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Chapter Text

Dick Grayson was in the midst of such a deep sleep that he couldn’t drag himself out of it, no matter how many times the alarm on his phone went off near the bed. The problem is that he was also awake in jerking spikes of attention, like a ship tossed in an ocean storm. Heavy sleep and then the too-loud air conditioner drilling into his head. Then heavy sleep and after, his stupid phone.

He didn’t know if he wanted to wake up. He didn’t think he did.

Then there were strong, rough hands under his arms shoving him forward out of deep sleep into uncomfortable grogginess, and he shoved at the arms.

“Bruce, stop,” he complained, twisting away and into the covers. “Lemme sleep.”

“Sorry, Dickiebird,” Jason Todd’s voice sounded too sharp, too knifelike in his ears. “B’s not here.” The arms didn’t leave, but repositioned themselves under his shoulders. Dick was surprised but also not surprised? He didn’t have the energy to be surprised.

“Jay,” Dick growled, pushing hard enough at the younger man that Jason stumbled and squeezed Dick reflexively to keep from dropping him. Because Dick wasn’t in the bed, he was on his feet but just barely, his arm thrown around Jason’s neck and his feet dragging along the floor while Jason half-carried him, half-hauled him away from the bed.

And when Jason’s arm tightened around his ribs, Dick recoiled with a howl that died off into a whimper.

“Shit,” Jason muttered, moving his arm lower. “Dick, stop fighting me.”

His voice was tight and maybe worried?

Or maybe Dick was still asleep.

He was asleep. It was a heavy sleep and a troubled sleep and a–

Dick’s whole body jerked once against Jason’s grip when the water hit his skin. He was down to his boxers and being forced into a bath that wasn’t freezing but it was cold, too cold, maybe freezing after all and he fought like hell to get up but Jason’s arm was like iron rebar and with an indignant sob Dick gave up.

“Why,” he asked, the smell of wet cigarette filling his nostrils. Jason was tugging off his leather jacket and throwing it out the bathroom now that Dick wasn’t fighting as hard, one hand on Dick’s chest in case he started again. The hard plastic of the tub was frigid against Dick’s back.

“Because Alfred asked me to check on you,” Jason said, adjusting the temperature of the still flowing water. “And it’s a good thing he did. Your bitch-ass is half dead already.”

“Let me go back to bed,” Dick mumbled and in an effort to get away from the chill on his back, his head slipped under.

Jason swore above the tub and a half-second later, Dick’s face was lifted out of the water and he sputtered and coughed. When he blinked up at Jason, it was with a suddenly clear mind. The clarity began to fade again, fast, but not before he was aware that he was shivering violently and that there was obvious worry in Jason’s pale eyes.

“Shiitake mushrooms, hold still. I have to get your fever down.”

Dick was coherent enough to comply with this, though coherency brought awareness of how miserable he felt, how much the side of his chest throbbed, how cold and hot he was all at the same time. The water sounded loud, too loud, and Jason shut it off right as the noise was becoming unbearable.

“I should take you to the hospital,” Jason said, standing and hunting for towels. “But going to the Bludhaven ER is like asking them to just sign the death certificate. It’ll take us an hour to get to Gotham Memorial.”

Dick’s teeth chattered and it took a few attempts to get out his words.

“Antibiotics in,” he stuttered, sitting up out of the water and then slumping back. The air was cold. The water was cold. His chest hurt. There was nowhere to go. “Kitchen.”

“You’re a fricking idiot, you know,” Jason muttered, throwing the towels on the vanity counter. He pulled the drain plug and plunged his arms into the water up to the elbow to hook them under Dick and drag him to the side of the tub, where Dick sat shivering even after Jason wrapped a towel around his shoulders. “God, you’re like a drowned kitten. Have you always been this light?”

Dick remembered standing on a rooftop, looking down at Jason who seemed especially tiny in the Robin costume. Just so, so short and thin, especially standing next to Batman, even after months of Alfred’s cooking.

“You’re smaller than I remember,” Dick had said, teasing. “Did you shrink?”

“Couple years of starving most days’ll do that to you, Dickface,” Jason had answered glibly, earning a warning scowl from Bruce. Dick didn’t know if Jason could read the worry and sorrow behind the mask, the very slight change around Bruce’s eyes that Dick just knew would be there.

“Names,” was all Bruce said. Dick knew he didn’t mean the insult-- it was the fact that it wasn’t their batnames.

“Sorry, Dickwing,” Jason had amended.

“Dick,” Jason said again. “Dick. C’mon.”

Dick blinked and found himself sitting on the floor of the bathroom still wrapped in a towel. Jason was crouching next to him, shaking his shoulders.

“If you do that again, we’re going to the hospital,” he said with a frown, studying Dick’s face.

Dick’s eyes filled with tears. He just wanted to sleep forever. When did Jason get so tall?

“You got big,” he said stupidly, pulling the towel more tightly around himself. “You’re not a kid. Who let you grow up without us?”

“That’s the fever talking,” Jason said gruffly. “Now quit passing out on me. I got you some dry boxers but if I have to help you I’m never gonna let you forget it.”

Dick summoned enough energy to scrub tears away from his eyes and grumble at the younger man. Jason left him on the bathroom floor with the damp towels and the boxers and Dick could hear him rummaging in the kitchen the whole time he was peeling the wet pair off of himself and pulling the dry ones on. It took too much effort, too much focus, and when the band was around his hips he just laid flat on the cold tile and towels and waited with his eyes closed.

“Shit,” Jason said from above him a few moments later.

“Not passed out,” Dick replied without moving.

Jason didn’t answer but it sounded like he sighed.

“Al picked a helluva time to be out of town,” Jason complained, leaning over Dick. “Or you picked a helluva time to have a crisis.”

“What are you doing,” Dick asked, opening his eyes as he shivered.

“Admiring your chiseled abs,” Jason said seriously, his lock of white hair falling into his eyes, his hands propped on his knees as he studied Dick’s chest. “Or looking for weak points. Whatever makes you stay alert.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Fuck, I need a haircut. What did you do to yourself, anyway?”

Dick reached out and Jason clasped his forearm and helped him sit up.

“Does it matter?” Dick asked bitterly, shuddering again. His whole left side was tight and throbbing and when it gave it his attention, he realized how much of his attention it had already been taking.

“Maybe, if there’s a chance of poison. At least your stitches held,” Jason said, pressing his fingers near the sutured wounds. Dick hissed and sucked in air, trying to move away. “Bed first, though. Can you walk?”

“Yes,” Dick said, gritting his teeth as he pushed himself off the floor. He balanced, one hand on the vanity for support, before his knees buckled and Jason caught him.

“Nope,” Jason said, ducking and spinning so Dick was draped on his back. “You’re like a Barbie princess. You don’t know when to quit.”

Despite himself, Dick laughed. Even with his head on Jason’s shoulder as the younger man carried him through the apartment to the bed, he felt dizzy.

“What the hell,” he mumbled, when Jason dumped him none-too-gently onto the bed.

“Have you seen those Barbie movies?” Jason asked. “They’re frickin’ hardcore. I thought if anyone else had watched ‘em, it’d be you.”

Dick let himself sink down into the blankets, his face pressed into the soft and dry pillow.

“No. Did you change the sheets?” he asked incredulously, grunting in protest when Jason flipped the blankets back just as Dick had cocooned himself in them. “Jay, I’m freezing.”

“Do you think Alfred would ever forgive me if I didn’t change the sheets?” Jason asked, sitting on the edge of the bed with a syringe and batting Dick’s hands away from the blanket. “I still can’t believe you haven’t seen the Barbie movies. After all the times I had to listen to you sing Pocahontas songs.”

“Twice,” Dick said, wincing as Jason jabbed a needle in his vein for the IV line. “Two times.”

“Three. That one time from the roof.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dick said faintly. “I’d forgotten about that.”

The bed creaked as Jason stood back up and Dick fumbled around reaching for the blankets, but they missed his grasp when Jason pulled them up instead and tucked them around Dick, the motion quick and gentle despite Jason’s continually coarse and off-handed tone.

“I was thrown,” Dick mumbled, already mostly asleep. “Against some broken pipes.”

“I’ll be back,” Jason said, his voice sounding far away and muffled. “Don’t die while I’m gone.”

“Wait,” Dick said, the word barely a noise in the dryness of his throat. “Wait, Jay, don’t l–”

The door slammed shut.

“–eave.”

Dick Grayson dreamt of falling. Sometimes, he was falling into flame and other times he was falling into ice, but it was always falling.

Every time, right before he hit the ground, he’d wake up with a start and a groan and glance around the empty bedroom and toss in the sweaty sheets and then fall back asleep again.

He didn’t know how long it had been when he woke again and heard someone moving around in the apartment. With a grimace, he untangled the IV line and sat up, dropped his bare feet to the cold floor and staggered to the doorway. He slumped against the frame, his vision spinning, and pressed a hand against his tender side.

Jason was in the kitchen pulling an eight-pack of Gatorade and cans of soup from a paper sack. While Dick watched, Jason put a plastic bag of grapes in the fridge and then pulled one of the sports drinks away from the others.

“The fuck are you doing?” he demanded when he saw Dick standing there. “Get back in bed.”

“You left,” Dick accused, feeling angry and not sure why.

“To get groceries,” Jason shot back. “Like I told you I was going to. Gracious, Dick, I was gone for less than an hour.”

“Hm,” Dick muttered, turning back to the bed. “Seemed longer.”

He sprawled on his stomach across the blankets, feeling too hot and gross to get under them. The IV line trailed out from his arm and up to the hanging bag.

“You’re a big baby,” Jason said, coming into the room with the Gatorade and a straw. “Drink this.”

When Dick made no move to sit up, Jason growled and knelt next to the bed and shoved the straw between Dick’s lips.

“Drink,” he ordered again and Dick did. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until half the bottle was already gone. He rolled over onto his side when Jason pulled the cup back.

“Don’t leave again,” Dick said quietly, swallowing. He couldn’t stop trembling, he was so cold, and he was immediately embarrassed that he’d even said anything, like the request had snuck out of him without permission.

“You didn’t get into fear toxin, did you?” Jason asked, putting the Gatorade on the side table and checking the antibiotics drip.

“No,” Dick said, putting his sore but free arm over his face. He braced himself for the harsh teasing Jason was almost certain to unleash. “I’m just…it’s been a hard week. It’s fine. You can go.”

“‘I should have called for backup’ hard or ‘I just don’t know when to cut myself some slack’ hard?” Jason asked, pushing the drink and Dick’s phone back so he could perch on the edge of the bedside table. When Dick looked up, Jason’s expression was serious and grim, not an ounce of mirth in the small lines around his eyes or mouth.

Dick was silent for a long time, holding Jason’s gaze, and then he closed his eyes and pushed his head into the pillow.

“Don’t do that,” Dick ordered hoarsely. “Don’t play the caring big brother.”

Jason’s wrist pressed against his forehead, and then the backs of Jason’s rough, calloused knuckles were on Dick’s neck. Each contact was short and precise.

“Your fever came down some,” Jason said. “And your pulse isn’t as rapid.”

“Jay.”

“You really fucking scared me, Dick,” Jason snapped. When Dick forced his heavy eyelids open to glance up, Jason was sitting on the bedside table again with both hands over his face. “I couldn’t get you to wake up. I almost called Bruce and he’s not even in the country.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick swallowed, his face hot. He was doing this all wrong. This was not how he wanted to reconnect with Jason and it was stupid to have let an infection spread so fast.

“Don’t be sorry,” Jason said fiercely, standing and letting his hands clench into tight fists at his side. “God, you are so much like him sometimes it’s infuriating. You aren’t superhuman. You should have called someone.”

And Dick knew he was right but Dick also remembered going to bed feeling a little sick but not that bad, hardly the worst he’d ever felt, and it wasn’t like he’d planned to get worse so fast but it was also such a shit thing to do, to be so irresponsible and bring it crashing down on someone else’s shoulders and his ribs still felt swollen with acid and now his head was starting to hurt and the next thing he knew there was a lump in his throat and he was blinking back tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, because he needed to say something, he had to, and there wasn’t anything else he could think of to say. “I’m sorry.”

Jason growled once, an incoherent noise of frustration, and he left the bedroom.

Dick waited, caught in a sob, for the door to slam shut again, but the sound never came.

