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There’s a glass case in the Batcave that hasn’t been touched in years. Inside it is a suit that’s still ripped in the middle, a little bloodied around the edges.
Jason doesn’t ever ask about Dick Grayson. Some things you’re told in Robin 101, but some you just pick up on instinct and this is one. Dick Grayson is the constant ghost at his heels, snapping and whispering and always gone when he turns around. Sometimes he’ll walk in and Bruce is standing there, tight-fisted and dry-eyed.
So he listens to the silence and he learns. He’s gotta be the best he can be and then he’s just gotta be better.
* * *
Despite never being more than a slip of lifeless air, Dick Grayson is the best teacher Jason has. Bruce tries, in his own way, to tell Jason when to fight and when to flee except Bruce is still terrified way down that he’ll break this kid, too. (Jason knows better. He’s hard-edged nails right down to his core; there’s something so fundamentally flawed in him he can’t ever see it crumbling away).
But Jason has the computer in the ‘Cave and all these tapes going to waste. Through Dick Grayson, he learns to flip and land in a fighting stance; learns how to take out the practice dummy with his thighs, how to skim a batarang off the head of a needle. Learns that you don’t always have to beat people into pulp to make them weep with fear.
Of course, there’s no way Bruce doesn’t know what he’s doing: the World’s Greatest Detective can’t be too shabby, after all. If he cares, he doesn’t show it. He holds Jason at arm’s length same as before, and maybe this is why.
“You should stop thinking with your fists, Master Jason.”
Jason pulls back, forehead clammy with sweat and breathing out through his nose. The dummy’s in worse shape, and that’s almost enough to make his insides turn warm and gooey. “Instincts keep you alive, you know,” he pants back, and reaches for one of the towels.
Clearing his throat (in a real gentleman-like manner, sure, and Jason bets that’s something Alfred had to practice for an hour or two in the mirror before it was picture-perfect), Alfred nods towards the screens. “Master Dick,” he starts, and his face shutters blankly for a quick second. “Master Dick,” he begins again, “thought with his head.”
Alfred Pennyworth is probably the smartest guy in the house, Jason thinks. Maybe the smartest guy in the whole fucking city. “Well,” Jason says, and he knows this is one of the times where he should just shut the hell up, “no offence, but. Dick Grayson is dead.”
Dick’s dead, and Jason’s a real live boy. Learn from your mistakes, that’s what they say.
Jason doesn’t wanna make any in the first place.
Alfred inclines his head, hands linked behind his back. “And the dead know everything.”
* * *
Jason improves.
So there are days where he feels like he’s drowning under ghosts. It’s not a big deal. The house is draughty and old and all these phantoms have to come out some time. Must be a blast on Halloween.
“Good,” Bruce acknowledges, and his face closes off faster than Jason can blink. “You’re doing good.”
It’s hard. There’s no bigger measuring stick than Dick Grayson (fallen idol and fallen son), and Jason is always, always, imperfectly alive. He’ll pull a move one day in training and a muscle'll jump in Bruce's jaw. It’s the only sign Jason gets, alone in this sprawling tomb, that he’s starting to blend in with his predecessor, their faces and bodies and lives totally superimposed. One day, he’s sure, he’s gonna wake up in that too big rich-person bed and even he won’t know who he is anymore.
There are days where he hates Dick Grayson. It bubbles, acidic, in the pits of his gut and beats through his body like a poison. There’s a case in the Batcave and there’s a case in Bruce’s mind where the memory of Dick is whole, untarnished and pure.
Sometimes-
God, sometimes, he thinks about how it coulda been him.
* * *
He learns a lot from Dick Grayson, status deceased.
There’s a night where Alfred’s bedridden upstairs with the flu (and here, Jason though there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that stopped that old sonofabitch, but there you go). Bruce is out, spending his downtime brawling with crap and filth, and Jason’s been training with a dead kid for hours.
He’s fourteen and a bit, give or take. All he gets these days are endless shots of Dick flipping and twisting his way around and today, Jason’s suddenly good to go.
It’s enough, the stream of old tape. He jerks off to the flickering screen and Dick Grayson’s wide smile; it’s cold, always, in the ‘cave but his skin is hot and his stomach is tense.
He’s sweaty and tired and Jason wonders what it makes him, rubbing one out and thinking of a dead kid. But it’s easy, fuck, the next day in his bedroom, just to close his eyes and call up shots where Dick took out a guy with his thighs or somersaulted in the training area.
He tugs on his cock and he thinks filthy thoughts about Dick Grayson and it’s just too easy.
* * *
The first time Jason puts on the suit, he has to rush to the bathroom to retch into the toilet basin. It’s sickening, how much he looks like the boy from the tapes and how much he doesn’t. He’s a cheap imitation playing at being a hero, that’s what he is, and it’s all too clear in his bedroom mirror.
He tells himself this is what he wants.
It’s been nearly two years since a Boy Wonder took to the skyline. He’s been rotting in a grave and rotting in a glass case.
Alfred tells him it suits him without even batting an eye. Jason’s been around long enough to know when Alfred’s lying.
When Bruce looks at him, his eyes are as dead as the kid in the videos Jason's studied. “Like it?” Jason asks flatly, and spins around, arms held out.
“You’re not here for a fashion show.” Bruce says, and his voice is all Batman. Something in Jason, in the furious red of his blood, wants to scream back and run. He fights it down, ‘cause he wants to survive. Wants to be something, just for a moment.
“I don’t think you’re ready to go out tonight.” Bruce tells him. There’s no shake in his voice but there might be a quiver in his hands that Jason’s sharp enough to spot.
“Whatever,” Jason replies, and takes off the dead boy’s clothes.
* * *
It’s weeks before Bruce decides Jason’s ready. He looks at the fake costume in his closet and thinks, sticky-cold with fear, of the ghost on the screen.
One day Bruce comes down to breakfast and says “Tonight,” and that’s that.
Jason taps the ‘R’ on his chest in the glorified tin-car he tried (failed) to filch the tyres from and he sees visions of another kid, like him, flying and flipping and falling. Another messy body on the ground with the limbs all broken like a warning, an omen.
That’s all fancy, ‘course. Dick Grayson didn’t die falling, like his Mom and Pop. Dick Grayson died screaming out his lungs in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere and he probably betted on someone coming to save him. Jason guesses family legacy doesn’t mean shit to Death.
There’s nothing heavy tonight. Jason thinks maybe Batman chose a still summer night where everyone’s too busy stewing inside to rattle the cage of the local beast; he knows Bruce worries, still, that Jason’s gonna slip through his fingers. Bruce has got so many ghosts following him around Jason wonders that he can even open his eyes in the morning.
“Hey, pal,” he says to the small-time crooks trying to raid one of the failing jewellery stores in Gotham’s high end. “That’s maybe not so smart.”
One of them drops the bag to reach for a gun. Her other hand has a fine tremor that Jason picks up on and Jason always knows when someone’s scared. He lives in a funhouse of fear. “People were saying you were dead, kid,” she spits out.
“It’s going around,” Jason agrees.
* * *
Someone lets slip that his old man is dead. Just about figures.
There’s no funeral, and no grave, and no glass case to preserve the memory of Willis Todd. He wasn’t much, but he was Jason’s, not the hand-me-downs of someone long gone.
