Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

So Jason isn’t sure about a lot of things. 

Not about his mother’s love, at least—not when all he can remember most days is the way her haunted gaze had haunted him right back, emptier and emptier yet as the winter winds swept away the months and chased the childhood out of his bones. Not about Bruce’s love, either, with his world so far removed from Jason’s own roots; nor about Robin, the best and worst years of Jason’s life. Not about his place in his family’s life, before and during and after death.

Not even, really, about himself.

So, no. Jason’s never been sure of anything. And never like this. Never the way he is now: never the way he is with this.

But he has a ring box hidden in the pack of too-healthy multigrain muesli bars Roy never cares to check. He has a joint bank account he’s never once second-guessed. He has a house he shares and a life and a daughter and—

And he’s never been more sure of anything.

Roy’s eyes are locked on his, and if the eyes are the windows to the soul then Roy’s always held the key to his in the palm of his hand. “What do you say?” Roy says, soft and hopeful and maybe just as sure, and Jason—

Jason doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He fights the urge to tackle this man to the floor instead. He rests his forehead on Roy’s, thinks I will never be more sure of anything, and mouths his answer once or twice or thrice a dozen times against a pair of lips he knows like a map to his own heart. Yes. Of course it’s yes. Of course it’s always going to be yes.

“Jason Harper,” is what he ends up thinking out loud. In a few minutes he’ll have to grab his own ring from its hiding place, but for now, for now, he’s not going anywhere. Nothing short of the end of the world—and maybe not even that—could make him. “I could get used to that.”

Roy beams. All of Jason’s awfully impressive self-restraint goes right out the window as Roy does the tackling for him, and Jason feels the ground coming up beneath him as surely as he feels Roy’s hand cushioning his head as it does. Jason laughs, bright and feather-light and real, and feels Roy’s joy as fiercely as he knows his own.

If to be loved is to be known, then he knows Roy. 

And here’s the thing: Roy knows him, too, knows all of his greatest fears and his greatest hopes and his greatest loves, and, well, isn’t that something? (Isn’t that everything?)

Jason thinks it is.

When they finally come up for air, Roy says, “Did you mean it?” Jason raises a brow—he’s more than willing to show Roy just how much he means it—before Roy clarifies, “Jason Harper. Are you sure you want to take my name? You don’t want to hyphenate or something?”

Jason squeezes Roy’s hand in his own, the new ring that’s so quickly and solidly made his finger its home pressing against them both. Already, it feels like it’s home. He feels the sudden overwhelming urge to laugh—giddy, an unconscious response—like the child that grew up too soon, at the feel of it. So he does: so he lets himself, because this is Roy, and if he cannot laugh with Roy, then he cannot laugh with anyone. 

“I’d be honored,” Jason swears. And then, because he can’t help himself: “Willis was a piece of shit anyway.” He’s long outgrown his first father’s name.

Roy shakes his head, exasperated, but even he can’t stop grinning. “Well, alright then,” he decides. He shakes his head again—and this time it’s more disbelief than exasperation. Awe. “Shit, Jaybird. We’re getting married.”

“Glad to hear you understand what you just asked me,” Jason teases. It hits him, then, hits him and hits him, how happy he is. He’d spent years at war just to get to stand here with Roy and their intertwined hands—just to get to stand at all in this moment—and he knows, then, slowly and all at once, with pinpoint clarity, that he would not for a second give any of this up even for a chance at a life without tragedy. He breathes in: content. Breathes out: content. “You’re stuck with me for life, Harper.”

Roy doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he replies, far too satisfied, far too pleased: “Yeah. I am.”

Well, shit.

The sentiment lodges itself in Jason’s throat and he could choke on it. This, Roy—this is going to be the rest of his life. And he’s sure.

This is what he wants.

(When you know, you know.

And Jason knows.)

It isn’t until they’ve retired for bed—for once without a bedtime story for Lian, who’s away for a sleepover at a friend’s for the night—that Jason starts to think. They both have their respective rings on their fingers now—and hadn’t that gotten him the world’s most enthusiastic round of celebratory sex when Roy had seen his matching ring and realized just how much Jason had meant his yes—and they have their hearts set on a date three months from now at the very latest.

Jason prefers his classics to the more contemporary rom-coms, but When Harry Met Sally had a point. When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

So. Three months, it is. There’s a lot they still have to do between now and then, of course: decisions to make, debates between a larger-than-life ceremony and a quick City Hall elopement to settle, invitees to invite, marriage certificates to handle and name changes to apply for. But Jason’s confident they can handle it.

Which brings him to this. Thinking.

Jason Harper does have a nice ring to it—and no, that wasn’t a pun; Dick would never let him live it down if it was. And Willis Todd was a piece of shit whose last name Jason had clung to for far too long for his own good already. But when Roy had asked about hyphenating… Todd was the first place Jason’s mind went, but it’s not the only place it could go. It’s not the only name he’s ever held.

Everyone knows Jason’s history with fathers. Willis Todd is one thing, but—Bruce Wayne is another thing entirely. And that other thing might be equally complicated—to say the very least—but.

But Jason had been proud to bear his name, once. His time with Roy and Lian aside, his years as Jason Peter Todd-Wayne were some of his happiest of two lives.

He wants to be Jason Harper more than he wants almost anything in the world. He wants to be Jason Harper-Wayne even more than that.

The want doesn’t pass.

It wraps itself around him, settles in him like a particularly heavy meal. No, like something less extricable: like a blood transfusion. Like an extension of himself, the thought of being Jason Harper-Wayne continues to rattle in his skull even in the harsh light of day. The idea of it. But he takes this want and he lets himself sit on it a moment longer—a second, a minute, an hour. 

For now, he keeps moving. He has a fiancé to wake and a daughter to pick up and an engagement to celebrate.

He starts with waffles. Lian’s breakfast food of choice might be pancakes (with gummy bears in the batter, because she’s a menace like that), but Roy prefers waffles—and has done so for as long as they’ve been together. Roy’s Holy Trinity of Dips—peanut butter, maple syrup, and chocolate—go on the side: because Roy has his daughter’s incorrigible sweet tooth, and Jason loves them that way. He can get back to his healthy-choices spiel tomorrow.

(He does wash himself a handful of strawberries to go with the spread, though.)

This seems to be the right move, because breakfast-in-bed wins him an arched eyebrow—Jason is usually the one nitpicking about crumbs on the sheets—and a press of Roy’s lips to his so soft it feels like a gradual slide into love all over again. This has never been terrifying, not with Roy. 

“What time did Lian say she wanted to be picked up?” Jason prompts as Roy attacks his breakfast like a man starved. Roy had offered to take over all the planning and arrangements for Lian’s sleepover the second she’d started to make noise about it; the keenness makes sense, now. No doubt Roy had seen it as the perfect opportunity to finagle them some privacy for the proposal—though Jason can’t wait to give their girl the news now that it’s morning.

Roy swallows past a bite of food and darts a fond, knowing look at him. If there’s one thing Jason’s always understood, it’s that Roy and Lian are a package deal; Roy doesn’t think he’s ever loved his fiancé more than when he can see that Lian’s become a part of Jason’s package deal, too, these days. They’re a unit, all three of them now, and it’s the type of picture Roy’s never once imagined could be drawn for him. It’s the type of picture Roy’s always ached for.

“Noon-ish?” Roy estimates, then reassures his partner, “But I’m sure she won’t mind if we pick her up earlier—you know she’ll want to be first in line to hear the news.”

Jason chuckles. “Good point.”

