The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
inspired by @jason-flashfic's prompt 'haunted' ! 3.5k, bruce & jason, jason & gloria stanson, ghouls.
Bruce keeps his eyes closed.
The after-effects of the witch's curse linger in the air, pressing down on his chest until he can feel it ache. He knows there's a silhouette behind him. He knows it's arrogant to keep his back turned to a threat.
All around the cave, the bats chirp wildly, their wings fluttering in agitated motions. They don't like this new intrusion. They don't trust it. Bruce wonders if he can spend the night keeping his eyes closed. If he can delay facing whatever fresh hell the city brought him tonight.
In the end, he picks up a batarang and turns, aim ready.
He falters. "Jason."
The ghoul stares back at him with wide, empty eyes. Its hair is shiny and wet, like it pushed through the curtains of cave water and clambered up here. The Robin suit is damp too. Bruce puts the creature at 4'6, criminally underweight, pale, but not deathly pale. Its blue eyes are dull, with the tiniest of bags under each. Its mouth is pouty. But even with these distortions, the imitation it makes is uncanny.
Bruce should have expected this.
The ghoul hops down from its perch and moves to Bruce with the bird-like agility of youth. Bruce tries to get into position to defend himself, but for a second, he fears he won't make it. He feels disarmed. Instead of an attack, the ghoul wraps its thin arms around Bruce's middle. When it looks up, its eyes are shiny. Deceptively innocent.
"Whatever you are," Bruce growls, "stay away from me."
The ghoul blinks. There's a smattering of freckles across its nose, a lovely crop of curls forming a heart over its forehead. Jason, Bruce thinks. He sweeps a hand over the ghoul's forehead despite himself. Cups its cheek. Obediently, the creature lolls its head into Bruce's palm, its eyes adoring.
Then, it takes Bruce's thumb into its mouth and bites it.
+
There was no way of escaping the witch without shooting her, Bruce will give Jason that. The real Jason, that is. They'd been forced into a tight corner, and Jason had done what he did to protect Bruce.
There's always a way, a more rational part of himself points out. The stubborn contrarian that Jason knows how to bring out of him so well.
Regardless of how they ended the fight, the more troublesome outcome is the creature.
You may kill me now, the witch had snarled, but your greatest guilt will eat at you long after I'm gone.
Bruce sighs. It's a bit on the nose, as far as curses go. The ghoul is pawing at the bathroom door, its feet shuffling under the slat. Wayne Manor's sturdy interiors are no match for a small creature's nails, but he can't hide in the showers forever.
After a few moments under the hot steam, Bruce shuts off the water and wipes himself down with a towel. When he re-emerges, the ghoul immediately clings to his hand and tries to bite him.
Bruce snatches his arm dully. "Stop that."
The ghoul gives him a dour look. It's so quintessentially Jason, the sulking and sagging and pouting. Under a different light, the ghoul could've been a boy, and the argument would've been about something else—Bruce announcing that he wouldn't be able to drive Jason to school that morning, Jason pretending it didn't bother him. The memory makes his chest ache, makes him question whether it's real at all. So much of what Jason had been—of what they both had been—is lost to the ethers of time. No delusion is strong enough to revive it. But for a moment, Bruce feels weak. For a moment, Bruce wants to give—wants to let the creature take.
He shakes himself off and decides to head to the cave.
+
The ghoul has taken to tucking its chin over Bruce's shoulder, even though cape and cowl give it no access to skin. Its arms hang limply over Bruce's shoulders, its face bored. Sleepy, even. Bruce presses his cheek to the ghoul's cheek. It presses back. In the reflection of the cave's monitors, Bruce can see the hazy shapes of Batman and Robin staring back at him—together, like they're always supposed to be. The universe is cruel, in that way. In one way or the other, Bruce will always have to bury Jason Todd.
Having learned by now that Bruce won't be letting him feed, the ghoul has taken to sucking on the cape. Bruce busies himself with his notes instead. Gotham has received its fair share of otherworldly creatures over the years, and Bruce has documented almost all that he has encountered. There's enough material here on what to do with ghouls, how to eliminate them. Luckily, the creature seems to have no energy for anything. No desire to feed on anyone but Bruce. This brings the threat-level down significantly. There won't be a fight tonight, not in the physical sense, and the total ghoul-count is only two.
Bruce frowns. He thought about it earlier, what shape Jason's ghoul must've taken. What dark horror followed him home. Someone he killed, most certainly. Someone whose life and unfulfilled potential keeps him up at night—a brash decision made with cold conviction. Bruce knows he should take some kind of pleasure in this cosmic comeuppance. In the actions and their consequences.
But the thought of Jason suffering dulls any vindication he could've felt.
"Where are you," he says, when Jason's cell goes straight to voice-mail.
"We need to do something about the ghouls," he says again, an hour later.
