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Waking up alone in a dim room with no memory of how he’d gotten there is a bad day for anyone, even the Red Hood. Worse: realizing Batman is there too. And worst of all: that he’s hurt.
Jason listens hard. He opens his eyes and sees nothing but an old plaster ceiling. Bruce doesn’t seem to be hiding his ragged breathing, either, so Jason sits up, slowly.
His eyes adjust, and he sees old brick and steel bars. No one else around. Just the drip of water far away and, when he rips off his helmet, a heavy damp smell.
Bruce startles a little, which is a horrible sign.
“What did they do to you?” Jason asks.
“Jason,” he breathes, instead of answering. “I didn’t know if you were going to wake up.”
His helmet was dented, probably to take out the comms. Convenient side effect: Jason doesn’t know what the hell is going on or where they are.
“I’m awake. What do you remember? How are you hurt?”
Bruce ignores him again. “They jumped us on patrol. Dragged us somewhere and dumped us. Got scared.”
“Why’d they get scared?” Jason says, not really asking. His eyes have adjusted enough to see the way the Batsuit has torn and the bloody gash underneath. “Fuck,” Jason says, with feeling. “They thought they’d killed us both.” He crawls over and presses his hands into the wound. “How did it tear?”
“Caught the seam at a lucky angle,” Bruce gasps. “I think. Have to fix it.”
“Gotta get out of here,” Jason says. The wound is worse than he thought: he’s not sure if they nicked something important or it’s deeper than he can see in this light, but blood keeps bubbling up, shimmering like an oil slick. As he adjusts the pressure, he thinks he can see yellow fat. He swallows hard.
“You should go get help,” Bruce says.
“No.” The issue with wearing mostly leather is there’s not much to tear off for makeshift bandages. Jason roots around in Bruce’s toolbelt instead and finds some bandages. They soak fast. He just packs more on top.
“I won’t make it.”
“You will, you absolute bastard, how long could I have possibly been out?”
Bruce just looks at him for a second, and Jason wonders how worried he should be about his head. The bandages soak through again and distract him before he can think too hard about it.
“Jason,” Bruce says, and he sounds exhausted. “This is natural. It was supposed to go this way.” Something in his voice breaks. “No parent should ever have to bury their child.”
Jason would usually object to being Bruce’s son, but blood is squeezing out between the fingers of his gloves. He’s usually not squeamish but he wants to vomit. Bruce has this saintly martyr look on his face that Jason can see even behind the cowl. The resignation. Jason’s seen it on Dick before. He wonders if that’s how he looked before the bomb went off.
Bruce covers one of Jason’s hands with his own.
“I love you, Jay,” he says, and Jason is suddenly, incandescently furious.
“You know what, fuck you,” Jason snaps. “You finally start talking to me just in time to die?”
“Jason,” Bruce starts.
“No,” Jason yells. “You’re not dying in a stupid basement right after you finally tell me you love me!”
Jason stares at him, lips pressed together so hard they hurt. There’s a tiny, upset twitch to Bruce’s mouth. Then a proud one. Jason swallows and turns away.
“Okay,” Bruce says. “You’re going to have to do all the work.”
Jason tugs his t-shirt up to wipe his eyes. It mainly just gets Bruce’s blood everywhere.
“Same as fucking always,” he mutters, and paces around the room again.
He looks at every bar, the place where they join the ground and each other. All solid. There’s still a knife strapped to his thigh that whoever took them must have missed. Idiots. With time he might be able to use it to do some damage at the joins, but they had minutes, not hours or days. Then his eyes land on his helmet.
They’d beaten it all to hell to take out the comms. But the explosives—
Jason does the math. They’re in a tiny cell. The wall behind them is old, brittle brick. He could jimmy them out one by one with that same stupid knife but he doesn’t have time.
He thinks about bombs and timers. Pity blood loss didn’t come with a countdown. Back then he knew down to the second how long he had left.
“Batman,” Jason says, in his best mission report voice. Bruce is starting to lose his grip a little. But it’s Bruce, so he snaps to attention like he’s not bleeding out in a jail cell.
“Give me your cape.”
