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Having to stand on a step stool to reach the cupboards in the kitchen stopped mattering somewhere around the third time Jason had to use it. Now, he kept it in the sink cabinet, just behind the u-bend for whenever he needed. Because he did need it, and that was okay. Embarrassment had a shelf life, and if you didn’t let it screw up all your self-esteem, it turned something significantly more useful.
Jason decided to become useful. He liked to think that was very mature of him.
Bruce would tell him that he was just a late bloomer, which was exactly the kinda thing you said when you were six-foot-something in socks and built like you’d been assembled out of bridges. Meanwhile, Jason was five-foot-nothing. Well, four-foot-eleven, technically, but only a nark would split that hair.
If he had to cop up to any irritation – which he wasn’t, by the way – then he might point a finger at puberty. It had already started, you see, and it had unilaterally decided to screw him over. Sometimes it seemed like he was getting everything but the height. A squeaky voice, weird dreams, and an armpit stank that had prompted a real embarrassing sit-down with Alfred and a stick of antiperspirant.
Last week he’d noticed the beginnings of a peach fuzz. He’d sprinted to B’s room at half-seven in the morning, flinging himself onto that huge bed, and demanded immediate acknowledgement. Bruce had been half-asleep at the time, but he had nodded seriously and spent the next twenty minutes showing him how to shave. It was largely unnecessary given the current state of Jason’s babyface, but he appreciated the gravity with which Bruce approached it.
Standing at the sink with a razor he didn’t need yet, Jason made a private resolution. If he couldn’t be tall, then he was gonna be the burliest, hairiest short guy in all the lands. He was talking full Wolverine, only with better grades. Bruce’d be able to use him as a damn cannonball by the time Jason was done sculpting his destiny.
So, the height thing was okay. Honestly. Jason knew he was never going to hit someone so hard their teeth rearranged the way Bruce could, and he knew he’d never have the albatross wingspan of Dick – Dick, who was five-ten and had the nerve to say was ‘short’ in this line of work. Like, sure Dick looked modest next to people like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, but he was also one inch over average for a typical American male, so he could go fu—
Whoops, almost said a bad word. Jason had been real careful about his language since he started living with Bruce. He’d been there for two years already and his progress had thus far been a crock of shit. Oh god, there he went again. His bad.
It’d take time for Jason to achieve his peak Wolverine form, so in the meantime he had to make sure he was useful in other ways. That meant he had to be smart.
And he was doing a great job so far, for the record. His grades were impeccable – even better than Dick’s had been at the same age, he’d checked. He was also killing it in the drama club. Theatrics were half the battle when you were Robin, and Jason had found himself to be quite the performer by nature.
He’d recently been cast as Mr. Bingley in the school’s production of Pride and Prejudice. It wasn’t the leading role, but it was pretty significant. The chick playing Jane Bennet had a full inch of height on him and they’d had to do some blocking adjustment so it wasn’t the first thing the audience registered, but that was okay. His drama teacher had told him he had real presence. There were some accolades in his future, according to Ms. Vickers.
(He told Bruce, who said he was proud of him and made Jason feel all gooey. He told Alfred, who recalled his own glory days on the stage. He told Dick, who teased him for not getting the lead, but had already reserved tickets for the show next month.)
The theatrical part of his training was relevant right now, ‘cause everyone who was anyone in the vigilante business had their thing. Bruce had the creepy lurk, Dick had the ta-da aerial nonsense, and now Jason needed to leave his own mark.
That’s where Ace came in.
“Now,” Jason said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Batcave with his chin in his hands. Ace was sitting politely in front of him, wagging his tail. “I’ve come to terms that I can’t ride you into battle. You’re pretty big and I’m pretty small, but I still think I’m probably over the weight limit. I don't wanna blow out your back before you're old enough to have bad joints.”
“Boof,” Ace replied in agreement.
“But I think if we work together, we can maybe work out some kinda saddle situation.” Jason smoothed the plans out across the floor. He'd drawn them up during social studies on the back of a worksheet about the Missouri Compromise. “Look here, we can make sure the saddle’s bearing all the weight. Keeps the strain off you while also keeping the whole effect! ‘Cause the effect’s the whole point here, buddy. I come in swinging on a dog. That’s gotta make at least one guy pee his pants.”
The plans were missing something. Jason added a blobbed Batman in the background, looking very impressed at Robin’s ingenuity.
“I ain’t sayin’ you’re a horse. I’m sayin’ we should explore all our options. You in?”
“Oh, you are so stuck up yourself that it stopped being funny ten years ago.”
Uh…
Jason blinked dumbly at Ace for a moment before letting out a little laugh and looking towards the cave entrance instead. He definitely didn’t think the dog had spontaneously developed speech. Only big dumb idiots thought things like that, and Jason had aspirations to being the smart Robin.
Sometimes, B had this real specific way of walking when he was in the cape. It was something about the way he moved, like he had a hoverboard crammed under the cape with him. It read as unsettling in the dark, but in the fluorescent wash of the cave lights, the same walk just looked a little bit like he was on a very slow conveyor belt.
