#grenades | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kittymaine · 1 year

Text

Two Weeks Notice Ch.3

// Summary: There’s an alien invasion and Damian and Jason are the unlikely team that are going to stop it. //

When an alien invasion force made landfall off the coast of Delaware, nobody had been expecting it. Jason sure hadn’t been. He had been sleeping off a brutal fight with a literal vampire the night before when his phone woke him up with a laundry list of emergency alerts from Babs.

Most of that day was a blur to Jason. He remembered suiting up in his room before he left, pulling tactical armor over top of aching bruises and blood spotted gauze pads. He remembered speeding through midday traffic out of Gotham, following Babs’ direction to avoid the roadblocks and reach the rendezvous point she directed him to.

The rendezvous point was just an intersection of streets in a small Delaware town, the streets empty and quiet due to lockdown. When he got there, he was met with Steph, Cass, Damian and Blue Beetle. He barely had a chance to greet the girls before Black Canary was striding up to them and giving their marching orders.

Steph and Cass were teamed together and sent to one location, and he and Damian to another. Blue Beetle was teamed with Black Canary to head to another point to reconvene with some other Justice League members to form a strike team. The bats were being asked to hold some strategic points along the beach, but otherwise weren’t being asked to do anything too exciting. Since none of them except Duke were metahumans, their skill set wasn’t considered to be very valuable in the fight.

Regardless, Jason was on edge as he drove toward the coast, Damian riding his own bike by his side. He was extremely aware that Damian was only fourteen (fifteen, maybe?) and that made him the adult in their little team up. If anything happened to Damian, it would surely be his ass that the whole family would roast alive for it. He hated to admit it to himself, but he had just started to enjoy the company of Babs and her Batgirls, and he really didn’t want to fuck it up.

Damian was tense and quiet the whole ride there. It was the first time Damian had seen Jason since the meeting, but he barely acknowledged him.

It was barely a week before Halloween, so there weren’t any tourists on the beach when the aliens had landed. Even so, the beach looked like a bloodbath. Sprays of blood and bodies were dotted here and there on the cold beige sand. On the street facing the beach, cars were turned over and smashed, some still smoking quietly into an overcast gray sky.

The invasion was very literal, with a few small ships landed at different points along the beach where squads of aliens explored into human towns and villages. On top of that, the bug like aliens were taking no chances and shooting at basically anything that moved. The beach was a tough place to try and hold them back, considering how open and flat it was.

Jason motioned Damian into an abandoned car before trying to engage the enemy, and drove over the dunes and up onto the beach before flipping the car and using it as cover to try and halt the aliens’ advancement up into the town. Unfortunately, that meant they were pretty effectively pinned down as they traded shots with the aliens.

What followed was a terrifying and exhausting battle of inches.

Jason had brought a duffle bag full of ammo and a few supplemental weapons in case of a jam, but Damian only had the batarangs he could hold in his belt and ran out within minutes. Jason had handed some back up pistols to Damian and ignored the surprised expression on the kid’s face. He was League trained, just like Jason. He knew that Talia would have trained Damian on every conceivable weapon, including firearms. Damian didn’t disappoint, either. It took him a second to adjust to the rubber bullets, but once he did, he was almost as good a shot as Jason.

Unfortunately, rubber bullets didn’t do much when the other team were firing lasers that could turn sand into glass.

“We are going to die, if we stay here,” Damian grunted as he ducked just a bare second before a blue flash of light cut through where his head just was.

“If we fall back, we risk some of them splitting off and heading into town,” Jason grunted as he shot blindly over the edge of the car to try and push the three aliens advancing on their position back.

“They must have some short distance warp technology in their spaceship,” Damian said as he peeked out around the edge of their cover to take a quick look at the ship he was talking about. It was shaped sort of like a minivan with rockets attached to where you might expect the back tires to be, and had an almost clown car quality as alien after alien piled out of it as they took out the ones that ventured into their line of sight.

“If we can destroy their ship or whatever is inside the ship that is allowing them to teleport to our planet, we could free ourselves up to help elsewhere,” Damian continued.

“Leaving cover is risky,” Jason said doubtfully, peeking out himself over the top to see that the three aliens had dived behind a bank of sand and were scrabbling at each other like they were trying to dare each other to advance first.

“I’m sure you have something in that bag of yours that can help sew a little chaos,” Damian suggested with a cocky smirk.

