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“I really like your eyes, Jay.”
Jason looks up from his book to you, halfway across the library table with a grin splitting your cheeks, looking like the image of adoring from over a book of your own. It makes his heart wiggle a little in a not-so-elegant way, but it makes him smile sheepishly nonetheless.
“Yeah?” He asks, a little unsure, a little nervous, but you keep grinning, deeper now, and he finds his worries assuaged. Not the way his stomach flutters, though. No, that one gets… well he’d say “worse”, but it’s not unpleasant in the first place.
“The prettiest,” you whisper, almost conspiratorially. Like you’re telling him your biggest secret and not just that you think his eyes are pretty. “My mom thinks so too.”
“Well… thank you,” he starts, a little uncool but sincere as he wills the warmth tipping his ears red away. You don’t need the boost to your ego— you’d just tease him more for it. “And your mom too, for that and the nice shirt she gave me last time I was over.”
You wave a hand dismissively, propping up your head by the cheek, and he thinks the way you look when you lazily read is going to be a favourite feature in his daydreams. “You already thanked her like 5 times Jay, she’ll scold you at this point if she hears you. Just come to dinner tonight or something, she’s been asking when you’re coming over next.”
Home was scary; unstable. He didn’t go back because he liked it, he went back because if something happened to his mom and he wasn’t there… he wouldn’t forgive himself. Even if it wasn’t fair, even if it wasn’t his fault. He still would’ve blamed himself.
It made him all the more teary when your mom insisted on having him stay over and suddenly he’s brushing his teeth right beside you in not-so-ragged hand-me-downs. Suddenly he’s having a full dinner and your entire family’s just told him to just eat however much he wanted, and your mom made him take a tupperware she would never see again home with leftovers that taste like love.
Your eyes soften, as if you just know when he’s spiralling, and you reach over to take his hand in yours by the knuckles; thumb tracing over the back of it.
“It’s ok if tonight’s not the night, Jay,” you say lowly, much like how he’s seen you talk a stray cat out of some alley corner, and it makes his lips quirk up into a smile. He hadn’t even noticed them pulling into a frown in the first place, but you must’ve the moment they fell. “If you wanna go take care of your mom—“
“I can come,” Jason decides. A little wobbly, but firm, for the most part. Your eyes widen a little, but so does your grin, and his heart does the little flips like he’s seen Robin do on TV. “I— uhm, have to thank your ma for the shirt, anyways.”
And you bark a laugh that has the librarian shushing you, and he forgets about the weight of a million worries just by the sound of it. Already hungry at the thought of having your mom’s cooking at the same dinner table by you.
You met his mom once on one of her more lucid days. Knocking at his door with a cheerful greeting like a little scout, and he’d called back that he’d get to the door once he was done with the dishes in the sink. His mom had been having a good day, that day. As good as she could have them anyways with withdrawal quickly setting in, but he didn’t expect her to be the one getting the door and greeting you in.
He feels… stressed, immediately, at the thought, because a part of him never even wanted you to know where he lived much less see the inside of it. But your family’s a weird kind of stubborn and never lets him walk home alone when it’s dark, so eventually he’d caved after long enough of just slipping away from you guys into some alley nearby his house and taking a scolding the next time he saw you all. It feels embarrassing, because he doesn’t know if you’d see him as less for it; treat him less for it. For the mess or the way everything’s breaking or broken; for the way his dad isn’t around.
But he hears his mom laughing in the living room for the first time in so long, and suddenly he isn’t… all too worried. He’s letting the last of the dishes dry on the old dish rack by the sink, the one barely a leg away from crumpling over, and makes his way to the doorway separating the tiny living room from the rest of the house. You’re with his mom, laughing and grinning like you always do, like nothing’s wrong. Or maybe like you don’t think of him and his mom any less for the way they live, and he doesn’t know how to feel about either, but you’re charging on in the conversation that he realises a little too late is about him and his embarrassing stories.
“—And then Jay’s fumbling over the cup looking like he’s about to cry—“
“Hey!” he calls out, red in the face and embarrassed, and you simply grin at him with all the mischief in the world.
