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Lunacy is defined as the act of repeating the same action while expecting different results.
Well, go fish because it is not the worst thing Tim’s been accused of recently.
Besides, maybe it is insanity that drives him, that has him on his hands and knees in front of a grave, dirt caked inside his fingernails, digging and digging and digging. Maybe insanity is what has him clawing for the hinges on a half-submerged wooden casket in the ground.
Maybe insanity is what Tim should have surrendered himself to years ago.
(Maybe the only thing to be said about digging is that Tim is finally following in Jack and Janet’s footsteps)
Lightning cracks above the boy and the grave, illuminating the sky in streaks of golden tears, and rain smears white and red face paint down Tim’s cheeks. Smudges of pink that coagulate like thick blood and drip, drip into the muddy ditch Tim has submerged himself inside.
“What are you doing?” someone asks, their voice sounding choked with something akin to horror. Disgust. Intrigue.
“No. What are you doing?” he repeats, song-like and lilting, before laughing.
It’s the type of laugh that stirs inside his ribcage before erupting out of his esophagus like sharpened blades. It hurts to laugh and he can taste the face paint on his tongue and it tastes like the circus and medical restraints and it tastes like pain.
There is no response to his question.
He keeps digging.
After too long and not long enough and after the exact right amount of time, Tim’s fingers dig into the latches of a coffin and he doesn’t let himself hesitate before he pulls and he pulls and the coffin opens up in a yawning, breath-taking unsealing.
He stares inside the small wooden coffin, a smile tearing at his mouth and stretching his lips in a smile too big for his own face. The smile hurts, but it hurts in a good way. In a way that says ‘you’re still alive’ and ‘he’s about to be too.’ It hurts in a way that means everything is about to get better.
So, so much better.
“What are you doing?” that damned voice asks again.
Again, Joker Junior bats it away. “Shut up, Tim. I’m fixing things.” And then he turns away from that voice, from Tim, turns away from the part of himself that are crooning in fear at his actions, and grins fervently down at the body in the coffin.
Joke Junior laughs again but this time when he speaks the sound is strangely reproachful, “There’s no grave that can hold my body down.”
He reaches out for the cold, still skeleton. Maternal. Possessive.
Desperate.
He grips the bones, feeling them soften, dough-like, against his fingers. Fake. Something like rage flutters inside him and he skitters down into the casket, feet landing with a soft thud amidst the both too-brittle and too-soft bones of his big brother.
Absently, to an empty gravestone and the ghost he’s sure must haunt it, he whispers, “Apparently there aren’t any that can hold yours down either.”
There’s a moment where this makes pitch-black anger simmer over his mind like water boiling out of a pot. But, sure enough, when the heat spills over, it disintegrates into a maniacal giddiness. The laugh tumbles out of his mouth and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs and his knees buckle and he’s rolling around next to the bones in the casket now, but he’s still laughing.
The Joker is dead, but he is also etched inside the boy’s memory like an infected tattoo or a limb that needs to be cleaved clean off, and no matter how hard he tries to scrape the clown off, still the Joker lingers. Pins him to the walls of his own mind with bloody screws.
He keeps laughing.
(He can’t stop)
(Please help him)
While his body may be lost to the psychotic humor, Tim’s mind begins to wander. It inches away from the corporeal scene, almost disgusted, as he realizes what it means that his brother’s corpse is missing.
It means, he thinks, that someone has stolen you, Jason.
“Aww…” Junior clicks with a small shake of the head. “Don’t worry, Timmy. We’ll find him. We’ll find him, and then Jason will come home with us because mean old Mister Brucie Wayne don’t want us no more. Thinks something is wrong with me,” he laughs and laughs and laughs. “But you wouldn’t judge us, Jason. No, no. Dick says you hated the Joker as much as Tim does. More, even. Isn’t that wonderful?”
He curls up to the all too fake corpse in the all too real casket, pulling bones over his flesh like a quilt, comforted by the earthy scent of hope, and stares up at the sky.
“I killed him, Jason. I killed the Joker.”
Quietly, in the back of his mind, the part still warily reaching for awareness, the part too scared to step forward and too awake to step back, whispers, “Dick always says that you were the bravest, coolest kid that he ever met. You wouldn’t be scared of us, Jason, would you?”
__________
Jason remembers dying.
He remembers it more than he does coming back from the dead. He remembers the pain and the bomb and the suffocating weight on his chest. He remembers trying to scream, only to realize with a blinding agony that his lungs have been impaled with something sharp and slicked with blood.
His blood.
He remembers dying, and he remembers what came after (The League, and training until his body was black and blue, and Ra’s whispering in his ear), but Jason doesn’t remember being dead.
It bothers him sometimes, in the long, unsteady silence of midnight, that there is a period of his existence (or lack thereof) that he will never recall. Those months he spent inside a grave, swarmed over by dirt and bugs and seeping rain… those weeks (months) he will never get back because, unlike him, they are gone forever.
And then the years after. Those months. He remembers them.
Years of plotting his revenge.
Years of waiting for Bruce to just do it already. Just kill the Joker, please.
Years of disappointment and rage, and years of the building and building roar of grief that the man who took the life he could’ve had away from him was still alive and well. Years of his life that he will never get back.
