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The fluorescent lights of the grocery store cast harsh shadows across Jason's face as he reached for the cereal box on the top shelf. Dick watched the stretch of his arm, the way his jacket pulled tight across shoulders that had broadened since his return but still carried the lean proportions of youth.
"Got it." Jason dropped the box into their cart, and Dick caught the flash of dimples as he grinned—those soft indentations that belonged on someone years younger.
The cashier, a middle-aged woman with reading glasses perched on her nose, smiled at them both. "Brothers? You have the same eyes."
Dick's chest tightened with satisfaction. He nodded, slipping his arm around Jason's shoulders in what looked like casual affection. Jason's skin, visible at his collar where his jacket had shifted, held that porcelain quality—unmarked, untouched by time or sun damage. The Lazarus Pit had reset more than just his scars.
"Older brother?" the cashier asked Dick, already bagging their items.
"By a few years." Dick's fingers pressed against Jason's shoulder blade through the leather. Solid muscle, but the bone structure underneath still held that teenage narrowness.
Jason shifted, angling away from the touch, but not before Dick caught the slight flush across his cheekbones. Even his blush looked younger—that rush of colour that painted itself across features still soft with lingering baby fat. They walked to the parking garage in silence, their footsteps echoing off concrete. Dick studied Jason's profile in the yellow overhead lights. No crow's feet creased the corners of his eyes. No lines marked his forehead from years of scowling, despite the fact that Jason scowled plenty. His jaw had the clean definition of someone barely past twenty, all sharp angles and smooth planes.
"Stop staring." Jason's voice carried that familiar edge, but his mouth—Christ, his mouth still had that fullness that belonged on someone who'd never needed to shave every day.
"Can't help it." Dick unlocked the car, watching Jason slide into the passenger seat. "You look exactly the same as you did at fifteen."
Jason's hands stilled on the seatbelt. "That's not—"
"Better, actually." Dick started the engine, keeping his eyes on Jason's face as the dashboard lights illuminated those unlined features. "The Pit took away the bags under your eyes. All those sleepless nights on the streets."
"Dick."
The warning in Jason's voice made something twist in Dick's stomach. He pulled out of the parking space, navigating through the underground garage while Jason stared out the passenger window. The angle gave Dick a perfect view of his profile—the slope of his nose, unchanged since adolescence, the curve of his ear that still held that delicate shell-like quality. They stopped at a red light. Dick reached over, brushing his thumb across Jason's cheekbone. The skin felt impossibly smooth, no hint of the rough texture that came with age and exposure.
"People see us together," Dick said, "and they know. No question about it."
Jason turned toward him, and Dick caught the slight widening of his eyes, that micro-expression that had always given away his surprise, even as a kid. "Know what?"
"That you're mine." Dick's thumb traced along Jason's jawline. "My baby brother."
The light turned green. Jason's breath hitched, barely audible above the hum of the engine, but Dick heard it. He always heard everything when it came to Jason. Bruce would kill him. The thought arrived with the casual certainty of a weather forecast—clear skies, mild temperatures, Dick Grayson murdered by his adoptive father in the Batcave at approximately nine PM on a Tuesday. Because what Dick felt right now, watching Jason's throat work around a swallow as his thumb lingered on that impossibly smooth jaw, was not brotherly. It wore the costume of brotherly. It performed the choreography of brotherly. But underneath, in the dark space between his ribs where honesty lived and festered, it was something that would make Bruce's eye twitch in that specific way it did right before someone got a lecture about boundaries and responsibility and what the hell is wrong with you, Dick.
And God help him, some feral, unhinged part of his brain wanted to see it. Dick changed lanes, one hand on the wheel, and let himself imagine it. Bruce's face cycling through its limited emotional repertoire: confusion first, because Bruce always defaulted to confusion when confronted with something outside his carefully constructed models of human behaviour. Then the jaw clench, that micro-movement of the masseter muscle that telegraphed fury in a man who'd built his entire identity around not showing it. Then the silence. The worst part was always the silence, that cathedral-sized quiet Bruce weaponised better than any batarang, letting it stretch until the other person cracked and started explaining themselves, justifying, backpedalling.
Dick wouldn't backpedal. That was the thing. He'd stand there in the Cave with its dripping stalactites and its billion-dollar computer array and he'd look Bruce dead in the cowl and say yeah, and?
"We're not kids anymore, Dick." But Jason's voice carried that slight rasp it got when he was flustered, and his pupils had dilated in the dashboard's glow. Dick smiled, pressing his foot to the accelerator.
"No," he agreed, watching Jason's tongue dart out to wet his lips—lips that had never lost their teenage fullness. "We're not."
The drive to their apartment passed in silence, but Dick felt Jason's gaze on him at every stoplight, every turn. When they finally parked, Jason's hand found Dick's wrist as he reached for the door handle. Dick's heart stumbled over itself; a syncopation in the steady rhythm he'd trained to remain constant through free fall and gunfire and the particular horror of Tim's cooking. Jason's fingers were warm against the thin skin of his inner wrist, pressed right over the pulse point like he knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard.
The family would hate this. The thought arrived and departed with the emotional weight of a grocery receipt. Somewhere in a parallel universe, a version of Dick Grayson cared deeply about Alfred's disappointment, about Tim's uncomfortable silence, about Damian's theatrical gagging. That version of Dick was a well-adjusted individual who processed his emotions through healthy communication and perhaps a tasteful journal. This version of Dick was sitting in a parked car cataloguing the way Jason's thumb had begun to move—barely, almost imperceptibly—against the tendons of his wrist.
