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Gotham is quiet tonight.
Not just Jason’s part of it, either, according to the police scanner. It’s probably down to the cold - it’s unseasonable and sharp, paired with a cutting breeze, and Jason’s going to pack it in early himself once he’s done here. He doesn’t patrol, exactly - he’s not a fucking Bat - but after his nightly business is over he… meanders on his way back to the safehouse. Just to make sure nothing’s happening he doesn’t know about, and to keep an eye, as always, on the places and people who get chronically overlooked.
He’s been sitting on this fire escape for ten minutes now, protected from the wind and smoking idly, waiting to see if anything will happen. The most exciting event so far has been a too-fancy-for-this-neighborhood car pulling up on the street catty-corner to him and sitting by the curb, idling. Jason doesn’t blame the working girl who’s probably in it for trying to spend more time in the heated car with her john before getting out - most of the others disappeared off the streets hours ago.
A distant voice begins to rise, going from sharp and angry to outright yelling. Jason sighs and flicks his cigarette butt into the alley below, jamming on his helmet and getting to his feet. It’s probably a good idea to get some exercise in before he goes home. It’ll warm him up, if nothing else.
The driver’s side door of the fancy car slams open, hard enough to bounce back and hit the guy struggling to storm out. It doesn’t do much to cool his temper - he pauses in his diatribe to yell “Fuck! Goddamn door! Fuck!” before kicking it open again and stomping his way around the car to the passenger’s side.
Jason vaults easily over the fire escape’s railing, dropping down onto the pavement with a deliberate thump. The sound of combat boots hitting asphalt doesn’t even register for the Car Asshole, which just goes to show he’s an idiot as well as a jerk. He yanks open the passenger side door and drags the person inside out, throwing them down onto the pavement.
Well, fuck that sideways. Jason feels the tide of rage, only ever banked inside him since the Pit, begin to surge. The kinds of things the man is yelling are enough to earn him an unpleasant talk with Jason about keeping his homophobia to himself anyway, but violence towards one of the working kids will always mean a special ticket to the Red Hood Express.
And it is a working kid, too. The person the man dragged out of the car is slight, short-haired, and wearing a pale button-down, a tie, and dark pants. Probably a teenager by the size, or small enough to play it up with a schoolboy’s outfit.
Either way? Unacceptable.
“Please don’t!” the kid says, voice high and choked with panic. “Please! I’m sorry!”
“Don’t you dare fucking apologize to me!” The man shouts, and leans down to slap the kid hard across the face.
Jason’s disgusted irritation kicks over into green-tinted fury. “HEY!”
It’s hardly his most genius line, but it’s loud and deep-voiced and it makes the man straighten up out of kid-hitting range, which is really the point since Jason’s still got about twenty feet to cover before he can physically intervene.
“If I see you again, I will fucking kill you, do you understand me?” Car Asshole yells at the kid, already backing up. Even if he’s from out-neighborhood enough to not know what Jason’s helmet means yet, he’s Gothamite enough to know that someone Jason’s size heading his way in a fun outfit isn’t something he wants to experience.
Tough cookies. Jason accelerates up past the kid, still on the pavement and doing a shocky attempt at scrambling back, and pushes the asshole hard in the chest. It sends him staggering back against the open passenger-side door of the car and probably hurts quite a bit, which is good.
Jason grabs the man’s jaw and shoves back, forcing him harder up against the car, and when the asshole opens his mouth to protest Jason jams the barrel of his gun inside before he can speak.
“Hey,” he says, pleasant and conversational. “That’s not how we talk to people, okay? That’s some pretty unpleasant language. I didn’t like it. And you should know that the reason I haven’t fired a bullet through the back of your throat and out through your spine is because it would probably be upsetting to watch,” probably, this is Gotham, after all, “and I think the kid’s already had a bad enough night, don’t you? You can nod.”
The man nods, his eyes rolling with terror. He’s also drooling on Jason’s gun barrel, which Jason probably should have anticipated, but still. Gross.
