Work Text:
Jason gets home from patrol to find a blue and black blob curled up on his couch.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, dropping his duffel bag to the floor with a heavy thump. “Literally what the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Dick raises a hand and completely ignores Jason’s very valid question. “Hey, bud. How goes things?”
“I killed seventy-five people tonight,” Jason says seriously. He is lying. He only shot one guy and it was barely a graze. “With great prejudice and malice.”
Dick’s only response to this is, “Kind of hard to kill people without malice.”
“Like you would know,” Jason says. Dick shrugs half-heartedly, which is a weird gesture because he’s still laying down on Jason’s fucking couch. Jason slides off his helmet with a long, put-upon sigh, placing it down on the windowsill behind him with a bang.
“Man,” Dick says, with what Jason refuses to acknowledge as fondness. “You’re such a drama queen.”
This statement is so laden with hypocrisy that Jason doesn’t even give it the time of day. Instead, he gets to the point. “Are you going to make me ask the obvious question?”
Dick taps his finger to his bottom lip. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m feeling circuitous right now.”
“Congratulations on finally cracking open a dictionary,” Jason deadpans. “Why the fuck are you on my couch.”
“Well.” Dick says, in an ominously cheerful tone. Jason doesn’t bother to hide his groan. “I got a little bit shot.” As if he thinks Jason needs a visual demonstration, he pinches his fingers together. “Just a tiny bit.”
Coming from Dick, this could mean anything from I was within a mile of a bullet to there is a gaping hole in my chest. Jason considers this information.
“Dickard John Grayson,” he says, slowly. “Did you get blood on my couch?”
Dick puts a hand to his chest, which is, for better or worse, not gaping. “I could be dying right now, and your biggest concern is your dry cleaning?”
“Furniture is expensive!” Jason says, throwing a hand out to the mismatched thrift store furniture dotting his living room.
Dick looks down at a spring poking out from the fabric and raises an eyebrow.
“Okay, so the couch was fifty bucks and may or may not have been used to smuggle drugs at one point, but it’s the principle of the thing!”
Dick scoffs. “Oh, please. Like you’ve never bled on this couch before.”
“Of course I haven’t!” Jason snaps. “Because I’m a normal fucking person!”
Dick looks at him for a long time.
Then, he laughs. He laughs harder than Jason has ever heard him laugh before. He laughs so hard that he nearly slides off the couch, clutching at his side and wincing.
“Well, fuck you too,” Jason mutters, crossing his arms as Dick pulls himself back together.
“Ah,” Dick says, wiping underneath his eyes. “I really needed that.”
Here, Jason notices the blood seeping through the blue underneath Dick’s arm. Not quite a gaping hole, but not quite a mile from a bullet either.
Jason is not concerned about this. Not at all. Not even a little bit. And he shows this by saying, “Great, you did bleed on my couch. You’re paying for the dry cleaning, asshole.”
“Sure, sure,” Dick says, waving off the surcharge as only a man who was raised by a billionaire can. “Can we get back to the part where you think you’re normal?”
Fuck this. Jason’s hungry. He starts rummaging around in his pantry, and if he’s pulling out enough ingredients for two, then that’s nobody’s fucking business. “How about we sidestep that and get to the part where you give me two hundred cash for bleeding on my couch?”
“I only have Venmo,” Dick says.
Jason snorts as he starts chopping an onion. “ATMs exist, Dickhead.”
“Yeah, but then I have to remember my PIN and it’s, like, a whole thing,” Dick’s saying, gesturing aimlessly. Jason scoffs again, pulling out a saucepan because what even is the point of onions if they’re not caramelized? “Can you not put onions in mine? I hate onions.”
“Who says I’m making this for you?” Jason lies.
For a moment, the only sound is the clicking of the rickety burner as the pan heats up, the sizzle of the onions as they hit the metal. Dick starts clicking his tongue and making the most annoying sounds in the world. Jason carmelizes his onions more aggressively. He refuses to give in and pay Dick any attention. God only knows he gets enough already.
Dick is the one who breaks first, because he’s always been less self-conscious than Jason is. “It’s okay, Jay. Normal is a relative term.”
Jason throws the ground beef into the pan a little haphazardly. Dick is such an asshole. Jason should have thrown him out. Jason should have coded him out of the security system. Jason should definitely not be making him a simple meat sauce and pasta.
“Normal is a funny term from the guy in spandex,” Jason tells him instead of bodily tossing him out of the apartment, bullet wounds be damned.
Dick makes an offended noise in the back of his throat. “Says the guy who is also in spandex.”
“It’s Kevlar,” Jason says instantly. “So I don’t get shot like a fucking idiot.”
“That was a personal attack,” Dick says.
“Great work, detective!” Jason says, faux-cheery. The meat is browning now, grease bubbling up in the pan.
“I’m not the detective,” Dick says, even though he is absolutely Bruce’s child, through and through. “I’m the comic relief.”
Jason snorts. “That, right there, is the funniest joke you’ve ever told.” Another pan goes on the burner, water with a pinch of salt to keep the noodles from sticking together.
“Words hurt, Jay,” Dick says solemnly. “Even more than bullet wounds.”
“In what universe does that even make sense,” Jason wonders aloud. “God, you’re so fucking weird.”
“I thought we’d already been over this,” Dick says. “I’m like, the least weird person in this family.”
This does give Jason pause.
