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The Beach

⤿ Jason Todd x Ex! Wonder Girl! Reader

“I’m not going anywhere. Not with my life. Not with anything. I look at where I am and it’s just—circles. Same fights. Same city. Same you, same me, doing the same thing to each other every time I come home, and neither of us ever says what it is, and neither of us ever stops.” ⤿ In which Jason is breaking his own heart and yours at the same time.

Tags/CW: MDNI, 18+, smut, dry humping, clothed grinding, clothed fingering, handjob, semi-public sex, outdoor sex, sex on motorbike, cumming in pants (f&m), angst, infidelity-adjacent themes, emotional hurt/no comfort, brief injury mention, batfamily chaos. (12k words)

Bat-burger stinks of grease today. Like someone deep fried a rotting tire and then, somehow there’s even layers to it, like they also tried to cover it up with cheap cologne. And this is, unfortunately, most typical for Gotham fast food places, whether or not it may be criminal for other cities in the states.

The second the automatic doors slide open, the scent hits full force—grease, salt, old fryer oil soaked into the walls so deeply it probably lives in the building’s foundation now. Underneath it sits the sweeter smell of artificial vanilla from the milkshake machine and the sharp sting of industrial cleaner that definitely isn’t winning the fight.

The whole place buzzes under fluorescent lights and overlapping noise. Kids yell over cardboard Batman masks. Someone drops a tray near the counter. Oil crackles somewhere behind the kitchen window like steady rain.

You check the time on your phone, 7:33 pm, too early for the night to have touched the top scrapes of skyscrapers, but too late for lunch nevertheless.

You’re in no position to complain.

Dick shoots you a nasty side eye when you try to pick up your trail from the cashier counter, one that slowly forms in his lips before anywhere else dragging down his face and causing his eyes to widen. As if to say “are you out of your mind?” Then, he claims the sole available booth furthest from the families.

“So, now, tell me why you look like hell,” he says warmly, smiling in that overbearing way, sliding a tray toward you.

There are two burgers wrapped in black paper with little yellow bat symbols stamped over the top, fries dumped carelessly into cardboard containers, and one milkshake already sweating onto the table. Somehow, he still manages to look annoyingly put together despite wearing a hoodie that definitely belongs to someone else —Bruce—and sunglasses shoved into his hair indoors.

You drop into the booth across from him with a tired groan, shrugging your jacket off your shoulders.

Pursing your lips to the side of your face, you eye him before sighing dramatically, your shoulders dropping in the process.

“Real nice Dick, thanks.”

“Come on.” Dick leans back slightly, studying you in that irritatingly observant way all of the Batfamily has. Eyebrows raised, sympathetic eyes “You’ve got the look.”

“What look?”

“The Jason look.”

You stare at him flatly, “That isn’t a thing.”

“It absolutely is a thing.”

He steals a fry from your container before you can stop him. You slap his hand away too late, and he grins around the stolen fry like a twelve-year-old.

“And how would you know?” You shrug.

“Well for starters, you didn’t even react when I played Megan Thee Stallion in the Batmobile last night, so yuppp,” Dick pops his lips together. “I knew something was off then and there.”

Honestly, fair enough.

You peel the wrapper off your burger slowly, mostly to buy time. Grease immediately soaks through the paper onto your fingertips. Batburger, however somehow makes everything taste incredible while also making you feel vaguely closer to cardiac arrest.

Dick waits.

That’s the problem with him. Jason often bulldozes through silences until they crack apart, but Dick sits inside them comfortably. Patient. Relaxed. Like eventually you’ll fill the space yourself because humans apparently find silence unbearable after long enough.

But, despite that, Dick is also, for the most and untold part, physically impatient. He taps his foot nervously on the floor and crosses his arms across his chest. Puckers his lips and widens his baby blues at you until you crack.

And, it doesn’t take long until you do.

Unfortunately, he’s right. This is a Jason issue.

“It starts last Tuesday,” you mutter finally, clearing your throat.

Dick’s expression changes instantly—not dramatic, just quieter. More attentive. A little too happy that you’re choosing to open up. Like you had any other choice to begin with.

“Tuesday,” he repeats casually, reaching for his drink. “That bad, huh?”

Jason being back in Gotham is a rare thing these days.

For him to visit it has to be something Bruce related, or a lead on an outlaws case. Neither of them involve you, or the open files you have for Penguin that have been sitting archived in the bat-computer under your login.

So you don’t see him.

And you don’t really talk either.

You stopped calling around a month after his birthday because he stopped picking up, he stopped texting because you wouldn’t respond.

Somewhere in between all of that, the silence becomes normal enough to settle into your ribs like something entirely permanent.

It’s easier that way. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.

Your everyday life has improved drastically since Jason left —no drama, no avoiding anyone, not crying at nights where you were supposed to be studying. You go on about your day without a pit stop or despair at night when you should be patrolling.

Last Tuesday was no different.

You had spent a ridiculous amount of time after early evening patrol with Tim in the cave, gossiping about Bruce and Selina and why she dropped by the manor at 3pm the other day when Bruce said he was done with her for good.

It was 12 am before you even knew it.

“Wait!” Dick says, eyes so wide, they’re basically threatening to pop out “BRUCE AND SELINA DID WHAT?”

“This isn’t our issue here” you remind.

“Damn, you and Tim NEVER invite me to your gossip sessions”

Deadpanning him seems to set him straight; Dick gestures to you to keep going with your story to which you nod, taking a sip from your own milkshake.

“And before I continue,” you start, squinting “We don’t invite you because you’re no fun to gossip with. You barf everything out to Bruce anyway.”

Dick slurps loudly from his milkshake, blinking. It makes you regret speaking immediately.

“Thank you,” he says, pointing at you with the straw. “See? You’re so honest. This is why I keep you around.”

“You don’t keep me around.”

“I absolutely do. You’re like my very own addition to the Batfamily.”

“You legally cannot own people.”

Dick opens his mouth but closes it before he says anything. “Okay, that’s actually a fair point.”

Satisfied with his answer, you nod, half smiling.

Dick sighs dramatically. “Continue.”

The Batcave is never silent, even at midnight; One would actually argue that midnight is its busiest time.

Computers hum. Servers click somewhere deep in the walls. Water drips faintly in the distance. Every now and then Alfred’s maintenance schedule kicks something on that sounds suspiciously like a dying submarine.

But tonight’s quiet enough.

Tim eventually abandoned his chair somewhere around twelve fifteen after claiming he was “going upstairs for coffee.” (The tenth coffee for today) Which is Tim Drake-nese for “I’m about to disappear for three hours and return somehow more awake than before”

With nothing to do other than stare at the batcomputer, you settle for revising the Penguin case. And by the time you’re halfway through organizing evidence from a shipment bust your comm buzzes.

The bat computer lights up with a notification window.

[INCOMING VEHICLE. IDENTITY AUTHENTIFICATION SUCCESSFUL: RED HOOD ENTERING]

You stare at it for few good seconds, then, a distant engine growls somewhere above.

Low. Aggressive. Utterly familiar; The sound bounces down through stone.

The engine cuts, then his boots land on the floor—unhurried, deliberate, carrying the kind of footsteps that announce him like a title card.

You don’t look up right away. You tell yourself it’s because you’re still elbow-deep in shipment manifests, cross-referencing crates against Cobblepot’s known fronts, but really it’s because your hands have gone a little (no, not a lot) unsteady and you’d rather Jason does not clock that before you’ve had the chance to arrange your face into something unbothered.

Red Hood rounds the med-bay partition first—helmet still on, blood red gleaming dull under the cave’s blue-white light—before he reaches up and unclips it in one practiced motion.

Underneath it, Jason looks like Gotham weather: unpredictable, a little violent around the edges. There’s a fresh scab healing along his jaw and one near his cheekbone, and the shadows under his eyes look less like exhaustion and more like something he’s been carrying for weeks without putting down.

