Archive of Our Own ^beta

Russia was cold, but, then again, so was Talia, so it made sense that it would be her idea to send him there. He had wanted to go on a globe-trotting mission to learn the deadliest combat forms in the world so he could get his revenge on his “father” who’d loved him so much that he’d let the man who had brutally murdered him live, but noooo, Talia had shipped him off to fucking near Siberia, stuck him on a farm, and left him there. Something about him being too impulsive and not thinking things through. Jason didn’t know if she had mistaken herself for his mom—which she wasn’t—or if it was just her obvious lingering feeling for her “beloved,” but she’d finally made him a deal. Instead of just leaving him in the Middle Of Nowhere, Russia, indefinitely, or at least until he agreed to do what she said, if he could manage the pit madness well enough to keep himself and the animals alive for an entire year, then she would trust his judgement enough to let him make important long-term decisions.

There had been no mention of what would happen if he didn’t keep the farm up to snuff, but Jason was pretty sure they would default to Talia’s original plan of letting him cool his head—fucking perfect location for that—until he forgave Bruce. He didn’t want to die alone in Russia of frostbite or old age, which was why he was up in the tree in below-zero temperatures with a pump-action shotgun aimed at his chicken coop.

Jason did not like the chickens. In fact, he rather hated them. They hadn’t been so bad in the summer and fall, when he could just let them roam and trust them to find their own food, but with a foot of snow on the ground, he had to buy them feed, and Talia only gave him a very small allowance each month so that he wouldn’t go buy a plane ticket and a bunch of weapons. He was still saving up for both those things, though, so the chickens were eating into his budget, literally. Not to mention the fact that they were just stupid and always tried to roost in the trees instead of their nice, warmish, not-vulnerable chicken coop. He spent half an hour every night at least just trying to catch them so he could toss them in the coop.

He must have missed a couple, though, because three days in a row, he’d found feathers, blood, and wolf tracks in the snow. It was damn annoying too, since he made sure to count them all several times before locking them up every night, but there was no way a wolf could have busted into the coop without leaving marks, so it was still his fault. If that went on, he was going to have to cough up some more chickens to replace the ones he’d lost somehow, and Jason knew almost no Russian and had no clue where he was going to find a chicken for sale. Luckily, Talia had given him some weapons. The gun wasn’t the best, but he’d practiced with it enough to know he could nail a moving target with it, and a glow of green in the corner of his vision was thrumming for blood. He’d bundled up in the ridiculous looking, but warm, fluffy coat Talia had sent him at the beginning of winter, picked a roost in a tree downwind from where the wolf seemed to come from, and waited.

He had plenty of practice from working with Bruce—and from being dead for a bit—at sitting still for extended periods of time in less than pleasant conditions, but about two hours after the sun had gone down, Jason had started genuinely weighing the merits of turning in for the night and just stealing a flock of chickens for the one-year mark. It was so cold that surely even the wolf—

Snap!

Jason’s finger, stiff even through the thick glove, twitched against the trigger in giddy anticipation. There was a warm fire and a can of pasta with his name on it inside. He moved silently, scanning the treeline for the wolf. He didn’t know much about wolves, or any animals, courtesy of having been raised in the heart of Gotham, but if the wolves paws and stride length were proportional to its body, the wolf was probably about the size of a small lab. Not a very large target, but if you were really mad and good with a gun, you could hit just about anything.

He couldn’t pick the wolf out yet, but he was sure it was coming. The forest itself was pitch black, but all he had to do was wait for the wolf to step unsuspectingly into the clearing, where the bright moonlight on the freshly lain snow would be enough of a backdrop to get a good shot off.  

Jason grinned, his lips brushing against the heavy wool scarf wrapped tightly around his mouth. Any second…

There! He saw movement at the treeline, something small and pitch black. There wasn’t enough contrast for a clean shot, but he had his direction, and he adjusted his aim accordingly.

The wolf was smaller even than he’d thought, and inexpert as he was, he was sure it was pretty young. That didn’t change the fact that it was threatening everything Jason had planned and the lives of his birds, but Jason did feel a brief twinge of guilt. It was just a puppy, should have had a pack but didn’t seem to, and had gotten itself into trouble by stealing from the wrong person. Jason wasn’t staying in Russia forever just because a wolf was little, though. If he could kill Bruce, he could kill the wolf easily.

