SIX OF SWORDS
six Jason Todd vignettes, from Lost Days to Under the Red Hood
read it on AO3
i. the pit
He woke up surrounded by green, green, green, bioluminescent in its glory and cloying as an August day. The green surrounded him, filled him, perversive air drowning his lungs and stinging his eyes. It was sandpaper and silk all at once, sizzling and soothing at the aches in his joints like peroxide on a cut.
Jason’s mind stuttered like a faulty transmission, but his body seemed to know the score. Instinctively, his hands scrabbled out to claw blindly at the ooze, searching for purchase that wasn’t there. He let the animal panic carry him upward. It wasn’t until he hit air that awareness snapped back into focus and the pain—real pain—set in, lighting a fire that started in his chest and raced up toward his eyes and throat, down toward his belly and toes.
First, he remembered how to breathe. His face breached the surface of the Lazarus pit, and his lungs began to burn with a desperate desire that he could not answer, his mind still slow to respond. Suck in! some little voice supplied. So he did. The air rushed in, hot and acidic, and his lungs swelled. Jason blew out, gasping, choking, and his chest seized. It wasn’t enough. He coughed, bile dribbling from his lips. He breathed in again, and out again, until finally it fell into a natural, hiccupping rhythm.
Breathing brought him to a loose awareness, groggy, drunken, but no sooner had he lifted his head to peer around the chamber than a hand found the scruff of the robes he was wearing and yanked him up from the ooze. His skin felt sensitive, raw, and the hand had long and biting fingers. He wished desperately for the it to go away. His unseen savior dragged him up and out and over the lip of the pool, and then it tucked him away under a protective shoulder, hiding him from a growing cacophony of shouting.
“Run,” came a soft voice. A real voice. Lips against his ear, fingers bruising his wrist. His mind did not remember how to run, but his feet did. Antelope instinct.
Everything was very bright, and very loud, and the air felt like molten metal on his skin, hot and boiling and encasing all at once. It was birth and death together. He had visions of men in black and purple and green, psychedelic as the Caterpillar’s smoke, and they swirled into nonsense in his racing, empty skull. There was no time to dissect them while adrenaline coursed through him and made every neuron sing with fear. All around Jason was stone, and high above him was a circle of pure night sky, deeper than midnight and sliced through by a crescent moon. Dumbly, he stared upward at that dark disc. The hand pulling him yanked harder, crueler, and night-stalked feet carried him forward. As he ran, his mind began to fall into place. Sudden memories sprang up—a warehouse, a voice, and blistering heat. With the memories came the terror.
Jason recalled once when a thug had knocked him unconscious back when he had been Robin. He had remembered the whirling cadence of battle, and then he had remembered waking up in a bed at the manor, Christmas red and green abandoned on a chair next to him and his body dressed in gentle silk pajamas. It was as if someone had hit the pause button on his brain. Bruce had explained it all—he had been hit on the head, a bit of memory loss was normal for a bad concussion, and he would be okay. Calm and authoritative like the devil on Jason’s shoulder.
But Bruce wasn’t here now. Someone had hit pause again, but no one was here to supply the time that he had lost. The realization was distressing. Fear rose as bile in his throat, and the desperate, cliché thought of where am I?! began to pace the empty halls of his brain. When he tried to pull away, the hand just gripped tighter. “Run,” that voice hissed again. It was familiar. That, too, was distressing. Jason pulled again. Pulled harder. His hand broke free from the stranger’s grip, and then his mind slithered away.
Pain lanced through him, sharp and biting. Pain filled every pore, gnawed at his mind like bats in a chimney, rats in a cage. Desperate, wild panic coursed through him and rage lit in his belly, so hot, so bright, making his eyes burn with how it blinded him.
His mind was not prepared for the rage. The fuse of it lit and time slowed down, and Jason became acutely aware of the other bodies in the room. He noticed that there was a man in front of him, dressed in loose garb and holding a staff. Before he could think he leapt forward, arms outstretched. The man’s mouth stretched into a perfect “o” as Jason’s hands reached forward, realization dawning dumbly on his covered face, Jason’s thumbs aiming toward his eyes, lips twisted into a savage grimace.
