Chapter Text
When Jason wakes up, the laughter doesn’t stop. It never does after the really bad dreams, just continues echoing in his ears all night like a broken record stuck at the same song.
He tries to breathe through it, inhales deep through his nose and struggles to let it back out as his lungs hurt. He throws away the covers, removes his sweaty shirt and pads his way to the bathroom barefoot, only in his pajama pants. Every step seems to match another crazed laugh, another beat of the crowbar. When he turns on the light and looks in the mirror, he half-expects to see his domino mask and a patchwork of bruises covering his skin, but he only finds pale cheeks and hollow, tired eyes looking at him instead. His stomach turns, and he’s not sure if it’s the ever-playing laughter in his head or his very poor state that causes it.
The nightmares are getting worse. They're more frequent, more intense. Jason is often loud - he got a noise complaint for that actually, and it was incredibly awkward - and his fingers sometimes wander to the gun under his pillow in his sleep. Not the safest, he must admit, but every time he tries to sleep without it near, he just ends up staying awake, his eyes darting around the room, terrified.
He throws some water on his face, threads his fingers through his sweat-matted hair. The clock mounted on the wall across the open bathroom door informs him it's past four in the morning, so he doesn't bother going back to sleep. He debates taking a shower but discards the idea, deciding to deal with the nausea first.
He walks out of the bathroom to the kitchen, ignoring the emptiness of the room. He didn’t bother decorating when he moved in two months ago, and the only furniture other than the kitchen counters is still the chipped wooden table with his singular swivel chair. The walls are a grayish white that rather reminds Jason of his own pallor at the moment.
He trudges to the toaster, one of many second-hand appliances he had bought for this apartment. After placing two slices of bread in, he slumps on the chair and drags his laptop closer on the table.
He types in his password quickly, absentmindedly. The screen lights up to a simple black background, files scattered all over the desktop. After pressing play on some downloaded playlist, he starts the slow, methodical work of dragging each document to the right case file, renaming and organizing with a zeal office workers would be jealous of.
The busy work isn’t really necessary. No matter how disorganized the computer is, he can find everything easily. But on nights like this, having something simple, stupid, unimportant to do with his hands, only applying half of his brain to it, is like cold water on irritated skin. He lets the jovial melody of some 80’s song wash over him, focusing on the beat of the bass or that sharp, unexpected bit of trombone instead of the echoing laughter. He takes deep breaths and listens, listens, listens…
Then he smells fire.
His breath catches in his throat. They surface: barely-there memories of crushed concrete and ash on the air, in his nose, in his mouth; the pleading shout of a woman, the faintest yell of his name; blood, blood everywhere on him, ripped clothes and broken bones and something pressing down on whatever part of his body isn’t already in pieces to grind it to dust; the noise of the explosion, the finality of it, his eyes closing as he accepts it all and the clock ticks
five
four
three
two
ONE
and Jason gasps, and turns his head around, and sees his toaster smoking.
He stays on the chair for a long moment, a hand on his heart and the other covering his face. His throat feels so tight it hurts, but he doesn’t let the tears fall. When he’s breathing again, he lifts himself off the chair and hovers over the toaster on shaking feet, yanking the plug out of the socket.
The music has stopped; he must have picked a short playlist. His bread is burnt, black as charcoal. He throws it in the trash, but the bin is so full it simply slides off the pile and onto his floor. He has to resist the urge to kick the stupid thing across the room.
He slams his laptop closed instead, letting out a shaky exhale. Fuck this. Fuck sleep, and fuck fire and fuck nights off because he’s never gotten a single panic attack like this when he’s out on patrol. Fuck his stupid body for needing rest and fuck his stupid toaster that’s smoking and fuck his full trash can that he’ll have to empty in the morning.
Jason is done. He wants to sleep but he knows he won’t manage it. He wants to calm down, but the moment he lets his guard fall his stupid bread is burning and panic flares up again. He wants to lie down and close his eyes and keep them closed for a year or a decade or maybe forever. He wants a break, goddamnit.
His eyes drift to his living room, at the helmet waiting patiently for him on his second-hand couch. His trembling expression hardens.
Fuck nights off, indeed.
He’s on his bike twenty minutes later, geared up and heading for a bar in Crime Alley that he knows is a front for a cartel. He wanted to investigate a bit more before storming in, maybe call one of the Bats for help, but if he doesn’t act right now, he thinks he’ll explode for the second time.
The drive is short. He has his earpiece disabled, not in the mood to hear Barbara lecturing him tonight. He leaves the bike in an alley and walks decidedly to the bar, empty except for the barman and two rough-looking men slumped over different tables.
The bell rings as he throws the door open, and the two men look up. Jason notices that neither of them have any bottles or glasses on their tables.
The barman raises an eyebrow at him. “How can I help ya, fella?”