He tracked the movements as the wolf warily edged out into the clearing. The wolf was jumpy, jumpy enough that it might split if it heard so much as a brush of fabric, but there were twenty yards between it and the coop. Twenty yards for the wolf to get cocky.

The wolf stilled only a few feet out into the open. Jason followed the direction of its snout and realized with a chill that it was staring directly at the cabin.

The little wolf watched, tense as a spring, for nearly two minutes. Jason didn’t dare take the shot.

Finally, the wolf began to inch forward, quietly and slowly. It was still cautious, but it relaxed a little more with every step. Jason leveled his gun at its head, then—

The wolf’s head snapped up, and it took off.

Jason pulled the trigger.

There was a pained yelp, and the wolf plowed into the snow only two yards from the treeline.

Dammit, Jason had been aiming to kill, not wound it. He raised his gun again, but the wolf was too buried in the thick blanket of snow for Jason to be sure what he was aiming at. He wanted to put the wolf out of its misery, not cause it more.

Jason swore and flicked on the safety so the gun wouldn’t go off when he jumped, then dropped out of the tree and landed almost up to his knees in the snowdrift against the tree. Some of the snow shook into his boots, but he was only going to be in them a few minutes longer.

The wolf must have heard him, because it yelped and stirred. Jason fumbled with the safety, but the moment it cost him was enough for the wolf to jump to its feet and dash across the last two yards to the safety of the woods.

Jason swore and took off after it, fumbling for the flashlight in his pocket. This was bad. Jason didn’t know what he’d hit on the animal, but if the shot wasn’t lethal, then the wolf might recover and come back, and if it was lethal but very slowly, then the wolf might suffer for hours or even days before the wound finally killed it.

The flashlight was bright, but the beam was small. Jason could watch ahead of him to make sure that there wasn’t an angry wolf about to spring at him, or he could keep his eyes on the ground right in front of him. He switched between the two, following the deep footprints and the blood trail.

Wolves were fast, even injured and young, and Jason was sprinting to hopefully find it before it went to ground or whatever it was that hurt wolves did and the blood and tracks were covered with fresh snow.

Jason pulled his scarf down from his face, burning his lungs with the cold rather than the lack of oxygen. Russia could go fuck itself once he’d proved himself to Talia. A green tinge flickered in his vision at the thought of nuking the whole country. At least then it would finally be warm then.

Another though occurred to him as he barely noticed a fallen tree in time to jump over it. A wolf pelt could sell for a lot of money. He wasn’t sure how much, but best case scenario, he could buy a plane ticket out of there, if not to Gotham then to somewhere with rich people he wouldn’t feel bad about stealing from, and worse case scenario, he got a new blanket.

Jason was loud enough crashing through the underbrush and snow that any hopes of tracking the wolf by sound was hopeless until he heard a sudden pained yip and a series of loud thuds.

Jason stopped. That hadn't sounded very far away, and it sounded more like a fall than anything else. A fall down a slick hill or an icy embankment could be lethal as isolated as he was, and Jason didn’t want to die again.

He kept after the footprints and found the slope a few minutes later. The ravine would have been almost invisible in the dark, with snow softening the edges to make it appear more like the crest of a hill than the sharp drop off that it was. Jason might have tripped over it too if he hadn't known to be looking for it.

Jason peered over the edge and flitted the flashlight beam back and forth until he found the wolf, collapsed a few feet from the churned up pile of snow where it had landed.

The wolf wasn’t moving, so Jason took a bit of time to make sure he wasn’t going to get stuck.

The ravine walls were maybe ten feet long at an almost vertical incline. Jason was six feet, and his arms added another two feet. He didn’t have any rope on him, but he did have a scarf and a gun sling.

There was a tree close to the edge about twenty feet from where the wolf had landed. Jason knelt beside the tree and cleared the snow around the base, then shrugged off his scarf and tied one end securely to the trunk. He shrugged off his gun, unhooked the sling, and set the gun on the snow beside him, then tied one end of the strap to the free end of the scarf.

He hesitated for a moment before deciding that it would be safer to just throw the gun down the hill rather than attempt to climb down with it. He reset the safety, then tossed it gently, making sure that the barrel wasn’t pointing anywhere dangerous just in case. The gun landed silently at the foot of the ravine.

It was freezing, but his gloves were too thick for him to get a grip tight enough to trust his life too. He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them and the flashlight in his pocket, then grabbed the free end of the rope and threw it down the hill. Finally, he grabbed onto his makeshift rope and started walking backwards down the hill.

