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Jason has emptied the last gas can and is reaching for his matchbook when he hears it. He pauses with his hand in his pocket. One of the gang members? He left them unconscious and zip-tied in the alley, because he’s going through a phase of good behaviour and burning the warehouse down with them inside would definitely earn him a disappointed lecture from Bruce—who has time for that?
The sound comes again. Faint and high-pitched, maybe a young child crying for help. Jason moves his hand to his holster, just in case. He stalks around the empty cans and into the next room, where the gang had been storing their goods.
Most of the crates were upended and smashed in the scuffle. The room is filled with splintered wood, splattered blood, the lingering scent of gunpowder. There are not many places for someone to hide—and why would there be a kid here, anyway—but Jason crosses the room anyway and looks under the workbench. Nothing. His skin prickles with frustration, and he tears off his helmet.
“Hey,” he says, keeping his voice light and steady. “You can come out, kid. It’s safe.”
Silence echoes back at him. Jason swallows the metal taste in his mouth. He’s got a handle on the Pit now, but his hair-trigger temper is even worse than before his death. You’re not going to lose it on a terrified kid, you fucking asshole. He closes his eyes and listens for a shuffle, for a scrape, for a whimper.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I promise.”
The sound again: a tiny and inhuman cry, from impossibly small lungs. Jason squeezes his eyes shut even tighter. You have to be fucking kidding me. He jams his hand into his pocket, gripping his matchbook, but he doesn’t withdraw it. He isn’t stupid enough to set the place alight with a cat inside—the baby assassin would somehow know about it by the morning, and would turn all of his middle-schooler wrath on Jason, which was arguably more annoying than Bruce’s lectures.
“Get out of here, you bastard,” Jason says, setting his hands on his hips. The cat—a kitten, must be—gives another cry. He follows the sound and climbs through the broken crates until he finds one mostly intact, and behind it, a bundle of black fuzz. “You picked a shit place to hide.”
He scoops it out with one gloved hand. It wails again, but it doesn’t fight back, only wriggles uncertainly in Jason’s grip. He tucks the animal into his jacket and fetches his matchbook with his free hand, whistling.
He means to dump the cat as soon as the warehouse is lit up, but instead he finds himself on a nearby roof, grouched like a gargoyle, one hand inside his jacket to stroke the kitten’s soft forehead while he watches the cops wrestle the gang members into their vans. The animal is quiet, shivering faintly against his chest. He looks down. Two gleaming blue eyes look up.
Jason sighs. He should take it to a shelter, but they’ll be closed till morning, and he’s not a big enough dirtbag to box it up and leave it on their doorstep. Who knows what would get at it in the mean time. And he really doesn’t have the energy to deal with Damian’s wrath.
“One night,” he says, “and then you can fuck off back where you came from.”
Back at his safehouse-turned-apartment, he unearths the kitten from his jacket. The thing makes a pitiful noise and squirms again.
“I know, jeez,” he says, and sets it on the floor. It totters away on stick-straight legs. Jason doesn’t know shit about cats, though he thinks this one must be pretty young. Shouldn’t it have a mother? Siblings? He watches as it unsteadily navigates the apartment and wedges itself under the couch.
There were stray cats in Crime Alley when Jason was a kid—ornery things with missing ears and scars from being kicked around by the street kids. They all learned to run at the first sight of people. Once he befriended a small, underfed thing—both too young to understand the danger. He used to save scraps of his dinner and leave them outside, until Willis caught him and beat him soundly for it, and by then the cat had learned the risks, also, and stayed away.
Jason goes to the bathroom and takes a hot shower, scrubbing until his skin is pink and tender. He changes into well-worn sweatpants and a t-shirt with holes at the collar. When he returns to the living room, the kitten has wriggled out from the couch and is crouched beneath his coffee table. It cries when he walks by.
“Okay, okay,” he says. “What’s the matter now? Hungry?”
He opens his fridge. There’s some leftover takeout for him, though he doesn’t imagine the cat would enjoy Thai food. He sifts through the other options: a half-empty carton of orange juice, unopened bottle of barbecue sauce, opened case of beer. God. He thinks about the fridge at the manor, which Alfred always keeps impeccably stocked, and the fridge in his parents’ old apartment, which looked more like this one. Maybe it’s not the Pit that messed him up; maybe he didn’t bury those pieces deep enough and they’re all just coming to the surface. Those three years in the manor weren’t enough to wash him clean.