It felt like an eternity of silence but it must have only been miserable, aching minutes before Jason came back into the room with the bag of cold grapes. He hesitated on the threshold and then untied and jerked his boots off his feet with one hand, one after the other, as if the very action annoyed him.

Then he sat on the other side of the bed, leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out on the mattress. Dick winced and shifted as the mattress sagged and dipped under the weight and he stayed on his side, his back to Jason. There was a heavy, exaggerated sigh, and then Jason held a grape out over Dick’s shoulder and tapped his cheek with it.

“Eat.”

Dick took the grape and eased himself over, careful not to jostle his sore chest.

“What are you doing,” he sniffled, chewing the grape.

“Don’t choke,” Jason said sternly. “Or you’ll feel like you have to apologize for that, too, and I might shoot you in the kneecap if you do.”

For a long time, they were quiet-- Jason would hand Dick a grape and Dick would chew and swallow and hold out his hand for another one. He didn’t know if he was hungry or not, but his stomach seemed okay with grapes either way, until it suddenly wasn’t and he pushed against the last grape Jason offered.

Jason popped it in his own mouth instead and leaned over to set the bag down on the floor. When he sat back up, he put a hand on Dick’s head, his fingers buried in hair, and just left it there. He didn’t tousle Dick’s hair or do anything except leave his palm and fingers as a weight against Dick’s scalp.

“I thought coming to Bludhaven would be a fresh start,” Dick said. “But it’s just more of the same. Same drugs, same murders, same rapes, same hate crimes. Just different street names.”

“Gotham doesn’t have a monopoly on evil, Dickie,” Jason answered. “It’s ugly everywhere.”

“I know,” Dick protested, feeling childish. “I know that. I just…I wanted…I don’t know what I wanted. I wanted to find myself. But it’s hard when all I can see is how things are broken. And then it starts to feel like it’s me, like, maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I’m the one that’s broken and that’s why I can’t see anything else.”

“I think everyone is broken,” Jason said casually. “You aren’t special.”

Dick laughed, a choked sound far too close to crying again for his own comfort.

“I’ll stay til you’re feeling better,” Jason said. “But I’m gonna rat you out to Alfred when he gets back.”

Dick let out a tense breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, some of the stress falling off his shoulders. He sagged against the bed, limp, and his head was thick with exhaustion again.

“Go to sleep, Dickface,” Jason said, patting Dick’s head. “Stop fighting it. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

When Dick woke again, it was early morning and Jason was in the kitchen with the smell of coffee and cigarettes drifting across the apartment. He felt a bit steadier on his feet but still weak and aching when he leaned against the doorframe. There was a crumpled blanket at one end of the couch.

“You better not be smoking,” Dick said, rubbing his chin.

Jason turned, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and said, “I’m not.”

“Good,” Dick said, as Jason ground the cigarette out on what Dick hoped was an ashtray and not the counter or one of his plates. “I don’t want to lose my security deposit.”

Jason snorted.

“And it’s bad for me?” he prompted.

“Your words, not mine,” Dick said, limping across the room to the couch.

“Another round of antibiotics,” Jason said, pointing a spoon at him from the other room. “And I’ve slaved over this oatmeal and burnt one batch already because your stove is a fricking temperamental piece of shit.”

“Then what?” Dick asked, yawning and gingerly feeling his side. It wasn’t nearly as painful as the day before.

“We start your Barbie movie education,” Jason said.

“You don’t have to give me teasing material just because I’m sick,” Dick said with a tired grin. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep, but he was pretty sure it had been long enough that he shouldn’t still feel tired.

“You can’t tease me about Barbie,” Jason retorted, coming into the room with two mugs of coffee. He was walking quickly, but with eyes on the mugs and his hands held up a little to keep the cups level. “I’m not embarrassed about appreciating true art. You still put a metric ton of sugar in your coffee, right?”

Dick couldn’t remember the last time they’d had coffee together.

It was probably at the manor, before Jason had died.

He nodded mutely and accepted the warm mug.

“Thanks for staying,” he said, glancing over at Jason sitting next to him a moment later, the younger man’s hair sticking up in every direction. He chuckled.

“What?” Jason said defensively. “And of course I stayed. I can think of a dozen people who’d take my head off if I left you alone like that.”

“You mean because you love me, little brother,” Dick said, his heart full and warm.

“Psh,” Jason sputtered into his coffee. “Tolerate, maybe.”

“Close enough,” Dick accepted. He really was feeling better even if he knew he still had recovery time ahead of him. He sipped the sweet, black coffee and then let the mug rest hot and comforting against his palms.

“Dick?” Jason said, sounding pensive and quiet.

“Hm?”

“Don’t do that again.”

“I’ll try not to,” Dick said, deciding in a moment he had an opportunity to keep Jason reeled in. “But come check on me sometimes. I’m too stubborn to ask for it.”

He told himself it was for Jason, anyway.

“Maybe if I’m in town,” Jason shrugged. “I’m not going out of my way for you.”

Dick was comforted, after all, to admit that they were both lying.

Broken?

Maybe.

But reassuring all the same.

Chapter Text

There was a bird screeching and scolding from a low tree branch right outside the cabin door and though normally Jason Todd was not the type to hold grudges against defenseless animals, it had been a really long, really fricking miserable night. He hauled himself off the rickety twin bed, wincing at the noise the springs made, and staggered toward the door. He grabbed his semi automatic from the kitchenette counter on the way.

The bird was still making an awful racket when he kicked open the storm door. Maybe kicked wasn’t the right word. Maybe it was more like stumbling into the mesh screen and then nudging it angrily with his socked foot, while he tried to keep his balance.

Jason was weary and aching enough that if the bird had shut up he probably would have just gone back inside. But the stupid thing saw him and instead of falling silent, screamed all the louder. He opened his eyes long enough to check that the tree was, as he suspected, free of humans– and the beady-eyed little shit stared straight at him and opened its beak.

Whatever noise it made was lost in the echoing boom of Jason’s gun, fired without a silencer directly into the center of the tree. The bird took off with startled flapping and spiraling amidst the flurry of airborne leaves and twigs, and it vanished into the blue sky beyond.

If the noise was terrifying for the bird, it was agony for Jason. Delicious, sweet silence followed but he dropped to his butt on the porch planking with his hand to his left ear.

“What’d that bird ever do to you?” an amused voice asked and without glancing over, Jason’s gun arm went back up and aimed roughly in the direction of the sound.

And rough for him, even with ear trouble, was pretty damn on the mark.

“Woah, there, Jaybird,” the voice said, much more softly and seriously.

Jason squinted into the too-bright daylight at Dick Grayson, in civilian clothes and with two plastic grocery bags in one hand and the other held up in a gesture of surrender.

“Dick?” he asked, not entirely sure he wasn’t hallucinating. His arm held the gun level just in case.

“Guilty as charged,” Dick answered, edging to the side a little. Jason let his arm drop.

“This is Canada,” Jason said, as Dick climbed the short set of steps, knelt and gently took the gun. He stepped over Jason’s legs and went into the cabin and then came out empty handed.

“Yep,” Dick agreed, bending and putting his shoulder under Jason’s arm to lift him. “C’mon. Back inside.”

Jason stood and shoved him away and then swayed, dizzy and shivering.

“What are you doing here,” Jason demanded, standing with one foot on the porch and the other inside the cabin.

“I’ll give you one guess,” Dick said cheerfully. He was smiling but the lines around his eyes, deep for his age, were hard.

“Alfred,” Jason sighed, leaning back against the doorframe. He crossed his arms in an attempt to look nonchalant instead of weak. “I told him I was fine.”

“Yeah, three days ago,” Dick countered. “And then you fell off the face of the earth.”

“I’m just taking a vacation,” Jason said, retreating into the cabin. He really needed to sit down somewhere before he fell over in front of Dick. There was a couch in front of the fireplace, an old thing with worn and threadbare floral upholstery. Jason sagged heavily into the cushions and stared at the back of Dick’s head while the older man fiddled with the gas burner knobs on the stove.

“Mhm,” Dick said. “The pilot light is out. Anyway. Alfred would have come himself, but I was already in Montreal.” He surveyed the room and then grabbed a pack of matches off the mantle. “And if you’re just taking a vacation, then you won’t mind your tired older brother joining for a day or two.”

Jason glared at him but Dick either didn’t notice or pretended not to, while he pulled the broiler drawer out and ducked his head under the stove. When he scooted backward and stood again, there was dust in his hair. He froze with one hand on the knob and asked, “I don’t have bugs in my hair, do I?”

“Thousands of ‘em,” Jason answered, his words too loud in his own head. He tried not to think of the dampness of earthworms and the metallic smell of mud thick with pillbugs. Something about resisting those foggy memories made him feel guilty and he added, “No. Just dust.”

Dick stepped back from the stove and ran his hands through his hair, bent over a little as he shook the black locks out.

“I’m making tea. Want some?”

“No,” Jason grumbled.

“Suit yourself,” Dick said, sounding unbothered. Jason sat, trying to keep his eyes open, while Dick hummed to himself and heated water in an open pot and dug around in one of the three small cabinets for two mugs. He set them next to the stove and then peeled crinkly plastic off a box of tea bags he’d brought in with him.

“A vacation is a great idea,” he said without looking at Jason.

Jason swallowed and spikes of pain shot through his ears, both now. He frowned sourly at his own knees and wished the blanket on the bed wasn’t so far away.

Dick’s humming turned into singing as the water boiled and Jason gritted his teeth.

Four days before, he’d woken up with the slightest of sore throats, the kind that usually meant he hadn’t been sleeping enough. He’d ignored it and gone out after his mark, the one running underage girls from small towns into big cities with the promise of fame and the reality of drugged-up sex slavery.

There had been a fight (there was always a fight) and Jason had gotten into a tight spot (he usually did) and right before his backup plan had kicked in (flawlessly, as usual), a gun went off right beside his head.

So late that night when he woke with his ears ringing and throbbing inside, and his sense of balance all off, he very reasonably blamed a ruptured eardrum and hightailed it to a remote cabin to wait it out. The mark was in police custody with plenty of evidence so he was technically between cases. He’d even called Alfred, a small and rare courtesy, to bow out of their planned lunch.

Just so the older man wouldn’t worry.

Not so he could rat him out to Dick, who was whistling while he poured water over teabags. And even if it was now clear to Jason, and had been since that second day, that he was not dealing with ear damage from the gunshot but straight up, simple, inconvenient illness. The whistling was like fingers on a chalkboard and Jason did his best to ignore it.

“Would you shut the fuck up?” he snapped, only seconds later.

“Sure, sorry,” Dick said, only the barest hint of apology in his tone. “Do you want some medicine?”

“No,” Jason said, even while he was sniffling and taking the tea Dick handed him. “This cabin is just musty.”

“Hmm,” Dick replied, still standing. He looked around again, his own mug in his hand. It was purple and said REAL WOMEN HUNT in bright orange letters.

“You aren’t going to just go, are you,” Jason said flatly, closing his eyes. The tea did feel good, held in his mouth, swallowed down his prickly, swollen throat.

“Not a chance,” Dick said. Maybe somebody else would have heard careless ease in the way he spoke, but Jason, even with clogged and sore ears, knew Dick too well to fall for that. He heard steel resolve, obstinate but kind. And it irked him.

Jason knew Dick could be prodded to anger, that it could flare hot and bright in mere seconds, but that he’d have to do a lot of button-pushing to get there after Dick had been so tempered by Damian and age. And Jason, frankly, didn’t have the energy.

When he opened his eyes again, Dick was already changing the sheets on the bed. He threw a blanket toward Jason so abruptly it almost landed in Jason’s tea, and he just barely kept the corner out of the hot liquid.

“What are you doing,” Jason asked, the blanket clutched in his fist.

“Cleaning,” Dick answered. “If it’s so musty it’s making you feel bad, then I should clean.”

“You should stop, is what you should do,” Jason grumbled.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Dick shot back, turning a bit to grin. Jason scowled in return.

Jason gave up. He wanted to sleep, he wanted to not move or talk or argue or accept any of what was happening– feeling gross, Dick being nice, being stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The cabin was quiet for a long time, while Jason drank his tea and Dick ignored his on the counter. He produced cleaning supplies from somewhere, maybe a closet or the bags he’d carried in, and worked around Jason scrubbing every shelf and surface. He began to hum again as he swept with a cheap broom but cut himself abruptly a few notes in.

