Fic: Renascence, R, Slash
Title: Renascence
Author: Kezzy
Pairing: Bruce/Jason
Rating: R for sex themes, language and mention of pixie boots
Disclaimer: DC is responsible for all their characters and I claim none nor make a monetary profit from this. Thank you.
Spoilers: None, really.
Summary: It's all about who has the upper hand and who plays the game better.
Notes: There is an insane amount of love for snake_easing betaing this for me--not only is she completely awesome and responsible for this being as good as it is, she can read my mind. And then force it to make sense. Jedi-style with better special effects. Best beta ever, especially for wielding the 'End It NOW' stick perfectly. Any left-over mistakes are completely all mine. Also just as much love to neneboomerwing for witnessing, listening through and coaxing out this beast.
The scene where Jason watches Batman fly from a building and says something like, "I just love to watch you work" really stuck in my head. Specifically, his face as he said it. So this came out as a consequence.
Jason’s grin is wide and easy as he rocks back onto his heels, knife flipping soundlessly along the tops of his fingers.
“It was all the same to me, Bruce,” he drawls eyes slipping along the kitchen wall. He’s running out of milk and he might as well pick up some more peanut butter while he’s at it. “Even fighting with you was the same. You were thinking it, right? How well we moved together. How good I was.”
Bruce has several degrees of silence. Several different ways of speaking through silence. Jason knows Bruce is doing three things right now-attempting a trace they both know is useless, ticking through all the possible ways to play this out, and listening to him. Maybe he’s sitting down in the Batcave, fingers steepled to a point in front of him and staring at his monitors. Maybe he’s just staring down at his present, blunt and calloused fingertips running along the binding. Watching Bruce do that to the new books had always been one of Jason’s strongest motivations for the hobby.
“You don’t have that book already, do you?”
“No, Jason.”
Bruce’s voice is coffee-grounds rough and Jason is pleased that it’s not Batman’s. Yet.
“Good,” he answers cheerfully, moving to his fridge. The tile is smooth and cold against his feet, and Bruce’s voice along with it brings up memories of mornings together: breakfast, the morning paper, snitching a cup of Alfred’s coffee and knowing he’d lived through another eight hours or so on the streets. Knowing that he’d be headed out there tomorrow night with Batman.
“It’s so hard to know what to get for the vigilante who has everything. You know?”
There’s a laugh and it’s beautiful, pain slipping into the amusement that Bruce can’t quite help.
Jason loves the things Bruce can’t quite help.
He can feel Batman’s sorrow seeping into the last of his laughter and the thought of it makes him sick.
The knife buries itself into the wall with the hiss of metal scoring cheap drywall. Jason smothers a laugh in the back of his throat, tastes cigarettes and coffee and nothing that might remind him of Bruce. Wants to. Wants to taste Bruce.
”Batman, you know this is crap. I can do this. Stop acting like-
“You are a kid, Jason.”
“I’m Robin too.”
The memory is aged better than the good brandy Bruce likes and Jason doesn’t bother wondering if the other can remember anything without the guilt. He can’t, just like Jason can’t think about anything without the rage.
The thing about rage is that it’s just like sex-hot and hard and gripping. Jason doesn’t remember the last time he’d leashed one without the other.
Lie. Fucking lie.
”You have school in the morning.” A statement. Easy. Flat.
Jason doesn’t have to search for the grating want that lies beneath the words-it’s there, rustling under the good sense and intentions. God, Bruce’s good intentions are some of the truly funniest things he has encountered.
“You sound like a damn mother, Bruce.”
The purr of a zipper. The sharp, eager thrill of Bruce’s eyes, focusing their intent on him. The soft rustle of crisp, smooth bed sheets. A man’s sharp inhale, a boy’s answering hum. The rasp of denim being pushed to ankles, the whisper of a cotton tee being pushed over a head.
“You still have school in the morning.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to make sure I can still walk tomorrow, mm?”
The slip of Bruce’s amusement through his eyes, right before the hunger takes charge. A wide hand up his thigh, calloused and vicious in its gentleness.
