Archive of Our Own

KASSANDRA screams.

CHORUS: WHY DO YOU SCREAM? YOU SEEM SUDDENLY DISGUSTED

KASSANDRA: THE HOUSE IS REEKING BLOOD.

i.

“Reckon it’ll grow back?”

Jason hums. “Well, I’m no doctor,” he says, crouching down so he can more closely examine the bloodied handful of fingernails on the ground, still slightly glinting against the harsh lights of the warehouse. “Asshole was certainly screaming like I was chopping off his whole hand. Now that would’ve been a hell of a lot more permanent.”

Marco barks out a dry laugh. Jason can hear the clinking of metal, tools being put away somewhere safe until they could burn all fingerprints off. This warehouse is as close to the outskirts of Gotham as they can get while still being within city limits — probably the furthest possible point from the GCPD — but Jason didn’t get where he is by being overconfident. His men know that well enough.

“Permanent,” Marco says, mocking. “Men like that don’t care about big and existential things like permanence and long-term consequences. Can’t handle a moment of pain, a moment of it, not real pain. They act so big, but it’s easy to make them small.”

Jason grins lazily at him over his shoulder, although it remains hidden behind the helmet. “Why, aren’t you just reveling in it tonight?”

“You’ve got your causes, I’ve got mine,” Marco says lightly. The bandana wrapped around his face, shielding most of his features from view, is dark and dampened with sweat. His eyes, when they meet Jason’s, are glinting with something very genuine, the same earnestness that made Jason name him his second in command, and probably the thing that makes him so believable to everyone who he’s currently double crossing as an informant to Red Hood, including Jason himself. Or maybe it’s just the adrenaline.

Jason glances down at the bloody pile again. A moment of pain, or seven, an eye for an eye, or an eye for each of the working girls from Crime Alley that the asshole had hurt. It was only fair. Jason runs a tight ship; he’s set rules for his territories, and he enforces them, regardless of whether he enjoys it or not.

You cannot hurt people and not compartmentalize in some way or another. Scratch that — if you’re a sane, functional human being, you cannot purposefully inflict pain upon others without drawing some sort of line, some mental barrier to hold you through, otherwise something in you will irrevocably crack, and you will never be able to go back. If you do not enjoy hurting people there is no other way to stomach it. 

Jason has no fucking stomach for it. And yet.

It’s training. Pretty much everything can be boiled down to training, because you can train a person to do anything, and if you train them well, they will do it. In the throes of the Pit’s ash-ember rage and murmurings of vengeance, he’d shoot and hit a target, unheeding of whether it had been a live one or not, and Talia would pat his head like a dog, would reward him like a dog, would punish him like a dog. Jason would gnash his teeth and resist the urge to claw out his own insides. Bad, bad dog. He wasn’t always this violent. He didn’t always bite.

What is it they say? Man is a moral animal. You can get human beings to do anything, if you convince them it is moral. And you can convince human beings anything is moral, if you do it the right way.

“Nasty business”, he mutters, ignoring Marco’s extended hand and straightening up, knees only creaking a little. They’re still good bones, just a bit cranky from having once been beaten to death with a crowbar. Not good for the joints. “And we’ve got a tail on him? Didn’t look like he’d be getting too far with the way he was whimpering.”

Never one to be put off by Jason’s standoffishness, Marco pulls back his hand and shrugs. “Made it to the edge of the highway, threw up in some bushes and passed out on top of it. Nasty infection coming his way is what it is, with all those open wounds.”

“Maybe he will lose his hands in the end,” Jason says, appreciative. “Wonders never cease.”

“Serves him right,” Marco grumbles. From his utility belt, he pulls out a black velvety bag, then makes a vague gesture towards the pile of freshly ripped fingernails. “May I? For future leverage.”

“Thorough.”

“Gotta earn my keep somehow.”

Jason kicks back on the wooden chair their guy had previously been crying on, letting Marco do as he pleases. Nasty, nasty business. Fingernails are probably his least favorite, second only to eyeballs, which is a memory Jason certainly doesn’t want to bring back up. The echo of the popping sound it had made still makes his skin crawl.

He examines his gloved hands, flexes his fingers. He’s sure to have bruised his knuckles at the least — sure he’s armored to the teeth, but his gloves still need to be flexible enough for him to move, and also having reinforced still for hands wouldn’t make for very productive questioning sessions. One punch and it’d be lights out, and well, that’s just not worth all the work that goes into gathering intel and chasing down these poor excuses for human beings. He wants to see them beg for it, at least a little. Can’t solve a damn thing in the world by shooting first, asking questions later. The dead have nothing to say.

It’s a bit rich coming from him, of course, considering his whole, you know, actively shooting people in the face before they could even open their mouth thing he had going on when he first arrived back in Gotham. And the fact that Jason, once a dead man, does, indeed, have quite a bit to say.

He doesn’t regret it. Or he doesn’t regret most of it. Beyond sending a message, beyond — beyond Tim, he’d known that what Gotham had needed was a real shock to its system. Batman had been patrolling the streets for the better part of two decades, and yet. Crime Alley, its face that of a hungry child. A child looking over their shoulder on a dark corner. A child with bruises peeking out their sleeves. A child landing someone an envelope and taking the money. A child waiting under a lamplight for any passing car. A child in an alleyway, bruises giving way to tracks. A dollar bill, crumpled and muddied by the side of their body, gone cold.

A life cycle, of sorts. Jason had seen it a hundred times before, again and again. Through death and undeath, like nothing was ever misplaced, like this was all there ever would be.

Kids from Crime Alley die young. Jason thought he’d gotten out, but you never get out of Crime Alley, even if you leave, the same way you cannot come back from the dead, even if you do.

There are things the water does not give back.

Unbidden, he sees Tim’s face, still bewildered and not yet bruised and bloodied, still handing in the moment before tragedy. You’re here. How are you here? How did you come back?

Stupid kid. Jason won’t ever be able to come back, you can never come back anywhere once you’ve left it, because the thing about life is that it continues, that’s the only thing Jason has ever managed to learn about life, other than the fact it ends; it continues, and the world changes and you change, every time you change you die, everyone’s a ghost, all anyone knows of anyone is memory, and memory is a rope around the neck, a haunt. 

Jason couldn’t come back, no more than he would ever be able to go back, to go back to childhood, to the stubble on Bruce’s chin when he bent down to take a peek at Jason’s homework, to buttery orange afternoons inside the Manor’s library, Alfred’s peppermint hot chocolate, to his next patrol as Robin being significantly less stressful than the thought of an upcoming chemistry exam.

Sometimes he wants to go back more than anything. More than meaning itself. Even if time would rip itself apart, even if all he has done and failed to do so far would be completely erased, destroyed, vanished.

It’s so useless, all this wanting.

“Ready to wrap up, boss?” Marco says, and Jason blinks lazily at him. Marco only calls him boss when he’s trying to annoy Jason, and Jason, very maturely, does not rise to the bait.

“As I’ll ever be,” Jason mutters. All that’s left of the nails is a rusty, dried up stain on the floor, roughly the size of Jason’s palm, almost invisible if you don’t pay attention to it.

They exit the warehouse to a crisp, bitterly windy autumn night. This far out from the city, the sky is a deep petrol blue, dark and heavy, a Mariana-deep trench of a night. The warehouse still hums behind them, but Jason kills the lights with a few rapid clicks to the power system, until he and Marco are doused in nothing but the faint haze of distant pollution and the deep blue. Jason takes off his helmet, sighing deeply.

