The garage had been Jason’s for almost eleven years, though the faded white lettering across the front window still looked newer than most things inside it. TODD’S MOTORCYCLE & AUTO was simple, almost painfully so, because Jason had never cared much for advertising and hadn’t needed it anyway. Word traveled quickly in this part of Gotham. People knew the enormous bastard on the corner could resurrect an engine everyone else had pronounced dead, that he charged fairly, never took advantage of somebody who didn’t know a carburetor from a crankshaft, and had an irritating habit of fixing small things without putting them on the invoice. They also knew better than to ask too many questions about where he'd learned half the things he knew, why there were scars disappearing beneath his clothes, or why Jason Todd occasionally went very still whenever sirens screamed past the shop after dark. He had built himself something quiet here, something ordinary, and after spending most of his life believing ordinary was something meant for other people, Jason had grown fiercely protective of it.

At forty-nine, Jason had also finally become something his younger self had never seriously expected to be: old enough to complain about his goddamn knees. Not old, technically, though Dick took enormous pleasure in pretending otherwise. Jason preferred to call it accumulated mileage. Nearly three decades of broken bones, gunshots, stab wounds, dislocations, concussions, explosions, and generally treating his body like something disposable had collected their debt with interest. Cold mornings made his left knee ache, his shoulder clicked if he rotated it too far, and there was a spot along his lower back that could ruin his entire afternoon if he bent wrong. He owned reading glasses now, which he considered a personal betrayal, and there was enough silver threaded through his black hair that pretending it wasn't there had become impossible years ago. Most of it gathered heavily around his temples, blending into the familiar white forelock that remained stubbornly brighter than everything surrounding it. Time had changed the rest of him too, but it hadn't made Jason small. Nothing short of divine intervention was accomplishing that. He was still massive, broad enough through the shoulders to make some doorframes personally insulting, with thick arms built by decades of training and hauling engines around because he refused to admit machines existed specifically for that purpose. His chest was broad and hairy, while the brutally defined stomach he'd carried beneath the Red Hood armor had softened into the comfortable belly of a middle-aged man who liked good food, cold beer, and no longer treated every meal like fuel for tomorrow night's rooftop chase. Strength remained beneath the softness, though; Jason was simply bigger now, heavier, solid in a way that made him look less like a weapon and more like a man who had finally allowed himself to live inside his own body.

That evening, he'd been underneath a battered 1986 Honda Shadow for the better part of an hour, trying to determine exactly what its owner had done to deserve the mechanical hate crime currently masquerading as an electrical system. The garage doors remained rolled open despite the approaching storm, allowing humid Gotham air to mingle with the permanent smells of motor oil, hot metal, rubber, old coffee, and whatever takeout Jason had forgotten to throw away after lunch. Classic rock murmured from an ancient radio near his workbench while a box fan pushed warm air around without accomplishing anything remotely useful. Tools covered half the nearest table in an organizational system that looked like complete chaos to everyone except him, while three motorcycles in various stages of repair occupied the bays around him. When Jason finally slid himself out from beneath the Honda, the movement came with a low grunt that would have gotten him mocked mercilessly by every member of his family. He remained flat on his back for several seconds afterward, staring toward the ceiling and seriously contemplating whether standing was actually necessary before muttering, "Fuckin' forty-nine," beneath his breath and reluctantly planting one grease-blackened hand against the concrete.

Six-foot-something of former vigilante unfolded beside the lift with considerably less grace than Jason would've managed twenty years ago, joints protesting as he straightened and rolled one aching shoulder. He'd abandoned his shirt hours ago after getting oil across the front of it, leaving his torso bare except for sweat, dark chest hair, grease, and the sprawling collection of scars that told a story nobody walking into Todd's needed explained. Old gray sweatpants rode low around his hips, equally filthy with dark smears across one thigh where he'd repeatedly wiped his hands without thinking, and battered work boots remained loosely tied around his feet because apparently Jason had reached the age where even shoelaces could go fuck themselves. There was grease along his forearms, underneath his fingernails, smeared across one cheek, and somehow streaked near his ribs despite having absolutely no memory of touching himself there. He was wiping his hands on an equally filthy rag when the little bell above the front door rang, barely earning his attention as he tossed the cloth onto his workbench and reached for the bottle of water sitting beside his radio. "Be with you in a sec," he called, taking several long swallows before dragging the back of his wrist across his mouth. "Just so you know, I'm closing in twenty. If something's actively on fire, I'll deal with it tonight. Anything short of that, you're probably leaving it here."

