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Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
- Louise Glück
His mother had a bad habit of spending too much money on sweets, back when she wasn’t half-delirious from withdrawal.
She comes home stumbling, and the make up she so prettily puts on in the morning is smudged violently, as if someone was trying to wipe her whole face away, like a flower crushed. Her stockings have an extra hole in them. There’s dried blood on her lip. But she smiles at him and from her little pocket that’s sewn into her dress (“stupid dresses always got no pockets. gotta make them all myself!”) she whips out a Kit-Kat bar.
Five year old Jason would ask, once, “Mama, why do you bring me chocolate?”
His mother would say, “I heard about it somewhere. Kids love sweets. The more sweets they eat, the sweeter they are. And you’re the sweetest boy there is, aren’t you?”
Five year old Jason would nod. He is Mama’s sweetest boy. There’s Kit-Kat melting in his mouth, because he always lets it sit there. And after it’s all melted and heavy on his tongue, he munches on the inside, and giggles at the crunching sound. He’s staring at the giant patch of blue and green on his mother’s bare shoulder, stretching from her elbow all the way up. At five, Jason knows how your skin can change color like that. His skin does it too, when Willis hurts him.
His skin goes black and blue on his wrists and his legs. On Mama’s thighs and her face.
Her eyes trace his stare. Jason looks up at her. Staring at his reflection in her pupils feels like looking into the cracked mirror on their bathroom wall.
“Our landlord,” she says, then sighs. The cracked mirror begins to shine. There’s a small pause where she traces the bruise on her arm absentmindedly. Jason knows their landlord. He had thought the man was kind, because Mama said so, back when he had offered her a coat on a cold night. His Mama sighs again, a noiseless act carrying a bone deep ache.
“Jay… every man in my life has hurt me. In some way or the other. Every man I ever loved.”
She’s smiling as she says this. Bashful. Like she’s admitting to something embarrassing. She looks down at Jason with that sad wobbling smile. Jason hesitates, then quickly leans forward to give a quick kiss on her bruise, the same way she does to him.
“Not you. Not you, Jason, sweetheart. You would never.”
At five, it feels like the simplest, most obvious thing in the world.
Five year old Jason Todd is the only man in this world who wouldn’t hurt his mother.
—
Moving in with Dick fucking sucked.
For one, Dick is the most uncoordinated, messy person Jason has ever had the displeasure of working with. And even more so, his previous apartment in Blud was a fucking biohazardous zone, with eight different fungal colonies in his fridge. Jason would not like to share his apartment with bacteria and expired milk, thank you very fucking much. The whole process needed bleach and a fuckload of sponges and detergent, but Jason ain’t not quitter.
Dick’s old apartment is up to standard, no thanks to him, and their new one looks decent. They’re halfway towards unpacking everything already. It’s a relatively nice place, if by relative Jason means the old disgusting dump Dick was living in, which automatically makes the new place a luxury.
He doesn’t regret his decision however. It’s a lonely life he leads, and Dick breathes and moves like a being so alone and isolated it physically hurts sometimes to watch him. So he pretends that is the only reason he suggested it, and not because of further more intimate reasons that Jason chooses not to explore often.
Dick is fiddling with the cushions in their couch, and has taken to unpacking all the random little ornaments and trinkets that a good third of the boxes he brought in carried. For a man who has nobody to lean on, Dick sure has souvenirs from a lot of people. There’s paintings from Dami, and little snow globes from Tim, some ancient artifact from Kori’s home planet, Roy’s Darth Vader helmet that he apparently wore to Dick’s fifteenth birthday party and forgot to take home, making the helmet permanently belong to Dick.
Jason, on the other hand, simply has his clothes and toiletries, his Red Hood uniforms, and a quarter of his weapons arsenal that he keeps in his bedroom, along with the budding new collection of second hand books he regularly buys from a nice old lady a few blocks from his old place.
They make the place their home in silence.
He walks back from his room after unpacking his guns, deciding to pull out the bedsheets and make his bed look presentable enough to sleep in (he needs a nap). Dick is on his tiptoes in the kitchen, trying to put the box in which the microwave came atop the highest cabinet. His shirt sleeves fall off his elbow and bunch around his shoulders, and a silver of golden skin at his waistline peaks through like a tease, Jason trying and failing to not notice the arch in Dick’s back, the curve of his spine—
He clears his throat and looks up. Ogling the man who’s supposed to be his older brother is not exactly considered decent.
Except his eyes catch on to something else.
“Hey, what happened?” Jason asks, casually raising his arm up to easily push the box forward so it rests firmly, punctuating the good number of inches he has on the original Robin now. From this angle, Dick’s forehead reaches Jason’s shoulder.
