Chapter Text
Jason staggers into his apartment, one hand leaning heavily on the wall for support. He’s riding the painful aftermath of a pretty bad beatdown. It’s not the worst beating he’s had in his life, but it’s definitely the worst one he’s had this week… maybe even this month.
He mutters to himself.
You try to do something good, like stopping a drug deal and you end up in the crosshairs of the whole damn drug cartel.
He hobbles over to the bathroom sink and spits out a fair amount of blood.
That’s probably from the cracked ribs.
He cautiously lifts his gaze from the bloody sink to the cracked bathroom mirror and catalogues the damage.
His face had been well protected during the fight by the helmet so he doesn’t have a black eye or a bloody nose or anything like that, but his head hit the back of his helmet more times than he could count so he’s nursing a pretty bad concussion.
He looks at his reflection in the mirror, trying to blink away the blurriness, but a wave of nostalgia hits him and the exhausted Crime Lord with the white streak in his hair and the weight of Gotham on his shoulders, morphs into the young boy with the chipped tooth smile and the magic of being Robin at his command.
The young boy smiles, “No injuries, Batman. I’m cleared for duty. I’ll be ready for more butt kicking tomorrow.”
Jason’s reflection taunts him with youthful exuberance and unbridled hope. The image starts to blur as more tears gather. His heart beats faster. Ribcage rattling with each painful pulse.
“Fuck,” he grunts, blinking his eyes closed. With his eyes closed the visual reminder of the former Robin is gone, but the memories hit even harder. The poorly held back tears in his eyes burn stronger.
“Fuck me,” Jason groans, words echoing in the small, tiled bathroom. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter and pounds a fist against the sink until his knuckles pulse with a pain that registers slightly higher on the pain scale than his ribs.
He takes a deep breath, the labored inhale trembling through his body due to pain. His body shudders again, this time from the repressed memories that are rattling the box that Jason shoves down, with the intent to deal with them never. His next breath hitches and unstoppable sobs escape, reminding him why he shoves those memories of happier times so far away. Memories of how Bruce used to actually hug the poor kid. Memories of Bruce telling Jason how proud he was of his little Robin every day. Memories of how Bruce used to call him Jaylad or son.
Nope. Jason can’t go there right now. Tears won’t fix his battered body. He has to pull himself together. He has to do it alone… just like he always does. Always alone.
He opens his eyes, letting the trapped tears escape, and rubs away the remainder with the back of his hand. The hand that didn’t just punch the sink repeatedly a minute ago.
He focuses back on the present, because he keeps letting himself drift back to the past. He’s more than familiar with the early signs of dissociating and he’d rather not have that happen when he’s alone in his apartment.
He runs his fingers through his overgrown bangs and takes a steadying breath.
He wraps his arm tightly around his midsection, shuddering for a moment at how similar the protective movement is to an actual hug. It’s the closest thing to a hug that he’s felt in weeks. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t been hit by Poison Ivy’s cuddle pollen two days ago.
He really, really, needs a hug right now.
New tears burn from the back of his eyes and he takes another slow breath to stave off an inconvenient emotional break down. He doesn’t really need that right now.
Unfortunately, new pain and old memories are shoved to low priority status when the walls of his bathroom start shaking.
The earthquake increases in intensity, aggressively swinging Jason’s medicine cabinet open, spilling all of his random bottles of painkillers into the sink.
He holds onto the sink to keep from falling as the sound of violent thunder rips through the room. His eyes dart to the tiny bathroom window and the lightning he expects to see cuts across the glass in a shade of speedster red.
“What the fu—.”
The window explodes as a bolt of blood red speedster lightning hits him, soaring through the broken glass.
The feeling is similar to being blown up in a building in Ethiopia. Jason registers the familiar pain and, just like the first time, his body feels like it’s being pressure cooked from the inside. He gives the finger to whoever’s blowing him up for the second time, and promptly passes out.
_________
The first thing Jason notices when he wakes up is a hard wood floor underneath his back. His apartment is carpeted and the floor he’s regaining consciousness on is wooden. He must have been moved.
He slowly assesses the situation as he stays as still as possible. Moving too fast might cause the wood to creak as he shifts his weight. Opening his eyes might alert the kidnappers that he’s in fact conscious. Even the shift in his breathing might trigger Jason’s designated guard to get trigger happy.
As consciousness flows more freely into Jason, he struggles to fight off the pain, tapping into the skills he learned as Robin. Bruce trained him for years on how to manage situations like this. Jason hates to admit that Bruce’s training was the only thing that kept him alive while scraping his way out of his own coffin. Jason’s coffin escape was filled with desperate screams that shredded his throat raw and bloody, broken fingers that literally clawed their way through solid wood and earthy soil, but through it all—through the worst part of the claustrophobic agony, Jason could always hear Batman’s calm voice in his head guiding him ‘Take a deep breath, and then assess… take a deep breath, and then assess.’
Jason follows Batman’s old advice, but when he takes a deep breath—disguised as a harmless sigh from a deep sleep—he inhales a bit too much dust from wherever his captors are holding him and an ill-timed sneeze shoots out.