He danced a few steps of a tango with the broom when he crossed the cabin in front of the couch.

“What the hell,” Jason muttered at him, shrinking down into the couch. Maybe if he kept pressing himself further into the scratchy cushions he could get away from how he felt.

“I’m dancing for you,” Dick told him seriously. “Just to piss you off.”

Jason was angry that he couldn’t fully suppress the smile that flickered across his face in response.

When the entire cabin was probably as clean as a cabin could be, probably cleaner than it had ever been, and smelling of lemon and wood soap, Dick dumped his tea out in the sink and announced, “I’m going to chop wood for the fireplace.”

“It’s like seventy degrees outside,” Jason protested.

“So?” Dick answered and the screen door slammed shut on its spring hinge behind him.

Jason put his empty mug on the floor and stretched out on the couch and slept.

When he woke, he felt worse.

It was just starting to get dark outside and Dick was heating something on the stove. Jason’s whole head felt like cotton set on fire but the rest of him felt frigid.

There was a small fire just starting to catch in the fireplace, the kindling crackling with the faint pops of dry wood.

He wondered, briefly, if his lie hadn’t been entirely dishonest– he could easily believe that dust in the old couch was triggering some sort of allergic reaction. He sat up.

“Morning, princess,” Dick said when he noticed.

“It’s evening, Dickface,” Jason snapped.

“I made soup.”

“I hate–”

“I remembered. It’s not chicken. It’s…” Dick trailed off and picked up a can and read from the label, “turkey tortilla with extra chiles. Spice is good for head colds.”

“I don’t have a cold,” Jason said, throwing the blanket to the side and standing. He’d only taken two or three steps when it all slammed into him like a bucket of thrown water. The fever, the earache, the dizziness, the ache in his throat. He staggered and caught himself, but Dick turned and stepped toward him with an outstretched arm.

“Jay,” he said.

“Don’t fricking touch me,” Jason said, jerking back and overcorrecting. He almost fell, again.

“Jason,” Dick said, not moving closer. The steel in his voice was losing its gentle edge.

“I don’t need you here,” Jason growled. “I came out here to get away from everyone.”

“Everyone?” Dick said, throwing an arm in the arm. “Jason, I’m not everyone! Damnit. I’m your…I mean, we’re like brothers, Jay. Let me help you. Please.”

Jason regained his balance and considered the other man. He wanted to storm out but didn’t think he’d make it very far.

He thought of that moment a few months ago, the catch in his chest when he couldn’t get Dick to wake up in his apartment and everyone who could have done a better job of things was out of town.

“I can take care of myself,” he said hoarsely, clenching his hands, willing it to be true.

“You’re nineteen,” Dick said and when Jason met his eyes he didn’t see anger, but something haunted. The soup was boiling wildly behind him, little flecks of red broth splattering the stove top. “You’re nineteen, Jay,” Dick said again, “and you shouldn’t have to. You remember when I was your age. You were there. Didn’t I come home and whine like a baby and let Alfred force medicine and food into me?”

Jason hadn’t thought about it in years because he didn’t let himself think often about those days in the manor, before. He avoided them most of the time. But he did remember. He remembered coming home from school and finding out Dick was home because when he went to his room, he could hear the puking from the bathroom down the hall. He remembered the sugary sports drinks Alfred made it a general rule to avoid buying, suddenly showing up in the fridge.

And Jason remembered being sick himself, resisting it, resisting attention. It had made him uncomfortable for hours until he’d finally given in, only after being ordered to take it easy, and what a relief it had been to just give up and let Alfred check his temperature and, well, take care of him.

It had been a long time, then, since someone had done that.

It has been a long time since then.

“Soup is burning,” Jason said tiredly, turning back to the couch.

“Will you please stop fighting me?” Dick asked when his back was to Jason and he was stirring the soup, now on a cold burner. “I’m not asking you to be excited I’m here. Just…stop wasting so much energy being defensive. You’re allowed to be sick.”

“Fine,” Jason said wearily. “Whatever.”

“Good,” Dick said, exhaling. “Thank you.”

Neither of them said another word while Jason sat on the couch and got his bearings again, and Dick poured soup into two bowls. He brought one bowl to Jason and said, “This is really hot. I’ll be right back.”

He left the door open and Jason could hear him jog down the steps. A chilled night breeze blew into the cabin and Jason shivered. Faint and far off, either because of distance or his ears or both, there was the sound of a car door opening and then shutting again.

When Dick came back in, it was with a small black duffle bag that he plunked down on the little table near the couch. He unzipped and rummaged through it, his hands buried in rattling plastics and crinkling packaging.

“Here,” he said, even though he wasn’t giving Jason anything yet. He stood up with an orange bottle in his hands and unscrewed the cap. “Antibiotics. I’ve got some painkillers, too. Strong ones.”

“I don’t need painkillers,” Jason said, frowning. “Where did you get all that?”

“It’s my emergency bag,” Dick answered, shaking a pill out of the bottle. He handed it to Jason. “I take it with me everywhere.”

Jason shrugged and took the pill. His throat didn’t make it easy to swallow but he got it down anyway.

“Ten days,” Dick said, tapping the bottle on the table and then leaving it there. “Don’t skip any.”

“Yessir, Dr. Dick,” Jason mumbled around a mouthful of soup. “Motherballs, that’s hot,” he hissed, his mouth hanging open. He wasn’t going to spit it out in the bowl but it felt scalding.

“I warned you,” Dick said, but he didn’t look satisfied about it. “Want some ice?”

“No,” Jason grumbled. “Shut up. Why were you in Montreal?”

“Oh, you know,” Dick said, sitting on the small wooden chair that went with the table. He’d dragged it a few feet and now propped his feet on the couch while he blew on a spoonful of soup. “Drugs. What else is there?”

“Girls,” Jason answered, looking down at his bowl and stirring. It wasn’t bad for canned soup. He didn’t want to think about how much it had cost.

“I got the names I came for,” Dick said, slowly, his spoon held above his bowl. “Did you…?”

“I found him,” Jason said, forcing another mouthful down. He didn’t know why it suddenly felt so hard to just tell Dick the truth, to tell him what he wanted to hear. It felt perverse to be reluctant to share something that Dick would be relieved to know, that might make him proud of Jason.

Jason didn’t want Dick to be proud of him.

Jason was a little afraid he wouldn’t be and he needed it.

“Canadian police have him now,” Jason said. There was a long, tense pause. He swallowed more soup and caught a whiff of lemon cleaner. His hands wanted to shake from a chill but he wouldn’t let them. “I didn’t kill him,” he added.

Dick was too practiced to loudly sigh or visibly relax.

“Okay,” was all he said.

“I promised B,” Jason said, as if defending himself.

“I know. I’m glad,” Dick said quietly. “I’m sorry I was pushing.”

“Would you have left if I had killed him?” Jason asked, challenging, his eyes now raised to meet Dick’s whirlwind of a gaze. It was unsettling, sometimes, how the older boy could both look like a rock in the storm and a tornado of emotion all at once, while blinking and still.

“No,” Dick said after a moment, studying his soup like he was looking for the future. His spoon moved in a lazy figure-eight through the broth. “But I would have been angry. I would have yelled at you when I thought you were feeling well enough. I don’t think either of us would have left here very happy.”

“At least you’re honest,” Jason muttered.

“Jay,” Dick said, his voice low and a little rough. “I don’t care about Bruce’s rules. I mean, I do, of course I do, but when you take someone’s life, I’m more worried about what that does to you. The people you’ve shot probably deserved, probably deserved worse. I just…I’ve seen the toll that can take on good men. It hardens them. And I don’t want that burden for you. You’ve already been through enough shit. Let somebody else carry that.”

Jason was so startled he said the first thing that flew into his head, and it tore out of him sarcastic and cutting, “Did Demonbird get this speech, too?”

“Yes,” Dick said immediately, matching his gaze again. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

For a few minutes, the only sounds were them slurping broth and the crickets outside the cabin.

“Thanks,” Jason said softly, partly because it was hurting his head to talk. “Not saying I agree with you, but thanks.”

“You don’t sound too great,” Dick said, lifting an eyebrow. “Sure about those painkillers?”

“M’fine,” Jason said, putting the half-finished bowl of soup down on the floor. Dick picked it up before Jason had even lifted his hand all the way. “I’m going back to bed. You can have the fricking lumpy couch.”

“Thanks,” Dick said dryly, but it was an unspoken understanding that he would have fought for this arrangement anyway.

Jason dragged the blanket to the bed and fell asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.

If Dick did dishes or stoked the fire or watched stuff on his phone, Jason didn’t hear it. He slept deeply and restlessly all at once, and the sound of the springs creaking became in his sleep a thousand different irritations. It was like sleeping in unfocused loops, fragmented and gradually more insistent, until he woke with a groan. All details and all conscious thought were drowned out by the suffocating pain in his ears.

For long seconds, he couldn’t even move; it was like the agony was chaining him there. And Jason was no stranger to pain, but the thing people didn’t get about pain was that even if his tolerance had shifted upward, there was a point where that didn’t make pain any less painful in the moment.

He shoved himself off the bed by pure instinct, a desperate attempt to just get away. And he was burning up all over and he knew it would be cooler outside, so he stumbled to the door and flung himself out onto the porch.

The air was colder and made his face and chest feel better but made his ears feel worse and he sat on the top step and pressed his palms against them, whimpering in an animalistic way, devoid of self-consciousness.

If he believed in God, this was about the point when he’d start begging.

He was tempted to start anyway.

“Ears or head?” Dick whispered, sitting next to him.

“Ears,” Jason ground out, his breath hitching. He couldn’t even muster the attention to swear about it.

He was aware of Dick standing and then sitting back down, but he didn’t know how much time had passed in his absence.

“Take these,” Dick said, holding three pills right in front of Jason’s bent down face. “It’ll take them a bit to kick in.”

Jason swallowed them as fast as he could and then pressed his hand against his ear again. Dick tugged gently on his arm and suddenly there was something hot between Jason’s hand and his ear, one on the left side, then another on the right.

“Hand warmers,” Dick said. “Not a hot water bottle, but they’ll do in a pinch. C’mere.”

Jason let Dick pull him sideways until his head was resting on Dick’s chest, Dick’s arms around him as he held both warmers to his ears. He realized he was crying, not loudly, but his face was wet and dripping onto Dick’s shirt.

Gradually, very gradually, the tiny heating pads were helping and he finally managed to say, “Fuck,” in a plaintive tone while the meds were also kicking in.

“Shh,” Dick said, not really shushing him as much as making some attempt at a soothing noise. “Shh.”

Jason did not want to admit that it was working.

But as the pain in his ears subsided to more manageable levels, the chill of the air mixed with Jason’s fever became too much and he was shaking.

“D-D-Dick,” Jason said with chattering teeth. He didn’t want to move the hand warmers away from his ears or any of himself away from the warmth of Dick’s body to get himself inside. It felt like once he’d reached his breaking point and given in to accepting, even out of necessity, some comfort, it was impossible to give up. He was a sellout. He didn’t want to go on without it. “I’m fr-fr-freezing.”

“You’re burning up, Little Wing,” Dick replied, with a wrist on Jason’s forehead. “But let’s go inside.”

Jason sat back and the sudden gap was like a shock, just how cold and aching he was and how much less his ears hurt. He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d come outside.

Dick stood and pulled Jason up beside him, opened the screen door, and pushed Jason gently through ahead of him.

The mattress from the bed was on the floor, perpendicular to the fireplace and Jason curled up on it without question.

“Those springs were driving me crazy,” Dick said, tucking a blanket around Jason and sitting next to him on the floor. The heat from the fireplace had already warmed the mattress and Jason all but deflated against it, his ears aching less but still throbbing and his body hungry for anything to ward off the bone-deep discomfort.

He held the warmers on his ears, still, partly to drown out the crackling of the fire. Dick was quiet until Jason was drowsy and then he reached over and felt Jason’s head again.

“Sorry,” he said, standing and dragging the entire mattress with Jason on it as far back as the couch. “I don’t want to risk you overheating on top of everything.”

Jason grumbled in protest but didn’t get up.