Roy grins. It is a good point; she’ll probably be upset they kept it from her this long as it is—even if Roy had made sure to bring the topic up with her beforehand, just to get her green-light. Not that there had ever been any doubt, on either of their parts—Lian adores Jason, Roy knows. He sees it all the time, and he’s not the only one; hell, even their neighbors have commented on it from time to time. 

The second breakfast is finished, Jason’s up and off the bed—Roy’s tray in hand—before Roy can say another word. Roy laughs, shakes his head, and follows him right out the door.

Jason thinks, in the quiet of his mind, that he would follow Roy anywhere.

Today, though, he doesn’t need to; the following is mutual. They take turns at each other’s heels, neck-and-neck on their way down to the garage: laughing like they can’t stop as they race for the driver’s seat—Jason wins, of course, though Roy maintains that this is only because he’d gotten distracted checking out his husband-to-be’s killer thighs. (Jason, for his part, maintains that those killer thighs are exactly what netted him his victory—just not in the way Roy described.) Roy puts up a token protest, but there’s a thread of mirth woven through each complaint that keeps him from being believable. Jason shoots him a smug smirk and makes a big show of starting up the minivan—one of their first big purchases as a couple, and yes, Jason knows it’s a suburban cliché and certainly one that had had Damian sending him videos of himself laughing his ass off at Jason every day for a week straight—before rocketing out of their driveway.

Without even really thinking about it, Jason makes a beeline for donuts on the way—Lian’s favorites. Roy eyes him with that knowing look again. Lian’s guilty pleasure might be sweets, but Jason’s is spoiling her with those sweets, so much so that he knows the route to this stop by heart. 

But today is a day for celebrating, so all the detour earns Jason is a snort and three quick squeezes of his hand. I love you. I love you. I love you. Out loud, Roy just says, “This is why you’re Lian’s favorite.”

Jason grins. “Well, duh,” he says, pleased.

Another snort. Another three squeezes.

This time, Jason returns it. I love you. He thinks he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his forever fighting over who gets to drive the other around like this.

Oh, but what a privilege to have, he thinks. And what a way to go.

Lian is, predictably, delighted to hear their news—maybe even more than they are. 

(Okay, no, that’s not true. Roy refuses to believe that anyone could be more excited about this than he is. But she certainly puts up a good fight.) 

What she is, though, is the kind of child who zeroes right in on the important questions. And the most important one yet is this: eagerly, she asks, “Does this mean I get to call Jay-jay papa now?” 

Jason chokes on air. Roy sees the way he melts beneath the weight of those words, all warmth and love as it spills out of him. 

Roy wouldn’t exactly call himself a genius—Jay’s the scholar in their household, though Roy’s no slouch either, at least not where his bots are concerned—but in that moment his brain lights up like firecrackers. And he will forever pat himself on the back for the next thought that leaves his mouth: “Well, if you’re going to be calling him Papa anyway… What would you two think about signing some adoption papers and making it official while we’re at it?”

Jason stills. And the old Roy would have been worried but today he isn’t.

And maybe all the advice forums would have said to approach it differently—to approach them one by one, maybe, or to make sure the adult is onboard at least three moves before getting the child’s hopes up. But this is Jason, and Roy loves him, and Jason loves them right back, and Roy has never had a love so transparent before. And Roy knows. He knows.

He has nothing to be afraid of, not with Jason. 

Lian stills like she’s been struck by glitter and rainbows. (Steph’s her favorite Bat-aunt for a reason.) Her eyes go wide—awed. She looks, for a moment, just like her father in the face of Jason’s affection—in the face of his heart, reserved just for them. “Really?” she squeaks out. “Jay-jay’s gonna adopt me?”

Jason blinks, and there are tears in his eyes and a breathless laugh on his lips. And this is why Roy knows.

It takes a moment—a moment and a half, maybe—but when Jason’s brain finally seems to reboot, the joy in his eyes is brighter than it was even yesterday, with Roy down on one knee and a ring on Jason’s finger, and Roy would be jealous if he wasn’t so fucking happy. Deliriously fucking happy, actually.

Jason clears his throat. “Hey,” he starts, mischief lining those gleaming eyes, wet with wonder and a dream made real, and Roy has always thought them beautiful but today they’re alive—especially so, “I thought I was Papa now.”

Lian gives that the only possible response it warrants: she throws herself at him. Jason catches her whole weight with barely a stumble; and there are some perks to vigilanteing after all, Jason thinks, if only so he can hold his child for as long as she still wants to be held. She could be fully grown with a daughter of her own and he’d still carry her like it’s what he was made for. And sometimes it feels like it is what he was made for: her arms go around him in an instant, and she’s calling him papa at last and Roy is laughing at them both and this is the family of his heart.

Jason holds her tight, and thinks there’s a reason he’s so sure.

For once, the donuts go forgotten on their picnic blanket, left to the side as Lian refuses to leave the circle of his arms, and Jason can’t find it in himself to care.

Home, he knows, is not a place.

(Of course, Lian is still Lian is still a sugar-obsessed eight-year-old, and she remembers this particular fact not long after the fourth time her eyes jump to the unopened donut box. 

In the end, she gets Roy to bring the box over and hold it up for her so she can munch on her treats right from her seat on Jay’s lap, like they’re three puzzle pieces of a whole, and Roy does so with only minimal huffing and scolding.

They finish the donuts like this anyway.)

They spend the rest of the day like this, too. A puzzle—a picture—of their own making: lazing about in the park and humming along to birdsong, dancing around and around in circles as they step on each other’s toes—accidentally at first, then on purpose, a game only they know the rules to. Lian oscillates between giggling at them and demanding to step in as dance-partner. She hogs Jason about two-thirds of the time until Roy’s the one with his head tossed back, laughter loose and free like he’s half his age again, watching them with eyes that refuse to get tired of this even if he gets used to it.

Somehow, they end up playing tag all the way up and down the hills. Jason doesn’t know who starts it, but it isn’t long until they’re chasing after each other and each other’s laughs, running until they’re tripping and stumbling and falling down still laughing. For once, the day is theirs. 

And they make it stay theirs. They start up games of Would-You-Rather and I-Spy (Lian wins ninety-percent of them by a landslide, and they aren’t even letting her). They watch the birds go by; they feed ducks until even the ducks are bored and full of them, the way they’ll never be full of each other. They race-slide down grassy slopes. Lian browses wedding themes on Pinterest—and somehow ends up thumbing through Star Wars-themed weddings—until Roy pulls her attention back to them with home videos of her calling Jason Jay-bee and they watch until her eyelids grow heavy.

(They spend the rest of the day just like this: like old times, like they have all the time in the world, like they’ll never run out. They spend the rest of the day like this is all they ever want to do, and Jason has never known such peace in two lifetimes.)

And nothing changes with the rings on their fingers, except everything changes.

And everything changes, except they don’t. They’re still Jason-and-Roy and Roy-and-Jason in that way of theirs that never fails to make the Bat-brats pretend to gag. So everything changes, except nothing does—except everything does—and this is how he likes it: this is how he likes them.

So, yes. Jason knows peace, these days; he’s known it for a while now, the kind of peace that lasts, built and nurtured and fed in this home of his own design. 

He knows peace but he wants more of it. 

But that’s the thing about him. He’s always been greedy, he supposes; it’s why he came back for that fourth tire that brought him into Bruce’s life in the first place. It’s why he made his bloody way back into Gotham even after she spat him out; it’s why he dared to defy death herself for a second round in the ring of life. And it’s why he’s sat with this snowballing idea cradled in the nest of his mind for longer than a day now. 

It’s why he’s let it snowball. 

It’s why he’s here, and it’s why he knows: he knows what he wants. 

