Work Text:
He’s walking back down the aisle of gravestones when he sees it. Sees him, really, but sue him — at that time he hadn’t really known what he’d actually seen, much less worked out whether it was a person or something else.
Anyway, he still stops, fingers clenching around nothing where there had been a scraggly daisy moments prior. He’d left the scraggly daisy at the gravestone with his name on it. Dick says it’s morbid, how he visits his old grave occasionally like it’s some nostalgic old childhood home, like he isn’t using the most disturbing simile ever (according to Bruce) or the funniest, darkest humor out there in the died-and-got-better department — Jason would know. Because he died. He’s supposed to be the best at the died-and-got-better jokes. He’s the head of that department.
Words are hard these days. Poetry is even harder. But he thinks whatever he’s doing, it probably counts as moving on. The way everyone writes about it, there are tears and heavy stones being put down and sore backs to be cracked, but he doesn’t feel anything of that sort. His therapist says it’s because the change is gradual, whatever, not that it matters.
He smiles at least twice a day now. That has to count for something.
He stops where he’s standing because there’s a kid hunched over one of the smaller gravestones, the older one with chipped rock and fading carvings, shuffling a deck of poker cards clumsily with one hand.
It’s a nice, windy day in Gotham, one where the sky isn’t raining hellish hailstones or, like, turning blood red to serve as the backdrop of some up-and-coming villain’s newest ploy. The ground isn’t too muddy, either. The grass is growing out pretty well - Ivy would be more than pleased - and, while the colors around him could always be livened up a bit, he reckons the dullness of the cemetery is just part of the charm. His own cheeks must be pink with windburn; his fingers sure are. He doesn’t know when they became stiff, but they are now, so he guesses he just has to live with that.
It’s always cold, even with the thick jacket Alfred had personally seen getting over his shoulders before he’d left. No one talked back to Alfred about things like this. His word was sacred.
So it’s kind of concerning when the kid is dressed only in what looks like a thin, black coat (though to be completely fair it’s oversized enough to reach over his fingers and past his knees), a rumpled pair of brown pants and — and no shoes. Like a maniac. Jason has to close his eyes for ten counts and open them to make sure he hasn’t caught a bug that makes him hallucinate people’s bare feet. No, the kid’s footing about in cold Gotham weather. In a graveyard, in cold Gotham weather. He should sue this guy’s parents.
It’s made better, at least, by the thick, voluminous scarf that’s absolutely swamping the kid’s neck and shoulders, a thing in the brightest shade of red Jason has ever had the misfortune to set his eyes upon. Together, the ensemble looks like it would fit right into a lost-and-found box.
And the kid’s pretty pale. His knuckles look raw and painfully bony, especially when he flexes them reaching for the next card in his lap, creature-like.
Jason doesn’t know what possesses him — intruige, maybe, concern, maybe, demon, maybe — but his feet turn ninety degrees. He takes one step, and then another, and another. The leaves crunch below his boots and he’s speeding up, passing the gravestones in a series and not in a column now - forward, forward, and then he comes to a stop right at as a vinyl card printed with the picture of a jester comes fluttering onto the ground in front of his boots.
The small, thin hand that reaches out for it stills, and Jason watches as pale blue eyes raise themselves up to meet his own, startled and strangely vacant.
He looks smaller up close. Face framed by wispy black strands of hair that seem to shiver individually in the Gotham morning wind. It makes the kid look sorta flighty, his sharp eyes and thin mouth giving him the appearance of a bird at the edge of a branch. Though there’s not a single cut or wound on him — Jason gives him a subtle once-over, which really doesn’t say much, because most of the kid’s body is hidden by the thin clothes he’s got on — besides the scarf. That thing looks like a giant noodle wrapped around his shoulders
Still, this is a kid sitting criss-cross applesauce against a weathered old tombstone, fifty-two Blackjack cards sprawled across his lap like confetti, and who’s looking up at Jason like he’s about to rob him at gunpoint.
None of these facts make sense in his mind.
“Hey,” Jason says, finally. His voice is rough and rings crystal clear through the silence of the cemetery, just barely interrupted by the humming of whatever cicada thinks it has a chance of mating in this city. The grass continues to rustle as they’re teased by the prickling breeze.
The kid stares at him.
“You got a place to stay?”
When Jason comes back next week Tim is there, still in his hilariously over-large red noodle scarf, still dropping cards through his twitching fingers as he sits hunchbacked against the old weathered gravestone that dwarfs him like a giant.