“Hm?” Dick’s feet touch the ground once more.
Jason motions the shoulder. There’s a finger shaped bruise painting Dick’s soft skin. Deliberate. Forceful. Long. Like someone had been holding him in place long enough to damage the small blood vessels in Dick’s arm.
Because that’s what happens to cause bruises. Someone—or some thing— hits skin hard enough to destroy the vessels that carry a person’s blood. The blood from the burst vessels pool under the skin, creating a hideously fascinating course of colors right above that spot on visible skin, making it obvious to anyone who bothers to look that something violent, minor or major, accidental or on purpose, has happened to the person.
“Hm?” Dick feigns confusion. “Oh!” His entire body softens with relief, as if Jason wasn’t speaking of anything serious. “You know how Bruce gets. He was very into his mission report last night.”
Jason learned to read between the lines before he learned how to physically read.
“Looks painful.”
“Didn’t even notice it.”
Dick dismisses the conversation by choosing this moment to walk back into the living space to grab a box of kitchenware. Jason allows it.
It’s not like he doesn’t understand the meaning behind ‘you know how Bruce gets’. He does know.
A week into their little agreement, Jason has realized that Dick would rather starve than cook a decent meal. Jason opts to become the designated cook. It’s not like he is the one with the day job—he already has enough illegal money regularly coming in from his Red Hood alias, secured and stored in a bank account under a different name, since dead fifteen year olds aren’t exactly entitled to bank accounts.
Dick has his hands full with the new case that he’s ten feet deep in. Jason has a memory of the Replacement telling Bruce once, “the whole detective thing consumes him whole sometimes, Bruce, perhaps you should do something.”
Pot, Kettle, Jason had thought back then, thinking of how the kid’s fingers had trembled from sleep deprivation.
Dick comes home smiling. Jason is stirring a pot of boiling macaroni, adding salt.
“Little Wing!” he sing songs the nickname Jason cannot bring himself to detest. “What’s cooking tonight, good looking?”
He’s taking off his jacket and then his shirt, popping into his bedroom quickly to come back wearing a faded yellow t-shirt that’s tight in his abdomen and a size too small, an inch above his waist. Dick’s fashion style is like scrolling through a NYFW article on Spring Looks—it’s either something gorgeous and sexy or embarrassing and nonsensical.
Jason stares at the patch of bare skin for a moment too long. Dick’s looking at him with a strange expression, eyes a little wide and cheeks a little too flushed.
“What’s wrong?” Jason asks.
“Nothing. Just. Didn’t notice you grew so big.” Why does Dick’s voice sound like that?
“Eh, people grow up. Not so Little Wing now, hm?”
Dick’s nodding, but his eyes are fixated on Jason’s shoulders, perhaps on the way Jason’s shirt is stretched around his own muscles. He knows they make him look even more broader from the back, and his taller height accentuates it.
“Where’d you get the shirt?” Dick asks casually, grabbing two plates and pairs of cutlery, setting them on the table.
“Uh, found it on the couch. Sorry. I knew it was probably yours but it felt a little too big for you.”
“It’s Bruce’s.”
Jason switches the stove off. The macaroni is soft enough to be mixed with the broth and salad by now. He asks Dick if he could handle that without blowing up the kitchen. Dick pouts and says Jason is exaggerating his non-existent cooking skills and that’s really mean, but there is a shadow of relief in his eyes from the change in topic that Jason so generously handled to him.
Dick stares at Jason’s shoulders not so discreetly throughout dinner. Dick’s eyes are always so forlorn, even when he’s smiling and joking around, as if he’s the loneliest man on Earth hellbent on making sure no one else feels that same agony burning inside of him. Today, something has ignited like a matchstick in his older brother’s eyes as they lock onto the fabric pulled tight by muscle.
Jason wonders whether Dick usually wears such tight clothes at home, or if it is a new habit he developed from after Jason moved in with him.
—
“Mama, I spilled orange juice on my shirt.”
“What’s that you got on your hand?”
“Willis’ old shirt.” Jason’s clothes usually consist of second hand clothes his mother gets for him from shelters, or thrifted clothes that have holes at the seams. Willis sometimes dumps a dirty or torn shirt into Jason’s pile.
“No.”
Her tone makes him flinch. She has fire licking in her eyes. “You are not wearing that.”
“But I spilled—”
“I know, baby,” her voice drips with forced calmness. “I’ll get you something else.”
