Archive of Our Own

There is, of course, the lingering question: how the fuck did it end up like this. Jason thinks that he shouldn’t be so focused on it, but it’s all that he can think about, despite the blood, and the broken bone, and the general misery and yet, there he goes, focusing away. 

It’s easier, anyway. To track the convoluted, shitty path that brought him here, instead of letting himself feel the probe of fingers down his cervical spine, firm and dexterous, skimming over the latches that keep his helmet sealed without trying to breach them. 

He’s flat on his back, on the pavement, splayed like so much offloaded flotsam. His HUD is cracked, the screen distorted and pixelated, throwing error messages whenever the short circuits manage to loop enough current to light up at all. Faintly, Jason can smell hot copper, and he’s starting to think that the persistent buzzing in his ears isn’t a simple case of tinnitus.

The hands on him—and God , but he’s trying not to think too much about this, the aftertaste of a gunpowder chlorate stuck in his throat and clogging his nostrils, the rolling heatwave and air hunger that leaves him wiped out and winded, trying to gather enough of himself to get the hell up and do it now —the fingers won’t loosen. It’s like the digits have stretched out into claws and sunk into his skin, hunting for bone.

It costs him seconds of reaction time to remember this is a threat. 

Jason rocks upward, wheezes as he does it, because his ribs are fucked. Feels every muscle in his body spasm, tense with the whiplash. It’s clumsy, and too slow, and he’s half blind, with only narrow parts of his HUD even functional enough to display input at all, grabbing for the gun still on his belt and scrambling backward in the same motion.

Batman, naturally, does not take this well. There’s an instinctive oh shit that Jason can see cross over his face—everyone has it when a gun is pointed at them, no matter how many times it’s happened before—and the lower half of Batman’s jaw scrunches with it. Jason doesn’t lower the weapon. 

“Put the gun down.” 

“The fuck I will, you shithead.” His voice comes out high, strangled. He can barely make it through the sentence before he’s breaking off into a ragged cough. His throat is raw, and dry, coated with ash despite the filters in his helmet. 

“Put the gun down.” It’s more forceful this time. Jason finds himself reacting to it without thinking, too many years trapped learning to do it on instinct, and the weapon lowers. Jason considers for long seconds lifting it back up, just to make a point. 

Bruce moves into his personal space without much of a warning, already trying to feel for damage. Jason really is gonna kill him. Just this one time. Alfred will understand. Batman can’t really be killed anyway, he exists outside of this plane of reality. 

Bruce Wayne, however, looks about as well put together as Jason feels. 

“Get your hands off of me!” Jason insists, shoving at him. Bruce seems to grow about ten more of them to spite him, and no matter how much Jason peels his fingers away, they always come back. 

“Do you have a concussion?” Bruce asks. 

Jason stares at him, incredulous. He can’t think of anything to say for long seconds, because everything that does want to leave his mouth would just give him more problems. He settles on, “Am I supposed to be able to just tell you that? Recite it like…like some computer diagnost—fuck!” 

That’s definitely bleeding. The first flicker of irritation past the concern. “Do you feel dizzy?” 

“ Yes!?”

Bruce reaches for the latches on his helmet, and, really, Jason has no clue how he got close enough, how Jason let him get close enough, but suddenly he’s inches away. One hand holding Jason still by his shoulder, the other fiddling with some very delicate mechanisms, close enough that Jason can see the thin trickle of blood rivuleting down the side of Bruce’s face. Jason lurches away from him, Batman’s gauntlets digging in for a half-second before letting go. 

Finally.

“Don’t touch that,” Jason snaps, because he doesn’t need to be blown up a second time today. 

“Jason.” He’s not a fan of the way Bruce says his name, not a fan of the tone he takes. Aggrieved, more emotional than Bruce should be behind this cowl. It puts him on edge, makes him feel small and unruly. Like a Robin .

 Everything feels a little too real. 

Jason would love to panic, just a tiny, itty-bitty amount, about what just happened, but he’s not going to do that in front of Bruce. In front of anyone, but especially not Bruce. He works out his emotions with blood these days, and Bruce is as good a target for it as any. If Jason could just get him to stop touching him with concern. 

There are tears in his gear, weak spots ripped—or burned—away, leaving swathes of road rash up and down his body in awkward places. Jason reaches up, undoes the straps holding his headgear in place, shuddering as the seal breaks with a hiss and the helmet comes off.

It’s painfully bright, out in the real world. High definition, full-color, still rife with all of the floating miodesopsias that he was kind of hoping was just his HUD malfunctioning. The pavement is strewn with rubble, and they haven’t quite cleared the smoke haze, sitting below the worst of it. 

Bruce hesitates for a moment, but the stutter-stop of his motion makes a dark part of Jason growl with good, then the man’s hands are on his skull, feeling for damage. Jason lets it happen, mostly because he’s too dazed to check himself, and when Bruce finds a particularly sore spot, that’s enough of that. 

“Okay, I’m damaged, we’ve got it. Your nose is doing wonders for your face, why don’t you put some attention on that ?” 

Bruce’s hand comes instinctively to touch the philtrum, and Jason can’t tell if the blood that he smears on it is his own or the man’s. It’s gruesome. Fascinating, in its own way, almost like a blood-soaked puzzle he needs to put together. 

For all their differences, it’s impossible to tell the two of them apart at that level. To find the line where Bruce’s bloody hands end and Jason’s wounds begin. 

He picks up his helmet and tries to catch his breath. Bruce seems to finally remember that he has his own body, because his hand comes up to his ribs, hesitant, wincing. His cowl is picked off his own head, and his dark hair is messy and sweat-slicked. 

Bruce wipes at his face with the back of his vambrace. Immediate threat of death neutralized, the man takes in a shuddering, hitched breath, and states the obvious. “We need to move, they’re probably still out there.” 

With more explosives, yeah, no shit. 

“That’s great,” Jason says mildly, “good. Have fun out there.” 

Bruce gives him a severe look. Jason waggles his eyebrows in return, and he feels all of about twelve for it, but he can’t imagine having the energy to flip him off, so it will have to do. 

“I meant both of us together.” 

“No.” 

“I’m not leaving you out here.” 

Jason laughs breathlessly. “Great news—you’re not leaving me, I am staying voluntarily. Your guilt complex may be appeased.” 

Bruce says, Jason , again, in that same tone of voice, and he’s reminded of the fact that lowered or not, he still has a gun and a hundred and fifty grams of lead just begging to find a home. The man is still just sitting there, kneeling in front of Jason, arms held awkwardly at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. There’s a fissure in the microfibre weave of his cowl that Jason hadn’t noticed before, and it aligns neatly with the goose egg bleeding sluggishly at Bruce’s temple. 

He might not be the only one with a potential concussion. It certainly explains Bruce’s newfound team spirit. 

“No,” Jason says because he, too, can be a reductive, petty asshole. “No, this shit.” A vague gesture to the bright blue sky above them, being steadily tainted with the smoke haze of a still-smoldering wreckage. “This is your fault. If you’d kept your nose out of my fucking business—”

“And let you walk into a trap?”

“I knew it was a trap!” 

He did not, in fact, know it was a trap, but that’s really not the point here. The point is that…is that Bruce is doing what he always does. Being a control freak dialed up to a billion with the money to helicopter and enough social influence that everyone will leave him alone about it. It’s irritating. Beyond that, it’s infantilizing. Jason is an adult. This isn’t like when he was a Robin, lined up in the parade with the rest of Bruce’s child soldiers. 

Bruce releases a thin sound. It seems to come straight from the depths of his stomach, tired and croaked, like it’s been waiting ages to escape. “If you had communicated that better, then maybe—” 

“Communicated? With you?” Jason laughs harder and it’s a mistake. It hurts , strains something in his chest, ribs lancing with hot pain that cuts him short and leaves him inhaling thin and rapid. He goes white with the pain, he knows he does, but that doesn’t quite manage to overwhelm the sheer incredulity of the notion. “What, did you want me to log a report in your fucking filing system, Bruce ? Send you an email ?”

Bruce winces. Jason hopes it’s because he’s realized how much of an idiot he is, and not because the pitch of Jason’s voice has reached a particular frequency that sounds more like nails on a chalkboard than human speech. 

“I,” it would be a lot more intimidating, if Jason could sit up, without swaying slightly, a seasick tilt to the world that has his eyes locking with Bruce to anchor himself. “Am not one of your sidekicks, Bruce, I’m not sending you status reports every time I need to tinkle like Drake does.” 

“Fine,” Bruce agrees too quickly for it to have any real meaning. It’s lip service. An attempt to de-escalate, and Jason isn’t stupid enough not to notice that. “But whether or not you like it—” and oh, how Jason knows he’s going to hate whatever comes out of his mouth next in a way he never has before “—our best chance of survival is with each other. Do you want to get out of this, or would you rather I leave you here to die?” 