The kid looks less like he’s about to leg it at any given moment when Jason approaches, which is a very big win, in his opinion - even if said kid jerks his head up in obvious alarm at the sound of Jason’s very considerably gentle footsteps. Oh well, he tried. Jason stops just a distance away from the guy and the tombstone he’s leaning against. Tim stops shuffling his cards around like a compulsive gambler. Both of them stare at each other.
A bird sings a twiddling tune from afar.
“You keep coming back,” Tim says. His voice is dead soft, as tiny as the front paw of a mouse.
“Yeah,” Jason shrugs. He’s wearing Dick’s Gotham U sweater today, and they don’t chafe his shoulders about as much as his old jacket does. “That’s how visiting works.”
“Who’re you visiting?”
You, is what Jason would’ve said, if he had less braincells and more emotion at the moment. But this is just the third time he’s met the kid, and he knows what he means by you keep coming back. The kid’s asking what he’s coming here for, what he’s been coming for, long before he first met Tim.
There are multiple ways he could go about answering this. As the head of the Dead Jokes Department, Jason has put considerable effort into formulating various answers to the question of his death. I went out to go stretch a lil bit and came back to find my mortal shell six foot in stinking Gotham soil is his highest contender, closely followed by your mom. Some are tailored for Bruce, who still pinches like Jason stuck a lemon in his mouth whenever he dishes out his newest Hey I Died joke; some are tailored for Dick, who can take it a little better; and some for Alfred, who always outdoes him some way or another. The rest are tailored for the general public. Whatever general public he gets to meet, that is. He misses the Titans.
Tim does not fit in any of these categories. Also, there’s a kind of weariness in his bones that comes from lying awake in bed all night instead of sleeping like a reasonable person.
So he says, simply, “me.”
It’s a good call. The kid scrunches up his face, narrowing his fog-foam eyes as he squints at Jason. “You?”
“What, you got a problem with it?”
“How do you visit yourself? You’re” — Tim gestures to all of him in a like that kind of motion, from head to toe. “ — here.”
“It’s easy,” Jason says, with a shit-eating grin, moving to drop to the ground beside him. The kid just stares at him incredulously. He takes that as a sign to continue. “First you call up the Death Internet Service, because if you die the wifi would suck. So you gotta make sure the folks there are all cool with you linking up to their pre-ancient magic router system thing to watch YouTube. Secondly — “
“None of that makes sense.”
“ — shush — Secondly, you make sure you got yourself a really cool tombstone. If not you, then the people you’ve got up here. I’m talking sturdy, probably built like a brick,” Jason pauses, “if i was planning my dramatic comeback maybe even an angel or two. Depends. Consult the angel gravestone market. Thirdly — “
“ — you die,” Tim says.
Jason looks at him. The kid has heavy eyebags, but not as heavy as the double eyelid sagging over his eyeballs; he doesn’t look like a sickly Victorian boy dying of the plague, but he sure does look like he’s about to keel over and conk out at any moment. Jason has more than enough experience with that experience, though, so he’s not too worried. The only hazards here are the unforgiving gravestones that would probably crack a kid’s head open like a raw egg. Not taking any chances here.
“You die,” he agrees. “But then you get better. And then you visit yourself. And meet some weirdo playing with cards” — he snatches one from the kid’s lap, earning a reproachful yelp — twirls it about, carelessly, imagining the bite of metal in his skin had it been a Batarang. Too light, though. Too easy. Four black spades. “— like some kind of fortune teller.”
Tim smiles, a small, crooked thing that hesitates as it crawls on his cheeks. But he smiles, a dead thing, and so Jason smiles too, and it pulls at his face muscles in a way that has him thinking how long has it been since I smiled like this. It doesn’t matter, because then there’s the tiniest shove ever in his side and the kid has started to throw card after card at his head, laughing like church bells.
They flap at his face like a flock of particularly two-dimensional birds coated in vinyl; he drops some, dodges some, grabs a fistful and shoves them back in the kid’s face, and then they’re just two idiots trying to drown each other in Blackjack cards, soiling their asses with mud on the ground of Gotham Cemetery. Somewhere in the insignificant distance the bird keeps singing, but it doesn’t matter, not when they’re scuffling around like a pair of siblings, laughing and swearing at each other — one dead, the other not quite alive.