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The air tastes like blood.
There’s a tang to it, sharp and bright, and Jason’s long since grown unfortunately accustomed to it. There’d been a time not too long ago when bloodlust had entirely consumed him, but these days, he finds himself largely indifferent to seeing it. Which is good, he tells himself, because it’s pretty much fucking everywhere, always. Literally, Jason’s found blood in the weirdest of fuckin’ places during his stint as Hood.
This must be the aftermath of something pretty bad, though, even for Crime Alley. The warehouse is pretty much trashed; crates and blood everywhere, busted open and spilling styrofoam and bubble wrap guts all over the cracked cement floor. Three henchmen down, as far as Jason can tell; two of them are sprawled out over the floor, unconscious, but one of them’s starting to come to and groans as he attempts to pull himself upright.
Jason’s boots stop in front of him. The guy tenses, no doubt recognizing Jason’s legs before he even has to look up.
As he should, Jason thinks humorlessly.
“The hell happened here?” he asks flatly, tone brooking no room for bullshit. It looks like a drug bust gone halfway wrong, but if the birds and the bat haven’t come running, yet…
The lackey grunts, attempting to move what appears to be a shattered leg. “Fucking Robin happened,” he grunts, now looking even more sour now that he’s caught on that he’s been left behind by the rest of his gang. And in pain, but Jason’s hard-pressed to care much about that. It’s not like he’s buddy-buddy with these scumbags, anyway. “It was supposed to be an easy shipment. We just had to check that everything was where it was supposed to be before taking it to the harbor.” His lip curls with hatred. “Vigilante scum,” he says through his teeth, vitriolic and dripping with poison.
Now listen. It’s not like Jason’s fond of the Replacement or anything, but it’s clear Tim put up some hell of a fight. Even still, it's clear he got his ass kicked, considering the rest of the gang seemed to have left in a hurry. Otherwise, there'd be a hell of a lot more bodies around here. His mouth almost twitches with amusement.
Almost.
"Where did Robin go?" he asks sharply, and the lackey mutters something non-committal with an even more non-committal shrug.
Kid’s probably off licking his wounds and sulking, in any case. Like any of the Robins, Tim’s got a complex the size of a small planet when it comes to failure, and Jason can’t imagine the kid returning to the Manor after getting his ass handed to him during a drug bust- not immediately, at least, because then he’d have to deal with Bruce’s annoying fucking “chin up, bud, you’ll get ‘em next time” pep talk. Dick’s back at the manor for the weekend, too, and he’ll probably be just as insufferable as Bruce and about twice as tactile with the pep talk.
And if that’s a twinge of sympathy he feels for Tim, then no it isn’t.
The rest of the gang, he realizes, must be on the way to the harbor with whatever drugs they’d managed to salvage after Tim had no doubt ruined their immediate plans.
Jason sighs. That ought to be a fun party to crash.
He’s so close to getting out of there (seriously. It haunts him, actually, how close he’d been. One step further and he wouldn’t even have heard a goddamned thing) when Jason catches the faintest little sound. Like the fragile edge of someone trying to catch their breath and failing.
The lackey hears it too, because he immediately latches onto Jason’s leg with an impressively mollusk-like grip and clings for dear life. “Is that a fucking ghost?”
"Yeah. Boo." Jason hisses. He levels him with a look so unimpressed, it could’ve flattened a building, and has to resist the urge to nudge the guy’s broken leg with his own. He twists his leg instead, shaking the moron off before unholstering his gun and approaching the dark corner in the back of the warehouse. There, the beams cast crisscrossing shadows that shroud the overturned crates and piles of plastic waste in darkness. In the middle of the mess is a single, horizontal crate, longer and wider in length than the others with a crooked lid that seems like it was hastily laid down.
Suddenly, Jason has a bad feeling. A really fucking bad feeling. As in, he’d better not find in there what he fucking thinks he’s about to find in there.
And- yeah. It’s exactly what he’d expected (dreaded, feared).
The Replacement. Fucking- Tim.
