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1
The first time, he gets the text when he’s in line at the grocery store, shopping basket full of bricks of frozen stir fry because it keeps well and the single-serving sized bags of salt and vinegar potato chips because there’s a display of them at the end of the candy rack and he is weak. The lady in front of him is taking her time teaching her six-ish-year-old how to work the self checkout, so it sits in his phone, unchecked, for another twelve minutes while Jason leans against the candy rack and sighs. He looks over the woman’s head once to meet the eye of the store employee stationed nearby in case of user error, and gets in return the dead-eyed stare of someone who’s worked retail far too long to experience empathy anymore.
He gets to it while he’s waiting for the employee to decide to respond to the cry for help Jason’s checkout gave when he fed it an overly wrinkled bill- the blood’s mostly been washed out of it, it’s just the texture resulting from being run through the wash a couple times that’s causing the issue. Unknown number, three words- you owe me.
He only needs one hand to count the number of people he owes favors to, and one finger to count the number who would expect to get any sort of positive response to something like this. He tears open a chip bag and pops a chip into his mouth and taps his answer out one-handed while the employee finally approaches.
The answer comes immediately, while the employee frowns at the wrinkled bill and Jason offers a helpless shrug. Once the guy’s gone again, heading off to swap the wrinkled bill with a fresh one, Jason looks at his phone again, and sighs.
Why, he taps out, and gets the girl shrugging emoji in response, and he sighs again.
Just above his question is a selfie of Dick Grayson, hair ruffled from its usual neat coif and awkward grimace on his face instead of his favorite fake smile- and Harley Quinn beside him, arm hooked around his neck and chin on his shoulder. Worse yet, it’s a picture of a picture- he can see the white around the edges and the top half of the text under the bottom of the photo, like it’s a screenshot from a news site. He goes to look it up and gets as far as d-i-c before google helpfully autofills and shows him the latest news tweets. Harley Quinn has taken Richard Grayson hostage and has been sending threatening photos to various news outlets. Everyone is terrified. No one knows where they are. Everyone is terrified. Batman has been contacted and has not responded. Did they mention everyone is terrified?
Jason saves the number under Cass’ name in his contact list, replacing the previous cell number. She trades them out impressively fast, although Dick had confirmed one time that it was more to do with how she treats her phones than any sort of security concern.
send me the address and I’ll be there in thirty, he tells her, and gets a string of emojis back- happy faces, little pink hearts, a clock face, hands pressed together like in prayer. One of them has no idea how emojis actually work, and he’s pretty sure it’s not Cass.
He flips back over to the search results. It hadn’t shown in the picture Cass had sent, but in the photo being used by most of the internet, Dick is holding his hand in just such a way, a subtle twist of his wrist, the slight angle of his fingers. He’s giving the Batfam all clear sign.
“Oh, shit, someone kidnapped Grayson?” the store employee asks, having returned with a fresh, unwrinkled bill. “That sucks, man, he’s the best Wayne. Hope they get him back alright.”
He’s not being sarcastic, either, from the genuinely concerned look on his face. Jason powers his phone screen down and grabs the new bill and turns away.
Just for that, he’s gonna be a few minutes late.
---
Red Hood walks into the warehouse- because of course it’s a warehouse- to find i utterly, echoingly empty save for Harley crouching awkwardly beside the chair Grayson’s tied to, phone held out where they can both see it and one earbud for each of them.
“Really?” Red Hood asks. He hadn’t expected much, but he’d still walked in guns first, and he holsters them. It’s just tweedledee and tweedledum in an empty warehouse with a pile of barrels in one distant corner, no goons, no killing puzzles.
“Shush!” Harley scolds, waving her free hand at him in the universal volume-down gesture. “We’re watching videos of a skinny gay guy cooking old recipes and getting mad at them, I’m not torturing him, I promise.”
He closes distance and stands in front of them, looking down at the phone, which Harley begrudgingly angles so he can see the screen a little better. His HUD scans it and pulls up the account- surprisingly, Harley’s description is pretty accurate.
He doesn’t really know where Harley stands in regards to the whole secret identity thing, so Red Hood plays his part. “Playtime’s over, Wayne has to get back to flirting with underwear models,” he says.
Harley sighs theatrically but turns off the video and tucks the phone and her half of the earbuds into Grayon’s jacket pocket. “Give me a two-minute headstart before you blow the place, okay?” she says.
