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Alfred Pennyworth is a smart man. It's one of the few things that Bruce knows for a fact, beyond the certainty of death and taxes; Alfred Pennyworth is the most intelligent man he knows, and the things he says are usually correct. And so perhaps, when Alfred Pennyworth had told him that he was running on dangerous levels of sleep deprivation and as such maybe shouldn't be dealing with strenuous cases, or even being out at all, he might have been right. Because right now the Batman, the Dark Knight, is stumbling through a crumbling alley, thoroughly cursing himself for the night's events.
God spare him from his rogues and their idiot henchmen who continue to shoot at things without looking to see what they're trying to hit. He's gotten Crane back into the hands of the GCPD, but his wrist is definitely sprained, his sternum bruised from the Kevlar that stopped some of the bullets, his knee at least needs to be looked at, the car is still too far away, and one of the canisters of whatever new drug Crane was trying to peddle had been hit by a bullet, and Bruce had shoved his rebreather onto a cop and decided to fend for himself.
It's a perversion of Scarecrow's regular toxin, that much he knows. There's less terror here, more slow creeping dread, and it doesn't seem to be giving him the typical hallucinations. Fear toxin hallucinations burrow into the recesses of the brain, find the hypothetical that terrifies you the most, and manifests it out of thin air; Bruce has lost count of the number of people he's seen batting at nothing in front of them, eyes wide with horror. Whatever this is has left him lucid enough to know that what he sees isn't real, just his visual input being warped into something else. He doesn't see terrifying bat demons, he just sees the brick of the alley he's in, the hand he has pressed to it, though now everything is spattered with blood.
"You look terrible."
He doesn't see the mugger with his gun, he just sees the Red Hood, though now it's the Red Hood from Ace Chemicals, the Red Hood who would be a monster under that helmet, not a miracle.
It's not real, Bruce reminds himself, and suppresses the urge to flinch. Not that the first Red Hood had been innately terrifying, more ridiculous than anything when he'd originally been encountered, but Bruce knows who was under that red chrome now, knows what that man would go on to do, and what he would do still has the power to make him shudder, years later. Barbara, wan in a pool of her own blood; his son, face blackened with ash and his wrists rubbed raw from the rope used to bind him during his torture.
"Hn." Bruce wants to grind out more between his teeth, but there's a latent panic bubbling up in his throat that he has to fight to get down. The Red Hood — and it's not the first Red Hood, Bruce can see the leather jacket, see the breadth of his shoulders that his predecessor never had, it's not him — tilts his red mask, like a puppy encountering something confusing.
"Shit, you look really terrible," he says. The voice modulator renders everything toneless, but there's still a conversational lilt to it that Bruce recognizes because he knows the man talking to him, it doesn't matter what they spit out in their worse moments, he knows him. And then the Red Hood reaches up and takes off his helmet, and Bruce's heart slams in his chest.
Under the helmet, Jason's face is young and bleeding. His domino is gone, and there's a long scratch on his cheekbone where a fingernail must have torn at the flesh as it ripped the mask off. There's blood leaking steadily from matted curls down his forehead, blood staining his lips as it bubbles up with every breath, and livid finger shaped bruises on his jaw. His eyes are blue and sightless.
"Jason." It rips out of him without his meaning to. It's not real. You know it's not real.
"What happened to no names in the field?" Jason asks. But something in the defensiveness of his posture bleeds out, his tone is less hard than it generally is, and Bruce blinks his eyes several times, tries to scrub away what Jason looked like when he died with how Jason looks like now, taller and broader, hair clean and laced with white at the front. It feels a bit like staring at a magic eye painting, forcing himself to focus on the reality, when the horror is swimming just underneath, waiting for a slip of his control to resurface.
"Bad night," Bruce grits out.
"Gathered that much," Jason drawls, reaching to peel off his domino. Teal and gold, not blue and dead.
There's a part of Bruce reminding him that he is on thin ice, where Jason is concerned, and shouldn't push more than he seems to do just by being in the same vicinity as him. That same part also points out that Jason is only twenty, and Bruce's son, and it's not up to him to be concerned for Bruce, but the opposite. The rest of him is still struggling to remind himself that Jason's wearing a leather jacket, not a Robin uniform. You know it's not real and you're in public, calm down — Bruce rips the cowl off, lets the cool of the night air lick at his skin, and breathes deep. It helps, somehow. Perhaps because most of his deeply dreaded memories come from Batman, not Bruce Wayne.
