Chapter Text
“We’ve got: One AR-15, two EMP bursts, two cluster bombs, and one M72 launcher with”—Roy grimaced as he clunked the last piece of artillery down on the table—“exactly one disposable casing.”
Jason stared at him. “That’s it?”
Roy raised an eyebrow back at him. “Unless you want to try your hand at my trick arrows?”
“Your name is Arsenal,” Jason snapped, incredulous. “Where the fuck is your arsenal?”
Roy scowled. “In case you haven’t noticed, Jason, we’re in the middle of an alien invasion; I was doing something before you showed up here.”
Jason’s teeth clenched. “And you didn’t think to tell me that earlier?”
“Yeah? When would I have done that? Before your breakdown about Dick getting captured, or after your spiel about how you can’t lose Dick?”
“Are you fucking kidding me right—”
“Enough.” Kori’s eyes blazed green, and Jason and Roy instantly fell silent, glowering at each other across the pile of weapons. “Bickering will not get us anywhere, and it will not help Dick.” She turned to Roy, jaw set. “I have no use for weapons. Give Jason the rifle and the EMPs, and keep the bombs and launcher for when we carry out our attack on the ship. Jason—I presume you still have your own equipment?”
Jason shifted, taking comfort in the familiar weight of the various handguns and knives tucked into his armor. “Yeah.”
Kori nodded. “Good.” She glanced between them. “It’ll do. We have been in worse situations with far less.”
Roy held up for all of three seconds under the pointed weight of Kori’s look; then he deflated, raking a hand through his unbound hair. “Yeah, guess we have.” He caught Jason’s gaze, the quirk of his mouth apologetic. “Gotta wonder how we keep getting into said situations, don’t you?”
The brief flare of anger that filled him just seconds ago was already long gone, and Jason could only smirk, tiredly, back. “No idea; all I know is that somehow, we always get out of them.”
Roy nodded, eyes lowering in thought, and for a moment Jason thought he was studying the stockpile of weapons—but then he looked up again, and his mouth was pressed into a grim, uneven line. “Jason—I know you need him back, but…we really are outnumbered here.” He reached out and grasped Jason’s forearm, like he wanted to be sure that all of Jason’s attention was anchored on him. “You gotta promise me that if things go south, you’ll get out, okay? You have to leave him.”
Jason tensed. “Roy—”
“Jay.” Roy’s eyes flashed. “We have an exit plan for every mission for a reason.”
Jason opened his mouth, helpless. “Roy, they’ll kill him.”
Roy swallowed. “Maybe—but they’ll kill you a lot faster if you get caught.” His grip tightened. “Jason. Promise me.”
Jason stared at him, and for what felt like an eternity, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t get the words out past the knot in his throat. At last, he gave a single, stiff nod. “I promise.”
Roy’s gaze was unrelenting. “Say it. You’ll leave him, if you need to.”
“I’ll leave him,” Jason said, the words like bile on his tongue. “I’ll leave him, if I need to.”
~*~
Dick spends the next twenty-four hours alternating between sleeping, picking at the hospital food Tim and Cass bring him, and cajoling his team of doctors and nurses with sad, petulant blue eyes until finally, on hour twenty-five, Elizabeth Arata throws down her clipboard, scrubs the heels of her palms across her eyes, and declares, voice leaking with exasperated fondness, “Fine —I’ll sign your release forms, but only if you swear to me that you will remain on bed rest for a week after you leave this facility.” Dick just beams, triumphant, and from where he’s set up camp on the couch in the corner, Jason just snorts—he almost forgot what a fucking force of nature Dick Grayson is.
Hour thirty-seven sees Cass helping Dick off the bed and into the wheelchair Arata “loaned” them while Bruce sits on his tablet reading through memos from the Justice League and Tim and Damian wander around, gathering up the various items of clothing and equipment that are strewn around the suite from the family’s visit. “Your living habits truly require work, Grayson,” Damian sniffs, picking up a book lying open and face-down from where Dick had tossed it, bored, the night before. “Fortunately, you will have the chance to learn good practices from Pennyworth while you recover at the manor.”
Tim stills at that, his mouth pulled into the beginnings of a grimace, and that’s how Jason knows that something is wrong. From where he’s steadying himself against Cass on the bed, Dick looks up, surprised. “Dami, I’m not—I’m not going to live at the manor.”
