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Jason and Tim are getting along now. Getting along better, at least, Dick thinks as he watches the two of them from across the cave. Tim’s got a sprained ankle and Jason’s currently holding his crutch out of reach whilst the younger boy yells at him and to anyone else- Hell, probably even to Tim- it would look like some good old fashioned pushing someone into a locker style bullying.
But not to Dick Grayson. Because even from where he’s going over reports with Bruce, far enough away that he can’t decipher Tim’s words beyond angry shrieking, he can see the fondness in Jason’s expression, and the gentleness he uses to bat Tim’s hands away.
It’s ridiculous, he knows it’s completely irrational, but some small horrible part of him wants to march over there and push them apart. Disguise it as a scolding so neither of them can see the dark thing rising ever closer to the surface within him. Because, as good as he is at hiding it, as hard as he’s fought to be rid of it, Dick’s core is a selfish one and Jason was his brother. His first brother who won’t even look at him without at least two masks between them.
He shakes his head in a vain attempt to dislodge the sticky black thoughts, forces his eyes back onto the reports of a new rogue flitting between Bludhaven and Gotham and pretends he doesn’t notice the knowing look Bruce is sending him over his own case file.
Dick doesn’t want to admit it, but it is becoming a problem.
Everything was going fine until a few weeks ago. When Jason finally started coming back to the manor for Sunday dinner. He’d been ecstatic at the time, probably more so than anyone else, except maybe Alfred (not that he showed it), when Jason had hesitantly walked in the door and took the seat he had always chosen when he was Robin. The one opposite Dick’s. The chair that had remained vacant since his death. Finally, finally all Dick’s months of gentle hints and subtle attention to the cracks in Jason’s walls was paying off. Finally, he could have his little brother back to fill the chasm he’s left.
Or so he’d thought. Because as soon as Jason’s butt hit the ornate wood, Tim had pounced on him with twenty questions in rapid succession. Dick’s hand had already been raised to slap his overeager brother upside the head because they all knew Jason was as skittish as a fawn whenever he got within a mile of the manor and he couldn’t lose this, not again. The only thing that had stayed the oncoming hit was Jason’s shoulders losing come of their tension and a small smile straightening out his ever present frown.
As one, the family seemed to breathe out a quiet sigh of relief, and even Bruce had hidden his own smile into his glass. It was only Dick left stumbling in the wake of the realisation that Tim and Jason were… friends. On friendly terms at the very least. It was such a ridiculous thought that he’d shoved it right down and stuffed it into an iron box to ignore it resolutely for the rest of the evening. Even when it rattled the bars of its cage as he watched Tim drag Jason off to show him something he’d been working on.
He’d hoped, apparently in vain, that it would end there. A momentary blip of envy at seeing Jason’s walls go down in a way Dick had been trying to coax out of him for almost a year at this point.
“If you stare at the paper any harder, you might just set it on fire,” Tim’s voice cut through his brooding with light humour. The horrible part of Dick wanted to snap at him when he turned to find his brother standing next to him after somehow retrieving his crutch. Instead, he silently kicked a chair out for Tim to sit down on and offered him one of the case files.
A cursory glance around the cave revealed that Jason was still there, suiting up for patrol alongside Damian and bickering with the youngest over their blades. Or at least, that’s what Dick was going to tell himself when Damian waved his katana dangerously close to Jason’s neck and Jason responded by flashing the kris knife he was so fond of. Neither of them seemed particularly worried about it, so Dick once again left it be.
When he looked back at Tim, he was following his gaze and smiling. Dick felt himself frown, eternally glad his mask hid most of the motion, and bit his lip before he said something stupid like “He was my brother first.”
And there was the crux of the issue, he reflected half an hour later as he flew across Gotham’s rooftops. Jason and Tim were getting along better, much better than Jason and Dick and that selfish part of him he tried to pretend wasn’t there with all his might was getting jealous over it.
