Chapter Text
When Tim wakes up, he’s almost immediately dragged into another panic attack by the overwhelming emotions flooding through his pack bonds. He’s nauseous from Dick’s anxiety and the brutal crush of the inadequacy he’s radiating, his entire body is cold and trembling with the shock of J — of Jason’s — grief and rejection and pain and abandonment. The only respite he can find is the warm, yet slightly distant brush of Alfred’s gentle concern. The old beta has always been a little further removed from his instincts than the rest of them, but Tim scrabbles desperately at their bond and yanks.
It’s maybe thirty seconds later that the butler is rushing into the room Tim is in — his room in the manor, he realizes belatedly — and is brushing the hair out of his eyes as he gasps and sobs. Tim grabs at his arm and desperately clutches it.
Behind him, there’s quick footsteps in the hall and then Dick bursts into the room as well.
“You have to find him, please Alfred! It’s—J is Jason. Run the blood in the cave, it’ll prove I’m right. I’m right, I promise, I figured it out just now in the cave, but I can prove it this time, okay?”
He’s desperate. He needs them to believe him this time, to have faith in his ability as a detective, as a vigilante, as a member of their family.
If they don’t believe him, if they don’t trust him, he thinks he’s going to break apart entirely.
*******
Taking on the mantle of Batman had proven, time after time, to have been among the worst decisions Dick has made in his entire life.
Bruce died, and the pack, their family, started to fall apart. Damian and Tim weren’t getting along, Damian was drifting closer and closer to returning to the League of Assassins, and Dick needed something to make him stay. He handed over Robin to Damian, meaning to speak with Tim the next day to offer him the mantle of Nightwing. Tim had grown up, and he wanted to see him take on the mantle of an adult hero.
But the entire situation got derailed by Damian’s ego. And in response, before Dick could explain, Tim had blocked his pack bonds and ran, ditching his phone and trackers, only to turn up in Iran after having been held captive by the League of Assassins. Dick’s skin crawled when had Tim described the way that Ra’s had taken interest in Tim’s abilities and intelligence.
And then there’s the omega that he’d brought home.
By Tim’s own admission, a volatile and deadly individual who’d slaughtered dozens of assassins during their escape. But also one who’d adopted Tim under his care and protected him as best he could.
Deep in his instincts, the omega had fixated on Dick with an almost childlike intensity, trampling on all the boundaries one would normally maintain between two adults, especially an omega to a strange alpha. Immediately possessive of Dick in a way that grated on his nerves, smearing his scent all over him any chance he got while radiating pleased omega, it triggered memories he’d much rather leave buried.
But the soft pack calls and chirps pulled at his gut, reminding him of times when a young Jason had looked up to him like he hung the moon, the way his scent would spike in surprised joy when Dick had scent marked him, how the touch-starved pup would lean in and purr when Dick would tuck him under his arm during movie nights at the manor.
And these memories hurt, too, even more so than the negative ones.
Despite the difference in size, in eye color and build and demeanor, he couldn’t look at the omega without something in him seeing his little brother who died. Every time Tim said the name he’d assigned the omega, Dick’s pulse would jump and he’d imagine for a split second that Tim was talking to Jay instead, that Bruce would be sitting in the chair at the computer, that Damian would join in and Alfred would be there and that everything was okay. Everything was good.
And he really, truly couldn’t handle that on top of everything else. Not when he desperately needed to hold himself together in order to keep what remained of their pack from falling apart.
There was an easy solution — keeping his distance from J, ducking away and flashing his teeth in warning when he tried to scent mark Dick, ignoring the frustration that poured from J’s scent when Dick blatantly blew off him offering his neck in a gesture of deference.
Eventually, he can’t put up with it any longer, hiding out in the manor under the excuse of needing to spend some time with Damian.
But duty calls, and Dick has to head back down to the cave for patrol.
When J pins him to the wall, he stiffens, but when the omega bares his teeth and snarls at Dick, his instincts kick in.
He realizes belatedly that he didn’t have to go for the second or third hit, when J just reels back and starts keening this horrible, wounded noise, that shoving J back probably would have been plenty.
And then J is taking off and Tim is dropping rapidly into one of the worst panic attacks Dick has ever seen. There’s no thinking — if the decision is between pursuing the near-stranger down the tunnels to apologize or being there for his brother, he will always put his brother first.
******
Dick believes Tim. He was right about Bruce, after all. But they still scrape the dried blood from the cave floor and run DNA analysis, and when the results pop up on the screen indicating that the sample belongs to one deceased Jason Peter Todd-Wayne, Dick drops into the chair, burying his head in his hands.
In the background, he hears Tim explaining in a scratchy voice all the little details he’d noticed that had eventually piled up. Tim tells him that there’s been no sign of him on any of the cameras around the manor.
Tim catches Barbara up on what happened and loops her in on the search. Batman hits the streets with Robin to search for Jason, while Tim extends the search digitally into surveillance systems beyond Gotham.