It’s in the weird-blurry hours of dawn that he happens upon it: the mug buried in the back of the kitchen cupboard, so old and well-worn by now that the paint’s begun to fade. It’s one of those tacky “World’s Greatest So-and-so” mugs that are always on those trite listicles about gift ideas. Jason’s first Father’s Day after he’d been adopted—a little over a year after he’d started living with B—he’d been so nervous about it that he’d actually resorted to taking advice from one of those blogs. (He doesn’t care what Damian has to say about his early Red Hood days before he started making a name for himself; that was the lowest he’s ever sunk.) In his defense, though, it wasn’t like he’d ever celebrated the day with Willis before—he’d been clueless going in.

He’d gotten B some other things, too, in the end—a pair of novelty bat cufflinks and a wonky Bat-signal toy that shrieked “I AM THE NIGHT” when pressed, and he’d even asked Alfred to teach him how to cook B’s favorite breakfast meal so that he could surprise his dad with breakfast in bed—but this… 

It had said World’s Greatest Dad, once. But they’d had a fight a few months after that same Father’s Day and Jason had been so upset over it that he’d taken a permanent marker to the mug and scratched off “greatest” just so he could replace it with “BATTIEST”. Above it, he’d made looping arrows leading to two new messages—both aggressively underlined. The first had read: (And in a bad way!) (Not your stupid I-Am-Vengeance way.) And the second: I’m telling Alfie to give you a B– in ‘Dad’-ing. The worst part was that B had laughed when he’d seen it, had looked so utterly fond that Jason hadn’t even been able to stay mad at him. Not for too long, anyway.

He’d felt—

Well, he hadn’t known what to feel—how to feel—when he’d found the mug years later, still there, still standing, after death and resurrection separated them. But he’d been at the manor for some reason or other and he’d stumbled across it in B’s study and— 

After all this time, he’d thought. After all this time, his dad had kept it. 

Jason had tried, after that: tried to forgive. To let Bruce in again.

And for a while, he had thought it was enough; he had thought it was enough because it had worked. (No; for a while, it had more than worked—it had been good.)

But the good’s never been able to last, not for Jason. And after the next fight they’d gotten into—one so terrible and bruising and explosive that even Dick, the expert on terrible and bruising and explosive fights with B, had looked shaken on the sidelines, nauseous and reeling and horror-struck to bear witness to the metaphorical blood they both drew—Jason had snuck back into the manor on a day he’d known Bruce would be away at W.E. and he’d stolen the mug right out of B’s study. The old man didn’t fucking deserve it, Jason had thought at the time. Didn’t deserve this tiny piece of Jason’s heart, still here—still his—after everything.

Bruce had never mentioned it—had never confronted him about it.

But Jason knew. He knew Bruce knew who’d taken it. Knew, when the next time they’d been at the Cave together, both tiptoeing around their issues, Bruce had looked at him like—

Well. Jason didn’t have a name for it. But he was certain he’d never seen Bruce look quite like that before, except maybe on the day he’d shoved the Joker in his face and demanded his father make a choice.

Things have gotten… better, since then – slowly, sure, but better – but still Jason hasn’t dared call him “dad” again, even as he calls the other Wayne sons his brothers. Hasn’t dared to wonder if Bruce even still wants that, still wants him to call him “dad” again. Instead, he’d fought to keep things as professional as he could without walking all over his own heart: calls him Batman, now, not B; calls him Bruce, not B; calls him coworker, not family. 

(Bruce hasn’t asked for “dad” again, either.)

Now, though.

Roy wants to marry him. Roy is asking him for forever—Roy is offering him forever—and Jason knows better than anyone how fickle forever can be, knows how little ink on a page can mean when push comes to shove and reality comes calling. He knows better than anyone, and he doesn’t care. He wants forever anyway. He wants, he wants, he wants. 

But Roy knows how fickle forever can be, too. And still he’s asking, and still he’s offering. Still he’s wanting, too. Wanting Jason in this little corner of the world he’d carved out for himself, in his home and his days and his head, in his dreams and in every laugh yet to be built. Wanting Jason here. Wanting Jason to adopt their daughter. And Jason thinks, yes. Yes. He didn’t think he’d ever get here, with all his hang-ups and his baggage and his trust issues, but somewhere along the way he’d proven himself wrong. Roy had proven him wrong. Because here they are; because somehow, he did get here—somehow, they got here.

And Jason’s happy, is the thing—and this is just one more word he’d never thought he’d get to use again. But he is. He is. Roy re-taught him what it means to be so. Jason had been lost, when they’d first found each other—they had both been, really. But Roy had chosen him, had chosen him before Jason had even learned how to choose himself, and Roy hadn’t saved him but he’d walked each step of the road with him by his side anyway and Jason is only here now because of it. And somehow, after all this time, after all their strife–– the second first-person he wants to share this with, like some long-buried instinct, is still Bruce.

It’s a strange thing to realize.

But it’s also what makes up his mind.

Jason goes out of his way to find the original shop he’d bought this very gift from all those years ago: goes out of his way to track down the exact same mug, down to the make and model and shade of color. 

And when it finally arrives in the mail, he draws it carefully out of its box and sets it down and lets himself look at it, side by side with the one that holds all the shadows of his past. 

Jason exhales.

He digs out a marker. Scratches out “greatest” and writes down, haltingly, with forceful strokes, “battiest.” His hand trembles. And in front of “dad,” he etches out, not a tacked-on afterthought but careful and deliberate—

GRAND.

World’s Battiest Granddad. 

The other messages, he neglects to replicate. But it doesn’t matter. The mugs, he thinks, make a perfect set.

Jason doesn’t always remember the good. But the good exists.

The bad, though—he can’t forget the bad. And maybe this is what gives it its power: its power over him. Maybe this is what keeps him tethered here, forever stuck in a moment the rest of the world has moved on from. He can’t forget the bad, but sometimes he forgets that all the bad does is exist, too. It’s a part of him—but it isn’t him. 

He’s starting to remember now. With Roy, he’s starting to remember.

He’s starting to remember—to remind himself of—the good, too. 

Here’s something good: the Wayne Manor library. The familiar comfort of unfamiliar words; the unfamiliar warmth of familiar silence. The way it had settled inside him, like a kind of calm. His first calm in years, really—since days spent watching his mother leave herself long before she left him. You are safe here, Bruce had said the day he brought him home. You will be safe here. 

Jason had not known what he meant, at the time. Had not known what shape safety took, or what those letters spelled out and amounted to away from the harsh Gotham winters. 

But he’d learned.

This is where the good started: the knowing that he could rest. The knowing that someone else, someone other than himself, would keep him safe now. The lock on his bedroom door. The tin full of Pop-Tarts and granola bars Bruce had left by that very door without a word one morning. His mother’s red hoodie, soot-stained and three sizes too big and frayed at the edges, a far cry from Bruce Wayne’s standard—his mother’s hoodie, a staple in his closet, always neatly folded and packed away with the exact same care Alfred showed the rest of Jason’s new designer clothes. Alfred. The smell of freshly-baked garlic bread in the oven. Warm milk on nights he couldn’t sleep. Bruce finding him among stacks of books on nights Bruce couldn’t sleep. Bruce asking, in that quietly stilted voice he used to use when he was trying to respect the fragility of an outcome, if he could read to Jason on those nights—because even in the beginning, even before they’d learned all the little things that made and unmade the other, Bruce had known that this was something cardinal to Jason. This was something sacred.

The good had existed, back then. It still exists now, Jason is certain—even if the past does not, it does in him. It does in the way it changed him—because it did change him. Loving Bruce had changed him. 

