Archive of Our Own

The clock on the wall ticked forward like a knife scraping against bone. Measured. Relentless. Counting down to nothing Jason could name.

The room was dark except for the machines. Their blue and green lights pulsed in low, steady rhythms, casting shifting shadows across the white sheets, the white walls, the pale curve of Dick's face against the pillow. The monitor's glow reached far enough to touch the window, faint green bleeding across the glass like algae spreading across still water.

He was sleeping again. The sedatives the doctors kept pushing through his IV made sure of that—but they were PRN now, as-needed rather than continuous, which meant Dick surfaced in fragments. Clear for a minute. Gone the next. Reaching for something just out of reach before the drugs pulled him back under.

The morphine didn't help. Neither did the ativan. They kept his body still, his mind soft at the edges, but they couldn't quite quiet whatever was happening behind his eyes.

Jason wondered if anything could.

He sat in the plastic chair beside the bed, pulled up close—close enough that his knees almost touched the metal rail, his legs spread wide, boots flat on the floor. The position kept him low, grounded, ready to move if he had to. Old habits.

His helmet sat on the windowsill, a dark shape against the glass, barely there. He'd cleared the space himself after the second night—moved the dead orchid and the get-well card to the corner of the sill, where they huddled together like afterthoughts. The orchid had been there when he arrived. The card, too. He hadn't asked who sent it. Didn't want to know if the answer was someone Dick had once loved and now couldn't name.

Between his boots, the linoleum was empty. Scuffed. Cleaned too many times.

He'd stopped taking his jacket off. Stopped eating. Stopped leaving the room for anything but the bathroom and the occasional walk to the vending machine that left his stomach emptier than before. Five days of the same cycle—sit, watch, wait for Dick to open his eyes, watch him forget, start over.

A cramp twisted his side. His hands trembled—not from fear. He pressed his palms harder against his knees and waited for it to pass.

The leather of his jacket creaked when he shifted his weight, too loud in the artificial hush.

He kept it on because it was armor. Because without it, he was just some guy in a t-shirt sitting at his brother's bedside while his brother forgot he existed.

Brother.

The word felt wrong in his head. Too soft. Too specific. Dick had never called him that out loud—not directly. Little Wing was the closest he ever got, and Jason had spent years pretending he didn't notice the way Dick said it like it mattered. Like he mattered. Like being Robin after Dick Grayson wasn't a death sentence, just a handoff. A promotion.

He'd never known how to give that back. How to say you're the reason I didn't become something worse without it sounding like a eulogy.

Now he didn't have the chance.

The machines beeped. Dick's chest rose and fell. His left arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow, the gauze fresh—the nurses had changed it an hour ago, and Jason had watched them unwrap the wounds underneath. Bite marks. Cigarette burns. A cut along the inside of his forearm that was too straight to be anything but deliberate.

Joker had taken his time.

Jason closed his eyes. The back of his throat tasted like battery acid. He let the silence settle around him, thick and suffocating, until the only thing he could hear was his own pulse and the quiet hum of the IV drip.

Then he opened them.

Dick's were open too.

Jason didn't move. Didn't breathe. The shift had happened without sound—one moment sleeping, the next staring at the ceiling with that same blank, unseeing expression he'd worn for the first twelve hours after they'd found him. His pupils were still uneven. Wrong-sized. The left one lagged when the right one tracked, and the doctors said that would fade with time, with healing, with the swelling that was going down so slowly Jason wanted to scream.

He didn't scream. He sat. He watched.

Dick blinked. Slow. His gaze drifted from the ceiling to the window, then to the chair beside the bed, then to Jason's face. His eyes were hazy—the drugs, or the pain, or both—and for a moment, he looked like he might slip away again, back into the sedated half-dark where nothing hurt and nothing remembered.

Then his brow furrowed. He fought it. Stayed.

"You're still here," Dick said.

His voice was dry. Cracked at the edges. A nurse had told Jason that Dick hadn't spoken since yesterday morning—just stared at the ceiling while they changed his bandages, while they checked his vitals, while they asked him questions he couldn't seem to answer.

Now he was answering. Sort of.

Jason nodded. Didn't trust his voice.

Dick watched him for a long moment. His gaze drifted, snapped back, drifted again. "You're not a doctor."

"No."

"Family?"

The word hit Jason in the sternum like a bullet. He forced his expression to stay flat. Forced his hands to stay still on his knees. "Something like that."

Dick's eyes moved over his face—slower than before, but with that same flat assessment. The white streak in Jason's dark hair. The rougher build beneath the jacket. Then—strangely—a scar through his eyebrow, old and familiar in a way that seemed to make Dick's frown deepen. Like something in his chest recognized what his mind couldn't—or wouldn't.

"You've been here a while," Dick said. It wasn't a question.

"Five nights."

Something flickered across Dick's face. Too fast to name. "Why?"

Jason opened his mouth. Closed it. The truth was too big and too small at the same time. Because you're my brother. No. Because I owe you. Closer, but still wrong. Because when I died, you were the only one who mourned me like I was a person instead of a failure.

