Chapter Text
Jason is doing paperwork with his helmet balanced on one knee and a pen held in his mouth when the lights go out. He glances around, waiting for the lenses of his domino mask to adjust to the lack of light, then sighs and gets to his feet. Crime lording is not for the weak, he thinks grimly as he drops the pen and fits his helmet back onto his head. Tax-dodging involves a surprising amount of paperwork, what with all the money laundering, and apparently his new business partner is too much of a cheapskate to splurge on lightbulbs that actually function.
Heading out into the corridor, it takes a total of six words for Jason’s blood to run cold. They’re heard in passing, in between sporadic flashes of emergency lights and the blaring of alarms. “Oh, shit, it’s the fucking Bats!”
No matter what certain individuals have to say, Jason’s not an idiot. Arrogant and impetuous, granted, but he isn’t stupid enough to shack up with Scarecrow in any real sense of the word. Their partnership was supposed to be mutually beneficial. Crane wanted a way to get his latest batch of fear-reducing drugs out onto the streets, and Jason claimed that he felt like continuing to expand Red Hood’s crime empire. Red Hood has no qualms about allowing drugs onto the streets that he controls—something has to finance his war on two sides, after all—but Scarecrow was dreaming if he thought that Jason was ever planning to let an un-trialled drug created by one of Arkham’s head nutcases out with no interference. Jason had been almost looking forward to proving that Jonny's chronic paranoia was in fact warranted in this case.
An unexpected warehouse malfunction, a few minor injuries and a couple of major casualties, and an anonymous tipoff to the big bad Bat was supposed to leave Jason time to waltz off into the sunset with a pretty bag of cash over his shoulder while the Three Mask-eteers finished off his dirty work for him.
Instead, they had shown up before he even had time to cut out the letters from the newspapers and craft his note, and now people are running around like headless chickens in the flickering lights and Crane is nowhere to be found.
“Scarecrow!” Jason bellows, shoving through the floods of fleeing henchmen. One mention of the B-word and not a one of them had the guts to stick around and take a couple of heavy hits for the team. Jason has half a mind to stop and knock some sense into them himself. He shoulders open the door to Crane’s personal laboratory, built into the lower levels of their warehouse just like Jason's office, and bites back an angry curse as he enters the empty room.
Given that his supposed partner has likely already scurried off to hide in some dark corner, Jason takes the opportunity to dig through Crane’s desk in search of any evidence of clandestine meetups that might be getting arranged behind his back.
All he finds are documents detailing supply and shipment of Crane’s new drugs, and he’s in the process of searching for a hidden drawer when the door swings open. Jason’s already on his feet, gun cocked, safety off. He doesn’t relax in the slightest when he registers Scarecrow’s sack-cloth smile.
“How unfortunate, Red Hood,” the man rasps. “Caught in the act?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jason replies flatly.
“I never trusted you for a second, of course, but I’m hurt that you think I would be so stupid as to keep my important information in a desk, of all places.” Crane continues blithely.
“I was just trying to collect up the evidence to hide from the Bat,” Jason tries, and Crane lets out a smarmy little chuckle.
“Do you mean the evidence of our little deal, or the evidence of that bomb you’ve planted under my machines?”
Frankly, Jason isn’t surprised that Crane figured him out. He wasn’t exactly trying to hide his plan, since he already had a sample of Crane’s drug, which had been the main goal. The only thing left to do was to destroy either the means of production or the means of supply, and Jason was perfectly happy to trigger his bomb with a couple of bats still inside the warehouse.
He should have pulled the trigger right then and there, but the Robin in him couldn’t resist one last quip. “Brave of you to accuse the man pointing a gun at your face of being a traitor,” Jason points out. “Thou knowest not the meaning of the word, though, right?”
The next thing he knows, Jason is waking up on the floor. Crane is gone, along with his guns. Fuck—he must have blacked out. Did the bastard dose him with something? He feels down his legs, letting out an angry snarl as he realises that Crane has made away with the knives he had strapped to his calves, as well as the ones in his jacket.
