prodigaljaybird | (no subject)

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Not for the first time, Jason thinks that if it weren't for Bucky's hardass cardio class, he'd be crawling out of his skin by now.

He's gone back to his grave no less than three times, stood under the shadow of that enormous fucking monument. Brought no less than three times the amount of explosives it'd take to blow it up, too, but he hasn't done it. Not yet.

But he's going to. Sometime when...when it won't make things worse. When it'll mean something's over, not just beginning, not the start of some new anger inside of him that he'll want to keep feeding, need to keep feeding. Sometime when the sound of it, the violent burst of it won't make Lux cry.

He itches for it, expression dark more often than not, brow drawn down and mouth a thin, flat line, sneakers traded back for his heavy boots, beating hard against the jungle floor when he walks away from his hut. He doesn't realize he's headed for Tim's until he gets there, more wound up than when he started walking, and he thinks...he should probably leave. That he's no good to people when he feels like this, not to the ones he can't punish, and he's punished Tim enough. But he can't take this shit back to Bucky, and he's not taking it to Lux.

Exhaling as evenly as he can, Jason sinks onto the edge of Tim's porch, sits quietly, and tells himself he's resting, not waiting. If his brother's got any luck left, Jason'll be gone before Tim ever looks out the window.

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Bart wouldn't be quiet; Kon wouldn't sit and wait. Tim is trying to clean his camera when he starts to feel less alone than the walls of his hut would imply, and it's a familiar enough feeling that it doesn't take long to decide who he's most likely to find out there.

He considers staying where he is, camera in pieces across his bed, until Jason gives up and leaves. They see each other often enough at class and the compound that he could half-deny avoiding him, but.

But Jason came here for a reason, and he's been there for Tim a couple of times now, seems like he'll be there a lot more going forward, and it wouldn't be fair to keep hiding. Setting the lens aside, he uncurls his legs and pads over to the door, a quick peek to confirm it's Jason before he continues out and sits down with him. He's been here before, it turned out fine: he has to tell himself whatever this is will turn out fine as well. "Just in the neighborhood," he asks, pushing his hands through his hair before setting them to the porch edge and hanging his weight on them.

"I guess," says Jason, stiffening slightly when Tim sinks down next to him. He feels both better and worse for the companionship, sitting silent a long time afterward. It's a new thing to him, deciding what's fair and what isn't before he speaks, and he isn't very good at it, and so, when he finally speaks, he hardly notices that it could just as easily be said of Jason himself. "You don't talk to me."

His first instinct is to protest, deny it, because it wasn't quite what he was expecting Jason to say. Tim didn't know Jason particularly wanted him to talk to him, but he should have known the absence wouldn't go unnoticed. Not in a place where Jason has tea parties and friends and counts Tim among them. "I don't talk to most people," he says instead, true but not really applicable here. "Just ask anyone who knows me, it's not exactly a new complaint."

"Maybe not." It's true, he rarely sees Tim with others outside of class, and when he does, there's something utilitarian about his brother's habits. In the kitchen for food, not company, in the rec room for books, not a game of pool. Even so, he's sure that things have changed between them, can feel in his bones that something is different. There's an absence in Tim, an openness Jason hadn't realized had been extended to him until it was gone.

"But you talked to me more," he says, left hand reaching to worry at the cast on his right. "Before."

Before that night, before digging Jason out of his grave. Tim hadn't known before that how much he doesn't want to lose him again, how much he'd actually felt Jason's absence in his early teens, on a personal rather than professional level. Maybe it's a stupid way to cope with that, avoiding him, withdrawing, but sometimes it's all Tim knows how to do.

Notice the thing that could hurt, do whatever you have to make it hurt less. It's like learning to fall the safest way you can, because you're going to fall no matter how hard you try not to. "I guess there was more to talk about," he says, still closed off, still trying to pass this off as something Jason's picking at unnecessarily. "It's been quiet since then. Less drama, more tea parties."

Jason breathes out a sound that falls short of a laugh, not a sigh, just air squeezed from his lungs, short and unhappy. That'd started as such a good day. Surreal, bizarre, even, in the context of the rest of his life, but enough to startle him out of his bad mood and into something better. For a little while.

"You mad at me for that, too?" he asks. Worried as he'd been for Lux by the middle of it, Tim leaving early hadn't escaped his notice.

"I'm not mad at you for anything," he says, wouldn't know how to be mad at Jason for that, even if he understood why Lux was. Thinks he understands, anyway, because he still remembers her in the cave. Still thinks she's probably as complicated as everyone he's met in a cape and cowl, and no telling how that will play out with Jason.