Jason stays quiet long enough, just enough, that Bruce’s expression morphs with frustration and his mouth opens for something truly nasty to come out. He wants to make Bruce think he’s honestly thinking it over instead of just delaying answering, because he came to the same conclusion himself somewhere between pulling the gun on Batman and now. 

But he wants Bruce to think about the fact, just once, that someone considered dying rather than being in his presence. 

Fucking bastard. 

Jason doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a verbal answer, just starts to slowly ease upright. Pauses to catch his breath, with his hands flat on the asphalt, staring down at the yellow pavement marking and noticing the hole in the thumb of his glove, realizes he can’t feel his fingers the right way. 

Fantastic. 

Splendid, amazing, incredible, just—just the best . 

He makes sure to grab his gun as he goes, and tucks it into one of his holsters. Well. Okay, he tries. The slightest bit of pressure against his left leg nearly makes him black out, and he has to tuck it into the one at his waist instead. He wishes he had more. Fuck, this is going to be a bitch if his left leg is going to give up. 

Bruce probably really will be leaving him behind. 

Jason wonders a little hysterically if Bruce will bother to carry the guilt of his death on his ego like he has everyone else, or if it will be too tainted to bother with a second time. 

“We’re thirty-three miles east of the Allagash River,” Bruce makes it to his feet faster, just sort of rises, like he isn’t pushing forty with a broken spine under his belt. Jason envies him. How the hell did they both go through that explosion together and Bruce is just mildly inconvenienced by it? 

This doesn’t feel fair, but then again, nothing really is. 

Jason braces himself on the count of four—a nice, solid number that irritates the hell out of him because it’s not three—and then pushes away from the remains of the vehicle he was using to haul himself slowly upright. The world makes an unplanned rotation, and he squeezes his eyes shut. 

“Are you—?” 

“ Don’t . Let me make one thing—” Jason has to take in a sharp breath before he can finish the sentence, squinting his eyes open and hissing, “—Absolutely clear to you, Mr. Wayne . I am this close,” he lifts his fingers up, and makes sure that Bruce can see they’re pressed flat together, “To shooting you. Shut the hell up.” 

“That would be unproductive,” Bruce snips. 

Jason smiles lazily, “Who has ever accused me of being productive ?” 

Bruce has nothing to say to that, for once, or he’s wisened up to the fact that Jason isn’t quite bluffing about the whole friendly-fire threat. Not that the two of them are particularly friendly.

Jason lets his face go blank. “We should get off the road.” 

“I think we should find I-11. You need a hospital.” 

He bristles at the accusation of weakness. “And what ?” Jason asks, “Get followed and shot down? Who’s being unproductive now? Where’s your car?” 

His own is scattered across the highway in bits and pieces, maybe buried a little bit in Jason’s own skin. If Bruce hadn’t been there, and pulled him out from the worst of the wreckage, Jason thinks he would have died— again— with burning skin on his tongue. 

He wonders how long it would have taken to forget the taste of it to wash away. It hasn’t since the Joker. He doesn’t think it ever really will. 

He’s shaking. He tells himself it’s because it’s cold. Shock. It’s a natural reaction to something this violent. Normal. Expected. It feels like weakness exposed and oozing out his skin for Bruce to witness and cast judgment on.

Bruce doesn’t look shocked . He’s standing there stoically bleeding and brooding like he always does, mortal wounds be damned, eyes on Jason and expression as cool as ever. 

God, he fucking hates Bruce sometimes.

“I took the bike,” he says, flatly, and when Jason’s face screws up, adds, “Time was of the essence.”

And it’s not like he can respond to that. Not out loud, and especially not in the recesses of his own head, where he’d have to acknowledge the fact that Bruce hurried for him. To save him, even if it was just out of some misplaced sense of responsibility for Jason.

He’s still shaking. 

He can taste ash in his throat, and he doesn’t think it’s from now . It tastes too much like blood. 

They stand there for a few more seconds like they’re not both trained for this, and all they do is look at each other. Jason’s jaw flexes slowly. He considers asking Bruce why it’s of the essence now but he couldn’t be bothered with it before. 

That would be cruel, maybe, but it’s not like there’s much more than cruelty between the two of them these days. It’s not like it’d be the worst thing Jason’s said to Bruce, still reeling from an op gone bad and blinking sun spots out of his eyes. 

“Okay,” is what he settles on, forced out between gritted teeth, the closest thing to neutral that he’s got to offer. “Where’s that?”

Bruce’s tongue works behind his teeth, and Jason hates that he can read the frustration in that. Batman shouldn’t have microexpressions, and Jason shouldn’t have them all memorized, but here they are.

Bruce points, Jason curses, roundly. 

They start moving forward. 

Pony up, cowboy. 

“The hell did you do to it?” Jason asks, maybe to hide the way he’s limping and panting like a rabid dog, but also maybe because Bruce’s beautiful Maserati V8 is in as good condition as Jason is. It’s in one piece, but outwardly banged and bruised, bloody in all the wrong places. Jason looks at Bruce and he can’t help himself. “You should check it for a concussion.” 

The bike definitely has the car form of a concussion, and broken bones, and it’s twisted metal now, bent up on itself. 

Bruce sighs, quietly moving toward it. He flips open the seat to look inside the storage, and if anything made it out of that without being lightly charred, Jason will sacrifice his soul for the manufacturer. “Come here.”

There’s a first-aid kit. A small bag of gear. Jason scoops that out of Bruce’s hand and rifles through it, but the billionaire doesn’t seem to care very much. Which is good. The gear is nothing helpful for their situation. Batman can pack for everything except camping evidently, which is tough luck for them. 

Bruce hands him the kit. He slides out his phone next. Jason scoffs. “You gonna call Gordon so he can put up the bat signal for us?” 

“No signal,” Bruce reports, rather than rise to the bait. 

“Bullshit,” Jason grabs the phone from him, turns it around so he can see the same exact error message that Bruce is getting. He scowls. “They’re using signal jammers.”

“I put that together. The bike isn’t repairable,” Bruce decides after a brief lookover, which annoys Jason, even if it’s the same conclusion he would have come to himself, “your car is…” he looks back at the highway, splattered in its guts. “We’re going to have to walk. Can you?” 

No.

“Yes.” 

For some reason, Bruce doesn’t look like he believes him. Jason ignores that, opens the first aid kit again, struggling with the zipper for longer than is maybe ideal. “How far did you say the highway was?”

“I didn’t.” Bruce doesn’t comment on the handful tylenol Jason empties into his palm and knocks back dry, but the side eye is more than enough of an indication of his opinion.

“Do you want to?” 

“I-11 is about ten miles away.” 

Jason resists the urge to sigh. He decides to be nice and offers the bottle out to Bruce, and the man must be more wounded than he looks, because he actually takes some himself, the hypocrite. 

“Don’t you have a, like, panic button?” Jason waves a hand at the full bat-suit Bruce is still clad in, standing out like a band reject in broad daylight. “Or a super secret codeword for your Kryptonian prince charming to come swoop in and steal you away?”

“Superman is off-planet.” Bruce replaces the pill bottle, tosses the dead cellphone back into the pack and zips it up, starts divesting his cape and outer shell so all that’s left underneath is plain black body armor. His movements are tender, it’s easier to see with the weight off of him, because Bruce can no longer play off the stiffness in his limbs as the slightly awkward effect of the suit. 

“All six of them?”

“It’s just not an option,” Bruce says evasively. 

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Divorces can be hard for the whole family. They’ll come around eventually.” 

Bruce zips up the bag with more force than is strictly necessary. “Are you finished ?” 

“No,” Jason says, snottily. Bruce wraps up his cape, folds it like a towel, and then goes all the way of inefficiently unzipping the first-aid kit to stuff the cape inside and rezip it up again. Didn’t think to do that before, apparently. “Comfort cape?” 

“We might need the fabric.” 

It’s logical. Jason can’t poke at it. He doesn’t. They start heading down the road, careful step by careful step. He doesn’t have a lot of room for thought inside the swell of pain making every breath hitch in his chest. This is either a good thing, or a very bad thing depending on how he looks at it. On the one hand, he has absolutely no time to simmer, but he has even less time to process. 

Bruce is here, and that is a fact of life he has to carry, no matter how suffocating it is. 
Jason finds himself sucked into the swell of a never-ending mantra left, right, left, right, breathe, that he doesn’t even notice that Bruce has stopped until he slams into the back of him and sends them both tumbling into the dirt. 

“Mother fucker ,” Jason says, automatically, and it has more pain in it than anger, because he’s caught himself on his hands again and his index finger is crooked, bones throbbing from tarsals to femur, and his lungs contract painfully. Bruce grabs for his shoulder again, knows, intuitively, where to put his hand to avoid the bruises and breaks. Or maybe he just got further in his trauma sweep earlier than Jason was aware of. 