“Sit up and drink this,” Dick said a moment later.

Jason didn’t want to move but he knew Dick would keep pestering him so he sat up and drained half the glass of lukewarm water.

“All of it,” Dick said, when Jason had smashed his head down into the pillow again.

“No,” Jason muttered. “And if you try to make me, I’m gonna throw it on the fire.”

“That’s more like it,” Dick said, sitting down again.

“Why are you being so nice?” Jason demanded, his face buried under the blanket. He wasn’t angry, exactly, with Dick, but as he was feeling less paralyzed and more just plain miserable, he felt his tension rising again.

He was waiting for the rug to be jerked out from under him, is what he was doing, and he wanted to get it over with already.

Next to him, Dick sighed.

“Because I want to be,” he said.

“Not to keep Alfred happy?” Jason prodded.

“You know I’d do it just for him, but no. He’s not why.”

Jason relaxed, just a little. It might have had something to do with fever and sore muscles.

“Can we talk about this later?” Dick asked and Jason was instantly alert again. It meant that there was more Dick felt like he was supposed to say and there was no way Jason would be able to just let that go.

“No,” he said, even though he wanted to sleep.

“I wasn’t there for you before,” Dick said, his tone raw. “I should have been and I wasn’t.”

“You can just get the fuck out,” Jason growled, sitting up, with the blanket clutched around his shoulders. “Go. I didn’t ask you to be here. Go throw yourself a guilt party with Bruce.”

Dick looked stricken and furious all at once. He was sitting on the floor in just his boxers, sweat on his brow from the fire, with his wrists resting on his knees. He didn’t move.

“I’m not here because of guilt,” he said levelly. “I’m here because you’re here, for real, right now and you need somebody and I’m not going to make the same mistakes I did before.”

For a dozen heartbeats, Jason regarded him and then decided to take him at his word. It was a risk but he didn’t think he had the strength to physically fight him out of the cabin, and just accepting it was preferable to lying around and suspecting Dick of motives that, frankly, made Jason sick to his stomach.

And if it turned out later that Dick had lied, then Jason could get over that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been stabbed in the back by somebody.

Jason was also worn down enough to admit, even to himself, that he really, really wanted to believe him.

He settled back down on the mattress with his back to Dick.

“Okay,” he said gruffly. “As long as I’m not some atonement or pity project.”

“No,” Dick said. “You aren’t.”

There was silence for a moment and then Dick added, “And it makes Alfred happy.”

“I knew it,” Jason said, biting off a choked laugh.

“But for real, Jay. I drove out here and then I stayed because you’re important, to more than just Al. And I know emotional stuff makes you nervous but I think you need to hear it, too, more than you do. I love you. I wish to god I knew you better and there’s so much I wish I could change but it doesn’t make me mean it any less.”

Jason wanted him to shut the fuck up.

Jason wanted to memorize it, to replay it in his head for hours, to have it saved there for when things inevitably all fell apart for him again so he could remember that once Dick had said it and meant it.

“Scoot over,” Dick said, while Jason clutched his own shirt in his fists and if his shoulders shook a little, he could blame it on the fever. “I’m tired and my ass is falling asleep.”

Jason slid over on the mattress.

“Sleep on the couch,” he said, even after moving.

“You really want me to?” Dick asked. “I will.”

Jason didn’t say anything. He turned over when he heard Dick stand and walk across the cabin, but the man came back with his phone and stretched out on the mattress next to Jason and propped his upper body up on his elbows. He started a video and Jason rolled onto his stomach and propped himself up in identical fashion to watch.

“What is this?” he asked, even though he kind of already knew.

“Street fighting,” Dick said. “Bad habit.”

“Shit, he dropped his arm,” Jason said right before the fighter on the screen took a blow across the face. He winced.

“He’s got it back up,” Dick said with a chuckle. “Surprised he’s still standing, though.”

“I need a shower,” Jason said when they were in the fourth video.

“You reek,” Dick agreed amiably.

“Shove it,” Jason muttered, tucking his elbows in and dropping his head to the pillow. “You’re one to talk.”

“I happen to know I smell like sunshine and flowers,” Dick retorted as another video started. It sort of figured that Jason wasn’t the only one in their weird family that had trouble with insomnia.

Jason barked out a laugh that hurt his throat a little, but less than it had earlier. He drifted to sleep seconds later, his head tipped against Dick’s forearm.

“Your arm is cold,” he said faintly. “Feels good.”

“Gross,” Dick answered. “That’s from dried sweat.”

But he didn’t pull his arm away and Jason was already asleep.

Jason slept on and off for the whole rest of the day that followed, waking for food or water or once, to finally shower in the tiny bathroom that was still grimy despite Dick’s cleaning attempt. He argued with Dick but it was half-hearted and had an undercurrent of ease instead of suspicion, and they talked, too, of pizza places around Gotham and a judge they both hated and what they’d each do with a pet dragon.

When Jason woke on the second day after Dick’s arrival at the cabin, he decided he felt well enough travel home. Dick was still snoring softly on the couch when he left to toss his own small bag in the back of the beat up little car he’d rented. When he closed the back door and turned, Dick was on the porch with two mugs.

“Coffee before you go?” he offered casually, as if Jason hadn’t clearly just been about to bail without a farewell.

“Sure,” Jason said. He waited for the twinge of guilt or warning that goodbyes were worth avoiding, but it didn’t come.

“Gotta make some,” Dick grinned, heading back inside. “I just had the mugs to lure you in.”

Jason sat on the top step while he waited. His head was still a bit groggy with congestion but it was clearing and he could handle standing for more than a few minutes without his ears starting to pound.

Dick handed him a cup of steaming coffee a few minutes later.

“There’s a gas station a few miles away that has a diner attached. Wanna get breakfast?” Dick asked, sitting down beside him.

“I’m sorry I’m such a shitty half-brother, or whatever it is we are,” Jason said, holding the mug tightly in both hands. “But maybe call me sometimes, too. I don’t know how to ask for help.”

“Yeah,” Dick said. “I think we all have that in common. You don’t need to apologize, we all screw up. I think that’s part of being a family. We just all end up doing it in really spectacular ways.”

“I wanna blame B,” Jason said with a sideways grin. “But we both fricking know where the flair for drama comes from.”

“Alfred,” Dick smirked.

“Goodness gracious,” Jason said into his coffee. He gritted his teeth and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Breakfast sounds good.”

“I’ll grab my stuff. Meet you there? Do you need to drop keys off or something?”

“For the cabin?” Jason asked, looking up at him. “Dick, I have no idea who this cabin belongs to. I picked the lock when I found it empty.”

Dick looked at him long and hard for a moment and then sighed.

“I guess we cleaned it at least,” he said, resigned.

“You cleaned it, Cinderfella. All part of my master plan,” Jason called after him. He stood and put the coffee mug on the top step. Dick was complaining from inside but Jason ignored him.

If he beat him to the diner, he could make sure he made arrangements to settle the tab before they ended up arguing about it at the table.

When the car tires were crunching dirt and gravel as he turned down the lane, he was braced for the compulsion to just really take off, never stop at the diner, keep going and pretend it had never happened later when a better man might apologize for his own failings.

It would be nice if it never came, but it did come and he did feel that way.

The difference this time was that he shot it down.

Chapter Text

It only took five minutes but five minutes was like basically an eternity when you were only awake for an hour or two at a time. All that Tim Drake-Wayne needed or wanted to do was pee and go back to bed. Unfortunately, when he swung his legs off the bed, he knocked an unfolded pile of clothes onto the floor and then put his foot right on the edge of a bowl with remnants of pesto.

The clothes were on top of dirty laundry and towels and the pesto oil and herb were both clinging to his bare foot and dripping all over the carpet. He stared at them and then glanced at the collection of Red Bull cans, soda cans, Starbucks doubleshot cans, and sparkling water cans on his bedside table.

He had the brief and violent thought that it would be easier to bend a can in half, expose a sharp tin edge, and drag it down his wrists.

Easier than what?

Than cleaning up pesto, putting away laundry, going to the bathroom, staying awake.

It almost made him throw up, recoiling even as he thought it, saw it clearly in his own mind. And that was when he knew he needed to call Dick.

Even if he and Dick weren’t exactly on the best of terms, because things had changed between them and it wasn’t the same as it used to be, they got along well enough these days. Still, it had been weeks since he’d seen Dick, at the Manor, the first few days he’d been there after going home with mono.

Tim had managed two or three weeks of mounting exhaustion and denial and extra cups of coffee before he admitted to himself that it was abnormal even for him, and admitting that to Bruce while bleary-eyed and on his fifth cup of coffee at the office, had not had the results he had wanted: he was maybe expecting that it was just a heads up that he was taking a few days off.

It had turned into a much-protested trip to the doctor, blood work, a mono diagnosis and the tiny detail that his splenectomy meant he didn’t have and probably wouldn’t develop the tell-tale fever.

He just had weeks and weeks of thorough exhaustion and a crappy immune system that made halting efforts at recovery.

On Bruce’s, and Alfred’s, assistance, he had retreated to the manor and backed out of almost every commitment and activity to avoid further compromising his weakened system and to sleep.

And he had slept, for hours, until three weeks of being dependent on Alfred made him feel guilty and putting up with Damian’s verbal jabs pushed him over the edge and he spent a whole day out of bed just to prove he could and then retreated again to his apartment.

Another week of sleeping and warming up meals Alfred had left in the fridge while letting the already disorganized apartment go to hell around him added up to nearly two months of feeling like crap and unable to function. There was no way he was asking Alfred to do more for him right now. The flashes of suicidal ideation that were growing in frequency and severity, almost against his own will or actual desire, were now starting to actually make him wonder how he felt about it and that precipice was so frightening that instinct drove out any hesitation or recent distance between him and Dick Grayson and he flopped back to dig around on his bed for his phone.

Tim lay flat on his back across the rumpled comforter while the phone rang, once, then twice.

“Timmy!” Dick answered. “You’ll never guess where I am.”

“I don’t know,” Tim mumbled, rubbing the inner corner of one eye. He didn’t even know what time it was. “Do you have a minute? You sound busy. It’s fine. Can you call me later? I just, uh, I mean, it’s not like urgent or anything, I just need to talk.”

“Come unlock your door,” Dick answered. “I’m here.”

“What?” Tim sat up so fast he accidentally kicked the nightstand and three cans tumbled off onto the floor. He glanced around the room and his shoulders sagged. “Why?”

“Alfred called me. Said you abandoned ship. C’mon, or I’m gonna kick it down.”

“That seems a little excessive,” Tim remarked dryly, standing and avoiding the mess of pesto. “Give me a minute.”

He hung up and half walked, half hopped to the bathroom, where he washed his foot off in the sink and peed and glanced at himself in the mirror. He was pale and had gray shadows under his eyes, but that wasn’t anything new. His hair was reaching that stage past greasy where it was just dull and limp. He’d been showering when he had the energy at the manor but hadn’t bothered since coming home to the apartment; part of that was that his all-day charade preluding his location change had exhausted him so much.

There was a robe hanging on the back of the door and he slipped his arms into it and headed for the front. The robe smelled like Cass’ shampoo and he wondered if buying her a robe would change her borrowing ways, but he doubted it. He should probably get her one anyway.

The living room was just as bad as the bedroom. His forays to the couch to watch TV or just sleep in a different place left the remnants of food packaging and laundry and dishes in their wake, and the kitchen was equally bad.

He stood in front of the door for thirty seconds willing himself to just open it. He really didn’t want to. He contemplated calling Dick again and telling him he was too tired, to come back later. Tim could rally and clean a little bit before that happened.

Then he thought of himself with the cleaners, knowing which ones to not mix together and not caring.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care.

It was just that stupidly stubborn thought that maybe he could not care or maybe he wouldn’t care and it terrified him.

Tim slid the bolt lock and tugged open the heavy door.

Dick was standing there, hands in his pockets.

With Jason.

Dick had brought Jason.

Just as Dick’s face broke into a relieved smile, Tim shut the door on the both of them.

“Tim,” Dick called, pounding and not forcing the door open like he must have known he could. “Tim, it’s okay. He’s with me.”

“I told you it was a friggin’ awful idea,” Jason snapped, his voice muffled by the thick oak.

“Go away,” Tim muttered, too quiet for them to hear. He let his head drop against the wood and felt the vibrations of Dick’s knocking.