"Toxin," Bruce manages to spit out.
Jason groans theatrically and presses a hand to his eyes. "Fucking Jonathan," he mutters. And Bruce isn't entirely sure what to expect, but it's not Jason striding forward and placing a hand on his shoulder almost gently, ducking his head to find Bruce's gaze and studying his eyes intently.
It feels startlingly out of place. Something Alfred would do, or Clark, not Jason. He's mostly expected Jason to be gone by this point. They're...better than they were when the Red Hood was siccing androids on Batman and Nightwing, but nowhere close to what they once were; Bruce doesn't imagine that will ever come back.
"Scale of one to ten," Jason says carefully, moving his fingers to Bruce's chin to lightly manhandle him so that he can see what he's looking for. "How bad?"
"Four," Bruce says. "Still lucid, just compromised. Mild symptoms." He knows how he can get on fear toxin, real fear toxin, not this experimental nonsense. He knows how bad he can be. What he sees, how he reacts. Even with what happened afterwards, even with Bane's attack following so soon, he still remembers how it felt to beat the Joker into the ground while on fear toxin, Jason's name on his tongue.
"Please tell me you have an antidote on you, at the very least," Jason grumbles. "Because if I have to drag you all the way to the Batmobile, I'm demanding reparations in the form of all of my missed allowances." That stirs something Bruce's chest, the way it always does, so he just gives a curt nod.
Except that when Jason reaches for the belt, some corner of Bruce's mind kicks into self-defense, addled with toxin, and he strikes out half on instinct. If it were nearly anyone else, it would have knocked them flat, but this is Jason. And he trained Jason, and Jason has trained very extensively since then, molded himself into the kind of fighter who can and has taken on the Batman and managed to hold his own. Bruce also strikes out with his bad wrist, and Jason moves snake-fast, intercepting his blow and bending his hand back sharply, almost to the point of breakage, the kind of move meant to destabilize but not yet debilitate.
When Bruce stumbles hard to his knees at the shock of pain, Jason follows, takes advantage of the opportunity to fish the antidote pen out of a compartment on his belt and jam it, slightly harder than necessary, into Bruce's neck. As with all antidotes for anything they come across in their nights, Joker Venom and fear gas and the myriad of Ivy's pollens, this one is meant to subdue as well as heal, knock the recipient out like a light while it works its way through the bloodstream, stop them from causing any damage. Bruce can already feel his consciousness fuzzing.
"Thank you," he says, his tongue suddenly thick in his mouth. For the antidote. For being alive. For being here. Why are you here? Why not leave me to my own devices? Thank you, thank you, but why?
"Next time, keep the rebreather for yourself," Jason hisses. He's fidgeting around the belt, likely looking for the compartment he uses to dispose of anything with needles that needs to be trashed, lest it falls into wrong hands. Dick tells him that he could just use a trashcan, and that he's too paranoid for his own good.
"Changed the configurations..." Bruce whispers, and then he's out.
When he tumbles himself back into consciousness, Jason's beside him now instead of in front of him, arms loose on his knees and head leaning back against the brick. He's got the empty antidote pen still clasped in his fingers.
"I moved some compartments around," Bruce says. His throat feels dry and raspy, the way it always does after an encounter with one of Crane's mixes.
Jason hums. "Yeah, you mentioned," he says, and hands the pen over to Bruce. Bruce puts it in the correct disposal site, and when he turns to thank Jason for his assistance, Jason's holding something else out for him. "Found this where you used to trash 'em," he says quietly. In his hand, Jason's face smiles up at him.
It's not as if Bruce has forgotten that it's there. He never forgets that it's there. It's from that most blurry of times, the few weeks after Ethiopia and the funeral and the United Nations, when people were still asking where Robin was and Batman kept his silence but Bruce wanted to scream and cry and rage and demand that the universe give him back his son. He'd spent a lot of downtime on those nights wishing for Jason's face, then staring at Jason's face in that picture, Jason at newly fourteen, a hint of a dimple in his cheek as his mouth crooks upward, curls wild and windswept.
Whenever there's a case with missing children, or something that's taken him to Park Row, he tends to take it out, try to reach that part everyone says always arrives where he can think about the loss and it will stop hurting as much as it does. He's never gotten to that point.
