Chapter Text
As the second oldest son of the chief, Jason has never been under the delusion that he’d inherit any major responsibilities concerning leading Gotham or her people and as such, he spends the majority of his time away from her bleak moors and crumbling architecture in search of a solution to a generations-old problem. See, they have always had a bit of a pest problem in Gotham, but instead of something normal like mice or mosquitos, Gotham’s pest problem is dragons.
Dragons are the bane of Jason’s entire existence. They steal livestock, terrorize citizens, and destroy buildings – hence the “crumbling architecture”. Given that Jason has nothing better to do with his time, and the fact that he genuinely enjoys enacting violence as a way to work through his personal problems, he made it his self-appointed mission to hunt down the dragons’ nest. So far, his luck in that area has been abysmal and, quite depressingly, he’s not any closer to finding where they originate than he was several years ago at the commencement of his grand quest.
The day had been clear – one of the few days of sun this far north – and had settled into a blessedly calm night. Normally, Jason would have made it a point to stop and rest his crew, but home was so very close, he could see Gotham's coast and the urge to be home overrode everything else.
Beaten and weary, they dock their ships in Gotham’s harbor expecting the usual crowd heralding their return, having seen the ships' lanterns from afar. They had been gone for nearly a year this time – much longer than their normal voyages, but Jason would swear they were much closer to finding it than they ever had been in the past. They’d nearly had the dragons’ nest, yet it had eluded them, same as always, and eventually they had been forced to return with nothing to show for any of it.
Despite the favorable circumstances of the day, and the return of the second eldest son, nobody save for the harbormaster is present to welcome them home.
“Jason!” The harbormaster claps him on the shoulder.
Jason offers the man a tired grin and sweeps his arms about to indicate the empty harbor. His men shuffle around unloading what little cargo they managed to bring back. “I have been gone for nearly a year and not a soul comes down to welcome me home? Did something terrible happen while I was away?” He is merely joking, but the way Sam grimaces, he is afraid something dire may have actually happened.
“Something happened, alright.” Something flashes across Sam's face, but he merely shakes it off. “You will learn soon enough, I suppose. I would speak with Danny, if you can. He knows more about it than anyone else, and he can help you, should you need helping.”
That gives Jason pause. For as long as he’s known him, Danny has always been… a bit of an outcast. His parents are the most prevalent weapons master and blacksmith of Gotham, renowned for their innovation and skills – both of them avid dragon hunters. His sister Jasmine is a skilled fighter in her own right, and weapons master in training to boot. Danny is the black sheep of the family, showing no signs of his father’s brawn nor his mother’s knack for tactics. He helps his father in the forge when he can, but Jason knows he’s prone to running off into the forest for hours at a time doing who knows what.
“The Nightingales’ boy?” He clarifies.
Sam nods and gives him a significant look. “The very same. Surprised everyone.”
Worried for the wellbeing of his family and Gotham’s people as a whole, Jason leaves his men to finish unloading and takes the winding path up the cliffside to Gotham proper. As he nears the top, he catches the familiar sounds of dragons – their claws against cobblestone, the great heave of fire breath, the gnashing of teeth, a roar – and readies his greataxe.
Jason crests the cliff and is immediately met with a Deadly Nadder. He swings his axe but the creature ducks his attack and retreats, fleeing towards the village. Jason dashes after it, sparing little thought for anything else around him. He catches glimpses of dragons on buildings and in shops, of people chasing after the beasts, and the general mayhem that tends to accompany an attack of this scale. He loses the Nadder when he hears his youngest brother shout.
Jason turns towards the noise without thinking, adrenaline coursing through his blood like fire and setting his heart hammering in his chest. He scans the pandemonium until he spots Damian pinned beneath the claws of a Monstrous Nightmare, hands braced against its giant snout. He charges forward, throwing his full bodyweight at the beast’s head to knock it away from his brother. He stands over Damian, greataxe at the ready, and faces the Nightmare.
The beast’s pupils narrow to slits and a growl rumbles low in its throat.
Damian cries out, scrambling at Jason as he climbs to his feet. He latches onto Jason’s arm and tries to pull his axe away. “Jason, no!” He shoves his way between Jason and the Nightmare when it becomes apparent that removing his axe is a futile endeavor.
Jason doesn’t take his eyes off the dragon still glaring at him from behind his little brother’s back. Damian, with his arms spread wide, lifts his chin in defiance.
“Damian,” Jason barks, “what is the meaning of this?”
The boy huffs out a breath like the fight has been punched from his chest. “This is Titus.”
Jason finally pulls his eyes from the dragon to give his brother an incredulous look. “You named a dragon? What in the nine realms is wrong with you?!”
