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It’s not that Bruce didn’t know some part of this team was sleeping together.
In some combination.
He’d just been fairly sure it was Koriand’r and Roy Harper.
Jason, as a teenager, had already experienced enough trauma to set him far behind his peers in some areas and lightyears ahead in others. He was independent, adaptable, and endlessly compassionate, already struggling to deal with the kind of complicated moral worldview that most kids his age would take another decade to even begin considering. That Bruce himself still struggles with sometimes. On the other hand, he was stubborn, impulsive, and prone to lashing out at the world around him in ways that he lacked the maturity to control.
He also missed out on many of the common formative experiences a boy his age should have had. Before Jason died, he hadn’t so much as kissed a girl. Or a boy. Anyone.
At least, not for free. Not for fun.
Bruce is almost completely certain of that.
And yet. Batman stands in the shadows of an alien spaceship crash-landed on a desert island, a spaceship that has been converted into a home, and his son is in bed with an alien princess and an Arrow. Of all things.
It’s almost enough to make him forget why he’s here. He wants to forget, wants to pretend he has the right to stand here and count the time Jason was gone against the time Jason’s been back and figure out exactly how old his boy should be considered now and whether this is even appropriate. There is a fatherly instinct in him, long-buried and unused, that wants to bundle Jason back home to his childhood bedroom and not let him see anyone Bruce hasn’t vetted, approved of, and intimidated.
Even before he lost the right to such things with Jason, however, before he’d even met Jason, a teenaged Dick had told him in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t let his ward out on the streets to fight crime and then try to ban him from dating. Couldn’t say he was old enough to work a rape case and then claim he was too young to have consensual sex. It hadn’t stopped Bruce from running checks on all of Dick’s dates, but the logic had been blatant enough to keep the worst of Bruce’s hypocritical impulses in check.
Never mind that he probably should have put his foot down on the crime-fighting instead. He gave up a lot of parental rights, raising his children the way he did, but most importantly in this moment, he doesn’t have the right to try to protect Jason from others when he can’t even protect Jason from himself.
Ethiopia. Again.
That’s the failure he’s here for, no matter how much he wants to let this new information distract him.
The Outlaws look about as peaceful as anyone has ever seen them, like this: Roy Harper is propped against two pillows, one arm behind his head, his bow in easy reach against the bedside table. Jason is half a foot away, curled loosely toward Harper, one hand flat on his bare chest, the other shoved up underneath a pillow where there is no doubt a weapon strapped to the headboard. Koriand’r, a weapon herself, lies with her back to Jason’s, one foot hooked around his under the thin white sheet spread haphazardly over the three of them.
Bruce… hadn’t intended to stand here this long. It begins to feel voyeuristic, but aside from the surprise freezing him in place, he’d expected Jason to wake up right away. Bruce had been careful to give a tell when he entered, letting the warm ocean breeze catch his cape with a small snap. The boy used to go still, eyes slitted open in the darkness, at the slightest shift in the room. He’d expected…
“No.” The word is barely more than a breath, but it strikes Bruce hard in the chest. Of course he’s been a fool, to expect anything, let alone for Jason to quietly follow him outside and let him…
Apologize. He’s here to apologize. Things have been too good with Jason lately, finally, to let another raw wound continue to fester. No matter how the very thought of expressing an emotion right now, or any time in the next year, or any time until he gets Damian back, feels like opening a bunker in a nuclear winter.
Then Jason shifts restlessly, and Bruce realizes he’s still asleep, and the final piece to this puzzle falls into place. Jason wakes easily from most kinds of sleep, but nightmares cling to him.
He flinches and digs his fingers into Harper’s chest, and Harper stirs, exhaling, “Easy, Jay.”
“Don’t,” Jason says.
Harper pats clumsily at his own chest until his hand lands on Jason’s, and he squeezes. “Easy.”
“I don’t want to go there,” Jason says, strong and clear, which causes a chain reaction: Bruce takes a step back, Harper’s eyes snap open to meet his in the darkness, and both of them freeze.
