Work Text:
You reach the point of sleep where dreams end: they recede inexorably as waves and you forget, sleep follows the tide out and—yawning—you wake a little more for the complex ache of your mouth. A little more for the simpler ache of a cut stretched open and you groan, burrow yourself into—
into Jason, and the tide comes back in saying yes, yes, I remember. You followed him last night, took something like a chance and it clearly paid.
He’d undressed you, checked you for bruising that could, actually, be hidden, and dumped a bag of ice into your hand.
He’d taken his jacket off and put it around your shoulders, smirked when that made you shrink and think about running.
You’re still wearing it now, wrapped up in leather-gunpowder-blood-come-Jason-Gotham and a little more Jason, when he grunts and doesn’t let you slip out of bed to find your uniform and freak out by sprawling over you. He sprawls in his sleep, when relaxed. The rest of the time it’s like sleeping with a corpse, which.
Technically, you’ve been doing for months.
Bad joke, leaves a worse taste in your mouth than sleep and you sigh through your teeth, hear it whistle in the new gap and his hair stirs just behind his ear, he growls stop because you’re annoying him. You’re as close to naked as you’ve ever gotten with him, in his bed, annoying him while he tries to stay asleep on his new body pillow.
What the fuck.
“Lived with B,” he grumbles into the pillow, “can hear your emotional crisis from a mile away, I think we should skip it.”
“Your emotional crises come with premeditation and explosives, I think I can have my morning-after freak-out.” Jason grunts, a word or a laugh that you don’t catch before he’s moving slow and clumsy, muttering freak out about this and tonguing the corner of your jaw. Frustrating, light touches of his mouth on your bruises, and when he kisses you it’s a different kind of torture: slow and probing, his tongue easing your lips apart and smoothing over the cut, worrying gently at the gap in your teeth and pulling a low whine from you with lazy purpose.
“I know you like that,” he says, voice worn hoarse by sleep so it sounds like he’s whispering, like it’s a secret: “You wish you didn’t, which, I’m gonna tell you is really fucked up, but you do.” You’re already groaning for the truth of it when he tilts his head and drags his tongue warm and smooth across the length of your mouth. It’s ridiculous—stupid and strange and thorough—but he’s doing it anyway, honest to god licking his way into your mouth and you’re letting him the same way you let him punch his way in last night, and you’re getting just as hard for it.
Fuck, you hate him sometimes. Hate yourself, for doing this with him and hating—hating that he doesn’t want to hurt you the way you want to be hurt. Hating that when he finally kisses hard enough to split your lip, he pulls back at the taste of your blood and apologizes, like.
Like sometimes it’s wrong, if he makes you bleed. “I don’t—”
“—Care, I know kid, and I’d hit you again if I had the slightest interest in feeding you through a straw for six weeks.” He licks another bead of blood from your lip and lets you taste it on his tongue: he kisses with his eyes closed, you can’t decide if it’s because he doesn’t want to see or be seen, or if he just thinks that’s how it’s done. If it’s reflexive for him, the way it’s reflexive for you to keep watching, to note his hair falling against your brow and the minute way he twitches the first few times your lashes sweep against his skin. “Don’t you make yourself tired,” he sighs, kissing the cut on your cheek like he’s. Fuck—fuck, he’s apologizing, and you don’t want that, you don’t want to put him in a position to be sorry.
You stare at him, mouth twitching and an ugly sound held in your chest.
“You make me tired,” he groans, pushing himself up with both arms and hanging his head. You lift a hand and push it through his hair, try to push him away, but he laughs and moves down with it, leans in to scrape his teeth over your belly and make you squirm. You wonder what it sounds like when he really laughs, not reflexively, not at something ugly. You wonder what you’d have to do to hear it.
Be someone else entirely, you’re sure. It probably doesn’t matter, when who you are now still gets to wake up in his bed, in his jacket—and he’s swallowing your cock like you aren’t worth easing into it.
You aren’t, and he isn’t worth keeping your hips still or your hand from tightening in his hair: if he wants to be nice about this you’ll make him fight for that too, fight the way your hand pushes and pulls and makes him scrape you with his teeth, make him choke himself and pull off with a growl so he can catch your wrists in his hands and pin them. “I’ll decide if I want to choke on your dick, asshole,” making you flush and look away because you didn’t think about it like that, didn’t mean—
“Fuck, stop it,” he groans, squeezing your wrists and leaning back in, taking his time now: tonguing the head of your cock and making you arch instead of thrust, making you move just as slow as he does until you’re twitching from it. Kissing your dick as gently as he kissed your face, the burn of his stubble on your thigh making the burn of it on your cheeks smoulder, and when you dig your nails into your palms instead of struggling in his grip, when you whimper and bite yourself and don’t ask, he strokes the bone-hard part of your wrist and tells you good kid, good like he really is tired, and swallows you again. It means something when he presses your hands into the bed before releasing them, like patting a dog on the head and telling it to stay, so you try, stay your hands but grind your ass into his grip when he shoves his hands under it and lifts you off the bed into his mouth.
