#brujayweek2020

 -

A long, low whistle. A leer above a lit cigarette.

It is all the makings of terrible things.

"Playing dress up so late at night?" The man calls out to him, echoing off of the walls making up the dead end. He is ten feet away.

Robin doesn't say anything, standing straight from where he was bent over a petty thief knocked out and out cold on the ground, pulling the zip tie around his wrists tight behind his back.

"Kid like you, dressed like that, really shouldn't be out on these streets. Nothin' good ever happens this late at night." The man says to him, steadily closing the distance between them. Seven feet now. "I'm a nice guy, ya see. But you won’t always get so lucky. There're lots of bad men out here." And it seems like he quite likes the sound of his own voice too when he just keeps going. "I mean, unless you're looking for trouble, 'cause if you're then you're in just the right place, lil'bird."

Six feet.

"Trouble has a habit of finding me." Robin tells him, wondering if the man gets it at all. That the thief slumped on the ground didn't get there himself. Four feet.

"Seems like with or without you wanting it, eh, kid?" 

It is every last taste of the unsavoury injected into those words. That some men will take and take and take. And you can scream yourself hoarse when they hold you down but no one comes to save you, not now, not ever. So why even bother?

"Kid like me, right?" Robin echoes, looking up at the man that has put him into a corner. Two feet.

"Yeah." The man drops the butt of his cigarette, grinding it against the wet asphalt before reaching out with a nicotine-stained hand to curl it around Robin's jaw. He tips his chin up, the dim light from the street lamp from the mouth of the alleyway coats everything in a sick oily glow.

The thief at their feet does not stir, not even when the man's other hand reaches down, dragging over the skin on the outside of Robin's thigh before his hand goes up, his fingertips digging in and grabbing Robin’s ass hard.

A chuckle, low and deeply amused when he earns a quiet little gasp from between Robin's mouth.

"Well, baby, aren't you just asking for it?"

 -

When Robin steps on the man's hand and breaks every joint on every last finger, the man screams. Long and loud and almost unbearable.

Robin relishes in the sound even as he spits out, and it is scathing: "It's going to be a long fucking while before you'll even be able to touch yourself."

If asked to describe Robin in one word, Jason's answer is this: Robin is bait. So no one else has to be the blood in the water to be swallowed whole.

When Batman shows up with red and blue flashing a symphony behind him, he doesn't reprimand Robin even as he lays eyes on the state of the man. Instead they stand aside as Gotham's finest lead the men away, one finally coming to while the other now beginning to lose consciousness.

"Told you it works." Robin is rocking back and forth on the heels of his green pixie boots, hands clad in matching green gloves clasping loosely behind his back. He tips his head up to Batman with a grin that is all teeth when he can clearly see all the displeasure in the tense line of the man's clenched jaw. "Even if you don't want to believe me, I'm okay with this, really."

There are no bruises in the shape of anyone's hands across his body. That is his own doing. Robin’s mouth doesn't let up from its grin, not even when he presses himself up against Batman's side.

"B, would it kill you to say good job though?"

 -

There are only so many hours of the night left when they come back from patrol.

Jason doesn't head to the shower, he doesn't go upstairs either. Instead, he hops up on to the desk just as Bruce sits down at the computer. Jason doesn’t break the silence, not this time.

He swings his legs from his perch, working through the plate of cucumber sandwiches Alfred had left for them before he retired for the night. Jason has polished off three-fourth of the plate before Bruce says, finally, drawing his hands back from the keyboard when he no longer has the excuse of the nightly patrol report to fall on.

"You did good.”

“Pulling teeth would’ve hurt you less, isn’t that right, Bruce?” Jason asks around a mouthful of bread, sprays a bit of crumbs on Bruce too when he does if just because he can.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

"It's Saturday tomorrow, B. No school."

Bruce falls silent. Jason doesn’t reprimand him. Instead, Jason looks beyond Bruce to the row of Robin uniforms along the far wall of the cave. To Damian Wayne who has left Gotham for the League.

"The first Robin was your real son."

To Tim Drake who is dead and buried and mourned.

"They were both my sons."

Jason knows exactly every way where he doesn’t measure up, where he doesn’t even come close to either one of them. He is Robin in name only, and he has made his peace with that.

He swings his legs still, tip of a pixie boot bumping against the chair’s armrest. There is no reading between the lines for this. He drags his eyes back from all the Robins to have flown this nest to tell Bruce in probably what is the only way to spur him into action.

"I don't want to be your son, B."

-

It is the yellow cape that falls to Jason’s bruised knees.

It is the red tunic that hikes up when he reaches out to him.

It is the tiny pair of green scaly shorts that show off so much bare skin.