She picks him up. He’s seven years old, and she grunts at his weight. She’s thinner now, Jason had watched her stuff her bra with tissues before going out yesterday and then curse when she realized her belt needed an extra hole to fit. There’s more strands of hair on her pillow or tangled in the shower drain (Jason keeps it clean though, Willis smacked Mama across the face once for having hair strands on the shower walls.) Her face has sunken in, her cheeks no longer pudgy enough for Jason to squeeze.
“You need clothes that fit, Jason. Your father’s clothes don’t fit you.” She kisses his forehead. “They never will.”
—
Dick comes home tonight with hickeys all over his neck. Shades of red and maroon, some even a darkening purple. Ugly and so fucking revolting on his beautiful skin, a touch of some monster out there. His skin around his neck is usually so unmarked—Bruce always holds him tight by the arms, so Jason had become used to fingerprints at the wrists and the occasional hand shaped print above the elbow. Jason doesn’t talk to Bruce much anymore. He only sees Batman in the night and hears him over comms during patrol. They haven’t fought side by side since Dick chose to move in with Jason.
Dick sits down at the dinner table, displaying the marks on his neck like battle scars.
Jason doesn’t ask, “Are those from Bruce too?”
Because he already knows they’re technically not from Bruce, but Bruce is the reason they exist in the first place.
Dick knows to address the elephant in the room, however.
“Bruce needed intel.” It’s sickening how that is enough explanation.
He rolls his eyes and flashes Jason a cheshire grin, all perfect white teeth. His pink lips are a little swollen from French-kissing some scumbag who doesn’t even know he’s touched the skin of a man far more worthy than he could ever be. Pit rage slithers inside of Jason’s head like a venomous green viper, similar to the fit of anger he tampers down and seals inside of him when Dick brings home a new bruise and Jason counts them like… like the ripped holes in a woman’s stockings.
Jason treasures and nurtures the anger inside of him. He lets it out on the child traffickers on the streets, and tells himself that he’s killing child abusers in some way or another, just not the one who slits his throat in the presence of his murderer. Not the one who lets his older brother be French-kissed by serial killers. No, he’s different. He has to be. Or else their little house of cards will fall, and Dick will take it the hardest.
Jason is wearing another oversized shirt he found at Dick’s room, under his pillow. It’s a little old, some dumb rich brand, and he knows for certain to whom this cloth once belonged to. He can feel the heated desire burning off of the man next to him like a furnace.
He doesn’t ask if Bruce gave Dick the hickeys. He’s afraid Dick’s body might betray him and blurt out, “I wish he did.”
So instead he asks, “Why do you let him do this to you?”
Dick frowns, his grin falling, cracking. Cracked mirrors in Jason’s childhood bathroom.
“Do what? It’s just a mission, Little Wing, jeez…”
“No, a mission is not what you call whatever the fuck Bruce makes you do. There’s better ways to get some info than dressing you up like a cheap hooker and sending you into a nest of hyenas. Fuck, Dickie, I literally made Gotham’s drug trade mine and I didn’t have to whore myself out to half of Gotham for that!”
He regrets the last line the moment it spills out, but it’s too late. Dick’s eyes harden to stone and then begin to gleam. The cracked mirror shatters.
“Fuck you,” Dick spits, his voice trembling and laced with fury, but Jason drinks it in like a man quenched. This is how Dick should be—filled with wrath and hurt and fighting back. Dick used to be like this, once, without prompt. “I did what I had to do. But I don’t think you understand what that means, do you? Considering you pretend Bruce doesn’t even exist during patrol.”
His expression twists, guilt beginning to sketch over. Jason remains silent, his mind repeating the word whore whore whore in his head. At some point it stops sounding like him and more like Willis when his mother came home with torn stockings.
“Sorry. That was uncalled for. I know how much Bruce has hurt you.”
“Fucking whatever,” Jason chokes out.
“And besides, Bruce didn’t make me,” Dick says, as if he felt the need to point it out. His skin flushes a bashful pink but his face is twisted in self-loathing. “I thought this would be the quickest way to get it done.”
And fuck you to anyone who’s ever said Jason is cruel, because he can be downright cruel right now and twist the knife he stabbed into Dick, and ask him if that made Bruce give him the attention he so desperately and pathetically craves, but he’s not a cruel man and he doesn’t have to ask to know Bruce didn’t.
“Are there more?” Jason decides to ask, after a silence that stretched long enough for the final embers of rage to burn out of them both. “Underneath the clothes?”
“Nah. He was easy.”
And if a mauled neck is what qualifies as easy, what qualifies as difficult? Jason’s blood sings with hatred.