“Blow the place?” Red Hood echoes before he can stop himself. Harley, already a few steps away, turns on her heel and shrugs at him.
“Ask pretty boy, I just provide the booms and the bad-guy-face for a fee,” she says, and spins around again and breaks into a run.
Red Hood looks down at Grayson, who shrugs, already shaking the ropes off his wrists. “She’s a serious businesswoman now, what can I say,” he says.
“Do I want to know?” Red Hood asks.
“Not really,” Grayson says, face briefly wrinkled in thought. There’s a bruise blooming around one eye and another on his jaw. Harley had hit him- no, he’d let Harley hit him. Small difference- the difference between rolling his eyes at the theatrics, and hunting Harley down tonight. “It’s stupid, but not the kind of stupid you can hold over my head later. You bring a box of matches?”
The barrels in the corner. Red Hood turns towards them for a moment and digs into his jacket pocket. “I think we can go a little higher-tech than that,” he says, turning the smoke bomb over in his fingers. It’ll be just a little explosion, but that will start the chain reaction. “So we’re going with daring rescue, here?”
“Yup,” Grayson says.
He’s heading towards the entrance Red Hood came in through. Red Hood follows him at a casual stroll, setting the pace even if he has no real idea what’s going on. “Expecting someone else? Batgirl, maybe?”
“She’s busy,” Grayson says, and gestures impatiently towards the barrels.
Red Hood takes his time setting the timer and tossing the bomb over, then hustles Grayson out in a gentle hurry. They’re halfway to his bike- he long ago learned the lesson about leaving his only transport too close to explodable buildings- when the warehouse goes up.
“I should make you walk,” Red Hood says as they watch the flames billow. A traffic helicopter is already peeling off its route to come over and investigate.
“Then they won’t get the rescue shot,” Grayson says, and flashes his most winning smile when the blank face of the red helmet turns to stare at him.
They get the rescue shot, the traffic chopper following them to the nearest hospital. Grayson spends the ride pressed tight to his back, face mostly hidden against his shoulder and arms around his chest, a steady pressure that makes Red Hood’s heart skip uncomfortably every so often. Red Hood leaves him at the hospital and breaks a few traffic laws to see if the chopper is following him, and heads home when he’s content it isn’t.
It isn’t until that night, when Jason is poking at stir fry in a pan that definitely isn’t a wok, that he pulls up the news again and figures it out.
Nightwing had been out in broad daylight, a rare spotting of a strictly nocturnal bird, busting up some minor drug ring. The blue-chevroned blur in the picture has dark hair that is slightly too long, a body that is too short and too lean, although it would take being very familiar with Nightwing to spot the difference. The article is almost pushed off the digital front page, though, buried under the reports of Red Hood’s daring rescue of Gotham’s darling Dick Grayson, who had spent all day kidnapped and definitely wasn’t swinging around rooftops at any point.
“Ah,” Jason says, and tends to his stir fry before it can burn.
2
The second time is less- benign.
“If you’re trying to convince people you’re harmless,” Jason says, biting and cold and furious, although he can’t say if it was more at Dick or himself- “stop dragging me into it. I don’t need people thinking I’m connected to the Wayne family.”
“This one got a little bit out of hand,” Dick admits, looking into the mirror to grant Jason the reflection of a rueful smile through his soaked bangs, and then ducks his head again, blindly trying to angle himself so the water flowing from the faucet washes away the blood knotting the hair at the back of his head.
Jason puts a hand on the nape of his neck and shifts him just a little. Dick goes with it, his whole body swaying slightly as he adjusts his stance. The feeling of him, unresisting, following Jason’s lead, twists something under his ribs, kicks off the same uncomfortable heart-skipping as the feeling of his arms around Jason’s chest.
He lets go steps away, and Dick reaches up to carefully scrub at his hair, water running pink as it sluices down his neck.
“Someone get too close to figuring you out?” Jason asks after a moment, not wanting to speak but not really able to stand the small hurt noises filling the silence.
“Yeah,” Dick says tiredly, and turns off the water and straightens up. His shirt’s stained around the collar, but then again, his lip’s split and his nose was bleeding and his hands are a bloody-knuckled mess, so it’s not like anyone’s gonna need to see the blood on his shirt to figure out shit went down. “The thing with Harley last month- had to be two places at once, you know,” he says.