“Jesus fuck,” Harper breathes. It makes Jason twist away from him, clearly fighting toward consciousness, and Harper soothes him without taking his eyes off Bruce, which is interesting not because the affection is still surprising, but because he puts his arms around Jason instead of going for his bow. “You’re safe, baby, you’re with me and Kori. Kori? Could use your help here.”
There’s an edge in his voice on the word help that implies something other than comfort for a nightmare, which is perhaps why Koriand’r is already beginning to glow as she sits up in bed, the sheet falling to her waist. Bruce admires the efficient communication and also politely averts his eyes, even as he prepares for one of Starfire’s blasts, distantly glad he’d chosen to come in the suit after all—
“How’d you get past the Roybots?” Harper demands, which finally wakes Jason—
Just in time for Jason to lurch out of Harper’s arms and throw himself against Koriand’r. Bruce nearly shouts as Jason presses himself to her back and grabs her wrists, because surely he’s going to burn himself, badly, but then Jason says, slurred and sleepy and so much less clear than the nightmare, “Kori, it’s okay, it’s just my dad.”
And everything stops. For Bruce, everything stops.
Harper keeps glaring, and Jason keeps talking to Koriand’r until the orange glow fades from her skin, but not before it’s illuminated the faded bruises on Jason’s face that match Bruce’s face and also Bruce’s knuckles, and his stomach churns, because he’s always hurting and losing his boys, each one in an endless cycle and he shouldn’t be here.
“How did you get in here,” Harper repeats, less a question and more a threat.
“He’s Batman,” Jason says with the ghost of an unhappy smile, just as Bruce opened his mouth, on autopilot, to say exactly that. Bruce closes his mouth. “What are you doing here, Bruce?”
My dad.
Bruce clears his throat. “We need to talk.”
“Shove it up your ass,” Harper says immediately. “If you think we’re letting him go anywhere with you—”
Jason looks down at his lap. “Roy.”
Harper doesn’t flinch. “Jaybird.”
Koriand’r flips her hair and turns her back to Bruce, a slight that Bruce feels much deeper than Harper’s unrelenting stare-down. It’s not a mark of trust, but an indication that he’s that far beneath her notice, both as a threat and as Jason’s father. The former is all posturing, if she’s smart, but the latter she has a right to, and it burns. She traces the edge of Jason’s bruises with her thumb. “Roy. It’s Jason’s decision.”
Harper exhales through his nose. “Can I at least send him out of the room so we can get dressed?”
Jason’s mouth twists as he looks back up at Bruce. “You heard him, old man. Go lurk somewhere else for a minute.”
Bruce nods stiffly. He wants to take issue with Harper’s attitude; it’s controlling and overbearing, and Stephanie would call that a red flag. And Dick would lose his mind laughing over Bruce having the audacity to call someone else controlling and overbearing.
Still, he gives in to the urge to linger outside the door and eavesdrop, just for a moment. Just to be sure.
But they don’t start where he expects. Harper asks, voice infinitely softer, “The nightmare?”
“Warehouse,” Jason says hoarsely. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Will you wear your commlink?” Koriand’r asks. “If he tries something, I will fly him to the middle of the ocean and drop him.”
Jason laughs like a weight has been lifted. “No. No, but—”
“Tell me you’re packing,” Harper says.
“Always am now, remember?”
“Would the All-Blades work against Batman?” Koriand’r muses.
“They should,” Harper grumbles. “After that shit he pulled? He’s pure enough evil.”
“But not magic,” Jason says as if he’s trying to lighten the mood.
“I don’t like this. You don’t have to—”
The sheets rustle, finally, feet hitting the floor. “I’m not gonna be able to relax until I know what he wants, Roy, might as well get it over with.”
“You think he wants something from you?” Koriand’r asks, with a dangerous, royal sort of edge. Like if Bruce wants a favor after what he’s done, he’ll need to ask for it on his knees. He doesn’t disagree.
“Why else would he have come all the way here?” Jason sighs. “I won’t do anything without letting you guys know the plan.”
“Jaybird,” Harper says, pained. “You don’t owe him shit.”
