Rewatching the original "The Little Mermaid" animated movie while working on something else... I can't quite recall at the moment (early into it atm) if this movie ever establishes Eric as the heir of the throne of his kingdom.
I think it'd be really funny if Eric was actually a younger brother. So, like, maybe he's a duke, actually, but he still gets the title of Prince. Travels the sea a lot, unlike a more landlocked heir. Hanging out at this summer seaside palace while the rest of the family is elsewhere for some reason.
Like, imagine Eric's parents and older brother and maybe sister-in-law and niblings getting that letter at the end of this movie. Nearly drowned. Miraculously washed ashore. Fell in love with a mysterious voice and then a mute girl. Got enchanted by a shape-shifting sea witch and nearly married her. Killed the sea witch after she turned into a giant. Married the aforementioned girl who turned out to be the beloved youngest daughter of the mythical King Triton instead and have now established a strong alliance with the merpeople. Wild summer! Wish you were here!
What really makes this for me is that OP could have phoned it in on the chorus and just repeated the same fics, but no. They found a unique one every time. Class act.
I don't know who needs to hear this but... start living. The days are flying by and all you do is work, pay bills, and stress. Enjoy what you can like walks, sunsets, music, laughter. Joy doesn't have to be expensive. You deserve it.
my friends and I have created a game we call Quipposting, where you play quiplash but you roll a wheel full of character archetypes, and whatever it lands on, you all answer as if you are like, a wizard or cowboy. This legitimately makes quiplash go from a fun enough game to an S+ tier absolute unabashed banger
these are all from mafia goonposting but I think it’s my absolute favorite one of all time so I have a lot of pictures from it. Turn on some jazz and wait until people start talking in the accent and you’ll make Magic
me when one of my girlmutuals posts about how they got a little coffee beverage or took a nice walk or started a book they've been meaning to read for a while or otherwise found meaning and joy in simple pleasures
Tim: I know you feed on emotions. You're an ecto-being, known as Phantom, and you're hiding in Gotham from the government. Your real name is Daniel Fenton.
Danny defeated: Who are you working for? How did they find me?
Tim: Don't worry about that. I'm the only one who knows. Listen, I need your emotional eating abilities. Robin died a few weeks ago, and Batman is losing it. Could you eat his sorrow? Help cut through his fog of grief?
Danny: I- ugh I never tried that?
Tim: Well, now is a good chance to try. Pack your bags, you're moving into Drake Manor as my uncle, and we're going to save Batman.
Danny: Okay?
Tim: You seemed confused. Do I need to explain the plan again?
Danny: I'm not confused. I didn't expect this when I opened the door to a seven-year-old.
Tim: I'm thirteen.
Danny: I'm so sorry. Are you not being feed?
Tim: Everyone blooms at their own time!
Danny: Sure, buddy.
Tim: You-! You will actually do really well at posing as an annoying uncle. You're on thin ice, though. So watch it.
Danny: I'll take that threat more seriously when you can reach my chin.
How strange it is to wake up, check the news, see the world burning down… and still have to go to work, answer texts, be a person.
Do what you can. That’s enough. It really is.
The world is always burning somewhere. You just happen to be in an era when you have dozens of media companies making big money on broadcasting it to the world at large. Almost none of it matters to you and is just mental dead weight, something that neither affects, nor can be affected by you.
[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented…It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Moot keeps sending me FrownyAlfred posts, I cannot be held responsible for what comes out of that
It's broken and choppy so that I couldn't accidentally turn it into a multi-chap and never finish it but it's still one of the longer ones I've ever dropped on tumblr (i think) at around 6k
..........
De-aged Bruce dropped his jaw and dug sharply with both thumbs at the roof of his mouth.
"No, no, no, what's that—" Jason got hands on, but Bruce evaded scrutiny by keeping them moving, blocking and parrying Jason's grasps.
Until he couldn't. When he was gasping for air that he couldn't seem to take in and his whole body went flushed. There was pride and fear enough to keep him on his feet even then, but he was swaying dangerously.
"Aunt Di!!"
Jason managed to slip inside Bruce's guard and get a shoulder under him just before the mountain of a man lost to himself and collapsed.
The doors to the Fortress's medical isolation room were opened by the time Jason had dragged the man up to only a few feet from them and he faced down the form blocking the threshold now.