He ran out of rope about four feet from the bottom, and he let himself slide down carefully to the base of the riverbed. He kept his eye on the wolf the whole time, but it didn’t move an inch, not even when Jason retrieved his gun and dusted it off with the furry cuff of his coat.

The wolf didn’t twitch at Jason’s footsteps crunching in the snow. The pale moonlight was enough to see the awkward angle of its back left leg.

Jason stopped a few feet from the wolf, turned off the safety, and pumped the lever to load the bullet.

It would be quick. Quicker than anything those chickens got.

Jason swallowed down the bile in his throat.

This was…fine.

It was fine.

Jason had never killed anything before.

Not even a bug. His mom had always made him take them outside, and Jason had never seen a single bug in Wayne Manor.

Jason couldn’t help but notice how thin the wolf was. He wasn’t sure exactly what wolves were meant to look like, but he figured that it was something like a dog. Wasn’t the pack supposed to make sure the little ones got fed? Wasn’t the pack supposed to be there?

Just a lonely kid.

Jason took a deep breath and pushed down those feelings. This wasn’t a dog, it was a wild animal that would like nothing more than to eat all of Jason’s chances of ever getting out of there. The wolf was a threat.

The wolf stirred, long and mournful, and then the wolf shifted—not position, but its whole body was changing—and then suddenly, there was a pale scrap of human boy at the business end of his rifle.

The wolf—the boy—lolled his head enough to face Jason. “N—nyet, nyet!”

Jason swore and stumbled back, the gun slipping from his fingers and landing at his side in the snow.

A shifter.

The boy was a shifter.

“You—” Jason felt bile rise in his throat.

He had just shot a little kid.

It was dark, but the boy didn’t look any older than twelve, and he was just as thin as a human as he was as a wolf. Jason could see the ribs and pale flesh through the tears in the boy’s meager clothing.

“E—English?” the boy sobbed, his accent nearly American. “P—please, don’t kill me, don’t—”

Jason swore again and dropped to his knees, not caring about the cold seeping through his pants as he stripped off his coat. The shifter keened, a horrible sound that tore at Jason’s ears and heart.

“Shh, shh, I’m not going to—” Jason choked off at the sight of the kid’s mangled leg.

He grabbed the kid by the arm and hauled him against Jason’s chest so Jason could pull the thick coat around his shoulders. The kid keened again, pulling weakly against Jason. He really was just skin and bones, though, and his struggles were completely ineffectual.

Jason pulled the hood up over the kid’s head, then laid him gently back in the snow. He pulled the gloves from the coat pocket and tugged them on over the kid’s trembling hands.

What next?

A gust of wind tore through the ravine, tearing through the two thick shirts he was still wearing. He didn’t have long before he succumbed to the cold. He had to get out of there quickly, and the kid had to come with him.

Goddammit, what was he going to do with a kid?

Jason shivered and shut down the part of his brain that was concerned with anything beyond the right thing to do in the next few seconds. Batman mode, a twelve-year-old voice in the back of his mind cheered. Jason shoved down the wave of green and nausea the memory brought.

Fact one, he needed to get out of there.

Fact two, he needed to get the kid out of there.

He thought a bit more, but there wasn’t really much else. Any small concerns fit snugly into those two categories.

The first thing he needed to do was check that leg to make sure the kid wasn’t going to die of shock or blood loss.

Jason pulled out his flashlight and knelt by the boy’s leg. The boy whimpered and tried to flip onto his stomach, maybe to crawl away—Jason’s stomach tightened—but Jason placed the barest amount of pressure on the kid’s hip, which was enough to hold him down.

“Stay put. I’ve got to treat the injury, or you’re going to die,” Jason snapped.

The boy sobbed and tried to pull away again. “No, no, nyet, pojaluista, please don’t kill me!”

Jason scowled and pushed a bit harder on the kid’s hip to hold him still. “Yeah, working on that. Let me check your leg, you idiot.”

Jason huffed, a ghost of white pluming in front of his face, and he turned back to the leg. The kid didn’t fight him, either too weak or too scared, so Jason bit the end of the flashlight to free his hands and looked down at the wound.

It was horrible.

The bullet had gone straight through the leg, leaving a bloody mess of an entry and exit wound. The leg was also completely broken at the femur, either from the bullet or the fall. Moving it would be horrifically painful.

