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When Jason resolves to never, ever deliberately seek out injury again, he thinks he’s resigning himself to a whole lot of longing. Sure, Tim says he can just ask when he wants a hug…but if asking were that easy, he never would’ve started this shit in the first place.
So when he trashes the injury plan, he’s pretty sure he’s also trashing any chances of physical contact.
Turns out? He’s very, very wrong.
d a y s
Three days after his talk with Tim finds Jason watching a surprisingly riveting documentary about national parks. It’s mid-afternoon, still a good few hours before he plans to go on patrol, and he’s just thinking about getting a snack when his front door opens.
In this particular apartment, the front door opens onto the living room. There’s only a few feet of empty space between it and the end of the couch Jason is currently sprawled on, so he has a great view of Tim letting himself inside.
“Hey,” he says, feigning casual. Which is probably a lost cause after that mortifying conversation in the Cave, but he’s got his dignity, okay?
Even if that dignity is severely threatened by the sight of Tim in one of his well-tailored corporate suits.
Wait. Should he be wearing that?
“Did you seriously go back to work already?” he asks, incredulous. “You got stabbed less than a week ago.”
Instead of answering, Tim…starts stripping. First just his shoes and tie and suit jacket, all perfectly reasonable, but then he keeps going.
When he starts working on the buttons of his shirt, Jason’s heart leaps to his throat…only to petulantly sink back to its usual location when he realizes there’s an undershirt beneath the button down. Lame.
…No, wait, that’s a good thing. They’re friends. They’re just friends and that’s what they’re staying until, at the absolute minimum, Jason gets his shit sorted out. Which is probably gonna take a while, considering how he’s still working up to calling one of the therapists Tim recommended.
All of which means Jason needs to stop ogling Tim. Friends don’t ogle friends. Even if it’s really hard to resist when Tim’s down to just a sleeveless undershirt, slacks, and socks.
That undershirt is…really thin. Jason gets briefly, pleasantly distracted by the shadow of Tim’s nipples through the white fabric—and then less pleasantly distracted by the shape of the bandage at Tim’s middle.
Libido successfully quashed, he realizes Tim still hasn’t said anything.
“Tim?” he prompts. Starting to worry about Tim’s ongoing silence, he sits up, pulling his feet in to make room for him on the couch.
As Tim gets closer, Jason worries more, taking in his pinched expression and the lines of pain around his eyes. It can’t be anything life-threatening, not when Jason’s not feeling it, but why isn’t he talking?
“Are you—”
Tim crawls into his lap. Jason chokes on his own question.
“Um?”
“Headache,” Tim finally grumbles, very succinctly, before burying his face in Jason’s neck.
Oh. Well then.
Slowly, careful of Tim’s healing stab wound, Jason wraps his arms around him. The bond is warm between them, relaxing muscles that tensed in surprise. Tim breathes a relieved sigh against his skin.
“Okay,” Jason says quietly.
There’s so much force to Tim, so much deadly skill and unmovable stubbornness, that it’s easy to forget how small he is compared to Jason. It always takes him by surprise, how well Tim fits in his lap.
And it turns out there’s a special kind of pleasure to it when Tim puts himself in his lap by choice, instead of to save Jason’s dumb ass from an injury he could easily have avoided. Tim seeking him out for this makes something in his chest go tight and sharp, some protective instinct wanting to wrap him up and hide him from the world.
“Okay,” he says again, and sloooooowly lowers himself back until he’s lying down again, head resting against the arm of the couch and Tim curled up on top of him. He slips a hand into Tim’s hair to massage the back of his neck, applying gentle pressure until Tim goes pliant and boneless, tension draining out of him all at once.
They’ve never had this before. For all the times Tim’s been on top of him, it’s never been this easy.
It firms his resolve to never return to his old tactics. It’s no longer just that he doesn’t want to risk Tim’s life again; he knows he wouldn’t be satisfied anymore by the grudging cuddling he’s used to. Not after this. Not after the heady warmth that comes from having Tim willingly seek him out, wanting and welcoming his touch.
This easy trust is miles away from where they were before. Jason silently promises himself not to ever do anything that might jeopardize it.
w e e k s
It’s been a long, shitty day. Jason stumbles into his apartment, out of his uniform, and into his shower. Thirty minutes of scrubbing later, he has to admit the smoke he’s still smelling is probably in his head, not on his skin.