Jason doesn’t know. He doesn’t have a civilian identity worth protecting. “Sure,” he says.
“This time, I had to come up with a reason why Dick Grayson has so many bruises,” Dick says. “So.” And he gestures around them.
“You decided to yell fire in a coal mine,” Jason says, and Dick shrugs.
Which- no, what he did was in many ways worse than that. And Jason will take that to his grave, those memories of Dick in the bar, laughing and sharp-eyed, gripping the pool cue like he was giving it a handjob, leaning over to whisper in the ear of the man voted most likely to be massively homophobic. Before Dick decided to start tossing matches in a firework factory, it had been a great time for all involved.
He’d had the good sense to let Jason drag him away when the drunks started breaking bottles to use as weapons, at least, and now they’re in a McDonald’s half a block away, listening to the sirens wail as the police descend on the bar Dick had turned into a scene from Fight Club. He doesn’t have any real injuries except that one crack to the back of the head, and Jason doesn’t even have that much, and the cashier had happily taken Dick’s offer of a thousand dollars to not care about complaints about someone hogging the men’s bathroom.
It wasn’t how Jason had expected to spend the evening, when Dick texted him to ask if he had plans, but he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t expected something to go down.
Dick leans a hip against the sink and pulls his phone out. He pulls a face, caught between a satisfied smile and a grimace. “And there we go,” he says.
Jason doesn’t need to look at the headlines. He’s seen them before- dumb, horny, pretty Dick Grayson, starting fights at bars by thinking with his- well, his dick. Everyone who knows Dick knows those headlines are so much bullshit, and knows why they’re necessary.
Still, it has to sting.
“If that’s all you needed,” Jason says. He’s still feeling cold, ice flowing through his veins. He needs to leave.
“Yes,” Dick says, and glances at Jason and away again quickly. “Thanks, Jay. It’s easier to pull back when there’s someone else around.”
It’s easier to hide how vicious he is when there’s someone around to be scared of him, he means, and Jason is gracious enough to let Dick get away just this once with thinking he could ever scare him.
“Next time get the replacement for that,” Jason says, and it’s easy enough to say it, no matter if he means it, and pushes through the door and doesn’t look back.
It stays with him anyway, that memory of Dick- alone, bloody, wet, beaten and tired.
+1
The third time-
(“don’t take me to the cave,” red hood says, gasps between belabored breaths.
“all right,” nightwing says steadily, tone controlled, hands unflinching. he’s agreed to this a dozen times already. he’ll agree a thousand times if it keeps red hood from fighting him right now.
the bullet finally pulls free and drops from the tweezers to clatter to the floor and red hood tries to jerk upright and look around. he grabs for his gun- still on his belt, dropped in the entryway- and curls his hand into a fist when he can’t find it.
“easy,” nightwing soothes. he dares to reach up and brush a hand through jason’s bangs, blue-striped fingers tracing through the shock of white. red hood turns his face into the gentle touch, starved for positive attention, and nightwing’s heart breaks a little bit more.
the medkit red hood had left here, in this tiny little house in the suburbs, is not equipped for this. nightwing’s already had to bootstrap a painkiller cocktail and boil his equipment in microwaved water. there’s gauze pads and sutures but not enough of either, and nightwing’s streamlined suit doesn’t allow for much carrying space for extra supplies, and red hood’s body armor had taken the worst of it but the one bullet had gone up through his armpit into his shoulder and there’s so many important things there that could be fucked up beyond nightwing’s ability to repair-
he should have taken him to the cave, he knows- but if jason woke up there, drugged and injured and vulnerable, he would never trust dick again.
red hood relaxes again, drops his head back onto the cushion of his folded-up jacket. his good arm and both legs from knees down dangle off the kitchen table nightwing’s co-opted as a surgical bed. maybe that homebrewed painkiller is finally kicking in.
maybe nightwing should start carrying morphine.
“you came for me,” red hood says, a minute- an eternity- later, sounding like he’s only just now realized dick’s here. nightwing is probing his collarbone for signs of breaks and hums a single note in agreement. “didn’t think you would.”
“you called for me,” nightwing points out, and looks up at his face again. it had come as a total shock, when the alert came to him to tell him that red hood’s helmet was breached. it’ll show on jason’s face in the coming days, bruises blooming dark and ugly across his fair skin. he wouldn’t be able to go out for a while even without a couple of extra holes poked through him. “didn’t think you would,” he echoes, wry and self-deprecating. he knows how thin the ice is under his feet.
