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They huddle in a public restroom in a single stall together. Dick presses himself flat against the stall door and holds the package; Jason sits on the toilet and pisses. There isn’t any room to even breathe without touching.
Jason holds onto Dick’s knees, feet bracketing Dick’s feet, as he stretches his hand and the plastic stick down and between his spread thighs. His free hand is impossibly warm against Dick’s knee, fingers clamped, focused on the task. They want to argue about elbows, and knees, and god, move the fuck over, but the circumstances have robbed them out of the comfort of even just bickering.
Jason drops the stick in Dick’s hands. Dick has to fight the urge to drop it on the floor and kick it into the next stall. Out of sight out of mind, if only there wasn’t someone getting the best head of their life just one stall over, the guy whining a breathy, oh shit, Shauna! as Dick turns the stick facedown in his open palm.
“Package said five minutes if it’s still soon, less than a minute if it’s been longer.” Jason is cleaning himself up, dragging his jeans up, slamming the toilet seat lid, setting a five minute timer on his phone while Dick counts backwards from ninety and tries to not throw up.
“It can’t be any sooner than eight weeks,” Dick whispers. “We haven’t been together since I took on the Valentino case with Cass.”
“I’ve been sick since last month,” Jason says; his face is gaunt in the bathroom light as he sits down. He picks at a row of scabs along his knuckles. “I haven’t been able to eat fuckin’ anything without hurlin’ for four weeks now. I can’t think of any flu that’s got a guy in a constant state of worse-than-drugged and vomitin’ all over the place for four fuckin’ weeks.”
“Worse-than-drugged?” Dick whispers. Jason nods solemnly. His knuckles have started to bleed. Dick wants to gently take the bottom of his shirt and wipe them clean.
Shauna is doing a number on the guy one stall over as he groans and moans and babbles about fingers and lips and tits.
Dick tilts the side of the box— the long side with the advertisement image, with the dandelion and the grass and the tagline that says, ONLY brand that can tell you 6 DAYS later! —outwards from himself, just enough so that the very edge of the dandelion is all he can see.
“Any other symptoms?” he asks, then looks at Jason, and wishes he could understand why that knocks the air out of his chest. Maybe it’s the freckles— dotted star-like across his sharp cheekbones, the slope of his nose, the rounded curve of his chin. Maybe it’s the eyelashes— dark and dense around those venomous acrid-green eyes as they look up at him, the squint of judgment painting Jason surreal and mean and gorgeous on the toilet seat lid. Maybe it’s because Dick can’t imagine living without him again for longer than a day, an hour, a moment without wanting to lie down on the sticky bathroom tile and blink out of fucking existence.
“Got a lot of pain,” Jason answers, oblivious to the state of worship Dick lives in whenever he opens his mouth, “right here in my chest.” He traces the shape of his own lungs on either side of his chest.
“Like fear toxin? Or… heartburn?”
Jason grimaces. “Like heartburn.”
Fuck.
“Maybe it’s food poisoning,” Dick whispers and he has the strange and startling feeling that he is trying to convince himself of bullshit. Jason’s face mirrors that thought.
“Food poisoning for four fuckin’ weeks?”
“It’s possible.”
“You’re literally a moron.”
“Jesus Christ, Jason,” Dick snaps, and fuck, the timer balanced on Jason’s knee says 0:12 seconds and the world is narrowing down to this tiny plastic test laying facedown on Dick’s sticky palm.
For twelve seconds, it is just the two of them in a public stall. For twelve seconds, it is just Jason and Dick and the pressing of their knees and the air they are sharing. For twelve seconds, concepts like heartburn and prenatal appointments and an embryo developing a nervous system and a fetus with its dad’s dimples are not theirs to negotiate. For twelve seconds, their relationship does not hurt.
The timer goes off. There is no countdown; Dick flips the test and the sound Jason makes is horrifying. The guy next door orgasms, loudly, and Dick can only bite out, “Jay, don’t—“ as Jason stands up from the toilet seat lid and puts his fist through the wall.
It’s red. The mile-long paper Dick tore out of the box says that pink means lower levels of hCG in Jason’s body, which means that a plus that fucking dark red is a sign that Jason is more than pregnant— he is really fucking pregnant.
Jason puts another fist through the wall, and Shauna gasps, and Dick can feel his composure failing and his anger waking up, as Jason sits down (hard) on the toilet lid again and snarls, “Y’know how you can drug test a false positive if you eat, like, shit like poppy seeds? Maybe it’s like that— maybe it’s because of some shit that I ate and now it’s fuckin’ with my hormones. Maybe it’s just gotta work its way outta my system.”
“I don’t think there’s false positives for shit like this,” Dick whispers and Jason makes a strangled noise.
“It could be,” Jason begs. “It could be anythin’. Dick—“
“Jay, I— I don’t think there’s a chance.”
“Jesus,” Jason either prays or swears. And then his face crumples and he is suddenly twelve again, angry and terrible and defeated, hunched over on the manor floor and apologizing for fumbling a case, for breaking a pimp’s arm, for buckling under the weight of training.
I’m so sorry, Dick wants to say. I’m so sorry I did this to you. I’m so sorry that I’ve robbed you of something else. I’m so sorry that I’ve dragged you into my own shitty luck. I’m so sorry that I’ve put something inside of you that you never wanted, but instead, he drops to his haunches and presses his forehead to Jason’s knee.
“I’m sorry,” he cries. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
•
The shower is dead-skin cold. Not the type of cold that makes Dick arch away in a panic, but the type of cold that hurts. The type of cold that fucking burns— stinging, flesh-boiling, skin-sliding-off-in-sloughs cold.
He can’t lift his forehead from the cool tiles of the shower. His face stings where it’s touching the wall. He has a humorless moment where he pictures lifting his head and leaving skin behind, frostburnt in place on a tile surface.
He needs to get out. He needs to move. He should probably wash his fucking body.
He’s staring at the hair collecting over the shower drain, so much dark hair, so much curly dark hair, sees strands of white. Dick closes his eyes.
A knock— not tentative enough to be Alfred or Cass, not demanding enough to be Jason or Damian, would never be Bruce.
“It’s open, Tim.”
No point in saying it— Tim already has the door hanging open. Dick turns his head, just enough, to look at the kid through the wet ends of his hair, sees the look on Tim’s face, and then turns away again.
He hears the squeak of his shoes, the groan of the sink as Tim leans against it, the tight shuffle of Dick’s clothes that he’s left folded (thrown in a heap) on the sink. “If you’re looking for a knife, you’re not going to find it,” Dick says. It’s emotionless. He hates that he can’t hear himself in his own goddamn voice.
“Wasn’t thinking of doing that,” Tim replies. “I was actually making sure that you hadn’t stolen any of my clothes again.”
If Dick was to laugh, it’d be light and amused and a little guilty, but Dick Grayson cannot bring himself to even fucking smile. He moves his legs, resituates his numb feet, hears the click and groan of his knees because nobody in this pack can heal properly.
There’s a long silence, and then— “You are not allowed to kill yourself, Dick.”
Dick breathes in, breathes out. “I wasn’t going to, Timothy.”
“You say that—“
“I mean it,” Dick gasps. “Tim, I’m not going to. Fuck. I’m not—“ He buries his face in his feelingless fingers.
There are entire minutes of silence, spooling, infinite, entire days and weeks and months of silence between him and his beloved little brother, the kid he desperately, seethingly loves. I could build a home in this silence, he wonders drowsily. I could live a life in this silence. I could raise a family in this—
fuck.
“Okay,” Tim finally says. “I believe you.” And Dick knows it’s a lie, because he knows this kid and he knows the way Tim pitches his tone downwards, disinterested, distracted when he’s not telling the truth.
“Okay,” Dick echoes. And then to throw his own into the mix, just to keep things even, he whispers, “I’m okay.”
When he turns his face to look back at him, Tim is staring at the bathroom floor, running his fingers up and down the side of his arm as he always does when he’s on edge. Up and down, up and down, up and down, on the familiar path of blisters he’s worn into his skin from the persistent tips of his fingernails. Please stop, Dick wishes he could mumble. Stop worrying or I promise that I will go fucking insane.
“When you get out—“ Tim clears his throat, looks to Dick, startles somewhat at the eye contact. He tries again. “When you get out, come to the manor. Please? Just— don’t stay here and rot in this apartment. Don’t sit here and hate yourself.”
“Where’s Jason?”
Tim blinks once, twice, sets his mouth thinly. “I don’t know.”
“He can’t be out there right now.”
“Dick, I know. Okay, fuck, we just finished this entire fight with him already. He hit Bruce. Bruce is— he’s losing it right now. God,” he laughs weakly, disbelieving, “he’s on the brink of a feral drop right this moment.”