Jason instantly sees the problem and resists the urge to heave a loud, long-suffering sigh. Ah, shit.
Damian frowns, slowly. “Well—I suppose eventually you may wish to live on your own again, but I was only referring to the time you’ll spend with us while you heal from your injuries.”
Bruce is looking up now, too, eyes narrowed, and Jason catches Tim’s eye. Fuck, he says, wordlessly.
Fuck, Tim agrees silently.
“Dami, I have my own apartment in Gotham,” Dick says, patiently. “That’s where I’m going now, to recover.”
“Don’t be ridiculous—” Damian begins, mouth twisting into a stormy scowl, looking ready to put up the fight of his lifetime—except Bruce beats him to it, voice flat as it cuts across the room.
“You’re staying with us at the manor. I’ve already arranged it.”
Dick twists around to stare at Bruce, and Jason sighs, tipping his head back and throwing his arm over his eyes. “Bruce. No, I’m not.”
Bruce’s eyes are chips of slate in his expressionless face. “This is not up for debate, Dick.”
Dick’s voice is tense, a thin veneer of forced calm stretched over the resentment that’s beginning to broil underneath. “Bruce, I’m an adult. You can’t force me to live with you.”
“You are injured, Dick,” Bruce grits out. “You need help.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You need medical care, intensive therapy—”
“Yeah, which I can access just fine on my own, thanks, I do have insurance—”
“For god’s sake, Dick, you can’t walk!” Bruce bursts out.
Jason’s eyes fly open and he whips his arm off his face as he sits upright. The room is frozen, like someone has taken the scene and stopped the clock, and the tension in the air is so thick it almost chokes him. Tim and Damian are standing stock-still across the suite; Damian’s eyes are shocked as they flit between Dick and Bruce, and Tim’s expression is pained and reluctant, like he would rather be anywhere in the world but here. Dick has gone pale, trembling against Cass’s side, lips opened uselessly around an aborted protest; Cass herself is watching him carefully, mouth pulled down in a worried frown, something sad and resigned in her eyes. Bruce is staring back at Dick, gripping his tablet so tightly that his knuckles have gone white.
“You can’t walk, Dick,” Bruce repeats, voice hoarse, and Jason rises from the couching without thinking. “Please. Let me help you.”
Dick stares at him for another second, eyes wide; then his gaze drops, a high red flush crawling its way up across the sickly pallor of his face. Next to him, Cass sighs, tightening her hold around his torso.
“Come on, big brother,” she says, and in one smooth motion lifts him from the bed, depositing him gently into the waiting wheelchair. Dick blinks up at her, a little stunned; then he seems to realize where he’s sitting, and his face falls into perfect blankness, a hollow look stealing into his eyes that has even Damian shifting restlessly. But Cassandra only smiles, small and sad, and brushes a hand comfortingly through the ends of his hair.
“Have faith,” she murmurs, reaching down to squeeze his hand. “I do.”
Dick looks up at her, and just for her, a small smile curls at his lips, the first genuine one Jason has seen on Dick since Dick woke up—the first one he’s seen, Jason realizes, since when he still thought Dick was dead . It makes his chest hurt, deep and twisting. He missed that smile. God, he missed it.
Tim clears his throat, shoves the two hoodies and lose shoe that he’s holding into Damian’s arms, and ignores the outraged noise Damian makes to stride across the room, taking hold of the handles of Dick’s wheelchair. “Ready to get out of here, ‘Wing?”
Dick inhales, shakily, and looks back to meet Tim’s eyes. “Yeah, Red.” He glances to Bruce, then looks away just as quickly. “Take me home.”
Both Bruce and Damian exhale at that, at least some of the tension in their postures replaced with relief, but Jason doesn’t miss the look that Tim and Cass share, or the way Dick’s head is tilted down so his hair covers his eyes. He sighs, takes the wad of assorted clothes and possessions off of Damian’s hands, and joins Tim and Cass by Dick’s chair, nodding to the propped-open door and the corridor outside, bright with mid-morning sunlight and busy with all of the other healing heroes who are well enough to begin making their way out of the facility. “Come on,” he says. “I think we’ve all had enough of this place.”