Being loved by Bruce had changed him.

There is good here, he thinks. He thinks, he thinks, he thinks. There is good to be found. There is good to be had.

Here is the good: 

A Father’s Day present—the first Jason had ever felt any need or want to buy. A Father’s Day, period—the first Jason had ever felt any need or want to celebrate. 

A father: the first Jason had ever felt any need or want to know.

Here is the good:

A mug. An I love you. A mug—vandalized. An I’m angry at you. An I’m angry at you because I love you. I don’t want to be angry at you. A years-old gift, kept behind closed doors: kept safe, kept loved, kept whole. Do you still love me? Can you still love me?

Can I still love you? 

Here is the good:

Yes, Jason thinks, puts nib to mug, ink to ceramic. Yes, I can.

Chapter Text

Jason is not entirely used to sharing. (This is what happens when a person grows up learning to fight for the right to be.) With Roy, though—sharing might still not come natural, but it comes easy. It comes as something he wants.

So he does.

“Roy,” Jason says, and dares to bring the topic up a few nights after he’d finally allowed himself to welcome the way the word granddad settles in his chest like something that wants to be held. He flips over in bed and hums, nudging his fiancé’s ribcage with his head. 

Without needing to be asked, Roy shifts minutely and pats Jason’s elbow, signaling for him to come on over without words. Roy lets him rest his head where it belongs, by his heart; Roy makes space for him the way he always does—unthinkingly.

Jason exhales. He relaxes; it’s what he knows to do here, in this place that is his. It’s in the quiet moments like these that he thinks he could spend forever in the space between two heartbeats; it’s here that he feels safest: loved and seen and known, laid bare at his most open. This quiet is where he first learned to make peace with himself.

(This quiet is where he first dared to find who he is in the after. It’s where he first learned to forgive himself.)

Forever ends eventually—it has to; reality always comes calling, but Jason takes a moment to savor this second anyway. Then he opens his eyes and comes back to solid ground.

“I, uh.” Jason clears his throat. “I need to go on a quick trip to Gotham this weekend—or soon, anyway; whichever weekend works best for Lian.”

Roy hums, unconcerned. Jason may be out of the Gotham crime scene, for the most part, but that doesn’t mean he’s stepped out of the game completely; he’s still in touch with his people back home, after all, still deeply invested in changing Crime Alley for the better—it’s not unprecedented that he’s had to visit to give the underworld a more personal touch every now and then. It’s the compromise they’d come to when they first took a pushpin to a map and settled on New Haven, Connecticut—a place for them. Somewhere to build a life in—somewhere that’s just theirs. Somewhere to make just theirs. In the end, they’d chosen New Haven for a boat-load of reasons; mostly, though, they’d chosen it because it had made sense to them, and for once, they were the ones calling the shots. But it had also been the choice that felt right—and not just because it’s a reasonable train-ride away from Gotham and Star both in case of emergencies. No, it’s because it also—as luck would have it—happens to be home to both Jason’s first-choice comparative literature department (Yale) and Lian’s best friend from summer camp (Nora). So: their compromise. They haven’t looked back since. 

Well—they haven’t looked back since except for on the occasional trip down memory lane, at least. New Haven might be headquarters to two new vigilantes now, but still they can never seem to stay away from their roots for too long at a time. Gotham lives in Jason’s bones—Roy’s known this for as long as he’s known Jason.

Roy doesn’t mind: Jason always comes back.

(Here’s something else Roy knows, something only Roy knows: Gotham may live in Jason’s bones, but not entirely by choice. And Roy’s partner may not ever be able to escape Gotham, but he sure fucking wants to, sometimes, almost as much as he doesn’t. He loves Gotham—and probably will until the day his second death dawns—but he also can’t forgive her. 

Jason can’t forgive her, and he can’t forget, either: can’t forget all that she’s ever stolen from the palm of his hand. Can’t trust that she won’t take even more, now that he has something he wants to keep.

So the occasional trip down to Gotham’s shores is all Jason can afford her, these days. It’s all he can afford himself.)

“This weekend should be fine,” Roy reassures him. Then he guesses, “Hood stuff?” 

But Jason’s shaking his head. “No,” he says, though he’ll probably end up paying his lieutenants a quick drop-in anyway just to make sure everything’s still smooth-sailing. 

Roy nods. “The bats, then.”

Jason laughs wryly. “Not exactly,” he hedges.

Only then does Roy turn to give him a curious look. “No?” 

Jason winces. “The Waynes,” he offers instead, and the immediate understanding grimace on Roy’s face tells him he knows exactly why this answer earned the previous option a no.

Roy’s brows furrow. “Everything okay?” he asks. “Do you want me to come with you?”

And fuck, Jason loves him. Because want was the right word to use, not need, and Roy gets this, the way he has always gotten Jason. Jason hasn’t needed anyone since he had to grow up about a decade too soon, but still he wants Roy. He wants Roy more than he needs him, and this is maybe exactly why he needs him.

“No, it’s okay,” Jason says and offers him the tiniest quirk of his lips: but thank you. He can face Bruce. “I just—”

He hesitates—Roy doesn’t push. He lets Jason come to him when he’s ready; he always does.

Jason exhales. He doesn’t always know how to do this. He likes to give Bruce shit for never being able to just talk to people, but the truth is that Jason hasn’t quite learned to navigate this particular minefield either. He’s just not much of a talker.

But Roy is an exception, is the exception, and there’s a reason for that. There are a lot of reasons for that. 

“I’m just going to talk to Bruce,” he says finally. And: “I think,” he starts—stops, and swallows. Lets Roy’s easy, open affection keep him grounded and loosen the vice grip around his throat, and this is one of those reasons why. “I think I want to go by Wayne again.”

Roy startles. Of course he does: Roy was there, the day Jason went scorched earth and burnt every last tie between him and Bruce to ashes—every personal tie, at least. Roy was there, before and after and during; he was there every time Jason wondered if he was making a terrible, terrible mistake, and every time Jason decided he wasn’t. And Jason still doesn’t think he’d made a mistake then—he thinks that was exactly what he’d needed, at the time. Space. To himself. For himself. But this is not then, and he’s had his space, and he’s not who he used to be anymore. And the person he is now thinks that he might finally be okay enough to bridge that chasm all over again.

He can’t blame Roy for his skepticism, though. He knows what Roy must be thinking—what he must be seeing. Roy was the one who’d held him through the worst of those nights, after all. The one Jason had turned to. Still, to this day, Roy remains the only person Jason had ever spoken to about that decision—and the only person Jason had ever let see how afraid he’d been: of losing Bruce. 

(Roy’s also the only one who knows that the fear had gone by the time Jason was walking away, dust to dust. The fear had gone. And Little Jay might have once hoped he would never have to know what it meant to lose Bruce, but in the end, Jason had been the one to close that final door. 

In the end, Jason had known: he hadn’t been the only one to lose. And still the world had continued to turn, and still the world had moved on, and so he’d done the same.)

(I lost him, he’d said to Roy once, in the after-dark hours people like them call home, but I found myself. And to himself, he’d thought: I lost him because I couldn’t lose me.)

So: Roy knows. Roy knows every inch of him, every inch back and forth and inside and out, and he knows what it must mean for Jason to decide this now.

“You do?” Roy asks, but he isn’t looking for a response: Jason wouldn’t be saying this if he didn’t mean it. And he wouldn’t be saying it like this. The thought settles, and the sharp surprise is gone as quickly as it appeared. The twinkle in his eye that replaces it is Jason’s favorite; it always will be. “Jason Wayne-Harper, huh?”