It had been easy to squeeze, to crush. The blood and gore had not even felt hot on Jason’s fingers. Far away, the man howled. Far away, Jason used the falling body as a springboard, leaping toward another stranger. His hands clasped around the man’s neck. Somehow, this would make the pain better. He did not understand how, but he knew it, he knew it. There came a crack, a wet feeling under his fingers. Another fell. Jason grew aware that he was howling. He didn’t know where the sound was coming from, just that it was being ripped from his very core and that he could not stop it even if he tried.
All the noise had faded away to the pounding in his head. His thoughts were frenetic. Underneath it all, a mantra of pain, pain, pain, pain synced to his pulse. Before he could wheel on another bystander, the hands were back. They expertly disabled him, using his fury and his slowly waking body to their advantage, and with surprising strength they began to drag him away from the green glow of the Lazarus chamber. Jason knew that he was still yelling, but his captor said nothing. They merely dragged him away from the din of the pits and led him into shadow. Together, they wove through gardens and a small copse of woodland until they reached a small embankment.
His unknown companion grabbed him by the shoulders and turned his body so that he was facing them. It was a woman with a fighter’s build, cloaked in a dark jacket and holding a bag in her arms. Her face was tight with focus. She was very familiar, and some memory of her scratched at the back of his mind like a cat at the door, waiting to be let in. She shoved a nylon duffel into his arms. “Do not seek him out,” she said, breathless. “You remain unavenged.”
Then she pushed him, hurling him off the embankment and into the saltwater below. First came the cold, then came the sting, and then the crescent moon bled out into the black sky, extinguished.
ii. the dregs
The hotel was a step above seedy. It didn’t rent rooms by the hour, but the smell of cigarettes was baked into the carpeting and the man behind the scuffed receptionist’s desk had been oddly pleased when Jason had paid in cash. It was cheap enough that he wouldn’t blow through the money he had been tossed into the sea with, but just nice enough to be ordinary. If anyone was chasing him, they wouldn’t look here first.
Once he had booked the room and finally felt settled enough for his heart to stop racing, he took stock of his own body. First, Jason flexed his toes, paying careful attention to the way the fake hardwood floors felt pleasantly cool beneath his feet. Then he scanned upwards, searching for points of pain, possible broken bones. He was sore, but he could deal with that. His stomach, however, was nauseous with hunger. He poked through the duffel and found a few bottles of water and protein bars. He slammed one of the bottles, ripped apart a protein bar with scavenger fervor, and then immediately reached for more water. His stomach began to gurgle unpleasantly, having gone so long without nourishment, and he had to count his breaths to keep everything down.
Everything was still strange. His body felt electrified, like the neurons were firing twice as fast as usual. His mind was still cloaked in a dreamy haze that faded very slowly. What came back wasn’t memory, but it wasn’t not memory. It was images, blurry from fatigue and the weathering of time, and occasionally words that his inner voice spoke, though he knew he had never said. The clearest was the image of Talia pushing him into the water. Why had he been with Talia? He remembered training with her, taking meals with her. He remembered sitting with her on a warm spring night, listening to her talk about Bruce, his mind grasping at understanding. It wasn’t that he hadn’t understood her—he had—but the connections were so fleeting, and his mind had struggled to hold anything. He couldn’t remember what she had said, just that it had filled him with a nameless emotion, something with more rage than grief and more sorrow than fury. He remembered sitting on the grass next to Talia and crying, and the heat of the embarrassment that filled his chest now was overwhelming. He put his feelings in a box and shoved it back into his mind. He would either dissect them later, or he wouldn’t. He wasn’t concerned.
Jason took stock of the rest of his brain with a clinical efficiency. He remembered sleeping outdoors, cold and wet. He remembered eating out of trash cans and chasing off raccoons. He remembered nothing and then, like someone had clicked the lights on, he remembered something: scrabbling, bleeding fingers, the ripe smell of mildew, a smooth belt buckle. His stomach leapt. Jason scrambled over to the toilet and vomited up the meager contents of his stomach.
