#thank you tauria!! <33 you picked out some juicy ones OwO

[ragnarokhound]

“Tell me to stay and I will be here for as long as you’ll have me.” for the h/c prompts? 💞

Thank you for the prompts!!! I was going to respond to both of them today but uh. This one got a little out of hand lmao

I hope you enjoy!!

9. “Tell me to stay and I will be here for as long as you’ll have me.”

Jaytim, warnings for: Thoughts of self-harm, canon-typical violence, panic attacks/triggers w/heavy emphasis on breath, Jason being a defensive, self-deprecating asshole <3

---

Jason doesn’t like to think of himself as a couple cards short of a full deck, but some nights? Are harder than others.

It’s so stupid. It’s always so stupid. Half the time it’s not even a trigger— and Jason knows his triggers, intimately. Has them filed away in a corner of his mind so that when the glass descends and his hands stop feeling like they belong to him, he can think to himself, oh, it was the beep of that guy’s wristwatch that set him off. That’s why he needs to be outside right now. That’s why he wants to punch brick until his knuckles are red and white and mangled.

Take tonight for instance.

He was doing his rounds. In between cases and expecting a slow night, when he found some guy getting worked over by a couple of mobsters. This would be easy, he thought. I eat chumps like these for breakfast, he thought. They aren’t even packing.

But a few meaty thwacks in the exact wrong rhythm, followed up by the poor sucker screaming in the exact wrong tone, and he’s left playing fifty-two-card pickup with only jokers to substitute. 

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Bloody shins aren’t as satisfying as busted braincaps no matter what Tim and the other bats say, but relationships are about compromise. He puts the guys in cheap suits on the ground and calls them an ambulance.

Their hapless victim gets a talking to about when it’s smart to borrow from loan sharks (never), directions to Leslie’s clinic (yeah, no, you’re gonna wanna take 15th—), what to say when the Red Hood personally intervenes on your behalf (thank you, strange man, bye), and Jason makes it to a safehouse without once giving in to the burn of the goading green fire in his blood.

See? Compromise.

Now he’s on the couch with blood on his bare knuckles, and the shards of glass in the bathroom are all that remain of his mirror. He sits and tries to breathe, but his brain is full of static; shuffling and shuffling and shuffling the deck but there’s no one to tell him when to stop. He’s not really sure how much time has passed when he hears the quiet whir of his security system shutting down.

There’s a gun in his hand with the safety off, pointed at Tim before the window’s even open.

Tim’s voice is loud in the quiet room, casual and light like the liar he is, but to Jason it still sounds muffled. Boxed up. Buried.

He takes another breath.

“Bad time?”

“Fuck off,” Jason says, just as faux-casual, because that’s what they do.

Only it wheezes out of him instead, thready and weak. The gun shakes in his hand. Tim pauses on the window ledge.

Jason can practically hear the gears whirring as he reassesses the scene: Jason’s bloody knuckles and the distant sound of water still running in the bathroom sink. Haphazard parts of his uniform shucked off almost at random, the helmet nowhere in sight, but his top missing and the holster straps hanging off his waist. 

Air whistles in and out of his tight chest in shallow, streaking streams that get closer and closer together the longer he looks at Red Robin’s expressionless white eye sockets. He knows what Tim sees. 

The silence weighs on him. It pisses him off.

The only thing worse than being a scattered mess is having a witness. The only thing worse than having a witness is if that witness is Tim. They haven’t been fucking that long, but it’s been long enough that Tim probably came over tonight with more than one item on his to-do list.

“Not tonight, princess,” Jason bites out when Tim still hasn’t said anything. “Daddy’s tired.”

Tim steps inside.

The gunshot rings sharp and stinging in the air before he even realizes he’s pulled the trigger. The smoking hole on the floor by Tim’s foot is the only warning Jason feels capable of giving right now.

“Did I—did I fucking stutter?” He tries to say, but black spots bloom at the scattered edges of his vision, and he wavers.

One second Tim is frozen with his palms out, showing that they’re empty, and the next he’s easing the gun out of Jason’s hand and letting Jason twist a fist in the front of his costume. He helps Jason sit back down, and Jason doesn’t want to look at his face, to see the pity there. 

He gasps, muscles tensing, and under his fingers he catalogs the new mesh Tim is trying out with his suit. It’s probably something with a stupid, long name and the word “polymer” thrown in for added pretension. It sounds like something Tim would do.

“...something happen tonight?” Tim is asking quietly.

It’s not Robin-steady, because he knows Jason well enough to know how bad an idea that would be, but it’s not the levity they fake with each other either. Whatever it is, it’s making Jason itch.

Then he catches Tim taking his pulse and peering into one of his eyes with intense scrutiny, and what he’s said catches up to him. 

Jason laughs. It’s an ugly sound.

“Oh, quit it. I wasn’t gassed,” he snaps. “There’s no toxin, there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“That’s not what I—” Tim tries to backtrack but it’s way too late for that weak shit.