Shit. Dick presses his face into the tiles further until his nose touches. He can’t tell if his body is adjusting to the temperature of the water or if he’s experiencing hypothermia. “Are you looking for him?”
“Of course. We all are.”
“Then why are you here?”
When Dick turns his head again, the eye contact is brutal. Blue on blue, considering each other, static heat in the lines of their relationship, burnt edges. Tim’s face is so delicate and serious in the dark of the bathroom’s lightless walls that it’s eerie. “Because I came to find you,” Tim answers. “Because nobody else was going to.”
That’s good— nobody should want to. Dick turns the water off. Tim hands him a towel, looks away as if they haven’t seen each other naked before, as if Dick has anything else left to consider a part of his decency. “I won’t kill myself,” he repeats, echoing the fight he’s had so many times before. “I’m not that stupid.”
“Okay. I’ll be just outside the door. Please—“ Tim mumbles aimlessly. He doesn’t finish that thought. The door clicks behind him.
Dick, standing half-naked in his freezing cold bathroom, looks around and stares. He opens his closed palm over the trash can and lets the naked razor fall out, watches the blood drip between his fingers from the slice he’s broken into his skin from gripping it so tightly.
He begins to dry his hair.
•
Two months ago, Dick’s teeth hovered over the plane of Jason Todd’s exposed throat and Jason had laughed.
“Do it, pussy,” he’d snarled, part-glee and part-venom as it always is with Jason. “I dare you to do it, you fuckin’ coward. You fuckin’ pussy,” and then he’d laughed again, so infectious and loud, that Dick could feel it travel through Jason’s body, down his chest, his belly, the air between them, all the way down to Dick’s cock nestled between Jason’s stretched legs and up into his own core.
For one wild, feral moment Dick wanted to drag that sound out of Jason again until he had all of it in his hands.
Brazenly, he’d sunk his teeth into Jason’s lip and swallowed his infuriated scream instead. “Fucker!” Jason spat, lips pulling back around his own canines, and god— god, what beautiful teeth you have, Jason Todd. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Dick fired back, just to be difficult, just to pull and tug at Jason’s metaphorical pigtails like the slobbering, obsessed dirtbag he is. Jason’s scowl was alive and well, a dark scrunch of his open mouth that was so strikingly similar to Bruce that Dick almost recoiled from the thought of saying that out loud— hey, you look just like Bruce when you glare.
(he’s not that desperate to get both feet in the grave)
“You are batshit insane,” Jason snarled, but oh— the pun. Like prepubescent teens, the laughter boiling up and out of their open mouths and into each other’s, Dick swallowing down every hitch of Jason’s voice with the overwhelming, nerve-wracking feeling that Jason was doing the same with his.
“Batshit,” Jason echoed, even as Dick tipped him further backwards into the couch, even as Jason slipped his thighs higher up the crooks of Dick’s arms, even as Dick lifted both legs onto his shoulders and bent him in half.
So much skin and so much heat. Jason’s teeth and Dick’s throat, the way that Jason was gliding his nails along the ridge of Dick’s spine, the way Dick’s thrusts were going sloppy, as he gasped, “Jay— Jason— shit, Jay—“ trying to not cry, or laugh, or anything else equally as humiliating.
“ ‘s okay,” Jason slurred. “You can, beautiful. Go ahead and knot me.”
And he had— so very, very well.
•
Now, Dick stands in his dark blue bathroom and he thinks about how Jason’s stomach is beginning to swell between his hip bones, and how angry that makes Bruce, and how it’s not enough to be considered a bump, not yet, but two weeks ago, he had seen Jason unbutton his pants to sit down and it didn’t seem to mean anything then.
He keeps trying to bring reason to the thought (Jason is pregnant) but he can’t stuff the thought into its proper context (Jason is pregnant), like trying to shove a round peg in a square hole (Jason is pregnant—)
(—but how?)
So he towels off his wet arms and wet chest, and imagines flinging himself off the roof.
He imagines, for just a handful of seconds, that initial moment of his heels leaving the roof ledge. The shift of his balance, gravity, the sucking sensation of freefall. Thirty-two feet per second, discounting air resistance and friction and Dick’s conscience when it finally wakes up and realizes that it has one second before it becomes an overripe fruit splashing messily across the Gotham streets. He thinks of Bruce scraping the residue of Dick Grayson off of the floor and the poetry of that; thinks of his body plummeting into the concrete three stories below, head splitting down the middle and painting the sidewalk with brain and jelly and bone.
Bruce used to threaten him against dying— if you die, Dick Grayson, that will be the end of me, as if dying was something that Dick could control, or could foretell, or could even feel guilty about.
How fucking hilarious would it be that the thing that takes him out in the end is not a shotgun slug through the soft part of his belly, or the Joker pinning his body up on a wire like a damp disembowled t-shirt, or five tons of explosive materials condensed to the size of a pill and shoved down his throat— but just a slab of concrete and the inevitable explosion of something flightless losing its footing.
I heard the news. I saw the reports. How did it happen? What killed Dick Grayson?
Why, the one kid that could have fooled anyone into thinking he’d discovered flight? He fell!
“Dick?” Tim’s voice is small and muffled through the bathroom door.
“Still alive,” he mumbles. He’s smeared some blood from his palm onto his naked shoulder; the towel removes the evidence uncomfortably well.
“It’s not—“ Tim takes a breath. Dick hates that he knows what he’s going to say next. “Dick, it’s not your fault any more than it’s Jason’s. You can’t just blame yourself.”
Tim’s always been like that, spreading the blame around so that everything stays fair. Everyone gets the same amount of change, not a dollar more or a dollar less, because Tim can’t handle the concept of impunity. He should’ve been a fucking politician.
“Tim—“ Dick breathes, and then aborts the argument. He’s too damn tired. Instead, he pulls a dry t-shirt over his head, realizes it’s Jason’s, and stops himself from digging the razor out of the trash.
•
Bruce does not speak to him. Tim must’ve already negotiated with him— bent and pulled and yanked promises out of Bruce, piece by piece.
You can’t hit him, Bruce. You can’t kill him, Bruce. You can’t do it, even if he fucking deserves it, even if it is the least of what he deserves from fucking up this bad, Bruce. You can’t hate him, Bruce, because he already hates himself enough for the both of you.
Dick stands in the cool darkness of the cave and he doesn’t want to be buried here. Send my body back to Europe, he thinks of telling Alfred. Don’t let Bruce kill and bury me here, Al. I want to be in my daj’s home village. I want to be smothered in the dirt that I came from.
“Richard,” Alfred breathes from the other side of the cave platform. He’s wearing a long coat, his thickest wool scarf; he’s been looking for Jason. Behind him, Bruce stands, a carved grotesque in the shadow just past Alfred’s right shoulder. Dick has the amusing thought that Bruce must be the devil on his shoulder.
“How long have you been here?” Alfred asks. “Timothy said he asked you to come to the manor. We hadn’t thought you’d listen. We’ve been so worried for the both of you. We have been looking for your— “ his voice tapers off, a sentence without a hook.
The devil stares and Dick stares back.
His father, the demon, the only man outside of his dati that he’s ever felt small next to. The dark clouds of his eyes, the crisp line of his shirt, the thick roping of scars up his forearms and beneath his collar. The changes in Bruce Wayne that cannot be unmade. He stands now as a premonition just a bare twenty feet away. Dick feels like he’s been cast off to the losing side of this war.
“Have you found him yet?” Dick’s voice cracks. Bruce visibly flinches.
“No,” Alfred says and draws Dick’s attention back to him. He closes the gap between them, quickly, and Dick leans down into Alfred’s familiar arms to clutch pathetically at his coat lapels. “My boy,” Alfred whispers, and Dick sucks in a whimper.
“I’m sorry, Alfred,” he says. He feels Alfred’s hands grip the curve of his shoulders, fingers coiled together in a knot at Dick’s back. He smells like dryer sheets and lavender sprigs, like the bundles they’d make on Sunday mornings to place beneath the pillows in each bedroom of the manor for freshness and sleep quality, some warm little habit they’d created after the nightmares become too much for a kid like Dick to handle. Now, Alfred’s grip is tight and attentive, grown insistent with age.
Dick swallows a sob. When did these arms stop raising him? When did Dick grow up? When did he start making babies of his own?
(fuck)
“Do not apologize to me, my boy. You are learning the faults and beauty of adulthood much like your adoptive father before you, and I before him still,” Alfred says.
“But—“ Dick whimpers. “It’s Jason.”
“Ah,” Alfred’s eyes are sorrowful. “Yes, that is where the issue lies, doesn’t it? If it was still Jason and some unknown alpha, we would have no control over the circumstance. He’d be gone, wouldn’t he? Lost to his ways and the Gotham shadows. But because it is Jason and you—“ his breath is shallow, “then we have hope to keep him within our reach.”