Jason grits his teeth, swallows, and grabs the cream for his coffee. Nearly empty. Enough to fill a small dish. He sets it on the ground and slides it under the table. He’ll have to drink his coffee black in the morning, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
The kitten comes out when it’s finished, mouth and nose dripping wet. Jason is sitting on the floor with his legs outstretched, empty takeout containers beside him. It crawls over his knees, little claws pricking him through his pants, and stumbles off the other side. Keeps going. Gets all the way to the door, where Jason has left his steel toes lying on the ground, and pounces on the laces.
He pushes to his knees and shuffles over. The kitten scurries away, but it returns only a moment later, tail flicking as he unthreads one of the laces.
“This is what you want?” Jason says. He drags it across the floor. The kitten bounces after it, giving a tiny, ferocious growl. What the hell am I doing, he thinks, but they keep playing.
Eventually the animal wears itself out. Jason moves to the couch, kitten cradled in one hand, and flicks the TV on. He stretches out on the cushions and settles the kitten on his stomach. It curls into a tight ball, and when Jason rubs his finger under its chin, its entire body vibrates with the force of its purrs.
“I’m going to call you Timmy,” he says. Something about its pointy face and sad blue eyes. Jason pats it on the head and resigns himself to spending a night on the couch.
Is it warm enough, he wonders. Full enough. Healthy enough.
Batman had cleaned up the foster system all those years ago, but there are always things that sneak under the radar. This is Gotham. Maybe the shelter system is the same. Maybe they love creatures like this one: young, defenseless, smaller than Jason’s boot.
He thinks about the way it had climbed over his legs, fearless and trusting because he had fed it, because he had not hurt it, and his chest aches.
Jason does not bring it to a shelter.
Instead he goes to the store and gets more cream, which he shares, and a can of cat food, which he empties into another dish and sets on the ground. The kitten eats until its stomach is round, and then it sleeps. Then it wakes and eats some more, and runs around, swatting at Jason’s ankles.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” he says, to both of them.
He doesn’t need a cat. Doesn’t want one. What happens if he backslides—if he loses control again? He doesn’t think he would turn his rage onto something so small and weak, but look at what he did to Robin.
Jason crouches, and the kitten scurries to him. “Just for now,” he says. It bites at his hand, teeth sharp as pins. He rolls it gently onto its back. The kitten wriggles and squirms, then tumbles to its feet and bounds away.
He hasn’t been back to the manor since—you know. Sometimes he hangs out in the cave, debriefing and patching up scrapes after patrol, and everyone acts normal about it. Everyone except Bruce, who stares mournfully at Jason whenever he thinks Jason won’t notice.
But the manor is different.
Jason slides from his motorcycle and climbs the front steps with the kitten squirming unhappily in his jacket. “Hang on,” he mutters, and bangs his fist on the door. The day is warm and humid, but he shivers anyway.
When the door opens, it’s not Alfred, like he expected, and not Damian, like he hoped. Instead Bruce stands on the other side, looking surprised and panicked and relieved all at once.
“Jay,” he says, tentatively. “You—”
“Where’s the brat?”
Bruce blinks at him. “Oh,” he says, and his mouth slants uncertainly. When he speaks again, it’s rushed—like as long as he keeps talking, Jason will keep standing there. “Alfred is picking Damian up from school. He stayed late for a club. They should be home shortly. You can—”
Jason shifts back on his heels.
“Would you like to wait inside,” Bruce says, breathing out.
He winces internally and tries to come up with a casual retreat. Something that won’t make Bruce worry, because then he’ll follow Jason; something that won’t cut too deeply, because as much as Jason hates him, he doesn’t need anything else to keep him up at night.
“I have some—errands,” he says. “I’ll come back later.”
The kitten wails inside his jacket. He and Bruce look down. Don’t fucking blow this for me, Jason thinks, but the damage is already done.
He closes his eyes. “Fine. I’ll wait inside.”
Jason made his escape twenty minutes later when Damian arrived home, sweeping into the room with the air of a spoiled prince and immediately taking control of the situation.
