Chapter Text
“I have it on good authority that someone’s birthday is next week,” Steph’s bright voice rings over the phone.
Jason stops walking to heave a deep sigh and lean against a parking meter. “‘Hi, Jason,’ ‘how’s your day going, Jason,’ ‘nice weather we’re having, Jason.’ Any of the above would have been great conversation starters. Try again.”
“The weather’s been shitty,” Steph says, “and I don’t think lying is a great way to start a phone call.”
“Then start with something else.”
“Fine,” Steph says. There’s a pause and a blaring car horn on her end of the call. “I hope you’re having a great day, because it’s about to get even better.”
“You’d better proceed with the rest of that statement carefully,” Jason says.
“I always proceed carefully,” Steph says. “And I will proceed carefully now by stating that I have it on good authority that someone’s birthday is next week.”
“Alfred’s,” Jason says firmly. “And he’s sensitive about it, so don’t go throwing a party or anything. He gets embarrassed.”
“Alfred’s birthday is next week?” Steph gasps. “I haven’t gotten him anything!”
“He likes it that way,” Jason says. “Nice talking to you.”
“Wait! I haven’t even asked you my question!”
“Ask in the next five seconds or I’m hanging up.” Jason hovers a finger over the hang-up button.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Steph says breathlessly. “Will you go to a bar with me for my birthday?”
Jason twitches and almost hangs up on accident. “Will I what?”
“Well, our birthday,” Steph says. “Your birthday is the 16th. Mine is the 9th. So a week before yours. And it’s my 21st, so I want to hang out with people, but everyone I know is out of town. So if you would be interested in hanging out on the 9th--”
“You want me,” Jason asks slowly, “to go bar-hopping with you on your 21st birthday?” His jaw twinges, and he realizes he’s clenching it. Pedestrians have been passing him the entire time he’s been leaning against the parking meter, and he’s been scowling like someone kicked his dog. Great way to blend into a crowd.
“Not bar-hopping,” Steph says. “Like, maybe one bar.”
“And I’m a better option than Timbers or Cass?” Jason finally removes his finger from the hang-up button and runs his hand through his hair anxiously.
“Well, Cass doesn’t like going out, and Tim only just turned 20,” Steph explains. “And even if he could, he’d definitely be measuring out all of our drinks to make sure that we maintain perfect inebriation rates all night, or something.”
Jason nods in agreement, although it does no good. Steph obviously cannot see him through the phone. “And all I’d have to do is just… hang out?”
“Pretty much,” Steph says. “And have fun, obviously. Since it’s your birthday too.”
Jason stiffens. “I don’t really go in for those,” he finally says.
“Fine,” Steph says. “Then we can go out for my birthday, and your unobserved day of extraction. And I’ll get legally tipsy for the first time ever, and we can do bad karaoke if you want, and eat shitty food and then prank call Bruce. Or not, if you don’t want to. Because it’s your birthday too.”
A woman in a pink coat passes Jason and gives him an odd look. He realizes he’s got a chunk of his own hair in a vice grip and is leaning against the parking meter with all the melodrama of a Broadway actor. He releases his hair and tries to settle into a more relaxed standing position.
It’s not that he dislikes Steph. They get along fine. He’s been back in town three years, and been honest for at least two, but they’ve never really had much cause to interact with each other outside of Wayne gatherings and Bat Meetups. She seems fine, even if her taste in friendships is eccentric-- she’d have to be a little eccentric to hang out with Tim, right? But now she’s essentially inviting Jason to her birthday party, and he is put in the awkward position of realizing that this is a first. Outside of Dick and Alfred, none of the other Bats really try to just… hang out with him since he moved back to town. And their attempts have been the stilted ones of people who feel like they’re trying to domesticate a frightened Pit Bull.
“Ah,” Jason murmurs, “when is your birthday again?”
“Tomorrow,” Steph says. “Sorry for asking last minute, but I forgot. Not to make it sound like you’re a backup plan or anything.”
