Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jason is both annoyed and weirdly flattered when the replacement turns up to ask him for help. He mentally rearranges his calendar so he can be free Wednesday evening and says, “No, fuck off, I have very important business going on.”

Tim eyes his 72” TV playing Japanese wrestling more judgmentally than it really deserves. 

“Important crime things,” Jason emphasizes. “Make Wingdick do it.”

Tim pinches the bridge of his nose like an old man. “He can’t, he’s too well-known, it’ll bring up too many questions. He can’t just pretend to be my really young uncle when half the teachers at school dream of marrying him.”

Jason resolves to find out which half and send them pamphlets for addiction recovery, and also scare them into behaving themselves if they do meet Dick. “Crime. Stuff. I’m a crime lord, and that means I have a real job, unlike you losers.”

"I'll trade you new grips," Tim says crisply.

"I can't be bribed, how dare you," Jason says, "do you know how Big Bird gets his shoes and gloves to do the sticky thing? Can you do that for my gloves?"

Tim frowns. Jason opens his mouth to say it's fine, he'll take the grips, but then Tim nods.

"I don't know, but I'll figure it out."

Jason closes his mouth and pumps his fist instead.

"We have to be there at 6, you can't be late, and please wear something formal, something that doesn't make you look like a criminal." Then, suddenly waking up to the fact that he hadn't asked enough questions, he suspiciously asks, "What do you want the gloves for anyway? You use guns. Not much call to stick to those."

Jason, luckily, knows that the best defense is a great distracting offense. "What do you mean wear something formal, do you mean I can't come in the helmet? Are you discriminating against Hoods?"

The argument goes on for forty five minutes, with a break for grilled cheese sandwiches, before Tim realizes he's been had, and then it's too late. There's too little time before patrol for Tim to interrogate him about his (very righteous and justice-filled, really) reasons for wanting sick new gloves.

He puts an alarm on his private, secure pager for Wednesday, 4pm. Enough time for him to get into a suit and damned tie and pick up Tim, and also convince him that taking one of the Bat's cooler cars was practically required, if they wanted to make a good impression.

He also takes the time to dig out his oldest, loosest t-shirt and a pair of board shorts with holes in them and send pics to Dick with the caption 'this is fine for drakey's thing at school right?'

He cheerfully ignores the following twelve calls and forty seven messages. He replies to the forty eighth message when he's out on patrol and one of the people he punched left behind their bloody flip flops while running away. He takes a picture of it and writes, 'found the perf shoes. rly makes the outfit pop.'

On Wednesday, he's still with his lieutenants when the alarm rings. He frowns at the pager, frowns at the map they're making and then frowns at the only one of them he trusts not to kill their own dying grandmother for the insurance money. "You're in charge. I'm going to be taking care of family business, and I don't want to be disturbed."

She nods and the rest flinch away from him so he figures they got the message. He doesn't change fully, shoving the belt and tie in his pockets and getting on his bike, driving hell for leather so he doesn't get any sad looks or angry looks, or any looks at all from Robin Prime(a donna). He can make Timmers drive for a bit while he fixes himself in whatever car they steal.

He reaches Wayne Manor only five minutes late and gets a malicious pleasure out of Tim's surprised look.

"Can't believe you don't trust me," Jason drawls, already checking which cars are at the back, in the area locked away from him specifically. He could just take the Corvette left unlocked as bait, he acknowledges, but it's not good for Bruce to have things his own way too much. It is practically Jason's duty to make things more difficult for him.

"That one." He points towards the bright beautiful Bugatti. "Unlock it Tim-I-Am."

Tim rolls his eyes and says, "When he gets growly, I'm sending him your way. I'm going to tell him you kidnapped me and made me do it and you two can have a punching match." But he takes out his phone and his other special phone and starts doing something magical anyway.

"The old man couldn't win a punching match with me in his dreams," Jason says, cheerfully. Later on he'll wish he had a time machine so he could go back to this particular moment and kick his own ass for not asking any further questions. At the moment all he thinks is that if they didn't have Tim's school thing they could go down to the next town, which has a beach that isn't rotted by years of the Scarecrow and drug dealers blowing things up, and have a nice evening out.

Jason elbows Tim and tries to sit on him when he doesn't hand over the wheel fast enough, and he thinks that's why Tim is quiet, sulking like the little asshole he is, until they reach the school and he realizes that this meeting is like, a final final warning.

"We understand Timothy has health issues, Mr. Drake," the Dean says, while one of the Board of Trustees who used to know Tim's dad nods behind her. "But his medical documents are not in order and his school performance is simply dismal. It's not only his grades, we could make an exception for that-" with Wayne money easing the way, Jason mentally fills in, "-but he simply hasn't been in school enough. His record is blank. No sports, no extracurriculars and barely enough attendance."