It’s still early, at least by the usual vigilante standards — no one will expect Red Hood to be out on the streets until midnight or later. He usually schedules interrogations such as this around his patrol hours so there’s not much interference, because while he does have people he’d trust enough to keep an eye on his turf for a night, he avoids calling in as much as possible. People talk, and this business is a dangerous one. It only takes a day without being seen for rumours of his death to start flying around, which makes the wrong people brave, and it’s always such a pain to clean up the misunderstanding.

Jason glances downward. Looking askance in the dim light, it looks like his hands are covered in blood. He blinks again and they’re just his gloves, the rusty red of them.

“You’re distracted tonight,” Marco comments, like he’s talking about the weather. He’d shoved the bag with the evidence inside a paper envelope, and is now holding it under his arm like it’s a delivery, hands in his pockets, the picture of nonchalance.

Jason glowers at him. “Did it affect our goal?”

“It didn’t,” Marco says, as always seemingly unaffected by the gruffness of Jason’s voice. It’s a significant reason for Jason to keep him around; Red Hood needs to be respected, of course, but it’s hard to work with someone who treats you as a ticking time bomb. Instead of doing the work, he has to keep proving that he won’t go off. “Just something I noticed.”

“Well I don’t pay you to notice things, do I?” Jason tells him, shifting his helmet so he’s holding it under his arm and taking off in the direction of the low bushes on the darkest corner of the block, near a cluster of trees, where their ride is parked. “If it’s not interfering with the work, keep that shit to yourself. What, you’re gonna ask how I’m feeling next? We’re not friends.”

And he makes sure to keep it that way. God knows that enough trouble has been caused by blurring the boundary lines between work and personal life, and Jason’s not doing that shit with the people who work for him, regardless of the fact that in this case, they’re not exactly civilians.

(And Jason isn’t sure, he’d died not being sure of whether he would’ve preferred only being Bruce’s soldier instead of his son, if it would have been better to either have been just one thing or nothing at all.  Damn his stupid heart, which he could never help but carry with him everywhere. A soldier could've cared less about being loved. A soldier would’ve just done the work. A good soldier would've died in order to do the work. 

Jason supposes that answers that.

Good soldier. As if he was ever anything but. Everything has a meaning, or nothing does.

Hand on his stupid fucking heart.)

“Sure we aren’t,” Marco says cheerily. He tosses Jason the keys to the non-descript, dark gray caravan they’re working with tonight. It belongs to one of his informants, a woman who used to work the streets around Jason’s apartment when he was a child, now a manager of one of the less seedier clubs in the Bowery. The car has a “baby on board” ticker on the rear, which renders them basically invisible, and it’s as good of a getaway car as anything. “Just saying it like I see it, boss,” Marco continues, “Anything I should be worried about? Storm brewing on the horizon or some shit?”

Jason huffs as he unlocks the car. “Gotham’s due for a shitstorm, if you ask me. It’s been too quiet to mean anything good.”

“Ever the optimist,” Marco says. He reaches for the aux cord as soon as he settles on the passenger seat, and sniffs haughtily when Jason slaps his hand away from it without sparing him a glance. “Or we could be doing good work, making a difference. Maybe the city’s finally settling down for a new era of prosperity.”

Jason raises an eyebrow, unseen, but he feels like his deadpan expression can be seen even though the domino mask. “Right. Gotham, prosperous.”

“A blossoming utopia.”

The car splutters a bit as he turns it on, dies once, and comes back proper the second time around. Jason hits to turn on the heating immediately, feeling uncomfortably cold even through the kevlar. You’d think a childhood of semi-houselessness would’ve made him more impervious to colder temperatures, but it just made him worse with them. Anytime he feels cold, the part of him that will always be eight years old and half-starved will resurface, terrified of never being warm again, unsure if his mom will be unable to afford to keep their heating on for the next month too.

(And they don’t tell you this, but other than the green, the Lazarus Pit is so, so cold.

They don’t tell you anything. They just take your body and stuff your soul back into it, but they do it wrong. They take your body and make you live in it again. And the Pit is so cold. The rain is so cold. A dead body is so cold when you live inside it.)

“Are you dropping those off or keeping them as a souvenir?” Jason asks as they pull into the highway, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel as warmth slowly crawls back into them.

“A souvenir?” Marco asks. “What do you think I am, a sicko?”

“You’re a criminal, Marco.”

“You’re a criminal.”

“I’m just saying those fingernails used to belong on someone else's body, and you’re currently carrying them out in a velvet pouch.”

“Hood,” Marco says. “We kill people.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Tou-fucking-ché. Murder is one thing, dramaticism is another.”

“I’m not about to sit here and be told that I’m being dramatic by the Red Hood,” Marco complains. He pulls down the bandana from his face, halfway to a pout, and Jason almost stops the car and leaves him in the middle of the road. “You use blood as fingerpaint and say things about how it’s not about killing, it’s about sending a message, and I’m dramatic because I don’t want to get blood stains on my new coat?”

“Rookie move to wear a new coat for a night out,” Jason drawls. “And a ziploc bag would’ve done the job.”

“Jesus, did you practice to become this annoying? Were you a little brother in your past life?”

Jason takes this about as swiftly and easily as a steel-knuckle punch to the gut. His heart squeezes so painfully in his chest for a moment that he can almost taste it in the back of his throat, bitter and metallic.

He swallows it. “Something like that.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Marco give him a curious glance. “That was almost half of a straight answer about your personal life,” he says cheerily.

Jason slaps the fucker’s hand away from the aux cord again and jacks up the volume of the radio until it’s loud enough to make the windows rattle.

I get mean when I’m nervous, the radio says, like a bad dog.

He drives faster.

They’re dangerous, the nights where he gets like this. Where he maybe had an odd dream he woke up halfway through, a memory that keeps half replaying itself on the back of his closed eyelids, blurry and overbright like blinking away from staring at the sun. He’s trying to remember something, or he’s just remembered; each time he notices himself he’s gotten distracted again by its vague outline. 

Memory is a rope around the neck. Jason does his level best to keep his eyes on the dark road ahead and nothing else. At every turn he fails.

Over the thrumming of the radio, which has moved on to another guitar-ridden, anguish croon of a song, Marco says, “But I can tell that you really are a little brother.” His gaze meets Jason’s in the overhead mirror. “Even if you prefer to use the wrong tense and say that you were a little brother. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t work like that anyway. You either gain a brother or you’re born a brother, and then you can never un-be it.”

And when you gain a brother twice, to the first one you die, and the second one you try to kill? Jason thinks. Out loud he says, “I wasn’t born as anything.”

“Mhm,” Marco hums. “Well, that doesn’t matter either.”

Jason takes a sharp turn to the left. Ahead of them, the Gotham skyline stretches as far out as the eye can see, skyscrapers glimmering against the dusty red of the remains of a late sunset, still slowly setting over the bay. The contrast of the dying light and the somewhat clear sky sets the city in a strange blue haze, not quite daytime and not quite night.

There’s a word for it, he’s pretty sure, for those blue nights, these blue hours right before nightfall. He thinks he can recall, he read it for class once, a thousand lifetimes ago, it was — Didion, Didion was the one who said it. The French called this time of day l’heure bleue. To the English it was the gloaming. The very word gloaming reverberates, echoes — the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—

He used to love that book. He can’t, for the life of him, remember the last time he picked it up. He’s not even sure whether he still owns it or if his old copy is still stuck somewhere in the mausoleum that used to be his room at Wayne Manor.

It’s probably still there, right where he left it. Right. And that means something he doesn’t have the stomach to examine now.

“You know,” Marco continues, because he apparently doesn’t know when to fucking stop and Jason should have left him by the roadside about twenty minutes ago, “you can’t explain what it’s like to have a brother to someone if they haven’t got one. You’re supposed to protect your little brothers. And if you’re the older one you know the worst thing is that you won’t ever really be able to. You’ll try. You’ll love them to death. But half the time that isn’t enough. And being a brother — ah.” He sighs, rubs a hand over his brow. “You know how Cain and Abel turned out.”