Jason's strongest memory of Pops isn't even a good one. It was late, and summer, and he was slinking back through the window all covered in bruises because he never knew when to shut his fat mouth, but Pops was still there waiting. "Again?" his Mom said, but Pops just sighed, like Jason was letting him down all over again. "Jesus, kid," Willis had said, finally, "learn when to fucking run," and maybe it's funny now, or something, that he's dead, but Jason doesn't really feel much of anything.
When he finds the sucker, he thinks about beating him until the two faces look like one. Until there’s a physical reminder that someone on this godforsaken planet gave a damn about a lowlife like his old man. But Jason doesn’t. He holds off and holds back, fists and arms clenched so tight it hurts, Gods wept. The hurt keeps him going, keeps him sane (and isn’t that just fucked up, too).
He holds the near-empty shell of Harvey Dent and thinks of the ghost in his suit, and siphons out his rage into the hot summer air.
* * *
There’s an alcove with a full length window that’s good for smoking.
Jason finds it a few months after his Robin-debut and that happens to be a few months after he nearly kills a guy with two different faces. He was close to it. Bruce just doesn’t know how close.
When it’s been a bad day or a worse night, he’ll sit himself in that alcove (cold stone be damned) and open the window so he can blow out the dirty smoke without anyone in this house finding out. There’s only Alfred and Bruce, he knows, but there’s times he turns a corner and he could swear there’s a footstep behind him.
Old houses. Jason can’t stand them. Thinking about all the people who’ve kicked the bucket in here could drive a guy mad, so he smokes in his hidey-hole instead.
Barbara might know. There’s not much she doesn’t see, when she comes over, but those days are disappearing more and more. There’s another body wearing Dick Grayson’s old skin, that’s the problem here, and it’s gotta be hard on her. Jason’s trying not to hate her for it. Jason’s trying to stop hating, full stop.
“Bruce talks about you all the fuckin’ time,” he says, and blows out a long cloud of cigarette smoke. “Even when you’re dead, he thinks the sun shines outta your fucking ass.”
He’s going mad in here. Talking to dead kids is a Bruce thing, not a Jason thing.
Tapping the ash on the outside sill, he swings his legs over and sucks in a sharp breath of cold night air. The jump isn’t so far from here, and he might just do it. Push his limits, that’s what Bruce sometimes tells him before cutting off and going off to cry about his dead almost-son.
Dick Grayson doesn’t answer him. Jason didn’t really expect it, but in a world as messy as this it pays to prepare for everything. “He misses you something crazy, y’know. Can’t even get a sentence out of him where he’s not thinking about you, and that’s outside of training. I’d be better off havin’ a round or two with Alfred, that’s what.”
He tells himself firmly it’s a laugh. Talk to the dead guy, ‘cause no one’s as good at keeping your secrets.
“Pal,” he says, haltingly, and takes another drag. Blows it out again ‘cause the night air’s too pure. “I wish you hadn’t died.”
* * *
Jason gets pretty good at being a cheap imitation.
He tells himself every night he doesn’t care, when he looks in the mirror and he almost thinks he sees someone else look back.
* * *
No one stays a Robin forever, though. Jason ages out all on his own and when the Titans come knocking, he tells them to shove it right where the sun doesn’t shine. Well, probably doesn’t shine. Kory’s something else.
But: he’s been Dick Grayson’s replacement for so fucking long. There are long, weighted seconds where he’s not sure who he even is under all these layers: Jason Todd, lost in the wind one night with his pajama-ed legs swung over the edge of the house like he was ever gonna leap.
Bruce doesn’t stop him leaving. He knows that it’s simpler, like this, to let Jason go. Jason’s got a temper that’s all him (not the vestiges of someone he never knew but he feels like he did) and it’s easily sparked even after all this time.
Jason rents himself a shitty little apartment in the East End, near his childhood digs in Crime Alley. It’s got an inside windowsill where he can smoke (even if he’s getting too big for that, now) and all of the other residents are so crooked they wouldn’t care if he moved in carting a trolley-full of cooling bodies.
He’s doing good, on his own. Jason’s getting pretty sure that there’s something so ugly in him that no one can even put up with him anymore. He did the Titans a favour, he knows. They’d have thrown him out in a week for sure.
In his dingy bathroom, he splashes water on his face and tugs on his hair. There are lines settling into his face prematurely and his eyes are old. When he smiles, just to try it out, he doesn’t recognise himself.
“Hey,” he says to one of his new neighbours. They’re something small time, trying to make waves in a city that’s already drowning him. There’s a short scar near his hairline from where his ex-partner got mad when a business deal soured like old milk and threw a beer glass. “I could use a fella like you to check out my boiler, if you’re interested. I’m shit with that tech crap.”
The boiler’s working great. Jason installed himself the day he moved in, crouched on the dusty floor and getting grime all in his hair.
“Your boiler’s fine,” Small-Time says in some confusion, and wipes his hands on a rag Jason left out. That’s a relief, Jason thinks, and pushes Small-Time against the counter.
There are some lessons you just don’t learn in Robin 101. He might’ve got the birds n’ bees talk from Bruce anyway but sex, sex he knows from the streets. Fuck like it’s the last chance you’ll get, like your blood is burning and your bones are crumbling. Fucking is fighting: you make sure you win. Jason’s learnt this like he’s always known it.
* * *
It’s a good life, the one he builds for himself. Jason balances a mechanic gig down the street with trying to weed out some of the shit growing in Gotham’s yard and he balances it well. So he’s tired, down to the marrow of his old bones, but whatever. The world ain’t gonna stop for one man, his Mom used to say. At least, he thinks she did. It’s been a while.
But it’s a good life, and he doesn’t need kids with flashy cameras around their skinny rich-boy necks hanging around outside his parts.
Jason scowls, shoves his key in the lock and jiggles it until the stiff mechanisms slip past each other. "You on a field trip, or something?,” he asks sweetly, and dumps his bags in the doorway. He’s got his tools (the nice ones, the ones he ordered in from abroad that glint in the grimy light of the garage), and he’s got a COP Derringer .357 and his blade in a hidden pocket he’d sewn into the bag himself the morning before he started the job.
“You’re Jason Todd, right?” the kid asks, voice going reedy at the end. It baits a flush in the kid’s cheeks; but Jason’s heart is stopping and stuttering and his blood feels like ice slush.
He pauses, and wonders if he can reach the .357 before the kid pulls something on him. “Don’t see how my name means anything to you.” Pauses again, even though he’s got no breath to catch right now. “Beat it, kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” kid replies. He’s got a high-end Gotham accent that’s the same as Bruce. It’s way more polished than anything Jason could force out; and Bruce tried, wanted to make him easier to swallow at charity functions and Wayne galas but Jason’s always been abrasive.
Jason barks a short laugh. “Sell that line, short stuff.”
The kid’s eyebrows lower so much his eyes might never come outta their squint. Jason watches the paint flake on the corridor wall and he knows he could snap this kid’s neck right here. Dead kids don’t go talking, but there’re some things even an ex-Robin just don’t do.
“There’s-” starts the kid, and huffs. “Can we talk?”
Jason’s not dumb. He knows when someone’s scanning for cameras and he knows when someone’s trying to play him. “How long’s it gonna take?”
“Not like you don’t have the time,” the kid says, and steps over Jason’s bag on the way in. “You need to know. There’s been- sightings. I think-”
Jason knows his life began properly when Dick Grayson’s ended, in some kind of sick trade of fates. It’s a good life, and when something cracks through the window pane to slash through this dumb kid’s throat before he even finishes his sentence, Jason’s mind slows and he misses that life already.
