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Its morning when Tim stops still as he looks into the mirror, truly looks into for the first time in a while. He figured that he shouldn't be surprised by the sight before him, it was a familiar one to him after all, after all these years, but he'd been so distracted as of the past few days that even when he remembered the facts of it all, he sometimes forgot the physical effects.
A permanent smile made of scars.
Toxic chemical green growing from the roots.
The son of a joker and his queen.
The reason that he hadn't fully responded to Jason’s clear advances was looking right at him in the mirror.
After all, who could love a creation of the monster that had killed him?
With a sigh he leaned forwards into the mirror and held up the strands of his hair, seeing the green tint that the black had taken. Whatever pops had done back then had been damning enough that no amount of black dye could ever keep the color down for long, something that had exasperated Alfred a great deal when Tim and Babs had turned his shower all but black when they had tried to dye it for the first time by themselves after all of it, and after her accident as well.
(He hadn't stayed mad for long, even when bleach had done next to nothing to the stubborn color against the porcelain tub)
Tim knows good and well that if he wanted to there were enough bats around that knew of back then that at least one would have time to dye his hair should he not want to do it himself as he usually did. Barbara would likely have time between her daytime and nighttime jobs for him if he were to ask, and Bruce was only a phone call away, Alfred could be persuaded as well if the other two were truly busy. All three of them would do it without question. Without judgment. (They had been there in the aftermath for it all, there were no questions to be asked when you already knew). They had done it before after all in the beginning months when he couldn't stand to look at the green in the mirror. He does it himself now, but there were bad days when his knuckles would punch into the glass as laughs bubbled io within him at even the thought.
He went to one of them on those days.
(Except when Bruce was lost to time, when Alfred would help Bruce in his paranoid schemes, or when Tim himself was halfway across the world and out of even Oracle's reach (Owens had been the one to take care of him then, Z holding the dye bottle as the other man worked it in, and Pru laughed at the pair as they struggled to not get dye on their skin and had gotten it all over the now permanently black sand instead. He wished that he had taken a photo back then, because it was much too late now.)
The worst consequence that calling one of them would have would be the three of them attempting - unsuccessfully - to bench him for the night.
He doesn’t call any of them now, phone dialed with a different number instead.
—
When Jason woke up the morning - afternoon, something of the like - after going to the gun range with Tim, it was to the sound of his phone ringing near his head, loud and persistent and much too early for anything but a damn emergency. The fact that it was the other red's name on the screen was the only thing that saved the caller from the brunt of the frustration within him as he answered. Though he guessed that he didn’t hide it well enough by the response that he got.
“Never mind,” the teen says, and Jason just knows that the other is about to handle up and never bring up whatever it was that had brought him calling to him ever again after this.
“Just tell me,” the older man says, trying to make his voice a bit softer before the younger vigilante fucks all the way off, and all the progress that they had made over the past week or so goes right back to zero.
“It's just… Can you come over?”
Out of all of the questions in the world, this had not been the one that he had thought that he would hear today.
But bats and birds were known for surprising people, it was the only thing that kept most of them alive.
“You gonna tell me why?” Jason asks, even as he's already pulling himself out of bed and to his closet, looking for a shirt that didn’t have holes or blood on it.
“Just… Please? I'll explain when you get here.”
And Jason can hear the hesitation and something akin to fear slipping into the other's tone. It was the sort of emotions that he never would have associated with the other bat, not since the day that they first met in the Tower and a certain Robin couldn't stop running his mouth even as blood dropped from his nose.
Any hopes that what he was being called for was something fun died with that tone.
“I'm already on the way.”
—
When Tim answers the door the first thing that he sees are scars. Red jagged lines carved across too pale skin.
“Tim?” He asks, involuntary jerking back as the other boy looks away, shame written like a book within his frame.
The other vigilante doesn't answer, only stepping back into the apartment (into one of the nicer safe houses that Tim owned, because he wasn't bringing Jason to the Nest just for this to all go south) and trusted that the other man would follow, even if only out of shock.
Jason did, closing the door behind him once inside.
Tim sat down on the couch, one knee pulled to his chest as the other leg skimmed the ground, as the man sat with his head still pointed down. From where stood Jason had a clear view of the toxic green roots sprouting from the other's head as bile rose up within his throat. Tim bites back a flinch when Jason stepped forwards involuntary, fingers grazing over the Joker green like a man possessed.
“Explain,” is all that the older bat can manage to say, so Tim does.
He tells Jason about how when he had just been officially starting off as Robin, there had been a woman that was being mugged while Tim was on one of his first solo patrols. How she hadn't been in any danger at all, but instead had hit him over the head when his back was turned, and took him to a facility near Arkham. How the Joker had strapped him down to a table and then ran electricity through his body, as chemicals ran through his veins, and images played before his eyes until he believed that he was their son, and always had been.
