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evergreen ever sun ever moon
Jason dives, knocking Tim to the grimy sidewalk as a jagged iron stake embeds itself in the brickwork directly behind them, just past where Tim’s chest had been. “Where’s your fucking head?” Jason shouts, smacking Tim in the shoulder as he rolls to his feet, crouched and ready to move. It takes Tim a breath longer to come up, and he’s panting when he does, like he’s been at this for hours. But it’s nine p.m., and this is the first fight of the night.
The machine fires again with a pneumatic crunch and Jason skips out of the way, up the concrete steps of the Pentecostal church they’re brawling in front of. They’re right on the edge of Robbinsville, Frank Street Station sunk into the sidewalk to the north and a collection of empty nail salons and check-cashing joints to the south. The civilians have fled. A cop car flashes abandoned in the middle of the street, hood transfixed by three of the iron stakes, windshield shattered. The cops inside retreated all the way down the block when they realized their bullets weren’t helping, and backup never showed up, thanks to Oracle’s new experimental policy of throttling the GCPD band on threats too dirty for police.
Threats like this machine. Or is it a robot? Or is it a motorized suit closed up around an inner pilot? It’s nine feet tall at least, more or less humanoid in shape, encased in cables and metal plating. It’s not agile, but it’s fast, and the impact of its swinging arms has been enough to punch craters in the sidewalk and the walls of the church. At least the stake missiles seem to take several seconds to reload.
They need every second of grace time. Several of Tim’s shuriken lodge in the welded seams of the machine’s armor and explode, throwing the machine back several feet and encasing it in gray smoke. Tim’s shadow cuts through the haze, circling out of the machine’s line of perception, and Jason kicks off the church’s handrail to gain height and throws his full weight at the machine’s domed head, driving his elbow down into what he hopes is a weak point. The shock of the impact through his suit’s armor and padding immediately numbs his whole right arm, so in the same second he rips his knife out of his belt with his left hand and slashes across a neck cable, which does nothing.
The machine twists away, faster than should be possible in something so heavy, and Jason has to duck and throw himself out of range of the crushing limbs. But he sees Tim vaulting up behind the machine, bo staff aimed down, and Tim lights up the electrified tip as soon as it digs into a lip of the machine’s armor. Buzzing waves of blue sparks radiate from the machine’s neck, and the whole machine judders, arms frozen in midair. But the charge on Tim’s staff isn’t meant to last, and the moment the pulse ends, the arms swipe up and Tim has to spring away. He twists in midair and lands on his feet, and then—for some reason, as if he’s misjudged his torque—he stumbles sideways by two paces. Jason sees Tim heave in a breath. A small warning bell begins ringing in the back of Jason’s brain.
Jason jerks below another flying spike and unloads the entire clip of his KelTec in a lightning-fast series of precision shots, aiming for any strange place on the machine’s armor, any divot, any twisted cable or welded seam. He has as much luck as the cops did, the bullets crushing flat and pinging away on the metal. Or not metal, Jason supposes, because no human metal could stand up against what he and Tim have been dishing out. He ticks off a list in his head: magic, aliens, chemical mutations. Illusions or hallucinations? But Jason flexes his right arm, which is still aching and a little numb. That’s no hallucination.
Another round of Tim’s explosives erupts on the machine’s back, and the machine rounds on Tim. But Tim leaps up to smack the machine across the face with his bo staff and flips back down, sticking his landing this time, and then he’s off like a greyhound, racing up the street as the machine abandons Jason and builds up speed in pursuit. “Fucking hell,” Jason grunts, throwing himself after them, shoving his body faster.
Tim disappears down the stairs to the subway. The machine is so large it has to slow its pursuit to push down the narrow descending stairwell, which is the only thing that allows Jason to catch up in time to watch it aiming the spike launcher at Tim’s moving back—Tim, who’s quick as grease but is, insanely, running in a straight line, a target so easy Jason could have picked him off with a pebble and a slingshot. In desperation Jason throws his whole body against the machine’s side with a shout, knocking it sideways just enough that its aim throws wide and the iron bolt whistles through the air several feet from Tim’s back. Jason takes the machine’s blunt arm directly to his gut for his trouble, a blow that throws him through the air and back against the subway stairs.
Tim vaults the ticket barriers and keeps running, and the machine crashes through right after him. Jason groans and heaves to his feet, right back up to top speed, never mind the pain in his gut and back. Tim’s on the platform, jumping back from the blows the machine is smashing down, and then Tim shoots a line and swings up into the cables above the tracks. The machine swipes after him and misses, and then lines up to aim another bolt. “Third rail!” Tim yells, and sure, why not, nothing else has worked. Jason reaches the machine in a second and immediately throws himself down onto his hands on the platform, shoving up into a two-legged kick he sinks into the machine’s back with as much power as he can possibly release, and it’s almost not enough, the machine almost doesn’t go down, but it stumbles forward one step, two, and the third is over the open air of the empty tracks.
The machine topples into the tracks, so big it can’t miss any of the rails below. The electrocution is immediate, sparks flying across the machine’s metal surface, the amperes so enormous that the machine jerks for a moment and then lies still while the subway’s safety breakers clamp down on the emergency.
Jason sighs in relief. He shoves the ball of his fist into the body armor over his gut, massaging into the pulsing ache of the blow he took on the stairs. “Well, that was a mess,” he says, crouching on the edge of the platform to peer down. “You think it’s dead?”
“I hope so,” Tim says from the cables overhead. He still sounds out of breath.
“Let’s see if it’s playing possum,” Jason says. He pulls the Glock out of his thigh holster and fires down: the machine’s head, its back. He’s expecting the bullets to ping right off again the way they’ve been doing all night, but they don’t. They sink straight through the metal, tearing the surface of the machine’s armor like rocks through wet paper. “What the hell,” Jason says.
Tim drops to hang from his hands from the cables, then swings himself into a flip. He lands heavily on the edge of the platform and walks away toward the empty guard booth.
“And what the fuck is wrong with you,” Jason calls after him. Tim pretends to be too absorbed in picking the booth’s lock to hear him. Jason snorts, annoyed. “Are you hurt or something?” Tim hadn’t seemed hurt last night, when he’d trailed Jason all the way back to Jason’s latest safehouse without Jason even noticing, not until Tim slipped onto the fire escape behind him just as he was canceling the window alarm, scaring the crap out of him. Tim was lucky Jason hadn’t just shot him on reflex. But then Tim ducked past Jason through the window and started stripping out of his costume on his way to the bedroom, so Jason’s jumping heart didn’t slow down for at least a half hour, maybe forty minutes. “Are you getting sick?” Jason asks instead, which would be just perfect. If Tim’s got the flu, that means Jason’s right behind him.
“I’m fine,” Tim snaps. He gets the door open and picks up the booth’s corded phone. His voice comes muffled through the booth’s bulletproof glass. “This is Frank Street Station, emergency, repeat, emergency, divert all northbound trains, obstacle on the tracks.” He listens to whatever voice is on the other end of the line. “Situation is under control. Estimated time until track cleared: fifteen minutes.” He hangs up without waiting for a reply and comes to join Jason, both of them looking down at the machine. “Something’s happening to it,” Tim says. “A chemical reaction?”
“Fuck if I know,” Jason says. “How are we supposed to get it off the tracks? That thing has to weigh eight hundred, nine hundred pounds.”
“Or not,” Tim says, almost to himself, and drops down onto the tracks next to it. The breakers have tripped and Tim’s keeping his feet off the tracks entirely anyway, on the safe flooring, but Jason still immediately leaps down after him. He’s seen Tim stumble tonight. He’s seen Tim make more than one fatal mistake.
“You know what this thing is?” Jason asks. There had been no time to ask, before. Jason had been running patrol at the edge of Crime Alley, electrically aware of Tim stalking him from street to street, never coming close, only a suggestion of cape and movement at the very reaches of his vision. A series of crashes and some general screaming had pointed the way into Robbinsville, and Jason had sailed into the fight, dancing with the machine alone for about half a minute before Tim had appeared at his side like smoke going solid.
“It’s one of mine,” Tim says. “A case I’m on. I didn’t know they were aggressive.”
“Right, because it looks about as tame as a labrador,” Jason says, surveying the machine’s wicked plating and armored limbs.
“Not everything big is a threat,” Tim says. He unlatches his cape and wraps it around his gloves before he touches the machine, in case there still is a live current, but when he gets his hands below the machine's shoulder and lifts up, the entire shoulder comes away in his grip like hot pizza lifted out of a pie, strings of wet yuck trailing away like melted cheese. It’s certainly not made of metal anymore.
“That is vile,” Jason says.
Tim ignores him. “I’m taking samples,” he says. “Start piling it up onto the platform. No danger of electrocution.”
“I’d rather be zapped than touch that mess,” Jason says, but he goes to work anyway while Tim loads bits of the decomposing machine into baggies and stoppered tubes. It’s warmer down here than at ground level, where the late-September wind keeps blowing cold and then hot and then cold again, and Jason’s keyed up and sweaty. At first the pieces come away in manageable chunks, but as the minutes tick by, they turn more and more to a kind of gloopy sludge. Jason’s eventually shoveling it with his palms like he’s mucking out a stable by hand. At least it has almost no smell. “Really, though. What the fuck,” he says, resuming his attack while Tim stows his samples and joins him clearing the tracks. “What was that?”
“What was what,” Tim says, voice flat, emptying his hands on the platform and coming back for more.
“Fuck you,” Jason says. “You were out here like an amateur. I saved your ass on dumb shit, easy shit—”
“I’m fine, Hood,” Tim says, face locked into that infuriating emotionless expression he does so well, like an ice sculpture or an android.
“You could have died,” Jason says, flicking machine gunk off his gloves and balling his hands into fists.
“I could die any night,” Tim says calmly. “That’s the business we’re in. Oh, look at that.” At their feet, the rest of the machine is going completely liquid, draining off the tracks and then drying up into nothing. Tim kneels down and wipes his fingers over the metal of the running rail, then examines his glove. He pulls his samples out of his belt, but it seems the bags and tubes are now empty.
“We did all that for fucking nothing?” Jason says, looking at the pile of disgusting machine gunk on the platform, which is now just a puddle of liquid disappearing into thin air.
Tim boosts himself up onto the platform and heads for the exit. “I need to file a report,” he says, reattaching his cape as he goes.
“You need to take some antibiotics,” Jason says, but he doesn’t try to chase him down. If Tim wants to be an asshole about it, fine, he can be an asshole. “No thank you?” he calls after Tim’s disappearing boots.
“Eat shit,” Tim calls back, and Jason grins. That’s much better.
***
FROM: UNKNOWN
cn u just come deal w him
FROM: UNKNOWN
im 4 real gonna kill him
FROM: UNKNOWN
or myself
FROM: UNKNOWN
srsly
Jason frowns down at his phone, the text messages coming in on top of the news app he’s scrolling in between bites of spaghetti. He’s fresh from a shower, sweatpants on, his uniform folded up on the stack of stained and blood-spattered suits waiting to be cleaned. It’s four in the morning, at least thirty hours since the fight in the subway. He hasn’t heard from Tim since.
Who is this, he types out.
FROM: UNKNOWN
its S
FROM: UNKNOWN
obvsly
Jason has no idea what’s obvious about Stephanie Brown having the number of his latest burner phone, but at least it clears up the mystery of who she’s talking about. Jason hasn’t ever had much to do with Stephanie himself, not outside of uniform, but he knows she and Tim are very good friends. Tim mentions her offhand, sometimes, and Jason’s seen the two of them together with masks off, walking the streets in the daylight. And at night, too, backing each other up in a kind of tag-teaming that sometimes looks more like playing than working a fight. Jason’s been putting himself in places where he can catch glimpses of Tim more often, lately. Just when he hasn’t seen Tim for a while, for a few days. There’s this awful rotten part of his gut that gets all twisted and ugly the longer it’s been, and it helps, for example, to stake out a corner of one of the high-rises around the WE building until he catches Tim coming in or out of the garage on his motorcycle. Just a quick look, a few seconds through his binoculars. It’s fine, he has it under control. And Tim’s a freak, anyway. He probably has cameras on Jason daily. Possibly for a variety of reasons.
What’s wrong with T? Jason types. Maybe he really is hurt or sick after all. And for Stephanie to contact him about it—Tim must have filled her in on what they’ve been getting up to for the past five months. Jason wonders what Tim told her, for her to think Jason’s is the right number to call. Maybe everyone else is busy.
FROM: UNKNOWN
hes on day 4
Jason adds her contact to his phone. Of what? he types.
FROM: S
no sleep
Jason glares down at his phone. Now he’s going to kill Tim. No wonder he was making mistakes in the field last night. It’s amazing he was even vertical.
Where are you? he types.
The three dots of Stephanie’s typing appear and disappear for several moments. Finally a message comes through.
FROM: S
sry idk what codes u kno. do u have a comm? line 7.
He does have a comm, and he wears it every time he’s in the field, although he nearly never connects to any of the open lines. He pulls the tiny earpiece back out of its charging case and secures the anchor. With a series of taps, he opens the frequency to line seven. “Batgirl, you there?” he says cautiously.
“Oh thank God,” Stephanie says. “I had no idea how to encode 4053 Giella Avenue in a way you would understand. Who knows what prehistoric codebooks Bruce was teaching you forty years ago. And you can call me Steph, I’ve secured this line.”
“It has not been forty years since—fine, okay, Giella Avenue,” Jason says, taken completely aback. “By the park?” That’s, what, the Diamond District? Jason runs his fingers through his still-wet hair and wonders whether he should suit up or not.
“Yeah, it’s the garden apartment, door’s around the back. It’s a Birds of Prey hideout, but Babs says the team’s mostly in Mexico this week. I just needed a spot out of the way. Dick always makes such a big deal out of this—”
“Dick doesn’t know?” Jason decides the uniform would be too much. He throws on a tee shirt and hoodie instead, although he keeps a gun strapped to the small of his back and a knife in his boot.
“Not this time,” Steph says. “It gets bad, and then Tim’s fine again. Well, I say fine. Functioning, maybe. And Dick tells Alfred and Bruce, sometimes. And none of us needs that.”
So Tim isn’t functioning right now. The sick ugly place in Jason’s gut goes sicker and uglier. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he says. He dumps the rest of the spaghetti into a tupperware and drops his phone into his pocket, and then he’s disabling and resetting his window alarms, the rancid smell of the building’s overflowing alley trash pile full in his nose.
He shrugs into his motorcycle jacket as he takes the stairs of the fire escape at a tight clip. At street level, Crime Alley is barely moving at this hour, and the only early-shifters on the sidewalk keep their heads down and plow right past him. “Do you have a plan for how I’m fixing this?” Jason asks. “Or am I meant to freestyle?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” Steph says. “Just make him take a damn sleeping pill. I tried dissolving one in his coffee, but he got wise to me. I don’t want to try holding him down.”
“I’ll hold him the fuck down,” Jason says venomously. Force a pill down his throat and let Steph sit on him until he passes out. Or something. “You haven’t let him go out like this,” he says, struck by the sudden horror of Tim solo against another machine.
“Please,” Steph scoffs. “Door code is alpha-two-ten-tango-tango. I’m not telling him you’re coming.”
“Super,” Jason says. “Red Hood out.” He taps the line dead and sets his fingerprint to the roll-up shutter hiding his bike, and then he’s on the road, out of Crime Alley and across the shallow, murky Sprang River, then down the long line of Robinson Park. Giella runs through Old Gotham and the Diamond District, and any apartment that close to the park is going to be nicer than anything Jason has on deck. The traffic is light this early, and there are entire streets empty of anything but parked cars and bits of trash chased by the wind.
As expected, 4053 is a creamy Art Deco masterpiece frosted with ornamental molding. The arched windows of the upper floors are edged in thick drapes, and the wrought-iron gates of Giella Gardens at the southern end of Robinson Park are visible only a block away. Jason leaves his bike on the street and circles around back for the ramp down to the sunken entrance to the garden apartment. He opens the front door as quietly as possible, easing himself inside. It’s dark in the entrance hall, and Stephanie Brown is waiting for him.
She’s in leggings and a white tank top, her masses of blond hair in an unbrushed mess around her shoulders. A long plaid sweater covers her hands. Jason doesn’t think he’s ever been near her out of costume. “The cavalry has arrived,” she says, but her smile wavers on her mouth, and Jason doesn’t have to know her to know she’s worried. “He’s in here,” Steph says, and Jason follows her through to the living room.
The light is low, just a single tall lamp in the corner and the harsh blue beams of an open laptop on the coffee table and a tablet in Tim’s lap on the couch. Tim’s finger drags slowly over the screen, scrolling. “Wonder Boy,” Steph calls softly, and Tim raises his head.
Jason sucks in a fast breath.
Tim looks like hell. His skin is clammy, grease-streaked, bloodless. His hair hangs limp around his puffy face, dark circles sandbagged under his eyes. He’s hunched on the couch in a kind of defensive knot, but his expression is vague and out of focus, like he’s not quite able to track what’s going on. “What the fuck,” Jason hisses to Steph.
She pats his arm. “Yeah,” she says. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s about eighty percent insomnia, twenty percent stubbornness. But I just lost ten rounds of the great Cloceptryn battle, so you’re up, stud.” She pulls an orange pill bottle from the pocket of her sweater and transfers it to the pocket of Jason’s sweats. “We can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this with him,” she says. She’s looking at Tim with a mixture of love and exasperation.
Tim blinks back at her, and then his gaze sharpens on Jason like he’s just now realizing there’s something unusual about his presence. “Stephanie,” Tim says, voice hard, although he doesn’t move, not even to set down the tablet.
“I told you there would be consequences,” Steph tells Tim. She nudges Jason and points to the passage opening out past the couch and a pair of armchairs. “Couple of bedrooms back there, bathroom, big kitchen in the very back. There’s tech and a gym in the basement. I’m going to run on the treadmill until I stop wondering if I can put him to sleep with a couple of good knocks to the head.” She shakes back her hair and makes to leave the room, but Jason catches her by the sleeve.
“You don’t even know me,” he says quietly. She doesn’t know him and she’s leaving Tim alone with him, in this state. Like handing a kitten to a dog on a chain. She’s got no proof that Jason would never—that he could never.
“No,” she agrees. “But Tim does.” She gives him a brief smile and disappears, and a moment later Jason hears her step descending the basement stairs. The room seems darker without her presence. Colder.
“You didn’t need to come,” Tim says from the couch. He’s watching Jason, but then his gaze unfocuses again and drifts back down to his tablet. There are four coffee mugs on the table next to the laptop.
“No, I shouldn’t need to come,” Jason says. “You should be listening to your blond den mother.”
“I’m fine,” Tim says.
“Oh yeah? You’re good to go? Prove it. Dodge this.” Jason pulls his motorcycle keys from his pocket and lobs them underhand at Tim’s head. It’s an easy angle, obvious, the flightpath telegraphed from the set of his shoulder and motion of his arm. A five-year-old could duck in time. But Tim’s so sluggish he clues in a full second after he should have, his body spasming in an attempt to react, and the keys thump him in the shoulder before he can pull far enough away. “Yeah, that was great,” Jason says, his jaw stiff, his adrenaline climbing. He’s still just barely in the room, right in the doorway to the entrance hall where Steph left him. Tim is like a live bomb on the couch.
Tim picks the keys out of his lap and sets them on the coffee table, and then he actually takes a pull from one of the coffee mugs. “Was that fun for you?” Tim asks. His hands shake, just the slightest bit.
“I thought you were supposed to be the smart one,” Jason says. “Boiling your brain like this, Jesus fuck. What about the long-term damage, huh? You’re telling me you’re not fucking yourself up good?”
At least Tim finally flips the tablet dark. He sets it beside himself on the couch and leans back, audibly cracking his spine. “I can handle it,” he says. “I have time.”
“Before what?” Jason says.
“Before the hallucinations start,” Tim says, and Jason’s moving, Jason’s across the room. He kicks the coffee table away and goes down on his knees.
“You piece of shit,” Jason mutters, one hand around the back of Tim’s neck, gripping hard. “You fucking piece of shit.”
This close, Jason can see the spiderweb of dilated blood vessels in Tim’s eyes, how there’s even something wrong about his mouth. The room is cold, but Tim has sweated through his tee shirt. It’s sticking to his body, damp and hot when Jason puts his other hand on Tim’s ribs. Jason’s threat response is up so high he can feel it in his throat, in the backs of his teeth. “Anyone could kill you right now,” he tells Tim, the words grating out of him. He jerks Tim’s neck. “I could kill you right now.”
Tim laughs, a single, exhausted huff of air, and then Tim leans forward and kisses him. His lips are dry, barely there against Jason’s, but then suddenly Tim pushes deeper, faster, his breath stuttering. He closes his fists in the folds of Jason’s jacket. Jason holds him tight, strokes up his side, and then gets a hand flat on his chest and shoves him back hard against the couch. “Take the fucking pill,” Jason says.
Tim sags against the cushions. He pushes the limp hair back from his face with both hands. “Fine,” he says. “Give it to me.” He squeezes his eyes closed.
Jason knocks one of the white gelatin capsules into his palm, and Tim takes it with another swig of coffee from the only mug still standing—the rest are tipped and scattered, spilled across the rug from the force of Jason’s boot. The fight’s gone out of Tim, which scares Jason worse than anything. He doesn’t know what to do with Tim now. Leaving him in one of the bedrooms feels wrong, or maybe dangerous. “Let’s go downstairs,” he says instead, and pulls Tim off the couch with one hand.
Tim can walk on his own, and he lets Jason shepherd him out of the living room and into the hallway, where a chipped white door is swung open to the descending basement steps. Jason keeps a hand out as he follows Tim down, ready to yank him back by the collar of his shirt if he stumbles. All the lights are on downstairs, harsh after the shadows of the living room. Steph is pounding the treadmill at a high setting, her sweater in a heap on the ground beside her, and she pulls out her earbuds when she sees them.
“I took the Cloceptryn,” Tim tells her.
“Brave boy,” she says, but it’s unclear if she’s talking to Tim or Jason. “Why don’t you go lie down on the mat? Jason is going to do some yoga.”
“Fuck your yoga,” Jason says. As if any of this is okay, normal. Tim looks eight times worse under the basement fluorescents. Like he should be in an ICU.
“Go on, Tim,” Steph says, ignoring him. “I’m going to fill Jason in on our robot case, and you can make sure I’m not missing any details.” Even in this state Tim must be able to see how obvious she’s being, but he only turns and does what he’s told. A huge training mat eats up most of the open floorspace, hung overhead with bars and rings. Tim lies down right on its very edge, curled on his side, one arm under his head.