It was the first expression Jason had seen on the kid that wasn’t just blank professionalism or a grimace of effort. It was hard to say no to such a mischievous look from such a serious kid.

Jason snorted and ducked down to dig through a side pocket on his bag. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he sighed, holding up a handful of flash bangs. He armed them and took another look over the car to see if the aliens had moved, and almost ate a laser to the face for it. “Just close your eyes and ears, but still be ready. It’s hard to anticipate how these things will affect extraterrestrials,” Jason explained as he deftly chucked three flash bangs in a strategic line between them and the aliens.

Damian already had his earplugs in, so Jason shoved his own in his ears quickly and held up his fingers to count down to detonation.

Even behind cover and with earplugs in, the sound of all three flash bangs detonating so close together was nearly deafening and everything in their sight was cast into sharp contrast for a few seconds, their eyes no longer able to differentiate any nuance between light and shadow. Jason could barely hear the painful screech of inhuman voices screaming in pain over the faint ringing in his ears.

As soon as color began to seep back into his vision, Jason gave the hand signal to move out. Both Jason and Damian dodged around the car they had been using for cover and charged across the sand toward the spaceship. Jason took a moment to glance over at the small dune the aliens had been using for cover and saw sprays of blue that looked like maybe the flash bangs had maybe done more damage than he was expecting. But, he wasn’t about to pause and check. He’d much rather that than their enemies being okay and getting shot full of holes as a result.

They reached the ship after a few seconds of running painfully slowly, the sand pulling at their feet with every step. When they finally clambered onto the craft, it was mercifully empty. In fact, the inside of the ship was completely empty, with no seats or levers or anything sticking out of the walls. Instead, the walls, floors and ceilings were covered in markings, symbols, lines and shapes.

“Ugh, aliens,” Jason grunted, looking around the ship for anything that looked like a ‘DON’T TOUCH SELF DETONATION SEQUENCE HERE’ sign.

“We must find a way of turning off their warp point or, failing that, we must destroy the ship,” Damian bit out, scanning across the iconography littering the walls just as frantically as Jason.

“Easier said than done,” Jason muttered, not looking up from the series of symbols he was inspecting.

Suddenly, a wash of blue light spilled across the walls of the ship. Jason’s head snapped up just in time to see Damian snatch his hand away from a set of glowing symbols, a large circle under his feet shining in eerie blue light and steadily bathing him in strange dancing blue particles.

“Damian!” Jason shouted, crossing the ship in a few short steps and taking him by the upper arms.

He meant to yank Damian back out of the circle, but the second he touched him, it felt like his whole body both froze up and went immaterial. He could feel himself, everything that composed him, shaking apart like atoms in an ion storm. Everything that made him who he was scattering, disconnecting, freeing itself from the creature that called itself Jason Todd. He could only look mutely at Damian’s stricken expression and reflect that in the laundry list of all his fuck-ups, this had to be the hands down all time worst one. Not only did he let Bruce’s son disintegrate himself in an alien spaceship, but he was being disintegrated too.

He felt himself stretch. He could still feel his feet in his steel toed boots on strange alien metal, but he could also feel the sterile coldness of space on his collar bones, the wetness of clouds on his left elbow, the brush of feathers against his right hip. Jason also felt Damian, really felt him in a way he had never felt anyone before. He felt his child soft skin, and the pull of old scars on his back, and the ache of a broken bone in his leg that didn’t set right. He felt it all from the inside, Damian’s feelings mixed up with his own. Jason felt Damian’s emotions, the way fear sat familiar in his chest alongside a well-worn resignation to death. That cut Jason terribly deep. Jason knew intellectually that he had probably seen more death in his short life than thirty normal people combined. But, Damian was still a child, and the way that he so quickly gave up and resigned himself to death filled Jason equally with rage and despair.

And then they were coalescing, pulled back together, atoms stretched across miles like a rubber band that refused to break, finally snapping back. Jason had a panicked second to fear that they would come back together, a terrible accident that would result in a body with too many limbs and too many faces and too many thoughts. But, it was only a flash of a thought and then his body was back together just as it always had been and he and Damian were crashing to the floor in an unfamiliar place.

Jason still had his hand wrapped around Damian’s upper arm and used it to tuck him into the protection of his chest before they hit the ground. The chattering of panicked aliens immediately sounded out around them, and Jason sat up with his guns already hot.

