Kings Of The Underworld
Fandom: Batman
Characters: Jason Todd, Damian Wayne
Genre: Gen, humor, hang-out fic.
Warnings: Nerdery, boys being boys.
A/N: Damian needs something that only Jason can provide. (And it's totally not as smutty as it sounds.) Awkward adventures in brotherly bonding.
Jason Todd bit back a laugh as he opened the door.
His Gotham hidey-hole wasn't usually a place where funny things happened, at least not of the ha-ha-funny variety, but he had to admit that this … this was pretty good.
Damian Wayne was incognito, hood of his sweater pulled deeply over his face, huge-ass sunglasses that must have cost a fortune, eyes darting around over the rim as if he was expecting a swarm of paparazzi or a SWAT team to storm the scene.
Jason had never seen him nervous before. He hadn't even been sure that it was possible.
"It's me," the boy announced. He sure seemed confident in that little disguise he'd put together. Or he still took Jason for a moron, which was also a possibility.
Jason blinked. "You don't say."
It got even better, though, when the hooded teen took a step towards him, all breathless excitement, and whispered: "Do you have the stuff?"
Jason took his time to let him inside, leaning in the doorframe like a huge, bulky stop sign. He took a drag from his cigarette.
"Kid, it's not like I'm selling you drugs," he said dryly. "Don't be like that."
The boy broke out his trademark sneer. "Tch, as if I'd ever take drugs."
Jason smirked. "Right."
The sarcasm was completely lost on Damian, who didn't seem to realize that as Robin, he was getting hopped up on more hallucinogens, sedatives, knock-out gases and truth serums than any boy in his age range could ever dream of. Oh well, he'd eventually figure it out once he looked back on his adolescence and wondered what the fuck he'd been doing. Or perhaps that moment of clarity would never come. Damian was younger than all of them, but he already seemed slightly insane.
Anyway, back to business. Jason moved aside and held the door open. "Quick," he teased, adopting the boy's urgent tone from before. "Before someone sees you!"
That earned him a dirty look, but Damian obliged, pointing at his cigarette as he went past him. "You put that out," he ordered as if he owned the place.
Damian. Jason couldn't get over it. You didn't name your kid that unless you wanted him to turn out completely rotten, which, admittedly, was probably what Talia had been going for.
Well, at least he had a mom. That probably counted for something.
Still smoking, he followed the brat into his one-room apartment. The place had never looked this good, because he'd cleaned up for his … guest. That was, he'd fallen out of bed after a long night of fighting like, two hours ago, thrown out some crap, stuffed some incriminating evidence into hard-to-reach corners, and rushed to the Seven Eleven around the block to get a handful of candy bars and some ginger ale. He'd even reigned in his paranoia enough to crack open a window and let some air in.
Damian wasted no time. "Where is it? Show it to me!" He demanded, finally taking off those silly glasses. He almost looked like a normal kid now; a normal, super-excited kid.
"Sheesh, you're more pushy than a Bowery drug trader." Jason opened the backpack that was readily sitting next to his couch, and presented him the goods. "Not that I have any experience with that…"
Damian actually breathed "Cool!" as he more or less yanked the package out of his hands, and proceeded to aggressively tear into the wrapping in a way that gave Jason a really good idea of what a Wayne family Christmas looked like.
"This better be the uncut version," he hissed.
Jason snorted. "What do you take me for, some wimp?"
Damian interrupted his clawing at the package for a moment to look at him. "A little bit," he admitted.
Jason growled. "Please put on your Robin costume so I can punch you?"
"I didn't bring it…" Damian's voice trailed off when he finally held the video game in his hands, studying the cover with an almost dreamy expression on his harsh little face.
Jason cleared his throat and stretched out his hand. "That's fifty."
"Hn?" The boy barely paid attention to him.
Jason glared down at him. "Fifty bucks, you spoiled brat, I paid fifty bucks for that. Cough 'em up."
He'd been debating with himself whether or not to claim that he'd paid seventy for the special edition. Not because he needed it, but because he thought it'd be funny to scam Bruce Wayne's boy out of twenty bucks. But Damian would've found out anyway, and he was exactly the type of person to do something ridiculously disproportionate over something so minor.
Also, come to think of it, it would've been kinda petty and lame.