Blood spurts from the gash and the kid’s eyes fly wide even as he sinks to his knees like a stone, thudding dully. Jason’s hands find the exit wound and cover it, fingers slipping in the wetness, and he lets go with one to fumble for his phone. It’ll need cleaning, he thinks dully, and presses call as more blood bubbles under his palm.
His voice jackrabbits into the phone speaker and the kid’s pulse jackrabbits between Jason’s fingers, blood spilling wet and hot and sticky. He shouts something at Bruce, “Sniper, civilian casualty, he’s bleeding out he’s fucking bleeding out!” and rips off one of his own shirtsleeves for a makeshift tourniquet. The cuff of his other sleeve is stained already, a goddamn mess that’s matching the one on his cheap carpet.
“You’re gonna live,” he says to the kid, “you’re gonna fucking live.”
Even to his own ears, Jason’s voice is distant; and he used to be such a good liar. The sound of his own blood rushes loud in his ears to make up for the dying boy on his floor. There’s red everywhere, stark crimson on the carpet and his clothes and seeping even now through the tourniquet because never can he catch a break.
(Is it selfish? Fucking of course. Jason knows who he is. A kid gets shot and it just ruins his day).
An ambulance arrives some time after the kid starts to flop and twitch on the floor, caught fish-on-a-hook style. Jason steps back, hands slick and bloodied and missing both his sleeves after the other was sacrificed to replace the first. Neither was enough, he thinks. His face is wet where he’s pushed his hair out of his eyes. If he stops, slows, he can smell the copper in the air.
Someone approaches to check him over but he pushes them back roughly, bites out, “All of it’s his,” and comes back to kneel close to the kid, close enough to see his wide terrified eyes. “You had something to tell me,” he murmurs. “So don’t fucking die.”
They pack the kid up efficiently, carrying him off in his ruined rich-people clothes, and the roar of blood in Jason’s ears falls blessedly silent.
Jason moves to the window to keep watch. The missile left a rounded hole and a web of cracks across the pane; he breathes in, out.
The night is silent.
* * *
Bruce’s debrief drags longer than the police wanted to question him for, and that’s fucking saying something. Jason flips his blade around his fingers, matching his breathing to the knife-work and thinking.
The kid is in private care. It’s fifty-fifty whether he wakes up, and Jason hasn’t looked fondly on those odds since his first night out in pixie boots. He knows something, that’s for sure. Jason can’t think of something big enough that would get a kid that young taken out of the game like that.
Doctor told him the kid’s called Tim. Jason hates putting a name to a face. It breeds sentimentality, and that slows you down.
Exhaustion is stealing in around Bruce’s fine-boned face. Maybe it’s even age. For all his alien buddies, Batman is just that: a man. Jason’s apathy is a surprise. It’s like he’s watching Bruce on a silver screen.
They’ve lived in the same house for years, and Jason doesn’t know the man in front of him at all.
“It doesn’t fit the MO of anyone we know of,” Bruce says (or maybe repeats, but Jason stopped listening when he was a kid himself), “so it’s a new face.”
Sighing, Jason stretches his arms behind him until the joints click in to place. “Hoo – fucking – ray.”
Bruce’s jaw works. Probably fighting back the reprimand burning his tongue.
“D’you want me to tell myself off so you don’t have to?” he asks, and pantomimes Batman’s growl, “Language, Robin. Remember who you’re living up to,” and remembers with sickening clarity that it stopped being funny years ago, and maybe never was.
He kicks the chair back from behind him and runs out, muscles burning. There’s nowhere to go but Bruce’s eyes are stone-cold and Jason hasn’t been able to look at that glass case in years.
* * *
He finds the weapon in the corner of his room when he does a sweep for bugs. It’s coated in flaky dried blood but there’s no denying the shape.
It’s a batarang, one of Bruce’s old ones. It’s sharp as sin and glints where the kid’s lifeblood didn’t touch it.
* * *
The second attack comes in the night. Jason sleeps light, a habit birthed from Bruce’s paranoia and nights spent in doorways, but he’s still stupid and slow, clumsy with his dagger when he should be liquid-smooth.
The opening hit scores directly on Jason’s ribs. The second makes his face and the third his stomach.
His opponent is better. Fast and fluid, punches landing direct hits where Jason didn’t realise he’d even left himself open. His skin breaks under his eye and something crunches in his nose (but it’s not the first time). Jason doesn’t pull his punches or his kicks but he doesn’t sleep with his boots on and now he’s groggy from the thrumming pain.
He fumbles the blade, curved edges falling to floor. It’s a rookie mistake he hasn’t made since training, back when Bruce thought if Jason stepped in the dewy grass outside the manor he’d catch somethin’ and sicken. They (the sniper, the fighter, the black-silk night air) bends low to pick it up and takes Jason out at the knees in the same long motion. It’s continuous grace that Jason can’t fight. There are too many rules with Bruce and Jason’s been taught to keep an airtight lid on his rage.
He’s pinned by strong thighs and his own knife tight at his throat.
“Yield,” they say. There’s something mechanical and fucked up about their voice, but Jason’s arm is pinned tight and cruel against his back and it’s hard to think, harder to breathe.
Jason’s never backed down from a fight in his entire life. It was Bruce’s hardest lesson: you can take the kid outta the streets, but you can’t take the streets outta the kid. Jason doesn’t pick and choose his fights. He just picks ‘em all.
Blood collects at the knife tip. Jason’s jugular could be slashed in a second but, Christ, for once he just wants to keep living. “Yield, Christ,” he spits out, and spits again, real blood. There ain’t gonna be a single room in this whole flat without a bloodstain. “Fucking yield.”
The knife relents.
The loosening of the thighs allows Jason pause to quickly suck in stale air, thick with sweat and adrenaline and there’s never been anything sweeter.
Jason swallows heavily, rolls onto his back, pats at the new cuts on his face and the tender spots where he’ll bruise. The intruder keeps the waves of the blade flush against Jason’s abdomen, ready to nick through his skin like butter; Jason’s heartbeat spikes, breathing shallowly, and he chances a look.
Bodysuit. Armour. Heavy boots and gauntlets.
A red mask that covers the head like a shell.
Jason might as well have pounded the fuckin’ wall, for all the damage he’s done.
“Breaking and entering is rude,” he says, breath hissing as one of his ribs twinges. Jason’s eyes search the slits in that mask but there’s no way of telling if anybody’s home.
The mask cocks to the side. “What?” Jason asks irritably. The blade is beginning to cut through his shirt and this is an old favourite. It takes love to get them this comfortably worn. “You gonna end it or what?”
A long pause: time stretches and bends and the dagger never even wavers against Jason’s skin.
“Jason Todd,” the intruder says thoughtfully, voice muffled and strange.
“S’me,” Jason says. His voice is getting tight with panic like it hasn’t in years. He should’ve installed a panic button when he set up the flat but who would he call, anyway? “I’d shake your hand, but.”
Silence. Jason’s heart is loud enough he doesn’t wonder that they can probably fuckin’ hear it in Metropolis. “I had-” starts the intruder, and stops. The knife nicks Jason’s skin and it stings. His breathing is getting wet and bloody.
“I had to see you,” the intruder gets out. He sounds unsure, like he doesn’t even remember thinking about it. Like he arrived at Jason’s shitty flat with nothing but good ol’ murderous intent.
