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The campus didn’t look like anything Jason expected. Which was saying something, considering how much he’d been expecting.
Jason had circled the date in red marker the second Alfred had told him the visit was confirmed. He’d done a deep dive on the school website. Googled the campus map more times than he’d ever admit. Looked up course schedules and faculty bios and clubs and wandered through online student forums.
And not because he was obsessed or anything. It was just—interesting.
Now here he was. The sky felt too wide. The spring air felt too crisp, too full of possibility for a city that had been dipped in smog and wrung out by hand.
Gotham University felt like it belonged to another world entirely.
The buildings were ridiculous, old brick and glass mashed together like someone had forgotten what century it was. There were sculptures that didn’t look like anything and trees with plaques at their feet like they were war heroes. People kept walking around in groups, clutching iced coffees like lifelines and talking in the kind of too-loud tone that meant they thought everyone should care about their opinions.
Jason kind of loved it.
They were about halfway through the campus tour, and he’d already mentally claimed a table in the back of the library for himself. And a spot on the lawn for writing. And a vending machine in the philosophy hallway that sold a brand of soda he hadn’t seen since third grade.
The guide—a junior in a university hoodie with a voice like an over-caffeinated podcast host—had been throwing looks at Bruce all afternoon, clearly trying to decide if Gotham’s favorite local celebrity was really following them around like the world's most overdressed chaperone. Every time she said something like, “and this is where you might take your gen-ed history courses,” her eyes flicked to Bruce like she expected him to get bored and wander off in search of a cigar lounge.
Jason waited for it too.
But Bruce stayed close, arms loosely folded, face neutral but attentive. Jason couldn’t tell if Bruce was taking the campus in or mentally rebuilding the security infrastructure. Probably both.
The rest of the tour group recognized him, of course. No one had said anything, but Jason caught the lingering glances. The hushed whispers when they noticed him next to Bruce. The confused double-takes. All of them were trying not to stare too long, like Bruce Wayne might spontaneously combust into scandal or dollar bills.
Jason tugged at the sleeves of his hoodie as they passed under a stone archway, letting the small crowd funnel ahead. He tried not to look like he was vibrating out of his skin.
“This place is huge,” Jason said, craning his neck to look up at the arch. Sunlight glinted off the gold lettering carved into the stone. “You think they give you a compass during orientation?”
“Topographical map and an emotional support TA,” Bruce said, straight-faced.
Jason snorted. He felt some of the tightness in his stomach loosen just a little.
A few steps ahead, the group gathered around a bronze statue of some long-dead university founder. A mix of high school juniors and seniors and their parents, all of them at least two inches taller than him and dressed like they knew what they were doing. Like they all had SAT dates and career plans already charted out. Like they belonged on the college brochure: windbreakers, catalog-ready smiles, the works.
At fifteen—okay, fourteen, but rounding up didn’t hurt—Jason was only here because he’d asked Bruce on a whim, then pretended he didn’t care when Bruce actually said yes.
“I’m gonna be short forever,” Jason sighed.
Bruce hummed. “You’re not that short.”
Jason shot him a look. “You’re a human skyscraper. Everyone’s short next to you.”
Bruce hummed again, apparently unbothered. He didn’t smile, but Jason knew him well enough to catch the amused glint in his eye.
The guide was rattling off facts about dining halls and campus traditions, her voice bouncing with theatrical enthusiasm. Jason tuned her out—he’d already memorized most of it the night before—until she said something about visiting professors and public lectures, and then suddenly he wasn’t tuning anything out at all.
“For all our future lit majors,” she was saying, “Professor Rivera is doing an open lecture on Poe later this afternoon. He’s a bit of a local legend—goes all in on the dramatics.”
Jason stuffed his hands into his hoodie pockets and tried to school his expression into something neutral. Bored, even. Mildly curious at best.
But when he glanced sideways, Bruce was already looking at him.
“Do you want to go?” Bruce said.
