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“Good afternoon,” the woman behind the reception desk said, offering a practiced smile. “Welcome to Wayne Enterprises. How may I assist you?”
Jason smiled back, adjusting the strap of his bag. “I’m here to see Bruce Wayne.”
“Do you have an appointment with Mr. Wayne?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Wayne doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors. May I ask—”
The woman stopped abruptly, straightening in her seat as though she’d swallowed a ruler. Jason kept smiling, kept the pleasant expression fixed to his face, as he watched it dawn on her who it was she was speaking to. He’d seen it happen enough times to know how this went: the wide eyes, the embarrassed flush, the frantic apologies that followed, then the sigh of relief when he assured them it’s fine, don’t worry about it, no harm done.
“My apologies,” she said, when they’d finished the whole song and dance. “I—I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
Jason, still smiling, said his thanks and made his way toward Bruce’s office. He drew more than a few looks as he went, and he did his best to tune out the whispers that nipped at his heels. One would have thought his legal resurrection would be old news by now—what with the general insanity the city dealt with on a near-daily basis—but apparently not.
Normally, this would have been enough to deter him from stepping foot inside Wayne Tower. Or from going anywhere near strangers with iPhones, really. But the thought of potentially being—yet again—this week’s tabloid fodder was still more preferable than the thought of doing this in the manor, under the rest of his family’s prying eyes. He could already hear the jokes Tim would make about the sentimentality of it all . . . could already imagine the knowing gleam in Cass’s eyes, Dick’s obnoxious grin . . .
Bruce was behind his desk when Jason reached his office, a pen in hand and a stack of paperwork in front of him. He looked up the moment Jason’s shadow crossed the doorway. Whatever he felt about the unscheduled visit, Jason couldn’t tell. Not that Jason had expected anything else—Bruce had spent so many years perfecting the art of giving nothing away that at this point it wasn’t a mask so much as the shape of his face.
“Busy?” Jason said, aiming for nonchalant.
“Nothing that can’t wait,” Bruce said, setting his pen down. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”
“I’ve got time to kill.”
An hour exactly. Enough time to get this over with and then return to campus, where Jason could lose himself in Professor Castillo’s lecture and not have to think too hard about this impromptu detour.
Jason dropped into the chair across from the desk, dropped his bag beside him, and stretched his legs out. Some of his nerves must have shown on his face, because Bruce was still watching him, cataloguing for anything out of place. The look Bruce got when he clocked a limp Jason was trying to hide or when he was deciding whether to ask how many hours of sleep Jason had actually gotten that week—paranoid hypocrite that he was.
“Is everything all right?” Bruce asked.
“Yeah, I just—I’ve got something. Figured I’d drop it off early. Before Sunday.”
Jason reached into his bag and pulled out the padded envelope, setting it down on the desk.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Bruce said mildly. But even as he did, the start of a smile tugged at his mouth.
“Of course I did. I’m reigning champion—I’ve got to defend my title.”
“It’s not a competition.”
Jason snorted.
“It isn’t,” Bruce insisted. “There’s no competition, chum.”
Jason rolled his eyes. Chum. Bruce only ever called Jason—or Dick—that when he was feeling especially sentimental.
“Sure, there isn’t,” Jason said dryly. “Because you don’t have favorites. Because every gift is meaningful. The spirit of the occasion is what matters, yada yada yada.” He schooled his expression into something theatrically grave. “You know no one believes you when you say that, right?”
Bruce picked up the envelope, his faint smile inching higher. “Should I be worried?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Ominous.”
Jason felt the corners of his mouth twitch, despite the nerves sitting low in his stomach. “No glitter bombs, I promise.”
Bruce opened the envelope and took out the book inside. An advance copy. The Earth Didn’t Want Me, the cover read, and below it, Jason Todd-Wayne.
Even now—or maybe especially now, after months of sleepless nights staring at the blinking cursor on his laptop—it still didn’t feel real. His words printed out, the pages bound. And now there they were in Bruce’s hands.
Jason didn’t remember them well, the years before his mom had gotten sick. They were a blur now, but there were nights he still remembered clearly, from back when his father still came home and his mother’s good days outnumbered the bad. His father used to read to him whatever paperback he’d found at the secondhand shop. Willis hadn’t been much of a reader himself, but on the evenings it got too warm and muggy in their apartment, they’d sat together on the fire escape while his father read out loud, doing all the voices badly and without shame. He’d liked doing the voices, liked making Jason laugh hard enough that his mom would shush them in case the neighbors complained.