Dry off. Pajamas. The bed looks tempting, but he burned a fuckload of calories tonight and he knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t eat before he sleeps.
Kitchen. Something quick…and vegetarian.
There’s a frozen bag of vegetables in the freezer, a stir fry kit that comes with sauce and promises to be ready in less than ten minutes. He has no idea when the fuck he bought it (he prefers his vegetables fresh, thanks), but the expiration date is another year and a half out, so it’ll do.
Wok. Stove. Heat. He has to take it step by step, not let himself think past that, because if he thinks about what he’s doing—
The wok’s warm. Add some vegetable oil.
He’s adding sauce to the vegetables when his security system chimes in the pattern that means a window just opened. Smart move would be to go find out who’s breaking in and whether he needs to shoot them for it.
If he does that, the vegetables might burn. Jason stays where he is. Whoever broke in can seek him out, and if he has to shoot them in the kitchen, so be it.
He’s mid-stir when he hears soft footsteps coming up behind him. He knows those footsteps, and a little of his tension drains away.
Only a little, though.
“Need something?” he asks.
In answer, Tim hugs him around the waist. He leans into Jason, cheek settling against his back. Even without skin contact, it’s enough for the bond to thrum to life between them.
More tension ekes out of Jason. He drops his head a bit, lets himself close his eyes for a minute, focusing in on the warmth. It’s been three weeks since they started this new, more casual contact, and it feels better every time.
It helps.
“Smells good,” Tim says, very softly, after a long minute. “What’s for dinner?”
“Vegetable stir-fry,” he says. For anyone else, he’d add a pointed ‘for one,’ because uninvited guests don’t get dinner. For his soulmate…well, the kit’s family-sized. He can share.
Tim’s arms tighten around him. “No meat?”
Just for a second, he’s back at the apartment fire, trying not to gag on the scent of burning flesh as he carries people two or three at a time out of a building that wasn’t anywhere fucking near up to code. He has to swallow against the phantom taste of blood in his mouth.
“No meat,” he confirms.
Tim shifts in some kind of movement Jason can’t place by sound alone. He figures it out a second later—he must’ve been going up on his toes, because he’s too short to manage the kiss he lands on Jason’s cheek otherwise.
“I’ll get the plates,” he says, casual and domestic, but doesn’t move to actually do it.
Jason’s so pathetically grateful that tears burn at his eyes. He blinks them away and leans into Tim, just a little. Just enough to enjoy Tim’s answering lean.
Tim doesn’t offer any reassuring words. Jason wouldn’t want them. This, just this is enough—Tim’s arms around him, the comfort of their bond, the fact of his soulmate’s presence.
There was a minute (or two, or five) during the apartment fire where he thought about letting himself get burned. It would’ve been easy to pass off as a real, actual accident. The fire spread so fast, and he was in and out of it so many times—
But he resisted. He reminded himself of all those coping methods his therapist has been walking him through and, when that didn’t work, reminded himself what happened the last time he indulged—how close he came to getting Tim killed. He reminded himself that the new way is better, no matter how easy the old way was.
He fought the urge, even though it was harder than running up and down all those stairs a hundred times.
“I’m proud of you,” Tim says, like he can hear Jason thinking about the fire, like he knows how close Jason came to trapping him into offering exactly what he’s giving freely right now. “Thank you for taking care of yourself.”
It should embarrass Jason to be thanked for not fucking hurting himself. Maybe later it will. For now, it just feels…nice. Jason feels seen. Appreciated. It was hard fucking work, fighting that impulse, and it’s nice to have it acknowledged.
“Thanks,” he croaks, and lets himself blame it on smoke inhalation. “Who told you?”
Barbara was in his ear the whole time, frantically scanning CCTV footage and keeping a running list, trying to track who’d been in the building when it went up, how many had escaped, and how many Jason had rescued, so no one would be left behind. But Bruce was the one who found him lingering on the roof of the building next to Gotham General, keeping watch over the survivors. Either one of them might’ve sent Tim his way, so he’s expecting one of their names.
Instead, Tim says, “The ten o’clock news.”
Jason’s heart misses a beat. If there’s been an official report—
“Did they have numbers?”
