something about the sound of you
jason todd x reader
summary: falling asleep on facetime with him when he’s away on a mission <3 soft, but a tiny bit angsty because jason is emotionally constipated (affectionate) and reader misses him a lot.
Your phone lights up at 2:47 AM with a FaceTime call. Jason.
You were already awake. You've been awake for hours, lying in the dark with the fan on, doing that thing where your mind won’t settle, but sleep won’t come either. Just existing in the gap between. You haven’t heard from him in days, and your thumb hits accept before the first ring is done.
It takes a second for the call to connect, for the black screen to resolve into a dark room—a safehouse, maybe, or a motel. The only light is the glow of a joint between his fingers, flickering softly against his face.
His eyes are low and glassy from the smoke. They’re pretty in a way he'd hate you for noticing, lashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.
"Hi,” he says. His voice is rough, scratching raw against your ear through the shitty phone speaker.
“Hey.” You pull the blanket up over your shoulders and tuck yourself against the headboard. You’re mirror images of each other now, propped up in separate beds in separate cities. “You okay?”
It's a stupid question. You know it the second it leaves your mouth. He looks exhausted. It shows in his shoulders, in how stiff he is. Every muscle is locked in place because letting go means maybe not being able to pull himself back together.
Whatever this job is, it’s clearly eating him alive.
His jaw shifts. For a second, it looks like he might say something sharp. Instead, he takes a hit, holds it, then lets it go slow.
"Yeah," he says through the exhale, smoke curling up past his face. “No. I don't know."
He pauses, and all you can hear is his breathing. It’s deliberate, measured. A pattern you’ve come to recognize: him trying to manually override his own nervous system. He does it after nightmares, after patrol, after those long silences that mean he went somewhere in his head that he can’t easily get back from.
“Can’t sleep,” he adds eventually, like a concession.
You don’t push or ask why. He won’t give you that. Not yet anyway.
The line goes quiet, and usually you can sit with it. But after the last few days, it’s harder, and a quiet me neither slips out before you can swallow it back.
That’s when he really looks at you. His gaze catches on the old shirt you’re wearing, his shirt, then drifts over the rest of you: messy hair, bitten lips, the dullness of your skin.
A frown pulls his brows together, the edge in his voice softening. “What’s going on?”
You hesitate. You didn’t want to tell him this stuff; you tried to tuck it away for a reason. Because how do you tell him you’re having a hard time without him when he’s out there risking his life every day? It feels like adding weight to someone already carrying too much. It feels ridiculous.
But those hazy, steady eyes stay on you, patient, waiting, and they pull the truth right out.
"It's just a lot right now," you finish after a while, sounding more vulnerable than you meant to.
"Yeah." He taps ash off the joint somewhere offscreen. "I know exactly what you mean."
And the knot in your chest finally starts to loosen. You can’t believe you almost didn’t tell him. Of course he didn’t dismiss you or downplay your feelings. He never has. For all his stubbornness, all the pulling away and going quiet, he’s never once made you feel small for needing him, even when you’d convinced yourself he would.
The next drag he takes is slower. Not so desperate.
He glances at the joint, then back at you. "Not really."
He holds your gaze for a long moment. You can almost see him deciding whether to say it. When he does, it’s quiet, almost boyish: “Keep talking.”
The weight of that settles beneath your ribs, steady. Jason Todd, who would rather bleed out in an alley than admit he needs someone, is asking you to keep talking because maybe your voice is doing what the smoke can’t.
You tell him about the book you've been trying to finish, how you keep rereading the same page because your brain won't hold the sentences. You tell him about the rain earlier, how it smelled. You tell him about the stupid thing that made you laugh three days ago that you saved to tell him and then forgot until right now.
He doesn't interrupt. The joint burns down between his fingers, forgotten, and his blinks start getting longer. He sinks lower against the pillows without seeming to realize it, the camera tilting with him until he's on his side with one hand resting on the mattress. Close to the phone, close to you.
You keep going. You tell him you miss him. You tell him the bed's too big without him.
His eyes flutter closed, and his breathing slows, deepens, losing that tight, controlled edge. He doesn’t open them again.
You smile, small and soft. He’s finally asleep. Truly asleep—the kind that doesn’t come easy, the kind that never seems to stay.
You don't hang up, just turn the brightness down, set the phone on the pillow beside you, and close your eyes to the sound of him breathing. It’s not the same as having him here. Not his weight on the mattress, not his arm heavy across your waist, not his heartbeat under your ear.
But it’s him, alive and still yours, even from miles away.
You fall asleep twenty minutes later, and the call runs until morning.
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