Diana sucked in a sharp breath, then immediately moved to action. She took the weight from Jason entirely, hefting the body from Jason's arms, and led the way—airborne—to a medical sweet a few rooms over.
Jason's palms were sweaty and he rubbed them against the outer sides of his pant legs as he watched Bruce be laid out like a sack of potatoes to be swarmed by Kryptonian droids.
"Report, little one."
"He—fuck—" Jason cleared his throat, took a single breathe, and forced the world to settle. "He ingested something. It was—it had to have been hidden in the roof of his mouth. I don't know what it was but—" his mind rolled through the scene over and over and over, picking through the details.
Trouble breathing, flushed skin—seizure, by the way the body was convulsing on the table now—and there was something more. When they'd been face to face, when Jason had tried to press him back and pin him down—something...
A smell.
"Cyanide."
The tech seemed to have deduced it only moments before he as they were already preparing to pump his stomach and run saline flushes, hooking up lines for blood and IVs—hemodialysis—to fight and replace what had already been absorbed into the system. Lines that probably wouldn't save him. Realistically speaking.
Because when you were committed enough to have a suicide capsule imbedded into your body, they didn't tend to be in quantities of half-measures. This was a lethal dose direct to the biggest hub of absorption in the entire body and Cyanide didn't have any reaction gap to speak of, under those parameters. Not by Earth's metrics.
The singular, slim, empty hope was that Kryptonian tech could move faster with a harder punch and make a miracle.
Diana's tall frame filled his vision, blocking the brutal fight for life from him. "Did he speak?"
Jason stared at her as if doing so hard enough would allow him to look right through and see everything again.
Her hands squeezed his shoulders. "Little one."
"Mm?"
"Did he say anything?"
"He thought, um, he saw my blades and he thought that... we wanted him for..." there was a horrible sound of a failing body and Jason tried to step around her.
Diana moved with him, keeping herself between them. "We wanted him for what?"
"Um." Jason futility leaned back the other way and was blocked just as calmly. "Extraction." He let his eyes tumble to Diana's finally. "He thought I was Caste coming after information on Ra's. So he..." Jason gestured at everything behind her. "Di..."
The goddess' arms crushed him to her chest, pinning him there in a fierce hug.
"Fuck..."
"If anything in the world can save him, it's here," she reminded. "There's a chance."
"Not a good one! Diana—"
"I know."
"Fuck."
She squeezed him tighter. "I know."
..........
The duo of rapid footsteps pulled his gaze to the doorway. It had been a steady rotation for near twenty-six hours now, the only fluctuation was who and when. Covering an unexpected absence of Bruce, even for this short a time, wasn't the easiest thing.
They'd even resorted to putting Jason in The Suit for a four hour shift at one point, for Christ's sake, and that had felt borderline heretical.
Dick said something when he entered that Jason didn't catch, having slipped too deep into thought.
Jason gave his best guess at a response. "He's still breathing."
"What the hell happened?" Dick, who had been trying to hold everything together on the front of all the teams and operations Batman was coordinating at all times, had yet to have stopped in, despite them all knowing he was nearly sick wanting to.
"Turns out kidnapping a cult member is difficult, who'd have thought."
Dick grimaced, pulling up short just shy of the table. "God, he looks like shit..."
"Sweet as ever, Dickie."
He got flipped off for that.
Tim deigned to pull himself away from the screens he'd gone straight to on entering and his quiet discussion with the metallic caretakers. "He's awake."
Jason hummed. "I wondered. Bout twenty minutes?"
The wiry boy turned to the android for a moment again before nodding a confirmation.
"Which is batshit crazy," Dick muttered. "He should be practically comatose."
"F'l like i'," the the form hidden under masks and wires and tubes rasped out groggily. "Th'ell ar'you people?"
Dick, after hesitating, brought a hand to the sweat-caked brow. "Not your children, but still your kids."
A sharp, dry, crackling laugh tried to bubble up from the patient but immediately devolved into a cough which faded to wheezing. Jason stared, still ill at ease, at fog puffing far too quickly against the oxygen mask. Then flinched as fingers twitched.
He snatched Bruce's wrist halfway to the nearest line before he'd even fully stood from his chair.
"B?' Dick began, calmly. "I'm going to need you to stop being suicidal now, please."
