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When Jason first comes back to town, his first priority isn’t actually the pretender at all.
Rather, he’s preoccupied with other pressing matters— establishing his footing again (dead boy come back to life that he is), for one, trying to fall back into the messy, sludgy rhythm of Gotham City, planning revenge—
As it turns out, even the best-laid plans fail, and this is hardly Jason’s best-laid plan.
Batman’s new soldier (sidekick, fleet-footed sacrificial lamb) is a mousy little shrimp by the name of Tim Drake, and Jason pretty much hates the kid the second he first lays eyes on him. How the kid even holds himself up as Robin is beyond him; he looks like if the wind shudders by him wrong, he’ll breeze right over.
In fact, annoyingly enough— as if Batman could somehow, impossibly, tell that Jason’s malintent was polluting the city —Robin doesn’t even show up for patrol with the Bat. He patrols solo, as far as Jason can tell, which is fucking frustrating, because Jason had been hoping to take the kid out for a test drive of pain.
… Okay, that didn’t even sound that cool in his head, admittedly. But the sentiment remains.
Something occurs to him one night as he watches the oil-slick flash of Batman’s cape vanish solo over the horizon; perhaps Robin is benched. Jason’s been benched before, after all, and it’s not like it takes much to push Bruce over the edge in terms of getting grounded.
And, he thinks viciously, something pleased and cruel unfurling in his chest, a benched birdie is sure to have its guard down.
But there’s a method to all of this, a build-up. Havoc to be wreaked before he hunts down the hollow-boned cuckoo and lays waste to him. Otherwise, what would be the fun in beating Robin down to size?
Not that he needs to exert much effort to beat the kid down to size, frankly. He’s bite-sized, which honestly somehow irks Jason even more.
He’ll pluck just any black-haired kid up out of convenience, huh, he thinks, haunted by the very thought. Even his goddamn next-door neighbor. Had he been that replaceable to Bruce? Had his legacy been so easy to gloss over, like new wallpaper, as if nobody could see bloody, burned gouges carved into the wall underneath? Had they all just moved on to a new Robin— a new son, eager to sweep away the ashes of Jason’s corpse—
(He shatters another mug in Tim Drake’s name, and seethes).
So he bides. And bides. And bides some more.
He shreds Crime Alley to tatters and cobbles the remains into something newly terrifying. He makes it clear that the name on the title is Red Hood. He gets himself some nice, new stationary, and uses it to leave blood-smeared notes for nosy Bats. In two hours, he takes care of eight of Black Mask’s lieutenants, stuffs them gracelessly into a duffel bag, and ships it off so everyone knows exactly where he stands— especially Batman.
“What’s your aim,” Batman asks, and Hood laughs in his face.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he says, giddy from the rush, eager for blood. “And you won’t dare to forget again.”
In the time Jason’s been back, Robin doesn’t come out to patrol at all.
Pathetic, he thinks, and isn’t sure who he’s mad at— he just is, which is par for the course these days. Maybe Bruce, maybe Robin, maybe himself, for believing it’d have been different, for believing that when he came back, he would slot in the same as he had before he left. That the Jason-shaped space he’d left behind hadn’t been filled— like a grave.
There isn’t time to mourn Jason Todd, Robin, though— only time to establish Jason Todd, Red Hood.
The night is ideal for the culmination of his plan, too; the sky is unusually cloudless and clear, an apt metaphor for his path to the Manor. Batman and Nightwing are in Bludhaven, and Alfred—
He pauses.
—Won’t be a problem.
The Manor is huge, after all; Alfred doesn’t need to be involved. And more importantly, Jason doesn’t want him to be.
There’s something profoundly, eerily satisfying about sneaking into the Manor; being able to bypass the lousy security of the Manor to sneak back in— well, it makes the homecoming somehow bittersweet. It’s like he can trick himself that nothing’s really changed, not really, that he’s sneaking back in after a forbidden night roaming around when he was grounded—
Then, he thinks, he doesn’t have to confront the reality of walking into a dead boy’s bedroom.
