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The Empire (Doesn't) Strike Back
Rain pours down around them, humidity and static hanging heavy in the air. Thunder splits the swelling pause, the crescendo of violence that’s brought them to this point.
“Jason.”
The Red Hood stands across from Batman, anger radiating from every part of him, from the set of his shoulders to the tilt of his head. Jason stands across from Batman, draped in the righteous fury he’d tried so hard to keep tucked into his chest.
With the cowl gone, ripped from his head by a rough hand, rain blurs his vision, and for a second Bruce sees Robin standing in front of him.
Careless. He blinks away the image – he can’t let himself get caught up in emotions. Dick has taught him that that never ends the way he wants it to. Jason taught him that he never says the things he wants to. Tim – Tim’s a brat who knows exactly what Bruce wants to say, but doesn’t let him say it because it’s not a part of the kid’s plan. His arguments with Tim are… a little bit different, and don’t necessarily apply in this setting.
Red Hood’s scowling face comes into focus, mouth parted into a viscous snarl.
“Yes.”
God, Bruce wishes this was just another one of their rows, back when his second Robin was still full of energy and magic. He wishes that this was a matter of trying to redirect Jason’s anger, his rage at the disorder surrounding him.
Tim would be so happy to know that he has another brother.
Dick… Dick doesn’t even know that Jason’s back. The two of them have fought, and he doesn’t know that was his brother.
Bruce doesn’t want to raise a hand against his son. He doesn’t want to fight.
“Please.” Batman never pleads, but right now, Bruce isn’t Batman. He’s a father, calling desperately to his son.
Jason stays silent, willing to hear him out. Waiting for him to trip over his words, giving Bruce enough rope to hang himself with as he hurtles every misstep back in his face while he swings from the gallows. Jason’s always been dramatic like that, vicious like that.
Sometimes, Tim reminds him of Jason. It was worse, at the start, but now he doesn’t call out the wrong name when he sees red and yellow, when there’s a small form tucked into his side. Now, it’s the other things that has his chest aching with loss – the quiet scoffs Tim makes when he thinks Bruce is being stupid. The way he gets deeply invested into his interests, movies and technology rather than books and theater. The way he waits for Bruce to say something that he’s planned for, for him to spring Tim’s trap and open himself up to a half-hour lecture on why he’s wrong, complete with a long list of evidence to support his claims. Jason had never put together a powerpoint describing the way Bruce completely flubbed a call, but he'd been treated to a number of dramatic reenactments of “Bruce’s Worst Hits”, as he would scornfully call it.
It is astounding, the way his desires fill him. There is very little he would not give to have all of his sons under the same roof, in the same room. Bruce wants.
“I can help you. We don’t have to fight. Don’t make me fight you.”
Jason scoffs. “What, you think I’ll believe that? That I’ll believe you don’t care about what I’ve done, the power I yield over your precious city?”
Bruce takes a step forward, hands clenched into fists at his side.
“I know what happened.”
“You know nothing!” Jason snarls, shaking with rage. “So you talked to your friends, so you talked to Ra’s. It doesn’t matter. They can’t tell you what happened, why I’m like this. You don’t know shit, old man!”
“I know enough, son. They told me enough,” Bruce rebukes firmly, setting his jaw. Something in the back of his mind twitches at his wording. Somewhere, he feels like Tim is laughing at him. The thought is as random as it is inappropriate, but the feeling doesn’t lessen as Jason continues.
“I’m not your son!” Jason spits, his chest heaving. “Your son died in that warehouse three years ago! You’re not my father!”
Grief coats the words under Jason’s barbed veneer of anger, leaving them to weigh heavily on Bruce's shoulders as they hit their mark. So consumed, Bruce doesn’t think when he next opens his mouth. His voice, which had been the natural tones of “Bruce Wayne” as he tried to reach his son through the mire of misery he’s drowning in, slips into something not quite Batman, but very close.
“I am your father.”
Jason freezes at the same time Bruce realizes what he just did. Unbidden, he feels the words spill out of him without further input from his brain.
“There is no escape. Don’t make me destroy you.”
A hiccupping laugh interrupts him, small and unexpected. Jason’s posture has loosened considerably, more dumbfounded than furious.
“Jason, you do not yet realize your importance.” Bruce sweeps his cape behind him dramatically. If playing into his second youngest son’s taste for theatrics is what’s allowing them to talk without the threat of violence hanging over their shoulders, then so be it. He should be fine, as long as Tim never finds out that he’s abusing his beloved Star Wars like this.
Or Dick, who would no doubt use the knowledge to threaten to tell the press that Episode V was the one thing capable of allowing Bruce to interact with his kids normally when all other attempts have thus far ended in failure, whenever he got pissed at him.
“You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training.” Bruce steps forward, raising a hand dramatically, palm up as he extends it to his son.
Jason glances at it, expression wavering.
“With our combined strength,” Bruce clenches his fist, raising it up, “we can END this destructive conflict, and bring ORDER to the galaxy.”
“I’ll never join you!” Jason shouts back, but it’s… his voice is different. Lighter, tinged with a sort of disbelief that makes him sound younger. That makes him sound like the teenager he still is.
