⤷ POOR DECISIONS , JASON TODD .
summary 𓂃 the one where Jason Todd’s forced to confront his feelings for the thief he’s been sleeping with for six months. It started out as a “friends-with-benefits” arrangement after you’d saved his ass on a mission gone wrong, but everyone knows how those usually go. Someone catches feelings, someone wants commitment. In Jason’s case—he faced both, but he didn’t know how to ask for them.
tags 𓂃 fwb!jason todd x criminal/anti-hero fem!reader , slightly mature content but nothing explicit , friends with benefits to lovers , casual to serious , denial of feelings , mutual pining (they’re both in denial) , emotional slow burn , banter as foreplay , sarcastic!jason Todd, deflection , no labels , insults as affection , post-sex convo , dialogue heavy.
wc 𓂃 5.2k words
sequel 𓂃 morning after , jason todd. (MDNI 18+)
✦ masterlist ╱ dc masterlist 𓏼 ͜͜
THE FIRST TIME you met Jason Todd, he was bleeding out in a warehouse and still had the audacity to flirt with you.
Not flirt, exactly. More like threaten you with a good time while actively dying. You respected the commitment.
It was a simple job. Infiltrate Black Mask's weapons shipment, grab the manifest, get out. You worked alone back then. Cleaner that way. No partners meant no splits, no arguments, no bodies to bury that you didn't put there yourself.
Then someone else showed up.
You heard the gunfire first. The wet, percussive rhythm of a firefight spilling out of the main storeroom. You should have left. Professional courtesy said you let whoever was already there finish their mess and you came back another night.
But you were curious. And curiousity has always been your particular brand of fatal flaw.
You found him behind a stack of crates, slumped against the concrete wall with a hand pressed to his ribs and blood seeping through his fingers. He wore a leather jacket, a red helmet that covered his whole face, and the kind of posture that said he was too stubborn to die but too injured to argue about it.
"Nice night for it," you said.
He tilted his helmet toward you. Even through the voice modulator, you could hear the dry amusement when he spoke. "For what? Getting shot or getting caught?"
"Either. Both. I'm not picky."
There were footsteps coming. Heavy boots, at least three sets. You could hear the shouting too, someone yelling about finding the intruder.
The man in the helmet groaned, tried to push himself up, and immediately thought better of it. "Look, sweetheart, I'd love to stay and chat, but I've got a thing."
"A thing?"
"A bleeding out thing. Very time sensitive."
You should have walked away. You had no stake in this. You didn't know him, didn't owe him, didn't even know what he looked like under that ridiculous helmet.
But there was something in the way he said it. Not desperate and definitely not pleading. Just matter of fact, like he'd already accepted that he might not make it and was more annoyed than afraid at the prospect.
You were still new to this city then. Still figuring out who was worth knowing and who was worth avoiding. Looking back, you'd made worse calls.
"You're going to owe me," you said, and you grabbed his arm and hauled him up. “Big time.”
The safehouse was yours. Small, far from clean, tucked above an abandoned laundromat in the Bowery. You dumped him on a mattress that smelled like cigarette smoke and old sweat and went to work on his ribs.
The helmet came off somewhere between the third and fourth stitch. You didn't ask. He didn't offer an explanation. He just lay there on his back, watching you work, and said, "You're pretty good at that."
"I've had practice."
"Should I be worried?"
"Eh,” you shrugged. “Probably.”
He laughed. It sounded like a real laugh, and it changed his whole face. Made him look younger. Made him look like someone who knew how to have fun before the world got its filthy hands on him.
Jason Todd, he told you later. After the bleeding stopped and the whiskey came out. After you'd established that neither of you was going to kill the other tonight, mostly because you were both too tired and too drunk to bother.
"Red Hood," you said, testing the name. "That's what they call you?"
"That's what I call me. What they call me is usually worse… and pretty vulgar.”
You stayed up until dawn—bantering, trading stories. He tells you that the man who raised him was Batman, you tell him your parents were dickheads. He left when the sun came up, took your last granola bar on his way out, and said, "Same time next week?"
"You know where to find me."
He did. And he kept coming back.
Six months later, you stopped pretending you were just ‘business’ partners.