The kid’s strewn, arms akimbo, along the bottom of the crate like he’d been tossed in there (and that’s probably not very far off from what’d probably happened, if Jason thinks about it). He blinks at Jason slowly (vacantly, like there’s not a thought behind those liquid-blue eyes), then actually has the nerve to fucking smile a little bit, the little shit.
Actually. Where the hell are Dick and Bruce, anyhow? Swear to god, if this stupid kid had snuck out here to handle this on his own for some bullshit martyr reason, Jason’s gonna skin him and then use said skin as a dartboard.
Fuck. He’s seeing green. He needs to calm the fuck down.
“The hell are you doing in there, Replacement?” he asks sharply. Though the term isn’t any different from what it used to be when Jason first crawled out of the grave, it carries only about a fraction of its original venom. He’s long since given up on trying to actively hate the kid, much to Dick and Bruce’s amusement.
“Ambush. Lost the fight,” Tim mumbles, almost drowsily. He looks just awful, and that's Jason being kind. Not that the kid deserves his kindness, he thinks sourly, but whatever. “Tossed me in here."
Jason rolls his eyes. Robins and their dramatics (as though he’s excluded from that).
“Get out of there. You’re gonna give Dickface a coronary if you crawl back home this late. This is a shitty place for a nap.”
Something’s wrong. In the shadows, Jason hadn’t been able to take full stock of the situation. Now, under a thin sliver of moonlight that shines through a hole in the ceiling, he can see blood, almost black, pooling around Tim's body and out over the wood at the bottom of the crate. Tim’s gaze is glassy and unfocused, and he can’t seem to keep eye contact with Jason for very long before his eyes drift away.
“Replacement. Look at me,” Jason says, snapping his fingers. And why is his voice fucking shaking? He needs to get a grip, Jason, come on. “Tim.” He leans down to take Tim by the forearm and pull him upright, but Tim’s fingers flutter as they rest tentatively on Jason’s gloved hand. Jason stills.
“Don’t move me, J.” Tim mutters, his breath hitching. Every breath he wheezes out drags laboriously. Jason’s getting restless just listening to the kid get through his words. “I’ll go f- fast, you know?”
Tim doesn’t call Jason Jmuch. Or at all. That he’s doing it now means he doesn’t have the fortitude to say Jason’s full, two-syllable name, and that specific shortcut is a fucking bad sign.
“You’ll go fast?” Jason echoes, his voice pitching slightly higher with what absolutely isn’t panic. “What- what the fuck does that even mean? What are you talking about?” His hand slips slightly; the heel of his palm hits the tacky puddle of blood, and Jason freezes because that shit is deep. There’s so fucking much of it. How is there that much of it?
“‘Cause, I’m gonna-” Tim kind of gurgles, and his hand- which is like, so much smaller than Jason’s actually, what the fuck, twitches like a bird’s broken wing. Okay, bad metaphor, Jason, shit. “-Die, you know. Prob'ly."
What. The. Fuck.
Jason grips the side of the crate with his free hand and shivers once, like he’s been doused in ice water. Kind of feels like that, too. Every single one of his bones feels like a rod of ice, but his blood is boiling like it’s going to evaporate. It's not a great combination, actually.
“It’s okay,” Tim says hastily, misinterpreting Jason’s stunned silence like the idiot he is. “Well. It will be,” he amends with moderate difficulty, and nope, fuck, no way, Jason’s not touching that with a ten foot pole. Or a hundred foot pole, for that matter. “Jay, I…”
“Tim,” Jason snarls, gripping the front of collar of the kid’s cape with one now-bloody hand but careful not to jostle him around too much. “If you don’t shut up, I swear on Batman’s god complex, I’ll-”
Tim’s mouth twitches again, and unbelievably, the kid smiles. Again. It’s wan and pale and a shade of Tim’s usual grin, but it’s something. Jason's glad one of them can find humor in the situation, because it's definitely not going to be him. “What? Kill me?”
