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Jason’s halfway down the page of his book when there’s a knock at his window.
Call him old fashioned, but after a life and afterlife of nothing but jumping off rooftops and dodging punches, he deserves a quiet night once in a while. The good words of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are just as important as any scripture. Jason’s always been called a little reckless and a lot restless, so he’s not about to waste a rare chance to stick his nose into a book instead of a case.
But of course—because the universe can’t stop messing with him, because there always has to be a caveat to every quiet moment—the knock at his window is distinct, and unmistakable.
Two taps, and two seconds of silence; another two taps, and another in double-time. Jason hates that knock. It’s the Bat knock. It’s the secret code that Bruce drilled into him when he was younger, just like he did for all his other little recruits. It’s the one that’s simple and subtle enough to be secretive but distinctive enough to know its purpose. Given the differences in pressure between each knock, it’s not the Bat himself, or any of the other cave-dwellers. It must be someone who isn’t used to using it, someone who’s been taught it second-hand.
And, more urgently, the rapid tapping means it’s the emergency knock. So.
So Jason is on good terms with the family these days, he guesses. He doesn’t really know. He wouldn’t be caught dead knocking on anyone else’s windows like this, a phrasing that Dick takes so personally that Jason almost feels bad when he says it. But like the damn fool that he was and always will be, he sets his book down on the end table and vaults over the couch.
Playing Guess The Vigilante Outside Your Window isn’t really what he was hoping for tonight. Out of instinct, Jason taps at his thigh, feeling the solid support of cold weaponized steel. There’s a long-buried twinge of guilt deep in his stomach for it, but having weapons on his person for stray bats isn’t as bad as what they think he’s capable of, so he forces it down.
His mystery guest is still knocking on the window, more frantic this time. The taps are coming with not even half a second between them. When he looks out, Jason expects to see a cat scrabbling its claws against the iron bars of the fire escape, seeking warmth in the cold night because Jason’s a damn softy who sets half-opened cans of tuna on the railing every day. He expects to see a confused bird slamming itself into his dingy glass panes, telling itself that maybe this time the light in his apartment could turn into the sun. Hell, he even expects to see Dick hefting himself through the window, shot and half-conscious and still laughing and pushing himself back up to get punched down again.
He doesn’t really know what he expects to see, but what he gets is Superboy, eyes alight and wide, cradling Robin against his chest. He’s floating just above the window, swaying from side-to-side like a pendulum on an inch-long track. It’s too dark out to see much more than the reflective glow from Jason’s apartment, but the terror in the kid’s eyes is unmistakable.
Jason yanks the window open, the glass sliding up with a squeak. The cold night air drifts into the room, bullets of rain beating down on the fire escape.
“Robin’s hurt.” Jon’s eyes are sunken in, caught halfway in panic and distress. “We were on a case, and we were attacked by surprise, and they had magic, and he got stabbed, and then he told me to come here and then he passed out and it won’t stop bleeding and I don’t know how to fix it—”
“Kid.” Jason puts a hand to his temple, two fingers to steady himself like even drumming on ruptured glass. Jon’s in such a rush that Jason caught maybe half of it, at most. “Stay calm. I can’t understand a single thing you’re saying.”
“Please,” Jon says. His voice is almost inaudible, creaked out between a singed throat and gasps for air. “I didn’t—he told me to come to you. And he’s really hurt.”
He told me to come to you. Jason’s never been the most reliable bat, but he is the only one that thinks what Bruce doesn’t know should stay unknown.
Jason sighs and steps back to the side of the window with a single footfall, and Jon flies into the room so fast Jason could swear he’d unlocked teleportation. He doesn’t even stay in one place long enough for water to drip down on the carpet. When he turns around, lit in the fluorescent glow of the flickering bulbs overhead, he sees Jon holding Damian against his chest, floating inches from the ground. His fingers tremble and twitch around Damian’s arms; concentration must be the only thing keeping him from shattering Damian’s bones with unconscious thought. The symbol of childish hope on his chest is covered in blood, an ichor sinking deep underneath.
If lesson one of Bat School is secrecy, then lesson two is keeping calm in a crisis. Jason looks them both over to assess the damage. Damian’s definitely worse off than he seemed at first glance. Both of them are, really—Damian’s skin fading to a ghostly afterimage, Jon’s hands trembling where he stands, covering the wound on Damian’s side with untrained pressure. His palms are soaked half in red and half in rainwater, melding and mixing together in a grotesque light pink.
Jon might not be breathing, but Robin is. His mask is stuck fast to his face, melded with blood and slick with the cold air. Jason can just barely see the outline of a deep, jagged stab wound under Jon’s touch, zigzagging up and down in wild lines and patterns. The kevlar of his uniform is pierced through, torn off at the corner and seared with the remnants of otherworldly fire. The blood is leaking out at a languid pace, a river with no rapids.
