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Jason wasn't expecting the phone call. Well, he didn't expect phone calls in general, since his friends amounted to two guys who sat with him at lunch and talked to each other. He had forgotten one of their names, and at this point it was really, really too late to ask. It was either Michael or Mitchell.
Probably.
Not that Michael/Mitchell or Caleb had Jason's number anyway. Though they probably would be calling him when he was in the middle of doing his English homework, so they could get the answers from him. The only classmate that did have his number was Rena, but he was pretty sure she hated him at this point. He hadn't meant it as a break-up, but—
No, he recognized these digits. They were inked onto a crumpled piece of paper in spider-scrawl script, the zeroes curling in so far on themselves that they looked like sixes, the nines not quite completing their loop. That scrap of paper had been living in the bottom of his drawer for something like ten months now, because he didn't know if it'd be disrespectful somehow to throw it away? But keeping it probably just made him look like a freak.
His phone rang out for the fourth time and he fumbled to hit the answer button and very nearly hung up instead. He stared as the timer for the call ticked up for a full three seconds before he remembered how to do things with his hands. He found himself awkwardly hovering, half out of his chair, when his voice started to work.
"Uh, hello?"
Dick Grayson was many things. He was infinitely cooler than anyone else Jason had ever met, and that included Batman. He was also technically Jason's brother—Jason was pretty sure anyway, though he'd only seen Dick in person like four times in the past ten months and no, he wasn't counting.
"Jason! Hi Jay, hey. Jay. Jace. Jason," said Jason's technically older brother, the words stretching into each other.
"Are you drunk?" Jason frowned at the phone. His dad—other one, dead one—used to drink sometimes. More, the older Jason got. He was the kind of drunk that got weirdly affectionate, dragging Jason into hugs while slurring out how much he loved him. It made Jason feel weird and squirmy and he probably would have liked it more if it didn't end with booze spilling all over his clothes more often than not.
"Maybe," Dick said, stretching out the M for a full two seconds.
"Aren't you like, nineteen?" Jason asked stupidly. Shit, was he twenty? Knowing your sibling's age was probably something Jason needed to know. "You're not supposed to drink until you're twenty-one."
"We break the law every night, Jay, it's fine." There was a clatter on the other end of the line. "'m just tipsy, anyway."
Well, who was Jason to stop Dick Grayson, first and greatest Boy Wonder extraordinaire, from doing whatever he liked? He flopped back on his bed, limbs splaying out before he pulled the phone close to his ear again. There was—something going on across the line, some sort of crash-shuffle-shout. Bruce had walked him through analyzing background noises in recordings a little while ago, but he still wasn't very good at separating the sounds.
"He's not just tipsy," a voice said, close enough to the mic that her voice peaked and scattered into static. Jason thought it was Donna, but was struck with such a powerful wave of uncertainty that he swallowed the instinctive greeting before it could escape his throat.
Another scuffle, and then the sound quality shifted. "I am absolutely just tipsy," Dick crowed. "I can walk in a straight line and everything."
"He cannot," someone else reported. Kori? They must've put him on speaker phone. Jason did the same, dropping his phone on the bed by his head and staring up at his ceiling. Dick'd help him put up glow in the dark stars. There were two crescent moons.
"I did a flip earlier."
"You woulda landed on your face if I didn't catch you."
"You were the one that made both of us land on our faces, Walls."
The conversation continued, and Jason let it wash over him. Jeez, Dick had so many teammates Jason could barely keep track of them. Donna, Kori, Wally, Garth… other voices Jason couldn't quite match names to. So, so many friends.
They were laughing, and cheering, then another crash. A cork popping. It sounded like an entire party. If Jason closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he was there—fitting in memories of the one time Dick had helped him sneak out and took him to Titan's Tower for a whole weekend, and oh Bruce had been so mad—
"—can't call me Rob, anymore, come on—"
There was a particularly loud cascade of sound that had Jason wincing, before the noises suddenly cut off, leaving behind just Dick's voice.
"Jason. Jay. Hi."
"Hey," Jason told his ceiling.
"Sorry, I forgot I was—the phone—hey, Jay. Jason. Robin. You're Robin now, aren't you?"
"Uh-huh."
Dick's next words came through muffled—covering the speaker with his hand, probably. "…see! Can't be Rob, not when…"
In the ensuing silence, Jason traced three stars on his ceiling that were almost collinear. Orion's belt, Dick had explained, pointing them out when they'd taken a break at a rest stop on the drive to New York. He'd named other constellations too, but spotting those three clustered stars was the easiest.
"They're making me keep Rob," Dick reported mournfully. Then, "Jay. You're Robin."
"Uh-huh," Jason repeated.
"What… what's it like, buddy? B treating you good?"
"Yeah, I'm still learning lots of things," Jason said. His first six months with Bruce had basically all been training, and for some reason he thought it'd stop when he started going out on the street. It felt like there was something pressing he needed to do all the time—cases, homework, patrol—and when he wasn't he was studying and training to get better at those things. "It's been uh—gun safety, recently. Again."
