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It's a quiet night. The grey clouds are scattered across the sky, leaving clear patches throughout for the stars – few and far between – to twinkle back at him and for the moon to peek as if from behind a corner before being swallowed up by a moving cloud again. It's chilly, though not freezing, and Dick is enjoying the opportunity to just take a breath and bask in the Gotham night for once.
Batman is prowling in another neighbourhood, assisted when needed by Spoiler, so Nightwing has this random rooftop all to himself. He feels the absence of Tim's chatter in his ear or Robin's presence at his elbow quite keenly, but he'd rather take the emptiness for a few nights or weeks over seeing Tim beaten and broken again. He's still healing, though if you listened to Tim's protests you'd think he was never injured to begin with, but that's not the real reason behind Bruce benching him.
Red Hood is still at large. He hasn't stopped taunting the Bats or making cruel or threatening remarks about Robin. Because of that, letting Robin out on the streets – especially alone – is the last thing anyone wants, and for once, Dick agrees with Bruce's paranoia and controlling need to hover so he hasn't protested the decision. He'll take Tim's semi-serious betrayal any day of the week if it means his baby brother is instead spending his nights seated in a chair, manning the comms with Alfred or solving cases remotely, safe and sound in the Batcave.
Since it's a quiet night, Dick lets himself just breathe. He looks over the city sprawled in front of him, taking in the lights and the sounds, and just exists in the moment for a bit. He rarely gets the chance to do that nowadays. Sometimes, it feels like being Nightwing has turned into a job more and more these days – clock in, grind non-stop, take a short bathroom break, go back in, clock out. He doesn't know when he started looking forward to the end of his shift to crawl into bed and pass out.
The thumping of boots alerts Dick to another presence on the rooftop. He spins around, facing the unknown, and his entire form freezes up and tenses with anger. Vicious, murderous anger that he tries to suppress, because he isn't an angsty pre-teen anymore, he doesn't get a pass for losing his cool anymore. Still, the sight of Jason, for once in a simple domino mask instead of that cursed helmet, doesn't allow Dick to relax for even a second. He subtly switches off his comms, not wanting Tim to overhear or try to interfere, by pretending to sweep his hair away from his face. If anything happens, Babs has cameras monitoring the area and will send him some back-up.
“All alone, Dickwing? What, no birdie glued to your ass tonight? Or– wait, he isn't still out of commission, is he? I could swear I didn't hurt him that bad. I mean, I got beaten up with a crowbar and blown up by a bomb and I'm perfectly fine!”
Dick grits his teeth and pulls out his weapons – partly in anticipation of an inevitable fight, partly to give his fists something to wrap around so he doesn't charge Jason and knocks out his teeth.
“Robin isn't patrolling the streets right now. And don't worry, he's perfectly fine, in spite of your best efforts,” Dick spits.
Jason grins, wide and mean, showing all his teeth as if he's baring them like a wild beast preparing to attack. He looks perfectly relaxed, if you didn't know where to look and see his squared shoulders, the tension in his hands and arms, ready to defend or attack at any moment, the wide stance of his planted feet.
“Aw, come on, Dickiebird. If I really wanted him dead, he would be.” Despite the light tone the words are said in, Dick gets a shiver running down his spine nonetheless. His worst fears, his worst nightmares, the image of Tim, so young and bright being reduced to a small, crumpled form in a pool of blood, lifeless and cold– he can't bear it. “I just wanted to see what made him so special. I was only going to break a bone or two, maybe shoot him a couple times, but nothing more, honest! Not my fault the brat decided to be rude and start mouthing off. I had to teach him a lesson after that, didn't I?”
Dick growls and takes a few steps forward before halting again. His chest is heaving and the violence thrumming in his veins isn't helping him stay grounded. How dare he! A child – a teenager who freaks out about acne, who gets aches and pains from still growing and has to adjust the Robin suit a few inches every couple of months, who skips out on patrol sometimes because he needs to study for an upcoming exam or finish reading a book for his English class – that's who Jason is talking about! As if Tim has any fault in this entire mess. As if an actual, fair fight between him and Jason could ever actually be fair, when Jason has the advantage of years, experience, height and weight, and specialised training. Tim is amazing and an excellent fighter who had so many, incredible teachers, but Robin's training isn't about deadliness and brute strength – it's about disabling and incapacitating bigger and meaner opponents easily and as fast as possible until Batman (or Nightwing) shows up, it's about using Tim's slight form and lighter weight to slip away and get back-up when overwhelmed, about distracting opponents when fighting with Batman at his side, about getting victims away or bystanders out of harm's way.
Dick knows how capable Tim is. He can hold his own. But Robin is and always has been a partner . He isn't meant to fight alone and it would probably be years and much more experience until Tim could actually fight Jason and win , not just injure him as much as possible and hold out for as long as he can.
And Jason knows this. For him to pretend like any ‘test’ or ‘evaluation’ was ever going to be fair and accurate is, frankly, insulting. To pretend like his own anger and need to punish someone, anyone, to hurt someone else like he's been hurt wasn't the driving force behind the Titans Tower incident.