Normally, Jason would’ve said something. He was allowed to talk shit about B, ‘cause he was officially part of the family (legitimised in a court of law and everything). Once he’d gotten comfortable enough in the household, he’d started gathering a rotating stock of observations about how dumb Bruce looked when he wasn’t trying. He’d deliver it with the cheeky baby-faced smile Dick had taught him. It made it impossible for Bruce to be annoyed at him, because B was, underneath everything, a complete softie.
A good Robin knew the difference between a moment you could hit with a wisecrack, and a moment where you were supposed to shut the hell up and just straight-up glare at the intruder. This one one of those latter situations, ‘cause Green Lantern was coming in after Bruce.
“All I’m saying is that it was the right call and you know it,” he was saying. Lantern was almost as tall as B, but he was the type of guy to float himself off the ground to make himself look even bigger. “You just can’t admit it because it wasn’t your call, and that drives you absolutely—”
“The perimeter on the east side was compromised,” Bruce said. “Which you would have known if you stayed where you were supposed to. If you’d held the position instead of—”
“If I held the position, then the perp would’ve gotten out. Which you would’ve known if you took a second to remove the stick from your ass!”
“He was contained.”
“He was contained until he wasn’t, which is why I made the call.” Lantern cut himself off and pinched the bridge of his nose under the mask. “You know what, I’m not doing this standing next to a stalagmite.”
“I’m not stopping you from leaving.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Lantern sneered. “I’m making myself at home right here in this cave until you start understanding that I—”
“I understand fine,” Bruce replied. “You’re just wrong.”
And so on and so forth.
Jason had met most of the Justice League by now, enough times that the shine had worn off and they’d started resolving into actual people with actual habits. And the habit with Batman and the Green Lantern was the same every time: They’d work together, trust each other in the field, and then find something really stupid to bicker about. It was such old news at this point that Jason had stopped being aghast when someone insulted his dad.
Well, not dad dad, but his father-adjacent figure who had formally adopted him and whom Jason looked up to more than anyone barring Wonder Woman.
Whatever. The status of Jason’s parentage wasn’t on trial here, nor was it interesting. What was interesting was the way Lantern smiled just then.
Hm.
Hm hm hm.
Jason narrowed his eyes.
Y’see, he liked to think he was something of a connoisseur of Jane Austen’s works. He’d spent the last six weeks rehearsing Mr. Bingley, and Ms. Vickers had made the whole cast read the novel – not even just their scenes, ‘cause she said you couldn’t fully understand the overarching narrative from the inside of just one room. Jason had done it because he did what he was told, and also because once he'd started he couldn't actually put it down.
B let him him keep the fancy copy from the Manor library, and he didn’t even get mad when Jason accidentally bent the spine. He just said that books were meant to be read, and then let Jason squirrel away Persuasion, Emma and Sense and Sensibility too.
Apparently B was was the kinda guy who liked to encourage literary pursuits, because he came back one day with a boxed VHS set of the 1996 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, imported directly from England. He left it on Jason’s bed without an explanation, alongside instructions on how to install and use a newly restored VHS player. It wasn’t even Jason’s birthday or anything .
Maybe it was a bit of non-sequiter to think about Austen’s works when looking at two grown men, but he was building to something here. The point was that Jason Peter Todd was extremely familiar with the wonderful world of Lizzy Bennet and her tumultuous ride to romance with the dashing Fitzwilliam Darcy, and tat was extremely relevant.
“Hm,” he hummed. Ace was the only one to acknowledge him.
He looked at Bruce, standing with his shoulders squared and his profile set in that expensive way that used to put Jason’s guard up on instinct (before he’d lived here long enough to realise that Bruce just naturally looked like that). The uncanny stillness of him. The set of his jaw. The refusal to concede a single inch of ground on something he'd already decided. All of that pride.
He looked at Lantern. All forward momentum and barely-contained energy. He looked pissed, but the kinda pissed that resembled enjoyment if you squinted. It was the expression of a guy who wanted to be heard and was also, somewhere underneath the frustration, not entirely miserable about the company. Lantern was always like that with Bruce, even though he’d often misjudge or misunderstand the way B went about life. One might say he was filled with prejudice…
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…’ Jason thought.
When Jason arrived at Wayne Manor two years ago with stuffed shoes and a scowl, Dick had been a hard sell. Most of that was Bruce’s fault. Not out of malice, just a failure to communicate information that most people would consider pertinent. Jason thought the existence of a new brother might've warranted a heads up, but Bruce had either forgotten, which seemed unlikely, or he simply hadn't known how to say it and figured Dick would piece it together.
It’d been slow going. Dickie tried to be nice, but it was a distance that read as rejection, which made Jason want to reject back, harder. The Robin thing didn’t make things any better, and that had taken the longest to smooth over. Dick had given the mantle up but there was a difference between giving something up and being ready to watch someone else wear it.
There’d been a lot of push and pull, a lot of listening to Bruce and Dick argue, but eventually everything settled into something Jason could now accept as permanency.
