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He didn’t notice at first.
It was a slow gradual slide, a dozen individual elements snowballing into an actual real thing. Jason maintains that no one would have picked up on it prior to the inciting incident, but it does burn that Roy figured out that piece of his own psyche before Jason did.
The base truth of the matter is this: at some point, Jason went from partner to wife, and he didn’t notice.
Sterotypes form the foundation of the switch, which he... isn't quite sure how to feel about.
Jason likes cooking, okay? It’s an indulgence that quiets the gnawing need to control the food supply.
As far as hobbies go, it’s downright practical.
Bread is his favorite. Zucchini bread, banana bread, pumpkin bread. It's filling and warm and makes the kitchen smell homey better than any dollar store candle ever could. Besides, Lian loves the stuff—she exerts her power (puppy-dog eyes and baby-voiced pleaseees) to get Jason to throw in chocolate chips at every opportunity. Which is all well and good for the banana bread, but zucchini and chocolate is not a combination he personally finds favorable.
And cleaning is just—it’s nice, to be able to rigidly control his environment. He can’t be a full freak about it, of course, because Lian spends a good quarter of her time here and kids are messy.
Jam will get on the table. Crumbs will get in the couch. It’s fine. Jason handles that in a completely normal, definitely not twitchy way. It is actually legitimately fine. He finds other outlets (and deep cleans every time Lian leaves for Star City).
Weapons, he can get intense with. Those are his and his alone.
Jason organizes his knives according to the complex internal system that exists solely in his head; he’s tried to explain it before, to Roy and Rose respectively, but in both cases their eyes glazed over before he even got to the weight factor.
The spice rack is another fun controllable puzzle. Roy can cook, but he prefers take-out to the hassle. As a result, Jason’s been given free reign over the multi-tiered spice rack. He even keeps it up on a higher shelf so Lian can’t get into it. Spices are organized first by general use, then by shaker size, then by color and granularity.
Organization calms something within him.
He picked up his obsessive-compulsive tendencies from Bruce, but he’s not in actual mental illness territory—at least, not that flavor of it. It just gives him a slice of inner peace he can’t easily achieve any other way.
Stress and anxiety used to have him reaching for his gun, sharpening his knives past the point of practicality or even enjoyment. Now?
Jason just pops in his earbuds, turns Lacuna Coil to the max, and gets to dusting.
Clothing is its own thing. Jason dresses primarily for convenience, which tends to lean masculine by way of the fashion industry. Hoodies, plain cotton panties, clothes he can fight in, if needs must.
Primarily—not always.
He likes to feel pretty every once in a while.
Really, who doesn’t?
Jason remembers the girl clothes of his youth. He was mostly indifferent to them, but there were a few he liked.
Buttercup yellow sundress, bright and beautiful. The rubber band bracelets Mom got at the dollar store. Some of them were stretched out funny, but most went back to their princess shape once he took them off. His pinkorange sneakers—the sole wore out after a few months on the streets. Shame. They were his favorite.
Granted, there were plenty he didn’t like. His white church dress was pretty, but he wasn’t allowed to play outside in it, so he’d always change once they got home. His candy-cane stripe pajama pants itched along the seams. All of his shorts were from the boy’s section; neither Jason nor his mom loved the tightness and weirdly shorter shorts that flooded the girl's section.
Bruce gave him boy clothes, but never said a word against his wearing his mom’s old locket—only that Robin couldn’t, of course.
Jason doesn’t hold a grudge over that. He gets it, really, he does! It's practical and logical and basic opsec.
He would’ve liked to die with it, is all.
Jason was irrationally nervous, the first time he wore a skirt around Roy. It was one of the long ones Talia gifted him after she caught him running his fingers over her white rose-patterned cheongsam, too revealing in his interest. The skirt is gorgeous, gold threading adding another layer of beauty to the emerald cloth. Jason’s pretty sure it used to be Talia’s own that she got tailored for him.
Every time he thinks about that aspect of the gift, he gets a lump in his throat.
She knew, Jason thinks, that he values sentimentality. Talia certainly understood the nuances of the gesture.