It was late. Later than late. The kind of hour where the city goes quiet and everyone with common sense is asleep. You and Jason weren't asleep. You were sprawled across your worn-out couch, passing a bottle back and forth, arguing about something stupid that won’t matter in a few minutes.
"That's not how it happened," he said.
"I was there."
"So was I."
"Then you weren't paying attention."
"I was paying plenty of attention. You're just wrong."
You shoved his shoulder. He grabbed your wrist. And then neither of you was talking anymore.
It wasn't romantic and it wasn't soft. It was the kind of inevitable mishap that happens when two people spend too much time in each other's space and run out of excuses to keep their hands to themselves. He tasted like whiskey and something distinct underneath. You bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and he groaned like you'd done him a favor.
Afterward, you lay in a tangle of limbs and sheets, staring at the water stain on your ceiling.
"Well," he said.
"Well," you said back.
"That happened."
"It did."
A long pause. Then with the kind of careful casualness that meant he'd been thinking about it for a while, "Could happen again."
"Yeah," you said. "It could."
That was the beginning. Or not the beginning, exactly. More like the moment you stopped lying to yourselves about what this was.
The thing about Jason Todd, you learned, was that he was never boring.
He showed up at your door at all sorts of hours with stolen takeout and fresh bruises. He left his jacket on your chair and his guns on your counter and never once apologized for either of those things. He called you nicknames that ranged from affectionate to insulting depending on his mood, and he said them all with the same crooked grin.
"Morning, sunshine."
"Don't call me that."
"Okay, sweetheart.”
"Also no."
"Princess?"
"I will shoot you."
"Kinky."
He was good at this. The dance. The deflection. The way he could make you laugh and want to strangle him in the same breath. He was good at keeping things light, keeping things easy, keeping things exactly where he wanted them.
You knew his history. Bits of it, anyway. The parts he let slip when the whiskey ran low and the night ran long. The boy who died. The man who came back wrong. He told it like a joke sometimes.
"Came back meaner," he'd said once. "Or maybe I was always mean. Hard to tell."
You didn't push. You weren't his therapist or his mother or his keeper. You were the person who patched him up and slept with him and never asked for more than he was willing to give—which was usually sex and food.
Which was fine. More than fine, actually. It’s not like you were the relationship type yourself.
So you kept doing what you were doing. Meeting up between jobs. Falling into bed when the mood struck. Trading insults and pretending there wasn't anything else underneath.
You were both very good at pretending.
The problem, Jason realized approximately four months into this arrangement, was that you were funny.
Not just clever. Not just quick. Actually, genuinely funny. The kind of funny that caught him off guard and made him laugh before he could stop himself. The kind of funny that meant he started staying longer because he enjoyed your company way more than he should have.
He noticed it first on a Tuesday. You were cleaning a gun at your kitchen table, wearing one of his shirts because yours was in the wash, and you looked up at him with that particular expression you got right before you said something mean.
"You know what your problem is?" you asked.
"I have many. You'll have to be specific."
"You think you're mysterious. But you're actually just annoying."
He blinked. "That's... not what people usually say."
"People are polite to you because you're scary. I'm not people."
"You're not scared of me?"
"Should I be?"
He thought about it. Really thought about it. And the answer, which should have been yes, came out wrong.
"No," he said. "Probably not."
You smiled. A real smile, not the sharp one you used on marks or the flat one you used on cops. A smile that was just for him.
And Jason felt something in his chest go hot and tight and very, very inconvenient.
He ignored it. Obviously. He’s nothing if not pretty good at being ignorant when it serves him.
The jobs got easier with two people.
Not because you needed each other. Because you were both competent on your own, and together you were just faster, cleaner, and smarter.
You fell into a rhythm without meaning to. He'd call with a location. You'd show up with a plan. He'd argue with your plan because he had his own, and then you'd fight about it for ten minutes before settling on a third plan that was better than both.
"This is stupid," he said one night, hanging from a fire escape while you picked a lock three stories up.
"You're stupid."
"Elementary school comeback. I'm hurt."
"Cry about it later when we’re not in such a compromising position, kay?”
He rolled his eyes but it didn’t pair well with the chuckle that escaped him.
