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The queue on Ferris Avenue is long enough that Jason has time to regret every decision that has led to this moment. He stands two blocks back from the entrance with his arms crossed, which he'd been told twice not to do.
"Arms. Watch your wrists," Batgirl says in his ear. He uncrosses his arms, and hikes down the tube dress which is barely covering his ass.
The dress is… it is tight and ribbed. It's a costume. He's worn a costume almost every night for years and this is just a different one, that is all, he tells himself. The heels are annoying. They are only four inches, which Bruce apparently considered modest, and Jason has been walking outside in them for about four minutes and already thought of dunking them ungloriously into the alley trash can.
"You're doing that thing with your jaw. It makes you look constipated."
"I'm cold."
Batman's voice cuts in, lower frequency. "You're not cold. It's seventy-seven degrees."
Jason's eyes move; scanning, locating. He can't spot Bruce anywhere in the queue or on the street and that is the point, but it still prickles.
"Telling me what I am and am not…" he mutters.
After some silence on the line, Barbara continues: "You really do look uncanny, for the record. Penny-1 has outdone himself."
Jason scoffs, sweeping long curls off his face for what feels like the hundredth time since the drop-off. The soft wind is constantly lifting the strands, pasting them across his mouth, where they catch on the gloss, and he is rapidly coming to despise this entire ensemble.
He relaxes his jaw and falls into character when he realizes he's reached the front. The bouncer looks at him, the ID held out in his hand.
Jason holds his gaze, chin slightly up, the expression he'd workshopped in the mirror; A faint, weary boredom, the look of someone who's totally been to better parties than this one. And the look of someone who is, beyond question, of age.
Not that he needs to do much, both Bruce and Barbara said as much. This club has a well-documented habit of waving minors through, ID or no ID.
The bouncer unclips the velvet rope and hands the card back without spending too much time on it. Jason takes it, slides past him heel over toe, heel over toe.
"Clock starts now," Batman says.
"Copy."
"V.I.P mezzanine, the right side-"
"B." Jason steps inside, and on the landing and the club bass hits him as a wave; in the chest, in the back of his teeth. The smell of the place rolls up to meet him, too. Heat and sweat, people rubbing up against each other. Lovely.
"I've got it. We went over it." Jason touches his ear, adjusts the tiny piece in it, and squints into the distance. The lights strobe in pulses of red, making everyone look vaguely unwell. "But we should have had the briefing before we spent four hours on–" Someone passes close on his left going up the stairs. "Before all the prep."
"I concur with Batgirl. The result is very convincing, but the way you carry yourself is more imperative. Remember that."
"Yeah, yeah. You could've warned me the prep was gonna involve taping my dick back to my–"
"Robin."
"I'm just saying it's insane that we've got an actual woman on this line and I'm the one in the dress."
"Focus."
Jason exhales through his nose. He hits the bottom of the stairs and steps onto the main floor.
"Unfortunately, I'm not the demographic this sleazebag would consider letting into his company. Solano wants young, pretty, and dumb-looking," Batgirl says. "You, luckily, nail two out of three."
"Great. Love this for me," he says. "Wait, which two?"
Few groups push past him and he's momentarily lost in their pull, squished against people. Then the hold of it loosens, spits him out the other side, and he straightens his dress like nothing happened at all.
He goes past a group of girls taking photos of each other's drinks, lets someone's hand brush his waist and steps neatly out from under it before it wanders further, drifts past a pillar lined with neon-led ribbons. All of it points, eventually, at the long curve of bar tucked beside the mezzanine, close enough to the V.I.P. stairs that are guarded by two men in black whose necks are as wide as their heads.
He gets a stool but it's too tall; he can't hop on it his first try, and has to catch himself with a hand flat on the bar top and giggle at his own clumsiness.
The bartender watches him with weary, disinterested eyes that have probably seen every type of drunk this city can produce.
"Hi," Jason says to her and pitches it up and through his nose. "Can I get a water? I'm sooo parched."
His fingers find the lacy choker at his throat which is doing the tactical job of hiding his Adam's apple, and trace it while his eyes wander the room. He makes himself stop touching it.
The lounge looms above. Bruce's extraction window is forty minutes from entry. Jason used six getting into the thick of it. Thirty-four left, and all he needs is sixty seconds in that man's vicinity.