He had a big brother now, which came with all the things a big brother was supposed to do. That meant unsolicited advice about things Dick had absolutely no expertise in. It meant noogies, which Jason tolerated and immediately retaliated against. It meant that when Bruce was being the kind of grump that made you feel like you'd said something wrong without knowing what, Dick would materialise and translate.
Dick was, in short, the guy to call.
“Hey, Little Wing.” The warmth in his voice was immediate, like Jason had caught him mid-thought about something pleasant. Jason still hadn't worked out if that was genuine or if Dick was just like that with everyone. “What’s up?”
No use beating around the bush. Jason went straight into it. “I need information,” he said, “and I need you not to make it weird.”
“Hit me with it.”
“What’s the deal with B and Green Lantern?”
Dick let out a laugh. “Oh, you finally noticed, huh?” he said. “Yeah, B’s had a thing for him basically forever.”
“How long is forever?”
“Long enough that it stopped being interesting and started being a whole psychological case study. It’s been ten years, Jace. I went through my whole adolescence watching them make eyes at each other over consoles.” There was a popping over the line that made Jason suspect Dick was chewing gum. “Pretty sure it’s mutual too, for what it’s worth. Lantern is not a subtle guy.”
Jason had figured that part out on his own. He'd been reading romance novels since he was seven (starting with Ella Enchanted) and he'd always thought he had a reasonable eye for when two people were failing to do anything about something obvious. Of course, he was ignoring the past two years where he’d apparently completely missed B and Lantern getting mushy-eyed over mission briefings, but still.
“And they’re just both…not doing anything about it?”
“Yuuuup.”
“Because they’re idiots?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly comment.”
Jason flopped back against his bed and opened his free arm for Ace to crawl in beside him. When he first got to the Manor, he kept his bedroom door closed at all times – just in case, y’know? But then he felt bad when Ace wanted to snuggle. He started keeping it open ever since Ace first sat outside and let out a woe-is-me whine. He suspected Bruce used to send the dog over to make him more comfortable, and Jason wasn’t too proud to admit that it worked.
Ace snuffled against his side and Jason absently petted him as Dick continued: “Don’t even get me started on how this screwed up all my plans,” he bemoaned. “It was supposed to be Superman. I had this whole thing mapped out where I’d parent-trap Bruce and Clark together so I can finally get Superman as a stepfather. That would’ve been incredible for me personally.”
“How’d you try to parent trap ‘em without another Lindsay Lohan?”
“It was a whole convoluted thing. Involved the trainline from Metropolis to Gotham, don’t worry about it. Just, think for a second, Little Wing,” Dick said. “You’ve seen them interact, right? Apparently Bruce and Big Blue are platonic. Can you believe that?”
“I guess?”
“It honestly raises more questions than it answers, because I have never in my life seen two men be that gay at each other for it to mean nothing.”
If only to fan the flames, Jason said, “Y’know, Superman memorised B’s heartbeat.”
“And that’s exactly what I mean. So how is it that Lantern’s the one B wants?” Another pop of gum. “The eye contact alone. I don't know what to do with it. I've made my peace.”
Jason could sort of understand the grievance. He'd spent a portion of last year, after meeting Wonder Woman for the first time, quietly constructing a fantasy in which she and Bruce fell in love, had some kind of fairytale wedding, and Diana of Themyscira became his mom.
“They were arguing in the Batcave for forty minutes yesterday,” Jason said. “I don’t think they even noticed I was there. They just gonna do that forever, or…?”
“That’s the current projection, yeah. Until one of them does something about it, or one of them nearly dies and forces the issue. Knowing Bruce, it'll be the second one. You know what he’s like.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” And definitely not novelistically satisfying. Jane Austen would never.
“It sure is, kiddo. You get used to it. Kind of. You don't really get used to it,” Dick said with a sigh. “Anyway, what brought this up all of a sudden? Just general vibes, or did something specific happen?”
“General vibes. Just doing research.”
“Research, huh? You're gonna do your own parent-trap?”
“I'm gonna do nothing of the sort,” Jason said and he hung up with the last word. He promptly felt bad, called Dick back, and spent the next twenty minutes walking him through last night's patrol.
Jason settled on calling it Operation: Woodhouse in honour of Emma Woodhouse, who, now that he actually thought about it, was a fairly crappy matchmaker. He kept the name anyway ‘cause he enjoyed the thematic relevance. He’d also already written it in the notepad.
Logically, he knew that Bruce wasn’t incapable of finding his own partners. The models, the journalists, the women who played at being decorative and turned out to be sharp as glass. Catwoman had come the closest to being right for him. Close enough that Jason wondered if he needed to start picturing a future with a mom and a million cats, but that didn’t work out in the end.
Left to his own devices, Bruce might eventually do something himself about Lantern. Might. Given sufficient time and a complete personality transplant.
Hah. Like that’d ever happen.
Operation Woodhouse was designed around Derbyshire logic. It was technically a conflation of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, but Austen had written both of them so Jason felt that held up.