“He’s pregnant,” Dick’s voice quakes. He sees the way Bruce bristles out of the edge of his eyeline.
Alfred nods, a long and slow sway of his grey head. “Yes, as we all know. It’s not how I would have liked this to happen.”
“I’m so sorry, Alfred. It should’ve been different.”
“Ah,” Alfred’s smile is so soft. “Yes, I do believe I would have enjoyed a card instead as part of the announcement.”
Bruce’s voice breaks the stillness of the conditioned cave air. “How long have you two been like this?”
The water pipes squeak and a warm breath of steam touches Dick’s neck. A moth beats itself senseless against a computer screen. Alfred pulls away and Dick wants to chase the safety of his arms. That’s what he’s always been— a reprieve from an angry father. Dick tilts his head to catch Bruce’s eye.
“A year,” he says.
Bruce sucks in an audible breath.
The manor is quiet this late at night, with most of the pack looking for Jason, and the tired part of Dick that wants to crawl back into Alfred’s arms again is at war with the part of him that wants to run.
“A year?” Bruce says. “You— my... you didn’t tell us. Why?”
Because I was terrified, he doesn’t say. Because I knew you would hate me for spoiling the last of Jason that he was willing to share with you. Because I am terrified that, deep down, you are an alpha with an alphas needs, and Jason is an omega who you would lay yourself on the knife’s edge for. Because you are getting so old, Bruce— and Jason has only just been returned to you.
Dick’s chest burns. “Because I didn’t want to share him after so many years of you trying to own him and his tragedy.”
“Own him?”
“Yes,” Dick snaps. “Because you have spent so fucking long mourning Jason. The rest of us have been living in fear of what you would do if something else happened to him.”
“Not enough fear!” Bruce snarls. “Not enough fear, Dick Grayson, because I had you slipping around my back and taking what is not yours! He is my son!”
“He’s not yours! If he was, I don’t think he’d be pregnant and smelling of me!”
Everything in him which has healed over in scars pulls itself open just then, popping open old sutures, waking up dead nerve endings. Bruce’s expression is one of horror. It reminds Dick of what the fear toxin would put inside of him as a kid, faces wrenched wrong and twisted, like funhouse mirrors stretched strangely.
Bruce hits Dick so hard that it snaps his head back.
When they used to spar, back before Dick became the displaced prodigal son, Bruce would fight purely on the defense. Dick had recognized it, even as a child, as restrained roughhousing— a wolf dropping down on its front legs to satisfy the predator-instinct of a drooling puppy. Bruce’s arms braced for Dick’s quick little hits, squaring back, hands curled closed, no offensive swings returned. The shuffle-block-deflect dance of a parental animal teaching its young how to fight.
Dick had a rubber mallet fracture his brow bone seven months into being Robin. It had been the perfect setup: a ten year old in green shorts, a fucking tank of an Arkham doctor doped up on enough fear toxin to put down a horse. The sweep of the mallet had rattled Dick’s teeth like a jar of bees; he started drooling before he even hit the floor.
That night, Dick saw the animal that lives inside of Bruce Wayne. Emotion. Instinct. Bones breaking, choked off wailing. A smeary shadow of a creature, taking the confused man who had hurt its young and snapping his arms as sloppily and imprecisely as a ravenous tiger. Between the wind in his concussed ears, Dick swore he heard the man’s esophagus crack.
That was the moment he learned that the guarded blocks, lifted forearms, backwards shuffling that Bruce displayed during their spars was not a fighting style— the Batman was so much fucking worse.
Their spars took on a subtle change after that night. Dick swung harder, more intentional, in shivery anticipation of seeing the animal he knew rested just inside of Bruce Wayne’s skin. Bruce never stooped to take the bait.
It’s different now.
Dick has fucked up.
It’s not that he doesn’t see the fist or its trajectory. Of course he fucking sees it: the steady swing of Bruce’s right hand, the push-pull of his left foot swinging back to brace, the way his heel grinds down for leverage. It’s not that Dick doesn’t see its coming— he just doesn’t (impossibly, pathetically) expect it to land. Never, after all these years, would he expect Bruce to hurt him.
The fist smashes hard across a cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, rattles a tooth, leaves his eyes searing, and for one pitiful, passing moment, Dick wonders if he’s going to cry. It’s a betrayal— you have never hurt me like this before.
“Fuck!” Bruce cries. He’s shaking. “Dick,“ he gags. “My god, I didn’t—“
Dick is flat on his ass. He can’t straighten out a single thought in his head. He drags a hand across his face, trying desperately not to wince. His pulse is in his throat. He tastes blood. I’m not scared of you, he’s trying to figure out. Am I? No, you’re the man who raised me. I’m not scared of you. But my god, I need you to step back.
He tries to remember how to breathe. He inhales; chokes.
Bruce’s arms crawl towards him, and then he’s sweeping Dick up towards his chest, and oh fuck, Dick is crying.
“I’m sorry,” Bruce whimpers, holding him close. “I’m so sorry for hurting you. I’m so— it’s just… it’s Jason.“
“It’s okay,” Dick breathes. “Bruce, it’s okay. I know.”
They cling to each other. Dick cries. He wishes, desperately, that he could somehow undo all of this.
•
Jason climbs through the bedroom window.
It does hurt, Dick thinks, to be too aware of his existence. I know what boots he’s wearing by the sound of his heel on the window frame. I know he’s favoring his left side by the hitch in his breath. I know he’s angry because he hasn’t touched my shoulder yet, and Dick rolls over in bed to face the window.
It gives him a headrush when he looks at Jason; the sheer impossibility of a creature like this existing. Blüdhaven’s midnight moon sets the white in his hair ablaze, and beneath the dark furrow of his brows, Jason’s animal-green eyes look to Dick, and Dick’s soul sighs.
Jason doesn’t speak. That’s alright— Dick can’t blame him. He sits upright, blankets shifting, and he draws his knees to his chin. He’s reminded of being seven years old in his parents bed, bookended by his drowsy daj and snoring dati, waiting for sleep to come.
“Did you know,” Dick whispers, “that I’m affected by it as well? I hadn’t realized it. The internet says that the alpha knows on a subconscious level when it… when it happens. We can smell it. It makes us anxious.”
“You’re always anxious,” comes the growl. Jason’s sneer is beautiful. His figure is swollen in the moonlight.
(if dick looks too long at jason’s stomach he might vomit)
Dick gives a little laugh. The bedroom air is cold and sharp, goosebumps flaring up his naked arms and exposed chest. “Yeah,” he breathes. “I guess I can’t deny that.”
Jason’s mouth is wrenched down, slightly open like he’s still trying to figure out what he’s going to say. Dick is struck by the fullness of his lips. Time spools out. Have they always been this bad with each other?
“It’s cold,” Dick says.
“I know,” Jason answers.
So get in the fucking bed, Jason Todd. Dick lifts the covers, exposing his bare skin to the chill, and waits. It takes only seconds before Jason wrenches his armor off, unlatches holsters, unlaces boots, exposes swaths of naked skin. When he bends at the waist, the fat around his belly puckers out like it’s never done before.
Jason climbs in and it feels like he’s taking pity on him. His heat burns at Dick’s shoulder. They don’t touch each other.
“Where’d you go?” Dick whispers.
“Out.” Jason clears his throat. “Away.”
There is no curve to their bodies, no subconscious seeking of hands or skin contact. The space between them is miles long— Dick’s stomach is tight with the idea of it. He stares at Jason’s profile. Jason stares at the ceiling. Every single one of his eyelashes are spidery and long, fanning a shadow across his cheekbones.
“Tim said you hit Bruce.” He wants, pathetically, to touch Jason’s face.
Jason laughs poison. “I fuckin’ decked him. I hit him so hard that he actually fuckin’ whimpered— like a baby. Like a fuckin’ kid. Can you imagine that? Jesus Christ. I left after that so that he wouldn’t see me cry.”
“Oh,” he breathes. “Jay…”
“Shut up,” Jason snaps. “Shut the fuck up, Dick Grayson.”
Dick initiates the sex— it’s because he’s screwed in the head; it’s because it’s his way of coping; it’s because it’s the only way he knows how to apologize.
Do you always use sex as a way of reconciliation? Tim once asked and it had scared the shit out of Dick.
Yes, he’d answer now. It’s because sex is synonymous with both appeasement and guilt for me. It’s because sex is the only thing I can give someone as an apology short of giving them my life.
Jason is on top, digging his blunt nails into Dick’s shoulders and gasping, open-mouthed, lips wet, as he rides Dick as agonizingly slow as he wants. It might change after this— they might roll over and go at it like dogs, like barebacked teens, or they might pack their bags and call it a night because it just doesn’t feel right (ladies and gentlemen, thank you and goodnight!) But for now, Dick is good and lays very still as Jason takes and takes and takes, because it’s the only thing he can offer him. Because he’s terrified that this is the only way he can fix it.