“had to be you,” jason says, and grits his teeth on a groan and arches away. “couldn’t be anyone else,” he says, when he’s settled, nightwing’s hands gone still on his body. “can’t trust anyone else, not like this. only you.”
he knows- arrogant of him to say it, but it’s been true for years- everyone gets a crush on dick, sooner or later. he knows jason isn’t immune, has heard the catch of breath, felt the increased heart rate, seen hands reaching towards him. he has said nothing, done nothing, because it’s not his business, not really. except-
this is a conversion that needs to be had when both parties are awake and aware- this is a conversation that will never happen if both parties are awake and aware.
he aches to lean over and press a kiss to jason’s forehead, to whisper soft words into his ear. aside from another gentle sweep of his fingers to brush jason’s bangs out of his eyes, he keeps his touch strictly professional.
“we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he says, sickened with the lead-weight certainty that they would not be talking about it ever, and focuses on red hood’s wounds once more.
they don’t talk about it tomorrow.)
- Jason doesn’t remember, not much, not really.
It takes a while for him to figure out what he missed.
3
The third time, he almost doesn’t go when he gets the emergency signal. He’s not the closest- Nightwing’s beacon puts him in the northwest of Gotham, far away from Red Hood’s current prowlings near the waterfront. The others had been out, even the Bat himself putting in an appearance on the streets tonight, working to mop up something one of the frequent fliers cooked up. Nightwing should, by all rights, be calling on them, or Oracle, or even just yelling loud enough to be heard by one specific pair of ears in Metropolis-
But it’s Red Hood who gets it, small red light blinking persistently in the corner of his HUD as he follows the signal.
He finds Nightwing on a roof, huddled against the supporting strut for a rooftop billboard in a pointless attempt to stay out of the heavy mist that’s dampening everything. Nightwing looks up at him, face pale under the mask, heartbeat erratic enough for the sensors in Red Hood’s helmet to pick up on it, and suddenly he’s grateful he didn’t ignore it.
“Crane?” he asks, keeping his movements slow and steady as he approaches and crouches down out of kicking range, but close enough to make a lunge-and-grab, just in case.
“The antidote mostly works on this variant,” Nightwing says with a strained, slightly manic smile, tossing a single-serve injector on the ground between them. His hands are shaking and his legs are drawn up tight to his chest, but he’s doing a pretty good job of not showing too many outward signs of whatever’s going on in his head.
“The others let you go back on patrol like this?” Red Hood asks, careful to keep all judgment out of his voice. He’s plenty judging, but exclusively of the rest of the family. They all know better than to expect rational thinking from someone exposed to Crane’s toxins, no matter how stable they may seem afterwards.
“They didn’t know,” Nightwing says, and he groans. Paranoia, then, and slow-acting so it’s gonna linger for hours.
Red Hood starts going through his mental file on Dick’s various boltholes. He’s going to need someplace safe and secure, someplace he feels comfortable, someplace he won’t associate with trauma- so no Manor, no Bludhaven, none of Jason’s safehouses.
“Good with touch?” he asks, going through the steps that had been drilled into his head often enough he could recite them in his sleep. Nightwing could be brutal even without the added kick of being cornered and potentially hallucinating.
He takes far too long considering it, and ends it with a shrug and a falsely bright, “I don’t know, let’s find out,” which is not reassuring, Richard. But-
He called for Red Hood. Not the Bat that raised him, not the redbirds he calls his brothers, not even his badass sister. That probably means something.
Red Hood circles him, coming from the side- he’s been kicked by Nightwing before, he’ll take a whack from an escrima anyday over that- and gently, slowly reaches out. Nightwing watches him, eyes probably dilated to hell behind his mask, and barely flinches when Red Hood’s fingers brush over his hand, then close around his wrist.
“Still good?” Red Hood asks. He won’t fully trust a yes, but a no is a hard line he won’t cross.
Nightwing is, at least, aware enough to realize he needs to answer. “Yeah,” he says, staring at the hand on his arm like it’s something new and strange, and turns his own hand over to grab at Red Hood’s wrist.