Jason struggles to his feet, cursing bitterly. His helmet is still intact, which disproves the drugging theory. He must have simply fainted in front of Crane, who was too much of a coward to take the opportunity and rid himself of a thorn in his side.
Jason staggers out into the hallway, head swimming. He’s pissed at himself for letting Crane get away and pissed at whatever caused his fucking black-out as well. If the cause ends up being dehydration or low iron, he’ll kill someone. Joker would be favourite, although anyone in Jason’s immediate vicinity comes a close second.
He’s so caught up in his own thoughts that he almost misses the prone body lying face-down in the grey light. Leave him, Jason’s rational mind supplies. He has bigger fish to fry, and it’s not like the Bat-stard is around to give Jason a disappointed glare and a couple of loose teeth for his moral failure.
Instead, Jason drops to his knees with a long-suffering sigh and gets a closer look at the body. It’s Robin, he realises with a start, and flinches back. Tim’s eyes are still shut, and his face is ghastly pale, and Jason’s eyes skim over the kid’s suit in search of injury automatically.
There’s blood welling at the top of Tim’s suit, Jason can see it. Shit, he thinks dully. He crouches in front of the unconscious child, frozen in thought. Robin being here means Batman is on his way, possibly with Nightwing on his tail. That means that Jason needs to destroy the drug supply and hightail it out of the area as quickly as he can, before he’s forced into an impromptu family reunion.
It’s not like he even gives a shit about this kid, he reasons; he was more than happy to beat him into a bloody pulp in San Francisco only a couple of months ago. What’s it to him whether Tim dies now from whatever mysterious injury he’s received, or at some indeterminate point in the near future when his luck finally runs out?
As long as Jason moves him out of the warehouse before it blows, he can walk away happily. Red Hood will not be the cause of another Robin lying dead in the smouldering aftermath of an explosion, Batman nowhere to be seen. But, again, Jason knows that all of these thoughts are useless. He might be violently unhinged, but the idea of leaving a child to die alone makes his throat tighten.
He’s saved the effort of getting his hands dirty when Tim is yanked away from under him by someone that Jason hadn’t even heard approaching. “What the fuck?” he chokes out, squirming away from the newcomer. He’s shocked and angry that he let someone catch him out like that—clearly, he’s still out of it from whatever caused his earlier blackout.
Jason freezes as he comes face-to—well, helmet-to-mask—with Golden Boy: Original Model. But Nightwing has already turned back to their most recent replacement, a horrible look of fear in his eyes.
“Robin?” Dick murmurs, dropping to his knees beside the kid, and Jason gets the absurd feeling that he’s intruding on something. He’s at a complete loss for what to do as Nightwing peels away the fabric at Tim’s neck in search of the injury. The thought of leaving hardly even crosses his mind.
Jason is just about to slink away when Dick lets out a shuddering gasp, accompanied by a fresh spurt of blood through his gloved fingers. “Robin!” he shouts again, scrabbling in the kid’s utility belt for a bandage. Dick applies it with shaking fingers and Tim wakes up with a start, trying to wrench himself out of Dick’s grasp. Dick makes a soft noise in his throat and wraps Tim tighter in his arms. Jason watches numbly as Tim’s face goes slack and he melts into Dick’s grasp, clearly comfortable in this position.
Jason finds himself standing awkwardly to one side again, still unwilling to leave. He’s waiting for an acknowledgement, he realises, and curses his own weakness. But Dick is still checking Tim over, brushing gentle fingers over the bandage and running a hand through the kid’s hair.
The embarrassment of Jason lingering like a lost kid finally kicks in just as Dick turns away from Tim and locks eyes with him. Jason falters in the act of leaving, staring blankly at the man who was supposed to be his brother. There’s a sick sort of twisting sensation in Jason’s stomach. He wants nothing more than to escape and find someplace to hide and work through whatever he’s feeling privately, but he feels pinned in place by Dick’s gaze.