It isn't that he wasn't already hard-Jason was hard as he dialed the other’s number-but now his dick is an insistent, throbbing thing and Jason bares his teeth at the wall, at the Bruce who can't see him as he squeezes himself roughly, just once.
He wants to blow Africa off the fucking map. Wants the blood that Batman wouldn’t bleed for him and wants the newest goddamn Robin to stop acting like the perfect little protégé, wants him out of the Wayne name and away from the bed he fucking knows isn’t shared with Bruce.
It should feel good, to know he was the only one ever there. He just wishes he didn’t know why.
"You think I used you."
"Think?"
It doesn't bother Jason that the other can follow what he’d been thinking, but it’s unsettling. Irritating that Bruce has the upper hand even with his thoughts and he growls tightly against himself, the noise vicious and raking up the back of his throat.
"You insult me." Bruce’s voice isn’t quite the rasp Jason isn't (is, God, he really is) half-waiting for, isn’t quite deep enough for that, but it’s getting closer.
It only takes a moment to recollect himself, but it's still much longer than Bruce would've taken.
"Pretty sure it's the other way around here. You let him live."
"I let them all live."
"How is that ever going to be enough, Bruce?"
The problem, the real problem here is that Jason knows he's fucked. He knew he was fucked when he started jacking the Bat Tires, knew it the first time Bruce let him push him back against a wall and slip to his knees, knew it when the Joker’s smile didn’t slip, not for a second. Knew it when he clawed his way out of the coffin and definitely knew it as the waters of the Lazarus pit dried on his skin.
Knew it when Dick measured him for the first time and found him lacking. Knew it like he knew Bruce never found his thick way into Dick’s mouth. Knew that Dick had tried.
He’s cosmically fucked and Bruce is cosmically a fucker and Jesus, what a pair they make. It’s an essential form of perfection that will never fail to try to kill them both.
“You can still do the right thing,” Bruce informs him quietly.
And how just like Bruce to point this out. It’s a rare skill to be able to fit that much righteous accusation into a redemption offer.
“If the right thing involves pixie boots and man panties, I’m gonna have to decline the offer. For one, the leather really is working for me,” Jason replied dryly, wrapping his fingers around the hilt of his knife to yank it out of the wall. He resists the urge to immediately bury it back in.
There’s another laugh, but it’s nothing like before. There’s a menace in it this time, slipping along the undercurrents of amusement.
Jason isn’t so grown up that listening to Bruce’s voice shift into the low gravel of Batman’s doesn’t still make him ache. His skin is too tight, teenaged again, and he can practically feel the Kevlar-encased hand circle around the back of his neck. The unfailingly gentle press.
His mouth waters. Pavlov had fucking nothing on Batman.
“Stop killing.” Batman says it simply, an order to Robin. Like ‘Hand me that grappler’ or ‘Not in public’.
“Stop not killing.” The Voice isn’t enough to bring Jason to heel. Not anymore.
His sharp, angry breaths clash against Batman’s gentle exhale.
It’s pathetic to realize now he’ll never be in the mansion again. Alfred’s coffee. The damp, not-yet-dead scent of the cave. The hallways where even socked feet echo. Bruce’s absurd Egyptian Cotton sheets with thread counts Jason pretended felt the same as cheap ones. The choking, ridiculous collared shirts Bruce had pretended not to have a fetish for. Bruce.
Fuck.
All the logic in the world can’t change how much he wants Bruce to be right. In this moment, he thinks he might take anything for complete truth because this rebirth is killing him. He could believe the earth was flat just to get back to Bruce’s shadows.
He could-he could--and he would, God dammit, he’d make it flat, he’d set Gotham on fire, burn it all to the ground, throw all the ashes into the Lazarus pit and make it new. Make it sparkle. If it could be real, he’d believe in it, be the fanatic and make this his holy fucking war and-
let me back
-Bruce says nothing. Batman says nothing.
Jason can feel the hysterical, manic laughter bubbling up and it terrifies him, fucking terrifies him like a crowbar still does. The Joker bled him out and blew him up, and now they’re tied together.