Just like that, the veneer fractures and cracks and shatters completely, and all that’s left is bright rage that burns like the way ice burns.
But there’s something else…
It feels like nothing’s changed, not really, he thinks, and maybe at first, that’s his way of coping, but he finds it to be unnervingly, startlingly true as he looks around his old room. Nothing has changed. He isn’t sure how to place what he’s feeling as he stares blankly at his bed, and then at the desk, at the stacks of books, at the half-folded paper cranes—
Nothing’s changed, except for me.
Last time he’d stood here, he’d been Robin.
And now—
Now he’s—
He gets out of there pretty quickly. The nostalgia in his old room punches holes through him, leaves a numb, cavernous maw in his chest that yearns for something that can no longer be. When it roars and demands satiation, Jason offers blood and sacrifice in the form of Robin.
Tim Drake doesn’t stir until Jason’s halfway into his room, and by then, it’s already too late.
Tim stirs sluggishly, face blurry with sleep, and by then, Jason already has one gloved hand fisted tight into the dark red collar of Tim’s t-shirt. He yanks hard enough for the collar to cut into Tim’s throat and twists him with a flick of his wrist, dumping the kid down onto the wood floor with a loud thump.
Many things may have worked in Tim’s favor that night. His red t-shirt and green pajama pants? Not so much. The iconic colors stir something primal and enraged in Jason, so much so that he struggles to breathe, struggles to say what he has to say. His anger is this shaking, rattling thing, too much for him to handle— or maybe that’s his skeleton, cracking apart . Tim breaks the silence.
Warily, he says, “Hood? What are you—”
And that’s catalyst enough.
“I’m not here to talk to you,” Jason says, his words cold with venom.
Something twists, then in Tim’s expression. “You know who I am.” It isn’t a question, and it isn’t clever enough to save him.
“I know who you are,” Jason says, and laughs. “You’re nothing.”
Tim scrambles into a delicate crouch, and for the first time, Jason sees a little bit of Robin. The kid leaps, making to roll past Jason and get to the door, and Jason lets him go, because it thrills him. He prefers a hunt over an assassination any day.
He gives Robin a beat before he darts after him, out the open door and into the dark hallway, and his fingertips just skim over the back of Tim’s shirt as the kid hops for the stairs. He doesn’t quite make it, though, either because of unsteady adrenaline jitters or fear, and smacks his elbow into the railing. He pinwheels, thrown off balance, and that’s when Jason grabs him by the upper arm and yanks.
He feels rather than hears Tim’s shoulder dislocate. The kid wheezes out a breath that’s more air than voice, one leg lashing out in a way that’s all panic and no finesse. His foot knocks against Jason’s chest, so light that Jason barely feels it, and ugly, incredulous laughter bubbles out of him.
“ You’re supposed to be Robin?” he snarls as Tim thrashes about like a netted fish, flopping and frenzied and gasping for air. “You’re supposed to be the shinier model? The upgrade? Pathetic.” The fury boils and bubbles like oil, like asphalt melting under the sun. He wrenches Tim back by the hair, slams him down into the floor— right on the threshold of his old room —and yanks his head back, planting one boot against Tim’s back.
Blood smears over the floor— from Tim’s mouth or from his nose, Jason isn’t sure, and he doesn’t care.
“You know whose room this is?” he asks deceptively calmly, and when Tim just sputters through blood for a moment, he grips the bad shoulder and squeezes.
Tim’s spine arches, back bowing underneath Jason’s arm. “What do you want?” he hisses, his words splintering slightly. Quiet, as though he’s trying to be considerate— or maybe quiet, as in, trying not to let on that it hurts. And if it’s the latter— well, it’ll be a joy to test that.
“Answers to my fucking questions, pretender,” Jason says on a snarl, and ducks his head to repeat what he’d asked. “Do you know whose room this is?”
Tim stares into the room for a long moment— and then tenses.
Jason pulls back, lifting his weight off of Tim, and Tim scrambles back up to all fours again. Jason allows him the illusion of control, of hope for an escape, and then strikes, slamming his boot against the small of Tim’s back and sending him sprawling forward into Jason’s room. It’s poetic, in a way.