~*~
An eerie quiet had descended over the city, the frantic screaming and deafening artillery fire of earlier faded into muffled booms in the distance. The streets were deserted, all of the civilians who had managed to escape the invaders’ initial attack herded into the shelters the Justice League had set up just outside of Gotham, and for a moment Jason could believe that the world had already ended, and he, Roy, and Kori were the only ones left, piloting a cloaked jet towards the cluster of alien ships looming over the bay.
Roy’s head popped into the space above Jason’s right shoulder, eyes searching ahead. “You sure that’s the right ship?”
Jason fixed his gaze on their target, a smaller vessel hovering just below the main fleet. The insignia on its side, distinguished from the main symbol of the invaders’ military with a few added embellishments, had been the last thing he saw before that ship took off with Dick inside; he was pretty sure he would carry it with him into his dreams. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”
Kori leaned into the space over Jason’s left shoulder and followed his gaze. “That is the ship I surveyed,” she confirmed, nodding.
“Awesome,” Roy muttered, eyes flicking nervously to the mass of ships drifting just above, like a dark swarm against the russet sky. “Cool cool cool.”
“Alright, let’s go over the plan one last time,” Jason said, as they drew closer to the bay. “I fly us to the main boarding point of the ship, drop you guys off, and wait until you’re inside the ship before I maneuver around to the cargo bay and enter there. You do your thing, I’ll find Dick, and once I give the signal over the comms, we meet back up in the cargo bay. I’ll suction the jet to the outside of the ship just outside the bay door, so if things get messy in there and I can’t make it back in time, I want you to take the jet and get out as fast as you can—”
“We will not leave you, Jason,” Kori cut him off, at the same time that Roy snorted, “Yeah, fat chance.”
Jason resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Sorry, was it you who was just lecturing me on exit plans or some other trigger-happy red-haired idiot I know?”
Roy looked offended. “Exit plans don’t apply to members of our own team, Jason, don’t pretend like—”
Jason straightened. “Roy, shut up.”
“No, for once in your thickheaded life you’ll—”
“Roy.” Jason leaned forward and pointed. “Do you see that?”
“See what?” Roy demanded, irritated, but Kori was already leaning forward, head tilted as she looked to where Jason was gesturing.
“Yes,” she said, eyes narrowing. “It is…green?”
It was green, a streak of bright green light steadily zooming its way towards the shore over the bay, keeping just close enough to the water to stay out of the range of sight of the fleet of ships drifting above. It took Jason approximately two seconds to realize what it was; then he was slamming his hand down on the button to retract the roof of the jet and clambering up onto his chair, reaching for the flare gun in the compartment under the control board as he went.
“Jason, what—” Roy started, but Jason was already taking aim and firing, gaze intent as he watched the flare shoot in a near-horizontal vector towards the source of green light.
Two minutes later, a man in a white domino surrounded by a halo of hard energy pulled up to the jet, a highly disgruntled expression on his face as he clutched the fizzing flare in his hand. “Alright,” Hal started, brow rising impatiently. “Who tried to shoot me?”
~*~
Jason enters the room with arms full of fresh towels and linens to find Dick sitting propped against the headboard on his bed, eyes half-lidded as he gazes out the window, the custom-fit crutches Bruce produced from thin air the minute they stepped inside the manor resting innocuously against his nightstand. Jason sets the linens down on the end of the bed and moves closer to the head, reaching a hand out to brush a thumb over Dick’s cheek. “Dickie?”
Dick stirs, blinking up at Jason as his gaze clears. “Jay.”
Jason curls his fingers under Dick’s chin and tilts his face up. “You alright?”
“Mmm.” Dick sighs, relaxing into Jason’s palm, and Jason’s chest twists at how pale he looks. “Just a little tired.”
“I brought you fresh sheets, courtesy of Alf,” Jason says, gesturing to the pile on the bed. He glances around, taking the room in. “Been a while since you stayed here, huh?”
“Ages.” Dick’s mouth quirks ruefully. “Still looks exactly the same, though.”
Dick’s childhood bedroom does look exactly the same—Jason would know, from when he used to sneak in here during his days as Robin, a chubby-cheeked thirteen-year-old looking around in silent awe at the space his predecessor once occupied. The stacks of criminology and computer science textbooks shoved haphazardly into the bookcase, the boxes of picked-apart gadgets left to gather dust against the righthand wall, the elephant plush on top of the dresser and the worn Flying Graysons poster above the bed and the hand-painted Romani prayer framed on the desk—all of it kept carefully spotless but otherwise left untouched, as if simply waiting for its owner to return to claim them again. It’s a testament to Alfred’s love, Jason thinks to himself. Bruce’s, too, except that he’d never admit it.