He might have a chance at fixing this; venous bleeding is easier to deal with than an artery spurting blood everywhere with every heartbeat. He’s banked a lot on Alfred’s first aid lessons and surgery skills over the years, and he’s not about to second guess the butler-of-all-trades now.
“In the back,” Jason says, pointing to a closed door in the dark of his apartment with his thumb. When he bought the place on a cash advance, he’d told the old owner he was looking for an extra office he could remodel. He supposes it technically counts, not that he particularly enjoys having visitors there. “There’s a surgical table there. Sterilized and everything. I’ll get the kit.”
The only reply he gets is a gust of wind as Jon zips into the other room faster than Jason can even blink. True to his word, Jason paces over to the kitchen and fumbles for the obscenely stocked med kit under the sink, his feet moving in double time with his pulse. It’s almost funny, really, and he wants to laugh. Why should death bother him when he’s been through it, when Damian’s been through it, when it’s a constant threat in their line of work? But it nags at him, the kind of primal empathy that makes his every movement twist in just the wrong way.
He’s always had a bleeding heart. It’s a damn shame he’s never learned how to stitch that one up.
When Jason makes it to his halfway-decent hospital room, Jon has flicked on the lights already, the fluorescent bulbs casting long shadows. The makeshift operating table at the center of the room is flat down, a small wheeled end table as a stand-in for a surgical palette. Jon’s pulled up one of the chairs that Jason keeps in the corner to take his place by the table, where he’s finally let Damian slip from his hold. One hand is still wrapped around his side, trying to stymie the blood with enough pressure to hold back a freight train. His other is wound tightly around Damian’s hand, fingers woven together as if the thought of being separated from him is physically painful.
Maybe it is, Jason thinks, casting a wide shadow on them both. Jon doesn’t even startle when he bisects the lighting between them. “You’re gonna have to move if you want me to be able to do anything, kid,” he says, dropping the medical kit on the nearby end table with a clatter.
That gets his attention, at least. Jon startles, knocked out of his deepest thoughts. “Oh, um, right. Sorry.” He slides back about an inch without moving their hands apart.
“No, I meant,” Jason says, punctuating every word with a brush of his hand, “over there. Out of the way.”
Jon looks at him like Jason just asked him to swallow poison, and Jason just keeps motioning to shoo him as if it’s going to help.
“Every second counts.” Jason pulls up a second chair, its legs screeching on the floor. “I’ll help him, but you need to make my job easier here.”
This time, Jon’s expression morphs from indignation to utter despondence. He slides his chair back and out of Jason’s way, closer to Damian’s head. It’s enough; he’s still gripping Damian’s hand like his only lifeline, but his other hand slips away from the wound.
Finally. Jason can finally assess the full damage. He pulls back the tattered edges of Robin’s uniform, the seared edges a mundane proof of the magical. It’s a pretty nasty wound, in his completely unprofessional opinion. Wide, and deep on one edge, as if Robin was sliding in at the last second to block the strike, all of his other options exhausted. The knife must have been entombed closer to his side than his stomach. He’s lucky, in a way, that Jason can’t see a hint of bone or muscle. With all the pressure of a Kryptonian’s hands, the flow of blood has trickled from a stream to drips and drabs. His breathing is weak, but at least he’s still gulping down air.
The room is so quiet that Jason can hear Jon swallow back his choked words before he speaks. “Is he going to…”
Jason leans back in his chair and unlatches the med kit. A set of latex gloves, a needle, an individually wrapped spool of suture wire, saline, anaesthetic. “I mean, it’s not ideal,” he says, “but you got him here fast enough, so he’ll live. How long has he been out?”
“Just a few minutes.” Jon’s voice warbles up and down. “I tried to keep him awake and talking, but he passed out while I was on the way here.”
He looks at the wound again, sizing it up with his thumb and forefinger. “Based on the placement, it looks like it avoided nicking any arteries or organs.” He slips on the gloves. “How’d he get stabbed on the front from a surprise attack?”
Jon fidgets. How he can manage to do that without dropping Damian’s hand, Jason will never know. “He dove in front of me,” he finally says. “I told him it was stupid of him. They had magic, and my powers aren’t always the most reliable against magic, but I heal really fast. And when I asked him why, he said he…” Jon pauses, as if confessing to some grave sin. “He said he didn’t want me to be hurt.”
He’s busy pouring saline over the wound to clean it from any debris, so it’s hard for Jason to really respond to that, but he has a feeling his surprised reaction isn’t unlike what Damian must have felt when he let those words escape. But it’s not like Jason’s emotions have much sway over the past, so he preps with a quick shot of anesthetic, picks up the needle, and gets to work.