The silence that followed was what finally made Jason look up. Retirement hadn't managed to erase instincts hammered into his bones long before the first streak of gray had appeared in his hair, and something old inside him stirred automatically when nobody answered. Silence had meaning. Footsteps had meaning. Breathing had meaning. His brain still calculated the distance between himself and the nearest weapon without permission, and his green eyes narrowed slightly as he set the water bottle aside and turned toward the doorway connecting the garage floor with the little customer area. Then Jason stopped breathing. Whatever suspicion had sharpened his features disappeared so quickly it was almost startling, replaced by something utterly blank as his mind simply refused to understand what his eyes were giving it. The radio continued playing behind him, rain began drumming harder against the metal awning outside, and somewhere down the street somebody leaned on their horn because Gotham would apparently collapse into the ocean before its citizens learned patience, but Jason heard none of it. His hand remained wrapped around the water bottle as condensation slipped between his fingers, his grip slowly tightening until the cheap plastic crumpled beneath his palm.

There were some faces a man forgot because they hadn't mattered. Others faded slowly, details disappearing one at a time until memory became something softer and less reliable than reality. Jason had forgotten hundreds over the years: criminals, informants, people he'd rescued once and never seen again, men he'd fought, women he'd threatened, strangers belonging to an entire lifetime he'd spent trying with varying degrees of success to put behind him. Then there were the ones carved somewhere deeper, the ones time couldn't touch no matter how desperately he'd once wished it would. Jason knew that face. He had known it when he was young enough to believe anger could keep him alive forever, and he'd remembered it at thirty while bleeding in some filthy safehouse and wondering what they would've said if they'd seen the state of him. He'd remembered it at thirty-seven when he'd found something of theirs buried inside an old moving box and ended up sitting on the floor with it in his hands for almost an hour. He'd remembered it at forty-three when he'd unexpectedly dreamed about them and spent the entire next morning pissed off at himself because apparently his subconscious had decided twenty fucking years wasn't enough. He knew that face now, too. Older, changed by years he hadn't been there to witness, but unmistakably, impossibly alive.

For once, the smartass remark didn't come. Neither did the practiced indifference Jason had spent most of his life using whenever something struck too close to the bone. His expression simply changed, the hard line between his brows disappearing as his lips parted slightly and his green eyes moved slowly over them, tracing every visible piece of evidence that time had passed for them too. There had been a point in his life when Jason had known everything about them: how they took their coffee, what irritated them, what could make them laugh even when they were trying not to, which side of the bed they preferred, and what expression appeared immediately before they said something they absolutely shouldn't. He'd known how their hand felt inside his and the sound of their breathing beside him in the dark. He'd known exactly how tightly to hold them and exactly how terrified loving them made him, because Jason Todd had been young then—young, furious, damaged, and absolutely convinced that loving someone meant eventually getting them killed. So he'd done what Jason used to do best whenever he became frightened enough. He'd left.