He knew why. And maybe that stung worse, but Jason was Tim’s Robin, his hero, and boy that amount of admiration certainly didn't go away overnight. Maybe for a normal person a couple of murder attempts would have mellowed it out, but no one in their family was normal and once Jason had sworn off the murder, Tim had gone right back to bouncing off the walls at the mere mention of the second Robin. That kind of hero worship wore down even the coldest of hearts. Dick knew from experience.
So, he distracted himself, prowled his route with practised ease, listening to the others chattering on the comms but couldn't find it in himself to interject with his usual wit, even when the overlapping voices paused, waiting expectantly for his input.
“Nightwing,” Babs’ voice startled him out of his wallowing as he perched on a convenient gargoyle and glowered down at where he could faintly see the outline of Crime Alley, a smudge of dirty black amongst Gotham’s sea of sickly lights and inky pools.
“What.”
”You haven’t moved in half an hour, N,” Babs’ voice was laced with quiet concern despite his snapping response.
Dick sighed, “Sorry.” He didn’t even know what he was apologising for at this point, but he at least stood to stretch out his stiff legs. “Just lost in thought.”
“Wanna tell me about it, boy wonder?” He could hear the smile in her voice and it made his lips curl. Sometimes he missed this, missed his best friend amongst all the rough edges and tangled ends of their relationship. They hadn’t been together like that in a while but damn if she didn’t know him better than he knew himself some days.
“Nah, I’m probably just being stupid,” Dick admitted as he stepped off the ledge and let himself drop into the night. He twisted at the last moment, fired a grapple and felt the line pull tight in a swing.
It was close to the end of patrol at this point, a relatively quiet night if the high energy nattering in his ear and the occasional glimpse of a game of rooftop tag he got as he flew his route were anything to go by. Of course a quiet night still meant crime, it was still Gotham after all, and after stopping a mugging and helping the victim to her apartment, Dick found himself on the outskirts of Crime Alley. It would be monumentally stupid to go into Jason’s territory without permission, let alone a warning, but Dick was tired of thinking.
He at least scaled the nearest fire escape and hopped along the roof tops, aware that approaching Jason at ground level where Hood was most certainly at an advantage was basically a death sentence. He’d been shot at by his estranged brother enough in his life, thank you very much.
The universe decided to grant him mercy, or perhaps a tiny shining strand of luck, as the Red Hood was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Dick found himself standing on a familiar rooftop, peering over the edge at the spot that used to frequent Jason’s favorite food stand. Chili dogs, he thought fondly, and backed up from the ledge so he could picture Jason, thirteen and still only just fitting into Dick’s first costume, sitting there as he scarfed down whatever Dick had bought him as a treat. It had been a peace offering, at first, after he admittedly got his head out of his ass and started actually spending time with the new robin. Jason hadn’t been trusting then either, for good reason, and food had seemed the easiest way to his heart. But soon, soon it had been one of their things.
Dick hadn’t known how blessed he’d been to have things with Jason, those little rituals that he’d mourn for four miserable years, wishing somehow to have both never started them and to have infinitely more. He hadn’t been back to this rooftop since. But if he concentrated hard enough, he could make the image of Jason, of Robin, turn his head of curly black hair and grin impishly at him with ketchup at the corner of his lips.
Only it wasn’t ketchup, it wasn’t sticky, it was thick and dark and dripping from his cracked lips and between his teeth and that wasn’t a smile it was a grimace and -
A gravely, robotic voice cut through the air and dispersed the waking nightmare in front of him. “What are you doing here, Big Bird?”
Dick didn’t have it in him to jump, he just spun around to come face to helmet with Red Hood.
“Ah, you know. Sightseeing.” He joked to cover his genuine lack of reason. What was he doing other than torturing himself?
”Uh-huh,” even the helmet and probably domino mask underneath couldn’t hide the obvious look Jason was giving him. “So which one of them asked you to check in on me?”