Can’t Batman see it? Destiny ropes that have nothing kinky about them, nothing but blood and bile and vicious laughter that never. Fucking. Stops. It just echoes and bleeds together until he’s certain there’s nothing left for him here, not even the fact that he used to be the right hand of vengeance. Because vengeance let him right the fuck down, the mission let him down, and if he can’t go home, where the hell is he supposed to go?
Jason doesn’t think about the possibility that he wasn’t enough. He goddamn well remembers Bruce’s eyes, the satisfied, lazy heat and the rucked-up sheets and sweaty skin. The adoration as he watched Robin stretch worked muscles in his bed.
Bruce would take him back, he would.
Jason wonders if the hollow of Bruce’s throat still tastes the same. Thickly works his tongue against his palate and inhales sharply through his nose.
“Fuck, Bruce, you know I hate these damn ties.”
“Mind your language.” Bruce Wayne answers, but it’s Batman’s eyes, Bruce’s body language, that lurk beneath the veneer of the rich playboy.
Jason sends him an irritated look and tugs at his tie again.
Bruce reaches over, wide hands flicking away Jason’s, and unties the tie. Reties it carefully, watching Jason’s eyes. His teeth show in a slow, not-quite Bruce-Wayne-enough smile.
It’s enough to make Jason hard, very hard, in his slacks. He wants Bruce’s fuck or maybe his mouth and doesn’t bother-never would think to bother-hiding it from Bruce.
“Mm. Behave tonight.”
“What’s in it for me?”
Bruce smiles and leans in close enough to let Jason smell the toothpaste on his breath, teasing him with it. Later, he’ll smell like the expensive champagne he only takes small sips of, and he’ll taste like sweet, minted water. A few minutes later, he’ll taste of heat and sex and secrets. Jason smiles and settles back against the Bentley’s seat, fingers chasing along the edges of his tie.
Bruce’s smile slips into a sharp, pleased grin.
“Fine,” Jason says. “Better question: Do I get punished if I don’t?”
Batman laughs.
“Fuck,” Jason breathes. The knife clatters as it hits the ground next to his feet, forgotten.
“Mind your language,” Bruce says mildly.
.end.
Author: Kezzy
Pairing: Bruce/Jason
Rating: R for sex themes, language and mention of pixie boots
Disclaimer: DC is responsible for all their characters and I claim none nor make a monetary profit from this. Thank you.
Spoilers: None, really.
Summary: It's all about who has the upper hand and who plays the game better.
Notes: There is an insane amount of love for snake_easing betaing this for me--not only is she completely awesome and responsible for this being as good as it is, she can read my mind. And then force it to make sense. Jedi-style with better special effects. Best beta ever, especially for wielding the 'End It NOW' stick perfectly. Any left-over mistakes are completely all mine. Also just as much love to neneboomerwing for witnessing, listening through and coaxing out this beast.
The scene where Jason watches Batman fly from a building and says something like, "I just love to watch you work" really stuck in my head. Specifically, his face as he said it. So this came out as a consequence.
Jason’s grin is wide and easy as he rocks back onto his heels, knife flipping soundlessly along the tops of his fingers.
“It was all the same to me, Bruce,” he drawls eyes slipping along the kitchen wall. He’s running out of milk and he might as well pick up some more peanut butter while he’s at it. “Even fighting with you was the same. You were thinking it, right? How well we moved together. How good I was.”
Bruce has several degrees of silence. Several different ways of speaking through silence. Jason knows Bruce is doing three things right now-attempting a trace they both know is useless, ticking through all the possible ways to play this out, and listening to him. Maybe he’s sitting down in the Batcave, fingers steepled to a point in front of him and staring at his monitors. Maybe he’s just staring down at his present, blunt and calloused fingertips running along the binding. Watching Bruce do that to the new books had always been one of Jason’s strongest motivations for the hobby.
“You don’t have that book already, do you?”
“No, Jason.”
Bruce’s voice is coffee-grounds rough and Jason is pleased that it’s not Batman’s. Yet.