"Oh. Of course." Damian reached into his pocket and handed over the money without looking at him. A hundred dollar bill fell to the floor in the process. Jason didn't say anything. He had no interest in taking it, but he wanted to know how long it would take Damian to notice.
The kid seemed lost to the world, so Jason strolled over to the couch, put out his cigarette and sat himself down. The video game console was already turned on and humming.
"Your dad really doesn't let you play Drug Lord 3: Kings Of The Underworld?" He asked after a while.
Damian shook his head, unable to take his eyes off his shiny new treasure. "No. Like I said, I'm not allowed to play games that glorify crime," he said grumpily. "Father doesn't like it."
Jason cocked an eyebrow. "Does he also not allow you to play games that glorify violence?"
"He has no problem with those."
"Figures."
"Can I wear shoes in here?"
Jason looked up, surprised by that polite request. He realized that Damian must've had some fleeting brush with social etiquette, probably thanks to Alfred. He looked like he was expecting an answer, too.
"Dude." Jason made an inviting gesture. He himself was wearing heavy boots, still covered in mud from the night before. "Look at me. Look at this place."
"…oh. Good."
There was a short, awkward silence when they both looked at each other and Jason realized that he was currently on a play date with an eleven year old vigilante, and Damian probably realized something similar. This was new. And kinda strange.
But, eh. His life had taken weirder turns.
He waved his hand. "Uh, what're you waiting for?"
"Right!" The eagerness on the brat's face would've been almost sweet, if Jason had liked children. Or Damian.
"Question." He watched him take the disc out as if it was some invaluable artifact. "Why didn't you ask - "
He'd been about to say 'one of your brothers', but somehow, that made him feel stupidly, irrationally alone, plus the Wayne family dynamic seemed too unstable to put it that way.
"Why didn't you ask one of the others?" He said instead.
Damian pouted. "Psh. Drake is too responsible to let me play it, even though he plays stuff like that all the time, the hypocrite. And Grayson doesn't get video games because he's a jock."
This assessment was amusing to Jason. In a way, this was the whole reason he'd agreed to do this at all. When Damian had called him with the bizarre proposition to buy him a game and let him play it, Jason had immediately known that the boy had to be totally desperate. He'd instinctively realized that he must've struck out with Dick, with Tim Drake, and probably some of the girls to even think about calling the Red Hood.
It thrilled him to see a Wayne fail at something, anything, and apart from that, the whole thing was doing … stuff to his ego; stuff that was hard to explain. There was Damian, asking him for something that neither his father nor any of those other model citizens could provide for him, but Jason could. He got a kick out of it.
"Right, and you're not a jock?" he quipped.
"Really, Todd." Damian sat down next to him, controller in hand and eyes glinting mischievously. "I'm not a jock. I'm a bully. Everyone knows that."
"That's … honest," Jason admitted. "And accurate."
"I know. Quiet, the cutscene is starting!"
They watched it together. It was a pretty sweet action set-piece in a casino; not as good as crashing through a glass roof in person, but not bad at all. Next to him, Damian seemed almost … bouncy, even though he was clearly trying not to look like it.
Jason knew what that was like, because he'd lived it. It was that awkward stage in your life where surfing subway cars was somehow a nightly occurrence, but getting the newest album of your favorite band could still make you wet your tiny green pants in excitement. It was something that Bruce had never really understood, because he'd been a man since he'd been eight years old.
Speaking of which.
"What did you tell your dad where you are?" He inquired. "He's not gonna grapple himself through my window any moment, right?"
"I told him I'm going into a bad neighborhood to help out the underprivileged," Damian replied with a mean-spirited smile.
Jason decided to let the burn slide. "He bought that?!"
Damian shrugged. "I think he's still holding out hope that I will turn into the kind of person who would do that."
"You're a terrible, terrible kid."
"We've established that," Damian said cooly, never taking his eyes off the screen. He'd started to mess around with the game's character creator.
Jason watched with amusement as Damian briefly considered playing a blonde, female bruiser with gigantic boobs. He discarded that idea, and made a foxy assassin that looked strikingly like his mother, which was awkward in so many ways. He then scratched that, and started working on a mobster that turned out looking … like Bruce Wayne. He scowled, hit 'Erase', and started over again.
Jason reached for a candy bar. He'd planned to plop Damian down in front of the TV and then go about his business, but this was all kinds of entertaining. And psychologically enlightening. Kid had some problems.