Hope flares bright in Bruce’s gut, and he can’t let himself think about how devastating it will be if that flare of light is crushed. He lowers his fist, advancing further with slow steps. “If only you knew the POWER of the Dark Side.”
Jason edges back from him with firm steps. He’s not scared, he’s not angry – instead, he’s almost playful. The hesitation and confusion in his posture has been blanketed by the familiar confidence that always had filled him whenever he slipped into a role.
His son isn’t trying to retreat from him, he’s acting out his part. He’s playing along.
Heart in his throat, he continues. “They never told you what happened to your father.”
Putting a hand dramatically to his heart, Jason shakes his head. His lips are pulling up at the left side, just slightly. “She told me enough!”
She? No, Bruce, you can play detective later. Right now, the most important thing is finishing the scene and taking Jason home. Bruce steps up to where Jason’s cornered himself against the edge of the roof, looming as best he can with his heart feeling lighter than it has in years.
Jason points at him, false anger in his posture, so different from the vengeful ghost he’d been at the start of their encounter. “She told me YOU killed him!”
Bruce tilts his head to the side: his son is too tall for him to look down at him. Just last week, he didn’t think he’d ever get the chance to see his boy grow this large, to ever know the joy of worrying whether or not his child would surpass him in height.
Finish the bit, old man!
Jason’s voice, young and full of laughter as it has always has been in his weakest moments, when he’s most distracted, prods him into action. Distantly, Bruce wonders who he will hear next, now that his dead son is no longer dead enough to damn and save Bruce in the privacy of his own mind.
“Jason, I AM your father.”
Jason’s chest starts heaving in performative gasps. Bruce swears that he catches him humming the first couple of notes to the Imperial March. “No, that’s not true. That’s impossible!”
Bruce spreads his arms out, as if presenting an indisputable fact. “Search your feelings. You know it to be true.”
Jason scrambles backwards, apparently using the ledge of the roof as a stand in for the spire thing Luke had clung to. He’s humming louder, never content to be in life without a soundtrack to accompany his rapid fire thoughts and emotions.
He used to hum the mission impossible theme more often than any other song, when he was Robin. That, and the little jingle Dick first put together during his time in the cape, whenever he was feeling overly playful.
Bruce loves him so much it hurts.
He reaches out, grabbing Jason’s wrist as he cuts forward in the dialogue queued up in his head. “Come with me. It is the only way.”
This close, Bruce can see the miniscule expressions that take over Jason’s face – his boy always had worn his heart on his sleeve and his emotions on his face. As much as he loved acting, he was always too genuine to truly wipe away his feelings.
He can see the hesitation, the anxiety, the joy. He can see the hope blooming in Jason’s posture, resonating with Bruce’s own insidious flare.
Jason grins, and flings himself off of the side of the roof.
Oh.
Bruce had forgotten about that part of the movie.
Shit.
Bruce launches himself after his son, diving headfirst to lessen his air resistance, and reaches out desperately.
“JASON!”
His son looks up at him, wonder plainly written across his face. He reaches out a hand.
Bruce grabs on, immediately flipping their positions and reaching for his grapple. His grapple that he doesn’t have, because Jason cut off his utility belt at some point during their conflict, and Bruce had been distracted enough to forget.
With no time to curse, he grabs the grapple from where he’d last seen Jason stash it as they’d raced across the rooftops earlier, and fires it blindly.
The relief he feels when it catches is almost as breathtaking as the harsh pull as he fights against gravity to swing his son back to safety.
They alight on a low rooftop, only differentiable from the previous by the small community garden one of the residents has tried to set up. Bruce immediately falls to his knees, his muscles screaming – he thinks that he may have dislocated his shoulder, or torn his rotator cuff with that stunt. Jason is no longer 100 pounds, easily lifted in one arm and swung out of danger in seconds.
Bruce looks down, needing to reaffirm Jason’s wellbeing. He needs to know that Jason is still alive, that he hasn’t let his son die in his arms a second time.
He’s met with an unguarded look of awe, Jason’s mouth parted in surprise. His mask is slipping off. Whatever mask tack he’d used clearly wasn’t up to bat-standard, Bruce thinks in the back of his mind.
Gently, Bruce reaches out with his bad arm, unwilling to release his hold on Jason’s shoulders for the world, to ease it the rest of the way off.
Bright green eyes blink up at him, wet around the edges as though he’d been crying. “Dad,” Jason breathes, winded.
His son’s looking at him with unfamiliar eyes, with an unfamiliar body, but the same love that Bruce was certain he’d lost forever years ago in Ethiopia. Unable to do anything else, he cradles the back of Jason’s head and brings it to his shoulder, clutching his son in a hug tight enough he can feel every breath he takes. Every expansion of his ribs. The hands clutching at and pulling on his cape, the breath dampening his neck as Jason chokes on a muffled sob, it’s all a miracle.
The world seems to stand still around them as they cling to one another. The rain lightens to a gentle drizzle, as though washing away years of regret and sorrow.
Bruce hopes, selfishly, that he can stay in this moment forever.
Since he knows that’s impossible, he’ll settle for moving this reunion to the family sitting room in the manor, the two of them draped in an oppressive number of blankets and sipping at Alfred’s hot chocolate.
He’s bringing his boy home.