Chapter Text
Jason was somewhere on the precipice between very, very drunk and absolutely hammered. Roy had warned him, he thought idly. "You’ll lose enough blood to affect your alcohol tolerance — be careful if you drink afterwards."
What did Roy know, Jason wondered. Stupid Roy. Jason had perfect control of his body, and he could choose to get drunk all by himself like a fucking adult, thank you very much.
Jason stretched out on his threadbare couch, enjoying the way it pulled at the bandage on his hip, just this side of the good kind of hurt. He tugged up at his shirt to inspect the tape holding down his cotton gauze, smoothing his fingers where it met his skin.
Okay, so maybe he had had a little too much to drink.
A noise from Jason’s phone surprised him, and he barely caught himself on the edge of his coffee table as he startled. “Woah,” he muttered, righting himself on the couch and grabbing at the phone.
It was Roy, of course - Jason couldn’t so much as think his name without him somehow knowing. Jason thumbed clumsily over the display and pulled the phone to his ear.
“Lo?”
“Jesus, Jaybird,” Roy laughed. He sounded exasperated but fond. “I told you not to drink so much.”
“Yeah,” Jason mumbled, “ya’ did. Didn’t listen though. Whoops.”
Roy sighed on the other end of the line. “You feel okay, though? Does it hurt?’
“M’fine. I’m not a baby,” Jason said, indignant. “Just a stupid tattoo, Roy.”
Thinking of the tattoo slipped Jason’s attention from the conversation. He pulled up his shirt again, smoothing his hands down his stomach to pick at the edges of the tape as if to peel it off - “Jason,” Roy said, and Jason snapped back to semi-alertness. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” Jason said. He swallowed, and his throat was suddenly dry. “Wish you’d been there. Was kinda lonely.” Jason would deny until his second death that he allowed himself to get drunk enough to be this level of honest, but Roy, to his credit, just sighed.
“I know,” he said, and he sounded sincere when he added, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t. But I’ll be back in Gotham soon.”
“Mm,” Jason agreed. Suddenly, an idea sparked in his mind. “Do you want to see it?”
“The tattoo?” Roy asked. Jason nodded for a moment before he realized that it didn’t translate.
“Yeah,” he said, “you can tell me if it looks all fucked up or not. I don’t know what’s s’posed look like.”
Roy just sighed. “I shouldn’t be encouraging this.” A pause, and then, “Be careful taking off the bandage.”
Jason smiled a little as he picked at the tape. “Kay,” he said. “I’ll text you.” He hung up the phone and straightened up on the couch, bracing himself as the room spun. Things were slightly easier once he was upright, but Jason still struggled a little to stand all the way up, take a few tentative steps, and shuffle slowly to the bathroom.
He tugged off his shirt, throwing it unceremoniously into the entryway, before he looked at himself in the mirror. His pale skin was flushed from the liquor, and his hair was a mess, the white patch sticking to his forehead. It took all of Jason’s concentration to peel off the top of his bandage carefully, slowly. He had to push his jeans down on his hips to get to the last bit, and then-
And then, Jason took a good look at the tattoo, admiring the way the black lines swooped and fell along his left hipbone. He traced his fingers near the curves, wincing a little at the tenderness. It had taken him forever to decide what he wanted — well, half-true. More accurately, it had taken him forever to work up the courage to get this.
Jason pulled his hand away and grabbed his phone. He took the picture unceremoniously — it was just Roy. And then, with a narrowed look of concentration, he selected the photo and sent it off.
Bed, Jason thought suddenly, or I am going to throw up. He abandoned the phone on the bathroom counter as he half-stumbled out of the room.
~~
Dick loved patrolling, he really did. It had been a part of his life longer than anything else had been, and he knew that vigilantism was as much his blood as being a Flying Grayson. But sometimes…
Sometimes, his adoptive family could be a lot.
Case in point was Damian, throwing every weapon on his person at Tim, who had affronted Damian by… Existing? Dick wasn’t sure what, if anything, Tim had done, but it didn’t seem terribly important as Tim dodged a coffee cup which shattered on impact with the wall behind him.
“Hey,” Dick snapped, “enough. No throwing household objects.” He paused to look at Damian, who was glaring daggers at Tim with a large book in his hands, apparently ready to bash Tim’s brains out with it. “Damian, Bruce will be back here in 20 minutes, and I am not covering for you if he finds Tim bleeding out on the floor.”
“Yeah, Damian,” Tim mocked, looking impressively composed for someone who had just survived a veritable onslaught of sharp objects, “what would daddy say?”