The basement is big and crowded, lined in panels of thick soundproofing foam. A bank of computers, a counter set with a sink and some expensive lab equipment, and rows of freestanding metal cabinets fill out three of the four walls, most of it cut within easy reach of a wheelchair user. The final wall holds gym equipment and an elevator that must spit out in the kitchen. Everything has a worn and lived-in feel, and Jason hopes Steph was right about the Birds being out of the country. He feels like he’s a kid in somebody else’s house.
Steph slows her treadmill to a walking pace. “So, these robots,” she begins determinedly, and Jason submits to the nightmare and follows Tim to the mat. But fuck if he’s going to aim for any kind of inner tranquility through stretching. He pulls off his motorcycle jacket and drops it over Tim’s small form before throwing himself into quick pushups, burning his high-strung energy. “Tim told me about the Frank Street fight,” Steph continues. “That’s the fourth time we’ve seen them, but I guess only the first time in person. The first three were on camera feeds. One in Burnley, two all the way down in Chinatown. Nighttime. Those three weren’t trying to swing at anyone—it was all property damage. They stepped out of the air and started busting up the sidewalks.”
Jason locks himself into a plank. “Stepped out of the air?” he repeats.
“I know, like real CGI shit. I mean one second the feed’s clean, the next it’s got a robot in it. The files are real freaky.”
“Portals,” Tim murmurs, the word slurred in his mouth.
“Or it could be literally anything else,” Steph says, flipping her hand in derision. “He’s been on a portals kick lately,” she tells Jason. “Everything is portals until proven otherwise.”
“Portals,” Tim slurs again, and Steph laughs.
“Alright, alright. It could be portals, what do I know. Go to sleep, sweetheart.”
Jason comes out of his plank feeling awkward and unneeded in the weight of the old and layered bond between Steph and Tim. Steph is lifting the hair from her neck and smiling at Tim fondly. She catches Jason’s eyes on her and then suddenly Jason’s included in it—she’s looking at him like that, too, like he’s on the inside of whatever this thing is. It feels so unexpectedly good that Jason’s stomach goes even more sick and twisty. “Busting sidewalks?” he says, dropping back into pushups so he can stare down at the gray fabric of the mat.
“Yeah, all three times,” Steph says. “They aimed those iron rod launchers down to break up the cement and then smashed the rest up by hand, and then they started pulling up pipes. It was down at the base of the buildings. I guess the pipes are right under the sidewalk there, kind of shallow. Big long pieces, ripped right out of their lines. Water spraying everywhere. They left the gas lines alone.”
“Lead pipes?” Jason asks. He boosts up into a handstand and does a set of bodyweight raises, his hoodie and shirt falling down around his chest.
“It’s Gotham and they’re old buildings, so I’d say so,” Steph says. “Why, does that make a difference? You think they’re after lead?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” Jason says. “If I were going after lead, that’s not a bad way to do it. This country dumped most of it by the seventies, but pipes were too pricey to replace. Government weighed cancer against dollar signs, and guess which one lost.”
“I’ll add it to our list of theories. They’re not keeping the pipes, though. They yank a bunch out and toss them, and then they step into the air again. Tim thinks they’re digging for something beneath the pipes, something they haven’t found yet. Like maybe they’re working off a dodgy map.”
Jason lowers down again and rolls over for crunches, holding his back off the mat to keep from knocking the gun still strapped to him. “But they didn’t threaten anyone. The first three.”
“No, not at all. There were civilians around, though not for long, obviously. But no one tried to engage, those other three times. Tim thinks it was the cops that riled the fourth one up.”
“It didn’t seem to care about pipes by the time we got there,” Jason says.
“Nope,” Steph agrees. “It even gave chase. I wonder who’s at the controls of these things. Someone has to be.”
“I thought it was some kind of machine,” Jason says, “but maybe they’re sentient. Maybe that’s what lifeforms look like wherever they come from.”
Steph hums. “Well, I sure hope not. You two fried that fourth one like a fork in a microwave.”
“Tim’s idea,” Jason says. “Voltage might be our only chance, if more show up ready to rumble. Unless you feel like calling in a meta.”
“Ha! Bruce would skin me,” Steph says. “Oh, praise,” she adds, in a different voice. There’s a high beep as she hits the emergency stop on the treadmill. “He’s gone down.”
Jason sits up out of his crunches and twists to his knees. Steph is walking across the basement to Tim and calling his name, softly at first and then louder, but Tim doesn’t react. She crouches by his curled form and pushes his shoulder until Tim rolls onto his back. Jason tugs the motorcycle jacket away in a hurry, but he can immediately see that Tim’s chest is expanding, that he’s breathing. He’s just asleep.
“It takes him like this,” Steph says, her mouth flat. “The drug. It’s hard stuff. He’ll be down for nine or ten hours. I could probably drop him off a building and he wouldn’t wake up.” She puts out a hand and runs the back of one finger down Tim’s cheek. “He hates this. He fights me on it every time. And he’ll puke when he wakes up. But what am I supposed to do? Nothing else works. Ambien goes down like sugar pills.”
Tim looks dead. Breathing, but dead. Jason didn’t think anything could be worse than Tim on that couch, vague and glassy. “What’s wrong with him,” Jason murmurs, touching Tim’s wrist to feel his heart beating from the artery.
“Oh, a thousand things,” Steph says. “All compounding some nasty clinical insomnia. You can tell him to lie down and sleep all you want, but his brain can’t. It won’t. It just runs around in circles tearing itself apart until he gives up and keeps working. Like I said, he has bad spells. And then he gets better.”
“And you keep him from dying until he does.”
Steph pushes a lock of Tim’s hair out of his face. “He takes care of me, too. Sometimes he’s been the only one.” She takes a deep breath and pushes to her feet. “Can you carry him? Put him in the bedroom with the blue walls. Babs says Black Canary takes the yellow room when she’s on the outs with Green Arrow, and I don’t want to hear it if he pukes on her pillow.”
Jason lifts Tim gingerly into his arms. It’s always easy to pick Tim up, but Jason’s past experience has involved a radically different context. He carries Tim up the stairs without waiting for Steph and finds the blue bedroom, a half-sized nook barely big enough for the queen bed. Small windows crossed with bars and set high in one wall look out on the sidewalk of Giella Avenue, where a lightening of the shadows suggests that dawn is working its way between the buildings.
Jason lays Tim down on his back on top of the striped comforter. Tim’s head lolls unpleasantly on the pillow, no tension in his neck. His face is slack and unguarded. Tim would hate to be seen like this, Jason thinks. Jason knows he himself would rather die than have their positions reversed, than be so wholly vulnerable, reliant on others, entirely unable to defend himself.
There’s a quilt folded on the seat of a ladderback chair in the corner, and Steph comes into the room as Jason is drawing it over Tim’s body. “You’re right, though,” she says, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know you.” She meets his eyes, and they watch each other for a long, quiet moment. “What are you doing with him?” she finally asks.
For the past five months, what Jason has been doing is going about his business while simultaneously feeling like something enormous is pulping the inside of his chest every second of every day, a sensation that gets both worse and better when he’s with Tim, when he’s touching Tim—that gets both worse and better when Tim disappears out the window and into the night. Also afraid, a dull and blanketing kind of afraid, like something terrible will be arriving soon and he has no way of fending it off. Also horny, too, of course. Also stunningly, stunningly out of control. Jason drops his gaze to Tim’s still, drugged form under the quilt. He has no idea what to say.
At least Steph doesn’t seem to be waiting for a response. She slides one of Tim’s arms out from under the quilt and attaches a wired monitoring cuff. Immediately the soft beeping of Tim’s heartbeat takes some of the dead weight out of the air. “Probably unnecessary, but he looks like it shouldn’t be beating at all,” Steph says. “I’ll be here with him. He’s not the only one who needs some shuteye.” She pauses, and then says, a little hesitantly, “Did you want to stay?”
But Jason’s already backing away. He pauses at the door, one hand on the casing. He wants to say something, maybe thank you. But he doesn’t, and then he leaves.
***
Jason knows, viscerally, physically, that he can kill Tim. Not that he will, not that he wants to, but that he can. At any time. In any condition. He’s stronger than Tim, better in a fight, quicker in a fight, smarter in a fight, crueler in a fight. Tim has brains on Jason, but Jason’s watched Tim brawl often enough to know that Tim has exploitable lag time between idea and action, and Jason could cut him down before Tim could execute. He thinks it would take him between sixty seconds and twelve minutes, maybe longer if Tim knew it was coming. The knowledge is a comfortable weight under Jason’s skin. Reassuring, even. What is not comfortable, not reassuring—what he simply cannot stand—is the new knowledge that there are situations in which other people can kill Tim too.
Tim glazed on that couch—Tim drugged on that bed—it’s intolerable. It can’t happen again. And yet it will happen again; Steph admitted as much. The sick and ugly place inside Jason begins to get extremely sick and extremely ugly as one day passes and then two, as he almost texts Steph over and over to check in on Tim and then, at the last second, drops his phone back into his belt. She would text him if something had gone wrong, he thinks. If Tim had come off the pill badly, if Tim still couldn’t sleep. Probably she would text him. Maybe. And if he texts Steph first, she’ll show the text to Tim. And Jason doesn’t want to push it.
Jason hasn’t pushed it, this whole time. Hasn’t asked for it, hasn’t begged, even when he’s riding the adrenaline high after a fight, alone on an empty street and wanting to put his hands on Tim so bad he can taste it—even then he doesn’t go hunting for Tim. He won’t do it, and there’s too much twisted up in why not: little slippery bursts of pride and fear and the danger of what he might do if he let himself—if he gave in and let himself—
And for the most part, beautifully, deliciously, Jason hasn’t needed to go hunting for Tim, because Tim has come hunting for him. Materializing out of the dark the way that all Bats do but Tim has perfected, a creepy little stalker routine that has Jason’s gut going hot and eager whenever he looks over his shoulder and sees the flash of Tim’s cape, whenever he turns a corner to find Tim waiting for him leaned up against a streetlight, all his body language saying come here, come here. Tim’s taught him how to disarm and strip the Red Robin suit so quick he can do it without looking, his fingers finding each taser panel while he scrapes his teeth along Tim's jaw.
There’s no schedule for when he can expect Tim to appear on his patrol, or on his fire escape, or several times, wonderfully, right in his bed. Jason figures that’s probably by design, and it’s okay, Jason’s okay with it, he’s not pushing it, when he stakes out the WE building with binoculars he’s not pushing it, when he rides his bike past the joint where Tim’s grabbing burgers with Steph he’s not pushing it, when he lurks at the back of the crowd for the ribbon-cutting for the new Wayne-funded library he’s not pushing it, watching Tim smile for the cameras through his big moment with the giant gold scissors and then slipping away again before he’s spotted.
And he’s not pushing it right now, he tells himself, jittery with the need to see Tim, to confirm that Tim’s still alive, still breathing, not gray and sick and dangerously weak the way he was on that couch, limp and helpless the way he was on the training mat. It’s unbearable, unendurable, the thought of anyone else finding Tim like that. Jason’s not pushing it, but the phone is back in his hand and this time he’s typing, he’s sending the text to Steph: Is he okay?
It takes her three hours to reply, an interminable amount of time Jason survives by stalking the East End until he finds someone who needs to be hurt and then hurting them very badly. Finally his phone buzzes.
FROM: S
hes ok
FROM: S
well, his version of ok
FROM: S
prbly he needs a mnth @ the seaside
FROM: S
like a victorian widow
The relief is so extreme that Jason goes a little bit lightheaded, and before he regains perfect control of himself he types Where is he? and hits send.
FROM: S
line 7, secure
Jason immediately taps over to the comm line. He’s straddling his bike in the trash-filled courtyard between a boarded-up pizza spot and a boarded-up hookah lounge. It’s just after midnight, and the air tonight is weirdly warm, one of those see-sawing fall days that feels like summer, the wind soft against his face. He didn’t bother with the helmet tonight, and the Gotham smog is sour in his mouth, familiar and metallic.
“Yeah, he’s good,” Steph says, without preamble. Her voice is friendly, easy, as if she and Jason chat all the time. “He bounces back every time. He woke up, puked his guts out, yelled at me for twenty minutes about calling you, and then went back to sleep. Fair warning, I’m pretty sure he’s planning on avoiding you for a couple weeks. Captain bruised ego over here. Didn’t like you seeing him when he was down and out.”
Jason leans against his handlebars. He doesn’t want to wait a couple weeks for Tim to ride out his embarrassment. “Where is he?” he asks again. Maybe he’ll just roll by, catch a glimpse. Just see with his own eyes that Tim is okay.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Actually, don’t say anything at all. Don’t tell him I told you or I will literally never hear the end of it. I’m down in Chinatown, he’s at Whitney and 65th. We’ve got eyes on two more of those robots right now. We’re both running surveillance.”
Jason’s belly twists. “He’s out there alone with one of those things?”
“Uh, yeah? He’s fine, remember?” Steph says, like he’s an idiot.
“He’s fine,” Jason repeats, only it comes out like a question, because he is an idiot.
“Hey, are you okay?” Steph says, sounding genuinely concerned, and Jason takes a long, silent breath to get his head on straight.
“Not since the last time I checked,” he says, letting it land like a joke. She laughs.
“Same as the rest of us, then,” she says. “He’s fine. He’s safe on his own. I wouldn’t let him out by himself if he wasn’t.” But that’s not true, because Tim lies better than anyone Jason has ever met in his entire life. Tim can pretend everything is normal until the only thing stopping a giant robot from firing a stake through his back is the fact that Jason happened to be there too.
“I’m going,” Jason says, and he knows his voice has gone all wrong again because Steph sucks her teeth.
“Listen, you need to get yourself under control,” she says. “He doesn’t need protecting.”
Jason knows that. He does. Tim is a perfectly trained living weapon so cold and brutal Jason would bet on his going up against almost any threat on Earth and coming out ahead. “I know he can handle himself,” Jason tells Steph, tells himself.
“Sure,” Steph says. “Anyway, the robots are just walking around right now. If you’re quick, you could get there before Tim’s starts busting up the sidewalk.”
Jason’s already pushing off on his bike, revving it up a little bit as he rolls back onto the street.
“Hey. I’m glad you came, the other day,” Steph says. “I’m glad I met you.”
That sensation again, of being caught on the inside of Steph’s glow. Jason feels it like a hand on the back of his neck, and he ducks his head, uncomfortable. “I’ve gone up against those robots,” he says. “You don’t engage either, not without backup.”
“Obviously I’ll be ignoring that, but you are so sweet, oh my God,” Steph says, and Jason has to disconnect from the comm line in a hurry.
***
He can hear the crash of rubble and muted pops of police-issue Glocks over the roar of his bike long before he turns the corner on Whitney. It’s clear that the situation has devolved from surveillance to active engagement in the time it took Jason to hang up on Stephanie and book it across town. He skids onto the scene directly in front of a couple of police cruisers studded with iron stakes and yet somehow still running their engines. Three youngish cops are crouched behind the cars, radioing for help that isn’t coming.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Jason snaps at them, swinging off his bike. “You wanna be skewered like a kebab? Let the professionals handle this.”
“Get back behind the line!” one of the cops yells, but Jason has already blocked all three of them out of his notice. He scans the scene in the space of two breaths. Mostly residential, roll-down shutters, trash bags piled on the street, scaffolding hiding half the block. A hair-braiding salon with the sidewalk busted up out front, pipes pulled out, water fountaining up from the ground. The robot’s out in the middle of the street, identical in every way to the one he and Tim fought a few days ago. This one is twisting around, searching, and Jason spots Tim long before the robot does, crouched up in the scaffolding like a painted gargoyle. Jason watches as Tim drops through the air in a perfect forward roll, a jump line unspooling behind him with far too much slack. Tim hits the robot hard and spins his body around the robot’s neck and chest, the fall giving his mass dangerous momentum, too fast for the robot’s swinging arms, and as he kicks back and away Jason sees the jump line is wrapped around the robot’s neck, knotted tight. Tim stays in range, ducks and weaves under the robot’s arms, leaping up and jerking back, so quick the robot can’t touch him, can’t land a single blow, and he’s beautiful, oh God, he’s healthy, he’s back at the top of his game, and Jason feels his lungs expand fully for the first time in days, the weight melting away: Tim’s okay.
All at once Tim breaks out of the robot’s range, racing away, and the robot follows, firing off an iron stake that Tim dodges as easy as breathing. The robot gets about ten feet before the jump line around its neck goes taut, jerking it backward but not off its feet, which was maybe Tim’s hope. The robot slows but doesn’t stop, and Jason can see Tim’s mouth flatten in irritation as the robot takes one step, another, another, until with a squealing wrench the massive chunk of building anchoring the other end of the jump line comes free and plummets down to crater in the street.
But by this time Jason has followed Tim’s line of thinking: they’re nowhere near a subway entrance, and all power lines in this part of Gotham run deep underground. No chance of another easy source of high voltage. Best to truss this thing up like a Thanksgiving turkey until an alternate form of disposal can be arranged. Jason does less aerial artistry these days than most of the Bats, but he still carries a jump line. He fires the line into the hood of the cop car behind him for a moveable anchor, busts the auto-retract gear against the asphalt so the line dumps out all at once into his hand, and then he’s on the scene, he’s in the middle of it.
Tim already knows he’s there, and if he’s annoyed, he doesn’t show it. Jason jerks away from a fired missile and closes with the robot, dropping several smoke pellets in case the robot perceives through sight and swinging close around the robot’s legs. Tim’s already there to snatch the end of the jump line out of the air when Jason tosses it, curling around the robot’s legs again and up over one of its shoulders, Tim launching off Jason’s outstretched arm to gain height, Jason grabbing the line from him and passing it back, both of them scrambling out of the way of the stake launcher again and again, coming one hairsbreadth from being taken out by a missile or a swinging arm but always sliding away in time, dancing with each other as much as with the robot, sure of their own bodies, sure of each other’s, and it’s perfect, it’s gorgeous, Jason’s blood is up and he’s grinning, he’s having the time of his life.
Tim circles once more and then knots the line in two fast moves, and without needing to check Jason knows to pull a gun, blast the robot in the face to piss it off, and break away backward while it tries to charge. It takes two steps before going down, tangled impossibly in the jump line, its arms locked up, its legs churning uselessly against the tension. It strains hard, thrashing against the asphalt, but most of their new lines can’t be broken or cut by anything short of a laser, so it’s not going anywhere fast. The missile launcher is roped to its side, but it fires anyway, the stake shooting along a few inches above the street to embed in a fire hydrant, and then there are two sources of water fountaining into the air.
Jason’s panting, going over the robot in quick passes, checking for loose spots, but there aren’t any. He and Tim were too good. He grins up at Tim and is shocked to see Tim grinning back. Tim throws his expressionless mask back on quick, but it’s too late—Jason saw it, Tim admitting how much fun he’s having, and it makes Jason want to keep going, tackle him and spar with him up every level of that scaffolding. He wants to wrestle Tim on a rooftop. He wants his hands on Tim, his weight on Tim. Jason takes a step toward him, and Tim raises his chin, challenging. But the robot gives an especially powerful jerk, and Jason takes a breath. Right. This first.
“You’re not carrying a metal-melting taser by any chance, are you?” he says, and Tim flashes a half-smile.
“Left it in my other tights,” Tim says.
“I think this one weighs a little more than the one in the subway,” Jason says. No chemical reaction here to turn metal into goo. Even if he drags on the line with all his weight, he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be able to move the robot more than an inch or two.
“I want to see what’s inside this thing, what it’s made of,” Tim says. He runs his glove over the thick plating of the robot’s back, which even while the thing is lying prone easily comes up to Tim’s waist. “I need an ultrasonic scanner. Or a micro CT.”
“In your other tights too?” Jason says. Behind them, the three cops are hesitantly poking their heads up from behind their cars. In a minute, one of them is going to get brave and try coming over here.
“In the Cave. Long way to drag a robot.” They both follow the end of the jump line to where it’s anchored in the hood of one of the smashed-up cop cars. “If that cruiser is even street-legal anymore.”
One of the cops steps out from behind the barricade. Because nothing is ever fair or easy, he’s pointing his gun at them instead of at the still-struggling robot.
“I’m shooting if he comes any closer,” Jason says.
“You’re absolutely not,” Tim says, and there it is again, that little ghost of a smile.
“Just his feet.”
“Just nothing. I need samples. Do you think you could cut its finger off?”
“Mister Red,” Jason says, giving a mock gasp. “What if it’s sentient? What if it can feel pain?”
Tim glares at him. “Can you do it or not?”
“Probably not,” Jason admits, but he crouches down next to the robot’s arm anyway, the one not connected to a missile launcher. “This metal stops bullets. I’ve got nothing stronger than that.” This arm ends in eight finger-like appendages about as thick as Tim’s bo staff, most of which are clawing at the closest loop of the jump line.
“Try this,” Tim says, tossing him a miniature laser blade, the kind used by surgical robots.
“You have all the pretty toys,” Jason says. He flicks on its intense white beam and hopes that the lenses of his domino are strong enough eye protection.
“Put your hands up and step away from that thing!” the cop shouts. A hissing argument begins as his fellows try to talk him down from what they have rightly identified as a very stupid way to end up with a vigilante’s fist in their teeth. Jason and Tim ignore them.
Jason tries pinning one of the fingers down under his boot, which is harder work than he expected. Even a single finger is strong, nearly stronger than Jason can hold down, and it’s going to be brutally embarrassing for him if he can’t manage one finger in front of Tim. He leans all his weight into his foot, stomping down, readying the laser—and flails forward as the finger disappears from under his boot, as the arm disappears, as the robot disappears. As the loops of jump line fall to the asphalt, wrapped around nothing but September wind. The robot’s gone. Vanished into thin air.
“Portals,” Tim says seriously, and Jason flicks the laser blade off.
“Like fuck it’s portals,” he says.
“Hands where I can see them!” yells the cop.
“I’m going to shoot him,” Jason mutters, shoving to his feet and stomping over to look down into the hole in the sidewalk in front of the hair-braiding salon, which is still gushing water. Mist clings to his hair, but the air tonight is so soft and warm that it feels good, tiny icy pinpricks along his sweaty scalp. He pulls a flashlight out of his belt and aims the beam into the rubble-filled dark, but it looks like any other hole in the street to Jason. He can’t see anything worth portaling some interdimensional being across space and time to steal. Or whatever’s going on with these robots. “I figure they got the spot wrong again,” he says when Tim joins him, coiling the used jump lines over his shoulder.
“Batgirl, any news on your end?” Tim says. He has a finger on his comm. Jason can’t hear what Steph is saying. “Mine too,” Tim eventually says, and then grimaces at whatever Steph says in response. “Yes, he’s here, and we’re going to have words about that.” Jason snorts a laugh and walks away to give Tim a little privacy, and also to present a solid and threatening presence to the cop, who has taken six steps away from the busted car.