“I’d kill him, you know. If you ever asked. I’d kill all of them.” He’s unclear if he means the scumbag at the bar and all the others before him, or Bruce himself, but Dick obviously interprets it as the asshole he had tongue locked with a few hours ago.
He just wants to make sure Dick knows.
“I know,” Dick says, his smiling wobbling. “You’re a sweet guy, Jason.”
Jason has always been a sweet boy.
—
“Okay, you ready?”
Jason nods, excited, and there’s a certain thrill and joy he feels bubbling inside of him during the rare times his mother is sober and free at the same time to do something like this with him. There’s a leaf, a rock, and an ice cube in his hand, and a glass of water in front of him. If what his Mama explained to him about the topic that confused him at school is true, then the leaf and ice cube will float, and the rock will sink.
“Okay, baby, now throw the leaf in!”
Jason does so, and watches it float.
“What does that say about the leaf, hm?”
“Its density is lower than the water’s density!”
“Good job, my smart boy. The ice cube now, come on, make a big splash!”
Jason is giggling when he throws the freezing ice cube into the water and the force makes a plop sound as water spills out, droplets of water on the surface of the table. His fingers are cold now and he touches his arm and shudders.
“Water is less dense when it is ice,” his mother says. She’s smiling and shivering. Her collarbones peak out so much Jason thinks he can pour water into the hollow dents besides her neck and watch a leaf float in there. Her fingers so frail and trembling to the point he has to help her put her dress on every morning, clasp her bra behind her back carefully, as he gets ready for school. At eight years of age, he understands now what a sick person looks like.
Willis had said he’s “glad the bitch is dying.”
“And the rock sinks because…?”
“More dense than water!” Jason chirps. “You are so smart, Mama.”
It happens fast. The way her eyes glaze over, as if she’s suddenly seeing something Jason couldn’t see, going somewhere Jason cannot follow. She doesn’t speak or move, just staring off into the wall, her ribs protruding and visible the way they are whenever she’s only in her bra.
He wants her back.
So, he repeats.
“You’re so smart, Mama.”
She startles out of her trance and laughs, but it sounds awful. “Nonsense, sweetie.” A pause, and then the ugly wound Jason opened festers. “The last time I was smart was when I graduated middle school. I had dreams to be a teacher.”
She drops the rock into the glass of water and watches it hit the bottom roughly, her smile twisting her face into something grotesque.
She overdoses ten days later.
—
Dick crawls into his bed three months after living together.
He’s shivering, clad in a thin white t-shirt that hangs off his shoulder, falling to his thighs and long enough to cover his underwear. He’s mumbling, Little Wing. Jason. Jay. Can I sleep with you? Please.
And Jason mumbles back, Get the fuck in, Dickie.
Jason knows he’s grown bigger and taller, but laying here in bed in the quiet hours of the night, Dick trembling beside him, he’s again reminded of how small Dick is now, caged in Jason’s arms. His waist is so slim Jason’s arm can reach around it. His physique is not skinny by any means; he’s got hard muscle and a set of abs that’d make an IG Model jealous—he’s just always been on the leaner acrobatic side. A gymnasts dream bod.
Jason remembers a time when he had to look up to look Dickie in the eye, the hero worship coursing through his system like an adrenaline rush, so strong that he would have followed Nightwing to hell and back. Remembers the warmth that bloomed unwillingly on his cheeks whenever Dick would smile down at him.
“Jesus fuckin Christ, did you mistake the fridge for your damn bed? Why are your toes so cold? Wait, scratch that, why is your entire fucking body freezing?”
“I o-only just got b-back,” Dick stutters out.
Jason frowns. He doesn’t check Dick’s bedroom before going to bed every night, and today was one of those nights where he came back from an early patrol and decided to just pass out in bed. He shifts to his side more to favor Dick in his arms, twisting to get a better and firm grip on the older man, but freezes when Dick hisses in hastily concealed pain.
Frowning, Jason traces his fingers across icy skin, his eyes accustomed to the fuzzy moonlight that’s bleeding from the window onto their bed. They stop at Dick’s neck, and Jason finally looks Dick in the eye, his heart beginning to pound as the blood rush echoes in his head. A giant bruise that’s glaring up at him, Dick’s cheek swollen and a violent red and—heart wrenchingly, damp.
“Dick—”
“It’s not a regular thing.”
“I’m gonna fucking kill him—”
“Jay, come on I didn't even tell you it’s Bruce!”
“And I didn’t tell you I was talking about Bruce.”
Dick scoffs, wet, shifting away, but Jason pulls him back in. “I wonder who else you have a complicated history of trauma and daddy issues with that you want to place blame on for every bad thing in your life.”
