prodigaljaybird | (no subject)

It's been two weeks since Lux gave him the news. Two whole weeks, and Jason's been able to think of little else, all his thoughts consumed with what might be. He thinks, after a lot of deliberation, that he hopes it's a girl. A boy would be great, too, and Jason would love a little boy with equal fervor, but when he looks at Lux, with her soft hair and her beautiful blue eyes, he just. He can't stop thinking about how beautiful her daughter would be, with all of Lux's kindness, and maybe some of Jason's energy.

Either way, the kid willl be a handful. He's learned that much sneaking books from the shelf, about what to expect when expecting and afterwards, what babies need, what toddlers need. Holy shit, Jason can't wait for when the baby can talk, he's going to do nothing but read it stories, the kind he always wished his own mom had had time to read. Make it sandwiches with the crusts cut off like Alfred made. Tell it things, everything, the way everyone always refuses to do for him. This baby will want for nothing, the truth least of all.

And clothes. Surveying the pile he's secreted away in his old cave, Jason thinks he might've taken too many babyclothes from the box, but that's all it will give him.

With an inward shrug, Jason deposits his latest finds - a bib that reads #1 Baby and a onesie that proclaims Jason the greatest father in the world - and exits the caves quickly, startling to see a familiar face as he emerges.

"Oh," he says, pausing, but he brightens. "Hey!"

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Jason's smile fades. "She thinks her dad will hate her," he says, and he'd been terrified of that, too, but then he calmed down and thought about it. "He won't, though." Who could hate Lux?

"So she doesn't want to tell anybody yet. It's gonna be obvious though," he adds, kneeling to dig through the clothes pile with a shrug. "Eventually."

He's quiet for a while after, sorting needlessly through the onesies and bibs, the tiny socks that do something funny to his heart. "I never even had brothers or sisters. I've hardly been around babies. But I'm gonna figure it out."

"Did you ever think it was weird," he says, still holding the little red and green onesie, so like the original uniform. Just add a yellow cape and some gauntlets, a pair of pixie boots. Dick would like it. Dick would probably be happier about it, know how to just be happy, and reflect Jason's enthusiasm back at him until it became necessary to do anything else. "That we were all only children? Knowing him, it was probably intentional."

Hero-worship, maybe even love, didn't stop him from knowing just how manipulative their mentor was. Dick could reflect Jason's happiness back at him, but he thinks Jason's the only one of them who could be this genuinely happy about it. Who won't carry too much of Bruce over into this kid's life. "I think you'll do fine."

"We didn't have anything," he says, repeating something it'd taken Talia's prompting to make him realize. "Just him. He could control us." Not Tim, though, Tim had a family, did, at least, when he started out.

"It'll be yours, too," he says, looking up. "Your family. You're my brother, you're its uncle."