"Tt."
The older boy smiled wryly. "Least we know where Dami gets it from..."
"As if the 'hn's didn't already make it obvious," Jason sniped.
"You can't tell me that wasn't still crazy." An eyebrow was raised at him.
He tipped his head a fraction, allowing for it.
Bruce's eyes had slowly cracked open over the course of their small tiff and he was blinking owlishly now against all the assaults on his vision.
"Tim, can—"
"Yep, yep, just...." The lights of the operating suite dimmed considerably. "Bingo. Thirty-five percent and a progressive roll up."
Several lines in Bruce's body loosened around no longer having to fight that specific line of tension.
"Has anybody explained the situation to you yet?"
Bruce just stared at Dick, half-lidded and miserable looking.
"So, welcome to the future." The jazz hands made Jason roll his eyes. "You should be several years older right now, but you got hit with a curse. Got de-aged." Dick glanced around the Fortress walls. "And sorry about all this. Not sure what happened there, this isn't normal protocol."
Bruce continued to stare.
"Still not a talker then, good to know..." Dick perched himself on the edge of the table, ever oblivious to personal space. "That's fine. We'll just catch you up on some things over here to pass the time while our wizards figure out how to do a little uno-reversie on this, cool?" He waited only half of a beat. "Cool. So..."
..........
"What is it?"
Bruce opened his mouth. Closed it. Said nothing.
Dick and Tim—mostly Dick—had been rambling on for the past hour about home life, minus critical or sensitive information, to "fill baby Bruce in". Translation: Dick was nervous and coming down off the high stress of the past two days and needed to word vomit at someone he loved. Bruce just incidentally happened to be a, literally, captive audience. One who had asked all of two-and-a-half questions in all that time.
So for him to be showing a tangible reaction was worth prodding.
"No, come on." Tim tipped his head. "You're making a face. We're cool here, B, you're not gonna remember any of this anyway. Just say it."
The too-young, old man wet his lips to help ease the discomfort of speaking. "I thought you said that the Joker had killed him? Had killed... Jason."
Tim nodded. "Correct."
"But this is..." the blue eyes were sharp and searching, flicking between them all, "your last story," he gestured weakly at Dick, "is after? That?"
"Get to the point, geezer," Jason snapped, hackles rising as he was forced outside of his window of tolerance again.
He'd been living outside of it for most of the conversations, actually. The feel-good reminiscing wasn't exactly his comfort zone to begin with and sue him if he wasn't any less stressed about the situation than Dick. It had been a long week even without this shit. He and Bruce weren't on the best of terms, sure, but he didn't want him fucking dead. Leastways not anymore.
Bruce's brow drew in fractionally, the concept of a frown without really completing it. "I didn't... terminate him?"
Jason stared.
The big man felt it and zeroed back to him, eye slipping carefully back and forth between Jason's.
"Why the hell are any of you still with that-me then?" The League member slowly, eerily scanned the room yet again. "Why are you... with me now?" His head tipped, brown furrowed only just. "Why do so much to save someone that..." His teeth clicked shut, face tight.
The room swayed around Jason and it was only the relational orientation of the stiffness in his boots coupled with years of training and torture that kept him upright. All of the world narrowed down to those icy blue eyes searching his and a slight ringing in the absence of sound. Somebody touched his shoulder and he viciously shrugged them off.
He knew he was leaving the room but he didn't really process it until he nearly walked straight into Clark.
"...Jason? You okay...?"
"That's not our Bruce."
Superman's brow furrowed. "Both Zatanna and Constantine are more than sure... What makes you think it's not?"
He shook his head. "That cannot possibly be him."
"What's he done?"
Jason stared at the man, knowing in a bone-deep way that there could never be any words to describe this.
He pulled hands through the spikes of his hair, frustrated, and stepped around Big Blue.
He needed to walk before he shot something.
..........
"What in the fresh hell do you mean, Dick!?"
"I don't know! He's not here!" the older boy snapped back.
Jason growled about it, felt a familiar thought from years of training prick at the back of his mind, and closed his eyes to breathe.
He could hear Dick doing the same thing on the other end.
"How?"
Dick hummed. "Hell if I know. Tim thinks he might have sweet-talked the Fortress."
"He—" Jason stopped to puff out another long and slow, yet sharper, breath through his nose.
