Like, I’m just thinking about that one specific photo of Dick and Jason going skiing one time, that Dick’s looking at while drunk and grieving Jason after the Last Laugh story:
Imagine Jason coming across this picture at Dick’s place when he happens to be there (reluctantly) because they’re sharing information on a case.
And Jason starts freaking out, (but only internally, can’t show weakness, ever, not even with family, especially not with family) because HE DOESN’T REMEMBER THIS. Like. AT ALL.
But he genuinely doesn’t think Dick caught him snooping and even realizes Jason’s seen it, so even being paranoid, Jason can’t honestly convince himself that Dick like, faked the photo and planted it for him to find for some manipulative purpose…..no matter how much he tries to tell himself that its some kind of trick, in the days and weeks that follow.
Because the thing is, Jason KNOWS that he has gaps in his memories, he’s aware, that’s not a revelation to him….like, he died. There are repercussions to that. The brain’s a tricky thing, even mysterious resurrections and mystical Lazarus waters can’t regrow lost memories from brain cells lost and magically restored in function, if not necessarily in perfect replica.
Its just….its never before occurred to Jason that he might be missing memories with Dick, specifically. Its not like he forgot Dick. He still remembers interacting with him from before, the older brother who was as much reputation as he was a presence, distant because of his issues with Bruce but decent enough the times he was actually around Jason…..enough for Jason to feel like he was actually his brother, his family, but not enough for Jason to feel like he was as much his family as Dick always seems to try to pretend.
Except now he can’t stop wondering if there might be more to that just than his older brother trying to willfully review the past through rose-colored glasses.
He remembers Dick giving him his Robin costume and his blessing, that night they first teamed up to take down that drug lab together. Dick giving him his phone number and advising him to call whenever he felt like griping about Bruce, not to keep it bottled up inside.
He just doesn’t remember ever using it.
But he also remembers the one or two times he teamed up with the Titans, and how….familiar Dick feels in those memories, how familiar he acted with Jason, like it wasn’t strange or unexpected for him to reach out and ruffle Jason’s hair with a friendly grin. Like it just made sense, like of course he would do that.
He remembers how Dick used to call him Little Wing, still tries to whenever he thinks Jason’s in the right mood not to get pissed at him for either the name or the attempt, Jason’s never forgotten that….
But now that he’s thinking, now that he’s trying to pinpoint things, he can’t for the life of him remember when that name began. Where it began. How it began. Because it had to have begun somewhere, it was too natural, unforced, even in the earliest memories Jason has of actually hearing it come out of Dick’s mouth.
And he remembers the way Dick offered to take the fall for him with Bruce, if Bruce caught Jason returning from his last unsanctioned adventure with the Titans. Again, the ease and familiarity with which Dick cheerfully told Jason to just throw him under the bus if Bruce gave him any grief, tell the old man how it took Jason and the entire Titans to bail Dick’s ass out of the fire. Given how defensively independent Jason is himself, one of the traits he and Dick have always had in common, its strange to him now, to look back on that and notice the total lack of argument on his own part, how he just…accepted this offer from the older boy without protest. Like it was an argument they’d had many times before and Jason had reluctantly learned to just accept when offered, allowing himself to bask in that small, quiet glow of feeling protected, looked out for…treasured.
And it occurs to him now….that he doesn’t remember ever getting in trouble with Bruce for that. He remembers getting home just before Bruce, Alfred agreeing to cover for him with a knowing glint and an approving nod….Bruce being too distracted by coordinating the JLA’s response to the entire world waking up from Brother Blood’s mass hypnosis. Sure, the Batman was the world’s greatest detective and knew practically everything….but only the things he looked for, looked into….and it wasn’t like the two eldest sons of the Bat were lacking in the stealth and subterfuge department.
And suddenly, picturing that photo in his mind’s eye, him and Dick standing on the slopes of some ski trail, smiling in a way he never remembers smiling but can match close enough when he tries it now, practicing in the mirror…
….reflecting on the fact that he doesn’t remember ever skiing in his life but he just knows without knowing how, now that he’s thinking on it….he does know how to ski, he might not be OIympic medal-worthy any time soon, but he’s got the basics down, if he strapped on a pair he wouldn’t be making a fool of himself like….like….
….the memory darts in and out of his reach like the silver-flashing scales of a fish that refuses to be caught by hand, no matter how long he fumbles downstream through this river of uncertainty and regrets…half-glimpsed flicker-shadows of a snapshot in time, a window to a past where he did make a fool of himself, was laughed at for clumsy attempts but in a way that didn’t feel sharp, carried no bite, no sting, just….the joy of a boy, maybe two boys, two brothers, just playing and having fun.
And thinking back to that particular escapade with the Titans, his second team up with them but only the first having been endorsed by Bruce, unable to think of a time when Bruce has ever referenced even being aware of the latter….
It suddenly occurs to Jason to wonder if two sons of the oh so knowing Batman could have snuck away from his often crowdingly perceptive eyes more than just once.
If they were so inclined.
Wanting to bond, to know each other, to share their time and brotherhood without needing the sanction of the father whose conflict with the elder kept such a shadow cast over so much of their time spent together.
Suddenly, Jason catches himself thinking back over all the times Bruce was away for a day or two, a weekend, a whole week, caught up in offworld missions or adventuring in other dimensions, or sometimes just stuck unable to get out of a corporate retreat….and with Alfred most likely more than willing to cover for them, surely approving of any and all camaraderie between his two grandsons….it strikes Jason then, to wonder if they could have possibly hidden something as big as a ski trip from Bruce.
Almost without prompting, Jason’s mind starts fitting together pieces, outlining contingencies, orchestrating routes and schedules and stratagems for doing just that….
As if the challenge was reason enough to try.
And with the attempt carrying that now familiar tug toward a trail laid down long ago. One he’d walked before. And just forgotten about until now.
He starts feeling around for the other missing pieces, the gaps, the places where things don’t connect, where things he knows and things he remembers fail to line up, to fall into place. No matter how much investigation he’d done into his own past, into Bruce’s schedules and itineraries when retracing steps and trying to fill in the puzzle pieces of his mind when he’d first prepared his return to Gotham years before, with all it entailed. Know thy enemy, after all. Know thyself.
Funny how often in his case, those two felt like one and the same.
Because now, picturing those missing pieces, those gaps, and slotting in the third variable, the one he’d never before thought to factor in as likely all that significant….
Dick, his brother, who after all, had been there all along, even if ‘there’ didn’t necessarily mean under the same roof…
All too easily a much clearer, much more coherent picture starts to form.
One that casts so much light on things he couldn’t see and so much shadow on things he’s long believed.
One that means that maybe, perhaps, more than likely….there was more to his older brother’s claims of brotherhood than he’d given credit to previously.
Maybe there had been all along.
And with a pang in his chest that hurts far more than it should, if based just off of things Jason remembers rather than things that he feels, that he believes, that he knows…
Suddenly Jason can’t help but wonder what all his denials of said brotherhood, all his dismissals of past times spent together and past bonds spoken of…
How might they look, to an older brother who clearly remembered all those very things Jason was only now struggling to glimpse?
One who had no reason to suspect they were any less clear for his younger brother, given the lengths Jason had gone to…ensuring that even the slightest hint of anything that might be construed as a weakness was scrubbed from all evidence…before each and every time he interacted with his older brother, so often his enemy maybe never his enemy.
How could they look, Jason wonders now, still stuck on that single frame of a ski trip’s snapshot - on a Polaroid of all things, an anachronistic choice of record keeping….unless one was desiring to leave no digital trace - what could all those denials and dismissals look like without that critical insight, that knowledge of memories missing….
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