Chapter Text
There’s a reason, Tim thinks as he checks over his bruises and scrapes after the most recent scuffle with Jason, pointedly ignoring the other man where he’s doing the same on the other side of the safehouse, that there’s only supposed to be one alpha in a pack at any given time.
Before the invention of things like scent blockers and suppressants, it was unheard of for multiple mature alphas to exist within the same pack, but with modern medical advancement, it’s become a lot more common. Complicated, and requiring additional management of instincts, but possible none the less. Tim saw it most successfully done in extended families, where there was an existing bond and affection before presentation, where they weren’t facing life or death situations that spiked adrenaline on the daily.
But Jason and Tim are not brothers. As much as Dick has tried to encourage that bond between them, Tim's stupid instincts just can’t see Jason as anything other than an encroaching alpha who’s trying to push him from his pack, and Jason clearly sees Tim as an upstart who’s stolen what isn’t his. They clash at every turn, both in civilian lives when Jason is around the manor and when in the field.
Dick and Tim, sure, they’re brothers. Tim had been little sibling shaped while Dick was spiraling in his grief over the loss of Jason, and Tim had been horribly lonely and isolated with his parents traveling all the time and no siblings or pack to make up for it, so he’d slipped into that role without protest.
Dick and Jason, absolutely, even if they had a rough start while Dick adjusted to no longer being an only child. Despite the bumps along the way, like when Jason first came back as Red Hood and spent almost a year antagonizing them on the rooftops of Gotham, playing fast and loose along the line between vigilante and rogue.
Two alphas in a pack who are not family, not even friends, has led to constant bloodshed between them. Tim is handling it. He is. He avoids Jason when he can, which means he’s spending more and more time out of the manor so they don’t cross paths when Jason stalks through the halls of their home. It’s resulted in his pack bonds aching constantly with strain, triggering crippling migraines, frequently having to nurse wounds from scuffles that escalate to bloodshed between him and Jason when the other man starts to posture at him, when Tim just can’t force himself to back down, and now – now it’s impacting the safety of their other pack members.
Bruce had taken Dick home, the old omega radiating fury and disappointment at the fact that Dick had nearly been injured after he’d gotten between Tim and Jason while trying to mediate one of their spats. It was only Tim’s quick reflexes that had let him pull the blow from his staff that he’d been aiming at Jason’s throat before it would have struck Dick across the face.
“Control yourselves,” Batman had snapped at them, “You’re both better than this. Figure it out before you hurt someone.”
And Tim – Tim knows he’s right. But they’ve both been on suppressants for years, and wear scent blockers any time they’re both in the manor and always when on patrol, and nothing has worked. If anything, their fights have gotten worse over the last several months. All the miracles of modern medicine have failed them.
Tim stills at that thought, his fingers hovering over the bruise he’d just been prodding at.
There… were less modern ways to solve the issue of multiple alphas within a pack. And they’ve come to a point where something has to be done, something has to give, for the Bat pack to be successful. The conflict has been straining all of them, affecting their performance in the field too.
It was an option. It would solve the issues within their pack that were caused by multiple alphas who couldn’t get along. But – Jason would never agree to submit to Tim, which meant that Tim would have to submit to Jason, and once he committed to it, once he made that decision, there would be no going back. Tim would have to let Jason fuck him, bite him, dominate him so thoroughly that his body was forced to accommodate it by switching gears and producing omega hormones.
He swivels his head, staring at Jason for several long moments as he steels himself for what he’s about to propose, thinking it through one last time. The other alpha tenses under the scrutiny and bares his teeth at him, expecting more conflict.
“Jason,” Tim says slowly, “I have a solution to all of this. You just need to bitch me.”
Jason goes impossibly still for several long moments, and then he blows up.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” He spits, standing to his full height and towering over Tim, “I’m not a goddamn rapist, Tim, what the fuck kind of monster do you think I am?”