Jason only saw the room they were in with his peripheral vision, but he got the impression that they were in a huge hangar like room with steps like bleachers all covered in the same circles that Damian and Jason had just appeared in. They were surrounded by the same bug aliens they had been fighting on the beach, little knots of them gathered here and there near the various circles.

In close quarters, fighting the aliens was a lot easier, but also more dangerous. Luckily, they had the element of surprise on their side, causing the aliens to panic and fire wildly. Jason and Damian were both skilled, but things were tilted greatly out of their favor. They fought out of the big room that they had found themselves in and down hallways randomly until they could get to a room that seemed empty and hidden where they could catch their breath.

“Fuck, where are we?” Jason gasped, trying to catch his breath while also keeping an eye on the hallway they had just exited.

“We must be on the mothership,” Damian responded. He sounded tense, but at least he wasn’t out of breath. “The ship must have only been able to let them travel back and forth to the mothership.”

“Makes sense,” Jason said as he took a moment to eject the magazine on his handguns and check what he had left. There was practically nothing, so he snapped them shut and stuck them back into their holsters. He would be better off with his hands free. “So, now we just need to figure out how to get the hell off this thing.”

“Perhaps not,” Damian said. He pinned Jason with an irritated look when Jason snorted in disagreement. “Father’s team will be trying to infiltrate the mothership to disable the invasion at the source. But, we are already here. We can end the attack now and avoid any further bloodshed.”

“Damian,” Jason snapped, not quite able to fathom how much of a bad idea that was. “We are alone, with no backup, no one knows we’re up here, and I’m out of bullets! How the hell do you propose we even do such a thing?”

“Simple, of course,” Damian sniffed, tilting his head up in a move that would have communicated superiority if his hands weren’t clutching his katana in a white knuckled grip. “We find the bridge and take control of it.”

“Jesus, kid,” Jason sighed, running a weary hand over his face. Not only was that plan reckless, it was dangerous. They weren’t metahumans like everyone else involved in the fight against the invading force. They were highly trained, yes, but both he and Damian were ultimately just normal people. It would only take one lucky shot for one of them to be killed or injured so badly they could no longer escape. Damian was only fourteen, so maybe this made sense to him, but Jason had to be the adult in this situation. “There is no way that we are doing that. We catch our breath, then we’re heading right back to that teleporter room and catching a ride back to Earth. That’s it.”

“If you are too cowardly to take advantage of this opportunity, then I will do it myself,” Damian snapped, his chin tilting even higher. The leather of his gloves creaked, he was holding onto the hilt of his sword so tight.

“There is no fucking world where you go running around an alien spaceship with only a shitty ninja sword, just like there’s no world where I make that run with you,” Jason growled, feigning an anger he could barely summon up. It had been hours since he had arrived at the rendezvous point. He was exhausted and the adrenaline from the teleportation had worn off, leaving him shaky and tense.

Damian narrowed his eyes and loosened his stance, shaking his arms out from their tense grip.

“Good, now let’s-” Jason didn’t get to finish what he was saying, because Damian knocked his legs out from under him with a vicious kick and took off down the hallway in the opposite direction of the room they had just come from.

Jason squawked indignantly as he fell back into the wall, taken completely off guard and flailing as he tried to recover his balance. “You little shit!” Jason shouted once he gained his feet and took off after Damian, his anger reigniting like a familiar lighter in his hand, spurring him forward through his exhaustion, his heavy boots ringing out loudly on the unusual metal of the alien deck.

It took a few minutes before he caught up with Damian. The kid was fast as shit. It almost made Jason miss the days when he was five foot nothing and barely a hundred pounds. But, Damian eventually got snagged up in a narrow hallway with a bunch of panicking aliens that wouldn’t stop laying down suppressing fire. Damian was pinned down behind a column, unable to move forward or retreat without risking taking fire.

“Hey, assholes!” Jason shouted before lobbing a grenade down the hallway and rolling toward’s Damian’s hiding spot. He tucked a stunned Damian against his chest and covered his ears with his hands, a few seconds before a huge concussive blast rocked the hallway, sending them both to the floor.

“You had a grenade this whole time?” Damian groaned, weakly pushing Jason off him as he tried to climb to his feet. Even with his helmet protecting his ears, Damian’s words were muffled, so it took a few seconds for Jason to determine what he said.

