Work Text:
On a relatively chilly Sunday, at 1:20 am on the dot, the dockyard by Pier 6 exploded into flames. There was plenty Dick could have done differently, such as, say, noticing the trajectory of the cigarette sooner, but that thought got bodily flung out of his mind in tandem with his side slamming into a wall of shipping containers.
Oswald Cobblepot had allegedly turned over a new leaf, claiming that the Iceberg Lounge was a legitimate business for real this time. His name was on the manifest for a shipment that had arrived at Gotham Harbor earlier that evening, but the Batcomputer's scans had picked up a few too many discrepancies in the paperwork.
In a truly unpredictable twist, the Penguin was apparently smuggling in explosives.
Explosives that were supposed to be ferried away into the night by a skeleton crew of miscellaneous henchmen, before the dockworkers would start unloading everything in the morning. Henchmen who had managed to, instead, accidentally set it all off.
"kssht—wing, Nightwing, come in—"
Dick grimaced, levering himself up off the ground. His ribs twinged at the movement, his entire side aching in a way that meant his skin would be a watercolor canvas of blues and purples come Monday. "Nightwing, checking in."
"Nightwing, status report." Oracle's tone was smoothed over by the vocoder and crackling with interference, but the relief was unmistakable.
"Contusions and potential bruised ribs, but I'm mobile," Dick replied. He streaked his hands quickly over the back of his head, wincing with a bitten back hiss when he hit a familiar tackiness that had pain spiking through his skull. "Head injury, too."
"You were out of contact for five minutes. Red Hood checked in four minutes ago but has been unresponsive since; his tracker is in the general area and hasn't been moving."
He hadn't realized that he blacked out, but he let go of that thought quickly to focus on Jason. Oracle didn't need to explain why she was worried. Working with Jason had become an ever more regular occurrence, but he was still closed off and inaccessible. They didn't know what might set him off, and just asking could also set him off, so instead they all stepped carefully around him, avoiding topics like the Joker and warehouses.
Death and bombs.
If Dick had known the Penguin had been smuggling explosives of all things, he wouldn't have asked Jason to help him.
His gaze flickered back across the dockyard, to where the flames had lit up the everpresent smog with a dim, foreboding orange. "I'll check for him and other survivors."
"I called in the GCFD, ETA twenty minutes. Batmobile's on its way to you as well."
There had been six people in that skeleton crew, six people to load nondescript packs from a shipping container onto three nondescript trucks with stolen plates. One of the trucks had been caught in the blast, and its engine was belching black smoke into the sky. One was missing entirely. The third was untouched, but its door hung open, the seats empty.
Dick staggered closer. The shipping container had burst, littering the dockyard with torn pieces of metal. There was a strip of grass between the asphalt, where a tree had been struggling to grow in the salty air. It was on fire.
There was something on the ground near the epicenter of the blast that used to be a person who'd been too careless with his lighter and cigarette. If Dick hadn't held Jason back, hadn't told him to wait, that man would still be alive.
The same was true of the charred body, a little more intact, next to him.
There was a third body, further away where it had clearly been flung. Someone was crouched over it, hands fluttery and hovering, panicky like civilians tended to be, wanting to help but unsure where it was safe to touch.
Dick made his way over, straightening as he went and ignoring the pain that sparked through his ribs with each breath. The crouched figure looked up as he approached and scrambled backwards, hands fumbling for his holster and brown eyes widening. They caught the gleam of the fire and lit up gold.
"Hey," Dick said softly, raising his hands, palms open. He slipped easily a the comforting, friendly tone, like he hadn't been planning how best to beat him into the ground ten minutes ago. "I'm not gonna hurt you, okay? I'm here to help."
The man nodded quickly, even as his hand settled on the gun.
Dick couldn't worry too much about that, not he focused on the body on the ground and found it still breathing. He settled down quickly, pulling out the emergency medical supplies every Bat packed. Flash burns, a broken arm, a head wound that had split open the temple and was sluggishly leaking blood.
The motions were automatic—bandaging the head, cutting clothes away from the burns, gingerly avoiding the arm because he didn't have a cast for it. At one point Dick looked up. The brown-eyed man was watching him, his knees pulled close to his chest.
"I think he'll live," Dick said. "Are you hurt?"
The man blinked slowly, taking a beat too long to process the question. "Just… just bruises. I was in the truck. I didn't." His voice cut off abruptly and didn't continue.
Dick nodded, pulling his mouth into a gentle smile. "That's good. There were six of you. I've accounted for four. Do you know where the other two are?"
"Lia—she, she drove off. The other one, uh. Hood." He extricated a hand from where it was wrapped around his legs and gestured jerkily. Dick followed the motion with his gaze, and caught signs of movement past the smoke.