If Dick wants to get personal, Jason can get personal.
“You let him smack the demon kid around like that too?”
Dick punches his shoulder half heartedly, scowling. “You know that’s different.”
He’s hit me before, Jason wants to say, to argue, to retort. But he knows even that is different. Jason, the fallen son, and Dick, the boy who’s no one and everyone at the same time. Bruce, who’ll punch Jason in the face, but backhand Dick across the cheek. Bruce, who’ll let his Batarang slit Jason's throat and watch blood splatter across the floor, but match Dick’s anger with his own more ferocious one, and squeeze his shoulder and watch it drain out of him.
Bruce, who keeps the skimpy and tiny costume Jason’s corpse wore in a lovely little glass cage as a reminder, yet watches Dick whore himself out and say nothing.
Who suffers more, a man’s son or a man’s wife? Or is it the grief they share, the silent resolution, the shared pain, that is more tormenting? Ask an abused child who’s the strongest person they know, they will speak of a dead woman with forgotten dreams. Ask an abused woman, she’ll speak of a boy who’ll never hurt her.
Or perhaps that is just Jason Todd’s life.
It feels like he’s done it a thousand times when he leans forward to kiss the bruise on Dick’s cheek, feather soft and gentle. Dick is frozen, eyes blinking wide open, red rimmed and beautiful.
“Jay,” Dick whispers, his voice hushed and he licks his dry lips once, twice, thrice. “You don’t have to…” He tries to wiggle away, half hearted in his attempt to put some distance. Struggles weak as a newborn kitten.
“No don’t,” Jason says, in a rush, “when you let me hold you like this and let me kiss your bruises… you remind me of someone.”
Dick smiles a broken smile, that wobbly, ugly, cruel perversion of what should otherwise be something happy. But it’s like a reflection—for every difference in their appearance, there is a similarity in their approach to him, their behavior. The gentle shushing and the trembling hands and the bruises, God, the bruises.
“Who?” Dick whispers. “Who do I remind you of?”
Jason shrugs. “Just someone I knew. Was a long time ago. A different lifetime.”
Dick snorts, his voice still wet with tears. “Literally.” Another shaky smile.
Jason’s lips are back on his bruised cheek, touching more and more skin as they widen into his own twin grin. The residue of burning anger curls around him, urging him to get up, grab a gun, walk out the door, but all Jason can do is plant kiss after kiss, soft and gentle in ways he hasn’t been in such a long time. Lick away the salt he can taste on his lips.
It’s Dick who moves his face to the side when Jason leans forward again, smashing their lips together in a quiet slap of skin, his lips petal soft and trembling as they slide over Jason’s own.
They break apart gasping for breath, and Jason immediately wants more. It’s as if Dick had unleashed the monster Jason was barely holding back by a thread, and it’s now free to take as it pleases and it’s ravenous. Dick is heaving lungfuls of air, his lips parted and wet and slick and oh so pretty, his pale skin around the bruise shines within the moonlight and he’s ethereal, small and gorgeous in Jason’s bed, wearing the clothes of a man he’s desperate to feel a hug from.
But he’s here, in Jason’s arms, and it feels like he may have lost the battle but Bruce has lost the war.
“Did you love them?” Dick whispers.
“Hm?”
“The person I remind you of.”
Love doesn’t even begin to encompass—
“It’s the earliest memory I have,” Jason confesses. “Loving her.”
It’s as natural as breathing.
—
They pretend like nothing happened for a week. Jason finds it a little fucked up that they’re so used to acting like everything’s fine and compartmentalizing that sometimes it genuinely feels like nothing is out of the ordinary.
A consequence of fighting crime at night and hiding your identity, sitting at school and pretending the corpses of the killer you’re trying to catch aren’t being analyzed inside your brain like it’s a goddamned data computer.
It comes crashing down eventually when Jason shows up on a night he had informed Dick he wouldn’t be back, a mistake on his part. His original plans involved staying up and making sure his subordinates had gotten the job done, but things ended up wrapping way faster than expected, which meant he did not have to spend the night at the safehouse. His bed in his apartment with Dick is too comfortable to not miss it for a few miles on a motorbike.
Unlocking the door and stepping in, removing his boots to place them neatly next to Dick’s and taking a second as he does every time to gawk at the size difference of their feet.
It’s exactly then when he hears the shuffling, the sound of skin slapping skin, the guttural high pitched moans and whimpers of a man debauched. Jason freezes in position for a total of three shameful seconds before he’s able to force his body to move.
The door to Dick’s room is not completely shut, and as Jason grows closer the picture inside paints itself with vigor, his eyes taking it all in.