“Hey, Replacement,” he calls out, voice pitched for Tim’s empty chair. Then he notices it is empty, and something flickers across his face—disappointment, maybe, or relief, you can’t tell which and you’re annoyed at yourself for trying to.

“He went for coffee,” you say, still not looking at him, still very interested in a warehouse inventory from three months ago. “Tenth one today.”

“Ah.” A beat. “And you’re what, on Tim-sitting duty?”

Oh, so you don’t greet each other anymore?

“I’m working on a case, Jason.”

“Right. ’Course you are.”

“Our case.”

He says nothing, and in the infinity that this one second of silence holds you begin to feel it. The desperation hidden behind a word as small as ‘our’ with a tad of emphasis sprinkled inside it.

If you feel stupid, you tell yourself it’s probably because you are.

Jason drops into the chair beside yours anyway, the leather creaking under the weight of his gear, and neither of you says anything. The cave fills the infinite silence for you—the hum of servers, a drip somewhere past the trophy cases, the faint metallic tick of the Batmobile cooling down from wherever Bruce drove it in from.

You can smell him before you let yourself really look. Leather and gun oil and something underneath that, something almost like salt water, like he’s been somewhere with an actual coastline recently instead of Gotham’s chemical-grey and purple harbor. You wonder, distantly, if that’s an outlaws thing. Maybe somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that wasn’t here. San Francisco has an ocean. So does wherever else he lately has been, instead of giving you a sign of livelihood, probably doing his own thing like ever endlessly bonding with Bizzaro and—your brain supplies another thought before you can stop it—

Artemis.

You don’t let yourself properly finish that thought. You’ve gotten good at that, lately; cutting threads off before they can pull anything else loose.

“You gonna say hi properly, or are we doing the whole ignoring-me bit tonight?” Jason asks, and there’s an edge in there, trying to sound playful and not quite landing.

You finally turn. He’s watching you with an expression you don’t have a name for—too open for Jason, too unguarded, like whatever mask he usually keeps bolted on even around family got left somewhere on the drive over.

“Hi,” you say, flat. “Stop stealing my lines.”

“Wow.” he huffs a laugh “Riveting.”

“You want a parade or what? Weeks of radio silence and I’m supposed to throw confetti when you finally decide to remember the batcave has Wi-Fi?”

That lands. You watch it land—something tightens at the corner of his mouth, and he looks away first, down at his gloved hands like they’ve suddenly become the most interesting thing in the room.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Fair.”

“So, what do you want?”

“Some new domino masks.”

You blink.

“I’ve burned through all mine.” He rubs the back of his neck without looking at you. “Figured Bruce probably has… y’know. A warehouse.”

You stare, deadpanning. “That’s why you’re here?”

“It’s… one of the reasons.”

“One of.”

“Yeah, the main one.”

Silence settles again.

“So you drove here,” you start slowly, “to rob Bruce of -what- twenty dollars’ worth of fabric.”

“I didn’t say I drove for the masks. But….they’re custom.”

“They’re tiny.”

“They’re expensive tiny.”

Despite yourself, your mouth almost twitches. Almost.

Jason notices and upon it, hope flashes across his face so quickly it almost isn’t there. It disappears just as fast when your expression hardens again.

“Oh.” He looks back down. “Never mind.”

Your chest tightens—you hate that it does. “You could’ve texted, we would have sent you some.”

“I know.”

“You’ve apparently just remembered phones exist. Congratulations, Jason.”

The irony in your tone is demanding, burned and etched inside the sharp blade of what you truly mean. It’s a pity that you wish you didn’t speak of it, it’s even worse to taunt Jason just for an answer. One that you know you shouldn’t be asking for.

You wonder, why does it matter so much, why does it make you sick to your stomach to think about him in this specific context that you can’t dip your tongue inside your brain, choosing the other alternative that is dripping poison out of it towards him.

Jason of course, isn’t any better. He doesn’t stand motionless when being attacked.

“That’s not fair.” He mumbles.

“Nothing about you has been fair, Jason, so forgive me if I’m not real broken up about it.”

“‘M sorry.”

“Then why’d you do it?” you just stare at him, unimpressed, arms crossing over your chest like it might hold something else in besides your ribs.

“Because it’s easier than the truth,” he mutters, and it comes out before he can stop it—you can tell, because his jaw goes tight right after, like he’s biting down on the rest of the sentence before it can escape too.

Something in your chest does an unwelcome, traitorous little -flip- and you hate it immediately. You squash it down anyway, the way you’ve been squashing everything down for weeks, and go back to your monitor like the shipment manifest is suddenly the most fascinating document in Gotham history.

“Well. When you’re ready to say the actual truth, I’ll be here. Working. Alone. Like usual.”

He flinches. You feel it more than see it—a shift in the air beside you, like he’s folded in on himself an inch. Good, some small, ugly part of you thinks. Then, immediately, you feel worse for thinking it. You hate making him feel small and unwanted.

Then the spell of absolute silence stretches again. Longer this time, uglier if that’s even possible.

“I’m not—” he starts, then stops. Drags a hand down his face, over the scab on his jaw, wincing slightly like he forgot it was there. “I just don’t know how to do this part.”

“What part?”

“The part where I—” He exhales hard through his nose as his chest catches, frustrated with himself in a way that’s almost satisfying to watch, if you weren’t so busy being furious. “The part where I show up after ghosting you for so long and act like everything’s normal, and it’s not normal, and you know it’s not normal, and I know you know, and I still don’t know what to say.”

“You could start with why.”

“I— Why?”

“No, really.” You finally turn to face him fully, and it costs you something to keep your voice even, to keep it from cracking open on the next word.

“You disappeared after—” You don’t finish that sentence either. Some things don’t need saying out loud in a cave that echoes. “And then nothing. Weeks of nothing. And now you’re here asking about domino masks like that’s a real reason to drive to the one place you knew I’d be.”

He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice has dropped, gone rough at the edges in a way that makes your traitor of a pulse skip. “I actually also needed to see you. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Could’ve called.” You nonchalantly shrug.

“Would you have picked up?”

You don’t have an answer for that one. You both know you wouldn’t have, and the knowing sits between you like something with eyes and teeth and claws.

“I need—” he tries again, then stops, shakes his head like he’s trying to physically dislodge the right words from somewhere they’ve gotten stuck.

His eyes are doing something complicated—guilt, mostly, thick and obvious, but underneath it something almost like fear, like he’s standing at the edge of a conversation he can’t take back once he starts it.

“Not here. I can’t—there’s servers, and cameras, and Alfred’s probably got eyes on half this cave, Tim on the other, even at midnight, and I can’t say this with a camera on us.”

“Say what? You think everyone’s an idiot? That they haven’t figured out about you and me?”

“Pfffffffft—” Jason sighs, eyes closed in that anxiety induced way “Come for a drive with me?”

You stare at him. “It’s midnight.”

“I’m aware of the time, genius.”

“Where.”

“Cherry Hill Beach.”

He says it fast, like it costs him to get the words out at all, and something about the specificity of it—not just a drive, but a place, a real destination in the dead of night—makes your stomach twist somewhere between anger and something warmer you’re not ready to name, yet.

You should say no. You have a case open. You have every reason to say no, and exactly one reason to say yes, and that reason is currently looking at you with his big, green eyes like you’re the last solid thing left standing in his life.

“Fine,” you hear yourself say.

Something that isn’t quite a smile crosses his face—too tired, too guilty around the edges to be a real one—but it’s there.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“Oh my god, get to the point already,” Dick groans, dragging both hands down his face. “You two and your emotional constipation, I swear—”

“You want me to skip it?”

“No! No, I—” He waves a fry at you accusingly. “I take it back. Continue. Slowly. I need to know everything.”