Finally, the silence is broken. “Are you planning on leaving, or am I going to have to fight you?” Dick asks. His voice sounds strange. Jason opens his mouth but hesitates. The blank white eyes of Nightwing’s mask seem to be stripping the very flesh from Jason’s bones, leaving him exposed and frozen to the spot. Dick makes an annoyed sound in his throat, and Jason can almost see his blue eyes rolling behind the mask.
“Okay, just stand there, then. I have bigger things to worry about right now.”
A familiar sense of anger is beginning to boil in Jason’s stomach, but it’s dampened by the roiling nausea pushing its way up his throat. He’s grateful that nobody can see the mortified flush of his cheeks as he stands there, watching Dick carefully leading Tim towards the exit.
As soon as the two vigilantes are out of sight, Jason regains enough motion in his legs to slide to the floor, narrowly avoiding the dried smears of Tim’s blood. He should have just left while he had the chance, he thinks dimly. His hands are shaking.
Get up, snaps a voice in his head. There’s nothing wrong with you. It sounds like Batman. It’s right, though. There’s no reason for Jason to be feeling like a kicked puppy right now; he’d burned any bridges that Dick had been trying to build a long time ago.
Get up, the voice repeats angrily. Jason struggles to his feet. He has a safehouse nearby, just a room in an abandoned apartment that he’s kitted out with a safe and a mattress, but he’ll drag himself to one a bit further away just in case someone has decided to tail him. He's halfway to the exit when he remembers the drugs. Fuck, there’s definitely something wrong with his head. It scares him that he feels completely normal; there’s no tell-tale dizziness or tunnel vision to let him know that he’s not thinking straight. He makes his way down to the sublevels of the warehouse and locates the detonator that he planted in a relatively hidden area a few hours ago.
He thinks that he set it to go off after fifteen minutes, but with his mind the way it is right now it couldn’t hurt to double check. He has just pulled a screwdriver out of his utility belt when he hears the scrape of footsteps behind him.
“Jason,” Batman intones like the fucking Terminator. Jason spins around, low to the ground, brandishing his screwdriver threateningly. If only Scarecrow hadn’t stolen all his weapons while he was taking his unplanned nap.
“What the fuck do you want?” he snaps. To Jason’s horror, he feels tears forming in his eyes. All he wants is to go crawl into bed and sleep off whatever’s been fucking with his head and his emotions, and instead he has to deal with this shit.
“Step away from the detonator, Jason,” Batman says tiredly, and Jason’s body is wracked with a violent shudder. It’s like all of his emotions were being held back by a single thread, and seeing Bruce and Dick in the same day has finally broken the dam.
“Don’t call me that,” he hisses, still crouched in front of Batman like a scared cat.
“What are you trying to do here, Jason?” Bruce asks gently. “Crane is gone, you know he can make more of his drugs. Blowing up a warehouse isn’t going to solve anything. You’re being useless.”
Jason shudders again. Bruce’s voice is painfully soft, but his words sting like knives.
“Just give up,” Bruce continues. “Find something better to do, away from here. Leave Gotham to the professionals.”
Jason’s throat tightens with the need to hurt Bruce like he’s hurting Jason. He scrabbles helplessly for words to wield like a sword, but his lips feel numb. “Like your new Robin?” he gets out, glaring at Batman behind the helmet.
Bruce takes a step forward, hands held outwards like he’s trying to soothe a rabid dog. “Don’t be childish, Jason,” he sighs. “What were we meant to do? You know as well as Tim does, I need a Robin. It’s not his fault that you weren’t cut out for the task.”
Jason leaps forward explosively and Bruce sprays him with something that Jason swears wasn’t in his hands a second ago. It’s an odourless white gas but it burns in Jason’s throat, somehow having made it through the seal of his helmet. He falls back and scrabbles frantically at the catch of his helmet, desperately trying to suck in air. Bruce comes closer as the helmet clatters to the ground and Jason lies on his back, gasping like a fish out of water.
