Chapter Text
Bodies writhe when hanged. They just do. It doesn't matter if the victim is conscious or not, the body’s instinct for self-preservation overrides everything else and in a moment when oxygen is denied, it will fight viciously for a single breath. Even when every movement it makes only pulls the rope tighter around its victims neck. Closing of their larynx. Face blue and eyes rolling back.
Jason has seen hangings before. As a child they were a cruel warning used by gangs against sneaks, whistle-blowers and anyone else who dared to step out of line. As an adult they're reminders that there are worse ways to die and even worst ways to live. There a few things that make chills run down his spine the way a hanging does.
They reach the warehouse just as a triumphant reverie sounds from the floors below and a familiar figure is wrenched off the ground kicking and flailing in the air. Noose slung tight around his throat, taut and tense with his weight.
His little brother dangles like a slab of meat over blood thirsty thugs and Jason is caught between screaming in outrage and trembling with fear.
But he's beaten to it when a furious cry from his ear piece tells him that Nightwing has seen the same thing. It's less than 5 seconds later when he watches the older vigilante fall through the skylight with a deafening crash just as Jason finally manages to still his aim and fire.
The bullet slices through the rope. There's a thud, a second of stillness that seems to stretch itself into hours and then, a gasp.
A dry painful choked rasp and god, Jason has never felt anything give him so much relief in his life. The loud thumping in his ears that had been his heartbeat slows to a steady space as he climbs down from the rafters and by the time he lands on the ground, Nightwing has already managed to lead most the goons away from Tim, leaving a few trails of his handiwork strewn unconscious across the cement floor and several others trying to shoot at him behind wooden crates.
Jason reaches Tim's side to find the kid writhing desperately with the rope around his neck. Blood is seeping through tears in his suit and a crimson trail running down the right side of his temple speaks of more wounds beneath the cowl. Purple blue spots were blooming on his cheek but the way he struggles against nonexistent attackers speaks more of the torment he's been put through than anything else.
Because Tim has been missing for the last 48 hours.
48 hours from when Dick had knocked on Jason’s door asking for help.
37 hours since Bruce had attached himself to the computer doing active searches that come to nothing.
26 hours since they’d found Damian skipping school to look for clues in broad daylight
12 hours since Jason had wondered why this has gotten him so deeply vexed and bothered in the first place.
And exactly 2 seconds since he realized exactly why they were all fucking right to be worried.
And with that realization, a more familiar feeling stirs in his chest.
Nightmare fuel. All of it. Jason knows, the image of the younger bat screaming, thrashing and calling out to their older brother will haunt him in his sleep. But for the moment he feels nothing except for a vicious snarl of rage roll under his skin. Gritting his teeth and curling his knuckles, he barely holds himself back from chasing after Nightwing to help put down the culprits responsible. To shoot down every one of them who thought it was funny to string up a kid barely out of his teens.
Even hours later after he'd managed to drag his brothers back to the cave, after hours of carefully pulling out splinters from the bloody mess that was Tims arm, after even longer hours of watching said brother sleep off the drugs in his system, he still feels the anger from earlier unfurl and simmer under his forced calm.
It's bemusing really, the intensity of his emotions for someone he had tried to kill only a few years back.
But then he thinks about thin, pale, seething Tim sitting outside his apartment 3 weeks after he’d buried their older brother and he realizes there’s nothing perplexing at all about any of it really.
He shifts in his seat, turning his eyes away from the rise and fall of the heart monitor and instead takes to watching the rise and fall of Tim’s chest. His small, fragile figure so different from the frowning, affronted teen who chastised Jason when the older man had offered him a beer- and so very different from the teen that had offered him a second chance from outside a prison cell a week later. Whether that chance was deserved is an entirely different discussion all together. Ultimately Jason’s a pretty different person than he was a year ago. Hell he’s a pretty different person than he was a few months ago and as he continues to stare at the still figure on the bed, he realizes he can’t displace Tim from that timeline of change any more than he can Bruce or Bizzaro and damn them all. Because while he can’t deny the good this change has brought him, everything that’s happened in the past two days reminds him how much he stands to lose standing on this side of the fence. Reminds him what it means to live and accept the pain of it instead of turning your back and allowing yourself to scream.
He’s not Dick. He doesn’t really see family as something as important as he does. He never did. He never had a family. Not a real one. His mother had been too busy snorting coke to give a damn about feeding her son and his dad is a faded memory at the back of his mind he can barely recall. Bruce had filled those shoes instead for a while and it had been nice. If he hadn’t died he probably would’ve started seeing family as important as Dick kept emphasizing it was. But he did and he hadn’t.
But then he thinks of Tim, sitting all alone in his room with so much time and so little people to care about him that he’d managed to moonlight as Robin for months. He thinks about Tim who lost his older brother and tried to find another one in the guy who’s tried to kill him more than once. He thinks about Damian who still wakes up in the middle of the night clutching his stomach for a wound that isn’t there and calling out for a mother who put him in a coffin. He thinks about cass who never drifts too far from Bruce or Stephanie in public, the way she shrinks away when strangers at galas and balls remark that she’s ‘special’.
He thinks about how they’re all just fucked up kids, looking for family and safety with other fucked up people trying their best and maybe that’s the only way they’ll ever find family.
But than his thoughts are pulled away by the image of Dick pallid and gaunt, lips still blue under his oxygen mask and surrounded by blankets. A ‘Batman’ who sat by his side looking like he was one flat-line away from falling apart and he can't help but wonder if this 'family' has any chance of surviving in the first place.
Jason’s melancholic reverie is broken when Tim lets out a groan and he’s barely on his feet before the injured vigilante was already trying to push himself up.
“I swear to god Tim, if you don’t get back down I’m going to tie you down,” Jason growls. The threat is empty but nonetheless he doesn’t take his hands off Tim’s shoulders though the young detective doesn’t relent until, “He’s fine Tim. He’s ok” Jason sooths and almost instantly Tim relaxes and half eases, half collapses back on to his bed as if he’d used up any energy he’d managed to reserve from his restless sleep. But his eyes continue to stare at Jason as he makes his way back to his seat, inching it closer to the bed.
There’s a second of reluctant silence before Jason places an arm on to the mattress. He doesn’t do anything else but it seems enough when Tim slowly closes his eyes and drifts back into a more peaceful slumber.
Jason brushes his knuckles gently against the bruises etched just above Tim’s wrist. He leans back, takes a deep sobering breath, and sighs. Before his fingers move to gingerly clasp his brother’s hand, a smirk tugging at his lips when Tim grips it back.