“What, Jay? That one was funny, you know. You should’ve heard the one your mom told me just now— I didn’t know you—“
And all of a sudden he’s launching from the doorway to sit himself between you like that’ll save him from more embarrassment, red in the face and feeling so distinctly childishly warm in a way he always wants but never knows how to handle. It feels stupid, it feels strange. To feel safe in this house with his mom there, but then she wraps her arms around his middle, lips to his hair, and he has to fight back tears. Because when he looks up at her she’s smiling at him with exhaustion sitting under her eyes and the love shining in them, unparalleled.
You make fun of him for it, and he picks up an old throw pillow to hit you point blank in the face. Catherine’s cooing already, hand reaching out to stop him from grabbing another, but she doesn’t reprimand him because it makes you laugh.
“Mrs. Todd, he hit me,” you whine, jokingly. Jason glares at you for it from where he’s all but tucked into his mom’s side.
The couch is small, and already an adult and two kids fill it out enough that Jason’s half buried into his mom to fit, but neither of them mind. She’s softly carding his hair, smiling into it, like she’s got all the love and time in the world, and if you weren’t you he would have told you to ‘go away’. But he doesn’t, and he doesn’t try to look too deep into that right now.
“I don’t know where he got it from,” his mom hums, easy like breathing, “He was always such a sweet baby— he cried the first time he stepped on a dandelion when we took him to the park.”
“Mom,” Jason tries to say warningly, but she keeps going, pinching lightly at his cheek like she can’t help herself.
“Wouldn’t stop until I told him dandelions were strong flowers; that they’d come back twice as plenty next spring.”
And Jason should be embarrassed— and he is, he very much is— but the way your eyes soften, and the way his mom’s voice fills out the air… it makes him feel a little more cared for than he has in a while. To know that somewhere in that haze his mom remembers his childhood more than she might remember other things most days. And suddenly it’s a really really good day, not just for his mom, but Jason, too.
None of you mention anything about it when he starts to tear up, but his mom wipes his tears away with a gentle thumb, careful of her bitten nails, and you shuffle a little closer. And it’s like the poets say, in all their sad little poems— stuff like this makes the world feel less weary. Makes it feel more worth it to live.
“It’s probably cause of all those books he’s been reading, Mrs. Todd,” you mumble after a minute, and immediately he’s giggling, faking exasperation with a groan.
It’s safe to say, the first and last time you meet Catherine Todd, she learns to love you in the same way your mom loves Jason, because he doesn’t even get the chance to shoo you away before she’s inviting you to come back soon when he tries.
You flash them a grin that’s all too brilliant, and it makes his heart twist in something soft; makes him want to hit you for it because he can also tell you’ll tease him later. He does the latter, much to his mom’s dismay, but you laugh regardless.
“I’ll try not to step on any dandelions on the way, for ya,” you hum, eyes squinting in something less of a delighted crinkle and more of a teasing close. He huffs at you for it, but having this between all of you? It feels like dandelions in his heart. Un-stompable.
It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong, because when have things ever stayed right in Jason’s life?
To describe the time between losing his mom and meeting Batman is… a sore one. One marked by not only his grief for his mother, but then also the myriad of emotions (of guilt and shame and the bad kind of embarrassment) that came with accepting help from you and your family. All of a sudden leftovers tasted like pity, and hand-me-downs meant life or death in Jason’s little scale of shame, and he… avoided you all, more than he should have.
Still showed, still accepted help at his lowest, but disappeared into crime ridden alleys and sketchy roads when he just couldn’t take the guilt anymore. Because you all weren’t rich, no. Just generous, just kind. Just a family who views him like another son, even if the thought of you viewing him like a brother makes him feel sickly, but he doesn’t let himself dig into that. Not yet.
Everything changes when he meets the Bat.
When he gets picked up by Batman and adopted by billionaire Bruce Wayne the tides turn, and some part of Jason— the kid who never felt like his words of gratitude were enough— felt like this was an opportunity. Both being Robin and Bruce’s ward, to pay you all back.