‘Why am I not surprised that the old man’s advice is gonna get me killed’, Jason sighs under his breath, as he cracks his eyes open and prepares for combat.
It becomes clear almost instantly that the only things in the room that pose a threat to him are the layers of thick dust bunnies covering every square inch of furniture.
Jason props himself on his elbows now that it’s clear he’s not in imminent danger of being tortured. His surroundings are shadowed in the darkness of night, but the moonlight from a window illuminates the room enough to see a dusty grand piano in the far corner. A few plush chairs and a couch are the only other things in the room besides the piano. There’s also a fireplace that looks like it hasn’t been used in years.
Jason grunts in pain as he grabs his helmet from next to him on the floor, and he gets to his feet. He sneezes again, this time using his sleeve to mute the sound. He unholsters one of his guns and uses the back of his hand to wipe over his nose as he shambles toward the door.
‘I’ve gotta get the hell out of here. Wherever here is.’
He works on that plan as he exits the biohazard room and drags himself down the hallway. The longer he walks, the more familiar everything looks. He’s been here before.
The rich, opulent décor. The long hallways of a stately Manor. A family crest on the wall.
Jason drags his hand over his face and grimaces. He whispers to no one in particular.
“This is Drake Manor. I’m in fucking Replacement’s house! The little shit must have found my unconscious body in my apartment and dragged my ass here. But why? And how? The scrawny pipsqueak couldn’t bench-press more than a bag of potato chips without breakin’ a sweat.”
Jason can count the number of times he’s been inside Tim’s house on one hand. Him and the kid aren’t on the best of terms, in fact they aren’t on any terms, but Replacement got jumped once in Crime Alley and Jason had to play the part of hero. He also had to play the part of delivery man when the kid had to go and get himself knocked unconscious. Jason really wanted to leave the kid on the front porch like a normal delivery guy, but it was night, and no one was home, so Jason dragged the beat-up birdie up to his room.
But that was then, and this is now. Jason doesn’t appreciate being hauled unconscious to Tim’s mansion and he’s more than ready to forcefully share those feelings with Tim.
Jason scales the staircase, letting the anger fuel his footsteps. By the time he gets to Tim’s room he’s in full rage. Jason’s control of the Pit rage is limited, but getting better, so his anger isn’t green-glowing-eyes-fury, but he’s still really heated.
He doesn’t bother to knock when he reaches Tim’s bedroom door. He kicks it open with his combat boot, expecting the Pretender to be hunched over a laptop with an IV drip of coffee sticking out of his arm. Instead, he’s greeted with a dark room and a small lump of Tim buried under the blankets.
Jason folds his arms over his chest. His leather jacket squeaks from the movement and so does the mound of Drake under the blankets.
“Get up you annoying little shit.”
The words are meant to be intimidating and to convey the anger that Jason’s feeling, but crossing his arms doesn’t agree with his ribs, making Jason’s voice brittle. The last word even cracks.
Jason convinces himself that the heat currently traveling to his face is anger not embarrassment.
Tim whimpers again under the covers, but doesn’t sit up.
Jason sighs dramatically and rips the blankets off, because he’s not going to let this little rich boy ignore him.
When the blankets are removed, all that remains is a tiny boy that looks no older than five years old.
Jason takes an involuntary step back. He’s flooded with the sickening shock that he only felt once before in his life. It was when he went to Titan’s Tower to beat the new Robin to unconsciousness. The Pit Rage had consumed him entirely and the primal urge for blood was completely out of his control. Jason tries not to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t overcome the unbridled evil, and it killed Tim. Jason would have been left with the blood of an actual child on his hands.
He vaguely remembers beating Tim with his own bo staff. He vaguely remembers cracking multiple bones in the kid’s body and laughing at the bloody smear Tim left as he dragged himself away. Most things about that night are vague and hazy, but somehow near the end of the brutality, the veil of the Pit Rage hysteria lifted for a brief moment and Jason wasn’t the Pit possessed Red Hood and Tim wasn’t an obstacle that Red Hood needed to eliminate. In that brief moment, Red Hood was Jason, and Robin was a child that Jason was beating to death.
The Pit took many things from Jason—parts of his innocence that he’ll never get back—but nothing was as soul shattering as making Jason harm a child. When Jason was Robin, he was borderline obsessed with protecting children. It’s one rule that he’ll die before breaking. Jason’s dad—not Bruce, the other one—made it a hobby to beat the kid whenever he got bored, and because of this, Jason refused to be anything like his dad. Jason would protect every kid in the world if he could. So, when Jason slipped out of the fugue state of Pit madness and the blood of a kid—a Robin—was on his hands, it was almost too much to handle. He tapped into the ‘take a breath, then assess’ mantra, echoes from his lost hero slamming into his skull. He stayed with Tim and ducked away right as help arrived so he wouldn’t be discovered.
Jason breathes himself back to the current situation: Looming menacingly over a sleeping little kid. The kid is definitely a younger version of Tim and it’s jarring enough to make Jason freeze.