"Does that look like me?" Damian asked him, before hitting 'Finish'.
It was odd that he cared what Jason was thinking. But he assumed that he was now playing the role of 'friend' because he was the only one there. Lonely Waynes were weird that way.
He took a look at the character, and shook his head. "Man," he said gravely. "You have body image issues, kid. You should probably see someone about that."
"I do?" Damian appraised his work, brows furrowed.
"Yeah." Jason's lips were twitching. "Your face is not that handsome. I mean, come on."
He'd expected an elbow to the spleen for that, but what he hadn't expected was an elbow to the spleen and Damian looking actually affected.
"That's … that's me when I'm older," he explained defensively. "I'm supposed to be older."
Jason elbowed him back. Perhaps it wasn't so bad to have a shitty little brother, after all. "You realize that rich guys can be ugly and still get dates, right?"
"Shut up. I don't. Care," Damian insisted, hammering on the 'Finish' button with unnecessary force. "And I never will."
Was he … was he blushing? Was that a sore spot? Aww.
Damian was a nasty piece of work, but it probably wasn't okay to make fun of eleven year olds for their looks, even if they were pompous mini-gladiators with a perma-scowl and a bad attitude.
"I was kidding." Jason told him begrudgingly. That should've been obvious, dammit. "You're not ugly. You look … fine."
No response.
Damian played through the first action segment of the game in silence. Jason noticed that it took him a lot of tries to scale the wall of that drug refinery, many more than it would've taken him in real life. He either wasn't very good at this video game thing, or he was completely distracted.
Eventually, he hit 'Pause', and Jason could tell from years of experience with his dad that the kid was brooding.
"Father is handsome," he suddenly muttered. "But I … Grayson looks more like him than I do - don't do that."
Jason blinked. "I wasn't doing anything."
"You were about to do that thing that grown-ups do, where they pat you on the head and ruffle your hair. I know it. You're not the first to try. But don't do that with me, I'm warning you."
He looked down at his outstretched hand. The kid was right. He had been about to do that.
Weird. He put his hand down.
He was really not prepared for this. He'd been okay with letting the brat play some dumb game in his house, especially against his father's wishes, but he hadn't expected that they'd be … sharing shit.
He wasn't good at doing the big brother thing; or whatever it was.
"Well," he said uncomfortably, "Can't really help you there, but there's one thing I know."
"What's that?"
Jason shrugged his shoulders. "Don't compete with Dick Grayson in the looks department. Ever. That way lies madness, my friend. I'm serious."
Damian turned around and gave him a baffled look. Then he barked out a laugh, and that broke the tension.
"True," he agreed. His eyes narrowed. "You would know, wouldn't you."
Jason leaned back on the couch and smacked the back of Damian's head, which for some reason the boy was more willing to accept than a friendly pat.
"Play your game."
He did. And the next segment worked out much better.
"There's money on the floor," Damian casually said after a while. "That's mine, isn't it?"
Jason gave him a sourly look. "Yeah, I don't usually drop my hundreds on the ground and then leave 'em there."
"Keep it. For the game system." A small smile played around the boy's hardened mouth. "Since I can tell you bought it solely for the purpose of my visit."
Jason flinched. "I d - I didn't…I did not…" He deflated. "Okay, how did you know?"
"The dust pattern around it. It's the newest thing in the room. Seriously, Todd. Aren't you supposed to be a detective?"
"I prefer 'angel of vengeance'?"
The boy shot him a sneaky look, but then he asked, "Why did you do it?" He sounded genuinely curious.
Yeah, why had he done it?
There was the whole song and dance about helping the son of the Bat do something forbidden, no matter how silly it was. At least that's what he'd told himself to rationalize doing an eleven year old's bidding. But there was also something else. Something about Damian wanting to hang with him because he knew that Jason would let him do something he wasn't allowed to.
The truth was …
The truth was that, for some reason, he'd wanted this weird, disturbed kid to think he was cool.
And he'd bite his tongue off before he'd admit that right now.
Fortunately, he didn't have to. Damian seemed to take his answer from the silence, which was a pretty huge feat for such a terrible, terrible kid.
"Anyway," he said, un-pausing the game, "I hope you bought two controllers. Because there's a co-op section coming up. And I'm enlisting you in it."