What.
”What?”
Hood scoffed and his whole head rolled to make up for the lack of moving eyes. “I’m guessing it wasn’t Barbie, she’s already wormed her way into my comms. So was it Timbers or the Big Bad Bat?”
”No one.” Dick snapped. He could feel his own irritation brewing at Jason’s insistence that someone had asked him to come here to, what? Monitor him? “Can’t I come check on my own brother of my own accord?”
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as it left his mouth. It was wrong and he didn’t even know why it was wrong, but he could see Jason’s walls going all the way up only for burning anger to come pouring out of the cracks.
“So you are here to check on me,” Hood sneered, “What, am I not being docile enough for the great golden boy? Is not killing not enough? Want me to give the shitstains a fuckin’ kiss before I send them off to Arkham?”
”What is your problem?” Dick demanded, the words exploding out of him before he could even think to bite his tongue. He could feel his fists curl, nails digging into his own suit as he stared down his own brother and wondered where the insurmountable chasm between them had come from.
“My Problem? My problem is you-”
He didn’t stay to hear the end of Jason’s tirade. His feet took him backwards to the edge of the rooftop, past the ghosts of their late night things, and into the air. He was grappling away before he even registered it, heading for the cave and the bike that could carry him away from Gotham and trying not to feel all of seventeen again.
It was fine, he told himself an hour later as he locked himself into his bedroom and made a valiant attempt not to cry into a faded red hoodie that had never once fit him. Everything was fine.
…
Everything was well and truly fucked.
Jason had been off his game since his fight with Nightwing but that was no excuse for how badly he’d fucked this up. Getting cornered in a dead end alley unarmed was bad enough, but getting cornered in a dead end alley, unarmed, with a still recovering Replacement was tentative family truce threatening levels of bad.
They weren’t even on patrol. It was too early in the night, dusk only just having settled through Gotham’s smoggy streets, for Jason to be suited up and Tim, because he was still grounded, to be tucked away safely in the cave. Apparently, muggers didn’t care about Jason’s routine, especially not when their eyes caught on Timothy Drake-Wayne stumbling about on crutches.
Jason should never have let the kid talk him into coming to the arcade. It was such a Dick thing to do, so Dick in fact that Jason was almost certain his brother had taken him to this exact arcade once when he was still donning the yellow cape at night, that he’d almost said no on principle when Tim asked. Then Tim had started begging and needling and explaining that Dickwing himself had promised to take the replacement weeks ago but had stopped coming to Gotham since then. And maybe Jason knew a little more about why Dick had retreated to Bludhaven than he’d been letting on and maybe he himself was feeling a little guilty about chasing Tim’s older brother away…
But the why didn't really matter now, what mattered was Jason was stuck in a dark alley with an injured Timothy Drake-Wayne, half a dozen armed men looking for money and only his kris hidden under his clothes.
“Jason. Don’t,” Tim hissed, the hand he had locked around Jason’s wrist where it had disappeared under his jacket to close around the hilt, the only thing keeping Jason from jumping straight into a fight, badly concealed guns be damned. He was the fucking Red Hood, he could take a few back alley muggers. “Let me handle this.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Replacement,” he spat back, “But there are six men here looking to take your money and you’re the injured one. So, if you’d be so fucking kind. Allow me.”
Jason moved to draw his knife but the hand around his wrist tightened in warning. ”We’re civilians right now, remember?” Tim muttered, his other hand still raised placatingly to the men watching them from the mouth of the alley, crutch abandoned on the dirty floor as he leant most of his weight onto Jason.
“We ain’t got all night,” one of the men called, his lips fixed into the kind of sneer that looked permanent, etched right into the lines of his face like just another scar from Gotham’s generous streets. “Just tell your guard dog to stand down and hand over all you’ve got.”
