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Back when Dick’s parents had died, he had seen things. Mostly his parents, really, but occasionally, mostly during the night, shadowy figures. It had scared him, enough that it had taken him too long to tell Bruce.
Psychosis was what Leslie had said and the medication had helped, as had the therapy Dick had been in ever since then.
After a while, the medication got less and less, until he went off it.
Sometimes, he almost wished that he still saw them, only once or twice. He missed them so desperately much.
All that meant however was that he was not all that surprised when two days after Jason’s funeral, he turned and saw the boy sitting on the counter of the vast kitchen in his Blüdhaven apartment.
The lack of surprise naturally didn’t mean that Dick didn’t nearly jump out of his skin at the new figure on the chair. He almost dropped his container of leftovers, his free hand going to a knife he always had strapped to his leg, civilian or no.
“What the fuck,” he thought tiredly, staring at the boy.
Jason was wearing his Robin outfit (the one he’d died in, the one he’d died in, the one he’d-), grinning obnoxiously, dangling his legs.
Dick sighed, rubbing his face briefly, before turning to warm his food up.
“Dickie,” the boy said and Dick flinched. He wasn’t real. He couldn’t be real, there were no blemishes on his skin and Jason was dead, buried, gone forever. Still, it sounded so real.
He sounded real.
“Don’t ignore me,” Jason pouted from beside him.
Dick sighed again, fighting the grief that was threatening to swallow him whole because Jason was dead, dead, dead. Buried. Gone forever.
“You’re not real,” he said, voice cracking dangerously as his eyes started to sting.
“Wow,” the boy said, smacking his lips. “I mean I knew you didn’t see me as a real brother, but that’s a low blow.” There was amusement in his voice, he was joking, but Dick thought it wasn’t a very good joke.
After all, it was true, wasn’t it? Dick had been so caught up in his problems with Bruce that he had scorned Jason. They had interacted sure, later, and Dick had started to try, had started to see the sharp-edged boy as his little brother, but before he could properly do so, Jason had died.
Jason was dead.
Jason was buried.
Jason was gone forever.
“That’s not what I-” This time, his voice didn’t make it until the end and the next second, he was sobbing. His chest was caving in, his heart a black hole that was threatening to swallow him whole. The young man felt his breath coming faster. His vision was going in and out.
Panic attack, he thought numbly, but it was so much more than that.
“Right,” he heard, very far away. “This is getting a little emotional for me. Dramatic much?”
The microwave beeped.
Dick couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t-
By the time he managed to ground himself enough to check behind him, Jason was gone and his microwaved food was cold.
Right. Maybe he wouldn’t patrol today.
Dick curled up in his bed, stomach empty and chest emptier.
~•~
“Have you stopped being dramatic, Dickwing?”
This time, Dick didn’t jump, simply sending his little brother a resigned look as he went to make breakfast.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he asked. He knew he shouldn’t engage with his hallucinations, shouldn’t pretend they were real, but he couldn’t quite help it. Jason just sounded so…so himself, jumping right into annoying Dick.
The younger boy laughed brightly, jumping off the counter and landing silently as he moved to peer around Dick at the bacon he was frying.
“Not really, no. Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Dick sighed, but didn’t reply.
~•~
“Woah,” Jason said, pointing at the screen. “Did you know that penguins could be gay?”
Dick reluctantly moved his eyes away from his work, briefly glancing at the documentary adding idle background noise and then at Jason. The boy was seated next to him on the couch, a blanket that didn’t belong to Dick wrapped around his shoulders. He was pretty sure he had seen it around the Manor a few times, the rare instances he’d been over anywhere but the batcave.
“I did,” he said simply.
Jason scoffed. “Liar,” he accused. “There’s no way you knew that.”
A month into seeing Jason, Dick had graduated from being sent into rapid panic attacks and sobbing fits and had instead moved into an infuriating mix of fondness and annoyance. Sure, he still grieved, but it was more so after nightmares now or whenever anyone brought up Jason or, rarely, when he forgot Jason was dead. Buried. Gone.
“I did,” he said levelly, focusing back on his work.
“No you didn’t,” Jason argued.
“Yes,” Dick said firmly, trying to read. “I did.” His tone brooked no argument.