He pressed his forehead against the cool rim of the toilet bowl, not caring how dirty it was. The nothing and the something—those were meaningful. Cautiously, he began to poke at the memory, wiping bile from his mouth. Everything came after the something. Before the nothing, there was pain, lancing bright in his body, a phantom memory that made his heart race and made his limbs itch to curl inward to protect his soft core. Before the nothing there was nothing but pain, and that, he assumed, was the ticket.
Talia had given him a duffel filled with money from three different countries and a few thick sheafs of paper. He gathered up the strength to pull himself off the bathroom floor, washed the acrid taste out of his mouth with tap water, and then sat down at the dingy kitchen table that occupied the center of the room. Start big, came Bruce’s voice, and move inwards. Like a spiral. That’s how you answer any question.
The first thing to greet him was a newspaper clipping that said, “FOUR DEAD IN JOKER ATTACK”. It didn’t mean anything to him, so he put it aside. But there was a similar clipping underneath that—“JOKER ESCAPES!!”—, and then another one, until he had a small pile. Why would Talia give him these? He put them in a neat pile and left them for later, but his mind kept worrying at them like his tongue poking at a loose tooth.
At the bottom of the pile was small, rectangular piece of paper. The top read “DEATH CERTIFICATE”. Clipped to that was a last newspaper clipping—“BATMAN RETURNS JOKER TO POLICE CUSTODY”.
The feelings that rose within him met, paused, and collided. His chest grew tight, his throat constricted, and his mind began to tie itself in knots, shielding him from the truth Talia’s duffel had led him to. He had died. He had been dead. The nothing had been real nothing, the bliss of unconsciousness—not darkness, but true nothing. But before the nothing came the something. And the something had been the repetitive, sharp pain of Joker striking him with a crowbar, again, and again, and again, and again, until the pain blurred into one constant, the only constant. He remembered his mother. He remembered the bombs ticking down, the square numbers blinking, and then—then came the nothing.
Jason had been murdered. He had been murdered by Joker, for little else than ego. Bruce had not gotten there in time.
Jason had been murdered, and Bruce had done nothing. Joker was still alive. Joker was still killing. Jason’s body was coiling tight. His mind raced, pitter-pattered, and something was dripping out of him like a leak. Fury squeezed at his heart. He ripped the lamp from the bedside table and smashed it into the television; the screen cracked with a satisfying buzz. Next, he slammed his fist into a mirror. He turned his attention to the cheap chairs, the table, the bottles of water and the stacks of money. The newspaper clippings flew up around him and fluttered back down to the floor like moths.
Someone was pounding on the door, their voice tense. He wanted them to come in. His fists were balled against his side, his feet sliding into a stable position. If they came in, he’d kill them. All that rage had to go somewhere.
What he really wanted was to feel the Joker’s face beneath his hands as he mashed that stupid clown to putty. He wanted to torture Joker the same way Joker had tortured him, consume him with the conflagration of his rage. The blood would feel hot and good and he could be free, his own man, no one’s victim and no songbird either.
That’s not who you really want, some voice inside of him said, and then the image changed, spinning like a coin in flight. Bruce. This was Bruce’s fault. Not the murder, but the killing. Not the dying, but the living. Joker was alive. Joker had killed him, and he was alive, but Bruce had let it happen. Jason imagined what killing Bruce would feel like. He imagined bringing his fists down again and again until there was nothing left, not even atoms, the cowl stained red, the man beneath exposed for the coward he was. He chewed it over like a piece of fat and then swallowed it down.
All at once everything crystalized, and suddenly he knew the path before him with the clarity of a prophet. He would kill Bruce. He would do it himself, with his own hands, and he would do it alone. He would kill Bruce, and then everyone would learn the truth of who he was, learn the real story of the second Robin, blasted apart and buried in pieces. And that, Jason knew, would be the last tale of the Dark Knight.
