Chapter Text
He’s not sure if it’s really glass, but he keeps it cradled in his hands instead of putting it in his bag, just in case. His mittens are still in his pockets, the threat of losing his grip through the slippery yarn real enough for him to abandon them altogether, and his fingers are pink with cold.
He shakes the ornament a little, watching the fake snow slide about.
It’s a pretty good job, if he says so himself. The little paper figures took the better part of an hour to cut out and paste together, and despite the effort the glue still slid a little in places, glitter sticking in the gaps, but that just makes it more cheerful to look at.
He hadn’t finished it up properly until art class was done, even if no one was going to put anything suspicious together based on the holiday craft project of a ninth grader. But now that he’s done with his last class—and he won’t be able to visit the school library till the end of winter break, which sucks because even though Wayne Manor has a great collection of classics, it isn’t super up to date on the latest fantasy, and Jason already hit the maximum amount of books he’s allowed to take out—he can see the whole thing, and it’s definitely some of his better work.
Okay, Batman is looking more like a grey cat with a yellow stripe than a vigilante, because stupid Chase stole all the black construction paper and the little triangle he tried to glue on for the chin fell off when he was folding it through the opening. But the capes are pretty good!
He swings the ornament upside down on its golden string, and paper-Robin tumbles, like he’s doing a little flip.
Alfred’s car slides up to the pick-up circle just as Jason lands on the last step, leaving grey footprints in the slushy snow as he hurries over to get out of the cold. The wave of heat that hits him when he climbs through the door is warm enough to make his fingers burn as they thaw, and he shoulders his coat off awkwardly around his seatbelt as they drive away.
“Good afternoon, Master Jason,” Alfred greets him, and Jason smiles brightly at him when he meets his eyes through the rearview mirror. “I trust you had a good day at school?”
“It was the best!” he replies enthusiastically, and proceeds to tell him all about it, holding his ornament up so he can see what he’s talking about.
He’s still speaking when they pull up at the manor, and only stops when they roll to a halt.
“Thanks, Alfie,” he says, a little embarrassed to have talked so long, and hops out to bound up to the front door. He hears the wheels turning on the gravel of the drive as the car disappears towards the garage, and fishes his keys out of his backpack with an inelegant twist of his arm.
They’ve got a towering tree in the entryway, with silver lights and glass ornaments interspersed with blooming white flowers. It’s tall enough that Dick could (and did) put the blown glass star (which Alfred tells him is an original Chihuly, whoever that is) on top by hanging from the chandelier by his ankles. The look on Bruce’s face when he’d come back with the ladder and seen Dick and the glass sculpture dangling from the ceiling was enough to keep Dick in good spirits for days.
The white and silver wrapped packages tucked underneath it are just for display, although Jason thinks a couple of them are suspiciously heavy, though he’s willing to let it be for now. Bruce tells him keeping Dick from finding where the presents are hidden is a yearly struggle, and there have already been several audible shrieks of outrage as he’s uncovered decoys in the past week. Bruce must have known Dick wouldn’t think to check the fake presents for presents. It looks like he might have won the game this year again, but there’s still a week left.
This tree is for guests, not for family. It’s the first thing people will lay eyes on when they step through the entryway for the annual Winter Gala. That’s this Saturday, and even now Jason can see people moving last minute tables through the hallway on their way to the ballroom. The Foundation is hoping for record-breaking numbers this year, and Alfred seemed particularly pleased with the guest list when going over seating arrangements.
Jason has done his best to memorize everybody who’s going to be at his table, and plenty of others besides. Bruce might have told him not to worry, but he’s not stupid. This isn’t any other party. It’s important for the entire family to be putting their best foot forward if they want to raise the money they need to meet their goal. And Jason really wants them to meet their goal.
Bruce has been letting him help with the Foundation a lot more lately. It’s kind of great. Going out as Robin is amazing, it’s better than anything he ever though he’d get to do in his life, but getting to make real, concrete change in the bones of his city? It’s getting to stop crime before it even starts, in a way that feels somehow more permanent than just slapping a perp in handcuffs and calling it a day.
Jason’s ornament doesn’t fit in with the decorations on this tree. No, where he’s going is past that, through the maze of hallways and high reaching architraves, beyond the ballroom and the sitting rooms, and the dining hall (and the second and third, smaller, dining halls).
Nobody takes their shoes off in the manor, not like at Jason’s old apartment where his mom would scold him for even the slightest hint of mud staining their dubiously grey carpet, before she stopped caring. Everything here is cold marble and gleaming wood floors, and the rooms are much too big to walk far without your feet hurting, so he guesses it makes more sense not to go around in socks all the time. Even if he secretly thinks it would be pretty fun to try and glide down these hallways. Like ice skating, but without the ice. He’s never been ice skating before—there was a place you could go for free a couple zip codes over, but he didn’t own any skates and it cost money to rent them.
He makes sure to stomp the snow off his boots real good before he goes any further into the house, though. Alfred doesn’t need any more to clean than he’s already got.