Maybe his intentions hadn't been so violent initially. Maybe he isn't lying about that. But it doesn't change the fact that Jason did what all of the bad adults in his life before Bruce took him in always did: found someone convenient to take his frustrations out on instead of the real target of his anger and lost himself to the violence and the feelings of power. Dick just knows that twelve-year-old Jason would be disgusted with this grown-up version of himself. Has to believe that, because the possibility that this has always lurked beneath the surface of that little kid is too much to contemplate.
“You didn't ‘have’ to do anything. Nobody forced you to square up with a fifteen-year-old.”
Jason scoffs. “Don't bring his age into this, Nightwing. The moment he put on that suit, his age became irrelevant. My age didn't stop the Joker from taking a crowbar to my ribs.”
“And is the Joker the standard we should all be following?” Dick retorts. “What, he hurt you, so now you hurt everyone else because life sucks and it's unfair? I wonder where I've heard that one before.”
That strikes a nerve. Jason tenses, bristling at Dick, and he takes a step forward now too, leaning towards him in a threatening manner.
“You shut the fuck up! You don't know shit! You don't know what it's like to wake up from the dead, after hoping your dad would come save you until the very last moment, to find out that it's been six months and there's already another kid running around in the same suit you fucking died in! Six months, Dick!”
“You were dead, Jason!” Dick screams and his voice is raw, but so so strong, held up by the pillars of his fury and his need to protect, to defend, to eliminate the threat to his little brother. He wishes that threat wasn't his other brother, though. “You were dead, you were gone, and you weren't ever coming back! Because guess what, people usually don't do that! And the rest of us suckers who are left behind have to learn to live with it, with the guilt and the unsaid words that will never be spoken unless it's to empty air, and all the fucking shit that comes with having to move on when it feels like one of your organs was scooped out and left behind and you can't go back for it.”
“Oh, I'm sorry, was my death so bad to you ? My bad, I promise I'll try not to die next time, to spare you ,” Jason snarks, sneering at Dick in a way that Dick doesn't recognise.
There used to be a time when he thought he knew Jason. Sure, he hadn't hung around him much at first because, despite being the eldest and the semi-adult in the relationship, Dick had been… hurt. It was hard to look at Jason and not see everything he was not, not to over analyse and nitpick to find all the things that made them different – all the reasons Dick had been fired and argued with and pushed away time and time again while Jason had been legally adopted and given the Robin suit. It hadn't been Jason’s fault, Dick always knew that, even back then. He knows it now even more, with years and experience and a truckload of regrets behind him. But it hadn't been easy to look at Jason and not think, “what makes him worth trying to be an actual parent for? Why wasn't I worth that?”.
But whether he wanted to or not, Dick started to get to know Jason, albeit at a glacial pace. And while they hadn't spent much time being actual brothers before Jason died, Dick had thought he knew the bare bones – the core – of who Jason Todd was. The kindness. The love. The thirst for justice and the need to protect those who couldn't protect themselves or others.
This is none of that.
This sneering, snarling, vicious version of Jason is a stranger to Dick. He can't expect a traumatic death, a resurrection, and whatever the hell Jason went through afterwards not to have changed him but… but it's not fair. It's not fair for Jason to assume things and refuse to listen to reason and take out his feelings – based in reality or not, valid or not – on Tim, an innocent, or Dick or Alfred or, hell, even Bruce. Not while invalidating everyone else’s suffering and feelings.
“You're just being cruel for the sake of it,” Dick snaps back. His hands tighten around his escrima sticks, ready to turn the electricity on Jason at any moment, but he maintains the stand off for now. As much as he'd love to pay Jason back for what he did to Tim – and he knows Tim wasn't helpless, a defenceless little victim at the mercy of Jason, but it still hurts that his little brother got hurt and at the hands of someone who should've been his brother , not his opponent – Dick still has a few things to say. “I know that what happened to you was horrible. Fuck, Jason, I can't even begin to imagine what it must've been like to wake up in your own coffin, to dig yourself out, to be alive again after dying so horribly! But fuck you for thinking that no one else was affected by your death! Fuck you, genuinely, if you actually think that all of us just… what? shrugged our shoulders, said ‘oh well’ and moved on with our lives like nothing happened?!”
“Sure seems like it,” Jason drawls in a way that sounds careless and disrespectful, meant to aggravate and irk. It succeeds, because Dick wants to shake him just to make him stop being an idiot and listen to someone other than his traumatised brain or whatever lies he was fed. “Didn't take long for Timmy to start flying around in the ol’ traffic light onesie, after all.”
“First off, go fuck yourself,” Dick hisses. The repeated mention of Tim has his hackles rising again, the wound still too fresh for it to be poked without Dick wanting to go ballistic. “Keep his name out of your goddamn mouth. You don't talk to him, about him, around him– nothing! He is off limits! That kid deserves absolutely none of your ire and aggression, and if you pulled your head out of your own ass for, like, a second, you'd realise that you have beef with a high schooler who still can't order a fucking Uber without adult permission!
