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He can’t breathe.
Why the fuck can’t he breathe?
He can’t breathe and he can’t see and there’s wall to left of him and the right and above and below and he’s trapped, he’s trapped, but he can move which means he can fight and he can’t die again, not again, not—
No.
He was taught better than this. He knows better than this.
In the darkness, Jason closes his eyes.
After his nails dig through wood, they dig through packed dirt. Earth collapses in on him, entering his mouth and his eyes and his nose. Time’s suspended on a knife’s edge and he doesn’t know how much longer he can last and he doesn’t even know if he’s just burrowing himself deeper and deeper into the depths of hell but he can’t think about that, he can’t, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t. Because he was taught better than that.
The earth is dry concrete. His lungs burn and his muscles break apart fibre by fibre. Then moist. Then it’s wet, and soft, and it gives way to dark sky and full moon and heavy, pelting rain.
He pulls himself up and vomits onto the manicured grass under his torn-up fingertips. The air smells of wet soil and wet iron. Whatever he’s wearing is sticking to his skin, dragging him down into the ground like an anchor. He lets himself collapse and lets whatever sounds got stuck in his chest while he was six feet under come all the way out.
Distantly, he thinks to himself that it’s godawful to listen to. Ugly, like some prey animal dying on the side of the road. At least the rain’s so loud that it’s drowning some of it out.
When Jason wakes up, he’s dry. His body feels like it was chucked into a washing machine and set to the highest spin cycle, but he’s dry, warm, and surrounded by the smell of linen. Outside, the sky is an inky purple, maybe just before dawn. It seems like he’s in his room in the Manor, but the burn mark on the rug from when he knocked a candle onto it is gone, and the bit of chipped paint on the ceiling that he used to stare at when he couldn’t sleep is nowhere to be found. And right there, sitting in a big armchair in his smoking robe, not looming but not-not looming, is Bruce. The lamp on the nightstand casts light on Bruce’s lap but his face is enshrouded in shadow. It's the world’s cosiest interrogation.
“B?” Jason’s voice comes out cracked in the middle.
The response is silence. Thick and impenetrable, like thousands of layers of packed earth.
Bruce is probably mad at him. After all, Bruce had told him to wait and he hadn’t. He can’t say he’s sorry for disobeying orders because he can’t say that he would have waited if he had the chance to do it all again. But he can say he’s sorry for not being smarter about it, for getting caught, for making a big mess, and that’s going to have to be good enough.
“B, I—”
“I ran tests,” Bruce says. His voice is so soft and un-Bruce-like that it gives Jason chills. “Your DNA. Scans of your body. Every measure I could have possibly taken to be sure, I have. Now, I only need to hear it from you.”
It’s not the way he was expecting this to go. Bruce leans forward into the lamplight. There’s not a bruise or scratch on him, but god, he looks…
“Who are you?”
Jason’s mouth goes dry. He reaches forward to grab Bruce’s hand.
“It’s me, Bruce,” he says. “It’s Jason.”
The room becomes quiet and unmoving, like someone’s sucked all the air out of it. Then he’s being crushed into a vortex of muscle and sinew and warmth, and Bruce isn’t making a single peep but he’s shaking so so bad. Jason hugs him back. And first light turns into dawn, and dawn turns into day, and Bruce doesn’t let go.
It’s a weird thing, coming back to life when you’ve been dead for a good few years.
Bruce’s working theory is that it has something to do with this trans-dimensional rift that popped up on the computers at the Justice League headquarters recently, because of course it’s weird intergalactic time-space continuum shenanigans. There have been a few ‘anomalies’ since then, so says Bruce, and he’s going to be logged as one of them.
They brainstorm for a few weeks over what story they’re going to tell the press so that Jason can come out of the manor at some point. Eventually, they cook up some horseshit about how local investigators recovered the wrong body in Ethiopia and Jason had actually been living there for the past few years in a DSM-approved dissociative fugue state.