“Say it,” the man is demanding, his voice deep and rough. Akin to a growl. He’s got Dick’s head pinned to the bed sheets with a large hand gripping his skull hard enough to hurt, Dick’s chest pressed down and forcing his back to arch in an impressive curve that positions his ass perfectly to pound into. There’s a distinct sound of skin slapping skin, rhythmic and deafening around the room that has Jason stepping back enough to be out of sight.
“Daddy,” Dick cries, and Jason’s heart pounds, beating like a drum, blood rushing lower. “Daddy, please.”
Wrecked, and voice cracking, high pitched and breathless. God, Dickie is so erotic, in every sense of the word. So sensual in his everyday moves and his little slips of glowing skin, a teasing smile, a cheeky cock of the hip. Dick is a wet dream personified.
“So fucking tight,” the man grunts, and then slaps Dick’s left asscheek, making Dick yelp and squirm within the iron grip the man has on his entire body, helpless to the cock that’s being driven in and out of him, forced to just be held down and taking it.
Every slap of skin is followed by a breathless punched out litany of gasps from Dick, his gorgeous body sweat slick and reddened in areas that so clearly have been roughly groped and slapped at.
“Fuck yeah, baby girl, let me use you like the little cock sleeve you are,” the man is grunting out in his rough drawl, and Dick whines at the words, his whole body beginning to quiver like a leaf blowing against a strong wind.
“You like that, baby girl?” The man leans down to bite his shoulder, hard, breaking skin and Dick screams into the pillow, sobs that hitch in between. “Wanna be called that? Daddy’s baby girl?”
Jason's entire body is heated to the point there’s sweat dripping down his back in rivulets across heated skin.
“C’mon, I know you want to cum.”
“Go ahead,” Voice deep and smug, the man slaps Dick’s ass once more, him and Jason both drinking in the squeak that falls from swollen red lips. “Beg.”
Dick’s hair is pulled back in an aggressive tug that has his neck straining, and Dick’s sobs tumble out with nothing to muffle them with. His bloodshot beautiful eyes, open and hazy, clumped damp eyelashes fluttering.
They rake across the room and time stands still when they lock eyes, Jason’s own wide ones, half crazed with lust and bloodthirst, unblinking, his breath heavy.
Dick’s eyes slide shut as a dragged out downright sinful moan tears out of him, reopening his tearful pretty blue eyes to stare right into Jason’s soul.
“Bruce, please,” he wails, and then he’s orgasming into the sheets below, manhandled into sitting up.
Jason slips away quietly into his room, his dick rock hard and his chest heavy and constricted to the point his breath stutters silently.
Jason has not won the war. He doubts he was even an opponent in the first place.
Dick stumbles into his room an hour later, sobs bursting out of him as if it’s agonizing to hold them in. He’s in boxer briefs only, the landscape of his body, littered with bruises and bites like land mines, exposed for Jason’s view. His staggering weight presses into Jason as he throws himself forward, burrowing his face into Jason’s chest.
Jason could barely make out the shattered words that are slurred out into his chest that’s growing damper by the minute.
“I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry, L-little,” Dick hiccups, “Wing. Fuck, fuck, I’m so sorry.” Another hiccup. “You d-didn’t ha-ave to see that. I thought-I thought you weren’t gonna be back—”
“Dick.” Jason’s voice is strained.
Dick’s words pour out like a dam set free.
“I’m so fucked up, I’m fucked up, Jay, and that’s why-that’s why he won’t-he knows it. I Know he knows it. He knows everything. It’s just I had everything one day and then nothing the next and Bruce was all I had,” Dick hiccups once more and fat tears keep dripping into Jason’s shirt. “He used to keep me in his bed and hold me but he doesn’t anymore and now the only time he holds me is when I’m being too fucking stupid, and he’s holding my arm and leaving those stupid bruises that you hate so much—”
“Shhhhh, Dickie, breath. You’re hyperventilating,” Jason murmurs and he rubs Dick’s bare chest with his palm. Up, down. Up, down. Soothing. Placating.
His hands brush past a hardened nipple and Dick gasps sweetly, still sensitive. Dick’s breathing slows down until all he does is inhale lungfuls of air and breathe them out into Jason’s face. He continues to do that for a few minutes, staring into Jason’s soul while Jason’s hands continue to play with his chest, squeezing his nipples.