Jason never calls him back.
+
Jason has an apartment on East End, and Bruce knows where it is.
Admittedly, the climb is cumbersome with a weak ghoul on his back. The creature has no energy to support itself on hands and legs, but it hangs onto Bruce, pulls at his skin and whines when Bruce won't let him take a bite of his flesh. It's hungry. Pitiful. Bruce tried to buy it a burger on the way here. But neither burger nor cashier held much interest to the creature that was born to eat Bruce specifically, eat at him. His greatest guilt. The albatross around his neck.
Luckily for Bruce, the weight of Robin is more metaphorical than physical. Jason might not have the same luck. There's no telling what the boy's creature might be doing to him, what danger he might be in. Quickly, Bruce finds the fire-exit of the fourth story apartment and pushes open a window.
The anomaly becomes evident to him instantly. Jason's apartment is usually clean and impersonal to the point of sterile, but this time, the coffee table holds a few buttery magazines and a pack of Marlboros. Not Jason's usual brand of choice. Odder still are the bottles of nail polish. Pink, teal and scarlet shades glimmer in the low light, completely incongruent with the apartment around it.
A whisper of movement up north suddenly catches Bruce's attention. He moves through the hallway to follow it and ends up in Jason's bedroom, which is suspiciously empty. Bruce frowns. Air puffs at the curtain from an open window.
Bruce has a bad feeling about this.
+
Jason disappears for about four days.
Bruce tries to check all the tabs he keeps on Red Hood, tries to enhance surveillance across the city but with a hungry ghoul constantly on his shoulder and a severe lack of sleep going against him, it takes more effort than he would have wanted to dedicate. Letting his guard down around the ghoul is a dangerous prospect—letting it feed on him would almost certainly turn him into a ghoul himself.
But he cannot bring himself to kill the creature.
In the cave, the ghoul watches him pace with owlish eyes. It's starving, Bruce can tell. A part of him wishes it would lunge or attack, prove itself the demonic entity that it is, but all it does it hope.
Hope is dangerous.
With fuel and a can of salt, the job should be easy. It would certainly stop the nuisance. With the absence of Bruce's flesh, the ghoul has started to chase after other residue—sweat from the home button of Bruce's phone, his fingerprints on a glass of water. Keeping the ghoul away from him takes effort. It claws its way through doors, climbs up emergency ladders. When it can't get through something, it bangs its fist against it, slams its body against it.
Once, Bruce even heard a feeble, pained murmur.
It drives him mad, the thought that Jason needs him—the thought that he's starving Jason yet again. Of love, of sustenance, of—of survival. The boy isn't growing paler or sicker, but with every baleful gaze he casts in Bruce's direction, Bruce feels his gut clench and his conviction waver.
In the end, Bruce catches Jason right where his search began—in Jason's apartment.
He'd only just flung in, determined to comb through Jason's belongings for a sign on his whereabouts, when the back door hinge suddenly creaks. Bruce swerves just in time to catch Jason in a hoodie, a deer in the headlights looking to grab a bag and sprint. His eyes go wide. With practiced ease, Bruce swings a batarang until the line goes taut around Jason's arm.
"Fuck!" Jason tries to scrabble it off, but Bruce yanks him closer and slams him against the wall. The bag falls to the floor with a thud.
"Where the hell have you been."
"Nowhere." Jason scowls. "Get off me."
Bruce eases his grip but doesn't get off him. "I've been trying to reach you for four days."
"Yeah, I know." Jason rubs his sore shoulder and squints, then casts a glance at the Robin ghoul a few paces away, watching them boredly. "Cuddling with my corpse, huh?"
There's an unreadable expression on his face. Bruce avoids looking at him and searches through the apartment instead, his eyes scanning the environment even as his arms stay pressing Jason down.
"Jason?" A soft, female voice whispers.
Bruce freezes. The hardness of Jason's expression wavers.
"I'm here," he calls out. "Don't come out."
Despite Jason's warning, a thin, blonde woman steps through the doorway, her long legs concealing a strange, rubber-like strength beneath them. Sheila Haywood. Of course.
Bruce is just about to open his mouth when a sudden detail catches his eye. Jason's ghoul is wearing a pink nightgown, loose and floppy on its uneven body. Bruce narrows his gaze. With a pinched nose and carefully-made eyebrows stares a young woman, much younger than Sheila Haywood had been, with thick bangs framing either side of her face. An old-fashioned hair-cut. A fad from less than a decade ago that had suddenly faded from public consciousness.
Sheila Haywood had had curls.
"I told you to stay in," Jason scolds her softly.
The ghoul curls one leg over the other and crosses her arms uncertainly. Even with the blank look on her face, she moves with more vivacity than Bruce's own ghoul. Where Robin moved like he was tired, this ghoul had a spring in her step. An odd kind of bounce, like her limbs weren't quite used to motion and energy.