“They’re not exactly a non-lethal option, but I think we’re past that now,” Jason grimaced, hoping that this wouldn’t get back to Bruce. Hopefully invasive alien species weren’t included in his no kill rules. Jason really didn’t want to get run out of town again.

Damian struggled to his feet. He looked distinctly unsteady, the first visible sign of weakness Jason had seen since this whole thing started. “They were guarding something important here. We need to press forward and determine what.”

“No,” Jason said, over enunciating the word. “We need to retreat and get back to the transporter room. This is a fucking suicide mission.”

“We are uniquely positioned to end this invasion before anyone else is hurt,” Damian said fiercely, even as Jason watched his small fingers tremble around his katana. “No one else can get through their shielding. We have the element of surprise on our side, as well. But, the longer we dither here, the more we lose the upper hand.”

“Damian,” Jason choked out, struggling to his feet with a hand on the wall to help him keep his balance. “You are a child,” he bit out. “And I am responsible for your safety while we’re on this mission-”

“I AM NEVER SAFE!” Damian screeched, his chin wobbling dangerously, his shrill voice bouncing off the wall and making him sound even louder. Damian breathed heavily through his nose, his chest heaving with the effort to take in air. “My life and my safety have never been guaranteed,” he gasped. “There is only honor and the mission. So don’t try to treat me like a civilian,” he sneered, a thin facade of disgust pasted over his still trembling mouth.

Jason was frozen in the wake of Damian’s words. He thought vaguely that his heart might be broken, but the pain felt far away. His ears were still ringing, but he didn’t think it was from the grenade anymore.

Putting a pacifying hand up, Jason swallowed a few times before saying, “That … is really fucked up,” through a tight throat. “And, we are going to talk about that shit later.”

Damian sucked his teeth, but seemed to settle at Jason’s response. He wondered briefly what kind of response he had been expecting, but had to shove the thought away lest he start to cry right there on an alien mothership, probably minutes from his own death.

Jason sighed heavily, trying to think around the imploding star that used to be the heart in his chest and the ringing headache from being so near the grenade when it went off and the cramping of his own exhausted muscles.

“This is such a fucked plan,” Jason muttered, realizing he really had no choice. He couldn’t fight Damian and the aliens at the same time. Not without dooming himself or Damian to a certain death.

Damian, sensing the folding of his nerve, stood up straighter, hope spreading across his face.

“We can do it, Todd! I am confident in our ability,” Damian snapped out, standing at perfect attention and with a little furrow in his brow that just made Jason’s heart hurt more.

“Okay, okay. Whatever. I get it. I want to go on record again to say I think this is a bad idea, but I probably couldn’t find the way back to the teleporter room anyway. So, whatever, bridge it is.”

Damian nodded decisively, his pleasure practically beaming from him. “Then we should move swiftly to take advantage of the opening you have provided,” he said and without a backward look stormed down the hall now stained with char and splattered with alien blood.

Jason sighed heavily, but followed. What choice did he have?

Damian was right that the aliens Jason had blown up had been guarding something, because of course he was. As they continued to push forward, they ran into more resistance. Luckily for them, the further they progressed, the more panicked and disorganized the aliens were. Damian was an extremely skilled and well-trained fighter, but firefights were Jason’s specialty. With the two of them working together, they were able to push through two more blockades before they reached a big door, wider than the others.

“There’s something important here,” Damian muttered, examining every seam and panel beside the door.

“Definitely. But how do we get in?” Jason grumbled, using the alien rifle he had stolen to sight down the hallways and make sure they weren’t going to be shot at while they stood out in the open.

Damian tried poking and caressing all the little symbols carved along the edge of the big door. While some of them lit up, none of them opened the door. Jason kept his eye on the corridor behind them, anxiously watching for more reinforcements.

“Ah!” Damian exclaimed after a few minutes. He pointed excitedly at a glowing outline on the wall. “I think this is a hand scanner. Help me pull one of them up here,” he said, running for the nearest unconscious (or maybe dead, not that Jason was really paying attention anymore) alien and grabbing them under their armpits. Jason ran over and pulled the alien out of Damian’s grip, dragging him over to the wall. Damian slapped its hand against the silhouette of the three fingered appendage.