Jason shrugged, trying for casual. “It’s probably just some guy in a bad jacket talking about sad poems. Could be boring.”
Bruce arched a brow. “Would it be boring for you?”
“I think it’d be cool. If you’re not in a rush or whatever.”
“All right.”
Jason blinked at him, surprised. “Really?”
“You’re interested,” Bruce said. “We’re here for you.”
Jason felt something weird and warm thread through his chest. He looked away, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets.
“You don’t have to stay for the whole thing,” he added quickly, just in case. “I mean—like I said, it’s probably gonna be boring as hell. You could go walk around or something.”
“I’ve sat through worse,” Bruce said dryly.
“Like what?”
“Quarterly board meetings.”
Jason cracked a grin despite himself. “Okay. But if you start snoring, I’m pretending I don’t know you.”
“Understood.”
“Could we head in early? You know—scope it out?”
Bruce glanced at the tour group. The guide had launched into a spirited monologue about historical renovations, the group moving on toward the science buildings.
“You don’t want to finish the tour?” he asked.
“I got the gist,” Jason said. “Dorm, food court, something something community.”
Bruce gave a slight nod, and just like that, they peeled off. Bruce had the campus layout memorized—because of course he did—so it didn’t take them long to find the path back to the English department building.
It was one of the older buildings on campus. Ivy crawled up the walls, clinging to the faded red stone like careful calligraphy. Jason stared up at it, his heart doing that stupid thing where it sped up for no reason.
“Oh no,” Bruce said.
Jason looked up at him. “What?”
“You smiled,” Bruce deadpanned. “That building must be dangerous.”
Jason made a face at him. Up ahead, a cluster of students were arguing loud enough for him to catch a few words—something about metaphors and similes and Chaucer.
“This is the nerd Olympics,” Jason muttered.
“Your people,” Bruce said mildly.
Jason let out a sputter of laughter. “Rude. I’m telling Alfred.”
“He’ll agree.”
“Nah. I’m his favorite. He’ll revoke your dessert privileges.”
The bulletin board outside the building said they still had half an hour before the lecture—“Bedlam Patterns: Love and Madness in Poe’s Fiction,” the flyer read—so Jason let Bruce steer him toward a nearby café kiosk. They ordered pretzels and drinks and sat at one of the gazebos bordering the quad.
“I’m warning you now,” Jason said, “if this guy says the House of Usher is a metaphor for the psyche, I’m walking out.”
“Isn’t it?” Bruce said.
“That’s the obvious interpretation.”
That earned a dry huff of amusement. Jason took a bite of his pretzel and pretended not to notice.
A gust of wind rustled the trees. They looked out across the quad—a girl was napping on a blanket, two guys were tossing a frisbee back and forth. A group of students were arguing over a dog-eared playbook for something that definitely wasn’t Shakespeare. One of them mimed getting stabbed and dramatically collapsed into a patch of grass.
Jason tried to drink it all in. He wanted to seem cool—aloof, maybe—but his heart was hammering like he was about to take a pop quiz with a broken pencil.
He didn’t know exactly when the idea had started gnawing at him. Maybe it had been back when his mom was still alive, when he’d read that dumb short story in English class and realized he had opinions about metaphor. Maybe after that one week he spent trying to write a comic book script in his history notebook and accidentally turned it into a thirty-page fever dream. Maybe it was just because he wanted something that was his, something that wasn’t patrol schedules and case files and worrying if he was screwing up the Robin thing every night.
But once he’d realized he wanted it, he couldn’t shake it.
College. Lit degree. Writing. It sounded stupid every time he said it in his head.
He wanted it anyway.
“Do you think I could get in?” Jason asked before he could stop himself.
Bruce turned toward him.
“I mean, not now,” Jason went on, feeling heat prickle behind his ears. “Obviously. After I get my SAT and all that. Do you think they’ll let me in if I stop sounding like a kid from Gotham’s worst ZIP code?”
Bruce gave him a flat look. “You’d get in on your writing alone.”