"Please, call me Jason. Mr. Drake is his father." Jason points a thumb at Tim. This doesn't go over as well as he thought it would.

He immediately sets to charming them both as much as possible. Playing up Tim’s dad's health issues before the tragic death, and implying mental distress and also implying a fat check. All in all, it just about works, and it takes every bit of the skills Jason learnt while trying to get Black Mask's minions to defect. B's checkbook can do the rest, he's pretty sure.

They're almost back at the car when Jason risks saying something. He's pissed off at being thrown into that sharkpool without warning, but he's got enough sense not to start yelling while they're still on the grounds. He growls, "Why isn't B here? This isn't good, Timmers, and he should be here. He should know."

"He does," Tim bit out.

Jason is immediately sympathetic. "Got pissy huh?"

From the slant look Tim gives him, it was a little more than pissy. Jason doesn't remember Bruce being that nasty about bad grades, but Jason had gotten more than a couple of lectures on how school was his first and most important job.

"Know what it's like," he says awkwardly. "Hey if he lectures you again, tell him that you've already been CEO, it's fine if you get bad grades."

Tim narrows his eyes, then bites his lip before saying, "It wasn't-." Then he shrugs and just turns around to walk off without finishing.

Jason tucks the folder under his arm and follows him. "Want a burger?"

Tim shrugs again.

Once they reach the car, Jason gives him a sideways glance and says, "Want to take the car for a joyride and then throw darts at my Batman cutout?"

Tim smiles down at his Air Jordans. "I can make us moving targets."

"Let's kick his ass!" Jason cheers and like a goddamn idiot, he doesn't even spare a moment to wonder about how Tim laughs, like it's the funniest thing in the world.

Contrary to popular (Batman’s) opinion, he’s not actually an idiot, and he doesn’t keep his second life by sheer luck either, so he’s set up the security nearly airtight on his permanent place. Three weeks later, when he’s willing to die again, just so he can get some sleep, he gets a text to his phone that lets him know that someone has entered his place through a window, and also that it’s one of the Batkids. He takes about ten seconds to decide that unless someone is dying and needs him and only him to come kiss their brow and forgive their sins right at this moment, this can be tomorrow-Jason’s problem. Unfortunately, like all Bats, the youngest brat has a great sense of the dramatic and absolutely no sense of other people’s convenience. He comes slinking through the shadows to stand by Jason’s door like a creeping creeper.

“If you’re going to murder me, do it quickly, so I can go back to sleep,” he says after about a minute of this nonsense. 

“I have left Father’s protection and I am here to pledge myself,” the kid declares, voice ringing with determination.

“Keep it down. I have neighbors,” he hisses, and throws his least favorite pillow at the tiny gremlin.

“I am here,” the kid says, in what he probably thinks is a whisper, “to pledge myself.”

“Great, good news, we love to hear it. Now go the fuck to sleep on the couch.” 

The kid goes. The kid comes back five minutes later to take one of the blankets, but it’s the blue one that Dickie gave him as a housewarming present, and it was probably made in hell it’s so goddamn scratchy so Jason just turns the other way, shoves a pillow over his head, and goes back to sleep.

He wakes up to a distinctly edgy clattering from the kitchen, and considers sneaking out of the window until the kid goes away. But it’s his house, and he’ll be damned before he lets a Wayne out-edge him in his house.

“Where is your food?” the kid asks, and really, what is it with these kids and walking into his house and judging his lifestyle choices. “Is this a training programme? Are you training yourself for the remote possibility that you must live on pre-packaged food and mold.”

“That was last year,” he replies, and in the moment that Damian takes to reboot his brain, he picks up the kid and tosses him at the couch. He lands feet first, like a cat, or a jaguar, and Jason throws up a victory sign.

Damian furiously sits down where he landed on the couch, extra prim, shoulders up and back straight as a rod. 

“I have come to pledge myself,” he announces, again.

“Yeah, I remember that bit, Damianto,” Jason says, hunting under the cupboard until he found the emergency flour. Kid didn’t eat eggs, as far as he remembered, but he could make a mean eggless crepe.

“You owe Mother, so you’ll train me,” Damian declares, all posh on the ‘mother’ like he’s saying it on the damned BBC Radio.

“Yeah, no, that’s not how we ask for favors,” Jason replies, and raises an eyebrow.

Damian looks past him, then sneaks a look at him, then looks past him again and says, “You owe Mother, so you’ll train me… please.” 

“Sure,” Jason says, and then, in a friendly way, “pissed off at your old man, huh? What did he do?”

“Nothing,” Damian says, too quick and too sharp. “I just wished to improve my skills.”

“Running away is a good habit, Dames,” Jason says, willing to encourage any bad habits that will give Bruce a headache. “I used to do it twice a month.”