This shouldn’t be happening, he thinks. There’s no way that he should have been taken out by one hit like this. Something is terribly wrong with him, and it’s likely Crane’s fault. He needs to get to a safehouse, run some blood tests, figure out the problem.
Bruce is kneeling beside him, smiling down at him with aching tenderness. “It’s okay, Jaylad,” he whispers. “It was never your fault, either. I never should have let you be Robin in the first place, but after Dick left, someone needed to fill the void. I should have waited to find someone more suitable.”
Jason chokes for air as the first tear finally slips free from his eyes. “You need to move on, Jaylad,” Bruce says. “You were never meant to be Robin, and God knows you were never meant to be Red Hood either.”
And then he’s gone, and Jason finds himself lying alone on the cold floor of yet another warehouse. He doesn’t even realise that he’s drifting into unconsciousness until he wakes up with a start and a pounding headache, still entirely on his own.
Surprisingly, his detonator is still lying a few feet away, seemingly untampered with. Jason gets to his feet with a wince, feeling the tightness in his lungs. There’s no sign of Bruce, and Jason prays that whatever he was just dosed with doesn’t have any long lasting effects.
“Fucking Batman,” Jason mutters, mostly to fill the crushing quiet of the warehouse. He has no idea how long he was out for; hopefully long enough for Bruce to have finished whatever he was doing in here and leave. Even Jason’s vitriol has been leached away by Bruce’s words, said with such genuine softness. All he has left is bone-chilling numbness.
Jason sets the detonator and watches in silence as the LED display starts to tick down from fifteen minutes. Just in case, he checks to make sure that the actual explosives are still in their places, dotted inconspicuously around the room. Then he picks up his helmet and trudges through the warehouse towards the exit.
Just his luck that Batman locked the door after him.
“For fuck’s sake,” Jason snaps, slamming his shoulder against the door. Naturally, it doesn’t budge. He’s trying again when a familiar, high-pitched giggle stops him in his tracks.
He spins around and finds himself in a room that he wasn’t in a moment ago, one that isn’t even supposed to be on the same continent as him. “This isn’t real,” he realises, and his knees buckle with relief. Either Crane or Bruce drugged him with something, and Jason’s betting that it was Crane. Batman is violent and incapable of expressing emotion, but he wouldn't drug his own supposed son. Jason desperately hopes that it was Crane.
“Little birdie trapped in another cage?”
Jason whirls around again. The door that he was trying to open is gone, replaced by the same view of the warehouse in Ethiopia.
“This one is of his own makings, of course. I didn’t know wings could hold a welding torch.”
“This isn’t real,” Jason repeats, hunkering down and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He isn’t scared, he tells himself, he’s just trying to concentrate more clearly.
When he opens his eyes again, the Joker is leering down at him, crowbar in hand. “This isn’t real,” he mimics, testing the weight of the crowbar with glee. “The bomb that you set all by yourself certainly is, dear boy. And to think, I didn’t even need to bother breaking out of Arkham to kill you! You’ve done it all on your lonesome! Batman will be so proud.”
Jason shudders and makes himself stand, ignoring the tightness in his throat. “What a way to go, eh, Robin?” the Joker continues. Jason shuts his eyes and spreads his arms out, praying that whatever Crane’s dosed him with doesn’t extend to kinetic hallucinations. The fingers of his left hand brush against something and he jerks away out of instinct, but it was only the wall.
“Which way to the door?” the Joker muses in his ear, sending goosebumps down Jason’s neck. He feels blindly along the wall, hoping that he’s going the right way.
“Ooh, are you sure?” the voice continues. “Heading towards an active bomb is an interesting choice, sonny, but I suppose old habits die hard. We would know, wouldn’t we?”
Jason risks opening his eyes and almost at once he’s accosted by the metallic stench of blood. He appears to be standing in the Batcave, with Alfred, Bruce and Dick lying dead at his feet. He clenches his eyes shut again and breathes through his mouth, inching forward with his feet pressed to the ground to prove to himself that there’s nothing really there.
