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Seven weeks.
That’s how long Jason had lasted with the first Batman before he broke down, chest heaving, eyes burning, tears and snot and wet sobs washing away any rose-colored film that might have let him believe goodness, no matter how small, existed in the world.
Seven weeks the first time.
This Batman only took seven hours.
“Jason?”
The door, barely visible in the darkness of blackout curtains and early night, wavered ominously as his vision watered. Jason swallowed against the pillow curled into his gut as if it would help with the burning in his eyes and refused to blink. He knew that the slight inching forward of the door from its frame had all been in his mind. He knew that. Why would they have any reason to sneak the door open? It wasn’t as if there was anything Jason could do, wasn’t as if there wasn’t anything Jason would do, to try and keep them from taking whatever they wanted. But that didn’t stop him from hallucinating the glint of the knob turning in the barely visible light.
“Jason, please, can I come up on the bed with you?”
“No.”
He heard a sniffle from the floor. Dickie had never really learned to stop crying, was just a slower learner than the rest of them, maybe, or had had more hope to kill off than Jason had when he’d first been dragged into the Batmobile all those years ago. The kid had enough sense not to do it when Batman was around, finally, but whenever they were alone the waterworks came out. Especially if Dam—
No. Jason realized his eyes were squeezed shut and snapped them open, the door jolting back into focus. Focus. There wasn’t time to get distracted. Tim was barely hanging on to consciousness three doors down the hallway. Dickie needed someone to look out for him. Jason was all he had left. He had to keep it together.
Dickie’s voice was miserable and soggy sounding, as if he’d been crying into his sleeve again and was trying to talk through it. “Please. Please, just for a minute? I promise, I—I won’t…I’ll go back as soon as—"
Jason’s voice was sharp. “Dickie.”
A pause, like the entire universe flinched at his tone.
“Jason…I can’t stop thinking about him.”
Jason felt the bolt straight through his lung. For just a moment, his chest burned as badly as his eyes.
Because he couldn’t stop thinking about Damian either.
Dickie sniffled again. It sounded wetter this time.
Jason blinked the door back once more. “…Just for a minute.”
He didn’t turn or even flick his eyes over his shoulder as Dickie scrambled up, jostling the mattress to curl up in the small of Jason’s back. His sharp elbows and knees prodded permanent bruises in Jason’s skin, but Jason said nothing as he waited for the boy to still. Pain was just a warning your body sent your brain to let you know it was being hurt. Jason already knew he was hurt. Everything hurt. Life hurt. He didn’t need the warning anymore. Muffling it was like hitting snooze on an alarm over and over and over again.
For three breaths, Dickie’s heat spread silently over his back, thawing away a chill he hadn’t known he had. Then:
“…Thanks, Jason.”
“When I say, you go straight back to the floor, got it? I’ll tell them you rolled off in the night.”
He felt Dickie’s head nod between his shoulder blades and huffed in acceptance. Alfred, the butler that Batman apparently kept around in this universe, had shown them to separate rooms after feeding them a dinner Jason was too sick to enjoy. Jason had smuggled Dickie into this room with him because the layout of the windows meant only one side of the bed faced the door. Dickie could lie on the floor between the bed and the wall and be shielded from immediate view if someone were to burst into the room. Not that it would offer any real protection if they came looking for both of them or for Dickie in particular, but if they weren’t feeling particular, then Jason wanted to make sure he was the first choice.
It was his job now. At least until Tim recovered.
Dickie’s tiny hands pressed between Jason’s back and the boy’s own chest. Jason could feel them flexing as they clenched around Jason’s shirt. He had told Dickie it was only for a minute, but it was hard to keep track with only the burning of his eyes to mark the passage of time. When the arm he was lying on fell asleep, Jason squirmed away from the warmth beside him.
It took a few tries to gather Dickie up, since the soft mattress made his knees unsteady, but he finally managed to crawl across the bed with the boy and lower him back down onto the floor. Jason pushed Dickie’s head under the bedframe, then draped the blanket so that Dickie wouldn’t be cold, but it could still plausibly look as if the boy had dragged it off the bed with him.
The center of the bed gnawed away at something in his chest now, triggered by the cooling emptiness on his back. That was fine. The cold would help him stay awake.
Jason curled his knees under his chin. The door across the room glinted in light that wasn’t there.
Jason couldn’t remember what made him cry with the first Batman, at least not that first time he broke. It might have been bad—or it might have been trivial, something so small compared to everything else that the absurdity got to him.
