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Robin is dying on the floor again tonight.
The Red Hood looks over. The younger Jason’s eyes are barely cracked open, his domino mask long ripped away. There's a dark crust of drying blood stuck to his tear ducts. A rib bone juts out of his sternum. Jason, older now, years later, hood tucked under his arm, rubs the side of his abdomen: phantom pain and sympathy.
“Help me,” Robin pleads, and Jason pretends he hasn’t heard him. Robin’s voice is so quiet anyway, scratched and burning from the smoke, the screaming.
“Hood,” Batman calls when he notices Jason’s attention has drifted. “I need this report tonight.”
“You’ll get your report,” Jason snaps at him, indignent. “Fuck off.”
Bruce frowns, but turns away. Across the floor of the Cave, Jason sees Dick mirror their father’s expression, and his silence, too. Next to Dick, Robin cries out for help again, blood choking up his esophagus and splattering the skin of his lips.
“Batman,” he says, even in death the perfect soldier, never giving anything away. Jason turns away from him altogether.
By the time the report is typed up and submitted to their records, Robin has gone still, cheek pressed into the floor. Even his blood has dried on the stone, a perfect circle around him, a thin, black skin. Stephanie crosses the floor, fresh from the med bay, and tracks red across the length of the room. Tim pries off a muddy boot and flicks dirt onto the dead Jason’s empty, open eyes.
“Jason!” Dick calls out. Jason shoves the helmet over his face, securing it before he looks up. He sees his brother through filtered, yellowing glass. Dick jogs up to where Jason’s standing, straddling his bike, so close to gone.
“It’s late,” Dick says. “Early. Whatever. It’s been a long night. Stay for breakfast?”
Jason looks at Dick, the red marks on his face from the domino. He looks at himself, blank-eyed and bird-like, chest caved in on the stone of the floor. He looks away, revs the engine, and peels out of the cave without answering.
“Cook me something,” Robin chirps from the stool in the kitchen. He pillows his head in his arms on the counter. Jason is in his apartment, the night dark, a thunderstorm tearing the sky apart outside. Water thuds onto the floor length window of the living room.
“Whatcha want?” Jason asks, already pulling a pot onto the stove.
“Soup!” Robin says, and then, like he’s testing the syllables, “Sopa!”
“Yeah, I got it, chicito,” Jason says, “How could I have guessed?”
“Make the good one, alright?” Robin says. “Alfred never figured out how to make the good one.”
Jason remembers it well, the long hours in the kitchen, trying to get the seasoning just right. “Coming right up,” he says.
He chops, simmers, waters, and Robin kicks his feet, too short to touch the ground, talking endlessly and aimlessly.
“And B, he even let me tie him up all by myself!” Robin recites, a memory so vivid Jason can see it even now, reflected in the water bubbling away on the stove. “Gordon came in like a cop, you know, after all the real work was already done,” Robin says, rolling his eyes. “But he’s alright. I like Barbara. Sometimes she teaches me shortcuts in the neighborhoods I always get lost in.”
“Sounds like fun,” Jason says, almost absently. “You keeping your grades up?”
Robin makes a face. “‘Course,” he says. “Algebra is tricky, but sometimes I practice in my head on patrol. And Alfred knows, like, everything, so he helps me proofread my essays.”
Jason purses his lips and looks away. He squeezes his eyes shut, one hand on the lid of the pot, and asks, “Gonna go to college?”
And Robin smiles, bright as the day, and lightning flashes across the sky behind him. “Yeah. Yeah, I am, and Bruce said he’d come visit me, even if he had to take a few days off patrol. And he said he’d be so proud.”
“Yeah.” Jason cuts the heat and dips a ladle into the liquid, warm and red, swirling around the pot. He keeps his focus where it is, on the soup and the stove, and says, “I guess he would have been.”
“It’s just too bad,” Robin says, and when Jason finally looks up at him again, there are twin trails of blood streaming out of his eyes. “It’s too bad. And it’s not fair.”
His fingertips are black against the countertop like frostbite or cut bloodflow. The skin of his face blooms and ripens into dark, blue bruises. Then, he can’t speak anymore. He tries, mouth opening painfully, and only manages to gasp.
“Take it easy,” Jason coaxes to his younger self. He spoons two portions into bowls and takes a seat at the other stool, laying them out on the counter.
Robin grabs for his spoon and can’t quite grip it. It shakes out of his hand, a red thumbprint on the metal.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jason says, and lays an arm across his shoulders. “Yeah, take it easy, it's all alright.”
Robin gasps some more and Jason uses his other hand to bury Robin’s face into the crook of his arm. It smears ash across his sleeve. Jason holds him for a long time, firm enough to be crushing, holding together all of Robin’s broken bones, until Robin goes silent. Jason pulls him back and uses two fingers to close his open eyelids. He tells himself he has only gone to sleep.
There’s a pounding on his door a minute later, and a chorus of voices.
“Jason!”
