Chapter Text
I sit down for dinner
wth my dead brother
again
This is the last dream I ever want to have
—Michael Dickman, "Killing Flies"
There was a bird in Jason’s kitchen.
It was small, and it had black hair, and blue eyes, and a throat that was split open and an expression that betrayed nothing as it bled and bled and bled all over his plywood floors.
It made no noise as it died.
Jason did not look away, not for a second. In that moment, Batman himself could have crashed in through his window and Jason still wouldn’t have looked away, condemning himself to look at a dying robin with no reprieve.
He didn’t deserve any reprieve.
And maybe a small part of him wanted Batman to catch him.
But Batman hadn’t been seen in over a week now. Nor had Nightwing.
Nor had Robin; but Jason doubted that bore any sort of saying.
The Birds of Prey had been handling Gotham, and Jason had been… doing his best with his own territory, even though he could see the Birds creeping in from time to time when Jason slacked off.
They didn’t interact. At all. They avoided him like the plague, except they’d never do something as undignified as avoiding a Rogue. So maybe it was Jason that was avoiding them. He was avoiding all of Batman’s patrol routes. Not that it mattered.
It mattered, but not really. Batman was with Robin.
Robin. Not Jason. Robin.
Like the robin in his kitchen, dying, gurgling on its own blood and choking, broken wings twitching and flailing about, tiny body, jerking, shaking as though containing a little earthquake.
No one came crashing in through the window. There had been no one at all, the last several days, despite the obvious clues he’d been leaving all this time. There was no news. There wasn’t even anything over the comms, or maybe they’d just shifted to a newer, more secure line after… After.
There was nothing at all.
It made his teeth itch, his skin crawl, his hair stand on end. It made something roil unpleasantly in his gut, and his spine felt like it wanted to climb out of his body through his mouth.
After the twenty-seventh time the bird went lifeless and still, just for a few, long, drawn out seconds, dead— before it would start writhing again— Jason closed his eyes. Tried to rub the exhaustion in them away, prepared himself to watch, fixedly, for the twenty eighth iteration.
But the bird was gone.
Jason didn’t know whether the iron bands around his heart spelled relief or longing.
The thing with a jack-in-the-box is that the moment of anticipation is fulfilled. Those uncanny, elongated, unblinking staring contests with a closed box finally have a resolution. No matter how long one waits, there is the unequivocal knowledge that there is an end to it. Not necessarily a pleasant one.
Jason's relationship with his waking hours lately, and his scarce sleeping hours if they tend to occur, is similar to a timid child's reaction to flames. A child who's not been burnt himself perhaps but has seen fire in the form of a massive billionaire in a bat costume beating up criminals to a pulp for a living.
The first few days, he thinks he deserves it. He imagines it. Batman in all his righteous rage and glory, raining his incompetence and his rage on Jason. He imagines that he'd look remorseful, but not enough to stop. He wouldn't kill Jason, but maybe Jason won't walk the same after that encounter is over.
The thing though… The thing is that the clown never bursts out. Of the box that is. Jason waits. And he laments. And he remembers the way phantom bones gave away under his weight, the maddening rush that he felt in his blood with each mangled cry, he recalls them in bits, little shards of glass, he remembers the chase, the way the little bird…near the end was dragging his bloodied body away from Jason, holding a trembling and broken hand up in an unwilling surrender. Jason never felt more alive.
Jason never felt more alive.
That night he understood the thirst for blood. And since then, he's been waiting, like a guilty child, staring at his door, at his windows, over his shoulders, expecting Batman to come raining down upon him, as though privy to his thoughts. Jason doesn't know why he assumes that Batman would know that he enjoyed it so much, that he grinned down at his replacement as he pushed down on the ankle, as he reached for a sharpened edge and took it to a throat. His throat.