Except, it isn’t just any of those things when Bruce gives up all pretenses and kisses Jason breathless. Bruce is the fox in the hen house, the snake with poison in its fangs, the man in love, and maybe that’s the worst of them yet.

Bruce Wayne is a man that doesn’t lost control, this comes as close it gets.

It starts chaste with Bruce going slow and Jason eager to part his lips wide enough to welcome the slide of Bruce’s tongue. Bruce licks into his open mouth, dragging just the softest hint of teeth over the tip of Jason’s tongue when Jason tries to imitate what he is doing for him.

The first thing Jason lets out when he gets enough air in his lungs again is on a burst of delight: “Finally.”

 -

Bruce falls asleep in the armchair in the corner of the room, wakes up with a crick in his neck and bloody sheets tossed over him.

Bed all empty. 

 -

Maybe this is about mourning, Bruce supposes, when the Robin uniform remains streaked in a dead boy’s blood encapsulated in a pristine glass case.

Maybe this is about control, and how he seems to be losing all of it when the boy breathes and yells and bleeds all over a bed they used to share.

 -

Jason disappears from Gotham after that night.

Bruce doesn’t go digging, not because he already knows but because he has long since lost his right to know where Jason goes.

He goes through his routine, he reads through his case files, and when it gets dark, he goes out at night. Stalking the streets streaked in its own shadows, he swings, he dislocates a man’s jaw. He puts himself through the paces of a man waging a war. He also takes apart the handgun hidden in the waistband of the man’s jeans, breaking three of his fingers when he tried to reach for it.

“Do yourself a favour.” Batman growls out over the screaming. “Stay down.”

When Gordon turns on the signal, Bruce makes his way to the station.

 -

It starts with blood.

Like most things that come full circle, it also ends with blood.

 -

When Jason reappears in Gotham, it is in the center of a human trafficking ring.

Held in the basement of one of their transit points, Jason is beaten and bruised, surrounded by five overzealous goons who intend to find out who he is working for even if they need to gut him for the answer. There is still fresh blood dripping from his broken nose, pouring down over his lips and chin. The masochistic streak in him almost whines out loud, sounding like he is begging for it when his head is yanked back by the death grip in his hair.

Cool press of a serrated blade to his throat as one of the bad men leans in too close to murmur another threat.

It looks worse than it is. At least, this time, there aren’t maggots crawling across his skin. Fuck the small miracles if it means a better chance at the bigger ones.

And here might be a big one: A flash bang he doesn’t need to close his eyes to when they had him blindfolded long before they ever even made the plans to drag him inside of this room. It rings, shrill, but he doesn’t need to hear to feel the tiny little give in the thick ropes binding the length of his arms to the back of the chair.

 -

Eyes unseeing, ears unhearing, when the rope falls away, Jason moves.

What Jason doesn’t say is this: Like gum at the sole of his boots, like grass stains on the knees of his nice pants, like opening his eyes to find himself inside of his own grave gasping for air. If Jason gets to say so for himself, he is pretty damn fucking hard to get rid of.

Seems like Bruce is too when he yanks the blindfold down, and all Jason can see is the Bat clearing the room counterclockwise.

 -

It isn’t like he thinks he doesn’t deserve love.

Jason isn’t that masochistic.

Their history, if seen through anything other than some very rose-tinted glasses, goes like this: He meets him at a low point, and manages to drag him even lower. It didn’t feel that way though. As hard to believe as it is, Jason isn’t that far gone either. Even if it does come close on the days when he’s been away from Gotham for too long and all he remembers of the city is every single good thing and none of the bad.

There are a lot of bad.

 -

“Last time I waited for you.”

Jason starts, and he looks like he is daring Bruce to finish the thought: It was a warehouse in Ethiopia. Far enough where his screams never even escaped the room itself. Where it was Hell disguised in powdery white and grease streaked green and the fucking dynamite rigged to explode haven’t even began to count down.

“Last time you didn’t make it, B.”

He stands in the middle of the room, blood drying on his face, one eye starting to swell up.

“Last time—”

“Let me make it up to you.” Batman says over the silence when every last one of the bad men that held Jason in captivity is completely out, lying sprawled on the ground with not even a twitch. “Starting now.”

 -

Jason closes his eyes but he can see it so clearly right this moment. It is no way to keep a relationship on just the basis of one emotion.

Because the need festers like an untreated wound, sepsis fills the whole body, until the only thing he knows in his veins is this love of theirs.

 -

What he says: “Old man, I know you think you’re stuck with me but you’ve got a choice.”

What he means: And it doesn’t have to be me.