The thought leaves him feeling uncomfortably violated.

Jason starts to say something else, but Bruce’s hand clamps over his mouth. His voice is low, “I heard something, be quiet.” Jason goes still—holds his breath because he can’t hear anything over it—waiting. 

Bruce doesn’t move his hand, just shifts it down so he can breathe through his nose, physically holding Jason in place as they both just listen, to the rustle of leaves and nothing, and nothing, and more nothing.

Jason tries to catch Bruce’s eye, but the man isn’t looking at him, neck craned like a spooked deer, eyes wide and darting. 

The woods around them are silent, as still as it gets with the birds gone south for the winter and all the critters sleeping or fucked off at first sight of human activity. They’re alone. 

Jason opens his mouth, gathering breath to speak against the muzzle of Bruce’s gauntlet. The air shifts between one blink and the next. Bruce moves, shoving him, and a bolt flies an inch from Jason’s nose, burying itself into the tree next to his face. 

Jason inhales raggedly, reaching for his gun. He twists around, flat on his back—he needs to get off the ground, he needs to get off the ground, he needs to— and points the weapon up, trying to track the trajectory, but he didn’t see where the fuck it came from, just where it landed, and Bruce is already moving in front of him like he’s not just blocking Jason’s aim and he swears to fucking god he will shoot through him if he has to. 

The snap of branches under heavy feet, even though Bruce’s footsteps are silent, and Jason can hear the near-silent draw of another bolt, automatic instead of manual. Bruce is blocking the shot, but he’s also shielding Jason, which is supremely unhelpful, because only one of them is armed right now. 

The kick-start of adrenaline sees him through the effort of standing, but not before the sniper fires again, the angle pointedly downward . It misses Bruce’s left arm by a hair, a margin so small it could’ve been wind resistance or just Bruce’s uncanny ability to dodge projectiles. 

Like bullets. Or responsibility. 

“You—” Bruce starts to say, but whatever profound wisdom he had for them is cut off as, from a completely different angle entirely, a bolt buries itself in Jason’s thigh, high enough that for a second he’s not entirely sure it wasn’t his crotch.

He falls to side violently, slamming his broken fingers into the Earth because god fucking hates him personally—a vendetta for the ages—and he breathes in once. Bruce is yelling something now, probably at him. 

Jason really doesn’t fucking care. He twists, readjusts his grip on the gun and slams his leg into Bruce’s knee to get him to drop before he fires. He hears the thud of a body hitting the forest floor a moment later, and Jason doesn’t stop. Adrenaline pushes him up. The first bowman has finally caught up, Jason hears a third bolt fire. 

The thing about guns, the thing that Jason really likes about guns, is that bullets are fast. Significantly faster than crossbow bolts. It’s a gut reaction. So much of his life has been spent protecting Bruce Wayne that it’s just habitual at this point. He shoots the bolt out of the air before it can bury itself into Bruce’s chest. 

The next bullet goes in the sniper’s skull. He hits the ground before the echoes of the first shot have faded. 

Jason is panting. He can hear it. He can’t feel it anywhere. He looks down at himself, and the wood buried in his thigh, piercing his armor. It’s a stop-gap, not pooling with blood yet, just protruding from him, and he knows he shouldn’t pull it out but he reaches for it anyway, wrapping his fist around the shaft as he staggers, lists, blinks around the pain signals that are trying to shut off half his brain.

His finger is still on the trigger, his heart is still racing, when Bruce touches him it’s like a livewire under his skin, and Jason blinks hard, has to force himself not to squeeze off another round on principle. 

Bruce is swearing. Jason can’t hear it, but he can make out the syllables forming on the man’s lips, one after the other, over and over. His face tilts, looming over Jason at an odd angle, and he only realizes he’s falling when it’s over, and his back has hit the ground, head bouncing on the soft Earth. Bruce follows him down, mouth still moving, only it’s starting to sound less like curses and more like Jason’s name, said with just as much fervor and desperation. 

Then, pressure on his leg, around his hands, digging into the shaft of the arrow and the meat of his thigh, and Jason’s vision whites out for hot, painful seconds. Fire ants under his skin and a knee-jerk fight response that Bruce manages to suppress with one strong hand on Jason’s chest. It’s pathetic, how that keeps him pinned, pressing down on his cracked ribs enough that Jason’s just wheezy and anemic, lying there waiting for the pain to subside enough that he can string together two thoughts at a time. His gun is taken away. The one in his hand. He doubts Bruce takes all of them, but he can't focus enough to tell. 

He conceptualizes the motion of Bruce tying a belt around his leg, more than actually feels it. Hears the clink of the tongue hitting the metal belt buckle, the thick strap of the utility belt fastened and tightened with sure movements, cutting off blood flow so effectively that he feels the limb deaden in seconds, the burn of the make-shift tourniquet cutting into skin. Jason dry-heaves.

“Steady,” Bruce says, or Jason thinks he says, and he almost wishes he had another belt lying around to shove between his teeth, so he doesn’t bite his own fucking tongue off. He's grinding them, can feel the pressure in his ears before he forces himself to stop. He knocks his head back instead, stares up at the forest canopy above them, a blur of green and blue and brown that loses resolution fast enough that Jason knows he’s crying.

There are twigs digging into his back, and Bruce’s fingers digging into the open wound in his thigh. A shifting sensation, abrading tissue as the shaft moves. He’s grateful he doesn’t have a sightline, it’s bad enough he has to feel it, the suction of clotting blood to the arrow, sucking at the penetration as it’s pulled slightly, a steady upward force, unangled. 

“You need to keep quiet,” Bruce hisses. 

Is he making noise? Jason can't tell. He bites on the back of his hand to muffle it. He has the presence of mind, mild as it is, to realize that Bruce thinks that the men are still out there. Jason only got two. There were, what? Fifteen, twenty of them? He's loath to imagine what other weapons they have. Who the fuck has crossbows lying around unironically? He digs his teeth into his skin tighter. He tastes blood. 

The good thing about crossbow bolts is that the heads aren’t hooked. It slides free of Jason without tearing any more terribly than it went in, wedged in the thick muscle and fat of his inner thigh, and Jason would prop himself on his elbows, ask Bruce whether or not he should be worried about the sanctity of his femoral, but he honestly doesn’t know if he has enough blood pressure to execute even half of that maneuver, let alone get a full sentence out. 

And anyways, Bruce seems to think he has it handled.

“I can't tell if the shaft broke,” Bruce says. Jason wonders who the fuck he's talking to. Jason's not exactly in a position to be answering back, is he? He can blurrily make out Bruce staring at the bolt. He'd kept it of course, no emotions making him throw it aside with panic. Not for Jason . Maybe if this was one of his brothers, Bruce could be bothered to panic. 

Instead. 

Jason manages to pry his teeth out of his palm. “I don't want—” talking is exhausting. He's surprised at that, the way it shutters his mouth and makes his tongue feel like lead. That might just be the blood. “Don't… don't dig .” 

Bruce throws the bolt aside. “We need to move,” he declares, and reaches for Jason. It's only then that he notices an almost imperceptible tremble in the man's fingers. 

Jason hates him a little more for that. 

Batman is a force of nature, something untouchable and fearless. Bruce is supposed to be cold and unfeeling. Neither one of them could be bothered to get off their ass let alone do anything when the Joker —

It doesn't matter. 

What does is that Bruce is supposed to be unaffected, but he isn't, and Jason can feel a new wave of panic crash through him, hard. Bruce's fingers clamp onto his arms. 

“Get away from me.” Jason pushes him, means to, ends up just holding onto Bruce’s wrists weakly, realizing the absurdity in his own words. Like Jason is going anywhere, with a fucked leg and some fucked ribs and two fucked hands. Like Jason doesn’t need Bruce right now, whether he likes it or not.

He does not like it, for the record. 

“Jason,” Bruce protests. He closes his eyes and exhales audibly. “Just—just let me help you.” 

Better late than never, huh? Jason manages not to say that outloud. And not for lack of trying, his tongue has just sort of given out on him. 

Bruce manages to get him into a seated position. The blood rush to his head makes him list sideways, but the man's hands are there to steady him. He wraps an arm behind Jason’s back, under his armpit, hauls the both of them to their feet in one great heave, managing to keep most of Jason’s weight supported between Bruce and his good leg, the other dangling uselessly between them. When he looks down, Jason can see the belt, wrapped so tight around that the skin is bulging away from it. His pants leg has been sheared, armor left on the ground with abandon. Jason hadn’t even noticed Bruce cutting it off, can’t feel the chill, watches his leg go interesting shades of white and purple as blood flow is cut off.

It puts them on a time limit, Jason thinks. Only maybe a few hours before dead muscle starts necrosing in his leg, and if the tourniquet comes off after that point, it’ll stop his heart.