“It’s actually a little weird,” Dick says, with a strained laugh. “I feel like I’m sixteen again.”
Jason glances down at him. “I think you should lean into that.”
Dick raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jason says. “I’d sell a kidney to see you in the hotpants again.”
Dick snorts, a hint of mirth breaking through the exhaustion on his face, and Jason grins, satisfied. He watches as Dick reaches up for the hand still on his face. “Are you staying?”
Jason falters. “I, uh—I got a thing.”
There it is: The minute fall in Dick’s face, before everything gets neatly bundled up and shoved back behind a mask of cheerful complacency. Part of Jason is proud that he’s able to recognize it, now that he knows what he’s looking for; the other part of him feels a little sick. Jesus, Dickie , he thinks with a sigh, watching as Dick gives him one of the fakest smiles he’s ever seen. How have you not combusted by now?
“Oh. Yeah, of course you’d be busy. The city’s probably a wreck, isn’t it?” Dick gingerly returns Jason’s hand to him like it’s a time bomb and sinks back into his pillows, gaze flickering away. “Thanks for helping me get settled. I’ll see you around?”
For a long, heavy moment, Jason just stares down at Dick, torn. There are a million thoughts whirling through his mind, thumping against the inside of his skull in an attempt to get him to pay attention to them, screaming out demands of what are you doing and what are we now and what do I do what do I do what do I do —but all of them quiet in the face of the shadows under Dick’s eyes, the way his forced smile is flawless all the way up until the very edges, where it starts to break down. Jason swallows, makes a decision, and sits down on the edge of the bed, reaching down to unlace his boots. “Fuck it, it’s not important.”
Dick stares at him, real surprise on his expression. “Jason?”
Jason kicks off his shoes, turns onto the bed, and hooks his arms around Dick’s middle, dragging him down into the pillows. “My thing. It’s not important.”
They’re lying together now, face-to-face, Dick securely in the circle of Jason’s arms. From where their legs are pressed together, Jason can feel Dick’s foot just barely twitch against his calf, and the tiny motion fills him with a furious mixture of sadness and desperate hope. “You’re staying?” Dick asks, voice dropped into a whisper.
Jason sighs, pulling Dick closer; after a beat of hesitation, Dick nestles his head in the curve of Jason’s neck. “Yeah, Dickiebird, I’m staying.”
“For how long?”
Jason wets his lips. “For as long as you need me to.”
There’s a minute of silence, Dick’s eyelashes fluttering against the sensitive skin of Jason’s throat. At last, Dick says, voice small, “Thank you, Jason.”
Jason presses his mouth to the crown of Dick’s head. “Yeah, Dickie. Anytime.”
Dick swallows and presses closer, like he’s trying to burrow into Jason’s side. “Jay. Can I ask you something?”
Jason nods. “Sure.”
“Promise me you’ll give me an honest answer.”
Another nod. “Sure, Dickie.”
Jason can feel the hitch in Dick’s voice, as much as he hears it. “Do you think, one day, you’ll be able to forgive me for what I did to you?”
Jason closes his eyes and takes in a long, slow breath. He’s been wondering the same thing, for a long time now; it’s hard to give an honest answer when he isn’t even sure what that might be. Finally, after too many tense, thudding heartbeats, he exhales everything built up in his lungs and tries to breathe back in nothing but air. “One day, Dickie,” he says, quietly. “One day.”
Dick nods, his dark head rising and falling just on the lower periphery of Jason’s vision. “Okay.”
Jason reaches a hand up to stroke his fingers through Dick’s hair. “Talk about something else?”
“Yes, please.”
“Hmm.” He presses his fingertips into the nape of Dick’s neck and smiles when he feels Dick shudder against him. “Your physical therapist flies into Gotham tomorrow. How do your legs feel?”
Dick groans. “I like this topic of conversation even less,” he murmurs, voice growing fainter as his body relaxes against Jason’s. “They’re—alright. I can move them, a little, which is more than what the doctors expected. But it hurts, every time I do.”
Jason continues to massage his fingers into Dick’s hair. “Are you nervous?”
