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Cool slime pressed against Jason’s cheek. It didn’t make the wall any less hard, but it was nice to be reminded that he wasn't the only thing alive here in the dark. The jackasses who'd put him in here had sworn to lock him in a cube devoid of all life. Probably they hadn't cared about microbial slime mats, but Jason didn’t pass up chances to disagree with assholes, no matter how microscopic the technicality. He had slime friends now, millions of gooey cellmates keeping him company.
The fact he found that comforting probably meant the drugs were kicking in. That and the vertigo that had him cuddling a wall. He hated not being sure, but he'd never been in the first stage of bonding before, for all he'd boasted otherwise to the dickwads outside. Maybe the loopiness was just blood loss. He slumped further into the corner, cheek against the cold, damp wall. He felt stupid, and he was having more trouble than usual converting it to productive anger. He'd never meant to get drugged. He'd prioritized staying out of this fucking box.
The isolation chamber.
It was part of the procedure. Administer your garden variety cocktail of illegal bonding catalysts; then isolate recipient from all bond-reactive life. The whole sorry set-up was designed to induce latent bonding ability so they could serve the unlucky bastard -- in this case, Jason -- up on a platter. Ten percent of the US population had some ability to bond, but in Gotham the statistic was seventeen fucking percent -- because fuck Gotham, that's why. Like Jason needed a cherry on top of the Crime Alley sundae he’d been born into.
Maybe he'd bond with a slime mold, he thought. One of these motherfuckers right here. He wasn’t sure how that would play out. Who would Bruce walk down the aisle, Jason or the petri dish? He was fucked up enough to have an opinion about that, and it was kind of dumb, being jealous of a petri dish. He picked restlessly at the coldest, slimiest patch of wall, peeling away the secretions of generations of microbes. Their life's work. Life and death and birth. His chest tightened absurdly.
Fuck! Why couldn't he get angry? He choked back a sniffle. God damn it. Maybe they’d hyphenate: Jason Todd-Slime.
If this was the first stage of bonding, Jason had some complaints to lodge with all of human literature. People created millennia of poetry about opening one’s inner door for another human being, and it turned out the first stage of bonding was weepy sex?
The world drifted away. He couldn't feel the slime under his fingernails. His own breath had gone silent.
He still wasn't angry. Shit.
“Good drugs,” Jason shouted, or thought he did. His tongue was cotton in his mouth. He knew this heavy silence. It was the cold, awful void of the Pit, the devil’s own sensory deprivation chamber. Phantom fears crept into the silence, ghostly sensations of his skin crawling with bugs and grave dirt.
Newsflash, poets: the first stage of bonding doesn't feel like life; it feels like clawing your way out of the grave. It feels like a boiling pot of demon blood in Ra’s Al Ghul’s basement.
It took his breath away.
It’s not the pit, he told himself, fingers shaking in the dark. He groped for the cold surface of that damn slime-covered wall, but his fingers were numb and senseless. A tiny headache in the back of his skull sent little bursts of color across his vision. His lungs were concrete. He was certain he was shaking, even if he couldn’t feel it.
Shit, please don’t let the chamber door open right now. If they brought in whoever had bought his bond, he wouldn’t be able to fight back, not when he was like this, a blind emotional mess. God, lonely and stripped of anger, he might ask for it.
This part -- the initial bond -- wouldn't be a challenge, this part would just happen. Jason knew this miserable emptiness he'd built was his mind reaching out, seeking; a forgotten instinct kicked into overdrive. Maybe for other people, reaching out meant constructing a warm, comfortable place to welcome your bondmate, but Jason wasn't that person. The best he could do was create negative space. You could fit anything in all this nothing.
If these guys delivered on what they advertised, the bond-thread Jason found would belong to whatever crime boss had paid extravagantly to own him: a guard dog whose loyalty was both involuntary and absolute.
Jason had heard enough about forced bonding to know it could take a few attempts or even fail. But the failure didn't usually come in stage one. Stage two would be the real problem. Stage one bonds weren’t permanent or people wouldn’t have been opening that connection recreationally for thousands of years to fuck and then write poetry about it. The danger would come when they dragged a still-drugged Jason out of the box and started the next round of drugs and conditioning to would make the connection unequal, so whatever fuckface had bought Jason would always have the stronger will.
Jason's skin went icy at the thought of it. It was easy to tell yourself you could overcome that shit, but Jason had been born into the target demographic for coerced bond victims. He'd seen first hand how powerful they could be -- and how desperate people were to sell themselves into it, no matter how fucking awful it was guaranteed to be.
Worse, they’d brought him here as the Red Hood. Both the sale and the price would have been made on his reputation. His buyer was going to be big, bad, and lethal -- and expecting bats. Even if they shipped him outside of Gotham, it wouldn’t be long before somebody came after him. And when they did, Jason would put a bullet in their head because his brand new bond mate would want him too. He wouldn’t be holding back. The thought was like swallowing broken glass. He was going to puke.
Fuck, he needed to be angry.
Warmth brushed his cheek, but there wasn't any warmth in the room. The warmth wasn't in the room. Jason flinched hard away from it and nearly toppled over, clumsy with all his senses dulled.