“Buddy, you’re in for a rough night if you keep that up,” he calls, planting his feet and making a show of cracking his knuckles.
“I’d like to see some form of identification,” the cop yells back, which is very brave of him, Jason has to admit.
“ID this,” Jason calls, throwing up a rude hand gesture, and then Tim materializes at his elbow.
“Stop egging them on,” Tim says. He closes his glove around Jason’s wrist, hot pressure through the layers of Jason’s armor.
“He started it,” Jason says, letting himself be tugged away, going easily, ready to follow Tim anywhere right now, which is when the stupid brave idiotic cop opens fire on both of them.
Jason takes one bullet like a mule kick right into the kevlar-nomex blend of the armor over his left thigh, which hurts like hell even though it won’t find skin. “The fuck,” Jason snarls, spinning in front of Tim with a gun yanked out of his holster, but Tim’s pulling him backward before he can let off a single round, pulling him backward and laughing, and Jason does spray the ground in front of the cop’s feet just on principle before he turns and scrambles after Tim as the other two cops get over their better judgement and join in, a barrage of shots that ping off the brickwork and scaffolding and follow them until they whip around a corner and race away.
“You dodged an alien robot and then a cop got you with a Glock,” Tim calls over his shoulder, and fuck him, that asshole, but Jason’s laughing too, chasing Tim up 65th like there’s any danger the cops are actually following them.
“It’s going to bruise,” Jason shouts back, the wind in his hair, his motorcycle no doubt destined for the police impound lot.
Tim flashes a grin over his shoulder. “Poor baby,” he calls, and then he zags sideways down Romero as one of the busted police cars, unbelievably, squeals up the street behind them. Jason throws himself after Tim down Romero and then into an alley, up a fire escape, Tim like a bird in the wind in front of him, jumping and twisting, pulling Jason higher. They hit the rooftop and run flat out, Tim just barely ahead of him and floating through the leaps between buildings, and Jason thinks he could do this forever, he would chase Tim the whole length of Gotham, moon overhead and the city alive around them, endless, danger and safety and home.
The smell of the harbor is coming strong into Jason’s nose before Tim flips down into an alley instead of taking the jump to the next rooftop. Jason follows him below, catching himself on the fire escape as he twists down to ground level, where Tim isn’t running anymore, where Tim is in fact pulling the comm out of his ear and stowing it in his belt. Jason has just enough mental capacity to assess the scene—empty alley, dumpster, no low windows into the buildings on either side—before he’s yanking Tim forward by the edge of his cape and slamming their mouths together.
They’re panting from the run, gusting hot breath against each other’s teeth. Tim walks himself backward, tugging Jason after him with a grip on Jason’s jacket until Tim’s back hits the brick alley wall, never breaking away from Jason’s mouth. Jason kisses him fiercely, roughly, bent down to Tim’s tipped-back head until he gets tired of crouching and hauls Tim up into his arms, taking all of Tim’s weight while Tim makes a tiny sound and goes liquid against him. Tim would never say it, but these past five months have taught Jason that Tim likes that Jason’s so much bigger than him, taller than him, stronger than him. Tim likes being picked up, moved around, held down.
Tim wraps his legs around Jason’s back and puts his hands in Jason’s hair. Jason has one arm under Tim’s ass and the other free to stroke up Tim’s side, down his thigh. He works his hand between their bodies and presses down between Tim’s legs, over the hard shield of Tim’s cup. Tim breaks the kiss to lean back against the bricks, his mouth smeared and wet, his body warmly easy in Jason’s arms. He reaches up to peel the domino from Jason’s eyes, and then he pulls off his own mask. The alley is much darker without the lens filters, but Jason likes it better this way, able to see Tim’s whole face, his blue eyes catching odd flares of light from passing security blimps overhead. He kisses Tim again, gently this time, slowly, getting lost in it, until he hears the jump lines from Tim’s shoulder hit the ground. Tim’s cape follows, unlatched and discarded, and then Tim’s gauntlets.
“Right here?” Jason murmurs, mouthing over Tim’s jaw.
“I’m not waiting,” Tim breathes, unlocking the Red Robin belt and dropping it on top of his cape.
Jason grinds his hips into Tim’s ass, nothing but teasing pressure through his cup and armor. “You gonna put on a show for the sewer rats?” he says, although he does crane his neck to do another sweep of the alley. No signs of life, and the dumpster stands between them and the mouth to the street. Anyone passing by would have to walk deep inside to see them, only dimly lit by weak security bulbs at the roofline. Okay, then. Tim wants it here? Jason can do it here. “Get your tights off,” he says, reaching between them to disarm one of Tim’s taser panels, the biggest one over the seam where Tim’s leggings lock into his tunic.
He lets Tim down and digs into his own belt while watching Tim strip, transferring packets of lube and a condom to his jacket pocket, then pulling his own comm out of his ear. He sheds his belt and gloves and yanks Tim up again the second Tim has kicked off his jockstrap, his left arm under Tim’s thighs, Tim’s legs around his waist again—where they fucking belong, whispers the starving pit in Jason’s gut. Tim’s pretty cock is hard between them, and Jason licks his palm and strokes him, watching the way the muscles in Tim’s long scarred thighs ripple and pull. Tim’s throat is bare without his cape, and Jason puts his mouth to it, his tongue to it, sweat and the taste of Tim’s skin. “Don’t mark up my neck,” Tim says when Jason starts to suck. “I have meetings tomorrow.”
Jason sets his teeth against the spot and very gently bites down, too soft to leave evidence. “Wanna mark you up all over,” he says, huffing steam against Tim’s skin. His head is going hazy with want.
“You already have. A few of these are yours,” Tim says, gesturing—oh God—to his scars. Jason pulls back, stricken, but Tim only laughs and leans forward in Jason’s arms, kissing him insistently until Jason is back in the moment, rational thought slipping away again. “I’ll give you one or two myself sometime,” Tim promises, and yeah, yes, Jason would take them, would hold still and let him, any time he wants.
Jason pulls a lube packet from his pocket. “You sure you want it?” he asks, meaning the dirty alley, meaning, of course, himself.
Tim takes the packet away from him and rips off the top. “You going to make it worth my time?” he says. He catches Jason’s free hand to dribble lube across his fingers.
Jason grins. “Always,” he says, and Tim shifts in Jason’s arms, spreading his legs a fraction wider.
Jason hitches Tim back a little to work his free hand between their bodies, where he can turn his wrist up and tease his slick fingers behind Tim’s balls, around the rim of his hole. He wants to watch Tim’s face while he does it, but Tim curls forward as soon as he pushes in with one finger, drops his head against Jason’s shoulder, an arm locked around Jason’s neck. Tim’s little shuddering breaths are right in his ear as he works his finger in and out, adds a second, and when he crooks them up to rub across Tim’s prostate, Tim’s whine makes his cock throb. He knows he can take Tim apart on his fingers, can make Tim come on his fingers, massaging inside of him until Tim’s thighs are shaking and his cock spills, this long rolling orgasm that leaves Tim trembly and weak. Jason nearly whited out the first time he managed it, entirely by accident, Tim gasping for breath on his back on the safehouse bed.
It's trickier like this, holding Tim up, at a bad angle with his wrist, but he gets a third finger in and stretches Tim until Tim is biting Jason’s shoulder, one hand fisted tight in Jason’s jacket, and then Tim lets go and sneaks his hand into the pocket to pull out the condom. “How long can you hold me up?” he asks in Jason’s ear, out of breath, as Jason pulls his fingers free.
“A week. A year. They’d have to kill me before I’d put you down,” Jason says, and right now it feels true—between want and adrenaline, Jason’s barely feeling Tim’s weight. And Tim’s, what, five foot six? Lean muscle, a buck-forty? Jason could lift him one handed, any day of the week. Without even thinking about it.
“Fuck,” Tim breathes, squirming a little in Jason’s arms. Jason clamps both hands under Tim’s thighs and hoists him higher for a moment, just because he can. Tim runs his palms over Jason’s shoulders, down to his biceps and back up. “Put the condom on,” he says urgently.
“Yeah, God,” Jason groans. He pulls Tim’s legs more tightly around his waist and lets go, lets Tim support himself. He needs both his arms to do this quickly.
Jason unlatches the bottoms of his costume and shoves them a little ways down his thighs, and then the jock and cup. His left thigh is pitifully tender to the touch where it took the cop’s bullet, and Jason’s sure the bruise is going to look spectacular in his bathroom mirror at the safehouse. He rolls the condom down over his cock, slicks himself up with the second lube packet. “You good?” he asks Tim.
A moving beam from a passing security blimp gleams off of Tim’s sharp canine teeth. “The sewer rats are waiting,” Tim says, and Jason holds himself steady, helps Tim lower down, lines his cock up just right. And then the head is pushing in, and the length of it, a little at a time, Tim sinking down on it while Jason has to bite his lip and tense all of his muscles to keep from shoving Tim against the wall and slamming all the way in. Oh Christ, Jason tries to say, but it gets stuck behind his tongue, and all that comes out is a choked groan.
Tim’s hips are tiny in Jason’s hands. Jason holds Tim’s weight, lifts him up the smallest bit and pushes him back down, a sweet slow drag Jason rides for long moments while Tim whines behind his teeth and kisses Jason in a faltering, distracted way. “Come on,” Tim finally whispers against Jason’s mouth. “Let’s go.” Jason bites Tim’s lower lip and speeds up, dragging Tim harder onto his cock, beginning to snap his hips up as he pulls Tim down. “Shit, Jason,” Tim gasps, trying to roll his hips a little, but Jason’s holding him too tight, controlling how he moves. Tim’s heels lock against Jason’s spine and his mouth falls open as Jason finds a rhythm, and when Jason shifts minutely, the new angle tears a broken sound out of Tim’s throat.
Jason pushes Tim’s shoulders back to brace against the bricks just so Jason can watch the long line of him, beautiful on Jason’s cock, his pretty face and windblown hair, the layers of armor over his chest hiding the flush Jason knows is spreading down from his neck. Tim’s cock is jerking against his belly, wet and leaking at the tip. Jason drinks him in, the expression on his face, how his mouth stretches around a little silent wail every time Jason lands his angle just right. Jason wants this forever, doing this to Tim, making Tim look like this, feel like this, pulling those jolting gasps out of him that go straight to Jason’s cock.
At last Jason eases up his grip on Tim’s hips and lets Tim move the way he wants to, and when Tim shoves down harder, Jason matches him stroke for stroke, pressing forward, crushing Tim between the wall and his own body. Tim’s cock is trapped between them now, rubbing against the armor on Jason’s belly, and then Tim’s saying, desperate, “Jason—fuck, Jason—” and Jason frees one of his hands to close around Tim’s cock, sliding wet with precome in his fist. Tim shakes in his arms, clenching around Jason, his thighs trembling, and then he makes the most perfect sound and paints himself with come.
Jason hauls him higher into his arms, away from the wall entirely, nothing but Jason holding him up. “You gorgeous thing,” Jason growls, shoving himself deeper, holding Tim still so Jason can fuck up into him. Tim pushes his face into Jason’s shoulder, gasping, but he doesn’t tell Jason to slow down or stop, which he’s not shy about doing. The need to come is cramping Jason’s gut, and he’s chasing his orgasm, riding the very first lick of it.
“Oh fuck,” Tim grits out, his hot breath on Jason’s neck, and then more words Jason can’t make out, smeared into Jason’s skin. Tim tightens his fingers in Jason’s hair and clenches down around him, and the wave of his orgasm rolls all the way through Jason’s body, white pulses. He fucks Tim through it, stuttering thrusts that melt his bones until it finally fades away.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbles, panting. The blood is roaring in his ears. Tim’s head is still on his shoulder, and he turns his face into Tim’s hair, inhaling, sweat and the smell of Tim’s shampoo. He presses his lips to the shape of Tim’s skull. Tim raises up to find Jason’s mouth, and Jason kisses him slowly while he remembers what he’s supposed to be doing with himself, namely pulling out of Tim and letting him down. He accomplishes the first but can’t seem to go through with the second, can’t seem to let Tim out of his arms, even though his muscles are starting to protest. He pets down Tim’s back to his bare ass, slick between the cheeks with lube. Tim’s thighs are patched with fading bruises, all of them marking the places Tim’s slipped up in the field in the past few weeks, let other people touch him, hurt him. Jason skims his palm over them, intensely gentle.
“I think the sewer rats needed that,” Tim says, pushing his sweaty hair out of his face. He stretches in Jason’s grip and unlocks his heels from behind Jason’s back, and Jason reluctantly lowers him down, where he actually—delightfully—wobbles on his feet for a moment. Jason steadies him with a grip on his elbow, which Tim immediately smacks away.
“Can you walk straight?” Jason asks, just for the joy of making Tim mad.
“Yes, thank you,” Tim snaps, grabbing for his jock and cup. Jason pulls off the condom, ties it off, and tosses it into the nearby dumpster. “You should have incinerated that,” Tim tells him.
“The condom?” Jason says.
“You shouldn’t leave an easy source of your DNA lying around. Dangerous.”
“Who the fuck is trying to steal my DNA?” Jason asks, tucking himself away and pulling up his pants.
Tim is already rearming the taser on his suit. “If you knew who was stealing it, you would have stopped them by now. It’s the ones you don’t know about who present the problem.”
“You are psychotic,” Jason tells him. “No one would want my spunk.”
“I can think of three buyers just off the top of my head,” Tim says. He latches his belt and bends down for his gauntlets.
“Oh, we’re selling it now? For how much? Split the profits eighty-twenty?”
“Just burn it next time,” Tim says.
“All I’m saying, there’s more where that came from. Easy cash. We could have a good thing going.” Tim rolls his eyes, but Jason steps into his space where he’s recoiling the jump lines. He brushes his knuckles down the front of Tim’s tunic, down to where a couple stripes of Tim’s come are drying at the bottom. “What about this, huh? Burning this too?” He scrapes his knuckle over a pearl of it, smearing it deep into the armored fabric. “Are you okay to get home?” he asks, and watches Tim visibly waver between getting mad and kissing him, and when kissing wins, he sighs into Jason’s mouth. Jason cups the back of Tim’s neck. Tim’s hair is damp, silky, heavy across Jason’s fingers.
Tim pulls back after a moment. His expression has gone guarded, and then he fits the domino back on. Jason can’t see his eyes anymore. “I can handle myself,” he says. Jason first thinks he’s talking about fighting robots, and then he knows he’s not. “Don’t come again.”
Tim on that couch, utterly helpless. A red-hot line burns through Jason, something that feels like anger but isn’t. “Like fuck I’m not coming again,” he growls.
“This isn’t a debate,” Tim says. He’s adjusting his gauntlets, deliberately casual. “I’m telling you not to show up. I don’t want it and I don’t need it.”
“I don’t give a shit what you want,” Jason says. “Not when Steph thinks you’re about eight seconds from flatlining.”
Tim has icy composure, but Jason is just starting to be able to read through it, the slight tension in his arms that means he wants to hit Jason. “Steph doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She worries. It’s unnecessary.”
“She loves you,” Jason says, and now he is angry, suddenly and explosively, the way it always happens for him.
“I don’t need babysitting,” Tim snaps, and Jason grabs for him, grabs the jump lines coiled over his shoulder. Tim shrugs out of them immediately, and they come away in Jason’s hand.
“I hope she does call me,” Jason says, furious. “I hope she calls me every single time. I’m not letting you—”
“It’s not your problem,” Tim says.
“You are my fucking problem,” Jason snarls, crunching the jump lines in his fist, and by the time he realizes what came out of his mouth, it’s much too late.
Tim’s holding himself perfectly still, his face perfectly still, betraying nothing. And then he turns, kicks up off the dumpster, and vanishes into the fire escape, over the rooftop, gone.
***
In all the various and interrupted years of his life, Jason has never had trouble getting to sleep. He can close his eyes and flip his brain dark in nearly any circumstance in which he’s fairly certain of his immediate bodily safety—safehouses, planes, the backseat of a car parked for a couple hours in a highway rest stop—taking the chances time gives him without fuss or argument, the same as any other soldier. Staying asleep is a different matter, of course. He’s in and out of nightmares on an hourly basis, struggling awake long enough to suck down a few breaths and remember he’s still alive before going under again, so the actual quality of his sleep is more or less fucked, but at least he can rack up the hours as needed, unlike Tim.
But by the third day after the alley, Jason rolls onto his back on the safehouse mattress and has to admit to himself that something has gone very wrong inside him. He can get to sleep just fine—eyes closed, thirty seconds and then out—but he can’t stay under long enough to cycle through even half of one of his usual nightmares. He’s down for ten minutes, twelve minutes at a time before he breaks the surface again, coming up with a feeling in his chest like he’s falling, like the jump line caught him right before he hit the street. He grits his teeth and battles with himself, down into a fizzing, fitful sleep and then back up again, hours skating by until he heaves himself off the mattress and gives up trying altogether, somehow more tired than when he lay down in the first place.
He blows through an entire pack of American Spirits in three days, even though he’s been doing a good job lately on cutting back. He slouches against his windowsill like an unhappy corpse, exhaling smoke across the sunlit fire escape, desperately trying to unwind his brain by soaking it in nicotine. It doesn’t help, and neither does the way his mind is doing its very best to chew itself bloody over Tim Drake.
He hasn’t seen Tim since the alley, obviously (Christ, obviously, his fucking big mouth, so much for not pushing it—), so he has no idea if Tim’s sleeping, either. Jason’s burning to text Steph to ask her, or maybe to ride around town until he tracks Tim down himself, but he yanks back hard on his own reins every time. Back up, he tells himself, the way you’d tell a dog about to launch herself into traffic. He’s working so hard to keep from spiraling out about this, about Tim, about Tim’s insomnia, but it’s like trying to keep a truck from rolling down a hill. He’s having to put his back into it, and he can feel his heels slipping.
He's exhausted when he suits up to head out that night, even though he spent most of the morning and afternoon trying to sleep, snatching six or seven minutes at a time. He feels ill with it, foggy and nauseous, and he can’t imagine how Tim handles this night after night, how Tim manages to perform at such a high level with zero gas in the tank. He feels disconnected, spacey. He’s been going out without his helmet more and more these days, and he leaves it at home tonight, too. He can’t take another layer muffling him from the world. He’s muffled enough already.
He’s almost out the door when he feels his phone buzz.
FROM: S
y is T in kansas
FROM: S
instead of meeting w his shareholders
FROM: S
i feel like u have smthng 2 do w this
There’s a pause. Steph’s three typing dots appear and disappear for several seconds. Finally:
FROM: S
hes not sleeping again
Jason stares at his phone for a long moment, then drops it back into his belt and goes out to find someone to hurt.
He has very few open cases on the go, which is for the best. He doesn’t think he could stand any detective work, any undercover work, any slow stakeout right now. He takes the sick-ugly feeling in his gut and transmutes it into the kind of anger that needs to make someone bleed, and he knows he’ll find what he’s looking for in Cape Carmine.
He hasn’t been grinding his bootheel quite so hard into the organized crime converging on Cape Carmine as he used to in his younger years. When he first blew back into town, eighteen years old and so white-hot that every moving bug looked like a roach in need of stomping, he spent a wild couple of weeks hacking a bloody road straight through nearly every organized crime family in Gotham, gathering their leashes in his own fist and setting himself up as their master. It wasn’t a bad plan, necessarily: easy leverage to enforce better conditions for the sex workers, tear down the trafficking from the inside, demand the dealers quit selling to kids, collect protection money that actually bought real protection, stuff like that. But it was his first run out of the gate, and he’d gone too big too quick. The whole thing had bucked out of his hands, and at the time half his attention had been on Bruce, anyway—there had been this roaring black hole of hurt and hunger in him that had demanded to be fed, and Jason had been letting it eat its fill on any target in his path. And it’s still there, the black hole, the sick-ugly place—it’s not that it’s gotten any smaller, but somehow Jason has grown a lot bigger around it, and its voice is quieter inside of him, turned down to a kind of background mewl. Usually. These past five months with Tim not included—when he's learned the black hole can demand more than one kind of food.
He's less inclined to go so big these days, at age twenty-six. He doesn’t have the patience to do it right. He didn’t have anywhere close to the patience for it at eighteen, of course, which is another reason the whole thing had gone nuclear on him, dissolving into inter-gang warfare that left Cape Carmine primarily in the hands of the Five Families and erased any good Jason had managed to do in the process. Jason hadn’t much cared at the time; he’d burned himself so bad on Bruce that he’d slunk out of Gotham entirely for six months to lick his wounds.
Regardless, it’s been a long time since he was temporary king of the Cape, but when he rolls in on his new bike, he’s sure the word spreads immediately. No one wants to see him around here, and there are any number of high-ranked Family bosses in the immediate vicinity with a vested interest in attempting to make him leave as quickly as possible. It’s what he’s counting on, and he’s in the neighborhood for exactly thirteen minutes before he gets jumped.
Four guys, all white, buzzed heads and gold jewelry, knives and handguns, three Berettas, one Ruger. They’re in short sleeves, a tattoo of the Virgin in blue ink on their forearms marking them as belonging to the Cassamento Family, which means the entire East End’s heroin trade. Jason grins, sharp and feral. Perfect.
He doesn’t let them land a single blow, but it’s because they’re so far beneath him in skill, not because his form is any kind of pretty. He’s exhausted. He can feel his reaction time stretching slow and foggy, his limbs heavier than they should be, but it hardly matters in this fight. He bulls through them, breaking ribs, yanking an arm out of its socket, smashing a nose, throwing himself right up against their bodies so none of them can fire on him without hitting each other, lays two out on the ground faster than spit, and when one guy does get dumb and squeezes his trigger, Jason jerks away to watch the bullet tear through the shoulder of the guy with the Ruger right behind him, who falls down and starts screaming so loud Jason’s about to have the rest of the muscle in the neighborhood on him, which is slightly more than he bargained for tonight. He drives his heel into the side of the guy’s head just hard enough to knock him out, then spins, grabs the final guy’s ears, and yanks his whole head down into his armored knee. Lights out. It all takes about twenty-five seconds.