The lock clicked open. You slipped inside and he followed, quiet as smoke. The job was quick. In and out, data stolen, guards never even knew you were there.
On the rooftop afterward, counting the take, he looked at you with something unreadable in his expression.
"We're good at this," he said.
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm just..."
He trailed off. Rubbed the back of his neck. Looked away.
"You're just what?"
"Nothing." He stood up, stretched, and the moment was gone. "Same time tomorrow?"
"You know where to find me."
And he always did.
Pretending was useful, most of the time. And it worked… most of the time. Until it didn't.
For Jason, the crack in his shield appeared on a night when nothing special happened. No big job. No close call. No near death experience to blame it on.
He'd shown up at your place around midnight with Chinese food and a bottle of something cheap. You'd eaten on the floor because your table was covered in schematics, and you'd argued about whether Bruce Wayne was secretly funding half the villains in Gotham or just too stupid to notice.
"You're wrong," he said.
"I'm literally never wrong."
"That's statistically impossible."
"I'm a statistical anomaly."
He laughed. You laughed. And then you were kissing, which wasn't new, except this time when he pulled back, you were still smiling.
Not the sharp smile. Not the teasing one. Just soft. Warm. Like you were happy to see him. Like you were happy he was there.
And Jason realized, with the kind of clarity that felt a lot like panic, that he wanted to see that smile every day.
He wanted to wake up next to you. He wanted to steal your coffee and listen to you complain about it. He wanted to argue about stupid things and make up in stupid ways and keep doing this, whatever it was, for a lot longer than he'd initially planned.
He wanted you. Not just your body, though don’t get him wrong, it’s great. Not just your skills, even though those were pretty useful. He wanted your voice in the morning and your attitude in the afternoon and your laugh at night.
He wanted you in a way that scared the living fuck out of him.
"Jason?"
You were looking at him funny. He just realized now he'd been quiet for too long.
"Yeah," he said. "Fine. Just tired."
He wasn't tired. He was the opposite of tired. He was too awake, too aware, too close to saying something he couldn't take back.
So he kissed you again instead. Harder than before. Like he could fuck the feelings out of himself if he tried hard enough.
Sadly, he couldn’t. Could only do you hard enough to make you forget about the look he had.
The changes were pretty subtle at first.
He started showing up more often. Not just for jobs or sex, but for nothing. Just to hang out. Just to sit on your couch and complain about his day and steal your food.
You noticed. It’s not like you were stupid or blind.
"You're here a lot," you said one evening, not looking up from your book.
"Observant, aren’t you? I'm always here."
"You're here more than usual."
"Maybe you're just counting."
"Maybe you're just avoiding something."
He went very still. Then he laughed, too loud, too fast. "Avoiding what? I don't avoid things. I'm famously confrontational."
"Famously dead, too. That didn't stop you."
The words hung in the air. You'd never said it so directly before. The D word. The one he danced around with jokes and deflections and carefully placed changes of subject.
He didn't laugh this time.
"Low blow," he said quietly.
"You started it."
A long pause. The radiator hissed. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and then stopped.
"I'm not avoiding anything," he said finally. "I just like your couch. It's comfortable."
"You've never sat on it for more than ten minutes without complaining about the springs."
"The springs are terrible… but that’s not the point."
"Then what's the point?"
He looked at you. Really looked. And for a second, just a second, you saw something underneath the jokes and the bravado and the carefully constructed walls.
Then he stood up, stretched, and said, "The point is you ask too many questions. I'm getting food. You want anything?"
The moment was gone. You let it go.
"Spring rolls," you said. "And don't steal from that place on fifth. The last time you did, they put your picture on the wall."
"I'm honored."
"Yeah, you’re also banned."
"Same thing."
He grabbed his jacket and left. You listened to his footsteps fade down the stairs and wondered when exactly this had stopped being casual.
Anyone who knew Jason, knew that he deflected as easily as he breathed.
You could ask him a direct question and he'd give you three jokes, a threat, and a change of subject before you could blink. And you wouldn’t even notice. He was good at it. Too good. He'd had years of practice, could thank Bruce for that.
But you had patience. And you had time. And you had the advantage of knowing him in a way most people didn't.