It fit him like a glove, silk underlayer clinging to his skin like a second skin; at the same time, the outer layer is loose and swishy, ambiguous enough to be comfortable. He found it packed with his things when it was time for a new trainer. Talia never made a single comment—not on the skirt, not on the possible perceived contradiction of his top surgery three months prior.
Jason knows better than to expect Talia's quiet acceptance from the world at large. People let him down—sure, maybe Roy hasn’t yet, but it’ll come eventually. Maybe this will be that straw that breaks open the bond of warm trust that’s grown between them.
Whatever. It’s just a skirt. If Roy freaks, that’s on him.
Knowing a thing to be true does nothing to halt his hindbrain. Jason reminds himself and reassures himself and knows, but still, anxiety lingers.
He can’t help the way his stomach twists as he steps into the doorway.
From the looks of it, Roy was fixing up the defunct coffee machine, but turned at the sound of Jason’s footsteps. He’s shirtless, a pair of Jason’s sweatpants barely held up by one chiseled hip. Despite himself, despite the dread and anticipation, Jason’s eyes are drawn to his chest, his shoulders, the russet treasure trail disappearing beneath black cloth.
Roy raises his eyebrows, a split second of surprise before his face crinkles into amused arousal, looking Jason up and down with heat in his gaze.
It’s not really a sexy skirt, not tiny and tight, but Jason loves the appreciative desire written on Roy’s face, the quiet awe. It makes him feel—desirable, but in a warm mushy way, not like any lusting he’s known before.
This is—safe.
Loving.
Roy doesn’t ask and Jason doesn’t tell; instead, they share sweet coffee-breath kisses until the skirt is rucked up to Jason’s hips. Roy mouths at the hinge of his jaw as he jerks Jason off, agonizingly slow.
So things just sort of—slide into place.
Things slide into place with Roy sliding up behind him while he’s trying his hand at sourdough, kneading to his heart’s content. He’s in only a pleated skirt and a frilly eggshell apron (that he only got in the first place cause Roy was eyeing it at the store).
“I’m busy,” Jason complains, no heat in it, tilting his head back to briefly kiss him before turning back to his bread.
Roy nods against the back of Jason’s neck. His breath comes hot and fast, his voice low and eager when he speaks. “I know you are, Jaybird. So busy being a good little wife for me.”
Holy shit.
White heat pulses through Jason so suddenly it shocks the thought from him, a sparkler touched to his spinal cord.
He goes stiff and Roy stops breathing. Jason can’t make his mouth work, can barely make his mind work. His face must be bright red—more concerningly, Jason flushes down his neck when he gets really embarrassed, which means Roy can see—
“Good wife,” Roy says, husky, groping at Jason’s chest like there’s actually tits to grab, kneading at the muscle.
Dough squeezes from between Jason’s fingers as his grip tightens.
He can feel Roy behind him; warm skin blanketing, hot hard dick pressing, wanting. It’s so much heat.
Familiar calluses brush along his sensitive thighs; Jason bites back a moan as those clever fingers migrate up to press at the soaked fabric.
Roy slips two fingers under the panties and inside him in one smooth motion.
Jason gasps, head flinging back.
They’ve done this—not like this, but Roy has a feel for his body by now. He’s an instrument that Roy’s plucking the strings of, singing pleasure in moan and gasps.
“My good, gorgeous wife,” Roy hisses, sounding almost angry about it, sounding overcome. He bites fire into Jason’s shoulder and that does it, that’s what sends Jason over the edge, hurtling through waves of white-hot pleasure.
Jason tries to stand; predictably, that fails, his shaking legs giving way immediately. Roy grabs him, lowers them both to the floor in a gentle controlled fall.
Jason kneels on the cold tile, trembling with unnameable emotion. Roy’s grip is the only thing grounding him to the present, mind still circling the drain, echoing wife wife wife on repeat.
Okay. So that’s a thing.
It takes a few days of chewing over the wife thing for Jason to really wrap his head around it.
He and Roy have dipped their toes into freak shit before. Tying Roy up gets his cock red and drooling like nothing else, with the added side effect of cracking open a weightless chasm in Jason’s chest. That’s some type of feeling—not good or bad, just big. And Jason loves the hot thrill of his knives in Roy’s hands.