He keeps his hands low on Jason’s hips, fingers splayed around the very edges of his belly. He can feel the difference in size and weight; Jason is softer now.
Jason makes a noise. “When I was a kid—“ he gasps, opens his eyes to look heavy-lidded at Dick beneath him. “My fuckin’ bastard of a father knocked up our neighbor.”
Shit. Dick can already feel the oncoming spiral. He sucks in a breath, holds it, releases it slowly. “Yeah?” he encourages.
“Yeah,” Jason bites his lip through a painfully slow roll of his hips. “He brought the omega over while my ma was at work one morning. I had the flu and was stuck home from school, and I fuckin’ hated it when that shit happened,” his voice is so low that Dick can feel it in his stomach, “when it was just me and that motherfucker in the apartment together. Our neighbor couldn’t have been any older than twenty-four, twenty-five, and my dad chased him down like a slobberin’ dog, like a cat in heat, until they started seeing each other on the regular when my ma was gone.”
Dick doesn’t want to hear it any more than he wants to be having dispassionate sex, but he owes it to Jason to listen. “How’d you know he was pregnant?”
“Because that fucker took our grocery money for the month, bought 300 milograms of mifepristone and misoprostol, and made me sit in my bedroom as the neighbor sat in our bathroom and passed the fetus. I could hear him cryin’ and sayin’ that it hurt. My dad sat next to me on the bed. He didn’t even have to tell me to not tell my ma— he knew I wasn’t gonna. He knew I was too scared of him to say anythin’ to anyone. My mom came home later that day and accused me of stealin’ the grocery money. I let her smack the shit out of me instead of tellin’ her the truth.”
Dick can feel his heart clench and unclench. “Oh, sweetheart,” he whispers.
Jason responds by pulling his face away and oh, how Dick hates that it tugs his heart with him.
Jason mumbles, “The omega’s body channels all of the mifepristone to the uterus.” His hip stops working against Dick’s. The lack of movement is unbearable. "It blocks the supply of hormones to the uterus. After that, your uterus kinda just gives up on itself and starts vomitin’ out the contents. Down will come baby, cradle and all, y’know?”
Deliberately, Dick pulls his hands away from Jason’s hips. He has the urge to redesign his suit, buy a ranch, cut his fucking hair— the urge to do something so drastic that it snaps his head out of the darkness. He could take the pills with Jason. He could let them sit under his tongue, fall asleep with them in his mouth where they’d eventually slip into his stomach. He could shed his liver with Jason’s uterus, his stomach with the fetus. He should have to give something up as well.
“I’m sorry,” Dick breathes.
Jason starts moving again and they hiss, breathless and pleasured, in unison. Jason is so tight, smells so good. Dick wants to chase the indulgence of this until he can’t think of anything but the warmth between them.
“Don’t fuckin’ apologize for somethin’ that motherfucker did. It wasn’t you,” Jason gasps around a particularly long grind of his hips. “It wasn’t you, Dick.”
Jason comes undone afterwards, shoulders shaking. When he sucks in a breath, Dick can see the firm outline of his swollen uterus and the protective layer of fat growing around it. His nails bite into Dick’s chest; half-moons are etched into his skin.
Dick doesn’t finish. He can’t find the edge or pleasure he needs to do it.
Afterwards, Jason climbs off, and Dick finds a towel and wipes down his own thighs, then Jason’s. They don’t speak. Shoulder to shoulder in the cooling air, Dick has the disconcerting feeling that their relationship is irreparably changed. He wants to goddamn cry.
“Come here,” he whispers, almost hiccups. Jason’s eyes (so fucking green) are catlike and confused in the dark. Dick works off of instinct and shuts down the portion of his brain that wants to beg Jason Todd to forgive him as he rolls to his side, grabs Jason’s biceps, and drags the kid into him.
He presses Jason into his chest, heart to heart. Jason, the one kid who wears his prickliness and venom and razor blades as a finely-tuned mirage to hide the quivering little animal beneath, the one that carries his Catholic guilt like a cross, the kid that turns his face towards the barest bit of kindness and can’t help but open his mouth to root like an infant, desperate for more, pleading for whatever he can get. A rattlesnake; a coral snake; a kid in need of a hug without the vocabulary to ask for one. if Dick could only convince him that Dick Grayson would sacrifice his life once, twice, again, again, again, just to feel Jason Todd’s lips against his throat one last time, he’s sure Jason would finally realize that he is loved.
Jason burrows in, small. Dick spreads his arms, making room. Chest to chest, belly to belly. Dick hooks a hand around Jason’s knee and encourages him to hike it over his hip— Jason does, and then clasps his hands around Dick’s neck and presses a lingering kiss to the exposed junction of his shoulder. Dick fucking sighs.
He wants to tell Jason about Bruce hitting him, but feeling how Jason’s fingers grip bruises into the back of Dick’s head, it seems unwise.
•
“Would you do it if it was you?”
Dick’s breath catches in his throat. “I don’t know,” he answers truthfully. He’s grateful for this, that Jason still talks to him.
They’re an arms length apart on the rooftop of Lao’s Chinese Cuisine. Dick is suited up as Nightwing and plucking glass out of Jason’s shin. Jason is on his back and armed to the teeth in knives, a glistening red helmet tucked into his armpit.
They are on hour five of a stakeout gone wrong. Tim hadn’t finished sweeping the neighborhood with sonar for any of Valentino’s men before Nightwing and the Red Hood dropped into the middle of a surprise sitdown full of Valentino’s dealers in a sleepy Chinese restaurant. There'd been enough bullets flying to arm a small militia after the initial scare wore off and the grunts realized they were being busted by bats.
Now Valentino’s men are zip-tied in a tidy little corner of the restaurant, drooling and bleeding and pissing themselves, as the Blüd police sirens grow closer. A few of them sport broken teeth, bruised nose bridges, enough deep tissue wounds that would have Bruce fuming.
It wasn’t dispatching the mob that had Dick fighting with a feral dirtiness— it’d been Jason, stomach swollen beneath the edges of his armor, throwing his weight into a half-dozen grunts with no clue that they were trying to put a bullet through the skull of a pregnant omega.
Dick’s skin is still crawling. He can’t get his hands to stop shaking.
“Come on, asshole,” Jason spits; there’s blood in his teeth. He looks ghoulish in the neon lights of the Blüdhaven Strip. “What would you do if it was you?” There’s a sharpness to Jason’s tone. He wants Dick to try harder.
Dick tells Jason to stop moving as he pulls another piece of glass from the plum-purple bruise spreading along Jason’s shin. He looks down at Jason’s belly— at the way that it is only just starting to push out from the fencing of his hip bones, kevlar trying desperately to mold to the shape of it and instead leaving terrifying gaps wide enough for a knife to find space. Dick tries to imagine his own body like that, the weight of it in his lap. He can't, but he tries.
"Is it your baby? In this scenario?" he asks.
Jason shrugs. "Does it matter? It’s still a fetus inside of you. You’re still just as pregnant as you would be if it wasn’t mine.”
“If it's yours then that means I care what you think.”
"Jesus Christ, Dick. And what if it isn’t mine? What if you fucked some random alpha in the fuckin’ Iceberg Lounge bathroom and you got pregnant by some sort of miraculous conception. What if— what if the dude dropped dead, like, fuckin’ immediately after he came inside you. You didn't know his name and now he’s dead and now you’re pregnant. What would you do?"
"Jason, what the fuck," Dick breathes, and the concept is so delusional and bizarre that he fucking laughs. Jason does too. He’s so gorgeous when he bares his canines.
“Come on, you fucker. Humor me. What would you do?”
"None of that makes sense, though. It’s not even the same situation.”
“How?”
“Because,” Dick grits his teeth, “it’s not the baby of some random dead alpha who fucked you inside of a random-ass bathroom. It’s mine.”
Jason stares. The rooftop drops another ten degrees. Dick wants to spoon up all the pieces of his soul that just drooled out of him and shove them back in. He wants to bury his head into his own hands and suffocate. He wants his heart to stop aching.
Jason opens his mouth. "I'd fuckin’ toss it if it was some random dead alpha’s. That’s why I can’t make a decision— because it is yours. And it’s different knowin’ that it's yours.”
Oh god. Dick gasps wetly and stares.
In Jason’s head, the father is the difference between solace and rash decisions— surely life shouldn’t be this fucking complicated and simple at the same time. Dick wants to go to sleep; he wants to have mindless sex; he wants to go back to the manor and rehash every fight with Bruce he ever lost; he wants to dig into himself and draw out his daj and dati so that they can kiss his cheek and assure him that he’s too young for this misery; he wants the fetus to drop out of Jason so that it’ll stop hurting him; he wants the fetus to grow big and strong, with pearly white bones and all of its vertebrae in a perfect line; he wants it to shrivel up and melt back into Jason’s uterus; he wants to see it stretch Jason’s skin and feel it tumble; he wants it to disintegrate into bone and mindless flesh; he wants to see it run wildly across the manor lawn and hear it shout, “daddy!”