Naturally, that mattered little to Jason.
“Nu uh,” his little brother said.
“Yu uh,” Dick answered almost immediately.
“Nu. Uh. Nu uh. Nu uh, nu uh, nu uh,” Jason chanted.
Dick let out a long-suffering sigh, moving his hand to rub at his temples. “Jason,” he ground out.
“Yes?” the boy asked with a faux-innocent smile.
“Shut up.” It was a reasonable request in his opinion.
“Nu uh,” Jason said, sticking his tongue out at the older.
Dick really needed to look into getting medication again.
~•~
“You know that you don’t have to have a costume this tight, right?” Jason leaned against the wall, watching Nightwing stand over a downed criminal.
Nightwing looked around, but nobody else was there, only him, Jason and the unconscious guys. “Oh, shut up kid,” he said.
~•~
“Dickwing?”
Dick ignored him. Small mercies dictated that the hallucination of Jason (ha, HA, Hallucijason) stayed outside of the bathroom. Then again, Leslie would probably say that it was Dick’s subconscious wanting to pee alone.
Why it couldn’t let him pee in peace though, he didn’t know.
“Dickie? I know you can hear me.”
Dick rolled his eyes.
“Dickkk? Dickkk? Dickwing? Dickie?”
His little brother started knocking on the door.
“Oh, come on Jason,” Dick snapped. “Just let me piss in peace.”
“Such language,” the boy tutted through the door. At least he had stopped knocking. “What would Alfred say?”
The comment startled an actual laugh out of Dick.
“You’re such a menace,” he informed his hallucination.
“Yeah, but I’m your menace,” Jason replied smugly.
Dick washed his hand and opened the door, smiling down at his little brother fondly. Jason, still wearing his Robin costume, peered up at him.
“Yeah, I guess you are,” he said with a sigh.
Jason beamed and Dick’s heart clenched.
~•~
“Do you see him now?” Tim asked, looking around the room with such wide eyes that Dick would have normally laughed.
“No,” he replied calmly. “It’s been getting…” He wanted to say better, because that was what it was, right? Healing? It didn’t matter that he kind of liked having the annoying kid around, he knew that it wasn’t healthy. Jason was dead and he needed to accept that. Jason was buried and Dick had seen his grave. Jason was gone forever. “...better.”
His new little brother nodded, but he didn’t cease looking around.
Tim had heard him speak to Jason a few weeks ago and had apparently researched obsessively, only to present Dick with the fact that he thought Dick had an acute psychosis. It had been slightly ridiculous and…rather cute.
Especially because despite the subject matter, Tim had sounded so eager for Dick’s approval, so eager for him to tell him that he’d done a good job.
And Dick? Well, Dick had sworn to do better with this little brother than his other one, so he had told him the truth.
“I’m talking to Leslie again,” Dick added and Tim hummed.
“Yeah, B wants me to talk to her too, but I don’t see the reason,” the Drake heir said with a shrug.
“Well, therapy is good for everyone,” Dick replied gently. “Especially for us. Being Robin kind of comes with a lot of…heavy things.”
“I guess,” Tim said, shrugging again, “but I’m not like…I’m fine, you know? I’m not as bad as-”
“Me?” Dick asked dryly.
Tim flushed immediately, looking genuinely regretful. “I didn’t mean-”
“I know,” Dick interrupted, elbowing his brother good-naturedly. “Just…think about it, yes?”
Tim almost dragged his shoulders into a shrug again, Dick saw it in the way his shoulders minisculely tensed, but he aborted the motion. “Alright.”
“Good,” Dick said, clapping his thighs. “Now how about I beat you at Mario Kart.”
Tim scoffed, but stood readily. “In your dreams, maybe.”
They were through their third round, Dick firmly beaten by his little brother, when Tim turned to him again. “You’ll tell me if you see him again?”
“You know that it’s not a ghost situation, right, Timmy? He’s not real.”
The boy fiddled with his controller, shifting slightly. “I know, but…” He shrugged, trailing off.
Dick lowered his own controller, scooting over to wrap an arm around his little brother. He wasn’t sure why Tim was so interested in Jason, but he knew the grief in the other’s eyes intimately enough to not care. “I miss him too,” he said with a sad smile.