He sits pretty; ankles crossed, chest forward, the ice water he takes long sips out of sweating in his hand.
The minutes tick by– until finally a shadow falls over his shoulder. It isn't the twin thugs who've been posted at the base of the stairs all night. It's a woman in a suit, older than Jason, and very tall.
"Good evening," she says with an accent. "Mr. Solano would like to offer you a drink. If you're not with anyone."
Jason looks around owlishly, as though the idea hasn't occurred to him that anyone in this room might be watching him. "Oh?" He furrows his brow, pretty and confused. "Why's he sending you and not coming here himself?"
"Mr. Solano has invited you to join him in the lounge above."
"Really?" He squeaks and looks up excitedly. "No freaking way. I've never been to the V.I.P."
Jason tails the woman upstairs.
"He's walking in clean."
As he enters he's being observed, piece by piece. The appraising gazes itch him right through his skin, but he tries to keep confident. Then the curtain falls back and there he is: the most important man in this club, sitting in the middle. He's a big man with an oily grin, and rings stacked on all of his thick fingers.
Solano.
Jason smiles, softer this time, aims it right at him and lets his hips sway the last few steps.
"There you are, sweet li'l thing." Solano's voice has some gravel under the sleaze. He pats the seat without looking away. "Sit down. Tell us your name."
Hands are already at his shoulders before he's finishes the sentence– one of the other men from Solano's entourage– and he lets himself be steered down into the seat, boxed in on either side by men and a couple of younger women who can't be much older than Jason himself. Upsettingly, it is not the seat beside Solano. Another girl already has that one, and shows no sign of surrendering it. She gives Jason the stink eye.
"Melina," Jason says extending a hand over her. Solano closes in his sweaty one. "But my friends call me Mimi."
After that, he glances around, patiently, so Batgirl observing can read the scene through the lense. Jason, from where he sits, can now see the barstool where he sat is in direct line of sight of Solano. He chose well. And Solano saw him stumbling, so he should act drunk on the premise.
"So," Solano says, "tell me, Mimi. What's a thing like you doing all alone in a place like this?"
Jason lets his lashes fan down against his cheeks at the cliché. "Waiting," he says, "for someone worth the trouble."
Mingling continues, and Jason tries to be his most charming self. Giggling against the rim of the drink he's offered, pretending to take sips, talking, hiccuping, all the time racking his brain on how to initiate the next phase.
"Compliment his broad shoulders," Batman says in his ear.
Jason nearly chokes on his own spit. Out of the two whispering tactics into his skull tonight, coaching in the art of flirting with a crime boss twice his age, he had, somehow, bet on Babs.
"Wow," Jason breathes, "you're, like, so big and wide." He tips closer Solano's shoulder. "You must be at the gym all the time."
Solano flexes, unsubtly, like men do when they've been waiting their entire adult lives for someone to finally ask. "I dabble."
Jason abandons the drink in his hand and reaches across the girl seated between them, feigning a stretch that comes up just short, apologizing with a little laugh, sliding himself over and around her until he's wedged in tight against Solano's side, to his hip, exactly where he wanted to be twenty minutes ago.
"Can I touch?"
Solano basks. He rotates his arm around, and Jason takes the opening the second it's offered; one hand stroking admiring circles over the man's shoulder and bicep, cooing something about wow, seriously, while the other hand goes businesslike into the pocket of Solano's jacket.
His heart does a hopeful little jump when his fingers close on the phone in the left pocket. Thank fuck it's on this side. He works it free before Solano can feel the fumbling, lays it screen-down against the cushions behind them, and presses the little skimmer flat to its back– thin as a sticker, Barbara's handiwork– quietly eating into all the secrets the device is holding behind the encryption wall.
"Got it," Batgirl says, satisfaction bright in her voice. Her case would finally have some solid bones. "Give it a few seconds to finish the merge, then slip it back where it came from."
Solano nods at one of the men and stands up. No warning, no goodbye, just up and gone, drawn off by some newcomers to the lounge that he hurries to greet. Quickly, Jason slips the phone behind his own back.
The man to his right fills the space with panache, packing in close, uninvited. He looks like an uglier cousin of Pitbull, keeps talking Jason's ear off.
Jason forces out a smile and waits patiently.
But Solano doesn't come back– not in one minute, not in five– and across the room Jason can just make out him deep in conversation at another table.