He wants, he wants, he wants.
•
Dick slips into the cave as easily as a gust of air.
At the computer console, Tim sits with his chin rested on his open palm and a tangle of wires at his feet, the shelf of his shoulders curved in. The screen reflects an icy blue glow across the desktop, the keyboard, Tim’s porcelain-doll hands. Dick can see the tick of his spine when Dick’s breath blossoms across his shirt collar. It’s an age-old game they play. His hand clasps the back of Tim’s neck— scruffed like a puppy.
“Got you.”
Tim is a moment too-slow, hand swiping at empty air. “Asshole,” comes the burdened accusation.
“Bruce is going to have something to say about your reflexes.
He drags a chair out and takes a seat beside Tim in the glow of the cave computers. The tiny red dot that is Bruce’s digital position crawls across the expanse of Tim’s cyber-Gotham.
“Bruce would have something to say if I even so sneezed awkwardly. It’s the byproduct of being a control freak.” Tim’s mouth is pulled down. He’s watching the smaller dot that must be Damian pull to a stop on the edge of a tenement. “Why are you here, Dick?”
(because if i stay inside of my apartment alone for another twelve hours, i will be nothing more than a bloodless carcass in my bathtub with a razor blade in my fucking thigh)
“Jason’s on patrol.”
(tim, i am fighting to stay alive)
“Oh,” Tim breathes. He does not ask questions.
It’s risky even being here. Dick and Bruce have not seen each other since the last time they spoke (fought hit cried). Some fearful, undeveloped part of him is not sure if they still even love each other.
“Jason,“ Tim says carefully, “is not on the map. If you wanted to play creepy-stalker shit, you are fresh out of luck. He broke in one day and wiped himself clean from the algorithm. Bruce had a fucking fit, if you can imagine it. But—“ Tim does something with his hands, something that involves the mouse, the keyboard, keying in a password, bringing up a fifth window “— we still have a bug in his suit.”
With startling clarity, the cave echoes with the sound of lungs, the heave-push-heave-push of oxygen through aerated lobes.
“Is that—“
“Jason?” Tim’s mouth quirks. “Yes. We have all of his vitals. Oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing patterns. We’d know if he sneezed or even just blew his nose. This is completely live, if you were wondering. Jason Todd, on demand.”
(do you keep me on a leash like this as well?)
He listens to Jason’s breathing, the drag of an inhale, the sigh of an exhale, the harmony of life inside of a creature returned from the other side. Such strong lungs, he marvels pathetically. My god, you are perfection, Jason Todd. Even just your breathing is something to behold.
“You incredible psychopath,” Dick whispers. And then he pushes in close to the computer screen, heart pitching. “Can you monitor specific vitals one at a time?”
“Isolate certain channels? Sure.”
“Can you—“ Dick doesn’t know how to say it. He feels fucked up even thinking it.
Thankfully, Timothy Drake knows something about being a sneaky, fucked-up little shit. “Ah,” he says, one step ahead. “I can try. The software is tuned into Jason’s vitals specifically. But I can try to do something.”
It takes a few minutes of knobs and buttons and clicks. Dick waits patiently, almost guiltily. Tim doesn’t speak when he gets focused like this, so Dick watches and holds his breath. He counts to twenty, thirty, releases the air. The sound of Jason’s lungs fill the cave with life.
And then Tim gives a satisfied sigh, and Dick suddenly sits upright as the whump-whump-whump of a hummingbird heartbeat replaces Jason’s breathing.
“Shit,” Dick whispers as Tim echoes him with a light, “woah.”
The heartbeat is so fucking light. Dick imagines it tearing itself apart like wet tissue paper. Fragile. Quivering. A marvel. Beneath the fetus’ feathery heartbeat, the faint pound of Jason’s mature heart is in harmony.
Dick blinks once, twice, and then he goddamn sighs.
Tim, ever the scientist, looks to his wristwatch and mutters under his breath, “Two point five seconds apart. I’d say that’s low, but not concerning. My guess is that it’s asleep right now. A fetus heart will usually beat five to twenty-five times a minute. Slowing down this much can only mean it’s asleep. Jason’s awake, though. You can hear the consistent spike of his heart. It must be an eventful patrol. God, what an idea.”
Dick makes a questioning noise.
Tim’s face lacks the uncomfortable practicality he’s always wearing. “Jason. This— you.”
(jason. you. the very idea that creatures as fucked up as you can come together and create life)
“Oh,” Dick breathes. His chest hurts. “Shit, tell me about it.”
“Are you in love with him?”
Dick pulls his face from the computer screen, from the faint trilling pump of the tiny heartbeat. He stares at Tim. Tim stares back. He looks like his head is a glass of water and he’s trying very hard not to spill it.
“Of course I love him,” Dick whispers.
“You know what I mean.” Tim reddens a little bit. Dick feels his own sanity unspooling just a bit more.
“Of course I love him,” Dick repeats, voice barely there.
Tim opens his mouth. “But how? In which way do you mean?”
In the way a lung loves its twin. In the way the moon carefully touches the horizon before its long rest. In the way a white blood cell devours a foreign virus whole.
“Tim,” Dick breathes. “You know what I mean.”
A notification cuts off the majority of the screen (‘DAMIAN WAYNE has fallen off the preset path. Reroute to BRUCE WAYNE?’) and Tim quickly clicks over. It feels like a rescue or a desperate toss of a life preserver. Tim busies himself with the computer and Dick looks away.
Wordlessly, Tim hands him the headphones.
Dick pulls them over his head, palms pressing the speakers flat to his ears. In a few seconds, the sound of the baby’s heartbeat is condensed to the headphones, and for Dick’s ears only. He puts a hand on Tim’s arm. Thank you, the movement says. Tim nods without looking at him. Of course, he’s answering
Dick folds his arms on the desk and places his face in the nest of them. He closes his eyes, chest loosening, breath slowing down, breath-by-breath, until it’s the long push-pull of a tired pair of lungs. To the sound of fetal-life, he is lulled to sleep.
•
Damian makes eye contact with a lion and opens his mouth. Dick watches as the tip of Damian’s tongue pokes the end of his own incisor, then a canine, then a molar. He’s staring intently at the yawning lion, and oh— Dick breathes a light laugh; he’s finding all the similarities between the teeth of a feline and a human.
“Lions, when provoked, will always attack with claws first,“ Damian says, and the hustle and bustle of the zoo is but a backdrop to the cryptic creature that is Damian Wayne. “This is to pull the prey closer and gain control. After that, their bodyweight will be used to pin the prey animal to the ground, restricting movement. They will then deliver a suffocation bite to the throat or mouth, cutting off the airways and rendering the prey helpless.”
The male lion looks up at them on the other side of the glass with a lazy sort of disinterest. They do not bring food; they are not worth hunting. He shakes his magnificent head and lays it down next to his drowsy female.
In a similar way to Jason, Dick finds himself just grateful that Damian is still talking to him. It’s been difficult to be around the kid without feeling like he’s overstepping an unsaid boundary. Bruce’s territory.
“That sounds ruinous,” Dick mumbles, fingertips to the glass, and Damian’s pencil sketches the line of the lioness’ back as easily as running a finger through a spill of oil.
Damian doesn’t look up. “Once a lion's teeth clamp into your neck, you'll die fairly quickly. I imagine there is not much time for struggling, thoughts, or consciousness. Just darkness. If you feel anything, it won't be for long.”
“That's a dubious comfort, at least, sort of. I guess.”
“Hardly something you should worry about.” Damian’s pencil is miraculous as it brings forth sharpened claws, aged teeth, dark eyes, proud angles. “Would you like to know how a bat hunts?”
Dick laughs so savagely that it turns heads. “I’d rather not. I’ve found that’s the one animal I have nothing left to the imagination, specifically when it’s on the hunt.”
Damian smirks, a private one, but he does not look up from his artwork.
The Gotham Zoo is full for a dreary, wet Sunday afternoon. A few daycare workers field wandering preschoolers away from the perilous drop of a flight of stairs. An elderly couple measures their hands against the gold-rubbed copper imprint of a lion paw; Not to scale, the nearby sign says. A few college students linger around the enclosure and take photos, one of the girls slipping Dick a look every few seconds, interested in the obvious (painful) way that freshly-abdicated omegas always seem to be during those first few years of adulthood.
“She’s trying to see if you have a wedding ring on.”
Damian’s voice is disinterested, an infuriating trait inherited from the devil, his father, as he erases a paw and redraws it. Dick feels caught, somehow.