Jason’s boots echo around the bar as the door closes behind him. He stands right in front of the bar, keeping an eye on the two not-so-drunk men. “I’m here for Castilla.”
He sees the barman’s fists tighten. “Afraid I can’t help ya, then. Don’t know the guy.” He throws a careful look to the man on Jason’s left, and he sees the man there standing up, tall and muscular.
“You sure?” Jason drawls, leaning closer, his helmet almost touching the barman’s face. “Cause I heard he keeps coming over here, you see.”
The barman’s gaze is fixed somewhere over Jason’s shoulder. “Must have heard wrong,” he croaks.
“I see,” Jason says, rage still shimmering under the surface. “Then tell me – what’s your name?”
“Mike.”
“Tell me, Mike, I also heard he’s dealing to minors. Is that wrong too?”
Mike gulps, and Jason hears a heavy step behind him, and he ducks just in time for the big guy to punch air instead of his head. He draws the guns out of his holsters with practiced hands and sweeps a kick at the big guy, who takes a step back before it can reach him. Behind him, the other not-so-drunk man is quickly approaching, and Jason turns around hastily, aiming a sloppy shot at him. The rubber bullet hits him on the leg and he howls, collapsing on the floor.
One down, two to go. Jason smirks.
A hand appears too fast at his side and grabs his gun, yanking it out of his grip with an astounding amount of strength. Jason takes a step back, colliding with the bar as a result, and the guy lands a packed punch right on his ribs. As Jason struggles to get a breath in, someone – Mike – grabs his arms from behind the bar tightly.
More punches land, and Jason is left breathless for the third time tonight. His body is stretched thin from the insomnia and there are still faint echoes of memories in the back of his mind, the taste of ash, the ring of a laugh…
Jason snarls and huffs and presses the trigger on the gun still clutched in his other hand, miraculously getting the barman. Mike shrieks and lets Jason go to cradle his bleeding foot, allowing Jason to land a punch on his face. The man trips and hits the shelves behind him roughly, jostling the glass bottles into merry little jingles.
Jason doesn’t get to enjoy his small victory, however, because his face suddenly collides with the bar.
Once, Twice, three times. His helmet is almost cracking.
As the big guy pushes his head down a fourth time, Jason presses the gun right in his gut and fires. The guy screams, stepping back, and Jason shoots him another time in his shoulder. This time, the man falls to the ground, gripping the edge of a table.
“Fuck you,” Jason pants at him, feeling his head spin. He turns, walking toward the door behind the bar. It has a “NO ENTRY” sign that he’s about to starkly ignore when another shot rings out and pain erupts on his back.
He yells, the force of the shot careening him forward and into the ground. He groans, feeling blood seep out of the wound through the paralyzing pain of this bullet stuck inside his body, pushing apart his insides.
“FUCK YOU,” he shouts at the man, lying on his back and then realizing that it was a bad idea when his skin is pulled painfully. “Fuck. You.”
The big guy is still holding the gun, his hand shaking as his eyes struggle to remain open. Jason got him in good spots; he’ll pass out from the pain soon.
The problem is until then.
Another shot fires, but it’s so off the mark that Jason hears it break a bottle from the bar. He chuckles. This guy is a joke.
The gun points at him again. It shakes. The man slumps further and further down the table, but the nozzle doesn’t divert from Jason’s direction, as if it sensed his earlier mockery and took offense.
Jason realizes then that he can very well die for a second time today. And he realizes… he realizes that he doesn’t really care.
He stares at that nozzle and finds himself empty. Who cares if the bullet hits him and breaks his stupid helmet and buries itself into his brain? He certainly doesn’t. Living has been a pretty troublesome activity lately. The nightmares hunt him in his sleep and the panic hunts him when awake. The only moments of refuge he has from them is during patrol, when he’s hurting people. What kind of sick person is only calm when he can beat someone up?
He has nothing to live for except violence. He’s returned right to where he started; a volatile street rat with no future ahead of him other than crime and blood and sweat. The only difference between them is that Jason had the opportunity to be better, to crawl out of the hole he was in – and then he died, and something else came back. He lost that chance, and now he’s back to being nothing, back to having nothing and hoping for nothing other than survival, and truly, is that a good enough reason to make himself keep going?
He doesn’t want to. He should have never come back from the dead. He should have ended his story as a Robin, as a gifted kid who would become so much more, as a story of a lost hero. He came back vengeful and broken and wrong and he can’t fix himself, can’t find the reason to, when deep in his heart, he knows he shouldn’t have come back in the first place.
Maybe this is just nature’s payback. He was supposed to stay dead, and this is just her way of undoing a mistake. Here you go, Jason, get some peace now. Piss off.
He chuckles, and focuses back on the gun. “Shoot me,” he whispers. “Just shoot.”
Jason sees the man’s finger tightening and hears the shot firing and then pain, pain, pain in his stomach and
everything
turns
black.