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Jason sits in the rubble of his life. He can’t believe he’s here, again.
The door to Bruce’s study creaks open. Dick looks startled, like he expected to see someone else sitting in the thousand-dollar leather executive chair, and to be fair, Jason would, too.
“C’mon, kiddo,” Dick says, not quite firmly, but not uncertain. Tired, mostly. “He’s stable. Time to go.”
He nods, or thinks about it and then forgets whether he did or not. Dick’s hand rests on his back, briefly, as he slips past him, Bruce’s heavy, personalized pen tucked in his fist. Alfred was medevaced out to a specialist at RABE Memorial Hospital—one of Bruce’s old contacts, a son of a son from his father’s hospital, currently in residence in Bludhaven. If he wasn’t, they’d have stayed in Gotham, and flown the guy in. This is probably better. He doesn’t think he can stand to stay here, but he doesn’t want to leave.
Dick drives. His car is a shiny silver two-door that Jason would be all over any other day. Today, he looks out the window and grunts when Dick asks about getting Wendy’s. Jason picks at the same chicken nugget for fifteen minutes while Dick steals the French fries out of his bag. Alfred is still in surgery when they finally hit Bludhaven, so Dick takes him back to his apartment.
It’s nothing like the car, all brick and drywall, dirty clothes and takeout bags that they have to wade through to reach the couch. Dick disappears in the bathroom for a long time. Jason gnaws on a cold chicken nugget. Eventually, he hears the phone ring from the other side of the bathroom door, and Dick reappears. “Surgery went fine. We can visit him tomorrow, if the doctors give the OK.”
Jason nods dumbly. For all the words he’s learned since Bruce took him in, he doesn’t have any for right now. Dick hovers over him.
“I’m sorry, Jay. I’m really, really sorry.”
His fingers tighten on the damp Wendy’s bag. “Are you…are you going to send me back?”
“What?” Dick says almost inaudibly. He kneels in front of Jason, one hand coming to rest on his forearm, and not where he has a death grip on the greasy paper. “No. No, no, no. Jay, look at me. We’re family. I…I’m an adult, Jay. I’ll take care of you. Alfred will, too, when he’s b—"
“You don’t even like me.” All at once, it burbles up and rushes out, the words crumbling in a well of tears. “You hate me! You’re not gonna—why would you keep someone you don’t want?” He knows what it’s like, to be wanted, but not as much as something else. To be less valuable than a high, than whatever it took to get that high, when there was no money and no food. He knows.
He knows, but he’s suddenly on the floor, in Dick’s lap, the metal of an expensive watch pressing into the back of his neck where Dick is holding him. Rocking him, actually, like a baby. He’s almost mad, until he feels Dick’s diaphragm spasm against him, an aborted hiccup he muffles in Jason’s hair. It’s permission. The floodgates open, and he sobs, loud and ugly and childish. “It’s okay,” Dick says, when the grieved wailing dies down into whimpering, sometimes from the both of them, “we’ve been orphans before, Little Wing. We can do it again.”