“Open the door, man! It’s fucking freezing out here!”
Jason opens his eyes and sees only an empty chair next to him. He goes to get the door.
“Man, it smells good in here,” Duke says when Jason lets them all inside. He gravitates towards the kitchen, hands rubbing together to drive away the cold. “All this for us?”
“How’d you know we were coming?” Steph asks, already splayed out under his throw blanket on the couch.
“I didn’t,” Jason says. He retreats back to the counter, the stool, the two metal spoons, unblemished.
“Okay,” she says, drawing out the ‘y’. “It’s kind of giving stalker, Jay. Not a great look.”
“Yeah, creep,” Tim says. He walks right up to the counter and grabs the spoon from the second bowl. “Fuck, its hot,” he says, burning his tongue.
Jason takes a breath and gives himself a single, mournful second. Then, he pushes it all away, back down deep inside of him, and he turns back to his food.
“You guys broke into my house,” he says. “Who’s really the stalker here?”
Steph waves a hand in his direction, dismissive, and fumbles with buttons on the TV remote. Duke knocks dishes together in the cabinets, a ceramic clang, searching for a few more bowls. Tim blows on his spoon thoroughly and delicate, and this time it goes down easily.
The spices in the soup are just right, spreading red across Jason’s tongue. Thunder growls in the clouds outside.
It’s the third time that night Robin has woken Jason up, crying.
“Fuck!” Jason yells loud enough to worry that his neighbors have heard him. He grabs the gun from his nightstand and aims it shakily towards the face of the crying boy, ash streaming black lines down his burnt, bleeding face. “Just die already!”
Robin sobs louder, his whole face morphing into something raw, something ugly. The moon lights the left side of his face and leaves the rest in gory shadow.
“Just. Fucking,” Jason says, pulling back the trigger again and again until the gun, empty, clicks. “Die.”
Robin doesn’t, only flinches away from the bullets that never fire.
Jason screams and hurls the gun, clipping just past Robin and lodging in the wall behind him. Robin doesn’t notice and just keeps crying, his eyes swollen shut, the nerves of his cheek burnt enough he can’t even feel the movement in the air.
Jason presses his palms to his face and then, for no clear reason, he starts to laugh. At first, it's near-silent, a strained, deranged chuckle, but grows and grows. Soon his stomach is aching and his eyes are tearing up and he can’t stop, not even to breathe.
His eyes are blurry through the tears, but he can see Robin flinching again, once for every peal of laughter. He's gone quieter now, finally, cries morphing into whimpers. He holds himself, curling up to try and make the pain stop. It won’t help, but Jason doesn’t tell him that.
Slowly, the laughter peters out. Eventually, he stops laughing.
Robin and him watch each other from across the room, then, the silence thick between them, cut only occasionally by Robin’s whines.
By the end, though, he’s deathly quiet. And then, of course, he’s dead. And Jason can sleep in peace.
Robin is dead on arrival between them.
Blood has pooled as it always does on the floor beneath him, and on either side, a great chasm, stand Jason and Bruce.
Though Robin hadn’t moved in half an hour, an ideal corpse, he seems to reanimate as Jason and Bruce’s argument drags on and on. Dazedly, he blinks away the fog over his eyes. He drags a finger in lazy swirls through the cooling blood.
“I’m not fucking waiting,” Jason spits, hood in his hand, finally turning to go.
“Yes, you are,” Bruce says, advancing. “It’s too dangerous to go in now alone.” His foot nudges but doesn’t quite cross the pool of blood, the line in the sand. Robin, for his part, reaches a hand up to Bruce’s boot, drawing lines and figures across the sole in dark, wet red. He doesn’t cry out this time — he knows no one will answer.
“Fuck you,” Jason says, turning back just to look at his father’s face. “Every second you stand here arguing, someone dies. Don’t you have enough blood on your hands?”
Robin, on the floor, presses his eyes closed. He jerks suddenly, as if struck from above.
Bruce’s mouth snaps shut, and from the look on his face, he is years away. And all of a sudden, Jason understands: Bruce has his own Robin, always over his shoulder, so content to haunt him, and so eager to die. In his father’s mind and his own, Jason realizes, he's never really left that warehouse at all.
Jason storms out to do his job, anyway. Bruce stays behind in the cave, unmoving. Robin stares at the ceiling blankly for a long time, and falls still once again.
The headstone is simpler than he used to imagine. Dark grey, neat carvings. It’s late into the night, and it’s raining. Water taps politely against the stone, dips down into the negative space of the letters. Mosses grow in between the seams.
“You do know I’m not buried there?” Robin says, all cheek. “I haven’t been buried there for a long time.”
“Yeah, nene,” Jason says. “I know.”
“I probably shouldn’t be picky,” Robin continues. “But I kind of expected more. The old man should have built us a mausoleum.” Robin’s grin creases his face, bumps up against the mask across his eyes.