"Thank you," Bruce says hoarsely. He takes the photo gently, tucks it back into its dedicated compartment on his belt, and says nothing at the thick bob of Jason's throat or the knot in his jaw as he stares determinedly ahead of him, refusing to meet Bruce's eyes.
"How long's that been in there?" he asks quietly.
"Four years," Bruce says instantly.
Jason nods, as if Bruce somehow confirmed a suspicion. God, there used to be a time when he knew what Jason was thinking halfway before he'd even thought it himself. He misses that. "You know, I remember when you took that," he says. "Was a, uh, Killer Moth case, if I remember right. I remember I thought it was the funniest night we'd ever have." He nudges Bruce's shoulder slightly with his own, lips twitching upwards.
He looks relaxed. Bruce doesn't think he's seen Jason look relaxed since before he died, has never seen this version of Jason without a tension in his shoulders, a defensiveness in his eyes, half leaning away without even realizing it, ready to flee or sink into a fight at the slightest provocation. Perhaps it's the exhaustion that always seems inherent to him whenever he deals with the aftermath of fear toxin, perhaps it's his lack of sleep, but Bruce wants to indulge, fall into it, remember when this was nothing but ease and love.
"It was up there," Bruce says. The huff of air out of Jason's mouth is more sigh than laugh, but there's the ghost of humor there that Bruce hasn't heard in a while.
"Come on then," Jason says, standing. "You should get back to where Alfred can absolutely lambast you for what has to have been some bad decisions."
"No names in the field," Bruce tells him, no teeth behind it, not when Jason offers him a hand to help him stand and pats him on the arm once he does, still looking at him like he's bracing for Bruce to keel over, ready to try and catch him if he does.
"Yeah, yeah," Jason mumbles. "Let's just get you to your big fancy car before you pass out again or something."
It's when they're in the Batmobile, Bruce putting in the autopilot because he's not in the best condition to drive and he's not going to let a twenty year old behind the wheel of his car, that Jason hisses, scrunching up his face with a twinge of pain.
"What?" Bruce asks, already scanning for visible injuries.
"Cracked ribs, I think, from earlier," Jason admits, twisting his mouth. "Was on my way to go and tape them up before," he waves a hand in Bruce's general direction. "And then I got distracted."
"Good thing you're coming to the Cave then," Bruce says firmly as the car starts to drive. The antidote is good, solid, the toxin is almost completely neutralized, nothing but the occasional tinge of mild anxiety in the back of his mouth. It's why he's still checking Jason over, just to make sure that there's nothing else, because there will always be a part of his mind that thinks of Jason and broken bones and is transported back four years into the past, to a hot and arid desert, and the smell of blood and smoke burning him from the inside out.
"I'm fine," Jason says firmly. Bruce decides not to push it and turns back to stare at the road. Whatever this is, this bit of rapprochement that has Jason helping him in a mild crisis, Jason agreeing to come back to the Cave with minimal haranguing, Jason in his car, he's not going to push it, especially not while in a vehicle going eighty miles an hour that Bruce knows Jason will fling himself out of if he feels so inclined, damage be damned.
"Thank you, again," is what he says instead. "For your help."
"Wasn't really necessary, I guess," Jason says, hunching his shoulders. "You'd have gotten along fine even if I never showed up."
"Nevertheless." Jason seems to allow himself a nod at that. "And you get better medical attention than you would have gotten otherwise," Bruce adds. "Lucky all around for the two of us." Jason fidgets with his hands, an old boyhood habit he hasn't apparently broken yet. He used to crack his knuckles often as a part of it, enough that Alfred would give a sharp tsk of his tongue whenever he did, though that never stopped him.
"No luck about it," Jason says softly. "Spotted you looking erratic, came down to help." He shrugs, the way he did as a child when he was self-conscious about a good grade in school. "No big deal, if you were still technically lucid. You didn't need me."
It is a big deal, Bruce wants to say. To me.
He knows that he's attuned to Jason, more than he is to probably any of the others, not out of lack of love for them but out of that gut-churning fear that's been present ever since the Red Hood first revealed himself, that one day he'll blink and Jason will be gone again; and they have no idea what brought Jason back, the next time he vanishes might end up being the last time Bruce will see him all over again. It cracks something in his chest, to think of Jason similarly attuned to him, even though most likely to a far more minor degree, that just as he watches for Jason even when he knows he shouldn't, perhaps his son too watches for him.