“Well, here I am. The man of the hour,” Jason snips, and his panic dampens. Just a little. Enough that his eyes don’t water. “Great clothes, bad flat, worse hair-”
The blade is pulled back and the intruder rolls off, silent and graceful. Before Jason can move, the blade tears right through his hand and digs into the floorboard beneath it.
In the haze of yanking out the dagger and silent-heaving at the new, fleshy hole in his right hand, he never sees the ghost leave.
* * *
The situation, apparently, is serious enough that Bruce doesn’t just come himself but he brings Barbara’s replacement, too.
“Cassandra,” he says tiredly, and mock-salutes. “Hope you’re gonna do better than the rest of the sad bastards club.”
Dead, injured, broken. She’s treading a tightrope that Jason’s pretty sure snapped a while ago.
She doesn’t say anything. He gets the idea she doesn’t say much at all but then, he’s never met her before. Maybe it’s a reaction to Jason Todd, the perpetual fuck-up. God knows he can imagine what Bruce tells this girl about him.
Bruce is checking out the wiring in Jason’s door and scowling. That’s no surprise, ‘cause Jason’s seen him smile maybe once or twice in the whole damn time he’s known him, but. This isn’t a stop swearing you stupid kid kinda scowl. It’s an I’ll tear your body to shreds kinda scowl.
“He won’t say anything for, like, an hour,” Jason says, and pads over to the kitchenette. “Want a coffee? I’m gonna have one. Might skip the coffee and have some drink. I only get the good shit.”
His hands (even the one that’s bandaged and wrapped in a cast) tremble as he reaches for his smokes, and they tremble as he lights one.
Cassandra frowns and brushes hair out of her eyes. “They will kill you,” she says carefully. Clearly a girl who doesn’t mince her words; Jason’s never been in love before (he’s not sure if he even knows how to love), but that might change.
“I’m planning on it,” he says shortly, and takes a deep breath.
He watches Bruce work, prodding and poking and probably not finding out much of anything. A muscle in Bruce’s jaw tics and Jason knows the smoking is getting to him. The swearing, too. Could even be worry that Jason (big, bad, Jason Todd) will corrupt the new recruit.
Bruce should worry less. There’s no danger of him corrupting- well, anyone. Jason doesn’t have the inclination.
He’s right, though. It takes an hour and a half before Bruce comes over to begin the interrogation and when he does, Jason’s stuck staring at the garish stain where that Tim kid almost died. (And it could happen yet, it’s a waiting game).
“Red helmet. Bodysuit, all black. Armour like I haven’t seen but not where it could stop him moving. No weapons,” he says, to describe the attacker.
Jason imagines Bruce scribbling all this down in a little notebook and doodling the image to make him laugh in his head. “Fast. Smart. Didn’t hear him coming and I wake up when Mrs Gianetti closes a cupboard next door. Brutal,” he says, and snickers, waving his battered hand in the air. “He knew my name.”
Bruce’s eyes flash. Jason can almost see the little thunderclouds around his head. “How did he know?”
“It wasn’t exactly a cosy chat,” Jason snaps, and folds his arms. “So no, I didn’t ask. I was busy getting stabbed in the hand.”
Perched on the arm of the sofa, Cassandra watches him with hard eyes. He can’t imagine her getting beaten up in the night. “How?” she asks. Her words still spill out so slowly, and he’s sure there’s a story to ask Bruce about sometime. “How- did he move?”
“Like water,” Jason replies. “Like fuckin’ water.”
He doesn’t tell about what the intruder said. Jason hears it in his head, I had to see you, and it doesn’t feel right to say. Fuck knows why. Maybe Jason’s just so far gone he can't tell the difference between a friend and an enemy. Maybe it's just more fun this way.
* * *
Still, Jason takes the attack personally. His hand throbs and aches and he’s gonna become one of those old people who get all knarly and wise and claim they know when it’s gonna rain ‘cause my right leg is tingling, I swear, kid’.
Well. Jason knows he probably won’t live that long, anyway.
But there’s a rip in his hand and a break in his security and a boy is in a coma on his watch and that’s just not good enough. Not for him, not for Bruce (but nothing’s ever good enough for Bruce, unless you die and then you’re just a goddamn banner). He’s got the kid’s camera and the modified batarang to work with. It should be enough.
It’s not enough.
There’s a dead end every time he looks. The photos in the camera are blurred to hell and they’re all taken at night; whoever this fucking kid is, he’s got balls made of lead. A grudging admiration is taking root in his heart and Jason’s too pissed and too tired to even think much about it.
All the photos confirm what he already knows: he’s hopelessly outmatched, even if he could use both hands.
He could get a shot in, maybe. A good, clean bullet through the front of the fuckin’ helmet to end it. Jason’s a crack shot and he’s sick of caring and he could do it.
Jason’s pulled a trigger before. Never to kill. Bruce stamps that out of you, in the cave. Still, he can think of the red stain in his apartment and the slick feel of blood under his palms and he’s fired up, angry enough to wanna pull a trigger a hundred times over and he thinks, I can do this.
Bruce’s blood would run cold if he could hear his thoughts, Jason bets.
Bruce better count his goddamn lucky stars that there’s no way Jason could lure this guy into a trap like that. Hell, it’s not like he could put an ad in the fuckin’ Gazette. WANTED: INTRUDER WHO STABBED MY HAND. LET'S MEET TONIGHT AT EIGHT!
Sounds like a plan that’d make Bruce slap him upside the head for even thinking it. That’s almost enough to make him want it.
“Don’t think about it,” Barbara says when she calls. “Bruce will tell you to stop, and he’ll shut you down. You know he will.”
Jason snorts. He’s printing the photos from Tim’s camera, admiring the gloss of the paper and the definition he’s managed to wrangle out of shitty takes. “Yeah, it’s lovely to hear you too. Voice of an angel.”
She sighs, softly, on the other end. He can picture her, pushing her glasses back and wondering why Dick Grayson’s substitute was such a sonofabitch. “Jason-”
“I’m not doing shit, Babs,” he lies smoothly. “M’lying at home and cryin’ about my poor hand.”
“Suck it up, Todd,” she says smartly, and disconnects the line.
Good. Jason’s got shit to do.
* * *
He cross references the fuzzy memories of the attack with the profile on the screen. Even he knows the Red Hood. It’s a nightmare tale for little Robins. Train harder, Jason. You don’t want to be caught, do you? The clown’s locked up, though, and he’d bet his life that the Joker can’t move that way.
If it is the clown-
He’ll kill him for real. It’s not like Bruce is here to say when to stop.
* * *
There’s a long-distance snapshot of the new n’ improved Red Hood leaving a brownstone somewhere further east of Jason’s own quarters. When (if) the kid wakes, Jason’s gonna shake his hand.
In the photo, Red Hood -Mark 2- doesn’t look like he’s come out the bad end of a fight, and he’s got no weapons, so all signs are pointing towards safehouse. Jason’s got his own places to land when things get rough and if this guy is half as smart as he looks then he’ll have even more.
Still. He’ll check it out anyway; better safe than sorry is always Bruce’s reasoning (unless he gets jabbed somewhere more vital and his inner organs get their chance to see the sun).
What’s one more dead Robin? He knew his role. Keep Batman sharp, make sure he fucks up less and thinks a bit more. No one else is fool enough to run a kid around a shithole like Gotham and maybe someday it’s gonna pay off.
He’s outgrown the suit. There ain’t a place for him anymore and he’s suffocating, trying to squeeze himself into a city he doesn’t love anymore. He's made his peace with it: Jason's birthright was a couple of photos, and dying young like his parents. This, at least, is something he can get right.