After several months, he and Jason had come to a position of begrudging mutual respect but Tim still swung wildly between desperately wanting the approval or blessing of his predecessor and resenting any implication that he hadn’t earned the suit or place at Bruce’s side.

Not that it mattered much anymore, with things what they were now, but it felt too much like giving in and handing Jason more reasons to despise him if he saw the sorry state Tim and his life were in right now. Even if Dick and Jason had been on better terms recently, that didn’t mean Jason’s emotional cease-fire would extend to him.

“Timmy,” Dick pleaded. “He’s just here to help. We were getting lunch when Al called. I swear that’s all. No scheming.”

Tim slumped down to sit with his back against the door. He closed his eyes and he could hear Dick and Jason arguing in harsh whispers on the other side, but he didn’t try to make out what they were saying. He caught his own name a few times.

He opened his eyes and looked back at his apartment. He swallowed.

“Swear you won’t use it against me?” he asked with a sigh.

There was a brief silence and then when Dick started to answer, Jason cut him off.

“I don’t kick a man when he’s down, Replacement.”

“I can think of half a dozen times that wasn’t true,” Tim retorted, already resigned. He stood up and opened the door.

“You’ll just have to take your chances, then,” Jason said, but his words trailed off as he saw the apartment. “Holy hot shit,” he breathed, his eyes widening a little.

Dick didn’t blink. He took it in stride and he took Tim’s elbow while Tim glared at Jason.

“I’ve been sick,” he said defensively.

Jason’s face was already neutral again and he shrugged at him and nudged a pile of kitchen towels with his foot.

“I’m surprised Alfred let you leave,” Dick said without judgment, stepping over a toppled pile of magazines as he pulled Tim further in.

“I didn’t exactly ask,” Tim snapped. He put a hand to his forehead when Dick stopped abruptly. He didn’t mean to sound so angry but sometimes it felt like Dick wanted him to be grown up and then treated him like a kid all at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” Tim said quietly. “I just…”

He hesitated. Knocking Dick’s precious little baby bird was not going to go over well, no matter how much Damian deserved it. It would frustrate Dick, who liked to pretend Tim and Damian’s ongoing antipathy was secretly fond brotherly ribbing. Dick would take it as a personal insult and then they’d fight and Tim just wasn’t in the mood.

“I needed some space,” Tim said finally. “Don’t worry about the mess, honestly. I’ll take care of it soon. I just wanted to talk.”

Jason was standing at the edge of the kitchen staring at the sink with an expression Tim couldn’t figure out. Letting them both in had been a massive mistake, Tim could feel it already in his gut.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dick said warmly, all reassuring and kind, and the way that Damian and the past haunted the space between them evaporated. Tim was still mad, might always be a little mad, at Dick Grayson but Dick could keep his flaws and still be Tim’s older brother.

And all those things they needed to talk about, maybe, someday, if those conversations didn’t wreck what they had left, could be put off for the sake of the hug Tim found himself wrapped in.

“I’m just having a really hard week,” Tim mumbled into Dick’s shoulder, his own limbs stiff. He wasn’t fighting the hug but he didn’t have it in him to return it. He tried to force himself to ignore Jason but it wasn’t working very well. “I’m sick of being sick and it’s messing with my head.”

“You should have told me you were leaving the manor,” Dick scolded him gently. “I would have come by sooner. I didn’t even know you’d left.”

“Dickface,” Jason drawled from behind them, unhurried. “Let the kid breathe. Get him in a fricking bed before he falls over.”

Tim spun to protest this but Dick pulled him into the bedroom and shut the door.

“Ignore him,” Dick ordered, as if Tim hadn’t already been trying. “He’s just nervous.”

“What?” Tim asked, stumbling toward the bed and grateful for the closed door. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Dick said, kicking off his shoes. “He thinks he’s bad with family stuff.” Dick climbed onto the bed after Tim and pulled the comforter up over both of them.

Tim closed his eyes and let himself relax and be cuddled. He used to tell himself that it was for Dick, that he let this affectionate cuddling happen because Dick needed it, but in those months after Robin had been taken from Tim, he realized he missed it for himself.

“So, spill, Timmy,” Dick said after a moment. “You only call if it’s serious.”

“I told you,” Tim said, already drowsy. “Being sick is just messing with my head.”

But Dick wasn’t letting him get off that easy.

“How bad?”

“Just stuff I don’t want to think about,” Tim said vaguely, hedging even while half asleep.

“You know that isn’t you, Tim. Just keep reminding yourself. I’ll take you to talk to someone if it’s not going away.”

Tim nodded and even with the rift between them, he felt safe. It was easier when he wasn’t alone and deep down he was glad it had ended up being more than just a phone call.

And this, he thought, was why he’d wanted Dick: no dancing around things, no long explanations, no attempts to parse out what he wanted or needed to convey it to someone else. Dick just got it, he understood, he didn’t freak out.

Out in the living room, Tim could hear what sounded like the rustling of a trash bag. He fell asleep too fatigued to even feel guilty.

When he woke, it was growing dark outside and the bedside table lamp was on. The table itself was free of empty cans and he sat up.

The floor was clear except for some white powder over where the pesto had spilled earlier. All the laundry and dishes from earlier were gone. He sat still, collecting himself, studying what information he could gather from just listening. There was still someone in the apartment, but maybe just one person. No conversation, no duplicate set of footsteps.

Tim was tempted to stay in bed. But he was also hungry and thirsty and all he’d done all day, again, was sleep. So he forced himself to get up and leave the safety of the bedroom.

The living room was spotless. Even his old magazines had been stacked into neat piles. The double doors that hid the washer and dryer were open, and three baskets of laundry were folded and set in a line. The dryer was humming and an unfolded load sat by the washer.

Tim ventured further with noiseless steps and when he stepped around the corner to the kitchen, he found Jason standing at the sink scrubbing a glass container. There was a line of waiting dishes and the dishwasher was seeping a thin wisp of steam from the vents as it powered through its final cycle.

“What are you doing?” Tim asked, halting at the threshold to the kitchen.

“Your dishes because you are a fricking slob,” Jason answered.

Tim tensed and let out a slow, steadying breath.

“I told you I could–”

“Chill, nerdbreath,” Jason said, looking over at Tim. “It was a shitty joke. Dick told me you have mono.”

With a slight frown, Tim stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge, hunting for something to drink without having to ask Jason to move so he could get water.

“Where is Dick, anyway?”

“He went out to get more laundry detergent.”

“You guys really didn’t have to–”

“Shut it,” Jason said roughly. Tim’s mouth snapped closed and he grabbed a San Pellegrino from the fridge. He uncapped it and drank half of it in gulps, ignoring the way the carbonation burned his throat.

The dishwasher beeped quietly and Jason turned off the faucet and opened it.

“Tell me where shit goes,” he ordered, and Tim blinked at him.

“I can–”

“Tim,” Jason said, a challenge in his eyes, “you don’t need to. I’m not half as good as Dick at taking care of people but I can unload a fucking dishwasher. Are you gonna help or not?”

“Will you let me finish a sentence?” Tim demanded icily in reply. “You keep cutting me off.”

“Maybe try saying something that isn’t stupid,” Jason suggested, searching drawers for the silverware tray.

“Two more over,” Tim said, sighing. He hopped onto the counter to sit, and leaned a little against the fridge at his side. He’d only been out of bed for less than five minutes and already he ached all over, every muscle and joint.

When Jason finished with the silverware, Tim pointed to the next cabinet but gave that up after the first attempt and just gave monosyllabic directions or nods of his head after that.

“You’re really wiped out, aren’t you?” Jason asked, his tone strangely flat for him. Tim was used to everything the older boy said to have some sort of lilt-- anger, sarcasm, amusement. Jason closed the cupboard door on a stack of plates.

“Yeah,” Tim acknowledged, because what point was there now in denying it? Any respect he’d eked out by sheer determination was probably now a total waste. He might was well just own up to it. “Sorry my apartment was so disgusting.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you’ve always had a maid,” Jason grinned wolfishly and Tim shrugged one shoulder. It was irritating but it wasn’t like he was entirely wrong. But something about Tim’s easy, if bitter, acceptance made Jason’s face twist in a strange way.

The older boy turned back to the pan soaking in the sink and ran the water again, testing the heat with his finger.

“When my mom was…” he began and he sounded angry, his whole posture defensive. “When you let us in today, it wasn’t like I’d never…” Jason stopped again and Tim was frozen, barely breathing, and he felt like he was waiting for Jason to stop or to hurl the glass dish across the room. “When my mom got sick, our place was a wreck most of the time. I’d try to clean but I was just a kid. She’d try to help but I’d stop so she’d stop and it just never got done.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim said quietly, thinking of his own mother and the fact that he’d never seen her clean anything in his entire life; the steady rotation of maids that some years he saw more than he saw her.

Their house had always been spotless.

And empty.

“I’m not asking for fricking pity,” Jason said sharply, sniffing hard. He didn’t throw the glass but he scrubbed it like he hated it. “Just, if you’ve got family, they should help with basic shit like this.”

“You think we’re family?” Tim asked, faintly bewildered. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea but it was more surprising from Jason, who had always seemed ready to dismiss any ties.

“Dick seems to think so,” Jason said casually. He sounded less furious now that they were moving on and Tim was intelligent enough, even sick, to know not to dig. Jason had never spoken to him of his past before, not in any real way, and Tim felt his own thoughts as a suffocating weight. It was like Jason’s honesty had dragged latent feelings to his surface and all those conversations he’d once played out in his head and then discarded as ridiculous fantasy were now slipping toward the realm of possible.

“I didn’t understand how you could be so angry about me taking over as Robin,” Tim said, throwing it into the air without warning. “Until last year. I don’t think I ever told you that I get it now.”

“What are you talking about?” Jason snapped, spine suddenly straight and stiff.

“When Dick took Robin and gave it–”

“He what,” Jason hissed, looking at Tim so fiercely that Tim, despite himself, slouched back against the fridge before he felt how ridiculous it was and intentionally held his aching body loose and at ease. It was in absolute contrast with how he felt, what he was saying, but it was habit.

“Dick gave Damian the Robin mantle.”

“You didn’t give it up?” Jason asked, his hands now gripping the sink’s edge. “Storm out in a fit of grief or rage or whatever like Dickiebird himself?”

“No,” Tim said crisply. “He didn’t ask me. It was taken.”

“The idiot,” Jason growled. “Fucking idiot.”

“I’ve come to terms with it,” Tim said, now feeling a responsibility to calm Jason down instead of dealing with his own actually still pretty torn heart. It wasn’t that hard; he had a lot of practice disregarding it.

“The hell you did,” Jason said. “It’s hurts like a bitch, doesn’t it? And I was dead. I mean, yeah, I was pissed, but I was dead.”

Tim’s eyes filled suddenly with tears. He blamed being sick. He took another swig of the San Pellegrino that had been hanging limply from his hand.

“Yeah,” he said. “It does. So I’m sorry, you know. I mean, I didn’t think I could replace you. I just wanted Bruce to stop spiraling out of control and I tried everything else first. The first time I put it on, I didn’t even have his permission.”

“Yeah?” Jason asked, a lopsided grin on his face. “Me either.”

“Huh,” Tim said, finishing off the water. “I didn’t know that.”

He waited for some snide reply from Jason redirecting the conversation, if it continued at all, into somewhere more like neutral territory. When Tim wasn’t sick, it was that distance that kept them at least on speaking terms even if they were far from fond brothers.

“Did Dick apologize?” Jason asked, his voice low, as he rinsed the glass dish.

Tim was startled again and he hopped down and threw away the water bottle before answering.

“No.”

The trash can was near the sink, which meant he was closer to Jason, which meant he saw the way the older boy’s arm muscles pulled tight even if Jason kept calmly scrubbing the next pot.

Tim pulled a towel out of a drawer, the last clean one there, and began drying dishes from the rack. Everything felt too heavy for his wrists, too hard for his fingers, but he needed to do something.

“You called him, though,” Jason said, observing the fact.

“Yeah,” Tim said. “We get along most of the time now. I think he’s afraid, though. To apologize, I mean. Maybe he thinks talking about it will mess everything up. I dunno. I’m not even sure he thinks about it at all.”