Jason stops looking down. Forces his gaze up, blinking rapidly to dispel the blur of tears and dizziness, willing himself to stop panting like he’s run a marathon. “My gun,” he says, because it’s a beauty of a Sig M17 that he pilfered off a drug dealer’s corpse. He has an emotional attachment. 

Bruce doesn’t respond, just starts dragging Jason inexorably away, and Jason doesn’t have the faculties to throw a proper tantrum about it. 

Jason's probably going to die even if he had it, so maybe it doesn't matter. 

The first step is the worst. The sharp, glistening pain that makes his eyes burn and his stomach roll. He has no basis for the pain, just knows to brace himself. Knowing what to expect makes the second one marginally easier, but no less painful. 

Bruce is trying to be patient. Jason can hear him trying to be patient with all the impatient noises he's making. His grip on Jason doesn't loosen, and he doesn't just haul Jason onto his back and carry him like a meat backpack, so Jason counts whatever blessings he can. 

He tries to keep his eyes open to focus—he doesn't trust Bruce—but he can't stop himself from squeezing them shut constantly and panting. He hates this. God, he hates this. 

“Hey, hey,” Jason says, after a minute, or an hour, or a small eternity of awkward shambling over snapping branches and dead leaves. Bruce ignores the floppy hand Jason uses to get his attention, doesn’t react aside from hitching a little more of Jason’s weight up onto his shoulders and graciously ignoring the slight slur to Jason’s words. “Where’re we going, old man?”

Because Jason’s seen Bruce’s field dressing, it’s a lot better than a half assed tourniquet and some clumsily wrapped fabric around the wound. He knows for a fact that there’s something a little stronger than tylenol in Bruce’s first aid kit, and he fucking wants in on that shit.

But Bruce seems to have a destination in mind. A single-minded persistence that suggests an end goal that isn’t some interstate ten miles away.

“There are tracks,” Bruce says, without pointing, not that it would help. Jason’s been looking at the same ground Bruce has, and he has no idea what the man is talking about.

“Tracks?” 

“From them.”

“ Who?” It takes a second. Oh. Wait. “You're… what are you doing? Are you… seriously… ” 

“Yes.” 

He does not expand on his thought process, powerful and fantastical as Jason imagines it would be. Helpful and talkative as always. Jason wants to hit his head against something, and he does.  

He hits his head against Bruce. Bruce’s shoulder, because it’s the closest and most convenient thing, and also because he’s landed wrong on his bad leg, and there are black spots in his vision, and for a minute he thinks he really is going to have to ride koala bear from here on out.

Bruce catches him, the asshole. Like Jason is still five-two and sixteen, and not of a height with the man.

“I'm fine,” Jason insists, trying to shove at him. 

Bruce's fingers squeeze enough that it hurts, and Jason gags, only for Bruce to face him. “No, you're not. You're not fine.” 

Jason sneers, feels like it comes out wrong, is proven right when he catches the reflection of himself in Bruce’s eyes, warped and bloody. He has to pause and swallow down more bile, blood, and saliva. He knows he’s making Bruce’s point for him. “Since when do you care, old man?”

Bruce makes a noise . “When haven't I?” 

Jason scoffs. Wheezes on a laugh. “Are you—? Are you fucking serious ? Are you…” the disbelief and humor fades, and burning, raging anger takes its place instead. It feels like bubbling heat in his stomach, squeezing so painfully he can’t breathe around it.

There’s a snap in the branches nearby. Jason doesn’t care. 

He manages to find the willpower to straighten his spine. Adrenaline, probably. Maybe Bruce just taken off guard when Jason lurches, rams his elbow into his stomach, and the two of them go tumbling to the forest floor. 

It's a pathetic attempt at a tackle. 

Jason immediately regrets it. Because of the pain, yeah, but mostly because Bruce takes the opportunity to wrap his arms around Jason. They're—

Hugging. 

Definitely hugging. 

“Do not—” 

“Shh,” Bruce hisses, and for a moment Jason is filled with incredulity because he thinks Bruce is trying to soothe him, but instead, he hears movement and goes completely still. He holds his breath, because he can't get it to quiet. Bruce's hand clamps over his mouth again. Jason is irritated about this, even though it’s helping, and he’s getting irritated by how irritating everything Bruce does is. 

He can hear heavy breathing. It’s not human. There are human voices, but what they’re saying is hard to pick apart from the thick accents. 

The arm banded across his chest tightens, shifting Jason that much closer to Bruce, so his back is flush against the man, neatly shielded by his girth.

He wants to point out how unsurprising it is. That following tracks left by the men hunting them is a sure-fire way to run into the men hunting them. Bruce probably knows that, was banking on it, even though Jason’s mind had been on looting their vehicles and supplies, and less on more close combat.

Not that he thinks he could do close combat and win right now. 

The noises slowly get further away. They’re heading in the opposite direction, but it seems like it takes years before any semblance of silence settles in the woods. It’s the deathly sort of quiet, and Jason can hear Bruce’s breathing, thinned and struggling for steady. Jason wrestles Bruce’s hand off his mouth. 

“You don’t have to say it,” Bruce says, when Jason opens his mouth, which is a ridiculous statement, because Jason doesn’t even know what he was going to say. “I know. Those were dogs.” 

And—

Uh.

Were they?

Yes. That is exactly what Jason would have said completely. He was paying attention. Fuck this. 

“Get off,” Jason protests, and shoves weakly. Bruce does, and the ease with which he moves makes Jason jealous of him. What the fuck has the man been doing this entire time that debris and bullets and crossbow bolts have bounced off of him entirely? Where the fuck did he get a personal shield? Is it just because he’s fucking Batman? 

“No more messing around.” Bruce leans down, grabs Jason’s forearm and then around his waist, all but picking him back up and setting him on his feet. Jason hopes he gets injured just a little, because it would be nice to not be the only damaged one. “You need to start taking this seriously.”

Right. Because Bruce shot their attackers and gave them a direction to go in. Jason has done nothing since this whole thing started except stand around and look pretty. And bloody. A bloody pretty princess.

He needs morphine.

“Sure.” Jason settles on. 

Bruce gives him a side-eye for it, like he’s gauging whether or not the lack of retort is a result of blood loss. Jason’s not too sure himself, if he’s honest. Caves too easily to the way Bruce wraps himself up in his personal space, lets the man take more of his weight than he thinks is strictly necessary. It makes it easier to breathe anyways, if Bruce is doing the heavy lifting, and Jason needs a minute to just breathe.

“What now, captain?” he says, because Bruce has started that steady, dogged trekking again. The kind of one-minded persistence that means Jason’s not going to have any input on what the hell they’re doing from here, and that he’ll be lucky if he knows their destination before they get there.

“Didn’t you hear them?”

Jason lifts his chin, doesn’t remember dropping it, but the marked effort it takes isn’t exactly comforting. “Hear what?”

Bruce frowns at him, and it’s so familiar that between long, slow blinks Jason kind of forgets that Bruce isn’t allowed to look at him like that anymore. That Jason doesn’t have to feel sheepish about not being as fast, or smart, or capable as Batman, because Jason’s not a fucking Robin living in his shadow. 

They may not be equals, and Jason’s not sure they ever will be, but at least he’s not below him anymore. 

“They found the bodies,” Bruce explains, “they know you’re alive, and they’re looking for you.” 

The way he emphasizes that part makes Jason cold. “Not you?” 

“No,” Bruce says, “which gives us an advantage. They think you’re alone and injured. They said they were taking the dogs out to get your scent, which means we only have a few hours, if that.” 

Jason looks down at his leg, and declines to remind Bruce that they were, in fact, very much already on a timetable. He seems somewhat more stressed about the dog one. Jason supposes that makes sense. It’s not Bruce’s leg that’s in danger of being amputated is it? 

Jason can sustain whatever damage he has to. Bruce will just stand there and let it happen, over and over. 

 “Oh,” Jason says, and just that. 

Bruce lets out a sigh, gusty. Doesn’t say much else, not even when Jason rights himself enough to start hobbling along in his own right, as much as he can with a dead leg.

Jason doesn’t ask to stop. He knows they’re not safe, that Bruce is thinking of the dogs, and their pursuers, and the dipping temperature as the sun descends from its apex. Logical, complicated reasons that they don’t stop. But he can’t help but think that if it were anyone else, if it were Drake or fucking Dick or something, that Bruce might take a minute to splint the broken bones, dress the worst of the cuts and scrapes so an infection isn’t so imminent. Jason took the field training, got the rundown on triage, knows that, if nothing else, it would make him more comfortable .

Bruce doesn’t seem too concerned with it. Jason wonders, bitterly, if Bruce forgot. It’s fine, Jason tells himself, it doesn’t count when it’s him. It never has. It’s not going to. It doesn’t stop the squeezing ache in the back of his throat from unshed tears and the sheer numbing pain of being unwanted. 