Jason considered his options for a moment. He could use his socks to staunch the bleeding, but at the same time, being too self-sacrificing would get them both killed. If he froze, then the kid was going to bleed out or freeze at the bottom of the ravine. He also didn’t have any materials to splint the leg with on him. He needed some sturdy wood, and something to tie it with.

“Alright, kid,” Jason decided. How to pick him up… “We need to get up the hill so I can take care of your leg. I’m going to carry you on my back, okay?”

The kid cried out in pain and alarm, but they didn’t have time. Jason grabbed the kids arms, turned around, and pulled them over his shoulders. He held the arms with one hand to keep the kid from trying to get away again and used his other hand to support the broken leg so it wouldn’t pull too painfully. It didn’t help much, based on the sob muffled against Jason’s shoulder, but it would have to be enough.

Jason tucked his flashlight into his pocket and walked quickly back to where he’d left his makeshift rope to dangle, sacrificing grace for speed. Once he got to it, he patted the kid’s arms where he was pinning them.

“You have to hold on, kid. I have to climb up to get us out of here, and I need at least one hand,” Jason warned him.

The kid whimpered and shook his head, but after a couple of moments, his arms tightened minutely around Jason’s neck.

That was going to have to be enough, because if he fell off of Jason, it was going to be a painful landing.

Jason knelt against the incline as far up as he could and reached for the end of the scarf. He had a couple feet of it, so he twisted it around his arm twice before giving it a couple tugs. It held.

Jason pulled himself upward, then twisted more of the scarf around his rope as it slackened, using that to balance himself as he held the kid’s leg as steadily as he could. Kneel, push, twist, pull. It took a few minutes to get up the hill, when it would have taken him seconds alone.

By the time he got to the top of the hill, he was freezing. His pants were soaked from the snow, and his whole body was mourning the lack of his coat, gloves, and scarf.

Jason set the kid on his back on the snow, shutting out the keen. He really hoped that there wasn’t a pack of shifters about to come for his throat, but he severely doubted it. Lucky him.

Jason untied the gun strap from the tree and from the scarf. He knelt by the kid and pulled out a knife.

The kid’s eyes widened and he screamed.

Jason swore. “If I was going to kill you, I am doing a very bad job of it, so shut up.”

“Please, don’t—”

“I know, I know,” Jason growled, already hacking off a foot of the scarf material.

He cut off a second foot, then folded them into squares one at a time and placed them over the entrance and exit wounds. He had a fairly decent first aid kit back in his cabin with decent bandages, but the kid needed to hold on until then.

Jason used the gun sling to tie the fabric firmly in place and hopefully act as something of a tourniquet. The kid cried out in pain again, and Jason hushed him gently. That really had to hurt.

The next problem was the leg, but that was easy enough to solve. They were in a forest, after all.

He went a little ways into the woods until he found a few fairly straight sticks and returned.

The kid was absolutely motionless, and Jason was worried that he might have been dead until Jason stepped on a twig and that horrible, inhuman keening started up again.

Jason sighed and walked the rest of the way to the kid. He knelt down beside the leg, not even feeling the cold through his pants, which was a welcome and yet worrying feeling, and gently poked the leg.

It looked like a clean enough break, but that wasn’t going to make it easy.

“I’m going to have to set your leg before I can move you anymore,” Jason warned him.

The kid inhaled sharply. Jason could see the tears glinting in the silver moonlight. “Wh—what does that mean?”

Jason sighed again. “I’m going to have to put the bone back into the right place. It’s going to hurt. A lot.”

The kid shook his head frantically. “No, no, please, p—please, no, I can’t—please, I’ll be good! I’ll be good, I’ll do what you want, please don’t hurt—”

“If I don’t set your leg, you’ll never be able to walk again,” Jason snapped, green irritation flickering in his eyes.

The kid flinched, and Jason ran a hand down his face, trying to put himself in the shoes of a terrified little kid who thought he was going to be tortured or murdered. It wasn’t that hard, but it brought up a lot of painful memories, so he stopped that, but he was still more gentle when he spoke again.

“Listen, kid, I’m not trying to be mean about this, but I really do need to fix your leg. It’s going to hurt, but I’ll be as fast as possible, and then we can go back to my cabin where it’s warm,” Jason assured him, reaching up on impulse to run his hands through the boy’s hair. “I’m not going to hurt you more than I have to…what’s your name?”

