way he glared at his communicator. “Still no use?” Jason asked, obeying Dick and moving towards the yellowed stacks of parchment on the floor. This was what Jason noticed: there were no markings on the walls, no runes drawn for maintaining a dimensional seal. Even the parchment papers in his hold were empty, save for the very few meaningless scrawls of pen that meant jackshit.

“None,” Dick answered, just as Jason ripped an empty paper in two. “We’ll probably have to wait for someone outside to let us out.”

“And who will that be, exactly?” Jason asked, and it sounded far more bitter than he hoped. His limbs were lethargic, exhaustion rotting his bones even with Lazarus purring for action.

“Damian, maybe.”

There was no anger in Dick’s voice, instead replaced by a certain kind of bone-deep weariness. He threw the communicator straight into the fireplace with sharp precision that came only along their training, and it cracked immediately upon impact.

Jason raised an eyebrow. “‘Maybe’?”

“We fought.” Dick shrugged, shoulders drawn together. “He wanted me to stop contacting Tim after he disappeared and focus on the job but—”

“You can’t do that,” Jason finished, and he tried very, very hard not to react at the mere mention of Tim’s name. He hadn’t really gotten over that particular wound, not really—the hurt he felt over being replaced still stung. Jason could still taste the dense tang of blood souring his mouth, coloring his fingers, and he could almost see the Titans Tower: painted in red by the blood of the third Robin.

(And another image, rising up unbiddenly: the one where he drove a batarang deep into Tim’s chest during their fucked-up struggle for the cowl.)

“Of course,” Dick said, gaze morose instead of heated. “He’s my brother.”

Brother. The ease of which he said the word irritated Jason. He stood up, letting the parchments in his hands fall, creating a whole mess. It wasn’t like they were going to get back to this place, anyway.

“Sure,” Jason answered, ash on his tongue. Brother. He wondered if that was the title Dick would use for him. They had gotten closer during this whole ordeal, sure. Jason had said things that he would rather die another time than to admit, and Dick had allowed him in his space just enough so their relationship managed to turn, churn, and eventually stable out into what they had currently; not quite civil but not quite a truce either. Still, would Dick call him brother?

(Traitorously, the part of him that had always longed for touch, the one that was still hyper-focused on the phantom warmth of Dick’s skin on his, wanted more than that. He had stared upon Dick with stars adorning his eyes. Had foolishly, desperately yearned for his attention during the time everyone thought Dick had died from the chemo to a point where he wanted to be Dick Grayson—to fly as Nightwing through the dark skies of New York City under a warped rendering of his hurt.)

The room was dark without the fireplace, bare specks of dust motes swaying in the air with none of the haste that fueled the situation.

You should rest, Jason wanted to say to Dick, except the ground started to shake before he was able to. The first tremble nearly took him off his balance, and rather than turning into dust, the floorboards protruded upwards: bricks and concrete twisted from their original positions and unfolding inside out. Black webs ran through paper-thin cracks, pulsing in tandem with an invincible hourglass ticking down hung somewhere above their heads.

The ground beneath him jutted up, forcing Jason to leap before it turned jagged, landing a little bit harshly near Dick.

Parts of the walls fell away as the tremor grew far more erratic, plumes of smoke rising and obscuring their vision.

Jason coughed, his eyes hot and mouth dry only in the way that staying in a crumbling building would do. Dick shifted next to him, no doubt reaching for a grapple gun from his belt, but the thing was the whole place was breaking down along each passing second, and there wouldn’t be anything to grapple to when all of the dimension had crumbled away. The thing was—

—”Fuck!” Dick cursed, and he felt weightless for a moment, the ground falling away away away—

The thing was that Jason, despite everything, wasn’t ready to die just yet.

He thought it was a curse, way back when he had a sharp batarang embedded deep into his throat and with the drop of a chemo coloring the sky in sickly green. It was a curse to be revived, he had thought, because what was the use of being christened again with life when there was nobody to remember him—his only legacy replaced by a kid who barely knew what he was doing?

And it was the thought he kept around for the longest of time, the only thing fueling his rage towards the sheer absurdity of it all. His hurt, more so; hidden within the crevices of his mind with the heaviest padded lock he could find.

But then Dick was alive, and it felt like something in his heart bloomed again with tender, aching yearning, a pure thing beneath all the venom and rot and animosity.

The thing was—falling into the void as they were right now—Jason didn't want to let him go.

So he twisted his body, aligned it with Dick’s, and held him close by the waist to slot their lips together.

It was a last minute decision, since fuck it, Jason was selfish and there were thorns curled around his lungs and squeezing, tearing oxygen away if he didn't do this one thing, except—except Dick kissed back.

Dick kissed him back.

They were falling and falling and falling and Dick reciprocated his kiss.

Jason’s body felt feverish, burning red hot as his brain finally registered Dick’s body that was pressed flush against him. Want rushed into his fingers, his veins, so hard that it made his joints tremble. Dick breathed out a small choked off noise when Jason bit his lower lip and tore blood, tapering off to almost a moan that drew all his blood south, enough to shift the gravity of the situation and let it sit on backburner for the briefest beat of his heart. What mattered the most right now was this—this: the fact that Dick had willingly pressed himself back to Jason’s touch, kiss, and it wasn’t something you would want to let go.

The void around them flashed bright then, winking once, twice, thrice, and for a moment that they parted, Jason could see the sky doused in stars—as bright as the ones that would appear during Gotham’s chance clear humid nights, devoid of any criminal activity and potential looming disasters.

It was a brief respite before Jason felt Dick pull him closer by the waist, and suddenly there was nothing but inky darkness.

*

Jason woke up with his mouth parched and his eyes burning.