Because here’s the thing: Roy is never going to be the man to say no to more people on Jason’s side—whatever his own feelings about them are. What he will do, though, is keep one eye trained on Bruce at all times. Just in case. Guilty until proven innocent, and all that.

Jason shakes his head. “Harper-Wayne, actually,” he corrects, and meets his partner’s eyes steadily. “I want the name we share to go first. I want everyone to know we’re a family, all of us, me, you and Lian.”

His fiancé’s smile softens, opens, and it’s his. This smile is Jason’s and Lian’s alone. “Harper-Wayne it is,” Roy says—murmurs—and three words ring of a thousand.

Jason hears a lifetime in them. He hopes he always will.

And Jason might not always know how to do this, how to open up and ask people in, but Roy’s crafted himself a tailored-to-him key anyway. And Jason’s let him. He’d built himself barricades and borders, built iron gates and armed them all with barbed wire, and then showed Roy how to cross. All of his twelve-feet-tall barriers—all of his lines drawn and boundaries marked—all to keep his own secrets in and everyone else out, and Roy had taken one look at each one and said: I’m here anyway. He’d taken one look at Jason and said: I’m here anyway. Said: I’m here with you anyway. I will love you anyway. I will choose you anyway. 

So maybe Jason doesn’t know how to do a hundred and one things, talking at the tip of the iceberg. But he knows how to love Roy, and he knows how to choose Roy, and he knows how to choose this: them. 

And if Roy’s turned his prison fence into a picket fence, turned looping concertina wire coils into hydrangea shrubs and mango trees, then so he has. 

Jason can’t find it in himself to mind.

Roy offers to sit with him while he makes the call, and Jason is—not for the first time today—abruptly reminded of all the hundred-and-one reasons why he would live and die for this man. Jason doesn’t take him up on it, of course—Lian needs someone to drive her to school, and they can’t exactly call her out on the grounds that ‘her papa’s papa is kind-of maybe sometimes a dickhead and needs to be supervised’—but he loves him for it anyway.

(Roy’s next offer is a promise: one to put an arrow through Mr. I-Am-Vengeance’s goddamn knee the second he comes home to find Jason any worse than he’d left him; it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever almost-done for Jason. At the very least, Jason thinks, no one else would ever think of standing up to Gotham’s first knight for him—no one else would ever weigh his worth against the Bat’s and find him anything but wanting. Terribly, terribly wanting. But Roy would. But Roy does. And Jason, god forbid, believes him.) 

(Jason keeps these things in mind. No matter what—no matter how this ends—Roy is his. Everyone else can be Batman’s, but Roy—Roy is his. Roy chose to be his—just as he chose to be Roy’s.)

He sends Roy and Lian off with packed lunches and three hugs each; the hugs are for them, but they’re for him, too, a little bit. It, unsurprisingly, works—he settles in alone in Roy’s workshop and feels anything but alone. 

Jason has his own study in this house, of course, one he uses whenever he needs a few uninterrupted hours to bang out a lit paper for school, but if he’s being honest (and honest comes easier and easier these days), he prefers it in here. He likes being able to look up and find all these little traces of his love—a spare trucker hat here, a used mug there, stray Post-It notes everywhere. Traces of their love.

So he looks—so he finds them.

Then he breathes in—once, twice, deeply—and tells himself he’s got this. He does.

Well, of course he does: Jason’s turning twenty-seven this year—he’s not exactly a lost bird finding his way back to his own two feet anymore. He’s twenty-seven, twenty-seven with a nest and a life and a child of his own now, a child that calls him papa. He has someone he loves, someone he would start wars for—someone he would end wars for. Someone he wants to share his life with. He has a family he would kill for, bleed for, give his whole fucking life for. And he hasn’t been that hurt child in a very, very long time—the one who’d died angry and who’d come back angrier yet; the one who’d woken up vengeful and abandoned and desperate. 

(He hasn’t been desperate in so long at all. Hasn’t had to be. Hasn’t felt like a kid without a lifeboat, a son without a dad—or worse yet, a son with a dad who can no longer look him in the eye.)

All things considered—it should be over, he thinks. He should be over this. He shouldn’t care about Bruce anymore, shouldn’t want to, shouldn’t spend far too much of his time wondering what Bruce thinks of him now or if he even still thinks about him at all. He shouldn’t. But if it’s water under the bridge then Jason is slipping and sinking and drowning and swimming in it, and—

And it isn’t over. Not for him. And maybe not, he thinks, for Bruce, either.

He breathes.

Dials a number that still, after all these years, feels like second nature: feels like habit, like letting ingrained muscle memory take over. Hi, dad. It’s me. It’s Jay.

The phone rings once, twice, then clicks as it’s answered. An old habit of B’s. For a moment, there’s silence over the line, enough to make Jason wonder if Bruce knows who he’d just picked up for. They might be in each other’s lives again, but they don’t do this: Jason doesn’t call, not like this. Not on this line, at least—Bruce’s personal one. He calls Batman, only, and Batman answers, every time, and that answer is always Hood. 

(This is who they are to each other now. It’s Batman who still always comes when he calls.)

But Jason doesn’t call Bruce. Does Bruce even have his personal number saved, on this phone? Does he even remember it?

“Jason,” Bruce says, finally, cautiously—an answer to the unspoken. “Is everything alright?”

Another breath.

(What does it say about them that that’s the first thing Bruce thinks to ask, when his son calls to talk to him?)

No, Jason thinks of saying. No. But yes. But no. I’m getting married. I’m getting married to the love of my life and everything’s better than alright; everything’s more alright than it’s been since Mom died and I died and all the rest of it went to hell. He’s talking, of course, about Catherine—the mom who raised him, the mom he chooses. He makes his own choices now. Everything’s better than alright; everything’s sunshine and rainbows like I’ve never known it—like I’ve never dared to know it—and I don’t know if I can ask you to be there. I don’t know if you want to be there.

And I will be okay if you aren’t, but I still want you there.

Where does he even begin? How does he even begin?

“Yes,” Jason says, because it is yes. Everything else comes after—dominoes tumbling one after another. “Hey, quick question,” he blurts out, the first domino falling, even though there’s nothing quick or casual about this—not to him, at least. “When you had your legal team bring me back to life all those years ago, did you bring me back as Jason Peter Todd or as Jason Peter Todd-Wayne?”

A breath. Two. “Jason,” Bruce chokes out, “what?”

The Great Batman, undone. Jason would laugh if he could. He swallows instead. He shrugs, even if Bruce can’t see him, and tries to make it seem like an inconsequential thing. Tries to make it out like he doesn’t care either way. “Just wondering.”

(He hadn’t cared to know, once; hadn’t cared to find out. Whatever the answer might have been, it hadn’t mattered to him then. It does now.)

Bruce is silent for another second, or maybe three. “The second,” he says eventually – and even more cautiously. “I didn’t… you died as Todd-Wayne. They thought… they thought it’d be easier. To bring you back the same way.”

“Hm,” Jason says. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Bruce echoes, even more choked still.

Jason’s wondering the same thing. Okay? What the hell does that even mean, Todd. Or Todd-Wayne. Whatever.

“Yeah,” he says anyway. Doubles down on it like he means it—and he means it. “Okay.”

Bruce exhales. “I,” he starts, then stops. But ‘okay’ must mean something to him, at least, because he makes himself try again. Awkwardly—unsurely—he offers up a piece of himself like he thinks he can still trust this second son of his with it: “They said it’d be easier. But I pay them enough not to care about easy. The real truth is—I wanted it. For you to be Jason Todd-Wayne. I still… I still do.”