“I know you want to,” Dick murmurs, voice hushed, and it sounds like a promise. Jason leans down, ever so slowly, holding Dick’s lean back between both his arms, thinking of how easy it would be to crush him into his chest and never let go. Peppering kisses into Dick’s neck and collar, hot soft skin, practically made to squeeze and grope. Jason comes to eye level with Dick’s defined pecs, and he only needs to look up once and lock eyes with his pretty blues to lean forward and latch his mouth around Dick’s nipple, sucking.
Dick squirms, whimpering, “Oh my fucking—Jason!”
Jason allows his hands to map out Dick’s back, feeling every muscle and every scar standing up, shoulder blades and joints. They stop at the small of his back, for just a second, and then he’s sucking harder on Dick’s chest, licking and biting with some fevered haze. He thinks he could stay here forever, holding Dick. He thinks perhaps this is what he was made for all along.
His hands go lower and squeeze the plush muscle of Dick’s ass, mounding and groping and squeezing, gaining all sorts of whines and whimpers that soothes Jason like a lullaby. His fingers parting Dick’s cheeks, feeling his hole still slick and well-used.
Dick stutters and quivers in his arms, every little touch Jason gifts him is sending him deeper into a space inside his head, his eyes half-lidded and his damp crimson lips parted, saliva collecting at the edges. His nose is tinged pink and his cheeks have a rose hue to them. Tears cling to his long dark eyelashes like morning dew. He looks like a doll. There’s always a tragedy behind someone who looks this pretty when they cry.
Jason lazily fucks Dick with two fingers, in and out and then teasing, and Dick…Dick isn’t even hard between his legs, just lays limp and cries silently while Jason provides him a comfort he’s been denied for so long.
Dick’s nimble fingers are tracing patterns into his abdomen, and Jason shivers at the feather soft touch, feeling them go lower and lower, brushing over his happy trail, at the fine hairs over his cock, which is rock hard and tenting his boxer shorts. They slip beneath the waistband, eager, and Jason whines around the nipple in his mouth when Dick begins to palm him, slowly and sensually. His talented deft fingers, playing Jason’s cock, feeling the pre-cum slick over his foreskin.
Jason ruts into Dick’s palm like an animal, the slick sounds of his cock sliding in and out of Dick’s hands filling the room, accompanying the series of noises that Dick continues to let out. It’s like he can’t keep his mouth shut, the way he’s mewling in Jason’s embrace, allowing Jason to play with his hole and suck on his nipples, fuck his hand and eventually cover it with cum.
Jason feels Dick’s other hand combing through his hair, feeling the sweat pooled at the back of his neck and the strands of hair stuck to his forehead. He lets go of Dick’s nipples, breathing heavy, admiring the way they’re swollen and red and puffy, definitely sore. Dick might not want to wear a shirt all through tomorrow, they look like they’d hurt at the touch of a feather.
Every nerve ending in Jason’s body feels like individual live wires, ignited and buzzing. His mind trying to make sense of the last events that just went down, while still heaving deep breaths as he gathers Dick’s limp form in his arms.
There’s a tranquil silence that follows where Jason’s thoughts race.
“How long have you wanted Bruce to fuck you?” he whispers, and feels the way Dick stiffens in his hold, rigid as stone. Jason can taste the self-loathing that’s coming off him in waves. He can’t keep the resentment from his tone. Not towards Dick, no, but towards Bruce for turning them into these pitiful creatures.
“It’s,” Dick licks his lips, pink tongue darting out, “It’s complicated.”
“Is it?” Jason spits out, “You see him as a father. You want him to use you. You want him to fuck you.”
Dick looks stricken, like Jason had torn his chest open and brandished his bleeding heart. Maybe he had. And then a layer of forced calmness falls evenly, and Jason hates how much he loves it when Dick is angry.
“Are we going to pretend I’m the only one who’s fucked up? Not you, Mr Red fucking Hood? That he didn’t hurt you just as much as me, if not more?”
“You know it’s different—”
“Yes!” Dick throws a hand up. “Yes! I know it’s fucking different but at the end of the day he hurt us both. And don’t even try to deny it or act like you’re not the same as me. I know who you think of when you look at me.”
Jason swallows the lump that suddenly lodged in his throat. He doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t want to talk about it—
“What’s any of this got to do with your self destructive tendencies?” Getting angry is just adding fuel to a fire that is not worth burning their house down.
“You see your dead mother in me and yet you want to fuck me and you want to call me pathetic?” Dick asks, tears glistening in his eyes that are narrowed into slits.
“At least I never thought of her that way. She exists in a corner of my mind that is untouched by both my own filth and the Pit. But you,” Jason spits, feeling vicious. Feeling cruel. “You go groveling back to get slapped around by him like you’re his bitch, and then moan his name while some stranger fucks you. You’re happy with the hurt even, because at least then he’s acknowledging you. I didn’t call you pathetic, but it makes so much fucking sense that that’s the first thing you thought of.”