Jason’s mouth is dry. “Some say,” he starts, staring unblinkingly at the road, words catching in his throat, “that Cain didn’t know he was killing Abel, because no one had ever died before. He didn’t know there was a type of wound you didn’t come back from.”

In some tellings, Cain is described as biting Abel to death. Jason imagines what that first moment felt like, the one in which Cain realized his brother was no longer breathing. Did he stare down at the blood on his hands? Or did he reach for his brother’s face, forgetting himself, staining the side of his mouth with red? Was his first thought to pray to God to save him, before he recalled that God loved Abel more than he loved him? Did he try to shake his brother awake, did he bring his fingers into the open wound? Did he think, Oh, God, what have I done? What have I done?

Cain there is no way to get away from what you’ve done and the person who did it

Jason takes a deep, measured breath, trying to breathe through the memory of Tim’s pale skin against the deep red of his throat, the fluttering of his scared eyes. His fingers clench against the steering wheel.

“Well, maybe,” Marco says, considering, and Jason is sure this conversation means something else to him entirely. He’s glad that Marco is looking out the window, and therefore can’t see whatever haunted or hunted expression Jason is wearing. “That might’ve counted for something. But my point is, brothers will always hurt each other in some way, even if they don’t mean to. Especially if they don’t mean to, I think, and that always hurts the deepest.”

“Maybe,” Jason echoes. They enter a tunnel, warm and flickering yellow lights flashing like a roll of film being rewinded. Wind rushes in his ears, or maybe it’s something else.

Pain is very, very easy to inflict. Jason, aged fifteen and a half, would have disagreed — he’d understood, on a molecular level, that pain was a consequence, but not a goal. He would attack if attacked, but Bruce had always taught him to subdue first, to minimize any altercation. They were not executioners or torturers, Batman would say. Then he’d wink at Jason, give a little half-smirk. It’s not like we’re cops.

Jason, now, knows better. Or he knows otherwise, because better and worse is relative, but he knows — he’s been trained for pain, both inflicting and receiving it. He’s shot out people’s kneecaps  and heads and ribs, sliced their fingers off, blown out their brains, he’s ignored their pleading or even mocked it, as tossed bodies into the Gotham Bay and gone out to grab dinner afterwards.

Pain is easy to inflict. It’s very mundane, when it’s all you know, or when you know it intimately enough. And Jason knows it. Whenever he thinks he thinks he’s done learning it he has to learn it again.

(He did mean to hurt Tim. He did mean to kill him.

The fact has grown into a gaping, oozing wound somewhere deep in his chest, infected and itching, but he will not scratch at it. He’s afraid of what’ll come pouring out of it if he does.

Back with Talia, he had thought, once, about skipping Robin entirely and heading straight for Batman. He’d been so angry he pulsed with it, day in and day out, a live nerve, a house on fire. All he could think was an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye. But Talia had dissuaded him wholeheartedly. When asked, all she’d said was, It won’t work. You love him.

If you love him, is it a sin to kill him?

Jason will not scratch at the wound, no matter how much it weeps for relief.)

“Dropping you off soon,” Jason tells Marco, through the ringing silence in his ears. They’re in the Bowery already, damp streets with dark corners rushing past. “Guess you’re keeping the souvenir.”

“Be still my beating heart,” Marco says, patting the side of his undercoat where he’s keeping it. “My brother’s making dinner tonight, told me he’d eat it all by himself if I was late, and we’re cutting it close.” Marco grins, unfaltering even when Jason doesn’t reciprocate at all. “He always says that. But one time I was late enough gettin’ home, walked in real quiet ‘cause I was sure he was asleep. And sure he was — at the dinner table, waiting on me.” He shakes his head, fondly. “I mean it about brothers, boss. Blood or not, mine sure isn’t. You just can’t explain to those who haven’t got them, I’m saying.”

I ride through a tunnel, it’s still dark the whole way, the radio says. I couldn’t lose you. How could I—

Jason shuts it off. The silence rings inside the car, and Marco, for once, seems to get the message that he’s struck some sort of nerve, because he stays quiet and doesn’t reach for the aux cord again, keeping his hands still in his lap.

Jason doesn’t say a word as he drops Marco off at the tiny two-bedroom in the heart of the Bowery, bleeding nails and all. He says nothing as he quickly pulls away, ignoring whatever Marco calls out to him as he does so, merely gesturing in a way that could be vaguely interpreted as Talk tomorrow, another time. Something buzzes underneath his skin, like static, like the blood under his skin is rushing by too fast.

He drives the rest of the way home in silence, almost swerves into a lamppost when he thinks the word home to refer to his preferred safehouse in Crime Alley. The wound in his chest pulls, pulls, pulls.

It’s clear to him immediately he can’t patrol like this. He’s too distracted, too erratic, and erratic gets you killed. Jason can’t — he cannot think about death, the same way he cannot think about brothers or fathers or the wound, like he cannot think about what he killed him, like he can’t stand the cold, like he can’t be alone even though he needs to be alone and is, by design, rarely anything but.

So he calls in. He says nothing, does nothing. The wound pulls. If he scratched at it, surely it would bleed. The red would coat the underside of his nails, coat his hands, mark him as what he is, what he’s done, brother killer, brother dead—

Jason gets home, takes a shower, and eats. He stares blankly at the pages of a book for several dozen minutes on the couch. Pain, the book tells him, has an element of Blank — It cannot recollect when it began — or if there were a time when it was not — It has no Future — but itself. His entire body feels like a live nerve. He sits for so long his feet go numb, and he forgets his hands, and he wonders, distantly, what the symptoms of a heart attack are, whether he would be able to tell, because everyone says it starts with an impending sense of doom, but there’s scarcely a moment in which he doesn’t feel that. Guilt, he thinks, has an element of Blank. 

He lays down to sleep and does not sleep at all.

ii.

Most days he thinks about Bruce and feels nothing.

It would be a lie, and quite a poor one at that, to say that he does not think about Bruce at all. He couldn’t make himself believe it if he tried. He died thinking of Bruce and was resurrected thinking of Bruce. Through becoming and unbecoming, Bruce is as much a part of his mental wallpaper as Jason’s thoughts, as familiar to him as the palms of his own hands; he would know him blind, Jason thinks, by the exact manner in which his head twitches when he hears an unexpected noise, or by the sound of him cluttering about in the Manor’s kitchen, having long convinced Alfred that he could handle brewing a cup of coffee on his own, or by the manner of his steps on the pavement, on a rooftop, a single hitch of a breath.

Jason loathes it all so much he can barely stand it. He loathes Bruce almost as much, burning-red deeply, but only almost, because the truth of the matter is. The truth is.

He finds, more often than not, that he’s almost done forgetting his father’s face. Or not forgetting, exactly; he doesn’t think he ever fully could, even if the memory of his voice is long and truly gone, even if he sometimes struggles to recall the exact color of his father’s eyes. Willis Todd wore cheap, woodsy-scented aftershave, and he had callouses on the palms of his hands, which Jason used to poke at when he was little, rough bumps pink and irritated by a long day’s work, and Willis Todd would tell him it’s all just thick skin, it’s the body’s way of making sure it doesn’t get hurt again, and Jason would in turn spend years and years waiting for his own skin to toughen up a little, and he couldn’t understand why it all always hurt so much.