Y’see, Lizzy only started having a thing for Darcy once she finally realised he wasn’t a complete asshole (damn, he meant to say butthole). You shoved two people onto the Pemberley ground in a context that stripped away the whole performance of antagonism and the blamo. Here come the societal constraints to do the work for them.
Enforced proximity was what Jason was taking away from that analysis.
The notebook had a page of preliminary notes, a rough timeline, and a small doodle of Ace in a saddle that Jason had done during the planning phase and decided to keep for morale purposes.
He didn’t have a Pemberley, he reasoned, but he did have a panic room.
It was adjacent to the east corridor, soundproofed, stocked, and lockable from the outside with an override code that Jason had lifted from the system eight months ago. (Entirely unrelated reasons.) It was the closest thing the Batcave had to a country house drawing room. Jason felt Austen would've understood.
Okay, technically a lie – about the drawing room, not Austen being his spiritual soulmate. Like, yeah, sure the actual Manor upstairs had several drawing rooms that tickled that 19th century maiden itch, but none of those were able to contain Batman and his ring-powered eventual paramour.
There were probably a lot of core problems with this stage of Operation: Woodhouse. The biggest of which was Bruce, specifically the part where he had some kind of internal alarm system that activated whenever Jason was working an angle.That was a Dick Grayson legacy issue. Years of being outmanoeuvred by a small acrobat had calibrated Bruce's instincts to a level that Jason, as the inheriting party, now had to contend with. If he pointed at the panic room and said ‘Hey, why don't you both step in there for a second tee-hee’, the jig would be immediately up and Bruce would die alone.
What he needed was Ace, the trusted steed himself (only not, ‘cause the saddle plan hadn’t worked out).
Everyone loved Ace. B trusted him more than most people, and Green Lantern tended to drift towards anything dog-shaped whenever the opportunity presented itself. Completely understandable, by the way. Ace was a creature worthy to be adored, so it was only right that Lantern would take valuable time out of his visits to give him a proper scrub.
Ace, however, had purchasable loyalties, and Jason had been keeping squares of cheese in his utility belt pocket all week.
“Well excuse me for being good at my job, douchebag.”
Right on time.
Robin had been excused from tonight because he had rehearsal, which he had mixed feelings about. On one hand, he was Robin and Robin was supposed to show up whenever Batman needed him. On the other hand, his Jane Bennet had come down with the mumps, the understudy had neither the chemistry nor the projection, and the kid playing Wickham had fallen over a prop chair during act two then pretended that he wasn't about to cry. It had all been quite the disaster.
Jason had been impeccable throughout and received no credit for, because everyone was too busy managing the Wickham situation. He’d come home in a mood and settled into the cave to wait for B.
They’d gone buddy-cop movie today because there was some alien weirdo flouncing around Gotham, and that needed a Lantern consult. Jason heard them coming from the car. That probably meant they’d been at it for at least the length of the drive.
“It’s showtime, boy,” he told Ace, flicking a cube of cheese at him. Ace accepted the offering with a wag of his tail and a low ruff. “Go get into position, like we practiced.”
Ace trotted off just as Bruce came into view around the equipment bank. The cowl was already down, and his face was the telltale blank that made Jason suspect he was actively managing his expression. He did that a lot around Lantern. Jason didn’t know if he‘d prefer the active repression or the inevitably googly-kiss-kiss eyes he’d probably deploy when Jason’s plan worked flawlessly.
Lantern floated on in after him and, damn (darn, sorry). Now that Jason had noticed, it was so obvious that he couldn't understand how he'd spent two years walking past it. The way Lantern's attention snagged on Bruce's face a beat longer than it needed to, just slightly past the natural endpoint of a look as if he kept forgetting to stop. The way Bruce, when he was confident nobody was clocking him, would let his eyes drop south. Jason had witnessed this twice now and both times had to actively process what he was seeing, because it was Bruce, and the idea of Bruce doing something as normal and human as checking someone out had a quality of cognitive dissonance he hadn't fully recovered from.
He didn't get it, personally. A butt was a butt. Jason didn't understand the appeal of looking at one on purpose. Though that was probably a delayed puberty delivery that was still in transit. Give him a year and maybe he’d be just as weird about butts as Bruce was.
Ugh, now was not the time to think of his dad checking out butts. Now was the time for action.
“Hey, kiddo,” Lantern greeted with a friendly grin. “You wanna hear how Batman screwed everything up tonight?”
“I screwed nothing up.”
“Cry about it, man. You screwed up, I fixed it, I get to lord it over you.”
Jason looked between them. “Yeah, alright,” he said. “How’d he screw up?”
“Jay.”
“Okay, so,” Lantern said, “you know the warehouse on the east side of the Delmont territory—”
Bruce glared at him (fondly, Jason thought). “He doesn’t need the full briefing.”
“I’m being thorough. Isn’t that what gets squares like you all hot? I’m giving context.”
“You’re editorialising. You do this deliberately to flip the situation.”
