Black Dahlia || Dick Grayson [Titans] ✔️

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN

Present Day

I heard a loud crash and immediately jumped awake, eyes scanning my room around me for an intruder and finding no one. I listened carefully, sitting still in my bed, but didn't hear anything like someone coming in my direction. Still, I quietly got out of bed and made my way across the short distance and peered around the canvas divider.

Watching Jason in my kitchen, mumbling to himself as he picked up broken shards of glass from the floor. I sighed, padding out barefoot towards him, slightly annoyed to be woken up. He looked up at my approach, eyes blood shot, and I looked down to find that the glass he'd broken was a bottle of beer.

"Jeez, drinking this early?" I said with a shake of my head. "Are you even old enough? What are you, like, 17?"

"19, which is more than old enough in Europe," he responded, trashing the shards in his hand. "And it's not the early you think it is."

"What?" He nodded in the direction behind me and I turned to the windows, dark outside but for the moon and distant building lights. "What time is it?"

"2 A.M.," Jason answered with a shrug. "I tried waking you up earlier, but uh, your plants didn't seem to like that plan." I raised my eyebrows at him curiously and he sighed, grudgingly sharing more. "Anytime I went anywhere near you, the stems and whatever lashed out and hit me. I don't make a habit of continuing to try to do something nice when plant life decides to bitch slap me."

I couldn't help myself; I snorted a laugh that made him drunkenly glare at me. I knew that my plants would protect me while I slept at night, but it'd been so long since anyone else was around me that I'd forgotten about it. It was good to know, at least, that they still looked out for me.

"Have you checked the news? Seen if they said anything about last night?" I asked, choosing not to comment further on his embarrassment.

Jason shrugged again. "Didn't want to intrude too much on your space, being a guest and all."

I stared at him blankly. "You helped yourself to my beer."

"Well, yeah, that's different. Everyone knows a good host lets you get what you need from the kitchen. Food and beverage are necessities for survival."

"Yeah, somehow I doubt God was including alcohol in that decision during creation," I replied.

"Depends on your belief. Dionysus is my number one. Man knew how to party," he smirked. I rolled my eyes with a shake of my head as I headed towards the couch, the pillow and sheets surprisingly still neatly sitting in a pile on it. Almost as if he hadn't touched them at all.

After accidentally trashing Batman's safe house the night before, I'd felt a little bad about leaving Jason in the apartment with cold, high altitude winds blowing around it. Given that our new little friend Hurricane was on the loose, it also didn't seem like the safest thing for him. Whether the original target or not, Hurricane had his eyes set on Jason and a windowless penthouse seemed like a more than easy target.

It took about a half hour of arguing and another twenty minutes of guilt tripping, but I eventually wore him down into crashing at my place.

Apparently it was a little much to assume he would actually sleep.

I grabbed the remote and turned on the tv to one of those 24 hour news channels, hoping to see something about the botched gala from the night before. Instead, all there was was a debate among news anchors of whether global warming was real or not and if it had any effect on the surprise storm the night before, including an apparent earthquake that centered on a few city blocks downtown.