Leather Jackets and Painkillers | Jason Todd & Tim Drake
Info/Warnings:
Tim Drake-centric, Trans Tim Drake, Menstruation, Tim is on his period and in PAIN, Jason takes care of him, Good Sibling Jason Todd, Tim Drake is Red Robin. Jason Todd is Red Hood, Trans character written by trans author
batman masterlist
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Red Robin is in the middle of tying up a pair of thugs when a particularly bad cramp hits, twisting his insides like a blender and stabbing his gut with the viciousness of Damian with his katana; he grits his teeth, willing the pain to go away, and works his nimble fingers around the cord to finish off the knot.
With the criminals now taken care of, Red Robin taps the comm link in his ear, "O, I got two thugs tied up here."
"On it, Red. Alerting police now." Oracle responds after getting the location.
Red taps his ear once more, effectively shutting off their communication, then grapples to the top of a nearby building to wait for the police just in case the goons escape, or someone comes along to cut them free. While waiting, another cramp has Red clutching at his stomach and he has to sit down on the building's roof to stop himself from swaying on his feet and falling over the edge. He groans, cursing to himself as waves of pain wash over him, and his vision flutters before he realizes what's about to happen- fuck.
Suddenly, Red Robin falls to his side, vision black as excruciating pain grabs ahold of his consciousness and knocks him out.
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Red Hood is out on patrol, surveying his territory for trouble and shooting (rubber) bullets at anyone who provides it, when he notices the collapsed figure a few buildings away, just on the outside of his territory; when he gets closer, he realizes who that figure is, red chest piece and black sleeves and leggings giving it away before Hood even sees the yellow bird head in the middle of the figures chest: Red Robin.
Muttering curses to himself, The Hood bends over and picks the other up, throwing the smaller male over his broad shoulder. With Red Robin hanging over his shoulder, Hood's arm around his thighs to keep him from slipping, Hood turns in the direction of his nearest safe house.
About halfway to his hideout, Red Hood smells the metallic odor of blood thanks to the absence of his helmet, only wearing his domino mask tonight, before he feels a wetness against his shoulder, and he curses once more. "If you got blood on my goddamn leather jacket..."
He grumbles to himself, moving faster now, obviously so he can clean his jacket sooner and definitely not because he's worried that his (brother) replacement is injured.
The pair arrive at the safe house without incident, and Hood is quick to lay Red Robin on the couch that Hood himself has laid injured on many times before. He begins to strip Red of his suit, of his crime fighting persona, starting with the mask, turning Red Robin back into Tim Drake. The cape comes off next, then the chest piece, and so on.
Tim is down to his underwear when Jason realizes the other has no injures- scratch that- no open wounds, because in this line of work? One is always injured in one way or another, Tim is no exception, but none of the youngers current injuries are bleeding, and that confuses Jason. He looks down at his jacket, which definitely has blood on the shoulder, and at his hands, that are sticky with crimson; he then goes through the difference pieces of Tim's uniform, searching for blood, when he comes across the wet spot at the crotch of his leggings- his hands pull away covered with blood, and of course he didn't see it, because Tim's leggings are black and so are his underwear, but that means-
Jason looks at Tim's chest, where identical crescent scars shape his chest, and he remembers the gender marker on Tim's file when Jason first found out he'd been replaced as Robin and went snooping, and how the F was crossed out with a M next to it, and-
Tim is on his fucking period.
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Tim wakes up in a bed he doesn't recognize, in a room he doesn't recognize, and he's not in uniform even though he remembers that being the last thing he wore, instead dressed in an oversized pair of black sweatpants and a red hoodie that engulfs the whole upper half of his body, and he knows he's seen this hoodie before...