“You’re the worst listener.”

“I’m the best listener, I just also have opinions, which is different.”

You give him a flat look. He gestures for you to keep going, mouth full of stolen fries while his own cardboard box of fries remains full, and despite everything—despite the ache still sitting low in your chest from reliving it—you feel the corner of your mouth twitch before you catch it.

You busy yourself with your milkshake instead of answering, which is, apparently, answer enough.

“Oh my Gooooooood.” Dick’s whole face lights up, delighted and horrified in equal measure. “Something happened at the beach.”

“Things did happen at the beach.”

Dick’s chewing slows to a stop mid-fry, eyes narrowing at you like he’s trying to read the next paragraph off your face before you say it out loud.

“It’s not what you think.”

“I haven’t even finished thinking about it yet, so I’m gonna go ahead and guess it’s exactly what I think.” He points the stolen fry at you again, triumphant. “You did it. On the bike. Like a couple of teenagers.”

You don’t answer, which, again, is an answer, and Dick actually claps once, delighted, before catching the look on your face—the one that isn’t delighted at all, the one that’s still sitting somewhere back in that gravel lot with Jason’s forehead against yours with words hanging inside that would eventually be about to detonate everything.

His grin falters. “Okay. Okay, that face means it went bad. How bad.”

“Bad,” you say quietly, turning your cup in slow circles on the table, watching the condensation ring smear wider at its bottom.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Eleven.”

Gravel and sand crunch under the kickstand as Jason slowsthe engine of the bike, and the sudden hush after thirty minutes of highway wind feels enormous, like the world’s holding its breath along with you.

Much like Bat-Burger, Cherry Hill announces itself first as a smell—salt cutting through the fading city exhaust, creosote and brine and something colder underneath, the particular mineral chill that comes off open water at night. Then the road opens up, gravel ultimately replacing asphalt, and the beach spreads out ahead of you under a sky finally dark enough to hold a few real stars, not just the handful Gotham’s light pollution grudgingly allows.

The abandoned lifeguard tower stands crooked against the treeline, paint peeling, a relic nobody’s bothered tearing down. The boardwalk stretches out toward the water on tired wooden legs, half its bulbs dead, the ones still working flickering weakly like they’re not sure they’ve got the energy to commit. The tide’s out far enough that the wet sand gleams under what little moonlight makes it through the minimal clouds, and the waves come in slow, unhurried, nothing like the frantic churn of Gotham Harbor.

Jason parks facing the water and kills the engine, the endless quiet after hours of background highway noise feel but a mere buzz; distant enough that it proves not to be filling the air between you.

Neither of you moves for a second.

“So,” you say, when the silence gets to be too much even for you. “We drove out here. You gonna talk now, or should I start guessing? Because I’ve got a few theories, Jason, and none of them are good.”

He doesn’t answer right away, he’s staring out at the water instead, like it owes him something, jaw tight, one hand still resting on the handles even now that he isn’t driving anymore.

You swing your leg off the bike first, knees stiff from holding on too tight the whole ride, and Jason follows a beat after, pulling his helmet off and running a hand through hair gone flat with sweat and salt air.

“Pffft— where do I even start?”

“Uhm,” you say and clear your throat mostly to fill the silence before it can get its claws in. “You gonna tell me where you’ve actually been, or am I supposed to guess between ‘dead again’ and ‘ignoring me on purpose’?”

“Bit of both, honestly.” He leans back against the bike’s seat, arms crossing, eyebrows scrunching, and for a second he almost looks like himself again—easy, a little smug, the Jason who steals your fries and calls it affection. “San Francisco, mostly. Bludhaven for a week. There was a thing in Metropolis I’m not gonna talk about because Clark still hasn’t forgiven me for it.”

“What’d you do to Clark?”

“Nothing permanent.”

“Jason.”

“He’ll live. He’s Superman.” He shrugs, unbothered, and you almost laugh despite yourself, despite the time of silence still sitting sore in your chest and deep in your belly. “Bizarro says hi or ,like uhm— bye, by the way. He’s mostly just been breaking things and then he looks at me like I’m supposed to know what he means.”

“You adopted an ‘Upside down’ clone.”

“I did not adopt—okay, maybe I adopted a clone. He’s good backup though. Doesn’t ask questions.” Something flickers across his face there, quick as his gloved finger touches yours, gone before you can name it as his eyebrow raises. “Unlike some people.”

“I ask questions because you disappear, Jason. That’s how questions work. And plus, I’m worried.”

“Yeah.” He looks down at his boots, at the sand already working its way into the treads. “Yeah, I know.”

The quiet that follows isn’t comfortable, exactly, but it’s not the brittle kind from the cave either—softened some by thirty minutes of road and the ocean’s steady white noise. You find yourself watching the line of his jaw in the dark, the scab still healing there, and before you’ve fully decided to do it you’ve closed the distance between you, your hand coming up to his face like you’re checking the damage.

“What happened here?”

“Nothing.” Then, at the strict look you give him, he continues, “Fiiiine. Deathstroke. It’s a long story and it makes me sound worse at my job than I am.”

“You’re always bad at your job though.” you tell him, pursing your tongue out of your mouth.

“Rude.” But he’s smiling now, small and real, and he catches your wrist before you can pull your hand back, holds it there against his jaw like he’s not ready to let the contact go yet. His eyes drop to your lips, just briefly, just enough that you gather your tongue back in your mouth and feel his gaze land somewhere invisible and low in your stomach.

He says your name low, half a warning, half something else entirely.

You don’t know which one of you moves first, because maybe it doesn’t matter.

His mouth is on yours a second later, and it isn’t gentle exactly—it’s a long time of silence collapsing all at once, his hand sliding into your hair, yours fisting in the front of his jacket like you’re afraid he’ll disappear again if you let go.

The bike creaks under his weight as you crowd him back against it, and he makes a low sound against your wet mouth that you feel in vibrations more than hear, one hand finding your waist, bulky thumb pressing into the curve of your hip like he’s trying to memorize the shape of you all over again.

For a second—just a mere, tiny second—it’s easy. It’s months ago, before the container full of girls and Penguin and Lex Luthor, before having sex in his shower and crying yourself to sleep alone in his bed, before the silence, before his birthday, before any of it fell into that vicious circle of repetition again.

It’s just his needy, slobbering mouth, your mixed drool slipping down a path on his chin and his hands roaming your body and the salt air and the stupid, traitorous hope that maybe, just maybe none of it needs to be complicated after all.

You break apart only because you have to.

The kiss leaves both of you a little breathless, the cool ocean air rushing into the space between your bodies as if it's been waiting for the chance to break you apart, but neither of you moves very far. Jason's forehead brushes yours once before he reluctantly steps back, one hand lingering at your waist for a second longer than necessary.

Should he tell you now?

Before this escalates into something else entirely?

The motorcycle settles with a soft creak beneath Jason as he stops his train of thought and swings one leg over it. Instead of taking his usual position, he turns himself around on the seat until he's half facing you, his back resting against the fuel tank, the handlebars framing him.

He glances at you with the ghost of a smile.

Stepping closer, you stop next to his right knee. His legs are spread just enough to make room for you, the fabric of his pants brushing lightly against your thigh as the bike rocks almost imperceptibly under the shift in weight.

Before you can argue, he reaches up, brushing a few windblown strands away from your face with surprising care. His fingertips graze your temple, then your cheek, lingering just long enough to make your pulse skip.

"There.” Jason's thumb traces your jaw almost absentmindedly before he lets out a quiet sigh. “C'mere."

"What are you doing?"

"Trust me."

You roll your eyes, but the corner of your mouth betrays you.

He doesn't say something that could resemble an argument. Instead, his hands slide gently to your hips, giving you plenty of time to pull away if you want to.

You don't, not really.