“Yeah, and if it was Ollie?” Jason says, sharper. “You know it’s more fucking complicated than that.”
Harper is silent.
Koriand’r says, “We will be here when you return.”
Bruce waits for Jason on the beach, just in case Jason expected him to eavesdrop. He did, yes, but it’s less obvious this way. He pulls the cowl down to feel the breeze coming off the ocean, trying to enjoy it even while aware that this white sand beach with its dark starry sky is not his natural habitat. It’s not Jason’s either.
Gotham will always call him home, the same way it does for Bruce, for better or worse. But Jason deserves this, for a time.
He looks more relaxed than Bruce seen him in years, walking across the sand. He has a red hoodie zipped over his bare chest, a pair of loose linen pants skimming the tops of his bare feet and bunching only a little oddly over his thigh holster. His hair is still bedhead-soft-and-messy, humidity making it curl at the ends. He looks the same mix of man and boy he has ever since he came back.
Bruce didn’t get to see him grow up. That’s what he said to Jason in Ethiopia, that he wanted to see Damian grow up, but he didn’t say that he already missed it with Jason but he still got him back and if he could just get Damian back too—
With effort, Bruce shuts that thought down. He can’t make things right with Damian, not in this moment, but he can with Jason. As long as Jason is alive, it’s not too late.
“Bruce,” he says, reserved.
Kori, it’s okay, it’s just my dad.
He comes to a stop a few feet away, hands in his pockets, and Bruce can’t stop staring at him. Here. Alive. The moonlight off the water makes the bruise on his face look bluer, though Bruce knows from his own that it’s more of a mottled green by now.
Finally, Jason sighs. “Look, I’d rather just get down to business, but you can get it out if you need to.”
“It?” Bruce asks.
“Yeah. Whatever it is about this whole situation that you hate the most.” Jason shrugs, but Bruce still doesn’t know what he’s getting at it until he continues, “That Kori’s an alien? That Roy’s a guy? That I’m with them both together? No, you know what, knowing you, I’m sure the problem is that I’m fraternizing with teammates, right?”
And Bruce wasn’t going to say anything, lost the right to say anything, but Jason is letting him, and what comes out is: “Aren’t they a little old for you?”
Jason’s face goes blank. “Are you kidding?”
“They… they were… Roy Harper is your brother’s age,” Bruce says, not sure from Jason’s reaction if this is an even worse misstep than expected. “And you’d be younger now than—”
“I was only dead for six months,” Jason says bluntly.
“But with the catatonia—”
“Trust me, I’ve had plenty of life experience since to make up for it,” Jason interrupts. He shakes his head in something like disbelief. “That’s seriously your big issue?”
Bruce examines him. No, not disbelief. Not completely. It’s—hope. Hard for Bruce to see because he didn’t expect Jason to, as he would say, give one single fuck about Bruce’s opinion on his relationship, approving or otherwise.
My dad.
“You were undressed,” Bruce says slowly, well aware that he’s pressing his luck. “All three of you.”
Jason’s expression shifts rapidly to alarm. A kind of alarm that is very familiar to Bruce, a man who has had to give to give some version of the sex talk to four children and counting, so he continues before Jason can voice the coming protest. As matter-of-fact as possible, he says, “A long time ago, you told me that you didn’t think you were interested in any kind of sexual relationship. You weren’t sure. Are you… are you sure now?”
“Oh, fuck,” Jason swears, turning away from Bruce and looking up at the sky.
“Especially with more experienced partners,” Bruce presses on, “it can be easy to feel that you have to do things—”
Jason groans, ducks his head, and walks away.
Impossibly, Bruce feels a smile tug at his mouth as he follows his son down the beach.
“I don’t want to talk about this with you,” Jason says abruptly. “But I know you’re going to obsess about it, so—I’m not having sex with them. Roy and Kori do that shit with each other, they leave me out of it.”
“And you’re all happy with that?” Bruce asks.
“Well, they’re not fucking pressuring me,” Jason says. “Jesus, B, who do you think I am? Because you know I ain’t some blushing virgin.”