But he remembered what made him cry every time after that. Apparently this Batman was no different. Because when he decided to play with needles and vials and that hellish synthesizer, it was Jason he singled out as needing “special attention.” Just like the First Batman.
“Were you sleeping?” Older Dick asked. “You were. Of course you were. Sorry. It’s only…B’s back and he noticed something when he was reviewing the files from…well, anyway, he thinks you might need an antidote of some kind?”
He paused, framed in the doorway with the light from the hall. On the man’s face, Jason could just make out his grimace of guilt, as if he had been told guilt was the proper emotion to convey when entering someone’s room in the middle of the night. It was too exaggerated to be sincere.
“It really can’t wait until morning.”
Jason swallowed down fear. Fear was just a warning your body sent your brain to let it know that pain was coming. Just another alarm to snooze, until one day he hit snooze a little too hard and the clock stopped working entirely.
At least older Dick didn’t seem to realize Dickie was in the room as well. He forced a smile as Jason slid out of bed and held out a hand like he expected the younger boy to take it. “It’ll be alright, Jay, I swear.”
Damian swore.
Once.
It wasn’t that Batman didn’t allow it. When Jason first arrived, he swore all the time. If anything, Batman encouraged it. It seemed to bring him some sort of perverse glee to watch Jason struggle to force every one of those four letters through broken teeth. The glee was what had made Jason stop.
He didn’t know if that was the reason Damian didn’t swear. It was one of those things they never talked about. But Jason knew he had heard it once, the first time Batman’s fear toxin worked. Right before absolute terror took over any semblance of reality, he heard a quiet, “Dammit.”
He never asked if Batman thought it was funny.
He never asked about Batman.
Just like that time, he was lying on a stiff cot that felt more like a table. Normally he’d be strapped down by now. Damian always tightened the restraints until they were just shy of cutting off his circulation, so Jason was completely immobilized. If Batman put them on, he always left them a little loose; he liked it when Jason could thrash and buck against the venom, even—especially—if it meant bones broke in the process.
This Batman hadn’t even given him restraints. Jason didn’t want to know what damage he could do to himself pumped full of fear toxin with nothing to keep him still.
Of course, what he did or didn’t want never mattered.
A hand too heavy to be Dick’s, but Dick’s nonetheless, pressed into his shoulder. Jason took the cue for what it was and stilled his breathing. Pull yourself together, soldier, his mind whispered. Damian’s voice. What Damian always told him before Batman shot his body full of his latest strain of crackling fire and desecrating fear. The last thing his brother had said to him before Jason left him in that cave like a coward.
The last thing his brother would say to him ever.
“Jason?” Batman’s voice, softer, smoother than Jason had ever heard it. “We’re going to start with a blood draw. I need to know what’s already in your system. The files from the last…session…were incomplete.”
He had to lay his hand over Jason’s wrist to keep the arm from trembling too much for him to find a vein. Pressure from Dick’s hand increased, burrowing into Jason’s muscle in a way that would have been soothing if it were Damian’s fingers and agony if it were Batman.
After the blood draw, there was the waiting. Waiting was always hard. Every fiber of his being wanted to beg, but begging made Batman smile.
Jason hated Batman’s smile.
They had erected a set of flimsy walls around his cot, as if they thought he might not recognize the cave for what it was because the computer and cars and holding cells were out of sight. As if Jason hadn’t memorized every square inch of the ceiling from hours spent on his back in agony. Aside from Dick and Batman, this world’s Tim was there as well, behind the gray cloth walls. Jason could hear him now, muttering to Batman about “different strains” and “element identification.” It shouldn’t have surprised him that this Batman had stolen Dr. Crane’s research as well, it didn’t surprise him, but it hurt, in that tiny pit where his heart met the back of his ribcage, that he had made this Tim help create the toxins.
Jason would have killed to have his Tim there right now.
“So, Jay, did you know that I grew up in a circus?” Older Dick had stepped around from the head of his cot to Jason’s line of sight once Batman spirited away Jason’s blood. Now he pulled up a chair so he could hook his elbows onto the bed beside Jason’s pricked arm, that forced smile nailed to his face in crucifixion. “Let me tell about our elephant, Elinore. She—"
From the other side of the wall, Tim hissed.
Batman’s voice snapped, “Dami—” before cutting himself off as sharply as Jason cut off when Batman took out his batarangs. Their voices dropped, back into muffled, frantic whispers. One whisper hissed a little higher than the others.