"We all know that thing loves him, for whatever reason. So basically we've got Brucie with no Bats. On the loose. Awesome."
"Brucie et. LoA."
Dick sighed. "Point. Um. Tim's interrogating the crew now and I'm scrubbing perimeter footage, cuz otherwise—"
"We're screwed," Jason said in tandem with the older boy.
"Yeah."
"He talked them into tagging him—" Tim's exasperated voice crackled onto the line— "and the gutless, brainless—"
"Tim."
"So we're all agreed," Jason began, "that he's just—"
"Gonna cut the damn thing out and go scot free cuz of these fucking useless—"
"Tim."
"Am I wrong!?"
Dick took another deep breath over the line. "It's at least a start, isn't it? Do we have a last location?'
"He got himself a Zeta to New Mexico by using Supe's authentication code and then the tracker went immobile there, just outside of Albuquerque."
"That's useless to us, he's throwing us on purpose and the data is a smoke screen," Jason stated for the record.
No one argued the point.
"So we start with the familiar," Tim muttered, slowly coming down to their level of forced calm. "Dick can get Damian to do a probing check in with Talia. Babs, Cass, and Duke can start sweeping Gotham."
"Tim and I should do a run down of the whole Fortress, it may have been a double back to throw us off because there is a lot of stuff he could get into trouble with here."
"Sounds good." Jason swallowed hard, an eerie sensation crawling up his back. "I'm gonna check something else. I'll let you know if it pans out."
"Check what?"
It took effort not to bite out the words. "I'll let you know."
Dick hummed, a regulative sigh in disguise. "Copy that."
The line clicked twice as the boys at the Fortress switched off of it.
You had to think like Bruce to find Bruce and the more Jason thought back through all the time they had spent with him since he'd come to... There were a few expressions that stood out. Because Jason had looked at them and seen himself in Bruce.
Not in the little learned quirks sort of way that constantly plagued him these days. This had been different. It was the 'now you have to analyze yourself in a whole new light because you saw it in someone else' kind of different. Jason hated that. So it stuck out to him.
He knew exactly what the cause had been.
Helmet in hand, he sprinted for his bike.
..........
Jason knew every level of fear. He was extremely well versed. But there were, unfortunately, always new types of fear to find and this was an unexpected one for him now.
The sheer speed with which a young Bruce in unfamiliar territory, having minimal context, could track someone as well hidden as a holed-up-to-scheme Joker was... horrifying. A deeply ill young Bruce at that. Even Jason still had as broad a range as three likely locations himself, and that was only so narrow from tracking the creep extensively for the past three months.
The first warehouse he checked had been a bust, but the littering of bodies in the abandoned office building that he was scoping out now seemed relevant.
Bruce was armed, he confirmed, nudging at another of Joker's henchman who'd suffered a severed jugular.
There was very, very little sign of struggle in the whole room.
Their escapee had gone full League of Assassin's on them and Jason was only just realizing that none of them had ever stopped to consider what that really had to mean.
Bruce didn't kill. The moon set, the sun rose, and Bruce didn't kill. Bruce didn't kill and he had left the LoA and so assumptions had been made. They had all decided that they knew the origin of his hate for loss of life and filled that in as the fracture point of him stepping away from the LoA, but as Jason stood here now in layers of arterial blood it became time-stoppingly clear just how wrong they had been.
Bruce wasn't a goody two shoes; he was traumatized.
Guilty.
Uneasy was an understatement, but the moment the thought of Damian or Dick finding this out crossed his mind, Jason became downright nauseous.
He took a breath, trying—and failing—to ignore how much copper and iron he could taste in the atmosphere, and pulled out his phone.
"Yeah, um. Biz, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna need a favor." He paused. "We'll see." He breathed through his nose again. "I need you to bring one of my machete's, a duffel bag, and a one way ticket to the moon on flight Bizarro for some... baggage."
..........
This was something straight out of one of his nightmares.
Bruce had been aware enough and randomly kind enough to let Jason maneuver the room so that he was the one pinned between a half-conscious Joker and an unknown instead of Jason. But the openness of the half-renovated, fast-food joint's front-end was not helping nerves at all. The only positive currently was that at least he had both of the problems in eyesight. Especially with the Joker still muttering and cackling nonsensically to himself through intermittent gargles of blood and teeth.