You saw the way he looked at you when he thought you weren't paying attention. The way his hand lingered on your lower back. The way he said your name when his lips were on yours.
You saw all of it. You just didn't know what to do with it.
Because the truth was, you weren't much better than him. You'd built your own walls, your own reasons for keeping people at arm's length. You'd told yourself this was fine. That it was casual. That it was easy.
But it wasn't easy anymore. It hadn't been easy for a while. Nor was it casual—at least, didn’t seem like it.
——
IT HAPPENED ON A THURSDAY with no real catalyst to speak of. No big dramatic moment or close call or near death experience to blame it on. Just the two of you sprawled across your bed after heated sex, tangled in sheets that were already ruined, staring at the water stain on your ceiling like it held the answers to questions neither of you had asked yet.
The sex had been good. It was always good, which was part of the problem. The other part was that he was still here.
Jason had one arm tucked behind his head and the other resting on his stomach, his fingers tapping an irregular rhythm against his lower ribs. His breathing had evened out a while ago, but he wasn't asleep. You could tell by the way his jaw kept tensing and releasing, the way his eyes moved like he was reading something written on the plaster above him. He was thinking about something he didn’t want to say. You’d learned to recognize the signs over the past few months.
The room smelled like sweat and the cheap vanilla candle you’d lit earlier in a halfhearted attempt to make the place feel less like a hideout and more like somewhere a person actually lived. Your neighbor was playing something with a heavy bass line that vibrated through the shared wall, and somewhere down the street, a car alarm had been wailing on and off for the past twenty minutes. Normal Thursday night in Gotham. Nothing special. Nothing worth remembering.
Except it was different, and you both knew it.
"This is different," you blurted out, not looking away from the water stain.
"It's not different," he replied, and his voice had that particular flat quality that meant he was lying and knew that you knew he was lying.
"It's different."
A long pause followed, broken only by the ceiling fan clicking on its rotation and the distant thump of the neighbor's music. Jason sighed through his nose, not quite annoyed but close to it, like he’d been waiting for this conversation to show up and knock on his door and now it was here and he couldn’t talk his way out of it.
"Maybe," he said finally, and that single word was as close to an admission as you were going to get without pushing harder.
So you pushed.
"Jay."
There it was. The nickname you only used when you wanted something from him, and he knew it as well as you did. His jaw tensed visibly, the muscle jumping beneath his stubbled skin.
"What?”
"You know what."
He sighed again, deeper this time, and shifted his weight against the mattress. The springs creaked beneath him. He turned his head on the pillow to look at you, and his eyes were that impossible shade of green-blue that seemed to change depending on the light, though right now, in the dim glow of your bedside lamp, they just looked tired. Not physically exhausted, though he probably was that too. The other kind of tired. The kind that settled into bones and stayed there.
"We're friends," he said, and his voice was careful, measured, like he was reciting lines from a script he’d memorized a long time ago. "With benefits. Same as last week. Same as next week."
"That was the arrangement six months ago," you pointed out, keeping your voice even.
"So?"
"So six months ago you didn’t stay after. Six months ago you didn’t know that I hated cilantro and you didnt steal my coffee and you didn’t show up at two in the morning just to sit on my couch and complain about your day. Six months ago you left before I woke up, and I didn’t expect to find your jacket on my chair or your gun on my counter or your stupid face in my kitchen making breakfast like you belonged there."
He was quiet for a long moment. The bass from next door thumped through the wall, a steady heartbeat that didn’t belong to either of you. His fingers had stopped tapping against his ribs.
"Maybe you're just memorable," he said, but there was no weight behind it.
"Jason."
He turned his head to look at you fully then, and his expression was guarded in the way it always got right before he said something he didn’t want to say. His eyebrows pulled together slightly, and his mouth pressed into a thin line, and his eyes moved across your face like he was searching for something specific.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked, and his voice was lower now, rougher around the edges.
"The truth would be a nice change of pace."
"You can handle that?"
"Try me."
He held your gaze for a beat longer, then looked back up at the ceiling. His throat worked as he swallowed.