He enjoys three days without cats or birds getting in his way. Every night he catches a glimpse of them in the distance: wisps of shadow on the rooftops, flashes of red and green in the dark. He feels good about things. He went to the manor and left in one piece, and it didn’t shatter the careful equilibrium they had established. And then Red Robin alights on the roof beside him, light-footed as always, and Jason thinks, Jesus fucking Christ.
The boy hooks his grapple onto his belt and drops down beside Jason, dangling his legs over the edge. Jason scowls under his helmet. Part of him is annoyed that Tim isn’t afraid, after everything he did. A larger part of him is grateful.
“Is it true that you gave Damian a kitten?” Tim says.
Jason groans. It comes through his voice modulator as a growl. “Don’t make it sound like it was his fucking birthday.”
“You gave him a kitten.”
He waits for something to interrupt them—gunshots, sirens, screaming—but Gotham is calm. Tim keeps swinging his legs. Jason thinks about the foot of space between them. Probably less space than he deserved, after everything he had done. And he thinks about the kitten crawling over his knees.
“Did you really name it after me?”
“Oh, piss off,” Jason says, and gives him a shove.
Home is a wound that Jason cannot leave alone. He knows it needs time and space to heal, but instead he worries it constantly, flushes it out, scrubs it clean, keeps it bandaged and festering.
He is careful this time and checks Bruce’s calendar—the one he shares with everyone in the family, Jason included. Tim is at his own place in Gotham, Cass is with Steph, and Dick is in Bludhaven. Alfred will be home, which is okay. Damian, too, but as he said: sacrifices.
Jason strides through the door without knocking. The key to any con is, of course, confidence. He unlaces his boots and sets them neatly to the side. I can be here if I want. He doesn’t care what Bruce thinks, but he cares about Alfred, and this house. It’s my house too. The butler appears from the kitchen as though summoned by Jason’s thoughts, wiping his hands dry with a towel, and looks unsurprised, like this is a regular occurrence.
“Master Jason,” he says warmly. “It is good to see you. I believe Master Damian is upstairs.”
“Uh, right.” Jason shuffles awkwardly. “Thanks, Alfie.”
He goes upstairs and looks at the hallway of doors. He remembers which one is Dick’s. He knows his old room and Bruce’s master bedroom. The others he does not know, but Damian keeps his door cracked open. Jason sees it as a warning rather than a welcome. He makes sure his footsteps are loud, and though he nudges the door, he does not enter the room. He doesn’t like the kid, but he understands Damian better than either of them would like, he thinks, and he doesn’t actually enjoy digging his fingers into those hurts.
“Brat,” he says. Damian is bowed over his desk, pencil moving swiftly across his sketchbook. He doesn’t look up. Jason accepts the non-response for what it is and steps inside, leaving the door cracked behind him.
Alfred the cat is sitting on the windowsill. Timmy the kitten is asleep on the bed, splayed out like it had fallen asleep mid-stride. He rummages in his pockets and drops a few cat toys onto the blankets: little sewn mice and plastic strings, a shoelace, a crinkly foil ball.
Then he looks at the desk. Damian is watching, quiet and serious, that familiar scowl on his face. The boy turns back to his sketch and says, “Were you aware that Timmy is a female?”
Jason stays longer than he means to, sitting on Damian’s rug and dragging the shoelace around for Timmy to chase. Alfred the cat watches unhappily from the sill, his tail flicking. I know that feeling, Jason thinks, but then Damian moves to the bed and the older cat moves to his lap, and all is well again.
Then he sees the time. Jason makes a hasty excuse and slips into the hall, hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders hunched defensively. The kitten goes after his ankles, but he outpaces her. He descends the stairs, spots his boots set neatly by the door. It’s my house too.
But he’s too late. Bruce is already inside, shedding his jacket and handing it to Alfred. He looks up and sees Jason halfway down the stairs. His eyes shift higher. Jason turns; Damian is standing at the top with Alfred the cat in his arms, and Timmy at his feet, staring down the enormous steps.
Jason turns back. There is something new on Bruce’s face, knowing and pleased, that makes Jason bristle defensively.
“I’m glad you two are getting along,” Bruce says, with a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth, “but please, no more pets.”