Work Text:
Status report: Jason’s dad is dead.
Status report, edited for additional detail: Jason’s dad is dead. Jason is Nightwing/nineteen(/eighteen). Jason is alone. Jason’s big brother made him Nightwing. Jason is not allowed to kill. (Jason is not allowed to kill as Nightwing.) Jason’s dad is dead. Jason’s big brother left him alone. Jason’s big brother is pretending to be their (dead) dad. Jason’s big brother is raising their (dead) dad’s other kid. Their (dead) dad’s other kid is not allowed to kill (but he does, he does, Jason knows). Jason’s big brother has not left the other kid alone. Jason’s big brother is talking to himself and jumping at shadows. Jason’s big brother(’s city) is sick. Jason’s city is sick. Jason is sick. Jason is sick of being Nightwing and nineteen and angry and alone.
(Dickie says Jason is not allowed to kill but Shelton Lyle is allowed to kill Jason for not being Dickie, and that doesn’t seem really fair, does it? That doesn’t seem fair. It just doesn’t seem fair.)
Status report, edited to eliminate trivialities: Jason was dead. Jason is alive again. Jason’s dad is dead. (Jason’s dad is not alive again.)
Ninety-eight nights as Nightwing without (catastrophic) incident. (Ninety-eight nights of incidents. Ninety-eight nights of Nightwing, nineteen, alone. Ninety-eight nights of restraining himself into restraining criminals, no matter how inhuman the denizens of Blüdhaven insist on acting towards each other. Ninety-eight nights of being a good boy and not pulling out his favorite combat knife, because for whatever goddamn reason, he doesn’t wanna disappoint his big brother.)
Ninety-nine sees him stumble. Someone gets the drop on him. No, not someone. Something. This slab of meat doesn’t deserve the honor of being regarded as human. Its name is Shelton Lyle—it tells him, right to his face, and it’s at that moment Nightwing knows he won’t be surviving this encounter. It ties Nightwing up to a lamppost, doses him with opioids that leave him daydreaming about shooting himself in the face to keep his corpse from looking like his mother’s, and makes him watch as it lays an unhoused mother of three down across the pavement and cuts her from sternum to navel.
It makes Jason hold the heart in his hands as the drugs wear off. As it slices the costume from his ribs. As it cuts out Jason’s own. And he is Jason, at this point. Shelton Lyle calls him as much. Knows who he is, who they all are. It calls Jason Jason, calls him an impostor, a weak imitator. Not worth the rivalry. Barely worth the monologue, but if it’s to get its precious Dick Grayson’s attention, well, what a way to kick off its career.
The comfort of his big brother’s sigil is discarded beside him in shreds, a distant blue light. Pain is everything. The only thing.
Jason dies as he has one or two or three times before—only this time, the name on his tongue is his brother’s. But Nightwing isn’t coming. (And Batman never does.) Nightwing is already here, and he is Jason, and he is too weak to save himself yet again.
But finally, god, finally, he is not too weak for recompense.
Jason can’t kill the first man who killed him, ‘cause then Dad can’t kill him instead.
Jason can’t kill the second man who killed him, ‘cause Dad’s already dead.
Jason can’t kill the third man who killed him, ‘cause Jason can’t die.
Jason can kill the fourth. He’s not allowed to, sure, but he can. He can. He can. He can. He can he can he can he can he can he can he can he can he can. And he has the knife to prove it.
At their second meeting, Shelton Lyle is easy enough to catch off-guard. Most murderers do not expect their victims to pop back up the morning after and keep swinging. (Jason would know. He’s been on both sides.) He’s inhumanly strong, inhumanly durable—a meta, maybe? an experiment?—but here’s the thing about Jason: Jason is very fucking good at his job. And this morning, his job is going home, changing into his civvies, and heading back out to swat one particularly annoying insect, enhanced biology or not.
“I have a proposal for you,” the slab of pathetic heavily-chained meat drawls after Jason takes off its gag.
“Aren’t you bold,” he sneers back. “Not in much of a position to be asking anything of me, are ya?”