“No offense taken,” Jason says. “This is pretty much the definition of a backup plan.”
“Maybe,” Steph says. “I’ll pick you up at 8 sharp?”
It would be shitty to say no at this point. Only a loser would make someone he's technically friends with celebrate her birthday alone. Especially when she specifically asked. That’s the kind of stuff they used to make after school specials about.
“Okay,” Jason stutters.
Steph hangs up before he can even ask how she knows where to pick him up, or why she knew it was his birthday, or any other clarifying question. He jams his phone in his pocket and looks up and down the sidewalk. The parking meter he’d been leaning against boasted a semi-totaled car, evidently left there for quite some time, if the multiple parking tickets were anything to go by. He picks himself off and wanders in the direction of his latest apartment to… do whatever a person does in the 24 hours before their first official birthday party invitation.
Jason is washing dishes when Steph raps on his fire escape window at 8 PM sharp the next evening. She knocks impatiently several times before he finally sighs and wanders across the room to wrench the frame open.
“You couldn’t have used the buzzer?” he asks.
“None of the buzzers said ‘Todd,’” Steph says as she wriggles through the window. “You use a pseudonym, I figured. So I just climbed up until I found a window that looked like yours.” She dusts off her outfit, jeans and a purple crop top, and shimmies the window frame closed.
“Fucking Rapunzel-ass,” Jay mutters under his breath. He walks back across the room to turn off the faucet he’d accidentally left on.
“Window traffic went the other way in Rapunzel,” Steph says. She sounds like she’s about to add an adendum to that statement, but instead she gasps and lets out a low, possibly sarcastic, whistle.
“What?” Jason asks. He lets some irritation bleed through in his voice. She didn’t have to come in his house.
“You have quite the home library, is all,” Steph says. “Wha-- some of these shelves are even labelled. Does Babs know about this?”
“Babs has the decency to stay out of my house,” Jason says. “But probably.” He turns from his kitchen tasks to see her peeping at a glass-encased shelf labelled “Browning”, containing a gun and several poetry volumes. She looks up to meet his eyes.
“Is Browning the gun, or the book?” Steph asks.
“Yes,” Jason says flatly. “And they’re antiques, so back up a little. Now can we go?”
“You were the one who wasn’t ready,” Steph says.
“Well I’m ready now,” Jason says. He shrugs on a jacket, even though it’s warm enough outside that he shouldn’t need it. You never know with Gotham. “Now. Where are we going?”
“My friend Jordanna keeps recommending Highlights,” Steph says. Jason scoffs.
“Absolutely not.” He undoes the deadbolts on the front door and ushers her outside. “Highlights is a front for a party drug distributor. Which I am sure you knew.”
Steph authentically blanches. “I did not.”
“Besides,” Jason says. “You don’t want to go somewhere that chaotic for your first drink.”
“It’s not my first drink,” Steph says. “It’s my first legal drink. I’m in college.”
Jason pauses in relocking the door to look at her pointedly. “I will pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“Very gentlemanly of you,” Steph says, voice unserious.
“I try,” Jason says. “Anyway. I know a joint. It’s got atmosphere.”
They make their way a few blocks uptown to an alleyway door with a dimming neon sign that tactfully reads “Atmosphere.” Steph expects some kind of hip underground club, and is instead treated to a dim and slightly damp smelling basement bar, floor and walls lined with bowling alley carpet and featuring a classroom model of the solar system circa 1987 hanging from the low ceiling. There is one person in the entire establishment, a bartender who looks up at them apathetically as they tromp down the stairs into the main room.
“And this is… better than Highlights?” Steph asks. Jason nods as he saunters up to the bar.
“It is. Because at Highlights, all we’d end up with is cheap vodka and busted knuckles from when we inevitably break up the drug ring the proprietor is running.”
“And here they… don’t have vodka and we won’t fight the proprietor?” Steph asks.
“Of course not,” Jason says. “Well, they do have vodka. But there’s no sense in fighting me, is there?”