“Oh, my god,” Dick muttered. He rubbed his eyes as Damian actually snarled and launched himself at Tim, who was running at top speed as far away as possible. “You couldn’t leave it well enough alone.” To be fair to Tim, none of them were very good at backing away from points of contention — it seemed to be a Robin trait to run headlong into the exact situations where they should run away, to push limits when they should turn back and leave it the hell alone. Dick also knew — even if he hated to admit it — that Damian and Tim attempting to maim each other daily was safer, so much safer, than the alternative.
Because the alternative was Jason Todd.
Dick knew that it would never matter how many years passed: he would never forgive himself for not being there for Jason when Jason needed him. Maybe, if he had been around more, had been a voice of reason for Jason, had helped him find an outlet for the anger brimming just under his skin, waiting to be exploited —
It didn’t matter. Dick couldn’t change a thing about how he’d failed Jason, time and time again, like it was practiced. Even in his second life, Dick couldn’t manage to help Jason. Dick looked at him and saw himself reflected back, but distorted, like a fun house mirror, sharp edges and a smile that was all teeth and somehow still looked a moment away from broken. It made it hard to face Jason, hard to look at him and not see a boy beaten bloody with a crowbar.
The sound of Tim’s bo-staff smacking skin, hard, snapped Dick to attention. “Hey!” he yelled, in his best approximation of the Batman voice. “Stop trying to kill each other!”
The only response Dick got was the vague sounds of strangling from behind the Batcomputer. He was about to go over there and force Tim and Damian to hug out their rage — that’ll teach ‘em — when his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Dick huffed and fished out the phone, expecting the message to be from Babs or Wally, maybe even Bruce, if he was going to be delayed coming back to the manor. Instead, when Dick thumbed the screen awake, the notification read: 1 new text message: Jason Todd.
Dick felt his heartbeat in his throat as he gaped at the phone, frozen in place. He thought about Jason every single day, never failing to find something in his flat, Gotham, or the news to remind him of the Robin who fell from the nest, but they hadn't actually spoken since —
There had been a sex trafficking ring — wasn't there always? — and Red Hood had showed up with the Outlaws to dole out their own version of justice. It had been a flurry of violence and noise, smoke thick in Gotham's night, but it had ended with Jason and Dick and the leader of the ring on the roof. Jason had pressed a gun to the perp's temple, and the safety was off, but he wasn't doing it. Wasn't shooting. And it had taken Dick less than a minute to notice that the gun was moving because Jason's hands were trembling, and he wasn't moving or saying anything, just pressing the barrel of his gun to a rapist's head like he was waiting for someone else to come and pull the trigger.
"Hood," Dick had said, into the thick, heavy air over the building. "Hood, you don't have to do this. Put the gun down."
Dick hadn't been able to see a thing behind the red helmet, but he had wondered if Jason was smirking, or crying, or laughing, or if his face was as blank as his body language. Jason had just held onto the gun, as if Dick had never spoken, shaking and shaking and shaking, before he finally, suddenly, pulled away, coiled like a cat, and ran.
Dick had looked the perp up on the Batcomputer. None of them knew anything for sure, of course, and Jason wasn't exactly offering information about his origins on a platter, but the perp had been arrested before for soliciting sex from a minor. He'd been picked up in the Narrows, around the time when Jason would have been 7 or 8 and slumming there. He'd been released because they didn't have substantial proof. Because the kid, whoever he or she was, had vanished like mist at the hint of police involvement.
No one had spoken to Jason since. Red Hood had been relatively active within his own territory, disappearing for short stretches of time as he travelled with Arsenal to god knows where. Starfire had disappeared entirely, of course, and there had been an uptick in violence in the Hood's territory following it - but the wounds didn't seem to be from knives or guns. Dick had sent Jason a text, a week after that night on the roof — "How are you, Little Wing?" — but he'd never received a response.
Until this, three months later. Dick's phone vibrated again, reminding him, and Dick imagined it taunting him. Dick's fingers pattered over the screen, stalling, before he finally unlocked it and opened the message.
And then gaped and stared.
It was a picture — a picture of Jason — taken in a mirror in a dimly lit bathroom. He was shirtless, with his left thumb hooked in the waist of his jeans, pulling them down so the sharp line of his hip was visible. Jason's hair was damp and rumpled, sticking up and plastered to his forehead in alternating patches, and his eyes were unfocused, his lips ticked up in a lazy smirk. He looked really, really drunk, and really, really…
Appealing. Oh, god.
Dick could feel a tidal wave of arousal hit him, and he felt himself nearly stagger with it. Jesus. He wanted to thread his hands through Jason’s hair and see if he couldn’t muss it up even more, tilt Jason’s head back to bare his pale throat so he could suck where Jason’s shoulder sloped to meet the column of his neck. He wanted to kiss and bite and bruise down Jason’s broad chest, lap his tongue over his y-shaped autopsy scar until Jason shuddered and begged him for more, please, more. Dick wanted to bury his face in the hollow of Jason’s hip and nip at the jut of bone there, trace over the black ink there with his fingertips as he —
Wait, was that a tattoo?