“Bring Richard here. Let him off me instead. I get taken down by a less humiliating adversary, and you get a Batman who actually loves you enough to kill for you. We both win.”
Jay is quiet for a long time.
Some other week, he realizes distantly, he may not have turned the offer down, even knowing Lyle would just use it as an escape attempt. The delusional temptation to trick someone into accidentally showing they care about him waxes and wanes from day to day. Today he died and no one called to check in. Today he already knows they don’t.
“Nah,” he decides finally, voice breaking pathetically. “He’s let me down too many times. I fight my own battles now.”
It snorts. “You mean you lose your own battles—while larping in your beloved Dickie’s duds while he, a city away, ignores you to focus on his real family. You know, I had this whole speech lined up comparing you to me, really getting in your head about it, but it felt too insulting to my own competencies. You’re a cheap imitator to the good guys and the bad ones. And neither of them want you.”
He gestures with the point of his knife at the slab in the chair, and then back at himself. “From where I’m standing, I’m feeling pretty confident in my own abilities.”
“You’re right,” it panders. “Foolish of me to be taken down like that—it seems I was missing some crucial information about your biology. I should’ve gone with my initial plan. Maybe I still will, after I get out of here.”
He really shouldn’t take the bait. But he’s off his game. “Initial plan?”
“I go on cutting up regular old street scum, and just pin it all on you.” It says it like it ordered the wrong bagel—should’ve gotten lox on that instead of capers. Next time, next time.
“Is it really the best idea to be telling me this? I assume your little breakout plan doesn’t involve killing me for good, if you’re planning on using me as your scapegoat.”
“What does telling you have to do with anything? In what universe would your precious big brother believe you? He knows what you’re capable of.”
Jay growls low. The slab keeps blabbering.
“I mean really. Just picture it! You know what Richard is going to do when he finds out from the news that his little bluejay is out there slicing up homeless rats in his Nightwing blues? He’s going to sigh in relief. He’s been waiting this whole time for the other shoe to drop, for you to go off the rails in a spectacular show of force. And he’ll see the slightest suggestion that you have—damn the evidence to the contrary, damn your insistence that you would never, you’ve changed—and he’ll ignore it all, ignore your kicking, and your screaming, and your blubbering, because he’ll finally have solid excuse to toss you in Arkham for good and never have to worry about the little family embarrassment ever again.”
(Thing is, it’s right. That absolutely woulda worked.
It majorly fucked up, goin’ with Plan B.)
“Nah,” he says simply, crouching down in front of the chair to be at eye level. “I don’t think you’re gonna do that. I think I’m just gonna torture and kill you right now.”
“And when your passé monologuing goes on for too long and I break free?”
“Ooh, this is actually a fun one. I gotta admit, I picked up some real neat tricks spending two or three years as the Crown Prince of the Contingency Plan Kingdom and all.” Jay props his head on his hands and smiles. “You know how your sinuses hurt? How they’re kinda… watery and tender? Like, just a bit? Just a tad? Like maybe someone poked a needle up there?”
The slab stays silent for once.
He shuts his eyes wistfully. “See, I broke into a hospital here in Blüd last month to break up a designer drug ring, and you know what I found in one of the biohazard disposal bins two doors down? A prion research lab—with a sharps disposal container awaiting incineration. I’ve seeded a transmissible misfolding of proteins in your brain. You have ten years to live.”
“You’re giving me ten years,” the slab spits haughtily after a telling silence, “and you think I won’t be able to find or fund a cure on my own by then? Have you forgotten my day job already, or are you just a fucking moron?”
“Mm, yeah,” Jay agrees, “I did consider that. And honestly, I don’t think I’d hate that. You invent a cure for yourself, you also invent it for a hell of a lot of people who are, y’know, people, and not pathetic little weasels. You could cut a heart out of an innocent civilian every day for the rest of your long, long life and I still think I woulda done a net good here.” He sniffs. “Unless you do a real good job of keeping your development of a cure secret, of course. Tricky, but possible. So I just decided to just throw some spaghetti at the wall. Really get wacky with it. Why not, right? So I also put a couple drops of organic mercury onto your skin. That gives you… what, ten months? So even if you do get out, or someone stops me, or if—heh—if I change my mind and get all soppy and pathetic and decide to leave you alive after all… kinda too late to take it back, now, huh?”