“Secondly, your death broke everyone in the family! Alfred barely functioned for weeks! He was like a ghost, drifting through the Manor on autopilot, crying silently all the time! I didn't even know you were dead and when I came home I came back to a fresh grave and a funeral I missed! Bruce was so off his rocker he was going nuts on petty criminals and Rogues alike, nearly getting himself killed every other night because he just couldn't care less if he lived or died anymore! We grieved, we mourned, we lost our goddamn minds! And you stand here, now, and tell me none of that matters because… what? Bruce didn't kill the Joker? Tim became Robin after you? Were we supposed to utterly ruin and betray ourselves and then never interact with a human being ever again? Nobody replaced you, nobody treated your death like it didn't matter! We just moved on with our lives and that happened to include welcoming Tim into them too! There is room in this family for more than one person!”
Dick is breathing harshly and his skin is itching for a fight but he won't be the first to move. If Jason attacks, then it's open season – until then, Dick will be the big brother Jason clearly doesn't want to be – or doesn't know how to – and keep their fight verbal only.
“Yeah, exactly.” Jason crosses his arms over his armoured chest, glaring. He's also blatantly ignoring any words Dick uses to try to be reasonable, since he fails to acknowledge his latter argument. “If it'd been you or Bruce or Alfred, I wouldn't have hesitated. That fucker would have been six feet under before your bodies were cold. And I sure as shit wouldn't have picked the next idiot I saw off the street and made them Nightwing or Batman or Agent A.”
Dick narrows his eyes at the ‘idiot’ comment and rolls his shoulders.
“Hate to break it to you, Jason, but not everyone shows their love or grief in the same way. You can't expect everyone to act how the idealised version of themselves that you have in your head would. We each dealt with it our own way. Or, to put it the way you did, I'm sorry our grief didn't manifest itself in a way that pleases you . I promise I'll become a murderer the next time you die.”
It's cruel and it's mean and it's angry, but Dick can't help it. If Jason had come home as soon as he could, if he had been willing to hear them out before casting judgement on how they handled his death, if he hadn't gone after Tim in a senseless macho-man showdown that proved absolutely nothing aside from how pathetic it is for a fully grown, League of Assassins-trained man to face off against a competent but still growing fifteen year old vigilante , then Dick would be nicer now. He would have welcomed Jason back with open arms, would have felt for him, cried for him. But all of his empathy went out the window when Tim got his first scratch at Jason's hands.
Tim is his Robin, in a way that Jason, sadly, never was. Bruce made sure of that when he gave up Dick's legacy to a random kid he hadn't even met without even asking. Tim, though… Tim, he chose. Eventually. He trained him and looked out for him, patrolled with him, taught him everything he knew and then some. And maybe it isn't fair that Tim got what Jason never did, but Dick can't turn back time and fix anything. He had every intention of being a good brother to Jason before Ethiopia took it away. If Dick spent every second of his life drowning in his regrets, he'd be long dead by now.
This time, Jason responds with a gun instead of his words. Dick manages to twist out of the way enough that it only grazes him, instead of impacting a limb, and he, again, doesn't recognise the man in front of him. Unkindly, Dick thinks that if he died, he'd rather stay dead than come back as such a bitter, violent version of himself.
With Jason's offered opening, Dick clicks his mouth shut, pushing back all the words he still wants to hurl at his oldest younger brother, and throws himself into the fight. They're evenly matched, despite their differences in build, weapons, and skills, but Dick is using his anger to focus him, to sharpen his attention and awareness, letting his protectiveness over Tim drive him through every flip, punch, and kick, until he finally ends the fight by jabbing his escrima sticks in between Jason's ribs and bringing him down to his knees.
They're both bruised and bloody. Dick stands over Jason, panting, glaring still, and spits out some blood onto the roof before looking back at his brother.
“If you want to fight someone, pick me or B. Otherwise, stay the fuck away from Tim and see to your territory, since you're so protective of it. Find me when you're ready to actually listen to what I have to say. Until then, make sure Red Hood and Robin never cross paths on patrol.”
Dick turns around and limps his way to the edge of the roof, keeping his senses focused on the kneeling man behind him to make sure Jason won't stab him in the back – figuratively or literally, he isn't really sure – and then fires off his grapple. His battered muscles protest the pull of gravity as he flies away, but he ignores it as he's ignored it before. Tim is probably ready to break B's curfew to go tearing through the city looking for Dick after he turned off his comm as soon as he ran into Jason, so he has to hurry up and get back to the Cave. The thought of his little brother warms Dick up, despite the biting chill of the night air against his exposed skin, and Dick lets a smile curl his lips upwards, ignoring the complicated tangle of emotions in his gut every time he thinks about Jason.
For now, he's simply looking forward to Tim helping Alfred patch up his wounds, the worried-but-pretending-not-to-be-worried scolding Tim will undoubtedly unleash upon him, and then the warm cup of hot chocolate he'll share with his baby brother while Tim cuddles into his side and shows him Minecraft videos on YouTube until they fall asleep.
Now that's a much better way of looking at things for tonight. Everything bad will still be there in the morning, waiting for him to tackle a problem at a time. Until then, he has more important things to focus on.