Dick snapped out of his X-rated thoughts as he noticed, really noticed, the black markings curving just over the top of Jason’s left hip. Dick hadn’t seen Jason shirtless in close to a year — and that had been unintentional — but he was fairly confident that Jason hadn’t had a tattoo there before. The skin around it still looked inflamed and irritated; Dick didn’t know a lot about tattoos, but he was pretty sure that this one was fresh. As in, only a few hours old, fresh. With the redness of the skin around it, it was hard to tell exactly what shape the black ink took, but it looked… It looked like characters in a language Dick wasn’t familiar with, something swooping and curved and beautiful. It looked like… Maybe three words?
“Dick?”
Dick whipped around, pressing the screen of his phone to his chest, to find that Tim and Damian had stopped trying to kill each other and were staring at him. They were far enough away that they couldn’t have seen the picture, but Dick felt sure that they could see right through him, right through to the awful, dirty little part of him that had just been extremely turned on by a picture of Jason Todd — a picture that he was confident wasn’t intended for him, no less.
“Hey!” Dick said enthusiastically, and he winced when his voice squeaked slightly. “Sorry, I got a weird email — probably spam, you know. Anyways, Bruce should be home soon so I’m going to head out, I have some things that I could get done and —“
“You trust me to stay here, unsupervised, with Drake?” Damian inquired, mercifully interrupting Dick’s rambling. Damian and Tim both looked completely bewildered as Dick practically ran to his bike.
“Yep, you guys got it, letting you take responsibility for yourselves and so on, gotta grow up sometime!” Dick rattled off. He paused to tuck his phone in his pocket, carefully, before putting on his helmet, straddling his motorcycle, and throwing the boys one last shaky grin. “Don’t call me unless it’s an emergency, don’t kill each other, remember I love you, bye!”
Dick peeled out of the Batcave. He normally didn’t drive this fast, but, well…
Him getting home to figure out what the hell he was going to do was classified, in his mind, as a worthy emergency.
~~
“Jason. Jaaaaase, Jaybird. Wake up, you jerk.”
Jason grumbled and curled in tighter to his pile of blankets, intent on ignoring the voice prodding at his consciousness from above him. Jason’s head fucking hurt, and he was only about half sure that he hadn’t swallowed his own tongue. Could he even confidently say that he was currently alive?
“Jason,” the voice insisted, and Jason felt a hand push at his shoulder. “Jason, you need to wake up so I can kick your ass for worrying me.”
The cheerful threat of violence was all it took to confirm for Jason that the voice belonged to Roy, and he groaned audibly. “Harper,” he groaned around his thick tongue and cotton-mouth. “What th’fuck are you talking ‘bout?”
Roy sighed and rolled Jason on his back, ignoring his pathetic whine as his face was exposed to the dim light in the room. Jason let out a noise that was very nearly a whimper as Roy prodded at Jason’s cheek until he cracked one bloodshot eye open. “Jesus Christ, what?”
Jason could tell, through the haze of his hangover, that Roy looked relieved. “You scared me, Jay,” he explained. “You were trashed when I called you, you told me you were going to send me a picture of your new ink, and then I never heard from you again. I thought you fell in the bathroom and brained yourself on the fuckin’ tub.”
“‘M fine,” Jason said, and he tried to sound at least a little sorry. “Hungover as fuck and possibly braindead from liquor, but I didn’t fall.” Jason pushed himself upright on the bed, slowly, as he tried to remember the previous night. “Besides, I did send you a picture — you must've know I was fine.” Jason managed a cocky grin in Roy’s direction. “Were ya' looking for a reason to come home early, Harper? Fuckin’ drama queen.”
“Never looking for a reason,” Roy answered, automatic, but his face had curled into a frown, “though I definitely never heard from you after that phone call.”
Jason took a good look at Roy, at his messy red hair pulled back from his tired eyes, and could tell that he was serious — but Jason could confidently remember deciding to take a photo of himself in the bathroom. Had he not managed to actually send it to Roy before passing out? Had he even managed to take the photo, or just gone through the motions? Where the fuck was his phone?
Roy, ever the mindreader, handed Jason his cell and settled next to him on the bed. Jason huffed, woke the phone up, and navigated to his photos. “See,” he told Roy, as he peered over Jason’s shoulder at his screen, “there’s the photo. Told you I took it.” But Roy was shaking his head and reaching his arm around Jason to grab the device, moving his fingers over the screen to select messages, and —
And the last message he had sent popped up. It was definitely the photo. But the recipient was not Roy Harper.