He wonders whether he’s saved any of Timmy’s moving cutouts. By the end of the evening they’d gotten into Jason’s experimental ammunition and at least half of the cutouts were blown away, but they couldn’t have destroyed the whole obstacle course.

After breakfast, and after Jason’s taken him back to Wayne Manor to sneak out more of his clothes and also Titus and Alfred-the-Cat, and after Jason has taught him how to ignite a fire with nothing except whatever they can find in the average Gotham alley (a popular Crime Alley kid’s game), Damian speaks.

He’s drawing, and doesn’t look at Jason as he says stiffly, “It has been made clear to me that my skills and personality are not suitable for the position I wish to hold. I wish to better myself before I present myself as a competitor again.”

“Got in a fight with Tim?” Jason asks, not that he cares, except maybe he can make fun of Timothers for getting into a fight with a literal baby. 

“It was not Drake I had the conversation with,” Damian says.

And right. Jason looks at him and his rash temper, and the elegant brutality of his skills, and thinks that yeah, B wouldn’t like that.

“Whatever,” he says, after a pause. “I’m not taking care of your dumb dog or your stupid cat.”

Damian actually turns around at that, to stare incredulously at where Titus is sitting mostly on Jason’s lap and Alfred is curled around his neck and then after a pointed scoff he turns back to his painting. When he’s fallen asleep, with his drooling dog on top of him, Jason takes the beautiful portrait of a yellow-and-red Robin against a blue-black background. He doesn’t have a magnet but he does have a nail and a drill, so he puts it up on the kitchen wall instead of his fridge. Then he goes back to bed, because he’s spent two fucking weeks burning up shitty mixed drugs and carefully destroying chemical labs, and even more carefully getting jobs for a bunch of people who aren’t good, and who aren’t bad, but who need jobs to feed themselves and their families and who’ll make and deal bad drugs if they can’t do anything else; and he wants to spend at least three days sleeping that off.

The kid will keep until Bruce realizes he has a missing wing and comes running to recover it.

The next evening, he has cut his timeline to 'until Bruce comes running, or I can drug the kid and shove him in a sack and drop him on the Manor's doorstep.'

"No," he said calmly. "Not in a fucking month of Tuesdays."

"I fail to see how I am to learn anything meaningful from you while sitting here." He said, looking awfully judgmentally at the only mildly water-damaged walls.

"Age appropriate lessons only in this household," he announces and then rapidly texts Dick out of Damian's sight to ask him what vigilante outings are appropriate for his age.

"Hey, you're like seven right?" He asks, and adds, 'what amount of caffeine is appropriate? should I give him the rest of the six pack of red bull,' just to keep Dick on his toes.

"I am eleven!" Damian stands and draws himself up to his full shrimpy height.

Jason laughs and laughs and only just manages to dodge Damian's throwing knife, aimed right at his Achilles tendon. 

He lunges to the right in a feint and grabs the kid when he takes the bait and dodges left, and gives him a noogie. 

"We do not solve problems with physical violence in this household," he lies and uses his trump card: "Dickiebird wouldn't like it."

Then he carries Damian like a suitcase to the couch to watch the greatest musical of all time, Singing in the Rain.

Damian shows up anyway, of course. He runs three people through in two smooth moves that scream Talia and then backflips to higher ground in a showy way that is all Dickie. Jason gives him a high five, a PowerPoint on how he could have gotten that done faster and with less risk to himself, and a grounding.

Two days in, Bruce is still AWOL, it's a Monday and the kid isn't in school. 

"Father suggested that Drake could get a GED instead of wasting his time in school. I am also capable of completing my education without having to enter Gotham Academy."

What the fuck, Bruce, Jason thinks and blows a raspberry. "You're going to get into Harvard with that attitude are you?"

"I don't see why I must go to Harvard, or any university, I am the Heir to the Bat," Damian snaps.

"Oh, so you're going to be an uneducated little layabout who lives on Dad's money, is it? Except it'll be Timmy's money then!"

Damian frowns, eyebrows scrunching together in a way that signified an imminent tantrum.

Jason doesn't have time for that. "Kids need an education. I know people who would kill for the chances you're getting, so get your ass out there and onto the bike, and get to class."

"You didn't get an education," Damian said, like it was a trump card instead of a fucking shame.

"You wanna end up like me?" He sneers. "I'm a shitty crime lord running a shitty crime empire." 

"There's nothing wrong with you! Other than your imbecilic choice of apartments." Damian snaps with an emphasis that makes Jason feel...

"Goddamn right there isn't, I'm a fucking delight. But you're not me and you're not gonna be me if I have to sedate you and drag you to school every day of the year. You hear me, Dam-a-lam?" 

"Whatever, boomer," Damian says in his received pronunciation accent, and Jason regrets telling Steph that teaching Damian memes was hilarious.