A few moments pass in silence, Jason pulling the stitches in and out. He imagines Alfred at his side, pulling the needle for him, the way he’d turn something terrifying into something gentle. A few months into the Robin gig and his body was fraying and desiccated, but Alfred always managed to make him feel whole again.
“Do you mind if I watch?”
Shocked from the steady rhythm he’d found, Jason looks up at him, letting his hands move on instinct guided by the apparition of Alfred in his mind. “Would you leave if I said no?”
Jon lets Damian’s hand go, slowly, curling his fingers as if he’ll be broken by the mere thought. “I want to know how to help him,” he says. “If this happens again.”
Jason sighs. Jon’s going to hover—literally—no matter what he says, so he scoots his chair over to give him enough room to see. He doesn’t slow down the stitching since time is of the essence, but considering there’s super eyes beside him, it probably doesn’t matter how fast he goes.
He’s halfway through his work when Jon whips his head in surprise. There’s a blur, a flicker of blue and red, and then Jon is at Damian’s side, clasping Damian’s hand with both of his own. The blood on his hands is streaked through, dried in deep red. His hands shake around Damian’s, a wave crashing against the shore.
And then Damian’s eyes flutter open, and Jon instantly relaxes his shoulders, his tension, his expression, his heart. He looks about fifty pounds lighter and fifty years younger.
“Hey, brat,” Jason says, trying to bite back the relief he hears in his own voice. Damn these emotions.
Damian closes his eyes again, and then he drifts them open once more. Or maybe he just tried to blink, but his body’s running in half-speed. Then he says something that Jason thinks sounds like “unhand me”, but it’s hard to tell with his voice so scratched and parched.
“Yeah, kind of what I expected you to say,” Jason says, pulling skin taut with skin and a prayer to all that is unholy that Damian will behave for once.
Jon’s beside him. So maybe that one is guaranteed.
“Damian,” Jon says. A deep, unburdened sigh. “Don’t scare me like that again.”
“Jon.” Damian reaches a hand out, his fingers trembling closed around empty air. Jon instantly closes the distance to clasp their hands together, and Damian breathes out with a hollow ache. He utters something silent into the air, and it’s only Jason’s half-remembered lipreading skill that gives him a guess: you’re okay.
“Yeah. And you’ll be okay,” Jon says. Through the relief in his eyes, Jon looks almost proud. “Got you here as fast as I could.”
Damian’s expression is unreadable. Jason pegs it as one-third irritation, one-third frustration, one-hundred-millionth relief. “They got away,” he finally says.
Jon blinks at him. “Uh, but you also got stabbed.”
“Yes, which prevented us from following—”
“You could have died, why do you always have to think about—”
“Not to interrupt your little mushy reunion thing,” Jason cuts in, waving the suture scissors in the air, “but if you bleed out in my safe house, I’m never getting the safety deposit back.”
“You aren’t renting, you bought it. There is no safety deposit,” Damian says, making an attempt to sit up. He doesn’t get that far; before he’s even thirty degrees upright, Jon pushes him back down with his hand. The daggers that Damian shoots at him are somehow sharper than the one that cut through his abdomen. “What are you—”
“Damian, you were literally passed out from blood loss.” Jon’s hand might be gentle, but his tone isn’t. “I’m not going to let you bleed more to prove a point. Can’t you just relax for once?”
The suture spool is starting to thin out. Jason presses the package down to keep it from spinning off the table as he tugs it forward. With all the force he’s using to cut through this conversation, it’d go flying in the other direction. “Don’t think he knows what that word means.”
Damian struggles fruitlessly against Jon’s hold, wincing. An unstoppable object meeting an immovable force. “As if you’re the prime example of anything except getting yourself killed—”
“Who has the sutures here? The ones that are keeping your blood from spilling out all over my floor?” Jason holds the scissors high in the air, and Damian is, mercifully, silent. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Jon keeps his anchor weight down when he turns to look at Jason. He must not need to pay attention to his strength anymore. Still, there are lines and wrinkles of exhaustion cutting sharp edges into his face. “Can you get him to stop breaking his stitches? He’s gonna hurt himself.”
Not one to let his energy be spent in useful places, Damian tries pushing up against Jon’s grip again. Jon must have a lot of practice with it, since he’s placed his hand in just the right place to keep Damian from lifting himself off the table and opening the wound.
“You kind of have that handled,” Jason says, completely ignoring whatever Damian’s doing, since it’s not going to change his fate anyway. “Look, just tell him that we can do this the easy way or the hard way, maybe he’ll listen to you.”
“I can hear you,” Damian hisses. From the venom dripping in his tone, he’s awake on pure adrenaline and pent-up rage.