Damian folds his arms into an impressive pout and scowls at Jason. “I wasn’t going to let him just not have a name, that’s absurd.”
“That’s what’s absurd? It’s a dragon, Dames.”
The Monstrous Nightmare nudges Damian’s hip and he lowers a hand to scratch its nose. “What’s absurd is you barreling in with–” he startles and looks back up at Jason. “You’re home!”
Jason glances uneasily at Titus’s teeth. “Uh, yeah. Just got back.”
The greataxe falls to the ground as Damian bodily throws himself at Jason, wrapping his arms around the man’s middle and burying his face in his chest. Jason returns the hug reflexively but never takes his eyes off the dragon.
“I missed you.” Damian’s voice is muffled by Jason’s fur mantle. He pulls away and they both ignore the errant moisture gathered in his eyes. He moves back beside the dragon and rests his hand on its snout as though second nature. He is used to having the beast at his side. “Have you been to see the others yet?”
Jason raises his gaze where it’d been locked onto the contact and shakes his head. “I only just got back in the middle of a dragon raid.” He trusts his brother more than he’d ever trust any dragon, so he risks looking over his shoulder towards the rest of the village. Upon closer inspection – now that he is not in the mindset of immediate danger – it’s easy to tell that Jason’s initial speculation, however brief, was incorrect. The dragons crawling over buildings don’t appear to be tearing them apart, rather they seem to be nesting on the roofs; the dragons in the shops aren't terrorizing the shopkeepers, they mostly seem to be using their body heat to warm the interiors. Everywhere he looks, he sees joy rather than fear.
“It’s not an attack, brother. We have made peace with the dragons.”
Jason wets his lips and looks back at the younger, “How?”
Damian’s brow dips and he focuses his attention on scratching the Monstrous Nightmare’s scales. “I am not the best to tell the tale. You should speak with Danny, if he’s around.”
Jason watches incredulously as the Nightmare leans into the scritches and melts into a puddle under Damian’s enthusiastic ministrations. “You are the second person who’s told me to speak with Danny. What happened in the year that I was away that suddenly made him cool?”
Damian opens his mouth to reply but is cut off by a familiar harrowing shriek. Jason ducks on instinct and scans the skies trying to catch a glimpse of a creature no one's ever seen, one heralding doom and destruction.
"Night Fury!" Someone yells, and the people milling about whip into a bit of a frenzy. Jason lunges for his axe, but Damian stops him before he can go rushing into danger. Jason looks at his brother's hand on his arm and follows it to his face.
Damian gently pries the axe away, looking almost comical with a weapon larger than he is, then gestures for Jason to go ahead.
Jason hasn't been without his greataxe for months; he has slept with it by his bedside and carried it with him day after day on his journey. He had slain dragons and protected himself and his men with it. Heading towards danger without the familiar weight in his hand is unspeakably wrong and he rather wishes he'd decided to stay down by the docks. The call to action is too loud, and his curiosity burns to be sated.
A piece of the night sky breaks away and dives to the ground. The crowd thickens, and Jason loses sight of the living shadow. He pushes through the crush of bodies, ignoring the gasps of recognition from people just becoming aware of his return to Gotham. Emerging into a clearing of sorts, he finally lays eyes on the creature of nightmares, the unholy offspring of lighting and death itself– the Night Fury. It’s sleek and mostly black, low to the ground like a great, stalking cat with green eyes and pupils narrowed into slits as it appraises the crowd. The spines down its back and its hind legs are white, as though it’s wearing boots. Somehow, the creature itself is not the most striking thing about the scene before him.
Atop the beast, relaxed and smiling, is none other than Danny Nightingale. He has a pair of goggles pushed up on top of his head and black leather armor. His hair is windswept. He looks wild. He looks like adventure. He looks–
Danny’s eyes meet his and somehow his breathless smile widens more, into a toothy grin. “Hey everyone, look! Jason’s back!”
The attention suddenly shifts and Jason finds himself at the center of it, swept away by a wave of ‘welcome home!’s and ‘good to have you back!’s and ‘how was your trip?’s. He does his best to answer the questions, but finds the task quite difficult as half of his attention is pulled away by Danny and his dragon slinking away.
Jason presses forward and grabs Danny by the back of his shirt, “Oh no, you don’t. We need to talk.”
Danny looks up at him sheepishly, “About what?” The Night Fury growls and bares its teeth at Jason. Danny swats it away, “Not now, Phantom.”
“About that.” Jason stresses. “The dragons! When I left a year ago, dragons were the enemy. Now I come back from my quest – which was hunting down dragons, by the way – and suddenly everyone’s all buddy-buddy? I’m getting real tired of not knowing what’s going on, and I was told you were the guy to fill in the blanks.”
