Something that had gone into the ground at fifteen and resurfaced at nineteen as a question nobody knew how to answer.
Dick had kept his distance.
He’d told himself it was operational. Told himself Jason was volatile. That whatever had brought him back had left seams in him that split under pressure. That proximity would make things worse.
He told himself a lot of things in those years.
None of them were the reason.
The reason was simpler and worse.
He was afraid of what Jason’s eyes would do when they stayed.
They had found the reservoir during Jason’s Robin training.
A run gone long. A door in a wall that Jason had noticed because Jason noticed everything, and Dick had said we shouldn’t, and Jason had already gone through.
The first time, it had just been curiosity.
The third, they brought a flashlight.
By the fifth, they knew where the stone dipped under the water and how long they could stay under before it mattered.
They came back six times before Jason died.
It had been theirs in the way things become yours when they’re taken rather than given. Chosen rather than assigned. It existed outside the family’s architecture entirely.
“I used to come back,” Jason said.
Dick looked at the water.
Then Jason almost smiled.
“You used to make me swim laps in this thing.”
He pulled off his jacket. His shirt. The rest without commentary. Economical. Complete.
Jason undressed the way he moved through rooms, like his body was simply a thing he lived in rather than managed.
No awareness of being watched.
He heard the sound of Jason entering the water. The sharp breath of cold immersion. The displacement of water against stone.
They swam the reservoir the way they had as teenagers.
Not racing. Not performing.
Just moving through the same dark water in the same old dark.
At one point Dick floated on his back and looked up at the vaulted ceiling and let his mind go blank. Not empty, exactly, but unguarded. For the first time in years.
Jason was somewhere to his left.
When it happened, it wasn’t sudden.
There was a moment. Barely there. Dick could have turned his head away. Could have let it pass like everything else he had chosen not to touch.
Not urgent. Not desperate.
The kind of kiss that happens when two people have been circling something long enough that stopping feels like more effort than continuing.
When they separated, Jason looked at him.
Which was its own kind of answer.
baratheonpilled
gummygunk