They hold a press conference. Jason stands next to Bruce and smiles as camera flashes go off in his face.
“Jason!” calls Gotham Gazette guy that he doesn’t recognise. “What are you most looking forward to now that you’re back from the dead?”
“I’m excited to have a social security number again,” he says into the mic, and everyone laughs.
They ask him about how much he remembers, about what he’s gonna do now, about whether they have plans to sue the Ethiopian government. Bruce steps between him and the mic and makes big waving gestures with his arms.
“Hey now everyone, give my boy a break!” Bruce tops it off with that boisterous and guileless Brucie laugh that Jason’s always had a love-hate relationship with. It doesn’t stop Jason from having a full body reaction to Bruce calling him ‘my boy.’ God, he kinda forgot how Bruce saying that made him feel until just now.
Bruce fields some more questions and then somehow manages to steer the whole thing into a Q&A about his latest philanthropic venture.
Once the press conference is over, just as the reporters are starting to clear, Jason catches sight of a man in a black helmet and a brown leather jacket speeding off on a motorbike.
Jason waits for them to get into the car before he asks.
“Hey, B. That was Dick, wasn’t it?”
“Mm. Yes.”
Bruce is looking straight ahead at the back of the driver’s head. Jason wonders if Bruce thinks he’s doing a good job at hiding how much he doesn’t want to talk about this.
“I didn’t spot him,” Jason says, a little sheepishly. His Robin-ing skills are going to need some levelling up. “Not til he was leaving.”
Bruce is quick to respond to that. “He didn’t want to be spotted. That’s why you didn’t spot him.”
“What’s up with that? Not wanting us to spot him.”
“Only he can answer that.”
Everything that Bruce isn’t saying about Dick is a lot louder than the little he is. Evidently, there’s trouble in paradise. But he was never any good at asking Bruce about Dick and he isn’t about to get good at it now.
“We weren’t tight or anything, but…” Jason slumps back against the leather seat. “Weird of him to come the whole way here and not say hi.”
It’s not only Dick.
There’s this beige uniform-wearing cleaning crew from Wayne Enterprises that comes through twice a week to mop and dust and trim the garden. They always say hello when they see him but they mostly look too busy to chat. As for cooking, Bruce has been doing that. Jason had always hoped Bruce would be bad at cooking, because hyper-competent hot guy who knows exactly where to hit you on your solar plexus to make you go blind and shit your pants simultaneously but doesn’t know how to make eggs is funny as a concept. But life isn’t a comedy movie, so Bruce is good at cooking.
Bruce doesn’t tell him much about why Alfred left other than that he decided to retire and go home. Which is the most baldfaced lie Bruce has ever told, because if there was anything more obvious to Jason, it was that the manor was Alfred’s home.
Today, the menu is roast chicken with a side of french onion soup. Jason is on onion-chopping duty and Bruce is aggressively fisting raw chicken with a ball of herby breadcrumbs.
“Uh, should I tell Alfred I’m back?” Jason inhales wetly to stop himself from producing onion tears.
“We’ve held a conference. The news will reach him.”
Jason isn’t sure why Bruce is fighting so hard. He hasn’t heard that roast chicken tastes better when you can reach its throat from its cloaca.
“Can I call him? I want to call him.”
Sclop. Schlurp!
God, Bruce’s forearms are insane. And god, what an insane thought to have about someone going absolutely ballistic on poultry.
“Alfred didn’t leave a means to contact him when he left,” Bruce says. Schulp. Schlip! Which isn’t ‘I don’t have Alfred’s contact number’ because, hello, Batman.
“Yeesh. That bad, huh?” Jason puts down the knife and turns to face Bruce head-on so that he can signal that he means serious business. “You gonna tell me why you and Alfred broke up?”
“We had a disagreement about work that could not be reconciled.” Just as Jason’s opening his mouth to ask when, he adds, “A year ago.”