“You’re—bluffing.”
“I also put a time-release capsule with a bunch of button batteries down your throat. Could probably survive that with your existing enhancements. Or not. Could have to feel every second of the batteries eating little holes through your intestines as your own waste spills into your abdomen and the sepsis kills you slowly and excruciatingly over the course of, say, ten hours.”
It pretends to ignore him. “And even if you’re not? Your theatrics mean nothing. Your hubris will be your undoing. There’s nothing you can do to me—nothing that money and intellect can’t fix. Two things you seem to be lacking in spades.”
“Mhm, yeah, real dunce,” he agrees magnanimously. “Absolutely no resources at my disposal. Here’s the thing, though.”
The slab writhes pathetically against its bindings. Jay leans in.
“I’m a little fucked up right now.” He taps the point of his ka-bar at his own temple. The skin nicks, but not deep enough to bleed. “Been having kind of a rough day. And I don’t like you. I don’t like listening to you. Your voice, it’s not nice, it’s a little grating, really. And just your luck, you picked the one goddamn kid in the whole goddamn Wayne family who has absolutely no problem doing this.”
He strolls in uneasy lurches to his backpack, shaking its contents onto the floor. The ka-bar is exchanged for a set of flat-nosed pliers in his left hand and a pair of garden shears in his right. Jay noticed some interesting cybernetics when he was tying the thing up, but—not enough to matter. Not enough to save its pathetic half-life from Jason’s bug-out kit and the inevitable cut-off head.
“Tongue out,” Jay orders.
The slab, perhaps smartly, keeps its mouth shut, but that won’t really do much against garden shears and pliers and the pissed-off crimelord whose sabbatical he’s ruining, will it, bud?
“Tongue out,” he repeats. “I’m gonna cut it out, and I can’t cut it out if it’s in your mouth.” He hits its jaw fairly hard with an open palm and the handle of the scissors, disorienting it enough to force the pliers between its teeth and clamped onto its squirming tongue.
He yanks it towards himself, dragging its head with it, careful to keep his gloved hands out of biting range. The scissors make more of a drawn-out, sloppy crrrllllunchsshll sound than a classic, simple snip. They don’t even go all the way through. Disappointing. He wrangles with the meat and scissors for a while, reminded fondly of the times he’s tried to staple through the corners of essays with too many pages, until the tongue has been sawed a good two-thirds of the way through, the tough, straining muscle of it hanging limply by its remaining bridge of bright red meat as Jay repositions the pliers to grab onto the part that’s not rearing to fall out of its messy, drooling, screaming enclosure.
He snips off the rest of the tongue and fishes out a lighter from his pocket to cauterize the stub. Don’t want the slab dying too quickly, of course. Can’t have it choking on its own blood and ending the game too soon. Not after—after the woman on the street. He’ll have to—god, her kids. Her poor kids. Jay needs to track them down, make sure they have somewhere safe to go now that their—
Jason’s phone rings. He shoves the lighter in his pocket and lopes over to where it lays amongst the various sharps and tools from his backpack. The caller ID reads “work 2”. Dickie’s cell.
“What,” he snaps as he flicks it open, not even thinking to move out of the room with the screaming piece of meat providing a backing track.
“Oh god,” the phone crackles, “oh my god, thank god, Jay, you’re alive, you’re okay, you’re alive.”
Between the slab’s tongueless gargles for help and Dickie’s hysterical sobbing, Jay can barely understand him.
“What do you want?”
