Chapter Text
Jason was waiting for her outside her classroom, leaning against a wall in his leather jacket and trying desperately to pretend that he couldn’t hear the gaggle of whispering girls to his left. After she'd made fun of him for cosplaying as Tim to college, with button-ups and jeans, he'd stepped up his wardrobe to something less nerdy. Unfortunately, the camouflage that had been flawlessly hiding his natural 'your dad would just hate it if you dated me' vibe went out the window with the plaid.
His face lit up when he saw her coming out, though, and the giggling girls rapidly dissipated. Not that their scowls in her direction were at all accurate to the situation, but Steph gave them a smug smile anyway as Jason put his arm around her shoulders with an excited squeeze.
"So? How did it go?"
She gave him a mopey half-smile for a second, but couldn't hold it - she was just too happy to pretend otherwise. "A. Plus. She gave me a 97!"
"No way!" He held up his hand for a high five. "I told you, she's all about digging into those character dynamics, and Lady Susan is her favourite obscure Austen."
"All Austen apart from Pride and Prejudice is obscure Austen," she told him, which made him scrunch his face up.
"You joke, but I hadn't read any Austen at all before I took that class last semester, so it was all equally obscure to me. But Lady Susan, she never even finished. It ends with basically a summary of what would have happened in the rest of the book, instead of carrying on with the letters."
"Don't you mean the epistolary format?" Steph asked. She rolled her eyes at his mock-surprised face. "And I already knew that about the ending too, doucheface. You made me read it before writing the essay, remember?"
"And you actually did it, even though there's a film version?" He clutched his hands together. "Blondie, I'm so touched you actually listened to me."
"Wait, there's a movie?" She stopped walking, thankfully in a low-traffic part of the corridor. "You told me there wasn't a movie. The internet said there wasn't a movie."
"It was made under a different title," Jason said, with an unrepentant shrug. "Now that you've got your A plus back, maybe we can watch it sometime?"
"You think you get to lie to me to make me read a book and that will get you a date?"
"Hey!" he said. "I got you an A plus, thank you very much. And er, I didn't necessarily mean as a date. I mean, friends can watch movies, right?"
"Right, yes, absolutely," she said. There was a pause. "Necessarily?"
"Shut up."
Steph laughed. "Alright, when are we doing this? I'll bring the popcorn if you host."
He winced. "None of my safehouses have great TVs. Not tempted to break into the screening room at Wayne Manor? They have a real old-timey popcorn machine tucked away in a closet and Alfred showed me how to work it once. AND where he keeps the fake butter."
She shook her head in disbelief. "I really thought I at least knew about every room in that house by now, even if I haven't seen them all. How do I know you're telling the truth? That Alfred-allowing-fake-butter story sounds entirely made up."
"It's a fancy kind of French fake butter," Jason said in a conspiratorial whisper.
"Okay, I'm convinced," she said with a laugh. "So, how do you want to go about breaking into the most secure private residence in Gotham?"
Jason glanced around the quad, surreptitiously checking there was nobody within earshot. "You call yourself a former Robin and not only have you never broken into Wayne Manor, you don't even have a plan for breaking into Wayne Manor? For shame, Blondie, for shame."
"Hey, unlike every other former Robin, I've never lived there. If I broke in, I would actually be breaking in," she pointed out.
"I broke in a number of times since I stopped living there," Jason said haughtily. His face then broke into a grin, and she cut him off before he could subject her to whatever terrible joke about his death he was about to come up with.
"You have never stopped living there and you know it. Bruce and Alfred would both cry tears of joy if they heard you refer to it as 'home', and I bet Bruce wouldn't even object if you said you wanted your old room back."
"My old bedroom is a creepy shrine to a fifteen year old kid who died, and has remained as such despite me being very much alive again. I think he still goes and stands in there sometimes and wistfully imagines that he can still hear my voice, all while I'm downstairs yelling at Damian or something."
"Exactly. He loves his creepy little Jason shrines, I guess because he's bad at letting himself feel emotions, but he would give it up for the real you to be back in the Manor in a heartbeat."
Jason looked down, scuffed the ground with the side of his shoe, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Then, he looked back up at her.
"It's still more fun to break in, though."
"Hell yeah it is, let's do it," she said. "Movie night in the Manor, in Bruce's secret hidden cinema that apparently he only tells his real children about, Oceans 11 style."
She held her hand up for a high five, but Jason just looked at it disdainfully. "Oceans 11 was about a casino heist. They don't break into a house and watch a movie. They con their way into a casino and steal millions of dollars. It's important to me that you know that."
She gave him a look. "I'm not going to help you with your movie night heist if you're going to be pitpicky about my movie references. Just because I've never seen Oceans 11-"
"You've never seen Oceans 11? Okay, that's at least two more movie nights sorted, original and Clooney versions-"
"Doesn't mean I don't know it's about a group of friends having a great time doing some sneaky crime shit together."
He made a face at her, then finally gave her the high five he'd left hanging. "Alright. Three nights from now, to celebrate your first A in a literature class, thanks to my help picking an essay topic and working on your outline with you, we will break into Wayne Manor, sneak into the first floor screening room, and watch the film adaptation of Jane Austen's Lady Susan."
She grinned. "Let's do it."