Willis Todd liked his beer ice cold, and he always sat at the same stained armchair when he yelled at Jason to get him one after a long day’s work. Jason remembers, still, the almost-burning pain of holding the half-frozen can in his hands, how red his fingers would get, how he’d trip all over himself to pass it over as quickly as possible, sure the pain would kill him. As a child, Jason believed people could die of pain alone, and he tried to avoid it as much as possible. He failed at almost every turn, he thinks, and now he knows he wasn’t even all that wrong.

But as much as Jason can recall these details about Willis Todd, as much as he can still hold him in all these tiny ways, as much as he sometimes hates him and misses him like a little kid, he can’t deny that he can’t really remember the exact look of his father’s face. The cut of his jaw. The shape of his nose. How he looked when he smiled, which he so rarely did, always too stressed about work or losing the apartment or keeping the heating on or Jason’s mother’s valiant attempts to cease existing.

If Jason tries to think back to his father’s face, he looks strikingly similar to Bruce. And he knows, deep in his bones, that the two looked nothing alike, and he knows, deep in his bones, that he’s the worst sort of son that could possibly exist.

But he can think about Bruce and feel nothing. If he braces himself, as one would for a punch, he always does a solid attempt of it.

“Hood,” Oracle’s voice crackles to life into the comms. “Are you out tonight?”

Jason turns to the side, coughs once, hard enough his lungs hurt, and spits out a mouthful of red. He prods his gums with the tip of his tongue, but although he tastes metal, he can sense nothing loose or missing, which counts as a win in his book. A sprained wrist is all in a day’s work, but losing a tooth would really tick him off. On the other side of the room, the pile of limbs and blood-stained clothes groans weakly, but otherwise doesn’t move, except for a small flinch when Jason bends down to pick up the gun he’d knocked off the asshole’s hand.

He taps his ear to turn his mic on. “You just interrupted my bubble bath,” Jason deadpans. “You have two seconds to make this interesting.”

“The Joker’s dead,” Oracle says immediately.

Jason glances heavenward, praying for patience. “No he’s not,” he says.

“No, he’s not,” Oracle agrees, and Jason pinches the bridge of his nose. He appreciates that Babs doesn’t act like he’s going to have a meltdown at the mere mention of Joker’s name, and she’s probably the only one other than him who can truly make light of it like this, gallows humor and all, but still. One day it’s going to be true, Jason thinks, and he won’t know how to feel about that. 

“But now it’s been five seconds and we’re still talking,” Oracle continues, and Jason growls at her. “Anyway. Theoretically, how fast would you be able to make it to Gotham City Public Library?”

Jason blinks. “Theoretically,” he echoes, “what the fuck could possibly be happening at Gotham City Public Library that would lead to you contacting me?”

It’s been a considerable amount of time since the library has been involved in any sort of conflict related to Gotham’s criminal underbelly. Or maybe not that long, but Jason was still dead the last time anything of note happened, or so he hears — apparently the Riddler had used it as his personal headquarters for a time or something of the sort, and then it got destroyed, but Bruce Wayne funded its reconstruction. Ever since then, it has become one of the few places in Gotham that are relatively neutral, and Jason hasn’t thought about it much since he came back. The building looks so different from the one where he’d sought solace in as a little kid, and being the Red Hood doesn’t leave much time for reminiscing.

“Oh, you know,” Oracle says, and this time her voice grows a bit strained. “I could explain while you’re on your way there, because theoretically I already have your location pinned and know you’re the one closest to it, other than — well, as I said.” She clears her throat. “I can explain on the way.”

And then there are some subjects that none of them seem capable of not tiptoeing around him, and Jason wonders how it’s possible that so many incredibly skilled, well-trained vigilantes who lie for a living somehow become so unsubtle when it comes to this.

“Batman needs assistance,” Jason says, tiredly. “And Robin’s busy doing what, exactly, that you called me? Is Nightwing off-world?”

“Nightwing is busy handling evacuation efforts in Blüdhaven, since this is shaping up to be their worst flood in a decade,” Oracle says. Through the comms, Jason can hear her rapidly typing, and he can also hear the exasperation in her tone. “Robin is currently benched on concussion watch for forty-eight hours after an altercation with Penguin’s men, and is very unhappy about it. ” The typing stops, and when she speaks again, her tone has no mirth in it. “And even if he weren’t, I don’t appreciate your implication here. You should know better than most that Robin isn’t Batman’s savior, Hood. Batman is a colleague, not his responsibility.”

Jason has half a mind to tell her to fuck off for telling him to mind his tone, like he’s some sort of child, and the other half thinks back to Robin’s carefully measured words and tight shoulders, the way his steps seamlessly fall in line with Batman’s, the space he doesn’t occupy, the nervous lilt in his mouth whenever Batman appears bloody before him. Batman needed a Robin, gasped out through pale lips inside a tower on a moonless night.

Batman is many things, to a Robin. A mentor, most of the time. A guardian. With Dick, Jason is aware that the lines blurred — Bruce hadn’t been barely a decade older than Dick when he took him in, and years ago, when Jason was alive for the first time and a bit more starry-eyed, Dick had confessed to him that sometimes Bruce felt like an older brother, sometimes his boss, sometimes a colleague, and only in his later years did he ever feel like a parent. Dick was never able to call Bruce father, and Jason died before he could really admit to himself that he wouldn’t really mind, maybe, if Bruce were to call him son.

Tim Drake, Jason knows, still has a living, breathing father who is not Bruce. Tim Drake is fifteen. Tim Drake keeps a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush at Wayne Manor, and little else. Tim Drake looks at Bruce like he put the stars in the sky, but won’t move an inch closer, won’t uncurl his shoulders, won’t unclench his fist.

Batman can be many things to a Robin, but none of them have ever been able to pinpoint what exactly Robin is to Batman. They all draw their own conclusions, and live with the consequences.

“Well, that would be news for one of us,” Jason mutters, not unkindly. The pile of limbs across the room makes it to move, and Jason kicks him on the sternum, cracking the other collarbone. He stops moving after that. “So you’re telling me the Bat’s been patrolling Gotham on his own and he got caught in some shit? Losing his touch, is he? I bet that must sting.”

He’s saying it to be an asshole, because that’s what he is, truly. He knows Batman doesn’t work alone, hasn’t worked alone in years; he’d already joined in on enough of the Justice League’s missions by the time Jason became Robin that Batman works alone had only been half true at the best of times. Do you miss it? Jason had asked one night during patrol, in his early years. Having help is good, I guess, but now you have more people to worry about when you’re on the field. And Batman had squeezed Jason’s upper arm and said, It’s worth it, and Jason remembers thinking maybe Bruce never really liked being alone as much as he seemed to, maybe he’d been really lonely, maybe that’s why Dick leaving hurt so much. That’s why Jason—

He almost died with you gone, Tim told him, one patrol several moons ago, even though Jason had spent pretty much the entire night pretending Tim did not exist. Tim never seemed deterred by being ignored, ruthlessly efficient regardless of any acknowledging nod or even half-hearted glance, and Jason always tried to ignore that also. He wanted to, I think. He wanted to be forgiven for failing you.

Right, Jason replied. Death does nothing and solves nothing. I wouldn’t have forgiven him if he’d died for me. I would’ve just stayed dead. 

Tim never looks uncomfortable with Jason’s candour about his own untimely demise, which Jason is loath to say he appreciates. Instead he sometimes looks curious, which is worse, and that night, Jason had had to grab the bo staff from his hand to pull the kid closer to his eye-level, and grind out, Death means nothing. It won’t bring you relief or absolution or rest. It hurts, and then there is nothing.

I understand, Tim said, strangely calm, eyes hidden behind the cowl.

You don’t, Jason answered. I hope you don’t.