“I’m contextualising.” Lantern waved Bruce off and faced Jason, looking delighted. “Anyway, there’s this warehouse. We’ve been after this perp for, what, six weeks now? Some shapeshifter from the ass end of the galaxy—”
“Language.”
“—but what Spooky failed to realise, what I tried to tell him before he tried to go all I am the night on everything, was that there was a second perp he didn’t account for—”
“I accounted for her.”
“Then why was she behind you, huh?”
“Because I was letting her think she had the advantage,” Bruce grumbled. “There's a difference between not knowing something and choosing not to show your hand. That distinction may be too fine for you.”
Lantern let out a sharp laugh. “Oh, that's good. That's a good one. I'll tell you what I think the distinction is. I think the distinction is that you got caught out and you're too proud to say so.” The grin he had on was – Jason searched for the right word and arrived at shit-eating. “For shame, Batman. For shame.”
Jason nodded but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. He was too busy watching Lantern watch Bruce. The domino was still fused to his face, but it didn’t quite hide the way his eyes tracked the coordinates of Bruce's expression, checking where the needling landed and waiting for the specific reaction he was after.
“C’mon, Spooky. Admit it,” he crowed. “I did good. I did better than you tonight.”
“You did something.”
“Good enough for me.” Lantern turned back to Jason. “Kid, keeping him humble is a full-time job and I need you to pick up some of the slack. You hear me?”
Jason saluted. “Aye-aye,” he said. Bruce gave him a withering look, which just made him grin wider. That was the other thing Dick had taught him. Bruce's big scary looks had no actual power over you once you'd clocked that they came from the same guy who kept Ace's baby photos in his wallet.
”Aaaarrroooooooooo!”
Ace was excellent at keeping his cue.
The howl bounced off every stalactite in the cave and came back twice as loud, and Jason watched B’s face do the full transformation in about a second flat. He did that when something triggered his fight, fight, fight instincts. Jaw set, shoulders up, eyes sharp. Batman, assembled.
The green glow of the Lantern suit turned up a notch like he expected to fight. “The hell was that?”
“Ace.” B was already moving.
Lantern followed, floating up and outwards to clear a monitor back and get there before Bruce, because Hell would freeze over before he let anything happen to that good. Which, in Jason’s opinion, was a point in his favour.
He was keeping track of Lantern’s good point these days. It used to be the opposite, where’d he’d noted down all the bad stuff ‘cause he’d thought B didn’t like him, but now that he was noting otherwise, he was finding a lot to nod his head about. Creative, funny, able to keep B on his toes. It was important to log all this, because if these two idiots stopped being stupid and just fell in love already, then that’d mean Jason would have another dad. Gotta make sure he was worthy.
Jason followed them both deeper into the cave, where Ace (best boy) was sitting in the open mouth of the panic room. His haunches were set and his head was thrown back for a another loud, “Aarrroooroooorooorooo—”
“Heyyy, buddy.” Lantern dropped into a crouch and adopted the voice any human made whenever an animal or child was in distress. His hands immediately came up rub Ace’s ears with both hands, letting his gloves fizzle away into the ring so he could give him a full-contact rubdown. “What’s wrong, baby? Are we under attack? Did little Timmy fall down the well again?”
(Woah, whiplash. For a second, Jason thought Lantern was talking about their weirdo neighbour – that twelve year old pale kid with the camera who never seemed to blink whenever he and Bruce were nearby.)
Lantern was easy. Lantern saw a distressed dog and figured he could play the hero. He had no reason to suspect anything ulterior going on in the sacred grounds of allied territory. Why would he? Jason was a good kid; he had no real history of scheming (as far as everyone knew) so off course members of the Justice League were going to trust the situation as it seemed.
Unfortunately, B wasn’t quite so trusting.
He narrowed his eyes at Jason, like he could smell betrayal on the winds. And yeah, maybe it was a betrayal in the same way a little white lie was, but it was one done with B’s best interests in mind. Even though he looked entirely ungrateful right now. His eyebrow had that suspicious little divot in the centre, the only that only showed up when Dick had on his ‘doing-something-you’re-not-gonna-like’ grin. It was very rarely targeted at Jason.
No worries. Jason had prepared for this. The benefits of being a late bloomer, was that he hadn’t yet grown out of his cherubim cheeks. It was annoying at school, being a freshman with a pinchable hamster face, but at home where he could use it to manipulate Bruce, it was perfect.
Jason was a masterwork of innocence. A Raphael painting, perhaps. A choir of angels could've descended on him personally and felt at home. He met Bruce's gaze with all of the unclouded sincerity he'd been saving specifically for this moment and gave one small, guileless shrug.
“Jason—”
“I sure hope Ace is okay,” he said in a drawl.
And because Ace was also a little drama queen, he let out the saddest, pathos-laden little whine right on cue. No man was strong enough to resist that, not even Batman. On the off chance it was real, Bruce spared Jason one last suspicious glance before turning to follow Lantern into the panic room.
Oh, how foolish he was. Jason was the evil all along.