“No, no Jason, I’d be consenting, it wouldn’t be rape,” Tim protests immediately, “I’d – I’d let you do it, if it meant things would settle for the pack. I don’t fight with you because I’m particularly attached to my status as an alpha, or because I don’t like you, I fight with you because my instincts tell me I have to rise to the challenge of another alpha in the pack. If my instincts were – rewired into something else, I think we’d be fine. I can make that sacrifice. It's no big deal.”
Jason still seems fired up, but at least he’s listening, considering Tim’s words, rather than immediately firing off.
“Tim, this is – this is a huge decision, a very big fucking deal! This is not something you should jump into like this. Have you even done any research on the process? Have you seen it in action? It’s… I’ve seen the results when it’s done by traffickers. It’s rough. As willing as you are right now, you’re – you’re going to fight back, when the time comes, and I’d have to push through it and force you to submit anyway. Your instincts won’t let you just lie there and take it for the first few rounds,” Jason says, voice low and deadly serious. But he’s considering it, not outright saying no, and that’s a win in Tim’s book.
“I’ll go home and do some more research on it,” Tim promises – and he intends to keep that promise, he’ll deep dive on this for the next several days and take notes and put together a plan of action, “But I know it’s the only path forward for the pack to be successful. We’ve tried everything else besides one of us leaving the pack entirely, and – I don’t want that for either of us. We’ve both been through too much to survive being packless.”
******
Jason is still reeling from Tim’s offer by the time he makes it back to the Manor.
He closes himself in his bedroom, ignoring Dick’s attempts to check on him, and Jason thinks.
Jason presented early, as most street pups do. The physical and mental stress, isolation, and packlessness pushed kids to mature early in order to survive. He’d presented as an alpha, to his utter shock. His father being a beta and his mother an omega, he’d assumed he would be an omega or a beta as well. The likelihood of an alpha child from anything other than an alpha parent was phenomenally low. Sure, it was technically possible, but it was more likely for someone to be born a redhead than for an alpha to be born without an alpha parent.
And then he’d learned that Catherine wasn’t his biological mom, that his parents were Willis Todd and Sheila Haywood, who was an alpha, and a lot of things suddenly made a whole lot more sense. He hadn’t gotten the chance to process that information fully before he’d died, though, and when he’d come back – when he’d come back, he’d leaned entirely into his dynamic as an alpha, as was expected of him. Nothing struck terror into the hearts of criminals more than an exceptionally large, vicious alpha stalking them from the shadows. He’d learned that lesson early, considering the way that Bruce, Gotham’s beloved omega socialite, leaned into a highly convincing alpha impression with artificial scent and posture when he was Batman.
Jason had spent his first couple years back in Gotham mostly at odds with his old pack, alternating between working together on larger cases and clashing over the smaller ones due to Jason’s methodology. He’d settled into a friendly antagonism with Dick, something like brotherhood. His relationship with Tim Drake had been a little more tense, especially considering their fight in Titans Tower, but that, too, had settled with time. Not friendly, exactly, but he no longer hated him.
And then Bruce had died – or rather, gone missing in the timestream, as Tim Drake had later discovered. Losing his adopted father figure, his dad, had left Jason reeling. He had spun out for a while, his fights with the remaining bats getting nastier and nastier until he finally left Gotham, ran with his Outlaws team for a year or so, and came back home significantly more centered. Less volatile.
Bruce had welcomed him home with an invitation to officially rejoin the pack, to Jason’s surprise. Apparently being ‘dead’ had made the old man a bit more sentimental. Go figures.
Things would have been perfect, except that in the time that Tim had been globetrotting and Jason had been with the Outlaws, the younger boy had presented as an alpha. Seventeen was late to present, but that was easy enough to explain with his absentee parents traveling all the time. Lack of consistent exposure to hormones in early adolescence would delay presentation by several years and could even stunt physical growth, as was apparent in the younger man's shorter stature and leaner build.
And now here Jason was, with Drake offering to – to let Jason bitch him in order to smooth out the friction within the pack. It was nearly unheard of for an alpha to offer to be bitched, in Jason’s experience. Bitching was something that happened to weaker alphas on the streets, teenagers who got in with the wrong pimp or were trafficked in order to make them more appealing to clients. It wasn’t something you signed up for. Not knowing what all it entailed. He knew that theoretically, it could be done in a kinder manner than Jason had been exposed to.