Jason surveys them on the ground, three unconscious, one groaning and clutching the arm Jason ripped out of its socket. Dark blood is spreading across the asphalt from the one guy’s torn-up shoulder. Jason stalks over to the only one still moving, who tries to scoot away from him but can’t get very far. “Hey. You. You got a phone?” Jason asks him. The guy’s one good arm twitches toward his gun, which is lying on the ground by his hip. “Nah, don’t make me break your fingers,” Jason says. “You’re gonna need those. Phone, yes or no?” The guy’s face is drained of all color. He gives a single nod. “Get it out. Call 911. Right now, let me see you do it.” The guy follows orders mechanically, pulling a cracked phone from his pocket and punching in the numbers. “You get the ambulance here for your buddy with the bullet wound before he bleeds out. And that one, with the nose?” Jason jerks his thumb to the guy he put down first, smashing his nose to a pulp and then punching him out. “You get him sitting up, head down, right? Or he’s gonna drown on that blood.” And then Jason rears back with one foot, makes like he’s going to drive it right into the guy’s ribs. The guy pisses himself. But Jason swings through to connect with the guy’s gun, instead, sending it skittering up the street. And then he stalks back to his bike and keeps going, deeper into the neighborhood.
Fighting—street warfare—it’s what makes sense to Jason’s body, the last pressure valve before Jason blows himself up on the ugly inside him. Cleaning up his mess afterward is much less fun, and when he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, maybe he wouldn’t have even bothered. But the years cooled him down enough to start seeing death and death-dealing as a tool and a punishment, not an all-purpose can of paint to sling around the whole town. When he plays executioner now, he wants to have a reason; he wants the victim to have earned it. Following orders to come at him on a bad night in Cape Carmine is not earning it.
And he’s still exhausted, and he’s still feeling like trash. He circles through the streets slowly, waiting for the next drop, but after the show he put on with the Cassamentos, no one’s biting. The streets are mostly empty, in fact: Cape Carmine isn’t residential, mainly warehouses, low office buildings, factory lofts. He’s sure if he broke down any of the doors he’s passing he’d find a hub of illegal activity, but he’s not here to bust anyone tonight, not here to start something that will pit him against one or more of the Families on a grand scale. He’s just here looking for fights, and no one’s giving him any, and the longer he goes unbothered, the less he’s able to distract himself from the reason he’s down here acting like a child in the first place. And then he can’t stand it anymore, and he yanks his bike over into an alley and pulls out his phone. There are several new messages from Steph.
FROM: S
2 b clear i think its a good thing
FROM: S
that hes in kansas
FROM: S
and not working
FROM: S
for once
FROM: S
i am going 2 kill him about the sleep thing tho
FROM: S
just warning u
And she hasn’t asked for his help, she hasn’t told him to come and fix things, so what can he do? And Tim’s not even in Gotham right now. Jason’s suddenly so tired that he just wants to go back to the safehouse and take what little sleep he’s going to be allowed, five minutes at a time. He stows the phone in his belt and turns his bike back to the street, which is when a tiny flash sparks at the edge of his vision. He whips around, ready to engage, but he can’t clock an immediate threat. There, again: a tiny flash, a little pop of light. Down at the back of the alley. Jason swings off his bike and approaches, gun drawn.
The alley ends in a dog-leg turn, the perfect spot to box him in if this is some kind of ambush. But around the corner, Jason pulls up short. There’s a blue glow suspended in the air, oval in shape, about the size of a couple of car tires. A foot is emerging from it, and then the leg, enormous in size, edged in cables and wicked metal plating—a robot, another one, and Jason’s watching it step into his world. Jason floods with adrenaline, up on the balls of his feet, ready to move, and then there’s a flash of light and the whole thing disappears. Jason blinks, then shakes his head. Was it real? But before he can even come out of his stance, the blue glow spirals back out of the air, a central point spreading wider, and the foot comes through it again. Then the flash. And then it’s gone. Jason straightens up and takes a deep breath.
He watches the cycle five more times, just to make sure. Some kind of glitch in the portal, and it is portals; Tim was right. He pulls out his phone to try to get it on film, which proves to be another question mark. The robot foot shows up just fine, but the blue glow, the flash of light, the portal itself doesn’t show up at all. He supposes that’s why Steph told him it looked like the robots stepped out of the air on the feeds. But he certainly hadn’t seen a blue portal when one robot melted away to nothing in the subway, or when another disappeared out of their hog-ties on Whitney. Jason narrows his eyes, thinking. He wishes Tim were here. He’d be all over a mystery like this.
His next order of business ought to be to call Steph, get her down here to deal with the situation; she’s actually on this case, while he’s only hanging around the fringes of it. But what he actually wants to do instead is to see what would happen if he shoves a bomb through the portal right before the robot foot emerges. Since he figures maybe Steph but definitely Tim would frown upon that particular experiment, he decides to do that first.
He has a wrapped-up grenade in the storage compartment under the seat of his bike. Mostly he keeps one in there in case he needs to use the bike itself as a bomb in the middle of a fight—a couple shots into the gas tank and the seat, double boom. He jogs back around the corner to grab it, which is when he gets jumped the second time.
His instincts send him ducking below the first swing before he even registers what’s happening, then jumping back, throwing himself sideways, getting out of the way of the blows that just keep coming without space for him to take a breath and assess. There’re two of them, no, three of them, humans, metas?, enhanced somehow, and distantly Jason is aware that this is why he rolled through the Cape for so long without a fight, because someone up top was sending the message to these three to come deal with him personally. He lashes out and connects, ducks away, spins into a kick, flips himself over a flashing arm, and in the middle of it he gets flares of who he’s fighting: two female, one male, all three in some kind of black and white spandex uniform, all three with a weird-wrong greenish tint to their skin and hair. “Not that I’m not flattered by the attention,” he grits out in between landing blows that just aren’t having the same effect as they would on a human, “but who are you?” Instead of answering, the woman in front of him opens her mouth to show him her tongue has been cut out.
Jason lasts about another half-minute before he starts taking damage. He’s tired, and he’s slow, and there are three of them, and they hit like their arms are made of iron. He swears and stumbles when two of them connect at once, and another blow sends him down on the ground, where they beat the shit out of him for several seconds before he manages to pull a gun and just start shooting. And they’re good, they’re fast, but thank God they take bullets like anybody else—he lands a shot through one woman’s left calf and clips the man superficially across the hip, but the final woman throws herself on his gun arm and claws at him, and unfortunately her gloves are tipped in diamond-hard spikes. Jason hears his jacket shred, and then the body armor beneath, and then the points find skin, bright lines of fire down his arm, and in a moment she’s going to go deeper and cut through tendon, artery, bone. He smashes them both against the asphalt, trying to knock her free, but she’s on him like glue, and in desperation he pulls a second pistol with his left hand and shoots her through the thigh.
She lets him go with a howl, and she’s pumping blood; he’s hit the artery, which he didn’t mean to do. “Oh fuck,” he says, intending to get some pressure on it, maybe, or maybe watch her bleed to death—he can’t decide, he’s not sure what he wants—but the man knocks him away, a blow right across Jason’s chest that takes the wind out of him and throws him on his ass against the alley wall. The man scoops her up, for all that he’s bleeding freely himself, and then he dashes away, leaving Jason alone with the other woman, who’s still down on the ground, clutching her calf.
Jason heaves for breath, dazed and hurt and hurting. “Will he take her to help?” Jason asks the woman, his voice rasping out of him. She stares at him wild-eyed, panting, but then she nods. Her strange greenish face is collapsed with pain, but his shot only blew through the muscle of her calf, and she’s not in any immediate danger. She doesn’t look like much of a threat anymore, but he aims a gun at her, just in case. “Who sent you? The Families?” he asks, and when she nods again, he bares his teeth. Sending a handful of Cassamentos after him was one thing, but sending these three… That’s an escalation. That requires retaliation. He kicks out a foot in total frustration. He wasn’t trying to goad them into a war, but now that they’ve started it, he’s going to have to finish it.
The woman is getting to her feet, barely putting weight on her busted leg. She steadies herself on the brick wall, limping heavily out of the alley, and how easy would it be to take her down right now? Tie her up and threaten to put more bullet holes in her until she gives up everything she knows on the Families or whatever horrible human experimentation lab zapped her green and chopped out her tongue? But the thought of it is turning his stomach, and instead of doing his job, he sits on his ass and watches until she’s out of sight entirely. He hopes she gets medical care. She’s not the one at fault over this. She’s not the one he’ll be killing over this.
Jason lets his head fall back against the bricks. He should get back on his bike and get out of here, or at least get himself to a rooftop, open sightlines and high ground, but he’s so tired. He can’t imagine they’ll be sending anyone else after him in the next half-hour or so, anyway. Surely he has time to catch his breath.
He pulls a miniature med kit from his belt and gets to work on his arm, first. His costume top and the jacket are goners, and when he pulls the shreds of them back from his skin, he can only be glad that he shot the woman before she got any deeper. His forearm is torn up good, bleeding all over the place, though not, thank God, from either of the arteries, and he uses his whole supply of wound spray getting the mess of it clean and disinfected before he wraps himself from elbow to wrist. It hurts like shit, and so does the rest of him, beaten-up bruised-up knocked-down, but that kind of pain no longer sits at the forefront of Jason’s perception. It settles instead into a kind of sharp-toothed background sparkle, pressing in at the edges of his vision, like a rock in his mouth he has to breathe around.
He experimentally moves the rest of his limbs, flexing his muscles, taking deep breaths. He doesn’t think anything’s broken or torn. It occurs to him that he could go try his trick with the bomb now, but he doesn’t care enough anymore. He pulls out his phone and opens the message thread with Steph. Are you there? Line 7, he types.
He's waiting only a couple of minutes. “Hey,” she says. “Are you okay?”
And the answer right at present is no, but she doesn’t need to know or worry about any of that. “I have something for your robot case,” he says instead, and explains what he found as best he can, leaving out any mention of the fight. He knows the glitching portal is still cycling in the alley; he can see the tiny pops of light from around the corner every few seconds.
“Fuck, I can’t believe Tim was right about the portals,” she says. “He’s going to be insufferable about this. Let’s not tell him. Let’s say they’re parachuting in from spaceships instead.”
Jason laughs, and it feels good to laugh. “You pick the lie, I’ll back you up,” he says.
“I knew I liked you,” Steph says. “Where is it? I’ll come take a look, maybe bring some gear, run some tests. Tim’s better at that, but he’s off eating Ma Kent’s apple pie or whatever it is they do in Smallville.”
Jason pulls his exact coordinates off a GPS device in his belt and gives them to her. “It’s Cape Carmine. Listen, come in as quiet as you can, okay? Don’t get spotted. Things are a little…stirred up here right now. You don’t need to walk into extra trouble.”
“What do you mean, stirred up?” Steph says immediately. “What are you in the middle of?”
“I’m fine,” Jason says. “Just better to use some stealth right now.”
“Listen, pal, I’ve been playing this game with Tim since he was fourteen years old. I would bet one hundred dollars that you are tragically injured and bleeding out as we speak.”
Jason looks down at himself. He is, in fact, covered in blood, although only some of it is his. “I can’t take your money like that,” he says.
“Please call when you need help. Really. Call me,” Steph says, and Jason feels his chest clench up. An emotion starts in his body that’s so big and flood-like that it scares him, and he has to grab it and set it outside of himself, leave it there in the alley dirt. And Steph’s still going: “I’ve just about managed to get Tim trained out of bad habits, and here I am having to start over with you.”
Jason has to take a very deep breath, and then he glances around the alley and grimaces. “I’m heading out,” he says. “When you get here, the blood on the ground is mostly not mine. But I think everyone is still alive.”
“I fucking knew it, you asshole,” Steph says. “Fine. The blood will not make it into my report.”
“Right,” Jason says, and there’s a pause, silence on the line. He thinks about hanging up.
“He’s okay, you know,” Steph says. “He’s been in Smallville for three days, and that’s a miracle. He needs to be out of Gotham’s mess more often than he is.”
“You said he’s not sleeping,” Jason says, because he can’t help himself.
“Yeah, I went ahead and lojacked his biofeedback. I had a lot of time to think while he was sleeping off that Cloceptryn. Decided I was sick of having him try to lie to me about the whole thing, you know? Babs helped me build it out—it’s a bracelet, very chic and stylish. I had to threaten his life to make him wear it, but now I get the data to my phone.”
“Slick,” Jason says. “What are his numbers?”
“Not good. Four hours across three days.”
“Four hours of sleep. Across three days.” He closes his eyes. Even Jason is doing better than that, a lot better, for all he can’t get more than ten minutes of it at a time.
“He’s in a bad spell,” Steph says. “Listen, I don’t mean to drag you all the way into this. Tim likes to pretend he’s mister invincible. He doesn’t want anyone to know. He doesn’t want you to know.”
“No, I—I want to know,” Jason says. He wants her to tell him, tell him everything. Which is insane. Who is he to her? Who is he to Tim? He’s a resurrected ghost. He’s one giant warning sign. He’s about as stable as a game of pick-up-sticks. He’s someone who has been allowed to touch Tim for no more than five months. And if something happens to Tim, Jason doesn’t think—doesn’t think that he—
Something cannot happen to Tim.
“Yeah,” Steph says. “It’s getting worse, I know that much. These past couple years. I think it’s the stress. He’s doing too much, taking on way too much. He’s at the office forty hours a week, then on the streets in a mask another thirty-plus. He trains, he deals with family, he’s on call for capes in a bunch of different cities, he puts in time at all of Bruce’s black-tie bootlicking soirees—I don’t know, it’s just more than he was dealing with before. When we were younger. That’s my theory, anyway, the stress. At least when he’s with you, you make him turn his brain off in a really big way.”
The sound that comes out of Jason’s mouth is a choke.
“Oh shit, am I not supposed to talk about that? You realize he tells me everything, right?”
“I think I’d better go,” Jason says, and Steph starts laughing.
“I mean everything, Jason Todd,” she says, and he pulls the comm all the way out of his ear before switching it off. His face feels very hot.
He collects samples of the blood on the ground before he leaves. He’s not as good with a microscope as he should be, but there are several machines smart enough to do the work for him, analyze a sample and spit out a reading. He’ll have to break into a Bat safehouse to use them, but that’s okay—Dickie and friends can share once in a while. And then he hauls himself back on his bike and out of the Cape and does not go back to his apartment, even though he’s desperate for it, the mattress or the huge wide deep couch. It’s only midnight, so he forces himself to keep going, Robbinsville and Crime Alley and the rest of the East End, dropping in on his informants, ending a drunken gunfight outside a strip club, patching up a teenage gangster he finds left for dead behind a trap house and making him promise to walk himself to a clinic, on and on for hours until he can justify it to himself that he should be allowed to rest.
He stands in the shower for a long time when he gets back to his safehouse. When the water runs too cold to stand, he towels off and examines himself in the mirror hanging on the back of the bathroom door. He’s bruised up good, the blows he took tonight standing out dark purple over the yellowish, half-healed marks of older hurts, a scattering of scabbed-over scrapes and slices for decoration. The bruise on his thigh from the cop’s bullet is the worst of them, spreading blue and green and yellow from a central locus of pain. And his whole body is cut through with red and white ridges of scar tissue, although not quite as extensively, he’s noticed, as Tim’s is—the Pit wiped Jason totally clean, but he has not been careful with himself since.
He’s bled through the bandage on his right forearm, so he pulls on sweats and a tee shirt and goes to work on the wound under the bright light over the kitchen table, sweeping the clawed-up tracks for particles, cleaning it all out again, taping it closed, wrapping it tight. He puts four protein bars and a bottle of water in his stomach, checks over all of his weapons and gear, and finally, finally lets himself shut off all the lights and lie down flat on the couch.
Jason’s safehouses are usually stocked with whatever furniture the previous tenant happened to leave behind, and this one came with a gray couch so wide and deep that a guy twice Jason’s size could roll around with room to spare. Jason sinks into it, his head on a throw pillow, and goes immediately to sleep.
And wakes up ten minutes later.
He drags the heels of his hands over his eyes, which are itching with exhaustion. What is wrong with him, besides the things that are always wrong with him? In a rush of frustration, Jason grabs for the television remote sitting on the upturned cardboard box he’s using as an end table. The previous tenant also left a really very decent television on the wall, as well as—more crucially—several streaming services already logged in; the previous tenant is in fact spending two years in Blackgate on conspiracy to commit, and no one has cancelled his credit cards yet. Jason cues up Top Chef and does his best to put his brain inside something that is not in any way connected with his actual life.
Dawn arrives by the middle of the first episode. At the beginning of the second, Jason’s window opens. None of the alarms go off, because Tim has disabled them.
A jolt goes through Jason, all the way down his limbs.
“Red,” Jason says, boosting up on his elbows. “Thought you were in Kansas.”
“I came home,” Tim says. He hesitates there, at the window, the weak sun lighting up the edges of him. He’s in jeans and a chewed-up band shirt, Enya in big letters, a nineties scrawl. After a moment he heels out of his sneakers and comes closer. “You look like crap,” he says.
Jason laughs and lies back down. “You look like crap,” he says, and it’s true, or it would be true if Jason didn’t know how Tim could look on four days of no sleep. Three days of very little sleep and Tim still looks near death, but it’s not fucking with Jason quite so bad.
Tim stops at the very edge of the couch, standing over Jason. Jason reaches out and closes his fist in the hem of Tim’s Enya shirt, not tugging, just holding on. Tim glances down at his grip, runs a finger over the white bandages wrapping Jason’s forearm. “You’re good?”
“Barely a scratch,” Jason says, meeting his eyes, wanting, wanting, and then Tim, very carefully, boosts onto the couch and stretches out across Jason’s chest. Jason’s frozen for half a heartbeat, and then he heaves out a breath and wraps his arms around Tim’s body, the manic dog in his brain going finally and abruptly quiet.
Tim presses his cheek into Jason’s chest. His slim weight digs into some of Jason’s bruises, but Jason barely registers the ache. Tim’s so warm. He smells good, like laundry detergent and Gotham smog. “I think you’re on to something about the lead,” Tim says, and Jason spins for a moment before remembering the robots, the pipes. “Steph told me your idea. And they’re not stealing the lead, that’s incredibly stupid—”
“Hey now,” Jason says.
“—but I think it has to be why they seem to be targeting buildings at random. I think the lead is fritzing out their sensors, or their map, or whatever they’re using to look for…whatever they’re looking for.”
“Could be,” Jason says, and he doesn’t really care about the robots right now, or anything beyond this couch.
“I put the pieces together in Smallville. Kon—that’s Conner Kent, Superboy. Lead interrupts his x-ray vision. I used to use it on him all the time when we were kids, when there were things I needed to keep away from him.”
“How does that help us with the robots?” Jason asks.
“I’m not sure yet. It might not help at all.” And Tim can’t stop working the case, can’t stop thinking, planning, even when he’s so tired Jason can hear it in his voice, flattened and dragging at the edges—little pieces of reality slipping out from under the mask Tim wears every second of every day.
“You were right about the portals, by the way,” Jason says, and Tim raises his head to grin up at him, some life coming back into his face. The dark circles under his eyes are intense, like smears of makeup.
“Heard it from Steph. I told you, didn’t I? When I say something, you people need to go ahead and fall in line.” He’s so smug about it, so fucking annoying, and Jason is desperate to kiss him, but he doesn’t.
“I don’t fall in line behind you, Little Red,” he says. “I’m not one of your super-friends.”
Tim’s mouth softens into a different smile. “You don’t want to take orders from me?”
“And give you the satisfaction?” Jason says, a good line to maintain, for all he’s noticed himself coming to heel for Tim more and more easily the longer he’s in Tim’s orbit: pulled in, spin controlled, responding to his gravity. Jason puts one of his hands in Tim’s hair, tugs through it, digs his fingers into Tim’s scalp. Tim grunts in pleasure and puts his head back on Jason’s chest, pillowed now on one of his hands.
Something silver flashes on Tim’s arm, and Jason picks up his wrist. Tim lets him extend the arm, turn his hand in the rising light so Jason can see. It’s clearly the device Steph was talking about. She called it a bracelet, but it looks more like a watch, a metal band holding a sensor to the inside of Tim’s wrist. It must have been hidden under the sleeve of his costume, that night in the alley. There’s a display screen and a small button to cycle through readouts: hours of sleep across one day, totals across each day of the week, a few basic health trackers like heart rate and blood oxygen levels, even, like a real watch, a feed with the time. Jason punches through the numbers. Steph was right—four hours across three days.
“You asshole,” Jason says, sighing. He lets Tim have his arm back, and Tim tucks it against himself, his fingers splayed wide over Jason’s ribs.
“Don’t start with me about it,” Tim says, but there’s no heat to it. He sounds defeated.
“The drugs aren’t a long-term fix,” Jason says.
Tim clenches his fist in the fabric of Jason’s shirt. “Don’t start,” he says again.
“Fuck you,” Jason says, but he drops it, because the last time he fought Tim over this he managed to say something so embarrassing that Tim ran away from Gotham for three days. He can’t understand why Tim is back, actually. Why Tim is here tonight. In fact, what he can’t understand is what’s happening right now, what they’re doing. This isn’t how they’ve been arranging things. Tim shows up and they immediately have sex. Or they patrol and back each other up on the street and then immediately have sex. And it’s hot and intense and Jason loves it, but any talking they do, anything slow and gentle, Tim letting Jason hold him, that happens afterward, and doesn’t happen for very long.
It's not like Jason would have fucked Tim tonight anyway, not when Tim’s had so little sleep that he’s basically a walking corpse. And Jason’s had so little sleep himself that he can’t imagine he’d be much good for anything, even if he tried. It occurs to Jason that Tim’s never come to find him when he’s been like this before, strung out on insomnia and looking like shit. There have been times, in the past five months, when Jason has gone five days, six days without seeing Tim. He wonders if this is what was happening, Tim hunkered down through a bad spell.
Jason’s not going to ask questions. He’s so tired that everything is feeling kind of soupy and far away, like maybe none of it is real.
“Is that Top Chef?” Tim asks.
Jason has almost forgotten it’s on. “Yeah. Old episodes.”
“Cool,” Tim says, and settles more deeply against him.
On screen, the contestants are all making different varieties of queso, which is going very badly. Jason lets the noise wash over him. He can feel Tim’s chest expand with each breath, and if he concentrates, he can kind of feel Tim’s heartbeat. He slips his hands under Tim’s shirt and spreads them across the hot skin of his back, catching on the ridges and divots of scar tissue. He fits his fingertips against the bumps of Tim’s spine. Tim’s weight on him feels so deliciously good.
Pathetically, Jason doesn’t think he’s ever done this before, curled into someone like this, no motive and no end goal, against a body he wants and wants to be close to. He hasn’t often been held in his life. He hasn’t often held someone else. He’s not prepared for the way it knocks at something in the rear of his brain, some hidden and sun-starved core that trembles at being touched like this. Tim is different, Jason knows. For all his moody reserve, for all the tragedy that shadows him year by year, Tim is a person who has been held and loved and touched and hugged, from his birth onward, with no interruption in the long line of care.