Steph settles onto one of the low chrome barstools and stares at him blankly. He smiles.
“I own the place. Or, Hood does. Plus, I can get us a discount.” He flags down the lone bartender, a graying man in his fifties wearing a button-down with a galaxy print. “Neil! Can you get us a round of shots and a--” He glances down at Steph. “What else do you want?”
Steph fiddles with the height of her stool and looks up at Neil. “Can I get a hard seltzer?”
Neil stares at them blankly for a moment before turning around and walking away. Steph sighs and leans against the bar with one elbow.
“Sorry for dragging you out like this,” she says. “I know you don’t do birthdays. Or hanging out. Or, apparently, partying.”
Jason folds his hands on the bar and looks at her seriously. “I don’t. Not really.”
“It’s better than going out alone, though,” Steph says.
Jason shrugs, “Sure.” He’s never really had a problem doing things alone, but Steph seems pretty social. Dragging Jason out on a Sunday probably is better than sitting alone, to her.
“And, you know,” Steph adds, “I figure you should probably do young-people things sometimes, too.”
Jason turns and squints at her. “I do young-people things.”
“Sure,” Steph says cooly.
“I do young-people things all the time,” Jason says.
“No, yeah,” Steph assures. “Just like… not since I’ve met you.”
Jason unfolds his hands and points a finger at her. “You’ve barely ever talked to me. I have a whole life you don’t even know about.”
“Maybe,” Steph says. “But Babs agrees with me. Or, I guess, she agrees with Alfred. I heard them talking about it.”
She seems to instantly regret saying that. Her face goes stiff and she purses her lips. She doesn’t look scared, exactly, but she has the kind of deer-in-the-headlights look that people get when they’ve let on way too much and have run the risk of making it deeply uncomfortable for all involved. The fact that everyone in their lives has historically tiptoed around Jason probably doesn’t help.
Neil wanders over with a round of shots and a seltzer and places them in front of Steph and Jason without fanfare. Jason gingerly picks up one of the shots and looks at it intently.
“So,” he says. “Babs and Alfie think I’m a square.”
Steph can’t help herself. She snorts. “The fact that you just said ‘square’ kind of proves that, I guess.”
Jason shrugs and slams back the shot. He sets the glass down on the metal bar with a thunk and blinks back the cringe that the acrid liquid brings to his face.
“Well,” he says finally, “if you can get them to say that to my face, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”
Steph smiles and picks up a shot glass. “Fair enough.”
Jason grabs another shot and toasts with her. “To being young people.”
“To being young people!” Steph says. She knocks back her shot and coughs a little.
Neil eventually floats over to the jukebox in the corner of the bar and turns on some psychadelic song. Jason never really went in for that kind of music, but Steph only seems to notice that there is music, and that the jukebox is public access.
“Do you care what kind of music plays in here?” she asks. “Since, you know, you’re clearly curating an aesthetic?”
Jason waves a hand dismissively. “I don’t care. Neil likes the psychedelia, but you can play whatever.”
Steph happily slides off her barstool and walks over to the jukebox. Jason watches as she looks through the options and finally queues one up.
“Since we’re not at an actual club,” she says as she walks back over, “we’re going to have to do our best. And your jukebox is old as shit, so I’m making do with what music there is.”
Neil’s psychedelic song ends and fades into an upbeat disco track. Steph holds out a hand to Jason, beckoning him out onto the carpeted open floor.
“Nope,” Jason says, “I didn’t agree to dancing.”
“But you agreed to celebrating my birthday,” Steph says. “And to doing karaoke, which is way more embarrassing than dancing.”
“I didn’t say I was embarrassed,” Jason says. “I just said I’m not dancing.”
“Fine,” Steph huffs. She slides back onto her stool and takes another shot.
Jason sighs. “Do you want to go to an actual club?”
“No,” Steph says. She looks sideways at him and shrugs optimistically. “This place has atmosphere.”