That doesn’t answer his question outright, but maybe it answers it in a different way. The suture spool is empty, and there’s still a bit more to go; Jason turns in his chair, reaches for another packet, the needle staring at Damian with what Jason hopes is a threatening aura. “You wanna do it the hard way, then? Because I can tie you down to the table.”
Damian pauses, as if considering every escape technique he knows in his head. Jason can't see it as he focuses on unwrapping more wire, but from the silence, Damian's giving him the flattest look possible. “Try it and I’ll break out in ten seconds.”
“And break open your guts all over my floor, which, believe it or not, I don’t think you’d be very keen on.” Jason spins back around. He was right about the expression. The kid has so much fight in him for someone who spent the past ten minutes passed out on an operating table. “And if you don’t care about that, I think someone else in this room would probably kill you if you tried.”
Jon bites his lip. Damian’s stopped thrashing, so Jon’s hand hovers just above Damian’s chest, both a threat and a warning; with his other, he brushes against Damian’s hand, and Jason watches as their fingers interlock again, strength and weakness knit into one.
“But hey, that’s fine. If you tire yourself out, it’ll make my job easier,” Jason says. Regardless of how above it all Damian claims to be all the damn time, he’s still human, so there’s a limit. He can complain and argue as much as he wants, but not even Damian can fight against the natural limits of the human body. Even if he can, apparently, move his liver out of the way of a blade.
Jon’s grip is so tight that his hand is turning pale. His smile is thin, a rope held taut around his emotions. “Damian, just get some sleep.”
Instead of a direct response, Damian lets his eyes flutter closed, and the hitch of his chest and lungs evens out from staccato beats to an even rhythm. His hand stays linked with Jon’s.
Jason blinks. When was the last time the brat actually listened to anyone when they told him to rest? He just spent the last several minutes fighting to break his stitches like they were chains holding him down. When was the last time he set down his weapons in the midst of a war?
And then everything suddenly clicks into place—Jon’s expression when he tore into Jason’s apartment like a hurricane. Damian’s recklessness in the face of certain injury and potential death. His hand wrapped around Jon’s in his sleep, a lifeline like a lighthouse. Diving in front of sharp edges and bleeding to protect something too important to lose.
Why the hell he ended up in the middle of this, Jason doesn’t know, and he’d rather not. It’s not like he’s a model citizen when it comes to shit like this, and he’s not about to wallow in his own sorrows and regrets and woe-is-mes, not with a living lie detector in the room.
Which really needs to change, since Jon is hovering again, right next to Jason’s half-sewn threads and Damian’s jagged wound. “Get out of here,” Jason says, not unkindly. He turns his head to Jon, jerking his head in the direction of the door. “He’s not recovering any faster with you in here.”
Jon shifts in place, his weight drifting from left to right and back again. Clearly turning the options and their alternatives over in his head. His breath stops for half a second, cutting himself off with his own air supply. And then he does the last thing Jason was expecting—he nods. “You’ll be quick, though, right?”
Jason rolls his eyes as Jon makes himself scarce. It’s not like he’s an amateur. “Quick as I can be, as long as I have no more distractions. Get yourself cleaned up, you can take some clothes from the hamper.”
Jon scurries out of the room, and Jason is left in blissful silence.
So of course it can't last long. If there’s one skill Damian's never been able to master, it's acting like a normal person. He opens his eyes back up from his feigned sleep, and Jason doesn’t even blink.
“Yeah, didn't think you were out,” he mutters. “If you move around too much, you'll open up my handiwork, so don't be a dumbass.”
Damian rolls his eyes, which still technically counts as moving. He's much worse at following directions without Jon in the room. “If your stitches break that easily, I'd be better off doing it myself.” His voice is so hoarse that Jason winces in poorly-placed sympathy.
Jason ties another stitch. “You're lucky that it didn't hit an organ.”
“It's a simple matter of controlling my motor skills, I'm—”
“Lucky,” Jason repeats, “that you didn't die. And stop talking, I can hardly understand your insults.”
If he were anyone else, Jason knows that his patient wouldn't have the stubbornness to push past the rawness in his throat, but it's Damian. And because it's Damian, he sits up just slowly enough to avoid compressing his abdomen and ripping his stitches, and just high enough to stare where he thinks Jason's line of sight is, even though he misses the mark by a few inches. "Second-rate stitching," he says, giving his best I-definitely-wasn't-just-unconscious glare.
“Big words for the kid who got flown in here half-dead.”
"It was a calculated risk."
This is a more convenient angle for the last few stitches Jason needs to sew. Damian's ability to frustrate him while doing exactly what he wants is unmatched. “Guess you’re pretty bad at math, then. You scared the shit out of Superboy by diving in front of a knife, so I’d recommend not doing that again.”
