Patchwork Siblings, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl

Chapter 11 - How to Bridge the Gap [rough draft]

A/N: Warning for the phrase "quiet hands," though it is NOT used in an autistic or traumatic context. As in, the phrase is used in a completely different, positive context, but I know that some readers have trauma associated with the phrase itself, so this is a heads-up to prevent blindsiding.

(If you want more detail: Jason, who as you remember is brain-damaged and has trouble with articulation, uses the phrase to try to explain something that has nothing to do with stimming; the people he's explaining it to have no past history or negative associations with the phrase and are able to figure out what he means.)

o.o.o

Now that the Bats have caught them but didn't hurt them, Tim goes back to School and Tal- and Charlie is BORED.

He still has to stay hidden from people who don't know about him. But the Bats know about him now. He can go to the Bats to be not-bored until Tim comes home. He is still not allowed to leave the house unless there's an emergency, but maybe the Bats will countermand those orders.

Charlie taps on the number that Before Dick put into his phone. The sound pulses for a while, then stops. "Hi, this is Dick Grayson's phone! Leave a message and I'll get back to ya as soon as I get a chance. *BEEP*"

"Hello, Dick Grayson's phone. The message is that Tim is at school all day and I am alone. Please order me to come play with Jason. I love Jason." He ends the call.

Now he has to wait for Before Dick to get back to him as soon as he gets a chance. Charlie taps at the phone screen to summon the words 'Candy Crush.' He taps at candy that's not real so that they pop and disappear. He does it until he gets too bored to continue. He looks at the clock. Thirty-six minutes have passed.

He goes downstairs and watches a movie. That takes up more than an hour, but he's too bored to watch a second movie. He finds things to climb on and swing from. The house is big, so that takes up almost two whole hours, but then he finishes looking through the house for things to climb on, and now he's bored again. He collects a large pile of items, builds a tower out of them, then disassembles the tower and puts all the items back. That took another two hours.

The phone rings. Charlie dives for it. The name on the phone screen says 'Dick Grayson.' "Before Dick! Hello!" he nearly shouts into the phone, too frantic to wait for Before Dick to speak. "I miss Tim and it will be A LONG TIME before he comes home! My orders are to stay in the house unless it's an emergency, but maybe if you give me different orders, Tim won't be angry if I obey them even though he's an Owl and you're not." He waits.

"Uh... You wanna come over?" Before Dick asks.

"Yes," Charlie says.

"All right, buddy. I'll keep an eye on the security system and let you in when I see you."

"I don't want to make Tim angry by disobeying orders."

"He won't be angry. I order you to come over, okay? I can come abduct you if you want."

That is a good solution. He would rather Tim think him incompetent than disobedient. With all the other Owls, it's the opposite, but Tim is the one Owl that Charlie very much wants to be good for. "Yes, please."

"Y- Wait, seriously? Uhhh...okay, then? I guess I'll be over in a bit. Maybe you should text Tim where you're going so he doesn't worry when he comes home and finds you gone."

That is a good idea, too. Charlie ends the call and types out a text message to Tim: when you come home and i am not in the house, its because before dick abducted me to hold captive in his house, because jason that i love is there and i am bored and alone. please come rescue me and jason when you come back from school. if you abduct before dick too then there will be four of us to do interesting things together.

By the time he's finished typing all that out and taps the word 'Send,' the doorbell is ringing. Charlie runs to make sure that Before Dick is the one trying to gain entrance to the house before he throws open the door. "Hi! Thank you!"

"No problem, buddy. Do I need to, like...drag you off by your hair, or can you just...?"

"You can drag me off by my hand," Charlie offers, extending his. Before Dick cautiously reaches out. Charlie keeps their hands clasped all the way to the Bats' house, except when Before Dick needs to shift the car between Park and Reverse and Drive, because it feels good to hold people's hands.

When they get to the Bats' house, Jason is in a huge room full of books, looking at a big book with pictures. He makes annoyed sounds when Charlie tries to take the book away from him or to take him away from the book. Charlie decides to build a nest around Jason instead, and Jason doesn't resist that. Charlie takes his time finding the softest, prettiest blankets and pillows to wrap around the boy. Then he sits beside Jason and preens tangles out of his hair.

Before Dick is watching them. "Ahh, so not fair! How come he lets you hug him and stuff, but not me?!"

Charlie looks at Before Dick, then looks at his hands in Jason's hair. "I don't know. Jason, why don't you let Before Dick hug you and stuff?"