At least the hallucinations are tied to his sight. The Joker can’t touch him if Jason can’t see him, so he’s safe as long as he doesn’t open his eyes. Finally, he feels the warehouse door beneath his fingers. He runs his hands along the door frantically, fumbling with the doorhandle as soon as he finds it. The door opens and he spills out into the night, taking a shuddering breath of fresh air.
He opens his eyes again to the sight of an empty alleyway. The Joker is nowhere to be seen, and the air is thankfully free of the scent of blood. Scarecrow must have had his toxin programmed to pump into the warehouse proper in case of any difficulty, Jason realises. It was beyond stupid of him not to see that coming.
Jason’s safehouse is a matter of minutes away, but he’s unwilling to risk exposing it when he can’t trust his own eyes. He tries to remember how long Scarecrow’s toxin should take to make its way through his system. No longer than a day, surely, but he’s used to having Batman’s antidote on hand, and he’s never managed to synthesise any of his own.
Red Hood doesn’t carry a cell phone for fear of being traced. All transactions take place in person, and meetings are arranged via murdered close associate with a burner phone shoved into their mouths. And while this is usually all well and good, it also means that he can’t easily look something up if he’s missing information. Barbara used to say that he was like a forty-year-old in a thirteen-year-old body, he remembers. His body’s nineteen, now, his soul forty-one.
With a sigh, Jason moves away from the warehouse. It seems to be around three in the morning, and he’s almost certain that the streets are deserted, but a moment ago all senses pointed towards him being chased around a warehouse on a different continent by a homicidal maniac, so he’ll take that with a grain of salt.
He settles down on the kerb to watch the warehouse implode on itself with a muffled boom and a cloud of dust. Fear toxin is a stimulant as well as a hallucinogen, designed to cause your heartrate to spike to lethal levels, but Jason has never felt so tired. Perhaps Crane is trying a new formula, the usual hallucinogen mixed with a depressant to make his enemies easier to capture.
The thought spurs Jason back into motion. He doesn’t really have any plan other than avoiding human contact for the next while, but he thinks he should probably hide the more conspicuous elements of his outfit. He ducks into the nearest alleyway and crouches behind a dumpster to remove his domino mask and leather jacket. He finds them a lovely home underneath the dumpster along with his helmet, hoping to come back for them later, and emerges from the alley looking for all the world like a high college student who can’t find his way home.
There’s a park a couple of blocks away from the warehouse that Jason thinks might be far enough for safety. He would travel over the rooftops to try and shake any potential company, but he’d rather face whatever visual hallucinations he might be experiencing from a height where one wrong step wouldn’t lead to a shattered spine.
The silence of the night is considerably more peaceful than the warehouse had been, and Jason finds himself relaxing into his slow journey along the road. The stars are hidden by Gotham’s permanent layer of smog, but the air still feels fresher than usual. Jason is just beginning to think that the fear toxin has worn off when he becomes aware of a presence following along behind him.
His movements don’t falter for a second as he strains his ears for the sound of whoever’s there. He’s praying that it’s just another hallucination, because he’d really rather not be seen by a real person without his helmet, so he feels a sick sense of relief when the Joker falls into place beside him, jauntily swinging his crowbar in time with the thud of Jason’s steps.
“This is a really stupid fear toxin,” the Joker agrees before Jason has even opened his mouth to say it. “What’s the point in dredging up the physical embodiment of the worst night of your life, only to make me follow you around and crack jokes?”
“I’d say the worst night of my life was actually stumbling across Bruce and Selina on a rooftop when I was fourteen,” Jason says, just to be difficult. The Joker scowls at him.
“See? This is just miserable for the both of us. I can’t touch you if you know I’m a figment of your deranged mind, and you can’t put me out of our misery either. You haven’t been considering a lobotomy at any point recently, have you?”
“Beat me senseless with a crowbar,” Jason tells him flatly, because saying the words “bite me” to any version of the Joker feels just a little bit too weird.
