Chapter Text
Jason seizes consciousness with his blunted fingernails and does not let go.
He sits in a puddle of dirty rainwater and blood, mostly his own, at the head of an alleyway. The rancid mix of Gotham air—marijuana and sweat and grease and piss—is masked by blood clotting in his nose, like red, stinging salt. Blackness circles his vision as Jason digs pressure against the bullet hole in his thigh.
Those fuckers…Jason would be less pissed about the bullet wound if he had received it at his day job. Being a crime lord comes with those kinds of perks. But picking up chickpeas and broth from the grocery store should end up in falafel, not mortal injuries—because there’s no pretending otherwise.
Jason is about to die.
He’s fucking pissed this is how he’ll go—bullet wound clipping his femoral artery and feeding blood loss, concussion eating up his mental bandwidth, broken arm and bruised ribs crippling his movements. Missing twenty bucks and change from his jacket pocket. Missing the fucking jacket too.
But, Jason supposes, you don’t really get a choice of how or when you die.
And that’s the last thought he allows for mortality. Otherwise, his thoughts might start trailing down certain pathways. Pathways like the hundreds of deaths he’s responsible for, duffle bags with blood leaking between seams and gunpowder under his nails. Pathways like being thirteen and pulling on crime fighting tights and pixie boots and quips that hid the satisfaction he got at hitting rapists between the legs and child killers again and again and again. Pathways about Willis and Catherine and Sheila. Pathways about Bruce and Alfred and Dick. Pathways about red lips and yellow teeth and gloved hands that grabbed him and hit him and killed him.
Pathways, dangerous pathways.
Jason hits his concussed skull against the brickwork of the apartment building behind him instead. The physical pain is easier, and if Jason is about to die—again—it’s about damn time things got easier.
He lets his head loll. It’s hard to remember he has to keep pressure on his leg now, even if he’s only delaying the inevitable. It’s hard to remember he’s not thinking about the complicated stuff either…something about bleeding out makes his thoughts trail where they’re not supposed to.
One second, Jason is pressing on his bloody thigh and tasting Gotham’s shitty, salty air, and the next, he’s screaming as Talia keeps him from clawing himself raw. Then he’s helping Catherine dry dishes, ignoring the broken mug on the floor. He’s untangling Damian from wound-up blankets as the boy thrashes and cries in the throes of a night terror Ra’s al Ghul would never condone. He’s sitting ramrod straight in the manor kitchen as Alfred tames his hair, trying to forget the time he got lice and Willis wasn’t careful enough shaving it off. He’s knocking on Bruce’s bedroom door for the first time, stomach tangled into knots and fingers shaking and ignoring every instinct in his body that screams at him to run, because his room, with the nightmares and cold shadowed corners wouldn’t help either.
And then he hears Dick’s voice, the closest thing Jason’s ever had to an older brother, calling for him. Suddenly Jason is Robin, grinning as Nightwing lets him tag along for a patrol through ‘Haven. Jason is fifteen and jumping in the driver’s seat for the first time as Dick clutched his seatbelt and winced at every acceleration and break. Jason is dragging a red helmet over his head and sneaking back into Batman’s city, watching as Nightwing finds body after body that he’s responsible for.
“...Little wing!? Jason! Jay, wake up! Wake up, wake up, wake up…”
Jason barely feels what happens next. He’s moved, pain lancing through him like sandpaper scrubbed to his bone. Familiar black and blue swims in his vision and the voice in his ear says all the right words in all the right tones. Streetlights glow overhead, and air buffets his body. Squealing tires.
And then shouting.
Jason blinks against the wall of people—nurses and doctors, people in clinical gowns and scrubs and gloves. They wave penlights that burn over his gaze, blocking out glimpses of scissors biting apart of his clothes and gloved hands pressing and palpating his broken bones and bruises. Someone does something to his thigh and it sears and Jason screams and then there’s a hand on his hair and the white lenses of a familiar mask overhead—Nightwing, his Robin—staying close.
People move and Jason thrashes and there’s the bite of something, an injection, an IV, it doesn’t fucking matter, because suddenly Jason is clutching the black glove in his hand and falling.
The blackness is an abyss. For two minutes, he swims in the senseless, cool murk. And then many hours later, he’s blinking awake in a hospital bed.
There are LED’s searing overhead and a punishing world of AC. Jason shivers, acutely aware he’s wrapped toe to crown in bandages, with a sheet pulled up to his navel. The drugs lazing through his veins are good. His head floats and anything below his skin is gone.
There’s a dark head of hair pillowed in arms at his bedside.
“D’ck?” Jason mumbles.