Your siblings get into the colleges they wanted to, full ride scholarships with allowance, and your parents get weird promotions and raises at work. You purse your lips at Jason the next time you see him afterwards, because he’d been Bruce’s ward for all of a year at this point before all these “mysterious” good things started happening for your family.
“Mom would have just been happy with you showing up for dinner more, you know?” You sigh at him, not all that mad at the end of the day.
“Does her new job mean she’s too busy to host?” he asks, teasingly, stepping awfully close. He hasn’t tried to get too close in… a while, and none of you pushed for it, even if eventually your mom got a few comforting hugs in when the grief got too heavy.
“No,” you whisper simply, stepping closer in return, your hand brushing along his. “Just means she’ll be trying those obnoxiously long recipes more often and have us play guinea pigs.”
And there’s a distinct taste of grief, like a bruise in his soul that feels more poignant here of all places, on the porch by the beach tucked away behind a bridge, where you’d agreed to meet him. The tension tipping on the edge of a romance like in one of the comics he skimmed through (he’s more of a lit. guy). Something that feels like promise, and hesitance, and fear. Like being back on the couch at home with his mom and you; like the wind blowing his hair is her hand carding through it.
And it’s enough to make every breath here important, because being in love with you and admitting it to himself feels like a really really good thing.
“Think she’d want another test rat there?” He asks, bumping his forehead against yours in a way that makes you snort a laugh and close your eyes at the light impact.
“Yeah, she would. ‘Specially if it’s you,” you hum, delighted and smooth. Reaching a hand over to his heart like you know it hurts with the weight of everything. “Your head is really tough, by the way—“
He kisses you to shut you up, and you laugh into it, before kissing back, and it tastes like everything good in life. Like the scarf he still has from you, the old t-shirts still in his closet at the manor, and the dandelions you both step around on your way to your house.
And you tell him, not for the first time, “Your eyes are really pretty, Jay.” Followed by, “We should keep both our eyes open when we kiss so I can stare into them.”
He pinches your side lightly for that one, and he almost considers it for the beautiful way you laugh.
Jason works hard, as both a new student at Gotham Academy and as the new Robin. Second ward, only two. This was when Bruce was kinder, sillier, so it was easy to adjust to moving into the manor. Or as easy as it possibly could be for a kid like Jason, who was raised in a house the size of about like the kitchen. It meant that bringing you over as much as humanly possible was imperative to Jason.
Because watching you kick off your shoes and flop onto his bed like you’ve done it a hundred times before makes it feel… lived in. Yours, in a way his childhood home never really was his. Sinking into the cushions with a deep sigh, like your bones were made of butter and the bed was a nice, warm, cozy pan.
“If it’s too much for you, we can switch,” you hummed, muffled by way of the pillow you’d pulled to your chin.
He huffs, raising a brow as he slides onto the bed and over you, weighing you down in a way that makes you giggle; your arms curling around under his arms and pulling him up. Settling there together like he’s your personal weighted blanket, and that he lives to hear you laugh the way you do. Light, loving. Enough to make his heart flip and somersault off a rooftop.
He notices you’re careful not to press too hard with all the bruises he’s been picking up lately. All the bruises he won’t explain to you. That you won’t pry about not because you don’t care.
“As if you’d actually make that trade with me.” Neither of you would make any trades, really. Even if he would adjust easier to being in your house instead of the manor— wouldn’t make it home without you.
“I would,” you argue lightly, but there’s no bite at all.
“You’d sacrifice your mom’s cooking for this?” He asks tapping at the bed right by your hip, before he’s pulling your hand from his back to intertwine with his.
“Alfred cooks well enough to substitute— plus, no brothers to barge into your room at random hours of the day.” He has a feeling you mean the latter part a lot more than the former, because you spent a good while complimenting the food in the middle of eating it just today.
“I have one,” Jason corrects, pressing his lips to your cheek in all the way only lovesick teens seem to love. Fully, clumsily; like he’s not afraid to mess up as long as he gets to try. You grin at him for it, squeeze his hand tight and grit your teeth in cuteness aggression.
“Well worth the trade,” you murmur, and he rolls his eyes at you as you continue, “It’d be my first time having an actually pretty brother.”
