summary: Jason finding the profound, gentle, calming love he deserves.
warning: tooth-rotting fluff, JASON IS A LOVERBOY
The little supermarket closed an hour ago. You sit cross legged on the curb with empty cookie box on your lap, while Jason sits next to you, sleeves pushed to his forearms, looking more at you than at anything else outside.
He always looks surprised whenever he realizes that you’re not running away from him. As if some part of him still expects the universe to remember who he used to be and come take this away.
You notice it in the way his shoulders stay tense for the first few minutes, in the way his eyes stay focused on you. The city has taught him that peace is temporary and love is dangerous, and those lessons do not disappear just because someone kisses him gently and asks how his day was.
So you never demand that he forget. You simply make room for him.
“Did you know that there is a planet mostly made from diamonds?” you ask him softly.
Jason glances down, then huffs a quiet laugh. “55 cancri e, right?”
His gaze lifts to you, and there is love written plainly across his face. “Oh really? Thank you baby.”
Jason pushes himself closer to your side, moving with that careful grace that still carries traces of old violence. He settles his side completely against your side, his long legs stretched out, shoulder pressed against yours.
You feel the exact moment he relaxes.
It is small enough that most people would miss it. The slow release of breath, the weight of him leaning just a little more fully into you, the unclenching of hands that have spent too many years and years ready to fight.
But you notice. You notice because you love him wholeheartedly. Your fingers slip into his, intertwining.
For a while, neither of you speak.
The quiet is never awkward with Jason. It feels more sacred, like standing beneath a sky so full of stars that it feels like heaven is accepting you with open arms.
Jason traces absent patterns across your knuckles, and you think about all the versions of him that have existed before you came into his life and changed it for a better version.
Then you think about this version. The one sitting on the curb at midnight, holding your hand as if he is afraid to let go.
“I had a thought earlier.” he admits, voice low.
“Very funny.” He rolls his eyes, trying to look annoyed but you catch him smiling faintly. “I was on patrol, and it was quiet for once. No gunfire, no criminals, no rooftops collapsing. Seriously nothing.”
He pauses, looking down at your joined hands. He still finds it hard to believe that your soft hands are holding his round ones. “And I caught myself wanting to come home.”
The word lands gently between you. Because you hear him say this for the first time. Jason wanted to come home.
Home. Not the manor. Not a safehouse. Not Roy who acts like he’s in a relationship with Jason, and not you. Not some temporary place to sleep with one eye open. Home.
Your throat tightens. “We can go home if you want Jay.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, they are softer than the city has any right to make them.
“I know we can,” he says quietly. “Now that’s the weird part.”
You turn toward him fully. The street light catches the white streak in his hair, the scar near his throat, the tiredness that never really leaves him. You cup his face with both hands, and he leans into the touch immediately, like a man who has spent too long cold and is desperate to feel the warmth everyone talks about.
“There’s nothing weird about being loved baby.” you whisper. Something in him breaks then. Not in the violent way things used to break, but in the way where his brain stops screaming at him for a moment. His forehead rests against yours, and you feel his breath tremble before it steadies.
“I can’t believe this,” he murmurs. “I used to think happiness was for other people.”
“And what do you think now?”
“Now I think it’s this.” He kisses you slowly, with the kind of care that makes the whole world narrow to warmth and breath and the soft brush of his mouth against yours. There is no urgency in it, no desperation, only pure love. When he pulls back, he stays close enough that your noses still touch.
Jason looks up where the clouds reveal a scattering of stars above Gotham’s sky. The city is nowhere near perfect with all the criminals living inside, but tonight the sky seems gentler somehow. Revealing its stars. It almost feels like a hidden message for Jason, are the stars trying to tell him that he can finally stop swimming in the deep ocean because you came to his rescue.
He rises and draws you with him to the front of the store. Together you stand, your arms wrapped around each other as you look up at the clearing sky.
“You think stars can fall from the sky?” he asks with curiosity in his voice.
“I don’t think so.” you laugh at him. What does that even mean? Can stars fall from the sky?
“Funny,” he says, resting his chin on your shoulder. “Feels like one fell right into my arms.”
You smile, and he feels it against his cheek. You try your absolute best to not cry at how sweet and sincere he is.
For so long Jason has lived as if he is waiting for the next loss, the next betrayal, the next disappointment, the next hand reaching into the dark to drag him back under. But here with your heartbeat steady beneath his palm, he finally understands something he never lets himself believe.
Love is not something that blinds people and lures them into a trap. Love does not ask for permission to be let in.
Love is a place. A place where he can just sit down and breathe for a little while. A place where his name is spoken gently. A place where he is not a warning or a tragedy, but simply a man who is tired and loved and safe.
And Jason is sure that love is a beautiful person, too. A person who chose him and his problems, and turned him into a man he usually reads about in books.
You tilt your head back against him. “What are you thinking about?”
Jason presses a kiss into your hair.
“That I’ve spent my whole life surviving,” he confesses. “And with you, I finally get to live.”
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