Characters: Jason Todd, Damian Wayne
Genre: Gen, humor, hang-out fic.
Warnings: Nerdery, boys being boys.
A/N: Damian needs something that only Jason can provide. (And it's totally not as smutty as it sounds.) Awkward adventures in brotherly bonding.
Jason Todd bit back a laugh as he opened the door.
His Gotham hidey-hole wasn't usually a place where funny things happened, at least not of the ha-ha-funny variety, but he had to admit that this … this was pretty good.
Damian Wayne was incognito, hood of his sweater pulled deeply over his face, huge-ass sunglasses that must have cost a fortune, eyes darting around over the rim as if he was expecting a swarm of paparazzi or a SWAT team to storm the scene.
Jason had never seen him nervous before. He hadn't even been sure that it was possible.
"It's me," the boy announced. He sure seemed confident in that little disguise he'd put together. Or he still took Jason for a moron, which was also a possibility.
Jason blinked. "You don't say."
It got even better, though, when the hooded teen took a step towards him, all breathless excitement, and whispered: "Do you have the stuff?"
Jason took his time to let him inside, leaning in the doorframe like a huge, bulky stop sign. He took a drag from his cigarette.
"Kid, it's not like I'm selling you drugs," he said dryly. "Don't be like that."
The boy broke out his trademark sneer. "Tch, as if I'd ever take drugs."
Jason smirked. "Right."
The sarcasm was completely lost on Damian, who didn't seem to realize that as Robin, he was getting hopped up on more hallucinogens, sedatives, knock-out gases and truth serums than any boy in his age range could ever dream of. Oh well, he'd eventually figure it out once he looked back on his adolescence and wondered what the fuck he'd been doing. Or perhaps that moment of clarity would never come. Damian was younger than all of them, but he already seemed slightly insane.
Anyway, back to business. Jason moved aside and held the door open. "Quick," he teased, adopting the boy's urgent tone from before. "Before someone sees you!"
That earned him a dirty look, but Damian obliged, pointing at his cigarette as he went past him. "You put that out," he ordered as if he owned the place.
Damian. Jason couldn't get over it. You didn't name your kid that unless you wanted him to turn out completely rotten, which, admittedly, was probably what Talia had been going for.
Well, at least he had a mom. That probably counted for something.
Still smoking, he followed the brat into his one-room apartment. The place had never looked this good, because he'd cleaned up for his … guest. That was, he'd fallen out of bed after a long night of fighting like, two hours ago, thrown out some crap, stuffed some incriminating evidence into hard-to-reach corners, and rushed to the Seven Eleven around the block to get a handful of candy bars and some ginger ale. He'd even reigned in his paranoia enough to crack open a window and let some air in.
Damian wasted no time. "Where is it? Show it to me!" He demanded, finally taking off those silly glasses. He almost looked like a normal kid now; a normal, super-excited kid.
"Sheesh, you're more pushy than a Bowery drug trader." Jason opened the backpack that was readily sitting next to his couch, and presented him the goods. "Not that I have any experience with that…"
Damian actually breathed "Cool!" as he more or less yanked the package out of his hands, and proceeded to aggressively tear into the wrapping in a way that gave Jason a really good idea of what a Wayne family Christmas looked like.
"This better be the uncut version," he hissed.
Jason snorted. "What do you take me for, some wimp?"
Damian interrupted his clawing at the package for a moment to look at him. "A little bit," he admitted.
Jason growled. "Please put on your Robin costume so I can punch you?"
"I didn't bring it…" Damian's voice trailed off when he finally held the video game in his hands, studying the cover with an almost dreamy expression on his harsh little face.
Jason cleared his throat and stretched out his hand. "That's fifty."
"Hn?" The boy barely paid attention to him.
Jason glared down at him. "Fifty bucks, you spoiled brat, I paid fifty bucks for that. Cough 'em up."
He'd been debating with himself whether or not to claim that he'd paid seventy for the special edition. Not because he needed it, but because he thought it'd be funny to scam Bruce Wayne's boy out of twenty bucks. But Damian would've found out anyway, and he was exactly the type of person to do something ridiculously disproportionate over something so minor.
Also, come to think of it, it would've been kinda petty and lame.