The alien hand outline flashed red for a second, but then nothing happened. Damian and Jason looked at each other in doubt for a second. But, before either of them could say anything, a loud clang sounded from the door and steadily the two sides began to pull apart with a heavy rumble of machinery.

Jason dropped the alien unceremoniously to the ground, it’s body making a dull thump noise as it hit the floor. “That’ll work,” he said with a grin. He raised his rifle and carefully peeked around the doorway and into the next room.

What he found inside was not the bridge, but it was quickly apparent why the aliens had been so desperate to protect it.

Though it looked like no engine Jason had ever seen before, there was no other way to interpret it. In the center of the huge vaulted room is a glowing blue cylinder so big that there’s only room for a few catwalks around the sides. A clear case encloses the cylinder on all sides and on the right side of the room are a number of smaller clear walled rooms that looked suspiciously like blast walls.

“Well, shit,” Jason breathed as he took it all in.

“What?” Damian snapped, appearing at his elbow and taking a moment to scan over what Jason was seeing. “Hmph. Well, we can still stop the ship from here.”

“Yeah, but probably not without blowing ourselves up as well,” Jason grumbled, stepping further into the room.

“Do you have any more of those grenades?” Damian asked with a raised eyebrow.

Jason looked over at him with an exasperated expression, but he did produce one more grenade from inside his jacket. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

♥♦♣♠

When Jason swam back to consciousness, he was no longer in a strange alien spaceship surrounded by strange metal and glowing runes. Instead, he was pretty sure he was looking at the roof of a tent flapping gently above him in undulating waves. Jason took a deep breath and tried to take stock of himself. He remembered finding the engine room and then concocting some kind of crazy plan with Damian to chuck his last grenade at the engine and then try to hide in one of those little side rooms. But, anything after throwing the grenade was just a big blank.

He knew he should be hurting, but he couldn’t really feel anything. Jason could distantly feel pain all over, but it was distant, as if it was happening in the next room over or something. This compared with the rough sheet he could feel tucked around his chest made it pretty clear that he must be in a field hospital or something like it.

He tried to sit up, but quickly fell back to the cot he was laying on when the room spun in dizzy circles as he tried.

“Jason,” a husky familiar voice said. A steadying hand came down on his shoulder. “Hey, don’t try to move. You’ll just make yourself throw up.”

Jason squinted through eyes that felt like they were full of sand and made out the blurry silhouette of Dick standing over him. He couldn’t make out his expression through the domino mask, but his voice sounded exhausted.

“Where-” is Damian? Jason tried to ask, but his throat constricted painfully, sending him into a coughing fit.

Dick pressed a straw to his lips once he caught his breath. The lukewarm water tasted heavenly on his parched throat.

“Damian is okay,” Dick answered Jason’s unfinished question. “He made it out with only a few cuts and bruises. The Batgirls are taking him back to Gotham.”

Jason relaxed fully into the bed at that. Damian had lived. He was safe. He was heading home with Steph and Cass, two very capable people that he liked and trusted. Babs would take care of the rest.

“Jason, what were you thinking?” Dick asked, sounding wrecked. “You could have got him killed! Hell, it’s a miracle you both didn’t die.”

“Wasn’t thinking,” Jason mumbled. “Was thinking I was almost out of bullets. Was thinking it was taking too long. Was thinking I couldn’t let the kid run on ahead without me.”

There was shuffling from the side of the bed, but Jason didn’t open his eyes to see what Dick was doing.

“Dammit, Jason,” he mumbled, and his voice sounded distinctly wet in the quiet hubbub of the hospital. “I can’t lose anyone else. I really can’t.”

“Dick,” Jason sighed. Whatever meds they gave him must have been fading, because his head started pounding.

“I mean it,” Dick cried, the tears clear in his voice. “Tim left, Damian left. Damian is back, but I can tell that he already has one foot out the door. He’s looking for any excuse to leave us all behind. And, you’re just the same. I know that any day you’ll leave with the other outlaws and never come back,” Dick sobbed. Jason squeezed his eyes against his own throbbing headache. “And it will just be me. Alone. Alone with Bruce and that huge empty house full of ghosts. I can’t take it, Jason!”

Jason reached out blindly with his right hand until he felt Dick’s hair under his calloused fingers. He followed the curve of his head to his shoulder and felt it shaking in his grip. “Don’t cry,” Jason gritted out. He was embarrassed to realize his own voice was thick with emotion. He pulled on Dick’s shoulder until he tilted forward and Jason felt Dick’s face press into his ribs.