“You’re biased,” Jason scoffed.
Bruce’s lip twitched. “You’ve got your patrol logs practically written like novels.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “They’re not that dramatic.”
“You had a chapter title last week.”
“It was ironic!”
“You used a quote from Dickens.”
Jason tried not to smile and failed. “Okay, fine. But that’s not real writing. Can’t exactly have that on my application, can I? It doesn’t count.”
Bruce set his coffee down, frowning a little. There was something careful in his voice when he said, “I’ve read your writing, Jay.”
“Homework doesn’t count either,” Jason huffed.
“I meant your stories. Alfred proofread the last one, didn’t he? The one about a ghost haunting the subway?”
Jason looked away, the heat in his ears rushing into his face. “That was just for extra credit.”
“It was good.”
“It was dumb.”
“It was insightful,” Bruce said gently, firmly. “Sharp. You have a voice, Jason.”
Jason felt a small curl of warmth unspool in his stomach. He kicked at a loose pebble under the table. “Yeah, well. A ‘voice’ isn’t gonna pay the bills.”
“I’m a billionaire,” Bruce said, so seriously that Jason glanced up at him, snorting.
“I can’t just mooch off you forever. If I do, I’ll end up thirty and still living in the manor, yelling about comma splices.”
Bruce looked like he was holding back a smile. “You say that like it’s a threat.”
Jason grinned. “I’m not even kidding, B. I’ll sleep in the attic. Haunt the hallways. Write bad poetry. Alfred will have to slide food under my door.”
“I think he already budgeted for that.”
Jason couldn’t help but snicker. But then his gaze drifted back to the English building and its ivy-covered walls—to the students spilling out in groups, with their coffees and their backpacks and their too-expensive textbooks—and the rest of his laughter died in his throat.
The wind stirred again, lifting a stray paper cup and sending it skittering across the grass. He gnawed the last bite of pretzel just to have something to do.
“You really think I could write for real?” Jason asked after a moment, quieter than he meant to. “Like—not just weird subway horror stories. Real novels. Or essays. Stuff that ends up on actual shelves.”
Bruce didn’t answer right away. He just met Jason’s gaze, face unreadable as ever.
“I think if that’s what you want, you’ll do it,” Bruce said, with a soft, calm certainty that Jason didn’t know what to do with.
“Yeah, but it’s a dumb plan,” Jason grumbled. “What do you even do with a lit degree? Starve artistically and bartend until death?”
“You could teach.”
“Blech.”
“Write.”
“I just said—”
“You said it was a dumb plan,” Bruce cut in. “Not that you didn’t want it.”
Jason looked away again, swallowing hard. He didn’t know how to explain it—how close the wanting felt. How he wanted it so badly that it already hurt. How the more he let himself think about it, the more fragile it felt.
He could see it, for half a second. Not the him-now, but the him-maybe. Sitting on the grass with a notebook in his lap. Pretending he was just another kid with deadlines and papers and normal people dreams.
“Okay, Yoda,” he muttered, then cleared his throat. “I just—I don’t know. I like the idea of it, I guess. Having my own library. A desk in the corner. A cluttered one, like, with notebooks and tea-stained pages and fake antique pens. Maybe some weird little statue that’s supposed to inspire me.”
Bruce made a thoughtful noise. “Owl figurine?”
“Too cliché. I want a gargoyle. Way more mysterious. People would think I was haunted or something.”
“A little heavy for a desk.”
“Then I’ll get a small one.”
Bruce actually laughed at that. Jason didn’t hear it often—real laughter, the kind that cracked through the usual low gravel—but when he did, it stuck. He didn’t say anything; something in his throat felt too tight and sharp, too difficult to name.
Eventually they finished their drinks and made their way inside the building. The lecture hall was old, with wood-paneled walls and a chalkboard that still had some smudged writing. Jason slid into a seat near the back, folding himself into the chair with careful nonchalance. He tried not to be obvious about watching Bruce out of the corner of his eye as he settled beside him, perfectly composed like he did this sort of thing all the time.