The rest of the episode plays out on the television. Jason has no idea what happens. He feels like he’s being slowly anaesthetized, his limbs going heavier and heavier, exhaustion swimming through his body. A new episode begins—the contestants are on a beach—Jason doesn’t know, he doesn’t care, and then the screen goes dark. Tim’s turned it off. Tim braces his hands on Jason’s chest and leans up to kiss him.
Jason moves against him, slow press of lips, the edge of Tim’s tongue. He drags his mouth down Tim’s cheek. “I’m not gonna—tonight—” he says, slurring, nuzzling under Tim’s jaw.
“Me neither,” Tim says. “Just—”
“Yeah,” Jason breathes, kissing him again, holding Tim against him. He drags up the last of his energy and heaves them both up, turns them over, gets Tim underneath him on the couch. He settles between Tim’s legs, and now it’s Tim’s turn to stroke down his back, his fingers skating over the bruises and knotted muscle without digging in. Jason connects their mouths, everything easy and quiet, chasing nothing, just feeling Tim under him. And after a little while Tim’s hands still on his back, and their mouths move more and more slowly, and Jason pulls away without really knowing he’s doing it, dropping his head next to Tim’s on the pillow, his face turned into Tim’s hair, breathing him in. He’s not really holding himself up anymore. His weight’s on Tim, all of it, pressing Tim down into the couch. But Tim’s breath is coming deep and steady, and Tim’s eyes are closed, and Jason feels it when the tension goes out of Tim’s body all at once. And Jason doesn’t know anything that happens after that, because Jason's asleep.
***
Jason wakes to the sound of a couple of his neighbors shouting in the hallway, slamming doors, more muffled shouting from inside another apartment, choppy rap music blaring from a speaker, the building’s normal afternoon soundscape. Strong sun is beaming across the couch, right into Jason’s eyes, so he screws them closed and shoves his face into Tim’s neck.
And then his eyes fly open again, because it is afternoon, and Tim’s still here, and Tim’s asleep.
Very, very carefully, Jason eases himself off of Tim, hovering over him on hands and knees. Tim’s face is relaxed, open, and it’s different from the drugged state the Cloceptryn sent him into. He still looks alive right now, still looks like himself. Tim’s right arm is hanging half off the couch, the display screen on his watch facing up. Jason twists to eyeball it. It’s showing the time right now, 2:45 p.m. As gently as he can, trying not to wake Tim up, Jason leans down and presses the little button to cycle through readouts until he gets to the one he wants.
Seven hours of sleep. Continuous.
“Holy fuck,” Jason says, too loud, forgetting himself. Tim immediately stirs awake, his eyes coming open.
“What—” Tim says muzzily, rubbing at his face.
“Good morning,” Jason says, somewhat hysterically. Seven hours. And not just Tim—Jason slept seven hours, seven hours straight, no waking up every ten minutes or every hour, no nightmares. Jason hasn’t had a night without nightmares in—years. Since he was a kid, a little kid, maybe eight or nine years old. He can’t process it, can’t get over it, and at the same time he realizes that he feels fantastic, minus the aches and the line of fire down his forearm. Just deeply well and well-rested. It’s scrambling his brain.
Tim’s sitting up fast, and Jason raises up onto his knees, pulling away from him, giving him space. Tim presses himself against the back of the couch and flicks through the displays on his watch, his eyes darting between Jason and the readout on the screen. His breathing speeds up.
“Better than the pills?” Jason asks, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying; he feels insane. Jason slept the way a man sleeps after he buys a big loud dog, just taking off his armor and giving guard duty to someone else. Except the big loud dog was asleep too.
Tim’s face is turning red, but it’s obvious how much healthier he looks now than when he first came through Jason’s window. A couple more nights of this and he’ll probably ditch the dark circles entirely. And then Jason swallows. A couple more nights—Jesus. They could do this again. Jason could have this again, if Tim would let him.
“I don’t—I—I need to go,” Tim says, picking himself up off the couch, running his hands through his hair. “I’ve missed—fuck, two more meetings,” he says, clearly flustered, casting around at random. “I’m so late.”
“Aren’t you the bigshot over there? The queen is never late,” Jason says, and he’s flustered himself, scattered, feeling too big for his body.
Embarrassed or not, Tim curls his lip at him. “Call me the queen one more time,” he says.
“The princess,” Jason says immediately, and Tim turns and spins a kick into Jason’s chest, hard. Jason catches his ankle in one hand and holds it, smiling up at Tim helplessly. He rubs his thumb into the knob, back and forth. “Fire anybody who gives you grief,” he says.
“I—yeah,” Tim says, his face completely open, no mask, and yet somehow suddenly unreadable. “I mean, no, I will not be doing that.” He tugs his foot out of Jason’s grip and goes to collect his shoes from beneath the window, and then opens the window itself. Ten things try to jump off of Jason’s tongue, but he swallows all of them. Tim glances at Jason over his shoulder, and then he slides through the frame. A couple minutes later, Jason hears the muted roar of a motorcycle start up down the block.
Jason’s hardly sure what to do with himself, after. He’s jittery, keyed up, unable to focus on anything in the apartment. He eats and shaves and heads a few streets over to the abandoned personal training studio he’s been using as his main gym for the past year, where he works up a better sweat than he has in days. It’s amazing what sleep does for strength, fitness, muscle power. He babies his right arm only a little, but it’s a clean pain, nothing torn so bad that the gym will tear it further, even though the whole thing will take six weeks or more to heal. He’s buzzing on endorphins by the end of his workout, and when he steps out of the shower cubicle at the back of the studio, for some reason, he texts Steph: Solved the problem.
He makes it back to his apartment before she answers.
FROM: S
what problem
T’s problem, Jason types.
FROM: S
WHAT
FROM: S
HOW????
Ask T, Jason types, and then, after a couple of minutes, adds: You were safe last night?, meaning Cape Carmine, sneaking around a stirred-up wasp nest of mobsters after he’d cleared out.
FROM: S
my god
FROM: S
did we kno u were like this
FROM: S
have u always been like this??
And Jason’s so rested and healthy and full of endorphins that he only feels a very little bit like he’s not wearing enough body armor.
In the early evening, before it’s time to get back out on the street, Jason pulls the collection tubes of blood swabs from his freezer and takes them across the bridge to Murphy Avenue, where he breaks into a building masquerading as a closed animal hospital to play with some of Dick’s toys. Really they’re Bruce’s toys, Bruce’s bare-bones satellite laboratory equipment for raw materials that just won’t wait for the forty-minute drive back to the Cave, but at the moment it’s a lot more comfortable for Jason to leave Bruce out of the equation of his life entirely.
He shoots the two micro security cameras he finds inside with his silenced KelTec, but he’s very sure there are three or four more watching him from hidden locations. The machine analyses will sync into the Cave systems, too. It’s a good thing, actually: Jason wants the others to have the data. If the machines pull up anything useful on the three maybe-metas who jumped him last night, everyone will need to know about it. He wouldn’t want any of them to face a run-in with no intel. Except for maybe Bruce, of course.
He feeds blood from the samples into the mass spec and the genomic extractor, plus a couple of different biochem analyzers. The genomic extractor is the real key, mining through the larger Bat database to search for matches across millions of files. The tests will take hours to finish, and he programs the results to come to the new burner phone he collected earlier today. He smashed the old phone, but not before plugging Steph’s contact into the new one. And Tim’s, too, even though Tim has only ever texted him one time, well over two months ago, exactly four words: You’re out of condoms. Jason had been in the middle of tracking a delivery driver he was pretty sure was behind a string of murdered strip-club patrons when the unknown number had buzzed up on his screen, and he’d abandoned the whole chase immediately, hitting a drug store and then booking it back to that month’s safehouse in record time to find Tim spread out on the bed, naked and waiting for him. He still has no idea how Tim had pulled the number of that old phone. How Steph pulled the number of the last one.
But he texted Steph the number of his new phone himself, right after he plugged in her contact. Just in case.
He clears out of the lab as soon as he can. The longer he stays, the more likely it is that somebody in the Cave is going to get antsy about his being here and show up personally to ask questions. And he has bigger problems to consider, like how he’s dealing with the Families. Even if the test results come back somehow pointing a finger at any one of the Five Families—Cassamento, Maroni, whoever—they’re all at fault, tangled up inextricably with each other until it’s impossible for any one hand to pull a string. There are no easy answers, here: cut out part of the rot and the rest will metastasize and come down on him with a vengeance; cut out the whole cancerous mass and he creates a power vacuum in the Cape for a new gang to fill, one likely younger and louder and less practiced at maintaining discipline than the Families.
The question lasts him nearly the rest of the night, and even though he chews on it while riding patrol through Crime Alley and spending a truly stupid amount of time deescalating a gunfight between two pissed-off eleven-year-olds who got their hands on their older brothers’ assault rifles, he’s no closer to coming up with a solution than when he started. Jason would absolutely never admit this out loud to anyone, and he furiously throttles the offending part of his brain as soon as he realizes he’s even thinking it, but it’s times like these that he misses the old days, fourteen years old and following the plans of someone much, much smarter than him. Jason doesn’t want help or a partner or a team or whatever, but sometimes it would kind of be nice, sort of, a little bit. To have a sounding board. Or something.
He’s still turning the problem over in his brain by four a.m., licking hummus off his fingers outside an all-night Lebanese food stall in Newtown, when his phone buzzes.
FROM: S
got eyes on another robot
FROM: S
come join us
Jason’s already opening his comm even before her next message, line 7!!!, appears on his screen. “Are you two in trouble?” he asks immediately, his chest squeezing—he’s started to have some kind of conditioned reaction to these robots, his body cueing up a threat response much stronger than is merited.
“Nah, we’re good,” Steph says. “But get over to Aparo Park! You’re on this case too, right?”
“Oh I am, am I?” Jason says, balling up his foil and napkins and sinking them all into a nearby trash can.
“Oh yes,” Steph says. “You’re about to be on a lot of our cases, I can tell. My God, if I’d known it was this easy, I would have dumped him in your bed years ago,” so Tim must have told her. Jason struggles for a moment to say anything at all.
“Does he even—want me there,” he finally manages, and then grimaces: like a fucking teenager.
“He doesn’t know what he wants,” Steph says briskly. “He just—ah, wait, hang on,” she says, in a different voice, and then there’s silence. Their comms have excellent noise cancellation; Jason can’t hear anything that might be going on around her. “Well, fuck, the party’s started,” she says, after about half a minute of dead air. “The robot’s gone into property-damage mode with that missile launcher. It’s tearing up the men’s bathrooms right now. I have to jump back on Tim’s frequency, but get over here, okay?” The line goes dead.
And Jason’s already back on his bike, because even though he knows Tim is safe, rested and healthy and already working with Steph for backup, he can’t seem to make himself stay away. And there’s a new part of him, uncomfortable and strange and without an undercurrent of hunger, that doesn’t like the thought of Steph going up against the robots, either.
Aparo Park is barely ten minutes away, clinging to the edge of the West End and overlooking the Trigate Bridge. It’s the smallest of Gotham’s historic parks designed by landscape architects in the late 1800s, a once-elegant expanse of trees and slopes and winding paths facing the scummy water on one side and several streets of classic Gotham brownstones on the other, all of which have long since been gutted and mercilessly chopped up for tiny working-class apartments. Jason keeps his engine down to a low purr when he arrives, rolling through the gate and listening hard for sounds of chaos. There’s a big group of homeless folks congregated by the park entrance, most holding blankets and bags of possessions and squabbling with one another—like maybe they’ve all been suddenly driven out of the park by something too big and mean to mess with.
“Which way?” Jason asks one guy, who points him north, the upward slope, lit at even intervals by the park’s old sodium lampposts. He cuts the bike’s engine down to nearly nothing as he glides deeper into the shabby wilds. When the sound of property destruction is distinct and obvious, he abandons the bike in some hydrangea bushes and keeps going on foot, the first of the season’s falling leaves drifting down around him. Autumn is still creeping around the edges of South Jersey, not yet ready to commit, although at least the nights are cool enough now that Jason isn’t cooking himself in his layers. But the animals know the year is turning: overhead, flocks of small winged things are pitching themselves south in the dark, abandoning Gotham to the species of birds too stubborn to leave, the ones who ride out all seasons caped and cowled and paddling hard against the deluge.
The second turning in the path spits out into an open, unkempt stretch of grass and dirt holding the unexpectedly beautiful 1920s bathroom structures. The men’s block is already half-demolished, a side wall knocked down and the roof sagging, the concrete footing to one side fractured and split in multiple places. Lengths of pipe have been yanked out of the ground and tossed around the clearing, and water is gushing from several different sources. The robot is crouched over one hole, in the middle of pulling up another pipe. Steph and Tim don’t seem to have engaged.
Jason silently pulls himself into the low branches of a tree and scans for the others. He catches sight of Tim first, a dark outline very high in a tree on the other side of the clearing, and then he sees Steph, much closer, crouched behind a boulder and watching him. When she sees he’s spotted her, she taps the side of her cowl and holds up three fingers. Jason opens his comm to line three. It’s an open line, less secure than the one he’s been using with Steph, which means no names, no personal details.
“Are we just watching tonight? Should I have brought popcorn?” Jason says.
“I thought I heard your bike,” Steph says. “Red Robin seems to think we need passive observation data, because thirty-seven minutes of video footage on all the other robots wasn’t enough.”
“Video footage is unreliable,” Tim says, and he has his working voice on, all serious authority, apparently refusing to acknowledge that there might be anything uncomfortable about Jason’s being here after this morning, this afternoon. “This is a good location to see what the robot does in person, without interference. Minimal civilians, low potential for damage.”
“I think Gotham Parks & Rec might disagree,” Jason says, as the robot rips out another pipe.
“That’s what I said,” Steph huffs. “Hello, citizen tax dollars. Oh, Hood, let me give you the rundown. I should have called you when we were texting earlier, but Jersey DCF increased my caseload and I’m so busy I could scream,” as if he’s supposed to know what that means.
“What do you mean, texting earlier?” Tim says suspiciously.
“We talk. We’re friends. It’s none of your business,” Steph says, and Jason laughs, quick and surprised, always surprised by her, the way she somehow has this ability to just say things, out loud, even big things, heavy things, sensitive things, bowling right through any blinking caution lights. Like nothing has ever hurt her, even though—he knows, he knows, he’s read her file, he knows—she’s been hurt so bad he can’t imagine how she’s not in the grave next to his.
And there’s silence on the line, so maybe she can still surprise Tim, too.
“Plug your ears and whistle, Red Robin, you’ve already heard this bit. Anyway, Hood, after you called me in, I waded through a whole bathtub of blood in that alley while hauling some seriously heavy equipment, so that was very gross, thank you so much. Oh, Red Robin thinks the portal was glitching right there because the whole place was boxed in with lead. Dentist’s office on one side, imaging clinic on the other, all with some serious radiation shielding. And who knows what else is in those buildings—I mean, Cape Carmine, right? Kept the samples stable to run tests on site, though.” She breaks off as the robot rips a final pipe out of the men’s block and abruptly turns across the clearing to the women’s block. It aims its rod launcher at the base of the outer wall and fires, waits for the reload, then fires again. The bolts go in with a deafening squeal of metal.
“Shame about the buildings,” Jason says. The bathrooms really are weirdly lovely, fluted stonework and stained glass, glazed tile roofs, obviously designed by someone passionate for the craft. The robot gets its hands into the cracks the iron stakes made at the base of the wall and begins to pull, and slowly the wall itself starts to separate.
“Not to worry. The city will replace it all with something made entirely of concrete,” Steph says. “Anyway, you’ll never guess what the tests came back with.”
“The robots are Thanagarian,” Tim says.
“What the hell, bro?” Steph yelps. “That was my big moment! My big reveal!”
Jason has to rack his brain. “Thanagar—that’s, uh, the hawk people? Hawkman?” Alien planets tend to be outside of Jason’s daily purview, although he knows Dick and Bruce and Tim leave Earth often enough to hold more of an intergalactic mindset.
“You fucking glory hog,” Steph is still muttering.
“Hawkman and Hawkwoman,” Tim tells Jason, ignoring her. “And now we know the robots’ origin, but not who’s sending them or why, or how to stop them from crossing into our world. Intelligence must be our priority now,” he says, as if he’s a four-star general and not someone who fell asleep under Jason this morning. Jason has often noticed how different Tim sounds as Red Robin when he’s really putting on the act, really leaning into the identity. Colder, slightly inhuman. It makes Jason want to rough him up until the mask comes down. This mask, anyway. Tim is masks on masks on masks. Jason hardly ever gets to see down to his core. Down to what he’s protecting.
Jason flicks away a beetle trying to land on his jacket. “Has anyone pointed out the obvious next step of calling the hawks on the phone and getting their opinion?” Jason asks.
A huge section of the bathroom wall comes down with a crash. The robot begins flinging rubble away from the area, and Steph curses quietly as a piece of it cracks into her boulder. The pneumatic crunch of the robot’s stake launcher fills the air again, aimed down at the bathroom floor.
“Yes, I think we have to call it in,” Tim says. “Strictly for the intel, of course. Gotham can handle what threatens Gotham,” and he sounds so much like Bruce in that moment that Jason’s hackles come up.
“Yeah, well, what’s threatening Gotham right now could crush your ribcage without even noticing. Tell the aliens to come deal with it and tell B to suck it.”
“We’re not going to do that,” Tim says, and oh, he’s used to being obeyed in the field, isn’t he, he’s used to taking orders from Dick and Bruce and handing them out to everyone else.
“And you’re the head honcho on what we’re doing? You get to decide we’re all gonna play robot whack-a-mole for six more weeks instead of letting the experts clean it up?” Jason says, grinding his teeth.
“Straw-man fallacy. My reasoning is sound.”
Jason only stops himself from cussing Tim out by force of will. “How do you stand him?” he asks Steph, glaring across the clearing at Tim through his thin screen of leaves and branches. “I’m gonna shoot him out of that tree.”
“You know, I think I’m about to start having a lot more fun on these little outings. You two are hilarious,” Steph says. “Don’t mind him, Hood. He’s just pissy because earlier today Batman asked if we needed any help on this case.”
“Which we don’t,” Tim growls, and suddenly Jason is back in Tim’s corner. They’ll never need Bruce’s help.
Water begins spraying from several more sources as pipes snap and release. The dirt around the men’s bathroom is already mostly mud, and now the other half of the clearing is quickly following suit. The park’s lampposts reflect through the fountaining water and off the robot’s metal hide, off the pools spreading across the dirt, as if the whole clearing is a stage lit up for its very dangerous lead actor. Jason watches the robot bend, get a grip on a lead pipe, and drag it out of the ground, a huge long piece covered in dirt and grime. It tosses the pipe away and bends down again, gripping, pulling…and dragging up something bright white, something glowing white, and Jason’s moving, Steph’s moving, Tim’s shouting Engage! into their comms.
Jason has no idea what that white thing is, but he’s absolutely sure the robot shouldn’t be touching it. He fires his jump line into the side of the half-demolished building as he’s running and throws himself under the robot’s outstretched arm, whipping the cord of the line around the elbow joint and tying it off into a knot that isn’t very pretty but will hold. Jason sees the robot’s giant hand clench tight around the white object, the eight finger-like appendages weaving over each other to form a secure basket, and then Tim is there, and Steph, and the robot is trying to pick them all off with its stake launcher while hauling back on the jump line, little by little, dragging even more of the building down in the process.
“Batgirl, get some lead on it, keep it from portaling away,” Tim yells.
“How? I can’t make it a necklace out of pipes—” she says, and Jason is realizing that the only way the robot is going to drop its prize is if its hand is cut off. Jason still has Tim’s laser blade—he wasn’t planning on returning it—and he tears it out of his belt and flips the beam on high. He has no idea if the laser will actually cut the metal, but it’s his only option.
“I’m closing. Distract it,” he says, and then he’s inside the robot’s reach as several of Tim’s shuriken explode against the robot’s back. He launches himself at the robot’s trapped arm, helpfully pulled wide and taut, and drives the laser knife into the metal plating with an underhand grip—and thank God, he’s watching the blade sink in. He leans his weight into the handle, dragging the knife along, ripping the arm open in a weird parallel to the wound breathing fire under his own armor right now. But the laser blade is tiny, meant for surgeries, not for battling robots, and Jason is going to be here all night if he has to hack off the robot’s whole arm with it. And then he’s ducking, slipping in the mud, dancing away from the robot’s free arm as Tim and Steph fail in their distraction efforts, throwing himself out of the path of a flying stake.
There’s an eruption of green ooze at the robot’s back—Steph has launched a couple of gooparangs and heaved a length of lead pipe right after them. The pipe sticks to the goop, glued to the robot’s back, and Steph throws a second pipe right after it, then a third, tagging the robot with lead that it can’t shake off. “Smart,” Jason says, trying to close with the robot again, but it’s keeping him off, still way too fast for something of its size, even with the goop and the pipes. Steph appears at his shoulder, making herself a moving target, and then Tim’s there, too.
“You got more of those slime-bombs?” Jason asks Steph. He’s pulled his KelTec and is trying to line up a shot into the gash he opened on the robot’s trapped arm, which isn’t going to still be trapped in another few seconds.
“Fresh out,” she says. Her cape billows around her, dragging through water and mud. The robot lunges, and Jason has to dive low and roll, and he comes up covered in mud from head to toe.
Tim flips out of the way of another flying stake. “I have a shock disc I took from the Cave, but it’s only a beta version. Untested in the field. I don’t know if it will have the same effect as the subway rail,” he says.
“Well, fucking try it,” Jason says.
“I can’t. I don’t know what it would do to the object it’s holding,” Tim says.
“What even is that thing?” Steph asks, and right then the robot drags the line anchor free of the building wall and the rest of the women’s bathroom comes down with a crash that shakes the ground. They all dive out of the way as the robot charges them, dragging the jump line behind it.
“It’s what they’ve been looking for,” Tim says.
“So you don’t know either,” Steph says. “I’m sure it’s wildly radioactive and giving all of us cancer right now. What’s it going to do with it?”
“Don’t care,” Jason says. He’s sliding around in the mud, no traction for his boots. “Tie it up again, saw off the arm, then zap it to hell.”
Tim rips his grapple from his belt and smashes the auto-retract gear against a chunk of rubble. The line unspools into his hands, and he tosses one end to Steph. “How fast can we make this happen?” he asks, all business, and Steph grins at him, huge and white.