"This wasn’t supposed to be a thing," he said, and his voice had gone quiet, almost flat. "You were supposed to be easy. Convenient. Someone who got it and didn’t make it complicated. Someone who understood that sometimes a thing is just a thing and it doesn’t have to mean anything."
You waited. He wasn’t done.
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes for a moment, then dropped his hands back to the mattress. "I don’t do this," he continued, gesturing vaguely at the space between you with one hand. "The staying. The caring about your coffee order or the way you take your eggs or the name of your dead cat from a story you told me once when you were drunk. Any of it. That is not what this was for me when it started."
"And now?" you asked, because he hadn’t answered the question yet and you were tired of waiting for him to circle back to it on his own.
He turned his head on the pillow to look at you again. The dim light caught the white streak in his hair, the one that stood out against the black like a scar he couldn’t hide. He remembers telling you it was just hair dye before telling you the truth. His eyes were very blue in this light, or maybe very green. It was hard to tell.
"Now I’m still here," he said, and the simplicity of it landed harder than any speech would’ve
You propped yourself up on your elbow so you could see his face more clearly. The movement pulled the sheet down around your waist, but neither of you seemed to notice or care. The air was warm and still, thick with the weight of everything that had gone unsaid for months.
You looked at him. The sharp line of his jaw. The small scar above his eyebrow that he said came from a fight with a crowbar and then refused to elaborate on. The way his hair curled against his forehead, still damp at the edges from sweat. He looked like someone who’d just had some mind blowing sex and then been hit by a truck of feelings.
"What is it now?" you asked. "If it is not casual anymore, what is it?"
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the neighbor's music changed to something slower, some old song you couldn’t really quite recognize through the wall. Long enough that the car alarm down the street finally gave up and went silent. Long enough that you started to think he wasn’t going to answer at all.
Then he did.
"I don’t have a word for it," he admitted, and his voice was rough in a way that had nothing to do with the sex and everything to do with the fact that he was saying something he hadn’t exactly planned to say. "I don’t have a label. I don’t have some speech prepared where I tell you how I feel and we hug it out and everything’s fine. That isn’t how I work."
"I’m not asking for a speech," you said.
"Then what’re you asking for?"
You thought about it. Really thought about it, because he deserved an answer that wasn’t another deflection, not another joke to make things easier. The ceiling fan clicked on its rotation. The room smelled like vanilla and sweat and … him.
"I’m asking if I’m the only one who noticed that this stopped being casual about a month ago," you said slowly, watching his face for a reaction. "I’m asking if you’re going to pretend you didn’t notice too. And I’m asking what happens next if we stop pretending."
He blinked at you once, twice, like he was recalibrating. His fingers started tapping against his ribs again, that restless rhythm he couldn’t seem to control when he was thinking too hard.
"You’re very direct," he said.
"You’re very avoidant. We balance each other out."
A short laugh escaped him before he could stop it, surprised out of his chest like you’d caught him off guard. His teeth flashed white in the dim light, and the laugh softened the hard lines of his face in a way that made him look younger. Made him look like someone who hadn’t been through everything he’d been through.
"Balance," he repeated, rolling the word around like he was testing its weight. "Sure. We can call it that."
He reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind your ear, and the gesture was so casual and so intimate and so unlike the Jason who kept everyone at an arm's length that you held very still. His fingers lingered for a moment against the shell of your ear, calloused and warm, before he dropped his hand back to the mattress.
"You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?" he said, and there was no heat in it. Just resignation, softened by something that might have been affection if you were feeling generous.
"Say what," you said, even though you knew exactly what he meant.
"Don’t play dumb. You’re not good at it."
"Then stop stalling."
He dropped his hand from your ear and pushed himself up against the headboard, the wooden frame creaking beneath his weight. The sheets fell to his waist, and the lamplight caught the scars on his chest, the ones that mapped out a history he never talked about in any real detail. He needed the vertical advantage, or maybe he just needed to move, to put some distance between himself and the weight of the conversation.
"Fine," he said, and his voice was lower now, rougher. "You want to know what changed? You happened. You and your mouth and the way you never let me get away with anything. You look at me like I’m just… just some guy. Not a project. Not a warning. Not a cautionary tale about what happens when Robin grows up wrong. Just some asshole who sleeps in your bed, fucks you occasionally—maybe more—and argues with you about things that don’t matter because arguing with you is fun."
