jason todd complains about the new wuthering heights movie to you
He hates the ending. The entire film.
You don’t have to hear him say it to know— it’s written in the slow tightening of his jaw, the crinkle settling stubbornly between his brows, the restless bounce of his knee during the dog scene— you’re in for a long night.
The apartment is dim except for the standing lamp in the corner, its yellow light bleeding across the coffee table, catching in the rim of two forgotten mugs and the TV remote. You’re stretched along the couch, minion socked feet resting against his thigh. Jason sits forward in contemplation, elbows braced against his knees, fingers laced together like he’s about to deliver unwarranted remarks to a jury that won’t plead his case. The screen blackens completely, and the sigh that follows isn’t short of deep, beclouded disappointment.
“Atleast… the soundtrack was good,” you murmur, more peace offering than opinion, biting back the smile that always threatens when he gets incandescent with opinion. It’s not about the soundtrack, you hear him say.
“If I wanted to hear good sounds,” he mutters, running both hands down his face, “I’d stay back after a Justice League meeting with Bruce and Clark.”
Another groan, softer, dignified in its injury. His eyes fall back to the blank television, and he exhales through his nose. He reaches for your ankles, his hands warm where they wrap around your socked feet. He lifts them off his lap with deliberate care, setting them aside. Before you can stop yourself, you picture him disappearing down the hallway, shutting the bedroom door and withdrawing for the night.
You heavily miscalculated.
But he only leans forward instead, spine curving, body lowering— and then the full, solid warmth of him rests in your lap. His face turns inward, cheek pressing against you like he’s trying to hide from the world in the sweetest place he knows.
Then a faint grumble against your skin.
“They got rid of Lockwood,” he whispers in your lap, eyes already glazed over as if trying to sheath the film in its entirety out of him. He sits up as quickly as he bent, agitation snapping through him. His hands lift mid-air, twirling the loose string of his hoodie.
“No. That’s actually— that’s structurally incompetent. Why would you get rid of Lockwood? He’s literally the reason of the narrative. He’s the outsider looking in— he’s how we know about Wuthering Heights.”
His knee starts bouncing again.
“And Nelly— Oh, poor Nelly! Subjected to cockblocking Heathcliff instead of, I dunno, not being the unreliable narrator that adds to the gothic tragedy?”
He drags a hand through his hair, huffing in disdain.
“Also, why is he white? He’s, he’s supposed to be different. How is it realistic that a white man isn’t benfitting in 1800 England! And they turned it into a tragic romance! It’s gothic tragedy— not… not whatever that was: ‘Oh, Heathcliff! Spank me harder! I cannot fathom a life without your cock,’ gross! Disgusting! It’s– it’s beguiling, in a sense, turning one of my favourite’s into self indulgent slop.”
He looks at you then, genuinely distressed. His eyes were frenzied, your sweet, sweet confused boyfriend who’s just watched a fish-flopping-in-a-desert adaptation of his second favourite classic novel.
No, Jason Todd, in his infinite wisdom and disdain for television, would never tell his dear girlfriend that this adaptation means more to him than words can ever admit.
Your expression changes before you can stop it.
The teasing smile fades as you reach for him without ceremony, fingers sliding into the front of his shirt, tugging him closer until his knees bump against the couch and he has no choice but to lean in. Your hand comes up to cradle the side of his face, thumb brushing along the sharp line of his jaw where it’s still tight with something unspoken.
“Jay,” you murmur, thumb feathering the scar on his jawline, “you are nothing like Heathcliff, okay?”
His shoulders tense instinctively, as if in question of how easily you had read his mind. “I wasn’t—” he starts, too quick, “I’m not saying I am.”
Your thumb continues tracing the faint scar along his jaw, grounded, patient.
“Jason,” you repeat softly.
He exhales through his nose, gaze dropping briefly to the space between you. “He let it eat him,” Jason mutters. “Everything, the anger, the abandonment. He just— leaned into it.”
His hands settle at your waist, not gripping. His lifeline in a storm.
“I don’t,” he adds, quieter, “want to be that guy who thinks the world owes him blood because it hurt him first.”
Your fingers slide into his hair at the nape of his neck, gentle, deliberate. The lamplight pools in his lashes, turning them almost golden at the tips, and for a fleeting second, he doesn’t look like the Red Hood, or the vigilante who carved himself into something hard and formidable. He’s just Jason. Your Jason.
The same Jason who gasped in awe when Alfred gave him his copy of Wuthering Heights, too afraid to dog-ear or crease the book. He’d held it with both hands back then, you remember him telling you once— thumbing careful along the margins, eyes wide in that unguarded way he pretends he never had.
He told you he didn’t sleep that night.
Sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed at the manor, lamp pulled close, eyes glued to the pages. Like if he blinked too long, someone would take it back, tell him Gotham trash wasn’t good enough to read such a story. He said he kept smoothing the dust jacket flat every time it slipped, apologizing under his breath when he was too tired to reread it after patrol.
“I didn’t wanna bend the spine,” he’d admitted once, voice lighter then, almost sheepish. “Or break it, Alfred had entrusted me the book, I couldn’t ruin it because I got too excited.”
He’d traced passages with reverent fingers, not daring to underline them at first. Opting to memorize lines instead— carrying them around in his head during patrols and whispering them to himself whenever the alleys got too dark. He thought the anger was romantic. Aspiring to be some softer version of Heathcliff. One that churns all that anger and spite into wonderment and love. He had once thought, in the privacy of his gargoyle, that devotion was proof of something so absurdly profound. not yet understanding how grief, left unattended, could catalyze into cruelty.
“I used to think it was beautiful,” he had said, shrugging like it didn’t matter.
Now, sitting in your lamplight with worry stitched into the crease of his brow, he looks like he’s mourning that version of himself more than a botched adaptation.
“I don’t,” he says again, softer this time, like testing the words in a smaller room, “want to build myself out of resentment.”