There's a nightstand to the right of the bed with a bottle of painkillers and a glass of water on the surface, as well as a bottled sports drink from Tim's go-to brand. In front of the nightstand are two plastic grocery bags from a corner store native to Gotham, one filled with a variety of Tim's favorite snacks and different brands of chocolate, the other filled with pads and tampons in a multitude of sizes-
Tim slips out of the bed and quietly opens the drawers of the nightstand, snooping around for anything to tell him where he is and who lives here. The first drawer contains medical equipment, bandages and gauze and hydrogen-peroxide, etcetera. The second drawer is half filled with shirts and half filled with pants, though under the clothes lies a pocketknife and picture of... Alfred and teenage Jason?!
Tim sighs, now knowing who brought him here and where he is, or where he thinks he must be: one of Jason's hideouts. Still, that doesn't mean he's safe, as Jason has hurt him before- what if this is all just a trick, a trap? Tim slowly opens the bedroom door and tip-toes his way out of the room and around the corner, where he sees a uniform free Jason hunched over on the couch, wearing grey sweatpants and a green t-shirt and scrubbing at what looks like a leather jacket.
Jason doesn't look up as he sighs, "You owe me a new jacket, pretender."
"And I owe you a new jacket because?" Tim raises an eyebrow as he walks fully into the room, stopping a few steps away from the couch.
"Because," Jason emphasizes the word as he looks at Tim, throwing the jacket at the other, "you got blood on it."
Tim looks at the stain on the jackets shoulder.
"You do know I found you passed out on a rooftop, yeah?" Tim doesn't answer, throwing the jacket back. "What happened?"
Tim scoffs. "I think you know, considering the bags you left by the bed."
"If you're in enough pain to pass out on a fucking roof, then you shouldn't be out there in the first place."
"Don't tell me what to do!" Tim oh so cleverly fires back as another rush of pain hits him full force, and he stumbles for a second before catching himself.
"You didn't take the painkillers." Jason rolls his eyes as he stands, letting his jacket fall to the couch, and he grabs Tim's arm, dragging him back to the bedroom. "Come on."
"Let me go, asshole!" He tries to fight back, but he's in too much pain, though he's brought some comfort when he's pushed to the bed and a blanket is thrown over him, and he stays quiet when Jason hands him two of the painkillers and the glass of water, taking them without protest. However, he does ask, "Why are you doing this?"
It's now Jason's turn to raise an eyebrow.
"Why are you being nice to me? Don't you care that I'm..." Tim's voice trails off.
"I don't. It's none of my businesses." Jason shrugs, picking up the bag of pads and tampons from the floor and dropping them next to Tim on the bed. "You might wanna use these. I didn't... I didn't think you'd be comfortable with me going that far, so I just put you in my sweats. You can put on something else if you bled through. Bottom drawer."
Jason walks out of the room before giving Tim any time to respond, and Tim just stares for a minute, what the fuck on the tip of his tongue, before he takes Jason's advice and grabs the bag, making his way towards the bathroom.
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30. how don’t you know the difference between your left and right?
Thank you so much for the prompt and sorry in taking so long to answer it, the fic I wrote is technically part of my before and after fic series and I didn't want to spoil certain things. That said, it's now up - also available on ao3, ofc. But no worries - this can absolutely be read as a standalone!
Without further Ado -
my heart is melting and my hands are weak
Relationship tags: Jason / Roy, Jason & Tim
Additional tags: pre-slash, mental health, dissociation
For ppl following the series, this happens sometime in January 2020, Jason is 23, Roy is 27/28 or so
Jason knows when he wakes up in the morning that it’s going to be a Bad Day.
Not necessarily a bad day as in anything is going to go wrong. There’s a difference between a bad day and a Bad Day. Everyone has bad days, where they wake up in the morning and the sky is gray and some car splashes mud on them on the way to work and their boss yells at them because they forgot to do something small and they end up ordering a comfort pizza they really can’t afford right now according to their budget. That kind of bad day is just a part of the human fucking condition, he’d once told Helen. This is not what his Bad Days are like. Bad Days don’t necessarily have to be bad days at all.
The thing about Bad Days, the thing that defines them, is that on Bad Days Jason Todd wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t feel alive.