The whole manor is warm. That still kind of blows his mind. He and his mom used to just have a couple space heaters, piling blankets on blankets when their landlord refused to fix the heating. But Bruce just keeps the whole place like this, even the rooms no one goes in—he’s looked around the guest wing, held his hands over the vents to feel the hot air blasting—perhaps it's in case somebody comes over, so they don’t even have to wait? Or maybe he just doesn’t think about it at all. It’s winter, so the heat is on.
Jason is already sweating in his winter coat, but he likes to hang it up on the hook at the back of his door upstairs, not in the too-big closet in the entryway. It’s easier to get at that way, and he can just put it on before school without stopping anywhere else.
It’s not like he thinks Bruce is gonna steal his coat or anything—it’s way too small for him, on account of him being ridiculously huge (Jason thinks he’ll probably never be that big, no matter what Alfred tells him), and it’s not like he needs to sell the thing. But he likes to keep it close anyway. He’s been stuffing about half of the allowance Bruce gives him in the inside pocket for emergencies, in case Bruce changes his mind about this whole second kid thing.
He doesn’t think anybody ever told Bruce what a normal amount of money to give kids for allowance is, but he’s not about to tell him he’s being stupid, not when he’s got close to a thousand dollars in that coat and it hasn’t even been a year yet. It’s unclear what he’s supposed to be spending it on, given that the guy already feeds him and buys him clothes, not to mention whatever absurd amount of money he’s spending on the vigilante stuff. The Christmas presents Alfred helped him wrap barely made a dent.
The other half of the money he shoves in whatever donation box he claps eyes on. Last week at the library Bruce handed him a hundred bucks and he dropped it straight into their jar, making direct eye contact, but instead of looking offended Bruce just looked kind of fond. Jason doesn’t get him sometimes.
He hears Bruce and Dick in the den before he sees them, aggressive holiday music still not loud enough to drown out their overlapping voices.
The tree here, the real tree, is a lopsided thing that Dick lugged home two weeks ago after a murder at a christmas tree farm, trailing pine needles through the halls. He’d spent the next three hours vacuuming them up as Alfred oversaw, arms crossed, and scowled at Jason when he saw him laughing. He didn’t mean to, it’s just that he looked so sullen it was kind of funny. But he felt bad, and Dick ditched him and Bruce pretty much immediately that night on patrol, which made Bruce really grumpy too, and then they had another argument and Dick stormed out. He’s always storming out.
Jason doesn’t mean to bother him, but sometimes he thinks it’s just him being there that sets him off, and then he gets annoyed and starts plotting more ways to switch out Dick’s stupid name brand laundry detergent in Blüdhaven with fabric dyed stuff again. Which probably doesn’t help.
The tree is really ugly, and Jason loves it. It feels like something his mom would pick out, back when she still remembered to, sneaking into the lot on Ninth a minute before they closed to clutch her hands around the nearest tree available and refuse to let go until she could haggle them down to something they could afford. When Jason was six, she’d managed one for five dollars, and crowed about it the entire holiday.
Their tree this year looks like that. It’s to the left of the mantle, and with the fire on, Martha Wayne’s delicate crystal finials sparkle in the light and brighten up the branches, looking almost like icicles. There’s a wooden bird perched near the top with the year Bruce’s parents got engaged painted on the underside of its wings, and a pair of hideous plastic acrobats Dick picked up at a convenience store a couple years back. The lights are multicolored and twinkling, and the whole room smells like pine. He and Bruce set it up a couple days ago.
There’s a vase of red, blue and gold ball ornaments in a tall vase on the side table between two pictures, one of a small, dark-circled Bruce with a thin smile and the other of a red haired girl Jason assumes to be Aunt Kate. The heavy velvet stockings hanging over the fireplace have got their names embroidered on them in Alfred’s even stitches. It looks like something out of a holiday movie.
Jason pauses in the hallway before turning into the room, fixing his hair in the gold-gilt mirror. It’s the same style Dick uses—he’s not copying him, he just thinks it looks cool.
Someone laughs, and Jason adjusts his grip again so he can hold his ornament more securely. He knows it’s a little silly looking, making a little paper version of him and his dad, but it’s still pretty neat. And it’s concrete proof that he really does belong here—that he really does have a place. He’s one half of Batman and Robin , and that means something.
Bruce is gonna love it, he’s sure.
He steps up to the doorway, and pauses.
Bruce has a tangle of Christmas lights held up before him like the world’s most perplexing puzzle, and the tree is almost bare, Dick plucking ornaments up from the coffee table to put them back on with aplomb. He’s motioning towards the cardboard snowflakes in his hands, and there must be something to the whole Christmas cheer thing, because for once neither Bruce or Dick look inclined to start fighting.
The ornaments he spent so long picking spots for on the tree are piled haphazardly on the coffee table.
The snowflakes Dick holds are painted white, and coated in enough glitter that Jason can see it from here. Little circular pictures are pasted into the center of each one, and Jason spots a beaming Dick Grayson being held on Bruce’s shoulders affixed to the ornament in the boy’s right hand.