Establish familiarity. Calm them down. Explain what you’re doing. Jason tried not to think of where that lesson had come from.

“T—Tim,” the kid whimpered, leaning into the touch almost desperately.

“Tim. I’m Jason. You’re going to be okay,” Jason soothed. “But I need to hurry, or we’re both going to get hypothermia. Can I set your leg now?”

Tim whimpered, and his delicate little features screwed up, the expression nearly lost in the shadows of the giant coat swamping him. After a painful few seconds, Tim nodded, just once.

Jason nodded, though Tim had his eyes shut. Tim sniffled and tensed, and Jason noticed he was biting his lip.

Jason pulled off his hat and shoved it up against Tim’s face. “Bite down on that, okay?”

Tim flinched, but he nodded and hesitantly let Jason stick the hat between Tim’s teeth.

With that settled, Jason moved back down to the leg and took it in his hands. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

Jason snapped the bone back into place, and Tim screamed, the sound by the hat in his mouth. As Jason cut the scarf quickly into strips and used them to tie the splint sticks into place around Tim’s leg. The screams turned to muffled sobs, and Jason glanced up to see tears pouring from Tim’s eyes.

Broken bones, a crowbar, a bomb, he isn’t coming, hahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

Jason squeezed his eyes shut tight and took a deep breath. He reached up to pet the kid’s hair again to distract himself with the feel of life under his hands instead of a long ago death.

Tim keened again, less fearful and more pained this time, and he snatched Jason’s hand with his own trembling fingers, clumsy in the giant glove, and held Jason’s hand against his head as Tim nuzzled against it.

Another blast of wind sliced through his shirts and wet pants, and Jason shuddered. Under his hand, Tim shivered too with a tiny whine.

“We need to get back to the cabin,” Jason chattered. He took his hat from Tim’s mouth and pulled it back onto his head.

Tim nodded and shuddered again.

“I’m going to have to pick you up,” Jason warned him. “It might hurt.”

Tim sniffled and nodded. “Y—yes. Just…”

“I’ll be careful,” Jason agreed with the unstated plea.

Tim went limp and let go of Jason’s hand. Jason pulled away, tugged the flashlight from his pocket, clicked it on, and set it on Tim’s chest.

“You’re going to have to hold this,” Jason told him. “Point it right in front of us so I can see where we’re going.”

 Tim nodded and tightened his fist around the flashlight. Jason carefully shuffled one arm under Tim’s back and the other under his knees. He pulled the kid up against his chest, then stood up.

Jason took a deep breath, waited for Tim to point the flashlight a few feet in front of them, and started walking.

The walk back to the cabin took a lot longer than the sprint into the woods. By the time he could see the light of the cabin, Jason felt completely frozen through, and Tim’s eyes were drifting shut.

“Tim, I need you to open the door,” Jason warned him as he walked up the front steps.

Tim stirred and groaned, but when Jason knelt down in front of the door, he fumbled to grab the doorknob.

The door swung slightly open, and a small draft of warmth hit Jason like a kiss. Jason elbowed the door open and stumbled inside, carrying Tim immediately over to the woodstove, half dumping him in front of it.

The fire was dying, so, with numb fingers, Jason opened the door of the oven and shoved a few split logs into the oven. Then, with a groan, he stood up and stumbled back over to the door to close it.

While he was up, Jason stopped by his bed and grabbed a few of the blankets. He was still freezing to the very marrow of his bones, but he may as well make sure the kid didn’t die.

Tim was shivering when Jason dropped the blankets on him. Tim glanced up at Jason nervously, then pulled the blankets tighter around him with a small shudder.

Jason ignored him as he raided his dwindling food supply—he’d need to make another run—and opened two cans of tinned borscht. As it heated over the fire, he glanced down at the shifter pup staring back up at him.

Jason couldn’t take him to a doctor, or he’d be sold or killed. Shifters weren’t safe most places, but Russia was especially unfriendly to them. And, since the kid didn’t seem to have any kind of pack, that meant that Jason had to take care of him, which would destroy any chance of having enough money to leave Russia early. To avenge himself. All his plans, thrown away because of one stupid pup.

The kid didn’t even have the decency to mind his own business, just kept staring, his eyes boring into Jason no matter how he moved, and—

“Stop staring at me,” Jason snapped, green pulsing in his vision.

Tim flinched hard and looked away quickly, and the green ebbed away.

He hated more than one of his dads, but he kept acting like one of them.