Jason had never been so torn in his goddamn life.
And Bruce—God help them—could see the feedback looping them together as easily as Jason could. They saw each other. So Bruce knew.
"It's okay." The eyes were physically younger but there was still a depth to the soul in them that had always been Bruce.
Extra bright and out of place above the deep, muted, OD green half-mask the man had assuredly swiped.
Jason's hands reflexively snatched at Bruce's when the big idiot closed on one of his side arms but his wrong-footedness let Bruce direct far too much of the scene.
"B—"
"It's okay."
Pressure exploded against Jason's forehead, sending him stumbling back.
Three shots echoed in quick succession, a forth was interrupted, and then flesh impacted concrete.
Jason blinked around black spots as his brain came back online, one hand going to his head, the other landing on the holster Bruce had touched.
The now empty holster.
He swallowed hard. He shook his head to clear the last of the disorientation. Then his eyes landed on the scene again.
They caught a wall of primary colors pinning Bruce to the grimy carpet first.
Bruce was all but wheezing against the ground, his body still far too gone to have been Zeta-ing, let alone all of... this.
Jason cleared his throat, eyes flicking between the terror of a man pinned to the floor and the pale pasty form that didn't seem to be breathing. "Clark—"
Superman's gentle gaze found him through the darkness of the atmosphere.
"He's okay, Jason," the hero promised, carefully, neither of them used to Jason needing Superman to be that for him. "We'll figure this out after we get him back to the tower."
He breathed a careful, measuring intake as he processed and took that in. "Clark, the—" his sentence died around bile in his throat.
He swallowed.
Superman waited, eyes still patient.
"Joker."
The brilliant blue disappeared for a moment as the kindest man on earth paused to breath, too. "He's dead, bud."
Jason's next breath shuddered, his whole body shivering. "Um."
"We'll take him too," Clark said softly. "We'll confirm it. You'll see it. It's safe, Jason."
He laughed—breathily, weakly, and short—then gasped for air around the sound and slumped slowly back on a wall barely thick enough to hold his weight.
"Jason..."
"They can't know." He flicked his eyes to Clark, knowing he was dazed, not ready to shake it yet. "We have to make this my fault, they can't—" he breathed again.
Superman grimaced, shaking his head as he drew Bruce to his feet. "We can't. I'm sorry. We can't lie to them like that."
"You can't." He pried off the helmet. "But I can."
"Jason."
All eyes flicked to Bruce.
"Are you mine?"
It sounded bad. It wasn't. He knew himself. So he knew this Bruce.
This wasn't about possession. It was responsibility. Category. Heart.
Jason swallowed hard. "In a manner."
"Then let me do my job."
"You don't understand. How much this will break our you."
Bruce hummed. "I'm in deep enough to know that if I ever poke my head up again, it's going to be bad." He shrugged. "But I've had a protector. I know what it means. So if you're mine... If I'm yours... let me do what he can't."
"But we could get away with it."
"Are they as quick as you?"
He growled and puffed out a harsh sigh, following the thought, understanding the dead end. "They're ours," he said, instead of 'duh'.
Bruce nearly smiled. His gaze stayed heavy but a corner of his lip twitched. "Then there's no choice to begin with."
..........
"Can he hear us?"
"Not right now."
Dick side-eyed him. "You've just been standing here staring at him?"
"Yup."
The acrobat's head tilted, assessing, then nodded as Dick found his own reasoning. Whether it aligned with Jason's or not was doubtful. Mostly because Jason didn't know what he was doing either.
"Is it possible he looks worse than last time I saw him?"
"Yeah." Jason worked his jaw. "And he is."
"What are we doing about?"
He shrugged. "They called J'onn."
"...and that's supposed to fix this?" Dick muttered.
He hummed.
Bruce shifted minutely in place, cross-legged on the bolted cot with his back pressed to the wall, but it drew both their eyes regardless. He'd slipped into deep meditation over half an hour ago and Jason was seventy-three percent sure it was the only reason he could still breath at all. Jason was finding himself mad at the idiot for putting himself into this position. Risking what he did for what he had done it for.
But it seemed like Jason wasn't allowed to have that opinion.
Especially not in front of someone like Dick.
So he didn't.
Another form sidled up to Jason's other side.
"Little sister," he acknowledged.