He was already flicking a cheese cube in a low arc by the time Bruce had turned his back. It skimmed the ground behind him, Ace clocked it, and the trap was sprung. They didn’t even require rehearsal for how quickly the dog threw himself to his feet. He knocked Lantern to his butt (hah!) and flung himself out of the panic room. It went so seamless that Jason would've applauded if he had a hand free.
As it happened, he didn’t have a hand free. Both of them were already on the door, and the very moment Ace cleared the frame was the same moment that Jason shoved it closed with his whole body weight. He had the override inputted before either man could even think about stopping him.
The self-lock engaged with a sound like a knuckle cracking.
“Hah!” Jason exclaimed. He immediately cupped Ace’s face and gave him a well deserved smooch between the ears. Good boy. Outstanding work.”
“Boof,” Ace said.
Okay, okay, next part of the plan. Now all Bruce and Lantern – or Hal, Jason reminded himself. If he was gonna be Jason’s new pseudo-dad, then he’d have to get used to calling him by name – Now all Bruce and Hal had to do was find common ground and realise they were in love. Hal could be married and living at Wayne Manor within the fortnight, easy. (That was a word he learned from Austen. Fortnight. The British sure did have unnecessary words to make themselves sound fancy.)
“Jason.” Bruce voice came out warningly from behind the door.
“Oh no, I can’t hear you,” Jason lied.
He heard Hal snicker from behind the door. A sense of humour, good. Another point in his favour. “So you let the perp slip the net and now you let a ten year old play you?” he said. “Rough night for the Dark Knight.”
Jason was almost fourteen, thank you very much, but he let it slide because that wasn’t part of the mission. For now, he plonked himself down on the cave floor with his notebook and let the dog climb halfway into his lap. It was a hard push, seeing that Ace weighed roughly the same as a dining table, but Jason would be damned if he refused him after such a job well done.
“Open the door.”
“I’ve got opinions,” Hal continued to B, “about what this does to your credibility with the League.”
“Hal. Shut up.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Now, you had to understand that Jason had aspirations to be the smart Robin. He’d decreed it himself last year when he saw Dick mistake an actual shoelace for a liquorice lace and had spent thirty seconds chewing it before realising. Being the smart Robin was a worthy goal he planned to sustain for the entirety of his career – barring, of course, his secondary goal of becoming Wolverine.
What Jason failed to account for – perhaps stupidly – was that Bruce might’ve had years of experience on him. Not just in general, but specifically in dealing with small, overconfident people who thought they’d thought of everything.
Beep-boop-boop-beep.
Ha. That was funny. That sounded like a code being entered from inside the panic room.
“It’s okay, boy,” Jason said to Ace, glancing towards the security console he’d prepared to show the panic room cameras. He’d had plans to abruptly shut it off if his plan worked too well – he knew what B was like, the slut (affectionately).
Ha ha. That was even funnier. That looked like Batman inputting the override on the internal panel while Hal hung back with an amused grin on his face.
But that couldn’t possibly be the case. He’d changed that code, hadn’t he? He’d changed it specifically for Operation: Woodhouse three days ago while Ace supervised. There was no conceivable way that Bruce had the new one ready to go.
Abort, abort, mission failure. Time to regroup and—
The self-lock unengaged with the same knuckle-cracking sound.
“Jason.”
The door swung open to reveal Bruce. Hi Bruce. Jason scrambled to his feet.
His face was doing that thing, y’know? The thing where it appeared like he was expressing nothing at all, but was actually expressing mild contempt from every pore. He did the same thing when Dick showed Jason his triple back pike somersault off the upstairs balcony and managed to break the railing. It meant that Bruce was pissed, but in a low-key kinda way. A light simmering of pissed, maybe.
Hal was the opposite. He floated out after Bruce with a grin that looked positively insufferable, like he found the whole thing entertaining. Good to know. When he inevitably became Jason’s adoptive stepfather, he’d be the one who’d let him get away with murder. These things were important to establish beforehand.
Most importantly, neither of them looked like men who’d had a life-changing romantic experience in close quarters. More like two men who’d just waited for the bus together.
“How?” Jason said weakly.
“The override code was generated from the same cryptographic framework as the rest of the system,” Bruce replied. “Which I wrote.”
“But I changed it.”
“You changed it to your own birthday, son.”
Ah, he did, didn't he.
In his defence… Actually, no. There was no defence here. The self-declared smart Robin had made a major boo-boo, and that probably wasn’t very smart of him. Jason was still getting used to the fact that B tended to remember things like this. His bio-dad hadn’t been quite so proactive.
That was Jason’s mistake. Of course B would know his birthday. Last year, he’d arranged for Wonder Woman to visit and teach him Amazonian sword fighting. That had been an event that produced in Jason a feeling so large and unexpected that he'd had to go sit in his room for a while to not cry about it. (Not cry, no matter what Dickie said.)
“Quick question,” Hal said, raising a hand like he was in a meeting. “Just for my own education. What was the plan here, exactly? Like, walk me through the post-lock logic. You get us in there, then what?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Jason said. Deny, deny, deny. Just like Bruce taught him.
“Oh yeah?”
