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Dahlia showed up on his doorstep one night, drenched from the rain outside, her hair way longer than he remembered, her skin pale and ashy. She was dressed in seemingly lifted clothes, all four or five sizes too big. She had huge dark circles under her big blue eyes.
She was a mess, but there was no doubt it was her. She had a white streak in her hair that matched his, and it was right around realizing that that Jason snapped out of it and pulled her inside by her massive, damp coat.
He didn't realize he was hugging her until he felt her small, shivering form against his chest, her hands fisting his shirt tightly. Quickly, he took her coat and threw it unceremoniously onto the floor before sitting her down on his couch and - trained with Bruce's paranoia - bolted the lock on the door of his glorified hell hole of an apartment and drew the blinds closed, regardless of the pitch black night. He didn't address her for a few minutes, shell-shocked, and set a soda down in front of her on the table before going to find her clean, dry clothes.
Dahlia held the can of soda with her slim, calloused fingers, like she didn't know what to do with it, until he returned with a pair of sweats Kori had forgotten here on one of their Team Red sleepover nights, and one of his t-shirts that had shrunk in the wash. She took the clothes and he took back the soda, popping it open for her wordlessly.
She undressed immediately, paying him no mind. She peeled off the too-large sweatshirt and it was then he that he involuntarily noticed her new breasts, though they were overshadowed by the massive, offensive scar between them. He quickly averted his eyes. Her changed body shocked Jason into realizing just how long Bruce's daughter had been…gone for. Six and a half years. She must be seventeen, by now.
Holy shit.
The first week there were no words. Jason sometimes held one-sided conversations with her and would occasionally get a small response on a good day - widened eyes, a blink, a sigh - and others she would just gaze vacantly out the window.
After the second week, Jason knew he couldn't keep her boarded up in Gotham, forever terrified the Big Man would come crashing through his window and beat the living hell out of him for not bringing Dahlia to him immediately. He'd asked the girl the first night if she wanted Bruce, thinking she should be with her dad; he could afford the best therapists, she needed to be looked over by a doctor. She should be with him, Dickiebird and Alfred. She'd looked so terrified that Jason never suggested it again. He knew he should, but some sense of loyalty, some sense of understanding, forbade him from doing so.
He'd gotten it all together quickly enough; fake passports with names that earned him a small, upward twitch of her lips, clothes that would help disguise her well enough, though she wouldn’t be recognizable as the little Wayne heiress now, grown into a beautiful - if damaged - young woman.
He got enough money wired when they got there, a few hideouts ready. They'd go to Europe, he decided, first to London, then to France maybe, or Greece. Anywhere, really.
He officially dropped off the map. He was going to make her better, like Talia had for him, in her own way. Somedays he wondered if Talia was the one who sent her to his doorstep, but he never asked. It didn't make sense, because Talia fucking killed her own little girl in the first place. It didn't make sense, but Dahlia was alive and so was he. They died, and then they were just back, breathing again.
And that really doesn't make any goddamn sense because the last time Jason checked, the world was two caskets short, and it shouldn't be. But nothing in their world had ever adhered to the laws of the universe. Jason didn't believe in a lot of things, didn't believe God sent her to him - because holy shit, what kind of sick bastard, holy or not, would kill a little kid so brutally and then send her back like this - but he truly, truly believed the littlest Robin was meant to find her way to him.
Because in a world where little girls in bright yellow capes are getting killed by their mommies and brought back for a second shot, Jason didn't think it's so crazy that his little pseudo-sister would find her way to the one person who understood what it feels like to die and then get brought back to a life that's not even a semblance of how you left it.
The months wore on, a blur of cities and fake names, and Dahlia took a liking to Rome. They settled there for a year. They visited the colosseum one day - Dahlia liked history, especially the grizzly kind, he remembered - and learned of the slaves going to die at the will of their masters. She clung too tightly to him, tight enough to bruise and he clutched back just as hard as they quickly left.
They fucked for the first time, after. On the terrace of their small apartment, underneath the night sky. Jason expected it to be rough, with screaming, but it was soft and tender. She pressed her face to his shoulder after. He kissed her hair and held her against him, and he pretended not to notice when Dahlia pressed her face to his neck to hide her angry tears.
By their second year, Dahlia had gotten better and worse in different ways. She talked, more than she did even before it happened. Her hair continued to grow and she let it - Jason liked to believe she did because she liked him playing with it - dark as night, soft and curly at the edges. Her skin was darkened by the sun and she looked so much like Talia it frightened him sometimes, but she was even more beautiful than her mother. And the way she rolled her eyes made him think of Dick and when she glared he laughed at how 'Bruce' it was. But he tried not to think about them, and it wasn't hard to instead focus on this girl that his whole world gravitated around without his consent.
