Galas are awful.

It’s pretty much a fact of life at this point, is what Jason believes: the sun is a star, Gotham is shitty, and galas suck.

If he had known this would one of his responsibilities when he threw that tire iron at Batmąn, maybe he wouldn’t have even gotten close to the Batmobile.

~~Not really. He’d take this over the streets, he’d definitely take Bruce over the streets.~~

Because people here, the ultra-wealthy types that only come to Bruce’s charity galas for the tax write offs, give him snobby looks whenever he gets within ten feet of them. They whisper about him, he knows, they’re not subtle— about his little rags-to-riches story, about how Bruce took in another kid with black hair and blue eyes after the first one went to college, about how he doesn’t belong here.

And yeah, he doesn’t, but he can’t find Bruce and that’s what’s really making him upset.

So he’s done away from the Ballroom of the Manor where this is being hosted, and he walks down the hallway to get out of the west wing to just hide in one of the east wing libraries until this dumb party is over, when he almost trips over a lump on the ground.

Cursing, he corrects his balance and whirls around, but—

He stops.

…did he seriously just trip over a person? What the hell is a person doing in the hallway??

“…dude,” Jason says, crossing his arms in the tux-ish suit he’s wearing, “what are you doing in the hallway?”

Personally, he thinks this a fair question, because this is the house that he’s living in, thank you, not them.