"Oh. Of course." Damian reached into his pocket and handed over the money without looking at him. A hundred dollar bill fell to the floor in the process. Jason didn't say anything. He had no interest in taking it, but he wanted to know how long it would take Damian to notice.
The kid seemed lost to the world, so Jason strolled over to the couch, put out his cigarette and sat himself down. The video game console was already turned on and humming.
"Your dad really doesn't let you play Drug Lord 3: Kings Of The Underworld?" He asked after a while.
Damian shook his head, unable to take his eyes off his shiny new treasure. "No. Like I said, I'm not allowed to play games that glorify crime," he said grumpily. "Father doesn't like it."
Jason cocked an eyebrow. "Does he also not allow you to play games that glorify violence?"
"He has no problem with those."
"Figures."
"Can I wear shoes in here?"
Jason looked up, surprised by that polite request. He realized that Damian must've had some fleeting brush with social etiquette, probably thanks to Alfred. He looked like he was expecting an answer, too.
"Dude." Jason made an inviting gesture. He himself was wearing heavy boots, still covered in mud from the night before. "Look at me. Look at this place."
"…oh. Good."
There was a short, awkward silence when they both looked at each other and Jason realized that he was currently on a play date with an eleven year old vigilante, and Damian probably realized something similar. This was new. And kinda strange.
But, eh. His life had taken weirder turns.
He waved his hand. "Uh, what're you waiting for?"
"Right!" The eagerness on the brat's face would've been almost sweet, if Jason had liked children. Or Damian.
"Question." He watched him take the disc out as if it was some invaluable artifact. "Why didn't you ask - "
He'd been about to say 'one of your brothers', but somehow, that made him feel stupidly, irrationally alone, plus the Wayne family dynamic seemed too unstable to put it that way.
"Why didn't you ask one of the others?" He said instead.
Damian pouted. "Psh. Drake is too responsible to let me play it, even though he plays stuff like that all the time, the hypocrite. And Grayson doesn't get video games because he's a jock."
This assessment was amusing to Jason. In a way, this was the whole reason he'd agreed to do this at all. When Damian had called him with the bizarre proposition to buy him a game and let him play it, Jason had immediately known that the boy had to be totally desperate. He'd instinctively realized that he must've struck out with Dick, with Tim Drake, and probably some of the girls to even think about calling the Red Hood.
It thrilled him to see a Wayne fail at something, anything, and apart from that, the whole thing was doing … stuff to his ego; stuff that was hard to explain. There was Damian, asking him for something that neither his father nor any of those other model citizens could provide for him, but Jason could. He got a kick out of it.
"Right, and you're not a jock?" he quipped.
"Really, Todd." Damian sat down next to him, controller in hand and eyes glinting mischievously. "I'm not a jock. I'm a bully. Everyone knows that."
"That's … honest," Jason admitted. "And accurate."
"I know. Quiet, the cutscene is starting!"
They watched it together. It was a pretty sweet action set-piece in a casino; not as good as crashing through a glass roof in person, but not bad at all. Next to him, Damian seemed almost … bouncy, even though he was clearly trying not to look like it.
Jason knew what that was like, because he'd lived it. It was that awkward stage in your life where surfing subway cars was somehow a nightly occurrence, but getting the newest album of your favorite band could still make you wet your tiny green pants in excitement. It was something that Bruce had never really understood, because he'd been a man since he'd been eight years old.
Speaking of which.
"What did you tell your dad where you are?" He inquired. "He's not gonna grapple himself through my window any moment, right?"
"I told him I'm going into a bad neighborhood to help out the underprivileged," Damian replied with a mean-spirited smile.
Jason decided to let the burn slide. "He bought that?!"
Damian shrugged. "I think he's still holding out hope that I will turn into the kind of person who would do that."
"You're a terrible, terrible kid."
"We've established that," Damian said cooly, never taking his eyes off the screen. He'd started to mess around with the game's character creator.
Jason watched with amusement as Damian briefly considered playing a blonde, female bruiser with gigantic boobs. He discarded that idea, and made a foxy assassin that looked strikingly like his mother, which was awkward in so many ways. He then scratched that, and started working on a mobster that turned out looking … like Bruce Wayne. He scowled, hit 'Erase', and started over again.
Jason reached for a candy bar. He'd planned to plop Damian down in front of the TV and then go about his business, but this was all kinds of entertaining. And psychologically enlightening. Kid had some problems.