Jason couldn’t have been older than six, maybe five. But he remembered looking at those old books—worn covers, yellowed pages, the corners already soft and curled from other hands—and he remembered thinking, someone made this. Someone, somewhere, had sat down and wrote it and now it existed, out in the world, where a stranger with fifty cents could find it. That had seemed like everything, back then, though he hadn’t had the words to explain why.
“It’s not quite a first edition,” Jason said, before the silence could stretch on too long, get too heavy, “but it’s the earliest version anyone’s going to get, so . . . I don’t know. I thought you could add it to the collection.”
Bruce didn’t say anything at first. He was still looking at the book—his eyes fixed on Jason’s name, his thumb resting just beneath the letters, unmoving, like he expected them to rearrange themselves if he so much as blinked.
A year later, and Bruce still looked at it the same way he had when Jason had first showed it to him. That look of—not surprise. It wasn’t disbelief, exactly, but more like . . . awe. Or something dangerously close to it. As though the name was a lighthouse cutting through a long, long fog, and some part of him still wasn’t convinced the light wouldn’t go out the second he looked away.
“You finished it,” Bruce said finally.
Jason felt heat crawl up the back of his neck. “Technically, it still needs final proofread passes. And the cover might change. The publisher’s been going back and forth on the design but—yeah. I finished it.”
“When is it coming out?”
“September. Pre-orders are open.”
“You used to talk about this,” Bruce said quietly. His gaze hadn’t moved from the cover. “When you were young. You said—you wanted to get published. To see your name on a spine. Alfred used to—” He broke off, clearing his throat. “You’d bring him things to read.”
“I remember,” Jason said, keeping his voice light. “He actually gave useful notes. You always said everything was good.”
“They were.”
Jason let out a bark of laughter. “I was a kid with extremely derivative taste. Nothing I wrote back then was anywhere near the ballpark of ‘good.’”
“You were twelve. I wasn’t going to—” Bruce exhaled, something between a sigh and a laugh, and shook his head. “I wasn’t going to give a twelve-year-old line edits.”
“Which is why I took them to Alfred. Do you remember—there was that one story with the dragon and the dwarves and—I was clearly ripping off Tolkien. Alfred said as much. He told me the middle chapters dragged and the ending was too neat. Now that was useful feedback.” Jason chuckled, more at himself than anything. “I cried about it for twenty minutes, but still.”
Bruce’s brow furrowed. “You cried about it?”
“He was right. It was—Jesus, it was so bad. I was an idiot.”
“You were twelve.”
“I was an idiot at twenty-three too.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” The corners of his mouth lifted again as he looked back down at the book. “But you were also very good at twenty-three. And at twelve.” Bruce turned it over, read the back, turned it again. His thumb moved along the spine, as if he was committing every detail of it to memory. “And now.”
Jason rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly too hot in his jacket. “Don’t get starry-eyed about it,” he muttered. “It hasn’t sold yet. There’s a non-zero chance no one reads it and it’s on a remainder table by next Christmas.”
“That won’t happen.” Bruce looked up and held his gaze, steady. “You’re a great writer, Jay.”
Bruce sounded so sure, as if it was settled fact—like gravity or the weather or the location of Gotham on the map—that Jason felt a hard lump rise in his throat.
Jason swallowed it back, shrugged, and said, “Good books don’t automatically sell. You could write the most technically perfect, thematically rich novel of the twenty-first century, and it’ll get buried if the algorithm doesn’t like it. Or it releases the same week as something with a better marketing budget.”
“That seems cynical.”
“That’s the industry.”
Bruce frowned. “The industry’s wrong about a lot of things. I know what I’m holding.”
Jason didn’t know what to say to that—which was just as well, because Bruce was looking down at the book again. He opened it, turning the pages.
Jason couldn’t see it from where he sat, but he knew the moment Bruce found it. Saw the exact moment Bruce’s hands stilled on the page. Heard the soft exhale, as though something had reached into his chest and closed a fist around it.
It wasn’t much. It was barely anything—just a breath, just the smallest catch in it—but Jason had spent enough of his life learning to read what Bruce didn’t say out loud.
Jason looked away, out the window, at the city shimmering in the early summer heat. From this high up, it was almost possible to forget how sharp its teeth really were, the afternoon sun turning glass and steel bright enough to hurt his eyes.
“We don’t have to—I didn’t want to make it a thing,” Jason said, then immediately rolled his eyes. “Okay, maybe I did want to make it a little bit of a thing. Father’s Day gift and all.”
“This is . . . more than a gift,” Bruce said thickly.
“Yeah, well. You’re hard to shop for, old man. Can’t exactly get you socks.”