And in the middle of it all, after Dick and Damian are back from patrol and Tim is on his third day of no sleep, the comm system of the Batcomputer goes off and Clark’s smiling face fills the screen.
“We got Bruce,” He tells them, “Thanks to you, Tim. He’s too weak to leave the Watchtower yet, but he would like you all to come up as soon as possible.”
Dick and Tim exchange glances, and Clark, always the keen-eyed reporter, furrows his brow at the somber mood in the room.
“What’s going on, Dick?” He demands.
“I’ll tell you and Bruce together when we arrive, Clark. I really don’t think I can explain it more than once.”
******
Bruce doesn’t take it well.
It takes him a week get back on his feet, still far too thin and suffering from the prolonged malnutrition of his trip through the timestream. Against medical advice, he’s back in Gotham and donning a modified Batsuit, hitting the streets with a single-minded focus on finding Jason.
Tim… he’s been on the other side of feeling rejected by Dick, very recently even. But it hadn’t been anywhere near as final, as violent, as what had happened between Dick and Jason. And he still had the pack bond to fall back on, the knowledge that, while Dick hadn’t wanted him as Robin, he’d still wanted Tim as family.
A new problem arises when Tim hesitantly brings up their pack bonds over dinner. They’d broken when Bruce had “died”, and without being renewed with a bonding bite, they wouldn’t come back on their own.
In most cases, a new pack bond is formed by the alpha of a pack, and when the bite is placed by the pack’s alpha, the other members of the pack will automatically form pack bonds with the new member.
Bruce refuses. Without knowing where Jason is at, what he’s up to, or how exactly their non-traditional bond will be affected by Bruce renewing the pack bond with Tim, it’s risky, and he refuses to put them both in danger.
Tim admits quietly that he had to partially muffle the bond. At first, he’d tried to use the constant, uncontrolled flood of emotions that poured through it to try to narrow down where Jason might be, projecting back his own as reassurance that he was still there. But every time, Jason ended up spiraling at some point or another, and it would drag Tim into a panic attack. It just wasn’t sustainable.
Bruce goes very quiet after that conversation, and it takes Tim nearly a week to bring up the pack bonds again, this time approaching Bruce while he’s alone at the computer in the cave.
“I spoke with Leslie today. Bruce, we need to renew the pack bonds. She suspects that biting me will rekindle Jason’s bond with the pack, since there’d still be old neuropathways present between him, you, Dick, and Alfred. She says that multiple pack bonds, rather than just one, will help stabilize him and bring him out of the feral state he’s in. He improved after I bonded him, he was easier to communicate with. But he’s not going to get any further than he is now by us waiting around doing nothing. I know there’s a risk involved that it might incapacitate Jason at a bad time, but I think it’s worth it to give him a chance to heal.”
Bruce leans back into his chair, settling in with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Alright, Tim. The next time he’s calm, come find me and I’ll do it.” He says after a long pause. And then, “I haven’t been delaying our pack bond because of anything you did, Tim. I just was concerned that it might be damaging to you and Jason both due to the circumstances of the bond between you. You’ve done a good job while I’ve been gone, chum. You found me, and you found Jason, despite all odds. I’m proud of you.” And then Bruce is standing up and opening his arms, drawing Tim in for a hug and holding him close. “Just remember to take time to find yourself, too.”
Tim is shocked into stillness at the uncharacteristically open affection and emotional intelligence from Bruce, but after a moment of hesitation, he sinks into it, returning the hug.
“Your trip through the time stream must have knocked something loose,” Tim jokes weakly, “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
*******
J doesn’t remember much of the time after leaving the cave, but he knows he’s not in Gotham anymore. Exhausted and shivering, drenched from the rain, he’d crawled into an empty train car and woke up an unknown time later in another place entirely.
He ends up on the streets, dressed in baggy sweatpants and a red hoodie that he keeps drawn up around his face constantly to help hide the mask — he’s found that it draws a lot of attention very quickly. He sleeps on the fifth floor of an abandoned office building during the day and only goes out at night. He breaks into stores to steal when he’s hungry, snarls and bristles when someone gets too close to him on the streets, and avoids everyone as best he can.
He can sense Tim through their bond, the pup occasionally trying to reach out to him, but he steadfastly ignores it. He’s not angry with Tim, but he needs some space.
When he saw Batman, his first thought was that his dad had finally come back. He wasn’t sure where his dad had been during the days he’d been in the cave. But when he realized that it was Dick in the suit, something in him had cracked open. Dick never wanted to be Batman, never wanted to be the head alpha of the pack. He wouldn’t be wearing the cowl if their dad was alive.
Which means that their dad is dead, and Dick had rejected J from the pack. As much as he wants to stay with Tim, to follow the scents upstairs to check on the other missing members of the pack, he can’t. Dick is the leader of the pack, and therefore his rejection of J is final.
J finds himself spending day after day after day listening to the voices from the streets below from the well-lit corner office he’d started to den in, trying to piece together what they are saying. His inability to understand speech has become a massive hindrance now that he’s alone. He’s picking it back up slowly, bit by bit, mouthing the words to himself as he lays on the floor in the path of a beam of sunlight that warms his bones and glows behind his closed eyelids.