“Call me the Flash, baby,” she says, and they’re off, mud flying, wheeling around the robot like birds, and Jason has to watch closely with his eyes and his body for several seconds before joining in: he needs to feel how Tim and Steph move together, how they catch each other’s cues, how to insert himself inside their rhythm without becoming a wrong note. But Jason has always been able to trust his body to do what he needs it to do, even when he can’t always trust his mind, and in a moment he’s a part of the pattern they’re weaving, an anchor, catching the line when Tim sends it his way, bracing for Steph to roll across the plane of his back, keeping the robot’s focus on himself while Tim kicks up and tumbles over the robot’s chest. It’s fast, frenetic work, nothing easy about it, and yet it feels easy, feels like Jason’s done this every day of his life, snatching Steph out of the air, tensing for Tim’s iron grip on his shoulder as Tim slings himself around the robot’s torso.
They have the robot trussed up much quicker than he and Tim managed on Whitney, and it goes down with a crash that throws up mud and water in great splattering waves—Jason catches it across the face, in his mouth, bitter and probably full of bacteria. Jason spits some out of his teeth as he goes over the coils of jump line with his hands, checking for any loose places. The robot thrashes in the mud, slippery as a fish but secure in its bonds, pinned to their world by the lead pipes still stuck to its back.
“Oh, I like having him around,” Steph says to Tim, her hands on her knees, panting, and it takes Jason a moment to realize she means him, means Jason.
Tim pushes the wet hair out of his face and glances at Jason appraisingly. “He knows what he’s doing,” Tim says, which may be the highest compliment Jason’s ever gotten out of him.
Steph laughs and jumps on Tim’s back, messes his hair back up. “He does, doesn’t he,” she says, and then: “He’s better than you,” not a jab—an observation.
Tim’s braced to hold Steph up: she’s a little taller than him, a little bigger than him. He looks at Jason with that slight half-smile on his mouth. “I know he is,” Tim says, and shocked heat floods through Jason’s belly.
Jason pulls the laser blade back out of his belt with fingers that suddenly feel thick and clumsy. “Would you two like to help, or do I get all the grunt work?” he says.
“No, Red Robin is our grunt work man,” Steph says, so Tim dumps her shrieking into the mud. But he does come to take the laser blade away from Jason, brushing Jason’s fingers as he does. There’s mud smeared across Tim’s cheek, in his hair, down his costume. It makes him look younger, less dangerous. A boy, not one of Gotham’s bleeding gods.
Tim kneels down by the robot’s arm. The robot’s fingers are still closed impenetrably around the white object, and the cut Jason made earlier gleams almost invisibly under the crisscrossing jump line, thin and small against the robot’s enormous arm. “This may take a while,” Tim says, flicking the laser on high. As if sensing what Tim is planning, the robot thrashes harder, sending waves of water and mud over Tim’s legs.
“We’ve got a while,” Steph says, except they do not, at all, have a while. An almighty splash sounds from behind the half-destroyed men’s bathrooms, and suddenly a second robot is advancing through the water. Steph cusses, long and low.
“Cut fast,” Jason tells Tim. The second robot has them in its sights, and it’s already building up speed. Jason throws himself out to meet it.
Steph’s right there with him, at his shoulder. “What do we do? Rope this one up too?” She’s pulled her grapple from her belt, their last jump line: Tim’s and Jason’s have already been used.
“Red Robin, we could use that shock disc,” Jason calls, glancing over his shoulder to see Tim feverishly cutting into the robot’s arm, his face set in concentration.
“Not unless there’s no other choice,” Tim says, his voice now in Jason’s ear: the proximity feature on the comms is cancelling out as Jason puts distance between them. “It’s single-use. There may be more showing up now that their goal is uncovered.”
“Fuck,” Jason mutters. “I don’t suppose you have Hawkwoman on speed-dial?” he asks Steph.
“Nah, she doesn’t exactly come to girls’ night,” Steph says, and they’re out of time, they’re closing. Jason cuts to one side, firing on the robot, wasting bullets, trying to draw its attention away from Tim, and it takes the bait, charging him—and then abruptly swinging back around, faster than Jason could have believed possible, sweeping its arm, catching Steph hard across the torso, throwing her against a pile of rubble.
“Batgirl!” Jason yells, flinging himself into the robot’s path, trying to pull its attention to himself, and thank God, he can see her out of the corner of his eye slowly getting to her feet. “You in one piece?” he calls to her, weaving back, sliding in the mud, not even trying to throw a punch—he’d just hurt himself, not the robot. This is all Robin training: be bright, be loud, be a distraction.
“Goddamn fucking hell,” Steph is groaning, which Jason takes to be a good sign. But Jason’s next problem is that he still has no weapon on him that will do any good against the robot at all. He hopes Tim knows how to butcher in a hurry.
“Anytime with that jump line,” he tells Steph, rolling under the flightpath of an iron stake.
“Oh fuck,” Steph says. “Oh fuck. Hood, it’s jammed, the grapple,” and he steals a glance to see it in her hands, bent and mangled—it must have taken the brunt of the robot’s blow. “I can’t get the line out!”
“Never mind, fuck it, keep thinking,” Jason says, and she chucks the broken grapple directly at the robot’s head and follows it with several exploding shuriken, the same kind Tim uses, which of course have no effect. Nothing is going to have any effect. The fight has just become a pointless struggle, nothing but a play for time while Tim works.
Jason empties the clip of his KelTec against the robot’s armor and then pulls his Glock. “We need a bigger boom,” Steph says, and she’s back at Jason’s shoulder, moving easily, probably nothing broken.
“Should have packed a rocket launcher,” Jason says, and oh, oh. “Distract it,” he tells Steph urgently. “Can you give me—twenty seconds?”
“Take twenty-one,” Steph says, pulling her bo staff and lighting up the electrified tip.
Jason’s gone, flying across the clearing, back down the park path, around the turnings, down to the hydrangea bushes where he stashed his bike. He turns the key and slams the throttle into high gear, and the bike bucks under him, engine roaring. The park blurs around him as he picks up speed, racing back to the fight. “Batgirl, get out of there as soon as you see the bike,” Jason says into his comm, and Steph grunts in affirmation in his ear.
He hits the clearing in the space of two breaths, and Steph is already diving away. He keeps the bike pointed straight for the robot, fighting to keep it steady in the mud and water, gunning the throttle, feeling it jolt under his thighs, and in the last seconds he leans on the handlebars, brings his feet up to the seat, and kicks himself back off the bike entirely—no flips, nothing fancy, just his body falling through space, and before the ground comes up to crush him he fires two shots with his Glock, one to the gas tank, one to the compartment under the seat, where the wrapped-up grenade is waiting.
Light, smoke, heat, noise. The explosion shatters the clearing, and Jason throws his arms over his face and head as he’s hitting the ground, feeling the fury of it wash over him. But his armor is made to hold up against nightmares like this, the nomex running flash-bake hot but keeping him safe, and now he’s kicking himself for leaving the helmet at home so much—he can feel burning bits of ash and rubble singeing the parts of his scalp and face not covered with his arms. He rolls away, coughing smoke out of his lungs, and suddenly Steph is there, her hands under his arm, helping him up. “Battered and deep-fried, like an Oreo at the state fair,” she’s saying, so at least he didn’t pop his eardrums.
“Me or the robot?” he asks, leaning on her more heavily than he means to, trying to pull himself back together.
“Both,” she says, and Jason blinks the spots out of his eyes to see the second robot on its back in the water, strangely dented and crushed, its limbs bent at unpleasant angles, as if the explosion couldn’t tear the robot apart but could crunch it like a boot into a tin can. But even as they watch, the robot shudders and starts to move again, dragging itself over onto its stomach, trying to push to its feet.
“I only had the one bomb,” Jason says regretfully.
“Red Robin, how are we doing on the amputation?” Steph calls.
Tim has climbed on top of the robot’s arm, still sawing at the wrist. “Nearly there,” he grunts.
The second robot is trying to support its weight on its crushed legs, but they won’t hold it up. It topples down into the mud again, and now it begins dragging itself forward with its arms, crawling through the water like a horror movie monster, aiming itself at Tim. “Fucking Christ,” Jason groans, pulling himself off of Steph, shaking life back into his body. He’s aching and still a little blast-stunned, but he makes it across the clearing with Steph, both of them putting themselves between Tim and the half-smashed robot, even though they have absolutely nothing that will slow it down.
Steph throws down the last of her shuriken directly in front of the robot’s face and hits the detonator, but the explosions are too small to do anything, and Jason’s bullets are no better. “Nearly there—nearly—” Tim is chanting, and Jason and Steph are giving ground by the second. “Nearly—” Tim says, and in desperation Jason pulls his keris blade, ready to see if Talia’s steel and iron will at least let him go out fighting. “Nearly—got it, move move move,” Tim shouts, and Jason’s out of there, relief sucking through his chest, Steph on his heels, following Tim with a blind animal faith. Tim turns as he’s running and heaves something huge through the air to Jason—the entire robot hand, sawed off at the wrist, still curled into a fist around the white object, all of it bigger than a basketball and at least forty pounds. Jason catches it and tucks it under one arm, and Tim bends down to scoop a short length of pipe out of the mud. And then they’re out of the clearing, among the trees, back on dry land.
“Drop the hand,” Tim tells him, and Jason lets it fall into the layer of dead leaves and underbrush at his feet. Tim balances the pipe on top of it, and then he pulls a wicked-looking black disc from his largest belt pouch.
“Aim for the one Red Hood blew up,” Steph tells him; the mangled robot is still dragging itself across the clearing.
“I’m aiming for both of them,” Tim says. He arms the disc, rears back, and throws. The disc sails into the clearing, coming down with a splash in the murky water between the two robots. The charge detonates, and electricity lights up the clearing, rushing through the conductor of the water, enormously powerful, electrocuting both robots immediately. They shake with the current until the disc goes dark, and then they lie still.
Steph gives a wordless, guttural moan and flops down into the leaves, spreading her arms and legs like a starfish. “Let’s not do any more robots, okay? Let’s be done with robots now.”
Jason pulls his Glock and fires experimentally across the clearing, a couple of shots at the robot still trussed in the jump lines. The bullets sink in, punching through the metal, just like they did in the subway. “You need to do anything with them before they melt?” he asks Tim.
“Come here and see if you can pry its fingers open now,” Tim says, crouched beside the amputated hand, so Jason kneels down next to him in the leaves. The robot’s eight finger-like appendages are still laced tightly around its prize, but for some reason—even though the current didn’t touch the hand at all—the chemical reaction still seems to be taking effect.
Jason jams his keris blade between the fingers. The metal of the robot’s hand isn’t really metal anymore, and the blade cuts through easily, wet slices. The fingers fall away, and there it is: bright, glowing white, pulsing, nearly alive. “Strange,” Tim says, a ridiculous understatement; Jason’s brain can’t at all process what the object is. He can’t really even hold the shape of it in his mind, some kind of right-wrong-right energy that hurts to look at dead-on. It’s not meant to be here, that’s for sure—here in this park, here in this city, here on this planet.
“Don’t touch it,” he tells Tim, who makes a dismissive sound between his teeth.
“Obviously,” Tim says. He lifts a chunk of the robot’s chopped-up hand and uses it to scoop the white object inside the length of lead pipe. “Let’s keep this under lead shielding for now,” he says. He pulls the laser blade back out of his belt and slices off two big strips of his own cape, which he balls up and stuffs in either end of the pipe, securing the object inside.
“They’re gonna keep coming, you know,” Jason says. “The robots. As long as that white thing is here.”
Tim stands up, the pipe in his hands. “I know. We need to get it off-world, I think. As quickly as possible.”
“Oh, now you wanna bring in the hawk people?” Jason says, wiping his knife clean: the metal is starting to melt in gooey strands, dripping down the blade.
“Now we have a reason to ask for help. Now they serve a specific purpose,” Tim says.
“I am going to kill you,” Jason says seriously, and Tim smirks at him.
“Could somebody please call Oracle before another robot shows up,” Steph cuts in, and Jason goes to pull her to her feet while Tim opens his comm to Barbara’s direct line.
***
Hawkman is on another planet; Hawkwoman, however, is in the Justice League Satellite Watchtower. Barbara arranges for Shayera to meet them well outside of the city, deep in the Gotham suburb of Sommerset.
Jason’s bike is in one million pieces in Aparo Park, so he’s on the back of Stephanie’s, one arm loose around her waist and the other cradling the length of lead pipe hiding the alien object. Tim’s alone on the massive Ducati he has to drape himself over to ride, which is probably a good thing: Jason is not at all confident in the lead pipe as a stable method of containment, and he’s not sure he’d be able to focus on keeping it secure if he were pressed against Tim’s back, his thighs around Tim’s, his hand on Tim’s hip. Stephanie Brown is her own kind of gorgeous, but she’s not the one his gut is sick with, endlessly hungry, hungry, hungry.
They race along the streets of Gotham, then out across the Trigate Bridge, still light with traffic this early in the morning, up the interstate, heading west. The wind tears through Jason’s hair, chaps his cheeks, stinging against the small burns from the explosion. Steph has tied her hair down so it doesn’t blow into Jason’s face, and she has no problem keeping up with Tim, who’s bobbing and weaving around cars with the fierce joy for speed and power he inherited from Dick. Steph can keep up with Tim just fine in a fight too, Jason thinks, maybe not with Tim’s precision and ruthless skill, but with bravery and heart to make up for it. Not every cape can fight well in a group, but Jason’s seen Steph excel at it, as if she has an instinct for other people, for allowing herself to be one part of a larger whole. And she still remembers how to laugh, which is a trick Jason used to be good at, in an old life. Jason is realizing, slowly and haltingly, that he likes Stephanie Brown very much. It helps that when he looks at her, there aren’t any ghosts from his past looking back.
“I have a call from Nightwing coming in. I’m switching frequencies,” Tim says in their comms, and then the background soundtrack of his breathing has vanished from Jason’s ear.
Steph pulls one hand off the handlebar to scratch at her cheek and chin below her cowl. “This mud is going to give me some horrific facial disease,” she says. “Are you itching like crazy too?”
He is. The cold interstate wind is whipping flakes of dried mud off his face and costume like he’s a shedding dog. “We should have jumped in Aparo Lake before we left,” Jason says.
“And ended up with horrific diseases over our whole bodies, got it,” Steph replies. “I’m going to spend a year in the shower when I get home. I wanted to sleep before work, but that’s out the window.”
“You work…with Red Robin?” Jason guesses, although he really has no idea. He hasn’t been keeping tabs on her like he does Tim—like he does Bruce, although for different reasons. Jason’s never held down a job, himself. He mostly steals his vehicles, squats in his apartments, and grabs whatever cash or transferrable funds he needs off of the various pimps, dealers, and crime bosses he beats up or kills.
“Hmm. Let’s switch lines to something more secure,” she says, reaching up to tap her comm. Jason does the same, jumping over to their usual frequency, encrypted enough that they can drop the codenames. They’ve cancelled the proximity function while they’re on the road so they don’t have to shout over the wind, even though they’re riding pressed together. “Naw, you couldn’t force me to work for WE, as much as I’d love harassing Tim all day,” Steph says. “I’m a social worker. Just part time, though—I’m not as good at suffering as Tim. But I got my master’s and everything.”
And suddenly Jason understands her comment from earlier—Jersey DCF—New Jersey Department of Children and Families. Old, old memories swim up out of the dark of his mind. Gold letters printed on the vests worn by caseworkers, mostly middle-aged women, their severe haircuts and exhausted faces, the clipboards they carried. How they whisked in and out of the apartments on Jason’s childhood streets, or stood at the closed doors, knocking and knocking, calling the names of adults who refused to answer. They came to Jason’s apartment, a string of them across the years, different jewelry and different shoes but the same outcome, which was no outcome. And as a little kid, Jason had hated them, their judgment, the way they noticed things he didn’t want them to notice. He’d wanted them out of his family’s business. He’d known, then—every kid in Crime Alley had known—how to spot an outsider.
“And do you—like it?” he asks carefully. He has no idea what he wants her to say.
“No,” she says immediately, and then, “well, I don’t know. It’s different from what I thought it would be. You probably know this, but my dad was awful. A criminal, abusive, in and out of Blackgate. When I was little, I wanted someone to help me and my mom so much, but no one ever did, and finally I had to do it myself in a mask. In college, I thought maybe I could be that person helping other little kids who just want someone to see what’s happening to them, you know?” She sighs, her shoulders hunching, then smoothing back out. “But I just—I think I got used to the mask and cape. Doing whatever I wanted. The only laws are Batman’s laws, and even those are flexible. As a social worker—Jesus Christ, there’s so much red tape. It’s infuriating. I am so angry, all the time.”
Tim hangs right to take an exit, and Steph follows suit. They chase Tim off the interstate and onto a county highway, dilapidated houses and junk car dealers on either side.
“I can’t stand it,” Steph continues. “A lady telling me what her son’s dad is doing to her, and all I can do is file a memo and add it to the case notes, because the police are already aware? A girl tells me what she’s hearing at night, and I’m not allowed to step in right then and there? A little boy is being knocked around so bad he’s ending up in the ER, and Jersey just sticks him with the grandma, who’s secretly letting his piece of shit dad come in and out of her house whenever he wants? I just—fuck, man. If I quit, who’s going to be there to listen to these stories? Nobody. DCF keeps trying to dump more cases on me because they’re already stretched so thin.”
“So give the names to me,” Jason says, low. “Point me at the ones you can’t touch. I’ll erase the problem.” He wants her to do it so bad. He’d love it. It would make him so happy, ending these monsters, snuffing them out.
But Steph’s grip has tightened down on the handlebars, the muscles in her back rigid. “Don’t—don’t tell me that,” she says. “Don’t tempt me. I’m not like you, Jason. I can’t have that way out.”
He could turn this into a fight, right now. But: “It’s not about you,” is all he says. “It’s about them.”
“Stop,” Steph says. “Sure, maybe I’ve gone back a few times in a mask after dark. Maybe I have broken a couple of bones. But I draw my own lines, okay?”
“You know what lines I draw,” Jason tells her. “Unless you’ve been suffering from a little amnesia this past week, when you’ve been—” texting me, talking to me, being so nice to me, he doesn’t say. “When you said that we’re friends.”
“We are friends, asshole,” Steph says, knocking his shin with her boot. “So touchy, jeez. Tim likes you. I think you’re great. We can disagree on some of the finer points—”
“Lethal force is a finer point?”
“—and still beat up robots together. I trust you, okay?”
Jason takes it like a punch. “You—” He breaks off, voice suddenly rough. “Why?”
Steph kicks him again, like she hasn’t noticed he can no longer breathe. “Well, for starters, Tim trusts you. But really, it was—ah, you’re going to think this is silly. I don’t even want to say.”
Jason realizes his arm has tightened around Steph’s waist. With effort, he forces himself to relax again. They ride in silence for several seconds, the landscape around them slowly becoming less urban, giving way to marshy fields and trees going orange and gold with the season. Patches of mist contort over the underbrush.
“Okay,” Steph finally says. “Well. You remember a week ago, the Birds of Prey hideout. You convinced Tim to take the pill, which was magnificent, by the way, and then you brought him down to the basement. I made him go lie down on the training mat, and you followed him over there, and then you—you spread your jacket over him.” She pauses, takes a breath. “Like it was something you didn’t even have to think about. Like it was some kind of—natural reflex, maybe. Anyway. That’s when I knew.”
Jason stares unseeing at the fold of Steph’s cape across her shoulders. He hadn’t thought about it, at the time, except to feel its inadequacy, the jacket a pitiful shield against Tim’s awful vulnerability. He remembers Steph’s eyes on him on the training mat, how her gaze had been so soft, how it had twisted up something inside his chest. He hadn’t realized she’d been seeing straight through him, straight past every wall he’d ever thrown up.
She reaches down to pat his thigh, and because she clearly does believe in mercy over going in for the kill, she changes the subject.
“Didn’t we just pass the turnoff for Slaughter Swamp? Isn’t that where Solomon Grundy is moldering away?”
Jason sucks down a long, silent breath, and in a moment he can talk again. “Solomon Grundy: worse than the robots, yes or no?”
“Oh, but do we get Shayera’s help with him, though?”
And it turns out that discussing strategy with her is ten times more fun than it ever was with Bruce, or even Dick.
Eventually Tim brakes hard to come up alongside them. He taps his ear conspicuously and gives them a dirty look. “Why am I alone on the open line?” he yells over the rushing wind, and Steph laughs at him and reaches up to change her comm, Jason right behind her.
They finally pull off in a soggy field that may not be Slaughter Swamp but does smell very similar, all rotting vegetation and trapped water. Or maybe this is what September in the country is supposed to smell like; Jason has no idea. His agricultural experience is limited to picking up groceries at bodegas with bars on the windows. It’s unexpectedly loud out here, the early dark full of birdsong and insects and frogs, and small flying things keep diving unpleasantly in front of his face. He’s relying on the lenses of his mask to see—there are no streetlights—but Tim pulls a collapsible lantern from the compartment of his bike and flips it on, a dazzling circle of light, so that’s their location signposted for Hawkwoman or any other passing friend or foe for a mile radius at least.
Jason hands the lead pipe back to Tim for the transfer: if Jason has ever met Hawkwoman, it was while trying to make himself as invisible as possible behind his yellow cape as he followed Bruce through a crowd of heroes big and high-powered enough to have Jason crawling with adrenaline. Tim, on the other hand, has probably had entire conversations with Shayera Hol.
Jason hangs back by the bikes with a hand on his holstered gun when Shayera descends from the sky. It’s not that he doesn’t respect Shayera, or any of the big-league Leaguers, but any situation has the potential to turn sour, and he’s packing enough spare clips to keep things interesting. Shayera’s silver-white wings are fanned out around her, catching the glow of the setting moon. She lands lightly in the wet field, her red hair wind-tossed, her green and gold uniform nicked and scuffed with evidence of past battles. An enormous spiked mace hangs from her belt. “We couldn’t have done this somewhere else, preferably near a hot breakfast?” she says.
“Apologies,” Tim says, but he doesn’t offer an explanation. It made sense to get the white object out of Gotham proper as quickly as possible, but Jason’s sure Barbara sent them to the boonies for the express purpose of keeping Shayera out of Gotham. Bruce has become a fanatic in recent years about barring the city to metas, aliens, magic-users, the enhanced, with only a small handful of green-lit exceptions. Jason thinks it’s moronic, proof that Bruce has finally lost the plot, especially because the results have him swatting mosquitos off his face in rural Sommerset. Although he doesn’t take his hand off his gun.
“Happy birthday and merry Christmas,” Steph says. “Sorry about the wrapping paper.” Tim holds the lead pipe out to Shayera, but she flinches away, taking a half-step back before steadying herself.
“I can feel the power from here,” Shayera says. With apparent effort, she comes close enough to touch the pipe with the tips of her fingers. “It’s stronger than I was expecting, even with the cloaking.”
“We hoped you could identify it for us,” Tim says.
