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East Gotham Cemetery is, as most cemeteries are, a cheerless place even on a good day.
Today, at the tail end of a week long downpour blowing in off the Atlantic, frigid and inescapable, it’s a washed out nightmare in greyscale.
Usually neatly maintained lawns have become a churned up mess of mud and clay. Rainwater floods down the empty footpaths like miniature river systems, soaking Dick’s socks and washing askew the trinkets left by graves. Any flowers not already blown away are dead, brown petled husks.
The oldest of the headstones are so slick with water that their faded epitaphs are impossible to read as he fights against the tide, slowly making his way up the hill on his crutches.
If there ever were a day to skip this visit, it’d be today.
But Dick hasn’t missed a single Friday afternoon in four years, even before Bludhaven was wiped off the map. It’s a comforting routine, in the face of all this chaos, even if it’s a little redundant now that he knows there’s nobody here.
Except this time, there is.
Sat cross-legged right in the dirt, plain red hoodie gone blood dark with how soaked it is.
The last time Dick saw Jason in civvies he was 14, short for his age and all chubby, rosy cheeked enthusiasm. He’s none of those things now - broad shouldered and tall, eyes sunken above hollow cheeks, skin as grey as the granite headstone before him.
No guns or helmet or body armour in sight and Dick is glad for it, but Jason looks strangely diminished without them. If Dick didn’t already know that this was the same person that fearlessly led Batman and Nightwing on a meticulously premeditated gauntlet across the city a fortnight back, he never would have guessed.
Relief probably shouldn’t be Dick’s first reaction, all things considered, but it is.
Bruce hadn’t said anything about the confrontation with Red Hood four days ago. Everything Dick knows he’s learned from the news. Red Hood and Batman and Joker, a collapsed building that only two of them emerged from. No body recovered, but every chance that Jason was dead again before Dick had even got to talk to him.
Now here he is - fixedly staring not at his own grave, but the second one Dick doesn’t pay enough attention to; Sheila Haywood. Jason’s birth mother, Barbara had told him.
Probably not a good sign, wallowing in front of your dead mother’s grave after an, uh, explosive fight with your adopted father.
The sensible play would be to leave. Dick is injured, and Jason is unpredicatble. A recipe for disaster, if this comes to blows.
But they've already lost so much time, and Dick isn’t Bruce. He’s not here to fight.
He edges closer, deliberately clacking the crutches against the paving stones. Jason doesn’t react, and Dick doesn’t know the man he’s become well enough to gauge that on a scale of already knew I was here to completely dissociating.
“Mind if I join you?” he tries.
No response, so he takes his chances. Clumsily stretching out his bad leg and dropping down to sit in the mud next to his miraculously undead brother probably shouldn’t swoop his stomach more than flinging himself off Wayne Tower without a line, but it does.
Dick doesn’t know what to say. Jason doesn’t ask him to leave.
Rain splatters around them. It doesn’t feel real.
It feels like if he blinks too hard Jason will vanish, another hallucination. But if he stares too long, he’s worried he’ll bolt. Keeping Jason carefully on the edge of his peripheral vision, Dick mentally traces the words on the gravestone - a mockery, now; Jason Todd, Rest in Peace.
He might not know what happened in that condemned apartment block before it blew, but he knows enough to understand that peace wasn’t ever an option.
It is peaceful here though. Twin graves tucked behind a tasteful wall of shrubbery towards the top of the hill, out of sight of the main thoroughfare. Dick suspects Bruce chose the spot deliberately and he's grateful for it right now, a sheltered moment between the two of them and the dead.
“Ever wonder,” Jason murmurs after a while. His voice is a croaked whisper, barely audible over the rain. “If the world would be better off without you?”
There’s no inflection to it, no emotion. It makes Dick’s chest ache.
“Yeah,” he says, because it’s true. “Yeah, I have.”
Jason hums in flat acknowledgement.
Dick takes the bait.
“Have you?”
“Don’t have to.”
Jason’s smile is as sharp and dangerous as his knife. He tugs his hood down and bares his neck, revealing a nasty slice across the side of his throat - uncovered and only haphazardly stitched, a strange patchwork of fresh wound and shiny new scar tissue.
“Daddy dearest made it crystal fucking clear.”
He doesn’t raise his voice above that whisper of a thing - maybe can’t, Dick thinks, remembering the similar scar on Joey’s throat - and that somehow makes it harder to dismiss the accusation.
God fucking damn it, Bruce.
Whatever reaction Jason expected, his face falls at Dick’s stunned silence and he scrambles to cover it again. Dick tries desperately to piece together something to say and comes up empty.
“Lucky me, huh,“ Jason says, barely audible over the rainfall. “Not one but two parent’s who’ll choose the clown over me. What are the chances.”
That-- Christ, if that means what it sounds like…
“The fuck is so wrong with me that they keep choosing him?”
Jason’s whisper of a voice cracks painfully in the middle. It resonates sharply between Dick’s ribs.
“I’m so sorry, Jason. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” He means Ethiopia, and the months before, and the months afterwards. He means Gotham, four days and four years ago. “I’m so fucking sorry, Little Wing.”
He doesn’t know if it’s the sentiment or the nickname or something else entirely but Jason crumples like his strings have been cut, sobbing loud and ugly into hands like a child.
(Eighteen. Jason’s been fourteen for so many years, fourteen and immortalised in glass and stone, and now he’s here and he’s flesh and blood and he’s eighteen.)
Dick shuffles closer, pulls Jay against his shoulder. It’s awkward and uncomfortable - both of them twisted at an odd angle, crying and dirty, cold and sodden and alive, God, Jason’s alive.
“Why doesn’t anyone ever choose me,” he wheezes between wet gasps, and Dick clutches him tighter.
I did, Dick thinks but doesn’t say. That’s a conversation for another time.
“I do,” he says instead, curling protectively around Jason's hunched body like he couldn't four days or four years or a decade ago. “Fuck, Jace, I do."