“You can’t,” Tim says, swiping his wrist over his mouth and jerking his head back around to focus on Jason. “It’s not— It isn’t possible. What you said about an upgrade, you—”
Jason unlatches his helmet and slides it off. Tim recoils at his expression.
“It’s possible,” Jason says coldly, unclenching his fist and letting the helmet clatter against the ground. He takes a step full of menace into the room, and Tim, to his credit, doesn’t flinch back.
“I don’t understand,” Tim says, muted, hushed, his voice clogged with blood. One of his arms hangs limp. “Why didn’t you come back? What is all of this?”
Jason lunges. Tim ducks underneath his arm but lists slightly, enough so that Jason’s fist gets him in the collarbone instead of the ribs, where Jason had been aiming. It’s not as powerful as he’d hoped, but it spins Tim off-kilter, and Jason takes the opportunity to recoup and strike again.
He gets it right, this time; there’s a crunch, and Tim crumples like a flower underneath a steel-toed boot. His hand curls over his ribs, body hunched to protect itself, and he coughs, once, like the pathetic cheep of a fledgling.
Fitting, Jason thinks, and draws his rippled dagger.
Half folded paper cranes on the desk. Open-faced books littered over Jason’s bed.
The only thing that’s changed is the cuckoo, in a nest that doesn’t belong to him.
“Are you,” Tim sort of gurgles, “going to kill me?”
“You don’t think you deserve to die?” Jason asks quietly. He lifts his arm, purposefully giving Tim enough time to see it coming, and sure enough, the kid rolls slightly out of the way as the knife tip buries itself into the wood right where his upper arm had been. “Maybe that’s the legacy of Robin— to die, waiting for someone to save them.”
Jason’s a little faster this time, quicker with the blade, and it nicks the side of Tim’s face as it comes down the second time. The kid ekes out a sound that’s half-surprise, half-pain.
“Jason,” Tim says, and hearing his name out of the pretender’s mouth fills Jason’s veins with mephitic rage. “You can— come back, you can.”
“ What about this situation makes you think I want to,” Jason says through his teeth. He moves quickly, looming over Tim like a shadow— like a bat —as he grinds the heel of his palm down violently against Tim’s cracked ribs. Tim writhes, free hand lashing blindly at the side of Jason’s face haphazardly as he tries to fight him off.
“Then why,” Tim says, words trickling out like a river choked with weeds. He scrambles to push Jason off, but the weight advantage is showing, and Tim doesn’t even have a weapon to speak of.
Good as useless without the flashy gear, Jason thinks in a moment of white-hot anger, and in that moment of miscalculation, Tim’s panicked fist makes solid contact with the side of his face.
He jerks, surprised, and his hand flattens against Tim’s ribs as he swings the knife in an arc, going for the jugular, going for bleeding out and a dead Robin in a dead Robin’s room, how poetic, how ironic, how tragic—
But—
Something’s… bothering him. The knife waits against Tim’s throat, and so does Tim, with bated breath.
What’s wrong with this picture, Jason thinks, and his fingers twitch against Tim’s broken ribs, and—
That’s what’s wrong.
He draws back slightly, using the flat of the dagger to slide Tim’s shirt up slightly, not even entirely sure what he’s doing, but— There can’t be loose ends, there can’t be questions, and Jason’s got a few.
Namely— why the fuck can he feel this kid’s ribs?
“What, what are you doing?” Tim asks, his breath hitching.
“I’m asking the questions.” Jason interjects coldly, but moves the knife enough so that it’s not quite so close to Tim’s heart. “What the hell is this?”
“Uh,” Tim says, and there’s a note of near-hysteria in his voice as he stares at Jason. “Th-Those would be my ribs, I guess?” It pitches toward a question at the end, like he’s not entirely sure what Jason wants from him, and Jason doesn’t even know what he wants.
He’s trying to reconcile the Bruce who’d trained him with a Bruce that starves his birds as punishment, and— it’s not adding up. It’s not adding up, and it births a new sort of anger, a kind of confused, restless anger that climbs up into his throat like bile.