And when he pulls back just enough to deadpan you, your eyes twinkle in mischievous delight, and he falls right back down to smother your giggling face in kisses. Just until you concede that you find him the prettiest of every pair of eyes you’ve seen.
“Nobody’s even close to beating you for that spot in my heart,” you sigh at him, aiming for all the cheese you can muster in it. Somehow, Jason just falls in love with you more even when you’re cringing at yourself.
“Will you ever tell me what’s going on with you, Jay?”
You and Jason don’t fight often, not the real kind, with biting words and hurt feelings, but it’s not like it never happens. He expected this one to happen a lot sooner, actually. From the moment he’d taken on the mantle of Robin and vowed to himself that he’d keep you out of it as best he could, but hell, he underestimated your patience.
It came quietly, the doubt, flickers of it marring his favourite smile whenever he had to call a date short or had to cancel entirely. You pried gently, but he just… couldn’t risk you like he could anything else. He couldn’t risk your life when he knew he was already risking his, because as much as being Robin was magic, it was risk. Bruce had made sure he knew this coming into the mantle, had said it over and over during training. That being Robin was dangerous, and that anyone knowing it was a risk.
But Jason wants to tell you all about it, because your very presence in his life follows him even off-world. Even knee deep in some villain’s new lair. A spark of persistence that keeps him alive, the one person he can never quite wait to just come back home to. But he can’t risk your life like that. He sees a lot more of the city’s cracks as Robin now than he did living in them, and he knows the deprivation of the damned. Who’s to say someone won’t connect the dots once he tells you, and you come up as the next murder case he and Bruce have to investigate? It’d kill him to lose you. So he doesn’t risk it.
Even now, as you’ve met up to resolve the fight, at the same tucked away corner of Gotham you’d first kissed at, he doesn’t risk it, and you don’t pry. You ask, you press your hand gently against his until it opens up; slide your fingers in between the spaces of his. You stay.
“As soon as I’m sure I can keep you safe even after I tell you,” Jason promises, bumping his forehead against yours. The chill of the sea breeze, awful with pollution, barely distracting him from the way your eyes crinkle in worry. You say nothing, and feel everything too big to hold.
And when Jason dies— when the clock is ticking and he’s given up … he thinks of you. Loud explosions and the heat of death— and he thinks of kissing you while you’re laughing.
He never does get around to telling you.
There’s a lot of things Jason loses in the blast and in his prompt revival. A lot of things that are hazy when he tries to remember them at first that clear up slowly as he starts finding his way back to Gotham. No longer the same boy made of magic, or the same guy you love. Not with the war under his skin and the anger rolling his blood into a boil until it hurts and hurts and… sometimes, in the thick of it, he wonders if he should have died there in that explosion for good.
Because when he finally makes his way to your house for the first time in years, all but a ghost peering through the corner of your window, he finds someone who’s barely changed from being the person he loves. Who has a picture of him by the vanity, and more of them pinned into the wall. Cared for plushies and memories of him strewn about, and he gawks like a stranger behind his helmet. Stares at all the love you still have for him, and the new dark blue walls of your room, and the way everything that could possibly be changed has been changed into something reminiscent of him.
But he doesn’t reach out. It kills him not to, just as much as he thinks it might be killing you for him to be dead, but he… can’t . Not when the man he looks at in the mirror is twice the size and height of the boy you once loved; not when he made you live in mourning just to come back screwed up and scarred and with eyes he can’t recognise. Silver, light, and barely blue to the dark yet hopeful deep blue of most of his childhood.
So no, he can’t, no matter what Dick might say about moving on from “everything that happened” and making a life for himself. Because that was robbed from him in explosions and warehouses and by a laughing green-haired monster Batman never hated enough to rightfully put down. No matter the fact that this life isn’t going to change, that this one isn’t going to get better. No matter the fact that Jason has lost and will lose again to this damned city because no one wants to do all the dirty work to fix it— so no. He can’t just “move on”.
He can’t come crawling back to you when there’s so much blood to his undead name.