A year. A year of Bruce being alone in this big old house.
Bruce seems to decide that he’s tenderised the poor chicken’s insides enough, because he finally pulls his fist out.
“The weather is good,” he says, blandly. “The roast will take sometime. When we’re done here, let’s go outside.”
“To do what?”
“The batter cage, perhaps.”
“You know, Bruce… I’m not a dog. You can’t distract me with a ball game just ‘cause you don’t want to talk about Alfred.”
“I don’t think it’s true that you can’t be distracted with a ball game.” Bruce says this with a barely-there smirk on his face in the same dull tone he used to comment on the weather. Jason throws a bit of onion at Bruce’s face and cackles when Bruce catches it with his teeth.
Jason is good at not thinking about it.
In real-time numbers, not in-his-head numbers, it was three years ago, or more specifically it was thirty-seven months ago, or even more specifically it was one thousand one hundred and fifteen days ago. Thinking about it isn’t going to change anything so he doesn’t think about it. And he figures the longer he doesn’t think about it, the smaller it’ll become.
It feels small. And then out of nowhere, after months of sleeping easy, he wakes up drenched in sweat to the sound of high-pitched laughter and bones crunch-crunch-crunching and the singing of metal. All he can taste in his mouth is blood and the keratin of loose teeth. He hadn’t screamed once in that warehouse, not once— he hadn’t wanted to give that motherfucker the satisfaction. But he’s screaming now, which he doesn’t realise he’s doing until Bruce is on top of him and around him and stroking his back and whispering ssshh ssshhh ssssssshh.
It takes him ages to get his shit together. By the time he feels more like himself, his voice is ragged. He inhales one last time before deciding to be a big boy and sitting up. He can tell exactly where his eyes, nose and mouth were with respect to Bruce’s chest judging by the eye, nose and mouth stains on Bruce’s shirt.
“Ugh.” He grimaces. He knows Bruce is looking at him but he can’t quite bring himself to look back just yet. It’s not embarrassing to cry, which is the first thing he’d tell a civvie on patrol, except when it is embarrassing to cry because he’s the one doing it. “How gross. Sorry.”
“Don’t,” Bruce says, and rubs a calloused thumb under his eye with the precise gentleness he’d use to dust a fingerprint. When Jason does look up, Bruce’s brows are all knotted up, the way he looks when he’s been shot and doesn’t want to tell anyone about it. “Don’t ever apologise to me.”
Bruce Wayne. Supposedly busy guy. CEO of a major company, beloved womaniser, prolific philanthropist. And Batman, he’s supposedly a busy guy too. Fighting crime in one of the most crime-riddled cities in the country, and let’s not forget his post in the Justice League.
Except lately, Bruce has been acting like he has all the time in the world. In the day, he goes into W.E. maybe once a week and Jason will see him on his laptop here and there, but that’s about it. In the night, he patrols and spends a reasonable amount of time downstairs. But it seems like these days, there’s nothing much going on in Gotham. Bruce comes back every night looking as fresh as he was when he left, and no one’s shining a Bat insignia into the sky at night. Jason checks.
In conclusion, it’s suspicious. And Bruce is around. A lot. Which Jason doesn’t mind— who the fuck is he kidding, he loves it. But it feels a little like he has an over-qualified babysitter watching over him twenty-four seven.
“Soooo, I get why I’m here in the park on a weekday in the middle of the day,” Jason says. He catches a stray chilli-dog leak running down his hand with his tongue before it can dirty his sleeve. “I’m not in education, employment or training, leeching off Bruce Wayne’s trust fund money, mucking around while he’s none the wiser. But you…”
Bruce keeps pace with him as they make their way down the walkway. He’s nursing his food instead of eating it. “But I’m not?”
“I mean, no offence, B, but don’t you got stuff to sort out? What if someone tries to poison the water supply again?”
There’s an amused quality to his voice when he replies. “Are you getting sick of me, Jason?”