Later, minutes that feel stretched thin and snapping, when you’ve turned your head to bite the collar of his jacket and you’re breathing him in in counterpoint to every harsh exhale—later, when he’s going down on you and his spit-slick fingers are crossed inside you like a lie you can clench around when you come, and he puts your hand in his hair so you can hold him down when you hit the back of his throat and feel it flutter as you spill—
you realize I’ll decide doesn’t always mean no.
-
You wake up again, sated in some ways and hungry in others, when he sits next to you on the bed with two cups of coffee. It smells more strong than good, and you’re going to need it to deal with.
With the hypocrisy of needing to deal with Jason watching you sleep. “Don’t you have school,” he says, leaning into your side until you sit up and handing you a mug. You lean forward, get into his space so it’s not like he’s getting into yours, fold your presence in a little around him and the warmth of your coffee. It’s strong and cut with…raw sugar, you decide, scraping your tongue on your teeth. “There isn’t exactly a bar exam for vigilante justice,” you answer, and he grunts, laughing and really not as he leans a little more.
You’re still wearing his jacket, red lines dug into your body from the leather; you shake it off one arm at a time and there they are, with your scrapes and bruises, like there’s nothing he can give you that won’t leave a trace. The jacket slides off easily and he crowds you a little easier—Jason is a big man, and you’re never going to be, not without a lot of surgery and hormones—
that you’ll probably never bother with, if you’re honest with yourself, letting him crowd you until it’s just easier to lean your head on a broad shoulder and drink your damn coffee. Rolling up, your eyes strain a little to stare at the scar along his neck. You don’t reach up to touch your own: he’ll know what you’re thinking about, and this will just get weirder.
Or Jason could just say, “You know, I could have shaken you if I’d wanted,” and it could get weirder anyway. “Maybe,” you answer reflexively, because you don’t—it’s too much like a declaration, and it’s one thing to be trusted, it’s one thing to be invited, but.
Don’t say it—
He says it anyway, coffee and resentment clicking in his throat because he doesn’t like it any better than you do, but you—you’ve done something, gone and made him feel obligated. “I’m not kidding,” he presses, shrugging you off until you sit up to save your coffee. Sit up and realize the difference it makes, shrugging out of the warmth of his jacket and the heat of his skin, drinking to compensate, to busy yourself while he speaks. “If you need somewhere to go, you can come here. I’m not gonna give you a fucking key, but I won’t break your fingers for letting yourself in.”
Generous of him, you think, and he growls at—at the day, at the offer, at how long it’s taking you to respond. Growls because maybe he’s psychic or just gotten so used to you (likelier, and far more frightening) and he knows you’re being an asshole about it in your head.
So you’re an asshole about it out loud, raising a brow and finding sanctuary for your cup on a low shelf: “Can I keep your jacket?”
“Fuck you, no,” he says, laying back over your legs like it’s too fucking early, but he smiles, lets you take his cup and put it with yours. Lets you fold yourself over him and stare at him over the jacket-creases on your arm, trapped under his weight and feeling the strain in your head more than you feel it in your knees. He’s not—he’s not asking you to move in, he wants.
What does he get out of it? What can you get out of it? A place where the others can’t find you or won’t follow, somewhere to go when your face is this beat up and you don’t want to explain, maybe more. Maybe he just gets a sign, maybe he wants to help so he’ll know you want his help.
You can understand that.
And you do.
“Bruce isn’t dead.” It’s not an answer and not a question, but you say it anyway, quiet and close to his skin. Tell it to the line of his ribs and feel him tense and hear him mutter fuck, because you’re close. Jason might have the most reason to believe you but he has even more reason not to listen, a will that hurt him and things neither of you are proud of, the scar on your neck.
You rub your face on your arm and lift your head, look at him again and try to be more than blank, try to use the fact that he can read you now. This is what you need, more than a place. You have many places where “No one believes me.” You don’t want another.
Jason stares, mouth tight with anger: he looks at your eyes, lower—the bruises or the scar and you want to say fuck it, I forgive you already, but it might be better to say you owe me. It’s what he’d expect, and you’d both feel…comfortable, if not better. He sighs, pushes a hand down into your sleep-greased hair and tugs it a little. “I’ll make some calls.”
It feels like a calculated risk, layers of vindication pressing down where before there simply was a weight, a hand in your hair and your raw knees stinging a little against the skin of his back. It feels better and worse than you thought it would, maybe just more, too much, like the strain in your legs making you push and pull and move until you can roll on top of him. “Okay.”
“Okay what,” he huffs, eyes narrowed up at you with a sullenness that feels more warm than not.
You pick up your coffee from the shelf, straddle his hips and sit back on your heels like his crotch is your personal throne. His eyes narrow again until you press yourself down, then narrow differently. He doesn’t mind you as much as he tries to, and now you know. Your smile is syrup and sharp around your mug: you’re not going to say it the way he isn’t going to feel bad, razing his nails over your ripped knees.
“Okay, I won’t keep your jacket.”