With an almost questioning glance, he guides you the last few inches closer until you’ve climbed on top of him on the bike and now, you're perched comfortably on the seat that his lap has turned into, the motorcycle dipping even more slightly under the combined weight. It's more intimate than practical—there simply isn't much room—but it leaves your knees over his, your shoulders nearly touching, the two of you sharing the narrow space as the ocean murmurs in the background.

His mouth sloppily finds yours again before either of you can think better of it and quickly, the kiss turns hungry without being frantic, like both of you have spent weeks rehearsing this in your heads and neither version came close to the real thing.

Your fingers bunch in the front of his jacket, pulling him closer, for some stability, until the leather creaks beneath your grip and his hand slides from your waist to the small of your back, steadying you as though you're something precious and precarious all at once.

The sea breeze tugs at your skin, where your costume doesn't cover and sends loose strands of your hair across both your faces. Jason laughs quietly into the kiss, the sound warm against your lips before he chases you again, slower this time, lingering.

"Mmmh. There you are," he murmurs. “Much better”

You don't answer. You couldn't, even if you wanted to.

Instead, you kiss him again, your free hand slipping up into the hair at the nape of his neck. His breath catches almost imperceptibly. The reaction sends a dangerous flicker of satisfaction through you, one you try very hard not to examine too closely.

"I missed you," you admit between wet kisses, the confession escaping before pride can stop it.

Jason stills for the smallest fraction of a second. When he looks at you again, the guardedness is gone.

"I know," he says softly. "I missed you too."

His forehead rests against yours, noses brushing as the words settle between you. For a heartbeat you almost believe they're enough. You try to convince yourself they are, at least.

"I don't know if I believe you."

His thumb brushes absentmindedly along your side, and before either of you realizes what's happening, you're kissing again.

This one is slower, less desperate and overall, more dangerous in the sense that neither of you is rushing or seems willing to be the first to stop.

You lean into him until your shoulders bump lightly against the motorcycle. Jason follows without thinking, one arm circling your back to keep you balanced. The distance between you is reduced to less than a spec of dust, every breath of yours is shared, every pause between kisses lasting only long enough to search each other's face before closing it again.

His hand finds yours, fingers threading together as naturally as breathing.

"I kept picking up my phone," he says quietly against your temple before placing a gentle kiss there.

You blink at him. The moonlight catches the fading bruise around the scab along his jaw, the tiredness around his eyes, the tiny crease between his brows that only appears when he's worried. "What?"

"I'd write half a message." He lets out a humorless laugh. "Delete it. Figure it'd already been too long to say all I've been meaning to.”

He has to tell you now.

Now.

But if he does it’ll be like he’s murdering himself a little and burdening you an awful deal of lot.

Your hand rises almost on its own, fingertips brushing the healing cut near his cheekbone now. Jason closes his eyes, leaning into the touch ever so little. It’s so uncharacteristically vulnerable that something inside you softens despite yourself.

He looks exhausted.

You know well it’s not the kind of exhaustion that sleep fixes. It’s the kind that settles into someone's bones after too many nights spent moving from one city to another, one rooftop to the next, convincing themselves that standing still for even a minute might force them to think.

And you aren't helping.

You keep pushing, prying at every cracked seam you've managed to find tonight, waiting for him to finally split open instead of sealing himself shut with another joke— you keep bombarding him as if he’s proven to be fireproof. Or like he’s a bomb you’re trying to urge to go off.

Maybe that's cruel on your part. Maybe it's, also, outright necessary. Maybe the way you press your demands for an answer is what gets him to finally buck his hips into yours.

Then again, the latter might just be because you’re sucking his lower lip into your mouth, biting hard enough to let him know you don’t want to part from him yet, when he tries to pull back again.

"You look terrible," you murmur, and roll your hips against his once, twice, thrice, until you feel his cock starting to harden inside his pants.

You might just be outright mean for all he cares.

So mean.

But Jason’s fought meaner, so it will be alright.

Jason moans, kiss swollen lips glowing red as he’s rolling his hips underneath you again and the motorcycle creaks in futile sounds. "I've been told I wear it well."

"You don't."

"I was hoping you'd lie." He huffs a laugh, dragging a hand across the nape of your neck.

"I'm still mad at you."

"I know."

"You keep saying that."

"'Cause it's true." His eyes open again, impossibly green, impossibly gleamy in the dim light, but you lose sight of them when he dips his head so he can kiss the open, soft space where your ear finds your neck.

"So why are you kissing me? If you’re mad?" he rasps.

You don't have an answer. Maybe because you're angry. Maybe because you're lonely.

Maybe because every part of you has missed him more than you've been willing to admit.

Whatever it is, it’s gotten you ridiculously wet. So instead of speaking, you close the distance once more. Grabbing him by the jaw, squishing his cheeks between the pads of your fingers, bucking yourself onto him, until he lifts his head and finally submits into kissing you once again.

Jason groans softly, the sound catching deep in his chest as his hands tighten sharply around your hips, anchoring you in place even as he yields completely to the momentum you’ve forced. The leather of his jacket shifts beneath your fingers, cold against your palm, but the heat radiating off him, even from between his chest pads, cuts straight through it.

Because of your devious kissing courtesy, his mouth is a thing that’s demanding now, teeth grazing your lower lip just hard enough to sting before his tongue sweeps past your lips and settles inside your mouth sloppily, twirling around until you can’t help but do the same.

You huff out, tongue squashing, rubbing and twirling and fighting against his, until both of your jaws are sloppy and wet with rivers of spit. Smooching sounds override the sound of crushing waves against the shore, even the faint traffic sounds from the highway nearby.

So so filthy, but so much needed nevertheless.

Needed.

Needy…

Like the thing that’s slowly growing a burning flame down between your legs, leaving you soaked in its aftermath.

In this specific moment, as you’re trying to roll your hips faster against Jason‘s to chase that flame, you feel so thankful to whoever suggested the lightweight fabric of your costume shorts as an alternative to the gladiator style skirt. They’re so lightweight in fact, that you can feel your sleek seeping through in hot, squelching streams.

Panties impossibly ruined —you know they’re beyond saving now, no matter the need for heroics even over a cotton cloth— lower tummy churning, you can only work and work and work your hips into Jason as you feel your puffy clit catching and dragging on the raised seam of Jason’s pants.

Every shift of your weight against him draws a rough, hitching breath from his throat, his cock throbbing painfully inside his pants and cottony boxers, so much he can't even ignore it anymore. There’s bead after bead of precum oozing from his tip, wetting his boxers and he can feel the heat of your own ruined pants as well on him and—fuck—there needs to be a way where he can adjust himself without getting his hands off of you.

And right then, in that exact moment —Thank God— as if you could read his thoughts, you reach down and start fumbling with his belt, tugging at the buckle until it’s loose. His button and fly come next, right before you dip your hand inside his boxers and grip his pulsing cock.

"Shit" he murmurs wetly against your mouth, the word breaking apart into another hungry collision of lips.

One of his hands slides up your spine, tangling firmly in your hair at the base of your skull, tilting your head back to deepen the angle until you're breathless, dizzy, and entirely consumed by the weight of him beneath you.

The other hand however, grips hard where the curve of your waist is, pushing you down firmly, then back and forth now that his cock doesn’t sit painfully anymore, into a rhythm that could never be steady, for how desperate it is.

The cool salt air whips past your skin, completely ignored as your pussy weeps, throbs and ultimately clenches around nothing while your dizzy head is entirely focused on the friction of his hand moving you, the hard length of him sliding directly against your soaked shorts. The wet heat between you is insane, slick and all-consuming, making every downward rock of your hips feel like a jolt straight to your chest and tummy.

And eeeeverywhere his lips land, it burns.

Jason's hand tightens bruisingly at your waist, guiding your momentum with a desperate, frantic urgency that matches the ragged hitch of his breath against your cheek. You chase the drag of your clit over the wet patch on his boxers, a sharp gasp tearing out of your throat and straight into his mouth as a tremor starts low in your belly, coiling tight and churning.