Jason scoffs. “Yeah, you wish.”
“It is more quiet,” Bruce says. A sparrow lands in front of them to help itself to a breadcrumb before flitting off and Bruce’s eyes follow it. Jason watches the muscles in Bruce’s neck shift as he does. “Gotham the way it is now may not be quite like the Gotham that you remember.”
“Oh yeah? Is that something I’m gonna get to see for myself?”
Bruce isn’t exactly the same these days. Which is like… obviously, when you lose your sidekick in an explosion against one of your big bads and then that same sidekick pops out of the ground a few years later as fresh as a daisy, it’s gonna do a number to you. Of course he’s different.
It’s not bad. It’s just taking some getting used to.
‘Cause in the old days, if Jason asked Bruce something like this and he wasn’t ready to answer, he’d feed him some bullshit and move on.
And it’s not like Bruce suddenly got great at that. He still hasn’t told him anything about Dick or Alfred, and there’s a lot he doesn’t say. But nowadays, there’s this raw quality to him. Like sometimes he wants to show Jason everything and the only thing that’s stopping him is the fact that he doesn’t know how. Because instead of saying “in time,” or “later,” or “not now,” he says, “I’m sorry, Jason. I’m not ready yet.”
Jason bumps his shoulder against Bruce’s. “That’s okay. I don’t think I’m ready either.”
They enrol him into school.
Catching up with what’s what is pretty easy, and school’s pretty easy ‘cause it’s not like he has anything better to do. Everyone treats him like a zoo animal at first, but then the novelty of bothering the guy who had to get his death certificate cancelled dies out and he becomes just like anyone else.
It doesn’t feel real half the time. Loitering around with Bruce and spending time in the manor, he doesn’t ever get this weird non-reality feeling, this sense that he’s in a place he doesn’t belong in. But sitting at a desk in a class of twenty other students in the middle of the day, watching dust floating in the rays of light from the windows as Ms Lafferty draws algebraic equations on the blackboard, the uncanniness of it all is stronger than ever. Maybe it’s the mundanity that strikes him.
He’s supposed to be dead. He’s not supposed to be here. Yet he is, learning about matrices and imaginary numbers in his brand new red sweater-vest.
He keeps going through these growth spurts lately where he basically needs new clothes every second month. Every time he stands next to Bruce, he’s a little bit taller and a little bit wider. He makes jokes about getting bigger than Bruce altogether and Bruce replies with sceptical hums.
School is fine. He used to be so into school, which was half to do with a genuine love for history and literature and half to do with this harrowing need to prove to Bruce and himself and anyone that would look that he was worth something.
A part of him still loves school, but it just doesn’t feel as important as it used to. He studies just because, and he plays sports just because. He makes normal-seeming friends. He starts messing around with this girl on the swim squad named Sarah who has legs for days, and then he starts messing around with this transfer from Bludhaven boarding school named Tim. Tim’s a little short and only looks attractive in this bland, boy-next-door kind of way, but he gives good head and there’s something about his eyes that reminds him of Bruce, and that’s enough.
He graduates just because. He and Bruce talk about college. Bruce tells him that he’ll support him no matter where he wants to go and is pretty bad at hiding his relief when Jason tells him that he kinda just wants to stay in Gotham, thanks.
Jason wakes up in the middle of the night.
It’s not a nightmare kind of night. It’s just a regular I woke up and now I can’t sleep kind of night. He tosses and turns a few times before rolling out of bed. He pees, helps himself to a glass of milk from the fridge, and then he goes into the basement.
He can’t really say why it’s taken him so long to come down, and he isn’t sure what it is about tonight that pulls him there.
The cave is different in a lot of ways, but it’s hard to focus on anything other than the Robin suit. It’s suspended in a glass display case, tastefully lit like the centrepiece of a museum exhibit and it’s just… there. Next to the computer, the way someone might place a bobble head toy on their dashboard. Jason sits down on the ergonomic wheelie chair at the work console and tries to imagine Bruce seated here with his cowl off, his fingers linked, gazing at it.