“Now,” Jason continues, still in his pleasant voice, “I’m going to take my gun out of your mouth, and you’re going to get in your car and drive away, and if I see you again I will fucking kill you, do you understand me?”
Does he take special glee in echoing the man’s words back to him? Very yes. Does the man even notice? Ehhh, debatable.
Jason takes back his gun barrel, and the man rabbits. He forgets to close the passenger door, and it swings hilariously as he accelerates away before hitting a streetlight and slamming shut. Jason sincerely hopes it will need extensive body work to fix.
The kid behind him makes a tiny, bitten-off sound of terror, and Jason snaps back into himself. It’s not going to be easy to walk back all that menace, but he’s got to try. Poor kid. No matter who else Jason is hair-trigger primed to go merrily ballistic on, he will never, ever do it to a kid on the street. That’s sacrosanct.
He relaxes his body language, flicking Asshole’s spit off the end of his gun with a quiet “Ew,” before holstering it. “It’s okay, kiddo,” he says, turning around and reaching for his helmet release. Plenty of adult mobsters in this city would give someone’s left arm to see his face and have a guess at his identity, but the helmet’s designed to be scary and that’s the last thing this kid needs right now. If it means someone figures him out faster than he’d wanted, oh well. He’ll deal. “You don’t have to be scared. I don’t hurt -”
From this angle, the kid’s face is fully illuminated by the neon sign from the corner store across the street. Pale and tear-stained and emotionally wrecked like this, he’s easy to recognize.
Replacement! the Pit hisses.
The kid registers the moment Jason realizes who he’s looking at, and his eyes go blank.
Jason’s seen that look before, more times than he’d care to count. It’s the moment where someone realizes that everything’s going to get exponentially worse and there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s the moment where a mind flips from how can I get out of this to a grimly resigned endure.
Jason freezes, thrown. He’d thought he was rescuing a working kid. He’s primed to rescue a working kid. His brain is flicking through shelters, resources, sanctuaries, even as he stares down at the wrong person entirely. Is the Replacement here on a job? He doesn’t look like it. He isn’t acting like it. If he was here on a job, surely Jason would have been tackled by the entire overprotective Batclan the second his boots hit the pavement?
They can’t possibly be letting this kid out on his own so soon after Jason - after - he can’t even be fully healed yet. Jason knows what kind of damage he dished out.
What the fuck.
The Pit roars in the back of his mind but it’s… tinny. Weird. Even as he tries to focus on it and get his brain in order, his hands finish pulling off his helmet, and his shoulders pull in automatically, making him smaller and less threatening. His knees bend, bringing him down closer to the kid’s level. He can dimly feel pavement grit through the reinforced knees of his pants.
He feels cold seep through, too. The kid is lying on frozen pavement in just his shirtsleeves in this temperature, with the breeze cutting straight across them. Jason can feel it sharply on his face now that his helmet’s off.
He feels like he’s glitching. He’s definitely not in control. Some kind of nice-to-kids autopilot has taken over.
He takes off his jacket. “Hey,” his voice says. “Sit up and put this on. It’s cold out here.”
The kid stares at him.
“Read me in, kiddo?” Jason’s voice says, still all gentle and weird. “Let me know what’s happening.”
The kid’s face twitches, like he’s trying to have so many feelings at once that none of them can register right as an expression. His mouth works for a moment.
“Dad kicked me out,” he says. His voice breaks partway through so the last word comes out silent. Saying it out loud must crack something open in him, because his eyes go glassy and he curls forward, pressing his hands against his chest.
The Pit surges to life. Everything goes green, the kind of green Jason hasn’t been through in a while, the kind that ends with him surrounded by bodies and covered in gore with only kind-of complete memories of what he did.
He is going to fucking obliterate Bruce. He is going to burn that fucking Manor into ash and he is going to let this kid toast marshmallows on it, what the fuck. He kicked a kid out? Bruce kicked out a kid? He had the nerve, the absolute goddamn audacity, to put a third kid into a Robin outfit and then kick him out after Jason -
After Jason tried to -
And now that kid, that poor kid, is out here on the cold goddamn streets that Jason had started from, with some violent creep in a car and no backup except the guy who already tried to kill him once?
