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It started with Roy saying, “The thing is, space and time are, like… brothers.”
And with Jason saying, “Yeah, I was trained by Batman, I have a pretty solid understanding of theoretical physics. Is this portal going to get me back or not?”
“Well, it’ll get you to Gotham,” Roy said.
And Jason said, “Arsenal.”
And Roy said, “It’ll get you to a Gotham.”
“Arsenal.”
“I’m, like, 90% sure it’ll get you there in the right time period and everything. If it doesn’t, uh—emergency beacon? You still have your emergency beacon?”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Jason said.
“Super debatable,” Roy said.
“All right,” Jason said. “All right. No good options, right?”
“That’s pretty much our M.O.,” Roy said. “Kiss for luck?”
“Stop flirting with me, you’re taken,” Jason said.
They both looked across the battlefield just in time to watch Kori set an alien on fire, and Roy said, dreamily, “Yeah.”
Then he blew Jason a kiss, ducked away from the alien tech he’d been modifying throughout Kori’s distraction, and let the alien leader shove Jason through the portal they’d been using to kidnap him.
Jason blinks, and he’s staring at a storm. A moment ago, he was standing in the warm, waving yellow grasses of an alien planet; now he’s flat on his back on cold concrete. Has he ever seen rain from quite this angle before? Lightning flashes above him, one strike after another almost in time with the throb in his right ankle, which is how he knows he’s home. He thinks maybe he sprained the ankle when he landed, and maybe hit his head, if he’s right that the cold-wet trickling down his temple is rain and the warm-wet is blood.
As successful rescues go, this might be one of the worst.
Jason wraps his arm around his ribs and rolls onto his side with a groan. The aliens had him for three days, maybe four—Roy and Kori had his distress signal from the start, but his captors had portal tech they kept using to move him before his team could catch up—and they did not believe in medical treatment for prisoners. But the torture wasn’t the worst he’s ever had. It’s like they weren’t even trying to break him for information about a missing Tamaranean princess.
At least, he’s pretty sure that’s what they were trying to do. There was a language barrier. It would have been hard to miss her at the end there, though, so maybe he was just a hostage.
He breathes slow and hobbles to the mouth of the alley. It’s dark, but he knows his city, and the sense of wrong hits him immediately. Roy said 90%, but he may have forgotten to account for Jason’s eternally shitty luck. Which Jason can forgive, he supposes. It was a stressful situation. But the street before him takes shape as Jason’s eyes adjust to the darkness instead of the strange purple glow of the portal tech, and there: the news racks are full of papers instead of abandoned and graffitied.
Okay. Right place, wrong time. Jason can handle this.
First step is getting rid of identifying markers. The bat symbol on his chest needs to go. Aliens took his leather jacket, which was just rude, so it’s on full display as he ducks under the flickering streetlight. No one’s around, this time of this miserable night, but he hunches his shoulders to look like less of a target anyway. He comes level with the news racks and glances at the paper on top for the date, but then something bright yellow catches his attention in a window up ahead.
Well, speaking of bat symbols. It’s one of those tourist shops in Midtown that’s half Gotham merch and half convenience store, and Jason’s moving toward it before he fully thinks it through. The window is plastered with posters and t-shirts sold inside, with that old ovular logo, the dark bat in righteous light. According to the paper, Jason has landed twelve years in the past. Was Bruce still using that on the suit? He’s not sure whether Dick has made the switch from Robin to Nightwing yet, either—this is before Jason met either of them.
Which is strange to think about.
Bruce has loomed so large over his life for what feels like so long, but Jason has barely known him a full decade. Hell, Jason was dead or gone for half of that.
It’s strange to think about, and breaking into the store hardly even qualifies as a distraction.
He picks the lock in record time, cold rain slipping down the back of his neck and underneath his armor. It only takes a moment longer to silence the alarm because the tech is older than he’s used to. Lightning flashes as the door falls shut behind him, followed a few breaths later by a boom of thunder. Jason stands in the dark and quiet, dripping on the rubber mat, and tries not to feel safe.
Safe means the adrenaline goes away, and he drops behind that checkout counter until the first hint of dawn, when—what? What the fuck is he going to do twelve years in the past? Roy’d been pretty confident he could get Jason back if it came to this, and Jason wouldn’t tell him so unless the situation was a lot more dire but he’s pretty confident in that too, which makes this a waiting game. And it’s not safe, but home twelve years ago is a damn sight better than being held prisoner by aliens in space. Even injured and without weapons, he can take almost anything that comes at him here.