Years of planning just to end up learning through the Gotham grapevine that the Joker had been killed by Robin.
Robin.
Jason still can’t believe it.
The third Boy Wonder, Jason’s replacement (can you even replace a replacement?), is now a murderer. A true vigilante. An axe of justice coming down to sever the necks of face painted monsters.
As Jason draws closer to the patch of Earth that he once crawled out of, a cold feeling encroaches over his veins, icy and slow and numbing. He sees the gravestone — the one without Bruce’s last name because Bruce never cared enough to add it — and any lingering thoughts of the new Robin go tumbling out of his skull because today it is not the name he died with that has Jason pissed off.
It’s the loose dirt piled in a mound beside the blasted stone.
It’s the fact that someone’s mutilating the grave that Jason had been planning on mutilating. The grave, however depressing and isolating, is Jason’s and Jason’s alone.
Meaning it should be his and his alone to destroy.
Laughter spills from the other side of the tower of dirt, and Jason’s fingers drop to the gun on his waist. He creeps forward, searching the darkness with narrowed green eyes before the person in the hole inhales sharply and has Jason’s feet rooting to the grass.
The hole goes silent.
Jason doesn’t know why he doesn’t react right away. Bad night, maybe. Slow reflexes. Surprise catching Jason like a fish in a net.
Should he be defending himself? Attacking? He doesn’t have nearly as much as his gear as he should in a fight because he hadn’t been planning to don his full Red Hood gear, he’d been planning to say goodbye to one of the many parts of his past that he can’t bear to look at.
That’s okay, the Pit reassures. You don’t need gadgets to defend yourself. You’re not Batman. You’re better.
In the end, all the stillness is followed by a silence so outstanding that his skin actually crawls because nobody can be that quiet.
Well, nobody but a Bat.
“Looking for someone?” Jason whips around (how the fuck did they get behind him?) just in time to find himself staring face to face with none other than the replacement, with the boy killer, with—
With not Robin but Timothy fucking Drake.
The kid smiles too wide to be disarming, and it’s only after Jason proceeds to gape at him for a handful of seconds that he realizes there are wounds on the corner of Tim’s mouth that arch his smile into a classic Glasgow grin. The Joker’s handiwork, Jason is sure. The Joker. The dead and cremated and never coming back Joker. The Joker who is dead because of Tim.
Timothy Drake.
“Shit,” Jason’s hand rubs at his helmet, trying to massage away the migraine building through the red metal.
“Who are you?” Tim asks, and his voice is too high-pitched and strung-out to be natural. To sound right. Then, too Jason but also definitely not too Jason, Tim says, “Obviously, it’s the Red Hood! Genius, huh? You’re the genius of the duo? Yeah, right!”
The third Robin is in civilian clothes, but they're filthy with rain and mud and there are white and pink streaks caked down Tim’s chin and neck forming a choker of washed-away face paint and he looks so completely fucking pathetic.
He looks nothing like the Timothy Drake that Jason has spent the last two years planning to teach a lesson. The cocky, arrogant son-of-a-bitch with too much money. The better Robin.
Fuck, he doesn’t look like the better Robin now. He looks…
Honestly, he looks like a fucking baby. “Tim?”
That — of course — causes the kid to flinch hard, shuddering in on himself with a violent kind of repulsion. His hands clasp over his ears as his head shakes wildly, left and right, left and right. “No!” he snaps, vicious and high-pitched. “Shut up! You shut up! That’s not my name! That is not my name!”
Jason blanches, and he knows it’s stupid, but the kid just looks so wrecked, so utterly broken and taped back together, that he refuses to stand by, stone-faced. He’s not Batman. He doesn’t let his family (because this is his little brother, isn’t it? In a way?) suffer when he could possibly do something to help.
The Joker is who Jason has been plotting revenge on for the past two years, and maybe Jason should hate Tim for taking all of that away… but he doesn’t. He can’t.
Plans, Jason is realizing rapidly, sometimes need to change.
He clicks off the helmet, and just like he’d hoped, just like he’d suspected, Tim recognizes him. His body shudders with recognition before going rigid with surprise and horror and also, faintly… sheer, unbridled, inhumane delight.
“Hey, kid. I think…” he eyes the Joker scars on Tim’s mouth again. “I think we need to talk.”
___________
They become something of a nightmare.
The Red Hood and his Robin. Jason and his mentally crooked little brother. Gotham’s very own Princes of the Night.
When the two of them debut in the Gotham crime underworld, the streets do not run clean of blood for days because apart, they are unhinged and driven by want and revenge, but together… together they are justice riding in on death’s pale horse. Together, they are an impenetrable wall of calculated genius trained by none other than the Dark Knight himself.
Jason had always planned to change Gotham. Even before he became Robin, when he was still just a small boy with a dying mom and dead dad, he wanted to make a difference. He wanted to make a safer Gotham. A better one. One where good fathers didn’t have to do bad things to survive, and no kid went hungry or died strung out on pills.
Robin hadn’t been enough.
But the Red Hood? With Red Robin at his side? Well, together, they don’t just change Gotham— they run it.