It was probably the mono that was muddling his head because Tim realized belatedly, while drying the next dish, how utterly stupid any of that confession to Jason of all people had been. The situation wasn’t the same and it could just as easily set the older boy off, wreck whatever progress he had going on with Dick, give him more ammo for despising Tim. It had been a year or more since he’d treated Tim that way, but it wasn’t like they were actually close. Just balanced.

Balanced.

Like he was with Dick, with Stephanie, with Damian.

It wasn’t healthy balance, it was just the thin territory between a completely severed relationship and constant fighting.

It sucked.

Jason handed him another pan directly instead of putting it in the drying rack. Tim’s hands shook when he took it, because he was so many things at once and even his knuckles hurt.

“Go sit down after that one,” Jason said. “I’m going to talk to Dick.”

And for all the ways that conversation could have backfired or even slipped by as something worth ignoring, pretending they’d never talked at all, this was not a result Tim had anticipated.

Jason didn’t sound off-the-handle furious, just resolute. It reminded Tim of years ago when Dick would sometimes intervene with Bruce, after worming intel out of a reluctant and miserable younger Tim.

It felt a lot like having an older brother.

“You don’t have to,” Tim said slowly, setting the pan down and throwing the towel on the counter.

“Bullroar,” Jason shot back. “He should know better.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Tim said slowly, the pain in his knees and shoulders building as he stood by the sink. “But I, um, I don’t know if I…if I…” why was it so hard to talk? It wasn’t like this was the most difficult thing he’d admitted in the past day. He focused, closing his eyes to plot out his words. “I don’t think I can handle a Discussion with Dick right now.”

“Easy, nerdbreath. I’ll wait til you feel better. Oh, fu-”

Tim didn’t hear the rest of whatever Jason said because he was no longer conscious.

When he came to, he was on the couch and Dick’s face was right above his with a worried frown.

“Tim,” he was saying. “Timmy.”

“Yeah?” Tim asked, wincing at the light from the ceiling.

“Jay said you passed out,” Dick said. “It’s a good thing he was right there.”

“Your forehead almost made out with a cabinet door. You can thank me later for sparing your pretty face,” Jason said from by the washer.

“Thanks,” Tim mumbled, feeling an embarrassed flush rise along his neck. He was still lying down and he poured a lot of energy into controlling his heart rate and blood flow to prevent it from climbing.

“When was the last time you ate?” Dick asked, nudging Tim further back against the cushions so he could sit on the edge of the couch.

“I don’t know,” Tim said. “I don’t remember.”

“Will you let me take you back to the manor?” Dick asked.

“No,” Tim said, thinking of Alfred and Damian for entirely different reasons.

Dick dropped his head and sighed, and then looked up across the room at Jason. Tim craned his neck to see, but he missed whatever silent exchange they had because Jason had already turned back to rolling folded clothes and packing them in a duffel bag.

“Is it Bruce?” Dick asked. “If he’s being too hard on you–”

“It’s not Bruce,” Tim said, intending to snap but it came out more like a whine. He was still looking at Jason, who was still packing clothes with an impassive expression. Tim cleared his throat and pulled himself more into a sitting position. “I’m not going back right now, Dick. Alfred needs a break.”

“Well, you can’t stay here alone,” Dick said, patting Tim’s knee. “Why don’t you come stay with me for a week or two?”

Tim scanned the recently cleaned apartment and felt a tug of selfishness. He didn’t want to go somewhere unfamiliar like Dick’s new apartment when he was already feeling like crap even if it was a really kind offer. And it irritated him that he felt like they’d already decided for him.

“Dick, I kind of want to stay here,” Tim said, staring down at his hands. “I can manage.”

There was a weighty silence and then Dick said, “Okay. Why don’t I stay here with you then?”

“That’s like an hour commute each way,” Tim protested. “You have work. I’ll be fine, I swear. It was dumb to not eat enough today.”

“It’s fine, I’ll–”

“I’ll stay,” Jason said. Tim looked up in surprise at him across the room. The older boy was already undoing all his packing, pulling clothes out of the duffel and folding them to drop them in one of the baskets.

“We can alternate,” Dick suggested. “I have two days in a row off soon.” Jason nodded and they both looked at Tim.

The sudden relief of not having plans forced on him, their willingness to change tack, and what they were offering to do all washed over Tim at once in a warm, sweet wave. He was used to taking care of himself, he knew he could hold his own in fight against almost any human on the planet, but the way both of them were looking at Tim while they waited for his answer made him feel overwhelmingly safe.

“If you’re sure,” he said, in case either of them needed an out or time to reconsider changing their whole week for him.

“Are we cooking or ordering pizza tonight?” Jason asked in response.

“I vote pizza,” Dick said. “But Tim gets final vote.”

The warm feeling in the middle of Tim’s chest was seeping through him, even with his sore joints. He smiled, small and quiet, at the both of them.

“Pizza. Get one with capicola and I don’t care what else you pick.”

A phone call was made and Dick ordered the pizza, while Tim reminded him in the background that they could have ordered online. Jason seized the opportunity to start referring to Dick as “old timer,” which only stopped when they split up to finish cleaning. Jason carried baskets of laundry into the bedroom and Dick pushed Tim toward the shower, claiming it would help his mental state (it did) but insisting on standing outside the door listening in case Tim passed out again. Tim suffered the indignity with as much grace as he could muster, which wasn’t much considering how distractingly amazing a hot shower felt.

Thirty minutes later, they had pizza boxes on the coffee table and Tim was sandwiched between Jason and Dick on the couch. They didn’t bother with a movie or anything, and when Dick complained that it was too quiet with the three of them just eating, Tim started music over the TV speakers from his phone.

“Don’t you have any good music?” Dick asked after a minute. “Like Carly Rae Jepsen or something?”

“Arcade Fire is good music,” Tim argued around a mouthful of pizza.

“This just sounds sad,” Dick said with a frown.

“Life is fucking sad, Dickie,” Jason commented.

“This whole album is about families,” Tim insisted. “It’s not all sad.”

“Hmm,” Dick said. “Okay. I’ll give it a chance. But only because I trust you.”

When they’d eaten most of the pizza, Jason took the boxes to the kitchen and Dick leaned back on the couch and held his arms open. Tim sagged against him gratefully, already exhausted again after showering and eating. Dick propped his feet up on the coffee table and the album was still playing and Tim let his eyes drift closed.

He opened them again when Dick was squirming and making a weird strangled noise. Jason was sitting on the other side of the coffee table with a completely solemn expression, drawing a plastic fork back and forth across the bottom of Dick’s socked feet. It had come with the pizza for some reason and been left abandoned on the table.

“Shh,” Jason said.

Tim twisted his head to look up at Dick’s face. The man was thin-lipped and his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, but his arms around Tim were shaking.

“Stop,” Dick hissed, a small gasp of laughter escaping with the word. “You woke Tim up.”

“Don’t make fricking excuses,” Jason said. “He wasn’t asleep yet. Hold still.”

Dick’s feet at the end of the table were sliding to the left, and then the right.

“Jay,” Dick pleaded.

Jason glanced up and met Tim’s gaze. He still looked completely serious and Tim nodded, once.

“What are you gonna do if you’re captured and tortured?” Jason demanded earnestly. “Just motherflippin’ crack because you haven’t been conditioned?”

“I’m gonna kick your face and it’s gonna be all reflex,” Dick warned with ragged breathing. Jason leaned his head back in response but didn’t let up.

Despite how much he was enjoying this, Tim’s joints were sore again and right before he decided to just move away so he didn’t interrupt anything, Jason stopped abruptly and Dick relaxed with a sigh of relief.

“I’m gonna go smoke,” Jason said, sounding pleased with himself, tossing the plastic utensil onto the table with a clatter. The sliding door to the balcony closed behind him after he went out.

“What a jerk,” Dick said fondly. He nudged Tim with a shoulder. “Wanna go to bed?”

“Yeah,” Tim nodded. “Yes and no. I’m sick of sleeping but I don’t think I can keep my eyes open.”

“Your body is just making up for years of sleep deprivation,” Dick teased, pushing him up off the couch. “Go on.”

Sometime in the hours he’d spent out of the bed, one or both of the older boys had managed to change all the bedding. Tim collapsed onto the clean blanket and fell asleep within seconds.

The smell of coffee woke him in the morning. Tim woke and immediately froze for a moment, trying to make sense of the smell and the noise, before he remembered the day before.

He went out to the living room, still groggy and sore from sleeping weird on his side, and found Jason sitting at the table with a mug and a book.

“Dick had to go to work, so you’re stuck with me today,” Jason said, sipping his coffee and not getting up. Tim poured his own cup, grateful that Jason wasn’t insisting on treating him like he was totally helpless. He joined him at the table and leaned forward to see the cover of the book.

“Til We Have Faces?” Tim said. “I don’t remember where I got that one.”

“Alfred likes it,” Jason replied without taking his eyes off the page. “I’ve never read it.”

“Hm,” Tim said, yawning and looking at his phone. “Tell me if it’s any good.”

They sat at the table together, drinking coffee, while Jason read and Tim started to catch up on a backlog of Wayne Enterprises emails. Aside from the persistent pain in Tim’s joints and the fact that even sitting to type out emails was wearing him out, it felt mundane and normal. It felt a little unassailable, with the morning light through the windows and quiet, neutral company. It was balanced without being stressful and felt like maybe a predictor of things to come, if they were the sort of people who could manage mornings like this.

And that was a pretty good feeling.

Chapter Text

The grandfather clock ticked by the seconds– not the parlor grandfather clock, but the study grandfather clock– in the chilled room while Damian Wayne sat sulking in the tall wingback chair. He was wearing long pants and socks and a sweatshirt with the hood drawn up. The curtains were drawn against the morning sun, only a sliver of light slipping through at the bottom. His chin itched.

Damian reached a hand up and Bruce said, “Don’t scratch.” Damian scowled and clamped his hand down on his knee. He rubbed a little there while he thought Bruce was distracted with thumbing through files he was slotting into his briefcase. “Don’t scratch,” Bruce said again.

“Tt,” Damian said, gripping the armrests.

“Do I need to stay?” Bruce asked, glancing up at him. Damian resolutely shook his head. “I’ll stay if you need me.”

“I will be fine,” Damian ground out, irritated.

Irritated was a good word for it. Irritated all over. His skin itched and stung and was tender and sore deep down. Moving wasn’t pleasant. Sleeping wasn’t pleasant. Sitting wasn’t pleasant. And on top of that, his eyes were too dry and his lips were chapped and his nose wouldn’t stop dripping and his throat was scratchy and tight.

How he felt physically was only approximately one-third of his current annoyance, however. Another third was the fact that Bruce was leaving for Wayne Enterprises and caped business in China, and he wished to be present for both endeavors. Damian knew the offer to cancel the trip was genuine but he also knew the work was important. And this situation was his own fault, anyway.

His final source of annoyance was that due to unfortunate timing, Dick Grayson was overseas on Spyral business, Jason Todd was on the other side of the country undercover, Stephanie Brown was in the middle of a week-long study-abroad program in Central America, Cassandra Cain and Alfred were both accompanying Bruce, and that left…

Tim Drake.

Despite Damian’s well-reasoned protests that he did not need a babysitter for a measly four days, his arguments fell on deaf ears and Drake was called. He was due at the Manor any moment and Damian was still clinging to the idea that perhaps Bruce would relent.

“I’m almost fourteen,” Damian said stiffly.

“In two months. I am aware,” Bruce replied without pausing in his packing. “You’re also ill.”

“Tt,” Damian said. “I am not ill. I am recovering from the aftereffects of a negated toxin and will not worsen.”

“We think. We think you will not worsen,” Bruce corrected, his hands stopping on the briefcase clasp. He snapped it shut. “Tim isn’t going to be tucking you in and playing hide-and-seek with you, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s just staying here to keep an eye on you. And if you need me, call.”

Damian slunk down further into the chair and crossed his arms.

A moment later, there was a light knock on the study door and Tim Drake-Wayne poked his head in, then stepped all the way in when Bruce gestured for him to do so.

“Hey, Bruce.”

“Tim. How are you feeling?”

Damian glanced up sharply at Tim’s face. The older boy had been almost entirely absent from patrol for three months now, the longest stretch Damian had ever known him to be out of uniform.