So it’s not entirely unprecedented.
It’s just the implications of ‘wife’ that threw him at first.
(Jason’s not really—into gender. He was born with a vagina. Raised by his parents as a girl. Then, on the streets, he kept his hair short and told people he was a boy. Safer that way. And after that, well—why mess with a good thing? It’s not like it matters. He feels the same way about being a boy that he used to about being a girl. Which is a whole lot of nothing, mostly. Bruce never asked. He understood that it wasn’t a relevant factor, even if he maybe didn’t understand it the right way.)
(Jason’s if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it approach to gender led to Talia offering him top surgery. He thought about the new weight, the double-layered bras to keep everything in place, the way his trainer watched his chest instead of his hands. The ever present ache he still hadn’t managed to adjust to. Jason said sure, and that was that.)
(There are rules. He used to be a girl, and then his mom died. He used to be a boy, and then he died. He is no one’s son, but he used to be Cathy and Willis’ daughter. Jason is reforged and born anew and he hasn’t changed, except in the ways he has.)
(But something about wife.)
It’s easier, is the thing. Jason’s dug into the whys and hows the last few days, and he thinks he’s got it pinned. See, normally when Roy tries to tap into the praise kink he swears is there, Jason gets anxious and itchy and mean. Hell, the first time Roy stroked up and down his jaw and whispered good boy, Jason got so freaked he tried to veer them into unnegotiated gunplay territory. (That was a bad night for all parties involved.)
Jason isn’t good.
He can’t be. But Roy’s wife can be good. And Jason can be good at being his wife—cooking, cleaning, watching Lian, giving him somewhere wet and warm at night. Those are all things Jason was doing anyway. The layer of removement just makes it easier to conceptualize.
Psychological analysis aside… it doesn’t really matter?
Roy thinks it’s hot. Jason loves the sweetness and the kindness and the softness and very much does not mind the sexy way he has to go to get those, wife cutting through the knotted tangles of his mind as easily as a scythe cuts wheat, golden and sunsoaked and sharp-edged.
If it works, it works.
The next few days have them ducking into every available shadow and corner, Roy running his mouth in this fresh, newly-discovered way, until Jason’s loose and limp and pliant.
He doesn’t seem to be getting tired of it, and Jason…
Jason wouldn’t mind if this was just the way they had had sex now. Fully incorporating the hottest thing ever into their sex life isn’t exactly complaint-worthy. And if it does more for Jason than Roy… well, that aspect doesn’t sit right with Jason, but it’s not like he’s the one initiating this new thing of theirs. All he’s doing is existing as himself—if Roy likes to talk about it, that’s his prerogative.
“Hey,” Roy says, in his trying-very-intensely-to-sound-casual voice. It put Jason on edge immediately—as much as a guy can be on edge after three back-to-back orgasms. “So, uh, in the same vein as the last few days… would ‘good girl’ work better than ‘good boy’?
Jason pulls a face. “They both sound nice, in the theoretical. Except then you say it and I want to tear my face off.”
“Ouch,” Roy says lightly. He’s not offended. Roy loves it when Jason communicates.
They’ve touched on the gender thing before. Roy wanted to know what terms were alright to use for sexy-talk reasons. Jason was a little baffled by that whole ordeal—what did he care what words Roy used? Roy made it hot, every time; his dirtytalk was an endless stream of sweetness and filth.
Roy, being Roy, took that as a bit of a challenge.
The escalating euphemisms were the bane of his existence for a solid three weeks. Jason had to forfeit after Roy called it his ‘adorable meat curtains’ and he went dry in record time.
“It’s—not a girl thing. Wife just feels more right.” he stops, frustrated.
Roy tilts his head. “You know this isn’t the kinda thing you need to justify, right?”
Roy says that, but Jason keeps trying anyway, stumbling over half-formed explanations before finally cutting himself off. He’s not going to magically come up with the perfect explanation for his mixed-up mess of a mind.
Can’t wrangle sense out of the senseless.
“I just like it,” Jason mumbles, face hot.