The row of buildings is in the shabbiest chunk of the East End. Half of the flats are falling in and a roof-tile slides right down from one block and shatters a foot away from where Jason stands, dumb-silent in the broad daylight. It’s sweltering, in summer. Down here, a stone’s throw away from where he tried to grow up, the heat gets trapped ‘tween the tall buildings with their washing-lines strung across and the air gets muggy so you can never breathe. Cigarette smoke is thick in the air and music filters down from one of the open windows. Something old, white noise scratching over the acoustics.
It feels like half a year since he left. It feels like a goddamn hundred.
Jason finds the one he’s looking for without a problem. You can’t hide a safehouse, after all. You can only make sure it’s impenetrable.
The chipped front door swings open with a gentle push.
There’s no one home, and that’s vividly clear before he even steps through. The corridor’s dark as the pits of Hell and a battered air conditioner is making a go of whirring around, but there are no subdued voices or anything that sounds like people.
If it gets rough, well. The collateral damage will only be small.
He checks each door. Taps at each, ever so lightly, until he finds the one that’s one make-believing at being real wood. Jason’s brought all his tools in a beat-up leather satchel and cracking open shit like this is why he gets up in the morning.
When he’s done (and oh, Christ, it takes a long time but Jason’s got time to burn), this door, too, swings open without a squeak.
Dust. Blinds, half drawn. Sagging couch in a sad shade of blue. The click-click of an overhead fan. Two doors leading to other rooms.
On the stout coffee table is food that looks only a little off. Someone’s coming back and Jason moves like the goddamn ghost he was trained to replace.
He takes samples from the food and the cups and he sifts through the plainclothes in the wardrobe in the hunt for hair samples. The fancy helmet isn’t anywhere to be seen, and the suit neither, but Jason’ll take what he can get. It’s like fucking Christmas morning, getting something this easy.
It’s like a fucking textbook trap, but he’s not gonna think about that too much. Gift horses; gift houses.
When he walks over towards the sparse bookshelf, he feels the extra give of a loose floorboard. He’s got his tools. It’s an easy enough job to prise it up and the file he drags out could be a goldmine. The dust and cobwebs at the edges are new and the front looks worn. Either rats are learnin’ real fast to read or he’ll have to put this back before it’s missed. There’s a bad side to everything, he guesses.
There’s no printed name on the file. Jason fucking hates cloak-and-dagger. Too much I’m fine, Jay, just pass that bottle and not enough Mommy’s dying, wasting right away as you look. The truth’s easier to swallow than total horseshit.
He thumbs open the file and flicks through the first few pages of block text. When his flicking slows, stops, he skims the page and reads bold lettering twice.
Subject name, it reads. Dick Grayson.
Seems like however hard he tries, Jason can’t shake off the ghost at his back.
* * *
The part of him that’s still thirteen years old and angry at the whole fuckin’ world floods his brain. That’s what he tells himself when he’s staring at the file, blandly innocuous, on his kitchenette counter. Someone looks at this file a lot, going by the wear, and maybe he’ll get a grace period of a day or two but they’ll notice.
He’ll notice.
That’s-
Yeah. Jason’s avoiding thinking about it. He might drink it right outta his system and burn the folder and in the morning, he’ll be seeing stars so bright he won’t even know his own name, let alone why Dick Grayson is important again.
If he was smart, he’d call up Bruce and beg him for help. There are words that Jason could say that would have Bruce running here faster than his human legs could carry him and he’s known them since he found out the Robin baton got passed on after cessation.
Jason knows he’s many things but he ain’t often smart.
Instead, he picks up the file for the second time today and he reads, reads it proper (Ma, look! Got proper teaching like you always wanted!) and something in the bottom of his stomach drops and cramps.
There’s a page on the previous medical history of the subject (battered, broken, doesn’t know shit and that includes his own goddamn name).
There’s a page after that on new medical history.
Lesions through the pyramidal cells of both left and right hippocampi have resulted in the subsequent malleability of personality and memory formation. Whilst retaining an approximation of self, the resultant anterograde and retrograde amnesia prevents much recollection and the construction of new memories. Frequent reminders are necessary to prevent reversion to dissociative state.
Jason’s mouth is dry as the morning after a hard night’s drinking and his stomach clenches tight; Dick Grayson has a butchered pincushion for a brain and there’s nothing left but blood and bones and hey, more blood.
After that come pages and pages on Dick Grayson’s life, pre-death. There’s a page on Jason himself with an old newspaper photo pasted to it and there’s so much goddamn information. Height, weight, age, even his damn blood type; they got his Ma’s name wrong, but nobody’s perfect.
Jason Todd, twenty years of age, threat level: high.
* * *
Barbara calls him up in the middle of the fuckin’ night, composure slipping and sliding all over the place. “There was someone here,” she whispers, voice hoarse and tight. “Cass has been shot, fucking hell, they got her three times-”
“Is it our guy?” Jason asks. Her puff of breath is answer enough. “Are you safe?”
“When are we ever?” She replies. He can hear the control seeping back in through her pores. All his life, he doesn’t think he’ll see the likes of her again. Maybe, in another world, she’d look at him and see someone other than a suit in a glass case.
He hangs up, heart in his mouth.
* * *
He doesn’t call Bruce. He’s gotta be sure before he pulls a stunt like that. It’s what Bruce would do; you don’t hand out hope unless you’re sure it’s there.
Dick Grayson could be alive. If he is- he ain’t the same. Then again; none of them are. This profession is a game of luck, alright.
So he goes back to the street with the criss-crossing string washing lines and the heady, cheap smoke. The kids shout and laugh in the street and their parents watch with folded arms and cigarettes between their yellow fingers. No one knows Jason Todd here, and if they did, they wouldn’t care.
“You should watch out,” he tells a girl with eyes as big as moons as the handbag she’s trying to open is picked up and rushed off with a cry. “If you’re gonna play that game, don’t get caught.”
She nods, her stringy hair caught in the wind. There’s dirt on her face but her eyes are alive in a way Jason’s haven’t been for a while.
Breaking back into the safehouse is as simple as it was last time. Simple as pie, that’s what Mrs Volkov down the street used to say. Jason hasn’t thought about Mrs Volkov and her shit-mean husband in years; he wonders if they’re still there, struggling along in Crime Alley. He always swore he’d sort her husband out when he got big and strong. Jason guesses that's another promise he's failed to keep.
The overhead fan isn’t working today. Jason flicks the switch three times and the room stays still and he gives it up as a bad cause. All of the books on the shelf are in Romani and that’s a language Jason never got around to learning (or, he guesses, Bruce could never bring himself to teach).
Earlier, when morning was breaking across the muggy Gotham sky, he’d searched Richard Grayson on his beat-up laptop. All the pictures are years old and no one remembers the dead adoptee any more. He was born on the vernal equinox and his parents are dead, dead, dead and Jason doesn’t know why he’s here.
He puts the file back, anyway. There’s always a chance Bruce might come-a-lookin’ and he should know. It’s not his fault Jason is too chicken-shit to tell him.
The yells from outside drift through the thin glass of the window.
This time, at least, Jason hears him come in. “Before you try and kill me again,” he says, “I want you to know I have very goddamn respectable reasons for being in your flat.”
Dick Grayson (if it is) looks the worse for wear. There are cuts along his bodysuit and there’s a black, buffed mark on the armour that rings of a gunshot. He doesn’t speak but the slits in the mask stare straight at him.