Bruce's window is gone. Jason's blown past it without being able to finish cleanly. He's going to be so calm about it, Jason thought.
He has to do something.
"Do you know where the toilets are?"
The man beside him nods.
"Oh my god," Jason says. "You're literally a lifesaver. I've been sitting here like–" He presses his knees together harder, wincing for emphasis. "I didn't want to just, like, wander off and get lost, this place is so big, I can never find anything in places like this."
"All right. I'll show you," he says, beginning to rise.
"No–" Jason touches his arm, lightly. "No, you don't have to do that, I feel so bad, you were in the middle of your story– the boat thing, was it– I want to hear the rest, I was listening, I promise. Just point me and I'll find it, I'm not that hopeless." A pause. "Probably."
"You're way more natural at this than Dick ever was," Batgirl comments.
Jason grimaces and the man smiles at him with a bit too much tolerant warmth, and points him toward the corridor. While he talks– still yapping, holy hell it never stops– Jason's hand drifts back and stuffs Solano's phone between the cushions, right where he'd been sitting, shallow enough to be easily found. Not perfect, but it would have to do.
The man's hand finds his elbow before he's fully up, pulls him half a step closer. Jason lets it happen. Lets himself be steered toward the side corridor by the entrance, the man's mouth's still going, the noise of the club mercifully drowing out most of his mumbling.
Jason bites his lips together to keep from scowling.
The man leans down to Jason's ear, warm and heavy and reeking of anise on every exhale. "I'm the official sampler," he says. "So be nice now."
They're not walking toward the toilets but another set of doors in the corridor. He pushes Jason through one of them, and as the door is swinging shut behind them the noise of the club drops away to a muffled thrum through the walls of a private booth, curtained and cushioned.
Jason doesn't wait to see how the rest of it proceeds.
He grabs the man's elbow and introduces him to the wall with no flourish. The back of his head meets it with a thud that knocks his teeth together and startles surprise into his face.
"End of the line," Jason says, no lilt left in his voice at all, and points a finger at the man's face.
The hand that closes around his wrist is fast.
"Don't go shy on me now, bird," he says, low and thick. "We were just getting acquainted."
"Robin. Disengage, now," says Batman.
"Yeah. Yeah."
The patch has been on his inner wrist all night just in case. Now it's already in the man's grip. Skin to skin contact, five to ten seconds, and the target goes down within a half minute. Looks like they had too much to drink and leading to subsequent passing out and the worst hangover of their life. Bruce was specific about how and when to use it; to provoke them to grab an arm.
The man shoves back hard, his free hand coming up to brace on the wall, and in the scramble his palm slides up the inside of Jason's forearm. The patch catches, tears, half rips free of his skin.
When the man's grip finds him again, it smushes flat between their skin.
Jason spits in his face. "Let. Go. You pig."
The strength goes out of the man in one long pulse, all at once, his eyes fluttering, glazed over, and Jason helps him the rest of the way down with an ugly cut to the chin. The man staggers, folds, tips backward into the room in a heap on the velvet furniture, and Jason rips his wrist free of the loosening grip before it can drag him down with it.
He lurches back. Falls out through the door, bumping into the frame hard enough to bruise.
Jason looks down at his wrist and tears the dangling half of the patch off completely, balls it, shoves it in his bra– and tells himself the contact was too brief. Whatever residual compound remained on the surface wasn't even an adult male dose. He's fine. He has to be fine.
His legs go soft under him all at once, and he catches himself against the wall and then wobbles forward, pulling himself to the railing. Somehow he finds the stairs. Somehow he gets down them without looking back, without checking if the man is still awake, or whether booth door is even shut.
The heat of the club has him feeling nauseous right away. The lights start weeping at the edges, smearing into long stripes every time he turns his head.
The music changes; not louder, but thicker as though it's sliding into his brain through some sort of membrane. Jason keeps walking because if he stops, someone may notice, and he is not going to be a liability tonight, he is not–
He wanders through the crush of bodies, shoulders brushing him from every direction, and his breath starts to catch, shallow, hitching. He's been drunk maybe half a dozen times in his short shining life, but cheap beer has never made the world come apart at the seams quite like this.
Someone grabs him by the arm and yanks him to the side.