He asks it mechanically (the closest he can get to casual) as he turns off the stove. The lingering heat of the wok will be enough to give the vegetables the last bit of cooking they need, and if Tim has numbers—if it’s bad—he might forget all about them.
Causing a fire in his own fucking apartment after what happened today would be the worst kind of irony.
Tim waits until he’s set the wok aside to answer.
“Thirty-seven injured,” he says, arms tightening almost painfully around Jason’s waist. “No fatalities.”
It’s a good thing he tightened his grip; he’s the only thing that keeps Jason standing when his knees buckle.
“Fuck,” he says, and braces himself against the counter. “Fucking—shit. Thank Christ.”
“Thank you,” Tim corrects, kissing the back of his shoulder. “You saved a lot of lives tonight.”
He doesn’t speak the obvious. Doesn’t verbally acknowledge that after dying in an explosion, Jason finds it really fucking difficult to run into a burning building.
He just says, “I’m proud of you,” again, and this time Jason knows it means something different. Knows he means he’s proud that Jason did that, that he ran back into that building over and over and over again, until Oracle was one hundred and ten percent sure that nobody was left. Until the first responders arrived, late as fucking usual in Crime Alley.
Tomorrow, he’s gonna have to do something about that. Figure something out, find some way to get fire and ambulance services closer to his people. Every second counts in an emergency, and it’s unac-fucking-ceptable that the first fire truck didn’t show up on scene until Jason had been pulling people out of the building for almost twenty minutes.
Tomorrow, he’s gonna have to find a way to fix that problem.
Tonight, he just lets himself enjoy the relief that no one died. Lets himself treasure his soulmate’s comforting presence, the fact that Tim showed up even though Jason didn’t hurt himself. The fact that Tim’s proud of him.
When he’s steady enough for it, he turns around and, finally, hugs Tim back.
“Thanks,” he says into his hair.
“Any time,” Tim says, and Jason’s actually starting to believe it.
m o n t h s
Jason doesn’t know what pushes him over the edge. It’s just a normal day.
He wakes up alone, makes brunch for one, suits up and patrols alone, and ends the night alone in the VIP lounge at one of his clubs. It’s not a terrible day, not an unusually violent night or even a particularly stressful one. It’s just…routine.
There’s no reason he should be aching the way he is. No cause for the emptiness in his chest.
He has no idea what prompts him to pull out his phone and text
If you’ve got a minute, I could use a hug
but he does, and Tim texts back in seconds.
Where are you?
Club Encapuchado in the Bowery
Omw
The ache in his chest draws him away from the lounge and to the railing overlooking the first floor. It gives him an unobstructed view of both the dance floor and the door. He’s spent a lot of time at this railing since he first took over the club (one of several he liberated from the previous and now deceased owners), just keeping an eye on the crowd, but he doesn’t kid himself.
Tonight, he’s only watching the door.
Fifteen minutes after his text, Tim walks in, and just the sight of him eases Jason a little. The smile and finger-wave he gets when Tim spots him eases him a little more.
Then Tim disappears into the crowd, and Jason belatedly remembers to text the bouncer at the foot of the stairs, warning him he’s got a guest coming up.
The music is obscenely loud, lyrics indistinguishable but beat thumping through Jason’s chest. The railing vibrates beneath his hands in time with the bass line. Still, he’s not stupid enough to let it distract him from his surroundings (he doesn’t wanna be the next ex-owner), so he’s well aware when Tim arrives.
He should turn around.
He doesn’t.
Suddenly, he feels—fuck. He doesn’t even wanna think it, but his stupid therapist is always on him about naming and acknowledging his emotions, so here it is: he feels vulnerable. Exposed.
They’ve had plenty of physical contact since his confession in the Cave (it’s been three months to the day, he realizes abruptly), but this is the first time he’s actually asked for it. The first time he’s reached out.
The moment feels fragile. Like it might shatter if Tim says or does the wrong thing.
(Jason feels fragile. Jason might shatter.)
It’s stupid. Tim’s here, isn’t he? He dropped whatever he was doing and came straight to the club, and he wouldn’t have done that just to…just to what? What is Jason even afraid of? That he’s gonna suddenly announce he doesn’t think they should be friends after all, that Jason doesn’t deserve a hug? He could’ve texted that. No need to come all this way.
