Chapter Text
Jason can’t seem to die anymore. This doesn’t make it harder to hurt him. It just makes him care less.
He ponders the thought aimlessly as he shuffles around his pockets for the battery-powered, hand-held circle saw. It’s hard to reach his shin pocket with the rebar sticking through his left hypochondriac region, but he does it anyway.
Jason should be dead. Dying at the very least, stomach split wide like a maw and spewing hydrochloric gastric acid across organs that remember formaldehyde. But Jason doesn’t die, fingers wheedling their way into his pocket and snapping the saw clean from its elastic hold.
Knocking his view down from the ceiling— Jason always finds it easier to focus on his hands when his eyes are off duty— he fits the flat of his jaw to the top of his collar bones.
The hole in his chest foams wetly, blood and acid blubbering with every breath he shucks into scorched lungs. Six inches between him and freedom. Jason will cut four.
He passes the saw into his right hand– range of motion is important for things like this– and runs through the possible complications (that will mean nothing) on his body (that will rise anyway). He’s in a frankly disgusting warehouse, floor sticking to his cargos and stench of fish swimming through the air. Somehow, it keeps warmth against the December chill. Probably why the kid chose it.
He can still see the tarp she was sleeping on flapping idly against the railing of the rafters. The kid is long gone, bolting before Jason ever hit the ground.
That’s a good instinct, it's gonna take her far.
Jason turns on the saw, thinks better of it, and turns it back off before setting it carelessly near his hip. He scoffs— or maybe it’s a laugh— as he punches his fist into the pocket on his right thigh, grabbing packing gauze. He rolls his head around, looking for a sterile place to set them, before smacking it on his sternum instead. Jason can’t die, but blood loss and infection are nasty inconveniences.
His hand leaves the pile and $40 dollars in cash peaks out from the wrappers. The kid didn’t even have a chance to take it, Jason is such a fucking idiot. Using quiet footsteps in Crime Alley to approach a flightless bird; his roots are dying.
Jason shoves them desperately into the soil anyway; an invasive plant that learned it wasn’t indigenous and burrowed deeper anyway. If he had only ran faster the one time it mattered, his roots would have never ripped from the ground and bleached by the sun.
He hopes she’ll come back, a dilapidated warehouse beats the streets any day, and Jason can only shudder at what it means to be a girl out there. Despite all his struggles in the dark, he maintained that advantage.
Plucking the money out of the pile and back into the pocket, Jason brings the saw back to life and grips the first two inches of the rebar firmly with his left hand. He huffs his breath before turning on the saw.
Two minutes later and he’s free, arching his back off of concrete and making a note to replace his kevlar.
Standing makes him stumble, pain snaking white-hot cold through his arteries until it reaches his brain. He looks to the floor, boot smushing something unseen with little regard.
Oh, right. The bandages.
His voice breaks the silence like a gunshot, rough and tearing.
“Who fucking cares,” he mumbles, kicking it aside and gushing down his front like a forgotten hose.
At least the blood will keep him warm.
—
Getting home is boring, all things considered. He walks down the road that runs parallel to the harbor, boots scuffling the uneven pavement and catching on stubborn patches of weeds. If he moves northwest, he could get to Leslie’s Clinic in ten minutes. If he went far enough northeast he could get to the Somerset Batcave and raid it for all he’s worth.
Jason moves straight north instead, leaving breadcrumbs to his house of horror.
The night is as quiet as it is cold, air so still it almost feels normal. He can feel the chill entering his lungs anyhow, unmistakable despite his labored breathing and the filter of his hood. A starless sky greets his eyes when he throws his head back to suck in bloody snot. Again, who fucking cares.
A block later, gunshot ringing off the alley like an echo to scream, Jason shoots a rapist in the knee where he has a woman pinned to the wall.
She stares into his helmet, tears streaming down her ruddy-red cheeks in tendrils of mascara grit. Sagging against the wall and grabbing herself across the ribs, she sobs down at the thing on the ground, screaming in pain and clawing at the piss-soaked concrete.
Jason doesn’t say anything, just stumbles over with his left hand on the gun and his right on the hole in his chest. The woman bores her eyes into his, wide and terrified, stumbling further against the wall. Jason pays her no mind, just finishes his trek until he’s standing over the rapist. He slams a steel-toed boot into his crotch, dick flapping in the cold air like a white flag, and grinds it down like he’s putting out a cigarette.
The man screams loud enough to rattle glass. Jason doesn’t so much as smile.
“How does it feel?” He asks, voice flat and apathetic.
The man screams again, Jason's blood drips across his chest, stray dots speckling his boot.
“I asked you a question,” he says. The woman sobs behind him.
The rapist stares into his helmet like a wolf howling in a bear-trap, teeth bared to eat through its leg before the hunter brandishes a rifle. His eyes well with tears. Maybe more like a rabbit then.
“Bad,” he chokes out, pathetic and shrill, “it feels bad.”
Jason tilts his head like the farmhouse mutt he is, bred ugly to kill wolves and scare the sheep.
“Good,” he barks.
Kicking his foot down one more time, Jason turns back toward the mouth of the alley, ready to reenter the march to his apartment. Something touches his shoulder and he turns fast enough to feel the blood loss, right hand gripping a throat and gun pressed into ribs before the woman has a chance to gasp.
He loosens his grip, hand smearing blood into her long hair and pink jacket. She stares into the whites of his lenses, calmer than he thought she’d be.
Her hands grab his wrist, gently pulling it away from her neck.
“Thank you,” she whispers, holding it like a life-line.
Jason stares at the blood he left behind, careful not to move his head, lest she guess where he’s looking. She stares into the hole in his chest anyway.
“Please don’t die,” she says.
Jason slips his hand out of hers, reaching into his pocket, grabbing the forty-dollars, and slapping it into her open palms. Her brows furrow. He turns back toward the street, stumbling away before he says something stupid like how much he wishes he could.
“Hey,” she yells out.
Jason doesn’t let her finish, throwing the words over his shoulder with little regard, “go to The Laughing Cow on 34th and E in China Town, tell the cashier you want a cheeseburger. When he takes you to the back, tell him I sent you and hand him the money, he’ll give you a gun.”
She makes a noise of protest behind him, he doesn’t care.
“Go to the shooting range on the East border of the Bowery, find an old woman with a scar down her chin, she’ll teach you how to use it.”
He walks until he gets to a fire escape, yanking it down and climbing to the squelch of his muscle. That’s enough social interaction for today, he thinks.
—
Thirty minutes later, with his hood under his leather, eye peeking up at him from the blood-soaked hole in the back panel of his jacket, Jason pulls out his keys. He unlocks the door and cracks it wide an inch. Crouching low makes him feel like Atlas, but he reaches around for the thinnest part of the door anyway, glove in his teeth and cold-red fingertips finding the slide-switch. Security disabled, Jason shoves the door open with this palm and uses the frame to rise again.
He sighs, pulling the gun from his right thigh holster and turning off the safety. Launching himself through the doorway, he points the barrel at the spot in the kitchen he knows the intruder lies. He heard their presence in the air pressure, something he never could properly explain to Bruce.
Nightwing leans back against the counter, arms crossed and jaw clenched in a way Jason knows to be angry. Medical supplies and a domino are piled on the table he pretends is an island, cd case balancing out one of the legs that isn’t long enough. Jason closes the door.
“You need better security,” Dick snarks.
“Yeah?” Jason pops back, “get the fuck out of my house.”