Let it never be said that Jason was not a patient man. Talia had honed patience into him almost as well as every cold winter night on the streets spent waiting for morning or an opening to get his hands on food or money that would mean food. But let it also never be said that he did not have a temper to rival the Batman’s himself.
“Oh you idiot-” Tim sighed, stumbling backwards to lean against the alley wall as Jason pushed him off and leapt for the nearest man.
The fight was a bit of a blur, maybe because once Jason caught sight of a gun drifting a little too close to Tim for comfort he lost the edges of his vision to green and snapped the would be shooter’s wrist to make him drop it. At that point, he probably should have been paying a lot more attention to his surroundings than Tim’s but when a gunshot rang through his ears he was insanely glad to feel the burning in his own arm where it had grazed along his bicep as proof he wasn’t about to watch another bird die.
Jason swung around to face the assailant, only for a shadow to flip over his head and down them with a strike from a disturbingly blue stick. He refocused on downing the rest of the muggers so he didn’t have to process the man in blue fighting at his back. Obviously, that meant they went down far quicker than he would have liked, leaving him with nothing to do but go fetch Tim’s crutch and then Tim himself as Nightwing zip tied the muggers’s wrists and called it in.
”You called Dickwing?” He hissed furiously to his brother who didn’t even have the decency to look guilty.
“Nah. Looks like he was just in the area,” Tim said with a shrug like he wasn’t the most lying liar to have ever lied to Jason’s face. Maybe that was a tiny bit of an over exaggeration.
“You okay, Timmy?” Nightwing called as he sauntered over to them. Jason subtly tried to step away to give them some privacy but Tim looped an arm around bicep and promptly pulled his hand away covered in slippery red. Jason tried not to wince as he was reminded of the tear in his hoodie sleeve and the skin underneath.
”Is that blood?” Nightwing advanced much more quickly now, grabbing onto Tim’s wrist to twist it back and forth, examining it for the source.
“It’s Jason’s,” the snitch replied.
Jason wasn’t even entirely sure what happened next, just that he was somehow corralled and bullied back to the cave for Alfred to stitch up his arm by a one legged boy wonder and a man in a skin tight leotard who didn’t even bloody like him.
And no, Tim, he wasn’t making that up, he could tell Dick didn’t like him by the way the first Robin was still staring him down from the other side of the med bay no matter how resolutely Jason had been ignoring him. Seriously, he was pretty sure Dick hadn’t blinked more than once in the last five minutes.
Jason knew what the problem was. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Dick knew he was dangerous, that he wasn’t trustworthy to be around the robins, or the family at all, and tonight had proven that once again. Jason had fucked up, put Tim in danger, and Dick had every right to be mad at him. No matter how much it made the small boy inside of him want to curl up and wait for his big brother to come find him and promise everything was okay. Just like that time he’d knocked over a priceless vase in the hallway and hidden in the attic for three hours until Dick had found him and coaxed him out with soft nicknames and promises that no one was mad.
But he wasn’t that little boy anymore and it was time to face the grave he’d dug himself.
Once Alfred had finished the last stitch and wrapped his arm with a clean bandage, giving him a soft smile and a pat on the shoulder before moving away to clean up, Jason let himself have a breath to steal himself before standing. He made it all the way to the door of the med bay, thankful Tim had headed Bruce off so he could slip out without any more awkward conversations, before Dick’s voice stopped him.
”Where are you going?”
“Out,” he replied gruffly and managed a few more steps before he heard Dick following him. Given he knew Dick could move silently, especially in the suit he hadn’t stripped out of, only removed his domino mask at some point to reveal stormy eyes framed by shadows, Jason knew Dick wanted him to stop.
“You’re injured,” Dick told him like he hadn’t also been in the room as Alfred methodically ordered him out of his hoodie and up onto the bed so he could clean and stitch the thankfully rather shallow wound.