The professor was exactly what Jason hoped for: wild gray hair, sleeves rolled up, with a voice that demanded silence. He talked about Poe like it was a TED Talk with stakes. Quoted from The Raven and Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher. Gestured wildly about decay and grief and the grotesque inner self.
The seats were too big for Jason. The table desk creaked when he rested his arms on it. But still he found himself leaning forward, trying to absorb every word as he scribbled in the free notebook he’d snagged from the info table. Not because he had to, but just to feel like he could. Just for the cadence of it, the feel of pen against paper.
An hour into the lecture, Jason stole a glance at Bruce—a quick look, just once—to see if he was bored, if he was checking the time, if he’d dozed off with his eyes open in that creepy way he sometimes did.
But Bruce was still there. He was there, listening, occasionally tilting his head like he was actually paying attention.
Jason turned back to the lecture. He didn’t let himself think too hard about the relief that curled warm in his chest.
Jason could have just read the brochure.
That would have been the easy thing. Safe. No risk of making an idiot out of himself.
But instead, when Alfred had asked over tea last week what he was doing with his time lately, Jason, in a rare act of self-sabotage, had muttered something about maybe checking out Gotham U’s open house. Which Alfred, traitor that he was, had passed along like a signed permission slip.
Bruce had asked him about it not even a day later.
“If you want to look at schools, I can make time,” Bruce had offered—awkwardly, in that gruff, I-read-it-in-a-parenting-book-once way.
Jason had panicked and snarked something about not needing a chaperone. But he’d said yes anyway, because saying no still sometimes felt like it came with consequences, even if those consequences no longer involved rooftop arguments or fists.
So now here they were. Again.
They didn’t join a tour group this time. Jason figured it’d be weird enough already: a guy who looked too old to be in high school but too young to be Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard, trudging beside the billionaire himself. So they wandered through the courtyard and the library steps, past the econ building with the pigeon-stained cornice that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since before his last visit.
There were new benches. Fresh signage. A coat of paint on the clock tower that looked too bright to have been here when he was fourteen. But the bones of it were the same: offensively green quads, crooked trees with roots breaking through the sidewalks, and students trailing in small flocks between lectures, faces half-buried in scarves and earbuds and their own lives.
Everything looked smaller than he remembered.
Jason couldn’t tell if it was his memory lying to him or if the campus really had shrunk. Not that he remembered it well—just flashes, scattered impressions of polished floors and dusty windows and a vending machine that had eaten his dollar—but something about being back here again got under his skin, slow and familiar. Like the start of a migraine.
Bruce didn’t say much, which was fine. Jason didn’t either.
Not until they stood outside the English department building. The windows still looked like they belonged to a crumbling cathedral. Ivy still stretched lazily up the weathered stone walls.
And the same stupid bulletin board was still overflowing with flyers and calls for submissions. Writing contests. Poetry slams. Editorial internships. Literary zines with obnoxiously clever names.
Jason stared at it for a long moment, letting the words blur.
Bruce came up beside him. He glanced at the flyers, then at Jason.
“Are you thinking of applying?” he asked, his voice deceptively mild.
Jason shrugged. He didn’t turn around. “Thinking about thinking.”
“Literature?”
Jason made a noncommittal sound. Shrugged again.
“You don’t have to decide anything today,” Bruce said.
“I know.”
“You have time.”
Jason almost said, No, I don’t. But that felt cruel. Unfair. He had time now. He’d clawed his way back into time.
He just didn’t know what to do with it.
“Alfred told me you’ve been writing again,” Bruce pressed when Jason didn’t answer. “He said he’s been proofreading your essays.”
“Practice essays for the GED,” Jason scoffed. “If you can call that writing.”
“He was proud.”
Jason shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. Kept his face neutral. Kept all the old feelings—want, grief, regret—buried somewhere deep beneath the bone.