He isn’t sure how much time lapses between him entering the cave and the screech of the Batmobile echoing through the underground tunnel. There’s the hiss of the hydraulics as the car door opens.
“Jason.” Bruce’s voice comes out garbled by the cowl.
“Jason,” he says again, and now the cowl is off. He sounds out of breath.
He kinda wishes Bruce got stuck in traffic on the way here so that he could have more time to himself, because he hasn’t quite figured out how to feel about this yet, and he can feel the tension rising the longer he spends thinking about what to say.
“Can I get rid of it?” he asks.
“It’s yours, Jason.” Bruce replies in a rush, like he’s eager to get all his words out. “You can do whatever you want.”
“Okay. Then I want to get rid of it.”
With a few taps on the Batcomputer, the glass case comes down. Jason steps up onto the podium and takes the suit in hand.
Hard to imagine that he fit in this once upon a time. He used to be so small. Something about that makes him so angry.
Jason throws the Robin suit into the incinerator.
He starts training again.
They don’t talk about it, not really. But Jason starts letting himself into the basement regularly and starts back on his drills, and Bruce starts giving him tips. They begin sparring.
It’s easy.
Jason hasn’t asked about the Joker, a lot because he doesn’t want to hear the answer and a little because the Joker hasn’t come up.
There’s been no hijinks. No high-profile kidnappings, no complicated schemes to sink Gotham into the ocean. Lately, the Gotham Gazette’s frontpage headline might as well be ‘Nothing Happened Again’ every day. Jason’s perused three years of papers to catch up on the time he’s missed and he hasn’t found anything about the Joker after Ethiopia. The closer he gets to the present, the less he sees about anyone at all. It feels like Jason died and woke up in some alternate universe where everyone’s decided crime was a trend that’s over and the cool new thing is obeying the law. Except it’s never that simple.
What’s simple is that there’s a door in the Batcave, hidden, that never used to be there. Jason asks to be let inside and Bruce lets him in. And he knew that it was going to be something big and fucked up, but it still takes the wind out of his lungs to see that it’s this.
The Riddler’s hat. Falcone’s watch. Two Face’s coin. Slade’s mask. Memento after memento, one after the other, displayed in big glass cases.
“You were busy while I was gone,” Jason says, making his way down the aisles. “Is this why Dick doesn’t come over anymore?”
“Yes.”
“And why Alfred ‘retired’?”
“Yes. I wasn’t sure of how to tell you.”
Bruce keeps pace with him, walking when he walks and stopping when he stops.
Jason pauses in front of the green and purple suit. It’s stained with blood.
“That you killed the Joker, or that you killed all of these guys too?”
“Both.”
“Are you ashamed?”
“No.”
One of these days, Jason will ask Bruce how the Joker died, but today isn’t that day.
He doesn’t realise he’s trembling until he feels Bruce’s hand on his shoulder.
“I keep them here to remind myself of all the people they will never be able to hurt again.”
There was this one time, back when he first started living in the manor. Bruce had just picked him up off the street after he’d tried to jack the wheels off the Batmobile.
The first time, he’d done it because it was what he thought he was supposed to do. Bruce put him up in this king bed in a room that was bigger than the size of his mom’s apartment, Bruce enrolled him into a fancy pants school with a blazer the price of a kidney, he was getting fed three square meals a day with fucking lobster thermidor nights on Fridays, and Bruce wanted him to put on these armoured shorts, and kept looking at him like he meant something, like he was someone, and… well, what the fuck was he supposed to think?
He figured it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ but of 'when.' And after a few weeks of nothing, he decided to himself that instead of waiting around like a hapless maiden, he was going to make the first move. He was going to show Bruce that he knew that when you get some, you give some.
So one day, during training, Jason knelt in front of Bruce at the Batcomputer and started undoing his belt.