He zooms out onto the overpass, already planning on hacking the GCPD database to delete all of the parking tickets he’s getting. He’s nearly forty minutes late, and he doesn’t want to see what Damian can get up to if he’s left bored and unsupervised for forty minutes. 

It’s more of a relief than he would ever admit, when he gets to the school and sees a distinctive blue-black car in the lot, the only thing Dick took with him from Wayne Manor other than his own clothes.

He runs up the stairs, two at a time, and walks into the waiting room already saying, “I’m going to report a kidnapping.”

Dick has the nerve to laugh, the asshole. “Yeah, c’mon, phone in to the police and tell them I kidnapped my brother, please.”

Jason looms over him with all his extra four inches and watches Dick strain to be taller with pleasure. 

“Mr. Wayne, Mister…” the old receptionist squints at him.

“Drake,” he supplies, because what the hell, he’s already lied to the Dean of the High School about it.

The receptionist looks from him to Dick with a puzzled frown, and Jason realizes, annoyed, that even after all these years, he still looks like some Walmart-brand copy of Dickwing.

Dick smiles, all aw shucks charm and melting eyes. “We won’t be late again, Mrs. Rushing.”

“Yep, all urgent work to be put on hold until we get the brat home and in bed, don’t want him blowing up a building or murdering someone,” he agrees. 

Dick ushers him away and says, “That’s your MO, Mr. Drake, not Damian’s.”

“I have committed no murders,” Damian says flatly.

“Neither have I,” Jason protests, offended. It’s been at least a week since he’s done any murdering.

“Congratulations.” Dick ruffles Damian’s hair with a crooked smile and announces, “New tradition. Ice-cream at Gianni’s for everyone on No-Murder Monday.”

“In your dumbass car? We’ll look like the second comeback of NSYNC,” Jason says, desperately wanting to get behind its wheel. Dick never even allowed him to touch its steering before– before.

Dick cheerfully replies, “You can go on your dumbass bike then. Dames and I will come in my car.”

Jason sulks on his very cool bike until Dick stops the car just before they’re going to get into the city proper, and says that he wants a turn on Jason’s bike, and Jason should drive his dumbass car for the rest of the way. 

“Sure, if you want, not like I care,” Jason says, nearly vibrating with excitement.

Dick strikes strategically while Damian is making the very important life decision of what combo of toppings he wants and not listening to them. “What’s happening? The school called and said I needed to come, that Damian won’t go with Alfred. And all he would say is that he’s living with you now.”

Jason swipes Dick’s card to pay with. “This isn’t even a Platinum, what are you doing with your life?”

“Gym instructors don’t earn enough for Platinum credit cards, Jason,” he says, more wry than annoyed.

“Well, you know what they say, crime pays,” Jason says and pays with his own card instead. 

“I think we have very different ideas of who ‘they’ are,” Dick says, but doesn’t refuse the ice-cream, the hypocrite.

Damian ignores them to carefully rub the ice cream off his almonds so he can coax a squirrel into eating the nuts. 

“He just showed up, and wouldn’t leave. I figured he needed a few days to blow off steam.” Jason says, only just resisting the urge to say ‘he started it.’

Dick is being so patient, eating his own disgusting marshmallow and chocolate concoction, that Jason wants to punch him in the face.

“Said Bruce told him he wouldn’t be a good Robin,” he adds awkwardly. More than anyone else, the two of them know how earth shattering that would be. 

Dick frowns at this, face twisting into the thunderous scowl Jason still remembers from his own childhood, when every time Bruce and Dick met there would be hours of yelling and days of grim silence. 

But when Dick says, “I’ll talk to Bruce,” all Jason feels is relief. 

The next evening, he gets a ping on his phone, his actual phone, not one of the burners, and then ping, ping, ping until he grabs it just to turn it off.

There are several (high-quality, scanned professionally maybe) pictures. The last one, the first one he downloads, he remembers surprisingly well. It’s a four square picture, from an amusement park photo booth. His face is grimy with sweat and dust and sauce from their chilli dog competition, and Dick’s is the same. With the shitty photo booth camera, you can’t tell the difference between Dick’s cornflower-blue (Superman-blue) eyes and Jason’s own dark grey-blue. They look like brothers. 

First time he ran away from Bruce. If it hadn’t gone so well, maybe he would have stopped doing it.

He vaguely recalls what happened in some of the other pictures, but not all of them. In one, he’s being carried by Kori, and Dick has a sharpie in his hand, mid-twirl.

‘Got them from the old Titans’ archives, your wall’s looking a little saddo, you can put them up,’ Dickhead messages.

‘I see your ugly mug enough, i don’t need reminders,’ he sends back, and ignores the following torrent of messages.

He’s got pictures with Roy and Lian, and Sasha, but nothing with Biz or Artemis. He has to hustle to get to them before they leave the planet or the dimension or whatever.