They move together in increments, neither of them comfortable with the poorly-defined lines of Nightwing’s current limits. Red Hood isn’t keen on getting his helmet cracked open, and Nightwing probably doesn’t want to trigger some sort of attack and lose what little hold on reality he’s got, so they test the water before easing in, uncurling and standing in fits and starts, supporting and propping up where necessary.
It ends with Nightwing draped against Red Hood’s side, arms around waists and shoulders. He’s all hard muscle and tight-weave body armor but he still feels soft, body warm and pliant against Red Hood’s, head lolling against his shoulder. It feels- blindly, stupidly, Dick really should know better- like trust.
He’s soaked, and shivering a little in spite of the late summer night heat, and Red Hood grunts at him, irrationally irritated by the height difference between them and the kink he can already feel developing along his spine down his neck. He’d toss the idiot over a shoulder and carry him, but that lack of control might be what breaks Nightwing’s fragile grip on himself. Red Hood can deal with it, albeit with an appropriate amount of bitching later.
“Why didn’t you just call one of the birds,” he says, mostly to himself- a little to Nightwing, he’s present enough for a bit of a scolding. “I was an hour out, you’ve probably got- a cold now.” He cuts himself off, course-corrects from his doomspiraling. No need to feed the flames.
Nightwing mumbles his answer into the shoulder of Red Hood’s leather jacket, muffled and indistinct. He seems to realize the problem after a moment and lifts his head and tries again.
“I wanted it to be you,” he says, simple and plain, and Red Hood snorts and scoffs and looks away and tries very hard to smother that emotion that’s ripping right through him, gutting him and spreading him open. That is stupid, not- not-
He can’t name it. It’s tying knots in his throat and kicking his ribs and burning like acid in his veins all the same.
“I’m gonna give you hell over this when you’re better,” he says instead, when he can trust his voice again.
“Mm-hmm,” Nightwing agrees wordlessly, then collapses gently against his shoulder again, leaving Red Hood to drag his deadweight ass to someplace safe.
He wakes up in the morning, sober and dry and warm and cozy in the bed of an apartment he’s had for years, and Jason is cooking himself breakfast in the kitchen with his shoulders hiked up to his ears, ready to bolt at the first comment.
They don’t talk about it now, either, but it sits heavy in the air between them, soon, soon.
4
The fourth time is probably the only one Dick really counts as a rescue, instead of just business as usual. Jason is less inclined towards generosity, especially when it leads to his evening off being interrupted by a constant stream of texts.
she’s an ara the first one says, and Jason’s shameless enough to admit he has to look that one up. He considers responding with a snippy observation about Dick making comments like that when he calls Aqualad and Beast Boy his good friends, then decides he shouldn’t really encourage this and sets his phone aside.
hardcore vegan, the next text reads. preachy kind.
she’s talking about her ex now, comes a few minutes later, and Jason gives up pretending he isn’t going to do something and rolls out of bed.
He finds them at a restaurant that’s upscale enough for Dickie Grayson to take a date to, but not so upscale that the maître d' is willing to physically deny entry to Jason, in his leather jacket and heavy boots. Dick, he sees, is at a table in the center of the room and, for someone who knows him, brimming with impatience- his foot is hooked around the leg of the chair in order to physically restrain himself from moving, his fingers pluck at the tablecloth down off the edge of the table where his date won’t see, his smile is plastic and cracking at the edges. He’s wearing a button-up shirt but hasn’t unbuttoned the collar or rolled up the sleeves, a sure sign he’s planning out his exit strategy.
The girl across from him looks vaguely familiar- a daughter of one of Wayne Enterprise’s executives, Jason remembers eventually. No wonder Dick had been live-texting his despair instead of coming up with ways to antagonize her into leaving- Bruce would probably give him hell.
Jason takes a moment, takes a breath, then strolls over.
“Dick, is that you?” he calls as he approaches, grunging it up with his very best inner city accent just because, and-
No one has ever thought of Jason as knight in shining armor material, but the way Dick looks at him in that moment- it’s enough to give a guy a complex.
“Excuse me,” his date says. She seems polite, baffled, unobjectionable. Dick might even have been lying about their date so far. Jason kind of feels sorry for her, but he’s committed now, so he might as well follow through.
“Oh, uh,” Dick says, his delighted relief shuttering away and confusion descending. “This is- Jay, right?”