Bruce stays quiet, stays half a step behind him as they walk. He thinks Jason is the same twelve-year-old that cried angry tears while talking about sex and said he never wanted to do that again, and the same fifteen-year-old that got confused whenever a girl in his class liked him enough to ask him out. The same teenager just starting to figure out his sexuality, with all the usual uncertainty compounded by years of trauma and the corresponding insecurity and the fact that he died within the year.
And then Jason stops and turns to him. “And when I told you that, I was telling—I wasn’t telling Batman. It’s really fucking bold of you to bring it up now, like you’ve got any right, pretending to be anything else—”
“I wasn’t pretending, then or now,” Bruce says, because he knows what Jason means by that. Pretended to love me like a son, Jason has said, and it cracks Bruce’s heart every time, for all that Jason has never said it to his face. “I understand I’ve lost the right, but I wasn’t—”
“You showed me what I meant to you in Ethiopia,” Jason says, his voice hollow of the anger Bruce expects. “And I don’t mean the first time.”
“I know,” Bruce says quietly.
Jason looks up, surprise and then hurt crossing his face before he sets his jaw. “Then let’s just let it die there, Bruce. For good this time.”
Forget a crack in his heart; those words are a canyon.
“I’ll still help, or whatever,” Jason adds. “Whatever you came here for, I mean. I know you must be desperate if you’re coming to me, I’m not a monster.”
“This is what I came here for.” Bruce clears his throat. “I don’t need your help for anything, Jason. I came to talk about what happened.”
That catches Jason off-guard again, and this time he tries to hide it with a snort. “You? Came to talk about something?”
“I came to apologize.” Bruce hesitates, because it seems that’s one blow too many to Jason’s expectations, and he can’t seem to mask it. He stays planted a healthy distance away in the sand, and his posture tries to be a warning sign, but the boy is all wide blue eyes and trembling hands. His relaxed clothes made him look confident earlier, but now the same things make him look vulnerable in a way that makes Bruce, fully armored, feel like the villain.
Especially when Jason rubs the heel of his hand into his eye like a little kid, wincing slightly when it aggravates his bruised cheek. Bruce reaches out automatically to stop him from hurting himself, and he flinches.
It’s not even a surprise. That’s the worst part.
Bruce buries that deep and focuses on the moment. What he can make right in this moment. More and more lately he’s understanding that that has always been the way back, with all his children but with Jason especially, who has always needed actions more than words. So he reaches out again, slower this time, and this time Jason stays still and lets Bruce palm his jaw and turn his face into the moonlight.
Lets him examine the mottled bruising on Jason’s cheekbone as if he didn’t put it there. He probes gently until he’s satisfied that the damage isn’t worse than it looked, the way it’s been in his nightmares every night since, and that it’s healing normally. He strokes his thumb back and forth over Jason’s uninjured cheek, slow and steady, cataloguing the feeling of his son warm and here and alive under his hands.
When Jason lets out a shaky breath and leans into the touch, Bruce buries a bracing hand in his soft hair, the closest thing to a real embrace that Jason will allow right now. Jason shuts his eyes, and Bruce feels the slightest tug on his cape, the indication that Jason has caught it between his fingers the way he always used to. He admitted once that it was grounding, that it helped him know exactly where he was and who he was with, because who else in Gotham would be wearing a Kevlar fucking cape, you dramatic old bastard.
Bruce rubs the calloused pad of his thumb against Jason’s jaw, an extra tactile grounding, and Jason shuts his eyes tighter as if he’s pain.
“You know,” he says hoarsely, “Willis never did this part.”
Bruce strokes his hair one last time, then lets him pull away. “What do you mean?”
“You know, after he’d hit me, he never pretended he was sorry or that he loved me or whatever, the way he did sometimes with Mom.” Jason touches his hand to his jaw where Bruce’s just was. “It’s kind of nice, I guess.”
A single intake of breath. That’s what Bruce allows himself.
He tries to imagine that the armor is capable of absorbing that kind of blow. Something that he can roll through and examine later, no matter that it’s less a bruising hit than poison creeping into his veins, a poison that has no antidote because he deserves it.