“I—Jay, something’s wrong, wrong with me, I—someone sent me pictures, of you, you were dead, your, your chest was, I thought—they looked real but I—I can’t tell, I can’t tell if it’s real, it’s so hard to tell sometimes, I see you all the time, and I—I’m scared, and I don’t know if I can keep doing this, I can’t keep doing this, Jay, I thought I could but I can’t, I keep, I keep hearing screaming—”
“You and me both, brother,” he grumbles.
“—and I’m scared, I’m so scared all the time, and I keep thinking that I’m gonna—I’m gonna hurt Damian, or that Damian’s gonna hurt someone, or hurt me, and oh god, Jay, I—I don’t wanna hurt him, I don’t, I can’t, I can’t do this, I can’t be this, I—”
“You woke me up.” Jay swallows around the frog in his throat. “If you don’t need something, go back to fucking sleep.”
“Jay, please, I need, I need to see you. I need to talk to you. Please.” He gasps for breath into the receiver. Jay winces, pulling the phone away from his ear. “Please. I need you here. Please.”
“Whatever. Give me the address.”
He listens to Dick’s location and snaps the phone closed.
“Dammit.” Jay kicks the chair the slab is bound to. “Dammit, dammit, god fucking dammit! Fuck!” Hot anger sits like lead in his throat. He hits the wall. Fractures something in his hand. A pleasant, buzzing sting. Picks the ka-bar back up. Kicks his empty backpack across the room. “Waste of my fucking time. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fucking dammit.”
Something unreadable passes over the slab’s face, and then gets stuck there forever. Maybe it was on its way to hope. He’ll never know.
Jason saws Shelton Lyle’s head off in two and a half minutes, wanders a fifteen minute loop-de-loop through unfamiliar alleyways back towards his temporarily apartment, wastes six minutes scrubbing the blood off in his brother’s shower, spends half a minute shaking kibble into Haley’s bowl, and makes the thirty-eight minute drive over to a piece of shit Gotham penthouse to go have a responsible adult conversation with the number one goddamn person he doesn’t wanna fuckin’ see right now.
(He really should try and find some dimethylmercury, one of these days. It would solve so many of his problems so beautifully.)
He parks his bike out back instead of underground. The doorman sneers in recognition as he hits the button at the desk to summon the elevator.
Jay doesn’t have a great grasp on the… mechanics of his deaths. But whatever happens to his body as it pulls itself back together, it never seems to quite manage a full factory reset. The pressure in his recently cracked-open ribs as the elevator accelerates makes him sway with waves and pulses of latent pain, and as it decelerates… the opioid hangover does the rest of the job of bringing him to his knees. By the time he hits the fortieth floor, he has to crawl his way out of the elevator and over to the front door. He gives himself a few minutes to gather enough strength to look presentable before knocking on the door. He can hear Dickie’s sniffly breathing somewhere behind it.
“Open up, shithead,” he calls through, leaning forward with one hand on the doorframe. “I didn’t bring my picks with me and I don’t wanna dull my knives again.”
He steps back and listens to his brother undo both mechanical locks, both electronic ones, and finally, the deadbolt.
Still coming down from the adrenaline high of the kill, the first thought that crosses his mind is that his brother looks like easy prey. The second is that he shouldn’t think things like that.
“Hey Dickie,” he says. “You look like shit.”
“I’m not doing so hot,” he agrees with a stiff smile. “Sorry for the, uh—breakdown. Over the phone. I promise I’ll be normal now.”
“You probably wanna check if I’m a Clayface or whatever,” Jay suggests, pulling out his beloved ka-bar once more.
“Please don’t slash your—” Jay slashes his palm and shows him the blood. Dick pinches the bridge of his nose. “You don’t have to do that every time I see you.”
He shrugs. “It seems to comfort you. Not my fault you’re a paranoid little creep.”
“I’m not comforted by you getting hurt.” He sighs, stepping out of the doorway. “Sorry. Come in, come in.”
“You said someone sent you photoshopped pictures of me dead?”
“Uh, yeah,” he mumbles rawly, handing Jay his unlocked phone in a pretty boneheaded show of trust. “I don’t wanna—look at them again. I’m gonna go—make us some coffee.”