Dick doesn’t answer for so long that Jason thinks he might’ve fallen asleep. “No,” he says at last, and at last some of that exhaustion that Jason has seen him carrying around everywhere has begun to seep into his voice. “Just—scared.”
Jason’s throat constricts. “Scared you won’t be able to walk again?”
Dick breathes out, forehead pressed to Jason’s clavicle, and tells Jason the honest truth. “Scared I won’t be able to fly.”
~*~
By the time Jason finished his fast-track recount of everything that had happened, Hal had gone pale in the face, a disquieted twist to the corner of his mouth. “Jesus,” he said; then, “Does Bats know?”
Jason’s jaw clenched. “No, I haven’t been able to get through to him—the jamming field, it’s scrambled our comms—”
“Yeah, I haven’t been able to reach the others either,” Hal sighed, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “And as far as I know, most of the League is still stuck in the outer atmosphere trying to break through the barricade.”
“I’m not waiting for them to get through,” Jason said bluntly. “The second any intel Dick might have becomes any less useful, they’ll off him. I’m getting him now.”
The hard line of Hal’s mouth softened. “Yeah, kid, I know.”
Jason blinked. “Well—good. Are you going to help me or not?”
Hal sighed, glanced up at the alien fleet looming over their heads, and shrugged. “Of course,” he said. “When has Hal Jordan ever turned down a suicide mission, am I right?”
Jason lifted an eyebrow. Beside him, Roy snorted. “Awesome,” he said. “I guess that means we’ll need a new plan?”
~*~
This time, when Jason wakes to the sounds of panicked breathing, he knows exactly whose it is—trauma is an old friend by now, and he knows that no one, no matter how seasoned they are, walks out of torture and debilitating injury without their share of psychological scars. Dick’s eyes are squeezed shut, but his face is pulled tight in fear, mouth twisted and brow furrowed as muffled, pained sounds break free from his throat. He’s thrashing, too, head tossing on the pillow and elbows striking out, but the limited mobility of his lower half cuts his momentum short, so that the forearm that collides with Jason’s shoulder only thumps dully instead of hitting with the full force he knows Dick is capable of. Jason’s first instinct is to tighten his arms, but he knows from experience that all that will do is trigger Dick’s latent claustrophobia; instead, he carefully withdraws, places a hand on each of Dick’s shoulder, and presses him down into the bed so that he can’t hurt himself. “Dickie,” he whispers, staring down into Dick’s agonized face. “Dickie, wake up.”
Dick tenses under Jason’s weight. “No,” he whispers, voice strangled, “please, no—”
Jason’s throat constricts. “Dick,” he says again, a little louder this time. “C’mon, baby, wake up. You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
Dick jerks, eyes flying open so suddenly it’s almost violent. For a moment he just stares up at Jason, gasping, and Jason stays still and waits, waits—
—and then reality seems to strike, and the tension drains from Dick’s body. “Fuck,” he croaks out, going lax under Jason’s hands. “Fuck.”
Jason leans back, releasing Dick from his hold, and lays back down beside him. “You alright?”
Dick swallows, heavily, and Jason watches him in profile as he struggles to rein in his jagged breathing. “Yeah,” he says, short and tense, voice thick. He abruptly shudders, reaching up to grind the heels of his palms into his eyes; in the moonlight that filters through the half-drawn curtains, the tears that break in a thin stream from behind his hands glimmer like spilt mercury. “Fuck. No.”
Jason watches. “Is it what they did to you up there?”
Dick inhales shakily. “Yeah. That, too.”
Jason frowns, looking up. “‘Too’?”
Dick swallows, hard, and doesn’t reply for a long time. Just when Jason is about to break the silence, he lets out a sudden breath and says, voice small, “I can’t stop…dreaming about that machine.”
Jason hesitates, then rises up onto his elbow so he can look down at Dick’s face. “Something the Kuth’lori used?”
“No.” Dick’s eyes are distant, the line of his mouth uneven. “That fucking—bomb.” He shudders. “The ‘Murder Machine,’ or whatever they called it.”
Jason stills. Murder Machine . He knows it, of course—pored over it in the reports Batman released of Nightwing’s death, researched it in obsessive grief in the days after Dick’s funeral, stood and watched, almost numb with how much it fucking hurt , when the Justice League destroyed it—but he hasn’t thought about it since Dick’s return to Gotham, since his return to the living. Hasn’t thought about the possibility that, just because Dick isn’t dead, it doesn’t mean that nothing that happened during that battle was true.
