Chapter Text
“So, what’s it this time? Ivy again?” Jason rolled the words in his mouth, tender jaw shifting, “She dripping sweet, sweet poison into you Dickie-bird?”
Poised, balancing on one foot the other stretching behind him, Dick glanced over at him, lips quirking. Yeah, Jason knew that grin, that flash of teeth and that crinkle at the corner of Dick’s eyes. It was a grin that Jason knew almost exclusively from his time as Robin. It was Dick’s fond teasing grin.
Or it would have been. Once.
It didn’t seem right to label it as such now, not with the way it warped the bloodstains across his cheeks.
“Can’t it just be me Jay?” Dick drawled and lazily stretched, body taunt and relaxing, flexing and releasing.
Jason raised an eyebrow, purposefully glanced up at the one thing he’d been avoiding since coming in.
“Yeah.” His words dripped with sarcasm, “Cause this is all you Dickie.”
Like it was a compliment, Dick beamed. His entire face lit up, body straightening in a stretch as if to stand taller. A real kid on Christmas.
With blood splatter on scattered across his cheeks.
“Oh he was a challenge, but hey, a boy besting his mentor, that’s a stage of growing up don’t you think?” Dick fell from his stretch, rolling up into an easy stance, still grinning, “I mean, he didn’t fall for any of the traps I laid, I had to drug him personally.”
If he’d been a normal person, the kind that didn’t see murders everyday, didn’t live with the worst of people, didn’t stand up to the plate and remove the ones who needed to go, Jason would have shuddered.
Jason gritted his teeth and looked away.
Jason wasn’t normal, but seeing Batman, Bruce, laid flat on a table like a living monument high above the cave, well it wasn’t something Jason was exactly comfortable with. He was alive, sure, Dick hadn’t killed him, used him as bait to draw Jason in. He was alive and breathing and a heart monitor set out beside him, beeped rhythmically. But with an IV stuck in his arm, and eyes closed, Bruce was out for the count.
“So he was necessary,” Dick continued to chat, eyes all too bright, too knowing, “However the rest? All pure me doing it cause I wanted to.”
“You want to kill then?” Jason sniped back, relaxing further into his bonds, “Cause really, last time you weren’t man enough, and now you’re killing the little fish in the pond. Can you see now why I am expecting outside influences?”
Little fish. Little fish who bore faces that Jason knew from his research. Little fish, the henchmen, the delivery boys, who did it not because they believed in their work, but because of their families, their loved ones, and the dirt poor slums that made up the east end and the control the mobs have over them. Little fish Jason wouldn’t have killed, Dick had sliced through laughing.
All to get to Jason’s attention back to Gotham.
All to get Jason here.
It had to be Ivy. But this wasn’t her MO.
Dick rolled his shoulders, stretching his arms forward. Slowly his knuckles cracked as he flexed his hands together
“Can’t say I never wanted to kill before. Because I have, its just so…efficient,” Dick’s mouth stretched wider on the word, before pulling a hand back and pointing a thumb over his shoulder at Batman’s silent vigil, “Just never been able to, hard thing to do with a shadow his size over your shoulder.”
Wrong. This was all so wrong. That wasn’t Dick.
“Uh huh.” Jason nodded, as mockingly as humanly possible, then decided to screw subtly, “So what’s the drug?”
Dick’s laugh was a peel of tightly constructed syllables, too perfect to be anything but an act. In that moment, he had never seemed more different that Dick from before, the original, unaltered Dick.
“Jay, Jay, Jay.” Dick drawled, stretch abandoned, stalking closer, a big cat closing in on prey, “I want this. I want this exactly as I’ve got it. Isn’t that all that matters?”
The distance between them fell away to nothing as Dick stopped in front of him. This close, Jason got front row seats to the explosion of Dick’s pupils, the blacks chasing the blue to the thinnest of rings. Drugged up to his eye balls then, and inescapably pleased with the situation, with Jason bound and, held prostrate against Dick’s wall.
Inwardly Jason swore, he should have never had faced Dick, should have done better research on why Batman was missing and Nightwing was killing, should have read that message from Red Robin, maybe found Robin and Alfred-
Curiosity. Cat. And seriously Jason thought he had learnt from last time.
“Everything you want? I’m flattered really but I have this thing where I don’t do drugged-to-hell-“ Jason started, unable to help himself, cause his self-preservation skills were still out apparently, if they’d ever been there.
A new smile came out on Dick’s face, self-satisfied, indulgent. His hands came up, fingertips brushing over Jason’s hair, path clear. Jason swung his head viscously to the side to avoid, swinging on his bonds. It was to no avail as Dick smiled tighter and chased after him settling in his hair and yanking his head back, back to met Dick’s glinting grey-blue eyes.
“Of course I want you. Your mine, Jay.” Dick whispered, chest pressing against Jason’s, words like brands brushing over Jason’s lips.
His??
No, no way in-
“Fuck you Dick. I’m not yours, I’m not Bat’s, I’m my own-“ Jason started, anger searing hot through his veins, jolting forward to try and dislodge Dick.
Dick’s hands fisted tight in his hair, knocking him hard against the wall and Jason’s vision swum white, red, white and his head thrummed into a new level of pain. Vision flared back, fuzzy and blurring, and Dick’s narrowed, narrowed, angry eyes ran like melting wax.
“You're mine Jason.” Dick purred softly, voice and expressions a sharp contradiction, “As you should have always been.”