He bristles. “You know what they’re all thinking, I suppose?”
Damian’s pencil pauses. “I memorized all the exits and people here the moment I entered,” he says, and looks up with a furrow to his oh-so-serious eyes. “You didn’t?”
Jesus Christ. Bruce Wayne has ruined them all.
“Can you be a fucking kid,“ Dick whispers, soft and pleading and miserable, “for five minutes, Damian?”
Damian takes a moment to think about this, proud mouth in a thin line, the tip of his pencil just resting on the surface of his paper. He’s princely and untouchable and judgemental, even like this, even at thirteen, with a butterfly bandage taped to the split in his eyebrow and Talia’s ego running through him. I wish I could have been the one to hold you as a baby, Dick wonders despairingly. I would have tried to shield you from the sour seeds that were sowed into you.
(you couldn't even shield jason, dick grayson. you can't save any of them)
Damian seems to run the course of thinking over what Dick said, finds it stupid, and turns back to his art. “I would be considered a disappointment if I was to act like a child. Would you rather not discuss your attractiveness of the primal kind in the eyes of the omega population? Would you rather we talk about the lions?”
“Yes,” Dick mumbles. “Please.”
The omega girl looks back at them, her dark eyes searching for any signs of a mating on Dick’s skin. He wishes she could smell it on him— the occupied state of Jason’s womb. It’s different for the alpha as it is for the omega. Last night, he’d left for patrol with a stomach full of writhing, snake-like anxiety because Jason’s scent has taken the turn into milky vulnerability, Dick’s senses tuned into a channel that hasn’t existed before, a change in the airwaves that set off the primal receptors in his head. Now, when he catches the scent of Jason in the air, something in his nervous system wakes up and snarls, this omega is gravid. This omega is vulnerable. This omega needs you, and he trips and scrambles and panics until Jason is back in his sight as he should be. As he should always be, until the sun burns out.
The girl keeps staring. There’s nothing in Dick’s scent that has changed. She’s actually very pretty. Yet her hands are not wide, or boyish, or marred, or eerily beautiful in the white Gotham sun, so Dick does not care. He looks away.
Damian slams his artbook closed. It spooks the elderly couple, who take a look over at Damian and share a grin. Dick feels half-tempted to warn them— this one bites, folks. My god, am I a miserable sucker for him, but he’s not one to trust when hands are in the vicinity of teeth.
“The lionesses do most, if not all, of the hunting,” Damian narrates boredly. “They choose to do so mostly at night, to keep themselves shrouded. When hunting, they take on specific roles. Some play the role of center and others the role of wing. Wings chase the prey towards the center, and the center moves in for the killing bite.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Hardly. My father could learn something from these animals.”
“And the cubs?”
“What about them?”
“What’s their job?”
Damian blinks. He suddenly looks like a kid, stumped by a stupid question from a stupid adult. “Oh. They are meant to simply grow up the best they can. Eat, sleep, listen to their mothers, learn from their fathers.”
“Ah,” Dick says.
“Ah,” Damian echos.
(you should learn to be a fucking kid, damian wayne)
They move on to the Asia exhibits next, and Dick reads the Animal Facts! out loud from the plaques above their enclosures, and Damian tells him the gristly hunting habits of each species, down to the way they eviscerate the carcass and what happens in the digestive system as the remains are digested.
Black herons shape their wings into an umbrella that creates shade, tricking fish to swim into their shadow. Archerfish shoot prey with a precisely aimed fountain of spit. The mantis shrimp maims with only a few blows fifty times the strength of a human hand.
Bruce used to do this with Dick when he was still small enough to fit beneath the wingspan of Bruce’s arm. They’d come on a Sunday afternoon with a packed lunch and a pocketful of playing cards. Bruce would let Dick loiter around the elephant exhibit until he got hungry, and then they’d sit down for a round or two of Gin Rummy while Bruce silently ate his lunch and Dick talked about the weather, or elephants, or baseball players, or last night’s patrol with the infuriating energy of a twelve year old with a bruised chin and an aching row of stitches in his sinewy-bicep and too many thoughts in his obstinate little head.
Dick, Bruce would eventually mumble, it’s your turn, kid, and Dick would draw from the discard pile and talk about the tragedy of circus clowns instead.
Damian, much like Dick had been, does not seem to be phased by the disgruntlement of his guardian. Instead, he crouches before the red panda enclosure and stares at the sleeping male curled up in a hanging tire. He seems to be counting the toes, starting from one and ending at six, and then he opens his artbook to begin sketching.
Dick is struck by the unbearable weight of affection.
“Damian, you know that I love you,” Dick says quietly, intently. There is a long silence. Damian’s pencil goes still.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I just need you to know that I do. I really need you to know this, Damian.”
More silence. Damian looks up at Dick and my god, does he love this kid, but fucking hell— he looks so much like Bruce that it’s terrifying.
“Are you going somewhere?” Damian’s voice catches. “I know that you feel affection towards me. You’ve never needed to voice it before.”
“I’m not leaving,” Dick feels resigned to saying, chest too tight and twisted to elaborate.
Inside of the Gotham Zoo, the red panda twists over onto its back and continues sleeping.
•
The heat of Jason’s mouth is like a warm bath compared to the heat of his tears.
“Please stop crying,” Dick begs, and then licks sweetly at the underside of Jason’s lip.
“I am tryin’ to, you bitch,” Jason whimpers. His skin is limitless beneath Dick’s fingers, arms around his waist, hands snatching at the curve of him.
The desire to have Jason is possessive, domineering, categorized as asshole-ish. Someone could look into Dick’s head, find the clinically-insane ache for possession, and send him home with five different prescriptions and a restraining order. Dick wants— oh god, he wants.
But he also hates it when Jason cries.
“I wish I could change it all for you,” he mourns into Jason’s open mouth. “I’m so sorry that this is happening.”
“I can still get rid of it.” Jason’s eyes are unfocused. “It doesn’t have to be like this. 300 milligrams of mifepristone in my system, and you and I could walk away.”
Dick’s soul swells, and pinches, and stings. He hates it, fucking hell, he hates it; he wishes it was easier than this. He wishes they could stop being trapped at the impasse. He wishes he could stop feeling the ghostly impression of a puppy’s hand on the slender curve of his ring finger.
“You can,” he encourages. Tries not to sound gutted. “Sweetheart, you can.”
He feels the shape of Jason’s growing belly beneath the flat of his palm. My god, he marvels weakly. My god.
•
The Valentino case is starting to finally gain traction.
It’d started out as a favor— Cass standing on the balcony of Dick’s eight-story apartment, face void-like beneath her mask, voice pitching moth-soft as she said, “The drugs are bleeding into your city, Nightwing. Valentino is setting up shop on the Blüdhaven Strip. They’ve been funneling it through the harbor,” and Dick agreed to help. Of course he did. How could he not?
That was twelve weeks ago. Other than a few brush ups with Valentino’s men pimping out pills on the Strip to doe-eyed kids and time-aged sex workers, they haven’t made much progress until now. It’s difficult; Cass owes the majority of her time to Gotham, and Dick can’t stop spiraling long enough to form a plan.
He allows Jason to help. It’s not his idea. God knows he’d rather Jason be reduced to the size of a beetle, something slight and insubstantial, so that Dick can stow him away inside of his own rib cage and never let him out. But Jason, ever a fucking bully, pries his way into their case. It pisses Dick off more than he’s ready to admit— I won’t fuck it up, Jason snarls. You gonna keep me out of this? You gonna make me stay fuckin’ home? Dick, I won’t fuck it up. Dick hates that it works; making deals with Jason is no less dangerous than making deals with the devil.
The Blüdhaven marina has the age-old smell of fish and wet rope. A ship is docked, only halfway unloaded, a crane struggling beneath the weight of an airborne crate as its operator gets his teeth punched in by a bat and two birds.
Nightwing drops to his haunches, feels Cass’ feet find leverage on his shoulder blades, and propels her up, a tiny nightmare in black grappling a line around the operator's throat. She lets Dick spring off of her back, pistoning his weight against the nearest grunt trying to find an opening, and wraps his thighs around the man’s neck, choking out a yelp.
Across the docks, fifty feet from where Nightwing and Orphan are clearing out the cargo ship, the Red Hood breaks a man’s finger with the steel-edge of his combat boot. The man, Valentino’s grunt, gives a wail, soon cut short by Jason’s knee slamming a fracture into the man’s femur. He’s a blur moving onto the next, hands grappling for throats and shoulders, forearms snapping as easily as a kid’s pencil. Jason is better trained than he once was, molded beneath the persistent and punishing hand of Talia al Ghul. He fights dirty, taking on a few blows just to tuck in close where the grunt won’t see the glint of his knife.
