Chapter Text
“From every height I’d fall, I’d call,
I’d reach out for your hand, you sing;
If I have to be who I was (you’re not)
Do I have to be who I am?”
Secret Worlds, The Amazing Devil
If any city in the world knows how to pick itself up after a crisis, it’s Gotham.
She knows a thing or two about rebuilding herself from the ground up, from the inside out. She’s been doing it since long before Jason was even born. For decades, for centuries.
Hell, local legend says she’s been damned since the very beginning; a curse on the land, poison in the water, madness in the blood. Skeletons in the closets and ghosts in the walls, haunting generation after generation of Gothamites too stubborn to move anywhere else.
Jason believes those stories more and more, these days.
Or… wants to believe them, maybe. For the absolution it would offer him, a balm for his guilt.
Then again, guilt is the least he deserves after everything.
It’s been almost six weeks since the Scarecrow was taken back into custody of Arkham Asylum.
The water systems have been fully flushed, and the security at municipal utility buildings across the city has been tightened courtesy of a very large Wayne Foundation donation.
Fresh-faced police officers patrol the streets, recruits shipped down from Newark and Jersey City to fill the gap left by Crane’s lackeys, too new to have been corrupted yet.
Broken windows are being replaced one by one, graffiti is being diligently scrubbed from the walls, store fronts are being repaired and repainted.
Schools and businesses are reopened, and every Church and Mosque and shelter and clinic and charity organization is running drives for food and clothes and toiletries.
Victims of Crane’s drug who weren’t exposed to the magic detox cloud are being rehabilitated and displaced families are being re-homed.
The city is slowly, meticulously putting itself back together.
Jason only wishes he could do the same.
If Gotham is a healing body, and the streets are her blood vessels, then the people are the platelets working together to restore her. They swarm around the worst of the damage, stemming the blood-flow at the source.
Problem is, if Gotham is a body then the Bowery is a bone broken in childhood that never quite set right. It’s an old ache, familiar and grown around, one not worth the time or energy to ease when there are newer wounds to tend.
Crime Alley, of course, is the seam of the break. The site of the damage, the brittle bone knitted back together around the crack. The point of exposure, prone to inflammation.
Here, the pain is either ignored or self-medicated.
The population of the Bowery doesn’t have the health insurance to cover the residual effects of Scarecrows anti-fear toxin, they don’t have the luxury of sick days. They aren’t getting any of the governmental grant money promised for repairs.
They help each other out where they can, but the toll it takes is visible on them like it rarely is in the inner city.
Alley folks are resilient in the weary kind of way that Jason was raised with, that he feels in his bones; you keep going because you don’t have any other choice.
Maybe that’s why he’s staying here - a block and a half down from where his mom died, in an apartment that’s only a step up from a squat by virtue of the fact that he pays to crash in it.
Cash in hand, no lease, no background checks.
No questions asked when Jason wakes himself up screaming.
He couldn’t stay in Wayne Manor.
Or, well. He could have , technically speaking.
He and Bruce had rattled awkwardly around each other in that big, empty house for a full week after the Titans left before Bruce had cornered him to say in no uncertain terms that he was welcome to stay indefinitely.
That they could, ‘work out their next steps together.’
Like they should just sit down over afternoon tea and rationally, systematically bridge the insurmountable gulf of betrayal between them.
And the crux of the problem is that Bruce almost certainly could do that. He’d sit there perfectly composed, probably with a laser pointer and everything, and logically present each and every one of the missteps Jason took to get here.
That’s what Bruce does; he focuses so closely on the logical angle that he fails to consider the emotional one.
The same way he’d solemnly looked Jason in the eye and lied through his teeth when he promised Jason’s therapy sessions would be confidential, the same way he’d so calmly stripped Robin away from him like it wasn’t the only thing in the world that made Jason worth something.
But Jason isn’t capable of being anything but emotional about this.
How do you move past the fact that the closest thing to a father you’ve ever had wasn’t there when you needed him to be? How do you look that man in the eye after you’ve betrayed his most closely guarded secrets to one of his greatest enemies? How do you share Sunday brunch with a man who abhors killing, but murdered a man for you ? How do you pass him the fuckin’ peas when your own hands are drenched in more blood than you can even remember?
Jason appreciates that Bruce went after the Joker for him, he really truly does. The thought of Crane being just across town is bad enough some days that Jason can barely breathe, he doesn’t think he could have lived with his murderer still breathing Gotham air too.
But it also aches in his chest to see how deeply broken up Bruce is over it, a hollow shell of a man questioning his purpose and unable to find any satisfactory answers. As much as Jason can relate, it’s an acute kind of torture to see that agony mirrored in Bruce and know it’s all his fault.
That noxious mix of pity and guilt clashes with the lingering hurt of Bruce using Leslie to spy on him, and churns uncomfortably in his stomach. That small, persistent whisper in Jason’s head that wants to blame Bruce doesn’t ease up, no matter how justified the lack of trust turned out to be.
Jason hadn’t known how to explain that on particularly bad days, that voice sounds like Jonathan Crane. He hadn’t known how to explain that he doesn’t always disagree with it.