Bruce doesn’t draw closer. He doesn’t dare. And it gives Jason a sense of power like nothing before when it is Batman, not Bruce, standing there on the other side of the room. They have been crossing the country and then halfway across the world and then into outer space too in any attempt to shake off this gravity, like it is this place yanking them back. Like it isn’t one another.

What Bruce means: It never had to be you, it just is, I will choose you over and over and all over again even if we have to start from the beginning once more.

Jason is a pull unlike any other, even when he was dead and buried and his real body already stolen from the ground.

What Bruce says: “That’s not a choice I want to make then.”

 -

“No one makes you do anything you don’t want to. Ever.”

Jason has vindication on his side, Bruce has conviction on his.

“That’s right, Jay.”

 -

The same bed with a different set of sheets, Jason’s bloody clothes lead a trail from the window to the edge of the mattress where Bruce lays on his back with Jason straddling over him.

He sighs. 

He whines. 

He pants for it. Making every kind of loud little noises as he takes himself apart on the thick slide of Bruce’s cock inside of him. He rides Bruce with abandon, beads of sweat trailing down the arch of his spine as he rocks his hips like this is a normal thing. Having Bruce open him up as though he’s always been the only one for him.

 -

“Let me set your nose.”

Bruce breathes out, around the taste of blood when Jason finally pulls back from the sloppy kiss.

Blinking bright wide eyes at him, Jason’s lashes quiver, his hands shake a little too, but most of all, Jason tightens around him like a vice. He seems to crumple as he lets out a choked off little sound, wounded like the pain of his broken nose is coming back to him all at once. His eyes are rimmed in red, his bottom lip wobbles while blood stains his upper lip still. Jason looks like he could cry. But in a good way, Bruce thinks.

Jason accepts but he makes sure Bruce knows that it’s unfair that Bruce offers at all. 

“Only so I can blow you later.”

Bruce thought he would be at a loss but it feels natural for his mouth to tug into the smallest hint of a smile. “Okay, Jay.”

“Just okay?” Jason squints at him.

“I look forward to it.” Bruce corrects himself. And it’s like the meaning behind Bruce’s offer is only sinking in now as Jason’s cheeks go pink. 

 -

Razed down to the foundation, there is something to be build over top its wreck and its ruins.

They start here, at the beginning, in the aftermath of what follows desolation of their own forced creation.

 -

Jason holds still for all of ten seconds that it takes for Bruce to reset his broken nose, brings the back of his hand up and wipes at the small trickle of fresh blood when he does.

And then he is moving again, dizzying as he feels Bruce beneath him as his thighs bracket the man. He fucks himself down, and his motion only stutters sharply when Bruce slides both hands up along his sides. Stopping just below his ribs, Bruce brushes a thumb along the edge of some deep tissue bruising while the other stays still, steadying.

Turning it deep, turning it slow, as Bruce rolls his hips up to match every downwards shove from Jason.

An anchor to his sails. Reverence is an odd look when it overtakes Bruce’s face. He is a man at odds, five o'clock shadow scratchy beneath Jason’s palms when he reaches out to touch what has always been his, and Bruce leans into it without hesitation.

“Okay?” Bruce asks, kissing Jason’s fingertips.

-

Father Todd brings him inside of his church.

Sets the man down on the narrow bed after he lays down tarp. Stitches him and his three stab wounds up. Douses each one with antiseptic wash, and wraps it all up in clean gauze. A little tape that doesn’t quite stick and Jason winds the Bat up in saran wrap to keep everything in place. It’s a little do-it-yourself but there’s not much to be done about that.

“You’ve got every right to give me up.”

The man is solemn as Jason applies the last butterfly bandage to the long shallow cut made with a serrated blade across his torso. His voice is normal, edged in pain. And Jason almost wants the bat back if just so he didn’t have to deal with something so human.

He crosses the room to put away what is left of the first aid kit, telling the man shrouded in drama and a precarious placement of all the shadows in the room.

“You could just thank me, y'know.”

 -

Father Todd thinks on what he said outside in the alleyway with him taking the majority of the bat’s weight, and has to let out a singular sound in amusement.

“I was wrong, you’ve really never had to beg once in your life. You’re a billionaire who chooses to dress up as a fuckin’ bat.”

Bruce Wayne’s eyes are blue, and he watches Jason come back to the end of the narrow bed. Here, where he keeps perfectly still on top of Jason’s thin mattress, looking nothing like Gotham’s golden boy when his hair is soaked in sweat, messy after a night stuffed inside a cowl, and his mouth is drawn tight into a thin flat line.

Jason stands back. “There’s nothing in it for me to go against either one of your… you.”