”No shit, circus boy. Still got a patrol to go on, though,” he shrugged lopsidedly and made for the entrance to the cave. His bike obviously wasn’t here and he didn’t really feel like stealing one of Bruce’s cars, so he donned a spare domino mask and moved to grab one of the grapple guns when Dick’s hand closed around his wrist.
“You’re injured,” Dick insisted. “You shouldn’t grapple on that arm.”
“It’s not useless, Dick,” he spat, tugging his wrist out of that blue striped grip.
When he chanced a look at Dick’s face, his eyes were unreadable. “You-”, he started, but Jason cut him off.
“Look, I get that I fucked up tonight and I’m sorry I put Timbers in danger, so how about you get out of my way so I can get out on patrol and make up for it.” He made it another few steps towards the exit when Dick caught his other wrist, far gentler this time as if he was being mindful of not jarring Jason’s injury.
”What about you, huh?”
Jason blinked, incredulous. ”What?”
“You put yourself in danger tonight, not just Tim. And now you’re hurt-“
”Oh so this is my fault?” He snapped. Of course it was. It was all his fault. He shouldn’t have lost his temper. He shouldn’t have gone into that fight without back up. He should have waited until someone better fit for protecting Tim had shown up. But that didn’t mean Dick could stop him from going out there and doing better. Trying to make up for his past mistakes.
“I didn’t say that,” Dick had a pinched, pained expression on his face when he spoke, fingers curling tighter around Jason’s wrist. “I just… I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“News flash, Dickhead, you can’t save everyone. And you sure as Hell didn’t save me. So stop pretending you give a shit now and let me go.”
Surprisingly, Dick did, and it was only then that Jason heard the silence in the rest of the cave, as if everyone had stopped moving all together. Even the bats had gone quiet. One glance over at the computer showed them all in various stages of suited up, standing there like statues and watching him with those blank stone eyes.
“Fucking forget it,” he mumbled even as a humiliated flush burned his cheeks, then he turned on his heel and fled the cave.
…
You sure as Hell didn’t save me.
Dick watched Jason go in silence. Silence because the sheer number of words he wanted to say were currently choking him. Words Jason wouldn’t believe if their echoing argument was to be believed.
“Dick?” Tim called from somewhere behind him, but it was a much larger hand that landed on his shoulder and squeezed in a comforting way.
”B, I think I broke it,” he told the gloved hand offering him support.
Bruce rumbled consideringly. “I don’t think so, chum.”
Dick chanced a glance over his shoulder to see Bruce’s unmasked face. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
There was silence for a few moments as Bruce’s thumb rubbed small circles into Dick’s shoulder. “Relationships aren’t something you can just fix. Sometimes the vase is broken, Dick, and that’s okay. It’s okay to build a new one as long as you’re both ready for it.”
”What if he doesn’t want to? What if he’s never ready to…” Dick trailed off, trying to choke back the waves of grief as he imagined Jason’s back staying turned to him forever.
“Maybe you need to take a page out of Tim’s book and stay stubborn, chum. You remember how Jay used to be?” Of course Dick did, that prickly independent boy who used every tool he had to hide how terrified he was. The kid who needed patience no matter how angry he got. “He’s still the same Jay.”
“Right,” he nodded and found himself walking towards the cave exit before he even realized it, following Jason’s hasty footsteps. “Thanks, B,” he called over his shoulder.
”Go get him, chum.”
…
Jason doesn’t know how Dick found him. It’s been hours since he made his hasty retreat from the cave, long enough for him to make it all the way back to his turf, even if he hadn’t made it back to his safe house for his armour yet. Hours of stewing in what he was reluctant to call hurt.
But here Dick was, perched on the edge of a familiar rooftop, staring down at something on the street. When Jason inched close enough to peer over his shoulder, he couldn’t find anything in particular. He should have known it was a trap as soon as he saw the blue and black figure but his emotions were still rubbed raw and honestly, he didn’t have it in him to get chased down by a bat who could overpower him any day if he really tried.