"Does that look like me?" Damian asked him, before hitting 'Finish'.
It was odd that he cared what Jason was thinking. But he assumed that he was now playing the role of 'friend' because he was the only one there. Lonely Waynes were weird that way.
He took a look at the character, and shook his head. "Man," he said gravely. "You have body image issues, kid. You should probably see someone about that."
"I do?" Damian appraised his work, brows furrowed.
"Yeah." Jason's lips were twitching. "Your face is not that handsome. I mean, come on."
He'd expected an elbow to the spleen for that, but what he hadn't expected was an elbow to the spleen and Damian looking actually affected.
"That's … that's me when I'm older," he explained defensively. "I'm supposed to be older."
Jason elbowed him back. Perhaps it wasn't so bad to have a shitty little brother, after all. "You realize that rich guys can be ugly and still get dates, right?"
"Shut up. I don't. Care," Damian insisted, hammering on the 'Finish' button with unnecessary force. "And I never will."
Was he … was he blushing? Was that a sore spot? Aww.
Damian was a nasty piece of work, but it probably wasn't okay to make fun of eleven year olds for their looks, even if they were pompous mini-gladiators with a perma-scowl and a bad attitude.
"I was kidding." Jason told him begrudgingly. That should've been obvious, dammit. "You're not ugly. You look … fine."
No response.
Damian played through the first action segment of the game in silence. Jason noticed that it took him a lot of tries to scale the wall of that drug refinery, many more than it would've taken him in real life. He either wasn't very good at this video game thing, or he was completely distracted.
Eventually, he hit 'Pause', and Jason could tell from years of experience with his dad that the kid was brooding.
"Father is handsome," he suddenly muttered. "But I … Grayson looks more like him than I do - don't do that."
Jason blinked. "I wasn't doing anything."
"You were about to do that thing that grown-ups do, where they pat you on the head and ruffle your hair. I know it. You're not the first to try. But don't do that with me, I'm warning you."
He looked down at his outstretched hand. The kid was right. He had been about to do that.
Weird. He put his hand down.
He was really not prepared for this. He'd been okay with letting the brat play some dumb game in his house, especially against his father's wishes, but he hadn't expected that they'd be … sharing shit.
He wasn't good at doing the big brother thing; or whatever it was.
"Well," he said uncomfortably, "Can't really help you there, but there's one thing I know."
"What's that?"
Jason shrugged his shoulders. "Don't compete with Dick Grayson in the looks department. Ever. That way lies madness, my friend. I'm serious."
Damian turned around and gave him a baffled look. Then he barked out a laugh, and that broke the tension.
"True," he agreed. His eyes narrowed. "You would know, wouldn't you."
Jason leaned back on the couch and smacked the back of Damian's head, which for some reason the boy was more willing to accept than a friendly pat.
"Play your game."
He did. And the next segment worked out much better.
"There's money on the floor," Damian casually said after a while. "That's mine, isn't it?"
Jason gave him a sourly look. "Yeah, I don't usually drop my hundreds on the ground and then leave 'em there."
"Keep it. For the game system." A small smile played around the boy's hardened mouth. "Since I can tell you bought it solely for the purpose of my visit."
Jason flinched. "I d - I didn't…I did not…" He deflated. "Okay, how did you know?"
"The dust pattern around it. It's the newest thing in the room. Seriously, Todd. Aren't you supposed to be a detective?"
"I prefer 'angel of vengeance'?"
The boy shot him a sneaky look, but then he asked, "Why did you do it?" He sounded genuinely curious.
Yeah, why had he done it?
There was the whole song and dance about helping the son of the Bat do something forbidden, no matter how silly it was. At least that's what he'd told himself to rationalize doing an eleven year old's bidding. But there was also something else. Something about Damian wanting to hang with him because he knew that Jason would let him do something he wasn't allowed to.
The truth was …
The truth was that, for some reason, he'd wanted this weird, disturbed kid to think he was cool.
And he'd bite his tongue off before he'd admit that right now.
Fortunately, he didn't have to. Damian seemed to take his answer from the silence, which was a pretty huge feat for such a terrible, terrible kid.
"Anyway," he said, un-pausing the game, "I hope you bought two controllers. Because there's a co-op section coming up. And I'm enlisting you in it."