Jason notices the exact second that Damian freezes. Then he moves his hands to support himself as he slides up, slowly and deliberately, the rest of him stuck in ice. “Is he unharmed?”
“Yeah. Probably a little angry, though.”
“Why,” Damian rasps, and from his expression, he isn’t asking. It’s more of a statement of fact—that Jon is angry, and that Damian doesn’t know why.
“You should ask him that. Me saying anything wouldn’t really fix the problem,” Jason says. With a quick tighten of the suture, the slightest whisper of pressure, and a quick snip of the scissors later, Jason stands up. “Done. You’re welcome for saving your life, by the way.” Not that he ever expects to be thanked, and not that he really needs the praise from the pipsqueak, but he can’t help but be a bit snippy right back at him.
But to his surprise—Damian’s expression smooths out, and in the quietest voice he can manage, says, “Thank you."
The anaesthetic must be stronger than Jason expected. Either that, or he’s hallucinating from exhaustion. There’s no way Damian would actually thank anyone, let alone the guy he constantly calls a peon, or whatever fancy words he just looked up in the thesaurus.
In utter disbelief, Jason says, “Damn. I guess if I ever need you to say something nice, I just have to get Jon in your vicinity.”
Damian doesn’t bristle, but he does pause before blinking back whatever was fighting to emerge. “It could have been him here instead of me." For the first time since sitting up, Damian looks away from Jason to stare down at his hands. The damage might have been confined to his stomach, but Jason knows from experience that emotions seep through every thought like blood mixing with the rainwater. “And I won’t let that happen.”
Ah, and suddenly it all makes sense, why Damian would rather take a knife for someone than put anything into words. Jason gets it. He knows by now that he has the same scar tissue in his throat, the same bitterness on his tongue. Speaking anything aloud suddenly makes it feel more real, as if the words hanging in the air could create life anew. It’s only a half-formed thought, but it’s enough to catch the meaning behind it.
Jason gathers the bloodied bandages he’d used to clean the wound, tosses the spent sutures and needle in a bag. “You wanna elaborate on that?” he asks.
Silence. As expected, really. Asking Damian to express or even think anything regarding a positive emotion is more impossible than getting Bruce to react to something. Instead, when Jason turns around, Damian is sliding back on the table to lie flat again, one hand hovering near his injury. His eyes start to drift closed, half as an escape, half with pure exhaustion and spent adrenaline.
Jason shakes his head. Damian might be healing physically, but Jason knows from experience—he’s got a long way to go.
Ten minutes later, Jason steps through the door frame, a threshold between his pristine, unknown-to-most-Bats safe house and quick-and-dirty operating room.
“Alright,” Jason says, peeling off his latex gloves and adding them to the ever-growing pile of spent surgical tools. Slick with smeared blood and pinched sutures, they slide off his hands too easily. “He’s stable. Can’t say it’s much for presentation, but he’ll live.” He throws his hand back, pointing at the makeshift hospital with his thumb. “He’s asleep for now, but he should get checked out for real soon. He didn’t lose enough blood to need a transfusion, but I’m not an expert, I just pretend to know what I’m doing.”
Jon has taken a spot up on Jason’s couch next to his long-forgotten book, swimming in one of Jason’s hoodies. He looks up at Jason’s announcement, and then he seems to almost deflate. Jason’s not sure whether it’s from exhaustion or pent up frustration at the entire situation. “Okay,” Jon says, distant. “Okay.”
“Thought you’d be more relieved.” Jason’s always been one for needless ceremony and over-dramatic emphasis, but the gloves and bagged surgery supplies are tossed in a nearby trash can without so much of a flourish. (Lined and sterile, of course—he’s not an animal.)
“I am,” Jon says, biting his lip. He’s staring somewhere far beyond the walls, into the ether between the crevices and dark spaces that exist only in the liminal space that is Jason’s apartment. Definitely frustration. “I just…”
“You’re mad,” Jason finishes for him, “because you don’t know how else you should feel. Right?”
That gets his attention, snapping him out of his stupor. Jon turns to him, eyes wide and unblinking. “It’s not that I’m mad, exactly. Well, no.” He crosses his arms. “Yeah, I guess I am, just a little bit. Not about tonight, but every other time he's done something like this. He thinks he’s on top of the world and he thinks he’s invincible, and he just rushes in front of knives and bullets like they’ll bounce off his skin and doesn’t understand why that makes me mad. It’s like he forgets he’s human sometimes.”
“Maybe you’re a bad influence,” Jason says. His voice lilts up on the last syllable, a teasing note that’s always sounded more Grayson than Todd.