Dick nodded quickly "Okay, thank you. I've done everything I can for your friend. Emergency services should be here in…"
"Twelve minutes," Oracle provided.
"Twelve minutes. Can you keep an eye on him until then?"
The man nodded, inching closer.
"Thank you," Dick repeated, gentle and confident as he turned his back to the uninjured stranger with a gun strapped to his leg. "You've been very helpful."
The man did not shoot, for the same reason Dick didn't bother tying him up for the GCPD.
On the other side of the shipping container's remains, he found Jason. He was on his knees, palms layered over each other on the sternum of a woman. The steady, rhythmic motions of CPR.
"Red Hood," Dick said.
Jason didn't look up. He didn't acknowledge Dick at all. The chest caved under his hands in a way that suggested more ribs were broken than not.
"She's dead," Dick said. "You can stop."
It was obvious, looking at her. A piece of metal was buried deep in her forehead, barely missing her eye. A fatal amount of blood had already spilled onto the pavement, staining blond hair. CPR couldn't fix that.
Jason continued to move, just under two compressions per second. The blood pulsed out around the metal in the woman's skull, trickling around her open eye. Her iris was glassy and seemed impossibly blue, in the gloom of the night and the blaze of the fire.
"Red Hood," Dick repeated. Then, quieter, "Jason."
The chest wasn't rising fully after each shove of his hands anymore.
"Nightwing, status report?"
"I found Red Hood. He's… mobile, but not responding to me."
"The fire department's going to be here in eight minutes. Batmobile is parked a block away, let me know if I need to direct it closer. Get him out of there."
How? Dick wanted to ask. He didn't, because she didn't know, and that was why she hadn't offered any suggestions. None of them knew how to handle Jason anymore, not really.
Two months ago, they had interrupted an arms deal. One of the men panicked and dropped his gun. It had discharged, the bullet blowing straight through the heart of another gang member. Jason hadn't even hesitated, just grabbed the gun and disassembled it before moving to incapacitate everyone else in the abandoned construction site.
Jason had killed people, Dick remembered abruptly. He'd killed a lot of people. Jason was not supposed to be doing… this. Something had set him off.
Warehouses, death, and bombs.
Dick moved so he was sitting in front of Jason, the body between them. The helmet told him nothing. Jason didn't respond to the fingers Dick waved in front of his face. He didn't acknowledge Dick's soft murmurs of, "Hey, you gotta stop, okay? Jay. She's already dead. Little Wing. Can you let me know if you can hear me?"
Dick really didn't want to touch Jason, didn't want to know how he might react in… whatever headspace he was in. There wasn't really another choice, in this scenario.
Unless.
Dick had practiced his Batman impression to perfection, back when he'd still been a kid and his entire world had been Bruce and Alfred and fuzzy sun-warmed memories of his parents. Back when those kinds of shenanigans made Bruce smile, a soft thing that crinkled his eyes more than it touched his mouth.
"Robin."
Jason jerked like he'd been struck. His hands finally, blessedly, fell still. For one long, aching moment, he was stuck there, pressing the body's chest an inch down. Then the tension released, his hands falling to his sides, his exhale loud enough to get caught by the voice modulator.
Dick could hear the sirens in the distance, getting closer. He looked towards Jason, reassurances and questions and urgency on the tip of his tongue.
Jason said, "She's dead."
Dick breathed, something like relief flooding his lungs. "Yeah," he confirmed. "We need to go."
"She's dead," Jason repeated. "She's—I couldn't save her. I—"
"You can't save everyone." They all knew this. It hurt more as a kid, before Dick had really processed the stakes of what he'd dedicated his life to. It'd been horrifying, watching someone die, knowing that if Dick had just been better—
He was better at handling how it felt, these days. He'd come to the docks tonight to stop these people, and he'd failed to save them from their own mistakes. He didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. These things happened.
"She's dead." Jason was getting louder, voice pitching high enough that the sound was cutting out. "She—it was the one thing—I was supposed—"
Dick's hands were on Jason's shoulders, steadying him, before he realized he had moved. Jason went rigid, and Dick almost pulled his hands back, before Jason was suddenly sagging forward. Dick barely caught him, and the pressure of holding him up made his ribs ache. The body between them suddenly became extremely awkward.
"Jason. Are you hurt anywhere?" A head shake. "Okay. Can you stand up for me?"
It took Jason a moment too long, but he obeyed, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. "She's dead."
"I know," Dick murmured. "Can you walk?"
Jason didn't respond, but he did stumble a few steps back without collapsing. It was probably the best Dick could hope for.
"C'mon. Batmobile's this way."
Neither of them spoke as they walked, the silence between them filled with sirens and the distant clamor of a sleeping city. Dick led the way, but he kept glancing back almost compulsively, to make sure Jason was still following. The helmet was tilted slightly downward, lenses directed towards the ground, and the angle made it seem like it was glowering.
