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It’s one of those nights again.
He knows, vaguely in the back of his head, that this is a dream. But he hopes that if he does not focus on the lack of taunts and jeers and the blurriness of the figures surrounding them, he will get to see the end of it, and with it find some relief that his hand alone could not bring him.
Jason never succeeds, tonight is not the exception.
He licks his dry lips and tastes salt. He feels the ghost of fingers digging on the meat of his shoulders. What does it say of him that it is that sensation that remains rather than the cold kiss of the gun in his nape?
“Fuck him,” he, faceless and monstrous, had ordered. “Or I’ll shoot, and then we will.”
There was not much of a decision to be made.
Jason is yet to see a dull Halloween in Gotham, but the last one was particularly eventive and, as is often the case in Gotham, not in a good way. However, it is not the vileness of the act that haunts him, but the feelings that followed it.
Dick had been better than him at keeping his cool and he had been far more exposed than Jason. He got to keep his pants on, to pull out only the strictly necessary to comply with their captors’ demands. Dick had to strip from the waist below and spread, remaining pliant when there was a real possibility that the crowd would not be satisfied merely with Jason’s performance.
“It’s fine,” Dick had said, when nothing was, two fingers working on himself and a hand reaching for Jason, who remained stubbornly soft. “Just pretend I’m someone else. Close your eyes, ‘Hood.”
As if such a thing were possible.
Jason Todd did not want Dick Grayson before it happened.
Sure, he had a face that turned most heads and it would be stupid to pretend that he was not attractive, but Jason did not desire him or feel any sort of lust for him. Hell, those feelings were foreign enough on their own, far removed from his sort-of older brother.
There was frustration, reluctant admiration and other complicated emotions that had taken the back seat as soon as he slipped inside Dick and rutted into him like a beast. Whatever there was before no longer seemed to matter.
It was not just the physicality of it. Jason was not an animal.
The sensations haunted him, true, but not in the way he thought they would. He was not trapped, suffocating under his own skin. Every nerve felt alight instead, tingling and throbbing as he recalled the raw, unforgivingly tightness of the warmth between Dick’s legs - and how he had struggled to take him despite his best efforts to prepare himself. The short, self-soothing breaths that left his lips, the way he had clung to Jason, as if to anchor himself in the face of a storm-
What haunted Jason the most was that he wanted more.
Every waking moment was spent thinking about Dick and his clinging hands and salty tears.
Dick, naturally, had no such feelings for Jason. Despite how his calloused fingers had stroked him until he was firm and then guided him to his hole, Jason never held any illusions that he would, that whatever awful thing had awakened in him would find a match in his brother, but that did not deter him from spilling into his fist to the memory of him over and over again.
How would he feel about it, if Jason were to make him aware that he was the protagonist of his most disturbing fantasies? His daydreams kept things realistic in a sense: Dick never wanted him back in them, there was always a conveniently obscured agent forcing the matter between them.
Sometimes, there was no external force, just Jason taking what he wanted. Those dreams he enjoyed as much as he despised himself for having them. Whatever release they helped to stimulate brought along a fresh wave of self-loathing, and he was left staring at his dirty sheets, wondering how far he was willing to sate the hungry beast that roared within him
He would never though… Of course not.
Would Dick hate him if he were privy to his thoughts? Jason believed that he would find them repelling, but he would not necessarily extend that disgust to Jason himself. It was not hard to imagine that he would find a way to shift the blame onto himself, for not having realized that they had been surrounded, for losing one of his escrima sticks and for allowing one of the mobsters to press the muzzle of his gun to Jason’s head- All of these leading to their unwilling show, which had obviously crossed some wires in Jason’s head.
These excuses he would make for no one else. If Jason were extending these fantasies towards, say, Tim, after a similar event, there would be no compassion to be found. But because Dick had been involved… He would sooner martyrize himself than admit that something ugly and wrong was festering inside Jason. He could be certain of that much.
It felt nice to think about that, the possibility of washing his hands from it all, even if the Red Hood had never shied away from getting them dirty. It was merely a fantasy anyway, for these feelings would never - could never - be revealed.
Still, as he fisted his length and stroked it to hardness, he considered how often these awful occurrences took place in Gotham. No one was truly safe from them, as evidenced by what had happened to them. If a group of nobodies - all of whom had been dealt with by Jason with only minimal chiding from Dick - had gotten the upper hand on Red Hood and Nightwing…
Who was to say that such a tragedy would not come to pass again?
There was no way to tell if the next Halloween would be less troubled than the last.