“Yup,” Jason says, looking around for a- ah. There’s a waitress standing nearby with a pair of salads, watching them with absolutely no intention of intervening. Jason ducks over to lift the salads out of her hands. “Can you bring over an extra chair, please, I think I’d like to join them,” he says.
The waitress looks at Dick, who does an excellent job of looking too caught off-guard and unsure of himself to confirm or deny, then shrugs and moves away. His date, clearly sensing she was receiving no help from either quarter, turns to face Jason properly as he comes back over to the table.
“I’m Amalthia Bainbridge,” she says. Jason bites back his snort, then thinks better of it and lets it out. Credit where credit is due- Bruce never went in for the whole rich people names thing, and is perfectly content to let his kids keep running around with workaday names like Richard and Timothy.
“Just Jay,” he says, and sets the salads down. One goes to Dick, one to Jason, even though he’d rather eat old Batcave protein bars than what looks like a dry kale salad with a blue cheese crumble. “Should’ve asked her to bring silverware too,” he says, then shrugs, flicks some cheese away, and picks up the least offensive kale leaf with his fingers and shoves it into his mouth.
“I think that’s Amalthia’s,” Dick says faintly.
“It’s fine,” Amalthia says. She’s showing more gusto than Jasn expected- most of her peers would have hit the roof already. He is absolutely certain he can break her, though. “So how do you two…” she begins, falling back on manners.
“Know each other?” Jason finishes, picking up the question because he can’t bring himself to eat more kale. “We met at a bar. Dickie here decided to hit on a straight dude and nearly got his pretty face beaten in. Remember that?” he asks, reaching out to punch Dick in the shoulder.
He certainly remembers- that image of Dick in the McDonald’s bathroom has proven a persistent one.
“Oh,” Amalthia says, turning to Dick. “I hope everything was okay.”
Dick hesitates a second, caught between the desire to downplay potential injuries and the understanding that she’s never going to leave if he agrees with her and they present a united front to Jason. “Oh, uh,” he says- he’s stammered more in the last three minutes than in the first year Jason knew him. “It was okay. Jay was there.” And he flashes Jason a smile that borders on smitten.
Amalthia huffs and sits back in her chair. She has a hand on her little purse, a good sign. Jason looks at it, then looks her over again. Cotton and manmade fabrics, unless he misses his mark- no wool, no animal fiber of any sort, not even a leather band on her watch.
“What’s good here anyway?” Jason asks, not looking at Dick. He’ll figure it out, he’s a smart boy. “Lamb? Do they have lamb?”
Dick, mouth full of salad, looks up at him, then over at his date. He considers, chews, swallows, watches her some more. “They have veal,” he offers slowly.
“Veal!” Jason echoes happily. “I love veal.”
“It’s a calf,” Amalthia says, her tone cold as ice. “You’re literally eating a child.”
“Not a human child,” Jason says with a shrug, and she makes a muted noise of rage.
“Richard,” she says, turning to Dick expectantly.
“It’s on the menu, what do you want me to do about it?” he asks plaintively, and she makes that angry noise again and shoves her chair back and stands.
“I’ll call you later,” she says, grabbing up her purse and her jacket, and they all know she’s lying. Jason takes her spot once she’s gone.
There’s a moment of silence as they wait for the people at the tables around them, who are all silent and very pointedly not looking at them, to lose interest and return to their own meals. Then Dick looks at him and says, “You don’t actually eat veal.”
In truth, he’s not picky, and he’s been in plenty of spots where he couldn’t afford to have moral opinions on his food. He shrugs nevertheless. “Not if I can help it.”
“I was expecting you’d just call me with a fake emergency,” Dick says. The difference in him is immediate and profound- both hands on the table instead of in his lap where he can fidget and send texts unseen, body leaning forward towards the table instead of away into the back of the chair.
“That what you wanted?” Jason asks. He’d thought about it, but only when he was more than halfway to the restaurant already.
“Well, no, I expected that you’d blow me off entirely,” Dick admits with a wry smile. “I hadn’t gotten as far as figuring out what I wanted, aside from out of here.”
He could have gone to anyone else- almost everyone who’s ever spent five minutes in his presence would have been willing to bail him out. He’d gone to Jason instead, even believing Jason was less likely to respond, resigned to an agonizingly pleasant evening with a person he wouldn’t have ever gone on a date with if left to his own devices because he wouldn’t call on anyone else.
“Well, maybe I wanted to crash your shitty date,” Jason says.
