#proceeds to throw himself in front of Bruce without checking who the intruder is

[ghost-bxrd]

I humbly bow in gratitude and shall invoke your name on the corresponding future chapter 🙇‍♀️

And also credit you and @investyourlove1019 for the name brainstorming because Mockingjay for LilBruce is now canon. I don’t make the rules.

Jason‘s entire world view is shifting and crumbling and reassembling itself all in the span of a couple seconds and this entire situation is utter lunacy but—- let’s be for real. Before Bruce decided never to kill he was a little boy aching to avenge his parents. Death, life, neither mattered to him. He just wanted the murderer to pay. So him going to Jason after Hood established himself in Crime Alley? It’s actually more in character than one would suspect at first. But Jason obviously never got to know this side of Bruce.

Long story short, Jason agrees. Not because he thinks he owes it to Bruce but because this little toddler just saw his parents get murdered in cold blood right in front of him and the Red Hood doesn’t let shit like that slide. Ever.

(There’s this whole spiel where Bruce tries to throw his money at Jason because “How much do you want for it? 5 million? 6?” And Jason’s just like “Nah, early Christmas present :)” more serious of course, but end of the line is that Jason doesn’t accept a single penny. It is also the moment that Bruce decides to trust this weird criminal a tiny bit.)

Y E S tho! Make it so Joe grabbed some of the pearls from Martha‘s necklace before fleeing! Those pearls are crazy valuable and worth a couple hundred each, but Joe is a greedy dumbass who boasts about snatching them off the Waynes to drive the price even higher.

It works, of course. Just not in the way Joe suspected it would.

Within a couple hours word gets back to Jason about the pearls and he throws his money in the ring to track down the culprit.

When Jason finally gets his hands on Joe Chill, he doesn’t make it quick.

Bruce wakes up the next morning with a special delivery sitting on the steps to Wayne Manor containing the missing pearls.

That should have been it. Everyone’s happy, Jason did his good deed of the century and Little Bruce can now proceed to heal like he should have the first time around, with all the fancy therapy and stuff to go along with it. And Jason can finally focus on getting back to his own damn universe.

And he would. He really, really would, but every time he thinks about leaving, the picture of Bruce— alone and tiny and asking Jason to finish the job — pops into his head, and he feels like someone is fixing a noose around his throat because he can’t breathe.

So we’ve got a Jason who‘s perpetually terrified of Bruce deciding to act on those suicidal tendencies again. The part with Jason and the gun was opportunistic, wandering into Crime Alley alone is passive (relatively), but things like that can easily flip into deliberate planning and execution.

Bruce won’t go that far, but Jason doesn’t know that. What if Jason leaves and Bruce— dies? The Alfred of this world isn’t nearly as invested in Bruce’s welfare as the original was/is, it would be so easy for the little boy to slip between the cracks of the world and just— vanish.

Jason sticks to obsessively checking in with the kid to reassure himself of his continued survival.

Little Bruce, who is officially hero worshipping the Red Hood now, imprints on Jason like a baby duckling.

Prompt:

Jason gets booted to another dimension and adopts a recently orphaned Bruce Wayne.

Whom he also takes along for the ride when he’s pulled back into his own dimension.