Bruce hesitates for just a moment before handing it over. Jason knows the specs, and one of them is fireproof. That’ll have to be enough. Bruce probably can puzzle out what he’s planning, but Jason is depending on the blood loss being bad enough that he won’t figure it out until it’s too late. Jason has always moved fast, impulsively. Sometimes it even made him a good Robin. Until it didn’t.
Jason gets the cape around his back, not tied on. He hits the button on the helmet and rolls it like a bowling ball towards the opposite corner of the cell just as Bruce screams for him.
Jason pulls the cape over his head and dives for Bruce, trying not to land on his stomach wound. He covers them both with the cape just as his helmet explodes.
The blast knocks him out for a second, just long enough for Bruce to recover and start shaking him. They didn’t get thrown, but that was just because he’d pushed Bruce into the corner as far as he could. He hopes Bruce’s head didn’t slam into the wall. His feels like soup after the beating and the bomb, but he blinks until Bruce comes mostly into focus and calls that good enough.
“Jason,” he’s saying, over and over, more panicked than Jason has maybe ever heard him over anyone but Dick. Jason pushes himself up with less grace than he’d like in front of Bruce. One of the flying bricks hit his leg and he thinks it’s bleeding, but if he checks it now Bruce will want to stop and check him out, and they don’t have time. He gives Bruce a once over, too, trying to ignore Bruce’s hands patting him down for injuries and the horrible upset cant of his mouth.
“No time for your guilt complex, old man. Get pressure back on your wound.” Bruce’s hands move to his stomach at a delay, like he’s drunk.
Jason scans the room one last time. The helmet is blown to shit, which is perfect. Jason grabs the cape, thinking slightly hysterically about the time Bruce took him camping. Not like they haven’t left shit around before, but the less Bat tech people have access to to reverse engineer, the better.
Maybe thirty seconds have passed since the blast, but Jason would usually expect something by now. Someone noticing. He hears nothing, so maybe Bruce is right and everyone bolted.
Well, no time to think about that, either way. Getting out was the best option no matter what the fuck their kidnappers were up to. There’s a small part of him, the part getting used to working with the Bats, that hopes it’s that Nightwing and Red Robin are up there. Or Spoiler, or Black Bat, or anyone else who can take over so Jason can have the meltdown he has fully earned. But a larger, more practical part says that they can catch up if it’s them, and if it’s not, silence is a bad sign. Get out. Get away. Take care of yourself and anyone who can keep up.
“Br—Batman,” Jason says. “Stand up. I’ve gotta get you on my back.” The wall crumbled to dust; plenty of room for Jason to carry Bruce out if he hunched over.
Bruce stumbles to his feet, leaning heavily on Jason, his other hand clutching his wound. Jason squats down just enough to let Bruce half-fall onto him, and then manhandles him into some sort of piggyback position.
“If you don’t keep pressure on that I’ll kill you myself,” Jason says, and starts moving.
The building isn’t large, but it’s a labyrinth. Jason bets they’re in the basement of one of the old historic buildings in the financial district, and that it’s after 5 pm, when it becomes absolutely silent.
“Might as well have killed us than just left us to die down here,” Jason says, strained, after turning yet another corner and finding no stairs. Bruce huffs disapprovingly in his ear. Jason’s in good shape, but Bruce is heavy on a good day and today he’s entirely dead weight. Jason’s head pounds. He readjusts his grip on Bruce’s legs. Bruce has his face smashed into Jason’s shoulder and neck, and he’s breathing hard. It would be wails of agony from anyone else. Jason tries not to think about how this is the closest they’ve been since before he died. Somehow, despite everything, the familiar sound of Bruce breathing and the way he smells is comforting. Jason feels his eyes start to water again and blinks furiously.
“I don’t hear anyone,” Bruce says. “But if you run into anyone, you need to drop me and run.”
“Fuck that.”
“If you get outside, your trackers will work, and you can get backup.”
“Unlike you,” Jason says, gritting his teeth against Bruce’s weight. “I don’t leave people behind.”
Bruce is silent, and Jason trudges onwards.