Someone was pounding at the door. Someone was turning the handle. Someone was opening the door. Someone was dying.
iii. the men
It came easier now, every single one. It came easier because each one was easier to justify. When you hung out with bad people, Jason had learned, then you learned about worse people, and worse people than that, and it continued down like a nesting doll until you learned about the saddest, smallest, vilest sort of men out there. And there were plenty of sad, small men willing to pass on their sad, small skills to Jason, unaware that he was a Judas goat leading them to slaughter. By now, it felt formulaic, a game he’d played many times. The steps were always the same. He cut them down, and then he started at the top again, worming his way into circles that grew more and more exclusive and evil. It was like something out of Dante.
He thought about Egon, the fighting instructor, the human trafficker. Egon must have thought he was very clever, writing in code, keeping journals, leashing Jason on a curfew and posting guards. Egon, as it turned out, was the most boring kind of prick out there, a man so sure of his own intelligence that he couldn’t picture anyone smarter or better trained than himself. Anyone like Jason, or countless other people Jason had had the dubious pleasure of knowing. Egon had believed him when he had faked his poor German. Believed his obliviousness. He had never pried. Egon had always been willing to rely on the fact that everyone was stupider than him. He hadn’t had lieutenants, no one who could disagree with him and walk away from those fights. He had only had himself. Having people to contradict you, Jason was learning, was essential. Without conflict there was no growth. You needed assholes who would dig their fingers into the stitches of every plan and rip them open one by one, because those were the assholes who would keep your plans from blowing apart.
Egon had a lot in common with Bruce, Jason thought. Robin was never meant to disagree. Dick had disagreed, and that was when he had quit being Robin and become something else. Robin was a yes-man in green tights, a skald for the Dark Knight meant to sing and kick and punch his praises. And when Robin started developing a mind of his own, that was when the game ended. That was when the songs stopped being sung.
He thought about Egon, the fighting instructor, the fool. He thought about Egon writhing on the floor, pink foam running from his mouth, the poisoned energy drink falling from his hands, splashing onto his shirt, some garbled German jumbling together as he died. The Germans had a word for everything. Jason wondered if they had one for watching men die.
After Egon, there was the sniper. Then after the sniper came the explosives specialist, the chemist, the assassin, the tactician. He stayed with each of them for a month, he learned everything they would teach him, and then he killed them. One by one, he snipped the loose threads before they ever got the chance to unravel. He removed the bad men from the chessboard, though he knew that they would be replaced before long. In another world, another life, he would spend his days ferreting out the rottenest kernels of evil and casting them back to the darkness where they belonged. But he had bigger prey to hunt for now.
Now, Jason thought about all of those men, and he remembered their faces. He knew, with righteous certainty, that each of them deserved to die. They deserved to be killed, and he deserved to be their killer. He did not regret the killing. He did not regret the deaths. But something was happening to his heart. Maybe it was calcifying. Growing harder.
It wasn’t bad. Jason didn’t regret it. He didn’t regret any of it. There wasn’t even a shirking, hidden corner of his mind that cast doubt on his actions. Body, brain, and hands were united, acting in perfect tandem, and he had never felt so certain of anything, so sure of each blow of his fists and twist of his knives and bullet from his guns. But the days were growing longer, the nights longer yet, and his mind felt both sharper and slower. Gotham loomed closer, the tape was beginning to slow down, the music was beginning to slow down, and the feeling chafed at him. The game would soon be over, and Bruce would be dead. It should have been a good thought—a happy thought. But what would come after that nibbled at him with sharp teeth. What existed in the hazy after? What if there was nothing? A few months ago, he would have told himself that he was content with dying again, so long as Bruce died too. But now…
Now, he wasn’t so sure. Jason found that he had developed a taste for living. He liked his life. He liked hurting bad people. He liked having the plush bank accounts that Talia maintained for him, so that on very cold days he could buy a hot coffee and cup it in his hands, letting the warmth diffuse through his palms, taking too-hot sips so that the heat burned his throat and shuddered through his limbs and filled him with the simple mammalian pleasure of being warm. He liked that a lot. If there was nothing after Gotham, if he was to be a flameout instead of a phoenix—
He kept telling himself that he must focus on the now, on the mission. The only way out was through, and the only way through was the killing.
iv. the face
Bruce’s weight crashed down on Jason’s back, sending him tumbling to the damp rooftop as a fork of lightning split the sky. For a moment the world was lit up with startling clarity, throwing their shadows long and dark so that they looked like exaggerated behemoths and glinting off the flamberge blade of Jason’s knife. Bruce grunted with effort, driving his knees down into Jason’s spine. It gave Jason the opening he needed.