He’s still a piss-poor fucking replacement, Jason thinks, but the blade of his initial fury is dulled somewhat by the visible evidence of a punishment he’d never expected from Bruce. He draws back onto his haunches and surveys Tim, who’s still spread out over the blood-smeared wood, looking baffled.
Something new— something uneasy —twines up and around Jason’s anger like creeping ivy, burrows into the cracks. Beyond the arching windows of Jason’s long untouched childhood room, the sky starts to lighten. Alfred begins the day’s prep at obscene hours, and he’ll be by soon enough. It’s not a confrontation Jason’s looking forward to, and he still doesn’t have the answers he’s desperate for.
So.
Fuck.
It’s possible that he absconds a little bit.
It’s possible that he specifically absconds a little bit with Tim.
To be clear, Tim didn’t approve of said absconding. The kid had yowled like a stuck cat as Jason had forcefully tried to herd him out the open window, making every attempt to fight him off; while Jason couldn’t exactly blame him for his fear, he did find it supremely annoying, so he’d ended up, well-
“You choked me!” Tim sputters, the second he’s coherent enough to string together fully-formed thoughts, and Jason levels a practiced bitchface at him as he forcefully dunks a teabag full of mint leaves into one of his unbroken mugs.
“You know,” Tim continues, even though Jason wishes he wouldn’t, because he’s kind of having a crisis over the pitiful remnants of his not so well laid plan. He’d fucking panicked, alright, and now there’s a testy Robin ziptied by his wrist to Jason’s bed frame like the beginnings of a homemade horror movie. “For a Robin, you’re kind of mean.”
Jason actually does sputter out a laugh at that, but it’s more shocked than mirthful. Something sharp and tense curls its hooks deep into his skin and holds at Tim’s words, and he wishes he hadn’t left his helmet on the floor of Tim’s room, because he kind of hates that his expression’s bared open. “You’re just now getting that?”
Tim shrugs almost peevishly, and then immediately seems to remember both the shoulder and the ribs simultaneously. He immediately curls into himself like a pillbug, wheezing out a low groan as he readjusts, and Jason arches an eyebrow at him.
“What can I say,” Tim half-says, half-coughs. “I’ve always been known for my excellent observational skills.”
A classic Robin hallmark, Jason thinks sourly, and hates that he does.
Tim’s glancing around Jason’s safehouse, now, gaze surprisingly sharp and equally as bright despite his circumstances, despite what Jason had done not even a few hours prior. Blood’s still drying in a trail from the corner of Tim’s mouth to just underneath his chin, and he’s absently curled a protective hand somewhere between his ribs and shoulder. Jason isn’t sure if his quick adjustment is the result of Robin training or just a Tim special, but he doesn’t like it. He hauled Tim’s ass here to ask questions, and he’s going to get his goddamn answers.
Tim startles as Jason unceremoniously slams one of his chairs down in front of the bed, spinning it on its leg so the back of the chair faces Tim. He drops down into it heavily and taps the barrel of his gun lightly against the bedframe.
“Here’s how this goes, pretender,” he says flatly. He can’t be sure of the look on his face, but Tim’s throat bobs and gooseflesh ripples over his skin, so Jason’s pretty sure he’s getting the threat across, at least. “That shoulder of yours. I’ll set it if you answer my questions.”
Tim puzzles over this for a moment, shoulders lowering slightly. “So you’re not going to kill me? I’m … confused, Jason, what’re we doing here?”
And the thing is, Jason doesn’t fucking know. He masks this by cocking his gun, and Tim tenses back slightly. “I’m asking the questions,” is all he says, even though there’s fucking no way he has the momentum to kill the kid or even maim him anymore. The gun isn’t even loaded; it’s as much a prop as the threat-laced words, but Tim doesn’t need to know that.
Now that Jason’s looking a little closer, he’s almost positive the t-shirt used to belong to Dick. Actually , he thinks with a pang of something that absolutely isn’t nostalgia, I may have worn that shirt myself at some point.