Dick forces himself to focus on something else; if he thinks about a dealer’s hand on the vulnerable bulge of Jason’s belly, he might just lose his shit.
He mollifies a grunt with a blow from his elbow. He’s starting to feel the ache of his unstretched muscles, the persistent sting of an overworked body. He’s getting genuinely tired; has he always been this slow? Cass shoots past him, slower on her feet but packing a slug that rivals only Bruce. Outside of Damian, he has the bewildering feeling that she’s his best match.
Orphan pulls short and makes a weird little noise, unlike her usual critter-grunts. When Dick looks at her, Cass’ hand is outstretched towards Jason and a grunt twice his size— and fuck, Dick is spinning around, air caught in his throat.
“He has a bar,” Cass whispers just as Dick sees it. The man swings it back and bares it towards Jason, who only just barely blocks it with his forearm and a duck of his head.
“Fuck,” Dick answers. He’s vaulting over the deck taffrail, stomach in a twist. He knows Jason can handle it, but my fucking god, Dick can’t.
The dealer locked onto Jason is rearing back, arm raised. He’s so tall— so fucking tall, his shoulders broader than the omega trying to dodge him. Dick’s mouth is dry. The grunt brings the bar down. The blow to Jason’s belly is precise. Too fast, too full of intention.
Jason makes a loud, terrible gasp.
It doesn’t compute in Dick’s head. It doesn’t add up— things like this don’t happen. Babies don’t die from shit like this. They go to sleep to simply not wake up. They develop defects that stop the flow of nutrients delivered to their bellies and wither away. Their tiny hearts beat once, twice, and then go still.
Babies don’t die from getting the life smashed out of them.
They can’t. They don’t.
Dick Grayson won’t allow it.
(oh fuck— oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck)
Dick runs the length of the dock. He can see Jason stepping back, fighting for balance; one of his gloved hands cup the underside of his stomach, the other reaching out blindly for support. In one fluid motion, Dick extends his escrima stick and drives the titanium end through the soft, mushy, unprotected eye socket of the dealer. There’s a gristly shtk as his eyeball pops.
“Fuck!” Jason shouts.
Dick stabs the other eye before the word leaves his mouth.
He can’t move fucking fast enough. “Are you okay?” he snarls. Jason catches himself on a nearby crate, both hands gripping the edge, his chest heaving. Dick wants to slam his foot down on the gentle curve of the dealer’s forehead and send his brain splattering in every direction. He wants to see the inside of the dealer’s skull, all of the smooth white-concavity of his cranium, the mush of his cerebrum. He can’t fucking breathe. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Jesus, Dick— what the fuck was that?” Jason says, voice modulated and alien through his helmet. Dick unlatches it, violently, from the back of Jason’s head, and tears it off his omega’s sweat-stained face. Jason’s eyes are wide. He’s open-mouthed panting. He’s bitten a row of bloody teeth prints into his bottom lip.
Dick swallows, and he can’t stop the whimper that scrapes out of him. “We’re leaving,” he whines. “We’re done here.”
“This will be a fuckin’ waste of time if we leave now,” Jason snaps, but the tips of his fingers are grasping the corner of his belly. Dick can see the visible tremor going through him.
He doesn't give him even a split-second to argue.
Long, desperate fingers lightning-fast around Jason’s elbow, yanking him back so fast and hard he staggers, choked. Dick can hear the clatter of his upper and lower teeth smash against each other.
Dick’s heart pounds, adrenaline kicking through his veins. He’d be bracing for a fight on any other night, but fuck— not tonight, Jason. Give an alpha just this night to be a slave to his instincts.
“We’re leaving,” he chokes, “now, Jason.”
Jason stares. Dick can see the cramp traveling through his core, pulling a pitiful grimace from his lips.
Jason nods.
•
Bruce stands on the front step of Wayne Manor. He is rough marble, hewn stone, chipped away and formed by inhuman hands. On any other day, this man is the shape of Dick Grayson’s devil. His ball and chain; the dark cupboard in which he soured and bucked and rotted into the man he is now.
But today— Bruce Wayne is his father. And Dick feels the miserable crawl of tears that comes with being a child that can’t blindly trust anyone but their father to fix it.
Bruce moves quickly. The passenger door is wrenched open, and Bruce is saying, “what happened?” as his hands move to unlatch Jason’s seatbelt, already pulling the kid’s weight to his chest. Dick wants to fucking cry.
“He’s hurt,” Cass whispers from the backseat, unmasked and serious. A close copy of the man that raised them.
“I’m okay, fuck, it was just a stray slug that I fumbled blockin’, goddamnit,” Jason protests, but he’s spent the last half-fucking-hour breathing raggedly through his nose, face tight with sweat, knuckles white around the edge of the dashboard.
Dick claws his way out of the driver’s seat and hoists Jason’s arm around his shoulder, the other thrown across Bruce’s. “He got hit,” he whimpers. “The fucker got a swing in before anyone could move fast enough to stop it.”
Dad, his soul cries. Help.
They get Jason down to the cave with effort, trailed after by a concerned Alfred and the fluttering figures of Damian, Tim, and Cass. Voices are mumbled and layered, at Dick’s elbow, his back, his shoulder. Someone runs ahead to flip on the generator and get the cave overhead lights warmed up and buzzing. Jason is trying, desperately, to convince them of an untruth, but he can’t stop gasping when his hips move.
Tim collects shit off of one of the desks and clears it away. Damian follows on the heels of Alfred as they go to collect the medical cart. Bruce maneuvers Jason to sit on the edge of the desk, hands already moving to press Jason’s eyes open and check for dilation. Cass, the most helpful one of the pack, keeps a hand on Dick’s elbow and simply stands with him.
They peel the armor from Jason’s sticky skin, which the asshole has enough nerve to weakly protest. “It was just a fuckin’ graze,” he swears, but the grotesque oxygen-rich web of a bruise sprawling across his bare belly tells them the truth.
For a terrible five minutes, Alfred checks for breaks or fractures or ruptures. Damian hovers close. Jason’s belly bulges out, no longer the small-delicate thing it used to be, now almost obscenely beautiful with shape.
“Any pain while breathing?” Alfred asks. At Jason’s back, Bruce’s fingers mimic Alfred’s, down the rows of Jason’s ribs and along his tailbone.
“No,” Jason breathes.
“You’ve not broken anything,” Alfred announces. Bruce makes a soft accompanying noise. No breaks.
Fuck. Cass’ hand squeezes the crook of Dick’s elbow.
It’s not enough, though. There’s more to this; there’s more Dick needs before he can breathe again. “Is the—“ Dick starts, finds himself cutting his own voice off with a pitiful whine. Half the pack stare at him, Jason included, and then Damian opens his dour little mouth and says—
“He wants to know about the baby.”
The baby. Dick Grayson has done a terrible thing, he fucking knows. He’s wounded their only omega, their beloved son. He’s rendered him vulnerable. He’s slowed him down. He’s placed something inside of Jason that is slowly sapping him of energy, stamina, nutrients, space. Bruce’s terrible heartache, his lost child, his worst mistake. Dick Grayson has fucked up— god, he knows. He’s done something that he can never take back.
But Dick Grayson wants. He won't be scared to beg for it.
“The baby,” he gasps, a buckle in his knee, palms up and begging. “Please, please.”
(please just give me this)
The pack stares. Bruce nods once, quickly followed by Alfred. Dick wants to cower from the riveting focus of Jason’s eyes but he can’t. He can’t hide this anymore. If he has to drop to his fucking knees and grovel, he will. Please, Jason. You don’t know what you’ve given me— the gift you are creating. You don’t know how much I ache to sweep a kiss to its tiny face. Like my daj once did with me. Like Bruce once did with us both. Like how I ache to do to you.
“Jason?” That’s Tim, ever the mediator, pressing a hand to Jason’s shoulder. Half of them look to Jason, the other half to Dick. Dick can’t look anywhere else but at Jason Todd’s face.
Jason looks away. “Check for a heartbeat.
Dick makes a noise so deep in his throat that it burns. He feels his pulse thickly in his veins. He’s not sure that he’s not about to cry.
Alfred moves quickly, Damian ever on his heels. Bruce takes a step back and removes himself from the space they need for Jason to lay down. Tim makes himself useful the only way he knows how by claiming control of the situation and choosing the best place to stand and supervise. Cass, more creature than girl, makes a soft noise and runs a hand down Dick’s arm. If he loved them all any more, his heart would stop.
“Dick?” Bruce is looking at him, expectantly. “We’ll use my father’s stethoscope first. If we can’t hear anything, we’ll look for an alternative.” A lifeline— Bruce promising to do the best he can. He turns to Jason next and sweeps a hand into his sweaty hair. “Do you feel anything, kid? Any movement?”
Jason laughs once, ragged. “I think I felt something a few minutes ago. Could just be fuckin’ indigestion for all I know.”