"Keep going—fuck— just like that," Jason demands, his voice a gravelly rasp as he pauses for a fraction of a second, his green eyes burning up into yours with an intensity that completely strips you bare.

The vulnerability from before is back, razor-sharp and terrifying, before he crashes his lips against yours again, driving his hips up to meet you in a hard, punishing thrust that crushes against your sensitive clit, and leaves you entirely breathless.

Your hand, still wrapped firmly around his length against your palm, pulses with every erratic beat of his heart. The oozing, gluey stream from your pussy coating his boxers makes every movement even more slick, heavy, friction sliding into something dizzying and frantic as you try lifting his cock only a little, just to grind down on it again, chasing that sharp, agonizing pressure building behind your navel.

Jason makes a rough, choked sound in the back of his throat, his forehead dropping heavily against your shoulder, teeth catching hard on the sensitive skin right where your collarbone meets your neck, despite the fabric of your costume. A sharp jolt of pain blooms there, hot and grounding, and you let out a ragged gasp that gets swallowed up entirely by the curve of his throat.

"Fuck—wait—let me—" he manages, his grip on your waist shifting.

His fingers move to the front of your body, digging deep into the soft flesh above your shorts, right between your legs, as he tries to force a stuttering pause into the momentum just so he can adjust his fingers. But you don't stop. You can't, not when Jason’s fingers have finally found their place right over your clit and press tight circles on it.

Your throaty yelp clashes against his lips, right along with inaudible cursing. The sensation of it is too much—Jason knows exactly how and where to press, when to loosen his touch and when to tighten it and you can’t help but go crazy about it, sliding back and forth on his lap like a madwoman.

It’s pathetic almost. Insane. You’re both dressed completely, your pussy’s begging to be filled with something, anything, even a finger could be enough for your velvety walls to be satisfied momentarily. It shouldn’t feel this good, no, when you’re just humping and grinding like highschoolers messing around months before getting into third base.

The coil inside you is wound far too tight to think clearly anymore, vibrating right on the edge of coming undone, and the slide of your slickness over his palm and his hardened length is driving you entirely out of your mind.

You tilt your hips forward, dragging yourself higher and pressing down with a heavy roll that forces every inch of him to rub against your soaked cunt.

And Jason, Jason’s looking at you with that lecherous look in his eyes, the one translating desperation with his full, furrowed brows and his beautiful green eyes, tacky with brewing tears.

You know that look, you try to search for it inside the crevices of your mind, back to every time you’ve been over this particular edge and despite being desperate out of your mind yourself, you find that satisfactory little piece of information that tells you—he’s about to cum.

And so, in response, you simply swipe your thumb against his mushroomy tip, smearing oozing precum on his sensitive skin as you’re trying to toy with the tiny hole on his tip all while griiinding down on him as fast as you can.

Jason's breath hitches violently upon the act. His hand leaves your hair, shooting down to grip your wrist, trying to stop your hand from moving against him, trying to slow the pace before it shatters completely. "You're gonna—god, you're gonna make me mess up right here—"

"Then do it," you bite out against his skin, your voice trembling with a raw, vicious need that leaves no room for argument. Your thumb presses hard against his tip as you sink down onto him again, and the sound he makes is half-curse, half-plea, completely stripped of any leftover control.

“Make a mess Jay..”

That's all the warning he gets before the restraint of either of you completely shatters.

The low, rumbling growl that tears from his chest vibrates straight through you, rattling your teeth and sending a fresh wave of heat flooding straight to your core. The hand wrapped around your wrist instantly slackens, fingers opening to let you move however the hell you want, before sliding up to cradle the back of your head with a desperate, anchoring weight.

He stops trying to slow you down. He stops fighting the pull entirely.

Instead, Jason meets you in the middle with a sudden, brutal lift of his hips that knocks the remaining breath completely out of your lungs. His one hand grabs the fat of your ass, spreading your cheeks apart and bouncing you against him until your puffy clit gets squashed between his fingers and his throbbing cock.

The impact is dizzying. Every boundary between where you end and he begins blurs into a chaotic, overheated mess of friction and heavy, gasping breaths.

Your fingers tighten around his length now, milking him like he’s a lever to your pleasure, your pussy pouring out straight up syrup as you’re riding him fiercely.

The roaring crash of the ocean waves in the distance fades into absolute nothingness, replaced only by the wet, rhythmic sounds of clothes against clothes and buckles that clash and the ragged, broken sounds falling from Jason's lips.

"You're driving me insane," he grits out, his voice cracking raw against your ear as his teeth graze the lobe just hard enough to leave a mark. "Every single time... god, you don't even play fair."

"Shut up, shut up, shut uuuup" you gasp out, though there's no heat behind it, only the frantic, spinning vertigo of an edge you're hurtling toward at breakneck speed.

Jason’s never been good with taking orders at heart and following them, but now, he makes an exception. He pushes back the oozing pain of the awkward position of his hand and picks up the pace of his fingers on your clit until he watches you get reduced to a mess of shrieks and moans and embarrassingly shaky legs.

The coil in your lower belly snaps.

It hits you like a physical blow—a blinding, white-hot flash of pleasure that radiates outward from your clit, locking your muscles tight and stealing every coherent thought from your head. You cry out, your back arching sharply as your gooey walls clamp down around nothing, your hips stuttering helplessly against his as wave after wave of intense contractions tear through you.

Jason feels the exact second you go under, speeding up your grinding before desperately slowing down, body locking in that familiar way.

His eyes fly open, dark and dilated in the dim moonlight, and the absolute wreck of raw adoration and raw hunger written across your face is enough to push him right over the precipice with you. With a hoarse, ragged shout that gets swallowed by the night wind, he thrusts up hard one last time, his entire body going rigid as he spills hot and heavy ropes of milky cum against your palm, his fingers quickly leaving your hips and bunching into your hair to hold you onto him, so hard it borders on pain.

For a long, suspended moment, neither of you moves. The trembling silence settles over the two of you, broken only by the ragged wheeze of your shared breathing and the slow, receding murmur of the tide. His chest rises and falls erratically, your eyes keep slipping to the back of your head, and for a lust driven second you try to think of the fastest way to get rid of your costume without moving an inch or ruining it by tearing it apart —it would be extremely hard to explain why you need a new costume when quiet nights have lately been a thing in Gotham, and you’re not willing to think of an excuse. Not right now at least—because this can’t be it. You have to have him inside you.

You need it.

Need him.

Jason's forehead remains pressed heavily into the crook of your neck, his breathing coming in slow, shuddering gasps that fan hot against your sensitized skin. He doesn't pull away, doesn't try to break the contact or retreat into that guarded, untouchable shell he wears like armor. Instead, he does something worse.

His hand slowly unwinds from your hair, the grip softening from desperate and bruising to something agonizingly tender, his palm smoothing flat against the back of your head, then tracing the soft curve of your face before sliding down to rest between your collar bones.

"We shouldn’t have done that," he whispers against your skin, his voice still roughened and shredded around the edges.

There goes the faint effort for pressure—he’s trying to push you back and off— and your fingers, sticky and still warm where they're still trapped between your bodies against his spent length, finally loosen their hold. You let your forehead drop forward to rest against his shoulder, the leather of his jacket biting faintly into your cheek, utterly drained of the fight that could have arisen inside you if you weren’t this spent.

“What— what do you mean?” You manage between faltering pants and huffs.

Jason doesn't answer immediately. His forehead remains against your shoulder, but you feel the slow left and right shake of his head before you hear his voice.

"I mean..." He swallows hard, like whatever he’s saying hurts him "This."

The word is barely more than thin air.