“I read your file,” he says. His palms are sweating and for the second time in maybe a week he remembers that he doesn’t want to die. “Good read. I liked the bit where you’re supposed to be a kid who died years ago.”
One of the Red Hood’s hands clenches and relaxes. Repeats. “I don’t know you,” he says in the tinny voice Jason’s coming to hate. It’s phrased like a question.
Jason smiles. It feels brittle on his cheeks, like he’s just gonna crack right apart. “We met. You got me in the hand with my knife.” He waves the cast for good measure. You can’t gauge emotions from a blank mask.
“I don’t remember.”
The tissue around the hole in Jason’s hand throbs. “I actually came to be a good person. Save you and that kinda shit.” He can’t wipe the smile off his face, now. He’s gonna end up looking that that fuckin’ clown and he’d rather burn as hot as Satan’s shorts.
“I don’t need saving,” Dick (maybe, maybe not) says, but he pauses. “I need. I need revenge.”
Jason settles himself more comfortably on the windowledge. The window is big enough that he could get out, no problem, and the drop wouldn’t kill him. “You don’t sound too sure, pal,” he says, and lights a smoke. “What’re you getting revenge on?”
“My death.” Dick replies. It’s a whole lot more confident. “I had instructions.”
Yeah, Jason just bets he did.
The story isn’t too hard to piece together. Someone found beat-up little Dickie Grayson and a lightbulb went off above their head. Looked at the kid and thought, hey, wouldn’t this be cute to take down the Batman? And off goes Robin like a busted windup toy.
“The kid?” He asks, voice hard as the screech of nails on chalkboard. “He part of your instructions? Getting a kid in the throat is fine, sure. Bet that didn’t keep you up at night. He’s in a coma and Cassandra -you never met her, right- she’s lying in bed riddled with holes. Barbara’s thinking the next bullet you fire is gonna aim true and this time she’ll lose her life, not her legs.”
A flame flickers. Recognition of Barbara’s name.
“He was going to tell you,” Red Hood says softly. He doesn’t say anything else but the sentence hangs, waiting.
Jason sighs, stubs out his cigarette on the windowpane. “Whoever’s got you is a shitbag, you know that?”
He’s got two guns strapped to his sides and his blade at his back. Looks like undead Dick Grayson is already outgunning and those are only the visible ones.
There’s no answer, so Jason carries on speaking. “I get it. Some clown beat me to death, I’d be fucking mad. But I grew up watching you, I grew up in your fucking shadow and if this is it for you then what the hell is it for me?”
He sounds desperate. It hasn’t crossed his mind before this second that maybe he is.
“Take off the mask,” he says. His voice has gone small and the light outside is too-bright. “Prove me wrong.”
Something in Dick Grayson must still be the kind, scared kid from those tapes, ‘cause he does what Jason asks without a fuckin’ murmur.
And oh, but there’s no denying it’s him.
* * *
If there was a world where Dick Grayson survived, well.
Jason knows the world spins on a balance. If there’s a world where Dick Grayson survived, it would’ve been him instead.
* * *
“Jesus,” Barbara says, and all the air in her busted-up body rushes out in a small puff. “I thought- I thought you’d gotten confused.”
Jason shakes his head. The both of them watch Dick Grayson’s prone body (and hell, it’d been a task knocking him out) and the steady rise and fall of his chest. For a second, for just a second, he’d put his head to that chest and made sure there was the telltale thump thump thump there. “He’s not him, though,” he says, and shakes his head. “It’s his body but there’s nobody home upstairs. If there is- Barbara, it’s not him, yeah?”
“I know that,” she says sharply, and wheels forward. Her hand reaches out, and falls back limply into her lap without ever touching.
He wonders how strong someone’s gotta be to look a ghost in the face like that. How strong someone’s gotta be that they had to cut their brain right open.
Dick Grayson is a looker, there’s no getting around that. Even with the neurosurgical scars puckering at his temples, he coulda been carved from stone. There’s no denying his younger self had taste, if not sense.
“So,” he drawls, “which one of us gets the pleasure of telling the big man?”
Barbara’s face is blank and she looks every the hard-as-nails woman he first met in the ‘Cave years ago. Dick Grayson, dead as he is, still has the eyes she has. Old eyes, young face.
“Should we?” she asks, and brushes back stray hair. “Wouldn’t it be better- if-”
Jason’s stomach rolls and he can taste the bile in his throat, sharp and sour in the back of his mouth. “Ain’t that the rule, though?” he says. He’s trying for flippant but he’s not sure it works. “What would Bruce say?”
Her mouth flattens. “And I thought I’d been Barbara Gordon, not Bruce Wayne, all this time,” she says dryly, and wheels forward. “This,” she says coldly, “isn’t Dick Grayson. He wouldn’t want to live like this.”
“He remembers you,” he says quickly, and it’s only a little bit a lie. “He remembers your name. That means there’s a chance, that’s gotta mean something.” His palms are sweating and his throat is dry, and he’s scared in a way he hasn’t been for years. Jason’s a fucking expert in lost causes and maybe he just found the best one yet.
Barbara worries her lip and taps her fingers in the way, Bruce said once, that she used to tap her feet. “He’s dangerous,” she says, “volatile.”
The fan overhead clunks into life above. “Pretty fuckin’ sure Bruce said that about me, once.” Jason says, and doesn’t meet her eyes.
* * *
He sends Barbara off to tell Bruce the good news and she leaves him with a comm and a promise that she’s on hand if the situation gets tricky.
Babysitting duty gets a little harder after good ol’ Tommy Elliot turns up, bandaged up to the nines, a pistol in each hand and looking mighty trigger-happy. “Hey,” Jason says brightly, and that does the trick.
The first two shots fly wide as Jason springs from the chair and rolls under the flimsy coffee table. There’s a tinkling of glass as the window breaks followed by the crunch of wood as a heavy boot crushes the table he’s under, pushing shards of knock-off oak into his thigh. Hot blood dribbles out through the rips in his pants but he’s moving again, grabbing wildly at one of the now-useless table legs. His bag is across the room, hopelessly out of reach without crossing the line of fire.
(Jason’s good and dodging and ducking but only ever in a back-alley sorta way).
Maybe on a good day Jason would equal him but Hush has both working hands and Jason’s no match, not today. The wood in his leg stings like hell and there’s a roar of gunfire from those two pistols, smoke in the air. He gets a boot into Hush’s side with a good roundhouse kick but his foot is grabbed and he’s flipped onto his back, the vibrations thudding right through his body. He hears the crack of something but he can still move his toes and-
He turns his head and Dick Grayson is gone.
The noise of the volleys is still ringing in his ears as Hush grabs him by the back of the neck and slams him back down, head connecting with the weak floorboards and the chips of wood from the table.
“Grayson,” Jason says, and gets a punch in the mouth for his troubles. He tastes blood and saliva and then he’s punched again, hard and fast in the face. There’s a sickening crack that’s probably his nose (again) and the roar doesn’t subside in his ears.
His head lolls on the floor and he can half-see Hush through his puffed eyes. “What d’you do-” he gets halfway through asking, lips bloated and his mouth sticky with his own blood.
Shaking his head, Hush presses down on the cast over Jason’s hand. The cast gives way and the pressure on the wound is bright-white blinding pain, enough that Jason wants to vomit, pain pricking tears at the backs of his eyes.