Shayera gingerly takes the pipe from Tim’s hands, but she keeps it held out away from her body. “Easily, now that I’ve felt it. It’s a fuel source. I can’t say for sure how long it’s been waiting beneath Gotham City, or who placed it there. One of my people, I’m sure. Someone perhaps hoping to save lives.”
“Save lives?” Steph prods.
“The weapon it powers has been outlawed on Thanagar for generations, but Thanagar is restless. Civil war is once again on the horizon, the poor fools. There must be a faction willing to send agents across the galaxy to gain an early victory.”
“Oracle told you we’ve been having some slight trouble with robots,” Tim says.
“I hope Gotham doesn’t back down from a few robots,” Shayera says, grinning and flipping her wings, looking for the first time like a person instead of a war machine. “I may know who sent them. They’re my problem, now.” She turns the pipe in her hands, examining the open ends stuffed with Tim’s cape. “Sorry to vanish on you, but I have get this to safety and better shielding as quickly as possible. Its energy signature will leave with me—you should have no further trouble from Thanagar. I’ll conference with Batman once it’s done.” She takes off without waiting for a reply, beating up into the dark sky and out of sight.
“Well, she’s fun,” Jason says as Tim and Steph make their way back to the bikes.
“She could put you down with one move,” Tim tells him. He’s combing bits of flaking mud out of his hair with his fingers.
“So could most of the Watchtower crowd,” Jason says, unbothered. There are plenty of reasons why they’re up there and he’s down here.
“Not if you’re prepared for them. Not if you exploit their weaknesses,” Tim says.
“You sociopath,” Jason says fondly. “So, what, is that a wrap on this case? The citizens of Gotham sleep safely in their beds once more?”
“Case closed. And no one has ever slept safely in their beds in Gotham,” Steph says. She’s stretching, pulling her arms over her head, and she winces a little as the muscles flex wrong against wherever she’s injured—and she’s injured somewhere, Jason knows. They all are, always.
“We’ll know more after Hawkwoman talks with Batman. There may be more for us to do. We can’t drop our guard,” Tim says, and Steph groans and hip-checks him.
“Case closed, Wonder Boy.”
The sky is very slowly lifting from black to gray, pre-dawn light changing the quality of the shadows and blunting the shine of the hundreds of stars visible way out in rural Jersey. To the east, the lights of Gotham are still staining the clouds red as raw meat. Jason can see the security blimps patrolling, each a low-circling hawk built just as surely for battle as Shayera Hol. And yet given the choice between Gotham’s warzone or the wet, clean fields all around him, there’s only one place Jason wants to be. “This has been just a jim-dandy tour of the sights and smells of Sommerset, but I’d enjoy a shower more,” he says.
“Don’t speak to me of showers. We’re so late that someone’s just going to have to hose me down before I walk into the office,” Steph says, scratching her face again.
“It must be terrible to have to work for a living,” Jason tells her.
“Oh yes, how terrible to be an upstanding member of society,” Steph says, poking her tongue out at him. “As opposed to lying around the house all day watching soap operas.”
“Top Chef,” Tim puts in unexpectedly, his attention otherwise buried in his phone, but he does glance up to slide Jason a private smile.
“It’s called rest, blondie. You should try it sometime. I’m gonna be healthy as a horse in ten years while you and Red over there are two anemic skeletons fainting on a rooftop.”
“Oh, anemic, huh? How about you come over here and I’ll show you anemic,” Steph says, putting up a loose guard and settling into a stance, grinning at him, and Jason’s never sparred with her before, but he has a feeling it’s fun as hell.
“Red Hood, who is Sean Doyle?” Tim cuts in. “And Sofia de Windt and Zahra Suleman?” He’s holding his phone up, the screen throwing blue light over his face.
“Fuck if I know,” Jason says. “Why?”
“Their DNA matched the samples you fed into the genomic extractor this afternoon,” Tim says, and shit, Jason knew the machines were hooked up to the Cave systems, but he didn’t anticipate them syncing directly to Tim’s phone. He pulls his own phone out of his belt to see the notification there, too.
Steph abandons her attempt to goad Jason into playing with her and comes to read over Tim’s shoulder. “Are these the original owners of the blood in that alley?” she asks.
“Seems that way,” Jason says hesitantly, scrolling through the data on his phone and coming to the uncomfortable realization that short of stealing one of the bikes, there’s nowhere he can hide in the whole soggy field to avoid having a conversation about his private business with two Cave-certified Bats.
“Would you like to fill us in?” Tim asks.
“Not really,” Jason says. He could steal one of the bikes. The key to Steph’s is still in the ignition.
“Try anyway,” Tim says, voice flat.
The other option, of course, is to blow up in Tim’s face, dig in for a shouting match. It would be easy to do—Jason knows himself capable of snarling and snapping with less provocation than this, than Tim staring at him from the middle of a circle of lantern light, waiting imperiously for Jason to show his belly and give up whatever Tim wants, information, power, pride. As if Jason reports to him.
But then Steph throws her arm around Tim’s neck and rests her chin on Tim’s shoulder, and Tim’s whole body adjusts to her, leaning back against her in an entirely unconscious way. “Come on, Hood, don’t make us beg,” she says, and it turns out that Jason can’t do anything but sigh and roll over after all.
“They attacked me the other night,” he says. “All three of them, but they didn’t look like this at the time.” The system has clipped what seem to be corporate headshots to their profiles, and in them the three could be anyone you’d meet off the street. And young, too, younger than they’d seemed in the alley. Jason’s age, maybe. Or younger, Steph’s age. Tim’s. “Green skin, green hair. Black and white uniforms. And no tongues. At first I thought they were metas.”
“No metagene in the DNA,” Tim says, still scrolling through the data. “Whatever happened to them is manmade. What could they do?”
“Faster, stronger, didn’t even notice a punch,” Jason says. “Noticed a bullet, though.” Their profiles show all three of them as having worked at a minor technology startup near Gotham University, which sounds to Jason like the perfect cover for a human genetics lab. A problem he’s very happy to turn over to Tim to deal with.
“Any idea why they were coming after you?” Steph asks.
Jason pauses, eyeing them both.
“Or would you rather I followed you around town until I figured it out myself?” Tim says.
“You already follow him around,” Steph tells him, and Tim tenses up and shoves her, boyish and embarrassed, so Jason finds himself laughing instead of getting mad.
“The Five Families sicced ‘em on me,” Jason says. “We have some bad blood. They’re not too happy whenever I show up in Cape Carmine, and this time they had the muscle to do something about it. No idea how the Families got hold of their leashes, poor kids.” He looks down at the photos on his phone; they’re smiling for the camera like chumps. They didn’t deserve what’s been done to them. All the more reason to make the Families pay. “The Families took their best shot at me, and I’m not letting this rest. I shouldn’t have ignored them for this long, anyway. They sit up there in Cape Carmine dealing drugs and girls and guns and think no one will come kicking over their sandcastle so long as they keep their heads down and don’t make too much noise. Well, fuck that. I’m going up against them, and I’m bringing them down hard.”
“Oh, okay,” Steph says. “And how are we doing that?”
Jason startles. “We?” he says. “There is no we.”
“Shut up, yes there is,” Steph says, folding her arms. “You’re not going up against an entire criminal empire by yourself.”
“I’ve done it before,” Jason says, still taken aback.
“And it ended very poorly for everyone involved,” Tim says, so apparently he’s included in this we, too.
But there’s not going to be a we. Not about this. Not about anything bigger than a few robots and some lead pipes.
“You understand that I’m gonna be killing people. A lot of people,” Jason tells them, as patiently as he can. “They’re gonna deserve it. And I’m gonna enjoy doing it. As many times as it takes. And I’m gonna go home and forget their names and their faces and sleep really well at night.” That last part is untrue, but a guilty conscience doesn’t much play into it. “I promise you I am not exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember how many people I have killed in the last ten years. But that number is only gonna keep going up.” He’s not even trying to provoke them, to start a fight. He’s only handing them the facts, as gently as he would hand them a sleeping baby. This is the unpassable gulf between himself and them, the reason Jason is poison to anyone with Cave clearance. Steph can trust him all she wants, but this is always where things were going to end.
And Steph is already shaking her head, opening her mouth to give him—he’d bet his life—some bullshit about rubber bullets, when Tim cocks his head and says, “Sure, no problem.”
“What—Red Robin!” Steph yelps.
But Tim’s walking toward Jason, completely focused, prowling like a hunting cat. “He can kill as many people as he wants,” he says. “If he can make it past us to do it.” He tilts up his chin, and lantern light gleams off the white scars on his throat that Jason has put his mouth to over and over for months. Tim’s gaze behind the mask is so intense that Jason feels heat pool in his belly, in his cock.
“You’re very confident,” Jason says, and his voice has gone deeper.
“I don’t need confidence. I just know how you work.” Tim smirks at him. “In the field, I mean,” he adds, extremely unconvincingly.
Jason takes an involuntary step toward him, and Tim draws in a breath. But then Tim gives the tiniest jerk of his head toward Steph, reminding Jason that they have an audience. Right, shit. Jason huffs a laugh, giving himself a mental shake.
“You two wanna come be my nannies in Cape Carmine that bad?” he says, still incredulous.
Steph is glancing between Tim and Jason and back again, but she says, “This thing is bigger than Cape Carmine. We have to figure out if Humaspeck Technologies is experimenting on its employees and shut them down,” so it seems that Jason doesn’t even get to dump that problem on someone else after all.
“Well,” Jason says, “your funeral, I guess.” And then he watches Tim’s mouth twist to hide a real smile and has a hard time remembering why this is all such a stunningly bad idea.
***
Jason usually gets into bed as the sun is rising and sleeps through the morning and early afternoon. He has no idea when Tim usually sleeps, although usually is probably too strong a word for the relationship between Tim and rest. It’s true that Tim has appeared in Jason’s bed several times in the mornings, not for sleep, sliding under the blankets as Jason wakes bleary-eyed and already reaching for him, but Jason suspects he’s only stopping by on his way to work—Crime Alley is a little less than halfway between Wayne Manor and the WE headquarters. Maybe Tim sleeps in the evenings, after work and before patrol. Maybe he just takes catnaps all day. Maybe he hangs upside-down in the rafters with his cape wrapped around him like the rest of the Cave’s colony of brown bats.
Sinking into his mattress after showering the mud off his body, Jason hopes he’s going to wake up to Tim in his bed again. He thinks he might—after that moment in the field, Tim deliberately working him up, the set of Tim’s body language. Jason falls asleep waiting for it. Wishing for it.
And wakes up an hour later, heaving for breath, sweating, the nightmare still bright and real in his mind. He shoves up onto all fours, head hanging down, his heart thundering in his chest. It was one of his classic rotation, himself in red and yellow and green, racing through dusty streets, somehow feeling Bruce’s agony, feeling the crowbar come down on Bruce’s bones, knowing the explosion is coming, knowing he’s going to be too late, seeing the explosion ripping through the sky, the loudest sound on Earth—
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Jason punches his pillow and lies down again, curled on his side. He forces his lungs slower, forces himself into the meditative breathing patterns Bruce taught him as a kid, count in, hold count, count out. It takes him several minutes to calm down—much longer than normal. And this is normal, for him. This is all night, every night, hour by hour. When he goes back to sleep, he’ll probably go right back to the dream, running through those streets, or any of a hundred others: himself at eleven, forced down in an alley, himself at ten, watching his mother die, himself now, being shown all the suffering that is his fault because he isn’t good enough fast enough strong enough cruel enough to end it.
He's used to it. He should be used to it. It’s familiar and unrelenting and there’s no way to make it stop.
Except it did stop, yesterday.
It stopped with Tim.
Jason got seven hours of perfect, uninterrupted sleep yesterday, and when he went to sleep Tim was there, and when he woke up Tim was there, and right now—right now—fuck, fuck.
Jason rolls onto his back and shoves the whole ugly mess way, way down into his gut. Back up, he tells himself, the way you’d tell a dog. He glares at the sagging, water-stained ceiling for a few more minutes, and then he puts himself back to sleep. He wakes up every hour or so with the nightmares, but that’s not new. He can handle that.
Tim doesn’t show up, but that’s not new. He can handle that.
He pulls himself out of bed for good at noon and showers again to clear the cobwebs out of his brain, but the shower isn’t enough. He’s raw and pissed off and annoyed at himself for being raw and pissed off, and abruptly he can’t stand it, being shut away in the empty apartment. He throws on a uniform and a mask and leaves through the window, down the fire escape, into the busy crush of the neighborhood.
He doesn’t hit the streets in costume very often during the day, but day or night, Crime Alley knows who he is. He gets nods, shouted greetings he doesn’t return, a hundred eyes on him every block, a grandmother trying to press a paper bag of arepas into his hands, the cockroach scramble of certain men ducking into shadowy alleys as he passes. At the two-pump gas station on Nicholson, a middle-aged woman shoves out of the booth, past the attendants scrolling on their phones, and chases Jason down.
It's the owner, Dani Borkowski, and two nights ago, her daughter Regina was killed. She’s weeping freely, telling Jason what happened, how they found her body, how they called the police, how she’s sure it was the boyfriend who’d been beating the hell out of the girl, the father of Regina’s kids, but everyone knows how these things go, everyone knows what the police will do, what the police won’t do, how long it will take the police to do it. And Jason’s still raw and pissed off, but now he has a target for it, this lowlife lying low somewhere in Gotham, this motherfucker who doesn’t know he only has hours left to live.
It takes the entire rest of the day, tracking him down. Jason has to comb through security footage from the garage where the guy works, bust the heads of a couple of his friends, skulk around his mother’s duplex until he’s sure he’s not hiding inside, call in favors from three of the corner girls who have serviced the guy in the past. Night falls before Jason finally runs him to earth in the apartment of a secret girlfriend and drags him screaming up to the roof, where he extracts a confession, shoves a gun in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. Faster and less painful than the guy deserves, but Jason’s been searching for him for eight hours, and he’s ready to close the book on the whole thing. He leaves the body on the roof and calls the cops on a scrambled line to come deal with the cleanup. He’s sure Dani Borkowski will hear the news by morning.
Steph’s texted him a few times during the day, mostly a list of unexpected places she’s found mud on her body, and then one message that says plz plz plz cn we just get u an encrypted phone, which Jason ignores. Let her watch him kill a few people and then she can decide whether she really wants the ability to text him photos of Tim with ketchup on his face. Or whatever she’s planning to do.
He heads back to his safehouse, after, intending to exchange some of his gear and roll back onto the street for the rest of the night. He lets himself sit down at the kitchen table when he gets in, field stripping his Glock and cleaning the whole thing out, pulling off blood and spit and brain matter, domino and gloves and comm in a pile by the gun oil. He’s feeling—not better, but a little bit more in control, a little bit more like he can shove the black hole inside him into the edges of himself where he’s keeping the rest of the things that are giving off pain, like the right forearm flayed almost to the bone. He figures he’ll go prowl around the Humaspeck Technologies office building next, see what there is to see, and maybe Steph and Tim will track him down. Or maybe they won’t. It would be okay if they don’t, he tells himself. He’s worked alone for years. He wouldn’t know how to do anything else.
Jason’s replacing the Glock’s recoil spring when his window opens, and it’s probably Tim, the pathetic swooping lurch in his belly is pretty sure it’s Tim, but he still locks the slide and slams home the magazine and has the gun pointed at the window until the body finishes sliding through the frame. It’s Tim. Jason lowers the gun.
“You’d be more threatening if you drew on me when I wake you up, too,” Tim says. He’s dressed for patrol, black cape drinking the light from the kitchen overheads.
“I know it’s you when you wake me up,” Jason tells him. He pulls the KelTec out of his holster and starts to strip it too, levering under the assembly pin, even though he hasn’t used this gun today.
“You don’t. You’re asleep,” Tim says. But Jason does know, somehow. His body knows, even before his mind catches up. There’s no way to say any of that out loud to Tim, so he just shrugs, watching Tim out of the corner of his eye. There’s something off about Tim’s body language, but Tim’s control is so unbending that Jason doesn’t know what it means.
“You wanna help?” Jason asks, kicking another chair out from under the table. “I know you know how. Or was I the last bird B trained on firearms?” And Tim does come closer, pacing across the living room, around the back of the couch, past the empty chair. He pulls the comm out of his ear and slides into Jason’s lap, straddling him. Jason drops the cleaning pad and loops his arms under Tim’s cape, around his waist, the armored fabric of Tim’s suit warm and rough under his palms. “Oh, hello,” he says. The black hole surfaces in his gut and swells against the cage of his ribs, shoving outward, demanding.
The lenses of Tim’s mask are blank gashes, shining white, like a predator in a cave. “Unless you’d rather keep playing with your guns,” he says. He’s tense with coiled energy, muscles bunched like he’s ready to fight. Jason’s heart speeds up.
“Fuck the guns,” Jason says, and Tim strokes his hand over Jason’s jaw, over his lips. Jason opens his mouth for two of Tim’s gloved fingers, metallic and bitter on his tongue, meeting Tim’s gaze, holding it. He hollows his cheeks and sucks. Tim’s fingers are wet when they pull free, smoothing damp streaks over Jason’s chin, down the column of his throat, and then Tim surges forward and kisses him, immediately and unexpectedly urgent. His gloved hand circles to grip the base of Jason’s skull.
Jason leans into him, opens up for him, lets Tim have whatever he wants, as deep as he wants. He yanks Tim closer, up against his body, but he can’t shake the feeling that something’s off with Tim, with his energy, like Tim’s—angry, maybe? Upset? Not right, somehow, and when Tim starts pushing the jacket off Jason’s shoulders, Jason breaks away from his mouth. “Isn’t this the time of night when we should be doing this on top of a gargoyle and not in my kitchen?” he asks. It’s past ten p.m., past time for good little vigilantes to be out running their beats, and Tim’s no slacker.
“Maybe later,” Tim mutters, trying to kiss him again, but Jason gets a fist in his cape and tugs him back by the neck. With his other hand, he peels the domino off of Tim’s face. The blown blood vessels are back in the whites of Tim’s eyes, and the dark circles are dire again, blue-purple and sunk in deep.
“You wanna tell me how much sleep you didn’t get today?” Jason says. Tim bares his teeth, but then he shoves forward again, choking himself on his cape but meeting Jason’s mouth. Jason lets him go and kisses him, kisses him, bites his lip and bites his jaw. “Hey, hey, what’s eating you?” he says against Tim’s skin.
Tim makes a wordless sound. His hands scrape down the front of Jason’s uniform. “I just, I need—” he says, his breath shallow in his throat. “I need—” And fuck, Jason will give him whatever he needs, anything, no hesitation.
“I got you,” Jason murmurs. He works his hands under Tim’s thighs and stands up, lifting Tim with him. He walks them both out of the kitchen, Tim’s knees gripping his waist, down the short hall, into the bedroom, lit with the bedside lamp Jason never remembers to turn off. Jason lays him down on the mattress on the floor, kneeling between his legs, and Tim’s already moving, yanking off his gloves and throwing them across the room, the stiff gauntlets smacking against the wall, then reaching up for his cape. Jason disarms the taser on Tim’s belt and unlatches it, then starts on his own costume, shedding his jacket, pulling the body armor over his head, the underlayer, unlocking his belt. He disarms Tim’s tunic and Tim sits up to strip it off, and he doesn’t wear an underlayer—it’s all skin beneath, pale and scarred, burning hot under Jason’s hands. Jason slides his palms over Tim’s abs, over his chest, down his arms. He brushes across the thin, skin-warm watch on Tim’s wrist, and because he simply cannot help himself, he snags Tim’s arm and punches the button to bring up Tim’s numbers.
Zero hours. The last time Tim slept was thirty-two hours ago, when he woke up in Jason’s arms on the couch.
Tim tries to snatch his wrist back, but Jason holds on, digging his fingers into the bones. “You realize this is fucking bullshit, right?” Jason says, that old familiar catgut of fear-anger-fear vibrating inside him. “You realize you’re killing yourself?”
Tim yanks his arm, harder, narrowing his eyes. “I’m f—”
“If you say I’m fine one more time, I’m gonna slit your throat,” Jason hisses.
“Go to hell,” Tim says. He whips out his other hand and nerve-strikes Jason’s inner elbow, numbing his whole left arm. Jason’s fingers fall open, dropping Tim’s wrist. “I’m dealing with it, okay? I’m handling it.”
Jason shakes out his arm, the sensation already coming back in pins and needles. “You’re not handling shit. Over here acting like you’re not bleeding out, not even trying to fix it. Do you even care? Or are you just lying to yourself?”
Tim’s mouth drops open, and suddenly everything that’s wrong in his body language seethes to the surface, rage and misery and fatigue, his relentless control shattering around him. “You don’t know anything about it,” he snarls. “You think I like this? You think I’m choosing this? This is hell for me,” he says, flinging it down between them, unexpectedly ferocious, like a shell going off in Jason’s face. “I know exactly how fucked I am. I’m slow in the field. I’m a mess at the office. I’m making mistakes.”
“Then do something about it,” Jason says. Tim jerks on the bed, his muscles clenching, like he’s thinking about launching himself at Jason.
“As if. I’m not. Trying,” Tim says, the words coming out from between his teeth. “I did everything today. Went home from work early. Spent six hours in bed. Meditation. Melatonin. Hot bath. Jerked off. White noise. Brown noise. Deep breathing. Muscle relaxation. Weighted fucking blanket.” His heel kicks out and back, the boot slamming against the mattress. “Nothing. Nothing works.”
Jason’s never seen Tim like this, his ice sculpture act melted down to the bone, lashing out like a hurt animal. He’s sure he’s about to stick his hand in the rattlesnake’s mouth, but he says it anyway: “I feel like I’m remembering one thing that works.”
Tim pulls away from Jason, boosting himself farther up the mattress, putting space between them. He starts pulling off his boots. “Yeah. That does work, doesn’t it,” he says, like he’s talking about something awful, disease and disfiguration, and Jason would laugh if he weren’t ramping up for a fight.
“You wanna sleep? Great, let’s do it. Right now. Couch or bed?” Jason says, as if it’s not something he really would do, now or later, any time Tim wants.
Tim hurls his boots over Jason’s head, one after another, deliberately close to Jason’s skull. His bare feet seem very fragile. “Sure, let’s do it,” Tim says. “Let’s do it every day. Thank God the only person who has control over my brain isn’t me.”
“Oh, fucking bite me. Yeah, let’s do it every day, jackass. I’m not gonna sit here and watch you fucking—faint in an alley somewhere. Take a hit and not get back up—”
“Big hero,” Tim growls.
“—I’m not gonna watch you die,” Jason finishes, low and furious.
“You’re not allowed to control any of this. You’re not allowed to pretend like you can fix this,” Tim snarls. “So will you just—shut up and come fuck me already,” his eyes bright and glittering with anger, his jaw clenched, and Jason is going to kill him.