“Good,” he answers cheerfully, moving to his fridge. The tile is smooth and cold against his feet, and Bruce’s voice along with it brings up memories of mornings together: breakfast, the morning paper, snitching a cup of Alfred’s coffee and knowing he’d lived through another eight hours or so on the streets. Knowing that he’d be headed out there tomorrow night with Batman.
“It’s so hard to know what to get for the vigilante who has everything. You know?”
There’s a laugh and it’s beautiful, pain slipping into the amusement that Bruce can’t quite help.
Jason loves the things Bruce can’t quite help.
He can feel Batman’s sorrow seeping into the last of his laughter and the thought of it makes him sick.
The knife buries itself into the wall with the hiss of metal scoring cheap drywall. Jason smothers a laugh in the back of his throat, tastes cigarettes and coffee and nothing that might remind him of Bruce. Wants to. Wants to taste Bruce.
”Batman, you know this is crap. I can do this. Stop acting like-
“You are a kid, Jason.”
“I’m Robin too.”
The memory is aged better than the good brandy Bruce likes and Jason doesn’t bother wondering if the other can remember anything without the guilt. He can’t, just like Jason can’t think about anything without the rage.
The thing about rage is that it’s just like sex-hot and hard and gripping. Jason doesn’t remember the last time he’d leashed one without the other.
Lie. Fucking lie.
”You have school in the morning.” A statement. Easy. Flat.
Jason doesn’t have to search for the grating want that lies beneath the words-it’s there, rustling under the good sense and intentions. God, Bruce’s good intentions are some of the truly funniest things he has encountered.
“You sound like a damn mother, Bruce.”
The purr of a zipper. The sharp, eager thrill of Bruce’s eyes, focusing their intent on him. The soft rustle of crisp, smooth bed sheets. A man’s sharp inhale, a boy’s answering hum. The rasp of denim being pushed to ankles, the whisper of a cotton tee being pushed over a head.
“You still have school in the morning.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to make sure I can still walk tomorrow, mm?”
The slip of Bruce’s amusement through his eyes, right before the hunger takes charge. A wide hand up his thigh, calloused and vicious in its gentleness.
It isn't that he wasn't already hard-Jason was hard as he dialed the other’s number-but now his dick is an insistent, throbbing thing and Jason bares his teeth at the wall, at the Bruce who can't see him as he squeezes himself roughly, just once.
He wants to blow Africa off the fucking map. Wants the blood that Batman wouldn’t bleed for him and wants the newest goddamn Robin to stop acting like the perfect little protégé, wants him out of the Wayne name and away from the bed he fucking knows isn’t shared with Bruce.
It should feel good, to know he was the only one ever there. He just wishes he didn’t know why.
"You think I used you."
"Think?"
It doesn't bother Jason that the other can follow what he’d been thinking, but it’s unsettling. Irritating that Bruce has the upper hand even with his thoughts and he growls tightly against himself, the noise vicious and raking up the back of his throat.
"You insult me." Bruce’s voice isn’t quite the rasp Jason isn't (is, God, he really is) half-waiting for, isn’t quite deep enough for that, but it’s getting closer.
It only takes a moment to recollect himself, but it's still much longer than Bruce would've taken.
"Pretty sure it's the other way around here. You let him live."
"I let them all live."
"How is that ever going to be enough, Bruce?"
The problem, the real problem here is that Jason knows he's fucked. He knew he was fucked when he started jacking the Bat Tires, knew it the first time Bruce let him push him back against a wall and slip to his knees, knew it when the Joker’s smile didn’t slip, not for a second. Knew it when he clawed his way out of the coffin and definitely knew it as the waters of the Lazarus pit dried on his skin.
Knew it when Dick measured him for the first time and found him lacking. Knew it like he knew Bruce never found his thick way into Dick’s mouth. Knew that Dick had tried.
He’s cosmically fucked and Bruce is cosmically a fucker and Jesus, what a pair they make. It’s an essential form of perfection that will never fail to try to kill them both.
“You can still do the right thing,” Bruce informs him quietly.
And how just like Bruce to point this out. It’s a rare skill to be able to fit that much righteous accusation into a redemption offer.