And then Dick is jolting awake, gaze cutting to Jason’s open eyes like he was made for it. He looks torn between ten kinds of impulses, hands jumping here, expression twisting here. And then Dick settles for reaching out, fingers curling around Jason’s, careful of the IV placed several inches up.
“Little Wing?” Dick says, so gentle.
If Jason didn’t have all these random chemicals and medications introduced to his brain and fogging everything up, he’d be pulling away, snorting at the dampness in Dick’s eyes and offering his some kind of sardonic shield, the safest gift he can offer them both. But Jason does have all these random meds pulsing through his body, like morals. He hacks on the dry feeling of recent intubation instead.
“Here,” Dick is saying, rushing forward with ice chips that he drops into Jason’s mouth like he’s an invalid. Crap, he kind of is. Dick presses a button on one of the machines circling Jason’s bed. “Leslie will be here in a second,” he says. “Try to stay awake this time?”
Jason frowns. “‘M awake.”
“Good,” Dick says, all breathless and dramatic. He’s still staring at Jason, soft and gentle, and Jason is hit by a montage of distorted rememberings from the ride here, muttering senseless things about haircuts and body bags and…shit, did he start to cry? Fuck, he needs more drugs to deal with this. “Are you in any pain?”
Jason wishes he was. Very far away from this painless hospital room and Dick and those eyes…which kind of, start to trail down. Jason has to work to tuck his chin, to follow Dick’s gaze, because he doesn’t remember getting anything more than a couple of kicks and bruised ribs to the chest, but maybe he’s forgetting some kind of mortal injury, because why else would Dick have that kicked-puppy dog look on his face—
Oh.
There’s a kind of panic that seizes Jason as he realizes the significance of a shirtless hospital visit.
Jason shifts, but can’t quite gather the wherewithal or strength to pull the thin hospital sheet further up his chest, over the fucking autopsy scar. It’s the first time he’s been hurt and on decent enough terms with Dick-Head for the ensuing recovery period. It’s the first time he’s been caught carrying the scar…and Dick had to have known that Jason had one, an autopsy. He was a fifteen year old kid and his death was every kind of suspicious in the book. But knowing and seeing are different things. Under Dick’s damp, hurting gaze, he can feel the difference.
And Jason does not want to deal with this.
“St’p,” he says, fingers twitching in Dick’s hold.
Dick flinches, looking up, somewhere around his face. Better. “Sorry,” Dick says. “I just…I’m sorry, Little Wing.”
“N’t so little,” Jason points out. It’s been years since he trailed around in Big Bird’s footsteps.
Dick shakes his head, both hands clutching Jason’s now. “You’ll always be my Little Wing.”
“I…” Jason feels something clump up in his throat. Maybe it’s the brush with death, one of Jason’s closest since gasping into night air, covered with cold grave dirt and shaking maggots from his mud-licked skin, hair, and funeral suit. “I’m different now,” he says, not able to look at Dick, at the first Robin, who still flies weightless over city skylines because he learned to tread Bruce’s line. Not like Jason. Not like Jason, who was dragged over it, kicking and screaming and hurting, and stayed there . “I’m not Robin…I…I ruined it. ‘M not…”
Jason’s breathing becomes labored. Some of the beeping around them speeds up, becomes louder. Leslie is coming soon, Dick said, but she better hurry because Jason has a feeling the blackness encroaching his vision is coming sooner. He clutches at Dick’s hand—he doesn’t want him to leave. He might not be Robin anymore. He might be ruined, but he doesn’t want Dick to leave anyway.
“Jay,” Dick says, standing now, leaning in close, one hand carding through Jason’s hair. “Jay, it doesn’t matter. You’re not ruined, I promise, I’m just glad you’re back. I’m glad you’re safe…I’m glad you’re alive.”
Jason can’t help it. He finally regains some kind of feeling in his arm, his fingers, and he can’t help it. His hand rises to press against the thick cord of scar tissue that spans three corners of his body like it’s there for the taking. He clutches and something tight clogs up his throat and presses around his eyes and they squeeze shut but it still hurts.
And then Dick’s hand is moving too. It lays right over the top of Jason’s, overlapping, so much smaller than it used to be, except it’s not, it’s just that Jason’s so much different. And then Dick is telling him to breathe, even as his hand holds over that damned scar, the first person to do it, the first person from his first life to see it.
“Just breathe, Little Wing,” Dick says as Jason’s vision swims and his hearing flushes and he starts to tip over the side and down and below but still held by Dick’s hand. “You’re not ruined.”
And well, maybe there’s something about the near death experience and the drugs and that tone Dick uses as he says it. Maybe there’s something that happens in that damn hospital bed that makes it true.