Bruce keeps them going. Jason can see the cabin when they encounter the stream. It’s just a small thing, maybe ten or fifteen feet across, shallow enough he can see the bottom. Maybe two feet deep. It’s not big. It’s not impressive. 

The water stops him dead. He comes to a halt so sharp and visceral that Bruce takes a step forward only to be yanked back. 

His frustration is visible, but what he says is not move it or something of the like with his voice thinned with impatience and anger, instead, the exhausted, “Jason, please,” has him rocking forward. 

But he doesn’t move.

He looks at the water. And the water, well, it doesn’t look back at him, but it feels like it is. Daring him. Reaching up with caressing fingers, trying to soothe him, drag him back under, where all he does is drown, always unable to find the surface. 

  Jason feels like a horse in need of blinders and a set of reigns, frozen solid where he stands, Bruce trying to cajole him, lead him along. There’s nothing wrong with Bruce’s depth perception. The water has hidden dangers only Jason can see.

It took a while, after the pit, to de-trigger him. Talia said it was an involved process, Jason mostly remembers it being bloody. The way everything grated against his fried nerves, gun smoke and fire, loamy soil, specific brands of sanitizer, the high-beams of a toyota corolla, the sluice of luke-warm water on bare skin. He remembers blacking out a few times, waking up shoved in the nearest crevice, Talia’s nails scratching over his scalp as she gentled him down from it. Other times he was aware enough to cycle the panic into a blind rage, came back with his knuckles split open and new victims added to his ledger. He dialed back most of it, the knee-jerk flight instinct whenever anyone laughs a little too hard, the gag reflex at the scent of hot metal. He was doing fine with it. 

He’s not sure what Bruce sees. He doesn’t want to know what Bruce sees. The man’s grip on him has only tightened, but when Jason dares to chance a look at his face, it’s gotten softer. 

Jason clenches his jaw. He still can’t make himself move. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He wishes that Talia was here, to force him to function. 

“It’s okay,” Bruce says, quiet. Jason thinks it took everything in the man to offer reassurance, bland as it was. “Come on.” 

Bruce tugs on him with more force. Jason’s knees have locked, and he tumbles into Bruce’s chest. The man catches him for the umpteenth time today. Like he’s always going to do it, always has . Jason squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to pretend he’s anywhere else. 

He doesn’t remember getting across the stream. He doesn’t know what Bruce had to do to force him to take the first steps into the water. He has a vague memory of the cold lapping against his ankles, and Bruce’s sharp intake of air at the freezing water. The fifteen feet across seem like an eternity, but then it’s over , and Bruce is practically yanking him up the hill. 

The cabin smells sticky. Like old moss that has been left out to dry, but never quite managed. A dish rag left in water overnight. Mildew. It’s not thick with dust, but the overwhelming stench of body odor is quick to make its presence known. Wood polish follows. This is a place where men have been left to their own devices, and it smells like a locker room.

Jason isn’t twelve anymore, and doesn’t make a comment on the smell. Or even cringe at the visible stains on the understuffed leather couch Bruce drops him on, unceremoniously.

There are thick, acrylic blankets layered over the cushions, scratchy to the touch. Jason can see the entirety of the cabin’s living room from the living room, thinks it must have been used for hunting, or recreation, because there’s nothing in here to live by. The walls are mounted with taxidermied buck heads and raccoon pelts, maps, vintage guns and crossbows. Like someone’s decided to rent out their hunting season man cave to a troupe of hitmen.

He sinks in the couch, feels his ass hit a support beam as the springs creak under his weight, vindicates himself with the thought of these bastards breaking their backs trying to get a good night's sleep on this piece of shit. Bruce leaves him there, paces back to the door, checking the windows, loops the single-room cabin with agitated movements.

Jason lets his head flop back onto the cushion. The ceiling is surprisingly well made. Jason thinks there should be holes, or the spacing should be further apart, but no, the entire paycheck went into the ceiling, probably.  

Good.

At least it won’t snow on them.

“I found more crossbows,” Bruce announces, apropos of nothing. His voice is further than Jason was expecting. He waits a moment, but there’s not a follow-up to that.

“...Good for you. Good job.” 

Bruce appears in his vision, and offers one out to him. Jason has a moment to consider the trust that Bruce is giving him, by offering him a weapon at all. It might be some sort of guilt-trip. Bruce isn’t exactly above that. But the thing is, Jason also doesn’t care. He takes the crossbow, and settles it on his stomach, then goes back to laying there pathetically.

His fingers hurt too much to be on the offensive. 

Bruce takes the crossbow back immediately, and Jason considers fighting him for it, because what the actual hell is that about, but the man just sets it to Jason’s side, close enough that the draw rests against his thigh, and sets the duffel bag down. Crouches in front of Jason, face settling into an unhappy grimace, elbows on his knees.

Jason looks down at him, still not lifting his head, hoping that his raised eyebrow is enough to get Bruce to clue into how weird he’s being right now. “Don’t mind me,” he drawls. “Just taking a break. I’ll be up in a minute.”

“Jason,” Bruce says, firmly, and just that. Because it’s been nearly forty years and he still hasn’t learned that a single word does not constitute a full conversation. Jason wonders a little bit about his parents sometimes, because they had twelve full years with the man and they still raised—well. That. Did they all just grunt at each other? Is that why he thinks it’s okay? God knows. 

Alfred probably taught him how to talk. 

The duffel bag gets unzipped. Jason wakes up his spine enough to lurch forward a little, blinking, because he might actually want to get his hands on that first aid kit, if Bruce will pass it over, but Bruce plants a palm against Jason’s chest and pushes him back down without looking up. 

“Old man,” he says, warningly, because god fucking damn it he is getting sick of the man-handling. “I still have nineteen rounds.” 

“You don’t have a gun.” Bruce reminds him patiently. He shoos Jason’s hand away, like he’s a child. 

“I don’t need one to kill you with a bullet.”

Bruce doesn’t comment on that, just bats Jason’s hands away again to zero in on his leg. A part of him is relieved that he doesn’t have to make decisions about it. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want Bruce to, either.

Bruce has glue.

Jason looks at him, and Bruce looks back, and the man grimaces. Jason keeps looking. Bruce seems like he’s waiting for some sort of verbal consent, or at least acknowledgement, so Jason addresses the ceiling and says, flatly, “You found glue.” 

“...Yes.” 

“Good job.” 

Bruce bristles visibly. “I’m not a child.”

“No, really?” 

“Stop talking to me like I’m five.” 

Jason wonders if he sees the irony in that at all. “You’re making all these discoveries. I’m just so proud of you. I’m glad you can find things when it’s important to you. I mean, I guess that’s why you never found me, right?” 

Bruce doesn’t rise to the bait. Rather, seems to relax at Jason’s attitude, though that’s belied at the tension creasing his jaw at the remark. Jason licks his wind-chapped lips, opens his mouth, hoping to win out against the predictability with something particularly nasty, but Bruce starts peeling away the haphazard bandages made from the comfort cape stuffed into the bolt hole, and all he gets out is a strangled, “Son of a bitch .”

The sudden return of Bruce’s medic knowledge does not bode as well for Jason as he was maybe holding out hope for. The cleaning is bad in and of itself, the sting of alcohol on raw flesh. In comparison, when Bruce glues him together it’s not so bad. A pulsing throb when Bruce pinches the skin together, and then the man is wrapping up his leg with pads and gauze, tight and neat, all of Alfred’s military precision exemplified in full.

He doesn’t promplty bleed through the dressing, not even when the tourniquet comes off, and Jason is left gripping the couch for a full sixty seconds of agony as blood is restored to the deadened limb. Only then does Bruce offer him the painkillers, and a bladder of clean water.

“You’re an absolute cunt,” Jason wheezes, falling over himself to take them. He would’ve spilled the pills and the water all over himself if Bruce hadn’t kept hold of them, guiding Jason’s shaking hands.

“For treating your wounds,” Bruce says dryly. Takes the pills back after Jason tries to wriggle more than four out of the bottle. 

“Yes,” Jason will stand by this. He’s dying on that hill.

Bruce sighs. “Give me your hand.”

“Oh no,” Jason flops his arm limply in Bruce’s direction, trying hard not to move his broken fingers at all. “Oh no, I’ve already had enough of you playing doctor. We’re done.” 

Bruce definitely has his listening ears on today, because he grabs Jason’s hand anyway. Jason can’t really do more than whine loudly, which is humiliating, when Bruce prods at his pointer finger, trying to flex it out. 

“I can’t do more than splint them,” Bruce says with a note of apology. Jason says nothing. Bruce splints the fingers, and in lieu of medical tape, duct tape is used instead. Jason thinks that a documentary could be made about all the medical malpractice that’s being done to him today alone. 

Bruce prods his ribs—Jason hisses at him, and he leaves that alone instead of pulling out the super glue—and then seems generally satisfied that Jason isn’t ruptured and leaking blood everywhere or broken into too many tiny pieces. 