He knows he is. He can feel his own toes as he goes through the motions of the grounding techniques he’d been taught almost a decade ago now, giving every muscle its turn, putting himself back in his own body and remembering how to push air in and out of his lungs. He knows that he’s alive, because he doesn’t remember being dead, but he’s pretty sure he couldn’t feel the callouses on his fingers with his thumb inside his grave. He knows he’s alive.
But on Bad Days, he doesn’t feel it.
His examination of every sinew of his body complete, he opens his eyes and examines his surroundings. His current Park Row apartment is small, but well insulated, so he doesn’t have to cover himself with six layers of blankets in the dead of winter. Still, his body is a little cold in his usual bedtime attire of a loose undershirt and boxers, which he finds less confusing when he sees he must have knocked one of the three layers he still needed to sleep under in the January freeze onto the floor while he was sleeping. The room is extremely sparsely decorated – Helen tells him he should personalize his space, to make it feel more like his space, but he’s too likely to break the lease and run at short notice, and he doesn’t want to risk leaving anything important behind.
His phone pings, and he realizes he doesn’t know how long he’s been staring at the blanket heap at the foot of the bed.
Arse: I’m outside!!!
Jason groans. Just what he needs on a day like this.
Still, he pushes himself onto his feet, slowly making his way to the front door. He doesn’t bother getting dressed; it’s not like the man waiting to be let in hasn’t seen him look much worse. He disarms his security system mindlessly, relying on muscle memory, and opens the door.
“Heya, Jaybird,” says Roy Harper, a grin stretched almost grotesquely on his features. “Long time no see.”
Jason just waves at him wordlessly. Well, technically he starts signing, before remembering Roy doesn’t know ASL. But it probably looks like aimless waving from an outside perspective.
Roy walks in anyway, whistling appreciatively. “This place is much nicer than the last one, Jay,” he says in a low voice. It tickles somewhere in the back of Jason’s skull, something that he doesn’t quite understand.
Jason shrugs, letting the door slam shut behind him; he reactivates the security system in the meantime. “It’s fine,” he says. “Warm.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Roy says, glancing at Jason’s bare arms, in direct contrast to Roy’s own body being well hidden under what looks like two separate coats. “I’m starting to cook in this, man.”
Jason snorts. Roy’s struggling with the zipper of his coat, so Jason steps over to help, freeing his friend and revealing the thick wool sweater beneath, presumably the material the zipper had gotten stuck on. “Is there a reason you’re here?”
“Can’t I just want to visit my best buddy?” Roy asks.
Jason raises an eyebrow. Roy sighs in defeat.
“Fine, there may or may not be an op I could use Red Hood’s help on,” Roy admits. “Something a little more complex than a broken zipper.”
Jason realizes neither he nor Roy moved once the coat was off, and he can see Roy’s Adam’s apple bob nervously as the other man realizes the same thing. Jason clears his throat and steps back. He throws the coat over the back of his couch so it doesn’t sit heavily in his arms anymore.
“What is it?” he says, wishing he had pockets to shove his hands into. He settles for leaning against a wall to suggest the same nonchalant aura.
“Drugs,” Roy says, “probably. Some New York syndicate moving product through Gotham tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow, Jason thinks, mentally sighing in relief. Things don’t necessarily go badly on Bad Days, but it’s a lot harder to focus on nonlethal shooting when he’s on the verge of what Helen calls dissociating, and he used to call glitching out like it’s the fuckin’ Matrix.
Roy sits on the couch and puts his feet up on Jason’s coffee table.
Jason snorts. “Make yourself at home, I guess.”
“Do you have some of that fancy shit Bruce calls coffee?” Roy responds.