“Hilarious.” Jason says through his teeth. He’s coming down from the panic high, now, enough to be able to do a cursory examination and check for what the hell is actually going on, here. He isn't sure why he's getting involved, still.
Okay. Maybe that's kind of a lie.
Maybe Tim's very existence itches like the world's biggest mosquito bite, and maybe Jason has the urge to swat him every time he sees him, and maybe still seeing a flicker of yellow and green and red still makes Jason a little feral, but shit, the kid is still a kid, and Jason... Well, Jason has rules about that sort of stuff, sometimes. Maybe he doesn't even need a reason to be doing this other than the fact that his uneasiness surrounding Tim is only slightly outweighed by his uneasiness at just leaving the kid here, in a box (a grave if he dies in it, Jason's brain unhelpfully adds), in a fucking warehouse.
Tim’s cape is sticky-dark with blood, and Jason has to all but peel it away to see the gleam of sharp metal bright against the red of his outfit. Whatever it is- part of a beam, probably, he thinks a little frantically -it's pierced clean through and probably making an absolute mess of Tim's insides.
“‘S bad, huh,” Tim kind of slurs out, and Jason swallows once and gets a goddamn grip before scowling at Tim.
“It missed the central cavity,” he says, still careful not to jostle Tim as he withdraws his hand. “You’ll fucking live, and then you’ll regret being alive when Dickie gets his hands on you.” He’s already calling Dick with one blood-smeared hand- which he should’ve done earlier, shit, but he’d been panicking, alright? And on top of that, he still isn't exactly comfortable with giving his brother calls like that... casually, when someone's hurt.
Deal with it and walk it off, his brain says, and when Jason hesitates, his brain adds,
Isn't that what you did when you died alone?
“Little Wing,” Dick greets him with hopeful cheer, with all the naïveté of a person who’s about to have a very, very bad day. Jason almost regrets doing this to him.
“Do you know where Tim is,” Jason asks flatly, and Tim wheezes out something that had better not be a fucking laugh. He’s so dead once he’s feeling well enough to die again.
“Well, yeah, he’s supposed to be on his way back to the Manor,” Dick says. But he’s always been a great detective, and his initial cheeriness immediately gives way to suspicious curiosity when he registers who’s calling and why he might be calling. “…. Why?”
“Because I’m fucking looking at his impaled ass in a goddamn warehouse in goddamn Crime Alley,” Jason growls, triaging the injury and not even bothering to ease Dick into it. Fortunately- well, not fortunately, but -the only injury seems to be the rod sticking out of Tim’s right side, save for bruised knuckles and a rapidly forming bruise over his left cheek.
“You what?” Dickie’s voice plateaus off into something sharp and horrified. “What- what?”
“Get your ass to the address I send you,” Jason tells him with no other preamble. “Bring B, too,” he adds after a beat, reluctantly. He can already tell they’re going to have to either move the entire crate with Tim in it or be very, very gentle about getting just his body to the clinic.
Dick’s been doing this longer than Jason has. When the edge of panic smooths away, the voice that returns is all controlled calm and deadly urgency. “Okay. We’ll be there soon.”
You’d better, Jason thinks as he taps out the location, because I don’t know what the fuck I’ll do if this kid dies.
It’s not like he hasn’t contemplated Tim’s death before. At one point, he’d probably have thrown a fucking party or something. Well- no, maybe not, but he certainly wouldn’t have suffered any great loss, either. It’d have been a lesson to Batman, first and foremost: stop fucking doing this, loud and clear. Losing one Robin hadn’t been enough?
But a lot had happened since then.
“Jay,” Tim slurs, jerking Jason back to the moment (as much as he so badly doesn’t want to be here, Tim, can't you let a guy dissociate in peace?). “Lost a. Lotta blood.”
“I can see that.” Jason says acerbically, not even bothering at this point to keep the edge out of his tone. “You were stupid for coming here alone, Tim. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Jay,” Tim says, and Jason doesn’t at all like the tone of his voice. It’s too certain of nothing good, like Tim’s already made peace with his own demise and is talking to Jason like Jason needs to get there as well, even though Jason will never get there, because he never wanted to be in this goddamn position to begin with. “I- If I don’t-”
“I’m going to stop you right there.” Jason says coldly, now using one of his gloves to mop Tim’s brow. He isn’t sure when he started doing it, but if he doesn’t keep busy, he might go back and beat the shit out of the lackeys who’d been left behind.