He has to tell you now or else—

His hand slips away from your chest first, not abruptly, neither coldly, but with the reluctant care of being convinced that holding on another second will only make leaving harder.

He rests both palms against your thighs, then, like he’s not ready to let go despite his very last movement, refusing to look you in the eye and staring instead, somewhere, past you and the motorcycle, but toward the dark line where the ocean disappears into the night.

The silence feels different now. Heavier. Not awkward—worse than awkward.

Honest.

"Every time," he says quietly, "I tell myself I'll explain first."

You lift your head enough to look at him. The moonlight catches the strain around his eyes, the guilt that had briefly disappeared now settling back into every line of his face.

"You kissed me because it was easier than talking?" you ask, your voice still uneven.

Jason finally looks at you. "No."

The answer comes way too quickly to be rehearsed.

"I kissed you because I've missed you every damn day, but I, I shouldn't do that, not anymore." He rubs a hand across the back of his neck, eyes dropping again. “Artemis will—”

"Artemis?" you cut in, staring at him with irises shrunk from absolute terror. "What the fuck?"

The night seems to stop. Time seems to freeze and crack; even the waves feel farther and farther away.

Jason goes utterly still.

"No," he repeats, quieter this time, pinching the bridge of his nose. "That came out wrong."

"Did it?"

"It did." He says, panicked

"You literally just said—"

No. No! You can’t let him know. He still doesn’t know. Cannot know. That you’d already done the math on this a long time before he found the nerve to say her name out loud on a beach thirty minutes from home.

"I know what I said." He swears under his breath. "Jesus Christ."

"Are you with her? Is this what you wanted to tell me?"

His silence lasts barely a second and though, it feels like a whole year. And your eyes do that awful thing where they weep at the corners, waiting for an answer that could either stop, or kickstart your heart.

"No! Yes!? Kinda?"

The tide keeps working the shore somewhere behind him, slow and indifferent, and for a long moment that’s the only sound either of you seems willing to make room for.

You feel him breathe. In, and then a long, uneven exhale that shudders slightly on the way out.

“I keep doing this,” he says, so quiet you almost lose it to the wind. He says it like it’s something he’s been carrying so long it’s finally worn a hole clean through him. “Coming back. Taking whatever you’ll give me. And then I leave again and tell myself it doesn’t count.”

You don’t answer. You simply don’t trust your voice yet.

“I’m not going anywhere,” His hand tightens, just slightly, against your thigh, like the words hurt on the way out. “Not with my life. Not with anything. I look at where I am and it’s just—circles. Same fights. Same city. Same you, same me, doing the same thing to each other every time I come home, and neither of us ever says what it is, and neither of us ever stops.”

Your throat goes tight. You sink your face to his shoulder and keep it pressed there so he won’t see it, or the way your eyes are watering.

“And then I’m out there,” he continues, voice dropping further, rougher now, “and everything’s different. New city. New team. People who don’t know every version of me that’s already screwed something up. And she, Artemis—” His breath catches, just barely, on the word. “It -she- feels like maybe I could be someone that isn’t just wreckage for once. Like maybe something could actually go somewhere instead of just—looping.”

You don’t lift your head.

You can’t.

Because you understand, in the ugliest, most honest part of yourself, exactly what he means, and understanding it doesn’t make it hurt any less—if anything it hurts more, knowing there’s nothing wrong to argue with, nothing cruel to push back against, just a boy who loves you enough to be honest and not enough to stay.

Jason’s hand goes still against your leg, like he’s run out of whatever nerve carried him this far.

"So what?" you ask, voice muffled by the leather of his jacket. "You were going to come here tonight, tell me you've been someone else..."

"I wasn't.” he says, then to spare you, he adds “We’re not together, with Artemis, I mean."

"...kiss me—"

"I wasn't planning to."

"And then what?"

Jason drags a hand over his face. "I don't know."

“It’s okay, I— I get it.” You pull back slowly, and Jason looks genuinely pained now, like every sentence is digging the hole deeper. “I get it now.”

His hands fall away from your legs like they’ve forgotten what they were doing there, and he watches you climb off the bike with an expression that looks almost like relief bleeding into something worse—like he’d braced for a fight and doesn’t know what to do now that one isn’t coming.

You busy yourself with your costume instead of looking at him. Zipper, the places it has bunched up, the mechanical small tasks that keep your hands occupied and your face angled away. The sand’s cold under your boots and you remember Jason’s helmet landed somewhere you’re not bothering to locate yet.

Your name is spoken, careful, like Jason’s testing whether it’s allowed.

“I said it’s okay.” You don’t recognize your own voice. Too even. Too practiced.

“It’s not, though. You’re not even looking at me.”

“I’m looking for my uhm, my-your—”

Jason calls out your name again.

You find his helmet —as if you went actually looking for it—half-buried near the front wheel and yank it on harder than necessary, giving it to him with the kind of focus usually reserved for things that actually require focus. Jason stays where he is, watching you, guilt written so plainly across his face that some cruel part of you almost wants to make it worse, just to see if there’s a bottom to it.

You don’t. You’re too tired for cruelty tonight. It takes more energy than you have left.

“You don’t have to explain the rest,” you say, still not looking up. “I got the important part. You feel like you’re going nowhere here. I’m not going to sit here and argue you out of wanting to feel like you’re going somewhere, Jason, that’s not—” Your voice catches, just once, and you hate it, hate that even now your body’s giving you away. “That’s not a thing I get to argue with.”

“That’s not what I—” He stops. Starts again, quieter. “I didn’t say I don’t want to be here too.”

“You kind of did, though.” You finally look at him, squinting your eyes and cheeks in that pained expression for a quarter of a second and it costs something to keep your face remotely steady while your eyebrow twitches. “You said it feels like a loop. Same fights, same city, same me. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of sticking around.”

He flinches at that, actually flinches, like you’d hit something he hadn’t braced for.

“That’s not—” His jaw works. He looks, suddenly, painfully young, the way he sometimes does when the Red Hood posturing falls away completely and there’s just Jason left, twenty-something and still catching up on all the things nobody taught him how to survive. “I don’t hate this. I don’t hate you. I’ve never—”

You don’t want to hear it, can’t. It hurts in your chest and in your head, and you should have known better than rush into anything with him again. Because the truth is, no matter what, Jason brings out the worst in you. And now he keeps trying to explain and all you can hear are excuses.

You need him to stop.

Because you don’t get to need him at all!

“I said it’s okay, I understand!” You hiss, finally.

Jason looks at you for a long moment, something breaking further behind his eyes, and then he nods, slow, defeated, and reaches for his helmet without another word.

“Ah, that’s it?” Dick shrugs. “He told you about Artemis?”

He says the last part too casually, like he’s asking whether Jason remembered to mention the weather forecast. You go completely still, burger halfway to your mouth, the grease-soaked paper crinkling in your grip.

“…Excuse me?”

Dick frowns, and your pulse pounds against your ribs, loud enough you’re almost sure he can hear it over the fryer noise and the kids shrieking two booths down.

“You knew about this?”

“I mean, yeah. I met her and all.”

Your eyes harden. “Do you all collectively hate me or what?”

Dick has the decency to look a little sheepish, at least. He sets his milkshake down slower than necessary, condensation smearing under his palm, like the extra second will buy him something.

“It’s not like that,” he says. “I met her, like, once. At this thing. It wasn’t some big secret hangout you weren’t invited to, I promise.”

“How long.”

“What?”

“How long have you known about her, Dick.”

“Does it matter?” He winces before you even answer, already hearing how that sounds.

“Yes. It matters.” Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to—sharp enough that the kid two booths over glances up from his cardboard Batman mask, tracking the sudden tension the way kids always seem to.

“…A while.”

“A while.” You blink, something cold settling behind your sternum. “Woah.”