He turns away from the bubbling meat to give Dick the flattest look he can conjure up. “You?”
Dick smiles angelically. “The one and only.”
“You think you’re normal,” Jason finishes dryly.
Dick frowns, as if Jason calling him out is actually confusing him. “Yeah?” When Jason stares some more, he attempts to clarify. “I have a job. I’ve had relationships. I know how to talk to people.”
It probably says something that this is his standard for normality. “I talk to people, asshat. I have a job.”
“Jason,” Dick says, with what he probably thinks is exceeding patience. “Your job is crime lord.”
“Not true.” Jason points the wooden spoon at him. “Sometimes I pick up part time volunteer shifts at the library.”
Dick’s eyes do something suspiciously melty. “Do you?”
“Shut up,” Jason says automatically, heat crawling up the back of his neck. “It’s not—don’t make that face.” Dick continues to smile like an idiot. “Don’t make it a thing. It’s not a thing. You’re just trying to distract me from your bullshit.”
“I’m not allowed to be proud of my baby brother?” Dick says.
I’m not your fucking brother, Jason wants to say, but then he looks back down at the pasta he doesn’t have to make. Would he do this for anyone else?
He decides not to confront that right now, or maybe ever. On to more important things.
“You’re not a normal person,” Jason tells him, still not meeting his eyes. “You say shit like that about people who have tried to kill you.”
Dick hums, ambivalent. “If I dismissed everyone who had ever tried to kill me out of hand, I wouldn’t have any friends.”
Jason does meet his gaze then, for the sole purpose of giving him a single judgemental eyebrow.
“Ah,” Dick says at last. “I see your point.”
“See?” Jason says. “You’re a basket case. I win. When people try to kill me, I just kill them back. Foolproof solution.”
Dick presses his lips together, narrows his eyes. Jason is stupidly and uncomfortably caught out. Dick is sometimes okay with murder jokes—at the very least, he never gets outright angry like fucking Bruce does. But sometimes he gets all lecture-y and disappointed, which is almost worse because Jason has no good reason to be as affected by it as he is.
“What?” Jason says defensively. “Don’t give me that face.”
Dick stares at him for a second longer, but in the end all he says is, “Your pasta is boiling over.”
“Fuck,” Jason says, turning back to the oven in a rush. Dick snorts. Jason gives him the finger without looking back.
“You know,” Dick muses, as Jason dumps the sauce into the pan. “I don’t think normal people make jokes about murdering people. Just saying.”
“Kids joke about murder all the time these days,” Jason says. “Gallows humor and all that.”
“That seems legally unsound,” Dick mutters. Jason glances away from the bubbling sauce to give him another look. “What? I’m just saying a prior history of murder jokes wouldn’t sit well with the jury.”
“You know,” Jason says, snottily. “I don’t think that normal people consider hypothetical juries in hypothetical murder trials. Just saying.”
“Oh, so joking about murder is fine but the legal system is a step too far.” Dick rolls his eyes up towards the heavens. “I see how it is.”
Jason turns back to his sauce. “You just don’t get it because you’re a millennial.” Dick splutters. Jason hides his grin in his shoulder and continues. “You’re not hip with the youth humor of today. Like me.”
“I am so hip,” Dick says, sounding genuinely offended. “I am so with it.”
“Face it,” Jason says, faux-sympathetic as he scoops the pasta into two chipped bowle. “You’re old. Old as balls, even. You’re thirty, for God’s sake.”
Dick sits up in a sudden indignance. “I am twenty-six!”
Jason shrugs as he pours the sauce over the mostly-cooked pasta. “Makes no difference to me.” He hears Dick flop backwards onto the couch, then groan as he pulls something. “That better not be more blood on my couch.”
“You and this goddamn couch,” Dick mutters. Jason ignores this as he makes his way into the living room, perching on the edge of the coffee table and unceremoniously handing Dick a bowl.
Dick looks at the bowl and then back up at him, eyes wide and–surprised, maybe? Jason doesn’t think he wants to know.
“I didn’t take the onions out,” Jason says, like it’s a defense. “I just had extra—ingredients laying around. I mean. Whatever.”
Dick sits up, gingerly this time, and takes the bowl out of Jason’s hand. “Sometimes,” he says. “I forget how young you actually are.”
Jason scowls on reflex. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Dick says, and then, “Thanks for the pasta.”
Dick’s whole shtick, Jason thinks, is that he plays at sincerity twenty-four seven to keep people from figuring out what he actually means. The downside to this is that people forget just how sincere he can actually be, and just how devastating that sincerity is when carefully applied. Jason coughs, throat suddenly tight.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, completely honest. “Seriously. I don’t want to hear about it ever again.”
“A normal reaction to have,” Dick says. Jason rolls his eyes. “How about this. How about we’re both completely insane people who are trying to do our best?”
Jason chews and swallows, because he’s not a fucking animal. “You’re just saying that because you know I’m right and you’re a psycho and you’re trying to save face.”
“Or I’m saying it because I know I’m right and I don’t want you to feel embarrassed.” Dick shrugs elegantly. “Who’s to say?”
Despite himself, Jason snorts. And then there’s nothing but a comfortable silence, broken by silverware clacking against the bowls and Dick shifting to get comfortable on the couch. It’s, well—
It’s a little nice. Just a little. A quiet moment of peace with one of the only family members he really has left.
Jason says, “Don’t think you’re off the hook for the couch, by the way.”
Dick sighs.