"That’s a lot of words to say you like me,"
"It’s not that many words," he shot back, but he was almost smiling too, the corner of his mouth twitching upward despite his best efforts. “And I don’t like you. I tolerate you. There’s a very big difference.”
"It’s more words than you’ve said all week—and you do like me."
He shook his head and looked down at his hands for a moment, then back at you. The light caught his eyes again, and they were softer than you’d ever seen them.
"And yet," he said quietly.
"And yet," you agreed.
The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that happened when two people had said something true and were waiting to see what would grow in the space after. Your neighbor had turned off the music at some point, and the building felt almost quiet for once, just the distant hum of the city and the occasional creak of old pipes.
You reached over and took his hand. He let you. His fingers were warm and rough and familiar in a way that made your chest ache, and he didn’t pull away. His thumb brushed across your knuckles once, twice, like he was testing the feel of it.
"So what now?" you asked.
"Now nothing," he sighed, but his thumb kept moving.
"That is not an answer."
"Nothing changes. Unless you want something to change."
"Jason."
He sighed, but it wasn’t an annoyed sound. It was something softer, something closer to tired. "I’m not doing the thing where I give you a speech about being scared. You already know I’m freaked out. It’s not interesting.”
"Then what exactly are you doing?"
He looked down at your joined hands. His thumb had stopped moving. He was holding your hand like it was something he was trying to memorize, like he was cataloguing the weight, the warmth, and the way your fingers fit between his.
"I’m still here," he said. "I keep showing up. I keep staying after. That’s what I’m doing. That’s all I have."
You watched his face as he spoke, watched the way his jaw tightened and relaxed, the way his eyes stayed fixed on your hands as if looking at you directly would be too much right now.
"That isn’t nothing," you said quietly.
"No," he agreed. "It’s not."
He shifted closer to you on the mattress, moving slowly like he was giving you time to pull away if you wanted to. You didn’t. He rested his forehead against yours, his breath was warm on your lips. Your eyes were closed. His hand was still wrapped around yours, and you could feel his pulse in his fingertips, steady and quick.
"This is going to get messy," he murmured, and his voice was so low you almost missed it.
"Probably," you said, just as quietly.
"We are going to fight about everything."
"Yeah."
"You’re going to annoy me constantly."
"Yeah, that too."
He opened his eyes. They were very close, very blue-green. His forehead pressed against yours. His nose brushed against your nose. His thumb started moving again against your knuckles.
"Yeah," he said, and his voice was soft in a way you’d never heard before. "Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, this isn’t casual anymore. Okay, I’m not going anywhere. Okay, you win. Are you happy?"
"Thrilled.”
"You are insufferable."
"You like it."
He kissed you then. It was quick and soft and almost shy, which was ridiculous coming from someone who had his tongue down your throat about twenty minutes ago. His lips lingered for a moment against yours before he pulled back.
"You better not tell anyone I said any of that," he said against your mouth.
"Who would I tell?" you chuckled, pulling back just enough to look at him. "All my friends are criminals, and most of them want you dead."
"Jealous," he said flatly.
"Curious," you corrected. "There’s… there’s a difference."
He snorted and dropped back onto the mattress, pulling you with him. You landed half on his chest with your leg hooked over his thighs and your face pressed into the warm skin of his shoulder. He didn’t complain. His arm came around your back, heavy and solid, and his hand settled on your hip like it belonged there.
"You owe me breakfast," he said, his voice rumbled through his chest against your cheek.
"I owe you nothing," you mumbled into his shoulder.
"You asked me to stay."
"I did not ask. I made a statement. It’s different.”
"Same difference. Pancakes."
"You are impossible."
"And yet."
You laughed into his chest. His hand tightened on your hip for just a moment, and you felt his lips press against the top of your head. It was quick, almost like he didn’t mean to do it, but did it anyway.
The neighbor stayed quiet. The fan clicked on its rotation. The city hummed its endless hum outside your window, and Jason Todd didn’t leave. He stayed in your bed with his arm around your back and his hand on your hip and his chin resting on top of your head, and for once, that was enough.
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