The knife that Talia had gifted him was wickedly sharp. It had ripped through the utility belt like it was nothing, ripping the seams of Bruce’s body armor until a bright line of blood had welled up and begun to trickle down his hip. Jason could take Bruce apart piece by piece with it, digging the tip into every crack in his armor until he could pry it open, break it down. He waited for a corner of Bruce’s cape to snap taut and then drove the blade down into the concrete.
Bruce struggled like a rabbit in a snare. Jason slammed his palm into Bruce’s chin and struck a blow across his face before the man cut himself free with a pair of batarangs. Jason didn’t relent, pushing in close as Bruce regained his balance, cracking his helmet against Bruce’s jaw and driving him onto his backfoot with a well-timed kick to his throat. Bruce lashed out with the batarangs like they were claws, slashing them across Jason’s helmet with the chilling screech of metal on metal. Sparks flew up and were quickly extinguished by the unending rain. Jason pulled his knife from the rooftop and carved a line up Bruce’s cowl, exposing the scaled padding below. Bruce in turn used Jason’s forward momentum to push him back, sending them both over the edge of the rooftop.
Bruce landed on top of him with a heavy thud. “This is over,” he snarled, driving his fists down again and again on Jason’s chest and shoulders.
Jason knew better.
“No,” he said, “not nearly.” He grabbed the cowl where the knife had cut it and pulled, hard, until it ripped in half. Bruce leapt back, his fists raised before him like a pugilist. He had lost a gauntlet at some point, and his knuckles were already swelling a little. Sweat and rain plastered his dark hair to his forehead.
Jason took a moment to look at Bruce’s exposed face. Blood dripped from his nose and split lip, diluting with the rain and dripping off his chin. There were more lines around his eyes than Jason remembered. He looked tired in an existential way, wrung-out and disheveled. He stared at Jason with a wary exhaustion; ready for the fight, but sick to death of it. Beneath the helmet, Jason grinned. Knowing that he had worn Bruce down was a triumph unlike any he had known before.
He reached up and touched the switch on the back of his helmet. It slid open with a hiss; he took it off and let it fall to the ground.
This was the moment he had been waiting for; the moment when Bruce would finally see who he really was. The son reborn, the breathing dead, a demon, an illusion. This was why he trained with all those wretched brutes. This was why he had killed them all. This was why he hadn’t detonated the bomb he had attached to the Batmobile, even though he could’ve finished Bruce then and there. The possibility of Bruce never seeing him—never knowing him—was unthinkable. Jason needed him to know. And once he knew, the punishment could truly begin. This was the goal; this was the end. First, though, he needed the truth to sink into Bruce’s bones like mercury. Bruce wouldn’t believe his eyes. He’d need proof. Jason was prepared to provide it.
When Jason had started on this path, he had wanted to kill Bruce. Talia had helped to change his mind. She was the reason to his rage, and she had convinced him that killing Bruce would be too simple, too quick. If he simply killed him, then there would nothing afterward but a boring, luxurious, and bloody life as a crime lord. There was no poetry in doing things the easy way. There was no retribution.
Sometimes he still imagined what it would be like to kill Bruce, but it was too indulgent, made him feel like a bored Catholic fantasizing during mass. Made his teeth itch with how badly the deep, primal part of his mind wanted it still.
Jason knew now that what he really wanted was to ruin him. He wanted that more than anything. He wanted to take apart Bruce’s empire of shadow, destroy his enemies one by one. He’d do it only to prove that the Batman couldn’t. When there was nothing left, when the kingdom had crumbled, maybe then he would kill him. Or maybe he’d leave him alive to suffer, to watch. Jason liked that he had options. He felt unimaginably wealthy.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Jason schooled his thoughts, reminding himself of the task at hand.