He means it to be flip, but Dick looks at him like he hears the magnitudes beneath the words. Jason swallows under that piercing gaze but holds steady, maintains eye contact even as his smirk melts away.
“Sir?” the waitress says, and they look over at her. She’s standing beside their table now, no spare chair in sight, and looking between them knowingly. Jason has to turn away, silently cursing his fair skin for how well it shows his blushes.
“Could you bring my date here a menu, please?” Dick asks, sugar-sweet manners with a promise of an absurd tip, and the waitress spears Jason with another glance before turning away.
“Willing to stay now?” Jason asks. The sudden awareness tastes like ozone and snaps like lightning between them, anticipation kindling and embers flaring into proper fires.
“It was the company,” Dick confirms, fussily plucking at his sleeve, unbuttoning the cuffs to roll them up.
The waitress reappears with a menu. She’s smiling, and her phone is tucked into her apron pocket, and Jason wonders how long it will be before Bruce hears about this.
When she’s gone again, Jason sips at Amalthia’s wine- white, dry, almost vinegary- and looks at Dick again. He dares- a leap of faith-
“After this,” he says, hearing his voice from a distance. “Your place or mine?”
Dick considers him, eyes dark and heavy-lidded, expression content and amused. “Mine,” he decides, and Jason smiles back.
Dinner ends quickly after that- and yet, not nearly fast enough.
5
The fifth time- the last time- the first time-
The fifth time, he wakes up to an empty bed and a note taped to the bathroom mirror, a brief list of errands Dick has to run, a promise to be home again soon, a poorly-drawn kissy face, a help yourself to whatever for breakfast tacked on at the end.
Jason looks at the kissy face and snorts and laughs, because Dick isn’t there to see his reaction. “You’re such an ass,” he says fondly, easily imagining Dick standing at the kitchen counter, smirking to himself as he draws the terrible face.
There are no razors in this particular safehouse, so Jason goes without shaving, wandering around the apartment in day-old stubble and blue-striped boxers and an S-shield hoodie he stole from Dick’s laundry pile that Dick had to have stolen from someone else, considering how loosely it fits on Jason. He feels, startlingly, like a normal person, like anyone else would feel with a new relationship that’s set fire to his blood and a new lover found in someone comfortable and familiar. He wonders if they really can manage to spend the whole weekend in bed together, no mask bullshit.
Help yourself to whatever, the note had said, and Jason finds whatever to be in limited quantity- granola bars and oatmeal packets that won’t go bad after sitting in a cupboard for six months, breakfast sandwiches and hamburger patties in the freezer. No eggs, no bread, no milk- so they’ll take an hour to grab some groceries, that’s fine. He mixes two flavors of oatmeal together because he’s a heathen like that and puts the water in the microwave and wanders into the living room while it’s coming to a boil.
The TV has limited selection of channels. Jason surfs through them twice before landing on a news channel and leaving it on mute, and goes back in to check on the water.
His phone chimes as he’s stirring the water into the bowl with the oatmeal. He lets it sit for a moment while he checks- incoming text.
got held up at the bank, it says, and the phone buzzes in Jason’s hand as it chimes again. gonna be a little bit, the next text says.
It’s Friday anyways, the weekend doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow. Jason shrugs it off and heads back into the living room, scooping up oatmeal and taking a bite. He makes it all the way to the couch, and even manages to sit down for a good six seconds before he focuses on the TV enough to process what’s on the screen.
Then he’s back on his feet, good mood popped like a balloon. “Are you fucking kidding me,” he asks the TV, which has no helpful response. “Held up at the bank, you-” he starts, then cuts himself off with a growl and goes to look for his pants.
On the screen, over the scrolling text at the bottom raving about the midtown bank currently being taken over by masked gunmen, there’s shakycam footage from inside the bank of the head robber standing over a kneeling Dick. The robber is yelling and gesturing, while Dick’s expression is best described as exasperated. His phone is on the ground nearby, freshly broken into pieces.
Jason sweeps past again, pants on, boots on, gun and holster in hand and duffel bag containing the rest of his gear slung over his shoulder. “You and your shit luck,” he grumbles to the Dick on the screen- all bark and no bite, he’d rather have him than not, drama and all- before he turns the TV off.
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They do get their weekend in bed- but only after the news crews at the bank get their rescue shot.