They make it a little further. Jason’s been keeping a silent, horrible count in his head. He knows the statistics on blood loss. He knows they’re almost out of time.
“You know that I,” Jason starts. “Bruce, you still with me?”
Bruce hums, which just makes Jason go faster.
“You know that I. Fuck.”
He adjusts his grip on Bruce, trying to get him higher on his back. Bruce mumbles something that sounds like “son.” Jason’s hands burn, his eyes burn, his leg burns. He swallows, and swallows again, and keeps his feet moving forwards.
And then he turns a corner, and there is a staircase, and he almost drops Bruce because Nightwing is running at them at top speed.
“Hood,” he pants, sliding out of the way in time. “We were looking everywhere.”
“Blood loss,” Jason snaps. “Urgent.” He doesn’t drop Bruce, can’t make his shaking hands relax.
Dick pales behind the mask and says some sharp things into his comms. Jason isn’t paying attention. Bruce is breathing slower. The thought strikes him like lightning. Tim arrives then, and Steph, and Dick and Tim take Bruce. Steph tries to coax Jason out of his jacket but he refuses, monosyllabic. She sighs, pushes her hair out of her face and leads him into the moonlight.
Jason’s jacket is covered in Bruce’s blood, unsalvageable. By the time he steps off Steph’s bike it’s starting to flake off in grotesque patches. He doesn’t realize until they’re back at the Cave, a whole journey that will become just another hole in his patchy memory.
He gets there too late to see Bruce wheeled in and goes immediately to try to get back to him. Dick steps in front of him.
“Alfred said he was going to be in surgery for a while,” Dick says, softly. “Why don’t you go get cleaned up?”
“I,” Jason says. His leather gloves crackle as he peels one off, and he stares at it.
“Come on, Jay,” Dick says, and takes him gently by one of his bloody hands back to the sinks.
“He’s alive, right?” Jason hears himself asking. “He’s still alive?”
“Yeah, Jay,” Dick says. “He’s gonna be fine.”
“You’re not lying to me? He’s alive?”
“Do you think I’d be so calm if he wasn’t?”
This, at least, gets through.
“Fine,” Jason huffs, and peels off his other glove in one motion. It’s trash now, just like his jacket. Dick hovers behind him. “I can do this myself,” he snaps, and when he looks back again no one is there.
Alfred draws the curtains around Bruce for two hours after that, giving him blood transfusions. Jason sits down where he can see the curtains and the shapes moving just beyond them. He shrugs off Dick when he tries to gently herd Jason somewhere else, and that seems to be the last of his energy. He collapses nearby until Damian rushes down the stairs, looking pale. Then Dick plasters a smile back on and they head upstairs.
It’s just Tim and Jason sitting there, on opposite sides of the Cave, when Alfred comes out and sighs.
“He’ll be just fine.” Jason sighs shakily in relief, then pretends he didn’t.
“I’ll get Dick and Damian,” Tim says, and bolts up the stairs.
“He’s been asking for you,” Alfred tells Jason. He looks a little unsteady on his feet. Jason draws close, wanting something he can’t ask for. Alfred looks through him, as usual, and claps his shoulder, stronger than Jason would have guessed.
“My dear boy,” he murmurs. “You’re filthy.”
“Sorry, Alf,” Jason says, and doesn’t mention that Alfred is covered in as much blood as he was.
“Go,” Alfred says. “He shouldn’t be alone.”
Jason walks towards the bed with leaden feet, despite wanting to be back there for the last two hours. He parts the curtains and sees Bruce.
It’s never any less strange to see Bruce in a hospital bed. Despite Jason being horribly, painfully aware that he’s human, somehow the Batman still seems impervious to physical harm. He has a blood bag and another IV, plus oxygen in his nose.
“Jason,” he says. “Are you alright?”
“Fine, Bruce,” Jason says, suddenly remembering that he probably has a concussion or three. He doesn’t mention it. Bruce lies back with a sigh.
“Good,” he says. Dick, Damian, and Tim come through the curtains, along with Alfred, who’s changed his gloves and jacket. Bruce’s gaze flicks to them briefly before landing again on Jason, who shifts uncomfortably.