"Little brother."
She tipped her head, at Bruce not at him, and hummed.
The patient slowly, painfully, cracked open his eyes in answer.
"What the fuck...?" Jason and Dick muttered in unison, each ignoring that the other had.
Bruce's next breath shuddered horribly and he let his eyes slip closed again. So much of his body was fluctuating between taut with pain and relaxed by will. His hair was damp from sweat, parts of his shirt soaked through, too.
He was a mess.
Cass hummed again, a different register. It was meant for them this time. Not the patient. "Medical?"
"I believe that would be me," a smooth voice offered as J'onn drifted up behind them, coming to rest just behind her shoulder.
Bruce's eyes flashed wide open, his entire body snapping back online in waves of micro-tension.
"I should have thought..." J'onn murmured, and Jason felt the low skittering sensation, the telepaths mere presence, easing at the back of his mind. "That was careless, I apologize." He drifted to the floor, too.
Dick raised an eyebrow at the empath. They all understood him dampening his presence, of course. But the last move was distinct and final in an odd way. Something wholly unnatural to the man's average of motion.
"He's from before," J'onn said by way of explanation.
Jason narrowed his eyes, processing, then started to glance at the telepath before thinking better of it and blinking at Dick as the realization gradually rolled in.
Before JL. Before others. Before heroes were known.
As their perception of the man shifted another point-three degrees, Bruce himself was painstakingly unfurling, and rising in agony, to shuffle to the window.
It took a minute to pinpoint why. Cass had leaned fractionally back on J'onn who had squeezed her shoulder and smiled fondly down at her kind. She was floating the concept of them being comfortable around J'onn to ease the alarm, which Bruce was simultaneously experiencing as confirmation that the uncanny humanoid shape that hadn't needed to walk into the room was, quite probably, tangible.
Dick punched the comms. "B, this is J'onn. Remember when I said welcome to the future?"
Bruce's eyes flicked to him, briefly, and then back to the green lifeform.
"He's a Martian. He can shapeshift and read emotions and minds and despite all that insane crap, he's one of your closest allies." Dick shrugged. "One of few I think you might actually call a 'friend'."
Bruce swallowed hard, grimacing around the action. He'd swayed on his feet once or twice, too, but everyone was pretending not to notice. One crisis at a time, as they say.
"I'm sure you have questions," Dick tried, "so throw a few at us, if you can."
The look tossed back at him was a specifically desperate kind of glare that only those who had truly been thrown into the deep end could ever understand.
"Work with us, B."
The bright eyes flicked to the newcomer. "Dark—" he wheezed around the rasped sounds— "darkest moment."
All three Gotham units immediately moved to shift back and allow for privacy, but J'onn was already stepping to the glass, touching a hand softly to the barrier. "In the worst of moments I have seen child and parent interactions around me so volatile that I find I am, for the briefest of moments, happy that my little one never lived to grow so much grief between us." He curled his hand to a fist against the glass, eyes distant in the hazy reflection Jason could make out against it. "The guilt that follows after..." The flat eyes flicked to Bruce. "You, my friend, have kept me together on many a long night. I wish only to do the same."
Bruce's hand started to lift to meet the Martian's, only for him to realize it and withdraw. Packing himself away from them again, bit by bit. Jason swore his skin was starting to tinge blue.
"He's here to help get you healing again," Dick nudged, nearly begging.
Bruce's mouth twitched.
Jason recognized that stupid fucking look from his own stupid face and he stepped up and slammed a hand on the barrier, far different in contrast to the gentleness of J'onn's touch. "Don't give me that shit. We're getting you through this if I have to drag you kicking and screaming. So deal."
The sharp eyes, electrified with the pain they were under, flicked slowly between the kids.
Bruce, shaking, reached a hand to rest against the place of J'onn's.
The empath wasted no time in phasing through and into the room, dragging his cart of supplies with him. He caught hold of Bruce's wrist as soon as he had a single hand solid enough on the other side to do so and moved directly to bolstering Bruce fully the instant he was completely through. Bruce buckled around the support, breaths becoming more obviously strained as his control slipped by inches. He wasn't limp, but it was damn close.
J'onn pushed him to the wall-joined cot and drug the cart within an arm's length of them.