He sits back, his face clenching, and then he peels off the rest of his armor on his torso. The vest is eased off. The black undershirt is wet, and Jason stares at it with dawning realization, as Bruce peels up his shirt and studies the length of his side. 

Batman’s armor has weak points. Jason has known this for as long as he’s worked with him. He knows that he’s not strapped into an impenetrable bubble, but the sight of the blood smeared from his hip up to his shoulder from shrapnel still makes his eyes widen. 

“What the hell, Bruce?” Jason sits up, feels the gross, sticky return of adrenaline that really did not need to make a resurgence. It’s too dim in here to get a good idea of the wound. The amount of blood maybe isn’t enough to worry about, but it’s startling. The expanse of it, the quiet pain on Bruce’s face that Jason hadn’t noticed until he looked for it, tensing his eyes and shading him paler than usual.

He’d taken pain killers, back at the crash sight. Jason had never thought to ask why. 

Bruce gives him a look for the exclamation, a Batman to Robin look, chastising the display of emotion. Jason’s been on the receiving end of that look more times than he can count, wonders if Dick and Tim got the same treatment, the same quiet rebuke for any display of concern.

How dare he, really. 

He thinks there’s logic somewhere buried under it, or maybe it’s just Bruce’s knee-jerk displeasure with showing any sort of vulnerability. Another in a long list of insecurities to take out on his Robins.

Jason makes his sneer uglier, tells himself he’s angry over something else. The snobbish moral high ground in Bruce’s silent suffering, that’s it. His constant fucking martyr act, like he thinks he’s better than Jason because he can keep the screams clenched behind grit teeth. Like Jason is some sort of uncivil animal, whining and growling his pain instead of taking it with a bitten lip and dignity.

Bruce ignores him in favor of rooting through his duffel bag again, pulling out a pack of wet wipes and attacking his skin with some tenacity. “What.” he says, expansively, when Jason doesn’t stop staring at him.

“You didn’t think to mention that?” Jason asks, his voice coming out higher than he’d intended. “One time?” 

“Would you have cared?” Bruce bites out, and Jason is chastised enough to shut up for a few seconds. 

Of course. Of course he would have fucking—No. This is Bruce, he reminds himself. He doesn’t know what he would have said or done, but he knows that he would have liked the option of doing that. He thinks he probably would have shoved Bruce off with more force if he’d known that Bruce was hurting—

That Bruce was trying to one-up him, by hauling him through the woods on banged up ribs, and half the skin that should be up his side, when Jason could have walked perfectly fine on his own. 

Bruce breaks out the butterfly stitches and rubbing alcohol again, much more utilitarian with himself than he had been with Jason, pinching his own skin between his nails to flush the wounds. The potent sort of masochism Bruce is so fucking good at. Jason can only look for so long before he has to turn cheek, gritting his teeth and setting his gaze on the grimy window.

He addresses that window, because it’s easier, when he grits out, stiffly, “Do you want help, old man?” 

He’s not making it out of here without Bruce. There’s no reason to get emotional about this. Helping him is helping himself. It’s a selfish offer. He can’t make sense of Bruce cleaning him up, because that wasn’t. There was no practical purpose for it. Jason can’t exactly contribute to their grand escape right now.

Bruce’s fingers stutter for a moment, his expression cracking on the edges, but the stoic mask stays in place. “No.” 

“Suit yourself,” Jason shrugs, and Bruce does. He cleans up the wound as if it’s not even attached to his body. The grimaces and noises are bitten down and swallowed, leaving only a staggering emptiness that is an omen instead of a reassurance. 

Bruce finishes padding down the bandages, then lets his shirt drop, and puts back on his armor like nothing happened. He gets to his feet. “I’m going to see if they have running water. Then we need to talk about the plan.” 

Oh yes, the plan. The great plan in the sky. The one that Bruce has been sharing all of his thoughts about, and they’ve formed together, and worked so hard on. 

“Don’t fall,” Jason says. “I can’t exactly help you get back up.” 

Bruce moves away from him. It’s only now that he’s looking for it that he can make out the tense way he’s holding himself from pain. Jason feels like an idiot for having missed it before, but maybe he can be forgiven this one time, given that he was thinking about other things. 

Plus. Well. Concussion. 

Bruce returns, and he has a glass of water that he offers to Jason. That answers that question. “Did you check it for lead?” Jason asks mildly, “I have enough problems.” 

“I’m pretty sure I can find a bear trap somewhere if you want one more,” Bruce offers, dead serious, and Jason is caught off guard entirely by the humor, though he’s not sure if it is, but it also can’t not be. Bruce is trying to banter with him, maybe, or.

Jason is hallucinating. 

Probably that one.

“What I’m hearing is you didn’t check it for lead,” Jason concludes. He takes the glass, and stares at the floaties and then decides, well, what the hell, and drinks it all in one go. 

“They took their cars,” Bruce says, “we’ll need to wait for them to come back.” 

Jason represses a sigh. “Awesome. Did you find the signal jammer?” 

“No.” 

“What exactly did you do?” 

Bruce eases onto a seat on the coffee table. It creaks ominously under his weight, and Bruce looks like he could not give less of a shit about that if he tried. He acknowledges it, at least, looking down at the furniture with exasperation, and then just. Decides not to care.

Jason thinks that they’re probably fucked when Bruce Wayne decides to ignore the little details.

“Stopped you from bleeding out,” Bruce offers, steepling his fingers and resting his elbows on his knees. A fucking power pose, in this stupid ass cabin. That will fix this whole situation.

“Was that a good thing?” Jason mutters before he can stop himself. 

Bruce’s lip twitches, eyebrows furrowing, gaze dropping to Jason’s leg, like maybe the superglue will suddenly decide to give out on account of Jason’s lackluster gratitude toward it. “Not dying is generally regarded as a positive, Jason.”

“Well, given our track record, I wasn’t sure what company policy was on that.” It’s snippy, and kind of needlessly provocative, given that they’re supposed to be discussing a plan , but let no one say Jason’s ever had a mind for timing.

Bruce’s face does something funny. “I would never let you die. What the hell are you talking about?” Jason starts laughing at him, and Bruce’s expression gets upset instead of defensive. “I don’t understand what I did wrong. Will you just tell me? I don’t care that you’ve killed people, I forgive you—”    

“Killed people?” Jason repeats, and the laughter gets sharper. He’s smiling now, and the mirth is honestly a relief after so much hate. “That’s what you think I’m upset about? That I killed people?” 

“I…” Bruce hesitates. 

Jason’s laughter grows. The pain does, too. He blames it on his ribs, the aching, breathless sensation. “Oh, you dumb fuck.”

Of course Bruce doesn’t even see anything wrong with what he did. Of course Bruce couldn’t possibly pinpoint what it was that Jason is upset about, so he creates a guilt complex to transpose on him. Fantastic. It’s so on point for Bruce that he’s not surprised, but it hurts too much to do anything but giggle at it.

Bruce never knew him. Never bothered to see him as anything but a Robin, and now that there are real issues that can’t be glared away, and failings that Bruce did, he’s shirking away from any accusation of wrongdoing because he wants to avoid the guilt.

Bruce.

Bruce wants to avoid guilt. 

The man who has used guilt as a life motivator and doesn’t know how to function without it. That Bruce. 

“Can you really,” Jason has to stop and inhale, tries to get his chest to relax, so he’ll stop laughing, “not think of one reason I would be upset with you? Just one ?”  

The anger has frosted over, and Jason knows that’s all he gets, the half-minute of human emotion shut down in favor of some more stonewalling. Bruce’s jaw is hard. “You know I can’t kill the Joker,” he says, haughty. Still on his fucking high horse. Because killing is still the worst thing Bruce can fathom, the cardinal sin no one can return from. What tainted Jason in the first place, way back when he was fifteen and staring down the corpse of Felipe Garzonas, and Bruce saw him, saw Jason for the first time, the dirty animal thing underneath the Robin colors. The lost cause. 

“That’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed,” Bruce says, has always said. Jason bares his teeth at him.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want you to?” He did. Before. It mattered before, but Jason is capable of taking his own revenge now. He can make it as bloody and long as he wants, without Bruce leering over his shoulder and taking notes about bad behavior. And yeah, he does wish, sometimes, that Bruce found him important enough to bend the rules for. 

He thinks if it had been Timmy or Dick or anyone else, Bruce probably would have slaughtered Joker without a second of hesitation. 

Bruce’s eyes flash with frustration. “Then what do you want?” 

The coffee table is still creaking, or maybe that's the springs of the couch as Jason shifts his weight forward, restless with the press of anger and hatred and stale grief. It’s too late for what he wants. What Jason wanted died in a warehouse in Ethiopia, ticked down to nothing with a fucking bang , and Bruce wasn’t there for it. 