"Gun safety's very important," Dick agreed immediately. "It's ah—been nearly a year with him, right? You should celebrate. I have… great celebration ideas."
Jason shifted, turning towards his phone, but his body protested against moving out of the warm spot he'd pressed into his blankets. "It's uh… more than that. He met me in June. Last year."
There was a long pause. "Right. Right, forgot—didn't find out about you until—gosh, I was so mad at him. I find out he adopts another kid through the goddamn newspaper?"
Jason winced, suddenly feeling cold enough that he gave into impulse and curled in on himself. Dick had been angry exactly once, and that had been when he dropped in on Jason's patrol out of nowhere and threatened vaguely about talking to Bruce.
Talking to Bruce about this. He'd been incandescently furious in a way that Jason had never seen again, was almost sure he'd imagined, and it'd been about—well, about Jason.
"That must've sucked," Jason said, mouth dry.
"Not even the worst part," Dick said, letting out a long, melodramatic sigh. "It was—I left Robin behind, but it was still mine. Dammit, B. You can't just—another kid—that was my mom's name for me. My family's colors! You can't just hand that off to the first kid that reminds me of you—"
Oh.
Oh, Jason hadn't—
"I didn't—" he started, so quiet he didn't know if his phone could pick it up.
He hadn't known that.
"Hi, Jason." That was Donna, again. Probably. "Sorry, about that. We're banning him from drinking more."
"Yeah." Jason forced himself to laugh, but it came out crackly. "Yeah, um. That sounds like a good idea."
After mom had gotten sick, dad would bring him around to places that kids probably shouldn't have been. Some of dad's friends got mean when they were drunk—ruddy faces and pent-up rage. Those were the worst.
"Did he ever get to the invitation?" Donna asked.
"The what?"
"He wanted to bring you up here for Thanksgiving."
That—oh. Except Thanksgiving was supposed to be with family, and Jason's family was Bruce and Alfred now, and Dick was only sort of half there and apparently hated Jason for stealing Robin.
"I don't know if Batman—"
Static, muffled wrestling and yelling and then it was Dick again, shouting Jay and Jason instinctively braced against his voice.
"Sorry, sorry Jay, they keep stealing my phone—so. So you gotta stick it to B, okay? You better not become some sort of clone mini-me."
Jason blinked. The confusion was enough for him to push himself up from where he was lying, wiping at his eyes as he stared at his phone screen. It didn't tell him anything useful. "What?"
"You're Robin, now," Dick said, and his voice was so authoritative that Jason's back straightened without his permission. "But you're not me. And B took you in because he missed me but it can't be about that, okay? That means you're not allowed to be me. You need to be your own person. Make yourself someone your mom would be proud of. Or something."
"You're—you're not mad?"
"Oh, no, I am full of rage and hatred right now. And that's why you're gonna ditch B and come hang out with me and my awesome friends who are gonna stop taking my cellular device—hey—"
Jason wanted to laugh. Or cry. He wasn't sure. Bruce took him in because he missed Dick? That made—that made some sense, Dick was Robin and then Dick was gone, and so Jason had to be Robin and Jason had to be just as good as Dick, and, well, Jason couldn't be, not really, because Dick was the first and had done it the best and Jason knew he would never measure up—
But Dick didn't want him to do that. Dick wanted him to… be himself? Jason didn't really know who himself was. Himself was a kid from Crime Alley whose dad was probably in jail, whose mom died because she was sick, who smoked cigarettes because that was what cool kids did. (And because that was what mom did, before she got so sick she couldn't get out of bed anymore.)
Except Jason hadn't been that kid in well over a year, and the commish really hadn't liked when Robin started filching his cigarettes.
This was Dick Grayson though. Dick who had been Robin for basically as long as Jason could remember, who could do acrobatics as easily as breathing, who was Nightwing now, on a team full of metahumans and aliens while Dick was just human—Jason was pretty sure, anyway—and still managed to be just as good as them, if not better. Who still wanted Jason to come hang out.
Jason thought he could probably figure it out, for Dick.
"You're not mad at me?" Jason said.
"Why would I be mad at you? You haven't been stealing my—back off, Walls! I will catch you—"
"For stealing Robin."
"Don't be stupid," Dick said easily. "I gave it to you. You can't steal things people give you."
That was… true. Dick had given, along with the crumpled phone number at the bottom of Jason's drawer, the last version of the suit at the end of their second meeting, the one made for an almost-adult that Dr. Thompkins wasn't sure if Jason would ever grow tall enough to fill out. Jason was thirteen. He still had five whole years to drink milk and eat full meals and he was gonna grow even taller than Batman, just you wait!
"But," Jason said, "I took it before you—"
"Still can't call you Rob, though, they vetoed my decision," Dick interrupted, voice thoughtful. "You gotta be Wing, then. Night. Wingnight. Little Nightwing."
Something untwisted in Jason's chest. "I thought you didn't want me to be you."
Dick laughed, bright as a supernova. "Hah! See! Knew you were a smart one, Little Wing."