He couldn't say any of that. Not to the man on the bed, who was looking at him like he'd never heard the name Jason Todd in his life.

"You'd do the same," he said instead.

Dick considered this. His fingers twitched against the sheets—a small, restless movement that Jason recognized down to his bones. Dick had never been able to stay still. Even asleep, he moved. Even unconscious, his body fought. The drugs couldn't take that from him.

"Would I?" Dick asked.

The question wasn't cruel. That was the worst part. It was genuine. And there was something in it—a clarity, a sharpness—that cut through the haze of the drugs. For a moment, Dick wasn't fighting to stay present. He was present. Fully. Utterly.

Then his gaze slipped sideways, and the moment passed.

Jason's throat closed. He looked away. The clock on the wall said 2:47 AM. The world outside the window was dark and cold, Gotham's skyline jagged against the stars like broken teeth. Somewhere out there, Bruce was probably standing in the Batcave, staring at a screen filled with data he couldn't make sense of. Somewhere else, in a basement or a warehouse or a funhouse, Joker was laughing.

He'd checked. Three times. Every trail went cold. Every lead turned to ash.

"You should sleep," Jason said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

Dick didn't close his eyes. Didn't look away. He just watched Jason with that unfamiliar, dulled gaze, his breathing shallow but steady, his hands curled loosely against the blankets. The drugs tugged at him—Jason could see it in the way his eyelids kept wanting to drop, the way his focus kept slipping sideways before he pulled it back.

"What's your name?" Dick asked.

Jason's heart stopped. Then started again, too fast, tripping over itself like a bird slamming into a window.

He'd told him. Yesterday. The first time Dick woke up, coherent enough to ask, Jason had answered. Jason. And Dick had nodded, polite and distant, like he was filing the information away in a drawer he might never open again.

He'd forgotten.

Of course he'd forgotten. The doctors said his short-term memory was damaged. Said the trauma to his temporal lobe could cause gaps, confusion, difficulty retaining new information. Said it might get better. Might not. Said they wouldn't know for weeks.

Jason had listened to all of it with his arms crossed and his jaw tight, and he hadn't let himself feel any of it until now.

Now it crashed over him like a wave of ice water.

He'd been erased. Not just from Dick's past—from his present, too. Every night he sat in this chair, every conversation they had, every word he said—gone by morning. He was Sisyphus with a hospital visitor's badge, pushing the same boulder up the same hill every single day.

"Jason," he said. The name scraped out of his throat like broken glass.

Dick repeated it slowly. "Jason." He tested the syllables like he was learning a new language. His gaze drifted to the window, then back. Fighting to hold on. "You're a vigilante."

It wasn't a question. Jason looked down at himself—the leather jacket, the Kevlar undersuit visible at his collar, the combat boots. He hadn't exactly been subtle.

"Yeah," he said.

"Batman's people."

The phrasing made something cold slither down Jason's spine. Batman's people. Not family. Not allies. Not even partners. Just people, like Bruce was a god and everyone who worked for him was an acolyte.

"Something like that," he said again.

Dick's gaze drifted to the window. The machines beeped. The IV dripped. A car passed somewhere outside, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling before disappearing. When Dick spoke again, his voice was softer. More uncertain.

"Someone came to see me," he said. The words came slowly, like he was pulling them out of fog. "The first night. A shape. I think... I think it was him. Batman."

Jason nodded, even though Dick wasn't looking at him. "He was here."

"He didn't say much." Dick's voice was distant, like he was talking about a dream he couldn't quite hold onto. "Just stood at the foot of the bed. Watched me sleep."

Jason knew. He'd been in the hallway, pressed against the wall, listening to the silence. Bruce had stayed for eleven minutes. Then he'd walked out without looking back, his cape dragging on the linoleum floor, and Jason had watched him go and felt something crack open in his chest.

Not anger. Not quite. Something older. Something that ached.

"He's not good at this," Jason said. "The bedside manner thing."

Dick made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had any humor in it. "Yeah. I got that."

Another silence. Longer this time. The kind of silence that stretched and stretched until it started to feel like a living thing, taking up all the air in the room. The clock ticked. The shadows on the ceiling shifted as a cloud passed over the moon outside. Dick's eyelids drooped, then snapped open again. He was fading. Jason could see it.

But he was fighting.

Jason wanted to say something. Wanted to reach out and take Dick's hand, the way Dick had done for him a hundred times before—after nightmares, after close calls, after Jason had come back from the dead with his head full of rage and no idea what to do with it. Dick had never asked. Had never pushed. Just sat beside him, close enough to feel, and waited.

He owed him that much.

But his hands wouldn't move. They stayed locked on his knees, fingers curled into fists, knuckles white. The distance between his chair and the bed was less than two feet, but it felt like a canyon.

Dick turned his head on the pillow. Looked at him again. That searching stare, like he was trying to find something he'd lost.

"You look tired," Dick said.

Jason barked a laugh. It came out wrong—sharp and hollow, bouncing off the walls like a stone skipping across a frozen lake. "Yeah. Well."

"When's the last time you slept?"

"I sleep."

"That's not what I asked."

