Chapter Text
“Hoodie, sweetie, not everything is about trying to pull you back under B’s cape. Sometimes a man just wants a meal in peace.” Dick says around a mouthful of vermicelli noodles in response to Jason’s threat to send him packing.
The older hero is crouched in the shadowed corner of one of Jason’s favorite lookout spots, shoulders hunched and slurping noodles into his face with the attitude of a junkyard dog attacking a pack of raw hamburger. Jason wonders what kind of patrol the other man’s had, or if he’s simply never lost the appetite that took out half the roast on the rare occasions he was at the mansion for dinner back in Jason's pre-zombie days.
It looks like he got takeout from that midtown Vietnamese place that has the pho broth that’s liquid heaven. Jason’s stomach rumbles and he grinds the heels of his boots onto the roof to try and cover the sound. Dick smirks, peeking up at him through the dark curtain of his bangs, holding up a half-full take-out bag.
“Got you beef pho and that salty lemonade thing you like.” Dick says, like he doesn’t know the Vietnamese words and pronounces them without a trace of awareness for how pretentious he sounds. He holds the bag out to Jason, definitely wiggling his eyebrows under his domino, “Truce?”
Jason can smell the fucking broth through three layers of plastic and his built in rebreather. His stomach growls and Dick smiles at him like an angel contracted to do toothpaste commercials. He sighs and unlatches his helmet.
“You can stay until you finish.” He says, snatching the bag and popping a squat just out of dickface’s reach. He tears into the bag, sighing as the smell of fresh basil and lemongrass hits him in the face. Dick doesn’t do more than shoot him a grin that borders on gloating as Jason dumps everything into the broth. The older hero seems content to go right back to his own meal as soon as Jason digs into his, and he appreciates the silence.
He gets halfway into his pho before his stomach stops growling enough for him to get curious about what golden boy is reading. Dick's taking his sweetass time with his last few bites, apparently taking Jason's time stipulation seriously, only taking another mouthful of noodles every few pages or so. His hair is getting long again, he keeps having to sweep his bangs behind his ears, and has a tiny noodle bit stuck to his cheek under his mask where he was sloppy with his chopsticks. Dick absently chews on said chopsticks between bites, wiggling them between his teeth like a pair of old fashioned cigarette holders. Jason wonders how often he's gotten a splinter that way. He has hardly even looked at Jason since the taller man sat down and he's starting to believe Dick meant it about this not being a "rejoin the fold" meeting.
The rocky ground between him and the rest of the bats has smoothed out a bit in the last year, but the second B pushed for him to rejoin the main comms network and start pooling his case files with the others again, Jason made it clear that while he no longer wanted fire and brimstone between them, Red Hood still worked by his rules. And if that meant Hood worked without the other bats, then he did shit without the other bats. It wasn't like he hadn't made alliances elsewhere since returning to Gotham.
B's jaw had tightened like it did back in Jason's Robin days when he'd questioned protocol, but Jason wasn't a snot nosed kid whose only frames of the world were crime alley or under Batman's shadow anymore. He had a bigger picture now, and Bruce's "because I said so" voice no longer scared him. Amazing what dying will do for your perspective.
Nightwing had been the one to negotiate a truce that night. Jason was halfway home, his blood still steaming, before he caught that Dick had spun things so every compromise came from Bruce's end. Sure, Jason had to give up using bullets on routine patrols, but he'd already done that anyway since most shit he did outside the mob drug rings and the supervillains was community organizing now, and he'd built up enough of a reputation as the guy who'd toss your head around in a duffel bag if you crossed him that no one even looked wrong at any of the food kitchens, after school groups or dancer run clubs that had a whisper of his name attached.
Dick managed to frame a lot of the things Red Hood was already doing like concessions to Batman's demands, and some of the unease he'd felt at exactly how much Dickface seemed to know about his work was tempered by the fact that golden boy got B to agree that Hood's cases were his business, Oracle would be the liaison between Hood and any of the bats for any collaborations, and bat's needed to check in before starting any clusterfucks in his territory. Also, most blessedly of all, Jason was off the hook for any debriefings or goddamn BatTeam meetings.
Since then, he'd seen Dick at a handful of gatherings Alfred had invited him to and they'd worked together once or twice on a case, but the other man never brought up the strings he pulled with B. Or pushed for Red Hood to work closer with the rest of the Bats for that matter.
Jason flicks his eyes up from swirling around the last scraps of beef in his pho to study the other man, debating whether he wants to open up this conversational wormhole or not. This is Jason’s favorite roof not just for the vantage point, though he can usually either hear or see most of the major bullshit points in Crime Alley should anything go down. It’s his favorite because none of the other bats seem to notice it, tucked away from the wind and rain behind a larger, burned out shell of an abandoned tenement on one side, but protected from the stench of the nearby meat and fish markets on the other side by the neon billboard topped pawn shop next door. But somehow, Nightwing knew about this spot. Just like he somehow knew about all the shit Red Hood had been up to, funneling cash and working hands into the neighborhoods even good samaritan Brucie Wayne missed.