Still, he can bear it and focus on the part of that statement that matters, that needs correcting—but all his Robins are too good at reading his tells. Jason is already giving him a crooked little smile, a little bit of vicious satisfaction that just makes Bruce see the boy in the Robin costume all the more clearly.
The image seems to superimpose itself over this almost-adult Jason, who shakes his head at himself, looking out over the water instead of at Bruce. “Relax, old man. I’m a big boy now, I gave as good as I got.”
“Jason.” It’s the closest to Batman’s voice that Bruce has gotten all night, and only because he can still hardly speak around the horror of being compared to Willis Todd.
He thinks that’s what makes Jason smile again. “Seriously. I even threw the first punch, remember?”
“Stop. Trying to comfort me. Please.” Bruce does his best to slow his breath. Slow his thoughts. Find the one that matters. “Jay, lad, I’m not pretending.”
“Sure.” Jason is still speaking to the sea, but he seems a little lighter now that he’s landed a solid hit. “I mean, you know it’s not a few fucking bruises that I care about. And I guess I believe that you’re sorry for the rest, if that’s really why you came all the way out here. But, B… I meant what I said about burying it this time. I can’t… I can’t keep doing this with you.”
“I’m not going to make a mistake like that again,” Bruce says.
You didn’t even let me apologize yet, he thinks. The apology itself is crawling up his throat like panic, the same way it always does, desperate to get out but knowing it won’t survive in the clean air, the same apology that’s been left twisting around and around itself inside him since he was eight-years-old with no one left to say it to.
When he was a child there were periods where he couldn’t talk to Alfred at all, because that was the only thing that wanted to come out, and it wouldn’t come out. The same thing happened after Jason’s death, but Jason is here. Alive. Here. Alive.
“Maybe it’s not just a mistake,” Jason says. “Maybe it’s just how we are together. I thought… before Roy and Kori, I thought it was me, but they don’t…”
“It’s not you.” Bruce swallows the words that won’t come and says instead, “It’s Damian.”
Jason blinks. Something in his stance softens, even now, that endless compassion of his. Sometimes Bruce thinks that, more than anything else, is what got him killed in the first place. What gets him hurt by Bruce over and over again.
“It’s me,” Bruce corrects. “It’s… grief. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of madness, it’s like I can’t…”
“Yeah, Bruce, I know.” He gestures at the Batman symbol on Bruce’s chest. “When your parents died, you did this shit. When Damian died, you did… that. When I died…”
“When you died, I punched Dick in the face and told him it was his fault for creating Robin in the first place,” Bruce says all in a rush, before he can lose his resolve.
“Jesus,” Jason says, shocked.
“He already blamed himself,” Bruce adds. “He was in therapy for it. So I have, it seems, a pattern of retraumatizing my remaining children after I’ve lost one. It’s not you, and it’s not us, Jay, it’s me. If you can’t forgive me for that, I understand, but let it be for that, not… not because you think our relationship is somehow less, that you mean less, to me, because I have never been pretending when I’ve called you my son.”
Jason blinks again, but this time he’s blinking away tears. He blows out a breath and pretends he isn’t, and Bruce lets him. His turn, this time, to stare at the calm sea as if the inside of his mind is not a hurricane.
“How long did it take you to apologize to Dick, after all that?” Jason asks finally.
“Longer than a week,” he says, wry. “I’m trying not to make all the same mistakes twice.”
“I guess that’s something,” Jason mutters. He crosses his arms over his chest, but he finally looks back to Bruce.
And Bruce knows this is the moment where he’s meant to actually apologize, but somehow what comes out is: “I’m going to get Damian back.”
Jason tilts his head exactly the way he does it as Red Hood, a chilling gesture that looks downright eerie on a messy-haired twenty-two-year-old in a half-zipped hoodie. “Not where I thought that was going, but okay.”