Bruce pushed him off like he’d just come at his dick with a hot poker, with this look of abject horror on his face that was so hilarious Jason had no choice but to laugh.
And he wouldn’t have hated it, but that had been nice. To know that he wasn’t there because Bruce wanted that from him, even if it made no fucking sense why he was there if Bruce didn’t want to fuck him at the time.
The second time, it wasn’t about what Bruce wanted from him. It was about Bruce soaring through the air on patrol, Bruce placing a hand on his shoulder and saying ‘good job, Robin,’ Bruce leaning into his thigh to stretch out his hamstrings on the mats, Bruce towering over him after a spar all sweaty and grinning at him the way he never saw Bruce smile for anything else. It was about how they were in sync, utterly and completely, like a single breathing organism, and Jason was so horny all the time that he couldn’t fucking take it.
The second time, Bruce caught him by the shoulder before he could kiss Bruce for real and said ‘Robin’ in this stern tone of voice like Jason had just messed up on patrol, and Jason had wanted to jump off a bridge.
After that, he pushed it down, folded it into a tidy pocket square, shoved it into a box, and hadn’t looked at it again.
And it’s not like he’s into getting rejected over and over. It’s not like Bruce has done anything to make him think Bruce wants him like that, either. But he gets the feeling that things are different now.
So late at night, he comes into Bruce’s room. Bruce is in bed, freshly showered, reading a book to lamplight. He takes the book out from Bruce’s hands and places it onto the nightstand. He straddles Bruce’s lap. Bruce doesn’t flinch.
“Bruce,” he says, and he knows he doesn’t have to say anything else.
Bruce looks up at him like he’s searching for something. He doesn’t know what it is, but he sure as fuck hopes he finds it.
“Is this what you want?” he asks, after a while.
“Yeah.” Jason wraps his arms around Bruce’s neck to pull himself closer, until his nose is bumping with Bruce’s. He can smell the toothpaste on Bruce’s breath. His heartbeat is louder than his own voice. “Yeah, this is what I want.”
There’s another long stretch of silence.
Bruce’s hand comes up to cup his face.
“Then see if I would ever deny you a single thing on this earth again.”
Which is just about the scariest thing Bruce has ever said to him, but it’s hard to think too much about it when Bruce leans forward to kiss him like he’s trying to strip lead paint out from the inside of his mouth.
It’s assertive in this slow, intentional way that is way too much of an ask when he’s spent the better chunk of his formative years fantasising about exactly this. Jason rushes forward to grab Bruce’s face, his arms, his back, to take Bruce’s dick into his hand and stroke him until he’s hard. He gets impatient waiting for Bruce to get the lube and grabs it from out of Bruce’s hands, squeezes a big mess over himself and goes in with two fingers first. Bruce tells him to slow down and he tells Bruce to fuck off. And then he isn’t saying anything at all because Bruce is curling his fist around Jason’s dick and adding another finger right next to his own. Jason’s hips rise up as he cries out and he almost comes right there and then.
It’s good, but no amount of good is going to distract him today. Jason is quick to line himself up with Bruce’s dick and Bruce lets him. Sinking down on Bruce is just like how training with Bruce always makes him feel— overwhelming, like it might be too much, but if he works hard enough, he might earn it and then it’ll be better than anything else he’s ever experienced in his life.
But Bruce doesn’t let him earn it. At first, when Jason begins to move, Bruce allows it, but then when he tries to fuck himself on Bruce’s dick properly, Bruce grabs his hips and holds him there. Jason tries to move again—nothing. Again and again. His jackhammer heartbeat rises into his throat the way it hasn’t in a long time.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” he demands, and he hates the way that he sounds.
“Jason.” Bruce’s voice is soft but stern. His hands don’t budge. “Jay.”