His eyes snap back to Tim, and narrow.
“Does B starve you?”
Tim stares at him, slack-jawed, his mouth wobbling open slightly. The tangle of nerves condensed into a knot in Jason’s chest blows apart into something wild and thorny and restless at the kid’s expression. He leans back, rage sharpening, refocusing, redirecting entirely— look, he doesn’t care about the pretender, he doesn’t, not like that, but a slow crawl toward death at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect you… Fuck. Jason would’ve picked death at the hands of a homicidal clown over that, any fucking day of the week. He’s suffered enough of that specific brand of betrayal, thanks.
But still— Bruce?
And yet. The proof is right there, in the stark protrusion of Tim’s ribs, in the gaunt edges of his childlike face, and maybe Jason would’ve noticed if he hadn’t let the anger be his puppeteer—
And Tim’s—
Laughing?
“Look, I’m glad this saved my life,” Tim says, snorting incredulously, “but no, B isn’t starving me, Jason. He and Dick and Alfred are trying to help me— I dunno, not starve, I guess.” He leans back and purses his lips. “Did you seriously spare me because of that? Seriously, you were about to cut my throat.” Tim’s shoulders tighten slightly, and the startled humor gives way to something spooked and uneasy as he leans back and away from Jason.
“There’s still time in the day,” Jason warns him, but the threat is lackluster and bears only a shade of its earlier venom. Relief, stark and unbidden, consumes him for a moment as he pulls back and gestures toward Tim’s ribs with his gun. “So this was just you, what, rolling dice with your health?”
Tim slumps slightly. “I wish,” he mutters, and suddenly looks so tired that Jason isn’t sure what to do with it.
“Elaborate.” Jason says. It isn’t a request.
Something like embarrassment pinches the corners of Tim’s eyes, and he looks down at his hand. “My parents,” he says, stilted, like he has to reach down into his throat to pull each word out one by one. “—Or,” he corrects, “I guess it was my B in English…”
Jason just blinks at him, baffled; he has utterly no idea what the fuck this kid is even talking about, at this point. Whatever’s left of his anger has metamorphosed into some bizarre amalgamation of annoyance and utter confusion at this point. “You got a B in English?” And what the fuck does that have to do with anything?
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, you’re— whatever, a literary genius, Mr. Straight-As-in-English, I mean, anyone could tell you read with just one look at your room ,” Tim says- or really more mutters — more to himself than Jason — and Jason prickles defensively at the analysis. He fights the urge to argue it and just waits, tense. “ I on the other hand…” He jerks his good shoulder up, still not making eye contact with Jason. “So they took away my allowance.”
The pieces are still floating around. Jason just stares at him blankly.
“So…” Tim tilts his head slightly, sullen-faced and withdrawn. “I couldn’t buy meals. For a while. And they traveled, so they couldn’t— they couldn’t buy me groceries, and.”
Finally– the picture resolves itself, bright and clear and horrible. Jason reels back slightly. This isn’t what he’d signed up for. He’d signed up to pummel an entitled rich kid into the ground, shake his sense of safety, punish him for taking Jason’s place, and scare the shit out of him, and now here they are, fucking– having a moment, and what’s the point of Jason beating Tim into the ground if his parents beat him to it?
“What the fuck,” he says venomously. “Haven’t they ever heard of having food delivered?” What’s the point of having so much fucking money if you’re useless about feeding your own goddamn kid, he thinks, and hates that he feels pity for Tim. He’d carved out a place for anger, and the unexpected surge of sympathy doesn’t fit exactly right into that slot.
Tim huffs out a sound that could’ve been a laugh, if Jason wasn’t Jason and Tim wasn’t Robin and this was some alternate world where they were just joking around. “You sound like them,” he says, half like he doesn’t believe it. Jason doesn't either, and doesn't rise to the unexpected bait. “They asked me the same thing. But to answer your question, I had a housekeeper who brought food a few times a week.” The embarrassment comes back with a vengeance. “I stayed for dinner at the Manor when she didn’t come by.”