So when Dick started talking, Jason didn’t run.
"I wanted to be your Robin," Dick mumbled into the night, still not facing Jason.
"What?"
"What you were for Tim. Robin. Magic and hope and... what you still are for Tim. He never stopped seeing you as his Robin." Dick sighed. "I wanted to be that for you. Before. I didn't know it then, I didn't even have the words for it..." He trailed off and the silence lay between them like a graveyard.
Finally, Jason found his voice. He almost wished he was wearing his helmet, just to muffle the crackle of his throat, the breaking of his voice as he dragged the words over his own sand paper tongue. "Why are you telling me this, Dickwing?"
"Because... I don't know. Maybe admitting it will make it hurt less. I want to be your Robin. I wanted to be your Robin before you... died. I wanted to protect you, to be a hero you could look up to, could trust. But I fucked that up. And now... now I can't even be your brother right, let alone your Robin." The words spill out of Dick like blood from a punctured artery, fast and violent and irreversible. Jason's hands twitched like he could put pressure on the wound, like he could wrap his hands around Dick's throat to stop the flow, save them both from bleeding out here on this shitty rooftop.
"You... look, maybe you weren't my Robin. I mean, you sure as shit aren't my Robin now. I never had a Robin. But I did have a Nightwing.”
Dick turned to look at him and he still isn’t wearing his domino so Jason got a clear look at the glossy tears in his eyes.
“Ah shit, Dickie-” he didn’t even get the whole sentence out, to apologise for whatever he fucked up, before his brother was on him, curling his arms around him and pulling him as close as he can, then closer still until they’re crushed together. He just about got his arms around Dick before his head was yanked down, buried in Dick’s shoulder so he could run his hands through Jason’s hair.
“Fuck,” he mumbled as the soft touch coaxed tears to his eyes and he pressed his face more firmly into the Nightwing suit in a vain attempt to chase them away. His only solace was that Dick’s voice sounds just as wrecked when he spoke.
“Can we talk?”
”Y-yeah. Yeah, we can talk,” Jason said and tried to pull back so he could wipe away the evidence of his embarrassing breakdown but Dick’s arms tightened impossibly more, keeping him in place in his big brother’s hold.
“Don’t. Not yet,” Dick said pleadingly.
“Okay. Later”
…
Later came in Dick’s apartment. They finished patrol together quietly, then Dick went back to the cave for his bike, but not before asking Jason, “Come to mine? Please. We can get chili dogs, watch a musical, anything you want. Just. Come, please?”
And Jason had. He’d been there, standing uncertainly by the couch, when Dick slipped in through the window, greasy bag clutched in one hand and all the hope he could muster in the other.
“Hey Dickie,” he said softly as Dick drank in the sight of his moving chest and calm, pale eyes. Not blue anymore, he noted sadly. But not green either.
“Hey Jay.”
They wound up on the couch, Jason in borrowed sweats that used to drown him and now ended above his ankles and Dick with Jason’s legs in his lap because he didn’t want to let go any time soon, but he had conceded it was difficult to eat curled into each other.
“Is this my hoodie?” Jason asked after a while, snagging the faded red fabric from where Dick had left it on the arm of the couch.
”Yeah, you left it here when you last came to stay,” Dick answered absently as he strolled through streaming services for something they could both agree on watching. When Jason didn’t respond, he looked over to find his brother already staring at him, a look of profound… something on his face.
”I think we might be idiots, Dickie,” he declared quietly.
“Yeah Little wing, we might be.”
…
”Dick and Jay are getting along better,” Bruce remarked where he sat beside Tim, keeping him company as he waited for Alfred to give him the all clear on his leg.
“Fucking finally,” Tim grumbled even if he couldn’t bite back his smile.
”Language,” Bruce chided softly, but he was smiling too as they watched Nightwing and Red Hood suit up side by side, bickering back and forth like they’d been doing it for years.