Jay pulls open the messaging app and looks at the most recent incoming. Unknown number. Fifteen photos. Jay in his (k)Nightwing suit. Well, most of it. He’s missing the top half and several of his organs, strewn around him in a puddle so red it almost looks fake. Jesus, even having just lived it, the images still make him shiver. He… doesn’t feel so great knowing his body can piece itself back together after—after that.
Jay looks up to make sure Dick’s out of the room, exes out of the conversation, and deletes it entirely.
“There’s no pictures here,” he calls into the kitchen.
“Huh?” Dick returns to the living room with two foul-smelling mugs of what seems to be pure liquified charcoal.
“Am I in the wrong app? I don’t see any pictures here.” He scrolls sideways on the touchscreen, hamming up the tech illiteracy a bit. “You have too many apps. You should get a flip phone.”
“Gimme.” He hands it over. Dick looks over the screen. “Huh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s, um—yeah, you’re in the wrong app,” Dick sighs, as awful at lying to Jason as he’s always been. “It’s fine, you don’t have to look at them, it was probably just a weird prank. I’m over it. I was just having a little freak out. You can go home.”
Jay takes the mug of coffee from him and stares out the window, trying not to feel like an absolute fucking monster for doing this knowing damn well his brother has been known to hallucinate some real fucked-up shit. It works a little too well. All he can think after that is that it would be remarkably easily to kill him right now. He doesn’t want to, has no reason to, but—contingencies, contingencies. “This wouldn’t happen if you had a flip phone.”
“I’m giving it a year before you finally cave and get a smartphone like the rest of us non-troglodytes.”
“Never. I love living in the dark ages.”
“Jay, I… can I say something?”
“Not like I could stop you. Unless I cut out your tongue or something.” Heh.
“I just wanted to say… thank you.” The level of sincerity in his voice makes Jay want to throw up for at least half a dozen different reasons. “I know I’ve been—kinda hard to be around lately. And the… it’s just been hard. For me, yeah, but for you, too. And I just—”
“It’s fine, Dick,” he interrupts firmly.
“It’s not fine. I never even—I just need you to know how grateful I am. Not just that you’ve taken up my mantle, but that you—that you’ve done it with… respect. Restraint. You’ve done such an amazing job so far, and I was—there was a lot that I was worried about, stepping out of my suit and putting on the cowl, and I just—” He sighs shakily. “I’m just grateful. I know my home is in good hands with you.”
(It normally doesn’t take Jason two and a half minutes to cut off a single head. This one necessitated a bit of elbow grease, to saw through all the cybernetics. He can still feel the resistance of the metal reverberating in the splintered bones of his hands.)
“See?” he says, lead or guilt or half-healed mangled organs weighing heavy in his stomach. “You people need to fucking trust me more. Always so fucking suspicious.”
“About that. The. Me being so suspicious of you all the time. That’s not—I don’t want you to think that’s on you. That’s not—that’s not a reflection of you, or how you’ve been doing. That’s not on you. That’s on me. I just…” He sighs, staring out the broad, bright windows. “Do you take anything? For your…” He twirls his finger in a vaguely offensive loop-de-loop around his temple.
“For what? For being a certified whackjob?”
“I really wish you wouldn’t talk that way about yourself.”
“You’re the one who mimed it,” he complains. “No, I don’t take anything.”
“Should you be? Taking something?”
“You mean other than enough antidepressants to euthanize an ox? Nah, I’m in tip-top shape, Dickie, that’s why I’m always so cheery and full of life.”
He frowns. “I meant have you been diagnosed with anything.”
“I got what Holden Caulfield had.”
Dick blinks, foggy-eyed. “What’d he have?”
“Nothin’. He was just a stressed out, grieving teenager whose family treated him like shit. Not his fault a bunch of armchair psychologists decided to therapy-speak their way through every page of Catcher in the Rye for the last sixty years.”
“Hm.” He curls up on his side on the too-big couch, knees pulled into his chest. “Dames thinks you’re bipolar.”
“Damian’s a lying little prick.”