Jason's jaw tightened. He looked at the clock. 3:08 AM. Twenty-one minutes had passed since the last time he'd checked, though it felt like seconds and years at the same time. He looked at Dick's bandaged arm. He looked at the playing card sitting on his own knee—the one he'd taken from Dick's apartment, the one with Miss me? written on it in green ink that smelled like chemicals and malice.

He'd been carrying it for five days. Touching it when he couldn't sleep. Tracing the letters with his thumb like a rosary.

"I'll sleep when you're better," he said.

"That might be a while."

"I've got time."

Dick's expression shifted. Not recognition—not yet—but something else. Something softer. Something that looked almost like concern, directed at a stranger who'd been sitting in his hospital room for five nights for reasons he couldn't explain. His gaze drifted again, unfocused, and for a moment Jason thought he'd lost him to the drugs.

Then Dick blinked. Came back. Held on.

"Why does this matter to you?" Dick asked. "Me. Why do you care?"

Jason could have lied. Could have said Batman asked me to or it's my job or I'm just following protocol. Could have deflected, the way he always did, with sarcasm and a closed-off expression and a voice that dared anyone to push further.

But he was so tired. And Dick was looking at him like he actually wanted to know. Like maybe, buried somewhere under the bruises and the bandages and the fog of brain damage, there was a part of him that recognized the shape of this moment. The weight of it.

"Because you're my brother," Jason said.

The words fell into the silence like stones into deep water. Rippled outward. Filled the room.

The monitor beeped twice, quick, like it was startled.

Dick stared at him.

Jason stared back. His heart was pounding. His face was hot. He hadn't meant to say that. Hadn't even known he was going to say it until it was already out, already irreversible, already hanging in the air between them like a challenge.

There, he thought. There it is. The thing I've never said. The thing you deserved to hear a long time ago.

Dick's throat moved. He swallowed, slow and deliberate, like he was trying to remember how.

Jason's thumb pressed into his own knee, hard enough to bruise.

"I don't—" Dick stopped. Started again. His gaze slipped sideways, and he had to visibly pull it back. "I don't remember having a brother."

"I know."

"But you're here anyway."

"I know."

Dick's eyes were very bright in the dim light. Not with tears—not yet—but with something that looked like the possibility of them. Something that looked like the beginning of tears, if he still remembered how.

"That doesn't make sense," Dick said.

"No," Jason agreed. "It doesn't."

The clock ticked. 3:11 AM. The machines beeped. Somewhere down the hall, a nurse laughed at something, the sound muffled and distant, belonging to a world where people weren't sitting in dark rooms trying to figure out how to hold onto someone who kept slipping through their fingers.

Dick's hand moved on the blanket. Just a little. His fingers uncurled, stretching toward the edge of the bed, toward the space between them.

Jason saw it. His breath caught.

The playing card sat on his knee, the green ink still sharp, still mocking. He let it fall. It hit the floor as he leaned forward—fluttering past his thigh, landing between his boots, the question still visible in the half-dark—and then his hand was crossing the gap, the leather sleeve pulling tight across his shoulder as he stretched across the space between them.

He took Dick's hand. Carefully. Gently. Mindful of the IV line, mindful of the bandages, mindful of the way Dick's fingers were cold and thin and nothing like the hands that had pulled him out of burning buildings and caught him mid-fall and clapped him on the shoulder after a job well done.

Jason shifted his grip to keep the IV line slack, even as Dick's fingers tightened around his. The effort of it pulled a shiver through Dick's shoulders—visible in the way his bandaged arm tensed, the way his breath hitched and held before releasing.

These hands were hurt. These hands were healing.

But they were still Dick's hands.

Dick didn't pull away. Didn't tense further. He just looked down at their joined fingers, then up at Jason's face, and his brow furrowed again—that same puzzled expression, like he was trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. His hand was trembling, but his grip was iron. Jason heard the strain in it, the way the drugs made every effort audible—a soft, uneven rhythm to his breathing, a catch in his throat that wasn't quite a word.

"I feel like I should know you," Dick said quietly.

Jason's chest ached. A deep, bone-deep ache that had nothing to do with his scars or his old injuries or the way he'd been sleeping in a plastic chair for five nights. It was the ache of someone who'd been seen, really seen, and was terrified of losing it.

"You do," he said. "You will."

He squeezed Dick's hand once, then let go. Settled back in his chair. The plastic creaked under his weight. He pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders, the leather warm from his body heat, and looked at the window where his helmet sat against the dark glass—a dark shape against the dark, barely there.

Dick watched him for a long moment. His pupils were still uneven, still wrong, but his gaze was steadier than it had been yesterday. More present. His eyelids drooped, and this time, he didn't fight it.

"Jason," he murmured, just before his eyes closed. Testing the name again. Holding onto it.

"Yeah," Jason said softly. "I'm here."

The machines beeped. The clock ticked. The playing card lay on the floor between his boots, the green ink still visible, still waiting.

But Dick's hand stayed where Jason had left it, fingers still slightly curled, reaching toward the edge of the bed.

And Jason stayed where he was, watching over him, waiting to be remembered again.