"Pumpkin?" Jason made a faintly rude noise as he twirled the brush around his fingers like a drumstick. "You can have the pumpkin - I thought you'd eaten the pecan." Which meant that someone else had, if Wayne Manor was completely out of pie. But it really didn't bear thinking about who to blame, as little as he wanted to think about Bruce handing him the brush in the first place. Bruce had stepped back from it, gone back to doing whatever he was doing on his wall, and Jason was going to leave it at that: Bruce didn't breathe down his neck, and he wouldn't poke him, end of story.
"Uh-huh," he said vaguely to Mia, looking over the walls, still twirling the brush. Obviously it was going to be big, and red. Just as obviously, he didn't know a damn thing about painting birds. He caught Dinah's eye, and okay, it was probably still rude, but he returned her nod, and gave an additional "Hey" of greeting. But it was less rude, that was the thing.
And then it all clicked. He wasn't going to do a damn robin like everyone else - but considering that "robin" seemed to be some foreign word that meant "thing with wings" based on what was going onto the walls, he was probably okay. He poured himself a paint-tray of a selection of colors: red and orange and yellow and a smidge of white, then went back to his corner and settled in to work.
The red outlined the sweep of the broad shoulders, the edges of the lifted wings, the curve of the neck - they had long necks, right? - and the plume from the crest of the head. Then he dabbled in a bit of orange, and started filling in the wings with vivid feathers, and who cared if it was realistic or not? It was a fuckin' phoenix, no one was going to complain that they'd seen one perched in a tree that looked completely different.