Dick’s eyes are ablaze, hurt and anger swimming in them that has Jason snapping his mouth shut, heart dropping to his stomach. He doesn’t want to argue, he doesn’t but Dick’s doing the thing where he’s angry and making comments that purposefully gets a rise out of Jason, eventually leading to them storming to their respective rooms and coming out the next morning pretending nothing ever happened.
“Dickie,” he sighs. “Look, I’m sorry for all the shit I just said. I don’t want to shout at you right now.” He stresses on the last sentence by pulling Dick in closer, cuddling him. Their sudden argument had made Dick wiggle away from him, but Jason keeps him close again.
He doesn’t want to hurt Dick right now. He doesn’t want to become another man in Dick’s life who—
“I love you,” Jason blurts out, the lump in his throat choking him. Dick is rigid in his arms, breaths forcefully even. “I loved you back then and I love you now. And don’t ask me if I love you the right way because I don’t know—I don’t know. I don't… I don’t think there’s a wrong way to love you.”
“Jason, I,”
“No you don’t have to say it back. I know you love me, and I know you love the Replacement and all the other kids Bruce has collected over the years but what I feel for you is different.”
“No, Jason let me, let me speak.”
Jason stays silent.
“I love you too,” Dick murmurs into Jason’s shoulder.
Jason bites his tongue. Swallows down the words ‘not in the way I want you to’ down his throat.
“I love you so, so much, Little Wing.”
There’s a burn at the back of Jason’s eyes that he wills to go away.
“I am,” Dick takes a heavy breath, “I, uh,” There’s a sweet flush developing on his face that’s accentuated by the moonlight, making the dried tear tracks even more visible. “Since you became the Red Hood, I’ve always found you attractive.”
“When we moved in together, and you were cooking in our shared kitchen in Bruce’s clothes and, and, and, asking me about my day and, asking me if my bruises were fucking painful,” Dick’s breath hitches and a strangled laugh escapes. “It was like everything I dreamed about with Bruce came to life, to torment me by giving it the face of the boy I failed.”
“You didn’t fail—”
“Hush, Little Wing. And then I realized I’m not the only one thinking these… these thoughts.” Dick clutches Jason’s biceps, squeezing.
“You see your mother in me. You look at me as if you’re starving.”
Jason cannot bring himself to object.
“You want to keep me away from Bruce,” Dick concludes, voice soft.
What a fucking understatement.
“I want to pry my chest open and hold you inside, so that the only way Bruce can hurt you is to rip my heart out first,” Jason confesses.
“He would,” Dick whispers. “To get to me.”
“Then I won’t let him even touch me.”
Dick shuffles closer to lay his head on Jason’s chest, and stares up at Jason through his eyelashes, regarding him. “We’re some pair, huh.” Jason hums in agreement, playing with Dick’s hair, another hand rubbing circles over Dick’s back. There’s dried sweat and cum on their bodies, cooling and sticky, and Jason feels their skin stick and unstick everytime he moves his hand.
“Did I ever mention how much I love that you’re so tall and big now?” Dick murmurs.
Jason grins, bundling the smaller man in his arms. “Nah.” But he can tell. His thigh is the size of Dick’s waist, and he can easily wrap his arm around Dick and shield his entire body with his bulk. Jason loves it even outside of a sexual context, because his horny brain can’t stop thinking about bending Dick into a pretzel and fucking him so hard Dick will be moaning his and only his name. Fucking Dick so hard that Bruce wouldn’t even be an afterthought.
“Well, I am now. It’s so strange. I used to feel so safe under Batman’s cape. Now it feels suffocating,” Dick says, resigned.
“Tell me about it,” Jason groans. There was a time when the spot under Batman’s cape was the safest place in the world.
“But being under you…” Dick shudders. “It’s almost like I am my own person with my own dreams again.”
Jason rolls them over, trapping Dick under him in the soft bedding, and their bare chests are a hair’s width away from each other. “Then let me,” he begs. “Let me make you feel like that.”
“But I’ll be using you,” Dick whispers, voice cracking, tears pooling once more. One trickles over his reddened cheeks and Jason leans down to kiss it away.
“I don’t mind,” he says, and he means it.
Dick wraps his long lithe legs around Jason’s hips. Jason’s heart almost beats off of his chest.
“Use me. Make yourself feel loved and taken care of.”
Jason mutters the phrase into Dick’s ear as he feels his cock begin to harden. It feels like heaven. It feels like redemption.