His hands are so, so gentle as he pulls the kid up and settles the jacket around his shoulders, as he zips it up and brushes the kid’s hair out of his face.
“What,” the kid whispers. “What’s happening right now?”
“I’m going to take you somewhere warm and safe,” Jason says. “Can you stand? My safehouse isn’t far.”
It’s kind of a shithole, but it does have heat. And blankets. And tea, and pancake ingredients. Pancakes are good for trauma, right? They’re like the ultimate comfort food. Maybe the kid is a hot chocolate person? Whatever, he’ll manage.
“I think so?” the kid says. “Your. Your eyes are really green right now, Jason.”
“I’m really, really angry,” Jason says evenly. “Like, rage event level of angry. Here, let me help you up. I can carry you up the stairs if you need, it’s not a problem. You’re too small, don’t you eat enough?”
“I,” the kid says, and visibly bluescreens. Which is a pretty legitimate response, Jason’s like one minor crisis away from doing it too. What the hell is this night even.
They make it to the apartment with Jason’s arm protectively around the kid’s shoulders, tucking him into his side, and they make it up the stairs with only one small stumble, which is when Jason realizes he zipped the kid’s arms into the jacket while they were against his chest and effectively straightjacketed him, which, Jesus. No wonder the kid can’t tell what’s happening, Jason’s sending him like fifteen simultaneous mixed messages right now.
It’s kind of chilly in the stairwell, though, so he’ll wait until they’re in the apartment to unzip the jacket. The kid’s probably already in shock and the last thing he needs is a chill on top of everything else and what the hell has gone wrong with him.
Tim does not know what is happening right now.
Well. He knows what is happening, technically. He is sitting on the couch in Jason’s apartment. There’s a fuzzy fleece blanket with daisies on it around his shoulders and a mug of hot tea in his hands.
Jason’s in the kitchen making him chocolate chip pancakes.
Jason Todd. Is in the kitchen. Making him chocolate chip pancakes.
He hasn’t tried to murder Tim once. He hasn’t even said anything mean.
Tim doesn’t know what to do next. He doesn’t know what to think.
Uncharacteristically, he does nothing. He sits with his hot mug and stares blankly at the wall and doesn’t even startle when Jason moves carefully into view before approaching, hands visible, a plate of pancakes held out like he’s an EMT with a trauma teddy bear.
Tim probably is pretty traumatized, actually. Huh.
The pancakes are good. Jason eats a bite off Tim’s plate, chewing deliberately, before handing it to him, like Tim’s in any kind of mental state right now to worry about being poisoned. Like the Red Hood who beat him into a paste a few weeks ago would just… decide to wrap him in a blanket, feed him tea, and then poison him.
Then again, he hadn’t thought his dad would -
He -
He may not be a good judge of character. Right now.
He eats the pancakes. He drinks his tea. It’s… hot? Coffee has probably ruined his ability to taste anything as subtle as tea.
The heat is nice in his stomach, though.
“Kiddo,” Jason says, still in that calm, gentle voice. It’s not his Victims Voice, it’s something else. Tim’s never heard this voice from him before. Not with this deep tone, anyway. Before the Jok- before, when Tim used to watch from rooftops and strain his ears to hear Robin’s voice… he might have heard a version of it then, higher-pitched with youth. Might have, in fact, dreamed about Robin talking to him in that voice, like they were friends. Like Tim was something… like he was someone…
“You don’t have to tell me more than you’re comfortable with,” Jason goes on. Tim blinks. “But can you fill in a little bit about what happened?”
There’s a little rainbow flag in the pencil cup on the bookcase behind Jason, stuck in like an afterthought, like someone was handing them out for free and Jason took one to be polite and then had to put it somewhere. It’s one of the nice ones, with the triangle of extra colors at the stick end.