“I want you to know that it’s not your responsibility. That… I know that I never should have put that on you. But I am going to get him back.” Bruce stares at him, willing him to understand that he’s going to make everything right, that he doesn’t still mean anything he said in that desert, that he—
He’s—
Jason slips his hands back into his pockets and deliberately relaxes in a way that lets Bruce know he’s off the hook. A mercy kill to end this conversation. “If anyone can, it’s you, B.”
But even after everything, he sounds like he believes that.
It’s nothing short of miraculous, and that’s. That’s exactly the thing.
Back when Jason died, it never really occurred to Bruce to try to get him back. Yes, he had his share of half-crazed thoughts, and yes, there were a few in the hero community that had come back already, but not enough for Bruce to truly consider it a possibility. With Damian, his body already dug out of the ground by meddling forces and a plan half-formed in Bruce’s head, he knows it is. And he’s going to make it happen.
But Jason came back all on his own. Jason is his miracle, and he’s taken that for granted long enough.
Then Jason says, “Listen—”
“Jay,” he says, closing his eyes.
So he only feels the warmth when Jason steps up beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder in the sand, facing out across the water together. “Listen. If Batman needs me, he can call me.”
He snorts softly.
“And for the other thing, you know, I’ll call you.”
The other thing.
Kori, it’s okay, it’s just my dad.
Even after everything.
Bruce manages to nod, and then he feels a little tug on his cape, warm like the pull of the ocean breeze and a Robin’s smile, barely there before it disappears.
When Jason gets back to the ship, he expects Roy and Kori to be waiting right when he walks in, and when they aren’t, he reconsiders his position on whether they managed to follow them without him or Batman noticing.
Because he just took a walk on the fucking beach. With fucking Batman.
But Roy is still in bed where Jason left him, tattooed arm thrown over his face like he’s just waiting. Like he’s worrying, maybe. And Kori, impossible to miss, is nowhere to be seen.
Jason shoves his hand down his pants to unclip his thigh holster. The hoodie was a last second addition, grabbed from the floor beside Roy’s side of the bed, but he’d have gone with a shoulder holster if he’d planned it. “Hey. Where’s the princess?”
“Threatening Batman,” Roy says.
Jason goes still with the gun halfway out of his pants.
Roy, arm half-lifted off his face to see Jason’s reaction, grins. “Hey, Jaybird, is that a gun or are you just happy—”
Wordlessly, Jason points the gun at him. Even as his stomach does a fucking somersault at the sound of his laughter. He shakes his head and sets the gun on the table, hands still shaking a little from—that. That whole fucking thing.
“Relax, baby.” Roy’s still smiling, but the strain is more obvious now. “She’s just telling him not to show up without warning next time. Or, at the very least, not break into our fucking home.”
Jason winces. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize for him.” Roy sits up against his pillow mountain, open hand dropped to the sheets in clear invitation, but Jason unzips his hoodie and makes a show of bringing it to the actual hamper first.
“Boundaries have never been his strong suit, but I don’t think he’d have done it like that if he knew you and Kori would be in the same bedroom,” Jason says, pulling out shorts to sleep in.
“Yeah? How’d he take that?” Roy asks.
It takes Jason a couple tries to speak in the same casual tone. “Turns out he was mostly worried about me having sex.”
“Oh.” The surprise in his voice, Jason knows, is about the fact that Bruce would even know to worry about that. Jason had been surprised by it too. As a side effect of coming back to life, or maybe all the brain damage before that, plenty of his memories were hazy for a long time, but that mortifying conversation from when he was fifteen was one he’d blocked out all on his own. After a moment, Roy snorts. “What, he thought the big bad Outlaws were corrupting his little boy?”
“Don’t,” Jason bites out, before he can filter it.
There’s silence as Jason changes, then: “Jay. Baby.”
A little shudder pushes through him. He climbs back into bed without looking up, lets Roy hook an arm around his neck and drag him down. Roy is gentle about it, but Jason isn’t, his head butting Roy’s shoulder, nose mashed against his collarbone, breathing harsh.
Warm lips press against his forehead. “Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say, what with all your daddy issues.”
Jason jabs him in the ribs. “Pot, kettle. Fuck, Bruce was being less hypocritical than you tonight.”
“Ouch.”