He limps forward, starting to undo the straps of his armor even though just reaching to do it makes his ribs ache. There’s a baseball equipment bag on the back wall with Gotham Knights scrawled across it in white cursive, so he can shove all incriminating evidence in that, at least. Bruce would say to be ten steps ahead, but to take them one at a time. First step is blending in, removing the immediate threat. Second step is figuring out where to sleep.
Oh. That’s familiar.
It occurs to Jason for the first time that he’s—he would be—he’s here too. Little him. Twelve years ago, did he still have the old apartment minus electricity and heat, or had the landlord found him out by then? Was the little kid version of him on the streets in this storm, or had he already scored the new place to squat in, the good one with the mattress on the floor and the Poison Idea poster on the wall that Batman had followed him back to that first night?
He should know this. It was—it was a lifetime ago, but he should fucking know this. Because he’s out there, and Jason doesn’t—Jason can’t—
Jason can’t do anything that might change the timeline.
The surge of anger that sends through him is nearly as good as adrenaline. He rips his chest plate off the rest of the way and throws it to the ground, then unstraps his empty holsters with shaking fingers. He’s cold now, in boots and tac pants and the black long sleeves he wears under his armor, which means that wherever little Jason is, he’s cold too. And Jason can’t do anything. Twice over.
It's like the universe keeps throwing him new ways to be helpless. And his shirt is soaked in rain and blood and smells like gunpowder and space, so he tears that off too, then drops into a crouch with the stolen equipment bag to shove the whole pile inside. His ribs protest, loudly, and a wave of dizziness sweeps over him for good measure. This is not, he reminds himself, the worst thing that has ever happened to him. If he feels like he’s going to cry—out of frustration, maybe pain, but not because of the unfairness of it all, because Jason’s a little kid somewhere in this city but it’s not here in this store, now—then he probably has a concussion.
Maybe the second step should be first aid.
There’s a whole display of t-shirts in the back corner, and the mirror in the middle shows that his torso is black and blue, but—he turns to check his back—no open lacerations, at least, nothing life threatening. The head wound is mostly hidden by his hair, but only bleeding sluggishly now. There’ll probably be some kind of bandage somewhere in here, for all the out-of-towners who trip and cut themselves on, well, Gotham.
Jason pulls on the first black t-shirt he finds in his size, something stiff and fitted that says “What happens in Gotham…” in gold foil letters across the chest. It’ll work to hide the blood still dripping off his jaw.
The rack of sweatshirts proves more difficult. He pages through it twice, with more and more prejudice, because he’s cold, and Jason makes a point of not staying cold when he doesn’t need to, but this rack is full of sizes small and medium, and there’s exactly one warm, long-sleeved thing that will come anywhere close to fitting Jason.
It’s an XXL hoodie with a yellow bat symbol on the chest.
The red bat he wears is one thing—it’s a taunt when he needs it to be, a statement when he can stand it, a challenge if he’s feeling angry and maybe even an homage if he’s feeling sentimental, but it’s different. Thicker and bolder and bloodier. This, neatly shaped and stylized, is old-fashioned. Outdated. That makes it Batman’s symbol through and through.
He thinks about checking in the back for more stock. Just for a second.
Then the lightning, then the thunder, then his sprained ankle throbbing, and he yanks the hoodie off the rack with a curse. At least it’s a disguise. No one who knew Jason would ever expect him to be caught dead in this, even when he was a little kid. He was pretty desperate the night he met Batman, yeah, but that was only his first thought when he stumbled on the Batmobile just sitting there for the looting in that alleyway; his second was oh, fuck yeah, this motherfucker deserves this.
Bruce Wayne, he has to admit, did a lot for Crime Alley, or at least his money did. But Batman only had the guts to show his face in Jason’s city one night a year, and half the time he just made things worse. He might’ve been vengeance, he might’ve been hope, but to Crime Alley he was just the absent father that showed up every so often to knock you around and take the cash stuffed under your mattress. Jason already had one of those.
Jason didn’t have heroes back then, and even when he got one, it wasn’t Batman. He exhales hard around the twinge of his ribs as he pulls the sweatshirt over his head.