“Don’t most robins carry chlamydia?” the Joker asks. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole, my boy, let alone a crowbar.”
“You’re thinking of koalas. Or hepatitis.”
“Ah, so I am.”
The Joker is gone when Jason glances to his right, so he continues on his way to the park in silence. Go figure that the most civil conversation he’s had today was with a hallucination of his murderer instead of his adoptive father.
He’s halfway to the park when the next hallucination appears. Dick seems surprised when Jason walks right past him, but hurries to catch up anyway.
“Jesus, Jay, what’s going on?” he asks, finger stripes spreading wide in a gesture of supplication. “Oracle told us about the warehouse, said you and Scarecrow were working together. Is that true?”
“You’re doing a terrible job,” Jason says. He doesn’t mind this all that much, actually. He’d be more than happy to deal with a chatty Joker until he had time to figure out what was in his blood, especially now that the real fear-inducing hallucinations seemed to be over. The only thing scary about Dick Grayson are the flashbacks of V-necks gone by that Jason has whenever they see each other.
“Are you high?” Dick asks. He jogs a little bit in front of Jason to examine his eyes, but Jason keeps walking. “Or are you just fucking with me? There’s nothing funny about working with Scarecrow to put innocent people in danger, Jason. Batman is furious.”
“I know,” Jason agrees, and Dick’s face stiffens.
“So, what, this is just some sick attempt to get his attention? Fuck, Jay, I thought you were better than this. We can look past you murdering actual criminals for the most part, but willingly allowing innocent people to get addicted to whatever Crane’s putting out on the streets? You’re ruining lives, Jay.”
Dick’s cheeks are almost red with self-righteous anger, and Jason feels an answering curl of annoyance starting inside him. Sick attempt to get Bruce’s attention? He tried that, once, and look where it got him. A Batarang to the neck and a Joker living his best life behind bars once again.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Jason mutters like a teenager. He can be forgiven some childish behaviour right now, talking to himself in the middle of the night.
Dick’s face flushes even darker and his hands twitch like he wants to grab hold of Jason and shake him. Blessed hallucinations, Jason thinks. He can get all of his stupid snarky comments out without fear of physical retaliation. Instead of rising to the bait, though, Dick just lets out a sigh.
“I thought you were better than this, Jay,” he says, in a voice like a rubber band pulled too tight. Jason feels a spark of pride at having provoked any sort of reaction from the unflappable Dick Grayson. “I know that I have no right to tell you what to do, but I genuinely thought that you were a good person deep down.”
The spark of annoyance in Jason’s gut is now well on its way to becoming a proper blaze of anger. “Right, because you’d be so fucking normal if you were beaten half to death by your partner’s literal arch-nemesis and left to die alone, wouldn’t you?” He keeps walking towards the park, because stopping to argue with a figment of his imagination makes him feel just a bit too much like an actual lunatic.
Dick opens and closes his mouth repeatedly for a moment like he’s too angry to even get his words out. “Think about what you’re saying,” he manages finally. “Because it sounds to me like you’re using your trauma at the hands of a villain to justify the fact that you’re just as bad as they are.”
That brings Jason to a stop, and he watches in disbelief as Dick’s face clears, and he winces. Maybe Crane is smarter than Jason gave him credit for, after all. Why torture your enemies with relatively harmless hallucinations of their greatest fears when you can catapult them headfirst into an existential crisis instead?
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Dick continues. “That was too far.”
Jason just stands there. The toxin must be pulling from his mind in order to work, and the longer he thinks about that, the more scared he gets. Does he seriously believe in his heart that he’s just as bad as the Joker? And more importantly, is it true? Looking at Dick’s masked face, cold in the grey half-light, it’s not much of a stretch to believe it. "Fuck you," he tries to say, but it comes out more broken than he had intended, and he flinches.
Dick's face crumples even more. "Jay."
"No, seriously. Fuck you. Well, fuck me, actually, isn't it? And fuck the Joker, and Scarecrow, and all the rest of those bastards, and fuck me once again because it turns out I'm just as bad."