“Do you know what it felt like,” and Bruce is already flinching, like he can tell it’s a story he doesn’t want to hear, just from the rawness in Jason’s voice. “The first person I saw, after you let him kill me, it wasn’t you. It was Talia Al fucking Ghul. She didn’t have any reason to be there, she didn’t even know me, and she still cared more than you did.” 

Jason studies Bruce’s face. He wants it to hurt, and he looks for the evidence that it did, waiting for the verbal blow to settle. It does, but he feels no satisfaction, only a dull emptiness, the same one that’s plagued him since the pit.

“I…” Bruce lets the word linger, tastes in the air, and seems to grow afraid, because he doesn’t continue. 

“I died, Bruce,” Jason says. “I fucking died . Where the hell were you? You can save the whole fucking world when it matters, but I’m not—” His voice cracks, and Jason realizes somewhere between the vitriol and the venom he’s worked out the hurting core of abandonment, souring at the base of him. The way he felt in his last moments, small and broken and drained of the dying hope that Batman, that Bruce, that his dad would pull off a last minute rescue. “You didn’t even bother to show up.”

He’s mortified to realize that he’s crying, and turns his face away, biting his lip. 

Bruce is quiet for so long that Jason doesn’t think he’s going to speak at all, and he’ll just leave this here like he has everything else, and it will rot between them unaddressed. “I was there,” Bruce says, finally, and Jason’s head snaps up. “I found you. After. I…I wasn’t fast enough. If I had been a minute earlier—If I had just —” Bruce sucks in a sharp breath, and his entire chest shudders visibly. “You were alive when I got there.” 

“I wasn’t…” Jason is pretty fucking sure he would remember that. He remembers everything, in high definition, picture perfect clarity, relives it over and over every time he closes his eyes. Sheila's tears, towards the end of it, the way she apologized, the crowbar Joker left askew beside Jason’s limp body, the rapid beep of the countdown, and the final click as the ignition fuse was lit.

Jason even has brief flashes of his coffin, the designer material of the suit his corpse was sewn into, the thick, expensive oak he broke his hands escaping. He remembers the molten gold of the lazarus pit burning his lungs, he remembers Talia pushing him into the pool. 

Jason remembers everything , and in all of it, the one thing that is always missing is Bruce. 

“No, you weren’t. Don’t fucking lie to me just to—”  

“Yes, I was,” Bruce interrupts. He meets Jason’s eyes, and the stare is furious, but more than that—the weight of grief is haunting. The grief that hasn’t gone away, or even dissipated. It’s for a different boy than Jason, because Bruce’s son died in that explosion, and whatever crawled out of his grave was disjointed and wrong in every capacity. 

He inhabits the corpse of that Jason Todd, the dead one, and can only catch glimpses of the person that used to be there. 

“You weren’t conscious, but I tried—I felt you die, Jason. I held you when you stopped breathing, and I couldn’t—” Bruce sucks in his cheeks, exhales sharply. He’s trying not to cry, Jason realizes, and it’s absurd . “I didn’t take your death well. I haven’t. I…I thought you knew.” 

“You thought I knew what?” Jason wishes he was a little more like Dick. Has watched the man numb Bruce out, the way his questions go flat and tight, but the hysteria doesn’t leave Jason’s voice. “That you cared? That’s the impression I was supposed to get, when you let him live? When you replaced me, not even six months later? When I came back, and you chose the fucking Joker over me ? What was I supposed to know, Bruce? Tell me.” 

“That I would have done anything to stop it,” Bruce closes his eyes, “and I couldn’t. I failed you, and I couldn’t live with the consequences of that. I just wanted to keep you safe, and instead, I hauled your body out of the wreckage.” He looks up at Jason, and his eyes are miserable, “I have never stopped caring about you.” 

Jason sucks in a sharp breath, and wills the rattle of tears to stop. “And what good did it do me?” 

Bruce considers the question. “Nothing.” 

Jason’s throat aches from the unshed tears. He refuses to cry in front of him again. “I’m glad we understand each other then.” 

Bruce gets up, and walks away. Jason tries to tell himself he expected something different, but he didn’t. It’s all that Bruce seems to be capable of after all. 

Jason passes out after that, and wakes, an indeterminable amount of time later to Bruce looming over him. He’s redressed himself, cobbled together armor, holding one of the crossbows. Jason’s is still on the coffee table. 

Bruce says something.

Jason squints at him.

He passes out again. They don’t talk for a while.

Jason wants to say that he feels something about it, anger, or relief, or anything, but he doesn’t. There’s nothing left in him to muster up the will to care at all. He’s in pain, and exhausted, and the beginning of a tension headache has started somewhere at the base of his skull and wrapped a band around his temples, enough pressure that his eyes feel at risk for bulging out of their sockets.

Bruce won’t stop moving , almost neurotically about the cabin. Jason doesn’t bother keeping his eyes open long enough to ascertain what it is he's doing. He’s not sure that Bruce knows what he’s doing, because he keeps circling around and around. 

It takes Jason a while to realize that while he was unconscious, Bruce was actually doing stuff, shaking things around, two or three times, and uncovering traps, shaking off snow and ice from them. He thinks, oh, booby traps, and then passes out again. It’s getting harder to cling to consciousness, and harder to be aware when he is. Jason gets snapshots of sensation, the shifting of a blanket over his body, fingertips against his forehead. He thinks he’s dreaming. Bruce is only nice in his dreams. 

The next time Bruce tries to wake him up, the sun has vanished, plunging the cabin into long shadows cast on deep stained wood. The crossbow on the coffee table has disappeared, maybe due to the fact that the coffee table has also disappeared. One of the blankets has snaked its way from the end of the couch to cover Jason. It’s musty, smells like moth balls and rotting fabric, holes eaten into the edges. Jason’s leg has been propped up, too, even though he fell asleep sitting upright. 

Bruce has debased himself to touch Jason, crouching in front of him again, hand clamped firm on his shoulder. He’s speaking some more, and Jason squints at him, trying to make sense of what he’s saying with varying levels of success. Mostly failure. Bruce seems to realize that it’s not loading for Jason because expression gets tighter, then he says, considerably slower, “Can you hear me?” 

Jason nods. “Unfortunately.” It slips out of him without meaning to. Bruce doesn’t seem surprised at the bite, if anything, he’d been expecting it. Somehow that makes Jason more annoyed than if he’d snapped something back.

“They’re coming back,” Bruce explains, “and I need to move you.” 

Jason thinks his head has been replaced with cotton, because the words aren’t the ones he was expecting, and they don’t make sense in that order. “Move me?” 

“I found a closet.” 

“You found a closet.” 

“Come on,” Bruce grabs Jason’s bicep, trying to ease him up, but Jason doesn’t help him at all. A closet. Jason hasn’t hid in a closet since he was five years old, listening to Willis’s voice get steadily louder and more slurred with each fifth of whiskey.

“I’m helping you,” Jason says, and it comes out as more of a question than a statement, “I can still shoot. Where’s my…?” 

“Jason,” Bruce interrupts. Jason thinks that he’s obsessed with saying it, or has forgotten most of the English language except his name, because he’s not creative enough to find a different way to convey his displeasure. Or maybe he doesn’t need to, because it’s effective every damn time. “You’re a mess. I’m not letting you get in harm’s way. I know you want to help, but you’re a liability.” 

Jason can’t articulate his feelings to that statement. He doesn’t get the chance before Bruce is hauling Jason up off the couch into his arms again. Jason’s leg won’t take his weight, it doesn’t even pretend to this time, and he crumples into Bruce’s chest. He would have fallen on his face if Batman wasn’t there.

“It’s going to be fine,” Bruce says, the words automatic. He’s got his traumatized victim voice on, where the words come automatically, like he’s reading them from a script instead of feeling them. “Let’s go.”

Bruce did, in fact, mean a closet. And not a nice closet. It’s small. It would have been small even before the pit. Jason isn’t a kid anymore. Bruce drops him in it like he is a child, has the decency to try and ease him to the floor, however ineffective that is, and then goes to hand him the crossbow. He snatches it back when Jason reaches for it, “Give me your word you’ll stay here.”

“I would never think to leave,” Jason promises, even though his chest is squeezing, and he has no intention of staying in here any longer than he has to.

Bruce doesn’t believe him. Too many years watching Jason make the same sort of lie and sneak out to patrol the same night. “I’m trying to look out for you.” 

“I don’t need you to,” Jason snarls. 

“I want to, ” Bruce interrupts, and it’s almost blurted, like he really didn’t mean or want to let that escape. Jason’s world crumbles a little at the statement, rocks it on its axis in a way that their earlier conversation didn’t. Bruce is earnest, and Jason almost lets himself believe, for a second, that he might still care somewhere. “And you can’t defend yourself right now.” 

But no, of course. It’s pity.

This is pity.