Jason does, in fact, happen to have some of the fancy shit Bruce calls coffee. Tim brings it over in regular intervals, unwilling to find himself bereft if he finds himself crashing on Jason’s couch, or sometimes floor. Jason’s actually running low; as he goes through the motion of making the coffee – he knows exactly how Roy takes his coffee, of course, they’ve both made it for each other dozens of times to fuel long sleepless nights together, pouring over documents or just pushing away nightmares – he debates letting Tim know it’s almost gone, but it’s a safe assumption that Tim is already well aware. His brother’s overdue for a visit, anyway.
“Thanks, Jaybird,” Roy says when Jason finally hands him a mug. Jason nods and settles besides his friend, cupping his own mug.
“Tell me about the case,” he says, and listens to Roy as well as he can as the man speaks, telling him about the trail he found last week and how he followed it to Gotham, pausing only to take an occasional sip from his mug.
Jason closes his eyes and lets the words wash over him. It definitely sounds like drugs. Should be a simple case, in and out at the Gotham Harbor, shoot some bad guys and call the cops, maybe let O know in case they need backup. Plant trackers on the ones who don’t get taken in or taken down. It’s routine.
He’s so tired. If Roy hadn’t shown up, he thinks he’d probably still be in bed.
“You okay there, Jaybird?” Roy asks. Jason hadn’t noticed he’d stopped speaking, but now that he thinks back, there may have been a silent minute or two.
“Just, haven’t woken up yet,” Jason says, taking another sip of ice cold coffee.
“Mm,” Roy says. He looks Jason up and down, and Jason would wonder what he’s seeing, if he was at all in the presence of mind to do so. “Do you wanna spar, get the blood pumping a little?”
Jason likes sparring with his friends. He knows this about himself. Just, like, objectively, this is something he enjoys doing.
He doesn’t want to spar with Roy.
“Okay,” he says, dragging himself off the couch. “I’ll go change.”
He reemerges from his bedroom some vague amount of time later – he doesn’t know how long he spent staring at his dresser, trying to remember what he was doing, but it was probably not a short amount of time. Roy’s already working up a sweat, stripped down to his tee and sweatpants and stretching his arms.
“Ready?” Roy asks, grinning.
Automatically, Jason says, “Born ready.”
There’s an empty space in the apartment, cleared specifically for Jason’s workouts, that works really well for sparring as well, and there are no valuables in the apartment for someone to accidentally break, anyway, so they just get right into it. Roy throws a punch at Jason’s throat; he dodges, and makes contact with Roy’s stomach, instead. Roy coughs, but manages to make Jason stumble with a well-timed kick. It continues in this vein, the two of them extremely familiar with each other’s fighting styles and dirty tricks.
“You need to be more careful, you’re dropping your left shoulder,” Roy says casually, and Jason responds by raising his shoulder.
Roy immediately backs off.
“You okay, Jaybird?” he asks, and Jason realizes too late what happened. “Do you not know the difference between your left and your right?”
He raised the wrong shoulder.
“Yeah, I’m just – ” Jason sighs. “Never mind, let’s just get back to it, okay?”
“Nah, I’m over it,” Roy says nonchalantly.
“You sure?” Jason asks doubtfully.
“You’re not into it,” Roy says.
Jason shrugs. “I could be.”
“We can spar anytime, Jay,” Roy says, “it doesn’t have to be right now. ‘Sides, I think I’m in the mood to veg.”
Jason makes a face at veg. “You’re spending too much time with Tim,” Jason informs him.
Roy just laughs and claps Jason on the back. “I’d have to spend less time with you, then,” he says, “and I’m not planning on going anywhere.”
They veg.
Or, well, Jason finds his civilian laptop where it’s buried underneath the couch seat and logs into Dick’s Netflix, which he uses not because he can’t afford his own damn Netflix subscription, but because he likes messing with Dick’s algorithm. He tells Roy to pick something, and then he leans back on the couch till he’s only just barely touching Roy arm to arm, and closes his eyes.