This was fixable. And if not fixable, then at least repercussions could be avoided. At least that’s what Jason told himself as he ran a rapid internal audit of his options. He could brazen it out, he guessed. The baby-face manoeuvre Dick had taught him was a historically good way to twist B’s arm, but that one required plausible deniability, and Jason was running short on reserves right now. He could throw himself on the mercy of the court. He could fold entirely. He could claim a medical episode. He could point at something in the middle distance and, in the ensuing confusion, sprint.
“I was just—” He gestured to the panic room. “Exploring our safety protocols. Keepin’ you both on your toes.”
Neither Hal nor Bruce looked convinced by that. “Uh-huh,” Hal said.
“You got out in, what, thirty seconds? That’s gotta be a new record.” Jason stuck up his thumb. “You guys are great superheroes. I mean that.”
“Whatever you say, kid.” Hal floated by Jason, ruffling his hair as he did. “I’m gonna head on out. Staying too long in Gotham gives me hives. That’s a real thing, look it up.” Jason was pretty sure he was exaggerating, but he squinted down at Hal’s still-uncovered hands anyway, just in case. A spontaneous skin condition would at least redirect the conversation. “Spooky, let me know when you get another lead. And try not to screw it up this time. I can’t always be cleaning up after you.”
Bruce temporarily redirected his glare to Hal, who just snickered and zipped away from his destiny of being a kept Victorian wife. Or whatever the Green Lantern equivalent to an Austen heroine was. Probably something kickass and independent – like Lizzy Bennet but with a dick.
When he sailed out of view, Bruce turned back to Jason.
“Well, that sure was something,” Jason said. He turned robotically on his heel, patted his thigh twice to get Ace’s attention (and also reminding him of the cheese still making a mess in his pocket). “Let’s go, Ace. It’s late. G’night, B, sleep tight—”
“Stop.”
He froze automatically. Freedom was so close. It was just a few steps to the stairway, a few more to the elevator. There was a fireman’s pole somewhere that Jason couldn’t probably shimmy up if it came down to it.
“I’m a growin’ boy,” he said innocently. “I gotta get to bed or else I’m never gonna break five-foot. You really want to stunt my growth? That’s kinda cruel, y’know.”
“Look at me.”
Jason obeyed and turned back around. “You look great tonight, B.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Good genetics, I guess?”
B sighed. “You know that’s not what I meant,” he said. “Did you think it was funny? Locking us in a room together?”
Well, yes, obviously. Jason thought it would be extremely funny, especially when everything went according to plan. He'd had plans to gloat about the whole thing in his best man speech, which he'd assumed he'd be delivering at roughly sixteen, seventeen at the most.
“I thought it had a certain elegance to it.”
“Sit down, Jason.”
“I really should head to bed—”
“Sit.”
Jason plopped himself down on the nearest equipment case, arranging himself casually as if he sat down voluntarily and not because his legs had obeyed before his brain could argue about it.
Also culpable, Ace padded over and pressed his nose to Jason’s knee. Comforting. At least they’d be grounded together forever. Maybe, when Jason became Wolverine, he could amend his persona to be more dog-themed. He could revisit the saddle plan. Dogman was a lame name, but maybe he could be, like, The Doberman or The Komondor, or whatever. It’d look weird with a German Shepard sidekick, but Jason was willing to make sacrifices in the name of art.
“If you punish me, you have to punish Ace too,” he said, curling an arm around Ace’s neck and pulling him in so they were cheek-to-cheek.
There was a twitch to B’s face that betrayed his amusement. Irritated amusement, but Jason would take what he could get. “You’re not in trouble, son.”
“Oh, cool.”
“But we’re not leaving this cave until I understand why you did it.”
Jason squirmed. The equipment case was not all that comfortable, and he suspected that was deliberate. Bruce was the type of guy to arrange the Batcave specifically to make it inhospitable to anyone who wanted to sit down and collect themselves.
“I just thought…” he started. He hadn’t rehearsed this. The plan was for Bruce to realise Jason had matchmade them without having to be told, whereupon he would then be indebted to Jason for life and declare him the favourite son. Now that plan had failed, he just let himself say whatever: “Y’know how Lizzy and Mr. Darcy got on each others’ tits before they got all mushy about it?”
Bruce stared at him. “...What?”
“Well, that’s kinda like you and Green Lantern, ‘cept you don’t wear a cravat. Which you should reconsider ‘cause I think you’d suit it. Matthew Macfadyen isn’t my preferred Darcy, but you’d give real Macfadyen vibes if you’d just—”
“You locked us in the panic room,” Bruce said slowly, like he was struggling to compute, “because of Pride and Prejudice?”
“Wow. Way to sound super prejudiced about it, B. Maybe I had you wrong. Maybe you were the Lizzy this whole time.”
Hilariously, Bruce bristled. “I’m obviously Darcy,” he said, then caught himself getting pulled in. He shook his head. “Jason. You cannot lock people in a room because of a novel. That's not even something that happens in the novel, unless you've found a significantly different edition to the one I read.”
“It might not be a faithful adaptation, but it’s thematically consistent.”