“What?!”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
There’s something so humiliating about the fact that Bruce thinks he needs to hear that. He shakes his head, but he isn’t sure what he’s shaking his head at. Bruce kisses his brow. When Bruce does move, it’s unhurried, with steady, sure cants of his hips that builds pressure up-up-up in through to his gut, his chest, spreading like molten lava. And Jason keeps trying to move until he doesn’t anymore because he can’t, because Bruce really isn’t going to let go, because he’s not in the driver’s seat anyway and there’s no finish line. He learns to take it. He learns to beg for more, and Bruce fucks him harder, but he never fucks him faster. When Bruce finally does let go of his hips, he hardly notices. Bruce whispers that’s my boy into his ear as Bruce thrusts into him and he breaks apart into pieces when he comes.
Red Robin. That’s the name of the new suit.
Jason trains with it on for about a month before they finally go on their first patrol.
Call him delusional, but there’s something romantic about it. The first proper snow of December fell yesterday and the streets of Gotham are flush with white. They just had takeout for dinner. Jason’s favourite song is playing from the sound system. Bruce is looking as smoking hot as he always does.
The Batmobile had a few upgrades since the last time he was in it. When Bruce starts really digging into the g-forces, Jason tips his head back and yowls.
They patrol. They have sex. They patrol. They have sex.
Jason doesn’t know what to call it, this thing they’re doing. Bruce kisses him a lot, but never with passion, and Bruce touches him a lot, but not in the kinda way that says I want you. He touches him like all these pilgrims touched the feet of the Saint Peter statue in the Vatican City in this documentary Jason watched once. He touches him like he’s making sure he’s still there.
He touches him in a way that makes Jason feel kinda sad.
So Jason doesn’t know what to call it. But whenever Jason kisses him, he kisses back, and whenever they have sex, Bruce lays him down and takes his time and opens him up real slow and gets hard enough to fuck him multiple times over, which has to be worth something. And when Bruce comes, Bruce chants his name over and over and holds him and doesn’t let go, not ever, not until Jason puts up a fight to go take a shower.
One of these days, it’s going to stop being enough. He can tell. But for now, it is.
“You remember Felipe Garzonas?” Jason asks, over breakfast.
Bruce has been trying to perfect the art of the French omelette. In Jason’s opinion, an egg is an egg and they all taste great to him, but Bruce keeps saying he’s not quite there yet.
This is how they’re on their fifteenth morning of the exact same thing for breakfast. Jason watches Bruce’s back at the kitchen counter as Bruce whisks six large eggs with all the vivacity and desperate power of a teenager jerking off.
For Felipe Garzonas, though, Bruce pauses in his pursuit of yolk and egg white homogeny.
“I remember.”
“He didn’t slip.”
Jason’s been wanting to tell Bruce for a while, pretty much since the day he watched Garzonas go ker-plat on the pavement when he was fifteen years old. He didn’t, back then. Not because he felt guilty, and yeah, he was scared Bruce was going to kick him out, but that wasn’t why he lied. Back then, he lied because he thought it would break Bruce’s heart.
And now… well. Now, Bruce is looking at him like he always is— like he’s trying to remember every bit of him. Like he could burn the manor to the ground and it wouldn’t bother Bruce at all.
“I know,” Bruce replies, quietly. “I knew.”
Jason’s shoulders are lighter. He gets up off the kitchen island and comes around to hug Bruce from behind.
“Yeah, I figured. I just wanted to say it.”
Two days ago, three Gothamites were all found dead, all incinerated in the exact same way as each other. Bruce says there was a funny reading at the crime scene, like something not-from-this-universe has been slinking around, and Bruce says that since then, that reading’s been popping up more and more.
Tonight, there’s a funny reading right over the Finger River. Jason catches it on the screen of the Batcomputer as he’s coming down for training and heads for his suit before Bruce has time to tell him what-for.
“Should we roll, Batman?” he calls.
Behind him, he hears the familiar slide and hiss as Bruce pulls his cowl on.
“Let’s roll, Red Robin.”