“You know that he used to make me block stuff for him?” Jon’s arms fly out in front of him, a whirlwind of vigor and motion. Hard to tell whether he has control of his super speed at the moment or not. “He’d just—there would be enemies flying at us and shooting at us, and he wouldn’t even react because he thought I’d block all of them.”
Jason busies himself with washing his hands and tidying up the rest of his supplies, slotting them into their proper places. Gauze, tweezers, antiseptic, disposable gloves. It doesn’t hold a candle to Alfred’s first aid stash, but it’s enough in a pinch. “And did you?” he asks. He’s running out of bandages, so whatever conversation he’s about to open up better not need more stitches and tied threads.
“Well.” Jon fidgets. His index fingers intertwine, then pull apart again; together, apart. The misplaced anger is fading now, dying into an ember from a spark. “I mean, I had to jump in front of everything. He’d get hurt if I didn’t, and…” He pauses, letting the last implications go unspoken.
He’s got enough of a med kit to last him another impromptu visit from a stray bat or bird, Jason decides. He closes the latch on the box and tosses it up above the kitchen cabinets instead of its usual place under the sink. It won’t stop a Kryptonian who can fly and grab it, but it will keep a kid with more anger than inches from sniping it just to prevent it being used on him again.
Jason turns around. Jon is stock still, just sitting there on the couch. Staring at the way his unmarred hands knit together and unravel, like all the truths he’d held sacrosanct are fraying at the ends.
He knows it now, looking at Jon. He knows it, why Jon flew here, frazzled and decaying with blood streaked on his hands. He knows it, what it’s like to see cracks forming in glass you once thought was stone, the paralyzing thought of having what you took for granted be taken from you.
“And then you feel like the biggest damn fool in the universe,” Jason finishes. His hands creep to his mouth, forming an ever-comforting gap between his fingers just wide enough for a breath of relief. “For caring about something you can lose in half a second.”
Jon isn’t looking at him. “He could have died tonight,” he says. There’s so much swallowed emotion in his voice that his heart has turned hollow. “And I can’t… I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if that happened. If I lost him.”
It feels like staring into an eclipse. There’s more light around the edges, more truth in what he’s not saying than what he is. Jason’s been blinded by light and empathy too many times in his life to fling himself into it now, so he stays silent, listening without corrupting his confession.
Jon keeps staring at his hands. He’s clasped them together, but Jason can still see his fingers trembling. “Can I tell you something?”
“If I said no,” Jason repeats, his favorite phrase from today, “would you actually listen, or are you gonna say it regardless?”
“I think,” Jon starts, completely ignoring him. His voice is hoarse, the words still half-formed and untethered in his mind. “I think I’m in love with him.”
Jason raises an eyebrow in half-feigned surprise. “You’re kidding. And you’re just realizing this now?”
After a moment, Jon shakes his head, slowly. His interlocked hands are pale, as if all of his heat is concentrated in his confession. “I think I always have been. One day I looked at him while we were on patrol, and he laughed, and I… I guess that’s when I realized it. But it wasn’t a big thing. It was like I looked at him, and I just knew another name for what I was feeling.”
Damian laughing is such a foreign thought that Jason literally can’t even conjure it up in his mind. It’d be like Bruce laughing: a pinched nose, his mouth barely taut, curling up at the edges in a way that seems more carnival horror house than mirth. “I mean, sure. I believe you. If he knows how to laugh.”
The couch squeaks when Jon pushes himself upright. God, Jason feels like he’s back with the Outlaws, the way he feels a wince coming on whenever he hears a super in his vicinity making contact with one of his few possessions in this world. Jon manages to keep the couch in one piece, but only just; there’s a clear imprint of his hand on the cushion. “He smiles all the time,” Jon says, his face heating up. “Whenever I look at him when he thinks I’m not, he’s smiling.”
Interesting. Jason makes a mental note of that one. “Good to know that if I need him to shut up, I can just call you.”
Like a balloon slowly deflating, Jon sinks back onto the couch. “To be honest, when I realized it, it kind of scared me, because… Maybe because I didn’t know what it would mean. To like him.”
“Kid just took a knife to the chest for you,” Jason says. He leans against the wall, the door to Damian’s resting place two feet in front of him. There’s no point in lowering his voice for this one. “I’m a shit judge of character, but I’m pretty sure he feels the same way.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Jon tilts his head, likely listening for something Jason wouldn’t be able to hear in a million years. “I can kind of… tell, I guess,” he says, touching his ear. “Every time I’m around him, or whenever I send him a text, his heart beats faster. For like, half a second until he composes himself, but still.”
“Spying’s more of a bat trait, you know.”