Jason wrenches himself loose, bumping into a group of dancing women as he does, and gives them an apologetic wave. Swiftly, he dips, or rather staggers back into the crowd.
Hands find him again, low on his waist, fingers digging in. He's hauled sideways out of the crush of bodies and dropped onto a sofa before his brain catches up enough to object.
"Grope me one more time, creep–"
He prepares to swing around and deck this guy square with his elbow, but his vision tips and spins with him, and his arm goes nowhere near where he aimed it.
The man catches him before he slides off the cushion, hands closing around him, turning him until they're face to face. Jason tries to jerk himself loose, and readies a kick to the man's knee joint, if he will still not let him go.
"It's me. It's me. Calm down."
Even through the fog in his brain, he knows that voice. Rib-shaking relief crashes through Jason so fast he all but sinks into the hold, all relaxed.
"I screwed up, I–"
"Got dosed," Bruce finishes for him, scanning over Jason's shoulder. "Hold onto me."
"I feel sick, B. I feel like I might hurl–"
He pitches forward toward what he's fairly sure is the back of the sofa, except it isn't, and Bruce hauls him upright again with one hand flat against his torso, squishing the chicken-cutlets under his bra apart.
"We can't leave just yet. They've got eyes on you." Bruce's grip tightens on him briefly. "Drape your arms around my neck and look interested."
"I can't."
Jason tries. His arms feel like they belong to someone else, like they're hanging limp from a puppeteer's lines, and the harder he concentrates on aiming them for Bruce's neck the less they listen, only leaving him scratching the skin on Bruce's jawline with the stupid long press-ons and he feels miserable for it.
"I can't!"
"Shh-shh." Bruce takes Jason's wrists himself and lifts them, settling them around his own neck, then slides a hand to the small of Jason's back and pulls him in close enough that there's no breath left between them.
"Is she okay?"
Jason hears a female voice carry over the music, then spots glittery heels parked on the other side of the table.
"First time on drops." Bruce's voice comes out differently, flat and nasally, a stranger's voice. "She'll be fine. Just needs a minute."
Jason tries to hold up his end of the performance. His head is swimming, the room tilting in slow, lazy circles. He manages a petulant little whine and shoves his face in the crook of Bruce's neck. Spurred on, he attempts to swing a leg up over Bruce's lap, and nearly takes them both off the sofa when his heel catches in fabric and skids.
A hand catches over his knees and lifts him back on the seat.
"Baby," Bruce says, stroking Jason's back. "Might be time we head home. The party can't keep up with you tonight."
The egregious amount of some musky cologne Bruce has decided to wear assaults Jason's nose where it's buried in the collar. It clings to the inside of his mouth, and his stomach, already unsteady, turns over hard.
"Eugh."
Bruce laughs through his teeth. Then his fingers graze Jason's wrists where they're locked behind his neck, nudging. It takes Jason a beat too long to understand he's being asked to let go.
He hangs on tighter instead, leaning back, sliding halfway back into Bruce's lap.
"Youu… Your big shoulders." Then he frowns. "You told me I should hug you."
Bruce gives him a strange smile. "Let's get you home, hm?" And he's close, closer than is strictly necessary for the conversation, close enough that Jason instinctively leans back from it– because he told Babs, he told Bruce, no kissing of any type undercover, not for any reason, especially not as a girl– and that's when he notices another thing.
Bruce's face is wrong, somehow. He's wearing sunglasses indoors and there's way more hair than there should be. Jason squints at it, trying to work out what exactly is so deeply incorrect about Bruce's mouth area right now, and in the middle of that investigation his brain helpfully reroutes to inform him that he needs to pee.
For real this time, and urgently. A fact made significantly worse by the realization that he is, in fact, currently incapable of peeing, because–
"Robin, for fuck's sake– nod, say yes– something!"
It echoes sharp in his ear, yanking him sideways out of the thought.
"Mm– yes!" He flashes smile he is fairly confident reads as cute and girlish and not at all like he might lose the fight with his own bladder soon.
Then he's hauled upright, his vision spinning slightly with it, and he's still stuck to Bruce's side as Bruce laces their fingers together and tows him forward.
The woman in the glittery heels steps up to them on the other side of the table.
"Excuse me, but how old is she exactly?"
She lifts a hand flat in front of Bruce's very deep neckline to stop them moving past her.
