prodigaljaybird | follows the Timeloop of Bucky Barnes

Jason doesn't remember the first six months following his resurrection. He has pieces, fragments with edges too smooth to catch onto, snatches of cold and endless hunger, before everything tipped into warmth. He remembers Talia in brief, kind touches, fingers on his shoulders, his cheek. Knows that he fought a little, when the al Ghul's first took him in, but knows they never actually hurt him.

Not until the Lazarus Pit.

They'd washed him in fire and water, sent his consciousness screaming back whole and raging and thrust him into the night, naked as a jaybird and twice as terrified.

He hadn't been angry. He still isn't, not at them, hadn't remembered to be angry until he read the paper and discovered just what Talia meant when she told him, You remain unavenged. Clear as newsprint, black and white, the Joker alive and unpunished, and Bruce...Bruce abandoning Jason to his fate. Unavenged, unloved, unwanted.

He'd killed two people before he came back to himself that night.

He doesn't feel like killing anyone now. It's different, somehow, Bucky riding away from him and Bruce turning his back. It hurts the same, but it doesn't make him angry.

He's a messy crier, always has been, wet and loud and shaking all over, and Jason's chest aches with the force of it, but by the time he realizes the truth, by the time he realizes Bucky's not coming back, he's already exhausted, tears cutting jagged lines down red cheeks, spilling over a jaw he can't seem to steel no matter how he tries.

Jason makes it to Tim's porch in relative silence, not even breathing when he sits down. There are a couple places he could've gone. To Lux. To Katniss. To Boyd, even, but he doesn't want them to see him cry.

Tim's already seen the worst of him, and Jason rests his head against the porch support, pushes a tired hand over his eyes and doesn't open them.

The sobs, when they return, are quiet.

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Tim had read the report, had sat at his computer and started to realize what kind of person could write a report about what had happened with Jason, and suddenly the comparisons to Bruce didn't feel like compliments anymore. "You survived the cut, though," he points out, not sure how he feels about it, about any of it having a purpose. "Not just by coming here, you survive it at home, and that can't be a mistake."

But Jason isn't touching his throat, scar tissue that is going to take at least a decade to fade and here, it's only been what, months? He's talking about Bruce and thinking about something else, about bad shit and Bucky, Tim surmises. "How did Bucky hurt you," he asks.

"Scalpel," says Jason, "It was clean, he didn't know what he was doing," he adds, like that makes all the difference, and to Jason, it does. It hadn't hurt, he hadn't meant to, Jason knew it even as it was happening, and still Bucky won't come home. He's been near to death so many times, had never thought anything could hurt as much as that crowbar until the batarang, and death at Bucky's hands...it doesn't compare.

Jason drags the cloth over his face a final time and looks away from it, the cup in his hands, looks up at Tim and wants to ask him, what the hell is he doing now back home, if he's still a person that people run away from and don't come back for, but he doesn't think he can bear it, not right now.

A scalpel to the chest on repeat: the sick feeling in Tim's gut slides up into his chest, settles in his throat. It's probably a good thing that things still make him feel this way, that sometimes when Bruce isn't there he has to walk away from a body and throw up. That it can stay with him for days or months and he has to cross his arms now to keep from touching his collar.

He doesn't want to cut someone open and write a report on it later, but he doesn't want to let it show either, gritting his teeth and holding himself still next to Jason. "It still happened," he says, pushing his hair back and tugging it a little, staring back at Jason and finding it hard to hide that he's just as lost right now. "It's okay to be upset. Do you think...is he a danger to anyone? Is he a danger to himself?"

Tim would look for him, Jason thinks, maybe even without Jason asking him to. He feels it like a throb behind his heart, a new ache swallowed by the deeper one and not nearly as unpleasant. "He knows who he is," he says. "Where he is."

Bucky'd been so fucking guilty, couldn't even look them in the face in the bunker, not even when he spoke to them. "I think," he says slowly, "hurting anybody's the last thing he's gonna do."

"That's funny, because hurting you is the last thing I imagined he'd do," Tim says, lips curling back in distaste. It isn't kind, isn't fair, but his trust is easier to shake than Jason's, especially when he hasn't really given it in the first place.

He's an asshole: they established that earlier in the month, and he'll do a better job of working on it when Jason isn't crying on his porch and touching shocked fingers to the phantom wound on his chest. "Do you want to rest or do you want to keep moving," Tim asks, "Because there's a fine amount of ground to cover, and we'd have to find him eventually. He's got a horse with him."

"I..." says Jason. He wants to find Bucky, but more than that, Jason wants Bucky to want to come home, and he doesn't, and maybe Jason's stupid for ever thinking it could be home at all, that anything as good as that was going to last.

"I'm tired," he says, and at least he feels it, it's not one more lie he's clinging to today. He hasn't slept, his body weaker than warranted by mere fatigue, and he can't remember when last he ate. "Do you have any food? Tim, he." Jason swallows. That urge that's been there since seeing Bucky on the table, that instant need to protect him, it hasn't gone away. "He really didn't mean to."

Rest it is then, which won't sate Tim's nerves but it'll be good for Jason's, and that's the important thing right now. "Finish that water, I'll get you something," he says, getting up from the bed and heading for the small kitchen. He doesn't keep much beyond fresh fruit and nuts in it, but he can make a trip the kitchen while Jason sleeps. "If he really didn't, maybe he'll come back on his own," he says.

And if he did, he'll come back to finish the job--

Tim turns away from Jason and grimaces, gathering the light fare into a bowl. That's beyond unfair, that's. He doesn't want to think that way anymore, not here. Jason's not going to stab him; Bucky isn't going to stab Jason. It isn't smart to believe either but it's right. "You can sleep here if you want," he says, indicating the rest of the bed with the bowl before handing it over.

Jason looks down at the sheets, and it's only now that he truly takes in his perch, the end of Tim's bed, with Tim's food in his hands, and his eyes ache all over again. "Thanks," he says, meaning this and everything that came before it, apologies there behind it for ever thinking Tim couldn't have been this person to him back home.

"I won't take your bed," he says, "I still have mine, the one from before." He still has his cave, he can return to it. Probably should never have left it. "I don't understand why it happened," he murmurs, pushing a piece of fruit into his mouth. "We were just playing cards, Bucky, Lucy and me. And then we were in a Soviet bunker."

follows the Timeloop of Bucky Barnes

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