Wants to see him healthy just as much as Bruce does Jason.
"Nevertheless," is what he croaks out again, that old picture of Robin feeling as if it's burning a hole through the belt and into his skin. Tim's old words are on the tip of his tongue: Batman needs Robin. I'll always need you. He doesn't think Jason would appreciate it, and his time as Robin has always been the silent ghost haunting the corner of every interaction they've ever had since he came back. He doesn't know how Jason feels about having been Robin, not when it ended as catastrophically as it did, if he just wants to shove that part as far away from him as he can, or if he still holds it as close as Bruce does.
"Hey," Jason says quietly, and Bruce has to be more tired than he realized, to drift off into glassy-eyed daydreaming without even being aware. "I'm fine."
"Good," Bruce says, just as quiet. He feels a swell of emotion, too tangled and knotted to fully dissect, but there nonetheless, at Jason's reassurance. The silence that follows is almost easy, almost companionable, so close to foreign given the longevity of its absence in their lives, all the way back to the Cave.
Alfred does, in fact, lambast him over his poor decision-making. Bruce sits and takes it, because Alfred isn't necessarily wrong, and Batman is brave but certainly not brave enough to try and go toe to toe with Alfred Pennyworth.
His wrist isn't too bad, even with Jason's added ministrations from before he got the antidote, the bruises will likely fade in a couple days, his knee is passable, and his bloodwork comes back neat and clean, toxin firmly removed from his system. Alfred tapes Jason's ribs too, with significantly less admonishments, which Bruce can only chalk up to blatant favoritism. It's a hypothesis that's further proven by the fact that he pointedly says he's going to make hibiscus tea, a flavor Jason loves and Bruce has always shied away from. He'd almost be offended if he didn't agree with the man.
Just like Alfred, Bruce favors his children over himself too.
"I will say," Jason remarks casually as Alfred makes his way upstairs. "I might come over here more if I get special treatment every time I do." It's just the two of them, Tim in San Francisco and Dick in Blüdhaven, Stephanie and Cassandra currently in Hong Kong for something Cassandra needed to get done, and so Jason's words seem to echo in the cavernous silence that engulfs the two of them.
"You should come here more, when you're injured," Bruce says before his brain can tell him it might not be a good idea to say. He resists the urge to continue on and tell Jason that he should come here if he so much as gets a papercut.
Jason doesn't bristle at that, only shrugs. "Eh, maybe," is his response. But he still sits down at the edge of the cot Bruce has been ordered to sit on, and silently offers out his wrist. Bruce stares at him for a long moment, tries to figure out what on Earth the game is here, before that old vision swims in front of his eyes again. Jason, the blood on his face. How, the first time Bruce had seen him like that, he'd been desperately pressing his fingers to his son's throat, begging whatever deities existed and had control over the universe to let there be any heartbeat, even faint and thin and thready, just as long as it was there.
It hadn't been there. Bruce's tears had blurred out Jason's face after that.
"Go for it," Jason says now, alive and with a beat that Bruce can see jumping in his neck, if he looks closely enough.
Maybe it's whatever residues of toxin might remain, too small to be traced but still just present enough to have a slight effect, maybe it's the wound that is Jason's death that has never come close to healing, even with everything that's happened afterwards, maybe it's the fact that Jason is here and offering Bruce a chance to verify his corporeality with so much more than simple faraway looks and stern reminders to his brain that he's not dreaming or hallucinating, but Bruce's throat feels tight. And he presses his fingers to Jason's pulse point, presses down perhaps slightly harder than he would normally, and thrills at the way he can feel the blood rushing, the steady rhythm of it.
"Feel better?" Jason asks, even though he knows that this isn't how fear toxin works, logic and reasoning and rationale and empirical evidence don't really help if you're in the throes of it, and that if Bruce had still been suffering any severe aftershocks, not even something as grounding as this would have done much good. But this time it is. Because Jason is offering it, even when by all right he shouldn't, when Bruce hasn't deserved it in a long time.
Bruce swallows, and maneuvers his hand so that he can squeeze his son's wrist just a bit, like he's trying to reassure him in turn. "Yes," he whispers.