But he didn’t… didn’t think you’d move on so damn quickly. Even after all these years he was hoping the unfair hope that you’d wait for him to come back. Even if you didn’t know he could, or much less, that he was back already. And he doesn’t— didn’t think any of the men he’s seen pursue you about had any chance, with the way you ignored them and rebuffed them but then…
“What was he like?” One of them asks— one of them, with hair more brown, more soft and wavy, and eyes just as dark a blue as his had been before. He doesn’t see the face you make to the question from where he’s hidden by some low roof, listening in. Doesn’t see, but can feel the grief rolling off of you in waves because this one looks exactly like Jason did when he was younger, if maybe he had grown up right.
“I, Who— Jason?” You ask, and even from afar he can pick up the wobble in your voice, the way tears line your throat and the way this— this copy of him softens to nod.
And he knows this one, of all the ones before, will be his downfall. Because he is everything Jason never got to be. He watches you stutter and stop and tell this one about Jason— about the one you loved and not the one stalking you in the shadows— and grieve him and all he feels is the bitter swellings of jealousy and hatred. At you, at this soft haired copy of him, at what he’s long lost, too afraid to reach out for.
Dick’s become an annoyingly good brother in the time since Jason’s died and come back to this godawful city— preppy quotes and cheery attitude to boot, when Jason could distinctly remember him being the most barely-tempered man alive. It’s funny then, to be… this, with Dick. To be angry and changed and irreversible. To be a cancer to your own existence. To have switched so fully with the one man who never seemed to know just how to not be so angry.
You’d have laughed about it, if you’d known, but your laugh to Jason now is like a bluebell ringing in his head; a myth, a far-off legend. Like a dark and hopeful blue.
He grits his teeth, his fists tight around the grip of the pistols in his hands, and Dick (observant, trained to be) tilts ever so slightly his way.
“Not to be nosey—“
“Shut up,” Jason growls low, jamming the guns he’d been gripping quickly back into the holsters strapped at the waist of his pants. Cargo pants, once according to you being “the most dad jeans in existence”. And he never told you, but that made him daydream of you and a kid sometime in the future with all the stability his parents never gave him. With all the stability yours gave him. If he’d been more willing for introspection he’d go to therapy after the 5th pair he bought.
“Right,” Dick cringes, breathing in deeply through the skin of his teeth and rolling back on the balls of his feet.
Jason elects to ignore him. Until at least the tension gets thick enough that Jason feels like this stake out is gonna start having more shooting than was planned. Batman would have a field day with that, and again, the little ghost he has of you in his head laughs. Like bluebells and myths, and Jason wills his breath, his body, not to give away anything.
Neither of them say a word, but at the end of it, Dick gives him a look that’s all too close to pity, and he refuses to contact any of them for a month.
“…Do you think he knows about him?” Dick asks, staring holes into the back of Barbara’s chair in the Watchtower. Not joking; achingly quiet.
They’re both in civvies, because Dick’s off duty and Barbara takes whatever comforts she can up here in the halo of Gotham’s unforgiving streetviews.
When she turns around, her gaze is neutral, passive, and yet bitingly aware. Blue eyes coldly calculative and exhausted with years spent cleaning up the rot of the city that won’t crawl fully back. The all seeing eye of Gotham in the body of a woman who had lost far, far too much to it.
“Probably longer than we knew,” she tells him softly, but it hits just as hard. “They were the first thing he looked for.”
Jason doesn’t mean to seek you out, but what he says he wants and what he actually wants are two different things and apparently his entire being cannot listen to himself… because he’s watching you wait for a bus in the low lamplight on a quiet street, and he can’t help the way his heart weeps in relief at just the sight of you. Dressed up all pretty in dark blues and melancholic blacks, staring out into the street like you’re posing for a candid. Like you’re about to go on a date with someone who can’t be him anymore and he’s hurting himself thinking of when it was.