Nightwing hadn’t spilled Jason’s secrets though. So Jason would let him have his.
He points his chopsticks at the cover of the pulpy romance Dick’s reading, it’s by some bizarre dude who’s entire schtick is people getting railed by anything from the space time continuum to dinosaurs, like a sexual madlib.
“You read the Bog Thing ones that guy wrote?” Jason asks, and Dick’s head snaps up like he forgot Jason was there before he sways forward, barking out that awkward half-laugh people do when they get caught singing to themselves on the subway or riding the grocery cart down the aisle.
“Yes, yes I fucking have, and I can ask literally no one about them without looking like a freak, because they’re obviously about Swamp Thing who is an actual League member which makes the whole thing fucking weird.” Dick says, waving the book around. Jason's not sure he's heard the other guy drop the f bomb before, outside of missions that have gone ass up. It feels like discovering Mr. Rogers actually had full sleeve tattoos under his cardigan.
“Okay, but that one’s not as weird as the one that’s clearly about banging that interdimensional dickhead who shows up to fuck with Supes every once and a while.” Jason counters, grinning.
Dick leans across the gap between them, slapping his hand on the roof “You noticed that too!” He lifts his hand to his mouth and leans in, whispering, “Did it feel a little too...accurate... to you?”
Jason turns to look Dick dead in the white-out lenses, “Goldie, take it from a guy who’s seen the great beyond, there are things you are better off not questioning.”
The second the words leave his mouth, Jason tastes ash on his tongue, bracing for the fretting, wounded look to cross over Dick’s face the way it did when the other’s first realized exactly who was under the hood. The older hero frowns, brows scrunching under his mask and Jason readies a handful of comebacks to send the other man careening off his favorite rooftop never to return. Well, one night of pho was nice while it lasted.
“Are you really comparing clawing your way back to life with a porn novel about fucking an interdimensional chaos entity?” Dick asks, face scrunching in that incredulous look he’s seen the man turn on the Pretender after watching him down a hellish mix of red bull and Zesti while breaking the typing speed world record. Jason barks out a laugh, choking on his lemonade as the other man stares him down.
“I’m sorry, Dickaroo, do you have enough experience with either to cast such an objection?” Jason asks, smirking. “Far as I know, you’ve only skirted the edge of the great beyond, and I heard you get around, but don’t think your dalliances have been quite to that scale.”
Dick’s face closes off like a shop front gate slamming down with the sunset and Jason sucks in a breath to avoid flinching at the sudden chill. The other man pulls away, shoveling down the last couple mouthfuls of his dinner before standing, he doesn’t look at Jason as he rises.
“Thanks for letting me crash." He says, turning to smile at the space over Jason's head, its the toothpaste commercial smile again, not the impish one that he caught a glimpse of in their book talk. Dick turns away, scanning for a good spot to aim his grappler. The silence is long enough Jason thinks it's the end of conversation between them before he catches, "Not all rumors are true, you know.”
Jason flashes back to a late night conversation with Kori after an Outlaws run, both of them wiggling their bare feet in the sand as they watched the ocean lap the shore. Somehow they’d ended up on Dick, on the void between Kori and him being the most noxiously in love power couple Jason’d ever secretly wished to be in the middle of and the now, where they spoke like old coworkers who'd bumped into each other at the grocery. Old anger flashed in the alien princess’ eyes, but the regret there was louder.
“We did not understand each other then, and he was not blameless, just as I was not blameless.” She’d said, resting her chin on her knees, “But I wish I believed him the first time, when he told me how rarely anyone asked before they took from him.”
Jason curses under his breath, lurching to his feet as Dick pulls out his grapple, “Not as well as you do, I guess.”
Dick jerks, looking back at him over his shoulder, “What?”
“You kept B out of my business, months ago.” Jason says, swinging his fist into his other hand absently, looking at Dick from the corner of his eye, he pulls out one of the gory epithets he’s caught whispered about him in the dive bars around town, “You wouldn’t do that for a crime lord who runs around painting the streets in blood.”
Dick snorts, dropping his grappler back to his side, “I would for a crime lord that makes sure every kindergartner and their family in his territory has three meals a day.”
“It’s not like I organize that shit.” Jason says, rubbing his cheek absently “I just cut the checks and look mean.”
“And help the kids with their English homework.” Dick retorts.
“Look, The Giver is fucking messed up to dump on a bunch of hormonal twelve year olds. That’s a lot of shit to unpack.” Jason says, and his face heats when he realizes Dick’s turned around to face him fully, that smaller, realer smile on his face, the one that feels like sunlight in fall. Jason turns away to stare at the flickering neon of the pawn shop sign, “Thanks for dinner.”
A grapple line fires off, and there’s the scratch of gravel as Dick shifts for the jump, “Any time, Hood.”
Jason doesn’t look up til Dick’s long gone. Not once did the other man call him ‘Little wing’ or make a Robin joke. His stomach twists around that thought in a way he can’t decipher. He turns back to their eating spot to clear up their trash and realizes Dick took his garbage with him, but forgot the book. Jason tucks it in his jacket.