“Oh, I’m still allowed to do that? You’re still gonna let me put my dick in you?”
“Fuck you, Jason, you’re the only one I’d let—”
Tim slams down hard on the end of that sentence, his eyes going wide as he realizes what he’s said.
But it’s too late.
Jason’s heard him.
And that sick-ugly place inside him, that pulsing black hole of hunger, goes absolutely wild.
“Is that right, Little Red,” Jason breathes. A blinding haze of possessiveness is washing all the way through his body, every shred of anger expanding and transmuting into a life-or-death need to get his hands on Tim’s skin.
Tim’s frozen on the bed. “I—” he says, but nothing after that, like he can’t get anything past his throat. His breathing goes very shallow.
And Jason has worked so hard, these past five months, to keep himself in check. To haul back on his own reins. To keep from twisting around Tim in his own mind the way it would be so simple to do, so effortless, the dog stepping right into traffic, ready to be flattened by the oncoming rush of something enormous and unstoppable.
Five months of white-knuckle work—up in smoke. In less than ten seconds.
He closes the distance between them on the bed and shoves Tim onto his back with a hand on his chest, going down after him, crawling over Tim on hands and knees. He drags his open palm all the way down Tim’s body, everything he can reach. “I am the only one you’d let,” Jason growls. “I’m the only one you’re gonna let.” Tim’s breath is catching in his throat, but he gets his fist behind Jason’s shoulder and tries to drag him in, drag their mouths together. Jason braces over him, won’t let himself be moved. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Tim makes a noise that is not a word. Jason scrapes his thumb over a nipple, and Tim arches his back.
“Tell me I’m right,” Jason hisses. Tim shudders under his hands, and Jason thinks he won’t do it, he’s not going to give it up, but then—
“Yes,” Tim gasps, chest heaving, and Jason crushes his mouth against Tim’s, deep and fast, Tim whimpering against his teeth. He strokes down Tim’s arm until he feels the metal watch under his fingers again, and then he slams Tim’s wrist over his head.
The armored weave of Tim’s leggings is unyielding under Jason’s palm when he runs his free hand over Tim’s hip and thigh, between Tim’s legs, over the curve of Tim’s cup, and Tim jerks his hips up even though Jason’s sure he can’t feel it, pressing into Jason’s hand. Jason breaks the kiss and mouths down Tim’s throat, down his chest. He licks over one of Tim’s nipples and scrapes with his teeth, sucks, while Tim makes a high, soft sound and puts his hand in Jason’s hair. Tim’s chest is bruised in several places, old hurts from the night shift, mottled green and yellow, and Jason gives him another, biting high on the muscle and sucking the skin dark.
Jason lets go of Tim’s wrist to hook his fingers into Tim’s leggings and pull them down, and the jock and cup, Tim squirming to help him until they’re off his body, kicked onto the floor. Jason spits into his palm and wraps it around Tim’s cock, quick strokes, running his thumb around the head while Tim digs his skull back against the mattress. Jesus, Tim’s skin, his scars, the sounds he’s making, his body so sensitive for Jason—you’re the only one I’d let, holy God. Jason’s out of his mind with it, drowning on it, the black hole spinning out of his ribs, out of his mouth.
Jason leans down and sucks the very tip of Tim’s cock into his mouth, tongues the slit, pulls back and drags his lips down the underside of the shaft, around the base, not even trying to blow him, just tasting him, feeling him. Tim’s twitching his hips up, his abs shivering, and Jason kisses the seam of his inner thigh. “Roll over,” Jason whispers, pulling back to give him room, coaxing him over with his hands, and when Tim is on his stomach, Jason nudges his thighs apart and runs his fingers between Tim’s cheeks, over his hole.
Jason spreads Tim and lets spit fall from his mouth, dripping across his rim, and then he leans in and licks, circles his tongue, closes his mouth around his hole and sucks. Tim’s whining, trembling beneath him with the effort of keeping still, and Jason kneads down the back of Tim’s thigh, feeling the muscle locked tight. “Jason, fuck,” Tim grits out, half-smothered in the blanket.
“Relax for me,” Jason murmurs, licking out over the curve of Tim’s ass, biting down softly on the skin.
“You relax,” Tim says, huffing a laugh, but in a moment Jason can feel a little bit of tension going out of him, enough that Jason can push his thumb inside his wet hole and gently tug him open, come back in to lick around the rim, point his tongue and push it inside. Tim chokes and tries to lift up off the bed, shoving back into Jason’s mouth, and Jason has to clamp a hand around his upper thigh to keep him in place until Jason’s finished with him, Tim going louder and louder and then muffled, which means he’s bitten down on the blanket.
At last Jason pulls away, wiping his mouth and chin with the back of his hand. His cock is throbbing in his jock, and he grips himself, a squeeze he can’t even feel. Tim cranes around to look, tries to turn over, but Jason holds him down with a hand on his lower back. “Stay there,” Jason says.
“Hurry up,” Tim says, shredded, spreading his thighs wider, rubbing himself against the blanket. The spit between his cheeks shines in the light. “Want it, want you,” he groans, and Jason goes lightheaded and has to force himself not to grab for him again, force himself off the bed entirely. He unties his boots and kicks them off, then strips off the bottoms of his costume, his jock. His cock bobs free, hard and wet at the head, and it’s torture not to touch it, torture to wait.
He collects lube and a condom from one of the duffle bags on the floor that hold most of his clothes and other essentials, always packed and ready to move on to the next safehouse, and he’s back on the bed in seconds, reaching for Tim again—an agony not to be touching him every second, hearing him whine, making him come. Jason slicks his fingers and slides them inside him, first one and then two, molten pressure, velvet heat. Tim’s already so wet and relaxed around him, easy to fuck on his fingers, already keyed up and moaning for him. Jason drags over his prostate, watching Tim’s hands clench in the blanket, and finally Tim turns his head to the side and chokes out, “Just—just fuck me, right now,” panting, sweating, and Jason pulls his fingers free.
Tim raises up onto his hands and knees while Jason is rolling on the condom and slicking himself with lube. Jason presses himself against the backs of his thighs, smoothing his palms up Tim’s sides, over the tight muscle of his back, gouged through with scars. He’s always the most impossible thing Jason’s ever seen, and right now Jason feels like he could swallow him down, swallow him whole. Jason’s pulsing with hunger, alive with the pit in his belly that has whispered want and mine and own every single time he’s put his hands on Tim for the past five months, no matter how often Jason’s ordered it quiet. But it’s not going to go quiet, this time. The only one, the black hole whispers. The only one he’s gonna let.
Jason lines up and pushes inside, inch by slow inch, Tim crying out and locking the muscles of his arms, squeezing him, so tight around him even with the prep. He curls over Tim when he bottoms out, pressing his lips between Tim’s shoulders. Slow drag back out, gentle push in, letting Tim get used to the size of him, how much he has to stretch for Jason. He lifts Tim’s long hair away to lick the back of his neck, salt and searing heat.
Tim arches his back, shoves his hips higher. He turns his head to try to reach Jason, but it’s a bad angle, and Jason can only kiss the corner of his mouth, nuzzle along his cheek. Jason speeds up, bracing with one arm, wrapping the other around Tim’s chest, yanking Tim in, draping himself over Tim’s back. The bandages around his forearm slide in the sweat on Tim’s chest, painful pressure against the wound, little knives Jason ignores. He’s trying to land his angle, waiting for the reaction that will tell him he’s aced it—he raises up a little more, tilts down as he’s pushing in, and yes, there, Tim choking on a wail, choking on Jason’s name. “Got you,” Jason says, trying to laugh, and then, “I’ve got you,” making it something else—I have you, let me take care of you.
He works to keep the same angle, drinking down the sounds Tim’s making, how Tim’s rolling back against him, arms trembling, and it’s so good, Tim’s so good for him. He lets Tim go and raises up, gets a grip on Tim’s hips and drags Tim in to meet his thrusts, pressing in deeper, harder, and all of a sudden Tim goes absolutely rigid and silent for one heartbeat, two, three, and then he’s shaking under Jason, whimpering, all his muscles quivering, and Jason’s mouth drops open. “Did you just—” Jason says, flaring with white heat, almost dizzy with it. “Holy shit.” Jason forces himself to slow all the way down. Tim’s still shivering under him, his head hanging down between his shoulders. Jason reaches beneath Tim to feel for the wet spill across the blanket between his legs, and touching it pushes Jason even wilder—proof that Tim just came on his cock, untouched, proof of what he just made Tim do.
He squeezes Tim’s hip, rocking into him in shallow thrusts. “You want me to stop?” he asks, and Tim shakes his head.
“Don’t stop,” Tim mumbles, the words lost in his throat, trying to press back against him again, but his arms give out and he goes down on his elbows.
Jason pulls out of him and flips him over onto his back, away from the mess, an easy move Tim could block any other minute of the day. He coaxes Tim’s thighs up and open, helps him wrap his legs around Jason’s waist. He presses back in again, sweet easy slide, still going slow, Tim totally relaxed around him. He drags his gaze over Tim’s body, loose and spread out for him, his cock still mostly hard and twitching against his thigh, his flushed chest, his delicate face. Tim’s eyes are half-lidded, his pupils blown. “You’re unbelievable,” Jason says, petting over his abs, gaze locked on his face, feeling so possessive he could die.
He blankets Tim with his body, working under Tim’s shoulders until he has Tim entirely in his arms, one hand cupping Tim’s skull. Tim touches Jason’s cheek and draws him in to kiss, making little sounds into Jason’s mouth, moving under Jason languidly. His legs tighten around Jason’s hips, his heels pulling Jason in, demanding. “Come on, harder,” Tim whispers against his lips. “I know you want to.”
Jason circles his thumb against the base of Tim’s skull. “Are you—”
“I’m good,” Tim says, and for some reason his expression turns so soft. He wraps his arms around Jason’s neck.
Jason picks up the pace, sinking in deeper, faster, heat and pressure building until it’s hard to think. He drops his head to Tim’s shoulder and groans with it, and he feels Tim’s hand in his hair, Tim’s short nails against his scalp. Tim’s breathing is picking back up, and when he flexes his thighs to hitch himself higher, he’s suddenly gasping beneath Jason, fucking back against him. He pulls his hand out of Jason’s hair and forces it between their bodies, urgent, shoving down to wrap around himself. Jason feels his knuckles roll against the sweat of Jason’s abs as Tim works himself, and Jason raises up a little, gives him more room.
Tim’s thighs clench around him, starting to shake. “You gonna give me another?” Jason growls, voice hoarse, mouthing over Tim’s collarbone, and Tim moans his name. Jason’s burning up on him, coming apart on his sounds, his body, the taste of his skin. He wants to last for Tim, wants to push Tim over the edge again, but everything in him is tightening, drawing up. He heaves a moan as the wave crests, flooding through his limbs and smothering him, one long rush of perfect relief. He snaps his hips forward through the aftershocks, a faltering rhythm that slows and then stops. He’s panting, shivering a little, and he drops his head back to Tim’s shoulder and laughs. “Jesus, Red,” he says.
Tim makes a desperate sound, still working his hand, trying to fuck himself down on Jason’s cock, which is no longer comfortable. Jason raises up and eases himself out, although Tim’s heels lock against his spine, trying to keep him seated. Jason immediately replaces his cock with three fingers, stroking down Tim’s inner wall, over his prostate, the kind of focused abuse he can’t manage with his cock. Tim wails, bucking his hips up, twisting his head to the side, and Jason nudges Tim’s hand away to jack him himself. Tim throws his arms over his head and bunches the blanket in his fists. The long line of him is so beautiful, muscles pulled taut, sweat catching in his scars, his whole body vibrating, and Tim sobs as the tension snaps and he comes over Jason’s hand, over his own belly.
Tim’s heaving for air, eyes closed, all his muscles trembling. Jason wipes his hands on the blanket and strokes along Tim’s thighs, still tight around Jason’s waist, feeling them shudder beneath his palms, ghosting lightly over the fading bruises. The hickey Jason left on Tim’s chest has darkened like a brand, right at the junction of two of his scars. “God, you’re so—” Jason says, running the tips of his fingers over Tim’s softening cock, but he leaves it unfinished, suddenly afraid of what he might say.
Tim reaches down to pull Jason’s hand away, tugging it up his body to his mouth. He drags his lips across Jason’s palm, flicking out his tongue, tasting himself, the salt of his come. His mouth trails lower, to the very edge of the white bandaging on Jason’s forearm. He presses a kiss there. “You’re bleeding,” he whispers, meeting Jason’s gaze.
Tim’s eyes are like clear water, a drowning blue. “I don’t care,” Jason says. He doesn’t want to pull away even to check.
Tim’s breath is hot on Jason’s wrist. The pain in Jason’s arm is a red throb, infinitely unimportant. “You need to change this,” Tim says, meaning the dressing, and he’s not wrong—besides the blood, it’s damp with sweat and several streaks of Tim’s come.
“Later,” Jason says. He twists his wrist in Tim’s grip to touch Tim’s cheekbone, stroking his thumb across it. Tim lets go of his arm, and Jason leans down to catch his mouth, wet and open for him, Tim’s heels slipping in the sweat at the small of Jason’s back.
Tim’s wrung out and heavy beneath him, and it’s easy to lift his legs up and off Jason’s hips, back down to the mattress. It’s much harder to leave Tim there, limp on the bed, while he ducks into the hall bathroom to leave the condom in the trash and return with a damp towel. Tim’s covered in come and lube, and Jason wipes him off, his belly, his cock, between his legs. Sometimes Tim allows it; most times he doesn’t. Jason must have done something right today.
Tim’s alert and watching Jason, even though a light, uncontrollable spasm is still going through his abs every few seconds. “I can’t believe you’re not passed out right now,” Jason says. “Not even this puts you to sleep?” Jason’s not one to knock out after a good orgasm, but Tim’s had two, and he came hard.
Tim’s mouth quirks up. “Thankfully, no. Your ego would be impossible to live with.” He takes the towel out of Jason’s hands and uses a clean corner to dry his sweaty face and neck. “It sure makes me feel better, though.”
Jason remembers Tim when he first came through the window tonight, coiled and tense, angry. He’s none of those things now. “Shit, makes me feel better too,” Jason says. He lies down on his side next to Tim and gets an arm around him, drawing Tim into his body. “Could do that to you all night.” He strokes down Tim’s side and squeezes his ass. “See how many times you can come before you really do pass out.”
“Fuck off,” Tim says, but he works himself closer when Jason leans in to kiss him, slides his thigh between Jason’s. Long minutes pass of nothing but this, Tim’s tongue, the edge of his teeth, the taste of him lighting up Jason’s brain. Jason could lose himself in Tim’s mouth, how it’s always so easy, familiar, like he’s been kissing Tim all his life. He can’t stop touching Tim, his back, his ribs, his hipbone, down the firm muscle of his arm to his wrist, where he feels Tim’s watch under his palm. He closes his fingers around it, holding on. The metal is hot against Jason’s skin, smooth and solid, nearly alive, and in a moment it’s all he can think about.
He breaks the kiss and pulls back a little, watching Tim across the inches of space between them, full up with the heat of their breathing. “Hey. You scared the shit out of me, the other day. In that Birds hideout.”
Tim’s still open, his mask still lowered, and Jason is amazed to watch several emotions flit across his face before he chooses one that will piss Jason off. “Steph shouldn’t have called you,” he finally says.
“Nah, fuck that,” Jason says. His thumb slips off the metal of the watch, and he rubs the thin skin of Tim’s wrist, over the beating artery. “You’re not doing four days again. We’re not doing that again.”
Tim raises his eyebrows, and for a moment he tilts right on the edge of anger. He draws in a breath like he’s working himself up to another shouting match, but then he lets it out again, hissing between his teeth. He flattens his hand against Jason’s chest. “I can’t do the pills. I just can’t. You saw what it was like.”
Jason hooks his leg more firmly over Tim’s thigh. “I saw,” he agrees, awed that they’re not going to fight. He swallows, wets his lips, intensely aware that he might be about to ruin everything, push it all right over a cliff. “I meant it, earlier.” He hesitates. “I do want you here. Every day.”
He doesn’t have to explain. He doesn’t have to say, to let me hold you, to fall asleep with me on the couch, in this bed. Tim knows exactly what he means. And Tim does pull up the mask, then, letting his face go blank. Hiding.
The silence ticks by. Jason doesn’t mention the nightmares, how they skinned him raw after the near animal relief of the single night of peace Tim bought him. He doesn’t want Tim to know. Jason forces himself to meet Tim’s gaze, not to pull away. He feels heat start to bloom across his cheeks and ears, which is humiliating. Jason reminds himself that he is one of four people in Gotham good enough to kill Tim, which helps a little, although he’s not sure why.
Finally Tim takes a breath. “I work during the day,” he says, sounding almost—almost shy. Jason closes his eyes and laughs.
“Then I’ll change my sleep schedule,” Jason says, and jerks forward to kiss him again, cupping the back of his neck, rolling until Tim is half under his body. Tim drags his hands down Jason’s back, not at all careful with the freshest of the bruises, an ache subsumed by the bright heat of Tim’s skin, the way Jason’s shivering to be touched by him every minute he’s still alive.
“Not—not every day,” Tim says, gasping as Jason bites his jaw.
“Fine,” Jason murmurs, tonguing over one of the scars on his neck. Tim’s body might not even be able to handle a regular sleep schedule. A daily seven or eight hours might accidentally put him in a coma. “Just show up. Or I’ll come find you.” And he will, he really will. He’s going to start hunting Tim down.
Tim doesn’t say no, or tell him to go to hell. It’s dizzying, unbelievable. Jason’s all over him, his mouth, his hands, until he realizes he’s working them both up to another round. He pulls back and is delighted when Tim chases his mouth. “Are you going somewhere tonight? Patrol? Or are you calling in sick?”
Tim drags him in to kiss again, slick and deep and long enough that Jason thinks he really is going to play hooky all night after all. But then Tim bites Jason’s lower lip and pushes him away, both hands shoving his chest until Jason rolls off of him. “Patrol,” Tim says, flushed and breathing heavily. “Or rather, we’re meeting Steph to investigate your three enhanced blood donors.”
We.
Heat floods Jason’s core, and he orders himself to keep his face blank. It’s one thing for Steph to say it; Steph is loud and kind and easy and open. But Tim—
Jason sits up and stretches, just for something to do with his body. “Humaspeck Technologies?” he asks, his original plan for the night. “The office building?”
“Yeah, you never know. Maybe they keep the lab in the castle basement, like Frankenstein.”
“Frankenstein jigsawed his monster in his student apartment building,” Jason tells him, a knee-jerk Shelley reaction.
“I only watched the cartoon as a kid,” Tim says, goading. He’s sitting up too, running his fingers through his hair.
“The cartoon,” Jason says in disgust. He glances down at himself. Along with a new wound wrapping, he’s in desperate need of a shower, even though he’s about to hit the streets to work himself into a much worse state. It just seems rude to meet Steph while covered in Tim’s sweat. “Where does Steph think you are, anyway?” he asks.
“Having sex with you to clear my head,” Tim says easily.
Jason jolts around to stare at him. “Oh,” he says, feeling a blush creep over the back of his neck. “You really do tell her everything.”
Tim shrugs. He swings his legs off the mattress and stands up, pulling his arms over his head, dragging the muscles over his ribs long and tight. “It’s Steph,” he says, in the same tone of voice as he might say she’s mine, casually proprietary, as if that’s an explanation. Maybe it is. He holds up his arm, where the watch is glinting on his wrist. “Besides, my heart rate is going straight to her phone now. She knows exactly what I’m doing.”
“She’ll kill you if you stop wearing that thing,” Jason says, which will probably be better received than I’ll kill you, which is what he meant.
But Tim only touches the watch gently with the tips of his fingers. “I’ve been giving her ulcers since I was running around in green tights.” He adjusts the metal band, shifting the sensor to lie more directly over the center of his wrist, and then he meets Jason’s eyes. “She cares. She hangs on to people,” he says quietly. “She likes you, you know,” like this is a major accomplishment of Jason’s.
Jason laughs a little. “I’ll try not to do anything too grisly in front of her.”
Tim tilts his head, regarding Jason steadily. “Thank you. I’d appreciate it,” he says. He turns and leaves for the hall bathroom before Jason can respond, can take it back. Before Jason can decide if he wants to take it back. In a moment Jason hears the shower turn on.
Jason scrubs his hands through his hair and tries to lock his brain on tonight’s job, which is nearly impossible with how his body is buzzing—he wants nothing more than to follow Tim into that shower. Focus, he tells himself. Focus. Frankenstein or no Frankenstein, blind recon is always dangerous. There’s no telling what an office building in Gotham could be hiding. Or who might be around to defend it, including the very real possibility of a few more juiced-up former employees. Jason gets up to find his belt, abandoned with the other pieces of his uniform. His phone is inside one of the pouches; he wants to read over the profiles of his three attackers again, scan for chemical similarities in their blood analyses.
But the screen lights up to several messages from Steph, all from about ten minutes ago.
FROM: S
T said an hour U R LATE!
FROM: S
AND I AM BORED
FROM: S
nvr mind i spy a mugging dealing w that now
Jason smiles to himself. Heading your way soon, he types out, and instead of doing anything useful with himself, he shuts his phone off and drops it back into his belt again. He’s too wired to sit still. He starts stripping the bed, instead, pulling the wrecked blanket and sheets into a pile to take to the building’s laundry in the morning. He surveys the room: besides the pieces of two uniforms scattered across the stained carpet, the only things present are the duffel bags, the bedside lamp, and the mattress on the floor. Hardly five-star living, but easy to erase himself from; all he has to do is pick up the duffel bags and walk out the door. He’s been in the apartment nearly a month, and safety says it’s about time to move on, set up shop somewhere else. Who knows how many eyes have clocked him coming in and out of the window over the past handful of weeks, or worse, have clocked Tim.
But he’s strangely hesitant to leave—the way the afternoon sun comes through the window, the luxury of the television, the thought of going to sleep with Tim on the deep wide couch again. He nudges his foot under Tim’s cape on the floor and flips it up into his hands. The material slithers through his fingers, heavy and cool, lifeless without the body it’s built to drape around. He folds it up and drops it onto the bare mattress. It suddenly occurs to Jason that the next safehouse might come with an actual bed. Or if not, he could—he could acquire a bed. With boxsprings, and a headboard. If Tim is going to be sleeping in it. Not every day, Tim said. But sometimes.
Jason realizes he’s smiling again. He can’t seem to stop.
The shower is still running. It would save time if they shared it. Or maybe, he thinks, heading for the door, sending a mental apology to Steph, it would make them just a tiny bit later.