When he’d loop his fingers through yours as you took nighttime trips to get chilidogs, your grin washed in broken lamplights as you skipped along gross sidewalks, leaning into him. Skipping along the beaches of Gotham, scrunching your nose at the smell and pollution, and day dreaming about the day you both could skip town and visit that dark sky reserve. And Jason— oh, he’d follow you to Hell if you said you wanted to see it. Would trip his way following you straight into the Mariana Trench if you got curious enough to dive. And yet you never let him take you. Not until you both finished school and got jobs “good enough to skip town for” and—
And god does he want to go back. His hands are shaking as he holds himself closer to the shadow of the rooftops, breath stuttering wet. He wants to go back, however far back— doesn’t matter. As long as you’re there to hold him by the hand and drag him home. Where your mom’s waiting and your siblings cheer when they see him. Where dinner is a loud but welcoming affair and your family’s hand-me-downs are still his favourite things in the world because they’re all pieces of you and the people who made you who you are.
The bus pulls to the stop just as he thinks of the warmth of it, and when you step on and the bus drives away, he feels cold like a corpse.
Jacob O’Brien, Dick thinks, looks like a man who’d radiate warmth even as a corpse. There’s something to his eyes that twist in just enough softness for compassion and not pity; something in the way he talks to you that feels like understanding instead of impatience. And Dick wants to hate him for it, for Jason. Even if you don’t know Jason’s alive and Jason wouldn’t want anyone telling you that.
Jacob’s holding his hand out to shake Dick’s at some smarmy brunch place in the busy, pretty part of the city closer to the mainland, and Dick just can’t hate him. Not when his eyes are dark blue and he just fucking exudes nerdiness. And not even in the way Tim does, but just— he’s dressed like a fancy train coach and he looks so pleasant that hating him becomes so easy just because it’s so hard. Dick doesn’t have to think too hard on why you fell for this one, when he’d almost been entirely sure you would never fall for anyone after Jason.
“Are you always dressed funny?” He slips out, and the look you give him is scathing and scolding, even as Jacob laughs. Light and easy, like water off a duck’s back or whatever.
“Only when I want to leave a lasting impression,” Jacob admits, quiet but sincere, smile tipping into something understanding and Dick suddenly feels exposed. Like he came here underdressed to Gotham’s preppy uni kids’ brunch spot of the month. “And… I’ve heard you’re very important to my…”
Jacob turns to you, achingly soft and tender as he says your name, and Dick watches the way your frustration at him fizzles out in a second flat into something sheepishly restrained. Like tucked lips and peeking joy. And, oh. Dick finally gets it. He gets it just as much as he knows it’d break Jason’s heart.
“…And— you’re Jason’s brother,” Jacob says, turning back to smile at Dick like he hadn’t winded him with that. A part of him flares up, ready to offend, but the way Jacob says it, with all the tenderness he has for you… Dick can’t find it in him to be angry and to be right.
“…Yeah. I am— was.” And he wants to hate Jacob so bad for the way he makes Dick feel comforted. You’re in good, loving hands, and Dick wants to hate it.
When Jason and you had been younger, before losing Catherine, before all the secrets that kept him up and away, he’d weasel you away to one of the few parks he knew rotted in Gotham to practice some back-alley version of ballroom dancing, led by a kid who’d only known how to do it from period piece books that described it. He’d spin you as many times as you would let him, and he never told you why then, but it was because the way you laughed as you spun made his world narrow to the sound of you. Made the world golden, in the way the world is when you’ve got the best of it in your arms under yellow streetlamps.
You’re not sure why you’ve come back now.
But Jason has no grave— has no private memorial you’re aware of, and the manor feels too impersonal. The Todds’ old home was destroyed years ago, and your house is too full of your desperation to mourn. So you swallow the bile crawling up your throat and speak through the shake in your voice.
“He’s gonna propose to me, Jay,” you tell the wind, and the words are damning to taste. The breeze picks up from behind you, and your whole world shakes. “He’s—“
The words stick in the cavity of your chest like a confession, like a dirty secret that shouldn’t feel gross. Like Jason’s haunting you somehow.
“I wish it was you.”
You’re crying before you know it, trembling in the wind as the words are swallowed by the sea. For a second, it almost feels like someone hears you, that maybe Jason’s ghost had found you here, because for a second you don’t feel alone. You feel like you’re back to dancing under streetlights with the world’s sweetest boy. Like he never really left you. When you look back up though… nobody’s there to see.