It’s a little big, but that just makes it warmer, extra fabric to burrow into and sleeves coming down over his hands. The bright yellow catches his eye again in the mirror. At least he looks a little more normal now, less suspicious in this time period; even the white streak in his hair almost blends with the rest when it’s all rain-damp. His eyes are a little unfocused, maybe, because of the probable concussion, and there’s the blood smeared at his temple and the bruise on his opposite cheekbone, an abrasion on the edge of his jaw…
Jason puts a hand over the symbol on his chest and turns away.
And there’s a bat-shaped shadow standing in the window. His heart thuds under his hand. Fuck. Fuck, definitely a concussion, some kind of impaired senses, because Jason hadn’t felt him coming. Lighting flashes like a horror movie, illuminating the nightmare in the rain, and Jason’s mind races to come up with a play. He’s standing in a broken-open tourist shop literally wearing the stolen goods, so denial isn’t going to work. But this Bruce hasn’t met him yet. And he’s got nothing marking him as either a Bat or a vigilante. For tonight, he’s a common criminal. A petty thief. It’s good.
Hell, it’s even a little nostalgic. What he’d give for a tire iron.
Batman steps into the store, and the little bell above the door chimes. A hysterical laugh bubbles in Jason’s throat, but he raises his hands to shoulder-height because he can’t go higher than that without it hurting, because his life is just falling apart in this fucking convenience store, and he says, “I’m not stealing, I was going to leave cash.”
The Batman says nothing.
No Robin.
Jason’s mouth is dry. Could he change that now? Would he, if he could? Find his younger self and take him somewhere far away, make sure he never became Robin, never ended up in that warehouse, that coffin, that glass case? Robin was magic, but Robin was death, and Jason knows now that one always follows the other.
Batman still hasn’t learned the lesson, but maybe Jason can teach him this time, differently, before he ever finds a second kid to put in the suit. Robin wasn’t a legacy until they made it one.
And maybe Bruce would still want him. The kid. The thought comes to Jason out of nowhere, and fuck, concussions always make him cry, he has to clench his jaw to hold in the sob that batters against his bruised ribs, but maybe there’s something he can do now so that when Bruce finds him in that alleyway he sees a son instead of a soldier, before Jason ever even gets a chance to fuck it all up.
The Batman is still watching him silently. Jason should say something else. His hands are shaking in the air.
Then Bruce says, “Are you all right, son?”
Lightning flashes, his ankle throbs, and Jason sways with the storm. He steadies himself with a hand on the rack of sweatshirts, wraps his other arm around his ribs with a hard exhale, and ducks his head. Tries to shore himself up against—against the fact that—
That that sounded more like Bruce than Batman. That Bruce is young.
It’s the craziest thing about this moment, somehow, this loop back around to where they started—he’s younger than Jason remembers him being, back when Jason was a kid and he seemed ancient. His voice doesn’t have half the gravel even though he’s trying twice as hard, and Jason’s heard him sound that soft before but not in a long, long time. A lifetime.
The Bruce who has never met him sounds more like his dad than the one he came back to, and what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?
He needs to not be here.
It's possible three-to-four days of alien torture and portal hopping is catching up with Jason, however, because Bruce is beside him before he can move, arm around his waist to help him limp across the squeaky linoleum to the checkout counter. And then, presumably, to prison, because Jason doesn’t actually have any cash on him. His captors weren’t kind enough to leave him with his wallet.
But Bruce only lowers him to the floor, so he can lean back against the counter, his bad ankle stretched out in front of him. There’s nowhere else to sit, really; this is a kindness. He’s still not breathing right, from the pain or from the wild grief rocking like a great lake in a storm inside his chest.
He needs to not be here.
A cooler opens and shuts nearly silently on the other side of the store, and Bruce is crouched by his side before Jason’s hazy mind fully registers he was gone. He holds an uncapped water bottle. “Drink.”
“I—I was gonna leave cash,” Jason says again, because for some reason that’s what he’s stuck on. The cover, he figures. When in doubt, always stick to the cover.
“That’s fine.” Bruce presses the cold bottle into his hand, and the shock of it focuses him enough to drink. When was the last time water tasted this good? Whatever swill he got in captivity sure as fuck didn’t. He gulps down half the bottle before Bruce gently tips it down, probably so he doesn’t throw up in his own lap, and for some reason the gesture makes tears prick his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. I’m supposed to be mad at you, he thinks. You never apologized to me.