There hadn't been another person, some grand betrayal, or even a proper ending if Jason was willing to admit the ugliest part of it. He had simply started disappearing. Missions became longer, calls went unanswered, promises became excuses, and Jason convinced himself that distance was protection until he'd finally created enough of it that there was no relationship left to protect. He had told himself they would be better without him because Jason Todd had once possessed the particular arrogance of a traumatized young man who believed sacrificing his own happiness automatically made every decision noble. It had taken years, therapy he complained about attending, losing people, watching others build lives around him, and simply getting older to understand how profoundly unfair that had been. He hadn't protected them by leaving; he'd made a decision about their life without giving them any say in it, and no amount of noble bullshit could change that. Jason had lived with the knowledge for decades, eventually accepting that the apology they deserved would probably remain one of the many things he would carry to his grave without ever getting the chance to give. "Jesus Christ." The words finally escaped him in a breath, his voice deeper than it had been when they'd known him, roughened by age, cigarettes he'd eventually quit, injuries he'd survived, and nearly five decades of being Jason fucking Todd. Their name almost followed, but Jason couldn't quite force it past the sudden tightness in his throat. Instead, he lowered the mangled water bottle toward the workbench and somehow missed the edge the first time, something that would've been hilarious under literally any other circumstances. He barely noticed. His attention remained fixed entirely on them as something achingly vulnerable appeared behind his eyes, and for just a second the forty-nine-year-old man standing beneath the warm garage lights resembled the reckless boy he'd once been—not physically, but somewhere deeper, somewhere time hadn't completely managed to reach. A breath left him that sounded suspiciously close to a laugh as his gaze moved across their face again. "Look at you." His mouth twitched before the old Jason finally surfaced enough to save him from drowning completely in the moment. "You got old."

The quiet huff of laughter that followed was aimed entirely at himself. Jason dropped his gaze toward the concrete and shook his head, immediately recognizing what a stupid fucking thing that had been to say after more than two decades, but when he looked back up there was a crooked smile pulling at his mouth. It was older now, framed by lines that hadn't existed when they'd last seen it, but it was unmistakably the same smile that had once belonged partly to them. "Thank God." The humor disappeared from his voice almost as soon as the words left him, because Jason remembered being twenty-three and genuinely believing he would never see thirty. He remembered expecting every goodbye to be permanent, remembered waking after his resurrection and thinking those extra years were some cosmic punishment, and remembered friends who hadn't made it far enough to complain about aching knees or gray hair. There were people permanently preserved in Jason's memory as young because death had stolen the privilege of aging from them. Somehow, against every expectation Jason Todd had ever had for his life, he had gotten old. So had the person standing in front of him. His eyes burned unexpectedly at the realization, and Jason blinked once before stubbornly pretending they didn't. "You're here." Those two words came much quieter, stripped entirely of humor, sarcasm, or anything else Jason might have hidden behind. There was no Red Hood standing in that garage now, no angry Robin, no Gotham crime lord, no impossible resurrection story, and no frightened young man convincing himself that loving someone gave him the right to decide their future. There was only Jason, forty-nine years old with grease on his hands, gray in his hair, softness around his middle, reading glasses abandoned beside an invoice, and enough accumulated injuries to predict rain better than Gotham's weather station. He slowly unfolded his arms but made no move toward them. He wouldn't presume he still had that right, wouldn't assume decades of silence could disappear simply because his heart had apparently remembered exactly how to ache for them. Instead, Jason allowed his hands to fall loosely to his sides, leaving his posture strangely open while twenty-something years of apologies, questions, regrets, memories, and things he should've said crowded together behind his teeth.

For several long seconds, Jason simply looked at them. Maybe there was nothing left between them except history. Maybe they had someone waiting at home. Maybe they had come here entirely by accident and would walk back through that door once whatever had brought them inside was handled. Maybe Jason was about to discover that some mistakes couldn't be repaired no matter how good he'd gotten at putting broken things back together. He knew better than most that not everything deserved a second life simply because somebody desperately wanted one. Still, something small and painfully hopeful had awakened beneath his ribs before he could stop it, and Jason hated how immediately familiar that feeling was. His crooked smile softened as he leaned one hip against the workbench, those weathered green eyes never leaving their face while thunder rolled across Gotham beyond the open garage doors. When he finally spoke again, his voice was low and warm, carrying the faintest ghost of the man they'd once known beneath everything the years had added to him. "Been a long time, sweetheart.”