Jason might be the least complicated of them, he thinks. Which makes walling him out a little crueler, especially when they're in a lull, when he probably just wants to enjoy not dying this week. Maybe if they let him, he'll tell his little brother how that works. "It was a little surreal, is all. I kept expecting Brucie to sweep through and nauseate us all with a story about this one time he was playing squash."

This time Jason makes it all the way to a laugh, quick burst of it startled right out of him. That life with Bruce all those years ago...there's so much of it that shaped him, that changed him forever, pieces of it he carries around and thinks about every day, and yet half the time, it feels like a life lived by someone else. Like the part of him that wants it - a father, a home - just made it all up, one too many nights on the street twisting his head up but good.

"It was different," he concedes. "But kinda nice. I don't know, I just figured that's how they do things in England or something. Tea and cakes and shit."

"See a lot of those in London?" After Jason's return, it hadn't been hard to link certain events to his travels, even if they'd made his current status all the more complicated. Once a Robin, always a Robin, Tim thinks, and it makes him smile a little. Your heroes rarely turn out to be infallible, but sometimes they're still heroes.

"So what's going on with this Grace girl," he asks, shoving the topic somewhere else, someone else's problem before he keeps thinking about his.

"Tea and crumpets?" Jason asks, still with that same smile, a little more life in it now. "Wasn't really my focus. And Grace is my friend. They had another one of those parties, in the caves, drugs in...freakin' everything, all the food. I hung around to make sure nobody got too fucked up, we talked some. Then after...my grave, I saw her again. I didn't tell her what happened, but I guess I've been kind of tense? She saw me punch the Compound door. I don't know."

Jason runs his good hand through his hair, fingers digging as if to dislodge a headache. "She's really nice, she just wanted to cheer me up." Wonder steals over his face for a quick moment, the idea of anybody even bothering still so novel, but it's soon chased away by a frown. "Lux got so mad, I thought she was gonna break up with me."

His mouth twisting up at one end, Tim shakes his head, almost laughs. "Yeah, they do that when you let girls make huge friendly gestures at you." Steph hadn't exactly bricked him in the face again over Darla, but it had definitely made drifting apart easier on both of them. "Next time, make sure Lux is at least helping her cheer you up, it'll probably go down a lot easier."

Not that he can see Jason and Lux pulling apart the way he did with Steph. It doesn't seem like something they'd let happen quietly, if they let it happen at all. Tim flushes a little, figures he should put a disclaimer on it all: "Not that I'm like, any good at this either. I just talked to her a little, so don't, um. I'm a pretty terrible person to ask for advice on relationships."

Which, really--that should be clear from the fact that Jason's on his porch telling him they don't talk anymore.

Jason still thinks she could've said she was pissed before the party came and went, but after talking to her and then to Bucky, he's willing to chalk it up to mysterious female feelings that can never be truly anticipated or understood.

He wonders if he should be pissed that they talked about him, but after a moment of waiting, he doesn't feel it, and Jason turns his head instead, face creeping back towards a smile. "You dated anybody, baby bird?" Not here Tim hasn't, Jason would know, but. "In Gotham?"

Tim looks sideways at him before rolling his eyes, picking his legs up from the edge of the porch and folding them, hugging them with his arms. "A few times, yeah. Enough to know I should probably stick to crime fighting." He grimaces at that, feels a little too much like Bruce and not in any of the good ways. "The common denominator in your failed relationships being you and all."

"Really?" asks Jason, letting the rest pass as part of his brother's particularly stubborn brand of melancholy. "Like a steady girlfriend and everything?" He raises a brow. "You sleep with any of them?"

Looking at him sideways again, this time with a squint, an annoyed look on his face. He hates that question, probably because the answer is embarrassing, or embarrassing for the way people take it. Like it's sad or lame, and maybe it is but Tim's never felt like it was as important as everyone else makes it. There's always something else to do.

So he doesn't answer, not outright, looking away and blowing out a sigh. "Sure Jason, I devoted my massive amount of free time to it."

Jason grins, something in the huff of Tim's breath that makes him lean over, shoving at his shoulder. "Hey, this Robin never got laid either, not until - " Until Talia, and Jason's gaze goes distant for the briefest of moments.

"But hey," he says, eyebrow arching obnoxiously, "A place with nothing but massive amounts of free time. That sounds really hard to come by."

Another huff, this one a laugh, because he has to give Jason that. Let him make the joke, tear the excuse down, but Tim doesn't know how to answer. How to talk about it without sounding ridiculous, stupid. The class dork all over again, the kid who struggled with his early undercover gigs and tried to remember things he'd seen and heard in rap videos.

God, that was a nightmare. This should be less of one. "I just don't know if I care," he finally says, which is honest enough. There's probably a point where not caring means something, but he'll leave that up to Jason. "It's never been a big deal to me, like something I had to hurry up and do."

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