They weren't blood related. Because here was the thing that Dick couldn't explain to anyone, the thing that lived in that dark honest place and refused to be evicted: Jason looked like them. Like both of them. Not in the way adopted siblings sometimes grew to resemble each other through shared mannerisms and borrowed expressions, though Jason had picked up plenty of those too, the way he crossed his arms identically to Bruce, the way he tilted his head when considering a problem exactly the way Dick did. No. Jason looked like someone had taken Bruce's bone structure and Dick's everything else and put them in a blender with something raw and beautiful and hit puree.
And that—that—was the part Dick couldn't say out loud, the confession that would earn him a one-way ticket to Arkham if he ever breathed it into existence. Because looking at Jason was like looking at the son Bruce might have produced if they were all biologically related and then they’d be brothers in blood and God would’ve had a sick sense of humour. The high cheekbones were all Bruce, that aristocratic architecture that photographed like a Renaissance painting and intimidated boardrooms full of men twice his age. But the eyes, wide-set and framed by lashes that were almost obscenely long, those sat in Jason's face the way they sat in Dick's own. The same tilt. The same way they caught light and held it.
"This is fucked up," Jason whispered.
Dick looked down at Jason's fingers, long and elegant, but still carrying that slender quality of youth. No calluses from years of hard labour, no scars from battles that had marked Dick's own hands with proof of experience.
"Yeah," Dick said, turning his wrist until their palms pressed together. Jason's skin felt fever-warm against his. "It is."
Jason's grip tightened. "I hate that I look like this."
"I don't." Dick shifted closer, close enough to see the way Jason's eyelashes—thick and dark and unfairly long—cast shadows across his cheeks. "I love it."
Jason's breathing had gone shallow, and Dick could see the rapid flutter of his pulse at his throat; another mark of youth, that visible proof of a heart that beat too fast, too honest. Sometimes Dick thought that the moment Bruce had first introduced Jason—scrawny, defiant, drowning in the green and red and yellow of Dick's old Robin suit—something had short-circuited behind his eyes. Rewired the whole goddamn motherboard. Because he remembered standing in the Cave, twenty years old and furious at Bruce for replacing him, and then this kid had turned around, and the pixie boots were too big and the cape pooled on the floor like a puddle of gold, and Dick's anger had evaporated into something he didn't have vocabulary for.
His costume. His colours. Wrapped around someone else's body.
It should have felt like violation. It did, at first; a hot, possessive flare in his sternum that he'd mistaken for territorial rage. That's mine. You don't get to give that away. But underneath the anger, threaded through it like wire through muscle, was something softer. Something that looked at this kid in his colours and thought: oh, there you are.
He hadn't understood it then. Twenty was old enough to know better but young enough to lie to yourself with conviction, and Dick had lied beautifully. He'd told himself it was protectiveness. Told himself the way his chest ached when Jason smiled—rare and startled, like joy was a foreign language he was teaching himself—was just the natural response of an older brother recognising a kindred spirit. Told himself the heat that pooled low in his belly when Jason sparred with him, all untrained ferocity and raw potential, limbs too long for his body and eyes blazing with the need to prove something, was adrenaline. Just adrenaline. The same chemical cocktail he got from any good fight.
"Dick—"
Dick leaned across the console, pressing his lips to Jason's temple. The skin there was soft, unmarked by worry lines, and it tasted like soap and something indefinably young.
"My baby brother," he murmured against Jason's hair, and felt Jason shiver.
When Dick pulled back, Jason's eyes were wide and dark, pupils blown in the dim light. His lips had parted slightly, and Dick could see the edge of his teeth—straight and white and perfect, untouched by the years that should have passed.
"Inside," Jason said, his voice rough with something that wasn't quite anger anymore.
Dick nodded, watching as Jason fumbled with the door handle. Even his hands shook slightly, that fine tremor of youth and adrenaline that Dick had lost somewhere in his twenties. They walked to the elevator in silence, standing on opposite sides as it climbed to their floor. Dick caught their reflection in the polished metal doors; himself, clearly the older of the two, lines of experience marking his face and posture, and Jason beside him, looking like he'd stepped out of a photograph from five years ago.
The doors opened. Jason walked ahead, his key already in hand, and Dick followed, watching the familiar lean line of his body, the way he moved with that unconscious grace of someone still growing into his strength. Inside their apartment, Jason turned to face him, and Dick saw everything he'd been cataloguing reflected back; the youth, the uncertainty, the way Jason's body still held echoes of the boy he'd been.
"Say it again," Jason whispered.
Dick stepped closer, close enough to count the individual lashes framing Jason's eyes, to see the way his chest rose and fell with each careful breath.
"My baby brother," Dick said, and watched Jason's eyes flutter closed.
When Jason opened them again, Dick saw everything there—the want, the confusion, the way years of separation had twisted into something hungry and desperate and completely wrong.
"Yeah," Jason breathed. "I am."
Dick's hands found Jason's face, thumbs tracing over those impossibly smooth cheeks, and Jason leaned into the touch like he was starving for it.
"Always," Dick murmured, and when Jason's lips parted in response, Dick finally, finally leaned down to claim what had always been his. The kiss tasted like grocery-store lip balm and the ghost of the coffee Jason had been drinking, and Dick's brain shorted out for a full three seconds before it rebooted into something approaching coherent thought. Jason's mouth was warm and slightly chapped and opened against his with a sound—small, involuntary, wrecked—that Dick felt in his molten fucking core.
And the thing that cracked him open, the thing that split him right down the sternum and poured light into all the dark and rotting places he'd been hoarding for years, was that Jason kissed him back.