Bruce doesn’t do much alone work anymore, is the thing. Oracle rarely takes a night off, and Robin is off patrol only twice a week, which is when Nightwing usually swings over from Blüdhaven for extra support. Red Hood’s established truce with the Bats isn’t old enough to crawl yet, but he’s around, and much more likely to offer support on non-world ending events if it’s Oracle or Dickwing doing the calling. He probably wouldn’t take long to reply either if it were the Replacement calling for him, because that would seem someone would be actively dying or another earth-shattering event. And Batman—

Well, a truce isn’t an alliance. Everyone knows Red Hood can’t stand the sight of Batman on a good day, and Jason can’t stand being in the same room as Bruce for more than five minutes without feeling like he’s about to crawl out of his skin. So really, Jason understands Bab’s hesitance, and he’s also aware she would’ve first tried to contact literally anyone else if time weren’t of the essence, if something hadn’t gone very, very wrong.

“What’s your ETA, Hood?” Oracle asks, a little helplessly.

If I start now, he thinks, if I start now, maybe this life, still. 

“Seven minutes,” he says, and spits another mouthful of blood onto the floor for good measure.

If Blüdhaven’s flooding, that’s just because the overflow of Gotham’s bay has finally started to travel south, after the rain finally started to break a few hours ago.

It’d still been dark and heavy with clouds when Jason entered the apartment with the goon he needed to have a little chat with, but now there’s only the smell of metal and distant petrichor, accumulated raindrops from the tops of awnings, puddles of dirty water on each rooftop he swings by, so that by the time he’s making it to Gotham City Public Library, his hair is sticking to his forehead under the helmet from the humidity, reinforced-steel boots making an unfortunate squeaking noise whenever he moves.

“Where’s the fire?” he drawls into the comms, where Oracle has been conspicuously silent for several minutes. Come to think of it — “Old man, are you alive in there? What gives? I was in the middle of folding my laundry, so it better be good.”

There’s a crackle of air in his ear, but then nothing. Jason frowns, looking over both shoulders as he starts up the stairway to the main door of the library: it’s cracked open an inch, which is suspicious enough at best, considering it’s just past one in the morning. If it weren’t for the fact that their comms are virtually unhackable, due to Oracle’s handiwork, Jason’s mind would have immediately gone to trap. 

Unless Oracle’s been compromised, he thinks, with a small lurch in his chest, but no. Bab’s is too thorough for that, and she would kick his ass if she knew he’d thought it for even a second.

Another crackle, and then Oracle is saying, “Batman was tailing a transfer by Scarecrow’s handymen today, or so our intel says — Scarecrow wasn’t there himself, and whatever the shipment is, it’s not fear gas, or at least no strain that we’ve got on file. They were transferring boxes with the substance from a warehouse to a truck in East Bowery, but they were careless, almost purposeful about it, which should have been enough of a heads up.”

“Right,” Jason says slowly, inching the door open. It’s pitch black inside, and he cracks a glowstick from his utility belt with a muted crack. The semi-translucent green glow makes him vaguely sick, but he sucks it up, because he’s not a baby and it’s not like they produce these industrial glowsticks in any other color. “Unknown substance, not fear gas it seems, and Scarecrow. What do you mean by careless?”

“One of the boxes had a tear on the underside, and one of the containers slipped out, rolled under the delivery truck,” Oracle explains. She sighs again, and Jason can imagine her rubbing her tired eyes under her glasses. “They didn’t notice, apparently, and Batman attempted to retrieve it once they had exited the location. I agreed that identifying the drug and its effects took precedence over following the transfer himself, but Batman picked it up, and—”

“What?” Jason asks, when Oracle falls silent. He’d never fucking admit it, but having her voice chattering away in his ear has been helping him ignore just how dark and eerie the library is at this time of night. He traipses around the city at night for a living, but there’s something about being inside a place after hours that just gives him the creeps. The low light of the stick only makes it worse, and if his heart skips another beat because he saw something that turned out to just be a chair near a bookshelf, he’s going to get very pissy about it. It’s dead quiet, too, and each word seems like it disappears straight out of his mouth after he says them, muffled by the carpet and the sheer magnitude of the building. “Did he die?”

“No, he didn’t die, Hood,” Oracle grits out. “But it was a paralytic agent of some sort, short range, likely airborne as the seal was still on when Batman picked it up, either faulty or tempered with. He reported numbness spreading from his hands immediately. I attempted to help him evacuate to the Cave, but it was too fast-acting. I managed to guide him here when it became clear he couldn’t make it to the Batmobile in time. A few minutes later, he told me the numbness was spreading above the neck, and then he stopped responding, so could you please stop being a total fucking asshole for five minutes and try to find out if he’s still fucking breathing?”

Jason grinds to a halt, glowstick hanging senselessly from his hand. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah, oh,” Oracle mocks, not even a thin layer of cool professionalism left anywhere. “We don’t know anything about this paralytic, whether it’s just a muscle relaxant or whether it’s paralyzed his diaphragm, so please just look. You don’t even need to help bring him back to the Cave if you don’t want to, you can just drag him into the Batmobile right outside and I’ll do the rest, but I need to know if Batman’s still breathing. Agent A needs to know if Batman’s still breathing, or he’s going out into the field himself.”

Low blow, Babs, Jason thinks, but something sick and clammy has started to crawl its way up his spine. “Why didn’t you fucking tell me that?” he hisses, and begins to move through the darkened and hallowed halls of the library with more purpose, trying to find anything that resembles the cowl or a body slumped over. Damn the Bat for always merging with the shadows. “I didn’t know it was that urgent!”

“He was still communicating with me in a separate comm link when I first contacted you,” Oracle says, as Jason turns around the corner of the mystery section and speeds his way through the children’s area, which is open and spacious, with no clear sign of a Bat anywhere. “We weren’t sure how fast it was spreading, and you were still closest, but he stopped responding before I asked your ETA.”

“A bit of a heads up would’ve still been nice,” Jason mutters. “I didn’t know I might be walking in here to see Batman dead.”

“I’m sure you would’ve been delighted by the surprise,” Oracle snaps, and it hits Jason like a punch to the throat. He stops dead in his tracks in spite of himself, ice flooding his veins.

“You,” Jason says. His voice fails. When he speaks again, it sounds as if he’s been screaming for hours. “You really think I would be—?”

Oracle’s sharp inhale makes him flinch. “I’ll apologize if I must later,” she says tightly. “Find him. Please.”

She’s on edge, and she’s scared. Jason knows this. He knows all there is to know about what fear does to you, about lashing out and breaking things and saying the cruelest thing. He doesn’t fault her, not really, because he has done the same and he has done worse.

But he also knows that no matter how cruel one’s words might be in that moment, this is the truth of the matter: even if you didn’t truly mean it, you still thought it, and you knew it would hurt, and it wouldn’t hurt if there wasn’t a sliver of truth in it. A lie can anger, but it holds no emotional weight, because you know it bears no meaning. Truth is what catches in the splayed-open skin of the wound.

Does everyone think this? Jason’s almost dazed as he finishes scouring the contemporary literature section, rounding the corner of another shelf. Do all of them think he would truly be happy if Bruce died?

He doesn’t — it’s —

Death is nothing. He’s said as such to Tim before, and he believes it. If Bruce died, nothing would be solved, and the whole world would be wrong. Even in the depths of his Pit madness, he doesn’t think he ever wanted Bruce to die, only to see him suffer, to see him regret, to make him hurt. He wanted Bruce to live, if one’s being poetic about it; dying would have meant the end of his pain, and Jason couldn’t have that, not when Bruce had refused to kill the Joker, had chosen a different Robin. He needed Bruce alive with the knowledge that Jason, who he’d once called son and meant it, now hated him. 