Jason flops back onto his bed, sighing. He – he can’t subject Tim to that, either way. Even if Tim thinks he knows what he’s getting into, Jason just can’t do it. The younger man is small for an alpha, for one. His body isn’t designed to take a knot, and the size difference between them would mean it would be painful for him no matter how much they prepped him. And two – Jason still remembers beating the kid, breaking his bones, slitting his throat in Titans Tower. They’ve fought since – often, really. But it’s been little dominance scuffles, fights over methodology, reactions to each other's posturing and scent. This would require he pin Tim down, hold him there, and fuck him even though he fights back. It’s – Jason just can’t.
But Tim is right. They really have tried everything else. Both of them have been on dangerously high levels of suppressants, and Jason has seen the way the constant use of scent blockers has irritated the skin on Tim’s neck and wrists, leaving it red and raw. Neither of them have had a proper rut since Jason came back, because the fallout would have been explosive with the friction in the pack. It’s unsustainable. Dick nearly got injured today trying to intervene, and it’s – it’s only going to get worse.
And suddenly, Jason realizes what he needs to do. The answer is obvious, now that he’s thinking about it, but he gives himself until Tim approaches him again to think it through.
The days pass quickly, but Jason’s resolve only grows, and then Tim is waiting for him in his safehouse after patrol less than a week later. The younger alpha has what looks to be a case file with him, until he slaps it onto Jason’s kitchen table and the contents spill out. It… is a case file, in a way. In Tim’s typical obsessive manner, he’s compiled everything there is to know about bitching and broken it down into a neat little instruction manual, cited sources included. News articles, scientific studies, personal anecdotes, snippets of history books, even photos – many of which are quite graphic.
“I’m not bitching you,” Jason says without touching the contents of the folder, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall. Tim frowns, his brow furrowing. “But you’re right that it’s the best option we have to keep the pack together. So you’re going to bitch me, instead. You’re like a foot shorter than me, Tim,” Jason says when Tim opens his mouth to protest, “It would be one thing if you were an omega already, but there’s no way you can take my knot safely with your anatomy.”
Tim eyes him for a long moment, but whatever he sees in Jason’s expression, whatever calculations he runs in his head, he eventually nods his head slowly.
“Okay,” Tim says, “I can work with that. So how do you want to do this? Are we telling B and N ahead of time, or…?”
Jason grimaces at the thought of trying to explain what they’re doing to his dad, and Tim’s mentor, but he also dislikes the idea of Batman stumbling across them in the middle of the process.
“We’ll tell them that we’ll be occupied for the week with a personal matter, but I don’t – I don’t want them thinking their input on our decision to do this is wanted, so we can wait to let them know exactly what we’re doing until afterwards,” Jason decides, and Tim nods.
“Alright. I need a few days to clear my schedule for next week at Wayne Enterprises, but we can meet back up on Friday. We should do this at the Nest, it’s more secure than any of your safehouses. I’ll make sure everything is stocked so we don’t have to leave until the process is finished,” Tim says, and then he steps forward, confident and easy. Jason doesn’t know what to expect, but it certainly isn’t Tim to peel off his scent blocker on one wrist and then reach up and press the thin skin of his scent gland to the side of Jason’s neck in a bold, intimate marking before he leaves.
Jason is left with the scent of another alpha – the alpha he’s just agreed to submit to, to let bitch him – smeared all over the side of his neck. It should piss him off, like smelling Tim without blockers had done every other time they’ve interacted, and he does feel it spike up to an extent, but the heat he feels in his groin at the possessive gesture genuinely takes him by surprise, leaving him blinking dazedly in his safehouse. Something about the combination of their scents, rather than just running into Tim’s scent on its own, is… pleasing.
The scent lingers as he strips out of his gear and changes into civilian clothes, and he finds himself skipping his usual post-patrol shower without realizing it.