“A lot better,” Tim answered, glancing at Damian. Damian glared at him. It wasn’t like Tim was actually going to answer any real questions about himself in front of Damian. He didn’t even know why Bruce bothered asking. He was shot through with surprise when Tim added, “I’m handling the office and all my normal workouts. I think I’ll be ready to go out again by the time you get back.”

“Good,” Bruce said, with a genuine smile. “Glad to hear it. Alfred told me Jason and Dick stayed with you?”

The question ended on a note of actual curiosity, or as close as Bruce audibly allowed himself to sound. Damian himself was surprised, again; he had not known this about Jason Todd.

“Yeah,” Tim confirmed. “Until they went out of town.”

“School?” Bruce asked.

“Can we do the whole drill when you get back?” Tim asked, his voice a little hard and resistant.

Bruce raised an eyebrow in return.

“I applied for medical leave for the semester,” Tim said unhappily, dropping into the chair next to Damian’s. “All my courses are marked Incomplete and I can try to repeat my schedule next semester.”

“You don’t think you could have caught up?” Bruce asked, looking down at his desk.

Tim caught Damian’s gaze and rolled his eyes.

They didn’t have many moments of connection but this was common ground.

“I could have,” Tim insisted. “But it would have been a headache to make arrangements for all the tests I missed and argue with professors who were being jerks about attendance policies. I was advised to just try again next semester.”

“Who advised you?” Bruce asked, looking up at that.

“I was advised,” Tim repeated stiffly.

“Alright,” Bruce said mildly, letting it drop. “Alfred went over the details with you?”

“Yep,” Tim said, crossing his arms. Damian noticed and uncrossed his own. “Food, make sure he doesn’t skip steroid cream, no sunlight exposure at all, and I have an epipen to stab him in the leg with if he decides to stop breathing.”

Damian’s glare deepened. He was vindicated to see the frown flicker across Bruce’s face as well.

“If he has difficulty breathing, call me. And Dr. Thompkins. Do not wait until the last minute to use the pen.”

Now Tim scowled.

“I was joking, Bruce. Unlike some people, I don’t actually want my brothers dead.”

“You imbecile,” Damian snapped, sitting up. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now.”

“What are you waiting for, then, cretin?” Tim demanded.

“Enough,” Bruce said, not loudly but plenty stern. “You’ve made your distaste for each other very clear, but I’m trusting you to at least pretend to get along and maybe give each other a real chance.”

A chance. Like Tim would ever offer him that. Damian’s defenses were already up, his pride pricked at the insinuation he wanted Tim dead and the insinuation that he couldn’t have already made it happen.

Damian knew that Dick Grayson liked Tim and over time he’d even come to see what the man must have seen in Tim to reach that conclusion: Tim was intelligent, he was a good fighter, he pushed himself without complaint. They were all traits Damian either possessed or aspired to attain. But Tim insisted on treating Damian like a pest and Damian resented the easy, automatic way Bruce trusted him while questioning nearly everything Damian did.

He was not an idiot. Damian suspected they could be dangerous and effective allies given the right circumstances, but Tim dismissed him and Damian couldn’t bring himself to let any insult against his House and name stand. Even the threat of such a thing warranted an offensive attack.

“I know you’ve had your rough patches,” Bruce said, looking at both of them with a frustrated twist of his mouth. “I was hoping you’d have worked past it by now.”

“Onlychild,” Tim coughed into his hand.

Despite himself, Damian couldn’t fully bite back his unexpected grin.

“What?” Bruce asked, eyes narrowing.

“Mono,” Tim answered, waving a hand and coughing again. “Just a dry throat.”

“Master Bruce,” Alfred interrupted from the doorway. “We ought to be going.”

Bruce looked down at his watch and picked up his briefcase. He tousled each boys’ hair as he walked by the armchairs and said farewells, then he and Alfred were gone.

They sat in silence for several seconds before Tim said, “Welp, I’ll be in my room. I like sunlight and I’m not a…” Tim trailed off and Damian tensed, ready to let Tim know in no uncertain terms how he felt about vampire jokes, but Tim didn’t pick it up again. “Anyway. Natural light helps me not feel like crap right now, so knock before you just barge in. I’ll come out to make lunch.”

Damian was left in the study with the ticking of the grandfather clock and now that he was away from Bruce and Alfred’s hawkish eyes, he scratched furiously at his arms and neck. He stopped when it tipped from relieving into painful.

He was going to kill Pamela Isley. It didn’t matter that the unstable toxin had never been intended for him, that it was still being developed– if she hadn’t been working on it, weaponizing it, it never would have been there on the table for him to crash into when apprehending her with Batman.

And rather than being a mark in her favor that she actually stopped fighting to apologize to him, to give Batman what sketched out plans she had for an antidote, it was doubly infuriating that she’d done so because Robin was, in her eyes, a child.

Pamela Isley’s imprisonment in Arkham helped him precisely none when his skin itched and burned and blistered within seconds of exposure to sunlight, for three days now. It helped him not at all when he’d had to use an inhaler to help with the allergic swelling creeping into his lungs or the nights lost from patrol because of strong medications.

Even after Bruce had synthesized an antidote, the effects lingered and by his estimation would take up to another week to fade.

Another week of no sunlight, restless sleeping, and cup after cup of tea to combat the sinus symptoms. Plus Tim. Now he had to deal with all that and Tim.

Tim, who it probably would not kill to show just an ounce or two of the respect Damian had clearly earned. Damian scratched his arm again and then his leg. If he was careful, maybe they could mostly avoid each other. He wasn’t feeling quite up to matching Tim’s threatening glares with verbal parries.

By lunch, when Tim emerged from his room, Damian was bored and angry. Painting or sketching had both been futile efforts– his fingers were too tender, the itching too distracting. He’d told himself that he didn’t really need Bruce or Alfred’s reminders and that he could limit himself, but he was failing and reddish welts were starting to rise under his splotchy, bumpy skin.

Damian had never felt more ready to pick a fight but he kept thinking about what Bruce would say if Tim called just hours after he’d left to rat Damian out.

So, Damian stood in the middle of the kitchen while Tim moved around him, avoiding him and avoiding eye contact, while Damian hoped Tim would just start something already so at least it wouldn’t be his own fault.

But Tim warmed up food Alfred left in labeled containers, set Damian’s on a plate on the counter, and wordlessly went back upstairs with a container in one hand and a canned drink in the other.

Damian huffed and sat down and sourly ate half the lunch. He was too irritated and unfocused to finish. The pressure in his head was increasing and if it hadn’t been for remembering how much he’d despised Tim for sleeping all over the Manor several weeks before, he might have taken a nap. But the older boy had slept and not complained when awake– Damian wished he’d just whined like Dick did when he was enjoying Alfred’s attention over a head cold so at least Damian could be thoroughly disgusted instead of grudgingly admiring. Dick was the exception to his normal expectations and standards, as usual– but Dick had earned it.

In the end, he retreated to the dark safety of the cave. He had first wanted to sleep in the cave and not leave at all until he was well, but Bruce insisted on him being upstairs where there was an actual bed instead of emergency cots, since they had heavy enough curtains to block out the light.

Damian tried to practice. He kept having to stop to catch his breath, between the tightness in his throat and his congested nose and his weakened lungs. He gave up after an hour and sat at the computer to review case files, scratching absently as he sat curled up in the computer chair.

Tim came downstairs and Damian glanced over to see why he was looking for him, but Tim acted like Damian wasn’t there and went straight to the weights and began working out. He ignored Damian and lifted, then pressed, then moved to the parallel bars. When he stopped and threw a towel around his neck, he headed straight for the elevator. Right before the doors slid closed, he said, “Dinner in an hour.”

Damian had no time to reply.

Later, when Tim went to the kitchen to heat up dinner, Damian repeated his earlier maneuver. Tim stepped around him but made eye contact this time and that same old glare was on his face.

It wasn’t technically Tim starting a fight but it was a good indication he was about to. And Damian was so miserable and so bored and it had been driving him crazy that Tim had the audacity to ignore him when he’d promised Bruce to keep an eye on things.

“I can manage my own dinner if the instructions Pennyworth left were too difficult for you,” Damian said airily, aware that this was a weak blow but it wasn’t like he was in the best health.

“What is your problem?” Tim demanded, slamming the container down on the counter so hard that silverware rattled. “You little brat. I’ve stayed out of your way all day but you don’t let up, do you?”

“Perhaps if you didn’t antagonize me with hateful looks, I would not have to remain so wary,” Damian snapped back.

“What is wrong with you?” Tim shouted, throwing his hands in the air. “You arrogant little prick. I wasn’t even thinking about you! Do you honestly think you’re so important that everyone thinks about you all the time?”

“You…you looked at me in a way that indicated anger,” Damian said defensively, refusing to take a step back from the expression that now was very plainly furious. “Am I supposed to intuit that you are not upset with me when I am the only other person present?”

“God,” Tim exhaled, clenching his fists. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quiet and bitter. “Don’t you ever think about things other than yourself? Or stuff not right in front of you?”

“Of course I do,” Damian snarled. He scratched at his elbow under his hoodie sleeve.

“Stop. Scratching,” Tim hissed. “Take care of your own dinner. And don’t forget your steroid cream.”

Tim left the kitchen without food and Damian took deep, intentional breaths to calm himself. He heated the food in the microwave and accidentally burnt his already sore fingers peeling back the vented lid.

There was little else to do after he ate. He was tired and sore and it was getting harder and harder to not draw blood when scratching, his skin was so thinned. And with most of his usual activities causing additional stress, he decided to just give up and go to sleep. He went to bed still mulling over Tim’s words, feeling rebuked one moment and enraged the next, until he drifted off not sure at all how he felt about the older boy.

Damian woke in the dark with blood on his hands.

He knew because they were slick and he could smell it, tangy and hot in the blackened bedroom. His breath hitched as he tried to orientate himself.

Right as he remembered, the door flew open and Tim was there framed by the dim hall light.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and Damian sat up with his hands held out.

“Crap,” Tim muttered, disappearing from the doorway.

In the light cast across his bed, Damian looked down at his arms. He’d shoved back his sleeves while asleep and dug into the skin; careful probing of his neck revealed the same. There were streaks of blood all over the blankets around him and on the clothes he was wearing.

Tim came back with a whole stack of damp washcloths. Damian was still so startled, so shocked at his own lack of control and consumed by, “What will Father say?” that he didn’t protest or question it when Tim knelt next to him on the bed and motioned for him to pull his sweatshirt over his head.

The thin hooded shirt came off in halting, wincing movements, sticky and probably ruined. Damian threw it to the floor.

“Did you use your steroid cream?” Tim asked, dabbing at the blood on Damian’s arm.

“Of course I–” Damian snapped and then stopped. He thought back. “No,” he admitted sullenly. By great effort he kept his hands still and did not scratch at his legs even as Tim was wiping blood off his fingers. “Were you right outside the room?”

“Yes,” Tim said unapologetically. “I promised Bruce I’d make sure you didn’t stop breathing.”

Damian processed this, that the older boy had been sitting outside his bedroom door just listening for…hours, probably.

“I’m sorry,” Tim said softly, swapping out washcloths.

“I don’t need your pity, Drake,” Damian said sourly.

“No, I mean, for downstairs,” Tim said, without looking up. “I kind of went off on you. I’m sorry. Steph says I have bitchy resting face but I didn’t even think about how you’d see it.”

“You don’t like me,” Damian said as a statement. “Any inference I made was based on fact.”

“You’re right,” Tim said, turning Damian’s arm over. “Man, you really tore yourself up.”

Damian didn’t answer this– it was true and there wasn’t much he could say to defend his own stupidity.

“I’m not afraid of you, Damian,” Tim said flatly, “but I don’t like being insulted every time I turn around. Nobody does. And if I can’t convince you to stop, then I can pretend for Dick and Bruce and just avoid you.”

“I will be blunt,” Damian said, taking the washcloth Tim handed him and scrubbing at his neck. “I respect you, Drake, but I see little reason to attempt to alter my feelings about you when your dislike of me is based upon my lineage.”

“Ra’s?” Tim exclaimed, flicking on the side table lamp. “You think this is about Ra’s?”