Math is perhaps not as high on Jason’s list as English. Even still, the numbers aren’t fucking adding up.
“... So that’s dinner,” Jason says, or maybe he seethes it out between his teeth, or maybe he sort of snarls it, or maybe he just comes very fucking close to yelling. “ What about the other meals?”
Tim winces. Jason isn’t sure if the injuries are acting up or if he’s about to say something fucking stupid that’s going to piss Jason off even more. “There weren’t. Really. Any other meals.”
Fuck. He’d come for a fight. This is a surrender. He thinks about the way Tim’s strength had faltered earlier and bites down on his tongue so hard it nearly bleeds.
“Hey.” Jason sets the gun down on the chair. “Look over there.” He gestures to the window with his chin, and when Tim turns, Jason grips Tim’s dislocated shoulder in one hand, his arm in the other hand, and pops the ball back into the socket. Tim makes a sound like a dying parrot, good arm reflexively jerking toward Jason, and nearly cuts himself on the ziptie.
“Oh, you suck,” Tim croaks, rolling his shoulder slightly.
“Forgive me if my bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired,” Jason says callously, and then rolls up to his feet. “You got any allergies?”
“Not that I don’t appreciate this…” Tim says, bone-dry and sarcastic, “but what exactly is going on here, and why did you make me soup?”
Jason glowers at him warningly and doesn’t deign his question with an answer. He still isn’t sure himself what’s going on here, thank you very much. Or maybe he does know, maybe he’s well-aware that he’s still furious and could, once again, be as furious as he was when he first hunted Tim down, but now that much of that instinctual rage has faded, he— well, he’s still salvaging what’s left after the hurricane. Annoyance, mostly, something bitter and frustrated, a thread of nostalgia leftover from his room, from his books, from—
“Shut up,” he says unrelentingly, “and eat your fucking soup, dumbass.”
Tim’s no longer restrained, but there’s very much the unspoken implication that Jason can and/or will shoot him if he tries to escape. The kid has the audacity to sit there and lower at Jason sullenly, which—
Okay. From the kid’s viewpoint, it’s perhaps not that surprising. Tim’s still injured after all, and his ribs probably do need more practiced medical attention instead of the bag of frozen peas Jason had chucked at him unceremoniously, but Jason hasn’t thought that far ahead.
“You need to get better so that I can kick your ass properly.” Jason tells him, and Tim puffs out this low, long-suffering sigh.
“You have no idea how to be normal about this, do you?” Tim says, so matter-of-fact that it floors Jason, and what is this, some sort of impromptu therapy session in the wake of casual attempted murder?
“If you don’t shut the fuck up and eat your soup,” Jason says darkly. Fucking Robins.
“Is it the— Like, is it the way you came back?” Tim continues, something careful and cautious in his tone. He’s rested his bowl back down in his lap and is surveying Jason like the way a medical student examines a cadaver. Jason’s skin itches, and he finds himself averting his gaze.
He summons whatever last dregs of patience he has left and sets his bowl down, mostly because if he’s still holding it when he goes into this, he might accidentally fling it into the wall and break one of the few pieces of dinnerware he has left.
“Yeah,” he says roughly, after a beat. “The Lazarus Pit. Fucks my emotions a little.”
“So— you’re not as angry, now?” Tim asks, light and curious like he’s reading right from the How to Subtly Get Information Robin handbook or some shit, and Jason’s glare flicks from the kid’s face down to the still mostly-full bowl.
“I’ll show you angry if you don’t eat. the goddamn. soup,” Jason says, nothing short of outright threatening, and hates that Tim doesn’t even look scared anymore. He’s still just looking at Jason like Jason’s some sort of mystery to unravel, and the weight of the look sinks hooks under Jason’s skin and tugs.
But— he does eat. And for a minute, there’s a bizarre sort of domesticity about it all, just the two of them silently eating, the clink of Tim’s bowl against his plate, the high, thin stream of air that Jason blows to cool the soup off.