“I—” He wasn’t particularly sorry yet, but he also felt like a bit of an asshole. He poured the soup into two bowls and set one on the floor in front of Tim. “Listen, we’re going to eat this and get warm, then we’ll disinfect that wound.”

Jason left off the and sew it up bit. The kid had enough to dread, but he wasn’t trusting himself with a needle until his hands stopped tremoring with the cold.

“Th—thank you,” Tim whispered, accepting the spoon Jason handed him with shaking hands.

He only had one spoon, so Jason ate his soup with a fork, spearing the chunks and sipping the broth until it was gone. Tim took more time to eat, and he kept wincing. Jason could remember what food could be like after a long time without, and made a note of where any bucket-like objects were within grabbing distance in case the kid puked.

“I can’t take you to a doctor,” Jason said after a minute of silence. “If they ran any blood tests…”

Tim flinched, then nodded. He understood. Any blood tests would prove that he was a shifter, and he'd be killed.

“I know a fair amount of first aid, though. I’ll be able to patch you up,” Jason assured Tim.

Tim flinched, and Jason could see him biting the inside of his thin cheek.

Jason sighed. “I’m not going to hurt you any more than I have to in order to fix the problem. I don’t have any painkillers, though, so I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.”

If he had some liquor, he could get the kid plastered first, but Talia hadn't trusted him with any.

Tim sniffled and wiped at his eyes with the cuff of Jason’s coat. “I’m not scared.”

Jason’s expression must have done all the talking, because Tim snarled weakly at him.

“I’m not scared,” Tim insisted.

“You’re crying.”

“I’m not crying!” Tim exclaimed tearfully.

Jason rolled his eyes. “Shut up. There’s nothing wrong with a kid—” Tim was what, eleven? Twelve? “—crying after getting a bullet through the leg.”

“Wolves don’t cry!” Tim snapped. “My mother—”

Jason raised an eyebrow. Yes, he was rather curious about Tim’s missing pack. “What about mommy dearest?”

Tim stiffened and looked away. “It’s…it’s nothing.”

Jason felt a pit of guilt in his stomach. “Is—is she dead?”

Tim sniffled and didn’t look Jason in the eye.

“My…my mom is dead. Both of them. And my dad number one,” Jason offered.

Tim gazed deeply into the fire like it held all the answers of life. “They’re not dead.”

“Do you need help finding them?” As pissed with her as he was, Talia could find anyone.

Tim lowered his head and whispered, “No.”

…Oh.

Jason had heard that sometimes, especially during bad times, hard winters, wolf shifters would sometimes abandon their young. Tim was all alone, and his family wasn’t dead. It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.

Jason turned the words over in his head several times before he found a way to phrase them. “Did they leave you?”

Tim didn’t move at first. Didn’t freeze, didn’t flinch.

Then, he slowly raised his gloved hands to cover his face, and his little chest hitched. Once. Twice. Nearly silent sobs and crackling embers were the only noises.

Jason hesitated. He knew that he had been terrified of touch when he’d first been kidnapped, but Tim seemed to at least be trusting that Jason wasn’t going to torture or kill him.

Then again, when he’d touched the kid in the woods, he’d practically melted into it. Probably some form of touch starvation. Maybe wolves needed more touch than humans, maybe Tim just needed a hug.

Jason shuffled to Tim’s side, ignoring Tim’s half-hearted flinch, and set his hand on the top of Tim’s head, then ran it down Tim’s back, rubbing circles as he went before going back to the top. Maybe he shouldn’t have used petting a dog as a template for interacting with a touch-starved, abused kid, but it seemed to be working.

Tim slowly went boneless, letting Jason pull an arm around him to hold him up as he ran his fingers through Tim’s hair in quiet comfort.

“You can stay here until your leg is better,” Jason mumbled after a few minutes. He wasn’t even sure the kid was awake.

Tim yipped and pressed himself closer to Jason to whisper, “Thank you.”

“And after that…we’ll see.” Jason shifted uncomfortably. He had never been supremely comfortable in emotionally charged situations. “If you can be useful and shit. Maybe I can keep you around. At least until spring.”

In spring, Jason was leaving. The kid…he’d find something to do with the kid before then.

Tim buried his face in Jason’s shoulder and shook with fresh sobs. Jason wrapped both his arms around the kid and tugged him a bit closer as the winds howled outside.

Well, he’d always wanted a dog.