Work Text:
The story Jason tells is this:
There he was, twelve years old, out on the town with his tire iron, looking for a decent set of tires to jack. Hopefully, make enough to buy a couple of burgers and a pack of smokes. Then… there it is. The Batmobile. Just sitting there. And that's definitely worth a few days worth of burgers and maybe a carton of smokes. He gets three tires off, when Bruce comes back, and spots him. Jason hits him in the chest with the tire iron, and tries to run. Bruce finds him. Brings him back to the manor. The rest, as they say, is history.
It's a good story. It fits the Jason-who-came-back-as-Red-Hood perfectly. Hell, it kinda fits the Jason he was trying to grow into during his three years living with Bruce even.
It's a good story. It's also an absolute lie.
The truth is nothing as daring and cool and rebellious and tough.
But it's the story Jason tells whenever anyone asks. And Bruce never corrects him.
The real story is this:
There he was, twelve years old, desperate, starving, half-delirious from a fever, with an infection that wasn't taking its time in killing him. Too weak to do much more than drag himself out from behind the dumpster he'd managed to crawl to before he'd passed out earlier that night.
And there she was. The Batmobile. Just… sitting there. A meal ticket, and one that Jason didn't have to suffer too much to cash in.
He didn't have a tire iron; what kinda kid finds and carries around a tire iron? Truth is, Jason still, to this day, isn't entirely sure what he was gonna do when he dragged his dying self over to the car. Steal one of the side mirrors? Try and open the door? Steal a headlight?
He doesn't know. Doesn't know if he had any kinda plan, or if he was already so delirious from the fever that he wasn't thinking anything at all.
It hadn't mattered, in the end; Jason hadn't even gotten close enough to touch it before the door swung open, and there he was.
Batman. The guy hadn't even gotten out of the car yet. Jason can't even say he'd assumed he'd already left, because honestly? He wasn't thinking much of anything, and that's the only thing he can remember with any sort of clarity.
The irony of only being able to clearly remember being confused isn't lost on him.
But there he was: all four foot eight inches, sixty-seven pounds of him, staring up at Batman. Hearing Batman saying… something, something he couldn't quite make out, wondering what was going on.
The feeling of free-falling. Of everything getting… soft.
Jason doesn't know the next act in the story; he was unconscious, delirious, or high out of his mind for almost all of it.
But that's okay. Because it's not the story he tells anyway.
Every time one of Jason's brothers or sisters laugh at his story about stealing tires off the Batmobile, Bruce has to bit his cheek to keep from saying something. To keep from snapping, to tell them it isn't funny, that that isn't what happened, and it wasn't nearly as cute and cool and tough and 'badass' as Jason pretends.
Because Bruce remembers that night with picture perfect clarity. Remembers watching in his side mirrors, as a small, gaunt faced child -too dirty, and ragged for Bruce to even know if they were a boy or a girl at first -pulled themselves out from behind the dumpster. Remembers staring at the child, and realizing that he was staring at a child who was dying.
Bruce hadn't known what was killing the child; not then. But he'd seen the too-white face, the hollow cheeks, the tremors and the sweat as the child had pulled themselves to their feet, and Bruce had just… known that the kid would be dead by morning if he didn't do something.
He'd gotten out of the car, and moved as slowly as he could towards the figure, trying not to spook them. He'd gotten close enough to be fairly confident it was a boy, before the boy had seemed to notice him.
Bruce can't remember exactly what he'd said that night. What he'd said to the sick, dying twelve year old, staring up at him with foggy, glazed-over eyes that wouldn't focus.
It hadn't really mattered; the words weren't what was important from that night. Jason tells a story of hitting Batman with a tire iron, and Bruce lets him, because he knows Jason needs to tell the story like that.
But the truth is this: after less than two minutes of trying to verbally convince the boy, Bruce had simply picked him up, and bundled him into the Batmobile. Jason hadn't put up any sort of resistance, hadn't even really seemed to realize Bruce had picked him up.
The second Bruce had picked him up, he'd realized the boy had a fever; he'd been able to feel how hot the boy was through his gloves, a sort of body heat that all humans instinctively recognize as too hot.
He doesn't remember if he said anything during the drive. He knows Jason didn't; he can remember, every time he'd looked over at the little trembling body in the passenger seat, Jason's eyes had been staring at Bruce. Not seeing him, not really, but staring at him.
Never one to pay attention to speed limits, that night, Bruce had made the mile and a half distance from the alley where his parents had died, to Leslie's clinic in under two minutes. He'd carried the boy, bridal style, oh-so-careful as he'd rushed in, and started demanding someone get Dr. Thompkins.
Jason had nearly died that night; hadn't been any better the night after. It wasn't until the third night that Leslie had cautiously told Bruce that the boy might survive.
Bruce remembers Leslie telling Bruce that first night that she'd do what she could, but not to get his hopes up. Remembers Leslie telling him the second night that if they could get the boy through another night, then maybe he'd have a chance.
He remembers the cracked open, raw, visceral sense of relief he'd felt that third night, when Leslie told him that the little boy might live… and he fights back the urge to scream at his children every time they laugh at Jason's lie.