And what was that earlier? Jason?
"What have you done," Bruce growls suddenly, pushing Jason back against the wall with a forearm on his chest. "What did you do!"
Jason tries to knee Bruce between his legs. Bruce grabs his thigh just in time and rucks his hoodie up with his shirt. A cold, dreadful horror seizes him at the sight. Multiple scabs glint at him in the low light, fresh, red and sore. Teeth marks on skin. Rabid, long teeth marks across a body that's relatively flushed and healthy. When Bruce pushes Jason's chin up, he catches tiny indents there too.
"You've been feeding her," Bruce accuses.
Jason stares back with wry amusement, lifting one brow as if to say You've been starving him. A sudden discomfort gnaws at Bruce's gut. He'd done the chemical analysis on the ghoul right after it arrived in the cave. He knew, logically, that it needed to feed to gain energy. But he hadn't realized that a pound of flesh could return the ghoul its voice, its character. Suddenly, a flash of the cigarettes and the polish arrive to Bruce, and his eyes drift to Robin, who stares at him with longing.
Had he denied himself a chance to listen to the voice of the boy he buried?
"This is reckless," he says strongly. "We have no idea what a bite like this could do to you."
"C'mon," Jason huffs in disbelief. "We know what a bite like this can do. You can see it right there." He jerks his head at the woman, who had long grown bored with their confrontation and resigned herself to reading Vogue on the couch. "You really telling me you didn't put the pieces together?"
"Giving her your flesh isn't the same as giving her her life back," Bruce argues. "She's a ghoul, Jason. She's dead."
"Well, if you're here to ask me to kill her, you can put the idea to bed." Jason shoves Bruce's arms off of him. "I can't do it."
Bruce stares at Jason's back as he heads to the fridge, then lets his gaze drift to the woman. Underneath the rib-thin, stretched out skin, he observes the subtle cosmetic enhancements on the woman's face, the tilt of her lashes. A model, most likely. The thought summons up a dredge of memories, a fierce recognition.
Did Felipe fall, Jason?
"Gloria Stanson," Bruce says quietly.
Jason sets his water bottle down and shuts the door, as if Bruce's remark had no effect on him. But his shoulders are tense.
"I can't kill her, Bruce," he says, moments later, his face defiant but his voice weak with defeat. "You're gonna have to—" He flings his arms up vaguely. "I don't know. I don't want to do it."
The movement catches Gloria's eye. She licks her lips hungrily and tilts her head, an innocent hope washing over her expression. "Feeding time?"
Something about those words triggers Robin, who comes back to Bruce's side and buries himself there with longing. Please, his body seems to say. Please, Bruce? From the kitchen, Jason watches them with a strange look in his eyes, then turns to Gloria and says, "Come here."
"Jason," Bruce warns.
"Relax, it's just a little." Jason drives the edge of a knife against his thumb, revealing a fresh curve of blood. Gloria hops over to him and holds his palm to her mouth, drinking the blood in feeble sips.
"Ah," she sighs. "That's good."
Jason's eyes soften.
Bruce feels his own hand tighten protectively against Robin's head. "Jason. You can't play around with the dead."
Jason shrugs. "Hey, I came back! Why shouldn't she?"
"It's not the same thing," Bruce says gently. "Even if your flesh and blood can animate her, it won't return her soul. It's—an unnatural way of life, and not one she can sustain."
"That's not for you to decide. My body, my choice, remember?"
"Not if it concerns your life."
Jason's eyes flare with challenge. "How come you haven't killed lil' zombie pipsqueak then?"
Bruce glances down at Robin, who is trying to chew his way through Bruce's body armor with his little teeth.
"I can't do it," he admits.
Jason laughs without humor.
"That's why I came here, Jason," Bruce says. "It may be—difficult. But it's necessary work. We can't go on any longer like this." Especially you. "We have to eliminate them. We have to hold each other accountable and get it done."
"You know, on any other occasion, I would've loved to do a double-homicide with you," Jason says. "But you just had to pick this one, huh?" He sighs. "Alright. What've you got?"
+
They go down to the Batmobile together, Bruce, Jason, and their two ghouls. Bruce tucks Robin in the back, while Jason holds the door open for Gloria. They've barely slid into their seats themselves when Robin clambers over the console and climbs into Bruce's lap.
Bruce sighs.
"Forgot his car seat?" Jason tuts exaggeratedly.
Bruce ignores him and pulls out of the alleyway. It's not the first time Robin has done this. The ghoul craves proximity where it's denied flesh. But with the adult Jason in the passenger seat, a more pressing truth makes itself evident. Beneath his chin, Bruce can feel Robin's hair tickle him, but it's the only obstruction he offers. Robin is small. Bruce had forgotten how small he was. Somehow, with its living counterpart only a few paces away, the creature feels even younger in Bruce's lap.