Jason should’ve known it wouldn’t last, because he’s right in the middle of asking what happened with Tim’s piece of shit parents in the end when the window creaks.
Everything shifts. The world, before and after. One second, it’s just Tim and Jason, and the next, it’s Tim, Jason, and a spectacularly pissed-off Dick in Jason’s bedroom.
Fucking joy of all joys. The helmet he’d left in the manor, like a moron. Jason sighs, knocking back the last dregs of his soup before laying one hand on his gun. The unloaded gun, fuck.
“Nightwing,” he says calmly, ersatz pleasantness suffusing his voice. “Nice of you to drop in.”
Dick’s priorities go like this, clearly:
- Check to make sure brother number two is still alive and kicking, which he does with a low, heavy sound of relief. Jason recalls the scene he’d left on the floor of his bedroom, blood-soaked and messy, and can’t really begrudge Dick for his reaction. If only he knew Tim was still well enough to annoy the fuck out of Jason.
- Kick the Red Hood’s ass. Jason’s not terribly worried about this one, because Dick’s biggest weakness is still sharing a room with him. Jason isn’t going to kill Tim, obviously, but that doesn’t mean he can’t exploit the kid, and besides, he feels like he’s kind of owed as much for his plan going so spectacularly sideways.
Sure enough, the second Dick’s taken his moment to rapidly triage a distinctly grumpy-looking Tim, he spins to face Jason, and Jason can’t read the expression on that ever-so-familiar face, he can’t parse out the wildness in the lines of Dick’s face, the furrow in his brow.
He moves, thinking he's dodging a punch— and doesn’t see the fucking hug coming at all.
Dick hits him with the strength of a linebacker, knocking the fucking air out of him, and Jason only just manages to keep his grip on his gun as familiar, limber arms wind around him and hold tight. He reels backward, overbalancing slightly, one hand scrabbling at the wall blindly to steady the two of them before they fall through the cheap walls, and wait, what the fuck—
“Jason, Jay, you're alive—”
- Maybe Dick recognizes his dead brother’s come back to life and immediately tries to smother him. Jason identifies this as a murder attempt. Dick vehemently denies such accusations any time the series of events is recalled.
“I will shoot you,” Jason threatens, shoving his hand up against Dick’s face to force him back. Stupid, unloaded gun, stupid brothers, stupid fucking Tim and his nonexistent survival skills.
Dick pulls away, smiles a sunny smile, and narrows his too-bright, blurry eyes slightly.
“I’m sure you have a whole explanation for what happened, and I’m very interested in hearing it. But leave Tim out of your vendetta,” Dick says pleasantly, and Jason blinks at him, spinning from the whiplash. The air crackles into a sharp chill, frost and wrath and the promise of a grudge that Jason really fucking doesn’t want to deal with.
“Fucking have to, now,” Jason says, baring his teeth into a little sneer as he jerks his head away to break eye contact. Dick’s still half-twined around him like a curious octopus, and he twists around without success to free himself from the grip. Goddamn tactile idiot. “Have you seen this fucking kid? Thought you guys were trying to fix things.”
"Hey," Tim says, and is ignored.
“It’s a process.” Dick finally moves back, fingertips brushing over Jason’s upper arm as he peers out toward the kitchen. Jason stiffens at the casual contact and appeases the sharp burst of anger and uncertain whatever (that he isn’t going to touch, not with a ten-foot-pole, no way) by insisting to himself that he will shoot Dick, watch him . “Did you make soup?”
“Not for you,” Jason grinds out through gritted teeth.
“Oh, come on.” Dick nudges him, something delighted and wicked and fond in his gaze, and then whirls back around to gesture laughingly at a wholly unconcerned Tim. “Did you seriously bring him all the way out here just to angrily parent him? That’s familiar.”
“I will shoot you,” Jason tells him flatly, resenting the very fucking implication, thank you very much, but he isn’t sure why he bothers, because Dick’s already meandering down the hallway, and Tim’s muttering about wanting a second helping, and—
Fuck.
(He fires up the stove, anyway. Dick fuckin’ eats like a goddamn garbage disposal, after all.)