Danny presses his index fingers together, “Oh yeah? That’s– that’s fair, yeah. Can you put me down though?”
Jason realizes then that the poor boy is dangling a couple of feet off the ground and quickly lowers him. “Sorry.”
Danny shrugs, “Eh, it’s okay. I’ve got to feed Phantom, if you wanna… you know, if you want to come with me. I can catch you up on everything you missed?”
He’s nervous, eyes darting about and occasionally skating over Jason. It’s hard to tell in the dark with only the flickering firelight from the lanterns lit in the streets, but his cheeks are red.
Interesting. Jason files that away, he has more important things to worry about right now, like the Night Fury sniffing at his boots while he walks.
“So basically, um, I sort of caught Phantom. Well, really I shot him out of the sky with a net, but– pfffbt that’s neither here nor there. He got hurt, obviously, since I– you know, I shot him out of the sky? And he couldn’t fly.” Danny ducks into his family’s shop and reemerges a moment later with a basket reeking of fish. Phantom perks up with interest and wags his tail like a pup. A tail that, upon closer inspection, has a prosthetic fin. Or half of one, anyway. It’s shaped the same as the natural side, but it’s made of leather that’s been dyed a deep green, almost black. “I designed a replacement fin to help balance him, but he um– he sort of needs a rider now? He can’t move it on his own. I’m trying to figure out a way to give him full autonomy, but it’s tough work. Especially since he never wants to sit still.” Danny affectionately shoves Phantom’s head away from the basket he’s carrying.
They come to a stop near one of the sheep pastures and he dumps the contents of the basket into the grass so Phantom can root around to his heart’s desire.
“So anyway,” Danny continues, “it was a tough road to recovery, but he got there.”
“What did your dad have to say about it?”
Danny rubs the back of his neck. “It uh… didn’t go over so well, at first. There was this whole thing– with your dad, too. Since he’s the chief, or whatever. And he’s like, super stubborn.”
Jason chuckles at that and Danny shyly glances at him before looking away again as his cheeks stain an even darker shade.
“Eventually we got them to come around, though. A-and we realized that dragons aren’t all that dissimilar to us.”
“So now you’re a dragon rider?” Jason raises an eyebrow and gives him a sly smirk. “Decided to be cool for once?”
Danny chokes on nothing and goes into a coughing fit, face dangerously red – so much so that it’s unmistakable even in the evening dim. “I-I’m totally cool!”
“You totally were not.” Jason argues. “Not when I left.”
“Yeah, well that was like a year ago! A lot can happen in a year.”
Jason takes a second to really look at Danny for maybe the first time that night – away from the crowd, away from prying eyes, away from any distractions.
He's filled out, that much is clear; gone is the meek boy with twigs for arms. By no means is he as big as Jason, but he's grown at least an inch or two, and he looks like he can actually support the weight of his own armor now. He looks good, for lack of any better words to use. Jason finds himself staring, just a little, at this boy that somehow became a man while he wasn't looking.
“A lot can happen in a year.” Jason agrees.
Danny’s eyes flick over and away again just as quickly. He opens his mouth to say something only to be cut off by someone calling Jason’s name. They both look over to see Bruce running towards them.
“Oh jeez,” Jason takes half a step back, but quickly comes to peace with the fact that nothing in the world can stop the inevitability of Bruce.
Sure enough, as soon as he’s in range, Bruce sweeps his second son into his arms. “My son has finally returned!” His disappointment is visible on his face when he pulls away, “And I had to find out from Cliff.”
Jason shoves his father away, but even he would admit the gesture is more fond than truly angry or miffed. “I heard dragons attacking the village and that seemed a bit more pressing than telling you I was home.”
Bruce levels him a severe look and claps Jason on the shoulder. “Dragons no longer attack our village. We have found peace with them.”
Jason glances over at Phantom scarfing down a Cod. “Yeah, I see that.”
“And would you believe it’s all thanks to this guy right here?” Bruce’s other hand comes down on Danny’s shoulder, who almost buckles under it.
Jason hums and looks across at Danny, blushing and wilting under the attention. “I’m starting to.” Their eyes meet and a sweet, shy smile blossoms on Danny’s face.
Either not noticing the tension or altogether ignoring it, Bruce grabs Jason’s arm and tugs him towards home. “Let’s get you home, my son. You must be awfully exhausted after your trip. You can catch up with Danny in the morning.”
At mention of his exhaustion, Jason feels the sudden weight of it dragging on his limbs. A bone-deep weariness that’s filling his mind with fluff. He’s been awake for far too long, on alert and eager to be home. His year-long journey has taken its toll. He allows his father to pull him away, but can’t help glancing over his shoulder at Danny, who watches them leave with one hand on the back of the most fearsome dragon they’ve ever known.