“Except for the everything that’s fucking wrong with me,” he snarls. He didn’t know he was going to say that until he'd already said it, bubbling and burning out of his mouth like melting plastic, acrid and noxious— but he feels afloat, drifting; like he’s watching himself from the other room. So it doesn’t matter.

“It’s not going to be fixed, there isn’t any antidote for you to cook up in your cute little lab for this—” he whirls a sharp-fingered hand around his temple, “fucking garbage.”

“Jason,” Tim says, fingers tight and prying at Jason’s grip.

“There’s no cure for being beaten to death, no little step-by-step handbook for kids who don’t fucking stay dead, so you can take your shitty costume and your knock-off batarangs and fake-ass fucking concern—”

“Jason, take a breath for me.”

“You—”

Take a breath? Oh, he’ll take a fucking breath, alright—

He’ll take a breath and then he’ll—

He’ll take a breath and—

He’ll take a—

He takes a fucking breath.

Tim’s face is bare.

His eyes are very blue. It takes Jason approximately three years to realize that the heavy weight on his shoulders is Tim’s cape, unclipped and pooling in their laps.

It takes another five to realize that the heavy weight in his lap is Tim himself, straddling his thighs and breathing steadily under their joined hands. Tim’s heart beats an alternate rhythm, almost three beats for every breath in, almost four for every breath out, and Jason closes his eyes.

“Fuck.”

“Hey,” Tim says.

Jason doesn’t say anything more.

What else is there to say when your kind-of-colleague, kind-of-booty-call, complete-pain-in-the-ass comes over when you’re in the middle of some kind-of-mental break? Fucking ‘sorry’ ?

“Sorry,” he says. “Not exactly fit for company right now.”

Tim smirks. “I noticed.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You gonna shoot at me again?”

Jason scowls.

“I fucking might.”

Tim only rolls his eyes. Jason finds it oddly settling. He finds all of it oddly settling; bickering with Tim is normal. Easy. It reminds him of what he’s like now. The full fifty-two.

His fingers are still trembling, but Tim is stroking absent-mindedly over the skin on the back of his hand. He might not be aware he’s still doing it. Tim exudes an air of total comfort, like the only place he wants to be right now is literally babysitting Jason; but Jason knows better. He sighs.

“Listen,” he says, staring at a point past Tim’s ear. “I could have picked a better way to say it, but I’m— I’m really not up for anything tonight—”

Tim stiffens.

“Jason, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Sex, obviously.”

He watches in real-time as Tim processes that. It’s honestly kind of fascinating, in a terrible, gut-stabbing kind of way. Tim takes a deep breath.

“Dude. I get that you are in an emotionally vulnerable place right now—”

“Hey—”

“—but I’m not that much of an asshole,” Tim says flatly. “You really think I’m gonna bail the second I see that you’re having a bad night? Or that I’m only gonna stick around if you put out after you’re done having a panic attack? Very sexy. Fuck you very much,” he finishes, hissing and affronted. 

Jason stares at him.

“You can’t tell me this is how you wanted to be spending your night,” he says, but his hands creak convulsively around Tim’s, as if to hold him in place. The traitors.

“You don’t know how I want to spend my night,” Tim retorts.

“Oh, come on. I’m not gonna ask you to babysit me and check the closet for monsters before I go to sleep so I don’t have wittle nightmares—” Jason scoffs.

“So don’t ask,” Tim says, eyes burning; Jason’s breath catches. “Tell me to stay. I’ll be here.”

“You’ll be here,” he says skeptically. But Tim’s hands squeeze around his, so hard and fast it hurts. The pain is grounding.

“As long as you’ll have me.”

He wants to scoff again. It’s the kind of saccharine after-school-special corny bullshit that he always hated coming from Bruce.

But his grip is just as tight on Tim, their bones rubbing together through the barrier of their skin. The thought of letting go makes his stomach swoop, like the moments just after stepping off a plane with no chute. That window between stepping and being caught; when his heart still needs convincing that someone else will save him.

(It’s the kind of earnest, rock-solid sincerity he always craved from Bruce; the kind he always ate up, hook, line, and sinker.)

He swallows his pride. His dry throat clicks.

Fine. Stay. If you’re so fucking eager, is what he tries to say. 

But all that comes out is, “Stay.”

Tim leans forward, and drops his forehead onto Jason’s bare shoulder. Jason’s shaky breath stirs the fine black hairs beneath his nose, the mild scent of his shampoo wafting gently into Jason’s nose. After an uncertain beat, he lets his cheek fall. Then the rest of him. They stack against each other, two cards forming the foundations of a house. 

When Jason shakes apart, Tim holds steady.

#thank you tauria!! <33 you picked out some juicy ones OwO #jaytim #my writing #ladytauria #asked and answered #prompt game #*pats jason on the back* sorry bud I had to do it to em #i wrote the last paragraph first and the One metaphor at the end prompted me to write another thousand words OOPS #i'll collect these asks and post them to Ao3 for easy reading when I'm done with them lol