“Time to stitch your leg, Master Bruce,” Alfred says, and pushes aside just enough of the blanket to get at the nasty wound in the meat of Bruce’s thigh.
Bruce looks out of it in a way that discomfits Jason. He shifts again, then crosses his arms.
“I’m fine, old man.”
Alfred is halfway through a stitch when Bruce asks, “Did I really never tell you I love you since you’ve been back?”
“Bruce,” Jason hisses after a moment. He’s so mortified he’s not sure if he’s red, purple, or drained of blood altogether. The room goes silent. Alfred stops stitching for a moment, then resumes. Jason can see the needle shake. “Not the fucking time.”
“When is it?” he says back, and Jason gets it, but the answer is not in front of the entire fucking family, not in front of Dick and Tim and Damian and Steph and—
Not in front of Alfred, the only one who’s ever treated him normally, like he just went away for a vacation and came back a little more murderous, which Alfred bears with the same mild disapproval that he would a distasteful political opinion.
Now they were all going to think— he didn’t even know what they were going to think. That he was young, that he was weak, that he needed them—any of them—that he needed Bruce—
He’s worked himself half into a panic attack by the time he makes it to the lockers at the other end of the Cave. He slides to the floor. Usually the cool metal against his back would ground him but it just reminds him of how cold the ground was when he woke up in his grave. He chokes on his own saliva, remembering. He wants to leave, desperately, but he’ll crash a motorcycle in this condition. And there’s a part of Jason that believes, magically, illogically, that if he leaves the Cave Bruce will die. He has to see him better with his own eyes for it to be true. He’s fucking sick of learning things from the newspaper.
There’s a presence next to him when he next cares to open his eyes. For a moment he thinks it’s Dick, which would make sense, but it’s the kid. He squats next to Jason, looking down at him like he’s an unappealing meal.
“Fuck off, kid,” he manages. His throat still feels like it’s going to close up.
“You knew my mother.”
Knows, is more like. She calls him sometimes still to check up. He doesn’t really know why. His plan is over. He’s careful what he gives her on the Bats. And he’s not sure how much she reaches out to Damian. Probably less than Jason. Maybe that’s why.
“Yeah,” is all he says.
“She would’ve thought you were weak.” Jason takes a swing at him. Damian dodges easily, unbothered. “Richard,” he says, and chews on his lip. It’s an uncharacteristic thing for a child assassin to do. It makes him look his age. “Richard says she’s wrong. Not in those words; he would never dare criticize my mother to my face.”
Jason snorts. It’s a little easier to breathe.
“He tells me—” Damian cuts himself off. “He makes Bruce—” He stops again. He looks at Jason. “You don’t have Richard.”
“I have him,” Jason says. It’s one of the only things he’s sure about in this family. Well, Alfie, mainly. But Dick has attached like a limpet, trying obviously to make up for his fucking guilt complex by trying to force his way into Jason’s life. Sometimes breaking into Jason’s apartment works and they watch a stupid reality show together before Jason threatens him with bodily harm. Sometimes he’s not in the mood and ups the voltage on all of his booby trapped windows. Dick keeps trying anyway, with texts and memes and break-ins and dinners.
Damian nods, once. “But he’s not your father.”
“He’s not yours either.” Jason expects Damian to blow up at that, in one way or another. But the kid just gives him a look. Then he points at something across the Cave.
“What’s that green thing?”
“The computer monitor. Oh fuck you, you’re not doing one of those techniques on me. I’m fucking fine.” It’s mostly a lie. He hasn’t had a panic attack this bad in a while, and his lungs still feel tight. If he starts thinking about Bruce his vision goes patchy.
“Would you rather Tim?”
Jason sighs, harsh. “Fuck. Fine. 3 minutes and you leave me alone.”
Damian points at four more random objects. He makes Jason touch four things. Then he makes Jason listen for the bats’ wings flapping softly in the cave, the computer fans whirring, the sound Damian’s fingernails make on the lockers. He can breathe easier by this point. He does the smells automatically, before Damian asks.
“Leather and metal.”