Jason inhales, long and slow. Okay, he thinks again, and this time he doesn’t have to wonder anymore. He knows what it means. “Okay,” he repeats out loud. His eyes keep going back and back again to the photo on Roy’s favorite workbench; yeah, that photo, the one Roy keeps framed and in pride of place, the one of their little family of three all huddled together at Li’s latest dance recital looking like none of them have ever known the rain, eyes giddy-bright and crinkled up with laugh lines in the dark. Inhale—exhale. Jason doesn’t care for the mirror much, but still he’s pretty sure he’s never found that kind of unweighted joy on his face when he’s looking at himself; it’s only ever on pictures. Family pictures. 

Another inhale, another exhale. Lian’s dad inhales, and Bruce’s son exhales. Jason breathes.

And then he suggests, abruptly and all at once, “We should get lunch.”

A beat. “Lunch?” Bruce echoes like a broken record, like he isn’t some sort of detective. Like he doesn’t know what this means, either, let alone what it’s supposed to.

“Lunch,” Jason reaffirms. He can’t tell Bruce this over the phone—he can’t do that to him. And he can do that to his dad even less. “This Saturday? There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“And it can’t wait,” Jason finishes.

(Batman, Bruce, still always comes when he calls.)

The rest of the week inches by like snails on asphalt, and still, still, Saturday comes quickly—too quickly, maybe.

Jason lets it.

The morning he’s due to leave, Jason waffles over his options for a full hour before he thinks fuck it and boxes the two World’s Greatest Battiest mugs securely for delivery. He makes a pit stop at the post-office on his way to hitting the road for Gotham and makes the package out to an Alfred Pennyworth.

Before he mails it in, though, he rips a page out of the notebook he keeps in his glovebox and jots down the only message he can:

Alf—

Inside, you’ll find a keepsake from the past—one that might still hold true even now—and another for the future. I’m sure you’ll know what to do with them when you see them. I’d apologize for doing it this way and taking the coward’s way out, but, well, I am my father’s son: and he was a coward to the grave. But please tell B to take good care of them for me.

Thank you for everything, A. I don’t know where I would be without you, but it certainly wouldn’t be here. And I’d like to think that here is where I’ve finally found my peace.

J.

He folds the letter into a tiny square and slips it into the box for Alfred to find; he closes it all back up and seals it with just a little too much tape. In the end, he pays extra for same-day shipping to make sure it’ll get there in time to welcome Bruce home from their lunch. 

And, yeah, he knows he’s just hours away from seeing Bruce himself, alright? He goddamn knows. But this way, he can comfort himself with the knowledge that even if things go to shit today—even if everything goes to shit today, even if they walk out of that door today still unable to understand each other—at least he’ll have an out. At least he’ll have the option to call his grandfather up and ask him to keep the mugs and whatever stupid gesture they’re supposed to convey on hold for him.

Coward’s answer or not, it’s the only one he has.

Jason makes it to their meeting spot early—even after trying not to. He’d probably feel worse about this if not for the fact that he can already see that Bruce seems to have arrived early, too—earlier, even, than his standard “5-minutes-early is on time” Bat-protocol.

And there are about a hundred ways Jason’s seen this play out on the backs of his eyelids; and there are about a hundred ways this could play out. If he were still trying to fit into the shoes of the rebellious child, he thinks he’d break the news like he wants a name change after all—like he wants to leave Wayne behind only to tell Bruce the whole of it after the damage had already been done. Once, he might’ve justified this; might’ve called it necessary, even—a ruse all to make sure he’s not the only one who still wants him to hold on to the Wayne name with bleeding hands. 

But there is no ‘necessary’ here; Jason’s already gotten his answer—and anything more would be spite.

So he doesn’t play the rebellious child.

(He doesn’t play the rebellious child because he doesn’t want to play the rebellious child—not anymore. He wouldn’t be here to look Bruce in the eye at all if he were still nursing that age-old grudge, after all—and he isn’t: he isn’t nursing that grudge. And he doesn’t want to be.)

The thing is. The thing is. The angry child in him is finally at rest, finally at ease and at peace, and he no longer wakes up even at the sight of the father he once called his.

Calls his.

So instead, when he spots Bruce already waiting for him at the cafe—their cafe, the one they once made theirs, and he wonders though he shouldn’t if Bruce has ever been here with any of the rest of his Bat-brood—he doesn’t go looking for the hostility that once held him so hostage. He doesn’t go searching. And when he walks over and finds Bruce tense in his seat, too still to be the calm before the storm—and it’s this stillness that tells Jason he’s uneasy, because Batman would never be caught dead fidgeting—he doesn’t make one last joke. He can’t bring himself to. 

(“I pay them enough not to care about easy.”)

Because Bruce had been the one to propose their once-loved cafe as neutral ground. And Bruce is the one sitting in their favorite booth—the one choosing to. There are two mugs already on the table: a mocha latte, because Bruce had once held Jason closer than at an arm’s length away—close enough, certainly, to tell his son that his ruse of preferring black coffee had always been just that: a ruse. And Jason’s favorite: because Jason had once trusted Bruce enough to tell him everything, too. 

(Jason’s favorite: because Bruce remembers it even now.)

(“I wanted it: for you to be Jason Todd-Wayne. I still do.”)

Jason takes all of this in in the span of two seconds. Jason takes it in, and opens up with this:

“Hey, dad.” 

For once, he can meet Bruce’s honesty halfway. He can give Bruce this.

Bruce splutters, starts coughing on air and wheezing for purchase. His eyes go terribly wide—painfully, vulnerably so—in a way Batman’s never would.

Jason, generously, doesn’t laugh in his face for it. (And he only kind-of wants to.)

“J–Jay?” Bruce stammers. “You—did you just—did you just call me—what?”

“Don’t strain yourself, old man,” Jason quips, as if old man isn’t just another way to tell this man he’s still his son. As if the name Jay doesn’t still do things to Jason’s own heartstrings, too, coming from the father who’d known him best. It’s been a long, long time since he last felt connected to the carefree youth and wide-eyed innocence of Jay—but still it feels like coming home and coming back to himself, just a little bit. “It’s just a word.”

But it isn’t. It never is. And the look Bruce gives him tells him he knows it, too. “Jay,” he repeats, insistent but–– gentle: reverent. A lasting, enduring thing. Like a father’s open-door policy in his Robin days; like the first time Bruce ever called him sweetheart. “You’re…”

Jason lets him flounder for a second—okay, maybe two—longer before taking pity on him. “I hope you don’t mind the drop-by,” he says casually. “I promise I’m not here to get up to no good. Scout’s honor.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” Bruce says, quietly, even though they both know that Jason isn’t really asking for his approval at all, and neither needs nor wants it. Not anymore; probably not ever again. The streets are still painted in blood by his hand—the canvas to his artist—and Jason still considers each death worth it.  

Still considers each death deserved.

(Jason isn’t asking for his approval, but he isn’t asking for forgiveness, either. It’s not Bruce’s place to offer him that.)

“This is still your home, Jason,” Bruce adds, insistent, and Jason wonders if there are more words to unearth there, somewhere. More words to unbury. 

(Maybe, Jason ponders, maybe what he’s asking for is acceptance. Maybe what he’s asking for is this.)

The first time Bruce had tried to bridge the years and the shadows between them, the first time Jason had ever heard him say the words I’m sorry to him in the aftermath of his rebirth–– he’d thought, then, that it had come too little, too late. The bridge had already been burned, and of all the things Jason knew how to do, he knew how to hold a grudge like a fucking pro. So he’d done what he did best and turned away: he’d taken Bruce’s knock on his door and left it unanswered, left it unacknowledged. Left Bruce’s outstretched hand and well-loved mug buried in his least favorite safe-house; left their relationship, and the way he still called out for dad in his weakest moments, buried in the backest backs of his mind. There had been no room for forgiveness, back then. 