“Okay,” Roy says thoughtfully, “Okay. I can work with that.”
And work with that he does.
Before long, it's a sweet and treasured routine, albeit one that they keep discovering new aspects to, new ways to explore it. Jason couldn't dream of any of this ever going stale.
Roy’s brilliant at it—all Jason manages to do is react. By some miracle, Roy likes that.
It seeps into other aspects of their life, slow enough that—surprise, surprise—Jason doesn’t notice at first. He’s starting to think he’s bad at this whole ‘romantic intuition’ thing.
Still, it’s theirs.
Their kink, their nickname, their secret.
Until it isn't.
Jason’s broken fingers shake as he struggles with the window lock, succeeding only in smearing glistening red blood over the steel mechanics. Roy nudges him aside and dismantles the lock in record time.
Their party of three crawls through the window, one at a time. Jason very nearly doesn’t stick the landing. That knee’s worse off than he originally thought.
Failure hangs over their heads like an inescapable cloud, dark and choking. Duke claws his helmet off; it’s the first time all night Jason’s seen his face, and he sucks in a quiet breath at the dull eyes and miserable expression. Poor kid. It’s been a rough night for all of them, but Jason remembers the ache of youth compounding every hurt. Poor fucking kid.
Roy keeps running his tongue over his newly-chipped front tooth, feeling out the new sharp shape of it almost compulsively.
Duke staggers off in search of the ibuprofen, affording them some much needed privacy.
They’re all in a bad place. Roy gets close; Jason grabs at his thigh, twisting his fingers in the loose thread of his sliced-up tac pants, cutting off circulation to the tips. He and Roy watch them turn dark red together.
Blunt nails brush over his cheek. “Wife.”
Jason’s next breath comes too fast, too rough.
Roy rubs soft at Jason’s jaw. “You’re okay,” he says, soothing, like he’s talking to a wild animal. It’s a level of sweetness not befitting the situation. Jason blinks slowly as he tries to mash Roy’s words into their context, to try and find the sense in them.
The knife wound in his thigh is still throbbing with dull heat. Jason’s sweaty and covered in dust and he reeks. He’s not how a wife should be.
“You’re okay,” Roy says again with emphasis; louder, but still unnervingly gentle.
Jason shakes his head. Chubby little hands he could almost grasp, almost—
“My good wife,” Roy murmurs.
Jason winces, doing his best to keep his disagreement off his face. No version of him can be called good tonight.
“Uh,” Duke says. They’d forgotten he was here, forgotten to be alert to his presence. “You supposed to be calling him that?”
His face is screwed up, narrowed in on Roy, expression extremely skeptical. It takes Jason a couple seconds to put together what exactly is happening. Duke… is not interpreting this as an embarrassing social mishap. He thinks—oh. Jason reassesses the set of Duke’s body, his closed fist. Aw, he’s protective.
“It’s fine,” Jason says, genuinely warmed and struggling to hide it.
Signal really is a pal.
It's not like he didn't know that, but there’s something about your loosely-younger-foster-brother standing up for you that just softens a guy right up.
This is just a level of empathy and care that Jason hadn’t anticipated—although maybe he should have.
Duke is relatively unpoisoned by the victim-blaming well. That's half the reason Jason likes him so much. It’s nice to talk with someone who doesn’t see a tragedy or a warning when they look at him. Besides, he’s cool. For a bat.
Jason doesn’t have many allies in his city. He’s glad to consider Signal one of them.
Duke raises his eyebrows. “Fine like fine, or fine like Cass should eviscerate this guy?”
‘This guy’ like he hasn’t known Roy for over a year.
“Fine like I like it,” Jason says, exasperated.
Roy snickers like the child he is. “Jay really likes it,” he emphasizes, conveniently telling Duke just enough to get that grossed-out look on his face while not sharing anything that Jason hadn’t already divulged himself. Clever.
“Yeah, that’s all I really needed to know,” Duke cuts him off. “More than I needed to know, actually. Please stop talking.”
Jason hides his shit-eating grin in Roy’s shoulder. His face rubs against ash-coated Kevlar.