And Jason does hate him. He does. He must, because hate is very simple, and if Jason doesn’t hate Bruce, then he doesn’t know what the fuck else to do. A part of him knows or hopes that Bruce hates Jason in turn, or something similar to it, for all the blood he has spilled, for the rules he has broken, for the person he couldn’t be, kindness he couldn’t offer, forgiveness he couldn’t reach. 

He has never been able to forget the look in Bruce’s eyes that day when Jason handed him the gun, and pointed his own to the back of Joker’s head, when he told him to choose, quick, me or him. It had hurt, in those early days as Red Hood, to be face to face with Batman and see no recognition in his face, none of the tenderness he used to reserve for Robin, even with the cowl on. It had hurt, but it was a hurt that made sense, and then there was the thrill of it, because hurting people feels so good when you’re angry, and no one has made Jason angrier in this lifetime than Bruce has, Bruce and his hypocrisy, Bruce and his grief, Bruce and his soldiers.

Anger is a very lonely emotion. But it’s something to rail against.

Jason’s face feels overwarm under the helmet, and for a second, he’s desperate to take it off, to breathe. He taps his fingers against his collarbones instead, for some hope of grounding, as he bounds up the steps to the second level of the library, uncaring of any noise he makes. Considering the paralytic, it’s very unlikely Bruce managed to get himself up to the second floor, if Babs says he stopped responding mere minutes after he arrived, but Jason’s hoping it’ll give him a good enough view of the entire first floor. Up above, the glass ceiling lets in scarcely any light, moonless and rainy as it is outside, but there’s still a faint glow from the light pollution, a haze of silver. 

His glowstick dims, and he curses. He’s down to only two more, and the night vision in his helmet is as good as nothing. He needs to find Bruce and report back to Oracle, and…

What if Bruce is dead?

Jason dismisses the thought immediately. Bruce is different — he’s not like Jason, he can’t die. He’s been roaming the streets of Gotham for almost twenty years, holding his own against things that are infinitely stronger and more terrifying than some of Scarecrow’s minions. Bruce is alive. Jason is not searching for a body.

Unbidden, a part of him wonders if this is what Bruce felt like when he went after Jason in Ethiopia. If he was also thinking: Jason can’t die. These horrible things happen, but not to us. If he was thinking: He’s hurt, but pain always goes away, or if it doesn’t, it gets better. Once, a couple of months after Jason moved in with Bruce, before he ever became Robin, Jason didn’t notice the flat tire of his bike and fell face-first into the pavement in front of the Manor, scraping the skin off his chin. His teeth had rattled and he’d bit his tongue, mouth filling with blood. Bruce, who’d been getting ready to leave for work, ran up to him immediately, face impassive as he examined the injury. It hurts, Jason had admitted, in spite of himself. One of his molars had been loose, the last of his baby teeth, and it only made it all hurt more.

Don’t worry, Bruce responded, brisk but not unkind. We’ll wash it away.

Pain can be washed away. Even if it stains, the worst of it can be made right, until you can only really notice it if you’re looking for it. Jason feels like he’s always looking for it, it’s all he can see. He doesn’t know how he’d forgotten that moment, because for so long afterward, whenever he hurt he thought of it. We’ll wash it away, Bruce had said. I love you, he hadn’t said, but Jason thinks he knew it even so, or he used to.

(I’m not looking for a body, Jason tells himself, the exact same way Bruce had, on one of the worst days of his life as he scoured each warehouse in that small village, all those years ago. I’m not looking for a body, Bruce had thought, because we all have a million things we wish for before tragedy strikes, but only one after it does. When your child dies, the first thing you do is fall to your knees. You fall to your knees and your mouth falls open and your stomach drops and it is all an endless process of falling down, down, down, because your child is dead and that means something in you is also dead. When the worst thing that could possibly happen happens, all Bruce thinks is, I want to go back. I want to go back.

But you can never go back, and no one ever comes back from the dead, even if they do.)

Jason looks, and looks, and he sees nothing but darkness, and Oracle has gone silent. She’s probably fighting with Alfred on whether he should storm into the field or not, or maybe she’s telling Dick to brace himself, and he’s sure Tim is crawling up the walls in his room — or is he in the Cave? Is he even in the Manor — because the little asshole can feel when people are not telling him the whole story, and Jason feels, for a single moment, terrifyingly and utterly alone. Like a little kid, who’s just realized they’ve been walking on their own this whole time, and everyone else’s gone.

He turns around, crosses the entirety of the second floor to take the opposite stairs down again, and does an arguably impressive somersault to avoid breaking his neck when he trips over Bruce’s slumped body in the middle of the staircase.

“Why the fuck are you like this?” Jason almost yells, and his voice barely sounds like his own. He’s on his knees, glowstick discarded and tumbling down the stairs, but he doesn’t mind. He grabs Bruce by the shoulders and pulls, trying to turn him around. His cowl is half-off, like he’d been trying to unmask before he stopped. “Fuck, you weigh a ton. Why didn’t you sit down on one of the armchairs if you knew you wouldn’t be able to move, where the fuck were you trying to go?”

Bruce doesn’t reply.

Cold terror floods Jason’s veins. In spite of himself, in spite of everything — death and undeath and hatred — he feels like he’s thirteen again, small and terrified. His attempts to turn Bruce face-up turn more frantic, gloves slipping against the kevlar of the armor. Maybe there’s something to be said about panic-induced strength, though, like mothers lifting cars with their own hands to save their children, because Jason manages almost immediately once it sets in. He’s not dead, Jason thinks, he’s not, he’s not.

Jason’s eyes are stinging something awful, breaths coming in faster than they should. He turns Bruce around, and for a full second, he can’t make himself look, because what if he does and what if his face is — it would be just like his mother’s face, slack and pale; Jason remembers how it didn’t look real, how it was his mom’s face but didn’t look like her at all, like someone had replaced her with a doll, lifeless and cold. He doesn’t think he’d be able to handle having Bruce’s face imprinted in his mind like that. He doesn’t—

Bruce blinks up at him, languidly, like he’s moving through molasses. His jaw is slack, mouth half-open, a flush of exertion high on his cheeks, like he’s running a fever. His lips twitch once, twice, like he’s trying to move them, but of course nothing comes out.

Jay, he seems to be saying, unable to do more than shape his mouth around the syllable. Jay.

An odd noise crawls its way out of Jason’s throat, something between a scoff and a scream. “Oh, fuck you. Fuck you.”

Bruce blinks again. His body is dead weight, half-splayed over Jason’s thighs, but Jason can’t make himself move, because Bruce is warm, and if he’s warm he can’t be dead.

“You should’ve gone to the Batmobile immediately when you noticed what was happening,” Jason hisses. He takes off his helmet for good measure, setting it down on the bottom step with a loud thud. “It should have come to you. I don’t care if it would’ve tipped the fuckers off that Batman was around, you could’ve died.”

Aw, a voice that sounds like Dick’s pipes up in his head. You sound like you care.

Bruce’s lip twitches again. He doesn’t seem to be an pain, and he’s obviously fucking breathing, so Jason does a quick injury check — checking his pupils, prodding his spine, neck and ribs — before angrily tapping into his comm link and saying, “He’s fine, just stuck. Where’s the ride?”

“Thank God,” Oracle responds immediately, sounding exhausted. “It’s just around the corner — we just didn’t have a way to get him out of there and into—”

“I got it,” Jason says tersely. “See you soon or whatever. Go stop Agent A from committing another felony.”

He turns off his mic and pulls out the earpiece too, for good measure. He doesn’t know why, but hearing Bab’s relief makes him feel… odd. It makes it real. It wasn’t just him, she thought Bruce might be dead too. And he isn’t. He’s quite alive, and staring at Jason so intently it’s a wonder Jason’s hair hasn’t caught fire yet.