Bruce let out a faint breath of a laugh—except it didn’t sound anything like a laugh. Jason looked up and found, to his horror, that Bruce’s eyes had gone too bright, in a way he’d seen only maybe twice before in his life.
“Okay,” Jason said. A little too loudly, probably, but his chest was getting tight in a way he didn’t like. “That’s enough feelings for one day. If we keep going, I’m gonna get hives.”
“Jay—”
“It’s right there, Bruce. That’s—I wrote it there so it would say it. All the stuff that needed saying. So we wouldn’t have to stand here and—” The words caught in his throat. He swallowed hard and tried again. “We don’t have to, is all.”
Bruce didn’t answer right away. For what felt like a long time, he just looked at Jason, the same way he’d looked at the name on the cover.
“All right,” Bruce said at last.
“Good,” Jason said, nodding. “Great. This sure was—something. It’s been swell, even, but—I should go. I’ve got—my class starts at three, and I need to get back across town, so—” He started to stand, reaching for his bag.
“I’m proud of you.”
Jason froze, half out of his seat, his hand tightening around the strap of his bag.
“I don’t say it enough,” Bruce continued, voice low. “But I am. I know I didn’t always—there are things I should have said more when you were younger. When it would have—” He stopped, jaw tight, and Jason watched him visibly gather himself, like he was trying to steady his footing on uneven ground. “I still wonder sometimes, what might have been different if I had.”
Jason looked down at his feet, blinking back the sudden prickling feeling in his eyes. He’d wondered the same thing more times than he could count. Those last months as Robin, never quite certain if he was wanted past whatever use he could be in the field. Whether he would have made different choices if he’d known, if he’d been surer of his place outside the cape. Whether knowing, plainly, that he mattered beyond what he could do, would have changed anything about the boy who’d gone looking for his mother in Ethiopia.
He didn’t know the answer. He’d stopped needing one a long time ago. But the question still lived inside him—not an open wound, but an old scar that sometimes ached when the weather changed.
“Okay,” Jason said again. His voice came out more even than he expected, though it was a near thing.
“Jason—”
“I heard you.” He forced himself to meet Bruce’s eyes, pulling the strap of his bag onto his shoulder. “I heard you. I just—I’ve got class.”
Bruce got up from behind the desk. Jason stood rooted to the spot, unable to do anything but stare, as Bruce came around, reached out, and held Jason’s face in both hands. Jason leaned into the touch before he caught himself and jerked back, embarrassed, but Bruce didn’t let him get far. Bruce drew Jason closer, pulling him in until his face was tucked against his shoulder.
It was a surprise and it wasn’t. Bruce used to do exactly this when Jason first came to the manor, when he’d been all hard edges and bravado in a too-small frame. Then Jason had grown up, life had gotten complicated, and he—and Bruce—had grown into something harder to reach. He had assumed, somewhere along the way, that they’d outgrown the need for it, this kind of tenderness. That they’d both left this particular comfort behind, packed away with everything else from those early years.
“You have given me more than I deserve,” Bruce said, close against his ear. “More than I had any right to hope for. You came back and you—you built something, all on your own. Everything you’ve survived and everything you’ve had to put back together and you still—” His voice faltered, broke. “I’m happy you’re here, Jay, lad. Whatever the road looked like. I’m so happy you came home.”
Jason blinked fast, eyes stinging. Now the burning feeling was in his throat too and—god, this was ridiculous. He was a grown-ass man, closer to thirty than thirteen. There was no reason for him to be this close to tears like he was still a little kid—
Bruce’s mouth pressed against his forehead. Jason gave up and hugged him back, face buried in the crook of his neck.
I know, Jason wanted to say, because he did. It had taken him a long time to believe it—years of circling the family like a stray dog, unsure if he was welcome or just tolerated—but he knew it now.
“You’re going to make me late,” Jason said, when he could.
Bruce pulled back and looked at him for another long moment. That same searching look he’d given the name on the cover. That same awed look, as though he needed one more second to be sure that Jason was real, here, staying.
“Go,” Bruce said, smiling now. A real smile, small but unguarded. The one that had felt so rare when Jason was a kid, and rarer still when he’d come back. These days, it came more freely. “I’ll see you Sunday.”
Jason went. The heat hit him the second he stepped outside the building, thick and cloying. He let himself get swallowed by the crowd, just another body moving through the afternoon.
Behind him, up on the highest floor of Wayne Tower, his book lay open to its dedication page.
For my parents, whose love carried me farther than they knew.
And to my dad, who never stopped waiting.