“I’m gonna get out of here and let you guys get your kink on.” Duke pauses. “And by ‘here’ I mean the living room. I am not driving all the way back to the Manor after the night we’ve had.”
Yeah, that’s fair.
“Guest bedroom is yours,” Jason calls, tossing a water bottle to the kid. “Towels are under the sink.”
Duke pulls at his grimy suit, nose wrinkling. “Uh, got any clothes I can borrow?”
“I think Steph left some compression gear in the closet,” Jason says absentmindedly. It’s been a while since he’s made use of this safehouse—it’s entirely possible that there’s been some structural changes in his absence.
“Keep the noise down, you crazy kids,” Duke calls before the door slams shut.
That’s—good, probably, that he’s able to joke even after. Everyone in their line of work has to learn how to construct lightness even when none is naturally occurring, even when all hint of light has been sucked out and overshadowed with tragedy. He should match him.
Jason raises his voice, “You don't pay rent, you little leech!”
He’s not the only one who puts energy towards making joy of their own.
It takes visible effort, but there’s a wry grin on Roy’s face as he nudges Jason. “Such a good hostess, my wife is,” he coos, saccharine. Jason shoves him, face red, and Roy lets out a real laugh.
God, his husband is an incurable sap.
Later, sobs shudder out of Jason’s chest. The wetness on his face is lost in the warm cascade of the shower water, but Roy doesn’t miss it. He’s not looking so great himself, eyes squeezed shut against the spray, against the weight of it. They’re both bruised and battered and done with it—for tonight.
Tomorrow, they’ll be right back out there. Fighting the good fight, unchanged by the dead child of today.
Tonight, they let the scalding spray burn away their regrets, burn away the awful clinging memories. Burn away the baby they failed.
Roy doesn’t talk like that around Lian. Jason’s glad of it—he doesn’t want to be the one to verbalize all that they are at all, much less explain it in kid-friendly terms.
Defining things is… difficult.
Wife implies husband, implies vows and commitment and really, maybe all they’re missing is the rings.
They spend a solid half of their time cohabiting, and would be living together full-time if not for outside factors. Roy’s his emergency contact and vice versa. Roy has medical power of attorney, should anything happen. And if anything happens to Roy—well, Ollie and Dinah would have Lian every other weekend, and Donna and Dick would be heavily involved, but Jason is down for primary custody on all the papers.
Well-established as serious as they are... this is different.
If he says it out loud, he loses it.
Jason’s loved a lot and he’s lost a lot. It’s becoming increasingly clear that he can’t afford to lose this. It’ll break him clean open.
He's been shattered and cast aside before. Roy's been with him through the thick and the thin, but there will always be a little part of Jason that expects hurt.
That part of him wonders what he will reshape himself into, after this life, too, is destroyed?
Roy fucks him so good he cries, then licks the tears off his face while murmuring sweet nothings.
“My wife,” he says dreamily, breath tickling where his mouth is pressed to the shell of Jason’s ear. They’re so wrapped in each other that no one else exists, the world outside their bed ceasing to matter.
In retrospect, talking like that in the Batcave was always a game of risk.
Roy likes the edge of danger—Jason’s just a sucker for Roy saying sweet things and looking at him like that.
“Wife?” Dick’s voice is sharp enough to cut glass. “Wife?”
Jason thunks his head down onto Roy’s shoulder. Why can he not keep his family out of his sex life? At this rate, Bruce is going to come charging through the door with bugged recordings. Huh, that is something B would do, actually.
Perish the fucking thought.
"Yep, wife,” Roy chirps. “She’s cute, don’t you think? I might just have to knock her up and keep her.”
Jason flushes red at the same moment Dick goes white. That’s—Roy’s only saying that to tease Dick, and he’s going a little far maybe, but there’s something in that…
It’s not the misgendering—is it even misgendering if he doesn’t care one way or another? Regardless it’s not that.
Jason is wild and free and never going to be under anyone’s thumb again, never going to trust someone like that again—unconditionally, in totality. But Roy keeping him… it’s a big thought, too big to process outside of the safe fantastical babytrapping.
