After you defeat Jason at the Arkham Knight HQ, you can hear one of his soldiers say this. Confirmation that he was crying as he left the mall (loud enough for his soldiers to hear as he rushed past, might I add).
I think the reason why Jasonās is such a mess after the boss battle is not only that everything he had known to be true ā all the reasons for hating Bruce that he was conditioned to believe ā turned out to be a lie, but also that now that he doesnāt have that overwhelming hate, all that anger to drive him, what does he have left?
There are multiple times throughout the game that Jason hints at not being happy with himself and feeling too damaged and too different to ever live a normal life. Most prominently, when he says āIt was all about you, what Joker did. He ruined me to spite youā during the boss battle. In the Arkham Knight audio log you hear him tell Babs that he canāt go back to the manor because Joker hollowed him out and filled him back up with hate. He never says that he canāt go back to the manor because he hates Bruce, he says that he canāt go back because of who heās become. He feels ruined, alienated from the people who care about him. He feels like nobody can ever understand what he went through, like heās carrying this burden entirely on his own (which, this entire time, he has been), and like he has nothing but the lasting trauma resulting from the torture he had to endure that he feels can never be fixed because itās too etched into his being.
Iāve talked about this here, but a great part of what has been driving him is this idea that, just maybe, killing Bruce will make him feel better. Sure, he may be ruined, but at least heās gotten revenge on the man who heās been conditioned to hate. The man who never saved him, the man he trusted who let him down, the man who gave him this glimmer of normalcy and love for the first time in his life only for it to be ripped away. Maybe then heāll finally be able to get closure, to make all the pain mean something. Maybe then he wonāt feel miserable all the time. Maybe then he can start to feel like himself again, and that the hate and betrayal and the Jokerās laugh that heās still haunted by can finally subside. This idea is all he feels that he has, and thatās why, as the game progresses and Batman foils one plan after another, Jason starts to lose it, becoming more and more desperate and impatient to kill Bruce. This is the only way he feels that he can āfixā things ā he has to fix it. So when he comes face to face with Bruce and realizes that he canāt kill him, that he doesnāt hate him as much as he thought, that he canāt accomplish this mission that seems so dire in order to alleviate the symptoms of his PTSD, itās soul crushing.
He has all these conflicting emotions running through his head and, understandably, it must be extremely overwhelming. He now has to reanalyze his entire way of thinking, and maybe he realizes that this mission wasnāt so much about a battle with Bruce so much as it was about a battle with himself.
But on a happier note, he does get closure, just not in the way that he had previously imagined he would. He finds closure in knowing that Bruce never abandoned him, that heās still loved, and that he really doesnāt have nothing left after all.
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