Anything he did physically, outside of his head, whether running or falling, couldn't bring escape. Collapsed on the floor, cheek on cold slime, he put all his motion into his head, built a picture of himself lungeing away from the warmth back into the dark. He made himself a deep sea wreck sinking towards the abyssal plane, all shadows and desaturated grays. The long fall into the black was safety and concealment. The abyss was where he wanted and needed to be. Anger had always been his fuel, and without it, flight was his only option.
As if in answer, the warmth increased, throwing out light and heat like a flame. It leapt and snapped, and the anger in Jason's belly leapt with it, finally awake. It stopped his fall for a moment, familiar and welcoming but strange. This wasn't how he felt when he was angry. All his imaginings were cold and green and poisonous. Anger like a fire, warm and hungry, came from something else, someone else. Someone furious.
It was as bad as he'd feared. He didn't want to kill on anyone’s anger except his own. Especially not this kind, an anger that couldn't think.
Images followed, an inner soul opening to him. Jason should have pulled back, but again, the brush of this other soul pulled at him with kindred feeling that was almost but not quite right. Memories with people and the places he didn't know, but a feeling that spoke to him. Shithole places and shithole people and shithole collateral damage. A man counted cash on a damp, hot day while the car door shut on a red-eyed woman, expensive A/C brushing Jason's skin; bruised faces of people looked up at him in a musty police holding cell; then, most familiar of all, someone’s bloody nose broke under his fist -- no, not his fist -- followed by a vivid fantasy of a trachea crushed to dust. The last vivid bit of violence seemed to be only imagination, not reality. And that was the strangeness, the past that didn't feel familiar, every memory was layered all over with the bubbling frustration of restraint.
The anger struck Jason as righteous, protective, and bizarre. Bizarre because it wasn't what Jason had been expecting. Bizarre because it was leashed. Violent fantasies not carried out. What memories there were of violence enacted came weighed down with guilt. It roiled Jason’s stomach. No one should hate themselves for being angry about crimes inflicted on the weak and helpless.
He couldn’t stop his kneejerk defiance at the guilt washing over him. Punch him harder! Break him before he breaks someone else. We fucking need you to be angry.
We, he’d said. We need you -- we, the weak and powerless of Gotham's forgotten. Jason didn’t say we where anyone could hear it. Jason, if he said anything on the subject, preferred to say he was the fucking boogey man. Anything but a frightened kid who read Austen novels in a dark nook of a Gotham public library, a kid who imagined stupid things about Lizzie Bennet’s dream guy and dream wedding and warm, sunny dream library at Pemberly far, far away from here.
The glow faded, realizing Jason back to his slow fall in into cold loneliness, choking out the flames. He wasn't alone, chased by a stinging awareness of a life not under control. It wasn't any less familiar to Jason than the anger had been, maybe even more familiar, Jason and a stranger sinking together deeper, faster like a rock into a pool. It was too easy to tangle it up with his own need for control. If he didn't get out of here now, he was as good as gone. But it was hard to leave that other soul sinking into nothing without a rope. Jason so fucking stupid, every time.
Stay angry, he thought hard at that fire turned to damp coal. We need more people who are angry for us, not at us.
The anger and yearning at the other end of the bond flickered like they'd heard him, surprised to find anyone else down here in the dark. The embers flared up, from silence to roar like they were coming for him. It built and built, sunlight cutting through parted curtains, searing away the dark. Jason barely had time to think, Holy shit, before the fire front reached him --
The void shattered. Jason's senses tumbled back. He was once again in a dark, slimey cell in a Gotham basement. On the other side of the cell, he could make out the nearly undetectable glow at the edges of the door. Outside, someone was shouting.
Jason fell back against the wall, shaking. He'd let his guard down, let himself believe that whoever he'd found in the dark, they were righteous. He'd been a step away from welcoming the bond, from forgetting it belonged to the kind of person who’d buy a slave-bond on the black market. Maybe the asshole felt righteous in their own head, but humans could rationalize anything. The bright, focused will he’d felt was the kind that could crush a person flat. Or drive someone with ambition to cross any line to reach their goals.
Jason should know. He’d been a crime lord himself a time or two.
The door to the box slammed open, brilliant light spilling in. “Hood!” Red Robin shouted, jumpy and worried like he always was when he came after Jason. Like he thought Jason was gonna bite if Tim wasn’t cool enough. To be fair, Tim never was cool enough, and Jason did usually bite. He didn’t have the energy for it today.
“Here,” Jason said, flat.
“You -- oh, you’re responsive.” Tim sounded surprised. He was right, Jason shouldn’t have been, but Jason wasn’t going to agree with Tim out loud.
Jason scoffed, “Yeah.”
“Didn’t take or wore off?” Damian asked. He was twisting someone’s arm behind their back and didn’t bother looking up.
“Both,” Jason said. “Get me the fuck out of here.”
Fuck, he thought, leaning a little too heavily on the teenagers who’d come to get him. Whoever that will belonged to, Jason was probably going to have to kill them.
He wasn’t used to regretting that.