Jason Todd - Cancer

You thought you were doing a good job keeping it together.

After all, you’d done this before—walked this road alone, white-knuckled and too proud to ask for help. You survived it. Beat it. Locked the memories away in the same place you kept the versions of yourself you didn’t let anyone see. The scared one. The sick one. The one in hospital gowns instead of armor.

That life had nothing to do with Gotham. Nothing to do with them.

So when the bruises came back, when the fatigue hit like a wall, when sleep became less of a luxury and more of a necessity, you told yourself it was just stress. A virus, maybe. You lied, expertly. You went on patrol. You stitched up others. You smiled.

But deep down, you knew.

And when the test results came in—words like relapse and recurrence stamped on clinical paper—you sat in your car for nearly an hour, engine off, hands gripping the wheel like you could squeeze the truth out of existence.

You didn’t tell anyone. Not Bruce. Not Dick. Not Cass.

Especially not Jason.

Because Jason Todd had a way of seeing you—really seeing you—in a way that made hiding impossible. He knew how to peel back the layers. And you weren’t ready for that.

You could handle this. You had to.

Until the night you couldn’t.

It happened on a quiet Tuesday, in one of the safehouses you and Jason sometimes crashed at after rough patrols. The two of you were patching up in the kitchen—he had a cracked rib and a busted lip, and you had a shoulder that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Nothing you couldn’t handle.

Jason was leaning against the counter, beer bottle in one hand, teasing you about how slow you were getting. You rolled your eyes, tossed back a sarcastic reply—and then, just like that, your nose started to bleed.

Fast. Hot. No warning.

You froze.

Jason didn’t.

“Hey,” he said, suddenly serious, watching the blood trickle past your lip. “What the hell?”