goodie two-shoes newly adopted jason todd is one of the funniest fucking things to come out of the batfamily fandom, actually. y’all remember that episode of the office us where dwight gets fired and the day afterwards micheal is all sad like ‘why haven’t the cleaning ladies arranged the toys in my office and watered my plants?’ and everybody tells him ‘no dwight used to do that.’ ? in the funniest way possible i want this to be bruce and jason.
jason todd who was such a sweet eager-to-please kid. he literally adored bruce for taking him in and letting him be robin, so he was doing literally anything he could think of to make his adoption worthwhile to bruce. being the model student at school, keeping his room immaculately clean, training as much as he could--the enthusiasm was genuinely baffling to bruce, who up until that point had only ever dealt with dick motherfucking grayson as a child under his care. at first he thought something was wrong with jason, or that he was covering something up. alfred had to pull him aside after a few months just like 'no he's genuinely this much of a people pleaser, master bruce. this isn't an act'. they had no idea what to do with this kid.
bruce doesn't even know most of the stuff jason does, he just assumes these little things Happen to Happen, and doesn't consider that it isn't alfred or that it might not be a coincidence. he counts himself lucky that jason is a well behaved kid and doesn't look too far into the details of how far that behaviour goes. so through the years after jason's death, bruce is genuinely just... fucking baffled.
"alfred, why did you stop making those little smoothie pots and leaving them in the fridge for my breakfasts? i really liked them, but you never have them anymore."
"the ones you always left in the door of the fridge for me, with the post-it notes telling me to have a good morning."
"i have never made you a smoothie pot, master bruce. i fear this was another of jason's little habits."
"so you don't know how to make these smoothie pots?"
like- i want jason to have literally been doing the most random fucking stuff you can think of. he was organising bruce's sock drawer, watering the plants in the downstairs bathroom, stapling together all the WE files in bruce's office so that bruce wouldn't misplace any of them. he was going above and beyond to make bruce's life as easy as possible in any way he could think of for YEARS, and he did it all so quietly that bruce never noticed until jason wasn't around anymore and all of a sudden his life was real fuckin' inconvenient and he had no idea why.
i just think it would be funny if red hood does a big identity reveal in front of all the bats and bruce just instantly bursts into tears in jason's arms weeping about how 'alfred let the fern die and they had to buy a new mop bucket because nobody knew where jason had stored it last' and jason is just. very confused holding a sobbing batman because he genuinely forgot that he used to do any of that stuff. meanwhile dick's in the background next to tim and he's just like 'so were you the one that organised the west attic? 'cause tim thinks it was the spirit of thomas wayne and we've been arguing about it for six months.'
bonus points if the league of assassins comes into it because at some point talia comes to visit damian and her and bruce get to chatting about jason, and bruce gets all teary and fond as he waxes poetic about how amazing and helpful jason was as a kid living around the manor, all the stuff he used to do, and then he turns to talia to ask what he was like living with her and she looks at him with the eyes of a long-dead veteran to tell him 'within his first two months he'd blown up two watchtowers, taught damian to call us all slurs in six different languages, and shaved a strip of my father's hair off while he was asleep. over his time with us he has personally contributed to the creation of ninety-three new rules around the compound, and the day before he left for gotham i personally watched him set fire to one of our helicopters.' and then there's just a really awkward period of silence because bruce has no idea what to say to that because HIS time with jason was fuckin great.
