Work Text:
It’s pouring rain when Dick shows up outside Jason’s door, because Dick has seemingly dedicated his life to every walking cliche imaginable. Dick looks up at Jason through his soaking hair and Jason freezes, caught in the blankness of his gaze.
“We need to go,” Dick says. After all this time, Jason still trusts him nearly unconditionally.
So they go.
——
They’re ten miles out of Gotham when Dick looks away from the pounding of the rain against the passenger window to stare at Jason instead. The silence prevails for entirely too long to be comfortable before Dick breaks it. “You’re not going to ask me what I did?” he says. His voice is soft.
Jason flexes his hands on the wheel and doesn’t answer. Dick goes back to looking out the window before Jason mutters, “If I asked, would you tell me?”
Dick’s small smile, reflected in the glass, seems warped by the rain into something almost sinister. “No,” he replies, “I suppose not.”
They keep driving.
——
Jason stops in a nameless town after two and a half hours of driving. He pulls over in a motel parking lot and presses his forehead to the steering wheel, looks at Dick out of the corner of his eye. Dick is sleeping fitfully, fingers clenched in the sweater Jason gave him to warm up in back at home before Dick insisted, all manic energy and waving arms, that they had to “just drive, just get out of Gotham, please, Jason, I’m begging you”.
Two nights ago they fought the way only they knew how over what Dick glossily refers to as their “moral differences”. Jason sulked and snapped and Dick yelled until he stormed out, silence in his wake. Jason punched the bathroom mirror, stared at himself in the shattered glass, and wondered why he did this shit, dragged himself and everyone around him down into the mud where the only viable option was to get dirty. Jason’s knuckles aren’t bandaged but they should be, and he can see the way his barely-scabbed cuts threaten to tear as he balls his hands into fists.
“What the fuck are we doing, Dick?” Jason asks, and he tries not to be disappointed when no answer comes from the passenger seat.
——
Jason books them a room and wakes Dick with the keycard in hand. Dick shuffles sleepily to the room and sits on the bed inside, too disoriented to comment on the fact that there’s only one. He blinks at the wallpaper for a moment before he tips his head towards Jason and says, seemingly to no one in particular, “Do you ever regret it?”
“Man,” Jason says, “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” Dick laughs a little. Jason ignores him. “What’s the plan here? Keep driving and hope the Batman doesn’t catch us?”
He’s struck a nerve; Dick tenses all over and cuts his eyes to Jason’s, laser-sharp. “Who says I’m running from Bruce?” he asks. He’s wringing his hands. It should concern Jason that Dick is too out of it to lie convincingly, but it’s working in his favour in this case.
“Well, you just did, basically,” Jason tells him. Dick clenches his fists, bone-bruisingly tight for just a moment, before he relaxes them and flops back on the bed, still fully dressed.
“I’m tired,” he announces to the room. “Goodnight.”
Jason stays awake, staring at Dick’s still form, for long past the appropriate amount of time. Dick isn’t really asleep; Jason knows what Dick looks like when he passes out and this barely held-together caricature of sleep isn’t it. Dick’s fingers are still clenched tight in Jason’s sweater by the time Jason gives up and crawls into bed next to Dick.
——
Jason startles awake to a wet sensation on his neck and a voice whispering lowly in his ear. “Wake up, baby,” it says, and placing the voice as Dick’s isn’t as comforting as it should be when he’s pinned in place to the mattress.
“Dick, what the fuck?” Jason asks, tensing to try to throw Dick off of him. Dick tightens his grip on Jason’s wrists and leans harder onto them. “What’re you -”
“I know you still want me,” Dick interrupts. His eyes are shining in the dim lamplight of the room. “Come on, Jay, we both know you can still get hard for me."
Something terrible uncurls in Jason’s chest and he writhes, desperately, until he’s able to force Dick off him and stand up. “What the fuck,” Jason snaps, “is fucking wrong with you? You show up out of nowhere yesterday, make me drive you out of Gotham, and don’t talk to me all day. Now I wake up and you’re forcing yourself on me?”
“You want it!” Dick argues and Jason takes one menacing step back to the side of the bed where Dick lies, looking hurt.
“I want,” Jason says, “to know what the fuck is going on.”
For what feels like hours they stare at each other, gaze unbroken, before Dick seemingly snaps and breaks down. His entire body shakes as he sobs into his hands, loud and ugly. Jason stares in shock until Dick’s sobs turn into awful hiccuping laughs.
“I did it,” he says, raising his eyes to meet Jason’s. “I finally did it, and now you don’t have to.”
“Did what, Dick? What did you do?”
Dick smiles bitterly through his tears. “I killed the Joker.”
——
It’s always gone like this: Jason says, “I’m going to kill that fucking clown!” and Dick tells him that he’s better than that, that murder isn’t the solution, that killing the Joker would put him on permanent outs with the family, and doesn’t he want to be part of the family? Don’t you want to be with me, is the thinly veiled message. Kill the Joker and Dick Grayson walks. The joke, as always, is on Jason, because it didn’t even take murder to make Dick leave - just a particularly nasty argument. Just Jason, a shitty excuse for a person as always, finally pushing hard enough that Dick gave up.
“You didn’t kill the Joker,” Jason tells Dick. He’s never been more confident about a fact because the idea of Dick murdering anyone, even the worst of the worst scum on earth, is absurd. Dick is trembling on the bed. He won’t meet Jason’s eyes anymore.