She was beautiful, a young woman at nineteen, he couldn't call her a girl anymore. Her good days were great, full of laughter and hysterical dark humor and bright smiles or dry, teasing remarks. Her bad days were erratic and terrifying, at times he'd find her silently marveling at the massive scar in the juncture between her breasts in the mirror until Jason shook her out of it, distracted her. Kissed her, hit her, fucked her, anything to bring the light back into her eyes. Other days she'd leave their apartment to fight petty criminals with a tightly drawn scarf covering her face. She'd laugh at the blood on her clothes and kiss him roughly with a too-bright smile on her face, her bright blue eyes too wide and too dark. It aroused something dark in him, and remembered when Bruce came to him, asking for this dark miracle.
This is what he got; a beautiful, dark miracle. With more laughter and smiles, yes, but more darkness than what she'd left them with. She's not Pit mad, he swears, he promises. Because if she is, so is he. He might not remember how he's here, but he hasn't ruled out that yet. And maybe that's why they work, why they're happier than they've ever been because maybe they're both crazy and together is the only way to be some sort of sane.
The nights when she'd leave, she'd laugh wildly. The criminals would ask who she was. She'd scream and laugh into the darkness as she listed off names "the Joker" she'd say, when she was angry with him, "Catwoman" sometimes, "Nightwing" when she'd been crying that day. She only ever said "Batman" when she was feeling especially dangerous, only to people who wouldn't be believed. Never did she say "Robin.” Not ever.
They never talked about Bruce, or Dick, or Tim, or Alfred. They didn't talk about the red-headed girl in the Robin costume running around Gotham. That part of them, now, was as dead and buried as they should've been. They were happy here, their own form of happiness. Their own world, away from everything else. Just the two of them orbiting around each other like there was nothing else. Reality only slipped in sometimes when they remembered that no, there were other things out there. It was easy for them to forget though.
Another year passed that way. Their third year, they found themselves growing restless. They found themselves unconsciously drifting back to Gotham, like a signal calling them home. Not that they considered Gotham home, not anymore at least. Jason wasn't sure if he thought of Italy as home, but he didn't think so.
He found himself thinking - a little love drunk after a long, sex-filled night with Dahlia - that she was probably his home now. He had a feeling she felt the same, when he'd catch her looking at him with soft eyes or when she traced patterns into his bare skin. When he whispered words to her in different languages, and she'd always held him tighter and said them back.
They lingered in Germany for several months, then London for just a few weeks. Dahlia didn't like the rain. Jason would be lying if he said they hadn't domesticated a little. A little 'married.’ He might've even asked her if the idea wasn't so fucking insane. He told himself that, anyway, when the idea really sunk its teeth in him.
Dahlia had brought home a kitten whilst in Rome, instantly taking to the little creature and maybe missing the one she'd left behind. She brought the kitten back with them to Amsterdam, the only possession she wouldn't leave from their time in Italy.
Amsterdam wasn't the same as it had been the first time they’d hunkered down there, with Dahlia - only seventeen - in the adjoining room, the nights filled with her screams, moans and nameless strangers. He tried to stay out of his hotel room as much as possible, going on long, random runs whenever she stumbled in with some boy or girl.
She'd changed since then. It warmed him to think he did that. There are pieces missing, like him, but he liked to think she kept her important parts, even gained new things. She smiled, she laughed and he didn't remember her doing that before.
Under the sheets one night, Dahlia's lithe body draped over his, an arm drawing her close against him, with the cat asleep by their feet, he worked up the courage to ask.
His other hand was absentmindedly playing with her long, dark strands of hair, when he asked the inevitable question,
"Do you want to go home?" Dahlia blinked, but didn't move, still molded against him.
"When I'm better," she murmured into his chest. Jason didn't say a word when she began tracing one of his larger scars on his chest, the source of which he couldn't remember.
"Okay, D." While she traced his scars, he counted the freckles that decorated her cheekbones and nose, a gift from the summer spent in Greece. He almost didn't want to give her up. It was a selfish thought, but he found himself liking - maybe loving - the idea of the two of them - the broken little dead kids that should've stayed dead, but maybe they shouldn't have because maybe this was what was always meant to happen - just traveling for the rest of their lives. Maybe having a kid or two they could screw up just a little less than they'd been screwed up. Never go back to Gotham. Never, never, never. Never hold a gun again or a grappling hook - they can make money some other way - and just be safe, alone, happy and forever use some ridiculous false name that could become their real one. Just the two of them, wandering the earth together.
He thought he'd really love that.