Dick, Bruce, and Alfred attend your wedding in earnest the following year, haunted by a ghost in physical form. You never see him, but Jason watches you for every second of that day and he can’t breathe.
Jacob laughs with your family, greets Dick, Bruce, and Alfred like old friends, and beams at you like a man in love, and Jason feels ill. Like he could retch at the way tears are streaming down Jacob’s copycat face at the sight of you, but god, how could he blame him? How could he be anything but green with envy? How could he be anything but in love with you?
All the while, you look like a streetlight dream, washed in gold. Crying just as much as your now husband, and smiling just as wide.
He catches you, in the quiet. Just once. Slipping out to the terrace to stare up at the moon. Your expression screws into something pensive, something soft and vulnerable, and Jason wants to reach out. Because the last time he’d seen that look on your face was when he promised to tell you his secret.
And he thinks about the very first time he ever realised he loved you; of a library that’s more rundown now than it was, of forever. Because you’re dressed for a wedding that should have been with him.
You’re back inside before he can make a decision, but you whisper your gratitude to the open air.
Gotham rain sprinkles in like a morning kiss, the chill creeping along the streets. It’ll be warmer by the time you get out of the grocery, you think idly as the crossing light turns white. Jacob’s already off to work as the assistant of one of the foremost art conservators in the whole state, and you couldn’t be more proud— or worried about him. Yesterday when he’d come home after all, he’d anguished like a shaking deer about something called polyurethane and about how it was “the worst varnish in the world for paintings.” It made you smile to think of him and the way he all but curled into you at bed. The way he took your hands in his like it soothed him just as much as it did you to feel the cool metal of your rings slide against each other.
You don’t know what you’d do without him, really. Your silly husband and his silly antics, but… you wouldn’t want to lose him for the world. You don’t think you could survive a loss like that again after Jason.
Your foot catches on the curb at the thought of him— a sudden, hurtful thing like his name alone can snag you in place. His smile flashing in your mind brighter and louder and blurrier than every other memory you have. Because Jason was golden, to you. The spray of sunshine long after rain, the beat of golden hour in the late afternoon. Losing him felt like— feels like plunging into ice cold water. It’s all you can to weather the storm of it to hold yourself up on the nearby lamppost.
“You okay?” someone asks gruffly behind you, and you whip around to face them.
It’s not that it’s surprising someone is asking— you’d assume someone would ask if only to make sure you weren’t struck with joker gas or something, but this person seems more worried about you than any possible danger to be wary of. Large, broad-shouldered… built like a memory you can’t name. You don’t know why you know he’s worried about you, and you don’t know why he’s nostalgic, but something long asleep in your heart finds a beat.
“Uh, yes— yes, I’m fine. Just…” You look up at this man into his icy blue eyes, and something about the colour of them on that face feels wrong. They’re the wrong kind of blue. “…Caught up in my thoughts.”
Somewhere in your mind your mom’s voice— sharp and sincere all at once— reminds you it’s rude to stare but you can’t help it with this one. He doesn’t… feel right, in the way you might look at something and expect more familiarity, but who even is this person? The last person you know who’s built like a brick shithouse is Bruce, but this guy’s way beyond even his level.
“Do I— Have we met before?” You ask him, almost scratching your head in confusion at the scattered way your mind’s running, and his face shifts into something even more unreadable. Somehow, you don’t feel one bit scared. In fact, you’re gaping at him in confusion a little, and you snap your mouth shut when you realise it. The stranger catches it and smiles, so tiny, so wrong and all at once so right. When he presses his hand, specifically the space between his thumb and index, to his mouth, your brows furrow further.
It’s something Jason used to do when he wasn’t supposed to be smiling at something. He’d hide it by pulling his hand up to his face exactly like that, grinning into his own skin, and you’d jokingly scold him. Because most of the time he’d be laughing at you and something stupid you did or said. But his eyes aren’t Jason’s.
“Hard to forget a guy like me, I think,” he says in lieu of a proper response, and he gives up hiding the way he’s smiling. Small, soft, private. And— here’s the weird part: most things now that remind you of Jason first remind you of Jacob. A survival instinct, maybe, because any reminder of Jason is a painful one, and for years you couldn’t remember Jason without feeling miserable without him. But right now this guy is reminding you of Jason and it doesn’t hurt at all; because if Jason had been built like a brick shithouse like this man he’d say the same damn thing with a wider smirk.