This Bruce hasn’t done anything to him yet. He screws the cap back onto Jason’s water bottle. “It’s fine. You weren’t stealing. Were you attacked?”
Jason stares at him. He wasn’t, was he? Not the way Bruce means. But he didn’t give himself these injuries, and it fits the cover, so he nods.
“How long ago?” Bruce asks, and Jason knows he means can I still catch them?
“Earlier tonight,” he says, his voice still refusing to rise above a rough whisper. “I passed out for a while, I think, and then I walked—away. I walked away.”
None of it’s a lie, but he’s so off-kilter to begin with, he’s not sure his nervous system would clock it if it was. Shouldn’t be any tells for the Batman. Jason’s probably hard to read at all right now, being half-crazy and from the future and all; that’s probably why Bruce watched him for so long earlier without saying anything. It must be why he’s being so nice. He’s come to the wrong conclusion, hasn’t realized what Jason is.
“Hn.” It’s displeased, but not with him, and when was the last time that happened? “That wound doesn’t need stitches.”
Jason blinks. “I know. I’ve had worse.”
“Ribs? Ankle?”
“Not broken.”
Another grunt. “You don’t need a hospital.”
“I know,” Jason says, annoyance making him feel a little more like himself. He shakes his head to clear it, but that backfires and the floor wobbles. “I just needed clothes, my old ones were bloody and they took my jacket, it was cold, I don’t—I don’t handle the cold very well.”
He didn’t mean to say that.
“I know I’m still a criminal,” he adds, trying to regain his balance. “I know what you do with criminals.”
“Hm.” This time he sounds amused. “I can treat your injuries.”
Jason should say no. For the timeline. He should minimize potential damage by spending as little time with Bruce as possible and hope against hope that the Batman somehow forgets this encounter entirely. He should find somewhere quiet and dry to wait for rescue and not—not be selfish.
But he’s tired. And Bruce is being nice to him.
Then the white lenses on the cowl retract, probably because Bruce is reading his hesitation as fear and trying to make him more comfortable by appearing more human, which is ironic, given how calculated a move it is. But Jason doesn’t really care why and he doesn’t really care what he should do, because Bruce Wayne has stupidly distinctive gray-blue eyes and he probably shouldn’t have even built that feature into the cowl, but in that moment it’s like Batman’s not even there at all, and Jason’s just looking at his dad. Just Bruce, and Jason’s always been so fucking selfish with Bruce.
It was sort of the only time in his life when he was allowed to be.
Jason swallows hard and nods.
“Thank you,” Bruce says, as if Jason’s doing him a favor. He shifts to one knee by Jason’s feet and works the laces of one boot loose, and Jason feels like a little kid again, for all that he was way older than this stage by the time Bruce found him. He takes the heel of Jason’s boot in one hand. “This may hurt.”
Jason grunts as the boot is pulled off his swollen ankle. He rests his head back against the counter and closes his eyes while Bruce prods at the ankle with gloved fingers, rotates it this way and that to check for mobility. This, he does remember Bruce doing for him a few times, kneeling on the cold Cave floor while Jason sat, legs hanging, on a cot in med bay. It felt like a practical thing back then, but in his memories it feels like a ritual, something quiet and sacred.
“What’s your name?” There’s a sound like something unlatching: one of the pockets on his utility belt. Jason remembers.
“Small talk from the Batman?” he mutters, because he can’t think of a fake name fast enough. He blames the head injury.
And Bruce says, “Fine. You don’t have to tell me your name.”
Jason huffs.
Bruce props Jason’s heel on his armored thigh, then begins wrapping his ankle. “How old are you, son?”
“Don’t call me that,” Jason says, because he’s an idiot. Maybe because of the three-to-four days of alien torture, now that he thinks about it? But his filter is shot, and being stuck in the past where keeping secrets is a matter of keeping reality straight makes this conversation one of the dumber decisions he’s made.
Then again, Bruce probably won’t jump to the conclusion that Jason’s sensitive to the address because Jason is his estranged son from twelve years in the future. Then again, this is Batman, so Jason’s not putting it past him.
“You didn’t want to tell me your name,” he says blandly.
Jason kicks at him with his intact foot before he remembers this isn’t his Bruce. To make up for the slip in familiarity, he says, “You’re kind of a dick, aren’t you?”
“No. I’m vengeance.”