The barrel of the gun digs in to the top of Jason’s throat where his neck joins his head just as two feet -walking on silent footsteps- hover in view, blurring at the edges of his eyes. “Dick,” he says thickly, mouth heavy with blood and spit, “remember who you are-”
The slap of the pistol against his throat shuts him up and Elliot is a solid weight on his chest, crushing him into the floor. Black spots dance in his eyes and it’s like the nightmares he had as a kid. Sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking and never being able to breathe.
“Who else knows?” Hush asks. His voice is a soft murmur but it’s hard in the way Jason knows his own voice is. Enough anger can do that to a guy.
Hell, for all he knows this is his last hour. What a way to crash-land. He hawks back in his throat and coughs out an ugly glob of bloodied spit into Hush’s bandaged face. “Hope it- f’cking stains,” he wheezes, and loosens his dagger from his forearm to get the bastard in the side of the neck.
His hand is steady, keeping the dagger in as he grits his teeth to push Elliot off in one ungainly move. The blade is in deep before Hush can blow a bullet into Jason’s trachea and the positions are reversed; him on the floor, and Jason keeping him pinned.
“An’,” Jason says, voice scratching and tongue heavy, “M’not even the one you should be worryin’ about,” before promptly knocking the shitbag six ways to unconsciousness.
The two pistols, left lying on the floor (out of Hush’s reach, that was important and Jason’s brain is cloudy with pain noise anger) are pointed at Jason’s face with sudden speed and he’s stared through the barrel of a gun too many times. It’s a nauseating habit and he should quit; fucking story of his life.
“Hey,” he says quietly, like you would a spooked stray cat that’s hanging around outside your window. “Dick, you should put those down.”
Dick doesn’t answer. His right index finger taps the trigger, feather-light, to a tune only he’s hearing. A little more pressure and Jason’s brains are gonna be splattered across the floor and the wall. “Remember who you are, Dick Grayson,” he says, louder. The hole in his hand has started to bleed, running down his hand.
“I don’t know you,” Dick says. He sounds almost- angry. And that, at least, is something Jason knows.
He breathes out, wetly, and stretches out his fingers around the blade’s handle. “No,” he agrees, and wishes Barbara was here. Someone familiar, someone more than the replacement kid to keep Dick’s suit warm. “You were born- into Haly’s circus. Your pa was called John, and. Your ma was called Mary, and they loved-”
Dick drops one of the guns to wrench Jason’s arm behind his back, sharp and quick. Through the haze and the phantom-gunfire, Jason hears the crunch of bone and his own scream as something breaks; the bad arm, he thinks, just got a little worse.
“You don’t know me,” Dick Grayson whispers. The red hood is two feet away from them, discarded on the floor. Jason can see it through his squinted half-shut eyes and the dizzying blackness creeping up on him.
He swallows down the spinning queasiness. “I’ve known your fuckin’ name nearly half my life,” Jason says. He can hear kids -fucking kids- yelling and laughing just outside the window. Neighbourhood like this, no one cares about a few gunshots. “I saw your name- everyday.”
The grip on his arm tightens and the gun barrel presses cold against the back of his head. They’ll have to scrape him off the floor.
Dick Grayson’s voice is a dead wasteland. “But I don’t know you,” he says, and Jason grins. Feels the blood wetting his teeth and his lips.
“There’s always time,” he replies.
The clutch on his arm loosens.
* * *
“The file,” Dick says. His eyes are a warm shade of blue but they’re fuckin’ cold. “It’s for Bruce Wayne.”
Hush, tied to the spindly chair though he is, smiles. Jason raises his Derringer and aims it at Hush’s shoulder before turning his attention on Dick. “You’ve read it, right?” he asks. A pronounced shake is starting up in his hand but the bleeding’s stopped and he guesses he should thank his unlucky stars. “Still doing what the bossman tells you after you know what he did?”
Dick’s pretty mouth twists: “He saved my life,” he retorts, and the hand at his side (the one with the gun) twitches like he’s itching outta his skin to point it at Jason.
Jason can feel his own eyebrows raising high enough on his forehead they might never come back down. “He fucks with your mind an’ you call it saving your life?”
There’s a numbing deadness slithering over his body. He’s gonna keep talking ‘cause he knows that that blackness is bad news and today isn’t the day he’s dying. He thinks one of his ribs might be cracked and that’s why it hurts like a bitch to breathe, like something inside is attacking.
Something in Dick’s voice is still hoarse like he doesn’t know how to talk. “He told me who I am,” he says softly.
“Yeah, well,” Jason says. “I coulda done that, and all. And I wouldn’t have cut your fucking head open, neither.”
He thinks maybe now is the time to be kind. He should switch on the comm and ask Barbara for help, tell her that her boy is live and kicking, but-
This is as near to closure as he’s ever gonna get. It ain’t every day that you get to have a cosy chat with a dead guy. “Why?” Dick Grayson asks, his skin warmer than dead skin has any right to be. There shouldn’t be blood moving in his body, Jason thinks with detachment.
“That’s just-” Jason starts, and checks himself. That’s just what good people do, he’d say. He thinks of how he'd watched Felipe in freefall all the way down, and the feel of Harvey Dent’s neck warm under his hands. “M’not him, tha’ss why.”
He can feel each of his injuries, map them out when he closes his eyes. The numbness draws in, and he’s hurting enough he’s starting to see stars. He’d rub his eyes, hard, the way he used to do when it was 3AM and he had school the next day, but one hand is mashed and the other’s busy.
Dick, throwing the gun up in the air: “You said I had parents.”
Wetting his dry lips, Jason nods. Dick Grayson’s parents are a whole sight more at rest than their son, he hopes to hell, but there’s no nice way of putting it. “Know more than just that, too,” he murmurs, and blinks for longer than he should. “I’ll tell you- later.”
His hand falls to his side. Dick Grayson’s eyes are cold, and dead, and if Jason shuts his eyes there’s no real reason Dick won’t kill him.
Jason’s gun hits the floor a second before he does.
* * *
He wakes up. So, there’s that.
There’s the clinical thrumming beep of a heart monitor, and half his body feels like it might be made outta cloud cake. The other half, now, that feels like it’s being sawn apart with something mean and rusty.
“Hope you put me on the good stuff,” Jason murmurs. There’s a pillow under his head that’s all kinds’a glorious. Like a springy marshmallow.
Quiet breathing. “I always do,” Leslie’s voice says. She sounds tired, but Jason hardly knows anyone who doesn’t. “You had us worried, kid.”
The backs of Jason’s eyelids are red ‘cause the light isn’t getting blocked out and he can smell the sharpness of hospital antiseptic. He’s tired enough that everything aches, right down to his eyeballs. “Damn right. Think this makes me hero of the hour.”
Leslie tuts and straightens the bedsheets. Slowly, Jason cracks open one eye and hisses at the artificial lighting, the white walls. “Cassandra’s up and moving,” she says. “Wanted to go and help. The stupidity of you lot will be the death of me.”
Jason grins, and grins harder when his cheeks flare with pain. “It’ll be the death of us too,” he says, and opens his eyes fully.
Since he last saw her (and God, but he doesn’t know when that was; they patch themselves up like raggedy dolls rather than get it done proper), the skin around Leslie’s eyes has got tighter. There are more lines than Jason remembers and without him knowing, she’s got old.
When he tilts his head just a smidge to the side, he can see Bruce fast asleep in one of those god-awful plastic chairs. “How much does’e know?” He asks. Thinks about fucking it all to hell and going back to sleep.