The room gets brighter behind Jason’s closed eyelids, and he knows even before the door slides open and then shut again that Kori’s back. She lets out a quiet little hum at the sight of them together, and a few moments later she’s curling around his back, arm slipping around his middle and holding on with all her considerable strength.
She’s still warm; Jason melts. “Hey, princess. How’d you end up on Batman duty? I know Roy was dying to shoot him.”
“He was,” Kori confirms. “That is part of why I went instead. In case he couldn’t restrain himself.”
“The other part?”
“Wasn’t sure we’d make it before he took off, and she can fly,” Roy says, leaning over Jason’s head to kiss her hello.
Jason doesn’t mind kissing, but he likes it best the way Kori does it. Like the kiss itself is an afterthought, and she’s trying to press love into him with her mouth. Roy’s kisses are nice too, but it’s his hands that make Jason feel like he’s come home. The way he traces rough fingertips over Jason’s hairline as if he’s something precious—it’s the exact same way Jason has seen him cradle his bow sometimes, but somehow that makes him feel more loved, not less.
Because he gets it. They get it. That’s the point.
Kori props herself up to look over Jason’s shoulder at his face. “Jason? What did he want?”
“He wanted.” Jason stops, curling his fingers against Roy’s ribs. “He wanted to apologize.”
“That’s it?” Roy asks warily.
Jason nods against his shoulder.
All the tension in the room collapses in on itself: Roy backward against his pillows, arm tightening around Jason’s neck, a hard kiss planted in his hair; Kori forward against Jason’s back, palm pressed flat to his stomach, her forehead landing in the curve of his shoulder. She murmurs, “We thought he might have taken you away from us.”
“You ever think we’re getting too codependent?” Jason jokes weakly, and Kori wriggles her other hand underneath him to hold him in both arms and Roy tips his face up so that their foreheads can rest together and Jason can just breathe.
“I think we passed codependent when I put a tracker in your ass,” Roy mumbles.
“What?”
He hums. “What?”
“And the apology?” Kori asks. “Was it sufficient?”
It was fucking devastating, but he doesn’t think that’s what Kori meant. It reminded Jason, in the strangest way, of meeting the Batman from Earth-51; he’d been cold and shut completely the fuck down, where tonight Bruce had been trying so hard, but still. There had been this sensation of looking at his father and seeing a man who was not his father, but at the same time was, maybe stripped down to his bare essentials. Of realizing that there was something broken in Bruce that had been there long before Jason and long after too—but that somehow Bruce had managed to gather up enough bloody shards of it to love him.
The same way Jason does for him, will always do for him, no matter how many times they cut themselves on the jagged edges.
Even if it doesn’t mean forgiveness. Can’t, yet, when Jason had to walk a step ahead of Bruce the whole way down the beach just so he knew that it was real and not a new awful beginning to his new awful nightmare. That the shore wasn’t about to turn to desert as they walked, Jason fifteen again and following one of his parents into that warehouse to die.
In the new dream, it’s Bruce instead of Sheila.
Bruce tells him that the Joker is gone, that it’s safe, that he can come home. Sometimes it’s still Joker with the crowbar, and Bruce watches in the corner with his hand on Damian’s shoulder, a dark bloodstain spreading slowly across Damian’s chest.
Sometimes Bruce picks it up himself. With half his hits, Joker asked questions about what hurt more. Bruce asks why Jason is crying. Why does he want it to stop, when it’s going to help? Doesn’t he care? Why is he crying, if he loves his father?
It didn’t happen like that. Even in real life, what Bruce did, it wasn’t that. Doesn’t mean Jason wants to look at him until he stops seeing that shit every time he closes his eyes.
He hasn’t answered Kori’s question; as if they know anyway, Roy tucks Jason’s head back against his chest and she presses warm lips to the nape of his neck.
But he exhales long and slow, counting it out along with Roy’s heartbeat, and even now his best bet for calming himself down is a breathing exercise that Bruce taught him way back when, when Jason was a lonely broken kid with nothing and no one else, and what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?
How can it be anything other than enough?