“After we had that disagreement,” (and isn’t that just a beautiful piece of history being rewritten, Jason thinks), “I found the Joker in Crime Alley. He’d escaped from Arkham an hour before and was trying to find Quinn. And he just… taunted me. Told me he looked forward to breaking me like he broke the other Robin. He mimicked swinging a crowbar, for God’s sakes. I swear I could almost hear it whistling through the air. And I just saw red. The next thing I remember, I was standing over his body. There was blood everywhere and he… he wasn’t…”
“He’s not dead,” Jason argues. His heart is pounding out of his chest. “I don’t even think he can die, Dick.”
“I checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one.” Dick shakes his arms out by his sides and sucks in a deep breath. “I’m a murderer, Jason. I killed someone. I… I…”
“Okay,” Jason soothes. He reaches out tentatively to touch Dick on the shoulder and is relieved when he leans into it. “Okay. This is… it’s going to be fine, okay? You’re fine. Just take a few deep breaths.”
Dick’s eyes are watery and unfocused. “What do we do now?”
Jason is a selfish man. He’s always known this about himself, but it’s coming into crystal clear focus now. He knows what he should do: he should comfort Dick. But he can’t bring himself to do it.
“For now,” he says, tipping Dick’s chin up so their eyes lock, “we drink.”
——
It occurs to Jason, around Dick’s third shot, that there is a reason Dick ran to him after killing a man (Jesus, is that ever surreal). Jason is both a murderer and someone Dick loved, or loves, or could love? That part isn’t so clear. But he’s a killer that Dick knows personally, and it’s becoming obvious that Dick expects Jason to have some sort of advice on post-first-murder living.
Jason doesn’t remember the first person he killed. He was drowning in Pit rage at the time, spurred on by Talia, and obsessed with the idea of revenge. It could have been anyone. Jason likes to imagine that they deserved it, but he supposes it’s possible they didn’t - they could have been an innocent bystander in a larger plot. He certainly didn’t spend any time feeling guilty over it - he’s not sure he even could have. But the only deaths Jason has regretted are the innocent ones, and the Joker was about as far from innocent as the scale allows.
“But don’t you ever think about it?” Dick slurs, and Jason shakes his head and stands up, motions for Dick to follow him out of the bar and back across the street to their motel. He has to support Dick with an arm around his waist as he lists around drunkenly. Jason knows he shouldn’t have let Dick drink so much, or shouldn’t have taken him drinking at all, but it was the only thing Jason could think to do that wasn’t a heart to heart about their feelings. He’s not prepared for that; he has no idea what he feels.
It’s probably part guilt, that Dick fell to this level for Jason, or that Jason dragged him down there, more likely. It’s certainly disbelief. It’s a twisted satisfaction that Dick does care about him, and this much, to do something so out of character and irreversible. It’s envy, too, that Jason wasn’t the one to kill him. That’s two of the tasks he chose while with Talia that he’s failed to complete.
It’s making Jason feel sick. It’s making him feel empty. It’s nothing compared to how Dick must feel, if the unsteady way he flops onto their motel bed indicates. He motions for Jason to join him and he hesitates but does it anyway. Dick’s eyes are puffy and red; he was crying in the bar’s bathroom, Jason’s sure of it.
You’re so fucking selfish, Jason thinks as Dick reaches to kiss him. What the fuck is wrong with you? Jason meets his lips and licks into his mouth. He’s in shock, he’s in mourning, and all you can think of to do is get him drunk and take advantage of him?
Dick fumbles to remove Jason’s clothing; he gives up and lies prone when Jason shoos his hands away. Jason strips Dick carefully, thinking to himself both I’m sorry I don’t know how to fix this for you and now we’re the same. Now you’re mine.
He jerks Dick off none too gently and Dick arches into it, babbling drunken nonsense, tossing his head back and forth like he might clear it by shaking it. Dick always falls asleep after orgasm and Jason’s counting on that tonight, because the shock and reality of the body below his belonging to a fellow murderer is setting in, and if Jason is going to freak out, Dick can’t be around to see it.
You’re so good, he thinks but doesn’t say as Dick comes, you’re so much better than me, why did you do this to yourself? As Dick fades from consciousness with a soft sob, Jason thinks about all the times he argued in favour of the clown’s death and wonders what impact they had on what Dick did. If I had stayed dead, Jason thinks as he stumbles off the bed and into the bathroom, if I hadn’t come back around to ruin you, you wouldn’t have blood on your hands. Jason heaves into the toilet and shakes through a panic attack with his forehead pressed to the seat. He feels disgusting. He is disgusting. He doesn’t think he looks any different when he’s able to stand to look in the mirror, but the thought that Dick would have done the same thing - looked at his reflection to try to find the physical signs that showed what he had done - nearly sends him spiralling again.
I’m sorry, Jason thinks as he curls up on the bed, mirroring Dick’s body but trying hard not to touch him. I’m so sorry.
——
Jason startles awake mere hours later to his text tone. The message is from Tim; all it says is “He didn’t do what he thinks he did.”
It’s Jason’s turn to sob. The sound rouses Dick and he asks Jason, blearily, “Wha’s it?”
Jason stares at him, in all his still-drunk glory, naked in a hotel room and on the lam. He chose me, Jason thinks fiercely, he’s mine, mine, mine.
Jason Todd is a very selfish man.
“Nothing,” he tells Dick. “Go back to sleep.”