"Aw, I chipped it again," a soft voice declares from the back.
"You say something, Gloria?" Jason turns. When Gloria holds up a hand, he searches his breast pocket. "I've still got the teal one. You liked that one, right?"
"Mm-hmm." She smiles, accepting the bottle and propping one foot on the console to give it a polish. Bruce watches Jason out of the corner of his eye, his heart beating out of order. The curse reveals an uncomfortable truth. For the last few years, Jason has carried the woman in the backseat in the same way Bruce carries Jason. It's a heavy weight. It consumes.
For both their sake, Bruce takes the longer route back to the manor. If Jason notices, he doesn't let on, watching the city recede around them to reveal the green, rolling hills and woods of Bristol. Every now and then, Robin attempts to bite Bruce's cheek, his mouth. Bruce cups his hand around his face like a muzzle for a few seconds but lets him go. He wonders what would've happened if he'd given this Jason something—even an inch. If he would've heard that bright, jovial voice say "Bruce!" with the full fondness of youth once again.
He thinks about how much Jason was willing to give Gloria.
"You're staring again," Jason says pointedly.
Bruce's hands tighten on the wheel. "I didn't know you still...thought about her..."
"You don't?" Jason arches a brow, examining Bruce's face for a few seconds before shaking his head with his conclusion. "No, of course you don't. Best to keep the past in the past and move on, right? Probably healthier too."
"Does this look like moving on to you?" Bruce gestures to the boy in his lap.
Jason huffs, frustrated. "That's different."
"How so?"
"It was our job to protect people like her," Jason argues. "S'what I signed up for."
"Loss is a painful part of what we do," Bruce says hesitantly. "I wish I could say something to make it better, Jason, but it's never easy."
Jason mutely shakes his head. His eyes are red-rimmed. Bruce's heart twists with discomfort, with pride. In a way, it's just like Jason—that his first loss as a hero affected him so deeply, he still carries it. Jason is stubborn, sensitive, quick to emotion and to action. He never accepts failure as an answer—from himself, or anyone else. Bruce can empathize, even admire that determination. But that doesn't mean he isn't also a little afraid of it.
"Burying them again will be difficult," he begins. "But—we'll be together. I'll be there with you. Whatever we may have to carry tonight, we'll carry it together."
He wonders if that even means anything to Jason at this point, with the evidence of Bruce's failure sitting right between them. But when his eye catches Jason's, he sees his trust reflected right back in them.
+
As the pale blue light of dawn spreads around the estate, the four figures walk through the woods together. Robin and Gloria's clumsy footfalls crunch the leaves underneath them; Bruce and Jason move ahead of them in silence.
Bruce wants to say something to Jason about how it matters that he's here and alive. That no matter how complicated things have gotten between them, no matter how much Bruce grieves the boy who never got to grow up, he would never trade his Jason for a pale imitation, a shell of what once was. That he's sorry he can never quite give Jason what he wants, what he needs.
In the end, they stand together and take their ghouls by the hand, each weary in their own ways. Bruce takes one last look at Robin, tries to memorize the cherubic features that have gotten fuzzier over time. He tips the boy's chin up, watches the earnest hope on his face slowly start to fade as he pinches the boy's nose shut. Robin falls into Bruce's arms, his head buried into the crook of Bruce's elbow. Peace at last, hungry no more. Somewhere on the other side, Jason has Gloria in his arms, his cheeks tear-streaked. When Bruce sets Robin down, Jason picks his lifeless hand up and sets it on top of Gloria's so they can be together in ritual death. Bruce builds the fire while Jason spreads the salt. They work together in silence, moving quick to beat the sun that has slowly started to rise. When they draw back, all that's left of their memories is a haunting flame, threatening to melt away the last of a rotting flesh.
my favorite detail in true detective s1 is that neither of them wear seatbelts. i assume this is because rust has a death wish and marty feels emasculated by safety regulations
the thing is, piranesi found the Great and Secret Knowledge. arne-sayles says that the Knowledge is what humanity lost over time to "progress" (which he imagines as the ability fly or to control the minds of others), but what was really lost is the appreciation of the natural beauty of the world, a devotion and loving kindness to others (including the dead, animals and your enemies) and respect for and reliance on the natural world. we lost that in our modern world due in part to ambition and the relentless pursuit of "progress" no matter what the cost. which is precisely why the Other cant access the Great and Secret Knowledge - because he is so focused on finding it he would take a man slave and barely spend any time in it. you can only have the Great and Secret Knowledge if you fully appreciate the House. you have to be its child. the Beauty of the House is immeasurable and its Kindness is infinite
you are alive on a planet with insects and whales and diatoms and mycelium networks and puppies and your human friends. literally so awesome to be a living thing
