#gardenhoe!tim

[ladysdork]

Glowing End of the Stick

aka I love @careamorran‘s meta!Jason and gardenhoe!Tim world where instead of being dead Jason glows green and chats with plants. And she was wonderful enough to let me take a stab at writing some based off her super cool idea. 

More to come, but as a teaser and starting point… 

“What did you just do?” Jason swallowed and squeezed his eyelids, blocking out any trace of sunlight for half a second before letting go of the tether to the plant life around them. A shiver ran down his back as he settled into the isolation of his own skin.

“Intel, babe,” he responded. Jason stood and brushed the dirt off his hands and onto his pants before shoving his gloves back on. The soft leather stuck to his skin slightly in the humidity. When he looked up he found himself swallowing again as he was on the receiving end of Tim’s intensity. He had forgotten how scary the guy could look just standing still and watching. It was unnerving. “East side, c’mon.”

Jason started off left, ducking around and under leafy branches. He was careful about his boot placement. He knew his guns were basically useless here, so he kept them holstered but left the clips undone just in case. Hopefully this would stay a search and… rescue? Chat? He wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when they found her. Roy hadn’t really given him a briefing after the all-distress.

“What did you do back there?” Tim’s voice was just behind him. Honestly, his was silent enough Jason a little surprised but he had long ago suppressed that startle response. It didn’t look good in their professional circles. “Hood, what did you do?”

“Heard ya’ the first time,” he let the branch snap back, hopefully thwacking Tim, although there was no follow-up thud or sound of irritation.

“Then answer,” Tim said. “Your eyes just started glowing, then little… cracks or vines in your skin, and then the tree you seemed to be having an intimate moment with. So, I think I need to know why for this mission to make sense.”

Which. Was actually pretty fair. Jason did drag him into the rainforest to hunt down a powerful alien in an angry mood and then use his own powers with no explanation. That was a lot of unknown variables for his own personal control freak. Anyone else in the family would have hit their breaking point before leaving the house much less a full day into their tropical vacation.

“Hood,” Tim was still going. Tenacious. “It looked like you had m-”

The smaller hero, the only objectively true hero in the present company, was cut off when Jason tightened a hand over his mouth. He tapped the fingers of his free hand on Tim’s ear. He could almost hear the gears click into place as Tim pushed something at his wrist before nodding.

“Completely?”

“No, Jay,” which was reassurance enough since Tim was a stickler for the no-names-in-the-field rule. “I’m just an idiot. It wasn’t connected before but it’s totally down now.”

“Even to B?” Tim snorted which, yeah okay, he did have an entire computer network separate from Bruce. Jason sighed and swallowed, gaze focusing in on the bromeliad in front of him. “Okay, well, it all kind of… back when I came to life. Apparently, in between physically coming back from the dead and Talia dunkin’ me in the Lazarus Pit I was just wanderin’ the streets the Gotham as a mindless husk. Which, as you well know, isn’ exactly the safest position to be in. Luckily - God put that face away, I’m fine - luckily, Ivy found me. And rather than let me wander zombie-style through the alleyways she took me in. For…  quite a while. I was sort-of-alive a lot longer than I originally thought. Or, B thought.”

“At least Ivy took care of you. That’s good,” Jason looked up to see Tim’s awkward half-smile thing happening. He must have paused longer than he realized. “But I still don’t get the leap between being all glowy and living with Pamela. Harley and Selina seem fine. Or, at least normal. For them.”

“Yeah, well, story ain’t over,” Tim arched a brow and Jason shrugged. “Pam spent a while tryin’ to get through to me. But nothin’ worked so she figured it, I, couldn’t get any worse. Which was pretty true, I mean husk-zombie is no way to go through a second life. So, she tried her own plant-meta powers. Which didn’t really do anything, or so she thought. After the Pit, when I became me again albeit the extra angry aggressive edition, somehow they showed up.”

“What does that mean?”

“I… I’m not Ivy,” Jason said as he turned around and started walking again. “I can kinda communicate… like, listen in, on plants. I can’t grow the kind of new, cool, and scary types she does..”

“Is-” Jason turned when Tim’s voice choked but he seemed find beside a little pink. “Um, do you always glow like that then?”

“Yeah, when I’m using ‘em.”

“Ah, yeah, ‘kay,” Jason glanced back again to see Tim glancing around and following. Maybe he was freaked out by it? The silence stretched as they made their way East - Jason graciously holding the branches aside for Tim. Because he was only part asshole. When they reached a ring of trees with purple flowers stretching between them Jason stopped.

“Okay, babe,” he looked down at Tim and tried to ignore the swooping as the pale blue gaze snapped to his. “I gotta… commune with the plants again so if it freaks you out, which makes sense-”

“It doesn’t freak me out,” Jason watched as Tim drew his eyebrows together and pressed his lips together.

“Out with it then. You’ve been all quiet and pink since I used the power last time. It’s really fine if it makes you uncomfortable but I gotta use it to find Kori so you can go stand over there if that’s the case.”

Tim blinked up at him for a second before taking a step closer, “actually, I was thinking you look pretty hot all glowy like that.”

Jason had been gone for a month. So when he showed up on his boyfriend’s doorstep and asked him to come on a trek through the rainforest to find his ex-girlfriend he wasn’t totally sure how that was going to go over. Add in the revelation that he had been withholding superpowers for their years of partnership and friendship and five months of dating and he had been pretty sure that things were headed in a downward spiral. As per usual, his fault.

This, Tim smiling up at him with slivers of blue around dark dilated pupils, was a very different reaction.

Not that Jason was complaining.

“Oh,” he swallowed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tim leaned up, hovering just millimeters away and Jason thought about saying something about the rush they were in but it had been a month and he was only a metahuman. He slid his gloves along the bandoliers crossing Tim’s chest and pulled the smaller man the heartbeat closer to press their lips together. A second later, just long enough for Jason to get the picture that Tim really wasn’t lying about the whole ‘glowy is hot’ and ‘I missed you’ unspoken vibe, they parted. Jason pressed his forehead down against Tim’s, sighing as the tension that had been snaking around his ribs since he first knelt at the tree an hour ago melted away.

“Okay, go talk to the plants and ask where she went.”

“I’m a meta, not a fucking fairy, Tim,” Jason sassed as he tugged his glove off and briefly debated throwing it at his smirking sweet smartass of a boyfriend. “I don’t ‘talk to plants’.”