“His standards must be slipping,” he said wryly. “Pretty sure I wrote half of those at 3 AM in a Denny’s with a concussion.”
That drew the faintest amused breath from Bruce. “You made it work.”
A beat. A pause where something else might have been said. Should have been said, maybe. But Jason didn’t know what to say, so instead he gestured toward the same sad little kiosk he vaguely remembered. Bruce didn’t protest.
They ordered coffee—Jason’s with enough sugar to qualify as a dessert, Bruce’s so black it might have counted as a war crime—and found a bench just off the quad, tucked under a tree that had already shed most of its leaves. The air was cooler here, the sky a sharp autumn blue. Jason kept his coffee in his lap, half for the warmth and half to keep his hands from fidgeting. Bruce sat with his coat still buttoned, posture rigid.
The silenced stretched. Another one of those long silences they’d started sharing lately instead of shouting matches. The space between them was technically less than a foot, but it felt like it spanned years.
They stared across the lawn, watching students wander to and from class. One guy in a corduroy sweater was reading on the grass. A girl was sketching on a tablet under the statue of some dead dean with birds nesting in his elbow. A group walked past in heated debate about Hamlet.
Jason watched all of it with a strange ache in his chest.
“Do you remember the first time we came here?” he asked before he could think better of it.
“I remember you were excited,” Bruce said. He didn’t look away from the quad. “We went to a lecture on Poe. You were whispering answers into your notebook before anyone raised a hand.”
Jason felt the memory hit him like a sudden, bracing rush of cold air.
The lecture hall. The awkward chairs. His voice too loud to his own ears, trying not to sound like he cared too much. Bruce sitting in the back, trying not to look out of place.
He hadn’t thought about that day in years. He hadn’t let himself.
“I forgot about that,” Jason muttered into his drink.
“You said you were going to write something better than Poe,” Bruce said, and something about the way he said it—soft, careful—made Jason’s jaw tighten.
“Yeah, well,” Jason grumbled. “Fourteen-year-old me was a little idiot.”
“You were hopeful.” Bruce huffed something like a laugh. “You took every pamphlet you could find when you thought I wasn’t looking.”
Jason snorted. “Bet I thought I was being subtle.”
“You weren’t.”
“I think I kept them under my bed until I got embarrassed and threw them out.”
Jason didn’t say why. He didn’t have to. That version of him—shorter, scrawnier, trying too hard to look unimpressed when everything inside him buzzed with want—hadn’t known what was coming. He hadn’t known how fast everything could fall apart.
That kid would have hated him now.
“Didn’t feel real back then,” Jason said. The words came out quieter than he wanted. “I thought you were gonna vanish halfway through. Figured you’d get bored and make an excuse.”
Jason didn’t look over, but he could feel Bruce glance at him, frowning.
“I didn’t,” Bruce said.
“No,” Jason said, voice dry. “You remembered Poe.”
“I remembered you.”
Jason didn’t have a good comeback to that. His throat felt a little too tight to make one anyway. He sipped his coffee instead, as if it hadn’t just cost him emotional points to say all of that aloud.
“You used to want this,” Bruce said softly. “Back then. Before.”
“I was a kid,” Jason said. He stared down at the gravel, watching a rust-colored leaf tumble past in the breeze. “I thought I could outwrite everyone with a pencil and a chip on my shoulder.”
“You still could.”
“You say that like it’s easy.”
“It’s not.”
“Great. Love this inspirational Hallmark moment.”
Bruce let out a breath that might have been a laugh. Or a sigh.
“What’s holding you back?” he tried again, in that too-even voice he used so often now, as though Jason was a cornered raccoon, one sharp word away from either bolting or scratching at him.
Jason scoffed. “Maybe I don’t want to saddle myself with student debt just to read books I already own.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about debt.”
“Cool. That just leaves the part where it’s pointless.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I got my GED to prove I could,” Jason said, with practiced indifference. “That’s all it was. There’s no point to studying literature unless I want to teach it. Which, newsflash—”
“You’d be good at it.”