The testing instruments came out in multitudes. A simple finger monitor first, to get a baseline of the situation. No doubt more complicated things like leads would soon follow.
But J'onn was professional and he knew, typically, Bruce had a visceral need to be in the loop and so he began to announce and Jason's fear spiked.
He rapped on the glass again, this time for the empath. "Don't read them." He let even his mind beg J'onn to listen. "Don't make it real to him. All that he has right now is whatever lie he can sell his own body."
The man's whole life depended on those lies, at present.
The grimace he was granted in turn by J'onn was equal parts understanding, assurance, and trepidation.
The reader's screen was tipped toward the glass for them.
SpO2: 79%
Jason breathed softly through his nose, not letting a single change in his own vitals show. That was worse than bad. To let that show would be nuclear against Bruce's high level of perception.
Even if that was definitely taking a serious hit right now considering he was beyond hypoxemic.
"Oh, geez, is that all?" Dick nearly laughed. "It's bad sure, but nothing B hasn't handled before."
"Okay. So we know he's not dying over this," Jason falsely agreed. "Now we just have to get him through it."
..........
"Why do you all keep showing?"
It had been a week of fear, that at any minute something awful was going to give, but they'd made it through again. J'onn was reporting a good prognosis. Jason didn't feel like he needed to count every breath to make sure they were still flowing anymore.
"Waiting." Cass shrugged.
"Why? It's not as though you like what I am." Simple. Matter-of-fact. Curious.
"What you've done," Cass corrected.
Bruce tipped his chin, processing, studying. "In the end, its the same, isn't it? We're made up of the things we've done."
Dick glanced over, idly tossing a ball at the wall and catching it on the rebound for the two-hundreth time in the last twenty minutes. "I, for one, want to be here when we get our Bruce back, if at all possible around all of the everything going on in our lives."
Bruce's eyes flicked to Jason's and away again just as quick when he likely saw his same rebuttal reflected back at him in Jason's blank gaze.
He's still me.
"Where would have been the harm in him protecting you as I have?" Bruce, uncharacteristically, pressed. "That's all I've done. The worst of targets for the peace of the world."
Cass shook her head. As if the answers were obvious. "These days, even Joker has kids," she signed.
Bruce closed his eyes. Breathed. Nodded. And met her gaze again. "For them, I'm sorry. Nothing else."
Cass sighed softly. "Someday... You learn."
With that, she stepped away.
And it cut Jason. This Bruce couldn't possibly fathom how much it should be destroying him to have to see that, but Jason knew. And he hurt for him. Because it was Jason's fault. Even if it wasn't Jokers death, but the others, that were weighing on the family, there was still... a degree of fault.
But he held his tongue. Dick still needed room for his piece. Jason had a horrible, sickening idea that the beloved eldest was about to back away too. And then it would just be them again. Two wounded, starving dogs eyeing each other as something a step above a meal only because they recognized the fight in the other.
"You meet me in a few years, you know," Dick murmured, gaze distant.
Bruce waited him out.
"More than a decade and this is the first time I've ever understood what you meant all those times you told me you weren't a good man."
Jason closed his eyes so he didn't have to see the spike hit.
"I made your whole life a lie," Bruce extrapolated, not shying away from it. "The anger is understandable."
"Don't need your fuckin' permission for it," Dick snapped, pushing to his feet. "Certainly not yours."
The room got quiet for a time.
Bruce stared after the door that had claimed all the rest of his future brood. "Who trained her?"
Jason hummed, understanding. "Lady Shiva and David Cain."
His head tipped, eyes sliding to Jason. "I haven't handled that either... Have I?"
"You can't." Jason shrugged. "She's not me. She's given them their life and we have to respect that to respect her."
Bruce's eyes narrowed. "But is she safe?"
"I don't get to decide that." God, it felt like the fucking twilight zone. Since when did he have to be the guy not advocating for a quick double-tap to the brain?
The older-younger man hummed softly through his nose. Calculating. "...because you're like me...? We need muzzles and orders and shock collars lest we scare them too much?"
Jason stared at the unflinching not-Batman who still very much looked like Batman and became nearly nauseous at the wrongness of the unadulterated violence in the empty eyes. "Who the fuck are you?"
Bruce hummed again, a different tone. Something near disappointment. "Evidently still wrong." He slid in lazy steps back to the wall-mounted cot and perched on the edge of it, hands clasping and forearms resting on his thighs. "So I guess maybe this is all real after all."