The mini version of Tim isn’t sleeping soundly. He’s making little whimpering sounds and tossing and turning and Jason is all too familiar with what someone having a nightmare looks like. He’s had enough of his own to know the feeling firsthand, and he’s let Roy stay over at his apartment enough times to know what that one looks like secondhand as well.
Jason approaches the bed, but doesn’t know what to do. He’s dressed like a borderline villain at worst, an antihero at best. He’s not sure if aged down Tim even knows who he is, so stranger danger is definitely in effect. It’s not like he can—
Huge blue eyes lock onto Jason like a magnet. Jason expects the kid to scream and scurry backwards.
He doesn’t expect the kid to reach for Jason like the man is a freakin’ lifeline.
He doesn’t expect to lift the child out of bed and hoist him on his hip.
And he absolutely doesn’t expect the kid to sigh contently and bury his face against Jason’s Kevlar armored shirt. Jason sighs contently as well. He’s finally getting the hug his body so desperately wanted.
Everything is calm and quiet in a way that Jason isn’t used to.
“Tim?” Jason whispers
The boy nods against his chest.
“Do you know who I am?” Jason asks.
Tim shakes his head against Jason’s chest. He briefly lifts his head to smile at Jason and poke at the red bat symbol on the Red Hood’s shirt.
“That’s the Batman symbol. It means you’re here to save me,” Tim says with more certainty than Jason’s heard in any person ever.
Jason hikes Tim up a little further on his hip because broken ribs aren’t the most comfortable thing to deal with when carrying a child.
Jason’s no stranger to carrying children. Roy has a daughter that occasionally comes over to visit Uncle Jason. The little girl, Lian, is about the same size as little Timmy.
Jason winces as Tim lays back down against his chest. His ribs are screaming at this point. He breathes through the pain because he can feel little Timmy still trembling from his nightmare. Holding him seems to be calming him down. So that’s what Jason’s going to continue doing.
Tim’s in danger of falling asleep, so Jason asks his next question quickly.
“Who am I here to save you from?”
A man’s voice comes from the hallway.
“Tim? Are you awake, son?”
Tim tenses and grabs Jason’s jacket with his fist. Jason bounces the kid in an attempt to calm him down as the mystery man from the hall appears in the doorway.
Jason recognizes Jack Drake’s face. It’s a very punchable face.
There’s a tense moment of silence before Jack smiles.
“You must be Mrs. Mac’s son.”
Jason doesn’t know how to process that.
From Jack’s perspective, a strange man is in his son’s room in the middle of the night—with a gun holstered to each thigh—and the douchebag’s first thought is ‘Oh, gee. Must be the housekeeper’s son.’
Jason’s ready to murder him on the spot.
Tim turns to face his father and nods.
“Hi Dad. This is Mrs. Mac’s son. His name is…” Tim pauses for Jason to fill in the blank.
Jason sighs, “Jason McIlvaine. Pleased to meet you.” Those two sentences are both a lie, so Jason adds some truth. “Didn’t expect you to be home.”
It’s true. Jack Drake is never home. He’s always away on business trips with his wife. Neglectful son of a—
Jack interrupts Jason’s train of thought by extending a hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Jason. You’re right about that. The wife and I are always being pulled away on business. It’s a tough job running a multibillion-dollar empire, but someone’s got to do it.”
Jason continues to balance Tim on his hip as he extends his hand to give Jack a firm handshake. Jack glances down, noticing Jason’s bruised knuckles—from the boxing match with his sink—but still offers no objections to Jason holding his child.
Jason stiffens enough to irritate his ribs, but a small hand rubs up and down his back. The small gesture of affection almost blossoms a new level of hatred toward Jack, but for once, Jason gives in and allows himself to be soothed.
Jack slinks out of the room with an annoying chuckle. The man doesn’t know just how close he came to having Jason’s gun against his temple. He would have used the gun with the rubber bullets and not the one with live rounds, but a rubber bullet at point blank range definitely has the potential to send the man to the hospital.
And speaking of hospitals, if Jason doesn’t sit down soon, he’s going to pass out again.
He spots a rocking chair in the corner of the room. He assumes it’s Mrs. Mac’s. He’s not sure if this is a different dimension or a completely different universe, but from the little he knows about Tim’s housekeeper from his reality, the woman is in her early seventies. She probably spends a great deal of time in the rocking chair.
Jason collapses into the chair. Tim’s still using Jason’s entire upper body as a pillow, but at this point he could care less.
“Jason’s my real name,” he says, barely above a whisper. Still, the sound fills the room.
“Hi Mr. Jason.”
“No, kid. Just Jason. You want me to stay until you fall asleep?”
Tim nods, causing little spikes of pain in Jason’s chest, but he breathes through it.
Jason leans back and rocks—because that’s what the chair is designed for—as the kid in his arms drifts off to sleep.
When Tim is completely asleep Jason rubs his temples and his mind narrows down to one singular thought.
What the actual fuck am I doing?