And then. And then he met Roy. And then he met Lian. And then Lian started calling him Jay-jay and turning to him for hugs and insisting he needed to tuck her in at night and he started asking himself how the hell he became the kind of person someone thinks they can trust around their child. (Or trust with their child.) And then Lian was skipping over to him at school pick-up zones and introducing him to Mrs. C as The Bonus Dad and arguing with him over the radio and asking him if he loved her. And then there were drawings in crayon framed on his bedside table and report cards on his fridge and suddenly he was a dad even if she wasn’t calling him it, not yet. And then, and then, and then he was letting himself think of Bruce without all the familiar anger: and then he was letting himself wonder. He’d wondered how Bruce was doing. And he’d thought––

Bruce had been learning, too, when they’d first come into each other’s lives. He’d been dad and he’d made mistakes, yes, but he’d still been dad at the heart of it all. And out of all the mistakes he’d made, out of all the terrible, terrible ways he’d let Jason down, this was not one of them: Jason had never not known that he was loved. 

No, Jason thinks. It had never been love that was lost.

Bruce had been dad and there had been love there, so much of it it could’ve sated a dry fucking desert, and Jason wonders what else he’d been missing all this time. At what point do you realize your father is human? And how do you accept that he is? How do you reconcile the two? How do you forgive him for not having all the answers, for not making all the right choices and not knowing what you needed him to know? How do you forgive him for making mistakes he never meant to?

(How do you forgive him for not being who you thought he was? How do you forgive him for being just like you?)

Jason doesn’t know. But he’s dad now to a little girl who calls him such and he doesn’t have all the answers either; he’s certain he makes missteps all the time, too. He loves her, though, always, through every misstep, and that’s the one thing he knows even when he knows nothing else.

Here’s something else he knows: 

Bruce loves in the same way. Maybe this is where they converge: maybe neither of them have ever been able to do anything half-assed. But this is why Jason can sit here now and think that his dad might—yes—still love him all the same, even after all the blows they have and haven’t exchanged. Even after all the rest of it—and even if this is the first time Jason’s allowed himself to think of Bruce in that way in years. 

(Is love enough?)

His dad loves him, and his dad is telling him he doesn’t mind as if they’ve never stood on opposite sides. And his dad is talking to him now like Jason’s never walked away from Gotham and never walked away from him—or that if he has, then Bruce has waited by the shoreline for him all this time.

His dad is telling him he’s still home.

And—is he? Are you still talking about Gotham? Jason watches Bruce watch him. Or are you still my home, too? 

He knows the answer—his answer—is no. His home is elsewhere now. And it’s dangerous and it’s reckless and about a dozen other terrible things to build homes out of people—and Jason’s learned this first-hand, knows it by rote now—but still he thinks, and still he feels: there could be no safer place for a piece of his heart to reside than inside of Roy’s. Than inside of Lian’s.

(He still remembers the first time he’d ever stayed over at theirs; still remembers how they’d made it feel like someplace he could rest in even before he’d had the audacity to call it his place, too. That night, with his family all together under one roof—because they’d been family even then—he’d dreamed in color again for the first time since Robin’s magic deserted him. He’d dreamed of red—red, not blood—and his daughter’s laughter. 

They’re the only ones who have never once been afraid of the monster in his head, not even back when he’d still known to fear it. But that monster isn’t what they see when they look at him; it isn’t what they think of. They’re his tent, his caravan, his harbor to dock at. Home and homeland both. Camp Red-Arse. A map and a driveway; a wraparound porch and a front door. An open front door.)

So the answer is no, and it’s been no: Bruce hasn’t been home to him in six too many years now. Still, Jason wonders. Still, Jason wants to know. Because Jason may have another life now but Bruce is here anyway, and he’d dropped everything just because Jason asked. Jason called him dad and Bruce didn’t say no and he doesn’t seem to want to say no. And at the end of it all, Jason’s left right here, in the middle of the road: asking himself now if he still has a home away from home even after all those six too many years. 

Bruce, he thinks, has yet to stop watching him.

Jason lets the thought that this could still be his sit, and he finds he doesn’t quite mind. And he blows out a breath and watches all those questions, all those years, go out the window with it. 

I was in the neighborhood, he thinks of telling Bruce now, but the truth is he wasn’t, and he can’t say it, can’t make light of this. For the first time in six too many years, he wants Bruce to know that this means something to him. He wants Bruce to know him again. “I wanted to see you,” is what he ends up saying, each word chosen with intention, and they feel right. Better yet, the words come easy—and that’s maybe the biggest surprise of all. “Like I said on the phone. There’s something I wanted to tell you.”

Bruce straightens. “Oh?” 

Jason nods mutely. Deliberately, he bridges his hands together atop the table and cups his drink; the titanium of his ring—durable, practical for his night-job but the real meaning of it is for him, as reliable as his love for the man who gave it to him—glistens in a way impossible to miss, especially for someone like Bruce.

Bruce, tellingly, goes awfully, awfully still.

Jason smiles. Sees Roy’s smile in his head, still, every time he closes his eyes. “You know I’m seeing Roy.”

“I… do,” Bruce says, “yes,” but the words come out rattled and stilted and his eyes can’t seem to tear themselves away from Jason’s hands. He studies the ring like he’s on a particularly important stake-out. No: he studies the ring like he’s on his last stake-out.

“Well.” Jason exhales. “He, uh. He asked me to marry him.”

Bruce’s eyes finally look away, but only to find Jason’s.

“I said yes,” Jason says, needlessly. The ring speaks for itself.

“Oh,” the revelation catches in Bruce’s throat anyway, like he needed the words to be said after all. Like he needed it put in plain language. Like he needed to hear it. “You’re… you’re getting married.”

Jason could make fun of him, but also he can’t. He doesn’t. “I am,” he agrees, just as quietly. “I’m getting married.”

“That’s… oh,” Bruce says again, hardly breathing, “that’s wonderful, Jay,” and he sounds like he means it no matter how many times he’ll shit on Oliver Queen. He blinks, two or three or four times, like he once thought he’d never get to see this day. (It occurs to Jason only later that that probably is exactly what Bruce had thought—that that’s what Bruce had lived with, the truth as he’d believed it in its awful shape.) “Would it—would it be entirely too obvious and derivative to say congratulations?”

Jason looks at him. “I mean. You’d be the first to say it,” he responds with a too-nonchalant shrug. Bruce is also the first person he’s told, but he doesn’t say this.

“You—” Bruce inhales sharply, and this time he doesn’t need the words to be said at all. He hears it either way. He expels a barely-steady breath. “Well, then. Congratulations, Jaylad.” The light in his eyes runs awash with the quietest sort of contentment—all hushed gratitude and beholden wonder. Gruffly—but no less candidly—he adds, “I’m so happy for you, Jay.”

Jason swallows—and smiles again. So am I, he thinks; happier than he would have once thought possible, when all he’d seen was still green. “Thank you, Bruce,” he says; and he means it, too, even if it’s been years and years since the days when he would hang on Bruce’s every word and live and die on his approval. “I was wondering—I mean. If my last name is still Todd-Wayne…”

Bruce hmms, but it comes out weak. He’s hardly moving. 

“Harper,” Jason tells him finally. “I want to be Jason Harper-Wayne.”