“I didn’t spy!” Jon’s cheeks flush bright crimson, the look of a schoolkid who got caught cheating on a test. “I mean, not on purpose! It’s not like I can help it! I just…” His face is starting to look more like an inferno than a smoldering flame. “Sometimes my hearing gets to be a bit too much. And my dad told me to listen to something comforting when that happens. So I started listening to his heartbeat.”
God. This kid has it bad. Some deep part of Jason rises up to the surface, the part he wanted to keep in the ground. The part of his stupid teenage daydreams and fantasies that didn’t stay dead when he did, the starry-eyed kid who chased love ‘til it set him ablaze.
Jon slaps his cheek with his hand. Right—the invulnerable skin. No wonder he can touch fire without burning. “But, um, that’s how I noticed it. At first, I honestly thought he was sick or dying or something.”
Jason can’t help the amused noise, half-chuckle and half-cackle, that slips from him. “He probably thinks he is.”
His laugh doesn’t get a response. Instead, Jon looks almost crestfallen, staring back down at Jason’s cracked wooden floors. The cold from the rainy night air has started to trickle inside. “And that’s why I’m afraid,” Jon says, quietly. “Because even if he does like me… I don’t think he’d ever say yes.”
It’s a common feeling among fuck-ups like Jason. To deny yourself happiness, turn away from light for fear of burning your skin raw and stare back at the abyss instead. To exist in perpetuity, a forgotten memory instead of a constant thought, a life lost and never loved. It’s an impossible ask, to let someone into the most vulnerable parts of your soul.
It’s easier to pretend he doesn’t need love than to face the horrors unbound: the utter terror that he holds underneath his rib cage, that someone could stare into his heart, see the depths of his atrocities and stay.
“He probably wouldn’t,” Jason admits.
“Thanks, that’s helpful.” Jon throws his head back to the couch cushions with a huff. He pauses, closing his eyes. “Sorry. That was rude of me.”
Jason has no idea how Jon has spent so much of his life with Damian if that’s him being rude. “Not half as rude as what he says, I’m sure.”
“Do you think it’s… bad?” Jon’s emotions, for the first time in this conversation, are written plainly on his face. His eyes are swirling, caught in the middle ground between horror and hope. As if he knows how foolish his question is, whispered in an atmosphere that tastes of rust and oxide.
“What, that you have emotions?” Jason’s urge to rest his fingers against his lips again is so strong that his hands shake when he trembles past it. “It makes you more of a normal human being than ninety-nine percent of the people I know. Present company included.”
“I mean, do you think it’s bad to feel this way? When I don't know what he'll say.”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” Jason says in less than half a second. “Like, literally, the exact wrong person.”
In an instant, Jon’s eyes shoot up, staring directly into Jason’s. Jason can’t help it, the way that he feels scrutinized like an undiscovered creature under a microscope. He hates it, but Jon’s gaze is steady, and maybe he hates that more. “Damian told me to come here because you wouldn’t tell his dad. So you must have some similarities.”
Leave it to the son of two reporters to be able to pinpoint Jason’s weaknesses with all the gentleness of a police interrogation. “B and I aren’t on the greatest terms, yeah.” And that’s putting it mildly, but he’s not about to spill his guts out to his maybe-little brother’s maybe-crush. There's been enough blood spilled in his apartment today. “But the only reason he told you to come here is because he's got an ego that's more fragile than Bruce's.”
“Mr. Todd—”
Jason winces. “Okay, first, it's Jason.”
“Jason,” Jon corrects, looking like Jason just tricked him into saying a swear word, “have you ever felt like this before?”
He seems some part of himself there, deep inside, in Jon's starry eyes and hopes hung like a shattered asterism. In the soul of a kid who sees his hero flip into danger every day, who watches someone human pretend they're not, who sees the sun shining only from proud smiles and rare compliments. The one who saw the truth underneath casual words, who found something captivating in the man behind the myth.
“Yeah,” Jason says before he can stop himself, like a fucking idiot.
Jon's eyes go wide, and that's about when Jason realizes that he's signed his own death warrant.
God dammit. Idiocy, thy name is Jason Todd. Jason groans and runs a hand through his hair, his incongruous white streak flattening under his touch. A permanent reminder of the screw-up he's always been, in battle and emotions both. “Christ, okay,” he mutters. He turns away, placing both of his hands on the wall and hoping he can break it to destroy this entire conversation. No dice, so he shamefully decides he’s gotta plead to make it out of this unscathed. He throws his most indignant expression Jon’s way. “Can you do me a favor and kill me? It'd be a mercy kill.”
Jon blinks at him, gaze steady, full of curiosity. It isn’t like Jason is subtle with his distress, so ignoring it is a hell of a talent. “How did you deal with it?”
Jason’s pretty sure that his reaction is enough of an answer to that, but still. “Lots of practice,” he lies. His teeth are grinding against his will. “It’s complicated. Can we get back to interrogating you instead of me?”