Jason smiles a little and shoves Robin lightly on the shoulder, but he doesn’t agree. He can feel the grief that emanates from the stone, the restraint of its lettering, the dark, ugly color. This is not a place of honor—it’s a place of shame, a loss so deep you can’t see the bottom, can’t contain it to an epitaph in stone. Jason looks at the headstone and feels the weight of it cracking something inside of him. A life, and its violent end.
“At least I’m with the family,” Robin says, glancing over at the graves of Martha and Thomas Wayne. There’s a raised bit of stone behind him and he hops up, walks it casually like a balance beam. “Hey, did we ever meet them? In the afterlife or whatever?”
“I don’t know, chico,” Jason says, because what he does remember of being dead, he tries his best to forget. “You tell me.”
Robin’s laugh is like a bell. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
Jason says nothing, and the silence stretches. He stands, immovable, on the path before the graves, dressed in black, hands in the pockets of his dark jacket, his dark hair plastered against his face. Robin whistles, unbothered by the rain. He trudges through the grass, the planter boxes, warm and restless with life.
Jason doesn’t know what he expected to find here—maybe to put himself to rest. But his body is gone and has been for years, and the dead don’t speak. Jason turns to leave and Robin falls into line just behind him.
“I did good, though, right?” Robin chirps. Jason turns. Robin’s head is down, his eyes cast shyly away, hands at his sides shoved into invisible pockets. The edges of his cape are starting to fray, starting to burn.
“I did good,” Robin says again, and he stops walking. “Tell me that.” His arm jerks suddenly and violently, with a crack, bending out of shape.
Jason is rooted to the ground, watching silently as Robin begins to fall apart. The blood and bruises creep up gradually, covering him like a blanket, pulling over his face. Blood comes out with the next words, a plea, “Tell me. Tell me! I didn’t die for nothing!”
His knees buckle, almost on cue. Jason watches him sink lightly to the floor. He starts sobbing, red bubbling out of his lips. Jason doesn’t go to him, but sinks to the ground where he stands, his legs crossing on the floor.
“You did alright, birdie,” Jason says, very quiet. Robin lets out another sob, his whole body shuddering. With an inhale, Jason moves closer, draws a hand through Robin’s hair, pats his cheek. “You did good. It’s alright. You can let go.”
“I wanted to be brave,” Robin says through chattering teeth. “But I was scared. I cried.”
“You were brave,” Jason tells him forcefully. “You were so brave. You only have to be brave for a little longer.”
“I just thought she loved me.” A tear drains from Robin’s eye. “I thought they loved me, and cared. They told me all the hard parts were over.”
“They are over,” Jason says. “You were brave, and you did good. It won’t hurt for much longer.”
Robin shudders again, head jerking as he tries to shake it no. “Batman,” he says, strained. “On… his way?”
“He’ll be here in just a second,” Jason lies. “It’s alright now. It’s okay to let go.”
Robin lets out a choking sound and he turns over onto his back. Jason sees the moment the fight leaves him, draining out of his body into the ground. The pain disappears from his face. Jason remembers this moment, when the damage from the bomb finally caved in the roof, and for one last time, he got to see the stars.
And Jason doesn’t want to remember it so well, so clearly. To be like Bruce, a man with only a past, treading again and again the same, tired tragedy.
He looks at Robin, who has now gone still and limp and easy, and he wants to be able to rest.
Jason holds his own hand in the middle of the damp, dreary cemetery, until the end. Robin’s mask is gone, and this time when he dies, his eyes close, gently, all on their own.
Jason feels alive the way he only ever does on rooftops. The air is crisp, the night bright with the light of the moon, the streetlamps, every window on the block lit up from within. There’s a thrum in his veins and so much warmth on his skin.
Post-patrol, Dick is stretching his hamstrings behind him, trying to roll out the ache. Tim and Steph sit side by side on the ledge of the building, legs dangling over, shoulders knocking together. Duke is drowsy and dazed from his double shift, starfished on the floor looking up at the sky, and Damian stands over him, asking about the constellations on this side of the world.
Even Bruce and Cass joke lightly and quietly to each other on the far corner of the roof, huddled up, mirror images. They fit together, partners, in that perfect way Batman and Robin always used to. The way Jason and Bruce, a lifetime ago, used to.
Jason has a lot of rough edges—nothing fits well against the cracks. There’s venom now in his veins, and sometimes when you touch him, it burns. Still, he doesn’t flinch when Dick slings an arm across his shoulders and leans forward to tease Tim about his near-miss earlier. He doesn’t leave when Duke joins in, shouting from his place on the floor, or when Steph jabs him in the ribs and makes a grab for the helmet in his hands.
He just lets them crowd around him, maneuver carefully through his shards, and he breathes in the city air, looking into the bright blackness above the streets.
In the distance, just for a second, Jason swears he sees a figure in motion, hears a high, teasing laugh. Between the gap of two buildings, he sees the flashing shape of Robin, flying in a wide arc through the air. He’s whole and loud and vibrant. He’s blessedly, gloriously free.