I might not mind being kept, he thinks, if it’s you doing the keeping.
After all, Roy’s never made him feel struck or trapped. If he wanted to leave, Roy wouldn’t stop him.
But he’d miss him.
Jason would too, he’s beginning to realize—he’s known it for ages, but only now is it starting to concretely register, the depth of the hole he's dug himself into. He would miss Roy Harper like crazy.
This is a bad time to be having romantic revelations.
Dick’s jaw is working furiously, but hasn’t managed words yet. The cold stare of death talks for him.
“It’s fine,” Jason says preemptively, really not wanting to have this discussion with Dick Grayson of all people.
“Fine?” Dick spits, still glaring daggers at Roy. “That’s not—you should be spoken to with respect and not treated like a girl.”
Jason bristles, defensive on his partner’s behalf. “Roy respects me plenty! Mind your own business.” Then— “And what’s wrong with being a girl? Never took you for a sexist, Dickiebird.”
“You are my business when someone’s mistreating you,” Dick grits out, looking like he wishes that wasn’t the case (while also ignoring his last point entirely). Well, that makes two of them.
…Not really. There are a million things Jason would change about the course of his life. Dick Grayson being his big brother is not one of them. Maybe it’s the residual hero-worship. Maybe Jason never really got over being the successor to the world’s darling. Either way, even as annoyed as he currently is, some part of him is gleefully excited to see Dick act like the overprotective asshole older brother that he never really got much of a chance to see when he actually needed it.
If only it wasn’t directed at Roy, all-around lovely human being who may also be the love of Jason’s life.
Dick’s timing and aim is impeccable as always.
“Not everything is a case, Dick,” Jason snaps. “My private relationship? One of those not-case things that you don’t have to pry into.”
Dick turns his ire on Jason, furious more at the situation than Roy at this point. “He can’t talk about you like that! You don’t like—
“You don’t know what I like,” Jason cuts him off. “You don’t know and you don’t get to decide for me.”
“I’m not—”
“You are!”
“Fine.” Dick stares at him, detective gaze boring holes into him. “Do you like it?”
Well. He doesn’t love that Roy said that, right then, in present company. “I don’t mind it. If it bothered me, I’d tell Roy to knock it off. I don’t need you standing up for me to my own goddamn partner.”
Dick… looks somewhat placated, if not fully satisfied. When is he ever?
“Well!” he says finally, uncrossing his arms.
That tone has Jason gritting his teeth. Where does Dick get off, being so judgemental? It's a little late to play big brother, and they both know it.
“If that's what you want,” Dick says, tight and doubtful.
Jason valiantly does not retaliate. They both prefer to get the last word in, but Jason’s willing to let him have this one in exchange for them never talking about this again.
After all, that’s what their family does best.
Dick leaves, and Jason kind of loves that he can see the deliberation Dick takes in his stride so as to not storm out.
“Mayyybe shouldn't have escalated that one.” Roy rubs at the back of his neck sheepishly.
Jason grabs his stupid face and kisses him.
It doesn’t take long for Roy to get with the program, kissing his back with all the ferocity he had before they were interrupted. He even slips in some tongue in the moment before he pulls away.
“Let’s get home and make some babies,” Roy says.
Jason scrunches up his nose. That’s… not half as unappealing as it should be.
It's a bit of a moot point—Talia's had him on crazy-effective birth control since he was sixteen.
Not that he would want to be pregnant, but—Roy stuffing him full, trying his hardest to knock up him up despite the impossibility of it, because he just want Jason to stay that bad—
Jason swallows, thick.
Yeah, there's something to that.
Roy cackles and throws his arm over Jason’s shoulder.
Homeward-bound and happy, Jason leans into the loose hold.
“Keep me,” Jason gasps, near incoherent, ankles by his ears.
Roy doesn’t miss a beat, thrusting deep as he says, “Jay, you’re mine. My Jaybird. My wife. I’m never letting you go. Never.”
Kept and loved and treasured. Jason’s eyes burn at impossible possibility offered to him. He imagines it—never wanting for love or safety. Roy at his side always, the two of the bound by steel and promises. A love that never has to end or break.
Wife.