“Huh?” Leslie asks, all false innocence like Jason didn’t get wise to her act when he was still rocking scaly underwear. “You mean about Dick Grayson being alive, or you being a dumb idiot and keeping it to yourself? Christ, Jason. He could’ve killed you. He was going to kill you.”
Jason smiles, heavy and honey-slow. “M’still here, though,” he tells her. “Guess I got something going for me.”
“Shut up and go to sleep, Boy Wonder,” she orders tartly.
He’d give a cocky salute, but his fingers feel like they’re stuck in molasses so he just
drops
* * *
The next time he’s awake, it’s for keeps. Bruce is looking lively, too, and that’s almost enough to make him pretend he’d never woken up at all. Still, it’s been a while (it’s been never) since Jason backed down from a fight and he ain’t about to start.
“Yeah?” he says; tries to puff up as much bravado as he can when he’s high enough on meds to be seeing visions of Jim Gordon dancing the fuckin’ hula. “Where you keeping him, then?”
Leslie ain’t the only one who got old when he was looking the other way.
“Jason,” is all Bruce says, sounding a thousand years too old and for a second, looking every one of them.
The room is stark white and Jason’s whole body feels like it’s been pushed through a mincer. “Bruce,” he says tiredly (and the kid in him weeps to high heaven that he’s passing up this chance to make at being a real family but Jason’s got priorities), “you gotta tell me where he is. I made him- promises, and shit. Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not a man of my word.”
Bruce’s open expression shuts down faster than Jason can watch. “You’re a kid,” he says blankly.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but I haven’t been wearing the kid get-up for a while.” There’s no window in this room, and Jason hates it when he can’t see outside. There’s something about being boxed in that rubs him the wrong goddamn way.
Bruce’s face folds into resignation. “Yeah, I know,” he says. Everything about him, plainclothes though he may be, screams Batman. “But only a dumb kid tries to do something like this by himself. You should’ve-” he stops, and glares at the dirty floor like that’s what pulled old Dickie Grayson out from his grave. “You should’ve called me. As soon as you knew.”
“Don't start this,” Jason says tiredly, and pulls himself up, swings his legs over the side of the hospital bed. “I had it under control.”
Hospital gowns, he reflects. The fuckin’ worst.
Bruce’s face drains white and floods red so quick Jason starts almost worrying about Bruce’s blood pressure. A part of him, he guesses, always will be worrying after Bruce Wayne. “You should’ve told me anyway.”
It’s freezing-your-balls-off kinda cold outside of the hospital bedsheets, but Jason’s keeping himself together even if it’s just through sheer fucking bullheadedness. His arm, he notices, is mottled with blueish bruises and his thigh is scarring over new pink.
He rolls out some of the kinks his shoulders. Jason’s not sure where the burst of strength is coming from but he’s gonna max it out. “I was getting at his game plan,” he says smoothly. “Couldn’t have you getting in the way.”
Plan, yeah. He hasn’t felt like this big a fraud since he first put on the Robin suit.
“Give Leslie my best,” he says, pushing cheeriness into his voice, “an’ tell her I’m checking myself out. People to see, places to-”
Bruce’s face is like the blackest night of winter. “If there was any chance he was alive, you should’ve told me.”
The heart monitor screeches to a flatline when Jason rips the pads off. There are drips and needles sticking into him and he yanks those out too, grimacing and putting his bare feet on the lino. His clothes have gone wandering, like all his stuff used to do back when he was still living down the street where Bruce’s parents lost their cosy lives.
“Well,” Jason says, and grips onto the bed for support, “I couldn’t trust your judgement. If there was any chance he was alive- I know my place. You got rules, Bruce. Don’t want you breaking them now.”
What he doesn’t say is: Gotham needs a Batman who isn’t broken.
There’s too much the neither of them say to start now.
* * *
“Watch yourself,” Barbara says, and hands over his blade and his gun. It’s a nice gesture, for all they know Dick Grayson could rip him apart without cracking a sweat when Jason’s in peak condition. “You sure you’re up for this?”
Jason smiles, paper-thin and exhausted. “Guess I gotta be,” he sighs, and clicks the safety off. He shuffles over to the door and waits for the sensors to scan him before padding woodenly downstairs.
The ‘cave is empty and it’s still howling with ghosts. He finds Dick Grayson exactly where he last saw him on Barbara’s thin screens: the reflection in the case is jarring and Jason’s of half a mind to push him outta the way. The dead boy is dead still, and the man there isn’t him.
Dick Grayson stands, palm hovering in front of the glass like he’s not sure he can touch. His head comes up too high for the reflection to be a pure mirror image; Jason guesses enough death can do that. They’ve stripped him of his weapons and all that’s left is the black suit and the smatter of bruising on his face where Jason socked him one. There’s dried blood on his neck and a long, healing cut (it’s not like Cassandra, he thinks, to go down without a fight).
Each of Jason’s heavy, clunking steps echoes ominously. There ain’t any way in hell that Dick doesn’t hear him but he stays, transfixed, in front of the glass and the bloodied suit.
“Real sight, isn’t it,” Jason says. His voice scratches and his chest aches even with the bandages all wrapped around his midriff (and the joke is on him, lookin’ like he’s dolled up tastelessly for a Halloween party). Dick doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe, even when Jason is standing right next to him.
A soft hiss of air. “You said- you know who I am.”
Jason watches his own likeness in the glass. A little bit warped, like he’s seeing through running water. His face looks like a toddler painted it, all those clashing colours.
“Guess I know as well as anyone,” he hedges. The weight of his weapons comforting, familiar, in his hands and maybe that’s part of the reason Dick looks so adrift standing there.
Gnawing his lip, Dick turns to Jason for the first time since Jason stumbled inside. He doesn’t say anything but Jason’s breathing still quickens like he’s expecting a good upperbody cut to finish him off. “What?” he asks, harsher than he should.
There’s a shiver of displaced air as Dick lurches away from him, tumbling into a crouch on the cold stone. “I should’ve killed him,” he whispers, and looses a knife from somewhere in his sleeve. It falls into his hand. “I wanted to.”
Jason’s heart starts pounding like there’s a race to be won. Now that he’s here, weak as a drowning kitten, he doesn’t wanna die like this.
He says, “I told you already, there’s always time.”
For a few glacial, fight-or-flight minutes Jason doesn’t know if it worked. Dick holds that blade-handle like it’s the only thing keeping him on God’s good earth and it would be like stabbing butter to fight Jason like this.
“Yeah,” Dick says, thickly “Okay.”
It’s a good place to start.
* * *
They make it out of Gotham half alive with the stuffing falling out of them (more or less only Jason, though). Jason hotwired one of Bruce’s fancy-ass cars and he thinks they might have a lead on the location of Thomas Elliot, unreliable though his contacts are. It’s hot enough he can drive with the roof down, wind roaring in his ears like the ocean.
Dick told him he doesn’t know how to drive. He doesn’t tell him much else about what he knows, or what he remembers. Gotham disappears behind them in the mirrors and Dick twists around to watch it, face blank but eyes bright. It’s a gut feeling, Jason supposes. He kinda understands.
‘Course, they’ve gotta drive fast. Bruce won’t let them get far if he can stop them.
He glances at Dick, the wind whipping his hair into something crazy. Jason sees him, hand half an inch away from a glass case that hasn’t been touched in years. Inside is a suit that’s still ripped in the middle, a little bloodied around the edges.
There’s a plaque right at the bottom that reads A GOOD SON.