The recipient was Dick Grayson.
Jason could feel bile rising in his throat as he stared down at the phone with increasing dread. There was no way. There was no way in hell that he had sent that photo to… That he had managed to so beautifully fuck up what was supposed to be a fucking joke by… Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. By sending a half-naked, drunk photo of himself to Dick Grayson.
Jason’s hands tightened around the phone, and he could distantly feel himself start to tense up. This couldn’t be happening. He had let himself get drunk and vulnerable, taken what was a hint and nudge away from a sexy picture, and then sent it to the one person on the planet — other than maybe Bruce — who could destroy his life with it. Who would destroy his life with it, and, knowing Dick, not even on fucking purpose, not knowing the consequences, but just because Dick would think it was funny and would send it around and everyone, everyone Jason knew would be able to see him more exposed than he had let himself be around them in years because —
Holy shit, the tattoo.
They would figure out the fucking tattoo.
Jason heaved in a choked-off breath and curled in on himself, unable to control the way his heart was pounding and his clammy, cold hands were shaking. He could feel his chest caving in on itself, the sensation as real and brutal as the Joker’s crowbar to his ribs had been, as he ran through the worst case scenarios in his head on a fucking torture-loop. They’ll all mock you relentlessly. They’ll know everything you’ve tried so hard to hide from them. They’ll see the parts of you that you pretend you left buried in your coffin. They’ll find out that you’re just a pathetic, stupid, ugly fucking kid who hides and runs from all the things he claims he’s not afraid of. They’ll know —“
“Jason!” Roy shouted right next to his ear, and Jason started a little with the sudden noise. “Jason, Jay, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay, but you need to fucking breathe, come on, Jay!”
Roy’s hands were tight on Jason’s shoulders, and his face was inches from Jason’s, and Jason was staring at him with huge eyes as he hyperventilated. What a fucking train wreck. You’re just a fucking train wreck, and they’re all going to know. What now, street rat? Would you rather end up back in a coffin or be the laughingstock of everyone around? Pick your poison, because those are the best two outcomes of your pathetic, wasteful, miserable mistake of a life and —
Jason snapped back to awareness as Roy grasped Jason’s shoulders harder and shook him, and Jason gasped and fell back a little, taken entirely by surprise. It seemed to have Roy’s desired effect, though, because Jason could feel a shaky breath entering his lungs, idling, and then huffing back out. Slowly, slowly, until he was shaking less and breathing without heaving, and he could close his eyes for a moment to wipe the moisture away from around them.
Roy’s hands were gentle on Jason’s jaw. “I’m so sorry,” he said, when Jason had reopened his eyes. “I didn’t know what else to do. Are you… Are you okay?”
Jason closed his eyes again, because it was easier than seeing the pity in Roy’s, easier than admitting to himself that he had just had a complete mental breakdown. “I’m fine,” Jason, started, but a calculated look from Roy made him pause. “I… What the hell am I going to do?”
Roy was Jason’s best friend. He knew things about Jason that no one else knew — things that Jason couldn’t admit to himself in the mirror, most days. Like how the passion and intensity Jason threw into everything, he also threw into hating his own body; how he loathed looking at his autopsy scar or his shock of white hair and never failing to wonder whether or not he would have been better off staying dead. Like how Jason had buried any hint of his sexuality beneath a mountain of self-loathing and unresolved childhood drama, and the only reason he was fine with how intimate his relationship with Roy could be was because it was explicitly not romantic, not sexual. Like how Jason agreeing to be shirtless long enough to get the tattoo had been a big fucking deal, and the fact that he had offered to take a picture of it for Roy was not much less significant.
Like how, six months ago, the last time Jason had felt lonely and insecure enough to get drunk, he had texted Roy and confessed to him, “I’ve been in love with Dick Grayson since I was 15, and he never remembers I exist unless I try to kill him.”
“We’re going to figure it out,” Roy said, and Jason shook his head a little, but Roy was insistent. “Jason, we will. We’ll figure out something you can text to him to diffuse the situation.”
“He hasn’t responded,” Jason said, and his voice was uncharacteristically vulnerable. “Christ, he’s probably already sent it to everyone I’ve ever met, and he won’t even provide me the decency of telling me to my face how much he’s making fun of me behind my back. What a… What a dick.”
Roy laughed, surprised, and Jason couldn’t help but snort in faint amusement. At least, if all else failed, Jason hadn’t chosen a lewd body part as his preferred name. Most of the world might be shit, but dick jokes would never not be —
Still clutched tight in his right hand, Jason’s phone vibrated.