“I didn’t sign up for this, old man,” Jason tells him. All the fear has washed away from him, and now he just feels tired. He grabs Bruce’s shoulder and takes off his cape, so it’s not a tripping hazard when he starts carrying him down. “We share relevant intel, we don’t kill each other, we stay out of each other’s lane. I don’t do rescue missions.”

Bruce says nothing, of course, but his eyebrows do something funny. Jason glares. “That one time with the Replacement doesn’t count. I didn’t know he was going to be there, and it was a child trafficking ring. I wasn’t — I have morals, even if you think they’re skewed. Think whatever you like.”

He wraps his arms around Bruce’s torso and hauls him upright, straining against the weight. The easier thing would be to just drag him outside like a ragdoll, but he can’t have anyone seeing that and getting out a rumor that the Red Hood was dragging around an incapacitated Batman. He’s too big to pick up with both arms, Jason’s been dealing with a nasty shoulder injury from a few weeks back that’ll make it hard for a fireman’s carry. So, he settles for the next best thing and wraps Bruce’s arm around his own shoulder, trying to steady him.

Whatever the paralyzing agent is, it’s obvious Bruce can move somewhat. He’s not stuck, just numb — his feet drag on the floor, but he can minutely pick one and put it in front of the other when prompted. That’s good enough for Jason, who needs to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. They begin their long, winded track downstairs.

He tries not to draw too much comfort from the heat radiating off Bruce’s body, an innate reminder that he’s alive, alive. It doesn’t feel fair. It doesn’t feel like he’s allowed to, not after everything that’s happened between them, after all they have both done to each other.

Jason doesn’t know, he realizes, with a sort of dawning horror, as they drag themselves around the corner of the self-help section. He doesn’t know how he’d be able to live in a world without Bruce in it. For all that he has hated him, blamed him — Bruce has been there before and after him, and really, on some level all children believe their parents to be kind of immortal, even if they understand what death is, even Jason, who’s both seen and caused it so often.

He didn’t know he was this afraid, still.

“You can’t die,” Jason manages, through the squeezing in his chest that’s only half due to exertion. “You know that, you asshole? You can’t just die like this. You need to — fuck, I don’t even know.” Jason swallows. It’s strangely easy to talk like this, when he knows Bruce can’t reply, can’t even turn his head around to stare. “And I don’t mean Batman, okay? Fuck Batman and fuck the mission. Gotham was here before you, it wasn’t great but it was here, it would still be here without Batman. I mean you can’t die. You have — you have Nightwing. You have A. You have Robin, and he’s still just a kid. He needs… you can’t let them lose you. I—”

“Kid,” Bruce whispers, slurred and almost unrecognizable through numb limbs. Jason nearly drops him.

“What?”

“Kid,” Bruce says again, neck straining with the effort. He stumbles over his own two feet. “You… kid. My kid. You need — I need—”

Jason wonders, dimly, if the paralytic works through skin to skin transfer, because suddenly he can’t really feel his face either. “Don’t.”

“My kid,” Bruce repeats. His hand twitches on Jason’s upper arm, like he’s trying to squeeze it but can’t quite manage it. “Can’t — I need—”

You’re my kid. You need me, and I can’t lose you. I can’t let you lose me. I need you too.

“What the hell,” Jason rasps out. “What did they lace this paralytic with, why are you so—”

He can’t quite find the words. He doesn’t think Bruce is lying, but this definitely isn’t something he’d be saying so easily in front of Jason in normal circumstances. Bruce’s emotional constipation is one of those things one can see from space, and he somehow got worse after Jason died, which he doesn’t think should’ve even been possible. Since the Pit madness receded, since he’s been better, he’s seen the way Bruce keeps Tim at arm’s length, his tense conversations with Dick, how he snaps at Babs on the comms in a way he never used to before. It’s the way things are now, Dick told him, sounding bitter, and Jason pretends it doesn’t bother him. It’s not his family. It’s not his responsibility to make things better.

God, it was so much easier to believe in all of that when he kept his distance. Sometimes he feels like he’s haunting them, even though he’s still alive. 

“I felt,” Bruce says, jaw tense. They’re almost out now, just going by the librarians’ main desk. “You looked… scared. I felt — then — I felt. The same.”

The realization is slow and helpless, like someone’s stolen the heart right out of his chest. It feels empty, but he can still feel the endless, desperate thumping. “When you found me,” Jason whispers. “When you found my body.”

“Nothing.” There’s something glistening on Bruce’s face, bright even in the gloom, and Jason refuses to acknowledge what it could be. “Nothing feels — like it. You shouldn’t—”

It’s such a horrible mockery, Jason thinks, as he kicks open the door to the library and begins dragging Bruce down another flight of stairs, onto the street. Such a horrible mockery of Bruce holding Jason’s dead body, back when Jason used to be Bruce’s son, something that must’ve been unthinkable. But Jason is nothing to Bruce now, and Bruce is nothing to him, and it’s so ridiculous, really, because Jason was so scared. He’s so scared.

It’s very lonely to have once felt at home with someone, and then suddenly not have them anymore.

“Jason,” Bruce whispers. “Jason, I—”

“We’re not having this conversation here,” Jason says, voice trembling. He blindly reaches for the handle of the Batmobile. “We’re not having this conversation ever.”

“Jason,” Bruce says once more. Clumsily, he sets his hand atop of Jason’s, stopping him from opening the door quite yet. His eyes are hazy, blinks still unnaturally slow, but he’s looking straight into Jason’s eyes. “All… forgiven. All of it.”

Jason looks down at their hands. It’s started raining again, slow,  heavy drops pattering down onto the pavement. It is a truancy of ancient stagecraft, he knows, that the one who controls the doorway also controls the tragedy. 

His breath rattles in his chest when he exhales. He twists the handle and pulls the door open. “Get in, B,” he says, quietly. “Let’s go — let’s go back.”

He almost says let’s go home. They both know it, but Bruce doesn’t say anything.

The rain falls harder.

“Oh. Babs said you might still be in here.”

Jason glances up from where he’d been staring unseeingly into the lukewarm cup of tea on his hands. Tim’s lingering in the doorway of the living room, shifting his weight from leg to leg like he’s expecting Jason to yell at him to leave. It hasn’t been a long few months since Tim’s even been able to be in the same room as Jason if he doesn’t have a weapon in hand and three possible exit points in sight, so Jason can’t say he faults him for the twitchiness.

“The bay’s overflowing again,” Jason says, because that’s a logical, practical explanation for staying at the Manor overnight. The storm had picked up as soon as he and Bruce began heading back, and Jason’s main apartment is prone to flooding due to pollution clogging the drains on the street; he wasn’t too keen to walk through dirty, murky water after the night he’s had. “It’s late enough for Red Hood to clock out.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. There’s a large bruise in an impressive shade of purple blooming from the side of his forehead, and a still-healing cut on his lip. He looks tiny in a pair of sweatpants and an old band shirt that likely both belonged to Dick, because as far as Jason knows, Tim doesn’t stay over enough to have his own at the Manor. “I heard…”

“B is fine.” Jason’s tone is clipped. He takes a sip of the lukewarm tea for want of something to do. It tastes like leaves. “But if you talked to Babs, you know that.”

“I do,” Tim agrees quietly. He shuffles into the room and settles into one of the armchairs, pulling his legs up to his chin. “They only told me what had happened once you guys were on your way back. Doctor Leslie said I had to avoid stressful situations.” He says it with a frown, as if the thought disgusted him.

