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Dick slides the mug across the counter toward him. He tries to ignore the old spot of spilt jam that it nearly sticks on with a nod of thanks.
“Just how you like it.” Dick grins when Jason takes the cup and looks down at the liquid inside. It’s pale, not far off from the yellowish-tan of the pages of a well-loved book. His answering smile is forced as he puts the ceramic to his lips.
The sugar is thick on the center of his tongue and the cream sticks on the way down his throat. He can barely taste the coffee. His stomach turns.
He glances up from the jam on the counter and his eyes catch a framed photo on one of Dick’s bookshelves. It’s them at the ski lodge. A younger Dick has an arm wrapped tightly around the back of a tiny Jason’s neck, pulling him in tight and squishing their cheeks together. Sunburnt noses interrupted by the tan lines of ski goggles scrunch up with twin grins.
Jason grabs a teaspoon to stir in the sugar. When he lifts it out of the coffee, dripping cream, he catches a warped reflection on the curve of the spoon. He looks nothing like the boy in the photo. The shape of his eyes and the curve of his cupid’s bow speak to some sort of distant resemblance, but nothing concrete, nothing indisputable. The silverware shakes in his hand and he drops it back into the cup with a plop .
He glances up at Dick, who’s humming indiscriminately as he puts the cream back in the door of the fridge and pushes the sugar into a cupboard. He looks just like the teenager in the picture. His cheeks have thinned down a bit and he’s gone for a different haircut, a couple of new pale scars litter his jawline but it’s the same boy, just a little grown up. Jason knows what he’s doing with the coffee. It’s meant to be a peace offering, it’s meant to say look, I pay attention , I know you , I care about you . It’s sweet, he supposes, but maybe sickeningly so, maybe thick and false and stifling, like the lukewarm coffee in his hands.
Dick grabs a stained rag from the sink and scrubs at the jam until it comes up, leaving a clean, wet spot behind on the counter. “I’m gonna go take a shower.” He says, tossing the rag back into the sink, “You know where to find cream and sugar if you want more.”
“Thanks.” Jason croaks finally, staring into his cup as Dick’s footsteps start to track out of the room. Suddenly, the thought of another sip of the syrupy, creamy drink makes him feel as if he’s going to puke into the sink. It’s sitting at the table while Alfred putters around and Bruce reads the paper, echoing the motions of Bruce sipping his coffee with just a splash of cream. It’s his legs dangling off a rooftop ledge, a cool summer night’s breeze ruffling his hair, with Dick and Barbara and a styrofoam cup and thinking maybe they’re finally starting to like him. It’s curling up in an old plush armchair in the library and feeling a gentle pair of hands take a mug from his hands before it can spill as he drifts off to sleep.
The memories don't taste as sweet as they should- they taste ashy, like dust on his tongue.
He stands abruptly, the legs of the barstool he’d been sitting on scrape against the tile as he does. The sound of the water sputtering to life as Dick starts up the shower make themselves known in the back of his head, but don’t push hard enough to drag him back to the present. He pours the memories down the sink and turns on the faucet to make sure that they disappear down the drain, that Dick doesn’t come back and see the remaining droplets. Jason rinses out the mug, making sure that all the sugar stuck to the bottom comes off.
He pours himself the rest of the coffee and drinks it black, it’s scalding without all the cream to cool it off. And it’s absently planning a murder while he sits at a rickety table somewhere in Siberia and learns about how to make bombs. It’s stumbling into a 24-hour diner with Roy and sore muscles and bloody faces and making a toast to a job well done. It’s shoving aside files and making notes and thinking so hard about a case so late into the night that his head starts to ache. It’s his legs dangling off a rooftop ledge, a biting winter night’s gust stinging his nose, with Tim and a styrofoam cup and thinking maybe he’s finally starting to forgive him.
He washes the mug, dries it, and puts it away once he’s finished, because both Alfred and Talia raised him. He and Dick had made vague plans to grab lunch and talk about a case, and Jason thinks he should at least leave a note, but he gathers up all his gear instead and slips out the door, shutting it behind himself and resetting various locks and traps.
Dick steps out of the shower to an empty and silent apartment. He’d like to think that his face falls as he makes his way back to the kitchen, but there’s nothing unexpected about this, there wasn’t really any hope to be snuffed out. The coffee pot is empty and the cream and sugar are unmoved. He runs his fingers through damp hair, trying to figure out what it was that he did or said this time. It feels like all he does is reach out, stretch himself thin in hopes that he’ll finally earn a half-hearted acceptance. He wonders if it’s worth it, tugging his phone out of his sweatpants pocket and refreshing his messages. Nothing new comes in.
A flash of anger spikes in his chest. Dick would’ve poured him a new cup if he’d asked, if he’d just said something . He pulls the picture of the two of them at the ski lodge off the bookshelf and tugs down the hem of his sleeve to swipe dust off the top of the frame. He mourns the fact that he never got to patch the breaks that made Jason’s nose crooked as it is today, that he never got to see him grow into his thick, low brow, that he never got to see his cheeks slowly thin out or sit with him while he got his cartilage pierced. Instead he saw the jarring transition from the child he knew to the man that he didn’t.
But he still folds his arms across his chest the same way when he’s irritated, still lets all the emotions show on his face when he reads, still stubbornly takes out his hearing aid when he’s sick of listening to Bruce, and when he smiles it’s still the same crooked, glowing thing Dick remembers. He’s still the same kid in a lot of ways, but hurt and angry and grown in a whole slew of others.
Dick runs a hand down his face and writes a message to Jason: “ sry about the coffee, see you later ”
He sighs and deletes it, letter by letter.
A new text comes in with a little swoop before he can come up with something else to say.
“ still on for lunch? you’re buying. ”
He lets the smile find his face and tries to remember the name of the diner Roy said they’d gone to, “ Angelo’s? ”