There is a pause while the man pulls himself to sit up, his breathing laboured even over the obnoxious noise of the tarp moving as he does. Jason doesn’t shift to help, figures if the man insists on leaving even though those stitches might tear then that’s none of his business.

It’s how he’s maintained his corner of peace here for so long, Jason keeps his head down.

“Thank you, Father.” Bruce Wayne’s eyes are really fucking blue.

Jason nods once in acknowledgement.

 -

That was supposed to be the end of that. 

But of course, it isn’t. 

 -

Father Todd remembers peace, like a distinct memory just out of reach. It is quiet and subdued and lovely. It isn’t whatever this is.

“You really need to get off my roof.”

Batman is a shadow that takes shape and form as he drops down behind him without a sound. Jason bites back a sigh that wants to escape from between his teeth.

“Bruce.”

“It’s Batman.”

“Bruce.”

“There were men that wanted to rob you.” Bruce tells him, a hard righteous edge to his Bat voice when the three men that tailed Jason all the way from the store have been everything but subtle. Jason is a priest, not an idiot. He’s dealt with men like them for far longer than Bruce Wayne has ever tried to stop crime by beating it into submission.

And he tells him exactly that: “Let them.”

Bruce turns his head to him in that way Jason has learned to mean the man is looking at him like he’s being ridiculous. And Jason almost gives him the exact same expression in response if he isn’t busy trying to find his keys.

“A little help?” Jason asks, and Bruce in his full Batman gear takes the grocery bags from him so he can unlock the backdoor to the church without dropping everything.

 -

Father Todd saves a dying man. Watch if he’ll ever make that mistake again.

When he turns back at the silence that follows the drop of his keys in the little bowl by the door, he finds the man in the shape of a bat standing still in the threshold of his doorway. It’s a headache that builds from his temples to radiate down until he finds himself grinding down on his molars.

“You’re not a vampire. You can come in without an invitation.”

Jason cannot see Bruce’s eyes when he’s got the cowl up. And maybe, that’s for the best.

“I don’t want to intrude.” Batman tells him, and it’s that same gravel rough tone, scratching at the space that passes between them as he steps through the threshold while Jason crosses him to close the door behind them.

“A lil’ late for that, don’t you think?”

Bruce sets down the bags of groceries on to the kitchen table that sits on an uneven surface of the floor, wobbling a little as the weight settles. He pushes his cowl off over his head, grunts in question to what Jason means.

“Y'know, with you standing on my roof all night?”

Jason almost doesn’t notice the way Bruce’s shoulders tense up in answer.

-

No good deed goes unpunished.

Or so the saying goes.

-

Actions, Father Todd thinks, have consequences.

When he finds a man bleeding out behind the alley of his church, he brings him in, he stitches him up, and he doesn’t let him die.

Maybe he should have.

Because when he lets Bruce pin him against the wall, his first reaction isn’t to drive the short blade kept inside of his boot into the spot between two connecting plates of Batman’s armour. Well, he’s already lost his way. Instead, his reaction is a small, soft sigh that parts his lips to the hard press of Bruce’s tongue.

Jason has quite a few of his favourite literary prose coming to mind in description of just how Bruce is kissing him.

“You’re okay with this?” Bruce asks him when he finally draws back.

The two of them panting for breath, pink in the face, red in the mouth, and blinking a glassy sheen from the bright blue of their eyes. 

Bruce’s gentleness starts and ends at the kind of behaviours that really should raise far more red flags than they do. Because they are that of a stalker (a protector). A bit of maniacal obsession when he is imprinting on the first person to show him any kindness (human decency really, it was a great deal of blood after all).

Bruce Wayne is not a stray (even if he acts like one), and Jason Todd is not a collector of strays.

“Probably not but I already kissed you back.” Jason lives a life in devotion. “There’s no such thing as taking back a sin.”

“Confessional?” Bruce asks as he goes down on his knees, pushing the hem of Jason’s cassock up to his hips.

Jason inhales sharply at the cool air that hits him when Bruce pulls him free, cock already hard with barely a kiss. He tells him, like any of it still matters when he’s already strayed this far from the path. “No one else here to forgive me for mine.”

“I do.” Bruce tells him, looking up at him with those eyes. And he is painfully earnest in his conviction, his belief in the good that is Jason Peter Todd.

Jason breathes out, and he is shaky with it when Bruce’s hands touch the bare skin of his hips, thumbs digging in against his pelvis to keep him pinned to the wall: “You don’t count.”

He doesn’t know the half of it.

Especially not when Bruce wraps the heat of his mouth around the head of Jason’s cock, sinking down and down and down until he hits the back of his throat, and Jason can feel him swallow.

 -

God works in mysterious ways.