Damian rolls his eyes. “You’re supposed to wait.”
“Not in the rules. It’s a fucking grounding exercise.” Jason gives him a flat look. “I taste blood. Happy?”
Damian whips out a knife and slices him on his forearm, papercut thin.
“Ow!” Jason yelps. “Jesus, what was that for?”
“Just a grounding exercise,” Damian says, with a smirk on his face that indicates it was for Jason being an asshole, and sheathes the knife.
“She would be proud of you,” Jason says absently. He’s thinking of the speed and stealth of the knife, the patient way Damian has refused to rise to the bait. But Damian flinches. It’s the first time Jason has successfully connected all night, and he didn’t even mean to.
“I know,” he says, a strange look on his face, and turns to go back to his father's bedside.
That night, Jason haunts the Cave like his suit does. He doesn’t go near Bruce, and shrugs off Dick and Steph’s attempts to get him to talk, but anytime he thinks of leaving the panic attack threatens to make a reappearance. So he stays.
Dick comes over sometime in the morning, after Steph and Tim and Damian were all herded to school or college or wherever they went during the day.
“He wants to talk to you,” Dick says, face doing a funny thing. “I told him to,” he starts, and then sighs. “I don’t know. To use his words.”
Jason gives Dick a blank stare, but walks over to Bruce’s bed anyway. He pulls the curtains tight around them and stands a safe distance away.
Bruce doesn’t look at Jason. He looks down at his hand, which still has an IV in it.
“I scared you.”
“Great, another thing I did wrong. I showed a fucking emotion.”
“Jason. I meant to say I’m sorry.”
“What?” Jason says, thrown from his building rage.
“I’m sorry for scaring you. You got us both out. It was well done.”
Jason sits heavily in the chair next to the bed.
“You didn’t fucking scare me,” he says, despite having already admitted to it.
Bruce is making that face he made whenever Jason lied as a kid, fond and amused. It usually pisses Jason off. Right now, it makes him feel hollow.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says.
“Like what?” Bruce says. Like I’m your son, Jason thinks, and does not say. Bruce knows. It was never a question of not knowing that. It was a question of what it meant.
“Jaylad,” Bruce says, softly, and falls silent.
“Even now, you can’t say it,” Jason says, and wipes at his eyes, angry with himself for tearing up, angry with Bruce for everything else.
“I love you, Jay,” Bruce says, and even though he asked for it, it hurts more than the scar on his face ever did.
“Not enough.”
“If I could have taken your place, I would have.”
“You don’t mean that,” Jason says. “You’d leave Gotham unprotected, just to save some shitty kid who couldn’t follow orders?” And it wouldn’t be enough, even if he did mean it: that was the problem. There wasn’t some genius solution here he was missing. No amount of sacrifice by Bruce would change the past.
“You were a good kid,” Bruce says, and Jason bristles at the past tense. But Bruce keeps talking. “So good, and life had treated you so horribly, and I thought, maybe this time I could have a son, not a partner. And I loved you so much I thought I would die.”
Bruce just looks at him for a second, and Jason shifts.
“I failed you,” he says. “I’m sorry.” What he means, Jason knows, is the dying part. What Jason cares about is everything that came after. But Bruce will never understand that. Bruce understands things he can see: blood, guts, viscera. Emotions are secondary. It still is an apology.
Jason leans forwards until his forehead is on the bed so Bruce can’t see his face. Bruce’s hand lands in his hair, and for a moment it’s like he’s eleven again and just had a nightmare.
“You’re not even apologizing for the right things.”
“I know,” Bruce says.
“What if we don’t figure it out in time?”
Bruce’s hand cards through his hair again.
“I don’t know,” Bruce says. “Sometimes people don’t.” He takes a breath. “But isn’t it enough that I love you? Can’t we start there?”
Some days, it won’t be. Some days, Bruce will look down the cowl at him and Jason will just know how much of a fuckup Bruce thinks he is. Some days everyone will see the blood on Jason’s hands and not think about the lives he bought with it.
But today it is. Jason still can’t lift his head and look at Bruce, but he can do this.
He says, “It’s a start. Dad.”