Tim simply turned and snuggled into his embrace more.
~•~
It had been months since Dick had last seen Jason, but when Nightwing saw him standing on a roof, he didn’t even startle.
Sure, the boy looked different, scarred and older and far broader, but he was still unmistakably Nightwing’s little brother.
The hero landed silently.
Jason remained silent, eyes on him. They were green, growing greener with every passing moment of silence. Weird. Dick wasn’t fully sure why his mind was making up weird things now, but he supposed it had been a stressful week.
“What?” he asked, the silence getting to him. “No smart quips about my costume being too tight?”
Jason looked genuinely taken aback, some of the green in his eyes receding. “What? What are you talking about dumbass?”
Nightwing sighed and rolled his eyes. “Nothing, nevermind. I forgot how annoying you are.”
At this, the hallucination looked…hurt (?) for a moment, before the green came back full force. “What? I expected a lot of things, Dickwing, but not this,” he spat. “Why the fuck did I ever think this family would care?”
That was…odd behaviour. Nightwing blinked.
“I mean, I would say seeing you means I do care,” he argued, trying to go for a lighthearted quip, the kind Nightwing made all night long, but falling just short. “Although I’m not sure why you’re not…you know?” He mimed a shorter height.
“No,” Jason snapped back. “I don’t know.”
Nightwing shrugged. “Well, you do tend to normally show up in your Robin costume and a lot shorter. It’s pretty cruel of my brain to make you look all grown up,” he said softly. His eyes stung. What could have been. If Jason wasn’t dead, buried and gone forever.
“I-” The green receded again and Jason took a small step forward. “Dick, do you have hallucinations?”
Nightwing laughed. “Come on, we had that conversation already, kid. To be fair though I haven’t had them in a while.” He shrugged. “Anyways, I should go, it wouldn’t be good for Nightwing’s reputation to be seen talking to himself.” He snickered at his own joke, even if it was true.
“Dick,” Jason said, coming closer still. “Dick,” he repeated with more urgency, “I’m not a hallucination. I’m real.”
Nightwing laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it. “Damn, that’s cruel, little wing.”
But Jason only came closer and closer, until his hands clamped down on Nightwing’s shoulders and Nightwing? Nightwing went rigid.
Hallucinations were unable to touch him, he’d never had any other senses affected, only his hearing and his sight.
“W-” he started, but his voice got choked back by terror. Terror that the horrible hope blooming in his chest was about to he sucked into a black hole.
“The league put me into a Lazarus pit,” Jason said and Nightwing only heard him very distantly, very fuzzily. His breathing was becoming laboured. “I’m back. I’m Red Hood.”
Red Hood. The hope thrummed through his veins and Nightwing moved his hands to cup his little, taller brother’s face, feeling his skin under his hands, the way his scars protruded, the way he felt alive, alive, alive and not at all buried, not at all gone, not at all a hallucination.
“You’re real,” he breathed, voice stuck halfway between a question and a statement.
“I’m real,” Jason confirmed. “But, Dick, I’m Red Hood. I’m a murd-”
He was interrupted, his breath leaving him in a huff when Nightwing wrapped his arms around his brother, hugging him so tightly that he wasn’t sure where he ended and his brother began. He was sobbing and babbling.
“I’m a murderer,” Jason said once Nightwing calmed down enough to breathe more properly.
“I don’t care,” Nightwing said immediately.
“But-”
“I. Don’t. Care. All that matters to me is that you’re back, Jason. You’re here, you’re really here and I love you.” He wiped at his cheeks. “I missed you so much.”
Once again he reached out and pulled Jason into a hug, more feeling than hearing the long-suffering sigh his little brother let out. Well, he figured that if Dick had dealt with Jason annoying him as a hallucination, Jason could deal with Nightwing being a little clingy right now.
“For the record,” Jason said, voice slightly muffled against Nightwing’s shoulder. “Your costume really is too tight.”
Nightwing choked on a laugh or maybe a sob or maybe both.
“Jason?” he asked and this was all Dick, none of Nightwing in his voice.
“Yes?” his little brother asked, a mocking quality to his voice.
“Shut up.”