“I’m going to die,” Tim tells him, and Jason stares at him, fixated by the trail of blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth. That’s a great sign, he thinks faintly. Nothing like a little internal bleeding to keep things moving. “And I know you hate me, Jason- Jay,” he amends, “but I need you do a couple things for me. Please.”
“You know what,” Jason says, patience snapping like the ever-fragile thread it is as he swipes at the blood that continues to trickle down along Tim's face. He can't stand looking at it (even though, he keeps telling himself, he's seen enough blood for seven lifetimes). “Fucking fine.” As long as it keeps Tim talking and alert, fine. Let him say his piece.
Tim moves like he’s actually going to sit up, the idiot, and he might’ve if Jason hadn’t firmly kept him pressed down.
“I- c-came to B af-after-” Tim’s gaze goes unfocused again, and his words trail off into a struggling little gurgle. The breath he draws in is shaky, and Jason tries not to mentally compare it to a death rattle. He doesn't particularly succeed. “After you died. He was, in a really b-bad place, Jay.”
Okay, so Jason actually would rather be impaled himself than have to hear this. He mentally wills Dick and Bruce to hurry the hell up. It feels like it's been fucking forever already, with Tim, injured Tim, Tim-who-thinks-he's-dying.
“And,” Tim continues, unfortunately, even though all Jason can hear is high-pitched ringing and the whoosh of the world spinning wildly around him. If his hand hadn't been clamped down firmly on the edge of the crate, his legs would've given out. “He can’t- he shouldn’t be like th- that, Jay. Please don’t let him…”
Fury, sparking like a firecracker, brings him almost violently back to earth.
“You can’t be serious,” Jason hisses. “Worry about yourself, Tim. Bruce is a big boy, he can fucking take care of himself. Why the hell does it matter to you, anyway?” And it’s pissing him off, is what it’s doing. It’s bullshit, that Tim thinks he’s dying (even though he isn’t), and is using what precious time he thinks he has left to fret over a grown-ass man.
And it's not like it matters, anyway, because Tim isn't dying here.
“B'cause he’s a hero,” Tim insists, like he’s using the last of his energy to do it. “You’re my hero, a-and he’s my hero, a- and Dick, too. And heroes, they’re s-s’posed to.” Tim leans back, pale-faced and sweating profusely at this point. His breaths come out in little hitches, eyes wide like plates as he stares up toward the moon, and tears that he doesn’t even seem to notice trail down over the curves of his white cheeks. “Won’t be as bad if I d-die, not like you, but-”
Freeze frame. Rewind. What in the everliving ungodly fuck did this kid just say?
Jason isn’t sure of the look in his eyes, but he’s positive it’s nothing good, because Tim actually stops talking.
“Did he say that to you?” Jason says- or, well, he tries to say it, but it definitely comes out more like a snarl. “Did he fucking say that to you?”
“N-No,” Tim balks. “But it’s- you’re, you and Dick, you’re, y’know- and I’m-”
“That is such bullshit.” Jason seethes, gripping Tim’s collar. Suddenly, he isn’t sure he won’t strangle the kid before he has the chance to even bleed out. “And you’d better be glad you’re not dying. Because if you were dying, and you died thinking B isn’t completely obsessed with you, you’d have been a fucking moron, Tim. A fucking dead moron.” He glosses right over being called Tim’s hero- that doesn’t make his chest squeeze up into tight knots or anything, not at all -because he doesn’t have the mental fortitude to deal with both that and Tim’s inferiority complex.
Tim hitches out a little sound, like a hiccup. He's crying harder, now, but Jason isn't sure if it's from pain or because he's only just realized Bruce cares about him (and fuck, Bruce, get better at that shit). Then he takes a shaky breath and sighs, as if he’s the one being inconvenienced here. The audacity.