Fortunately for Jay, Bruce just looked bemused rather than pissed, so that was a point in his favour. He kept on trucking on. “Pemberley changes everything for Lizzy. She goes there, she sees where he actually lives, she has to reckon with who he actually is outside of the context that made her reject him in the first place.” He gestured again towards the panic room, and in doing so Ace lifted his head like he expected more cheese. “I adapted it to your situation.”
“I’m struggling to understand the inclusion of the panic room.”
“If I locked you in a drawing room, I’d give you ten seconds before you’re going all Jack Torrence on the door. The panic room was a necessity. Didn’t think you’d guess the code so quick.”
“Even if you'd changed it to something less traceable, there are three other overrides on that door.”
“Yeah, well. I’m an optimistic guy.”
Bruce shook his head. “I’m also struggling to understand why you did this at all,” he said.
God, Jason was gonna have to tell the truth, wasn’t he? Bruce was looking at him with those tell-me-the-truth-child eyes and Jason had always been weak against that. He squirmed again and knocked his head against Ace’s for support.
“It’s just…” He picked a scab on his knee. Where did he get that, he wondered. “You want him, right? Green Lantern. And you're not gonna do anything about it, because you're you, so.” He shrugged, tightly and one-shouldered. “I figured if you weren't gonna make a move, someone had to force the issue. I wouldn’t be a very good Robin if I didn’t look out for my Batman.”
He didn't look up when he said it. He was looking at Ace's ears, which were very large and soft and a much easier focal point than Bruce's face right now.
“Jason,” Bruce said evenly. When Jason slipped his gaze upwards, just to gauge the situation, B’s expression had done something he hadn't expected. The frown lines had smoothed into something a little more thoughtful, and for a moment he looked super young and super lost. “You can’t force an issue that doesn’t want to be forced. It doesn’t matter what I want.”
Oh, fuck that.
Jason’s contrite cherubim face turned to stone and he glared hard at Bruce. “I’m gonna need you to hear yourself right now, B, ‘cause that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”
“Jay—”
“No, I’m serious.” He dropped his voice into a lower pitch to mimic Bruce’s voice as he said, “‘It doesn’t matter what I want’. That’s what you’re going with? That’s nuts, B. That’s the kinda thing a Victorian widow says before she dies of the big sads.”
“It’s not—”
“Of course it matters. Why wouldn’t it matter?”
“Because some things aren’t—” Bruce paused and reconsidered what he wanted to say. When he decided, he came to a crouch in front of Jason, placing one steadying hand on his knee while pushing the other into Ace’s sable fur. “It’s complicated, okay?”
“Yeah, but it’s not though. He likes you, you like him. Why don’t you get together and like each other?”
That one made Bruce smile. “Wanting something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to pursue it.”
“That’s also super dumb.”
“Is that so?”
“All I’m saying,” Jason continued, “is that people can want normal things.” He looked up half-dramatically, hoping that the bad lighting in the Batcave cut the line of his chubby cheeks in a way that made him look more heroic. The only issue was that without rehearsing this beforehand, he had nothing else to hand. “That’s it. That’s the whole speech.”
Although… maybe it had the desired effect, because B was looking at Ace with a thoughtful expression. Eventually, he said, “There are reasons things stay the way they are. You understand that.”
“And there are reasons why things change,” Jason retorted. Ooh, that was good. Nice and dramatic, it hit all the right marks with the perfect amount of gravitas. He was good at this. “Are you scared, B?”
Bruce raised an eyebrow.
“I’m just saying. Maybe you’re just scared ‘cause you’re feelin’ too much and that’s scary.”
“You read too many romance novels.”
“I don’t read enough, and neither do you.”
B pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, the way he did when Dickie did something charmingly annoying. Jason knew it was the same motion because there were the hints of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Go to bed, Jason.”
“Are you gonna think about what I said?”
“Go to bed.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jason sent him one last award-winning grin, and then headed out. Mostly because he said he would, but also because he’d learned that there was a version of winning that didn’t require you to be in the room when it happened.
He made it as far as the corridor at the top of the cave stairs before his feet slowed on their one, which wasn’t his fault. His feet had their own jurisdiction sometimes. He found himself standing in the dark of the hallway with one hand on the wall and told himself he was just catching his breath after the climb. That was a lie. He'd done that climb approximately eight hundred times and his cardiovascular system had long since stopped registering it as exercise.
Really, he knew he’d stopped because he could hear the sound of the Batcomputer dialling out.
“Hal.” Bruce’s voice, even from here, carried. It wasn’t strained or nervous or anything like that. Just carefully. Like he was choosing the container before he figured out what he was putting in it. “Are you still in Gotham?”
A pause. The crackle of a communicator bridging distance. The rush of wind as a man flew through the sky, and the low amused sounds of a Lantern answering in the affirmative.
Jason stood there for one more second, grinning at the dark of the corridor and the dog that was nosing at the back of his knees, before continuing on his journey to bed. There was really no need to stay any longer because he already knew how this ended. He’d read the book.