Dick shook the visual out of his head. It was a helmet. Why was he even trying to read into its expressions?
When they arrived at the Batmobile, Dick hesitated before sliding into the backseat with Jason. Babs could handle setting the autopilot up. Jason wedged himself up against the car door, buckling himself in like it was habit. Dick didn't bother, bracing himself against the seats—suppressing a wince as his ribs protested—so he was directly facing Jason.
"Can you—"
"You're hurt."
Dick blinked, then nodded. "It's just my ribs, nothing serious. Can I check you for a concussion?"
"One of these days you're going to puncture a lung," Jason scoffed, but he reached up to pull his helmet off. The Batmobile purred to life under them, and Dick caught the way that made Jason still. "Are we—the Cave?"
"Yeah," Dick said, then paused. "Unless you don't want to? We can stop by a safehouse, or one of your places, if—"
Jason shook his head, finally unlatching his helmet and tugging it off. His curls were tangled, damp with sweat, face pale in the dim lighting. "No, it's. You're hurt, I just." He held his helmet loosely in his lap, fingers of one hand rapping against it and the other rose up to retract his domino's lenses. "My bike's still back there."
"You can come back for it later, or someone else can swing by and get it, if you're okay with that. I don't think it's a good idea for you to drive, right now."
Jason's mouth twisted into a grimace. "I'm not hurt." His gaze caught onto where Dick was pulling out a small flashlight. "Or concussed, for the record."
Dick flicked the light on and shined it into Jason's eyes instead of answering. They contracted as expected. "Okay, I believe you—"
"You're the one not wearin' a helmet—"
"—but I mean it. You shouldn't be driving after all that."
Instead of replying, Jason snagged the flashlight out of Dick's hand and turned it on him. His eyebrows were knitted in concern, before the bright glow shining onto Dick's face made Jason's features disappear into the shadows. "You're bleeding."
Oh, yeah. Dick did forget about the head wound. Jason had one hand on Dick's face, hitting the mechanism to retract his lenses as well. "I'm fine—jeez, give a guy a warning, will you?"
The light flickered over Dick's face then vanished. He blinked the spots out of his vision and caught Jason rolling his eyes. "'I'm fine,' he says, like he doesn't have broken ribs."
"They're bruised at the very worst."
"Sure, I believe you. Let me take a look at your head."
Dick obliged, twisting around and letting Jason prob gently at where the skin had split at the back of Dick's skull. They lapsed into silence for a few long minutes as Jason worked on the wound. Dick found himself staring blankly at the time, ticking past slowly on the Batmobile's dashboard. 1:48 am.
"Okay, it's not that bad."
Dick snorted. "I could have told you that."
"You could have a shattered tibia and you'd still insist it wasn't that bad."
Dick bit back an instinctive rebuke about the time Jason hid an entire GSW. Remembering his panic upon waking up in the Batcave's medbay still made Dick's stomach twist.
Jason's hands retreated, and Dick turned back around.
A pause stretched between them.
"Are you okay?" he asked, at the same time Jason said, "You called me Robin."
There was something painfully uncertain in Jason's expression, but then it smoothed over and he snorted. "Why wouldn't I be? I'm not the one that's injured—"
"Sorry, you weren't responding to anything else I was doing," Dick said, a little too fast. "And that's not—it's okay if you're not okay after that, you know?"
"Not Robin anymore."
"I'm not either," Dick said, with as casual a shrug as he could manage. "I still react, instinctively, when—you know."
"It's not that," Jason said. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, smearing soot into the streak of white. "I just, I—fuck."
He leaned forward, burying his head in his arms, balancing it all on the dome of his helmet. "She's dead."
"Jason," Dick said. He wanted to reach out a soothing hand, but he kept himself still. "It's okay. That wasn't your fault." It was Dick's, entirely. Dick for telling Jason to wait, for not realizing what the merchandise was quickly enough, for not picking up on how haphazardly and carelessly that henchman had been tossing his cigarettes, for—
"You don't get it." Jason's voice was muffled, but there was no missing the way his throat choked around the words. "She's dead 'cause of me. I wasn't—if I just waited or I was stronger or just—better trained, then—it's not fair." His voice was getting louder again. "It's not fair."
He wasn't talking about the dead woman back at the dockyard.
"Jason," Dick said.
Jason pulled himself up, leaning back against the seat. His voice turned quiet. "I was dying. I knew I was dying, and the one thing I was thinking about was that I could still save her, do something right. And I couldn't even do that."
When Dick came back from his mission with the Titan's and learned Jason was dead, he'd thrown himself into figuring out the how and the why, so he could figure out where he'd messed up. Figure out why Jason would run off. He hadn't even mentioned it to Dick, no voicemail or text message or anything.