Jason cracks one eye to look at him. There’s the barest hint of a smile on his face, and Jason remembers this, but it also doesn’t make any sense. “I’ve heard stories. Guys from my old neighborhood who could never walk right again after tangling with you. And you’re here, what, wasting your time patching up a petty thief? Cracking jokes?”
“I thought you weren’t stealing.” Bruce cracks a cold pack and lays it over his neatly bandaged ankle. Jason hisses as the cold floods through the pack, but he doesn’t move except to brace his hands against the floor. “You were going to leave money.”
“How many times you heard that one?” Jason asks.
Bruce is quiet as he pulls, of all things, a package of wet wipes from his utility belt next. It takes him a moment to separate a wipe with his gloves on, but then he’s moving back to Jason’s side and reaching for his fucking face and Jason—
—means to snap at him, but he flinches instead. When he was a kid, the light to Batman’s shadow instead of just a darker, bloodier shadow, Batman would drop one gauntleted hand to his shoulder to steady him, two to comfort him. Jason can still feel the weight of one heavy on his head when he’d done a good job.
For a long moment, he and the Bat stare at each other, and Jason tries to look tough about it, but mostly he wants to sink through the floor. He tries to breathe evenly. Batman hasn’t touched him gently for a long time.
“If I thought helping people was a waste of time, I wouldn’t be dressed like this, I would be picking off criminals with a sniper rifle,” Bruce says, and Jason stops breathing entirely. Bruce holds out the wipe. “For the blood on your face.”
Jason can’t move to take it.
Bruce doesn’t lower his hand. “Do you think I’m going to hurt you? For breaking into a convenience store?”
“I’m a criminal,” Jason says, like a broken record.
“You’re just a kid,” Bruce says, and Jason lets out a breathless laugh. What? Finally Bruce drops his hand to rest across his bent leg. “You’re twenty? Twenty-one?”
“That’s not a kid,” Jason points out.
“Trust me. It is.”
Jason will be twenty-two in a handful of months, and he doesn’t know if his dad even remembers his birthday. Not—remembers is the wrong word. Bruce never forgets a thing, but he’s not sure if Bruce associates the date with Jason at all. Or if it just belongs to the kid who died. Sometimes Jason doesn’t know if Bruce even believes they’re the same person.
Sometimes it’s easier to think he doesn’t. It’s better to think that Bruce is so cold to him now because he loved a different version of him than because he never loved him at all.
Jason’s the pathetic one who still loves the version of his dad that hates him. He’s the dumbass kid who hauled Willis onto his side every time he passed out drunk so he didn’t choke on his own vomit, who bought his mom heroin so she could get some relief from the cancer even though he knew it was taking her away from him faster, who still tried to save Sheila in that warehouse where she brought him to die. He’s the one who doesn’t know how to let go; even after they buried him he came crawling back.
He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Bruce offers him the wipe again, and this time he takes it, pressing it to his cheek and the blood drying all down the side of his face.
Bruce sits back on his heels and says, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but ‘criminal’ isn’t a genetic trait. Whatever you’ve done, you can do something different.”
Jason lifts his eyes. Bruce is watching him so steadily. Jason sort of forgot how earnest a person has to be to dress up as a bat and fight crime every night. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“I don’t need to,” Bruce says. “I’m not your lawyer and I’m not a priest. I’m just someone who learned to use that same darkness you’re carrying around for something that didn’t make me want to crash my car into Gotham Harbor. You could too.”
It almost makes Jason smile, how Bruce says Gotham Harbor with the same disgust as any Gothamite, how it makes a bit of an accent slip out around his Batman growl.
“I’m trying,” Jason admits. “It’s not that simple.”
“Let me help you,” Bruce says simply.
But it breaks the spell. Jason hasn’t forgotten that this isn’t his time, but for a moment, he did almost forget that Bruce doesn’t know. That this storm is going to end and the sun is going to rise somewhere above the Gotham smog, and the world is going to keep turning for the people in the past. Bruce is offering help like Jason won’t be gone tomorrow because this is real for him. Another night in Gotham City, another damned kid to try to save.
For a moment, for Jason, it felt like this was just his dad, reaching through space and time to talk to him again.
He crumples the bloody wipe in his fist. “You’re not—I don’t need your help.”
Bruce gaze sharpens. In the same moment, he looks down, pretending Jason didn’t just give him some sort of puzzle piece. He procures a disinfectant spray from the utility belt. “Whose help do you need?”