If Jason had not spent years training with Bruce, he would not have seen the change in his expression. Bruce’s face remained the same, stony and tight. But his eyes betrayed the barest flicker of hope and surprise and pain as he recognized his lost son. Some subtle tightening of his brow spoke volumes. Jason watched him, his tight-lipped smile empty and cold.
“Jason.” Bruce spoke the name like a curse. Jason’s smile grew wider.
For all of us. Punish him.
“Yes.”
v. the brothers
The sound of Chemo detonating over Blüdhaven was incredible. It traveled across the bay to reverberate through Gotham, rattling buildings and sending a chorus of dogs and car alarms into a barking, beeping tizzy. Ears ringing, Jason watched as the night’s few remaining revelers reacted; some pulled out their phones to check their newsfeeds, while others simply glanced skyward to gawk at the mossy haze. A particularly drunk man began whooping and hollering. Across the city, dark apartment windows lit up as their inhabitants were startled from sleep.
Bruce’s face was limned with an eerie green light, familiar in its gentle glow, though Jason knew that this wasn’t the life-giving green of the Lazarus pit. It was the green of Blüdhaven’s death, plummeting from the sky, packaged in a living bomb.
The silence after the blast rang like a bell. Jason watched Bruce very closely. There was a moment of pure stillness, like Bruce had been carved out of stone, and then his expression crumpled. Anger, sorrow, and disbelief warred across his features. He lifted a hand, reaching toward Blüdhaven, which glowed on the dark horizon. There was something very childish about the motion that amused Jason. If he squinted, he could almost see a little boy watching his parents die in Crime Alley.
“Dick…?” Bruce said very softly. Still reaching, like he could pluck his first son out of the rubble, stretching his arm across the bay like Atlas astride the world.
“My god, is Nightwing there?” Jason asked with mock innocence. He tsked his tongue, bringing a hand up to his face to hide his growing smile. “Imagine that.”
Bruce just stared at where the city had been. His breathing was coming faster now. It would have been the perfect time to finish him for good, if not for the surprise Jason had tucked away in the condemned apartment building. Sirens were beginning to shudder and wail, echoing through the alleyways. He thought he had people screaming and shouting, jabbering in horror at the scene of mass destruction next door, but he let the sounds melt into the background, focused on Bruce’s jagged, unsteady breaths.
This was where the fun really began.
“Jason, please—” Bruce’s voice sounded strangled. Jason bared his teeth in a savage smile. He could practically taste the other man’s desperation. He could live on it; he could live on this. Bruce looked so sad, so small.
“What? You just have to be sure?” The words were caustic. Jason couldn’t help the bark of laughter that scraped from his throat. It made Bruce flinch, which just made Jason laugh again. God, that face! He wanted to take a picture and stick it on his fridge. He almost wanted to let Bruce go, let him dig through the radiation and ruins until his skin began to peel and his hair started falling out. He wanted Bruce to try and find Nightwing. He wanted him to fail another son.
The thought came unbidden: is this what Bruce looked like when he found me?
It was as if someone had dumped ice water over him. His blood ran cold, and the shiver that ran up his spine was almost painful. He looked at Bruce, and the face looked different now. It wasn’t funny anymore. Jason felt nausea crawl up his throat, vertigo pulling at his head. It was just the tinnitus from the blast. Unsteadiness from exhaustion. Bruce had pulled him out from under cinderblocks and broken beams. He had held his body, and he had taken it home. Stop, he willed his traitorous brain. He had to focus on the mission. Only the mission, the path forward, retribution. The green light was still bathing everything, and a phantom whiff of sulfur reached his nose, and all he could think about was the Lazarus pits, Talia and Egon, the wet thump of a crowbar bruising his kidneys. He thought about Joker. He thought about all of the people that dumb fucking clown had killed. He had visited some of their graves, a ritual to steel himself, to cement the mission in his brain. It was as holy a pilgrimage as any. Katie Duncan had been six years old. Patrick Black had left behind three kids. They had both died painfully. Jason thought of them dying, their fear, their pain. He thought about the ways in which a crowbar could cause blunt damage or tear open your skin, depending on how you swung it. He thought about a teenage boy, very afraid and very alone. He breathed in, held it, and let his thoughts suffocate.