Eventually, Tim gives up on waiting for acknowledgement. While Jason is still fucking fretting, Tim squirms between him and the railing and wraps his arms around his neck.
Jason melts into it. He curls into Tim, over Tim. He’s so much bigger than him, it should feel like he’s hiding Tim from the world…but when he buries his face in Tim’s shoulder, it feels like he’s the one being hidden.
Tim just hugs him closer.
“Hi,” he says in Jason’s ear, barely audible over the music.
“Hi,” Jason echoes. Tim probably can’t hear him. Probably couldn’t hear him even if the club were dead quiet; Jason’s speaking into his shirt.
Is he squeezing too tightly? He’s probably squeezing too tightly, clutching Tim like a stress ball. He can’t make his arms loosen, though, can’t relax his grip.
He needed this. He needed Tim. He asked, and Tim came, and Tim is hugging him.
That means something. It shouldn’t, not when Tim’s been doling out hugs at every opportunity since their talk in the Cave, but it really fucking does.
They must stand there like that for at least five minutes before Jason finds the strength to let go.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. It comes out too quiet, especially with the soundtrack still going, but that’s okay; he knows Tim can read lips.
“Any time,” Tim shouts back. He tips his head towards the lounge, indicating the couch against the wall. “Can we sit?”
It’s a good idea, so Jason nods and leads the way. He’s pleased, but not surprised, when Tim opts for his lap instead of the cushion next to him.
The VIP lounge is designed to muffle the sounds of the club, set up with soundproofing screens that block some of the noise. The music is still very audible, but it’s not deafening. There’s room for conversation.
Not that Jason knows what to say. He should feel better after that hug and with Tim a nice, reassuring weight in his lap, but instead he feels scraped raw. The sense of being exposed hasn’t gone away.
It’s harder than it should be, asking for what Tim’s so quick to give.
“Thanks,” he says again, and Tim shakes his head.
“I’m glad you texted,” he says simply.
It makes Jason wonder if Tim’s been waiting for it. Three months since he told Jason he could just ask for a hug, and this is the first time Jason’s taken him up on it.
Does that make Tim feel unwanted? Like this is one-sided somehow?
No, Jason reminds himself, Tim knows all about how Jason was a fucking moron who nearly got him killed because he was willing to accept injury in exchange for a hug from him. He knows how Jason feels.
But it’s not always about knowing, is it? Sometimes it’s about hearing it.
Tim deserves to hear it. To be reminded that Jason’s grudging acceptance of his touch was all just an act. That Jason needs and wants and loves him.
That in mind…it’s not enough to just sit here, clinging to Tim like he’s a teddy bear. If all he wanted was a hug, a teddy bear would be just fine. He wanted Tim.
His therapist is big on acknowledging feelings, but she’s also big on letting them go if they don’t serve you. His embarrassed silence isn’t serving him at all.
More importantly, it’s not serving Tim.
He tries to let it go and focus on Tim. “What’ve you been up to tonight?”
Does Tim look a little brighter at the question?
“Wellll,” he draws out, a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth, “I might’ve been messing around at the docks.”
Jason can easily translate that as fucking with the Maronis, and he approves.
“Tell me,” he invites, and Tim does.
It’s not as easy as just deciding not to be self-conscious, obviously, but Jason’s gonna put the effort in, and he’s gonna ask for this more often. He’s gonna ask for more more often. He doesn’t just want Tim showing up when one of them has had a bad day.
He’s gonna ask for more. Tim deserves that much.
y e a r s
Tradition forbids soulmates from touching during the wedding. Jason’s hands itch through every word of it, desperate to reach out to Tim, but he stays strong. He doesn’t give a fuck about tradition, but he knows it’s important to Tim.
The wedding is important to both of them. It’s worth the wait.
When the JP finally announces them wed, he cups Tim’s face in both hands, and Tim’s hands come up to circle his wrists. The bond springs to life with an almost physical shock, like maybe it was just as impatient as Jason.
“Hi,” Tim says, beaming up at him.
Jason grins back. “Hi. Can I have a hug?”
“By all means.”
He reels Tim in and holds him, close but gentle. He knows how to be gentle now, knows how to hold him without desperation. Three years has taught him a lot.
“Can I have a kiss?” he murmurs in Tim’s ear.
In answer, Tim leans up. Jason leans down to meet him.
There are no stars involved. Jason sees them anyway.