He'd gotten as far as the cowl footage of Jason's birth mother dying in the rubble before the nausea in his gut had crested over and he found himself heaving into a toilet for the next half hour. He couldn't keep a meal down for a week straight after that, and gave up looking.
Sheila Haywood, forty-one, blond hair and blue eyes, murmuring through ruptured lungs about the boy that tried to save her.
"It wasn't your fault," Dick said, again. It was getting kind of hard to ignore how every breath made his ribs ache. "You did everything you could." They couldn't save everyone. Sometimes their best just wasn't good enough—that was something they all knew, something that Dick needed to repeat to himself over and over again some nights in the hopes that maybe someday he'd believe it.
"There were about twenty things I could've done differently," Jason said, voice light in a way that couldn't quite cover the ache in it. "I know you all think it was my fault I got killed, and I don't really think that's fair, but her…"
"Jason." Dick couldn't keep the sharpness out of his voice, the tone he'd use when Damian and Tim were at each other's throats again. "You dying wasn't your fault, why would you even—"
Jason's smile, weak and plastered on, turned suddenly into something mean. "Come on Dickiebird, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm the reckless one, remember? The bad Robin. I'm impulsive, I leap in before thinking, I'm unnecessarily violent. You felt like you needed to tell me to wait earlier tonight because you knew I was the kind of person that would have just jumped in. It's that recklessness that got me killed, remember?"
Dick's words caught in his throat. These were—Jason wasn't wrong. These were all things that Bruce had said, after Jason had died. All things Dick had said, too, fluttery with panic every time he laid eyes on Tim. Because every time he saw Tim, he thought about how Jason was only Robin because Dick'd stopped being Robin, and Tim was only Robin because Jason wasn't Robin anymore because Jason was dead, and the idea of Tim dying like Jason did made Dick feel like someone was reaching into his ribcage and shredding his lungs.
So Jason dying had to be because of something wrong with Jason, because if it wasn't then the same thing could happen to Tim, and Dick couldn't handle that.
And then, eventually, Dick had gotten over those anxieties. He didn't realize Jason had heard these things, but now that he thought about it, of course he would, wouldn't he? This was something that Dick had thought and insisted upon and said enough times that he still sort of believed it. He'd said that kind of thing around Damian, didn't he? Back when Steph was Robin, hadn't Bruce compared her to Jason, even before she'd died, and then it'd been the same thing with Steph. She died because she was reckless, because she ignored orders and ran off alone—
How did it take Dick this long to realize how fucked up it was to think that?
"You dying wasn't your fault," Dick repeated, as if starting to say this now would fix everything from before. He would keep saying it, until he believed it, until his mind stopped quietly pointing out that Jason was impulsive. That Dick did need to tell him to hold off, earlier tonight. "It—of course it wasn't your fault. And your mom—that wasn't your fault, either."
Jason's eyes were narrowed, his jaw tense. He was so easy to read, even in the low light. "You don't even know what happened."
"It doesn't matter, what happened," Dick said, and he knew it was true the moment he said it. "No matter what. It wasn't your fault, and—I'm sorry for ever implying that it was."
"If I just waited—"
"It doesn't matter. It wasn't your fault. You did your best, Jay."
Jason was blinking far too rapidly. His eyes slid by to linger somewhere past Dick's shoulder. "It wasn't enough."
"Yeah," Dick said quietly. He watched Jason place his helmet back over his head, and wondered if it was just for the physical protection, or if Jason used it to hide, too. "Sometimes it isn't, but we have to keep trying anyway."
The seatbelt clicked as Jason unbuckled it, and Dick jumped a little. He hadn't realized they'd stopped, that their surroundings had changed from Gotham's streets to craggy rock walks. He watched Jason open the car door and step out. He looked back on the threshold, impassive and collected, like he hadn't been on the verge of tears. Like he hadn't been doing chest compressions on a long dead body, blind to the world. "For the record, Dickie? What happened tonight wasn't your fault, either. I know you're overthinking how many different ways you could have snatched that cigarette out of the air, so stop. Or I'll kick your ass."
Dick offered up a weak smile as he followed Jason out. "Jay—"
"Yeah, yeah," Jason interrupted, completely unsubtle about how done he was with the conversation. "Let's get those ribs of yours checked."
Dick needed to write up a report about what happened tonight, about what went wrong, and tomorrow he'd have to figure out what to do about the bruises that would be plastered up his entire side. There was also a lot more he knew he needed to say. He wasn't going to fix years of damage with a single apology. He needed to talk to Steph. He needed to figure out how to bring the subject up with Jason again, and—and Bruce.
But for now he nodded along and let Jason corral him towards the medical wing. They had time to figure it out.