Jason blinked, as something else processed through, triggered by nothing more than a particularity of the last glance.
This Bruce, as much as he understood that he was an elder figure and a mentor to them all, as seamlessly as he had filled that role—to the extent that anyone in these circumstances could—he, in his own reality, was barely more than a teenager. Practically a peer with Cass and Jason at this age. He was no authority like this, at least not any more than either of they. No doubt, he felt as unmoored as the lot of them and it struck Jason just how much of that had been what he had was connecting to Bruce with all this time.
They had questions no one could answer, rage nothing could stifle, and it hit Jason like a sledgehammer...
Where he had been seething under older Bruce's middling, even care, structured with merely a handful of hard lines... younger Bruce had found what Jason had thought he'd always wanted.
Someone to say yes. An enabler. Ra's had let him run free, run ragged, really, with his rage. Trained him to hone it. Gave him every consideration Jason snarled for from Bruce...
And he hated it.
Bruce had lived that life, lived it well, and come to hate it with a passion so strong he desperately strove to instill lessons from it onto anyone in his life he could get to listen and bar them from the rest.
Jason stared at Bruce now, as a kid his own age who'd seen more trauma and violence—committed more—than most of even the world's deadliest soldiers... a kid who couldn't fathom becoming the future that Jason knew... a kid like him... and his stomach rolled.
..........
"Don't feel like you have to stay, Jaylad. Please." Bruce's eyes were the ones they knew again, even through the glass, weary and soft. "You have a life to live."
"I asked a question, I'm on no sleep, I'm hangry, don't make me repeat myself."
His lips twitched. Only a moment. Then everything sobered again. Had too. "Yes, I remember."
Jason grit his teeth, eyes flicking away. "Constantine wasn't sure you would, but—"
"It's alright."
"It's not. I should have stopped you—"
"Jay."
His eyes drew back to B, they couldn't help it.
"I don't regret it."
He shook his head, rolling it against the window in frustration. "Bullshit."
"Look at me."
Jason did, reluctant.
Bruce stared levely back from his same perch at the edge of the cot, elbows at his knees and fingers laced between. "For the ripples and the trickle-down and the unexpected repercussions? Yes. I regret that. I hurt for all of those." He rolled a shoulder. "But for the very action itself? For getting him away from all of you?" The big man set his shoulders. "I'll never be sorry."
Jason had to blink hard a few times while wiping the sweat from his palms with the sides of his pants.
"Do you understand me?"
He swallowed hard, unable to do more than nod without escalating the room's level of emotion.
"Good." Bruce offered one of his rare, gentle smiles. "Now go home, lad, and reset. Understood?"
Jason nodded numbly, forcing his feet to follow the direction.
..........
"You can't be, uh... Charged. On the technicality of it not actually being this you that pulled the trigger. So..." He swung the door further open and stepped back. "We no longer have to hold you..."
Bruce snorted, derisive.
It may have been the letter of the law, but there was no justice in this.
As badly as he wanted there to be.
For him to be allowed to feel as right as he did for what he knew was so far from it.
"We should put my access on indefinite suspension, for the time being."
Clark visibly balked at that. "Whatever... Whatever you think is best..."
"Oh?"
"Yes. And I know that—"
"So. Clark—"
"I know."
"So when I give you and Diana an age bracket sedation protocol—"
"I know!" The mild-mannered heart winced. "...I'm sorry."
Bruce rolled a shoulder, his whole body moving as if loaded under wet sand, scooping up the pile of stripped paper linens to throw in the hazard bin on the way out. "What's done is done." His mind swam with all the ways that there wasn't any way to prepare for returning home with all that had come to light.
The bundle was taken from him with one hand and another gripped tightly to the junction between his left neck and shoulder. "Bruce." The eyes always said more than anything else ever could. All the nuance and guilt and too-late observations that would sound pedantic housed in words "I'm so sorry."
He hummed. "So am I." Before he stepped into the hallway, he paused. "Do we even know why they ignored mine, yours, and Diana's orders to break me out?"
"Well." Clark cleared his throat. "Uh. You had made them promise, a few days before, that they wouldn't let you miss Alfred's birthday... So..."
Bruce closed his his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Fantastic..."
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