Bruce makes a sound like all the air’s been punched out of him; he makes a sound like he might’ve let himself cry if he were someone else. If he were anyone else.

“Jason Harper-Wayne,” he says, so softly and carefully and without daring to look a gift horse in the mouth. He repeats it to himself once or twice—or thrice—as if in a daydream. He clears his throat, but it doesn’t help; his voice still comes out frayed, fractured. “Jay, I…”

“I know,” Jason says. “I…” He keeps his eyes steady through an uneven breath of his own. Treads on and leaves the crux of it behind him: unspoken, though acknowledged. They both know. “I’ll probably need a lawyer. We, uh. We don’t have an exact date for the ceremony yet—soon, though—but we wanted to get all of the red tape out of the way first.”

Bruce clears his throat again. He straightens and latches on to the change of subject gratefully. “Yes, of course,” he says with all the gravity this situation warrants. “I—you can use my legal team. They’re already familiar with your case, and I’d…” He hesitates. “I’d be honored to be able to help you with this.”

(Jason hadn’t been the one to tell Bruce when he and Roy first started dating; Jason hadn’t told Bruce at all. He’d let Bruce find out on his own and that had been that.)

(Except that hadn’t been that. Bruce had once thought that he would never get to be on the other end of Jason telling him anything again.)

Jason flashes him a brief—real—smile. “Thanks, B,” he says again, tentatively, and it’s as close to an I–trust–you as they’re going to get today. B. “Do you need any other information from me?”

Bruce shakes his head. “But I’ll let you know if anything comes up,” he promises. “I can brief the lawyers later this afternoon; it shouldn’t take long to hear back from them.”

“Sounds good,” Jason agrees. 

“Of course. I’m… I’m glad you told me,” Bruce says, and it doesn’t sound like just something to say. Luckily, he doesn’t seem to be looking for a response. He pauses, then clearly makes up his mind enough to add, “But does ‘Harper’ have to come first?”

Jason stares at him incredulously. “Is that a joke right now?” he says. “Is Batman joking? Is that still allowed?” 

Bruce stares at him stoically—the way he does only when he’s trying to look stoic, and who the hell would’ve thought Jason could still read him even now—and Jason breaks, snorting. He says, “Well, I mean, yeah. It’s the only name I’m going to be sharing with them, so, you know, it kind-of does have to go first. If you really want to die on this hill, you’re going to have to let Roy take the Wayne name too.”

Bruce doesn’t immediately laugh the idea away. There’s something about the look on his face that has Jason pausing right along with him.

“Wait, seriously?” Jason arches a skeptical eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re actually considering it.”

Bruce looks almost disturbingly earnest. “I want you to be a part of my family,” he insists, “but regardless of how poorly I’ve succeeded at letting you know this, you never really stopped being a part of it at all. So, more importantly—I want to be a part of yours, if you’ll have me.” He exhales. “And I know that Roy’s a big part of it.”

“And Lian,” Jason reminds him, because he didn’t ask for a child but he can no longer imagine his days without her.

“And Lian,” Bruce nods like it was never in question—like he never once doubted that Jason could be good for a child. He smiles, then, quietly and heart-achingly hopeful. “I’d be honored to have them both take my name, if they want it.” And because he’s at least partly the reason Jason grew up learning to be a grade-A little shit (the other part comes from Alfred, no matter how many people Jason’s grandfather has fooled into thinking he’s all-work-no-play), Bruce narrows his eyes and tacks on, “At least neither of them are going around calling themselves Queen.”

Jason can’t help it: he laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs like he hasn’t laughed with his father in years, in a lifetime and a half and more. He laughs like he used to love laughing with this person he still knows.

He laughs and says, jokes right back, “Lucky you.”

Bruce suppresses the tiniest smile: a smile that looks, in the right light, just like that home away from home. He can’t seem to look away from the marvel in front of him: his second son, his returned son, alive and aglow like death has never known him, has never dared to know him. “Lucky me,” Bruce echoes, agrees, and—oh, this is why Jason had once been so proud to be his son.

“I’ll talk it over with Roy,” Jason relents. “But it’s his choice whether or not you’ll be getting two new Waynes. So we’ll see.”

“Like I said,” Bruce says: Lucky me. And the chuffed little upturn of his lips speaks for itself, because this one isn’t a joke at all.

Jason stifles a pleased look of his own and clears his throat. “Harper would still go first, though,” he warns. “We’d be the Harper-Waynes.”

Bruce, to his credit, only looks a little put out by this. “Well, I suppose I can live with that,” he says, but his face betrays his satisfaction. The look in his eyes is still just a little—or maybe a lot—wonderstruck.

Jason remembers what Bruce’s wonder used to feel like, back when he still knew it, knew it like the back of his own goddamn hand: knew it running around the manor, laughter trailing behind him, asking B for his first hug, then his second, then his third. Bruce used to give him this look all the time. Used to let him see it, a daybreak in motion, because wonder is meant to be seen. 

Bruce used to watch him like Bruce was the lucky one.

Jason thinks of that kid now. That kid had loved Bruce. Sometimes, Jason thinks that not all of that kid went away when he died. “B,” he starts, then stops. Then starts again: “I know I said we don’t have a date yet, but…” He meets that wonder in his dad’s eyes head-on and thinks that there might still be a place for it here after all, in this tiny cradle of peace they’ve carved out between them. “But we will, and. And I want you there. When we get there. I want—I want you there.”

I want you there, Jason thinks, on the happiest day of my life.

Bruce looks at him like that again: like he’s the lucky one. “Then I’ll be there,” he says, and there’s no lapse, no calendar to check, no exhale. No hesitation. This moment feels like they do, for just a second—suspended in time.

(They used to talk about this. Jason knows Bruce used to dream of this. Of getting to see his son find the one Bruce might finally be able to trust with his Robin-gives-me-magic heart, of getting to see his son at the end of that aisle—of getting to see his son so happy. 

Jason’s dad had been open about these things, once upon a time. Jason can only imagine now that Bruce had buried that dream with his child the same day he’d locked that free-spoken part of himself away, but—)

Then Jason smiles, and Bruce lets the breath go. “You want me there,” Bruce repeats, because he needs Jason to hear it, “and I’m there.”

(But Jason has always been Bruce’s miracle. This, Jason hasn’t yet clued on to—but Bruce knows. Oh, Bruce knows.)

The wonder never leaves. Jason thinks he gets it—he feels much the same way, after all.

(For the first time in years, he doesn’t feel worlds apart from the man he once chose and asked to be his dad.)

There is so much history here, between and around and beneath them. There is so much still to come.

(“I know you don’t need me of all people to ask you this,” Bruce says, later, before they part. “But I need to ask—I need to hear it from you.” He pauses just to look at Jason with enough intensity to bring whole buildings down. “You’re happy, Jay, aren’t you?”

Bruce doesn’t say the word love, but he doesn’t have to.

Jason considers him, his dad. How does he say this, he thinks—how does he put something that was not meant for words into words? How does he tell Bruce that he’s happy, yes, but he’s been happy? That’s not new. What’s new is this: what’s new is that he trusts it. By the gods, does he trust it. But how does he tell his father this? How does he tell Bruce that all the poets were lying—Roy doesn’t make him whole, but he makes him feel a little more like himself, a little more like the ground is solid and the sky is blue and the world yet turns. How does he tell Bruce that Roy makes that world move?

Well, by answering the question to start with, Jason supposes.

“Yes,” he says, the way prayers were built to be said. “I am.”

Bruce smiles: a father, if a father is a man who finds joy in his child’s. “Yes,” Bruce agrees, “you are.”)