“J’son,” he says, or more like breathes. “Come back.”
A prickle, sharp like a wave of needles behind Jason's eyes, threatens to consume him entirely. There’s something in his throat that feels like it’s the size of a tennis ball, all tangled up in thorns like Ivy’s vines.
“I can’t promise that,” he says.
Tim manages to look skeptical, somehow, all pinched and unhappy.
“Fine. I won’t promise that.” Jason amends. “I’m not doing this dying promise bullshit, kid.”
Now Tim looks sympathetic, which Jason kind of hates even more. What the hell does this twig have to be sympathetic for, anyway? Jason’s out. He doesn’t have to worry about the expectations, about being a good soldier, about Dick, least of all about Bruce-
About the-
About the way Bruce’s expression softens when he comes down in the morning, sleep-rumpled and tender before the day's work sharpens him-
About the way Dick braids strands of Jason’s hair while Jason pretends to sleep, humming off-key-
About the way the pans clatter together as Alfred starts the day’s cooking-
Tim coughs, the sound wet with blood, and Jason startles.
“Fuck,” he says, because that’s all that feels adequate. Where the hell are-
And then a hand closes tenderly over his shoulder and squeezes, and it’s like salvation. That’s Dick, warm and present and there, and he ever so gently moves Jason over. Jason finds that he’s got a death grip on Tim’s collar, still, and it takes monumental strength for him to pry his fingers free.
Dick moves in right next to him to pile Tim’s wound with gauze, all affectionate and shit the way Dick is, all “alright, sweetheart,” and “it’s going to be okay, Tim.” It’s a complete juxtaposition from Jason cussing the kid out. Even still, Jason welcomes it. He hadn’t even realized how good it felt to have his brother take over, with how woefully unequipped Jason had been to deal with this nightmare.
He doesn’t even like Tim.
So why the fuck is he suddenly- mortifyingly -positive that he’s choking up?
“You did good, Jason.” Jason tenses, flying around so quickly that he almost overbalances and joins Tim inside the crate.
“What the hell took you so long?” He snaps, because lashing out is all that he has left. His shield comes up thorny and poisonous and spitting fire, but Bruce is apparently immune to every one of those things. Just Jason’s luck.
“It’s only been a few minutes, Little Wing,” Dick murmurs. “You must have been scared.”
“I wasn’t sc-” Jason chokes, his words teetering on the precipice of a sharp drop off as he recoils back from Dick’s outstretched hand. “Fuck you. I was fine. I did fine.”
“You did better than fine.” Bruce tells him, and Jason can tell that behind the cowl, Bruce is giving him the dumbest corniest look ever. Blades gleam along Jason’s tongue; he’s ready to throw knives again- I didn’t do it for you, I didn’t do it for your approval -but he isn’t sure why he is still here, so he doesn’t give Bruce the leeway to ask. Give an inch and the two of them take ten fucking miles.
“He’ll be fine,” Dick says warmly, cupping the back of Tim’s head for a moment before taking his shoulders. Bruce gets the kid’s ankles, and they lift him out, careful not to jostle the wound. “I’ve gotten impaled a whole bunch of times, and somehow I’m still here.”
Bruce’s eyes snap to Dick sharply, and his mouth tightens disapprovingly; the look gives Jason chills, and it isn't even directed at him. “I was only aware of one,” he says, deceptively light, and Dick freezes guiltily. Jason’s mouth moves like a motor that he can’t control.
“Thrice,” he mutters reflexively, even though Dick gives him the evil eye. What the hell’s he gonna do anyway, with both his hands under Tim’s shoulders? “He got it through the shoulder blade once, and above his hip another time.” That had been a great night. Fucking not. Jason had cried so hard he’d thrown up, not that Bruce needs to know that.
“Dick,” Bruce hisses out between his teeth, but the lecture goes nowhere because Tim makes this pathetic little sound that makes Jason’s teeth hurt. “We’ll talk about this later,” he says, in his CEO-executive-decision voice, and Dick grumbles something rude that almost makes Jason smile. Almost.