Jason jerked his head up, incredulous.
“I have a body count,” he said flatly. “And a history of violence. And no filter. What part of me screams ‘academic role model’ to you?”
“You care about stories,” Bruce said, gaze fixed ahead, like this was easier to say without eye contact. “You care about people. And you’re more disciplined than you think.”
Jason rolled his eyes, but something in his chest stuttered. “You sound like a report card.”
“I’m giving you a compliment.”
Jason grimaced. “That’s disgusting. Don’t do that again.”
Bruce didn’t smile. Not exactly. But his mouth twitched a little, like it had almost remembered how.
They sat in the silence for a while, long enough that the cold settled into Jason’s spine and the coffee cup grew heavy in his hand. Students milled past, some glancing their way, some pretending not to. A breeze stirred the leaves. Jason felt the quiet crawl into his ribs and stay there.
He thought of how he used to imagine this kind of life when he was younger. Back when he still lived in that tiny apartment with his mom, when library books were his only constant, and he’d sometimes walk past the Gotham U gates just to stare through the bars. He’d press his fingers to the iron and wonder if he could ever belong on the inside.
It all felt farther away now.
Jason blew out a breath and let his head tip back, squinting up at the sky.
“It’s a stupid thing to want,” he muttered. “I mean, come on. Literature? What the hell am I going to do with a writing degree?”
“You could do anything you want.”
Jason risked a sidelong glance. Bruce, coffee cup resting on his knee, was looking at Jason with that unreadable expression that made him want to square up on instinct.
“You’re gonna make me hurl,” Jason said.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You should be trying to talk me out of this. Tell me to get a real degree. Like—I don’t know, engineering or business or whatever. Something practical.”
“You’ve had to be practical your whole life. You’re allowed to want more.”
“Like dooming myself to lifelong unemployment?” Jason snorted, partly because it was funny, and partly because the lump in his throat was back again, unwelcome and familiar. “It’s a degree that doesn’t get you anywhere. It just—wastes time. And money. And—and who cares if I can write? Where’s that gonna take me?”
Bruce looked away, eyes flitting back to the quad. His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture softened.
“You’d be the guy in the library corner,” he said. “With the notebook. And the gargoyle. Writing something brilliant and telling everyone it’s crap.”
It was Jason’s turn to look away. The lump in his throat crawled higher, like it was trying to work its way out. He swallowed it back.
“Jesus,” he said, as coolly as he could muster. “You always this sentimental?”
“Must’ve been something I ate.”
Jason laughed—the sound slipped out before he could catch it, sharp, startled. He took a long sip of his now-lukewarm drink to pretend like it hadn’t. Bruce didn’t comment; he just drank the rest of his own coffee as the campus hummed around them.
The wind picked up slightly, rustling through the dry leaves at their feet. The sun had begun its slow descent, painting the edge of the quad in deep reds and bruised golds. Jason let his gaze stray toward the English building.
Red brick and ivy and self-importance. Even now, sitting in its shadow, it felt like another world—close enough to reach, but still behind glass.
Jason took a slow breath. Willed his shoulders down.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
Bruce tilted his head. He didn’t say anything, but Jason could feel his attention sharpen.
Jason forced himself to keep going. “I don’t know if I want to do this. Or if I just want to prove that I can. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.”
Still, Bruce didn’t speak.
“If I do this—and I’m not saying I will—but if I do this,” Jason continued before he could lose his nerve, “I don’t need you to tell me it’ll work out. Or that I’ll be fine. But I wouldn’t mind if you said you’d show up.”
From the corner of his eye, he caught the flicker of emotion cross Bruce’s face—gone in a blink, like a shadow ducking out of sight.
“I will,” Bruce said, just like that. As if it was as easy as breathing.
Jason didn’t know if that was true. If it could really be that simple. But for a moment, as the sun dipped closer to the horizon, casting gold light on red stone, he dared himself to believe it.