They look happy, and bright, and their smiles are shinier than anything Jason will ever be. He slips his own ornament into his pocket.
“Can you believe it?” Dick is saying, as he hangs the snowflakes up, evenly spaced across the tree. “They were just boxed away upstairs, Bruce, I wouldn’t have seen them at all if I weren’t looking for that book to show Babs. It’s criminal. Criminal! To think, we could have gone a whole Christmas without them!”
“And be deprived of your gap-toothed grin?” Jason exclaims in mock horror, stepping in all the way, and Bruce smiles as he sees him. “A tragedy.”
He tries to ignore the way Dick’s jaw tightens at the intrusion, before the older boy straightens and calls out a greeting.
“Hey, Jay!” To Bruce, he continues, “See, he gets it.” he makes grabby hands at the box on the floor, and Jason hurries over to hand him the next snowflake. It’s the two of them on a rollercoaster, Dick no older than twelve, cheeks pink with excitement and gripping onto the lap bar for dear life. Dick puts it high on the tree, and Jason shoves away the twinge of jealousy at the placement.
There’s a near-empty plate of cookies on the coffee table at the edge of the small pile of unhung ornaments. Alfred must have stopped by right before he left.
“Looks great, right?” Dick says, fiddling with the white ribbon the snowflake hangs from and not waiting for a response. “Hand me another one?”
Jason does, and Bruce’s eyes track the movement, looking askance at his hands. He resists the urge to hide them in his sleeves.
“What’s the glitter from?”
The ornament—more preschooler’s craft than art the more he thinks about it—sits heavy in his pocket.
“Just a thing at school.”
Bruce waits for elaboration. Jason presses his lips into an approximation of a smile.
“Why are you here? Weren’t you supposed to be home later?” Dick asks, and reaches for the plate of cookies a second after Jason does, beating him to the last one and meeting his gaze head on as he takes a bite. Jason lets his hand fall, shrinking back into his coat.
“Got out early for break,” he says, and Dick hums. He can’t tell if it’s in dismissal or just disinterest.
Dick finishes hanging the snowflakes, leaning back to get a better look at them. There are no pictures of Jason on the tree, just a dozen or so reminders that no matter how hard Jason tries, he’s never going to be able to hold a candle to all this history.
“Did you make them?” he asks, and is ignored.
Bruce gives Dick a look, which doesn’t do much given that he’s barely looking at them. “He did. They made them at school. He must have been what? Twelve?”
“Ten,” Dick informs them, sounding offended at the lack of accuracy.
“I guess they don’t make them anymore,” Bruce says, and now it’s Jason’s turn to hum noncommittally.
Eager for a new subject, he pokes at the snarl of wires Bruce is working at. “Need some help?”
The man shrugs, letting them drop lightly into Jason’s hands, as if to say by all means. They unravel the string section by section, green wires coiling into a definable spiral between them on the floor.
When they’re done, and the lights are sparkling on the branches, and each glittering snowflake is hanging on the tree with the rest of the ornaments, Bruce pulls him into a one-armed hug, and the record player plays faintly holiday-tinged instrumentals as Dick half reports, half acts out a misunderstanding on his last mission with the Titans.
There’s hot chocolate from Alfred, and the fresh-cookie smell of sugar and butter wafting down from the kitchen, and Jason laughs and tries not to feel like he’s sitting in somebody else’s house, even though he is.
It’s nice, or it should be. Nobody yells, and Dick even passes him the gravy boat at dinner, even if he pretends not to hear him the first time he asks.
Later, he holds the ornament in his hands. It’s nowhere near as pretty or elegant as the snowflakes Dick made. The shapes of the cutouts inside are all wrong, and there isn’t nearly enough glitter, only the remnants of what he could scavenge after everybody else had already shoved their way to the supplies table. They shift pitifully at the bottom of the cheap plastic.
The more he looks at it, the more the little paper Robin looks more like Dick than him.
The whole thing is crude and misshapen. It’s trash. It’s something a street rat would make, and it’s not fit to put on anybody’s tree, let alone one in a manor.
He can’t believe he thought Bruce would actually think it was cool. Not when he’s already got Dick to make him things. Jason’s just the cheap replacement picked up to fix Bruce’s empty nest syndrome, and he and Dick are getting better. He bets Bruce wishes he could take the whole adoption thing back.
The ornament doesn’t break when he drops it into the wastebasket in Bruce’s study on his way up to bed. It’s not glass. Just an imitation of the real thing.
He goes to bed feeling rotten and miserably sorry for himself, all the while knowing he’s being ridiculous. It’s an ornament. It’s not a big deal.
Still, when he wakes up the next morning, the smell of bacon, quiche, and cranberry pull-apart bread thick in the air, and walks by the den, there’s something crooked in him that stutters and eases back into place when he sees his ornament hanging merrily from the middle branches, the little Batman and Robin smiling cheerfully amidst the crystal and ribbons.
Somebody must have found it, and decided it did belong on the tree after all.
He smiles before continuing on to breakfast.