"Mngh," Jason mumbles. "Dickhead. Loud."

"I'm not loud?" Charlie wonders. He knows he was loud when he and Before Dick were still the same person, and the Owls made very, very sure that he stopped being loud. Now that he's Charlie, something in-between, daring to be more and more loud as Tim keeps not punishing him for it, maybe he should start experimenting to see just how loud he's allowed to be now.

...Maybe not yet. He's too afraid of making Tim angry at him. But...later. When he's braver. Maybe he'll try to be louder, carefully, a little bit at a time, and see how loud he can get before being punished.

"Quiet hands," Jason murmurs, so soft that Charlie wouldn't have been able to hear him if he didn't have Talon ears.

"Oh." Charlie looks at his hands again. When he tried to take the book away from Jason and Jason away from the book, his hands were...being loud? And Jason didn't let him. But his hands now are gentle in Jason's hair, and Jason is letting him do that. So maybe it's good to be quiet sometimes, so he doesn't scare Jason away. He can be quiet to Jason and practice being loud when he's not with Jason.

He looks at Before Dick. "You're still loud."

"I've barely said anything this whole time!"

"Your hands. Are loud. When you grab him or his treasures."

"...Huh." After a minute, Before Dick approaches, so quietly that Charlie can't hear him even though he's looking right at him. Before Dick sits down next to Jason, close but not touching. Jason doesn't react. Charlie takes his hands out of Jason's hair. Almost a full minute of silence passes. Then Jason frowns and butts his head against Charlie's hands. Charlie looks at Before Dick and wiggles his fingers at him, trying to tell him what to do without sound.

Before Dick carefully, slowly, touches Jason's hair and gently scratches the scalp.

Jason hums and relaxes as he turns a page in his book. Before Dick looks at Charlie in delight. Success! Charlie is happy for him. Before Dick starts preening out the tangles in Jason's hair like Charlie was doing, and Jason leans against him. Before Dick puts one arm around Jason's shoulders and squeezes gently, and keeps running his other hand through Jason's hair, and softly rests his cheek against the other side of Jason's head. His entire body is saying "I love you so so SO MUCH" without any words. It's very good.

But now Charlie doesn't have any Jason to love. He pouts, then lays down beside Jason, snuggling against his leg. To his joy, Jason rests a hand on his hair and pets him. Jason loves him, too! It's very, very good.

After a while, Jason stands up and takes Charlie's hand and takes a few steps. He frowns and stops. He turns and looks at Before Dick for a while in a distant, wary way. Before Dick puts his hands behind his back and looks away and hums, rocking a little back and forth. Finally, Jason reaches out to grasp his sleeve and starts walking again, holding onto both Charlie and Before Dick. Before Dick looks at Charlie in delight again and says something, but he doesn't make any sound when he speaks, so Charlie doesn't know what the words are. But he knows what Before Dick is saying, anyway: "Jason loves me and I'm so happy~!"

Jason leads them to a big big big empty room with pretty floors and giant sparkly things hanging from the ceiling that Charlie wants to climb if he's ever bored again. But Jason is paying attention to him now, so he keeps his focus on Jason.

There are several air-filled balls that Jason and Before Dick and Charlie push back and forth to each other with their feet and sometimes their hands. Sometimes Jason stops in the middle of the floor and stares at nothing, but when Charlie touches his arm or talks to him, the light comes back into his eyes and he works hard to find the ball again so he can kick it.

Finally, FINALLY, Tim arrives. Charlie runs to kneel in front of him just in case, but he's glad that Tim doesn't look angry. "Tim, I am very sorry that I failed to prevent Before Dick from abducting me. Are you angry?"

"If you wanted to come over and play with Jason, you could have just said so," Tim says with a little smile.

That doesn't sound like Tim is about to punish him. "I want to come over and play with Jason," Charlie tries.

Tim snorts. "Yeah, I can see that."

"I want to play with Tim, too, now that you are not at School anymore."

"Cool. Did you guys ask permission before you started playing kickball in Mr. Wayne's ballroom?"

Charlie stares. Bruce Wayne is not his master, Tim is his master. He didn't think he needed to get permission to do things from anyone but Tim. "No. I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Tim looks over at Before Dick, who is sidling up close to Jason as if hunting for a new hug. "I'm guessing someone would have stopped you before now if it wasn't okay."