"Do you know him?" She says to Jason.
Heads turn, the crowd is smelling a scene. Jason's stomach lurches anew when he blinks, and beyond all the people, sees the shape of the two tall men from the V.I.P area at the other edge of the dance floor, looking rather menacing. He tugs Bruce's sleeve.
"Shit. I think we're bust," he tries to whisper a bit louder so that it carries over the music.
Bruce pushes him lightly behind his back, still talking to the woman in that weird voice of his. "I'm sorry– do you work here?" He glances past her, scanning. "Actually, you know what, get Mr. Solano down here. He'll vouch for both of us."
The name has an effect on the crowd, groups of the clubbers behind her exchange looks and mumble.
"Solano," Bruce says again, like he's reminding a forgetful friend, "the owner." He tips his head toward the mezzanine. "He'll tell you exactly how old his sister here is, and probably also that you're currently holding up two of his V.I.P guests for no reason."
"I don't–"
"Go ahead and check," Bruce says, magnanimously, already half-turning like the matter's settled. "We'll wait right here."
The woman hesitates, glancing back toward the lounge. The two men are now rapidly approaching them.
"No! We need to go," Jason warns Bruce with a whine.
"Baby, baby. What's wrong?" Bruce bringing him around, settling him under his armpit.
"I don't wanna be here anymore," he tells Bruce's face and the sunglasses. He swears he sees his own sparkle back to him in them. "Take me home, please."
Bruce strokes a thumb on his nose, then pecks Jason's forehead gently. "That we'll do, babycakes."
They whip around again and Jason clutches Bruce's hand in his tighter.
"Tell him we said thanks for the bottle!" Bruce calls out, lifting a hand up to some people Jason can't focus on enough to identify. And as everyone turns to look where he waved, Jason's being pulled into the crowd again.
He concentrates hard on walking in a straight line behind Bruce and not on his bladder, which is rapidly becoming the most urgent crisis of his night, possibly his entire life.
"B. B, I need to tell you something important."
"Not now."
They arrive at the stairs.
Jason's feet do not want to do stairs. Jason's feet are barely managing the floor. He opens his mouth to say so and doesn't get the chance; Bruce's arm locks around his waist and lifts, walks them up just slow enough to look like they aren't fleeing the building, and the stairs blur past in a series of stumbling, half-managed steps.
"Is the car in place?"
"ETA fourteen seconds."
Something slips, Jason feels it leave his foot, and he cranes his neck back just in time to watch one of his heels tumble down the stairwell behind them, end over end, vanishing into the flashing lights below.
"Farewell," he tells it, with some solemnity.
They burst out into the night. The door swings open ahead of them– already, somehow, before Jason's brain finishes registering there is a car– and Bruce gets it open for him first, guiding him down into the seat before folding in after.
The cool leather feels unbelievably good against the back of his legs. He sinks into it like it's the only soft thing in the world. Bruce leans across him, and there's a click at his hip as the seatbelt locks home, and then a hand that lands flat on Jason's forehead which stays there for a moment.
The car pulls away. Jason, without consulting anyone, lifts both feet– one shoed, one not– and plants them against the dashboard.
Bruce swerves out of the alley mouth and lets out a dragged out exhale.
"First rate. No comment," Babs says.
"Debrief tomorrow. Better get little miss here to bed."
"Ha. Cinderella."
"Come again?"
"I was– Wait. Please, hurry home. Please, please, please." Jason presses both hands flat against his stomach over the rucked up dress.
Bruce snatches the glasses off his face and gives him a worried look.
"What's wrong? Talk to me."
"I need to–" Jason whines. "Oh, hell. It's gonna hurt like a bitch to rip out."
The air conditioning hits his face in a cold breeze, and the prickling heat under his skin recedes just a little. His eyes start focusing again, the streetlights morphing from blots back into actual lightpoints, and only now– now that he can actually see– does he take in Bruce's disguise in full.
The tight charmeuse shirt. The moustache, thick and dark and glued on, sitting under his nose.
"What the – Oh my god."
"What?"
Jason bursts out laughing, which is doing absolutely no good for his situation, and he still can't stop.
"All right. This was the last time we ever do this," Bruce says, hand gripping the steering wheel.
"B. I wasn't gonna say. But you couldn't be looking more like a sex offender with that thing on your lip."