He feels calm for the first time in a while, dozing there in the sun. He’s sleepy, but fights to keep awake and continue enjoying the warmth radiating through him.
And then there’s an overwhelming, agonizing pressure in his skull, like someone dropped a fucking cement block on him, and J is screaming and screaming and screaming, grabbing at his head and clawing in a desperate attempt to make it stop, before he loses consciousness.
Waking up is a bit of a surprise. J is in agonizing pain, and any movement makes him dizzy and disoriented. His head is so loud, and something feels different.
He barely manages to roll onto his side in time to vomit all over the carpet, casually noting the fact that his sun beam is long gone and the room is once again dark, which means he’s been laying here passed out for at least six hours. He continues to lay there without attempting to get up — what’s a few minutes longer? His pulse is pounding in his ears, and he’s slowly starting to make sense of the mess of noise in his head as being bonds, but they’re… they’re not right.
They feel misaligned and painful, like a broken bone that healed without a splint, and then got infected and left to rot.
Jason desperately tries to block them out to give himself room to think through the flood of overlapping panic and concern and JASON-Jason-jasonjasonjason-Jay, but suddenly there’s a voice that cuts through it all.
“Hey, buddy. Looks like you’re having a rough day.”
J throws himself to the side on instinct as alarm jolts through him, grabbing a stapler that had fallen onto the ground and flinging it in the direction the voice had come from. He hears a yelp as he rolls to his feet, and when he faces the intruder, he catches the tail end of the figure ducking neatly under his projectile.
J staggers, his entire body protesting the sudden motion and his head spinning, but manages to stay on his feet long enough to throw himself at the intruder, tackling him with a growl.
“Woah, hey hold on!” The man grunts as J punches him in the gut, but manages to block and redirect J’s next strike, grabbing him and getting control of his arm. J is sloppy with pain and dizziness and the distraction of whatever the fuck the mess of feelings and emotions being projected at him through these new bonds are.
J jabs an elbow up into the intruder’s ribs, breaking free of the grip on his arm. They trade a few more blows, mostly J striking and being redirected, before things devolve and they end up grappling with each other on the floor. The man’s hat gets knocked off when they hit the ground, and is quickly crushed under their bodies. He makes an offended noise in response to that.
J is… not at his best. Rolling around on the ground while you feel like you’re going to throw up and your head is going to explode at the same time is extremely unpleasant. He gets the feeling the other man is going easy on him, like they’re play fighting rather than J being a serious threat, which only serves to irritate him further. He growls, and eventually manages to get them flipped so he’s straddling the shorter man, pinning his wrists together with one hand and the other fisted in the front of the red vest he’s wearing.
He feels a surge of dizziness, and if his grip shifts and his hand speeds into something more akin to propping himself up on the other’s chest than holding him down, he would never admit it.
The man smirks up at him when he meets his gaze, like he knows exactly what J is thinking. His red hair long and messy and falling loose around his face. J is pissed off about that, for some reason.
They both evaluate the other for a long moment, J breathing in the thick, amused, and slightly interested scent of the alpha underneath him. It prompts him to suddenly notice the nature of their positions and flush. He shifts off of the other man’s torso, flopping over to sprawl on his back next to him instead. Clearly he’s not a threat, and if J stays upright any longer, he’s going to throw up.
They lay there, catching their breath from the impromptu fight that felt more like a spar, before the intruder finally speaks up again.
“The name’s Arsenal. That mask looks really unpleasant, dude, and it’s cutting into your face. I’ve got some tools back at a safe house that I could use to take it off. I can bring ‘em back here if you’d like.”
J squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus through the agony in his head. Every single emotion or thought that comes through the bonds is accompanied by an excruciating pain that makes him want to gag.
Eventually, he gives up and projects as hard as he can shut up-shut UP-SHUT UP down each of the rotten bonds, before he pulls up his mental shields to block out the resulting flood of shock and concern and offense from them. He just needs a bit to work through the pain in his skull and remember what the stranger — Arsenal — just offered.
After what’s probably way too long, he manages to surprise himself.
“Yeah,” J says, voice hoarse from disuse. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
J ends up following Arsenal back to the safe house instead, the offer of a hot shower and a meal and some aspirin for his head too temping to resist.
The muzzle comes off for the first time in years, and J is… Jason is ready to figure out what that means for him. Maybe with time, Dick will forgive him for whatever it was he did.
Arsenal kicks the muzzle across the ground, and then tosses it into the bin of scrap metal, his lips twisted in disgust at the sight of the thing.
J prods at the pack bonds, and flinches at the agony that it triggers. Yeah, something is really fucked up with those. Probably has to do with Dick’s rejection, he thinks. He’s really not sure why they came back, let alone came back so wrong.
He decides to leave them blocked. Even Tim’s. At least that way, he doesn’t have to deal with feeling bonds from pack members who hate him — and a kid who’s stuck in the middle of it.