“Kiddo?” Jason prompts.
Or maybe Jason got the flag on purpose. Maybe he sits on this couch where Tim’s sitting now, and looks at the little flag, and…
He doesn’t know what it means that the flag is there, but Jason didn’t throw it out. Tim can’t stop looking at it, now that he’s noticed it.
“He found a picture,” he says distantly. “Not, not a racy one. Just…” It had been a picture of Superboy, one of the signed ones he’d given away like candy in the early Young Justice days. But Superboy had chosen one of the pin-up-style ones instead of a headshot, and he’d signed it to Tim with an XOXO, and then it had seemed even funnier for him to borrow Anita’s lipstick and put a big kiss mark on it, and they had all laughed until they nearly cried. It hadn’t been mean laughter, or anything. Connor had done one for Cissie next and they’d laughed just as hard, and then Bart had zipped off and made a bunch of his own and dropped them like leaflets all over the living room. It had… it had been a good night.
Tim doesn’t even know why he kept it. He doesn’t know why it was tucked carefully away like a prize instead of tossed into a drawer. But sometimes… sometimes it was nice to take it out and imagine that he was just a kid named Tim, who sent a flirty letter to his favorite celebrity, and that Superboy had flirted back, and it was so normal and okay that he has a picture to show for it.
“Kind of a queer one?” Jason says softly, twisting around to follow Tim’s gaze to the little flag.
“Yeah,” Tim breathes. How had Dad even found it? He would have had to search Tim’s room.
He should be upset about that. He’ll probably be angry about it later, and about how Dad had driven him all the way out here to confront him with it, how he’d planned to do it in a dangerous neighborhood on a cold night when Tim was in his school uniform and not even wearing the blazer. And then left him here.
He’s crying. Not hard, but he can feel tears going down his face. They itch.
Jason takes a breath, and then his hand settles on Tim’s shoulder, big and warm. He rubs a little with his thumb, and Tim has to close his eyes against the sting.
Tim’s a good liar. He should maybe feel worse about that than he does. There would have been so many ways he could explain that photo, blunt the impact, defuse the situation. And instead he’d frozen, taken completely off guard, and instead of spinning a story he’d said “Dad…” in a broken little voice and it had all been over from there.
It’s so innocent, is the kicker. It’s utterly ridiculous that what got him here wasn’t years of vigilante work, or the less innocent things in his head, or a villain attack or any of the thousand other things that he’s come up with contingency plans for over the years. It’s absolutely laughable that Dad could miss the injuries and the absences and the patched-up excuses and then find that photo, with its vague hint at the one thing Tim’s kept safely in his heart and never, ever brought into the world, and not only figure it out but act on it. It’s just - it’s insane.
He never saw it coming.
“Can you tell me about that man tonight?” Jason says, quiet and soft.
“That man?” Tim echoes vaguely. “You mean my dad?”
Jason’s brain stutters to a halt. “Your dad was the man in the car?”
The kid’s forehead wrinkles. He’s still crying a bit, although he doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Yes?”
Jason feels the foundations of the night shift underneath him, not that he’d had them all that well in place to begin with. “So… so Bruce didn’t kick you out?”
“I don’t live with Bruce?” Tim says, uncertainly.
Jason’s thumb automatically keeps up the soothing motion on Tim’s shoulder. The kid doesn’t look alarmed, just vaguely confused, which makes sense because it’s only been like forty-five minutes since his dad -
His dad just -
His dad literally just kicked him out, holy shit, and like actually kicked him out of the car. The car had pulled to a stop. It had been sitting there, idling, which means Tim’s piece of shit dad had planned the time and place of this, had planned to leave him in fucking Crime Alley with fucking nothing -
“Jason…?” Tim says, in a small voice, starting to lean away from him a little. Jason tightens his grip on Tim’s shoulder automatically, because if Bruce didn’t kick him out and Tim’s dad did then the logical place for Tim to go next is the Manor, which is not safe because Jason is going to burn it the fuck down since Bruce -
No, hold up, he was burning the manor down because Bruce kicked Tim out like an asshole, but -
Goddamn it. Goddamn it, this is the extra crisis to make Jason break, what the fuck -
Tim leans away harder, so Jason reels him in and locks him down to keep him safe until he’s finished figuring out this, this fucking disaster and knows what the fuck to do, the Pit rage is going haywire in the back of his mind and he really, desperately wants to murder someone in the face right now to shut it the fuck up but he doesn’t know who to murder.