It’s always pity with Batman. The Atlas play, weight of the world on his shoulders. Jason’s a warm body to preserve, because Bruce can, because he feels like he has to. His pick-and-choosy guilt complex that Jason’s somehow managed to skate by in this instant. 

Jason reaches out and takes the crossbow, almost surprised at the strength still in his body, as he draws it to his chest, resting the base over his knees. Bruce stares down at him, hand on the door, eyes as hard as they ever are. 

Jason lets his head tip back until it hits the wall, looks at Bruce from beneath his lashes, trying to force his gritted teeth into a grin. “Won’t move,” he says, lifting three fingers in a mocking salute. “Scout’s honor, Brucie.”

Neither of them point out that he was never a scout, and it means shit. Bruce may take whatever reassurance he wants to. 

Jason moves.

It takes about five minutes, short enough that Bruce was cutting it thin with his whole stow the cargo maneuver, banking on Jason to comply. Five minutes, and then the silence of the cabin is broken by barking, far off. Half a minute later it’s joined by gunshots, and human screaming.

Jason knows Bruce has it handled. Isn’t worried. Batman’s in his element. In the dark, armed with a few pieces of chewing gum and a stick. He’ll hand all of their asses to them.

He moves anyway. Doesn’t examine the near compulsiveness of it, chalks it up to a healthy sense of rebellion and his own inability to be a bystander to someone else’s action. It’s not because he wants to have Bruce’s back. It’s not because he wants to make sure that Bruce does actually manage on his lonesome. 

It’s because Bruce told him not to. And Jason’s never been one to turn down the opportunity to shoot some annoying motherfuckers. 

Bruce is, of all things, on the roof. 

Jason can hear him stomping around when he manages to limp his way into the kitchen. Bruce has set up traps to keep the men out, because of course he has, and Jason makes eye contact with one of the men trying desperately to claw their way out of a bear trap, the front door open. He’s on his feet, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to be there much longer. 

It’s a little awkward. 

The lights have been left off. Jason wonders if Bruce has his night vision lenses, or if the man’s just relying on his eyesight to be superior to all others. Either way, it’s a bitch to make his way through, squinting at shadows to see if they move. He picks over the mess of bandages and supplies they left in front of the couch, tilts his head to track the sound of Batman springing from the roof into action. Hears the grunt and thud of more bodies being dropped.

Well in hand. Chewing gum and a stick. It’s enrichment for him at this point. Taking the dog out for a walk so it doesn’t get too restless in the house. 

“Hey there,” Jason says, in a whisper, sidling toward the man in the doorway. He lifts the crossbow, sets the sights on the man’s torso, level with his kidney. “I must say, you are not looking good, buddy.”

The guy really isn’t. He’s gone an interested shade of slate gray, sweat beading at his temple and body bowing around the massive teeth sunk into his shin. The bone has cracked, Jason can see. Probably splintered, the powerful muscles in his legs contracting to have the shards rending tissue from the inside out. He’s whimpering too, for all the world a prey animal pinned. 

It is, at its best, extraordinarily pathetic. 

Jason grins, and it’s not a struggle this time. He inches closer, glancing around the man to peer into the woods, still suspiciously quiet for now. Sets a hand on the man’s shoulder, heavy, forcing him to shift his weight and tearing out a strangled groan when that moves his trapped leg. “Good of you to show up, though,” Jason says lowly. Ghosts his finger over the trigger of the crossbow. “I did have some questions for you and your pals out there.”

“Listen, dude—” Jason slams his foot down on the bear trap, and hears the grotesque crunch of bone beneath his boot. The hunter gags, the smell of urine filling the room in quick succession with the bile that spews from his lips. 

“Shhh,” Jason says, pressing a finger to the man’s lips, “try to cooperate for me, huh? We’re not done, and your leg can really only take so many more hits until it comes off. We don’t want that, do we? Amputations get so messy.”  

The man doesn’t respond. Jason doesn’t know if he can respond, still heaving and distraught about the little kick. It takes some of the wind out of Jason’s sails, realizing he won’t be able to bleed quite as much violence from this one as he might want to.

“What do you want?” The man says, eventually, voice croaking but distinctly quieter than the last time, hopefully soft enough that Bruce won’t get nosy and come check on them before Jason can get something productive done.

Jason leans in, peering at the man’s face, dropping his voice. “Who tipped you off, huh? Who let you know I was coming for you?”

It shouldn’t have been a trap. Jason’s been stringing along this merry band of smugglers for a while now, folding them into some of his other cases. He’s even used their services, on occasion, when he didn’t have time to restock on his weapons. But they were towing a line, bringing in the wrong sort of drugs and artillery, selling to people they had no business getting anywhere near. It was time to nip this one in the bud.

He didn’t expect a rat. It’s something he’ll need to deal with, once this is all over. 

“No one,” the man says, and Jason is somewhat thrilled at the opportunity to sink his fist into the smuggler’s gut. 

“Bull shit ,” Jason crows, breaking his own rule a little bit, getting louder than he means to. “C’mon, buddy, you tell me now and I’ll think about letting you out of that thing.” 

The toe of his boot nudges the trap, earns another wheezing groan. Jason pats his shoulder consolingly. The smuggler takes in a sharp breath, and his eyes are pleading. Jason rolls his own. The man is getting sweaty. 

“It,” he breathes in, Jason tries not to shake him from impatience as he gathers the air to speak, “it was you . You think you don’t…you don’t got a reputation now, Red Hood? You love ‘em and leave ‘em, like a god damn fucking slut. ” 

Jason goes still. “Did you just slut shame me? Because I’ll have you know, I’m a virgin, so talk.” 

“You fucking kill everyone you ass! You really think someone wouldn’t pick up on that?” 

Jason probably deserves that, just a little. “Who told you?” 

“Do you not speak English? How many different ways do I have to tell you that it was—” Jason kicks his feet out from under him, and the smuggler lands hard on his ass with a wail. The noise is grating. Jason points the crossbow in his face. 

“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says, pretending not to struggle with the draw weight. “It’s the goddamn twenty-first century and I’m being judged by my body count. I’m giving you one more chance, motherfucker.”

The man inhales raggedly, “Red Robin.”

Tim. Timothy Drake. Timothy fucking replaced Jason Drake tipped off the smugglers to what? To kill him? Did Bruce know? Is that the only reason that he’s here? Not because Jason was of any concern to him, but because he’s trying to keep blood off of TIm’s hands, to keep it from tainting him and ruining him just like it did Jason? 

Bruce doesn’t care.

Bruce never cared. This was all about that fucking guilt complex again. Can’t have his precious Robins ruined by the consequences of their own actions. Never ever. They might die. 

“I see,” Jason says, his voice even. He shoots the smuggler in the stomach. He hobbles over his body, and ignores the agonized gasping behind him. Jason hopes the crossbow bolt hurts. He wants to step on it and watch the blood ooze out, soaking his skin. 

Nothing helps him anymore, nothing makes it better. The only consistency he has now is blood. 

Bruce is breathing audibly, standing in the middle of a pile of bodies. Jason can see movement, hears the audible groans, and he knows that they’re alive, and he thinks that Bruce is a fucking idiot for it. They can still get up this way. They’re still going to be tomorrow’s problem.

Bruce is a maid. He’s always cleaning up and then aghast that the room is a mess again. That’s his problem. He never believes in permanence. 

The man turns to him. “I told you to stay put.” 

“Did Drake tell them?” Jason snarls, not even bothering to answer that. 

Bruce’s face goes stiff, and it’s an answer in and of itself. Nearly a decade of being the most emotionally constipated person Jason knows and he still has tells a mile wide when he’s caught lying.

“Jason,” he says, warningly. Takes a step forward, hand outstretched, like he’s trying to mollify a rabid dog. “It’s not what you think. Red Robin made an error in judgment.”

“An error in judgment?” Jason’s voice is rising, “He could have gotten me killed!”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you,” Bruce says, “it was—”

“A mistake,” Jason finishes in a hiss, “just like you being late was a mistake, and you not being there when I woke up was a mistake, and all of this was a mistake!” Jason laughs sharply, and it pulls on his chest muscles, and he aches to his spine. “Are you proud of your new little pet? Look at what you do to all these children, Dad. All of them will end up like me. How happy will you be when your legacy is soaked in blood, and the bodies of your children are pinned on your walls as a trophy to your ego?” 

Bruce’s hands have gone limp at his sides, shoulders slumped. For once, Jason can’t read him. He’s walled himself off again, gone cold and numb, staring at Jason like they’re two strangers on the street, nothing between them at all.

Between the night sounds, the chill of the wind rustling the trees around them, the smell of iron and gunpowder thick and familiar. The imperfect silence of ragged breathing and too-fast heart beats. In the midst of it, all Bruce says is, “I’m sorry.”

Just that, offered paltry. It’s not enough, and they both know it. 

“Yeah,” Jason breathes, “you always are.” 

Then he turns, and walks away.