A faint beeping filled his ears, rhythmic and lulling. His head throbbed, was the issue, his senses dulled and cottony as though blood didn’t properly fill his limbs in. The only thing he could register fully was the hard floor digging into his skin, and Jason grasped at that feeling until his nerves weren’t quite so numb anymore. It took several seconds—several too long, in fact—until Jason was aware enough to take in his surroundings.

He was on the ground, in the damned container.

Back where it all started.

He woke up, slowly, muscles burning something fierce as if he had just fallen from a height equal to breaking a bone clean. Maybe—perhaps he had, considering what had happened. Lethargy pulled on him just as a wave would at the shore, and it was with great strength that Jason sat up to assess the situation, to which he had immediately saw Robin kneeling next to Dick, parts of what used to be the alien tech scattered around them and smelling faintly of burnt smoke.

Robin got them out, then. The kid looked harried and even a touch bit worried in a way that Jason never saw him look like before. It would’ve been a strange sight if it weren’t for the phantom warmth insistently lingering behind on his lips, clinging to him even as he stood up to walk closer to where Dick was, his fingers aching and aching to touch except there was still someone else here and it felt like Dick’s eyes on him were too knowing, an echo of Jason’s own sentiments.

“Damian,” Dick said, voice steady despite the lack of armor on his body and the bruising on his nose, “get Alfred to dispatch the car.”

It was a clear dismissal if anyone had ever worked with Batman. Damian looked confused, but that was before he shot a glare at Jason that was so sharp, indeed this was Talia’s spawn through and through. Suspicion was a hard thing to miss when the kid didn’t let his gaze stray away from Jason in the slightest, and Jason himself wondered—distantly, in the same voice that resonated together with Lazarus’ sibilant hisses—whether Damian was thinking about the bullet hole he had left him with at this very moment.

Robin’s footsteps were hard and reluctant as he made his way out of the container, firing his grapple somewhere high, disappearing from view just to get a better signal in between Gotham’s terrible snowstorm.

“You were right,” Jason said, a starter of sorts that would’ve sounded nonchalant if it weren’t for the tightness in his throat at the reminder of the events that had gone down. “He did save us.”

Dick’s chuckle was soft. He accepted the hand Jason lent him, pulling himself up to stand next to him as they both stared at the white that blanketed the world outside like a wedding veil. “I told you so,” Dick said, and the conversation tapered off to an end. Just that.

Jason’s foot kicked at a metal screw that was a few sizes too big to be used in normal human machinery. It was as though the words stuck to his tongue had all evaporated but the few ones that were far too shameful to be said out loud such as are you seriously also into me? For all the literature that Jason consumed in his pastime, his speechlessness right now was almost like a mockery that burned his voicebox.

Well, at least it seemed that Dick was on the same boat, this recent trend of awkwardness. They were never that great at talking about emotions, admittedly, even if Dick seemed to be slightly better than him.

But a question still lingered in the air, bright like a neon sign waving them to their unaddressed kiss: what now?

Because Jason wanted to ask—do you think of me as an enemy, a brother, or a lover?

Or, maybe, all of them and nothing at all at the same time?

Jason glanced at Dick, taking in his form and the exhaustion that adorned his features, the faint dark rings beneath his eyes and the bruised swollen mess that was his nose. It was a wonder how Damian managed to keep his temper in check earlier considering the form Dick was in after being stuck in the same damn place with Jason for a few long, long hours. Miracles, he supposed. Though the detouring thought didn't do any help to fully erase the growing want that curled inside his guts. The fire that begged for release the moment it had tasted Dick’s reciprocation. The ache and the burn and the yearning—

“You could go back to the cave too,” Dick said, suddenly, his voice cutting through the thrill of snow. “Ride along with us. Let Alfred check on you and me.”

Jason hadn't stepped foot in the Batcave ever since he had donned the Batman cowl and pranced around in his mental instability and insecurities. He didn't think he would even be welcomed back, after all the things he had done and the pain he had inflicted to all the people Bruce had cared about.

Dick’s offer was an olive branch being shoved straight at his face, obvious even to maybe the most obtuse. Gift horses, or whatever. Taboo to look at it in the mouth.

Jason tried not to think of the implications that floated underneath Dick’s voice. Zeitgeist and dispositions placed aside as he took in Dick’s worth just for what it truly was lest he fumble on himself—an offer to recover, figure out the effects of the tech that had unceremoniously swallowed them up, and possibly yet another chance for Jason to face the impact of his past actions in the form of a conflicted Alfred.

But when Jason met Dick’s eyes, he found that it wasn't just that.

Dick’s eyes were bright sky blue, glinting beneath the crude portable container lights that were haphazardly placed by the men they had defeated, and his features were drawn together in a small frown that reflected his uncertainty. (Dick Grayson being wrong-footed; that was something to be dissected far more at a later time.) His face was a mirror to what it had been seconds before they fell into the abyss when the tech’s dimension collapsed around them.

It was. It was. Jason would surely know of it: the image of Dick’s face seared into his brain along the phantom touch that graced his lips.

Again, they were seriously not equipped to deal with this.

“Sure,” was what Jason said, eventually, far longer than what he would've liked.

Dick’s mouth parted at his answer, and this time Jason allowed muscle memory to guide his wrung out body forward, just enough to press a small fleeting peck to Dick’s lips. Damian was probably somewhere out there keeping an eye on Jason, but he didn’t care enough to stop.

“Sure,” Jason repeated again, pulling away, and for once he didn't dread the whirlwind of emotions he would have to face sometime in the future the further they kept this up. It felt right. This felt right. Neither of them would probably live out a happy ending devoid of any hell, but that was made their fucked-up relationship special, dead fathers and brothers notwithstanding.

The small smile on Dick’s face was hesitant, bemused, except it was rawfully honest.

“Okay,” Dick answered, and that was all there was to it.

They could figure it out.