"Little Wing, I didn't mean it," Dick tries, reaching out a hand, and Jason jerks away from it reflexively, even if Dick couldn't actually touch him.
"Yeah, well, I did," he mutters, staring bleakly down at his feet. Dick is staring at him with a sickening look of pity on his face, and Jason feels something in his chest twist at the sight. Some small part of him—yellow-caped and wide-eyed—wishes that the real Dick would swoop in and rescue him from whatever is going on in his head. He aches to be wrapped up in Dick's arms like Tim was earlier, to feel the warm weight of Bruce's hand on his shoulder and his gentle voice saying that no matter what Jason has done, they still love him enough to take him back.
When he looks back up, he expects Dick to be gone, but instead he gets a gloved hand wrapping tentatively around his wrist.
He almost feels bad about the speed with which he wrenches his arm away and skitters backwards like a wild animal, staring at Nightwing—the real Nightwing—in horror. This whole fucking night just went from miserable write-off to strong contender for the worst night of Jason's life.
“Jeez, Jay, what’s the matter?” Dick asks, eyes going wide behind the white lenses of his mask.
The words that Jason needs to say are sticking in his throat. Sorry, Dickie, I was under the impression that you were a drug-induced hallucination potentially caused by either a legally insane supervillain or our own deranged adoptive father. I never would have been so emotionally vulnerable with you if I’d known the truth! Thanks for telling me that you actually hate me and think that I belong in Arkham. Instead, he just says “fuck”, and kicks viciously at the kerb next to him. Maybe if he ignores Nightwing for long enough, he’ll be left alone.
Whatever fear or upset he was feeling has all but vanished in the wake of his shock, and he does his best to convert that back into anger. Anger is easy to deal with. It doesn’t leave him feeling as exposed as that awful tightness in his throat.
His plan to go camp out in the park is utterly derailed, so Jason figures he’ll keep walking at the same pace until he finds somewhere that he can try and slip away. Hopefully Dick will take the hint eventually, because there’s no way to explain that Jason genuinely thought he was talking to a figment of his own imagination without dying of embarrassment.
“Jay. Jason, come on, don’t do this.” Dick is trailing along beside him, looking hurt. “I’m sorry for touching you, and I’m sorry for what I said, but can’t we try talking again?”
Jason ignores him in favour of looking around for an easily accessible fire escape or the likes.
“Look, I know you’re not going to lead me to one of your safehouses and I’m not leaving, so either we can stop, and you can explain what’s going on or you can keep walking all night.”
Jason’s eye twitches. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Dick’s voice in his ear, especially when he’s making an extremely valid point. It’s going to look ridiculously lame to suddenly burst into a run out of absolutely nowhere, but he’s hoping that he’ll have enough of an element of surprise to get to the ladder on the side of the building across the road. From there he can sprint across a couple of rooftops and find someplace to hunker down until Dick gets bored and goes back to his injured baby bird.
His movement rhythm doesn’t change from one step to another, and Jason’s sprinting for the ladder and halfway up by the time Dick’s confused shout finishes echoing through the street. He’s two rooftops away, not daring to look back in case he loses his lead, when he’s tackled to the ground by a blur of blue and black.
He catches himself with his face and rolls over onto his back, clutching his hands to his chin and groaning. Dick rolls with him easily, crouching above his chest and peering down at him pityingly. “Sorry, Jay. That was a lot harder than I hoped.”
The stupid bastard almost sounds pleased with himself, and Jason thrashes angrily in his grip. “Don’t call me that,” he spits, voice muffled. “I think you broke my fucking nose.”
One gloved hand worms its way between Jason’s and peels them apart. Dick scrutinises him with Robin’s careful eye. “No, you’ll be fine,” he says, and has the audacity to attempt a smile.