Jason begins to think, after a little while, maybe…Batman isn't coming because he's in mourning. Or maybe he's plotting. Or maybe they're all watching him, like an insect under surveillance. He thinks about provoking them again, as though his offense wasn't morally heinous enough. He wonders whether there's an act that will push that righteous dick over the edge.
If it's not a mutilation of his precious new toy soldier, what else could it be?
Jason can't stop thinking about his damn eyes. Not the eyes themselves, but the pure terror reflected in them, in tandem with Jason's own reflection. The pupils shrunk into pinpricks. A wholly physiological reaction that even the bravest of soldiers can't control. It's the pain. A normal response. But his eyes, Jason doesn't know whether he enjoyed the way they stared up at him, or detested the creature more because of them.
There is always that youthful innocence in eyes that have not been privy to a certain brand of pain. Maybe Jason enjoyed wiping that look away. Even if it comes at the cost of his own punishment.
A punishment that is pending, but not on its way. At some point, in the whirlwind of keeping up with his territory, and punching assholes, and seeing dead birds here and there, Jason begins to hysterically foster the question: How long is this going to take?
How long? Batman isn't the type to procrastinate on vengeance and justice.
Jason should have been giddy maybe, that he's getting away , that maybe Batman doesn't actually give as big a fuck as he always claimed he does.
Because for fuck's sake — Jason didn't leave a single bone unbroken or untouched. Short of throwing the boy off the actual tower and watching his body splat on the pavement like a useless bug, he's done everything else.
Maybe he shouldn't be that surprised. Actually, the more he thinks about it, the better he can justify the radio silence. After all, what did Batman do to Joker after he beat Jason to a bloody pulp and killed him? Nothing. He did nothing!
Jason laughs when he finally realizes this, because of course. Why was he expecting retribution? Why was he expecting Batman to give a shit about anyone? He claimed that he loved Jason, he claimed that Jason's position as Robin was sacred, or at least secured through a sense of entitlement.
And then Jason died– no– he was horrifically killed, and Batman didn't move a pinky.
Poor kid, Jason thinks without attaching any actual sentiment to the thought. Poor kid, that foolish little shit, must've thought he was special.
Maybe Jason could've gone further. He could have drawn more blood. Snapped more bones. Elicited louder cries out of the exhausted lungs. He would've apparently gotten away with it.
But still, it's not his lack of reaction that bothers Jason. It's his complete absence. It's not that Batman isn't chasing Jason. It's just that he's not here. Not on the streets. Not on the comms. Not anywhere. None of the bats are.
Jason will lie if anyone asks, not that anyone ever would, and he would say that he bit the bullet because he was curious. He was curious to see what cave the great Bat was lurking in. And so he followed the trail and got to the end of it.
But the truth is, Jason is tired. Not with the situation itself, seeing as he helped initiate it, but rather this annoying power parade of control coming from Batman. It feels somewhat insulting. God knows if Jason had beaten a civilian with that much severity he would already be in Arkham exchanging anecdotes with Gotham's most deranged.
So, yeah. He's tired. He doesn't like this treatment. And maybe he is curious too. He decides to get to the end of it.
And he gets there. The end, that is. He gets to the end of it. To the reason. Reason why he has not seen Batman around. The reason, the reason which has white walls, and sterile beds, and the smell of antiseptics and tubes and the beeping of several monitors and—
And one Bruce Wayne, haggard, looking far older than his age– as old as Alfred, if one looks at his eyes too closely– which Jason doesn’t, for that matter—
One Bruce Wayne, next to one Timothy Drake.
The end of it… is the hospital. Where Bruce Wayne has been sitting vigil for the past few weeks–months? Nonstop. Barely enough to piss, even.
The bird, as it turns out, is not quite as dead as Jason imagined it to be. But he thinks that perhaps he looks worse now than he would have in death.
Little bird. Not dying, not dead, but something else entirely. Something worse, and better, both at the same time. And Bruce, unmoving, still as a stone statue if stone statues could exude grief like the rotten miasma of a corpse.