“Ya know, I think we could all use a little more therapy-speak in our lives.”
“Don’t curse me with that, you little freak. Shrinks are a blight on the earth, and the people who talk like them doubly so.”
“My ‘shrink’,” he says with lazy, sideways air quotes, “wants to try putting me on Haloperidol.”
Jay lets out a low whistle. “And people think I’m the crazy one.”
“I’ve been—seeing and—y’know, hearing some things. And having some… symptoms. Of the. Symptomatic sort.”
Jay… might need to ease up on the gaslighting. A bit. “Uh. For how long…? Because if it’s just recently…”
“Um.” He squints in thought. “Five years? Ish? Late teens.”
Jesus christ. “You cannot tell any of the Bats.”
“I know.”
“I’m serious. You need to wipe that shit from your EMR.”
“I know.”
“They’re not gonna let you be Batman if you tell them. They’re gonna think you’re fuckin’ nuts.”
“Thanks for all the care and support, Jay,” he mumbles into the cushion.
“Oh, you know me. I’m always campaigning for unstable whackos to get to wear the cowl. I have a vested personal interest in the matter, after all.”
“You are not,” Dick growls, frighteningly quiet, “going to be Batman. I’m not letting you hurt yourself like that. We are not having this argument again.”
“Yeah, well, you ever decide you’re too batty to be the Bat, you know who to call. I could do both our jobs at once twice as effectively and still have half as many highly visible breakdowns as you.”
“Don’t try and start shit with me, Jason, I swear to god I’ll throw you out of here in a heartbeat. I’m not in the mood.”
Jay stands there in fuming silence, sipping idly at his shitty coffee.
“Do you actually think you should be on antidepressants?” Dick asks slowly, walking on eggshells for the first time all conversation. “Because I can get you a prescription. Without you having to talk to someone, I mean.”
Privileged little prick.
“Nope.” Antidepressants can’t unfuck his life. Can’t unkill their dad. Can’t re-kill him for being a shit fucking dad. He glances sideways at his brother. “You’re gonna majorly screw that kid up, you know.”
He rolls to his other side, hugging one of the throw pillows to his chest. “Nah.”
“Nah?”
“Nah. He came pre-screwed up. Got him like that from the store. Really takes me off the hook.”
He brushes aside the shock at Dickie’s nonchalance to deal with later. Or never. “Hey. Guess what.”
“What.”
“Can’t screw him up worse than Bruce woulda. Way I see it, that’s a free pass.”
Dick snorts. “He’s a good kid. I love him to bits.”
“He’s a little psycho killer. I should know.”
“Runs in the family, I guess. Still a good kid.” Dickie looks up at him sluggishly, still holding the pillow. “You think you’ll ever want kids?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never. You think I’d want to bring a living human being into this doomed fuckin’ plane of existence? You think so ill of me.”
“Didn’t bring Dames into the world,” Dick ponders. “Still got stuck with him. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. Never say never.”
“What’s got this record skipping in your head today, Bayonetta?” Jay prods.
He laughs, brittle but genuine. “Been a while since you’ve called me that.”
“Still got the ponytail, dontcha?”
“Hm.” He picks at a piece of lint. “We fucked up saving a victim in a fight against Pyg last week. Robin and I, I mean. Girl was around Dami’s age. Dunno what happened to her. Probably dead. Can’t stop thinking about her.”
“Don’t care.”
“Don’t believe you.”
“Don’t care,” he repeats. The lie doesn’t feel any better the second time around. “Only thing I care about is getting your lazy, moping ass off the couch. C’mon, let’s go catch a movie or something.”
“Don’t wanna.”
“Dickie. C’mon.”
“Get out of my apartment.”
“I can’t. I live there.”
“Get out of this apartment, asshole.”
“No.”
“Jason.”
“You never wanna hang out.”
“You’re annoying.”
“Nuh-uh. Could an annoying person do this?” Jay grabs his brother’s ankle and drags him clean off the couch, not particularly caring if his head hits the corner of the coffee table on the way down.