They stayed like that for a while, Dick shaking into Jason’s side even if he didn’t make a sound, and Jason trying to let the tension bleed out of his body. Slowly, the pain in his head started to ebb, and he was able to breathe a little easier. It was quiet and slow for a few minutes at least.

Until someone yanked the curtain separating Jason from the rest of the field hospital back with a loud jangle of metal rings. Dick leaped back from Jason like he had been caught doing something he would get in trouble for later. Jason’s eyes shot open to the vision of Batman in all his terrifying glory, backlit by the clean white light of the hospital. His suit was scratched and singed and splattered with blue alien blood, and his jaw was clenched so hard it looked like it was chiseled from marble.

“B?” Dick choked out, his voice still showing a significant amount of emotion for a bat. Bruce acted like he didn’t hear him and held himself so still he was practically vibrating.

Bruce took one step closer to Jason’s bed and pulled the curtain back behind him with another loud jangle that set Jason’s headache screaming.

“Dick,” Bruce gritted out between teeth so clenched he could barely move his jaw. “Leave.”

“B, this isn’t the time,” Dick said, his voice calm and pacifying, all indication of his previous emotions gone just like that. Dick slowly stood and put his hands out in a gesture of surrender, even as he put himself between Jason and Bruce. “Jason has a very severe concussion. He’s not in any shape-”

Even though Jason was watching, he didn’t really see what happened next. Bruce moved that fast. One second, Dick was talking to Bruce as gently and carefully as he would a jumper. The next second, the curtain was torn off it’s metal hooks and Dick was laying spread eagle on the ground and Bruce was hauling Jason out of the bed by his throat.

Jason could hear people yelling from all around him, but he couldn’t spare any thought for them as he focused what little attention he could scrape together on the threat in front of him. To consider Bruce anything other than a dire threat at that moment would have been the height of idiocy.

He was still fully suited up as the Bat fully equipped with all his armor and preferred weapons, while Jason felt fairly sure that he was completely nude underneath the thin hospital gown he was wearing. Hell, he was pretty sure he had a catheter and IV still connected to him. And Bruce’s face, what he could see of it, was twisted in rage, every one of his clean white teeth on display as he snarled in Jason’s face.

“If I EVER,” Bruce was yelling, his voice incredibly loud in what was previously a quiet tent, spittle flying from his mouth onto Jason’s face, “so much as LOOK AT Damian again-”

“B, stop!” Dick had gotten up and was trying to physically pry Bruce off of Jason, but Jason knew that it would be practically impossible to do so. Not without hurting Jason in the process, anyway. “You’re out of control! You-”

Like swatting a fly, Bruce flung out one hand and smacked Dick down hard. If Dick had been expecting the hit, it never would have landed. But, he hadn’t. Even in this rage, Dick must have trusted Bruce. Maybe that made him naive, but Jason suspected that was what made Dick so good, even while it hurt him.

“I will put you in a hole so deep and so dark that no one will ever find you,” Bruce was still talking, still threatening Jason, but he could feel himself going away. The pain in his head was incredible, the fear pounding in his chest was almost worse, and he was rapidly losing the struggle to keep breathing against Bruce’s tightening fingers. This was too much, so close to losing Damian and so soon after seeing Dick break down for the first time ever, this was too much too fast for Jason, and he could feel himself checking out.

Jason was quickly leaving the building, Bruce’s voice fading into so much roaring water against the rocks, his body growing numb and far away and inconsequential. For a little while, he could pretend that this was happening to someone else.

Jason wasn’t sure how long the shouting went on for, but he suspected it wasn’t very long, before a flash of red flickered past his eyes and Bruce disappeared. Jason dropped like a bag of bricks and probably would have cracked his head on the frame of his cot if Superman wasn’t suddenly there to catch his fall.

He looked just the same as Jason remembered him from his childhood. His hair still had that silly little curl in the front and his arms still felt like marble even though they handled him like spun sugar. His handsome features were twisted with sorrow and pain. Jason remembered that expression too. He would make some offhand comment about what it was like living on the streets or with his mom when she was really doing bad, and that face would come out. It used to make teenage Jason so mad. Like, why look so hurt over it? It wasn’t like Clark could have done anything about his situation. And, if he could, then maybe he deserved to be hurt over it.