“Well—“ you stammer, suddenly sheepish but strangely pleased, “—I don’t think you were born this swole. When’d you get buff?”
Hey, you tell yourself, immediately feeling embarrassed at the fact that was the first question out your mouth. That wasn’t smart.
At least big guy didn’t take offense to it; if anything, he ducks his head to hide his face further from you under his cap and something tells you the shake of his shoulders is laughter and not tears. This feels like some kind of public humiliation kind of punishment, like Jason laughing at something stupid you said as you scramble to either correct yourself or— or well—
“I’m serious,” you double down. Grinning like you’re not serious at all, “Did you come out the womb bricked or what’s happening?”
“Do not use that word here,” he laughs, and something about it is awfully low in the same way Jason’s was. Deeper, but still just as secretive as when he used to run about the alleys of Gotham. He never really did learn to laugh all that loud when he had to be sneaky. “You do not know what that means in modern context.”
“You do not know what that means in modern context,” you mock, deepening your voice to an exaggerated extent. You’re on autopilot but you’re not; working on bones of personality that haven’t lived since Jason did, rusted with grief and bubbling with nostalgia.
Stranger just grins like he knows this, like he’s aware of the significance of it and the way it makes you feel awful and good all at once. When he looks up with those icy blue eyes, the wrongness feels clearer, the difference more distinct. You think of Jacob’s dark blue eyes, like Jason’s, and you breathe. The grief in your bones settles back in with familiarity, and a strange guilt follows soon after.
“Sorry I—“ you pause, not exactly sure what to say when you’re not exactly sure what lead to this. Old love yawns to settle your nerves like Jason would have by grabbing your hand to lead you through the street when you’re nervous. You don’t notice the stranger’s hand twitch. “I didn’t mean to take up much of your time. You just… reminded me of someone.”
Again, a flash of something unreadable crosses his face that churns your stomach. Something there and gone again so quick you wonder if it ever showed up at all. Vulnerable like love and heavy like grief. Marred by something you can’t understand. The stranger mutters something to himself with a humourless half-scoff, half-laugh and nods once, then turns to leave.
You don’t call after him, but you stare, confused, down the street for him
until he somehow disappears in a crowd. Icy blue eyes haunt you for the rest of the day, the week, and old habits seem to keep popping up until they settle back down.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” Jacob chirps when he greets you later, smelling of conservation-grade varnish and solvents. You feel inclined to agree.
“I got the groceries done,” is all you tell him, watching his soft grin widen, and feeling your heart flutter wholly alive. Like you’ve found a piece of yourself you lost.
That week, you bring dandelions to the park you and Jason frequented, and tell him
it was nice to think of him again without hurting. You like to imagine a ghost version of him siting beside you on the rusted swing-set, smiling like he always seemed to be when you were talking; like you’d seen in candids people took of you two that you spent years ignoring.
“Jacob went through them with me, y’know,” you add softly, kicking up the dirt under your feet. This park had long been stripped of all its gravel years ago, but you kick at the tough dirt anyways. You imagine Jason grinning, because you imagine he’d like Jacob. “He thought… He thought you’d be happy to know I thought of you again. For the first time in forever without falling into some… depressive episode.”
Jason says nothing; neither his grave nor the image of him conjured up in your head, but he’s smiling. It’s enough to make your heart bubble.
Nobody asks Jason about you now, as much as possible. He’s killed that conversation enough no one wants to try, but if anyone did ask him now if he thought of reaching out to you, he’d tell them no. He can anguish over it in private, but when he sees you walking down the street with Jacob, laughing so hard you crumple over, he thinks about peace. Thinks that maybe he’s found it with you far apart from you, and that the best thing he can do for you both is stay out of your life, forever.
There are dandelions splitting the concrete when he turns away from you and Jacob, and while his heart twists a little in that numb burn… he doesn’t step over them. He barely feels them crushed under his shoe.