“It’s okay,” he says, slightly hysterical, patting Tim on the head. “It’s okay, just - just give me a minute, the fuck...”
“What… did you think was happening?” Tim says tentatively, rigid against his chest. That’s okay, Jason’s being really freaky right now. Also he tried to kill Tim, like, barely a month ago, and that’s a lot to process, probably. Tim’s probably worried Jason might try to kill him again, Jason’s a little worried he might try to kill Tim again, except the place where the rage against this upstart little replacement Robin used to be is filled with a completely different rage that a parent looked at the kid they’d raised, who they’d fed and clothed and taught to walk and read and - and brush his teeth, who they’d probably said ‘I love you’ to on a fucking daily basis, they’d looked at that kid and thought, well, I’m done now.
That’s - that’s bullshit. It’s bullshit. Tim’s dad had looked at his kid and thought that.
Tim’s dad had looked at a Robin and thought that.
“Jason?” Tim says, barely audible, his whole body tight with tension.
Jason struggles to focus.
“It - you know, it’s not relevant, it’s just - do you like that house, the one you grew up in?” He could burn that down, maybe. That would be a good rage outlet. “Do you want me to kill your dad? I could kill your dad.”
“What?” Tim bleats.
“I can kill someone else instead, there’s murderers all over. I could kill a rapist, how about I kill a rapist? And I could just maim your dad a little instead. Maybe some scarring!”
“I don’t know what to say right now?” Tim says, sounding a little hysterical himself. “Are you having a breakdown? Are you okay?”
Jason groans and buries his face in the back of Tim’s neck and focuses on breathing for a few moments. The constriction around his chest starts to ease, and the green fades a little bit.
“So your dad kicked you out tonight,” he says, voice muffled by the back of Tim’s shirt.
Tim’s body jerks and his fingers tighten on the arm Jason has around him. “I -” he says. “I - yes, he - he didn’t say it exactly in those words but he s-said he’d k-k-”
“Shit, fuck, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m shit at this, that was a terrible way to say it,” Jason says frantically, hugging Tim tighter. “You don’t have to say it too, I just -”
He stops. Breathes.
“When I saw the car, I thought it was a john being shitty to a working kid. And when I saw it was you, and you said ‘Dad kicked me out’...”
Tim doesn’t respond. Jason belatedly realizes he’s trembling, and probably has been since Jason made him remember what his dad (his dad, what a shitstain) said to him.
Fuck. Jesus Christ, Jason, get it together.
“Kiddo,” he says, lowering his voice to a murmur. “Kidlet. Tim. Can you let me know how you’re doing?”
There’s a pause, and then Tim turns his face to press against Jason’s arm, the motions sluggish and jerky. Delayed shock? It could be. It could also be a whole new shock, brought on by the healthy way they’re both having simultaneous emotional meltdowns. For fuck’s sake, this poor kid. If he’d had this night in front of Dickface he’d probably already be going to therapy and sleeping in a new room plastered in rainbows while Dick joins the local PFLAG chapter, and instead he’s got… this. Extra emotional trauma with a danger cherry on top.
Tim takes a breath as if he’s going to say something, then holds it for a moment before letting it out.
“Take your time,” Jason says. “You can say whatever. Or not, it’s okay.”
Tim takes another ready-to-talk breath, and then says in a rush, “Do you think Bruce would be mad?”
“About… the picture?” Jason guesses. He’d definitely be mad about how this night has gone, holy shit. In all sorts of ways.