“Look, it wasn’t my business to tell you! That’s a Jason conversation, not a Dick conversation, there’s a whole—” he gestures vaguely, fry waving like a tiny, greasy flag of surrender “—chain of command thing on who gets to say what.”

“There’s also a pyramid scheme of how much of an asshole you can be, and you’re at the top right now.”

“Whatever you say.” Dick holds his hands up properly this time, fry still pinched between two fingers, a small, useless white flag. “Point is, it wasn’t mine to tell. And for what it’s worth, from what I saw, it didn’t look like—” he pauses, choosing the next words with more care than he’s used the entire conversation “—it didn’t look like what you’re picturing. She and Bizarro, and him—it’s more like a weird little found-family thing. Doesn’t mean it didn’t still mess you up. Doesn’t mean he handled any of it right either.”

You stare down at your burger. Your appetite, along with most of your patience, has left the building entirely.

“But we are the found-family thing,” you mutter.

Dick’s jaw tightens. “That’s not—I didn’t mean it like that. We are family. I just didn’t want to blow up your situationship with Jason over at Batburger.”

“Well, congratulations, because now you’ve totally saved it.”

“Hey, that’s not nice—”

“Isn’t it?” You cut in, and something ugly and quick surfaces before you can stop it, before you even want to stop it. “You’ve always been weirdly protective. Ever since—” You stop yourself, but not soon enough. Dick’s face shifts, already bracing, like he can see the sentence coming a full second before it lands.

“Ever since what?”

You should let it go. You know you should—you two swore, once, a long time ago, to never drag this particular thing back out into the light. But you’re tired, and hollowed out, and some petty, wounded part of you wants him to feel even a fraction of what’s currently sitting in your chest like a stone.

“Ever since us,” you say. “You and me. Back when. Maybe this isn’t about protecting Jason at all. Maybe it’s easier to keep me distracted with him than to actually just say whatever it is you never said back then.”

The silence that follows isn’t the comfortable kind Dick usually settles into so easily. His mouth opens, closes. For once, he doesn’t have a joke ready, and the absence of one is somehow louder than anything he could’ve said.

“That’s not fair,” he finally says, quiet. “And you know it’s not.”

“Maybe.” You don’t take it back, though. You’re not sure you can, not tonight. “Doesn’t change the fact that you sat on this for weeks and let me walk in blind.”

“I didn’t think—”

“No,” you say, standing, gathering your jacket off the booth’s cracked vinyl. “You didn’t. That’s kind of the problem. And I don’t understand why!?”

You pause for a moment, jacket half-on, to actually think it through.

“Oh my God.” Something clicks, ugly and sudden. “You were protecting your own shot!” You stare at him, something between disbelief and hurt cracking your voice. “We’re supposed to be friends now, and you do me this dirty, Dick? Fuuuuuck you!”

The automatic doors hiss open behind you, and you barely make it two steps into the parking lot—the night air a slap of cool after the grease-thick warmth of the diner—before Dick’s voice cuts through it.

“Hey—wait. Wait, come on.”

You don’t stop walking. The gravel crunches under your boots, and somewhere behind you, Dick’s footsteps break into something closer to a jog, quick and uneven against the lot’s cracked asphalt.

“I’m not chasing you through a parking lot just to get my steps,” he says, finally catching up, falling into step beside you, breath a little short. “Can you just—stop for a second?”

“I have things to do.”

“At 9 pm.”

“Apparently no one thinks about my timeline, so I’m making up for lost time.”

“Okay, that’s fair, that’s—I deserve that.” He steps in front of you, hands raised, and you’re forced to either stop or walk straight through him. You stop, arms crossed, jaw tight, the Batburger sign flickering somewhere behind his head, buzzing faintly like it’s got something caught in its wiring.

“Look. What you said back there. About us. That’s not—I need you to actually hear me out on this.”

“I don’t need the speech, Dick.”

“You’re getting it anyway.” His voice softens, but there’s something urgent underneath it now, something less practiced than his usual easy charm. “Artemis and I met. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I’m not sitting on secrets to protect Jason’s love life out of some noble family loyalty thing.”

“Then why.”

He exhales, and for once he doesn’t have a quip ready. “Because before you and Jason first happened—and kinda between that whole mess—you and I had our own thing.”

“So what?” Your voice comes out flatter than you intend, guarded, arms tightening across your chest like you’re bracing for something.

“And, yes, I wanted it to be more than brief.” He says it plainly, like it costs him something to put it out there without wrapping it in humor first. “I did. I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t try, a little, after. That wasn’t just some rebound thing for me, even if it was for you. I care about you.”

“Dick—”

“I’m not saying this to guilt you. But we’re friends! And I don’t want you getting hurt! Okay? I wouldn't try to keep this a secret just to snoop in between you and Jason. But i'm kinda in the middle, because Jason is my brother and you are one of my best friends. I just don't think it's okay to go around and telling either of you eachother's business.”

You stare at him for a long moment, the anger in your chest slowly losing its grip, sliding into something more tired and more honest. Behind him, the Batburger sign gives one last flickering buzz before steadying, casting a weak reddish glow over the cracked parking lot.

“You could’ve just said that,” you finally say. “Weeks ago. Instead of letting me find out over bat-fries and a milkshake.”

“Yeah.” Dick rubs the back of his neck, and for once the gesture doesn’t look practiced—it looks like he genuinely doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “In my defense, ‘hey, the Amazon who helped your mother stage her death is kinda seeing your situationship’ isn’t really a text you send casually.”

“You could’ve tried.”

“I could’ve tried, yeah,” he agrees. “For sure.”

The wind picks up, cold enough to cut through your jacket, carrying with it the smell of the highway a few blocks over, exhaust and rain that hasn’t fallen yet. You hug your arms tighter around yourself, and Dick notices—of course he notices, he notices everything, it’s the most infuriating and endearing thing about him—and shrugs out of Bruce’s stolen hoodie without a word, holding it out.

You look at it. Look at him.

“I’m not wearing your weird guilt hoodie, Dick.”

“It’s not a guilt hoodie. It’s a fine, we’re-standing-in-a-cold-parking-lot hoodie. Completely different category.”

Despite yourself, something in your chest loosens—not fixed, not entirely, but loosened, the way a knot gives an inch before it gives all the way. You take the hoodie. It smells like Dick’s cologne layered over something that’s unmistakably Bruce, cedar and old leather, and you pull it on anyway.

“For the record,” you say, voice quieter now, mouth pouting, “I don’t actually think you were trying to sabotage anything. I think you’re just bad at knowing where the line is between protecting people and managing them.”

“Ouch.” He winces, but there’s no real sting in it. “Accurate. But ouch.”

“You do it to Tim too. And Damian. You did it to me tonight.”

“I contain multitudes of bad coping mechanisms,” he admits. “It’s a whole personality.”

You almost laugh—actually almost laugh, the sound catching somewhere in your throat before it can fully escape, and Dick catches it too, something in his shoulders easing at the sound like he’d been bracing against the cold and the silence in equal measure.

“So we’re okay?” he asks, and for the first time all night, he sounds almost young about it. Younger than the easy grin usually lets on.

“We’re okay,” you say. “But you owe me. Big.”

“Name it.”

“Coffee. Every night this week. Or else you'll be picking sides.”

“Deal.” He says it too fast, too relieved, and it makes something in your chest go warm despite everything. “I’ll even throw in the good coffee. Not the cave sludge.”

“The good coffee, Dick. I mean it.”

“The good coffee,” he confirms, holding up two fingers like a scout’s honor, and this time when he smiles it isn’t the sheepish, bracing thing from the diner—it’s something closer to the actual Dick Grayson smile, easy and a little dumb and entirely genuine.

You bump his shoulder with yours, and he bumps back, harder than necessary, nearly knocking you into the side of your car, and you shove him off with a laugh you don’t bother holding back this time.

“Go home, Dick.”