The trap is right there, and obvious, and Jason knows everything matters because he’s in the wrong time, but it’s starting to feel like nothing matters, because he’s in the wrong time. He walks into it on purpose. He should get to say it to someone, shouldn’t he? “My dad, probably. He… he doesn’t…”
“Hn.” Another puzzle piece. Bruce sprays the wound in his hair without warning, but when Jason flinches away from the sting, he anticipates it, his other hand up to catch Jason’s head from banging against the counter. “Is your father the one that calls you a criminal?”
“I thought you were a detective, not a psychologist,” Jason says, leaning away and curling his uninjured leg to his chest, overly aware of the yellow bat symbol there.
“There’s considerable overlap between the two,” Bruce says. “How do your ribs feel? I have more cold packs.”
Jason shakes his head. Then again. “I am a criminal though. I hurt people.”
Bruce stays silent. People who deserve it, Jason thinks, and it feels like Bruce hears the unspoken words. It feels like he might not agree or approve, but that he hears it. Jason hasn’t gotten that feeling from his Bruce in a long time.
“I hurt him. On purpose,” Jason pushes. “I don’t even know if I’m sorry.”
Bruce studies him for a long moment. Then he offers him the half-full water bottle again. “He forgives you.”
Jason’s fist clenches around the plastic bottle so hard it spills over the top. “What?”
“I have a son,” Bruce says. Jason exhales. A son. Twelve years in the past. He’s talking about Dick. “Around your age. We haven’t… spoken in a little while. But there’s nothing he could do to me that I wouldn’t… he could stab me in the chest to watch me bleed out, and as a father, my biggest worry would be whether he’d be okay once I was gone.”
It’s different, Jason thinks. It’s different, because he’s talking about Dick, and Dick has never done anything awful enough to need that kind of forgiving. He’s not like Jason, for all the formative years Jason spent trying to live up to him. Bruce was always telling him not to bother, but back then he meant it kindly.
There was a time Bruce would never write anyone off as a lost cause. Jason can never decide if it makes him sad or angry, that that’s the one rule Bruce broke for him, in the end.
Right now it just hurts. Like his head, like his ribs. He’s getting so tired. Bruce rests his gauntleted hand on Jason’s shoulder, that familiar gravity, and says, “If your father is being hard on you, I imagine it’s because, whatever path you’re going down, he’s not sure you’re going to be okay.”
“I’m not.” Jason presses his hands against his eyes. He’s fucking this up so badly, but it’s not fair. It’s not a fair fight, Bruce forgiving him the things he’s not sorry for and staying by his side anyway. “I haven’t been okay in a long time and he hasn’t—he hasn’t even—”
Bruce drops his second hand to Jason’s other shoulder. Two hands for comfort, that’s the rule. Jason shivers in his stolen sweatshirt. It’s grounding as well as gravity, keeping him steady and pulling him down. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right, son.”
“I want to go home,” he says quietly. There’s no point not saying it now, all cards on the table, because this Bruce can’t tell him no. There’s the matter of the timeline, but Jason is tired, and—and he’s always been selfish with Bruce.
“We’re going to figure this out,” Bruce murmurs, only he’s saying it as Batman, and Jason doesn’t want Batman. Not even the one from twelve years ago, not even the one that sounds like his dad. It’s not enough. It’s not home. Batman was his partner, not his hero.
Jason lifts his head. “I want to go home. Please, Dad.”
Familiar gray-blue eyes widen, and his hands tighten on Jason, and that’s about when Jason starts to glow with that strange, alien-purple light.
It ends with Roy saying, “Yeah, no, it didn’t change anything.”
And with Jason saying, “Are you sure? I didn’t fuck up the timeline?”
“Well, once we couldn’t find your beacon in our Gotham, I just reversed the portal tech, so even though you didn’t jump through one on your end, the one I had my hands on just… pulled you back through? It was—I reversed it,” Roy says, waving his hands to illustrate his absolutely nonsensical point.
“So you’re saying it never happened.”
Roy snaps and points at him. “Right. Exactly.”
“Except I remember it,” Jason says flatly. Every little detail.
And Roy says, “Well, yeah. You lived through it.”
“Roy.”
“Look, it’s not—the portals were manipulating time and space, not you. They can’t take memories out of your mind, they just make it so, you know, the moments you remember didn’t actually happen within our known universe. Which means nothing you did could’ve changed the past, but now I’m really curious what you did, Jaybird.”