Tim doesn’t answer, but the tension in his body ratchets up a little.
Jason closes his eyes. His anger with Bruce is 100% still there, no matter how weird this night has gotten and whatever the everloving hell is going on with the Pit rage right now.
Putting another child on the streets in a fun outfit to fight crime should not have happened. Putting another Robin on the streets while the man who killed the last one is still skipping around the city giggling is so breathlessly, unconscionably, recklessly stupid that Jason’s anger spills off of Bruce and over onto Dick and, yes, even Alfred a little.
Jason’s got anger to spare. He’s generous like that.
Does he think Bruce would do what Tim’s Dad did tonight, though?
“I don’t think Bruce would be mad about the picture,” he says finally. “I think he’d be awkward and emotionally repressed about it, but I think he’d figure himself out. Eventually. And I think you’d be fine.”
He wishes, he wishes so hard that he could say something like Bruce will always love you and believe it’s true. It’s probably exactly what Tim needs to hear right now. Tim’s probably desperate to hear it, to put that thought into the hole in his chest and fill it up a little.
Jason cannot, will not give Tim a lie right now. And the last thing Tim needs is the promise of another adult’s unconditional love when it might turn out to be a fresh disappointment.
And okay, Jason’s just… gonna have to park this train of thought for the moment and get angry about it later. It’s too much to unpack, too much feeling to be contained by this apartment tonight. He doesn’t actually want to find out if someone’s head can spontaneously explode.
“You know what, though?” he says, leaning back and fishing out his phone. He keeps his free arm around Tim. “You wanna know who’s going to be really obnoxiously supportive about this?”
It only takes him a minute to find what he's looking for. These pictures are old, but the internet is forever.
He holds out his phone. He’d picked one of Dick in a frankly embarrassing amount of glittery rainbow bodypaint, mid cheer with one arm around Roy Harper and the other around Kory Anders.
Tim gives a watery laugh. “San Francisco Pride, when he was seventeen,” he says. “He got in a huge fight with Bruce about whether it threatened his secret identity.”
“Oh my fucking God,” Jason says, disgusted.
“I forgot about this,” Tim says quietly, staring down at the picture.
“How many items of clothing would you like to own with rainbows on them?” Jason asks, dead serious. “Round down, because Dickface always does too much.”
Tim gives a long, shuddering sigh and lets his head thump back against Jason’s shoulder. Jason kisses the top of it, instinctively, and then has (another) minor crisis.
“I’m so tired,” Tim says in a small voice.
Jason knows what he means - not just physically tired, but everything tired. The kind of tired that sleep alone can’t fix. The kind of tired that makes you feel like a toddler - too exhausted to do anything but cry about how tired you are and hope someone will come along and figure it out for you.
“Lie down,” he says. “You can sleep here tonight. We’ll figure everything else out later. You want to brush your teeth first?”
Tim shakes his head and tips himself over, missing Jason’s shitty thrifted throw pillow entirely and curling up in a little ball right in the middle of the couch cushion. He looks so small that Jason has to stare in the other direction for a few minutes, breathing carefully.
He should get up and figure some of this nonsense out. He should probably call… someone? Christ. He should figure out who to call and then call them. Someone less scarring and emotionally stable, like, at all, which in this city narrows down his options considerably.
He should, at minimum, put the dishes in the sink.
He leans his head back and stares at the ceiling instead.
In the morning, Tim will wake up on Jason’s couch with the daisy blanket tucked around him. Jason will be sitting next to him, feet propped up on the coffee table, dozing a little. They’ll have breakfast - not pancakes - and Jason will give Tim a sheet of paper and tell him to write down the things he wants most out of his room.
Jason will leave the apartment. Tim will try to watch a movie and won’t be able to pay attention to it.
Jason will come back in a car that isn’t his with cardboard boxes full of Tim’s stuff.
Neither of them will comment on the split skin over his bruised knuckles, or the way he seems calmer now in a way that goes soul deep.