He isn’t familiar with whatever it is Roy picked for them; some comedy he’s never heard of, but he missed a lot of pop culture during the time he was dead, and then “dead”, so that doesn’t really mean much. Tim’s Steph tried to “educate” him, and he threw a stray batarang at her. Fake dead Robins don’t get to lecture actually dead Robins, he’d said. None of it really mattered to him, and if something truly important had happened, it would come up in a case. That’s how he found out that Doctor Who’s a woman now, whatever that means. Tim had a lot of opinions on that one.
Jason can barely hear the comedy over Roy’s commentary, which suits his relaxation needs perfectly. Roy’s generally a lot funnier than the comedies he’d been forced to sit through over the past few years, anyway, and he likes the way his low voice rumbles through the bones of the couch, so that he feels it in his lower spine.
Eventually even Roy’s voice peters off, however, and Jason finds that he doesn’t even mind. Roy repositions so he’s got his arm on the back of the couch, and it makes the hairs on Jason’s neck raise in anticipation of – something. He doesn’t know. He gets so aware around Roy, sometimes, and he doesn’t have anything to compare it to, doesn’t understand the feeling. He chases after it as often as he ignores it.
His phone chimes again.
TD: knock knock
u have a key
TD: it’s polite to ask, motherfucker
ur not polite
“Yes I am,” Tim huffs, already shutting the door behind him, and Roy startles so hard it shakes Jason, too.
“I – what?” Roy asks, and Jason just shows him his phone, because it’s quicker than explaining. “Oh. Hi. Was Jason expecting you?”
“Coffee,” Jason grunts.
Tim holds up one of Alfred’s reusable shopping bags, presumably holding coffee in it. “Good stuff’s running low, figured I’d replenish it,” he says.
“Knew Jason kept you around for some reason,” Roy says wisely.
Tim’s eyes flash in amusement, but when they settle on Jason, the concern in them is clear as day.
All good? he signs.
Jason shrugs. Bad Day.
Tim nods in understanding. His Bad Days don’t look like Jason’s, not from the inside or the outside, but he got them, too. Probably everyone in the superhero community did, but Jason didn’t make a habit of talking about his therapy with anybody except Tim, and Bruce when Helen forced him to.
“Didn’t think there’d be anybody here except Jason,” Tim says as he unpacks his meager offerings. He also seems to have brought over some of his disgustingly sugary cereal bars. Nobody would be touching those except Tim.
Jason translates in his head. Is it okay that Roy and I are here on a Bad Day? He scowls at Tim’s back. As if he can’t make the choice of who he wants to hang out with.
Roy’s easy, he signs when Tim faces him again, knowing Tim would know what he means. Not heavy. It’s fine.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t planned,” Roy says. “Chased a lead down here from New York. I’ll only be here for a couple of days, most like.”
“Need help?” Tim asks, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Red Robin’s at your service, if you need him.”
“Nah, I’m good on that front, thanks,” Roy says. “All I need is Jaybird right here.”
Jason doesn’t react to Tim’s raised eyebrow. He knows what Tim thinks, and he’s not going to comment on it.
“But I was wondering if you could recommend some solid ASL courses,” Roy continues. “I remember Dick said you had everyone take them for Cass, I bet you did a fuckton of research on it.”
Jason stares at Roy in shock.
“Yeah, I did,” Tim says slowly, “why are you asking? Is this for a case?”
“Just figured, if I’m going to be following this guy around any longer, might as well speak his language,” Roy says, shoving his shoulder against Jason.
“Huh,” Tim says. He opens his mouth to say something else, but then his phone chirps – literally, his texting ringtone is a little bird chirp, Dick set it – and he frowns at the screen. “Ugh, I have to go.”
“Lock after yourself!” Jason yells. “Don’t leave the door open ag–!” But Tim’s already gone, and he leaves the door a little open behind him, the little brat.
He makes to go and close it, but Roy’s already gotten up. He pats Jason’s shoulder comfortingly and says, “I’ll get it, you just stay right there and get your beauty rest, Jaybird.”
“Shut up, Roy,” Jason groans.
Roy grins at him again. “Never,” he promises, and Jason hopes to hold him to that.
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