Jason groans and covers his face with his hands. “This is giving me a headache.”
“I could try to erase your memories, if that’d help?” Roy offers.
Jason lifts one hand away to flip him off.
There’s a fake shutter sound and a flash, and when Jason looks up, he’s staring directly into a phone camera, and that’s about when he realizes he’s still wearing the Batman hoodie. He looks past the camera to Roy. “Start running.”
Roy grins. “With your injuries? I like my chances.”
“I have a gun.”
“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have given that back to you.”
Almost a year later, Jason is standing next to Dick at the Batcomputer, the two of them lined up behind Bruce’s chair like good little soldiers or like kids at the principal’s office in trouble for fighting, depending on the day. It’s the early hours of the morning, and Bruce has the cowl pulled down, gloves off, head tilted against his fist while they wait for a file to load.
It’s a large file.
Large enough that Dick has time to pull out his phone; he could spend an hour on that thing just replying to messages. Jason thinks there’s such a thing as having too many friends. It’s only been a few minutes, during which he’s pretty sure Bruce is napping, when Dick goes still in a way that means trouble.
Jason glances at him sharply. He whispers, “Oh my god.”
“What, Dickface?”
“Oh my god, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen.” Dick shoots him a look of such pure glee that Jason’s eyes narrow. He tries to grab the phone, but Dick ducks right under his arm and twists to show the screen to Bruce instead. Except that means Jason can see it over his shoulder, and—
Fuck.
It’s the picture.
The one that Roy promised would see the light of day when the world needed it most, that bastard, just because Jason skipped a fucking Outlaws mission to work a case with the Bats—of all the people he could have sent it to—
“Oh, I remember that,” Bruce says.
Jason’s heart stops.
Bruce looks up at him. “The sweatshirt. They used to sell those in that store in Midtown. Where did you find one?”
“I didn’t—it wasn’t on purpose,” Jason snarls.
“No one said it was,” Bruce says mildly.
“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Dick whispers to himself, cradling his phone. “This is better than my baby Jason pictures. Shit, I owe Roy my firstborn now.”
“You what?” Jason shakes his head. His heart has started back up twice as fast. He does not feel normal, but he gives it his best shot. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. Stop showing people the baby stuff, it’s creepy.”
“I only show people the pictures, not the video,” Dick says absently. He’s typing now, which is good at least, because it means he’s probably replying to Roy and not sending that picture to any of his other awful friends. Or, god forbid, Tim.
Bruce doesn’t remember, because it didn’t happen in his past, Jason tells himself.
Bruce stands from the computer, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Will you boys deal with this when it finishes decrypting? I have to take Damian to school this morning.”
“How domestic,” Jason says. Because he’s being normal, and normal Jason is an asshole. Bruce cannot remember, because nothing changed.
Jason made his way home eventually, yeah, but not because he did anything so simple as ask.
Bruce says nothing, just pauses to look at the picture again over Dick’s shoulder. The corner of his mouth ticks up. Jason still looked like a mess there—pale and washed out by the camera flash, his eyes red-rimmed and his damp hair sticking up like a disgruntled cat—but at least there wasn’t any blood on his face. Just a clean cut and a still-blooming bruise, and he was missing a fingernail on the hand flipping off the camera. But the gesture didn’t block the bright yellow bat symbol spread across his chest, and something in Bruce’s eyes softens as he looks at it.
“It was storming, and I was cold,” Jason says defensively.
Bruce’s hand rests on his shoulder as he passes on his way to the stairs. A familiar gravity. “It looks good on you, Jay.”
Jason closes his eyes. It’s not their first time talking since he came back from the past, but it’s new enough that it still feels fragile, this peace they’ve won in fits and starts and fights.
“It looks so good,” Dick says seriously. “I’m thinking, new family portrait concept—”
Jason snaps and lunges for him.
Dick laughs, blocking the attempted headlock. “Tell the truth, how often do you wear it?”
“Boys.” Bruce’s voice echoes down the stairs, and they both freeze.
For just long enough until they hear the entrance into the manor shut behind him. And then Jason sweeps Dick’s legs out from under him, and Dick executes some cheating little grab-and-twist that ends with both of them on the ground and him perched like the bird he is atop Jason’s chest. He grins. “Like, ballpark.”
“Fuck off.”
If maybe Jason sometimes still sleeps in that hoodie when it’s cold, it’s nobody’s business but his own.