Clark was saying something to Jason, but he still couldn’t hear anything going on around him. It was just ‘wah wah wah’ like the adults in Peanuts. That was pretty funny, so he started to laugh. But that must have been the wrong response, because that made Clark look really scared.

Then, Clark was gone and Dick was there instead. Dick’s voice came in a little better. He wrapped something around Jason and rubbed at his arms, and Jason leaned into him. What he really wanted was Bizarro. Bizarro would be kind and sit with Jason and tell him funny stories until Jason came back. Jason didn’t really know Dick and didn’t really want to know Dick, but between him and Clark, Dick was definitely the preferable option.

Steadily, Jason came back to his body. Dick knew what he was doing, and luckily his presence didn’t fuck with Jason too bad, so he was able to do all the right things to bring Jason back.

When Jason’s hearing finally came all the way back, Dick was talking about canned herring for some reason. Jason must have made some noise of exasperation, because Dick cut off his story and immediately focused back in on Jason.

“Hey, can you hear me? Jason?” Dick asked, his fingers digging into Jason’s shoulder.

He shrugged his hand off. “Can hear you fine,” Jason mumbled, his lips still feeling numb and his words slurred.

“Dr. Skadi needs to scan your head again, after all that,” he explained evenly. Jason stared into the blank white lenses of Dick’s domino and hated that stupid mask viscerally. It was hard to tell what expression he was making from just the set of his mouth. “I’m just going to get you into the wheelchair and-”

“He hit,” Jason stumbled, the words feeling like they were shuffled around in his head and he couldn’t find the one he needed. He took hold of Dick’s arm and tried again, “He hit?” the last word still wouldn’t come.

The expression on Dick’s face was definitely sorrow, Jason could tell even with the domino mask.

“What B did was wrong, Jason,” he said quietly, mournfully. “Nobody is going to side with him on this one. He won’t get near you again. The League will watch him, and I’ll watch him if I have too.”

“No,” Jason grunted, shaking his head for a second before the spiking pain in his head reminded him that his brains were currently barely congealed pudding and shaking the bowl around was just going to scramble it more.

Dick grimaced and held his head still with both hands, while Jason grimaced through the pain.

“No,” Jason gritted out. “He hit you,” he emphasized.

Dick was silent, but his hands shook where they still held Jason’s head on either side.

“He,” Jason struggled. The pain was subsiding, but his words weren’t being any more obedient than they’d been before. “How many. Times?” he asked, stumbling through a different way to phrase what he wanted to know.

The shaking got worse, and Jason has to gently move Dick’s hands off his face, so he wouldn’t shake up his head more than it already had been. Dick’s mouth, still the only way he could gauge his expression, was trembling. Trying not to think about it too much, Jason reached out and pulled Dick’s head to rest on his shoulder.

Dick cried and even if it was quiet, Jason could still hear him. He could feel the tears once they wore through the adhesive on the bottom of his mask drip onto his bare shoulder. He could feel how desperately Dick’s fingers pressed into his back.

Jason thought about how this was his big brother, crying because his foster father had hit him, crying because his foster father might have hit him a lot. He thought about Bruce punching him in that interrogation room and tagging him in the throat with a batarang and any number of other times he had put him down in the name of fighting the good fight. He thought about Tim walking dazed and gaunt through a field of bare trees in Pennsylvania. Jason thought about Damian sitting at that meeting in his pajamas and not looking at anyone while his father raged and broke things in the other room.

He thought to himself that this was still too much. It was too big. And his brain was basically spaghetti. He would give himself a break and not think about it too much for right now.

Because, he had enough on his plate just then. He had to get up and get into a wheelchair with Dick’s help and get pushed into what looked like a cleared out gift shop so that he could get another brain scan in a high-tech and expensive looking machine and then wait through having his IV reattached and the popped stitches on his back redone. Through it all, Dick stayed with him, even if he was tired and even if he was still leaking tears every few minutes, and that wasn’t nothing. It meant a lot more than take out left at his door and stalking over rooftops.

#jason todd #red hood #batfam #damian wayne #robin #dick grayson #nightwing #fanfiction #aliens #the aliens die guys sorry #physical abuse #child soldiers #medical procedures #concussion #guns #grenades #life down on the farm #two weeks notice #kittywrites

11 notes · View notes