(He doesn't tell him that there hadn't been all that much to rewrite. Boarding schools didn't leave a lot of time for backyard barbecues and family picnics)
He tells him that he was there three weeks before Bruce and Barbara found him, the damage already more than done.
How he usually kept it dyed since then.
And Jason listens to it all, green growing into his vision at the end as he backs away, knocking into the wall and sliding down it as he tries to calm himself down. And Tim damn well knows that the smart thing to do would be to get as far away from the other vigilante as he could as Jason’s eyes were glowing acid green, especially as the permanent smile on his lips was on full display.
But if Tim had ever listened to his better judgment then he would have never been Robin in the first place.
Tim slips off where he had been sitting on the couch before and kneels in front of the other man, digging the heels of his hands into Jason's things both for balance and in hopes that the pressure would be grounding for the other.
When Jason looks at Tim, the other bat's face is tinted by a slowly receding glow of green. He can't help but hope that he isn't imagining the slight awe in which he thinks that he might just see in the other’s eyes, even as he questions why its there at all.
“Sorry,” he says after a long moment, the glow full gone and his mind fully his own.
Tim doesn't think then before he speaks, a rarity usually disappears for when he finds himself mouthing off during a fight:
“I thought that the color was pretty,” he says almost absently, raising a soft hand to trace where the glow had just been playing against Jason’s skin.
(The ‘so long as its you’ goes unsaid, and only heard within Tim's own mind)
Jason feels his eyes close at the featherlight touch, his mind whirling with the words that the other had just spoken much too earnestly.
“You're a little insane aren't ya?” He asked, already knowing the answer even before the revelations of today.
(Even before finding out that they had both been torn apart by the same man. That there would likely be no one else in the city that quite understood him the way that Timothy fucking Drake did)
“Well I got the smile marks for it,” Tim said as he smirked.
Jason had always thought that the other former Robin'd had deep dimples or something of the like when he smirked like this, but now he knew that it was the scar tissue rippling beneath however many layers of makeup that the other had always worn.
He thought that it must be a testament to just how gone he was that he looked at the scars now and didn’t find them horrific, because they were Tim’s.
Tim stills as Jason mirrors his movement from earlier, bring a hand up to trace the scars as if they're not ugly and horrific in every manner that they could be, and Tim can't help but think that just maybe it would be okay to let himself have this now. That the other knew the ugly part of him that he had been scared would send him running, and was still touching him softly as if he were worth anything at all. As if he wasn’t damaged goods. As if his appearance wasn’t a constant reminder of the monster that haunted them both.
Tim leans forwards on the living room floor, moving his right hand from the other's face to his shoulder and slotting their lips together as if it could make them human once more, and not little more than monsters washed in green.
Jason leans into the press instantly, moving against the other with all the gentleness that no one had ever truly afforded either of them before when in a situation like this.
After a long while, Jason snakes his hand into Tim's hair, pulling back from the other and finding how much more green it looks now that he was noticing it, looking for it. He found that he didn't mind so much so long as it was Tim who was shaded with it. Minded it even less when Tim had such a dazed look in his eyes to accompany it.
Leaning forwards this time, Jason kisses the scars on Tim's cheeks, feeling the texture against his lips. He would almost ask if they still hurt if it wasn’t for the way that the other shivered at the touch as if it was something kind.
“You usually keep it dyed,” Jason realizes aloud as he runs his fingers through the deep green before him.
Tim nods against his hand. “I was going to ask you to do it,” he offers freely. “It's why I called you.”
Jason hums quietly into the small space between them. “Do you still want me to?” Is all that he asks, because bringing up anything else would be much too heavy for how impossibly light he felt right then just from a kiss or two.
Tim considers for a moment, weighing it all. There would be things to explain if they didn't, but…
“Would you be able to look at me if we left it?” Is what he finds himself asking of instead.
And Jason doesn’t really need to think before he counters. “Would you be able to look at yourself?”
And wasn't that a million dollar question?
He had spent so long covering it all up, pretending that he wasn't as much JJ as he was Tim, and acting as if it all never happened at all that that the thought whether or not he could survive seeing constantly, and not just in the morning when putting makeup on to hide it, had never really crossed his mind.
They don't dye his hair that morning laying down in Tim’s bed and just holding one another instead until patrol.
—
When Bruce notices that Tim's hair was growing in a noticeable amount of green at the roots a few days later, he offers to dye it for him like he did in the first year after. But Tim just says that he wants to try and let it grow for a while as it was, to become less ashamed of it all.
Bruce is hesitant, it would be harder for Tim to keep his identity secret with such a unique look, but more than anything he's proud.