Jason doesn’t bother putting any real effort into trying to get away—he doesn’t have his grapple gun, and Nightwing has far more experience with rooftops than the Red Hood—but he does wriggle around and glower, a lot. It occurs to him that he could attack in earnest, leave Dick unconscious on the rooftop and leg it to the nearest safe space—but then Dick is reaching up with one hand to remove his mask and his blue eyes are filled with such quiet hope that Jason’s heart just twists.
“If I get off, are you going to attack me?” Dick asks.
“Fuck off,” Jason says on instinct, and then hesitates. “No. But I’m not interested in a fucking heart to heart, so you can either leave me alone or we can have a very cold and awkward night.”
Dick sighs and sits back on his haunches, hands resting lightly on Jason’s chest. “I mean it when I say I shouldn’t have said what I said about you and the Joker. I’m really sorry, Little Wing.”
Jason can’t stop the flinch that runs through him at the name, and Dick’s eyes snap to meet his. “Don’t start,” Jason growls.
Dick sighs and finally, blessedly moves away. Jason takes the opportunity to stand up and cross his arms, glowering. “Look, I’ll leave you alone if you really want me to. You’re obviously dealing with something, and I know we don’t get along at all, and I just want you to feel safe. But can you at least tell me what you were doing with Scarecrow so I can relay it to Bruce?”
The knee-jerk reaction is yet another “go fuck yourself with a crowbar,” but Nightwing’s going to figure it out anyway as soon as he goes back to inspect the wreckage of the warehouse. Jason’s surprised Bruce hasn’t put two and two together already—he literally watched Jason setting the bomb—but he also clearly had bigger problems on his mind.
“I wasn’t actually working with him,” Jason says, desperately toeing the line between sullen and sulky. Something about Dick Grayson brings out the angsty teenager in him, which would be utterly mortifying if Dick hadn’t been exactly the same when Jason became Robin.
“The drug was new, I wanted to figure out how he was making it and stop him, but by the time I figured it out it was already too late. I had to find a way to destroy what he’d already made, and the easiest way was to offer my services as a distributor. You can go check the warehouse,” he added quickly. “It’s all gone now. Blown up.”
Dick’s face softens into a careful smile. “Okay. Thank you.”
Jason rolls his eyes and scowls deeper. “Whatever. Go kiss little Timmy goodnight and change his bandages so that he doesn’t miss a night of child soldiering.”
He’s about to leave when he catches Dick’s expression. It’s somewhere between surprise and worry, and Jason realises delightedly that he’s hit a nerve. But then Dick says, “Tim wasn’t out tonight. He’s not even in Gotham,” and Jason’s stomach drops.
“Jay, is everything alright?” Dick asks worriedly. “You don’t look good at all.”
Jason shakes his head and backs away. If that was a hallucination, then there’s a good chance that Bruce was as well. He feels sick; it’s not that he wanted that interaction with Batman to be real—he got fucking pepper sprayed, or whatever it was—but it does beg the question of what Jason’s deepest darkest fear seems to be. It clearly isn’t the fucking Joker.
“Jay? Little Wing? Your eyes are crazy dilated right now, are you actually on something?” Jason doesn’t want Dick to know, that’s for certain. He shakes his head, but Dick doesn’t seem convinced. “You are, aren’t you? What is it, fear toxin? Come back to the cave, we’ll get you tested and give you an antidote.”
“No,” Jason snaps, and Dick’s eyes shutter.
“Don’t be like this, Jay, please. You won’t even have to see Bruce if you don’t want to, I’ll tell him to clear out. It’ll just be me and you, maybe Alfred. What if it’s dangerous?”
“It’s always dangerous,” Jay bites out. “I’ve been managing myself for this long while you’ve been off galivanting with dear old dad and the toddler terror, don’t go growing an aching heart now.”
Dick’s eyelid twitches twice. “I just want to help you, Jay." He pauses, frown deepening. "You’re my brother.”
And there goes the camel’s back.
“Bye, Dickface,” Jason says flatly. He doesn’t look back to see if Dick moves after him. “Don’t follow me, or I won’t get help.”
“Bye, Jay,” Dick whispers after him, and Jason keeps walking.