“Why else would you have–”

“I hate Ra’s,” Tim spat out. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with you. They really hammered that bloodline thing into you, didn’t they? Do you think I care? I had crappy parents, Damian, and I loved them anyway, but Bruce has been more of a dad to me than Jack ever was. I’m not my parents and you aren’t your grandfather.”

Damian scowled down at the cloth, now rusty brown with old blood. He glanced up at Tim and saw the older boy’s jaw tightened, saw the deliberation in the set of Tim’s shoulders. The older boy sighed and then looked at Damian.

“Do you want me to be completely honest?” Tim asked. Damian considered and then nodded. “Promise you won’t try to kill me? Or even attack me?”

“I swear it on the–”

“Good, thanks.” Tim interrupted, biting his lip right after. Damian wrapped his arms around his own knees in an attempt to keep from scratching. Now that he was awake the itching was worsening again. “Damian, you showed up out of nowhere in my house, acting like you owned the place and treating me like shit. Then, during the worst year of my life when I’d just lost a father, again, you took my cowl and my name and the only reason I was given was that you needed something to do so you wouldn’t go kill people while you felt bad. It was my cape, my dad, my house, and you took everything and nobody stopped you.”

“It wasn’t as if I was happy,” Damian said sulkily after several minutes, during which he exerted a lot of effort to keep his promise and not strike the older boy. “Everything I knew was taken from me when Mother dropped me off here. And then Father didn’t even like me.”

Tim sat back and his carefully blank face showed surprise, for just a moment.

“It never occurred to me that you might miss it,” Tim said. “I mean, it makes sense, I guess.”

“I have come to hold a different opinion of my upbringing than I did initially, but yes, I did miss it,” Damian said, unable to keep all the acid out of his tone. It was becoming harder to not scratch. “It was all I knew. And I had respect and power there.”

“Well, that sucks,” Tim said, meeting Damian’s glare with something more open in his face. “We were kind of going through the same shitty thing and we just ended up hating each other.”

“It wasn’t exactly the same,” Damian said, but he knew it was a feeble argument and Tim gave him a slight frown.

“Of course it wasn’t, but there are significant similarities. I’m not saying you’re my new best friend or that I even like you that much. But I do respect you and I think for own our sanity we should work on changing how we treat each other.”

“You respect me?” Damian echoed, even itchiness forgotten for a moment. He hated how desperately he wanted the older boy’s…approval? Admiration? He didn’t know what he wanted, only that he was sick of being treated like he was constantly on trial.

“Of course I do,” Tim said. “The only reason you were ever a threat was because you’re good at what you do. Where’s your steroid cream?”

Damian blinked and blamed his toxin-damaged eyes for the way they watered.

“Bathroom counter,” he said.

Tim handed him the tube a moment later.

“Why don’t you get down and I’ll get the bloody stuff off the bed?” Tim suggested. “I’m crap at this big brother thing but I can handle some of the obvious stuff.”

“You don’t have to be my brother,” Damian said, tentative and reluctant to push any uneasy middle ground they’d found. He himself knew he was in serious risk of upsetting it at any moment.

“Tough luck, dipshit,” Tim answered easily. “Sorry. Habit. Anyway, I think I’m your brother whether either of us want it or not. And I’m sorry I’ve been doing such a crappy job.”

Damian stood next to the bed and smeared stuff over his arms and neck while Tim jerked sheets off the edges of the mattress.

“Dick’s a better person than I am,” Tim said, “but I guess I should stop using that as an excuse.”

“Grayson is a better person than everyone,” Damian said. “It is an impossibly high standard to hold yourself to.”

Tim chuckled. “I remember that feeling. You’re probably kind of right, anyway. I’m gonna get clean sheets from Alfred’s linen closet. Do you think we should even try washing these?”

The bloodied wad of sheets in Tim’s arms looked like something Alfred could possibly salvage, but that meant telling Alfred and admitting how bad the night had gotten.

“No,” Damian said. “Throw them away.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Tim agreed.

Within a few minutes, the bed was remade and Tim yawned while Damian stood looking at the clean blankets. The steroid cream was helping, but only slowly, and now that the distraction of conversation was gone the soreness and stinging pain from his torn skin was etching deeper into him.

“I’m so tired,” Tim muttered, more to himself than anything.

“How will I insure that I do not…” Damian trailed off and looked down at his bare arm. He should get another shirt but the air conditioned air being pumped into the room felt nice.

“Socks,” Tim yawned again, motioning limply toward Damian’s drawer. “Put socks on your hands.”

Damian rifled through the drawer looking for a suitable pair.

“Are you simply guessing at solutions?” he asked, pulling the socks on over his fingers.

“Chicken pox,” Tim answered. “That’s why my nanny at the time did when I had chicken pox. Don’t stop breathing, okay? I gotta sleep.”

Damian nodded, and didn’t contest that it wasn’t exactly something he could control. Tim left the bedroom and let Titus in the room as he went.

“Don’t lick me,” Damian ordered Titus sternly as the dog leapt up on the bed. Titus whined and nudged Damian’s leg and then turned and fell asleep.

It was late morning when Damian woke to burning like flames licking at his chest. He shrieked at the feeling and flopped over as he opened his eyes.

The curtains were open.

Titus was sleeping in a patch of sunlight.

Damian dragged the blanket over his head, panting for breath, and looked down at his chest in the light that seeped through the fabric. The skin, already itchy and patchy with rash, was now scarlet red and blistering.

“Shit,” he heard Tim spit out and then the room was plunged into darkness again. “Stupid dog.”

“He didn’t know,” Damian moaned, clutching the blankets.

Tim pulled them off his head and even in the dim light, muttered, “Shit,” again when he saw Damian’s bare chest and arms. “C’mon,” he said, “go to the bathroom.”

Damian sat up and found he was shaking too hard to even attempt standing. Without warning, Tim scooped him off the bed and carried him.

“I’ll be right back,” Tim promised, crouching down to where Damian sat shivering on the bathmat. “Can you breathe?”

Damian nodded and Tim left.

While he was gone, the burning sensation mounted until Damian was tense all over with pain. Tim came back only moments later with his arms full but Damian felt like he’d been waiting for hours.

“What are you doing,” Damian asked through chattering teeth, as Tim threw a towel in the bathtub and poured a whole gallon of milk on it.

“Trusting google like an idiot,” Tim answered. “Lie down on the tile.”

Damian stretched out and Tim didn’t even squeeze out the towel before spreading the sopping thing over Damian’s chest and neck. The relief was immediate even if not thorough.

“Ten minutes and then you’re taking pain meds and I’m spraying you with lidocaine,” Tim said. “Do you want me to call Bruce? I should call Bruce.”

“Don’t,” Damian protested. “What could he do? It won’t change anything.”

Tim sighed and sat on the edge of the sink. Damian didn’t move but as his own shaking was subsiding he saw that Tim’s fingers were also trembling.

“We’re sleeping in the cave tonight,” Tim said firmly. “I’ll take one of the beds apart and build it down there if I have to, but we are not risking that again.”

Damian nodded and closed his eyes.

They moved down to the cave after Tim gingerly lifted the towel off of Damian and Damian insisted on at least rinsing off the milk residue, which he had to fight for and they nearly came to blows but Tim finally relented when Alfred the cat sneaked into the bathroom and wouldn’t leave Damian alone.

“This really isn’t necessary,” Damian protested, hours later, when Tim sprayed him with the lidocaine spray for the sixth time.

“No, but neither is being miserable any more than you have to be,” Tim refuted. Damian stopped arguing.

He didn’t move very far all day from the mattress Tim had hauled downstairs in lieu of rebuilding an entire bed. He claimed he was tired but he mostly just didn’t want to admit how much he stung all over, and he was fairly certain Tim saw straight through it.

Even though he didn’t think he could, he did end up sleeping on and off throughout the day and once when he woke near evening, which he only knew by the time on the monitor, Tim was sitting at the massive computer screen typing rapidly. He stood and studied the computer while Damian watched, and then tossed a controller toward him.

“Here,” he said, just as the window on the screen loaded.

“Is that…Cheese Viking?” Damian asked. “I thought I uninstalled that.”

“I know,” Tim said, sitting down next to him. “Like a year ago. But nostalgia and easy gaming are better than novelty right now, trust me. I mapped a controller so you don’t have to sit at the desk.”

“Thanks,” Damian said, swallowing. He sat up, and winced, and Tim picked up the lidocaine spray again. “You don’t have to–” but it was too late.

“I’m gonna go heat up dinner,” Tim said. “Unless you’d rather order something.”

“Is it dark?” Damian asked, already playing the game.

“Almost,” Tim said, looking at his phone. “Sunset ends in…twelve minutes. Why?”

“Raouche delivers but only to the bridge. Someone has to meet them,” Damian said without taking his eyes off the screen. “And I haven’t been outside in days.”

“I mean, if it’s dark,” Tim said slowly, “I guess it’s okay. Are you sure you feel okay?”

“I would not suggest it if I did not,” Damian said stiffly. As an afterthought, he added, “I feel well enough to sit in a car.”

“Okay,” Tim said with a shrug. “Just tell me what you want and I’ll order.”

Fifty minutes later, in the dark of late evening, they sat in the car and listened to music while waiting for the delivery guy. Damian stayed in the car, sleeves pulled over his tender hands, while Tim got out and paid him and took the food.

They ate in the cave, not talking much. But the insults and glares were absent as much as happy conversation, so it was a pleasant change. The burns were fading much more quickly than normal burns would have and after all the days of misery the itchy feeling was finally ebbing. Damian wasn’t comfortable exactly, but between the antihistamine that Tim had talked him into, the lidocaine he was relentless with, the steroid cream and the inhaler Tim made him use just in case, his discomfort felt bearable and he could focus on things again.

After they ate and fed the animals, Tim started a movie on the computer and paused it to talk to Bruce on the phone an hour in.

“We are getting along well, considering,” Damian said when Tim handed him the phone. He looked at the fingernail gashes in his arm that were already hardening with faint scabs. “Physically, I am improving.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “Things here might take an extra day. Let me talk to Tim again.”

Damian returned the phone and tried to keep his eyes open while waiting for Tim to end the call, so they could finish the movie but he was so drowsy. Tim stood up and paced and it sounded like they were discussing a case but Damian was already too sleepy to follow the one-side of the conversation and piece it together.

He fell asleep.

He woke hours later, in what he knew only by feel was the dead of night, and Tim was sitting at the computer typing rapidly and talking through a comm. Damian rolled over and went back to sleep.

When he woke, his mouth felt bone dry and he was stiff and his skin was tender but it was the best he’d felt in days. He sat up and looked around the cave, still half-lit with artificial light. The clock said it was after nine.

Tim was asleep in the computer chair, curled up with his chin tucked into his knees, snoring softly. The computer monitor was dimmed and Damian realized with a small start that Tim had slept there on purpose and not by weary accident.

The younger boy rose to his feet and tiptoed across the cave floor and put a hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“Move,” he ordered, wincing inside at how harsh he sounded. Dick seemed like it was effortless for him to sound caring but Damian still found it difficult without a lot of focus. “Go sleep in a bed.”

“Ugh,” Tim said in response, eyes cracked open. He uncurled slowly from the chair and added, “Crap. I think I overdid it.”

“I am feeling much better,” Damian said evenly. “I will make you coffee.”

Tim staggered, not to the elevator, but to the recently vacated mattress on the floor, and flopped down across it.

“Dick comes back today, as of last night,” he mumbled into the pillow. “So you’ll be free of me.”

“Not in this condition, we won’t. Grayson wouldn’t allow it,” Damian said, crouching down next to Tim’s head. “But I can manage things until he arrives. Coffee?”

Tim nodded and Damian hesitated, then reached out and tugged on Tim’s sleeve. Tim turned his head to look up at Damian, his bangs falling across his eyes. He pushed them impatiently out of the way.

“Thank you,” Damian said stiffly, leaving his fingers on the cotton hem of Tim’s shirt. “For taking care of me.”

The older boy blinked once and then reached up and patted Damian’s hand. He yawned and rolled over.

“You’re okay, Damian. I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you.”

“I’ll be back with coffee and breakfast,” Damian said, standing up. “Do you require anything else?”

“Nope,” Tim said in a sleepy voice. “Don’t go outside yet, Dracula. We gotta test you with the UV light down here first.”

And Damian could have protested the nickname. He could have changed his mind about coffee.

But instead, he grinned a little and let it go.