It was easier to leave.
The nightmares aren’t new.
He’d had them sometimes, before. A normal response, Bruce had said. Especially after a rough patrol, or those cases that cut a little close to home.
After Deathstroke, they’d gotten worse.
Night after night of falling, of looking up at Dick’s anguished face vanishing in the distance as the washed out yellow light of office windows streaked past; running through close, dark spaces - subway tunnels, twisting alleyways, the endless manor halls - always followed by some unseen threat just out of sight, just out of reach.
Months of waking up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath with his heart beating out of his chest and his every nerve screaming run had been enough for Crane’s offer of artificial nothingness to seem like a blessing.
Jason should have known better. That old adage; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. He should have known, nothing ever works out the way he wants it to.
Now, with the drug’s effects lingering in his system - jangling in his nerves, suffocating in his lungs - the half-memories are twisted into something even sharper.
Dick smiles beatifically as he lets go of Jason’s hand, the Titans standing behind him watch him fall - passive bystanders at best and sneering caricatures at worst. The lights in the windows shine by turns the fairy light kaleidoscope of carnival colors and a sickly squirming ethereal blue. He’s running down a hallway but he’s the hunter not the hunted, and he really, really doesn’t want to catch whoever he’s chasing.
Details are foggy tonight, just vague impressions of an awful choking tightness in his chest, but it’s familiar enough for him to know that he won’t get any more sleep tonight.
The walls are too tight, close enough to make him itch on the inside. His limbs feel twitchy and restless, he needs to move, needs to breathe.
He grabs his hoodie and heads into the night.
Fortunately, Gotham is just as much of an insomniac as he is. She comes alive in the dark, despite repeated attempts by the City Board to install a permanent curfew.
Especially places like Park Row, which is both Gotham’s red light district and the border for at least three different gang territories. The former is almost certainly what keeps the latter from breaking into all out war, because the pimps are a gang unto themselves and they won’t tolerate damage to the merchandise whether it comes from the Freaks or the False-Facers.
Jason used to swing by as Robin and chat with the sex workers before he left for San Francisco, because he remembers a few of the older girls checking in on mom after she got too sick to leave the house and everybody knows even The Batman avoids Crime Alley.
Not many are left now that knew him as Cathy’s scrawny little ankle biter and those few that did didn’t know him as Jason, they’d known him as Robin.
Now Robin is working with the Titans on the West Coast, and Jason can’t exactly walk up and ask how they’re doing without exposing a whole bunch of secrets he’d rather not compromise twice.
He doesn’t have anything like a patrol anymore, but he likes to touch base.
Jason doesn't really know what he'd do if he found something worth interfering in. So far, he’s only scared off a few would-be muggers by just yelling at them, but they were young and clearly inexperienced.
He doesn’t know how he’d react if things got physical. Hell, the last fight he was in he froze the fuck up, had to be dragged out by the wannabe Robin.
That's unfair to Tim, he knows it is. He also knows that he has to check on the Alley workers before anything else, or the thought that something might be happening will prey on his already frazzled nerves all night.
It’s easy to clamber up the fire escape behind the Monarch Theatre and do a loose circuit around the Alley by rooftop.
Thankfully, everything seems quiet. He doesn’t have to find the limits of his cowardice tonight.
Jason lurks on the roof long enough for a smoke, then slides back down a drainpipe on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and heads for the bus stop on Crown Point.
The bike Bruce bought him is long gone - a casualty of Jason’s spotty memories from the last few months, probably found by some opportunist and scrapped for parts by now - but the annual paid transport pass has been almost as good. The monorails might be free of charge, but there isn’t a station this side of Otisburg. The bus network is decent enough for what Jason needs.
There’s a library on the north side of the West End, overlooking the river and close enough to the University that it’s open 24/7 to accommodate the night-owl students venturing away from the campus facilities.
It’s one of the older buildings in the district, all bare stone support pillars and sweeping arched trellises, and the closest thing he can get now to scaling the elaborate towers of the cathedral roof.
While it doesn’t hold quite the same nostalgia as the Manor Library, Jason spent enough time sheltering in libraries when he was homeless to feel… familiar, if not quite at ease. They’ve got free wifi and public-use computers and electrical sockets to charge his phone.
It’s also a damn sight warmer than his crappy little apartment. He stands in the open foyer for a few minutes, shaking feeling back into his fingers.
Jason hasn’t really read anything for a while, chemistry textbooks aside. Not since the Tower, probably.
Before that, he’d been working through the classics with Alfred. But the old butler's heart had given out before Jason had mustered up the enthusiasm to continue Great Expectations.
The last time Alfred had gently knocked on his bedroom door and invited him down for what he’d affectionately called ‘Book Club’ even though it was only ever the two of them, Jason had mumbled some excuse and stayed in bed. He’d been hospitalized two days later.
It feels like a violation to pick it up again now; a vigil Jason lost the right to attend.
He turns away from the bookshelves, finds an empty desk with a decent vantage point and squeezes himself into the corner seat to watch people disappear into the stacks.
There are almost certainly better things he should be doing, but fuck if he knows what they are.