Jason let the lopsided grin creep back over his face. He was getting back into it now, and when he looked at Bruce’s hangdog eyes, it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He cast his pitying, malicious stare on the sad Dark Knight.
“If he’s there, Bruce, you’re too late. Again.”
His old mentor stiffened. Jason could see his resolve coming back now. He knew that telltale look of calculation, the stiff upper lip of duty. He knew that feeling of remolding your rage into something bigger, something brighter. Bruce turned away from the ruined city and turned his fury on to Jason like a searchlight. Still some fight left in the old dog, apparently. Good for him, thought Jason. He’d need it.
Jason uncrossed his arms, letting his hands fall to his side. His fists itched in anticipation. “One son returns from the grave as another enters it,” he purred, barely able to restrain the manic glee in his voice as he widened his stance and dropped his weight into his hips. The certainty of the moment was like chains or a mantle or pure, unfiltered destiny. He let it feed him. “What a fitting ending this has become.”
vi. the end (upright)
The bike leapt like cavalry beneath him, braying with exhaust and solid beneath his thighs. All around Gotham sirens were coming to life. Jason breathed in deep as the acid-sweet smell of gasoline filled the night air. He thought that maybe tonight was a good night after all. Despite everything, it was a good night.
It was a good night because it was crisp and cool and loud, the din of city eating away at everything else. It was cold enough that he wished he had his jacket, but at least the cold air kept his broken fingers from aching too badly on the throttle. The stars were smudged to nothing above him, blotted out by city lights and the thick pillar of smoke rising from the city center. The night looked endless-blue, midnight forever. The best type of oblivion.
It was a good night because maybe, just maybe, the Joker had been gored through by falling rebar, the original Red Hood now red all over, struck down by the new Hood, the better model. Ouroboros. Long odds, Jason thought, but odds. Look on the bright side, chum. Bruce had taught him to never gamble—that you didn’t need to gamble when you are sharp and prepared—but at least he had taught him how to be optimistic.
It was a good night because Jason would never die again. He was wingfree and immortal, high on gasoline and adrenaline and the throbbing of his broken fingers. He felt like Icarus in reverse, the glue binding together, the wings holding, the sun above like an open mouth. He wanted to know what it felt like to swallow knives and spit them out again. He wanted to hold a lighter up to the pad of his thumb just to see. The high rooftops beckoned, as they always had.
It was a good night because he thought that he scared Bruce, and there was no better feeling than that. It had all been so easy, so fun. Take Bruce’s old tricks, play them back in reverse. The old man was predictable in the best of ways, righteous in the worst of them. The only thing Jason hadn’t anticipated was the hand wrapping tight around his wrist, Bruce trying to carry him from the building as the timer clicked to zero and the fuses lit. That gloved hand had been ice cold on his arm, grip bruising, though it had not been hard to twist away as the heat of the blast hit them both in the back, barely dampened by the cape Bruce had thrown around them. Some repressed emotion trickled out of Jason’s brain as he rewound the memory. He paused, let it dissolve. He thought about what Bruce’s face must have looked like, that cloying sense of déjà vu that must have washed over him as vicious as nausea. He was probably still there, combing the wreckage, looking for lost sons.
A doppler roar filled his ear as he buzzed past a glowing ambulance. Soon the news stations would send helicopters to stalk the scene of the blast like vultures. Bruce would be long gone by then, and so would Jason. The crime syndicates will rebuild, new leaders emerging from schoolyard knife fights and midnight raids, and they’ll go back to peddling dope to teenagers, same as before. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe the story of Red Hood will stick around long enough for them to think twice about that. Black Mask will surely bribe the right people to escape prison time, but there was no real future for him, not after having his soft belly so publicly exposed. He’d be lucky if the new blood didn’t rip him open the minute he stepped out onto the streets. But that’s what you got when you rolled over.