“My point,” Dick says, “is that I’m fine. And Tim will be, too.”
“He isn’t like you, Dickface.” Jason says flatly, crossing his arms to keep his heart from ripping a hole through his chest and leaping out, or something corny like that. “He’s like a fucking- shrimp version of you. Thin and gangly and,” Jason’s voice stutters. “Shit.” One of Tim’s arms slides free and hangs loosely at his side, and he looks dead, like a corpse, and maybe that’s how Jason would’ve looked if there’d been enough of him to scrape together-
“-hear me, Jay?”
Jason’s gaze flicks from Tim’s bloodless little hand to Dick, who’s watching him carefully.
“Can you breathe with me, Little Wing?” Dick asks warmly, and even though Jason still kind of wants to tell him to fuck off, he finds himself reluctantly syncing to the beat of Dick’s breathing. “It’s going to be okay. The clinic isn’t far at all.”
“I know that.” Jason hisses. And he does know that. It’s just that his stupid brain’s having a hard time catching onto the fact. And all this for a kid that he doesn’t even-
That he hates for what he did-
(Doesn't he?)
“Jay,” Tim mutters woozily, gaze moving sluggishly from Dick to Jason. Dick almost drops him in surprise, but Jason doesn’t look away- doesn’t dare to look away from the bright, striking blue of Tim’s gaze, startlingly clear despite his condition. “You’ll come h-home too?”
Jason unravels. Every quadruple-knotted string inside of him comes undone and slips loose.
The blood’s drying on Tim’s face, and the words come out like Tim has to reach down and drag them out, but he’s still talking, despite. Stubborn, even though Jason hadn’t promised him anything at all. Even though Jason had been so very close to wringing that little birdie neck himself, not very long ago.
(And what the fuck is he supposed to say to that, anyhow?- he already knows.)
“Fine, Replacement- Tim,” he says, through the lump in his throat. He pretends not to hear the inconspicuous sound that Dick makes. He doesn’t even dare to look at Bruce- not yet.
Not yet.
——
“What the hell were you doing in Crime Alley without backup, anyway?” Jason asks Tim a couple days later, midway through reading aloud to the kid as he recovers in bed. Tim had had the audacity to ask Jason to read him a Physics textbook, and he'd actually properly strung Jason along for a few minutes, too, the little shit.
“Looking for you,” Tim says blankly, as if it’s the most normal thing. Like people just- look for Jason, casually.
“Why?” Does no one around here have any self-preservation?
“Dick pulled a prank, and I wanted to…” Tim sighs. “I wanted to get him back. I needed intel. Didn’t find you the way I expected to, but-” He shrugs unapologetically.
"Couldn't you have just... Texted me?" Jason asks, and it feels like he's getting a headache from how over this he is. How Dick and Bruce manage to let Tim out of their fucking sight when he pulls shit like this is beyond Jason.
"Would you have answered?" Tim asks, matter-of-factly.
And, well. Fair.
“You know I’m not a good guy, right?” Jason asks him incredulously— frustrated —because this fucking kid… “I was just as likely to kill you as anyone else in that warehouse. Tell me you get it, Replacement.”
Tim has the fucking audacity to smirk at that. “You may have done some bad things, Jason, but you aren’t a bad guy.” He shuffles around to get comfortable, closes his eyes, and reclines back into his pillows. Jason just stares at him, stunned into silence.
(So maybe, he might actually do anything for Timothy Drake-Wayne, even if he doesn’t actually realize how fucked he is in that moment.)
He continues to just blink at Tim dumbly until Tim, without opening his eyes, extends a foot and kicks Jason lightly in the arm. “Keep going.”
Jason obliges- well, for a minute, but then closes his book.
“Dick’s a sucker when it comes to prank food,” he says after clearing his throat, and Tim cracks one eye open slightly. “Toothpaste Oreos, caramel-covered onions, Mac n’ Cheese powder in his orange juice…”