Dick frowned. “I’m sorry, Jay,” he murmured, as if he didn’t want Batman to hear. “B was trying to keep you all separate, until we’ve had a chance to talk about it more. But you should know that he’s not your Damian. He would never hurt you.”
It wasn’t his Damian.
He knew that.
He knew.
But…if there was even the slightest semblance…
Jason vomited the words before his brain could get a bucket in the way. “H-he could hold my arm.”
Dick stared. For a moment, it was all he did, as if his ears had sucked in Jason’s words and routed them to his lungs instead of his head.
“You…hold your hand, you mean?” the man asked, wrinkled brow smudging away the slight similarities between him and the boy Jason had stashed under his bed less than an hour ago.
“My…” Jason was already in too deep and, oh, there was the back of Tim’s head peeking around the edge of the wall, just enough that Jason could see his ear as he desperately eavesdropped. “I—I can’t h-hold it still without restraints, I’m sorry, I—”
Dick shook his head. “Jay, no—”
“Jason.”
Jason forgot how to breathe.
Batman stepped around the gray divider, Tim and the tiny simulacrum of Damian trailing in his shadow. He wasn’t wearing the cowl. Jason’s heart, desperate for oxygen, threw itself against his ribcage in relief that the man wasn’t wearing the cowl. But his mind, frantically exploding in bursts of white and black, knew that just meant he had to look at those dark, unfeeling eyes.
“Jason,” Batman repeated, intentionally softening his voice and—okay. Okay. Jason’s Batman liked to play games sometimes too. Soft didn’t mean soft. It meant slow, careful, danger, danger, danger. “I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”
Living made Jason uncomfortable, but you didn’t have to have lived with Batman for years to know the man wouldn’t appreciate hearing that. Jason sucked in a breath that didn’t reach his lungs and nodded, reflexively.
From his side, Dick made a sucking noise. “Ooh, um, B? He’s, uh, probably right though. Someone…might actually have to hold him.”
Five pairs of eyes twisted to look at Jason’s arm. He had already been trembling before Batman appeared so suddenly, at the thought of the needles and the vials and the toxins to come. Now his arm vibrated with a force he couldn’t have hidden even if he wasn’t exhausted.
Tim was the first to flick his eyes away, uncomfortable. “I can hold it. If you’d rather.”
It should have helped. This Tim was so like Jason’s Tim that his heart kept stopping and starting again with a lurch every time he realized how close he’d come to catching his eye, twisting one of their signs to let each other know they were alright. But Tim was never around when Batman strapped Jason to the table with the needles. It was just Batman, and Jason, and Damian.
Out of desperate reflexes, Jason’s eyes twitched to Damian.
He was young. He was so young. Realistically, probably the same age as Jason himself. But all the scars and lines from too much living in too few years were gone. He was a total stranger.
Except when their eyes met, Jason got a glimpse of…something. Something that understood pain. That understood fear and the need to hide it. That understood trying and failing and persevering anyway, because even if life wasn’t worth fighting for, there was still honor in the fight.
Something distinctly Damian. Something that understood Jason.
Damian cleared his throat in what could almost pass for a scoff, if they weren’t all as keenly aware of each other’s discomfort. “Tt. You will need to help Father with the synthesizer, Drake, since you were the one who reprogrammed it most recently, knowing none of us have the time to learn a new system. Grayson, you can hold the rest of him, but it looks like you will, indeed, need someone to steady his arm. I am the only one left to do so.”
Batman fixed his dark gaze on his son. The fact that Damian never wavered told Jason things weren’t so different in this universe after all. Not the good or the bad.
Fortunately, by the time Batman turned his eyes to Jason, Damian had absorbed most of their malice, leaving only a chilling absence of feeling. “Jason. Are you sure that’s alright with you?”
If he said yes, admitted that’s what he wanted, would they take Damian away? It wasn’t his Damian, would never be his Damian ever again, but it was something. Like a parent replacing a beloved childhood toy. It wasn’t the same. But maybe you could learn to get comfort from this as well.
Jason forced himself to nod, eyes closed. He’d open them when Batman ordered him to.
But the order never came. Strong arms slid into place behind him, pulling his body in tight and still. A small hand, calloused and warm, drew itself around his wrist, holding his arm taut. His fingers curled down reflexively, and the small hand caught them between its own. Jason could feel Damian’s heartbeat through the finger pads pressed against the back of his hand.
Batman’s voice again, smooth and cool like the unfeeling stone of his cave. “This will burn a bit.”
Jason squeezed his eyes. Tears leaked down his face like blood.