And then Jon does perhaps the worst thing he could do for Jason’s conscience. He pulls his knees up to his chest, locking his hands around his legs. Scrunched up like that, it’s hard for Jason to see him as anything but a kid with more emotions than he knows what to do with. A kid with a crush on his biggest hero, ready to strip the stars from the sky if he was only asked.
It’s hard to see him as anything but a mirror image from a whole other lifetime ago, and isn’t that just a cruel irony. He’s the sun in love with a shadow, and Jason was a ghost in love with the living.
Leave it to Jason to dig his own grave for the second time. Curse him and his soft spot for kids, and fuck him for having some modicum of perspective to give here. “Okay, look, I’ll level with you,” he says, since it’s not like he can hide it from a sentient polygraph. “I didn’t deal with it. Don’t deal with it. It’s not a work-in-progress, because there’s going to be no progress, so put that one away.”
Jon silently raises an eyebrow, which is almost worse than him interrupting.
“But I can guarantee you that the only reason he’d say no is because he’s scared of the kind of person he’d be if he said yes. Being happy is fucking terrifying if you’ve never felt it before. Because,” Jason pauses, and the words are rushed now, and his head is swirling with maybes and what ifs and he hates it, feeling his soul leak from him without his permission, “because you feel like you don’t deserve it, like it’s all gonna be ripped away from you if you try and reach for it. Or if you do, you get a few fleeting minutes before you screw it up. And then the only good thing you’ve had in your life vanishes without a trace.”
He looks down at the wall, ignoring Jon’s reaction, whatever it might be. Why is this so hard to say to Dick’s stupid smile, and so easy to say to a kid he hardly knows? Jason’s a mess of contradictions just like he’s a screw-up with his emotions, and the last thing he wants is for anyone to follow in his footsteps.
Jason clears his throat. “I’d bet my second life on Damian feeling like you’re too damn good for him.”
It’s starting to sound like a confession booth in his safe house, and Jason doesn’t like it at all. He pauses, heart hammering out of his chest like he hadn’t realized oxygen was a requirement for life.
Jon picks at his shoelace, the anxious energy in his fingers channeled through his every action. “But I want him to be happy,” he whispers.
“And that’s terrifying,” Jason responds. “But I think he’s more afraid of losing you by messing up whatever you could have.” He pushes past his instinct to reach for creature comforts and billowing smoke. “And I have a monopoly on making a mess of things with emotions, so he’s not allowed to steal my bit.”
“So you think I should tell him?” Jon sits up a little straighter, a little more unsure of himself. He sounds wistful, perhaps, for the first time tonight—the relief of safety and the fear of the unknown rolled into one.
“That’s up to you.” Jason shrugs.
“What if,” Jon says, staring directly into Jason’s soul without even using his X-ray vision. “What if you told your person about your feelings?”
The thought is so alien that Jason almost has to laugh, but he forces it down underneath the relentless staccato steps of his pulse. It’s an easier pill to swallow with their roles reversed, where Jason’s not the one spilling out his soul to someone else in his imagination. “Honestly? I think he’d say yes, and that’s the worst part. So I’d be a goddamn hypocrite to tell you not to think about it.”
Jason Todd giving lectures on emotions. Dick would weep if he saw him now, but that’s kind of the fucking problem, isn’t it. It’s not really like he has a choice on thinking about it or not, because his traitorous brain won’t get it out of his head now.
Eventually, Jon pulls himself together, letting the words sink in and etch themselves into his heart. He stands up, Jason’s sweatshirt pooling at his shoulders, a clean slate from everything he was worrying about tonight. He’s at the doorway to Jason’s operating room in a blink. “I really do love him. And I want to be with him. I want to be with him for the rest of my life.”
“Pretty damn dramatic,” Jason chides. “Suit yourself.”
“I think,” Jon says. It’s the exact same part he’d paused at earlier, when the world was a bit more complicated. “I think I’ll tell him. I just want him to know. And maybe he’ll say no, but…”
Jon’s fingers catch on the door frame to the operating room. He opens the door, looks toward Damian, and then turns back, staring right into Jason’s heart. “Being happy shouldn’t be so terrifying.”
It’s strange, the way that the echoes of Jason’s own words feel different when spoken by someone who lives in the light, like someone who leaps through the darkness without a safety net to his name. It’s strange, but a part of him feels—
A part of him feels like there could still be life left for someone like him.
Jon takes his rightful place at Damian’s side, lacing their hands like pulling threads back together. In his sleep, Damian’s hand tightens around Jon’s.
Maybe, Jason thinks, there’s still something to live for. Maybe there’s still happiness for them both.
Maybe they’ll be all right after all.