“Go solve your crimes, weirdo.” He backs toward his car, parked crookedly enough across two spots that it’s clearly meant to be noticed, hands shoved into his jacket pockets now that the hoodie’s yours. “Call me if the spreadsheets on your case get violent.”

“They’re always violent. It’s Penguin. Everything he touches turns into a nightmare.”

“That’s oddly specific trauma for a spreadsheet.”

“You have no idea.”

He laughs, real and warm, and it echoes a little in the empty lot, bouncing off the Batburger sign’s dying buzz. You watch him climb into his car, watch the engine growl to life, and for a second—just a second—things feel almost normal again. Not fixed, but something closer to it than you’ve felt in weeks.

The cave is quieter than usual when Jason rolls in—no Tim mainlining his tenth coffee anymore, no Dick’s obnoxious mixtapes bleeding out of the Batmobile’s speakers, just the low hum of servers and the drip somewhere past the trophy cases that never seems to actually run out of places to drip from.

Same old as about three hours ago.

Which is why the melodic sound hits Duke like a physical thing the second the garage door grinds open.

Something slow. Something with a lot of feeling in it. A voice crooning about heartbreak (?) and bad decisions (?), muffled, suuuure, but unmistakably coming from inside Jason’s helmet, which is still on (what the fuck?), even as he swings off the bike with all the theatrical weariness of a man who has personally been wronged by the universe.

Seriously? Why is Jason akira-sliding his bike to… sorrows? By Bryson Tiller?

Duke, halfway through restocking a med kit, does not move, does not blink. He just squints, confused and watches Red Hood clomp past the med-bay partition with his shoulders slumped and his helmet blasting what is unmistakably now Spotify’s “This is Bryson Tiller” playlist at a volume no tactical helmet has any business supporting.

“…Jason?”

Jason doesn’t stop walking. “Not now.”

“Is that—” Duke tilts his head, listening harder, squinting even harder, like the song might change if he just focuses. “Is your helmet playing music?”

“It’s a feature.”

“It’s not a feature, I used that helmet as reference for mine, there’s no—” Duke sets the med kit down entirely, because this deserves his full attention. “Why would Red Hood’s tactical helmet be playing a Bryson Tiller song?”

Jason finally reaches up and unclips the helmet, and the second it comes off, the music gets louder, not softer—still playing, tinny and mournful, from some internal speaker Duke definitely was not aware existed until this exact moment.

Jason sets the helmet on the counter near the Bat-Computer, gently, like it’s the only thing left in his life currently behaving the way it’s supposed to. Duke seems even more confused by it, if that’s even possible.

“Long night,” he says, and keeps walking toward the lockers on the top floor, jacket already half off his shoulders.

Duke stares after him. Then looks at the helmet. Still singing. Something about reminiscing and facing the truth and mistakes.

“Are you gonna turn that off?” Duke raises his eyebrows at Jason in genuine question.

“No.”

“It’s just gonna sit there, singing?”

“Yep kid, take it or leave it.”

“Jason.”

“Duke.”

“This is genuinely one of the weirdest things I’ve witnessed in this cave, and I watched Damian try to fight an invisible Ra’s al Ghul for forty minutes because he was on fear toxin and refused to accept it wasn’t real.”

Jason pulls his turtleneck over his head, muffled and irritable. “Different night, different trauma.”

Duke picks up the helmet like it might bite him, turning it over, trying to locate an off switch that clearly wasn’t installed with this scenario in mind. The song shifts into a bridge, something aching and a little too on the nose about somebody standing while watching somebody else walk away.

Duke’s expression does something complicated.

“Wait.” He looks up, dead serious, like everything finally slid into place in his mind. “Is this about you-know-who?”

Jason, from somewhere inside the locker, says nothing, which is somehow the loudest answer ever available to Duke.

“It is. Oh my God, it iiiiiiiiis.” Duke, smiling sets the helmet back down with the exaggerated care of a man defusing something. “What happened? Did you guys fight? Did you—Jason, did you break up with her? Is that a thing that happened tonight and that’s why you’re in Gotham? Spill!”

“I’m not talking about this with you.”

“You’re talking about it with your helmet and Bryson Tiller, apparently, at full volume, sooooooo.”

Jason emerges from the locker in a hoodie two sizes too big and a clean pair of pants, his hair a disaster, expression somewhere between exhausted and personally offended by the general concept of feelings. He crosses the cave, picks the helmet back up, and—mercifully—finally silences it with a firm press of his thumb against the side panel.

The cave falls back into its usual hum and drip.

“Better?” Jason asks flatly.

“Kind of a letdown, honestly. I was invested.”

“Go back to your med kit, Duke.”

“I have so many questions.”

“And I have zero answers.”

Duke studies him for a second— the scab on his jaw, the exhaustion sitting heavier than usual under his eyes, his swollen lips and the particular slump of someone who drove for too long and came back having ruined something he didn’t mean to ruin.

Yup! This is a 'you' thing for sure.

“For what it’s worth,” Duke says, quieter now, dropping the bit, “whatever happened—you look like garbage, man.”

“Thanks. Very supportive.”

“I’m serious. Go sleep. Come back and be a person tomorrow. The... helmet radio thing can wait.”

Jason huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh, but isn’t nothing either, and heads for the stairs, helmet tucked under one arm, silent now except for one very faint, barely audible hum of bass still bleeding out from somewhere inside it—like even switched off, it hasn’t quite let the song go yet.

Duke watches him go, then looks down at the med kit, then back at the stairs. The second Jason is gone, he pulls out his phone.

[Duke Thomas]: Hey, Tim. Jason just came in the cave blasting Bryson Tiller!? Wtf? [Tim Drake]: WDYM? Y disnt U TELL ME immediatley!? He came in and literally stole you-know-who like three hrs ago [Duke Thomas]: WTF you're kidding! I KNEW IT! I think they broke up! He was listening to BT's sad songs [Stephanie Brown]: Yall this is too juicy WHAT! They were dating? And we didn't know? I thought it was a situationship fr I'm patrolling with her rn but obvs i can't ask. She's mad tho! Tim do something! [Tim Drake]: They weren't! + Im nt supposed t know about ts, yet! I’ll ask Damian to get more intel by you-know-who. Duke ur on Jason duty. Lock him in there if u need to. [Bruce Wayne]: I fear you all seem to forget I am in this groupchat. Please do not interfere on personal matters. Do NOT get Damian involved in this. [Bruce Wayne has been removed from 'Fam Updates'] [Stephanie Brown]: TIIIIIIM! WHO ADDED HIM? WAS IT YOU? [Tim Drake]: TF? no! [Cassandra Cain]: I did! It's the gossip groupchat and Bruce is fun to gossip with I'm sorry :(

Jason Todd Masterlist

~All rights reserved: @/strawberry-nugget, 2026. Please do not copy, over write or steal my work // Likes and reblogs are so appreciated but if you you liked this you can let me know in the comments <3

A/N: I so promise once i'm done with everything that happens before the events of 'Baby Came Home' i will eliminate the angst ;p Anywayzzzz, the next thing i post will explore what exactly Dick and reader were talking about in the parkig lot, because it's not about just the time they dated! Stay. Tuned.

The last scene of this fic was inspired by this TikTok

Taglist: @starfiremylove @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger @fanggq @cassiecasluciluce @tigerf-cker @cowboysaveme @osclerc @whosmev @mochiclouds @vanillacici @dreammarereads @deadbeatphobos @brucewayneisavirgin @punkydollysblog @nigthwingsbaddie @rosieposiediditagain

(if you asked to be tag and do not find yourself in this list i saw no indicator that you are over 18 anywhere in your blog! If you’re not a minor, however you can dm me and I’ll add you. Or I have not seen your comment about wanting to be tagged and I’ll fix that asap as long as you comment it under my jason masterlist or under this post)

Dividers by @/cursed-carmine

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