“That means we have a possibility.”
Dick watches everything from what, he swears, feels like the corner of the cave. Moony. Watery. Disconnected. If it wasn’t for Cass’ hand, he’d wonder if he was floating.
The fluorescent cave lights paint the bruise on Jason’s belly garish blue. Dick’s head spins with what-ifs (what if it’s dead what if its life was smashed right out of it what if it’s nestled inside of jason’s womb like a tomb holds the dead) and tries to not puke. Bruce takes the stethoscope and begins the painful, gasping three minutes of gliding the diaphragm to different points of Jason’s belly. The top, for a moment; the peak, for a moment; the underside, for a moment.
“Ah,” Bruce breathes; he keeps it pinned to the underside of his stomach
There’s a horrible silence, then Bruce unhooks the earpieces from his own ears. Without moving the diaphragm, he holds it out to Dick. “Come,” he says softly. “Come listen to your pup.”
fuck.
Dick whimpers. Jason makes a noise in the same note, of the same tone. He looks to Dick and Dick trips to him. He pulls the stethoscope from Bruce’s hand, fumbles the earpieces in, and closes his eyes.
The whump-whump-whump of a hummingbird heartbeat floods his ears.
“Oh,” he breathes.
“What’s it sound like?” Jason’s voice. Guarded. Unsure.
“Like a fucking windchime.”
He opens his eyes. Jason is staring. There’s a long moment where it’s just Dick and Jason, where it’s just them and the pressing of their souls and the air they are sharing.
And then Jason grins.
•
The pack leaves them to clean up. Dick gets Jason into one of the manor showers with a bit of effort, guiding him up the stairs and over the lip of the tub with as little jostling as he can. He strips Jason down and then runs the water.
“Sexy,” Jason comments as Dick peels his own suit off and unearths five hours worth of dirt, grime, sweat. There’s blood caked at the base of his hip bone; he hadn’t even realized one of the grunts got a successful jab in. He’d probably feel some higher level of embarrassment if he wasn’t riding on such a fucking high right now.
He climbs in then, bullies Jason aside to get them both in without someone’s ass hanging out. It feels, remarkably, like the public stall they stood in almost four months ago. How mildly alarming it is that they allowed time to crawl so far without making a decision.
“To tell you the truth, I’m fuckin’ flabbergasted that Bruce isn’t in here monitorin’ me himself,” Jason says. The water is running through his hair, and he tips his chin back and lifts his arms to work it in. Dick stares because he’s a degenerate.
“He’s probably white-knuckling it in the kitchen right now thinking about you passing out. We should drop a shampoo bottle and make him shit his pants.”
“Fuckin’ real. You’d think he’d grown out of this by now considering how many people he has runnin’ around and getting their teeth kicked in.”
“It doesn’t matter how many of us there are, he’s a nervous wreck when it comes to you in particular.”
Jason laughs once. “Oh,” he breathes through a very small grin. “Like you?”
Dick gestures vaguely. “I have a good reason.” And then he gets soap in his eye and Jason guffaws meanly about it, but then he feels the warm brunt of Jason’s boyish palms in the corners of his tear duct, wiping it away.
He wishes he’d known Jason before his unfortunate fall into Robin’s colors, the kid that he was before all of this— the bruised cheekbone from Catalina Todd’s insistent hand on a Tuesday evening, the piles of school books beneath his unkempt bed, the puppy-scent of a kid that has no idea the burden he is to grow into when the candied-peach smell of an omega wakes up and pours from his glands. Dick would have loved to have met that kid; he had met that kid, just already in Robin’s suit and chafing under Bruce’s overbearing hand. Dick hadn’t been kind to him then.
“Let me,” Dick insists as Jason struggles with the shampoo bottle. Jason hands it over with a small huff. Dick pours some into his hands, works it into a lather, and then works it into Jason’s hair. White hair through the gaps between his summer-brown fingers makes his heart pound. He places a kiss on the back of Jason’s shoulder.
“Were you goin’ to tell me that you wanted to keep it?”
It’s not an accusation. In fact, it’s cautious— shy. Jason sounds like he’s twelve again and skirting the edges of the raging storm that is Dick Grayson with a vendetta against Bruce.
“No,” Dick answers truthfully. He catches water into the cup of his palms and pours it over Jason’s hair.
Jason turns around. Tilts his head back. Watches. His lips are wet. There’s a fine layer of grime at the bottom of the bath.
“I wish you’d stop being such a fuckin’ martyr all of the time. You deserve to have an opinion, Dick.” And then he licks his lips. “I won’t forgive you for not telling me.”
Dick chuffs a whine in his throat, and then nods. “I know.”
“Are you mad that I was thinkin’ about tossing it?”
“No.”
“You sound like it.”
“Whiplash. Ask me later.”
Jason smiles. It’s as clear as lake water, as still as a dragonfly rested on a river rock. There’s not a drop of venom in that smile. The rattlesnake inside of him is asleep.
“I guess we’ll have to start thinkin’ of names now.”
Dick nods, chest blooming with gold. “I suppose so.”
•
Dick is twenty-six and falling into this thing with Jason so fast it scares him sometimes, to the point where Jason’s freckles and boyish hands and mean little snarl are the only things on his mind, and sex comes as an afterthought.
There are no bells and whistles to any of it. Falling in love feels like a fool’s game. Dick Grayson and Jason Todd are too fucked up for that sort of thing.
In reality, it just sort of happens, a natural progression in their relationship, from begrudgingly spending the weekends together to stave off the nightmares, to kissing on top of his sheets and pulling off each other's clothes, knocking the lamp off the side table as Dick paws around blindly for a condom he knows is still there.
After the first time (that transcendent exchange of bodily fluids with a person he has spent years knowing and hating and mourning and loving), they begin the perilous journey of mutual sex. He learns about Jason faster and better than he ever has before— what the difference is between the way Jason digs his nails into the meat of Dick’s arm and the way he drags them along the blunt of Dick’s spine, how to make Jason bite in a harmless way, how to hold off until Jason comes first, to the utter beauty of Jason’s laughter in his windy ears. And after the first half-dozen times or so of sex with Jason, Dick loses count. A blur. It becomes routine, a much loved series of ordinary events. He puts his suit on at night. He takes it off in the morning. He has sex with Jason. Jason likes his toast with jelly, not butter. Dick drops the toast jelly-side down. Jason guffaws. They have sex again.
But— there are times that stick out in his memory. The first time Jason climbed on top and set the pace, forcing Dick into submission. The time that they’d done it in the blind darkness of a warehouse, still suited up, by touch alone and the sound of each other’s voices. The first time they shared Jason’s heat.
As Dick sits on the bed now and watches Jason struggle into a pair of jeans, hissing and spitting and fucking mad that he can barely fit, Dick hopes it was one of those times that made this baby. He hopes that their baby wasn't conceived out of routine or boredom. He hopes it was one of those times where Dick was drowning for Jason, gasping for air, overcome with love and obsession and distraction, the condom forgotten. Dick would rather be responsible for loving Jason too much than to have this pregnancy be the result of something as boring as an accidental tear in a condom.
The apartment is cleaner now, curtains finally hung over tall windows and an oven that habitually has something in it. Late summer evenings on the balcony, Dick stretching out the muscles in his calves while Jason leans heavily on the balcony handrail, watering their weird gathering of plant pots. I’m tellin’ you, these are never gonna fuckin’ grow, he mumbles and Dick grins at the curve of Jason’s everexpanding belly and says, yes, they will. There are bullet holes in the brick along their apartment window and Jason fills them with strips of trash bags. Dick loves him. He can’t say it, but he does. He tries to show it as much as he can. The quick ride to the convenience store, where Jason demands to take the motorbike and forces Dick to hold on, hands clutched around the expanse of his stomach. The nights they watch the 6 o’clock news and Jason plucks Dick’s eyebrows, crosseyed with concentration, and Dick tries to sneak in a kiss, much to Jason’s fury.
Wherever Jason goes, Dick is only a step behind.
They shower together most nights, wedged in as best as they can as two abnormally tall men and an unborn puppy. Jason washes Dick’s hair. Dick kisses Jason’s shoulder. He hasn’t touched a naked razor in weeks.
“I’m not namin’ it after any dead relative,” Jason threatens, and Dick laughs.
“Not even Bruce’s parents?”
“Fuck no.”
“What a waste of good names.” Dick kisses him.
Jason kisses him back and Dick can feel the grin. “What a waste, my ass. We’re namin’ it Alfred before I bestow yours or Bruce’s trauma upon it with your dead parents' names.”
“That’s mean,” Dick breathes.
“Are you mad?”
“Whiplash. Ask me later”
He kisses him again. He feels the shape of Jason’s growing belly beneath the flat of his palm. My god, he marvels weakly. My god.