“I remember,” he forces out, finally. “A bomb that could only be disabled by stopping your heart. It—” He swallows, something cold trickling down his spine. “That’s how Bruce told us you died. That Luthor stopped your heart to keep the bomb from detonating.”
Dick exhales, slowly, like he’s putting everything he has into keeping his breathing steady. “Yeah. That’s about the gist of it.”
In the darkness of the room, Jason stares at him, a lump rapidly forming in his throat. All this time, he’s assumed that everything about Dick’s faked death was, well, fake—but this— “Dick,” he says, voice strained. “Did Luthor—did he actually—?”
Dick clears his throat. “Mm,” he replies. “He, uh, suffocated me while I was in the machine. After the bomb had stopped, he brought me back with”—his voice wavers—“I don’t know, some kind of pill. I don’t—I don’t really remember it that well.”
Dick’s face is pained, like just touching upon the memory hurts him, and Jason—Jason feels sick. “You were dead.”
Dick’s eyes flicker to him, then fall away again. “No, not really—I mean, I was only out for, like, seven minutes—”
“Dick.” A hot surge of anger rolls up Jason’s spine. “Your heart stopped. For seven minutes. You were dead .”
Dick flinches, like the words burn him. “I don’t know. I guess.”
Fuck. Jason resists the urge to close his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
At that, Dick lets out a humorless snort. “I thought I did?”
Fucker. “Not that, you fuckface, and you know it,” Jason snaps. “Why didn’t you tell me you actually died, before you faked your death?”
This time, Dick does look at him, gaze disbelieving. “What could I have possibly said that wouldn’t have made me seem like even more of an asshole than I already was? ‘Hey, Jason, I know that you were, like, really dead for almost three years, and that you had to claw your way out of your own coffin, and that it took a dip into a pit of screaming-crazy green acid and a few years of rehab from a power-hungry assassin woman for you to fully come back again, but I blacked out for a few minutes right before I lied to everyone I love and abandoned you all and it’s giving me nightmares, do you think we could talk about it?’”
Jason scowls. “I didn’t know the whole story.”
Dick frowns, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You hated me when I came back, Jason. I don’t think ‘the whole story’ would have done much except make you hate me more.”
Jason opens his mouth, then closes it again. There’s a tense moment of silence, in which he glares at Dick and Dick glares back, and Jason wants to say so many things, things that he feels like a hurricane in his chest but can’t even begin to articulate—
What he settles for, in the end, surprises even him. “I didn’t hate you.”
Dick recoils, blinking, like the words have genuinely shocked him, and a fist reaches into Jason’s chest and squeezes. He watches as Dick swallows, as all the fight drains out of him at once, and longs for the days when he and Dick could read each other’s thoughts in nothing but facial expressions, when he could tell Dick I love you without any fear of the consequences. He wants that again, he thinks—wants nothing more than to take back the last two years, to do it all over again so that this time, he never has to let Dick go. Dick exhales and rubs at his eyes, like he’s exhausted but might cry at the same time; then he uses his forearms to leverage himself over and onto his side, so that he’s back to filling the empty space inside the curve of Jason’s body.
“Well, I hated me,” he mumbles, burying his face in Jason’s pillow, “and I hate talking about this—it’s all in the past now, isn’t it? Can we just…go back to sleep?”
Even Jason, King, Baron, and Knight of the Unhealthy Coping Mechanism, knows that that’s no good. “Dick—”
“Please.” Dick’s voice is small and soft, and tired, so tired. “I miss sleeping next to you.”
Ah, fuck. Leave it to Dick to pry out Jason’s weakness and use it to get out of a conversation about his own weaknesses. Jason sighs, but finds himself pulling the duvet up around them anyways, sliding down between the sheets until he and Dick are pressed together again. He tucks the blanket around Dick’s curled body, then slings an arm over Dick’s waist. “Fine,” he murmurs, resting his chin on the messy nest of Dick’s hair. “Sleep, for now. We’ll talk about this later.”
Dick snorts a sleepy laugh against Jason’s neck. “Sure, Bruce.”
Jason’s entire body jerks in instinctive protest. “Um, you fucker,” he begins—but Dick is already asleep, his breathing soft and even as he curls into Jason’s arms.