“If the right thing involves pixie boots and man panties, I’m gonna have to decline the offer. For one, the leather really is working for me,” Jason replied dryly, wrapping his fingers around the hilt of his knife to yank it out of the wall. He resists the urge to immediately bury it back in.
There’s another laugh, but it’s nothing like before. There’s a menace in it this time, slipping along the undercurrents of amusement.
Jason isn’t so grown up that listening to Bruce’s voice shift into the low gravel of Batman’s doesn’t still make him ache. His skin is too tight, teenaged again, and he can practically feel the Kevlar-encased hand circle around the back of his neck. The unfailingly gentle press.
His mouth waters. Pavlov had fucking nothing on Batman.
“Stop killing.” Batman says it simply, an order to Robin. Like ‘Hand me that grappler’ or ‘Not in public’.
“Stop not killing.” The Voice isn’t enough to bring Jason to heel. Not anymore.
His sharp, angry breaths clash against Batman’s gentle exhale.
It’s pathetic to realize now he’ll never be in the mansion again. Alfred’s coffee. The damp, not-yet-dead scent of the cave. The hallways where even socked feet echo. Bruce’s absurd Egyptian Cotton sheets with thread counts Jason pretended felt the same as cheap ones. The choking, ridiculous collared shirts Bruce had pretended not to have a fetish for. Bruce.
Fuck.
All the logic in the world can’t change how much he wants Bruce to be right. In this moment, he thinks he might take anything for complete truth because this rebirth is killing him. He could believe the earth was flat just to get back to Bruce’s shadows.
He could-he could--and he would, God dammit, he’d make it flat, he’d set Gotham on fire, burn it all to the ground, throw all the ashes into the Lazarus pit and make it new. Make it sparkle. If it could be real, he’d believe in it, be the fanatic and make this his holy fucking war and-
let me back
-Bruce says nothing. Batman says nothing.
Jason can feel the hysterical, manic laughter bubbling up and it terrifies him, fucking terrifies him like a crowbar still does. The Joker bled him out and blew him up, and now they’re tied together.
Can’t Batman see it? Destiny ropes that have nothing kinky about them, nothing but blood and bile and vicious laughter that never. Fucking. Stops. It just echoes and bleeds together until he’s certain there’s nothing left for him here, not even the fact that he used to be the right hand of vengeance. Because vengeance let him right the fuck down, the mission let him down, and if he can’t go home, where the hell is he supposed to go?
Jason doesn’t think about the possibility that he wasn’t enough. He goddamn well remembers Bruce’s eyes, the satisfied, lazy heat and the rucked-up sheets and sweaty skin. The adoration as he watched Robin stretch worked muscles in his bed.
Bruce would take him back, he would.
Jason wonders if the hollow of Bruce’s throat still tastes the same. Thickly works his tongue against his palate and inhales sharply through his nose.
“Fuck, Bruce, you know I hate these damn ties.”
“Mind your language.” Bruce Wayne answers, but it’s Batman’s eyes, Bruce’s body language, that lurk beneath the veneer of the rich playboy.
Jason sends him an irritated look and tugs at his tie again.
Bruce reaches over, wide hands flicking away Jason’s, and unties the tie. Reties it carefully, watching Jason’s eyes. His teeth show in a slow, not-quite Bruce-Wayne-enough smile.
It’s enough to make Jason hard, very hard, in his slacks. He wants Bruce’s fuck or maybe his mouth and doesn’t bother-never would think to bother-hiding it from Bruce.
“Mm. Behave tonight.”
“What’s in it for me?”
Bruce smiles and leans in close enough to let Jason smell the toothpaste on his breath, teasing him with it. Later, he’ll smell like the expensive champagne he only takes small sips of, and he’ll taste like sweet, minted water. A few minutes later, he’ll taste of heat and sex and secrets. Jason smiles and settles back against the Bentley’s seat, fingers chasing along the edges of his tie.
Bruce’s smile slips into a sharp, pleased grin.
“Fine,” Jason says. “Better question: Do I get punished if I don’t?”
Batman laughs.
“Fuck,” Jason breathes. The knife clatters as it hits the ground next to his feet, forgotten.
“Mind your language,” Bruce says mildly.
.end.