“But it doesn’t have dancing,” Jason says.
“It doesn’t have dancing,” Steph agrees. She’s doing a great job of looking nonchalant, like she really didn’t care all that much. Jason has a feeling she does that a lot.
She should be allowed to care. He knows she’s headstrong, two minutes in a room with her could tell you that, and by all accounts she usually barrels right through a situation once she makes up her mind, everyone else’s opinions be damned. She’s not embarrassed, because even if she was, she’d be dancing anyway. She’s holding back because…
Because she’s uncomfortable? Because she thinks he’s uncomfortable? She doesn’t want to scare him off, for some fucking reason. Which is bogus. Jason lives in Gotham. It would take a hell of a lot more than dancing to actually scare him.
Besides. Jason’s young and in one of the biggest cities in the world. And what’s the use of living in a great city if you don’t occasionally do stupid shit, or whatever Wodehouse said.
Jason sits for another moment before stepping off of his stool. He holds out a hand to Steph.
“It would be pretty stupid to go to a party and not dance,” he says. Steph smiles and takes his hand.
“I don’t do all that many young-people things, either,” she says above the music. Jason smiles. He releases her hand and moves a few chairs out of the way to make space on the floor.
“So we’re both squares, then.”
“Bat Business will do that to you.” Steph does some dance move that looks like she’s hopping while falling. Jason reaches out to catch her and almost gets hit in the face when she flails an arm violently upward. Steph gasps.
“Careful!” she cries, half-laughing. “This one demands space.” She carries on, effortlessly moving into the next steps, which also consist mostly of flailing and not falling.
“Does this one come with set moves?” Jason asks, watching hopelessly. Steph’s arms snap up above her head and she twists in a circle.
“It comes with a Just Dance game,” she says. “You should know this one! Dick likes it.”
Jason nods.
“I know we had that one when I lived at the Manor,” he says. “I was better at the shooting games.”
“So it’s time you learned this one then,” she says. “Come on, arms up.”
Jason obliges and throws his arms up. Steph twists in a corkscrew and snaps her head back and forth.
“Am I supposed to spin?” Jason asks helplessly, flailing one arm. “The song keeps saying to spin.”
Steph responds by reaching above his head to grab one of his hands and twirl him. It’s a hard reach— he’s about 7 inches taller than her. He barely manages to duck under her arm.
“One obligatory princess twirl down,” Steph says gleefully. “Now do me.”
Jason grabs the tips of her fingers and twists their arms. Steph whirls around with enough speed that she accidentally slams backward into his chest. He lets out an oof.
“Sorry!” Steph says with genuine dismay. “Occupational hazard of twirling.”
“Very Cinderella,” Jason says once he can breathe again. “Try again?”
Steph grabs his fingers again, this time managing to twirl without knocking the air out of his lungs. She lets go and segues into another of the falling dance moves, managing to make it look almost like she was supposed to have been twirling in the first place.
There’s a jingle from the direction of the door. Jason looks up to see one of his lieutenants, Mario, walking down the steps and scanning the room. He gives Jason an upward nod and does a double take when he sees Steph dancing.
“Problem, Mario?” Jason asks.
“Uh—“ Mario steps closer and shakes his head. “Just— business stuff.”
Steph pauses her spinning and leans back against a chair. Mario glances at her again, clearly uncomfortable.
“Just— it's business. Not sure it’s something you want to talk about in front of the lady,” he says. Steph scoffs quietly. Jason hears her mutter “I’m not a lady” under her breath.
Jason’s tempted to take Mario aside for two seconds and get a rundown on whatever’s happening. Just so he can stay up to speed. Steph’s doing a good job of looking unbothered, but it has to be weird to have your dancing interrupted by the Red Hood Gang.
But Mario doesn’t look too bothered, just uncomfortable, and Jason’s kind of in the middle of something. He glances back at Steph, who is still pretending not to listen.
“Can’t talk business tonight,” he says to Mario. “It’s my birthday.”
Steph grins.