Before Dick looks up and points at one of the hidden cameras. "B's probably spying through the security system and crying with joy to see Jason having fun."

They stay until it gets dark, and then Tim takes Charlie home. To Charlie's joy, they are permitted to take Jason with them. Before Dick comes, too, with his Nightwing things in a backpack. "If we're going to be working together tonight, anyway, might as well team up right from the start."

o.o.o

Bruce is not at all pleased about the idea of just letting all the kids loose on patrol. Talon - or 'Charlie,' as he's apparently recently renamed himself - has yet to earn Bruce's trust, Tim has had no formal training, and poor Jason ought to be in bed and focusing on his recovery, not gallivanting around the streets of Gotham at night fighting crime when he still regularly spaces out and has trouble stringing words together.

Yet Dick is right that the boys have apparently been doing it all on their own for at least several weeks now, and this is a chance to assess the situation with adequate supervision. One night just to observe and evaluate, and then Tim and Charlie will not be allowed out in the field again unless and until they complete a proper training course in non-lethal combat, victim handling, detective work, and other Bat skills. (By then, hopefully either Jason will have miraculously made a full recovery or Bruce will have figured out how to persuade him to stay home.)

Bruce is also working on the problem of what to do with Tim as a civilian, since living mostly abandoned with only a half-feral ex-assassin to take care of him is not acceptable. That's a day-problem, though, and it is now night. Time for the Bats to take flight.

The cave is quiet as Bruce prepares for patrol alone, since all the boys went to Drake Manor, where Tim's and Charlie's gear and supplies are, to get ready. He's tempted to keep in touch with Dick, but knows he can't push too hard for fear Dick will get annoyed and stop responding to his texts. He needs to be patient - he'll see all the boys soon.

Once Batman's in town, it's easy enough to check Nightwing's and Jason's trackers. Nightwing is staying in the vicinity but not too close, allowing the others to do their thing. Batman tails the trio for a while, observing.

They start out in civilian clothing, taking public transportation to Robinson Park, the Iceberg Lounge, and other Rogue hot spots. Things are mostly quiet along the way, though Tim and Charlie sic Jason on a mugger when they come across one.

Batman tenses, but is surprised to find that Jason is able to rescue the would-be victims completely on his own, even patting the shoulders of the rescued couple in a friendly way before escorting them the rest of the way to their car. They give him some chocolate in thanks, which, to Batman's relief, Tim confiscates. "We can't eat candy from strangers before testing it first," Tim explains, and Jason scoffs in a way that clearly means "Duh."

The next little incident is an encounter between two groups of young men, all armed and a little intoxicated and far too sensitive to potential territorial threats. Charlie dons his full Talon getup and tackles this one, expertly dodging bullets and knives, identifying the most egregious instigators and subduing them. Though Jason's help is not necessary, Charlie does not object to Jason shuffling in to mop up the stragglers, banging their heads together while Charlie is stringing up the others. The few remaining young men, with more sense or instinct for self-preservation than the others, quickly scatter.

Tim has been snapping pictures the whole time, so unobtrusively that even Batman, who knows to look for him, keeps forgetting he's lurking there. Once Charlie and Jason jog back over to join him, Tim turns his camera to show them the screen. "Look, I got a really nice one of Charlie kicking the gun out of that guy's hand."

"I look good," Charlie comments, and Jason laboriously forms a thumbs-up.

TBC

A/N: The phrase "quiet hands" can have negative associations for some people, since it's often used to order autistic children to stop stimming. (A lot of stimming, despite looking odd to outsiders, is objectively harmless and has beneficial effects for the autistic person, so telling them to stop a harmless stim can be distressing and, if done often enough / long enough / severely enough, can cause lasting emotional wounds.)

This context however, is completely different; neither Jason nor Charlie has any baggage about the phase, and Jason had something very different in mind when he said it. I hope it's clear from the story what he meant and how Charlie perceived it, but I did want to acknowledge that that phrase can be problematic for people in real life who have been traumatized by it.

(And if any of you happens to be a caretaker/teacher/etc. of someone with special needs, don't make them stop doing things that make them feel good just because it's not "normal." Or even, like, just because someone's stimming or doodling or not making eye contact or whatever doesn't mean they're not paying attention; sometimes behaviors like that can actually help them focus better on whatever assignment they're supposed to be doing. When it comes to genuinely disruptive or damaging stims, it's better to facilitate replacing them with healthier substitute stims instead of completely repressing them.)