And Joker…well. Just for tonight, Jason would allow himself a sliver of hope. Tomorrow, Joker would go back to killing sons and daughters as he always had, locked in his overblown, overwrought, cosmic pissing match with Bruce. Tonight, though, Jason could pretend that he was really gone this time. Just like he had pretended, for a moment, to not hate Bruce with every fiber of his being when they had been fighting the Society’s goons, when their hands had connected for that perfect maneuver, as seamless as if years had not passed. As seamless as if Jason had never died.
A very bitter feeling bloomed in his chest. Logically, clinically, he knew it was grief. It was so sharp. For a moment, his lung burned. But then he thought about what Bruce’s face must have looked like under that cheesy cowl, those hands turning over every board and beam from ruins of the building, and Jason laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He’d bottle that sad expression up and sell it on the streets if he could. People could live on less, man.
vi. the end (reversed)
He didn’t know what he expected. Not this, certainly. One moment Jason had been holding a gun to Joker’s head, the next his own blood was spraying from his neck, pain and the first touch of panic biting down on his mind. A batarang clattered to the floor somewhere behind him. The clown was braying, but Jason couldn’t hear the words. He gurgled, clutching his neck with trembling hands, and then slid down to the ground to die.
Jason could see his own blood spreading across the floor, trickling down with the slight slant of the condemned building. He stared at it, not knowing what else to do. Bruce never missed. Bruce kept his batarangs razor sharp. Bruce had meant to kill him. It was poetry in the darkest sense, the black mirror staring back at him with the eyes of the void. He should have known that it would end this way. He should have always known.
A small part of him welcomed this. It was the part that yearned for the quiet that had become between Robin and Red Hood, the still nothingness that he couldn’t remember but he found that he missed. The larger part of him—certainly the louder part—was torn between the shaking, animal fear of his life slipping away, and an odd, inexplicable joy that Bruce had done it. Sure, maybe Jason had wanted him to kill Joker, but in a way this was more fitting. Bruce had always been like a wayward T-cell, eating away at every cell but the cancerous ones. Treating the symptoms, never the disease, and wreaking havoc around him as he did so. It didn’t matter that Jason was the victim; it didn’t matter that there would be consequences; killing Joker was simply off the table.
So, Bruce had killed Jason instead. He wondered if Bruce had panicked—though that didn’t seem like him—or if he thought it was better this way. Maybe it was better to kill the lost son who had crawled from his own grave. Maybe Bruce could convince himself that Jason wasn’t human anymore, or that he was a blight that needed to be burned to nothing. A demon, a zombie. A child that had pulled himself from his own grave and needed to be put down. What was that book called...? Wading through his own brain was starting to feel like walking the sewers beneath Gotham, the water making everything slow, deliberate, blood and grime swirling together. Dust to dust. End to end. He knew he was dying. He knew it didn’t matter.
Regardless, it was beautiful. The arc of the batarang, the slice against Jason’s neck, the white-hot ice-cold flash of pain—it was beautiful. He wondered how Bruce would tell the others. He wished he could see it. He wanted to see the look on Dick’s face—if Dick was even still alive, which he doubted—when Bruce told him that he had killed Jason, how Talia would react when she found out. She, at least, would see the poetry in it just as Jason had. He wondered what Dick would see. What the new Robin would see. Jason hoped it would awaken a lick of fear in his replacement. This will be you someday. Maybe Bruce would bring his body back to Alfred to have the old butler clean him, dress him, bury him again. Or maybe Bruce would leave it behind to be zipped into a black bag and thrown to the morgue’s jackals to autopsy and cremate.
Jason’s ears were ringing. His heartbeat felt slower now, and the entire room was filled with the smell of copper. Shapes moved in his periphery, but he couldn’t lift his head to see what was happening. He heard Joker shuffle over to where he had stashed the C4, his contingency plan, howling with glee all the way. He heard Bruce shouting in righteous agony. Two and two clicked together in Jason’s mind, and he felt like singing with the symmetry of it all, his dying bones vibrating, brain alight. Then Joker pulled the trigger, and the world collapsed in a flash of heat and fury.
I have been here before, Jason thought to himself before his mind flickered out.
A moment later, he opened his eyes.