“And what would she know,” Jason deadpans. He rubs a hand over his forehead, feeling like this night has aged him a million years. “What’d you want?”

“Nothing,” Tim says, like a liar. “Maybe I just wanted company.”

Jason stares at him. “Company,” he echoes, “from me. Famed mass murderer.”

“You’re not a mass murderer,” Tim protests. That’s apparently too much vehemence, because he winces at his own voice, gingerly touching the side of his head. After a moment, he settles further back into the armchair again. “You just operate under a different set of morals than most people do.”

“That’s a very nice way of saying I kill people,” Jason says. “Impressive. You should be a lawyer.”

Tim grumbles something indistinguishable. There’s something about the lateness of the hour and the dimness of the light that makes everything a bit surreal, softer around the ages, like everything’s happening through a film of gentleness that isn’t usually found in the grayish days. Jason’s sitting in the exact same spot on the couch that he used to when he was younger, and the tea Alfred makes is still the same brand. He can almost pretend that the terrible thing has never happened. That life continued as it should have and led him here.

Only almost, though.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Jason asks. He makes a vague gesture at the huge bruise that is Tim’s body. “Alfred’s always strict when it comes to head injuries. I’m surprised he’s even letting you out of bed.”

Tim smiles wryly. “Well, it’s been twenty-four hours and I haven’t dropped dead, so he’s backed off a little. He’s also—” His expression falls a little. “He’s downstairs, with Bruce. He was really worried. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like that.”

Jason’s mood sours, too. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I bet.”

He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to forget what that one second before he looked into Bruce’s face had felt. It still makes his throat ache just to think about it. What if, his mind keeps saying. What if, what if, what if.

Tim is silent for a moment, and then he says, “I remember the first time I had to assist when Batman was injured. Really injured, not just something you can walk off from. It didn’t… it doesn’t happen as often now, but when I first became Robin, it was every other week or so.” His nervous eyes meet Jason’s for a second before quickly darting away. “It was — it wasn’t great. But in his first patrols with me he was so careful. He had to be okay to pay attention to me, I guess, so I wouldn’t screw things up. But he got overconfident once, and I was supposed to be watching his back, but this guy had this, like, flash-bomb thing? That doesn’t cause a lot of damage, but there’s this bright light, and I couldn’t see. When I finally managed to get a hold of things, B was on the ground. He wasn’t moving, and there was — there was blood.” Tim swallows. “It was naïve of me, I suppose, but I remember thinking that I didn’t know someone could bleed that much.”

They can, and they do. It’s always more than you think possible. Jason knows this intimately. He feels vaguely sick, hearing Tim’s words. He couldn’t have been older than twelve, if Jason has his timeline right, and Jason doesn’t think he saw Bruce get seriously injured until he was fifteen at least.

“I thought he was dead,” Tim murmurs. He looks up at Jason again, and this time he holds the gaze. Jason stares back, something odd stirring in his chest, something he can’t quite name. It’s too warm to be sadness, but it can’t be too far off. Understanding, maybe. “Training kicked in, and I was calling for backup and feeling for his pulse and knew for sure he wasn’t dead pretty soon, but I — I still remember. That one second before I knew. The one second in which he was dead. Like Schrodinger’s cat, you know? He was alive, but he was also dead, because I didn’t know, not really. And in the end he was fine, it took him barely a week to heal, but I still remember it.”

The house is reeking blood, Jason thinks, despair suddenly crawling up his throat. Like Kassandra, standing in the entranceway of a house she was brought to belong to, Jason stares and stares and screams and screams, but makes no noise.

He knows who put the blood there. He knows where it’s coming from. Cain there is no way to get away. What you’ve done and the person who’s done it.

“I thought he was dead too,” Jason says, roughly. “But only for a moment.”

Only for a moment. For Bruce, it had been only a moment as well, but his never ended. Perhaps he wishes he could go back, if only to exist within a space of time before he knew Jason was dead, when fear was just fear. Perhaps he wishes he could go back more than anything.

And it’s so useless, all this wanting.

He looks at Tim, his tired, pale face. He can picture it covered in blood as easy as breathing, can still remember the feel of his pulse jackrabbitting under Jason’s hold, throat bare and breakable. He has never apologized, but he has also never asked to be forgiven. A part of him says he’s never wanted to be forgiven, but he knows deep down that that isn’t true. He’s never going to be good again, but that doesn’t mean he can’t wish he still was. When they think you’re bad, people act worse.

“Tim,” Jason says.

Tim’s eyes are bright and knowing. “I know,” he whispers.

“Bruce said he forgave me.” Jason swallows. “I don’t know how he can.”

“Forgiveness has nothing to do with the person who’s being forgiven,” Tim says. “And there was never anything to forgive you for, at least not to him. I’ve said this to you before, but he’s — he’s always loved you too much for that.”

Jason shakes his head, eyes desperately searching for something in Tim’s face — anger, deceit — but all he sees is a bit of bemusement, something soft. “I almost killed you,” Jason says, disbelieving. “I would’ve killed you. And there’s nothing to forgive? I don’t know how you could.”

“Because forgiveness isn’t about you,” Tim says, this time more firmly. “And Bruce is good at holding grudges. Too good. He doesn’t always know how to start. But there was never anywhere to go with you, Jason. You’ve always been his son. He can hardly forgive you for that.”

Jason’s eyes are aching again. “You deserve better than all this, Tim,” he says, and finds that he means it, because there’s always something about Tim that makes him so sad. “He doesn’t do enough. You don’t have to be content with it just because—”

“He’s here,” Tim says, voice catching unexpectedly on the word. He clears his throat. “He’s here, which is more than I’ve been able to say for most people in my life. Maybe it’ll always be like this, and maybe it’ll get better. But for now it’s good. It’s — it might look bad from the outside, it might look a little bit broken, but it’s good.”

Jason hadn’t been nearly as eloquent when he was this age. It makes him ache all the more. He needs — he misses his dad, he thinks. Everything feels so desperately big all of a sudden, and he needs some older, wiser being who can make everything seem small again. Instead, he’s here with this kid, who’s looking at him like Jason’s never tried to slit his throat open before, like he feels safe.

The rain pitter-patters against the window, harsh and unyielding. Jason looks at Tim, who looks straight back like he can see exactly what it is that Jason’s trying to hide. This room feels like being stuck inside a nightlight, a paper boat softly bobbing up and down a stream.

Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Jason grabs his tea from the side table and stands, sore muscles protesting against it. “Get up, kid,” he murmurs, lightly punching Tim’s knee where he’s all curled up in the armchair. “I’ll fix us something warm to eat. I don’t think either of us will be sleeping any time soon.”

The look on Tim’s face is almost painful. He doesn’t quite smile, but his eyes do all the work. “We can bring something down for Alfred, too,” he says, hesitantly. “He’s been too worried to…”

It’s been years since he’s been here, but he still remembers the path to the kitchen as if it were yesterday. As he starts down the hallway, he half-startles at the sight of Tim behind him, because for a moment, it’s like watching himself go by, years and years ago, mussy-haired from sleep and grinning at something Dick said, a blanket draped over his shoulders in the colder days. Like the fabric of time has grown thinner, he can see it all: Alfred teaching him how to dice up vegetables for a pot pie, Bruce carrying him downstairs the one time he sprained his ankle, Dick hollering for Jason to come down soon or he’d eat all the waffles. It’s all there, all still there, bright and alive, and Jason’s here again, and it’s still him. 

“I’ll fix us all something warm,” Jason says, voice firmer than what he feels. He doesn’t know what he feels, but it’s liquid, watery and breakable and bright all at once. “Come on.”

“Okay,” Tim says, a tiny smile on his face, and they do.

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –