Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Does it ever upset you? This life you live?” One dead man asks to another, not without a hint of sarcasm.

     The dim lights flicker on and off above the slick cement floor; they haven’t been changed in decades. It’s disgusting. The way the corners of the basement are tinged with black mold, the rusted red pipes that snake their way across the walls, and the pungent, stale smell of disrepair that permeates throughout this condemned building. It’s frigid and biting from icy air outside, and the wheezing radiator is long past its working date, huffing its last breaths of dying warmth. Obviously, this place hasn’t seen visitors in years except for the occasional squatter. However, two men, one of twenty-one and one of twenty-three, Tim Drake and Jason Todd, are now holed up in the basement, a terrible reunion in full swing. 

     “What—what do you mean?” Jason gasps; his lungs rattle with pain.

     Battered and bloodied, Jason lies chained to the wall, handcuffs keeping his arms restrained together. A tarnished manacle connects them to one of the rusty pipes. His shirt, a red polo, is sullied with smeared streaks of grime, grease, and general filth from sliding across a floor that’s probably never been washed. The pants aren’t doing any better, either.

     “You know what I mean. Everyone thinks you’re a person that you’re not. They walk on eggshells around you because they think you’re unstable and will have a ‘Pit attack’ at the slightest provocation, they think you’re a ‘good man who protects kids’’” Tim’s voice gets louder, imbued with such a potent fury he’s practically screaming, “But I know who you are. And despite your miraculous revival—” He ignores Jason’s flinch at the mention. Who gives a shit if he’s feeling uncomfortable, Tim thinks, I’ve felt uncomfortable for a long, long time because of him, “your rotten husk of a soul still keeps company with the worms squirming under the cemetery. You’re living a lie. You lied and got to ruin me, yet I’m supposed to be content with my humiliation! You’re not some misunderstood rebel who made mistakes, you’re a fucking mass murderer!” 

     In their turmoils, they can both see the stark look that the other wears like morose robes: the sight of a devouring hatred, and the sight of an anguished guilt thought buried. 

     “Which one of you made up the ridiculous Pit Madness excuse? Was it you or Bruce?” Tim asks, no longer as intense as before, but with a subdued, persistent resentment. A slowly simmering cremation.

     Jason hangs his head low. Tim isn’t surprised. Of course he decides to stay silent instead of owning up to anything. It’s typical of cowards.

     “Do you know how many people have been in a Lazarus Pit? Cass, Kate, Dinah, for God’s sake, even Bruce has been in a Lazarus Pit more than once! I’ve been in one because of your actions. You know what all of us have in common? We aren’t crazy. So why is everyone giving you the excuse that the Pit caused you to do those awful things, huh? What makes you so goddamn special?” 

     There’s a loathing in his tone, like he’s talking to a piece of gunk on his shoe, but the way Tim’s chin wobbles and eyes seethe betrays something far deeper, further than mere shallow plight. Jason’s shaking now, if it’s panic or hypothermia or something else, Tim doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

     “Do you know what it’s like to have everyone coddle the person who murdered you? For everyone to lie about you and say you would have forgiven your killer? That you looked up to them?” 

    Between the lines of anger and grief, sadness and acrimony, Tim’s throat is hoarse with a deep-seated, blurred emotion, unable to be solely defined, “Everyone thinks I idolized you when the reality is I never knew you. I never photographed you during your patrol routes or went to school with you while looking from afar. I certainly never liked you more than Dick. You were never my Robin and never my hero; you were always nothing more than a cautionary tale.”

     That gets a reaction. Jason finally looks up at him, weary and glassy. The infamous Red Hood has certainly seen better days. The image of the man who made the streets run crimson with the blood of Gotham’s underbelly feels distant, enormously so. How far he’s fallen. 

     It’s odd, Tim muses. Five years ago, at the Tower, Jason felt like a Goliath. He towered over Tim even in his embarrassing Robin costume, and while Tim wasn’t afraid of him, he knew that he was certainly a dangerous threat. Now Tim’s the one towering over Jason, who’s shackled to the floor by chains and the regret of actions he’s clearly tried to forget.

     But it won’t be forgotten. Not this time.

     However, the look in Jason’s eye is infuriating. It pisses him off; it fills him with something hellish. The hollow vacancy in his expression, the way his matted, sweaty hair clings to his forehead, the way he purposely keeps himself small by sitting on his knees and holding his cuffed hands together. He’s a moron if he thinks this will fool Tim into thinking he’s some housebroken pet, as if this is a ridiculous misunderstanding. 

     No. Tim knows the former Red Hood. The Red Hood who put decapitated heads into duffel bags, the Red Hood who turned sons and daughters into orphans, and turned wives and husbands into widows. The Red Hood who broke into Titans Tower, murdered him, and left his friends to find the brutalized body. The smell of mold and rot that seeps from the cracks in the floor is nothing compared to the smell of bile whenever he has to look at Jason. He’s a killer and deserves to be treated like one.

     Jason finally speaks, uneven and raspy. Neither can tell if it’s from emotion or the pain. 

     “I know there isn’t any justification for—for what I did. I know you hate me. I hate me too. But the others don’t deserve this. After… after you died, Bruce wasn’t the same. He was suicidal; your death ruined him. It got so bad that the Justice League needed to intervene. I don’t know what you’re planning, and I don’t care what you do to me, but whatever it is, please leave Bruce—”

     His face smacks to the side from Tim’s punch before he’s able to finish. 

     He hits way harder now than he did when he was at the Tower, Jason notes with a sardonic resignation. He can already taste the bitter stew of tooth fragments and ripped flesh pooling under his tongue. His left molar is rattling loose, and the spots floating in and out of his vision have yet to subside. When he finally regains his senses, Tim looms crimson like the sharpest dagger, slippery and soaked with the astringent scent of fresh violence. The man heaves with pure ire, knuckles ivory from clenching them so hard and jaw set firm in anger. The blood dribbling from Jason’s chin mixes with the grime on the floor and the spots of darkness still dancing in his eyes as he glances down. He thinks he might have a concussion.

     “Don’t you dare try to pull that with me! I’m not going to be lectured on what’s best for Bruce from the guy who put a bomb under his car!” Jason snaps up at that, scarlet droplets splattering out at the sudden motion. Tim’s scowl turns to a vile sneer; it radiates hatred and contempt and other uglier, nastier little emotions Jason doesn’t have time to process, a reconstruction of himself in the most sickening way. A shameful caricature.

     “Oh, you thought I didn’t know? About the bomb under the car? Or the story of how you got blown up after being sold out by your mommy? How about your stupid plan to get Bruce to choose between you and the clown?” 

     Tim knows he’s being cruel, but considering who he’s talking to, the cruelty is deserved. He cannot think of anyone who deserves this more than Jason Todd.

     “After I came out of the Pit, Ra’s told me things. I figured out the rest on my own when I arrived back in Gotham. None of this has anything to do with Bruce, or Dick, or even Bruce’s kid. This is between us because you decided it needed to be. Because you decided that our lives needed to be connected.” 

     There’s another long silent stretch. The broken radiator is still wheezing and buzzing like a gnat, and Jason only now notices his own shaking. It’s from either stress or possible hypothermia. Perhaps both. There’s a leak on the upper right corner of the ceiling; it’s muddy yellow and crusted and obnoxious with the constant tap. tap. tap. of stagnant water hitting the concrete floor. It’s a horrid cacophony of battling noise, and Jason’s curiosity eventually gets the better of him. He can’t stand it anymore. 

     “How did you come back? Bruce brought your body to the crematorium; there’s no way the Pit can restore one from ashes.”

     “Fine. I’ll tell you. Not for free, though. I have a question for you, too.” Tim lets out a snide hum, “You guys should probably vet your funeral directors better. The guy at the crematorium was a League assassin and swapped out my body with another. Afterwards, they brought me to a Pit and you know how that goes. Bruce has some random guy’s ashes in his living room, by the way. It’s my turn for a question, now.”

tap. tap. tap. 

     This time, the silence is even more excruciating, mottled and disfigured in its own corruption. A flicker of something peculiar crosses Tim, and he looks to the side. His arms are folded while his eyes are cast downward, and though he tries to hide it, Jason notices the way Tim’s breathing has changed.

     “Why did you do it?” He blurts out.

     Jason wasn’t expecting that.

     “Now you’re tongue-tied? You’re the only person who can answer this."

     There’s brief hesitation; Tim takes another deep breath. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I had nothing to do with whatever was going on between you and Bruce. I didn’t take the whole putting a knife to my throat thing personally, either. Not for long, at least. We meant absolutely nothing to each other.”

     Tim turns his back, his silhouette barely visible in the dying lights overhead, and in that moment, he almost looks like a kid again. It’s sobering, the way history can repeat itself sometimes, like a book rewritten with only the names changed. 

     “So why? Why did you do it?”

tap. tap. tap. 

     “Still no response? You’re so used to saying the Pit made you do it or Talia manipulated you that coming up with a real reason must be difficult. You’ve spent the past five years being coddled, after all.”

tap. tap. tap.

     Tim’s mid-turnaround when Jason finally answers, “…I was angry.” The light above Tim gives out, casting half of the room in the expanse of night. “…I was angry about everything. I died, and Bruce let you take my mantle so soon after what happened to me. Nothing changed, and no lessons were learned. And there you were, parading around in that costume with your Young Justice friends,” Jason’s face tightens and lips turn downward in a scowl, sour and scathing, “while I was nothing more than a memory locked behind glass. I wanted to show Bruce what he could lose; what could go wrong if he doesn’t stop.” He looks away, softening under the pressure, “I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this. It was an accident.”

tap. tap. tap. 

     The darkness speaks, apoplectic storms brewing and roiling and blooming across the ceiling to offer a deluge in rage; the change in atmosphere is immediate. “That’s fucking bullshit. You can pretend all you want that you concocted a stupid goddamn grand plan to right the wrongs of the world, but I know the truth! You were never in the right, Jason! You were always the bad guy! It was never really about fixing things, was it? It was about revenge and hurting everyone else around you because you’re a pathetic, sad sack of shit!”

     He screams, voice incandescent and dredging up years of repressed wrath, “You want to lie to me and act like every single person you killed was irredeemable? That every single petty criminal deserves to be butchered? That you aren’t a massive hypocrite? The funny part is, you killing me isn’t why I hate you.”     

      Jason flinches again. It satiates Tim’s righteous furor, the rancid malice that courses through his veins. “I lost my father and Steph one right after the other; it was the worst time of my life, and my death was just the cherry on top. So no, it’s not why I hate you. It’s everything else that I hate about you. I’m sick of seeing everyone act like you’re some—some victim! Acting like your actions aren’t appalling. I’m sick of seeing everyone feel oh-so bad for you when every single bad thing you’ve endured was a result of your own awful decisions. Bruce made them believe it wasn’t fully your fault, that fucking fate itself was set up against you from the moment of your birth, and it disgusts me. The worst part, what makes me truly despise you, is that they had to rewrite history to make you someone redeemable.” 

tap. tap. tap. bzzzt.  

     The light above Tim flickers back into existence. Jason wishes it had stayed dead. Wishes he stayed dead.

     “They ruined everything about me in order to make you worth something.” There’s a wetness to Tim now; it’s a wound so deep and a hurt so palpable it’s almost physically tangible. Jason, on the other hand, is far away; he’s long since left his physical form and his spirit floats somewhere far off beyond this corporeal torment. He is wavy and light, and if it wasn't for the taste of iron in his mouth and chill in his bones, maybe he could pretend this is a subconscious manifestation of his guilt. It would be easier that way. If this wasn’t real. 

     “Everyone thinks I was a loser without friends. They think my parents didn’t love me and left me alone in their house for months at a time with no company except the maid. They think I idolized you. That Jason Todd was my Robin, and I was your biggest fan. They think I cried while we fought, that I was begging and pleading for you to stop because I knew you weren’t fully in control of yourself. They want to believe it’s the Pit’s fault you did what you did. They want to believe that Talia manipulated you into hating me. They think I would forgive you in an instant because I loved you so goddamn much. Nobody knows me anymore.” 

tap. tap. tap.  

     “You killed me twice, in a way. Even though I came back, you made sure I stayed buried. You stole it. Everything. So now I’m only a remnant—a footnote in Jason Todd’s tragic story. The truth doesn’t matter as long as they can turn me into a martyr for your redemption.” 

     He’s going to kill me. The thought doesn’t come to Jason in a sudden wave of panic or in a somber, sullen moment of realization. It’s just a fact. There’s no point in dragging this out any longer. He’s been here three days, nobody knows where he is, and he’s shackled to the dilapidated wall of an abandoned building. It’s cyclical. The Red Hood dies mirroring the way he was born.  

     Jason’s voice is a shadow, a hoarse imitation of what it once was, beaten down by cold and fists that prod at his resolve, “Get it over with. This has gone on long enough.”

tap. tap. tap. 

     The silence is hell; it’s stinging nettles to Jason’s psyche. It feels like there’s a gun to his head and he’s waiting for the trigger to be pulled. There’s nothing but the anticipation of what is inevitable, the bang.

     “You really don’t get it. Even after this, you still don’t understand.” Tim’s voice is bitter, though level and firm in a way it hasn’t been since he took Jason here.

     “We aren’t the same, Jason. Not one bit. This has never been about revenge or anything of the sort. You decided to be a snoop and figure out the identity of the new guy patrolling your streets, and you got your answer. I can’t let you leave because you’re going to tell Bruce and Dick and the whole ‘batfamily’,” Tim spits at the word, mocking and full of disdain, “That I’m alive and I don’t want them to know. I have plans I can’t afford to stop. That’s it. Stop acting like I’m going to kill you. I’m not a murderer. I’m not you.”

     “…Why don’t you want them to know?”

     “Because I don’t want to be a part of your lie. I’m not going back there and acting like nothing happened, like you were always part of the ‘family’. You came back after your countless atrocities and faced zero repercussions. You may have discarded the Red Hood identity and decided to call yourself Red Robin, you may have started a youth shelter under the Wayne Foundation, and you may have even started making public appearances at Bruce’s stupid charity events, but I know. I know the things you’ve done and want everyone to forget. The things Bruce wants everyone to forget. I’m not going to go back there and partake in some sappy reunion like we’re a family and it’s all forgiven. I will never forgive you.”

     Tim swells with emotion, not with anger or indignation or even spite, but something more somber, more reminiscent. Jason can’t look him in the eye. 

tap. tap. tap.  

     The silence has changed, not searing or stinging but still painful nonetheless, speaking of loss and the ache of youth stolen, of an oppressive injustice ever unanswered, of the betrayal spanning a lifetime.

     “I never thought things would end up like this. I became Robin because I wanted to help. I wanted to help him, but after I’m gone, he gives up because it’s too hard? Because he doesn’t believe in justice when it’s his son pulling the trigger?”

tap. tap. tap.

     “Jason, why are you allowed the second chance you stole from so many others?”

Chapter Text

The air is dismal, stagnant in the ensuing quiet.

     “I’m still waiting for your answer.”

     The contempt lashes Jason and eats into the depths of his beaten skin, gnawing through torn muscle on its way down to the bone.

     Physical tolls have begun to wear him out, blatant evidence of his torture. Jason’s vision periodically clouds over with sluggish black masses passing across the walls like opaque veils. It disorients him greatly. The tapping from the leak on the ceiling has morphed into a steady splashing stream of brown-hued water as it begins to rain outside, and the foul ambiance of the basement is punctuated with the occasional rolling crackles of lightning outside.

     Pervasive numbness pricks at his hands, and he forces himself to look at them; they’re waxy and almost dyed a palish-blue from the biting cold. The sloppy mixture of his blood and grime and sweat has formed a congealed accretion of filth beneath him, and there’s a dead rat in the right corner of the room which he hadn’t noticed before. Time doesn’t seem to register right, and Jason can’t tell how long he’s been silent. He’s barely hanging on to consciousness. 

     “If you don’t answer my question this goddamn second, I’m injecting you with drugs and forcing it out of you.”

     Jason’s sight finally clears long enough to focus on Tim’s face. He’s still dressed in his costume. Red Hood’s old costume. Jason’s old costume. The black leather jacket with the whitish-gray shirt, the pants, the combat boots, the gloves. The only thing that’s missing is the helmet and the domino underneath.

     The hate and resentment is also impossible to ignore. 

    With a certainty he didn’t know he had, Jason musters up the strength to speak, even if it comes out feeble and without force.

     “It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want a second chance. I told Bruce I was prepared to face the consequences, but he wouldn’t let that happen. I wanted to be held accountable. I deserved it.”

     A scoff. Tim just scoffed at him, as if Jason hasn’t spent the past five years desperately trying to amend for his actions. He knows it will never be enough, he knows it won’t make things right, but he’s tried to make things better, tried to honor Tim in any way he can manage. Yet Tim acts as if Jason’s spent these miserable years gloating, like he’s some leech who’s attached himself to Bruce’s vein and wears his crimes with an unabashed, bleeding grin. Jason didn’t want this life.  

     “Am I supposed to believe your stupid pleading? You tried to blow Bruce up, and now you love him so much you can’t fathom going against him?” Tim crosses his arms, and his voice lowers with scorn, “If you ask me, I think you’re a sanctimonious, hypocritical, little asshole who always sees himself as an exception to his own rules. I think the only reason you ever got a second chance is because you and everyone else still only see a victim, and not who you truly are.” 

     Deafening rumbles of thunder rattle the basement and paint chips flake off the ceiling, dusting Jason in sooty white specks; they resemble spilt ashes. Lights dim and sputter to the sound of howling wind that shrieks from outside like the tortured wails of a thousand subjected depravities. The smell has somehow gotten even worse, and the growing leak in the corner creates a sordid pool that reeks of rust and shit. He’s starting to get jealous of that dead rat.

     “You have every right to hate me for what I did; it was unforgivable and awful, and I’m sorry, but I have morals. I wanted to help people, Tim.” Jason can hear the trepidation, the exhaustion that trickles through the thin fissures of his own stoic facade, “I made sacrifices no one was willing to make. You say it was only about revenge, and maybe a part of it was that, I’ll admit, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I should never have gone after you. I meant it when I said I wanted to change things.”

     Jason drowns in his shame, eyeing wrists rubbed raw by the shackles, dripping blood onto cement in thin red lines that travel down his arms like brutal, lurid scribblings. There’s an unbearable, throbbing pain in his eyes as the fluorescents above swing off and on his face to the chaotic beat of the storm, shadow to light to shadow to light.

     “‘Death will come to those who deserve death, and death may come to those who stand in my way of doing what’s right.’ Those are your words, aren’t they? That’s what you told Bruce,” Tim’s expression hardens, and Jason writhes under the abhorrence, the vehemence, in their gleam; they scalp him to expose wounded nerves underneath. “So tell me, Jason, did Willis Todd also deserve to die?”

     It’s somehow gotten even colder now. Jason’s breaths shudder, and vaporous icicles stab into his throat as frigid burns creep on his mottled flesh.

     Jason hasn't thought about his father, his biological one, for a long time beyond the occasional recollection. They're memories from a time that feels alien now. He was a different person back then, and while the world wasn’t kind, it felt more manageable. 

     “Willis Todd was a small-time crook who grew up in Crime Alley, right? Car theft, petty thievery, the works. Even found a position under Two-Face, too.” Tim retrieves a file from his pocket and throws it across the room towards Jason. “I mean, look at his criminal record. Constant repeat offenses with clearly no intention of quitting anytime soon.”

     Jason is exhausted. It might be from the blood loss, the hypothermia, the concussion, or all of the above, but his head’s full of static. There’s a nausea that travels from his stomach and threatens to purge itself yet again onto the squalid ground. Each time he tries to focus on the file, tries reading the record, a pulsating soreness radiates through the sides of his skull that causes his vision to smear into rudimentary blurs and streaks of shifting color.

     Tim clearly doesn’t give a shit, though, and continues to monologue. Good to know theatricality is still a commonality between all former Robins.

     “But he loved you, right? Willis wasn’t a conventionally good man, but he tried, didn’t he? He did what he could to support his family.” Tim pauses, and Jason retches, “Would you have killed him? If you were still Red Hood, would you have killed your father had he been alive to see what you become?” 

     Jason vomits; putrid yellow bile surges forth and mixes with the mess of gore and filth underneath him, splashing upwards onto the busted radiator. Tearing up, he leans his head onto the pipes. What a miserable existence he lives. What a miserable simulacrum of a human being.

     “Puking all over the floor isn’t a good distraction. Answer the question.” 

     He’s such a goddamn loser. The thought comes to Tim incredulously, accompanying an eye roll and a scowl. Between this and that ridiculous clearance-aisle Robin costume he wore at the Tower, it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that anyone could ever take Jason Todd seriously. He who indulges feasting on supposed beasts, yet ignores that he brandishes the fangs of a monster, an aberration; repulsive scum who dredged his vile self back up from the ground, from death itself, to release his violence onto the vulnerable of Gotham, and now he’s heaving on a filthy floor when forced to face consequences. This is a desperate charade of remorse, a fraudulent attempt at guilt that’s almost insulting to witness. What is it going to take to wring some honesty out of Jason, to make him show his true self? What buttons does Tim need to push?

     “Willis Todd was exactly the kind of man who you would have killed without a second thought, a man who continually committed crime with a basically guaranteed chance of recidivism. Yet everyone says you were devastated to find out he was murdered by Two-Face. You even wanted to kill Harvey for what he did. So make it make sense.” 

     Another crashing boom erupts, and Tim’s temper rises with every passing moment. He thought they were past this, the falsehoods and the lies, with every pain laid bare between them. Yet Jason persists. He refuses to be honest, refuses to acknowledge the blood that still crusts itself under his fingernails and won’t wash away no matter how much “charity” he smothers it with; those stains will remain forever.

     Tim has already acknowledged the falsities, has already refuted the “Pit Madness” bullshit and his “adoration” of Jason, so why won’t Jason just take his mask off? Why still pretend to have regrets? The only person he has left to deceive is himself. 

     Jason struggles to speak, his mouth still stings with bile and clogging scarlet foam, “What are you trying to—to say? That my dad deserved to die? That I dese— ”

     Knuckles collide with Jason’s temple, and he is sent sprawling onto the floor with a sickening thud. The sludge coats his hair, his eyes, the inside of his lips, between his teeth as he lets out a pained gasp. His vision is further blurred, and the black dots swimming in his head dance around with increased ferocity. He tastes death, and Jason thinks he might be dying, himself. Tim’s tirade is scarcely noticed against the hellish rigging in his ears, rippling agony that sends his entire body into thrashing, jerking motions.

     “You obtuse piece of shit, you know exactly what I’m trying to say. Your amazing philosophy falls apart like a tower of toothpicks at the slightest bit of scrutiny,” Tim spits, “Your entire M.O. is determined by what you think will hurt Bruce the most. That’s all there is to you. You are not a voice for the oppressed, and you are not some principled anti-hero who does what Bruce won’t. You’re a pitiful man-child who’s angry the world didn’t stop turning when you died. You kill out of spite because you’re a bad person. There is nothing noble about you. There never was.”

     The wind’s protests strengthen into an obscene whistling noise as it travels through the gaps in the walls. The entire basement is now drenched in dirty water as the leak continues to spout and sputter. 

     “How many Willis Todds did you kill during your rampage? And how many Jason Todds did you create in the aftermath?” Tim drills into him with righteous fervor, a ferocity and conviction that makes Jason shrink, “How many children were orphaned because of you? How many kids were forced into destitution because of you? All because you decided to be selfish, all because you wanted to make Bruce mad.”

     There’s a roar in the sky, one so intense the static prickles Jason’s hair, yet Tim’s fury drowns it out, “If those children resorted to crime to make ends meet, would you kill them, too? Would you shoot them, stab them, blow them up into a mist of gore? Just as you had their parents?” 

     Tinder kindles inside Jason; it sparks his chest to fill with fuming smoke as rage burns inside him, an old flame thought long dead viciously combusts to the tune of his abasement.

     “I would never hurt a child! I killed people who hurt kids! You can call me a monster, you can hate me for what I’ve done, but I wouldn’t do that.”

     “Yes, you would.” The retort is insultingly perfunctory, and he can hear the dismissal in Tim’s voice, as if it isn’t worth the effort of arguing. The fire in Jason burns brighter; he can feel the flames flickering behind his eyes as it tints his world a visceral red.

     “No, I fucking wouldn’t! You think I told those drug dealers not to sell to kids on some whim? Do you think I killed that child trafficker because I was fucking bored? I wouldn’t hurt a kid!” 

     Tim’s had enough of entertaining Jason’s delusions. How he clings to his crafted, manicured image of morals. Jason still holds onto the fictitious idea of Red Hood that Bruce spoonfed everyone, the misunderstood and traumatized fifteen-year-old who was driven mad by the Lazarus Pit. The poor little boy who made mistakes, who had good intentions, who didn’t mean to hurt so many people. Jason loved Jane Austen and classic literature, of course. He was such a precocious angel, such a sweet child. It makes Tim ill.

     The cruel, deeply unkind part of Tim that arose in the wake of his resurrection—the part he usually ignores—wishes that Bruce had left that impoverished twelve-year-old on the streets. He should have left that boy to scavenge dumpsters for scraps and squat alleyways littered with used needles and beer bottles. Everyone would have been better off, maybe even Jason included, but Jason deserves his misery; he deserves to be flayed and roasted by his sins. He deserves his damning.

     “Maybe not at first, but what would have happened if you didn’t end up killing me?” Jason flinches in response, and Tim quashes the urge to knock his teeth out. This man is so predictable; his guilt is so artificial and meaningless.

     “You would have eventually realized your whole plan was for nothing. You’d have realized that Bruce wasn’t going to do what you wanted, and you would’ve gotten desperate. You would have begun stooping lower and lower. You say that you would never hurt a kid? That you killed those who hurt kids? The thing is, Jason, you hold everyone else to a higher standard than you do yourself. It’s bad when others hurt kids, but it’s different when you do it. When you do it, when you brutalize children, you’re doing it for the ‘right reasons’,” Sarcasm roll off his tongue, hoping that it covers the ache with an indifferent mask. “After all, was I not an innocent? Was I not a young boy? Or does that not count?” 

    As expected, Jason already has an excuse lined up, another regurgitation of his warped rhetoric. “I said that was unforgivable, and I never should’ve done it, but—” Tim doesn’t bother letting him finish his sentence. He’s heard enough.

     “But what? I was Robin? I was sixteen? We’re only two years apart? It was never your intention to kill me? That changes absolutely nothing. This isn’t about making you feel bad for me, because your fake remorse is worthless, and I don’t want pity from anyone. This isn’t about what you did to me. I’m saying this because you’ve already shown your willingness to break your own damn rules. You’ve already shown that those under eighteen are still on the table; you’ve already shown there’s no one exempt. So I have every right to think you would hurt or kill a child in your petty pursuit of vindication.”

     The ceiling creaks and groans as the downpour intensifies, covering the basement in half an inch of stagnant squalor. Tim can see the shiver in Jason’s bones, the invasive cold that paints his lips and fingers with gloomy hues, the ruined red polo drenched in blood and bile. He should probably be worried, move Jason somewhere dry so he doesn’t start shutting down from hypothermia. Not now, though. Tim has some things to get off his chest.

     “I planned on killing you, by the way. Almost went through with it, too. It happened about four years ago.” 

     The statement echoes through the room amid the splashing of falling water and violent bellows of thunder. Jason’s eyes widen, but Tim doesn’t know if it’s in fear or surprise. Maybe it’s something else entirely. 

     “Back when I was with the League, I saw a picture of you at one of Bruce’s stupid events. But Damian…that’s his name, right? He was in the picture right next to you and I was—I was furious. After every life you took, after killing me,” Tim’s voice cracks at the word, and he hates the shriveled hint of weakness that sneaks out, “Bruce let you hang around his eleven-year-old son. I knew that you would end up hurting him. I knew that you would eventually relapse and stain your hands with his blood, so I decided that you needed to die in everyone’s best interest. I went back to Gotham for a day and put in a false report of a robbery in the Financial District. I’m sure you remember the rest.” 

     Oh God. That was Tim? Jason remembers it through a cloud of hazy green gas and panicked squeals of scurrying rats. He remembers the stinging smell of garbage and gasoline, the sound of his bones breaking and squelching under the force of a Bo-staff. He remembers the pain, the fear, the helplessness, the apathetic war march of an imminent death. Jason still carries the scars. His left leg throbs on rainy days, and he still walks with a limp when not on patrol. 

     “Why…why are you telling me this?” 

     “Because I’m making a point. Even at my absolute lowest, even when I desperately wanted to, when I thought I needed to, I still didn’t cross that line. I couldn’t bring myself to kill you. At my worst, I’m still better than you.”

     It’s a great effort to keep his voice level, Jason struggles to keep the stutter of cold and pain out of his voice, “If you—if you hate everything about me, everything I stand for, then why steal my mantle? Why run around in my costume, calling yourself my alias?” 

     “First of all, Red Hood wasn’t yours to begin with, dumbass. It was the Joker’s, which you took from him. Second, I became Red Hood for the same reason I didn’t kill you. Because I’m better. I was a better Robin than you, so why not be a better Red Hood, too? I took something you used to hurt people and helped them, instead. Park Row likes me in a way they never liked you. You’re a fake.” 

     Jason’s vision blurs again, his view clouded by a thick milky fog that makes the lights overhead sheen with an ethereal glow. His body doesn’t feel like his own. The throbbing in his head refuses to cease, and the rubbing shackles on his wrists send serrated fire through small hanging flaps of exposed, loose skin, but it is distant, almost removed. His hands itch and he’s unbearably hot, even as Tim’s glare prickles his spine, caressed by the pallid fingers of an icy rage. 

     “Bruce took you in, he raised you as one of his own, he gave you the opportunity for a better life, and you betrayed him. You tried to kill him. The real tragedy isn’t that you died, but that you came back and decided to undo every single scrap of goodwill you ever earned.” Tim’s low-toned stoicism muffles Jason’s protests, and the whole room seems to quiet with them, “Earlier I said that your rotten soul is still buried underground. I was wrong. Looking at you now, this is who you really are, who you’ve always been. You were awful from the moment of your birth. You’re a fraud, a traitor, and a murderer. You’re just like your mother, Jason.” 

     You’re just like your mother, Jason. 

     You’re just like your mother, Jason.

     You’re just like your mother, Jason.   

     Jason’s heard those exact words before. They fester inside him, untether wrath he thought lay dormant forever. He remembers everything—every sight, every sound, every smell, every emotion captured in that unaltered moment of time. The whiffs of burning rubber, the tone of Dick’s blunt loathing; it was the hindsight of a prophecy without fate, inspired by choices only. These events were foretold the moment Jason chose to become Red Hood, the moment Jason chose anger over love. It has been years, yet the pain hasn’t faded in the slightest.

     He plummets into the past.

       “I wish you stayed in the ground and I wish I never met you. You’re a monstrous piece of shit and you’re dead to me. I hate you. We’re never speaking to each other again.”

      Devastation. Misery. Shock. Dick wishes he were dead. Dick wishes they never met. And it’s Jason’s fault. 

     “Dick, I’m sor—” 

     He doesn’t have the chance to get another word out. 

     “Don’t ever apologize to me. You’re just like your mother, Jason. Go to hell.” 

     Jason explodes. He’s—he’s not like his fucking mother, and he’s sick of the comparison. His mother, who saw her son, her biological child, and sold him out to the Joker. His mother, who took every ounce, every single little cent of love he had for her, and spat on it. His mother, who decided to light a goddamn cigarette while he was being tortured. He is not Sheila fucking Haywood.

     A regression festers, a purulent inflection of the mind. Jason has become like Red Hood again; fury clawing at the gates of his heart and invigorating him with a desire for savage retribution. He hates and he hates and he hates and he hates until it’s all he has left.  

     “Fuck you, Tim! I’m so sick of your lies. You say that this wasn’t planned? Then why the fuck was there another person with you when you ambushed me? And if you care about justice so much, why not turn me in to the police and be done with it? I’ll tell you why: because you want revenge. You want to hurt Bruce by hurting me. That’s it. You want Bruce to know that I’m out there somewhere, being hurt, and he can’t reach me. That’s his punishment for lying. So despite what you say, despite your veneer of fucking bullshit objectivity, me and you have more in common—”

     A brief flash of light, a loud bang, and a portentous doom gather under the deepest of sinister nights before Jason feels something rupture with an intense, fiery pressure. It enters just below his ribs and shreds through his stomach with an unbearable pain before lodging itself in his gut. He looks down to see frantic spurts of red and warmth against his hand, gushing out his side into the murky brown sludge. 

     “You—you shot me.” He whispers, his voice a pitiful wheeze.

     “I’ve been too lenient with you. Expecting you or Bruce to take responsibility by choice is a foolish endeavor. I see that now.” Tim’s still pointing the gun at him, the air itself morphing into the very essence of silent wrath, “I’m going to initiate Bruce’s failsafe. I didn’t want to do this, but you forced my hand.”

     The storm continues to howl mournful cries. Jason blacks out to the song.

Chapter Text

Jason awakens to the stench of rotting fish and seawater. His whole body feels as though it’s aflame, every muscle and vein screeching in discomfort. He blinks the blurriness out of his eyes while they groggily flutter open. His memories are spotty, poked with holes and left to bleed out.

     The last thing he remembers is…a horrible pain. Tim shot him, right? He also remembers a building, abandoned and neglected, where Jason was left chained to rusted red pipes on a concrete floor. It’s become clear they changed locations while Jason was out. This wasn’t where he was being held.

     Sensations of coarse, gritted concrete have been replaced with splintered, decaying, uneven wood that gives slightly under Jason’s weight. Through tiny gaps in the floorboards, he can see the churning froth of teal seawater below as it smashes into barnacle-covered pillars. The walls that surround him are tarnished iron, worn to a dull gray without any windows or openings. All else is concealed by complete darkness except for the illumination of a computer laptop opposite him, about ten or so feet away on a stainless steel desk. There’s an old desk chair, too, though Jason can’t make out any details of it. His face is deeply bruised and winding stripes line his sight with broken blood vessels like sanguine ropes over a morbid painting.

     Someone’s sitting across the room, their back turned to him, but Jason can’t see them well; the green light of the laptop creates a black silhouette that obscures their features. Jason, unfortunately, knows who it is, regardless. The rhythmic tapping of the keyboard grounds Jason and he eventually tries to get up, but an awful pain lances into his gut and he gasps as white bursts across his sight. He falls back onto the floor while his shackles chime with the sudden movement.

     “You’re finally awake. It’s been sixteen hours, jackass. I was starting to think you were playing dead.”

     The chair swivels around. A light switch is flipped on, Tim rummaging through various bags of weapons and ammunition and explosives. It appears they’re in a storage garage of some kind; boxes and crates of differing sizes are piled on top of each other and crammed with junk. Maybe Tim moved him to a location near the marina.

     “I thought a change of scenery could do us both some good,” Tim says, forthcoming and ripe with faux-compassion,“So in my infinite kindness, I decided to move us somewhere different while you were taking your little nap. Oceanfront property is quite the luxury, if I do say so myself.”

     Jason doesn’t respond.

     “What’s with the sudden silent treatment? You were so desperate for my forgiveness and spilling out apologies not too long ago, then you started screaming at me and calling me an awful hypocrite, and now I’m not worth your time? I even went through the trouble of removing the bullet and dressing your wound. I’m very hurt by that, Jason.”

     With some hesitation, Jason moves his hand down his stomach, where he was shot. Tim’s not lying. He can feel the fibrous, gentle cloth of medical gauze over where the bullet entered, and can smell the pungent chemical odor of iodine and other disinfectants on his fingers. 

     “…Why?”

     “Why what? You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

     Jesus Christ. Tim is such a smarmy asshole.

     “Fine. Why bother with the antiseptic and the other shit when you obviously plan on torturing me more later?”

     The look he gets is vivid in stark anger, “Don’t be a goddamn drama queen. I’m not torturing you. Everything I’ve done to you is a result of your own actions. You have no one except yourself to blame.”

     This isn’t fucking torture!? Is Tim serious right now? What does he call chaining someone to the floor and routinely beating them, bludgeoning them, shooting them for days on end? Ire bursts from under his skin, the desire to retaliate rears its malicious head, but he barely resists. His mind is hazy from the pain, and he is on the precipice of a breakdown, but he can’t afford to piss Tim off. Jason’s emotions are turbulent and constantly pivoting in rapid flux; rage becomes grief, which becomes guilt, which becomes disbelief, and repeats back to rage again. He and Tim are both snakes devouring themselves, death and rebirth in infinite variations and multitudes, physical and metaphysical. An ouroboros conceived through anguish.

      No matter how genuine his regret is, no matter how much he tries to apologize for what he did, Tim isn’t going to believe him. It doesn’t matter that Jason’s tried his best to put who he was behind him, it doesn’t matter that he’s tried to atone for the blood he’s spilt. Tim doesn’t care.

     A bout of tenuous, momentary peace rests between them. The salt in the air goads the wounds on Jason, stinging licks across bare flesh that distract from his unshed tears and quivering void in his chest. The oppressive weight of Tim’s judgment builds. It is Jason’s gallows. He beholds the edge of an everlasting condemnation, where the glacial waters of Caina lay calm under wind’s siege, where he and Sheila reunite in perdition, where blood betrays blood.

     “One of the things I hate most about your ‘redemption’  is how everyone treats it as some unanimous agreement, like it’s some ridiculous objective truth.” Tim says.

     “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

     “Bruce says you’ve ‘redeemed’ yourself. He says you’ve made up for your mistakes, and everyone else goes along with it because they believe in him and trust his judgment. Who are they to decide that you’ve made up for what you’ve done?” Tim grimaces in disgust, “What about the people you killed? Do they not matter? What about their friends? Their families? Don’t they deserve a chance to decide?”

     When Tim pulls out a Manila folder from the bag he was looking through, he places a typed letter in it and switches the lights off again. Another foreboding moment. What is he doing?

     “Redemption is not a tangible absolute that can be attained or rewarded, and it varies from one to another. We both know the whole thing about you ‘protecting women and children’ is a bunch of bullshit. The thing about you protecting sex workers is also a lie. But even if those were true, even if you were the secret savior of Park Row and Gotham’s underbelly, why does Bruce of all people get to decide you’ve properly made up for your evils? Why not the ones affected by what you’ve done? I’ll tell you why: because you and Bruce won’t confront that some of those you’ve wronged probably find you irredeemable. You bastardize redemption into a simple farce and ignore the reality of your situation. You’re both cowards running away from your own actions.”

     Jason is done. He shuts his eyes and lets the darkness fall upon him. His exhaustion has run him ragged, and he can’t play these games anymore. The torture, from the beatings to the psychological abuse, has begun to take its toll, and he’s starting to break. His mind is damaged and unraveled; thoughts are seeping out through the hairline fractures that travel across his skull. He can handle pain, can handle suffering, but it’s different when the face of your torturer is the one of your biggest regrets, the face of the person who deserved your vitriol the least. It amplifies every minor cut, every scrape, and every little bruise into something unbearable. It comes with the knowledge that you have created it yourself, because it’s Tim who’s doing it.

    Forgoing the evasive words, forgoing the platitudes, forgoing the placating tone, Jason decides to answer honestly. Things can’t get any worse than they already are. There are no more consequences for lying; the result will always be the same. There will be a punch, a kick, a fractured rib, a shattered jaw or femur, or maybe all of the above. Pain is the only truth here. The spoken word means nothing to a man consumed by terrible hatred. 

     “Tim—I don’t—what do you want me to do? I feel guilty every goddamn day, I have nightmares where I see you, still and cold, and it's all my fault.” His composure cracks trying to keep the frustration at bay, “And I know you hate me, I know you think I’m a monster, but just—just tell me what you want me to do. Tell me how I can make things better. You won’t—you won’t tell me anything! It’s not fair!”

     For a moment as long as an eternity, Tim stares. He is completely cloaked by the dark, except for piercing eyes that reflect light from the computer beside him. He looks like a living shadow; a specter that moves across the corners of your vision with a watchful, otherworldly gaze.

     “You know…seeing you this way, broken and pitiful, I hoped it might help me understand you better. I thought that maybe it would help me gain something resembling empathy for you, for the boy who everyone says was so kindhearted once upon a time. But it hasn’t helped at all. I am no closer to understanding you, and I feel nothing but resentment. I’ll never be able to empathize with whatever made you do the things you’ve done. You are alien to me.”

    Beatings are preferable to when Tim has these speeches, the ones where he decides to poke at Jason’s biggest regrets, his most personal vulnerabilities, and tear the wounds open further. 

     “Maybe you’re just fundamentally empty, Jason. Maybe everyone was so desperate to believe you were good that they saw something in you that wasn’t there. Maybe you were always awful.”

     Tim pauses.

     “I have dreams, too. I have the same exact one almost every night. Mine aren’t like yours, though. Mine aren't nearly as banal.”

     Jason holds his breath.

     “When I have them, people are smiling. They’re happy. It’s me and you and Bruce and Dick, and even Alfred is there too. Everyone. We’re at the dining table, and Alfred’s made us dinner like we’re some ridiculous, happy family that does ‘weekend get togethers’ or whatever. Dick coddles you; he calls you his ‘Little Wing’ with a big grin because he’s so gosh-darn excited to see you. Bruce goes on and on about how happy he is that you decided to come by and visit, as if being around you is something to be celebrated.”

     In a false show of detachment, Tim turns his back to him, as if it will hide his hurt from prying eyes. And while Jason can’t see his expression, Tim’s voice is bone-tired; it sounds as though he’s aged fifty years in but a moment’s notice.

     “Then you look at me, and you call me ‘Timbo’ and ‘Timmers’ and a bunch of other stupid names I can’t stand. You look at me like you haven’t murdered so many—so many goddamn people, like you didn’t kill me. And I’m forced to accept it. Every time I try to speak up, every time I try to say ‘I don’t fucking want you here,’ they glare at me. They tell me ‘He wasn’t fully in control of himself, Tim’, they tell me ‘We just want what’s best for you, Tim’, they tell me ‘Why can’t you let us be happy, Tim’. So I storm off and leave.”

     He’s breathing lighter now, in short puffs through his nose, but he speaks faster, more resentful. 

     “But you follow me, and I turn around, but you give me this—this damn look. It’s so compassionate, and it makes me sick, it disgusts me, because it’s an emotion you don’t possess a modicum of. You don’t have compassion. And then— and then you hug me. You tell me that it’s going to be okay because you’re going to be a better brother from now on.”

     Hostility has concentrated into pure venom. The walls echo with the clamor of Tim’s hatred, sending violent reverberations that quake Jason’s battered body.

     “I’m screaming and thrashing, telling you that you’ll never be anything to me other than a murderer, that I hate everything about you, but you won’t let go of me. You won’t let go of me because you don’t see me as a person. I’m some prop to dole out your cherished forgiveness. But the worst part—the worst is after I open my eyes, after I realize it was a nightmare, because I remember that’s the life Bruce would actually want for me. That’s the life they want me to live. They want me to be your brother. They want us to be family.”

     Sometimes, when he thinks about his past evils and sins, Jason wonders what Hell is like, wonders what infernal punishment will await him once he passes that veil the second time. He only realizes now that he’s found the answer. Jason’s Hell is this forsaken storage unit. Jason’s Hell is the here and now. Jason’s Hell is entirely Jason’s own doing.

     “You said you want to make things better. Is that right? Do you really mean that, Jason?”

     Jason nods, albeit with slight reluctance.

     “Then I have an offer for you. I can’t give you redemption or forgiveness, not even close, but if you really want to prove me wrong, if you really want to prove to me that you’ve changed, you’ll agree to it. Show me that capacity for good Bruce supposedly saw in you over a decade ago.”

     The next few words that leave Tim’s mouth fill Jason with full-bodied shock. They completely overwhelm him with a ghastly, creeping dread. 

     “Help me. Be my Robin.”

     …The word Robin smells like formaldehyde and stings like embalming fluid entering collapsed veins. Jason sees glimpses of his past flare in his memories. The tires. Ma Gunn. Gloria Stanson. Felipe Garzonas. Sheila Haywood. A clown. An explosion.

     “I have a plan to fix things, and I'm giving you a chance to help, Jason. Don’t waste it.”

     His mouth is arid.

     “What is—what is your plan?”

     Tim looks at the file clenched in his hand, and his face becomes indecipherable before he speaks again.

     “Bruce has a…contingency of sorts for himself. One created long before he ever met you or me. He made an alternate personality. If he ever found himself mentally attacked or if his psyche reached a breaking point, the alternate personality would take over while Bruce’s consciousness takes a backseat. He calls it Zur-En-Arrh.

     “It’s an alternate completely focused on the mission, completely unshackled from emotions and irrational thoughts. We need to force it if we want things to be fixed. We need to make Bruce reach his absolute mental limit, and then Zur will temporarily take over his mind as a defense mechanism. It’s a planned psychological breakdown, one we can utilize. When the dust settles and he regains control of himself, Bruce will realize the error of his ways and go back to being Batman, the real Batman. Not the lousy pretender he’s been the past five years.”

     Tim has lost his fucking mind. He’s fucking crazy. He must know how psychotic he sounds, right? This isn’t normal. This isn’t right. This sounds like a plan the Scarecrow or Mad Hatter would think up, not Tim Drake. Maybe the Lazarus Pit did drive him insane, maybe it does cause madness, because the person Bruce and everyone else described, the person they all seem to miss so strongly, wouldn’t ever think of doing this—something so malicious.

     “You’re going to brainwash your dad into doing what you want? You’re going to break his mind so some alternate personality takes over? You’re fucking crazy!”

     “Bruce isn’t my dad,” Tim sneers at him, “and what would you rather have me do? Should I take after you and try to kill him? Should I start shooting a bunch of people in some pathetic attempt to get his attention? Who are you to lecture me on how I deal with things? He’s not going to listen to anything resembling reason, so he needs to have his hand forced. I'm not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I care about him.”

     “Because you care about him!? Are you a fucking lunatic?” Jason’s voice cracks in disbelief. He’s absolutely dumbfounded, “I can think of dozens of different ways to go about this. You just want to hurt him for what he did to you. It’s evil!”

     Anger sharpens into a knife, rubbed against a whetstone by the time passed without him. Tim’s contempt is a storm, loud and bellowing against the cracks of faraway thunder.

     “You hypocrite. You didn’t give a rat’s ass about making the world a better place, so don’t try that high and mighty act with me! You told Talia, word for goddamn word, when you decided not to kill the Joker, that you don’t care about anything other than yourself. ‘He would have been dead. A quick, agonizing death. And this world would have been a much better place for it. But I don’t really give a crap about the world’. That’s what you said down to the letter. Every time you speak, you drip hypocrisy. The syllables you utter are only lies. You are a worthless waste of air who knows nothing about helping others. You’ve only wanted to cause pain to people.” 

     Rage grips Jason wholly. He hates Tim. He loathes Tim. Jason hates his arrogance and his haughty sense of moral superiority and the way he speaks of things he knows not a thing about. Tim doesn’t understand Jason. Tim doesn’t know why Jason did what he did. Tim only likes to hear the sound of his own fucking voice. What does he know about what Jason’s been through? How can he pretend to understand Jason better than himself?

     “You don’t know anything! Why is it so awful that I wanted to be avenged? That I wanted him to care about me? Should I have been okay with my own murder!? I wasn’t asking Bruce to kill Cobblepot and Scarecrow or Clayface. Not Riddler or Dent. I was talking about him. Just him. And doing it because…and doing it because he took me away from my dad.”

     Tears weep down his cheeks; they drip onto his clothes and sting with salt, but stopping is a futile pursuit. Jason can’t prevent his heaving, his palpable, raw emotion; tides of longing and melancholy and hate swishing about on a turbulent heart.

     “Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he’s crippled. I thought…I thought killing me—that I’d be the last person he’d ever let him hurt. If it had been Bruce that he beat to a bloody mass, if it had been Bruce that he left in agony, if it had been Bruce he’d taken from this world. I would have done nothing but search the planet for that pathetic pile of evil, death-worshiping garbage and sent him off to Hell.”

     The waves below the building crash against the rocks and pillars below, sending a salty mist upwards through the cracks on the rotten floor. There’s no wrath, no sadness, no sympathy, in Tim’s gaze. There’s…absolutely nothing. Nothing except the barest hint of disdain and condescension. He is a cruel and bitter man.

     “You never should have become Robin in the first place, Jason. If that’s what you wanted Bruce to do, if that’s what you think you deserved, then you never understood him or what it means to be Batman. It’s almost pitiful how stupid you are. You think I don’t know what it feels like to be hurt? To feel like you’ve been betrayed? Do you hear yourself right now?”

     Jason’s tongue is paralyzed; he can’t form any words. His anger, his strength, has been completely hemorrhaged and left to drain.

     “Let’s be generous and ignore that Bruce did want to kill the Joker but was stopped by Clark from actually going through with it. Bruce wouldn’t have wanted you to kill him if your positions were reversed, he would've wanted things done the way they’ve always been, but you don’t care about what others want, do you? It’s always been about your pain, about your suffering and no one else’s because that’s what matters. You admitted as much during your ‘heart-wrenching’ speech.”

     Another massive wave breaks onto the rocky shore and sends frigid drops of water over Jason from underneath. He’s freezing. His fingers have turned purple, and the tips have darkened into an almost blackish hue.

     “You think I don’t know I’m awful? I know I’m damned for the things I’ve done. I know I deserve to be punished. Do what you want to me, but don’t do this to Bruce.”

     “I’m not doing this to hurt Bruce. How many times do I have to spell it out for you, moron? Despite everything, I still believe Bruce is a good man, one who has done something awful, something that hurt a lot of people, and I’m doing this to help him. He needs a reminder of why he became Batman in the first place, like an ice bath that startles him into alertness. He’ll remember what it means to wear that symbol. This will be temporary, and good for him in the long run. You can’t comprehend the idea of caring about someone selflessly. Or caring about others in general.”

     “Then what about Dick? Do you think he’s going to appreciate what you’re doing? Don’t you care about him, too? This will end up hurting people, Tim. People who have nothing to do with any of this. People you care about. What about Alfred? What about Steph—”

    In an animalistic display, purely feral, Tim grabs Jason by the collar of his shirt and slams him up against the wall. His head bounces off the hard metal with a sharp thud, and newly shed, runny blood sticks to his hair. The harsh ringing in his ears has returned with a vengeance, and stark colors pulsate at the edge of sight. He definitely has another concussion.

     “Don’t ever utter that name out of your mouth, you filthy pig. You don’t have the goddamn right. We thought she was dead, but she never got a memorial, she never got to be mourned. You want to know what I was told after it happened?”

     He is hatred personified. He is a reckoning made real.

     “I was told how she died thinking she was a failure, how she was tortured and degraded and abandoned. You never mentioned what happened to her once during your entire little stint as Red Hood! You didn’t care that what happened to her was awful, that what happened to her was unjust, because you only ever think about yourself. She was Robin, she died, but you didn’t care because it wasn’t you who suffered. If you ever say her name again I’ll break you in two, do you understand me?”

     Splinters dig into Jason’s skin as he’s dropped, and he slumps to the floor with a painful wheeze. His back chafes against the uneven, rough walls of the storage garage. The dim glow of the laptop monitor burns like heated needles boring into the whites of his eyes.

     “I tried to give you a chance, Jason. I tried to extend a hand, but you refused. This is happening with or without you. You never really cared about redemption, did you? What you want is to be exonerated, to be told it wasn’t your fault.”

     Jason can’t form a response. It’s as if he’s dying.

     “There was a man who once said that all it takes is one bad day to turn even the best of us insane. He was wrong. He was a weak-willed, despicable, slimy weasel who grasped at straws to justify the depravity he inflicted onto everyone else. Others weren’t the problem—they never were—it was only him. The two of you are remarkably similar.”

     Barbara once told Jason the same thing, what feels like so long ago. History continues to inflict new pains with familiar faces, scars that are shaped like a memory.

     “You vacillate between extremes, between self-serving guilt and unearned anger you delude yourself into thinking is righteous. Despite the many years gone by, you’ve never learned to age past fifteen.”

     Tim kneels to Jason’s level on the floor.

     “That’s where we differ. I’m not sixteen anymore. When this is over, things will finally be back to the way they should’ve been. I’ll make sure of it. Bruce will realize the best thing you ever did was die, because you paved the way for someone better to take your place. Nothing of value was lost with you.”

     However much Jason wants to say something, anything, he can’t. He’s a shell, cowed by torture and emptied of pride. Dribbles of blood patter down on the floorboards warm and viscid and leaking between the tiny cracks like steady flows of malice into thirsty seas below, swallowed by its white foams and gray rippling swells. Gotham is a place made rapturous on victimization, and so it eagerly feeds.

     Tim turns away from grabs the folder and his laptop, shutting it closed and leaving the room pitch-black.

     In an apathy and disinterest that makes him feel small, Tim grants one last withering glance, and parts with words forged from a personal hell; Jason’s twelve years old again, scavenging for scraps and hiding in abandoned alleyways. His requiem was born and assured in infancy, a child preordained to brimstone and sulfur jets. He never stood a chance.

     “I’m heading out. I have a delivery for the Wayne Residence. Sleep well, Jason. You’re going to need it.”

Chapter Text

There’s a letter on the kitchen table when Bruce enters the room. 

     Plain white envelope. Crimson wax stamp. No return address or any identifying markers except the word ‘BRUCE’ in thick bold lettering on the back; it’s been the fifth one he’s been sent in the last forty-eight hours. Jason’s been missing for four days and Bruce has received multitudes of ransom messages claiming to have him, asking for ridiculous amounts of money in exchange for his release. Sometimes they’re emails from anonymous senders, sometimes they’re phone calls with AI voices, sometimes they’re text messages from burner phones, but they’re all proven to be fake in the end. There will always be awful people willing to capitalize off tragedy, and Bruce doesn’t have time to entertain their sick games when his son has vanished without a trace, when he spends every waking moment thinking about how to bring him back home. This will be the same as the others; Alfred must have seen it in the mail earlier this morning and forgot to tell him. 

     His body is saturated, overwhelmed, with anger. Every night he patrols with righteous fury in his gut, red soaking his knuckles from the petty scum who are arrogant enough to cross his path. He scours Gotham with a single-minded fervor, desperate for a clue to go off of. All of his public appearances have him begging for anyone to come forward if they know anything, but nothing has manifested. Absolutely nothing. Bruce’s son has disappeared, and it’s taking its toll. He’s become unbalanced and crazed in a way he hasn’t endured since Tim…it doesn’t matter, Bruce shouldn’t bother reading some hoax letter. He’ll have Alfred look at it later.

     …He decides to open it, anyway.

     Dear Mr. Wayne,

When I was a young boy, my father used to tell me bedtime stories of monsters. Fiendish ghouls and goblins with sharp fangs and jagged claws that took naughty children who don’t behave. They had scaly emerald skin and pinprick eyes as black as night, they spoke in indecipherable howls and screams, they hid under the bed and in the closet. I thought they weren’t real. I later realized that monsters do exist. They wear flesh and bone like ours, they can speak our words and tell their own lies, they hide in plain sight. But now I find myself wondering: when is a monster not called a monster?

Is a monster not a monster when you once tucked it into bed? When you once kissed it goodnight despite the atrocities it committed and the tragedies it inspired? Is a monster not a monster when you raise it as your own and decide to love it, cherish it, protect it despite its own evil? How about when you ignore the bodies hidden in its closet? Is a monster not a monster when it pretends to regret its own wretched nature? When it sheds crocodile tears while the meaty chunks of those it devoured are still wedged between its bloodied teeth? Is a monster not a monster when you call it your son? Is a monster not a monster when its name is Jason Todd?

I have Jason. I can’t help but worry for his well-being, Mr. Wayne. Gotham has had a dreadful cold spell these past few days, with temperatures at night that go below freezing. His hands have turned a deep purple, and his nails slide off his fingers with little effort. His recalcitrance is rewarded with fists, with hammers, with tire irons, with crowbars. Infections have started to set in; his wounds are weeping pus of many colors and his stomach is retching vast quantities of acrid bile. Jason is in quite awful shape, but things will only get worse as his condition continues to deteriorate. Despite this, he has been given far more clemency than he deserves.

You have failed this city, Bruce. You have broken your sacred oath. You have allowed a mass murderer to wander your halls, allowed a killer to patrol your streets. Do you think everyone will feel safe once they find out who Red Robin really is? When they find out that the man who protects them has killed so many of their own? Do you think the Justice League will ever trust you again after your duplicity and lies are exposed? Why have you forsaken justice? Why have you protected your monster of a son?

You have three days to find him. On April 27th, Jason will die. You cannot have both your son and justice; they are diametrically opposed sides of the spectrum between good and evil. You cannot claim to be a hero of integrity while harboring a killer within your home. You cannot claim to care about the common man while protecting someone who has killed so many. You are a liar. You are a fraud. You’ve become what you claim to hate. You’ve become a beacon for corruption and deceit. You can have either Batman or Jason, Bruce. Not both. Make your choice.

     Yours Truly,

     R.H

     His fingers are rigid, completely clamped onto the paper and carved from cold white marble. He can hear his pulse in his ears; his head throbs wildly as a bead of sweat rolls down his temple and splashes onto the letter, smudging the black typewriter ink on the crinkled right edge. He calls out to Alfred in the other room, feigning calm despite the terror that clenches upon his heart.

     “Alfred, did you get the mail earlier by any chance?”

     “No, Master Bruce. I was just about to do so now, in fact.”

     Someone broke into the Manor. Someone broke into the Manor while they all slept. Someone broke into the Manor while they all slept and left a letter. Someone broke into the Manor while they all slept and left a letter and was able to completely avoid detection while doing so. An unknown intruder was able to do this without alerting any of Bruce’s security, without tripping any alarm, and without waking anyone up.

     What if they decided to do more? What if they decided to hurt Damian while he slumbers in his bed? What if they decided to infiltrate the Cave and wreak havoc? This isn’t some thug looking to score big with a ransom or a rogue looking to torment Batman by taking Red Robin. This is someone different, someone more dangerous. This is someone who wants to break him down.

     Wait…

     The signature at the bottom of the letter. R.H. Those initials. He knows what they mean. Bruce knows who is doing this. Jason, before he was taken, heard reports from citizens of Park Row that a new person was patrolling their streets, someone was going around playing hero and stopping burglars. Jason said he wanted to investigate the claims himself, and Bruce allowed him. They were said to wear a leather jack, combat boots, and a… and a red helmet, of sorts. It was only in whispers, though. Bruce didn’t give it much mind; amateurs deciding to put on some cheap homemade costume and run around in an attempt to be the next Batman is nothing new. He thought it would turn out to be some irresponsible teenager with nothing better to do, or maybe it would end up being some well-meaning buffoon who didn’t realize the risks involved. Not…not someone like this. Not a demon who stole his son.

     Wavering hands form a slight tremor. The paper slips out from his grip and falls onto the ground with a soft flutter, but in the domineering silence it sounds like a gunshot in a vacant alleyway, the clatter of pearls scattering on filthy ground. Bruce can’t afford to panic right now. Jason needs him at his best. He can’t afford to fail his son a second time. History will be denied a chance to repeat itself, and he refuses to hold Jason’s limp body again while the world burns around him. There will be no more loss.

     Tim’s death was the precipice. There is no pain worse than watching one child kill another. Bruce wanted to die. It was when annihilation whispered its endless end and offered total consumption among the rows upon rows of stolen souls, mouths along mouths begging for Bruce to join their legion. He was caught transfixed in the vastness of its indifference; its apathy was an allure, sharing no more misery, no more suffering, no more failure. Rich temptations rewarded by the deprivation of his being. Death could be the ultimate absolution.

     The only thing that stopped him was what he owed Jason. Bruce owed Jason a father, he owed Jason the happiness that was robbed from him, robbed from his sweet son who wanted to love and be loved. If Bruce loses one more person, it will destroy him, ruination of all kinds guaranteed. And he won’t let that happen. He can’t afford to fail. Not with so much on the line. Jason will be brought back home at any cost.

“Barbara, it’s Bruce. Tell Dick that I need him at the Manor immediately. I’ve found a lead in Jason’s disappearance. Get in contact with Stephanie and Cassandra too, if you can. We need as many hands on deck for this.”

     Dick and Stephanie still have his number blocked; he's forced to contact them through Barbara when emergencies arise. Bruce tries not to dwell on it too much. The two of them may have their grievances with him and with Jason, but he’ll need to put their sour history aside for now. He can’t let himself be distracted by his personal squabbles with the stakes so high, when Jason’s life hangs in the balance a second time.

     “A lead? What kind of lead?”

     “A letter. Someone broke in and left it on the kitchen table. Says they’re going to kill Jason in three days. They know my identity and Jason’s too. I’m going to call Clark and ask him if he can take Damian for a few days. I’m not risking him getting hurt in the crossfire.”

     The line goes silent for a few excruciating seconds before she responds, her tone professional and diligent even when tainted by stress. 

     “I’ll let them know. I’ll look over the Manor’s security cameras and CCTV street footage in the meantime. Let Damian know about the situation. He gets angry when he feels like he’s being left out of the loop. He might be upset that you want him sent away so it would be best if you meet him on his level.”

     Talking to Damian is an equivalent pain to pulling teeth. Not because Bruce dislikes his son, not in the slightest, but because the circumstances of his arrival drove a colossal wedge between them before they ever got to meet. The wounds were still so fresh. The body was still warm. Bruce loved Tim. Tim was Bruce’s son. He loved Tim’s compassion, his intelligence, his unequaled desire to help others. Having Damian show up so soon felt like…felt like an insult to Tim or felt like trying to replace him. 

     When Jason died and Tim came along, things were different. Bruce was bruised and guarded, but Tim was so charming and endearing, he was so intensely lovable and eager to prove himself that Bruce could never fathom disliking him. He wanted to protect Tim, and he dreaded the idea of any harm coming to him. Damian…Damian wasn’t like Tim at all. The boy was arrogant when he arrived. He was so cocky, so self-assured and callous. Tim had died mere weeks ago and Damian was already making demands of him the second he walked through the door, proclaiming he needed to become Robin and implying that Tim didn’t matter. Bruce couldn’t stand him. He couldn’t stand hearing Damian talk badly of someone he loved so much.

     So Bruce lashed out. He kept Damian at a distance. He was cold and unapproachable. Damian only reminded him of what he’d lost yet again, and he was too caught up in his own grief to feel any remorse for his behavior. By the time he could gather the resolve to bridge the very gap he created, to try and get to know his son, it was too late and Damian had already found his place. One without his father in it. He regrets how things turned out. He should have been more understanding, he should have been kinder. Damian was just a kid, one who desperately needed acceptance.

     “I’ll talk to him. Let me know immediately if you come across anything in the footage.”

     “You know this doesn’t change anything, right? I still feel the same way about what you and Jason did. I’m doing this because it’s my responsibility as Oracle, not because I think I owe either of you anything. I’m not looking to make amends, either.”

     There it is, as always. Bruce hates it when she does this, when she lords his actions over him. She and Dick are always so…vitriolic—whenever they bother to communicate, that is. Bruce and Dick haven’t actually talked to one another in years, not beyond the rare update on the comms every few months. It’s infuriating that everything fell apart so suddenly and without any chance of recovery. He tries to keep the bite out of his response.

     He fails miserably. 

     “You make that extremely clear whenever you lower yourself to interact with me. Thanks for the reminder. Goodbye, Barbara.”

     The call ends abruptly with a huff and Bruce eyes the second floor where Damian’s room is located. Maybe Alfred would be better off telling him the news? No. That wouldn't be right. This is Bruce’s responsibility.

     Walking upstairs, he passes by empty rooms and vacant hallways populated by ghosts and lost love. His feet are leaden and bogged down, as if the blue carpet is a syrup that sinks under his weight with every movement. These halls were once full, they had life to them. But now they’re hollowed-out skeletons where the living dead roam.

     He knocks on Damian’s door, hesitating briefly before tapping his knuckles against mahogany wood.

     “Damian? Are you there? I need to speak with you. It’s important.”

     The sounds of shuffling and faint footsteps come through the walls in muffled notes, and as Damian opens the door, an odorous aroma of paint and chemicals enters the hallway. He has an apron on, dotted with faded streaks and splatters of various colors, from florid reds and yellows to dim grays and browns. Damian has always shown a passion for art; Bruce is glad he’s found something else to dedicate himself to. Bruce couldn’t allow him to become Robin and it was a major point of contention in the past. It’s a large part of the reason they aren’t particularly close, despite his best efforts.

     “Yes?” Damian says.

    A neutral question, perhaps even mildly content. Things may go smoothly, or at least as smoothly as they can given the circumstances.

     “I need you to pack some of your things, Damian. I’m going to call Clark and see if you can stay with him at his farm for the next few days. There’s been…” Bruce pauses. How does he word this? He doesn’t want to cause alarm, but he also doesn’t want Damian to believe he’s hiding something important, “There’s been an update on Jason’s disappearance. We’ve discovered some new information and I don’t want you to be here in case something happens. It could be dangerous.”

     A searching look comes by him, which is a good sign, or at the very least not a strictly bad one. Damian is a proud child, if he thinks he’s being talked down to or if he feels like he’s being underestimated, he’ll certainly lash out.

     He knows that Damian’s upbringing has instilled certain aberrant values, but Bruce can’t risk having him around when an incredibly dangerous, very much unknown player has revealed themselves and their despicable intentions. His endurance has been stressed to its breaking point over what’s happened to Jason, his fortitude crumbling at the foundations, and if something were to happen to Damian on top of that, Bruce wouldn’t be able to live with himself. He’d die in all ways a man can. 

     “…Am I a burden to you?” 

     What? That wasn’t the response Bruce was expecting.

     “What brought this on? Why would you think that?”

     “You’re sending me off to Kansas on a whim.”

     “I’m sending you away because things are going to get dangerous, Damian. They broke into our house! I’m making the decision as your father to do what I think will be best for you.”

     “That’s a first.”

    A vein begins to pulse on Bruce’s forehead, and he attempts reigns in his ire. Damian has clearly developed a rebellious teenage attitude; he sometimes forgets that his son is fifteen now. He needs to be firm, Damian will come to realize this is being done for his own good.

     “Where is this sudden attitude coming from? You’re friends with Jonathan. You like feeding the animals. It’ll be like a vacation. What’s the problem?”

     “We only ever interact when you’re making demands of me,” Damian frowns, “You wouldn’t go through all this effort if it was I who went missing instead of Jason. Just leave me be. The only reason you keep me around is because it’s good for optics; the doting father and his beloved young son.”

     “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not true.”

    The frown digs deeper into Damian’s face, becoming a canyon, and his tone lowers in disdain. He’s about to say something cruel.

     “I see the way you look at me, Father. You don’t look at me and see me, you look at me and see who you wish were there instead. I’m the burdensome child, the one you were saddled with after the better one passed. How do you think he would feel knowing you lied about him? Do you think he would appreciate being called weak, having his parents be called abusers? Do you think he would enjoy being told his murderer is his biggest hero?”

      Fury, cauterized and smoldering. He’s not going through this again. Bruce didn’t lie about Tim. He didn’t fucking lie. Tim did look up to Robin, Tim did have neglectful parents, Tim did struggle with his physicality and his training. Bruce can’t help it if some things get twisted around over the years, he’s not in control of what others say or do. Why are he and Jason blamed for everything that’s gone wrong since then? His entire family wants to act like he’s some insidious manipulator who takes pleasure in letting a madman run wild. They don’t know Jason, either. They don’t know him like Bruce does. Jason wouldn’t do those things by choice. Jason would never willingly hurt anyone like that, especially not Tim. Why are they so determined to make his son out to be a monster? Why are they so adamant in believing Jason is evil?

     And how dare Damian invoke Tim’s name only to salt Bruce’s wounds. Damian knows nothing. 

     “Tim is dead. He’s dead and he isn’t coming back.” His nerves scorch with contempt, “You know nothing about him, you never even knew him, so don’t act like you care now! You said that he was irrelevant, you said that he was an insignificant civilian. You had never met him and yet you disparaged his name and character. How do you think he would’ve felt knowing all the things you said about him? Tim would’ve hated you.”

     Damian’s face falls and crumples in genuine pain; Bruce has never seen such a look on his son before. A suffocating quiet blankets the entire Manor. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the hallway, the soft hum of the air vents below him, the uneven creaking of the wooden floor, it evaporates like steam rising from a burning stove. Or the cremation of a corpse.

     “…I’ll pack my things. Please let Alfred know I’ll be down shortly.” 

     “Damian, I’m sorry—”

     “Go. Leave me alone.”

     When Damian shuts the door, it is not with a loud bang or a smashing crack, but with a gentle click. It's worse than if he slammed it. 

     Unnatural. Anomalous. It’s concentrated anguish. This has gone beyond misfortune, above simple tragedy. It feels infernal. Almost deliberate in its horrid nature. What can go wrong has gone wrong and will always be wrong. Gotham is Hell, and Bruce an angel of the abyss. Like poetry straight from Dante, cantos that ebb and flow from word to word spinning an epic of unholy vengeance; punishments crafted in such a way as to feel pointed, cruelties so precise as to be devised by The Great Beast himself. The house Bruce built shall be his prison, the bonds he forged shall be his chains, the love he shared shall spoil to hate. He flies above the skyline yet buries his failures under the dirt. The boy who lost his parents will grow to see his children meet the same end.

     But there are no demons or devils, and no evils beyond what lies right here. These tortures are fully earthbound. His grimoire summoned what he caused himself; a life co-signed in shed blood, a future chosen and guided by only his own hand. 

     Aghast, he stands there, in front of the closed door. Alone again. 

Dick arrives around fifteen minutes after Clark comes to pick Damian up. No greetings or hellos as he strolls into the Cave. He’s straight to business. Bruce wasn’t expecting it any other way, he doubts Dick sees him as family anymore. 

     “Show me the letter. I’d like to see it for myself.”

     He hands it to Dick, who quickly looks through it, his eyes darting back and forth as he reads the lines, passing it back to Bruce with a sigh and an inquisitive hum.

     “Did you find anything on it? Fingerprints, chemicals, etcetera?”

     “No. I analyzed the letter after Damian left and found no traces of anything. Barbara also let me know the Manor security footage was completely scrubbed clean for fifteen minutes between 3:25 and 3:40 AM. She’s still seeing if there’s any CCTV street recordings that can be found. Whoever did this is good at covering their tracks.”

     Dick rubs his chin in thought, and the computer lights bask him in shades of blue and white. A pensive, bittersweet melancholy touches Bruce; it makes his heart twinge. Dick being here in the Cave. The two of them working on a case, two top-notch detectives joining their minds together, it makes him reminisce. He remembers when Dick was Robin, fresh-faced and full of energy as he gingerly talks about giving some robber the “ol’ one-two” during a fight or when his nose scrunched a certain way when he was thinking about how to solve a problem.
     
     Those days, the days of Batman and Robin, the days of Dick and Bruce, are over. Those days aren’t coming back. Dick is only doing this because he’s Nightwing, because he’s always been so passionate about helping others, not because he wants to reconcile. Dick is a professional when he’s at work, when he’s doing his job. If they find Jason—No, Bruce won’t think like that, when they find Jason—Dick will go back to hating Bruce and leave him in isolation once more. Things will go back to how they’ve always been lately, with indirect insults told through someone else and passive-aggressive avoidance.

     An observation from Dick snaps him out of his spiral.

     “When I was looking through the letter something odd stood out to me. When talking about Jason, they refer to you as ‘Mr. Wayne’ but when talking about you specifically, they call you ‘Bruce’. That’s an oddly personal way to address someone in a ransom letter. I think this was sent by someone who knows you. Not as a public figure or as a business acquaintance, but as a friend or something similarly personal. I don’t think this is a Bane situation with a criminal that happened to figure out your secret identity.”

     Dick stares at Bruce warily, contemplating his next words.

     “However, the motive isn’t exactly an unusual one, especially when considering who they took. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of people this could be from.”

     That makes Bruce pause. What is Dick exactly trying to imply here? Why would someone close to Bruce take Jason?

     Rather suddenly, Dick scowls at him, contoured by shadows.

     “Don’t give me that look, Bruce. I’m not in the mood to deal with your forced ignorance. You know damn well why he was taken. Jason hurt a shitload of people, it was bound to catch up with him someday.”

     “I’m not ‘forcing ignorance’ and I don’t appreciate what you’re implying.”

     “Well I’m not ‘implying’ anything! I’m outright saying that whoever did this wants revenge for whatever Jason did to them. They practically say as much in the letter.” 

     Take a deep breath. He’s had enough arguments for one day and doesn’t have the time for another one, not when the circumstances are what they are, but Dick won’t stop.

     “You know, Bruce…I don’t think you realize just how many were harmed by him. I never thought you would treat death as some statistic. The ones Jason killed aren’t cardboard cutouts or distant approximations of a human being. They weren’t only monsters. They were real people, they had family and friends and lives that were capable of change, that were precious to others, that had value.”

     Tempers builds, pressure bubbling under his flesh without release. Does he think Bruce doesn’t know that? Does he think that Bruce doesn’t despise what Jason was manipulated into doing? Bruce thinks of the lives that were senselessly lost every day and every night that he looks at his son. Jason killed many, Bruce is aware. He mourns them greatly. They had lives that were cruelly taken, cruelly snuffed out, but it wasn’t Jason’s fault. The Pit took something out of him, it degraded his son’s mind until there was nothing left but revenge and rage. Anyone who is close to Bruce would know that. Anyone who is close to Jason would know that.

     His son climbed back up from those choleric pits of madness, tamed the green’s draw towards brutal savagery, unwound Talia’s conniving manipulations, to rebuild himself so he can become a hero once more. No one is beneath redemption.

     “I know those lives meant something! Why are you so dead set on making Jason out to be irredeemable?! Jason is capable of change. Jason deserves to have the chance to redeem himself.”

     “Are you serious?! ‘Deserves to redeem himself’?! Jason hasn’t done shit to redeem himself except sit around and mope. What has he done to atone? Absolutely nothing. You know what you are, Bruce? You’re an abuse apologist. You sicken me.”

     Bruce withers; something cracks under the pressure, something invasive and dangerous in the back of his subconscious. 

     “What did you just say?”

     “Every time you use the Lazarus Pit as some made-up excuse to reduce Jason’s accountability, every time you say he was manipulated by Talia or ‘the green’, all you’re doing is excusing his repeated atrocities with a bunch of bullshit.” Dick is scarlet, snarling with hate, “‘Oh? Jason killed a bunch of people? That’s awful but the Pit was influencing him so it’s not entirely his fault.’, ‘Oh? Jason took over the drug trade? That’s a big problem but he had a tough upbringing so it is what it is.’, ‘Oh? Jason murdered Tim-” Dick’s voice cracks, fractured like glass, “murdered Tim in cold blood? That’s horrific but Tim always looked up to Jason so he would be forgiven’. Jason became a monster and you allowed it. How would Tim feel, huh? Do you really think he would forgive Jason? Do you think he would forgive you?”

     How do you think he would feel knowing you lied about him? Do you think he appreciates being called weak, having his parents be called abusers? Do you think he would enjoy being told his murderer is his biggest hero?

    Scathing words from before come crawling back with a vengeance, and Bruce is overcome by them. It always goes back to Tim. Every. Single. Time. 

     “I loved Tim! Tim was my son! If you want to blame anyone for his death, blame me. Jason was my responsibility and I failed him. He wouldn’t have done what he did if I was there to save him. It was my fault. You don’t have a son, Dick. You don’t know what it’s like to lose one!”

     “No.” A frigid, targeted tempest chills the Cave, the bats overhead scatter and shriek at the sudden malice, “I blame Jason for what happened to Tim entirely. I felt awful when Jason died, I blamed myself for not being there enough, but no amount of guilt will ever overshadow the hate I have for him after what he did. He takes and he takes and he takes without any regard for others. Maybe—maybe if Tim was still alive, maybe if Jason decided to actually make amends or take accountability and shuttle himself off to Blackgate, I would feel differently. But I am never letting go of what he did to Tim. Never. And I’m never letting go of you letting him walk.”

     The fight, the anger and wrath and fury, pathetically deflates out of him and onto the floor in stunned silence. At the end of it, despite his hate and his disgust, despite his conviction and determination, what Bruce has left is a dead son and a broken family; ruined relationships torn apart by heartbreak. Nothing is ever going to fix this, is it? Nothing is ever going to undo what has been done. Nothing is going to bring Tim back. 

     “Just—just stop. I’m done fighting. I’m going to go revisit where Jason was last seen. Come or don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

     Bruce walks to the Batmobile; he doesn’t wait for Dick’s response. Memories replay, and he recalls some advice he told Jason back when he was Robin. After Felipe Garzonas died, his father, Josè Garzonas, wanted revenge and took Jim Gordon hostage. It ended up with the father dying, just like his son. Another pointless tragedy. What he told Jason back then hurts particularly apt now. It feels so distantly long ago yet still smitten and tart in its recent bitterness. History tends to repeat itself.

     Josè’s body is crushed under the car, his hand peeking out from the wreckage.

     “A lot of stupidity and some deaths, all wrapped up in a father’s righteous anger”

     Jason looks at Bruce in confusion, awash with puzzlement beneath the domino mask.

     “Say what? Who was the old guy with the uzi?”

     “His name was Josè Garzonas. He was Felipe’s father, Robin. For every action in this universe, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Consequences, Robin. There’s no escaping them.”

Chapter Text

The run-down bar Tim finds himself at has an overbearing stench of shoddy gin and cigarette smoke that makes the back of his throat burn. He sequesters himself to one of the circular booths in the corners, where the seats are worn with use and the color of the table has faded from a rich brown to a cracked and dusty blackish hue. An untouched shot of Fireball whiskey sits next to him, the scent of cinnamon provides a lingering respite from burnt, squalid miasmas.

     The patrons can probably tell that he’s not a usual client, that he’s a “have” dressing the part of a “have-not”, with his bleach-stained hoodie and hand-me-down sweatpants, but the scowl on his face dissuades them from coming over to bother him about it. Tim wouldn’t be caught dead at this sort of establishment—the type where illegal activities most certainly occur after hours—but Talia wanted to meet somewhere inconspicuous and this was the closest place he could think of. He still doesn’t get why they couldn’t just talk over the phone.

     The door rings open as she enters fifteen minutes later than when she said she’d arrive. This is unacceptable. Tim’s running a tight operation, and he injected Jason with enough sedatives to keep him out for only two more hours, so she needs to make this quick. Whatever she wants to discuss better be worth his dwindling time. 

     Talia weaves her way through the dingy bar stools and the raucously drunk crowd gathered by the television. She sits across from him, putting on a refined and dignified air about her, despite Tim knowing better than that; she’s not fooling him. They share the same disconsolation, empty discontent.

     “You’re late. Does the League not have the budget for watches?”

     “I am doing well, thank you for asking.”

     He doesn’t appreciate the attitude. Tim had to move so many of his plans around to make this meeting happen, and now he’s going to have to send Bruce the second letter he wrote tomorrow. His schedule is already packed as is, not to mention that Bruce has sent his entire squad of loyal attack dogs onto the streets, like starved wolves, since Tim broke into his house. 

     “I fail to see why this couldn’t have been over the phone. If this meeting you wanted so desperately to happen ends up wasting my time I’m going to be really annoyed.”

     “Don’t use that tone with me. You ignore my calls. You do not update me on anything and I am forced to find the answers myself. I cannot afford to have your silence if you want my continued cooperation.”

     The reason Tim ignores her calls is because he’s busy. He can’t give Talia play-by-play updates on the daily when he’s juggling so many objectives at once. Keeping Jason locked up in a storage unit, avoiding encounters with Bruce and his hounds, patrolling as Red Hood, setting up his whole Zur plan. Those take time. Tim’s far too preoccupied for silly chats. 

     “I got your kid out of the way for you. He’s perfectly safe in Kansas right now, and as far as I’m concerned I’ve kept up my end of the deal. There. I’ve updated you. Can I go now?”

     She rolls her eyes at him. The audacity of this woman. It’s always a performance, always a show, little different from everyone else. She plays pretend to hide her emptiness, bereft of prospects or a future.

     “Always so impatient. If you were anyone else, I doubt my Father would tolerate such irreverence. Nonetheless, I am glad my son is well, but I did not come all this way to only hear about him. I have other concerns, as well.”

     Ra’s al Ghul is an annoying, ancient old fart with a forehead the size of Texas. Tim’s not stupid, he knows the reason he was resurrected was because Ra’s sees him as a tool to use against Bruce. The bullshit about “wasted potential” and “righting wrongs” was to butter Tim up and make him into an oblivious pawn. It’s obvious, what better way to get rid of Batman than to send a former Robin after him? Someone who knows his strengths and his weaknesses more intimately than anyone else? Ra’s hopes Tim and Bruce end up destroying one another in their conflict, but Tim’s not gullible, and he’s certainly not dumb. He has his own agenda. When this is over, history will be set right once more and the disastrous sequence spanning the last five years will be corrected. What could Talia possibly be concerned about? That he’s going to double-cross her precious father once Tim gets what he wants? She’d be right, of course, but that’s not the point. 

     “What concerns? Everything is just fine on my end.”

     The battered and cracked amber lights above the two of them flicker ominously as the ambient chatter of the bar grows. Dusk becomes night, and they merge under the darkness. They are two apostates abandoned by their faith, used as martyrs without consent and crucified by a false idol in favor of the heathen.

     “I believe your plans are too drastic and you should reconsider.”

     Tim’s blood simmers, hissing and spitting in the heat; liquid rage runs beneath the skin. Too drastic? 

     “Excuse me? Are you joking?” 

     “No. You were deceitful when you first told me what you planned. You did not inform me about your treatment of Jason and what you would do to Bruce. You said you were going to make them face justice for their actions, you never said anything about torture.”

     Talia’s upset that Jason has some boo-boos? God forbid he’s gotten some bumps and bruises, the cute little baby boy. That’s a bridge too far. The woman who is part of the League of Assassins has such delicate moral scruples. Yeah, Talia simply can’t stand violence. Who the hell is this lady trying to fool? 

     “I’m not torturing anyone. If anyone is being tortured it’s me for having to listen to Jason’s incessant whining. After what he did, I have zero concerns if he’s a tad uncomfortable or not. Also, as an aside, was he just as much a moron when he was with you, or is this idiocy a new development?”

     “Enough,” her voice is quiet, hushed to not draw attention to them both, but firm, “I was wrong letting Jason go back to Gotham, but I will not let history repeat itself again. I underestimated his desire for violence. I will not repeat the same mistake and underestimate yours.”

     “When are you going to realize…I’m not Jason Todd.”

     This isn’t about violence. This is about making Bruce realize where he went wrong, where he made the mistake of choosing his own selfish wants over the lives of others. Jason was a maniac, a violent criminal who was never going to help anyone other than himself. He was never good, that bastard came out of the womb with ill-intent, yet Tim’s the only one aware. Tim is different. He protects people. He’s a hero. 

     “Do you regret helping him? Do you regret sending him to those teachers who trained him to kill? You were mad at Bruce because your father was dead at the time, so you sent Jason back to Gotham, right? What did you genuinely think would happen? Did you honestly believe Jason ever had noble intentions? Are you really that naive? Or are you just an idiot?”

     “Mind your tongue,” she snaps, fingers digging into the rotted wood, demeanor sharpened by offense, “Jason told me he was going to bring peace. He was going to take the city from Batman and bring order. I’ve seen enough, and I no longer think it is wise for you to continue this crusade. I recommend you change your plans before they spiral.”

     His eyes narrow to a dark glare; Tim isn’t in the mood for her cryptic responses or her ethical posturing, “What are you trying to say? Why should I stop now? Tell me, O’ wise one.”

     She falters, falling into an uncharacteristic display of hesitancy. 

     “I do not wish to see you ruin yourself.”

     She can’t be serious right now. Who needs enemies when you have friends dumb as rocks? Perhaps the Lazarus Pit gives brain damage as a consequence of overexposure. It would explain why her dad is how he is, too.

     “Oh, of all the melodramatic, histrionic, bullshit I’ve had to hear the past few days—”

     “What happens after, Timothy? What is your plan for after Bruce’s failsafe personality is activated? For after Jason is put into prison? What happens after you get everything you want? What are you left with? What will you do next? I don’t think you have one. I don’t think you plan on having an ‘after’. Why lead yourself to ruin for revenge?”

     “This isn’t about revenge!”

     An oppressive hush chokes the room, and a few patrons look up at him oddly. He didn’t realize he yelled that. The chatter, the drunken buzz of spirits and beers returns shortly afterwards, but it’s more cautious, more wary, than it was before. Tim sets himself back on track.

     “Look, Talia, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but my plan isn’t based on anything personal. I’m doing it because someone has to fix this mess and I decided it has to be me. Nobody else was going to. I can’t sit by and watch Bruce lose his mind again. Did you really only come here to tell me I need to quit? Because I’m not.”

     She looks thoroughly unimpressed, and her nails tap against the table. Tim finds it incredibly grating; he forces the corners of his mouth to stop forming a frown. He’s too much of a professional to be bothered by such slight annoyances. 

     “You’re lying.”

     Never mind, he takes back what he said about being above slight annoyances, she’s getting on his nerves now. No wonder Bruce dumped her. 

     “Lying about what, exactly?”

     “You’re a victim of a horrible, violent act and you’re trying to reclaim your identity, your agency. You want to lash out against those who hurt you, who took those things from you. This is just as much about personal feelings as it is about your supposed ‘justice’.”

     Tim hates that word. Victim. Tim is not a victim. Victim is the pernicious buzzard that clings to the edge of Tim’s shadow as it would a carcass; it is the hovering, invidious ghost that pelts his every action with a whip coated in sobs. Victim implies helplessness, victim implies submissiveness; it gratingly bawls the tale of a wistful young child who begs and weeps and screams as he’s beaten into a pathetic heap of shattered bones and torn slabs of flesh. It deceives and destroys, it twists stories into fables, squanders truth into lies.

     He was a fighter. Tim fought. He fought like hell. He didn’t go out crying, he went out telling Jason what a pathetic bastard he was, that he was a stupid piece of shit with no grasp of reality. So no. Tim is not a victim.

     “Uh-oh,” He musters up all of the scornful, cynical, mean-spirited sarcasm he has, “The Pit is acting up and influencing me. I’m seeing green. It's telling me that you’re downplaying your own role in this to avoid responsibility, that you are every bit as duplicitous as you claim me to be. It also called you obnoxious.”

     Pausing, he stares at her with every ounce of genuineness he can afford—and ignoring Talia’s scowl—but his voice still comes out scathing and mean, “I don’t blame you anymore for deciding to heal him. I don’t. You thought you were doing something kind. What I do blame you for is being the one to send him to those murder instructors or whatever, and you were the one to tell him about me being Robin in the first place. Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation, maybe I wouldn’t have to do this, if you kept your mouth shut. Food for thought, isn’t it?”

     Talia would typically snap at him right about now, maybe threaten him or something along those lines, but she doesn’t. She then looks at him in pity. It turns him virulent, slathers him in rabid hate. Pity is for the weak, it is empathy’s malignant brother, who simpers from above while tearing you down to level with the basest of men. Pity is for those who are worth less, and Tim is not worth less.

     Liquor. He needs some liquor. He spots the shot glass next to him and downs it in a deep gulp. The whiskey stings and fizzles as a pleasant, torrid burn slides down his throat; a controlled blaze, small flames to prevent a firestorm. He knows what this is, it’s a desperate attempt to avoid feeling, but Tim has done way too much of that lately. Especially guilt. Guilt is a useless emotion to have, and it will lead him astray.

     Instead, he hones in on his anger, his loathing; it’s the infernal torch that guides him forwards and drives his momentum. It’s an enticing anchor, and keeps him from the sullen thoughts; the mendacious, fragmented reality distorted like broken mirrors against broken mirrors, a replication replicated in obscene perversions. 

     Tim usually doesn’t drink, but maybe this slight buzz will do him some good.

     “I admit I made mistakes, Timothy, but I brought Jason to those teachers to stall him from returning to Gotham. He wanted to kill Bruce, he had ideas of some grand confrontation to destroy him. He needed to be sidetracked and needed to be given a different purpose. And what do you think he would have done if he found out about you on his own, if I hadn’t told him myself? He would’ve come after you much sooner, especially when he was still so angry, so…volatile, early on. It would have been a bloodbath.”

     Despite their differences, despite the running undercurrent of mutual annoyance between them, despite the fact that he hates her curmudgeon of a dad, Tim can’t help but feel a tad empathetic. At the end of the day, they were both used, and they are both destined to be not truly known. 

     “…And yet you were still blamed for it. You helped Bruce get his son back, and you were thrown aside. Jason got what he wanted from you and watched as Bruce called you every nasty thing under the sun. Manipulator. Schemer. Seductress. Everyone blames you for what Jason chose to do, for taking advantage of such a ‘vulnerable and traumatized young boy’. And yet you still protect him. Even now. Why? Why do you want me to quit after everything they did to you?”

     “I desire retribution, but not like this. There are other ways to get the results you want.”

     Duh, no shit Sherlock. Of course there are other ways to do this, but those wouldn’t accomplish what Bruce needs. Bruce needs tough love. If Tim decided to do things another way, like revealing himself, telling the Justice League that Bruce is a liar, and getting Jason put in prison as a result, what does Bruce learn from that? Nothing. It’s too simple of a plan. Bruce doesn’t learn why what he did was wrong or where he started to stray from his responsibilities, it only serves to punish him. Bruce needs to learn through experience, he needs to be brought down to his lowest point so he can rebuild himself as someone better, the person he used to be.

     Tim misses the Bruce who had a lollipop compartment in his utility belt for crying children, who was stern and serious but also incredibly compassionate, who was overbearing in his protectiveness, who cared more than anyone. Tim wants that Bruce back, Tim wants his Bruce back. If a minor mental reboot is what’s necessary to achieve that, Tim will do so without hesitation. He knows, despite his mistakes, Bruce is a good man and he wouldn’t have become this warped, this corrupted, if it weren’t for that awful, awful demon he calls a son. 

     “I’m sorry,” He’s lying, he’s not sorry, “but I’m not stopping this, Talia. I can’t.”

     Though Talia’s conflict is evident, he doesn’t think he’ll ever understand why she carries such reservations. She loves Bruce, that much is obvious, she had a child with the guy for Christ’s sake. But the man she fell in love with isn’t who he is now. Tim loves Bruce, too, but not this version of Bruce, not the Bruce who would choose to protect a serial killer even after what he did to Tim so many victims. How can Talia still defend a person who said that she manipulated his son into killing people? How can…how can Bruce do that in the first place? Did Tim the people Jason killed not matter? 

     “Timothy, I clearly can’t convince you to change your mind, but know this: whatever happens from here on out is on you and you alone. When you realize this isn’t what you wanted, when you realize that you have made a horrible mistake, don’t blame anyone but yourself. I warned you. You will not find the happiness you so desperately seek.”

     What an arrogant, holier than thou, self-aggrandizing, and downright stupid thing to say. Here’s Talia al Ghul, so omniscient and so very very above such meager emotions; she can’t possibly fathom why Tim would logically want to do this. Tim’s a dumb kid looking for a way to lash out against the world, a choleric and volatile child who sees the world in nothing but shades of red. She’ll never understand being angry or upset, she’s far too wise to fall for such immature feelings. Asshole. Boy oh boy, does he have some choice words for her.

     “You like to pretend you’re not upset, like this is only an annoyance to you, but I know better. Why do you have this persistent, infuriating need to be seen as above me? Because you’re not, you’re sad and lonely and resentful. You got conned like a fool. You let them walk all over you. So why do you defend him? What do you know about Bruce that I don’t? Nothing. That’s what.”

     Talia’s response is clad with pensive gloom, filling the bar with overcast omens, foreboding tragedies yet to come. It is forlorn, sorrowful, a reception for the lost.

     “I’m a mother. I don’t defend his actions, and I certainly don’t excuse them, but I do understand them. I do not want your plans to hurt my son’s father. It’s as simple as that.”

     This whole meeting was a waste of time. Talia is clearly coping poorly with the situation at hand. She can’t see why this is the best course of action and the most logical solution. She’s too enamored with the rose-tinted memories of a distant whirlwind romance, too entrapped by the romanticized idea of Jason Todd, the doomed cherub who smells of dirt and fire. Poor, precious Jason Todd and her ‘Beloved’ Bruce Wayne. Tim is destined to be alone. He is the only one who can peer through the illusion Jason and Bruce have cursed upon them; it pulls seraphic, saccharine images of a loving family over the world’s eyelids to entice it into a blissful embrace where living is sugared and sweet, where nothing ever really breaks and scars fully fade with time. 

     “I’m glad we had this talk,” He’s lying again, he despised every goddamn second of it, “but I really must get going. Pru owes me some favors and I need to get in touch. I know for a fact that she won’t tell me to quit, at least. I’ll call you later, when the job is done.”

     Tim can feel her staring as he leaves, traversing through the haze of cigar smoke and the acrid stench of beer. They are not piercing or pointed, not malicious or enraged, but…mournful. For who or what, Tim doesn’t know. 

The last place Jason was seen was near a small public park in the red-light district. Surrounded on three sides by corroded, neglected, tenement buildings that infest the air with the smell of rust and sewage, the park is a quaint patch of dying grass in the midst of urban decay. If this was the last place Jason was seen, why wasn’t there any reports of an incident or altercation? Bruce finds himself perplexed. Did nobody truly see anything…or are people keeping quiet because they have something to hide? According to the police report, Jason was seen a little past ten o’clock walking towards this area, wearing a red polo shirt and black pants. The buildings that circle the park are occupied by tenants, with the dim yellow lights of illuminated rooms peaking through their patchy window curtains. Somebody must have seen something. He intends to make them talk, whoever they are.

     As he surveys the buildings, Bruce is made aware of a presence lurking behind him; he knows how their eyes rake his back and how their body radiates sheer contempt from aura alone. He turns around.

     It’s Stephanie. No surprise there.

     “I was expecting Nightwing.”

    Her displeasure is obvious even through the mask, “It’s amazing how you’ve managed to alienate literally everyone and still act like you have the option to be picky. It’s either me or nothing.”

     He’d rather choose nothing. Stephanie has it out for him in a way that’s remarkably unique in its open resentment. She never minces words with him. She makes her hostility abundantly clear. There is possibly no one on Earth who hates Bruce Wayne more than Stephanie Brown. However, he needs every single bit of help available to bring his son home. He can’t let Jason down, and that means gritting his teeth and toughing it out for the next couple hours. Bruce will debase himself into the dirt of it means his son comes home safe.

     “Very well. According to the case file and police report, Jason was last—”

     “I read the dumb reports already. I know.”

     …God help him get through this.

     “Fine. Search the grounds. See if there are any footprints, traces of blood, or any other materials of significance. I had the police section off this park so there wouldn’t be any contaminated evidence.”

     It shouldn’t be difficult. The park is slightly larger than a football field, with a sparse collection of partially debarked trees and playground equipment Bruce is almost positive violates several safety standards. Stephanie scowls at him, turning to investigate a huddled group of dead azalea bushes near the gated entrance. The cold, dismal rain drenching the city these past few days has rendered the ground a muddy, soaked heap of slop. Each step sinks slightly into the ground, and it almost feels fitting, searching through frigid, wet dirt thar slips through his fingers and leaves a bitter chill behind in its absence. An apt metaphor.

     Bruce usually appreciates silence, even encourages it, but the current atmosphere makes him disquiet, makes him on-edge in a way that’s deeply uncharacteristic. Stephanie’s resentment rumbles outwards from her, each action underscored by an unsaid animosity that gusts and bellows like the gale winds of a squall. It has to stop.

     “I know you’re mad, Spoiler, but—”

     She turns abruptly, looking at him with the pain of death, pupils pinpointed and teeming with malignant, sulfurous hate.

     “Nope. Not having this conversation with you. I’m not wasting my breath. So stop talking and shut your goddamn mouth.”

     What?

     “You didn’t let me finish what I was going to say.”

     “I already know what you’re going to say. It’s the only thing you ever say. It’s always about forgiveness and redemption but I’m not fucking dealing with it. I’m not like Nightwing, who still deep down holds out in the belief that you’ll come to your senses one day. I’m not like that. I don’t hold a fool’s hope. I gave up on you years ago, the very second I found out what happened. So don’t you dare start preaching to me, because I’m not hearing it. You and your favorite son can bond in Hell for all I care.”

     Bruce is left floundering; he didn’t know her feelings ran this deep, that the wound was still bleeding so heavily and spewing vitriol between them. 

     “Is this…is this also about Black Mask? About what happened to you? Do you still hold that against me? I’m… I’m sorry that happened. It was my responsibility.”

     She pales in absolute mortification, changing to a compounded expression of wrath and shock. Disbelief of his ignorance.

     “Are you…are you really that dense? This isn’t about me. This is about you and—and him. Jason.”

     “I…”

     The words won’t come out, they’re stuck to the roof of his jaw and each time his tongue tries to form them they slide over it like a viscous paste. 

     It isn’t fair. Jason…Jason was a good kid. He was the victim of other’s narratives. Bruce always had to endure the whispers of ignorant provocateurs saying Jason was the “Angry Robin”, that he was the son of criminals and street vermin. “Jason was destined to go bad” they’d say, “It was bound to happen” they’d say, “Of course he got himself killed, he couldn’t control his temper.” they’d say, “He was a reckless idiot.” they’d say. Bruce would have to watch as Jason’s face fell every time he was insulted, every time he was called a thug or a brute or a criminal even though he was just a twelve-year-old boy trying to make the world a better place. Jason was kind. Jason was joyful. Jason was altruistic. And it was taken from him.

     If Bruce can make those words disappear, if he can make the world see Jason as the loving and good person he truly is, then Bruce can rest a little easier. Maybe some things were exaggerated a tad, but he would rather Jason be known as who he wholly is than solely his worst moment, a horrible mistake made under the intoxicating influence of the Lazarus Pit. Bruce has done all of this because his son deserves better than prison garbs and concrete walls. He didn’t lie about Tim to make Jason look better. Bruce didn’t lie at all. 

     Before he can muster up the resolve to respond, he catches something, just barely on the edge of his perception. Between two of the buildings surrounding the park, there’s a narrow alleyway no more than five feet wide. Behind the shadows of the night and the obscured view created by heaps of trash bags and scattered junk, there’s something hiding in wait. No…not something… someone.

     The two of them are being watched.

Chapter Text

“I’m back! And I brought some Batburger!”

     Merciless pain graces Jason’s back like fresh cuts as a wintry gale comes through the open storage room door. It’s started to rain again, the sound of ice pellets hitting the roof like bullets against steel. Tim puts on a mock frown, exaggerated and overdone. He’s in one of his sarcastic, insufferably arrogant moods. Jason supposes that’s better than Tim’s worst ones, the ones where he looks for the slightest justification to beat or maim him.

     “Damn. You don’t look so good. Maybe a KGBLT or a Riddle-Me-Fish would cheer you up? I would’ve got you a Jokerized side of fries but I don’t want to trigger you. I take mental health seriously.”

     “Fuck—” A heaving cough interrupts him, phlegm rattling within Jason’s airways; a crimson foam froths upwards over his mouth and down the sides of his lips, “Fuck you.”

     “And to think I went out of my way to buy you food. I took fifty bucks out of your wallet to do it, but still. Guess it’s back to sipping puddles of stagnant rainwater and licking condensation off the walls for you, pal.”  

     What a gargantuan prick. 

     Tim shrugs at his retaliatory glare, completely unaffected. “I suppose it doesn’t matter much. Me and you are heading out soon, we’ve got places to go and people to see. Can’t stay too long in one place lest we get caught. Big things are happening soon.”

     They’re moving again? The last time they moved locations Jason got shot in the stomach and was bludgeoned into a bloodied pulp. Nothing good comes from moving. Nothing good has come from any of this.

     And what does Jason’s family think is happening to him? Does Bruce even know what happened to begin with? Do the rest of them even care? What of Bruce’s condition? Tim said he had something for the ‘Wayne Residence’, but what was that something? It could’ve been anything, it could’ve been a bomb or anthrax or poison. Bruce could be dead right now and Jason would be none the wiser. Every single scrap of information he receives about the outside world comes from Tim, and he could very well be lying. For all Jason knows, the game’s already decided and the opponents already obliterated, the warden entertaining himself by toying with his captive audience of one.

     “So where did—where did you go? When you headed out?”

     “I went to send Bruce a letter and talked to Talia, but I don’t see how that concerns you. She told me you’re a filthy mutt who backstabs others at the earliest convenience and she’s glad that you're getting your just deserts. Thought you should know.”

     Jason ignores the increasingly petty provocations. He already knows that Tim is a bitch, no use in trying to argue with him.

     “What was in the letter?”

     “Why do you give a shit? Why does it matter? Look, if I wanted Bruce dead I would’ve done it already. I don’t even want the guy hurt. If anything, I’m rooting for him. I want him to realize you’re despicable. You think we are similar, that I too hold the intoxicating desire to hurt and kill and destroy, but I don’t. I’ve already told you everything in detail, but because you can’t fathom the notions of love or of doing the right thing, you’ll never comprehend it no matter how many times I tell you it again.”

     Oh, shut the fuck up already. Here Tim goes, on and on and on in long-winded and overly-wordy soliloquies about justice and symbols and altruism and the greater good to hide the fact he wants the earth underfoot and those who walk amongst it to bleed the same as he did. He refuses to speak plainly, always hiding his true motives behind tattered window-dressings of “obvious” logic and unaffected stoicism. What a load of shit. Beneath all of the theatrics, all of the meticulous plans and contingencies, Tim is nothing more than a hurt child lashing out against an unjust world that doesn’t remember him.

     Jason can sense it in Tim’s eyes. He knows that feeling. That ravenous hunger. That glint of primordial, ubiquitous hatred that you enclose in your chest with wrought-iron bars, but are never quite able to fully rein in; a beastly abomination that leaves carnage where a sense of self once held true. It is truly harrowing the ease at which regret and animosity can cohabitate within his heart, how easy it is to cater sorrow for someone who has stained the ground in Jason’s suffering, how easy it is to hate someone whose fate is a blotted and dirtied mirror reflection of your own; one smeared and distorted in some areas, not a perfect symmetry, but still ghastly in its resemblance. How strange it is, to look at Tim and see himself, pained and so, so angry back when he first donned that shining red helmet. And Jason despises it, he finds it repulsive because—because what does that say about him?

     If—if Jason sees this raving lunatic, completely insane and gripped by vengeance, and thinks of himself, what do others see? Is this how Jason’s family sees him? Is this how everyone sees him? Was he always feared, always hated, always the villain? It was so easy to justify, to shove blame aside, to rebuke accusations with the promise of eventual peace, because sometimes bad things need to happen in order to achieve a greater good. The problem is…isn’t that what Tim is saying too? Jason knows what he did to Tim was indefensible, that he’s going to be damned for it, that he’s done something unforgivable, but were his other actions unforgivable also? Was he always wrong? Was it worthless in the end? Was there no meaning in any of it?     

     No. He refuses to believe that. The blood loss must be getting to him. He can’t afford to think about this ridiculous bullshit anymore. Jason wasn’t wrong to kill those reptiles. Jason was the righteous one. He was the one who could’ve fixed everything. Not Tim. Jason had no other options. Gotham is a slaughterhouse, feasting upon the supple meat of its most vulnerable. Mercy does not live here, it dies in forsaken back streets that overflow with surging ruby rivers and ripe violence. Such evil must be met with evil of its own.

     “I have to admit, after years of enduring this fraudulent, shitty excuse of a life you and Bruce have blessed me, I’m glad I didn’t bring my dad back to life. It wouldn’t have ended well.”

     Here it comes. Another one of Tim’s goddamn monologues. 

     A shriek of wind passes through the gaps between the corroded roof tiles, spraying a barbed mist of bone-chilling rain, glazing a thin layer of ice over Jason’s hair; it traps him, memorializes him, in this very moment, like a coat of gloss on his damnation. He is solely defined by his pain, and all else is simple refuse.

     “I remember that I wanted to bring him back so badly. It happened to me, so why couldn’t he come back too? It would’ve been easy. But then I started hearing the things everyone was saying about them. My parents. That they were ‘abusers’, ‘child beaters’, my dad was an ‘alcoholic’ and my mom was a ‘cheating slut’. And that was only the tip of the iceberg, as time went on they got nastier and nastier, more and more depraved. ‘Didn’t you hear the Drakes whipped their son with barbed wire?’, ‘Didn’t you hear they whored Tim out to rich business men?’, ‘Didn’t you hear they raped their child?’.”

     A loathing so powerful it’s practically porous, this ineffable anger leaching from Tim is an expression forged by an enmity amplified upon itself, to touch it is a chemical burn and to gaze at it a welding flame. Jason is not ignorant, he knew of the lies about Tim’s parents, but that has nothing to do with what happened that tragic day at Titans Tower. He wasn’t the one who said those things, so why does Tim place all injustice, all worldly suffering, at Jason’s feet? There are things that he can admit were egregious mistakes, things he did that were wrong; he’s said so a thousand times already. But this isn’t fair. Jason is no liar. Quit the goddamn monologue and grow the fuck up.

     “If I brought my dad back, he would’ve returned to a world that hated him for things he never did, for crimes he never committed. He would’ve spent every waking moment of his life under the shadow of heinous lies you and Bruce cast on him. He doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserve to live like me. My dad deserves to rest. I loved my parents, and I could never subject either of them to this kind of abuse just because I missed them.”

     “What am I supposed to do about that?!” Jason shouts. His shackles jingle in agreement, they dance to the hymn of his woe, “It’s not my fault people said bad things about your dad! They said shitty things about my parents too! You blame everything on me.”

     “Excuses, excuses. The difference between you and me is that what they say about you is to your benefit; it makes you look better than you really are. Meanwhile, I’m destined to be labeled an incompetent, histrionic child. I wonder how someone like Mia Dearden feels about some of those particularly sleazy falsities regarding your childhood… ‘extracurriculars’. How would a real survivor feel about your more scandalous stories.” 

     No. Jason is never talking about that, he’d rather take the torture. He had nothing to do with those types of rumors. They were sick and exploitive, he would never propagate that kind of conspiracy, something so obscene and distasteful the very idea sends vile revulsion down his spine. He would never claim to have gone through that.

     “Don’t you fucking dare put those on me! Don’t you even fucking try, Tim, I swear to God!” He snarls.

     “Put what on you? That you lied about turning tricks at the age of eleven? That you supposedly sold your body on street corners to put food on the table? That the way you and your mom made rent on time was to have slimy pimps strut you around the neighborhood?” It’s a unique talent, the way Tim mocks him, brimming with disdain, making Jason’s self, his very soul, dirty and unclean; he’s a discolored and bloated carcass whose shambling gait is a mockery of the living, his existence is an error. 

     “I wonder how Mia feels; a woman who was sexually assaulted by her father, who was trafficked into prostitution, who struggled with drug use, who contracted HIV. How would she feel if she found out her very real trauma, her very real experiences, were stolen and repackaged into a fake sob story to get you out of jail? How would she feel if she found out your abuse was a made-up lie to score you pity points?

     “You take and steal from those better than you, people who have faced truly unimaginable hardships, to cover up your own intrinsic moral failings. Taking something as horrific as sexual abuse and lying about it to make people feel sorry for you, that’s fucking evil. You’re evil. You aren’t like Mia. You’re not someone who has a hundred reasons to hate the world yet still has the strength to remain good despite it. You’re not that, you’re just another dime-a-dozen asshole with a gun.”

     “I never fucking said those things! Neither did Bruce! I thought they were disgusting! I would rather die again than be blamed for that.” Jason’s voice cracks at the edges, his injustices heating his face and pitch rising to an apoplectic roar, “Why do you hold me responsible for every single fucking thing a person says about me or you or anyone else?! I’m not the orchestrator of some elaborate conspiracy! What the genuine fuck is wrong with you?! Are you going to blame me for being born next?!”

     “It doesn't matter if you didn’t create the rumors yourself! You never once spoke out against them. You were too comfortable with your cushy riverside condo and your happy father-son bonding times and even your weekend family pot roasts to ever consider telling the truth, because then the dominos would come falling down and you’d be forced to confront the reality that you deserve to rot for what you did and everyone would hate you! You’re complicit. There is no pit in Hell deep enough for you, you malignant, deviant, irredeemable useless fucking scumbag!”

      Hate grips Jason in a stranglehold, animosity reaching beyond a threshold as silence grows and grows; he’s paralyzed by the intensity of his own rage, and his skin has been pulled taut by stress. The screams and whistles from outside still persist, bouncing from all directions like a raucous, discordant crowd witnessing his defilement with rapt approval, gleeful at the sight of a dogmatic man who has been brutalized and diminished to a piteous heap.

     Let them laugh. Let them jeer. Let them mock. Jason knows he was right. He knows that there are those who need to die. Tim can’t convince him otherwise, not when Jason has lived the experience of a hapless victim at the crossroads of fate, met with a terrible end through no fault of his own by the hand of a vile evil. Jason may not be a good man, but he is a just one. 

     Checking his watch briefly, Tim switches his cadence forcibly light, letting out a weary sigh, “It’s time to hit the road, I think. Our conversations are always so illuminating. It’s unfortunate that I tend to lose track of things as a result. I need to rendezvous with a friend of mine, so let’s get going.”

     He stands up and searches through a black trash bag on his right, eventually pulling out a white sack, besmirched with dust and debris, which stains it beige. Jason doesn’t like where this is going.

     “What’s that for?”

     “I can’t have you know where we’re going, silly. It would ruin the surprise.”

     “I’m not letting you put that on me.”

     “Then I’m going to shoot you again, and I’d hate to waste a good bullet. You can either let me put it on, nice and easy, or you can make it difficult and force my hand. Your choice.”

      “Fine. Put it on.”

     The sack goes over his head; his vision is engulfed almost entirely in black, except for the faintest specs of light that shine through minuscule holes scattered across like a stellar night sky. A pungent must of aged-cloth and damp mold makes his stomach roll. Suddenly, and without any forewarning, Jason’s hoisted up and slung over Tim’s back. His chains sing with the back and forth motions. Even without his sight, Jason can sense Tim’s utter revulsion. Jason feels it in the tenseness of Tim’s muscles, the rigidity in his shoulders. They speak for him in the ways words won’t.

     “Maybe getting you Batburger was a bad idea. You need to lay off the extra pounds, tubby.”

     Tim is such a fucking asshole.

     They pass through the door of the storage unit, the wind beginning to belt at Jason’s back and the rain hammering like crooked nails at the skin of his neck. Water begins to collect at the bottom of his hood, making it harder and harder to breathe as a growing pool covers his nose and the rest of his head. He starts to heave. Each time he tries to get air, an outpouring of rainwater runs into his windpipe and down his nostrils. Spots grow bigger, light grows dimmer. Jason is about to die, gurgling inflammation accumulating in his lungs, when he registers the sound of a door opening and is promptly flung off Tim’s back.

     He lands on his stomach, and a raspy gasp escapes him. Pain spews across his gut; a familiar trickling sensation wells from where his bullet wound resides, warm liquid spilling forth and sliding along the sides of his torso. Water ejects from his throat, and he wheezes pitifully; phlegm, blood, and rain mixing into revolting mucus that coats his lips and dribbles down his chin in thick, soupy strands. His hands, damaged and numbed as they are from the cold, manage to feel the sensation of scratchy velcro or carpeting like static on his fingertips, and he tries to stretch his legs out but he’s met with stern plastic or metal on all sides of him.     

     He realizes that he’s in the back of a van. 

     “Y’know, it’s so fitting that you were buried when you died, yet Bruce wanted me cremated. It seems almost deliberate. You got to stay yourself; your corpse painted with the most beautiful of blushes and fitted in the finest suit and tie. You deserve the very best, don’t you? That’s how everyone remembers it. Perfect, angelic Jason, so innocent and virtuous, taken far too soon. It doesn’t matter what you do now, because the amount of people you killed or the amount of lives you ruined are completely irrelevant; you’ll always be that darling summer boy with cute little curls and a toothy grin.” 

     Scathing and sarcastic, but also steeped with an untamed and unbound fury; It’s impossible for Jason to comprehend the sheer loathing. It’s an ineffable appetite, as if Tim wants the deepest bowels of Jason’s identity torn from the foundations and strung about; to let his punishment be promethean, eviscerated by shame for all eternity, selfhood plucked and regrown and plucked again. The raptors love to see a man unmade. Tim will force Jason to pay back the blood shed a thousandfold, and he will make everyone watch.

     “But to cremate something is to destroy it, to burn it until it’s left completely unrecognizable, nothing more than soot and broken bone fragments. You can recognize a person from their body, but not from their ashes. Who they were, their aspirations, their thoughts, their feelings, their relationships, completely reduced to dirt. Worthless dirt, completely inseparable from whatever you want to project onto it—onto me. It has no mouth to speak, no eyes to see, no hands to touch, and no heart to feel. A pile of dust can’t refute a lie. I admire the poetry of it.”

     The back doors slam behind Jason, and the starting rev of a car engine follows shortly; the scent of diesel and smoke wafts through stale air. As they begin to move, Jason’s eyelids begin to droop. Drooping lower and lower, closer and closer to closing shut, shivers wracking him entirely, so violently they resemble spasms.

     As consciousness begins to fade, as the chill fades to the distant background of his awareness, Jason wonders if this is a rest he won’t wake up from, if this is where his story will end a second and final time. This prospect should be frightening, even mortifying, but what conjures is a glimmer of apathy and perhaps even relief. He now knows better than to expect death. Whatever Tim has planned for Jason is far worse than dying; he would never be generous enough to grant him that reprieve, and he will force Jason’s candle to stay alight until the wick flickers only the whispers of a flame. 

     And with that thought, he slumbers.

Consciousness drifts back to him like a languid amble that leaves him wishing he had passed on in his sleep.

     Jason is still in the van. He registers nothing beyond the black emptiness of the hood and the damp carpeting still scratching at his skin. Everything hurts. His nerves flare with every shuddered breath. He chafes against his broken ribs and even the smallest twitch of a muscle nearly sends him into a convulsion. He bites down on his lip to avoid making a sound, tearing the flesh and gifting the tang of copper on his tongue. 

     “Can you remind me what the hell you want me to do again? The plane ride was a fuckin’ drag and I need a repeat. Jet lag and shit.”

     That’s a woman’s voice. It’s coming from the passenger seat. Tim is talking to someone. How…just how many people are in on this? He’ll need to stay quiet, maybe he’ll finally learn something useful.

     “When Ra’s recruited you he clearly wasn’t thinking of the best in mind, huh?”

     “Fuck off, asswipe. I should’ve left your sorry ass on read.”

     “But you didn’t. I’m just too likable and charming.”

     “You’re a bitch.”

     Who is this vulgar woman? Wait…Jason remembers something. When Jason was first taken at the park, he recalls a second person there, only barely; they tranquilized him while Tim held him down. Jason’s vision was hazy and the cloak of night made details difficult, but a shadow passed over him before the pinch in his neck took hold. It couldn’t have been Tim, because he felt Tim’s arms shoving Jason into the muddied ground. Could this…could this be them? Could she be Tim’s accomplice?

     “So are you. Anyways, I need you to watch Batman and Spoiler for a bit while I work on something. Comm me if they start to move or leave the area. I’ll drop you off nearby.”

     “And what will you be doing?”

     “Stealing the tires off the Batmobile while they’re busy investigating Jason’s disappearance.”

     Huh?!

     “That seems a bit too petty a job to have me playing lookout. Sounds pointless.”

   Determination, desperate zealotry, plummets the temperature ever lower. Malicious cold breathes through the van, frostbitten flesh bursting forth from Jason’s tender skin by the force of Tim’s own conviction.

     “It isn’t pointless. It sends a message. Bruce will understand, he has a certain history. If you’re spotted by them, run. Let me know and try to buy me some more time. Don’t fight them, Pru. Under any circumstances.”

     So Pru is the woman’s name. She seems…difficult to work with. Crass and headstrong. A tad full of herself. A wildcard.  

     “You want me to run? I think I can take some old grandpa in a bat costume. Is it because the other one with him is your ex? Do you still have a boner for her or something?”

     “Stop being a pervert, I'm serious. If you can’t beat me in a fight, you stand no chance against Bruce. There’s a reason I’ve avoided a direct confrontation with him. You’re a good shot, but that’s nowhere near enough. He’s fought your Master and come out on top. You really think you’d last longer than ten seconds? Don’t fool yourself.”

     “Thanks for the heads-up, General Drake. I’ll heed your commands to the letter.”

     “Pru, I mean it. I will not have you ruin my life’s work because of a ridiculous desire to prove yourself. This plan is all I have left, and I’m finally so close to achieving it. If you fuck this up for me, I’m going to be pissed. Understand?”

     The woman—Pru—takes some time to respond, letting the sounds of the city speak for a precious breath: engines and wheels against gravel asphalt, the gritty crackle of rubber and metal grinding over occasional patches of mud-specked ice, sirens and horns, screams and shouts. 

     “…Okay, okay, I get it. Geez, don’t be such a hardass. I don’t even get the specifics of your scheme or whatever. Why not shoot the bastard and be done with it? He looks like a goddamn used tampon, all bloody and shit, so just finish the job and kill him already.” 

     “I’m not going to kill him, I’ve told you that. I’m going to make it look like I killed him. I have a location already chosen, and at midnight tomorrow I’ll pull it off.”

     “Give me details. I want to know what I’m helping with. I’m not going through with anything if I don’t know the point of it. I’m not a charity worker, Mr. Drake.”

      “I’m going to blow up the Monarch Theatre. It’ll be a mirror image of how Jason died the first time, fire and mushroom clouds, falling concrete and metal, the whole shebang. It will even take place on the same day of the year, Jason’s death anniversary. Bruce will get there too late, searching through rubble just like in Ethiopia. He'll realize he failed to save his son again, and in the last place he ever went with his parents, no less. I’m going to use thermite or something similarly hot so it looks like Jason was vaporized. No bringing him back a second time.”

     That’s…that’s sick. That’s sick and unimaginably cruel. How can Tim so easily explain what psychological torture he’s going to put Bruce through and then still claim to care about him? It’s horrible. It’s heartless. It’s wrong.

     What happened to mess Tim up so badly? Why is he so hateful? It doesn’t make sense. Was he always like this? Was he always a vengeful, vicious creature and nobody else noticed? People…people don’t change that much or that drastically. It’s the same with the aberrant ones, with the twisted perversions of a human soul like Victor Zsasz or Black Mask. They always were what they are now, and that's why Jason did what he did. It's why monsters like them have to die. 

     “And then what? 

     “After that, Bruce’s psyche will break, and that's when Zur-En-Arrh will take over.” The way he speaks so indifferently of the atrocities he’s going to commit is appalling, “Zur is a temporary personality he designed in case of mental interference or a psychotic break. A crime fighter without emotional attachments. Batman without Bruce, basically. I then reveal that Jason is alive, and Zur puts him in prison because he isn’t burdened by Bruce’s sentimentality. Bruce will eventually regain control of himself when the dust settles, and I’ll tell him why I did what I did. He’ll be upset at first, obviously, but he’ll come to appreciate it with time. They all will. My end goal is…”

     A tangible pressure amasses in his hesitation. 

     “I want to save him. I’m going to save him. Whether he wants me to or not. That’s my end goal.”

     “You’re such a fucking dork, dude. You and your penchant for drama. It’s a shame you never joined theatre club or some other shit because you're the biggest prima donna I’ve ever met.”

     “Yeah? Well it’s a shame you never became a comedian, because I’d pay money just to throw tomatoes at your stupid bald head, that’s a real comedy act. Stick to your silly guns and leave the adult stuff to me. So are you helping or not? I don’t have all day and we’re almost at the drop-off location. Save your insults for later.” 

     It’s odd to hear Tim be so…normal? Immature, almost. Like a living, breathing, human being instead of a ghoulish revenant. It’s hard to see Tim as a person sometimes, if Jason dares to be completely honest. He’s more like the personification of Jason’s sins; he’s a wicked maelstrom of regret and revenge that takes the form of a blue-eyed ghost, a castigation fit for a man sentenced to a synthetic purgatory.

    “Fine, I’ll help. You know I’m a sucker for explosions, anyway.”

     “Thanks. Genuinely.”

     A rush of envy, green and corrosive, a garrote that snakes its way around Jason’s throat and tightens into a ligature. No one is genuine with Jason, no one trusts him, no one jokes around with him, but they line up in droves for Tim. Jason never had friends, never had a team, never had anything to call his own. He can’t even manage to get his own family to care about him, yet Tim can earn good favor with a literal fucking assassin.

     Jason didn’t ask for this. He didn’t want any of this. He didn’t ask to die. He didn't ask to come back. He only…he only wanted his dad. He wanted Bruce. And he was punished for it. He lays here abused and disgraced for the crime of seeking a solution.  

     Steady, cautiously, the van comes to a stop, and there's the sound of a door clicking open. They must’ve reached Pru’s drop-off point. 

     “Remember, Pru. No confrontations, just let me know their whereabouts. If it goes accordingly, I’ll return to pick you up in about fifteen minutes. Stealing tires shouldn’t take too long, I think.”

     “Yeah yeah, I’ll let you know if things go down the shitter.”

     Pru shuts the door behind her, and it’s just the two of them now. Jason and Tim, the dynamic duo. The rain has mellowed out into an even drizzle, gentle taps against windows instead of hammers thrashing against glass. Slowly, they start to move again, now turning and patrolling at a leisurely pace. Tim must be looking for the Batmobile.

     “I know you’re awake, Jason. You breathe differently when you’re sleeping.”

     Jason’s thoughts are lethargic, opaque and clogged, dust motes on the inside of a shutter lens, clouding his mind’s eye with cracks and blobs and dots. 

     “Then why did you tell her your plan if you knew I was listening? Seems—” An influx of vertigo washes over him, the specks of light shining through the hood twirl and quiver, green and red in his vision; his head throbs to the tempo of his heart, “—Seems arrogant of you.”

     “I don’t think it matters. You’re in no condition to do anything about it. I’m sure you have a whole speech planned out, one last desperate attempt to change my mind and have everyone hug it out, but I’d rather we not continue to waste one another’s time or energy. I will not stop and there's nothing you can say or do to convince me otherwise.”

     “Then you are a lost cause, Tim. You’ve gone off the deep end and soon you’re going to realize how badly you’ve fucked up.”

     Tim laughs. A terrible, miserable laugh twisted by an abyssal amount of contempt. 

     “Me? A lost cause? You’re a funny one, Jason, I’ll give you that. I guess if that’s true, then you were never a lost cause yourself because you were nothing to begin with. Running around, killing countless amounts of people in some moronic, infantile attempt to get Daddy Dearest to love you again is insane. Totally off-the-wall batshit crazy. I hate to break it to you, but thinking criminals deserve to be executed doesn’t make you a liberated, free-thinking philosopher. It makes you a Republican.” 

     It’s a petty, juvenile insult, but it plunges him into a venomous spiral, the last rivet coming loose and letting the floodwaters stampede a torrential tide. Disparaging Jason’s life, his death, his rebirth, his morals, his beliefs, his existence into a simplified, rudimentary story of some stupid thug who got himself killed. Jason hates this man; he hates his hubris, he hates his hypocrisy, he hates his mockery, he hates his lies, and he hates the unyielding guilt he feels when looks at him most of all. He hates Tim Drake.

     “Maybe I did the world a goddamn favor by killing you! You’re an evil bastard. This has jack shit to do with altruism, you’re only mad because Bruce loves me more than he loves you. He chose me, he wanted me, but you had to force yourself on him like a fucking parasite. You’ll never be Dick’s brother, you’ll never be Alfred’s grandson, and you’ll never be Bruce’s son. You deserved to be forgotten, because you were a mistake and—”

     “I feel bad for Catherine Todd.”

     Casual, matter-of-fact, and in the same brevity one would talk about the weather. Jason starts to tremble, either he’s finally going into shock or Tim’s maliciousness truly runs that cold.

     “Imagine being Catherine, to raise a child you know is not flesh of your flesh, not blood of your blood. You decide to nurture a young, beautiful little boy with teal eyes and a bright smile. But all is not well. There’s something horribly wrong with him. He takes. He has a mouth that won’t stop suckling and hands that won’t stop grasping for more. He has a predilection for cruelty. He steals and indulges in violence, yet you can’t help but love him still. And then your husband is murdered, leaving you alone with no one else but the child who is not yours. The boy still takes, still grasps despite the money dwindling ever thinner, ever more scarce. You start to get sick; you realize the child is slowly killing you.” 

     “Stop—”

     “But you still love him, so you soldier on. He is still ungrateful, he is still cruel, and he is still killing you. He is a drain, a vampire that gorges itself even though you can provide no more, his thirst unable to be slaked by kindness. You spend your last days wasting away, the child firmly attached to you and refusing to cease his suckling, and you die realizing what a mistake you’ve made. Your death is his fault. You’ve raised a monster. You should’ve smothered it in its crib when you had the chance.”

     “I said stop—”

     “The truth is…you are not Catherine’s son, Jason. You are not Willis’ son, either. You are not even Sheila’s son. I may not be Bruce’s son, but Jason—”

     “Shut the fuck up!”

     “—you are no one’s son.”

Chapter Text

Dick remembers the circus. 

     He remembers the sounds, the sights, the smells. He remembers it all, he could never bring himself to forget. The big bloated tent striped bold red and white, like a large peppermint ballooned against the night. The persistent jingle of tunes, triangles and horns and drums, slightly off-key but jubilant and pleasing to the ear. 

     He also remembers the animals.

     Dick doesn’t consider himself a superstitious person, even in a world filled with Gods and magic and things that defy the fundamental principles of nature and reality itself. But he remembers the circus animals; they had an instinct. Sometimes, before an accident or before a performance went wrong, they knew. They knew what was going to happen. The goats would let out harsh ringing bleats and the lions would let out guttural, foreboding growls from deep within their throats. The elephants would raise their trunks into the air and trumpet a siren. The falcons would shriek shrill notes. They had something preternatural, something that told them of danger. 

     And would they scream if they were here right now with Dick, sitting idle in the Batcave while Bruce investigates? Would they bleat, growl, trumpet, shriek? Would they know what awful event is about to befall them? Would they know the doom that is pounding on their doorstep, insistent and smashing hard knuckles against their fortitude? Or would they be as clueless as everyone else? As clueless as Dick?

     The screech of burning rubber rockets throughout the cave, wild vibrations causing the stalactites above to shudder and rumble. Bruce must be back. 

     The Batmobile quickly comes into view, and Dick can already feel the anger radiating from it before coming to a full stop. Bruce seems to nearly surge out of the vehicle, movements emphatic and teeming an almost bloodthirsty rage, like a sort of savage hatred. Steph accompanies him, her hair falling wildly around her shoulders and holding an expression abundant in antipathy; it’s a face graven deep with resentment, and her disgust is outwardly expressed. 

     “What happened?” Dick asks. 

     “Our perp stole the tires off Bruce’s car. Left us another letter on the windshield, as well.” Steph’s exhaustion trickles through, and her throat sounds hoarse and raspy; she’s been yelling at someone for a long time. Dick is pretty sure he knows who.

     Bruce. His wrath is a blindfold pulled tight around his head; it allows him to see only through visions of charnel flesh. It’s an unceasing night terror that twists, that defiles, that perverts what memories it touches. Soon they will be forgotten in the most complete sense. 

     Life has become a nightmare with no reprieve; to live now is to wade oneself through a thick suspension of steadfast misery, only kept going by the weak momentum of the step before and the fear of what comes when you stop altogether. It attaches to you. It sticks itself to your skin and wears you as a suit. And then it becomes increasingly hard to tell what is real and what is fable, what is actually “you” and what is the result of other’s views.

     No one is an exception, and Dick isn’t different. Some days he sees himself a womanizer, but other days he sees himself a prude. Some days he sees himself as a ray of sunshine, a beacon of hope. Other days he sees himself as a cluster of rage, a repressed bundle of violent urges. But most days…most days he can’t see himself as much of anything at all. Uncertainty is the new certainty, and the entirety of his character is nothing but what strangers prescribe. There is no such thing as fundamentals when self-perception is torn apart by hordes.

     “He’s mocking me,” Bruce roars, slamming his fist into the computer’s keyboard and popping the buttons loose, “He—he stole my tires. He knows what that means. And—and maybe we could’ve had a breakthrough, could’ve done something, if Stephanie didn’t let them get away!”

     “You bastard,” Steph manages to sound so loud in her malice yet speaks barely above a whisper, “You stupid old fool. You were there when we saw them, and you were the one who took the lead. The only reason this is happening in the first place is because of you and Jason’s complete inability to take some goddamn responsibility, so whatever happens to Jason is on you. Just like the first time!”

    Ferocious, crimson ire is bled in an instant, roused just beneath Bruce’s skin, a spuming tidal wave rushing forwards seconds before crashing ashore. Things will be said in retaliation that cannot be forgiven and actions will be taken in anger that cannot be undone. And Dick can’t let this go on any longer. He needs to make it stop. If not for their sake then at least for his own. Try to bring focus back to the mission at hand.

     “Wait, hold on. What do you mean you saw them? You saw who we’re after? The one pretending to be Red Hood?”

     Steph huffs, “No, not him, someone else. They didn’t match his height and build, though they’re probably involved in some capacity. While we were chasing them our actual guy took Bruce’s tires.”

     If the circumstances weren’t so dire and the man’s actions weren’t so heinous, Dick would honestly find that slightly funny, and it further reinforces that this is being orchestrated by someone who knows Bruce personally. However, it’s surprising just how personal this must be. They specifically chose to take those tires as a statement, fully knowing the context behind it. This is not only someone who knew Bruce, but was close to him. Extremely close to him. The only kind of person that would know enough about him but also have the skills to pull it off is somebody…within Bruce’s circle. 

     It’s a terrifying thought, both distressingly claustrophobic and frighteningly vast, a petite paper box opened to reveal a cavernous abyss. There are very few individuals who fit the profile, but every single one of them would have a plausible motive. Hell, Dick falls into those qualifiers. 

     “I think we should open the letter,” Dick’s voice comes out distant and of a hollow quality, as if hearing himself talk from third person, “maybe he’ll slip up and reveal something.”

     He reaches for the letter; it’s lying prone on an examination table, slightly translucent from the downpour of ice and rain outside. It has the same hallmarks as the first one: A plain white envelope, the word ‘BRUCE’ spelled on the back with thick bold lettering, a crimson wax stamp, and even the same typewriter font and ink color—though the rain has caused it to blotch and slightly run in thin lines down the damp, pulpy paper. This was absolutely written by the same man.

     Dick opens the letter.

     Dear Bruce,

Apologies for taking your tires. I had a flat and thought yours would fit rather nicely on my car. I’m aware you tend to reserve a few spares in the trunk, so I do not believe the setback I caused you was too great. I hope you can forgive me; you tend to do that a lot. Forgiving people. Especially those who do not deserve it.

I was very naive when I was younger, and I had different perceptions on what the most frightening type of evil was. I thought that the worst, most terrifying people were ones that caused destruction and misery for its own purpose and without sane reason. People like Scarecrow, Victor Zsasz, The Joker. Those who seemed like anomalies to the very essence of human nature, that defied the idea we are good and kind and compassionate. I now know better.

The most horrifying, most bone-chilling kind of evil is the one born of our own abject stupidity and ignorance. The abusive father who hits his son despite once receiving those same beatings as a child, the unrepentant drug lord who once had a friend succumb to addiction, the ruthless gangster who once lost a family member to meaningless mob violence. The evil that is born out of a man’s inherent cowardice against honesty and their own mental feebleness is, by multitudes, the worst kind. It is procured from an intellectual inability to self-reflect that is so common, so woven into our societies that I can’t help but tremble at the mere thought of it. And that brings us to your dear son.

Jason Todd is the most disgustingly stupid person I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have assumed poor Catherine dropped him on his head as an infant a few times too many. He is ignorant, simple-minded in the most perverse fashion, and a scourge on the collective intelligence of our species as a whole. A grown man who commits mass murder out of a childish, misplaced anger is irredeemably dimwitted. He is everything I despise, the ugliest parts of humanity I wish didn’t exist: a cruel, selfish, unbelievably idiotic egocentrist with zero regard for the personhood of others or the sanctity of life. I often find myself lacking the words to give appropriate depth to my revulsion for him; I have never felt hatred quite like this.

If this letter is received by you in a timely fashion, you will have approximately sixteen hours until midnight strikes and April 26th becomes April 27th. As I mentioned in my first writings to you, I will kill your son that day, the eight year anniversary of his first death. Should I send you his head in a duffel bag? Or would that be too on the nose? Perhaps you would prefer pictures, instead. I am agreeable to both. Your time is running out and yet you are no closer to finding me than you were when I first took him; clearly the World’s Greatest Detective has lost his touch.

I am not without mercy, however. On one special condition, not only will I return your son to you in one piece (for the most part), but I will also turn myself in to either the authorities or to you. The conditions are as follows: before nine o’clock tonight, I want you to make a public appearance as Bruce Wayne. It must be televised and have full press involvement. At this appearance, you will reveal Jason’s identity as Red Hood to the public. I do not care what cover story you invent to explain your “discovery” of this fact, what’s crucial is that you let the oblivious masses know the truth. Most importantly, you will not justify, excuse, or explain away ANY of his actions under ANY circumstance. No exceptions. If these parameters are followed, I will return your son within an hour of your confession and will turn myself in as previously stated. You have my word, and I do not give that lightly. If you do not follow my conditions or ignore my final offer altogether, you will come to live with that regret forever.

I do realize that I’ve given no concrete proof of Jason’s captivity under my care, so I will rectify that now. Inside this envelope, there should be a bullet encased in a small plastic pouch. This bullet should have a sufficient amount of Jason’s DNA from the blood and flesh samples left on it. I used it to shoot him. Non-fatally, of course; he was getting rather mouthy and it shut him up for a few precious hours. 

     Best regards and I hope to see you soon,

     R.H

     This is…this is awful. Even worse than what Dick was expecting. These are the musings of someone mad. Not the stereotypical kind, full of empty fumes and lukewarm threats, but the kind of madness that is cold. A mean, biting cold. It is permafrost, no matter how warm the surface may be the soil underneath is hard and unyielding, impenetrable and uncompromising.

     Despite the pretense of manners and affable demeanor, despite the verbose delivery and fanciful words, there is nothing remotely kind in this letter. It is purely malevolent.

     “Well…what does it say?” Steph questions.

     “He wants Bruce to tell everyone Jason is Red Hood on T.V. He said he’ll let Jason go and turn himself in if he does.”

     Dreadful creaking noises, like the last dying moans of a brittle peace, echo and Dick turns to see Bruce gripping the end of the table with such force it nearly croaks under the pressure, thin metal and plastic twisting around the digits of his fingers, curving around them as if shrinking away from his touch.

     “Revealing his identity would be a death sentence,” Bruce bleeds vulnerability, desperation and anguish entwined by a noose of grief, “He’d spend the rest of his life in prison or in hiding. They would try to kill him.”

     Steph scowls, her disdain palpable and unflinching, “I can’t begin to imagine why so many people would want to hurt Jason. It confounds the mind. And I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll be much help, since you said I can’t do anything right. Maybe I’ll call the funeral director and let them know Jason’s suit size ahead of time.”

     Bruce’s pupils dilate and he turns an even uglier red. The two of them start screaming at each other. Dick tunes out their quarrel; it becomes a dull thrumming in the background.

     Things are spiraling so quickly. How sad they’ve become; it wasn’t supposed to be this way. They’ve had their fights, their squabbles, their interpersonal conflicts, but the mission always came first. Saving lives always came first. But that isn’t how things are now. How deep have the divides run that even with a life in the balance, they still can’t put aside their hurts, their grievances, their resentments? Then again, Dick can’t put those away, so how can he expect such of others?

     He once heard the phrase “the past sweetens the present”. He can’t remember from where. Dick’s life would be so much easier if that were true. How he wishes the past was a spoonful of sugar to alleviate the feculent, putrid taste of shame on his lips. How he wishes nostalgia could embrace him and comfort him with consoling recollections. He’s had glimpses of this captivating sweetener, when he talks to Damian about Tim and the adventures they’ve had together, but those moments are fleeting. They are flashes in a pan. In Dick’s experience, the past does not sweeten the present, but rather the present spoils the past. 

     Dick can’t look at Bruce and see the man who took him in, who loved him and raised him and taught him everything he knew. The man who did those things is a concept, a theoretical construction rather than something once existent. Dick no longer sees Jason as a child taken too soon, a twelve-year-old with a cheeky sense of humor. Jason is a murderer; he was never that little boy. And he’s aware these statements aren’t true, he knows that Bruce does love him and Jason was a good kid, but facts are irrelevant in the face of overwhelming emotion. It’s a lesson Dick learned once the idea of Tim became more important than who he was, once Tim stopped being a person and started being an idea, a symbol.

     “Steph, cut your losses,” he says, “I know you’re angry, but fight Bruce to your heart’s content later. We need to find a lead right now, and we don’t have time to waste.”

     “You’re taking her side? He’s your goddamn brother, Dick.”

     It never fucking ends. It’s one argument after another; something’s finally broken inside him. It turns out family is soluble, it can dissolve and fade away. He can’t bring himself to stop it this time. Maybe this family should fade away.

     Dick had a brother once. He was one of the best people Dick ever knew. But Jason murdered him. And he’s scared that Jason will hurt his other brother one day, too, the one who volunteers at a hospital and loves animals and draws comics in his free time. There may come a time where Damian dies under the pretense of peace.

     He won’t let that happen. If Jason is Dick’s brother then Dick refuses to be Bruce’s son.

     “Bruce…I’m done. I’m finished. I don’t know what the hell happened to you, I don’t know what turned you into this. I can’t recognize you. And I don’t know why I still bother trying to fix it,” his hands start to tremble. Deep shivers move their way up his arms and sting the top of his chest like heartburn, “I keep trying to tell myself that you’ll realize what you’ve done. I say to myself that this will be like all the other times where we’ve fought and things eventually go back to normal. But I think—but I think this is how things are from now on and I can’t be a part of it.”

     It feels like giving up. It feels like weakness. But the only alternative is to keep this mockery, this corpse, of a relationship going. Dick’s done a lot of things since Tim died, most of which he’s not proud of. He’s blocked Bruce’s number and said that Bruce is dead to him and that he hates him and that he wishes Jason would go crawl into some hole and waste away, but those were said in anger. This wasn’t; the lack of anger makes it sincere. Rage has become such a baseline that divergence from is unnatural. It is the devil that occupies your heart as if it were a home. But Dick doesn’t think he has any rage left. What only thrives is regret.

     “I’ll help you find Jason. I’ll bring him home. But after that…we’re done. It’s over.”

     Bruce blanches, the reds sapped out and replaced by the pastiest of whites; he’s become a phantom. His voice comes out a whisper, his hushed death knell to a deadening dream.

     “You don’t mean that.”

     “I do this time. There’s no going back. Nothing is saving this.”

     It gets quiet in the cave, not by volume but by atmosphere, leaving dying, residual ripples. Dick feels he could reach his hand out into the empty air and feel the hands of the old Bruce firmly grasp back. They were staunch hands, calloused and roughed around the finger joints, maybe a little crooked in some places, but also paternal. They were hands that could shatter a jaw in one swing but also cradle a newborn. They were hands that could lift a thousand pounds but also affectionately ruffle Dick’s hair. They were loving hands, gentle hands, strong hands, compassionate hands. Now there are no hands, only clenched fists.

     “Wait,” Steph exclaims, “This paper kind of smells like seawater. Gross seawater.”

     Saltwater? Dick inspects the letter again, taking it from Steph and breathing a long, steady breath through his nose. It’s only a notch above imperceptible, so scarce a bloodhound might skip it over, but it’s there. The paper smells of salt, but not only that. It smells like whiffs of oil slicks and wilted seaweed, soured fish oil and overripe oysters, burnt plastic and dumped trash. It smells like Gotham seawater. The perpetrator had Jason near the sea. There’s still hope, he couldn’t have moved Jason so far in such a short amount of time since delivering the letter. They can still do this.

     “I’m going to search for oceanfront properties. This is the lead we’ve been waiting for.” Dick finally has a clue, he finally has something to go off of. There’s adrenaline coursing through his body. This is it. They have something. They can find Jason, catch the guy who did this, and then—and then—

     …and then what?

     It dawns on him; his excitement is stolen thusly.

     And then nothing changes. They’ll be stuck where they are. Jason will still be Jason. Bruce will still be Bruce. And Tim will still be dead. There is no accomplishment in this discovery, no joy to be had, because all possibilities will always converge onto the same broken road. The best and worst case scenarios are one and the same. Dick will be trapped here forever, no matter how many bridges he burns or how many loved ones he is forced to bury. There will be no progression, no evolution, no peace, only the inevitable repeat of a moribund hope, the idea of an ending but never one actualized. Dick has committed an unforgivable crime and this is his reckoning. 

    When did Dick stop thinking of Robin as a cherished legacy, something he did out of love, and start thinking of it as an affliction? He can’t remember, but it became a curse, nonetheless, one you had to pass down. Or perhaps a ritualistic sacrifice, a pound of rent flesh and a cup of spilled blood offered for a promise. A warm, living body to be used up and discarded in exchange for the assurance of growing older. Nobody who stays Robin gets to grow older. But by passing it on, you inflict that pain, that trauma, that death onto the next sweet gullible fool who naively wants to help and doesn’t know any better. The Robin mantle has killed people. Dick has killed people. He is a murderer by inaction.

     In the distance, out of focus, he sees Tim’s memorial, a display case and small copper plaque oxidized into a light green coating at the corners. It always commands Dick’s attention. Even when he isn’t at the Manor, even when he’s across the country, even when he sleeps. That memorial is the act of malice everyone remembers but none utter, the vestige of a great injustice buried and neglected under the titanic weight of their mortal sins. It stands silent and still next to Jason’s, yet speaks louder than all. 

     Tim Drake: He Died So Others Could Live.

     Wherever Tim is now, Dick hopes he’s happy. He hopes he’s happy and away from all this, looking down on them from above. 

     “I’m coming with you.” Steph says, and grabs his sleeve as he starts to walk away.

     “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

     She frowns, clearly disappointed.

     “What? Why not? It would be easier to cover more ground if we both go.”

     Dick pulls her closer, whispering in her ear so Bruce doesn’t hear them. He’d really not have Bruce overhear this and blow a gasket, interactions with him have become like bare steps over landmines, explosive wounds and bloodied scars.

     “Steph, I don’t think it’s wise to leave Bruce here by himself. If he’s left to his own devices he’s going to do something rash or worse and it’s going to screw us over. Bruce’s been…“off”, lately. More than usual. The whole situation is getting to him, and you’ve seen it with your own eyes. He’s rattled, temperamental, reckless. It’s like he’s on the verge of a complete breakdown. I’d rather have you stay here and make sure he doesn’t do anything drastic. I mean…look at him, he’s a mess.”

    Glancing beyond Steph towards where Bruce is, Dick’s heart drops. Bruce looks unbalanced, feverishly scanning the letter, eyes flitting wildly from line to line as if he hopes the words on the paper will change if he stares at them long enough. As much as Dick disdains him right now, as much as Dick never wants to associate with him again, he also has no small amount of pity. This is the great man he once revered. It’s a near-mythological fall from grace, almost like watching a loved one succumb to disease. Under the impassive stare of a graveyard’s due penance, kinship crumbled to dilapidation—but Bruce fell alongside the wreckage, too. And Dick finds no joy in that. The Dark Knight has become the useless tatters of something once grand and powerful, and even if they manage to find Jason and wrap this story in a dainty red bow, a perfect bookend, it won’t bring Bruce back. Bruce is just as dead as Tim, only in a different manner.

     In response, Steph grips his arm tighter. It’s probably going to leave a bruise.

     “No. I’m coming, you’re not pushing me out of this. I’m not a nanny. If you’re so worried about him then why don’t you be the one to watch him. He’s your dad, not mine.”

     “Please don’t be difficult.”

     That was apparently the wrong thing to say, as her voice, still quiet but newly scathing, rises in pitch.

     “Difficult? You’re being just like him,” she jerks her head towards Bruce, who still obsesses over the letter, single-minded and self-destructive, “and every other asshole who treats me like I’m an optional fucking accessory.”

     “Steph, I didn’t mean it like that—”

     “No, you’re listening to me now. I’m speaking. Every time you complain about those dumb ass jokes or when someone calls you a himbo, you should remember me and Cass and Babs aren’t even given that decency. We are girls and nothing else. Our contributions aren’t meaningful, not worth commenting on. We exist to orbit around big manly men like you, Bruce, and sometimes even Damian. Cass is the one who doesn’t talk, Babs is the one in a wheelchair, and I’m the ex-girlfriend. That’s all we are to them. Despite all the shit that’s said about you, you’re still respected. People like you. When you talk, they listen. I’m not given attention, I’m not important enough to be liked, and I’m not given permission to speak. When I talk, I am ignored and belittled and treated like an idiot. Don’t tell me to stand aside and babysit your stupid dad.”

     “I talk and people listen? They weren’t listening when I said Bruce was lying, they weren’t listening when I told them I wanted Jason in prison, and they weren’t listening when I begged them to stop bringing Tim up as a sick prop. Nobody listened to me at any point.”

     “Your friends stood beside you, what do you mean ‘nobody listened’? You had the Titans, you had Young Justice, you had me. And you're pushing me away for what? Admit it, it's because you think I’m not as important or capable. Don’t act like you’re unaffected,” Steph relents slightly, her edge no longer a bladed criticism, “You’re not immune to the opinions of strangers, Dick. Nobody is, especially with the prevalence under these circumstances. You begin to internalize it, whether you’re aware or not. And Bruce is his own man, it’s not our responsibility to baby him. If worse comes to worst, Babs will let us know and then we can deal with it. She has eyes everywhere. So start treating me like who I am. I know I can help.”

     Has he…has he internalized it? Has Dick begun to slowly, unconsciously, change his thoughts of others to match what he hears from the masses without pause? Has he started to think of Stephanie as less than himself? If so, does that…does that mean his memories of Tim will become altered one day? Will Dick hear someone talk about Tim’s adoration of Jason and have it seem true rather than an unforgivable perversion? Will Tim become the sad, lonely little boy who needed protection from his awful parents? Tim would cease to remain Tim in Dick’s bereaved remembrances; he would no longer be.

     That is his greatest fear. Dick will never let himself forget. Those memories will remain untouched for as long as he lives. He refuses to be like Bruce, he loves Tim too much to let that happen. To exist in a manufactured fantasy would be an insult to what his brother believed in, to what Dick believes in. Maybe…maybe it would be best if another was there to keep him in check. 

     “You’re…you’re right. We’ll take my bike.”

The sun is setting on the oceanfront, the dimming marigold dot being slowly swallowed up by roiling waves of black seawater, darkening the sky in a banquet of purple clouds. There’s an overpowering scent of dead fish and motor oil, and the ringing cries of gulls and boat horns sing like a discordant melody. The water laps up at Dick’s feet from under the boardwalk. It would almost be pleasant if it weren’t for this being Gotham, and therefore decrepit. 

     They’ve been searching the city for almost twelve hours now. Docked and undocked boats, unused and used storage containers, shops both opened and closed, they’ve looked everywhere. Amusement Mile, Port Adams, Blackgate Isle, Miller Harbor, Roger’s Yacht Basin. So many locations, yet not a trace of Jason to be found. Time is running out. They only have four hours left.

     There’s one last place on the boardwalk to investigate before they move to another location altogether. It’s a small, cramped storage unit with thin rust coating its dull iron walls and an eroded padlock covering the door. It shouldn’t take too long to look through.

     Dick slams the end of his escrima stick against the lock, shattering the shackle and causing it to rain down onto the wood in shiny metal fragments. The door creaks open, like the long groan of a person in pain, or like a bad omen of what lurks inside.

     The first thing he registers is the scent of garbage and mildew, but the second is the sight of blood spattered everywhere.

     Even in the dark of the unlit room, specked red dots visibly mark nearly the entire interior, from the worn-down desk to the grubby office chair to the mounds and heaps of boxes stacked on top of each other. They are not neat little rings of crimson, though. They are violent, ejected by immense force, spewed out due to an incredibly vicious beating and stretched out into ovals as they smacked against the surface. 

     There’s a dried pool of corroded blood crusted in the corner, long streaks running from its center and smearing itself against where the wall meets the floor. Someone tried to stand up but slipped in their own puddle of gore; a partial handprint was made where they fell down. Dick can almost hear the whacks, the thumps, the cracks, the bangs that caused this carnage.

     “Holy shit. This looks awful.” Steph mutters as she steps inside.

     Once again, Dick does not consider himself superstitious, but sometimes…sometimes events leave a residual imprint on the location they take place. This storage space feels off, it feels sinister, it feels wrong, as if the ghost of a great barbarity haunts this desolate scene. He can hear the victim’s cries, their pleas and their begging as they’re ruthlessly butchered, mercilessly abused.

     “We should…we should comm Oracle. This place is a crime scene now. Spoiler, we need to—”

     “Wait, I think I see something under the desk. It looks like writing. Hand me a flashlight”

     Steph crawls under the desk, flashing the light on the floor. Two letters reveal themselves, drawn messily as if with a shaking finger.

     JT

     It’s been confirmed. This is Jason’s blood. He wrote a message with his own blood. 

     “Nightwing?”

     “Yeah?”

     “I need…” Steph stands up straighter, flattens her tone, before speaking further, “I need you to make me a promise.”

     She says it with a mixture of apprehension and determination. She’s cautious but also composed. 

     “What’s the promise?” He asks.

     Dick’s fortitude wavers, becomes unsure, rather suddenly. Confidence has been increasingly hard to come by these days, and there’s not a lot to be gained from it.

     “I’ll say what we’ve both been thinking: This is being done by someone we know. There’s no way this is a random act done by a disgruntled stranger. It might even be someone we call a friend, or God forbid, someone we consider closer than that. Too many facts line up for it to be anyone other than a familiar face.”

     Of course Dick has been thinking that, that’s all he can think about. Every time he tries to think of who it could be he draws a blank. He’s thought of the possibilities; he hates them. But simultaneously, none of them make sense no matter how the logic falls into perfect alignment.

     Bart, Roy, Conner, Cassie, Cissie, Talia, Damian, Cassandra, Barbara, Stephanie, Helena, and Dick himself, among others. They have their motives to hate Jason, to want to do him harm, but the reasons and the rationale do not match the ferocity of what has been done. This has gone beyond retribution. The hatred on display here is astronomical, it cannot be quantified or explained by mere description. Dick can’t imagine someone like Conner or Cassie or even Talia hating Jason enough to torture him to this degree, to paint an entire room red. It doesn’t make sense. But if it isn’t one of them, who else could it possibly be?

     “I know that, Spoiler.”

     “Then you need to promise me that no matter who it is, no matter who turns out to be the culprit, you will get the job done. I don’t care if it’s your best friend in the entire world, I don’t care if it’s a family member, and I don’t care if it’s the love of your life. I need you to put your personal feelings aside and do this the right way. No pardoning their actions, no getting them off the hook, no taking the easy way out.”

     “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about this. I thought you hate Jason.”

     “Yeah, I do hate Jason. I don’t give a shit about him. But people often forget I first became Spoiler to stop my dad. I intimately know about putting family aside for the greater good. It's because of that I will not let this become another Jason situation where nobody is held accountable for the things they’ve done. Don’t be like Bruce. I want to expect more from you.”

     Don’t be like Bruce. Those are loaded words, ones he’s been telling himself constantly. Can he bring himself to do better, though? If it turns out to be someone like Roy or Damian is behind this, will he be able to do what’s right? Or will he truly be his father’s son?

     “I’ll…I’ll try. I’ll do what it takes.” Is what he answers with.

     Steph glances behind her back towards the door, “I guess that’s as good I can get. And…I’m sorry for making light of what’s said about you. I know why those jokes about your body upset you so much. They’re inconsiderate.”

     “No, it’s fine. I’m sorry I brushed you off. It wasn’t right of me to treat you like that,” Dick also shifts his view, he’s suddenly embarrassed, “the way you’re treated isn’t fair. It’s gross and sexist as shit. You deserve to be respected.”

     Dick isn’t that close to Steph if he’s being honest, but moments like these are enlightening—not quite a revelation—but a spotlight burning bright on those blessed with Tim’s involvement in their lives, connected through his boundless compassion. The constellations do not shine without him here to light them.

     “I have information you both might find useful.” A voice rings out from behind them both.

     The two of them turn around quickly, readying themselves for a potential confrontation. They know that voice.

     Talia al Ghul. She has news.

     “I know who took Jason.”

Chapter Text

Stephanie Brown would not trust Talia al Ghul under most circumstances. In fact, Stephanie Brown would probably downright despise her. She will always harbor hate, if not for the woman’s actions, then for her inaction. The bodies buried, the tears shed, the pain beared. It leads back to her. Because she healed Jason. And she didn’t stop him. For that simple reason, there will always be resentment for Talia al Ghul. It will never abide, and there are no condolences or apologies good enough to amend this. 

     But there are those—two, in particular—who Steph resents so much more, so strongly it reduces her animosity towards Talia to a paltry afterthought. It’s an all-consuming, evergreen need for retribution, and it vastly overwhelms any other anger she holds towards the woman. There is also a saying—one she can’t remember the origins of—that repeats inside her head, and it colors this encounter a slightly different shade.  

     The actions of a man, no matter how heinous, can always be excused as long as there is a woman behind him to blame.

     And maybe it’s because of that saying, or that desire, that she doesn’t scoff at Talia. Despite her better judgment, despite every rational sense telling her she shouldn’t bother with this sudden, nonsensical, deus ex machina last-minute identity reveal, Steph decides to listen.

     “The person you’re looking for is located inside the Monarch Theatre. They have Jason chained up there. If you are both quick enough you should be able to get to him in time.”

     Dick laughs at Talia; it has no kindness. It’s erosive, like water damage peeling away at a wall, chipping paint off and exposing the worn, jaded cynic he’s become underneath. It doesn’t lie, and it speaks every word for him. Of course Dick doesn’t believe her, and on the off-chance he did, he wouldn’t think she’d care enough to tell. It’s up to her to take initiative. Steph had forgotten just how much those two don’t like each other. 

     “How do you know this?”

     “I was in contact with them. They proposed a plan to remedy my current…reputation, let’s put it. I agreed to help them on the condition that they don't involve my son. But they were not forthcoming with the exact details, only a basic outline. If I had known this was what they intended, I never would’ve said yes.”

     “This is your doing? You really can’t help yourself, can you?” Dick’s voice trembles and his fists clench hard as granite, “You stick your fingers in places they don’t belong and force the rest of us to suffer for it. When you kept Jason for three whole years and didn't tell any of us, people died. You sat there, watched him drop bodies upon bodies on the streets, and did nothing.

     “But that wasn’t enough, so you decided to do it again. You decided to let another conspire and plot against us so you could get revenge over a petty lovers quarrel. It’s because of your diminutive, fragile ego. This is your fault. Get out of here before I do something I regret.” 

     Talia sours, “Is that what you think this is about? You’re still the same immature, servile brat you were as a little boy. I have had my name dragged through the mud. I have been called a seducer, a monster, a manipulator, a devil for things I did not do. Every crime Jason committed has been blamed on me, the responsibility has been put solely on my shoulders, because Bruce refuses to admit his son became what he fears most: one more criminal with a gun. Perhaps you should start looking at your own failures before you judge mine.”

     “My failures?” Dick’s pitch rises, his disbelief causing it to crack.

     “Yes, your failures. Why did you allow Jason to get away with what he did? If he had been properly tried and sentenced for his actions, none of this would be happening. You and your family’s failure to hold him accountable was the match that set this ablaze.”

     “You—you nasty, despicable witch. I told everyone I knew what happened. I spent hours upon hours researching and arguing and groveling so I could get people to see the truth! But sometimes people don’t want the truth, they want to believe things are cracked but not broken. No matter what I said, they told me I was grieving. They told me I was “looking for a villain to blame”. Bruce had made everyone believe the lies he told; they went with it because it’s easy! How dare you try to turn this around on me when you're the one who healed Jason in the first place! Get out before I make you.”

     Steph can see between the two poles, between Talia’s desire for vindication and Dick’s deserved outrage. Being blamed for something you didn’t do versus being blamed for something out of your control. 

     “Who are they?” Steph’s question echoes, “Who’s doing this?”

     Sudden, unexplained melancholy sweeps itself across the room; a tactile grief rushes forth. A lone church bell ringing, roses and lilies sprouting their buds up from the ground to twist themselves into funeral wreaths, words engraving themselves on a moss-covered tombstone. This sadness could be a cursed premonition, knowledge that will lead her down a path to ruin. 

     But that has never stopped her before. She will never cower because that is who she is, but Talia does not acquiesce.

     “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d call me a liar. It’d be best if you discover who they are yourselves.” Talia turns her back to them, preparing to leave and take the coveted knowledge with her.

     Steph won’t let it end like this. She will not endure this any longer. She will not be an idle woman, watching a flock of songbirds tear the wings off one another. A conviction such as this is not born out of a need for mercy or some archaic, altruistic personal philosophy. Pragmatism is her goal. Jason will be rescued for the sole purpose of watching him and his story come apart at the seams. One day, he’ll stand in front of them—the entire Justice League—with no more lies, manipulation, or cowardice to hide behind, and Bruce will watch his son be dragged into the darkest pit of Blackgate where any light shuns its scant traces. Jason Todd shall be unmade and unraveled, his story left rightfully forgotten and name only mentioned in the muted whispers of someone abashed. Only then can Steph find solace, and only then can Tim finally be put to rest. 

     “Stay where you are.”

     It is a booming command, harsh to the ears, carrying an authority Steph didn’t know she had.

     “I want to know. No, I will know. You won’t deny me the answers you promised. And you won’t out-stubborn me, so tell us who it is.”

     Since the very beginning, Stephanie Brown has refused to back down. From her plans against her father to her brief tenure as Robin to her brush with death, her determination has been her vigor. And because of that, she will never surrender. She will always fight. Her father couldn’t stop her, Bruce couldn’t stop her, Black Mask couldn’t stop her, and she won’t let Talia think she can stop her, either. 

     Exasperation is plentiful between them, and Steph might be noting some guilt from Talia, as well. Not guilt for her actions, per se, but for what she’s about to utter. The portentous omen intensifies, thicker and more potent than before; anticipation writhes in her flesh. Rain stops dripping, waves stop crashing, wind stops blowing, floorboards stop creaking, Steph stops breathing. Silence.  

     “Timothy isn’t dead. My father resurrected him. He wants revenge.”

     A blur of motion flies past Steph’s shoulders, and only after does the frantic sight register. Dick, his forearm pressed against Talia’s neck, his other hand holding an escrima stick—sharply crackling with electricity at the tip—just an inch away from her chin.    
     
     “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shatter every single bone in your face for what you’ve said. You. Crossed. A. Line.”

     Talia looks unphased.

     “I wouldn’t be so hasty if I were you.”

     Steph glances downward and notices a knife held in Talia’s hand, a hair's width away from stabbing into Dick’s abdomen; she must’ve had it hidden up her sleeve and unsheathed it when he pressed her up against the wall. 

     “It seems we are at an impasse, Richard.”

     He shoves his forearm harder against her. The metal creaks against his call for violence.

     “No more games! I’ve had it with you. You got my brother killed and you have the fucking nerve to stand here and utter his name!? To tell me this is his fault, no less? How dare you. Go ahead and try to stab me, I don’t care. It won’t stop me from maiming you.”

     A trigger is struck, sharp and weighted as the crack of a blunderbuss. Talia grimaces, and the discontent ripples back and forth between the two of them, swells that move like shifting air currents.

     “Ignorant child! When it matters most, you revert to being your father’s son in all the worst ways. After Jason is lost forever, after you are left with nothing but your own failure, I will not allow you to blame me for this. Too many times have I been castigated, ostracized by your clan for actions I never took. I will not be here to watch you say it was my fault. Not again.

     “I would’ve done anything for Bruce. I loved him like no one else. I had gone against my father for him, I had healed his son for him, I had a child with him. My love was repaid with betrayal. I was branded the villain, an instigator to fan Jason’s “Pit Madness”, but then I met someone else who was thrown away, who was willfully forgotten and taken advantage of. He told me he had a plan to set things right, to help Bruce remember how he used to be. We both wanted the man we loved back. How could you expect me to say anything other than yes?”

     It could be another manipulation. Talia may very well be lying as Dick says, yet again another fabrication designed to lead them astray. 

     But Steph doesn’t sense that, and her intuition is one thing she still has left. It comes off too earnest—vulnerable and ignominious. Steph would never associate that with someone like Talia al Ghul. She can bring herself to believe Jason is at the Monarch Theatre.

     And that conclusion doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from experience. Stephanie Brown and Talia al Ghul have nothing in common, they have no commonalities or kindred experiences or sense of comradery except for one crucial detail, one unifying factor: they both put their faith in Bruce Wayne and got hurt for it.

     Steph used to be Robin. Nowadays, that’s a shameful secret you’re not supposed to mention, a blemish on an otherwise spotless legacy best left to wear down in a shabby, run-down corner of Bruce’s mind. But it still happened. He can’t take that away from her no matter how hard he tries to ignore it. Steph was Robin. She wore that brightly-colored costume to jump rooftops and swing across the lit skyline and maneuver in the air with the grace of a starling. For forty-eight days, she was part of the legend. Until she was fired.

     “I gave you a fair shot. You don’t measure up, but there’s no shame in that.”

     That’s what he told her; it was never true to begin with. He never intended to give her a fair shot. He was upset because Tim left and decided his father’s needs came before Bruce’s. And nothing should ever come before Bruce. So he looked elsewhere, and there Steph was, desperate for his approval, wanting so badly to feel useful and to prove him wrong about her. So he took her in; it quickly became clear how insignificant she was to him. She was never trusted with his identity, with any of his plans or contingencies or the most basic mission knowledge beyond what everyone else already knew. It stung. In the end, however, she can’t put much blame on Bruce for how things turned out. The worst gang war in Gotham’s history was her fault, born out of a foolish need to show Batman she was worth caring about, that she was capable of doing good. The War Games will always be her sin to bear, and she doesn’t hate him for his reaction. Hundreds dead, thousands more injured, gunpowder and soot caked under her fingernails. Her skin has been rubbed raw and bloody by it.

     No, Stephanie’s betrayal of faith was for what he did after Jason’s rampage. Contorting a corpse to fit the mold of a perfect, demure victim, sucking out the marrow to fill it with poison. Batman stopped being a symbol, an ideal, an urban legend, a hero. Once she got to know the man behind the mask, Batman died. Now he’s only Bruce Wayne, and there is nothing to admire about Bruce Wayne. 

     In a twisted way, Steph can see why he treated her so coldly. Nothing is worse to men like him than those who he can’t control. Dick, Jason, Damian, Cass, they are his children. He can stand atop them on his throne and act as their salvation, the shadowed savior who rescues the desperate from poverty or abandonment or harm, becoming a sturdy hand to lift yourself up after a tragedy, whether it be dead acrobats or a life on the streets or an upbringing of horrific abuse.

     It goes like this: you offer up your loyalty, you devote yourself to him, you become an extension of his will at the expense of your own. And of course you say yes. What would the alternative be? A life picking scraps of fatty meat from leftovers in the garbage? Removing splinter fragments of the bullet from when your father shot you in the leg? Scratchy, puke-green wool blankets and broken spring mattresses from an underfunded orphanage? Yes was always the only option. The consequences come after the high. 

     Steph wasn’t like that. No rescue took place. She was self-made. Spoiler was her own creation, purple cloth woven and given a life, a meaning, by her and her alone. Arthur Brown needed to be stopped and thus it was born. What can a man like Bruce do with that? How do you control someone who doesn’t depend on you? Who didn’t need saving? Perhaps that is why he had so many spats with Barbara. She was self-made too. Or that’s why he needed to change the circumstances of Tim’s death, because Tim also never needed to be rescued.

     The only avenue of control left was that of the narrative. Bruce guided his pen and rewrote the book of history, but Steph proves that his authority is not absolute, that there exists others outside of the fiction he created, that Tim is still remembered. As long as Steph lives, she will be a reminder of Bruce's scar. A reminder of what will never be truly forgotten, an oath broken and a dead boy dishonored. She and Talia have that in common. They remember.

     “I’m going.” Steph says.

     “Going where?” Dick whips his head back to look at Steph; his sorrow is gluttonous, crossed between the roads of betrayal and disbelief, hate and disappointment. 

     “To the Monarch Theatre. It’s worth checking out.”

     “She’s a liar, Steph!”

     “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least try. I think she’s telling the truth when she says Jason’s there.”

     “You—you can’t be serious. You’re taking her side over mine. After what she’s done? After what she caused?”

     “Dick, nothing about this has to do with taking sides. This is the first time I’ve met her. But if there is a minuscule chance that she’s telling the truth, I think it’s worth looking into,” Steph looks towards Talia, their stares meeting one another in contemplation, and she asks another question.

     “If you’re telling the truth, if Jason is at the Monarch Theatre and somehow Tim’s really the one doing this, why come to us? You should be happy everything’s gone so smoothly thus far. You’ll get your name cleared without having to get your hands dirty, and the people who’ve wronged you will get their comeuppance. What reason do you have to help us?”

     The response is concise. Unrehearsed. Painfully frank, so it stings all the more that it sounds true. 

     “It would end up hurting Damian, even if by extension and indirectly. I don’t want my son put in harm's way. Physically, emotionally, or otherwise.”

     Sentences. Syllables. Letters. They form on Steph’s tongue but she doesn't know how to verbalize them, too many reflections and sentiments clashing and mixing in disorganized battle, struggling to make themselves known. Words fail her.

     So Steph decides to simply nod and excuse herself.

     The squeak of the floorboards sounds different to her, now that she's the one leaving. Each step less ominous, guarded, than the last. Water and wind simmer rather than howl, the lightning not as forbidding; she has another goal, and that is enough to propel her forward. If Dick doesn’t want to help her, she’ll call someone who will. 

     It's quite sad, really, because this entire time it’s been obvious how much Dick still loves Bruce. To have such a caustic and irreparable betrayal happen from someone you care about so deeply must be an unyielding pain, and being forced to constantly live that betrayal must scathe moreover. Maybe Talia, on some level, is an easy target to redirect that hurt towards. It’s much better to hate someone you never really knew rather than someone you truly did. Grief, bitterness, it doesn’t disappear, but is made survivable; Steph wouldn’t quite call it “livable”, as living is a different struggle altogether. Talia is by no means blameless, and certainly had her own hand at play, but she isn’t the villain Dick wants her to be. There are beasts far more foul afoot.

     “So you’re just walking away?! It’s not him, I don’t need to confirm it. Tim would never do something like this. There’s going to be nothing there!” Dick yells to her.

     “I can’t leave it be. I think it’s just something you don’t, or can’t, understand. I believe her because I’ve been there—where Talia is. You’ve always been important, and you’ve been looked up to for a long time by a lot of people. I don’t think you quite know what being forgotten feels like. It teaches you. I would know; I’ve been forgotten for a long time.”

     For a moment, Dick’s brave front slips to reveal a chasm-like grief. A quiet sadness shedding light on a gash that hasn’t healed, that will not stitch itself. And just as quickly as it came, it disappears from view, dragged back into the dark recesses once more.

     “…Fine. Go if you have to, but I’m not coming. I’ll look somewhere else. Gotham Village or The Narrows, maybe.”

     He slowly backs away from Talia, moving his arm away from her and removing his weapon. Leaving some parting words, he says, “The next time I see you in this city, I’m not going to hold back. And don’t ever mention Tim again.”

     “Oh Richard, it’s so amusing when you try to sound threatening.” Talia breathily laughs, but it’s shallow and put-on, her own version of a mask, “I’ll leave, but only because I came to relay information and nothing else. I look forward to my eventual thank-you letter in the mail.”

     She sharply turns towards Steph; the fake amusement evaporates and is replaced by a grave warning. 

     “Stephanie, he will try to charm you, to profess the righteousness of his cause. He will appeal to your sentimentality or your sense of justice. If all else fails, he will try to play on your regrets and exploit your guilt. You must let your heart become iron, your resolve stone. Do not be swayed like I was. Do not make the same mistakes.”

Midnight approaches; the moon shines hazy luster over a suffocating layer of silver fog that sticks low and lazy. The rain has ceased its downpour to become steady snow, and a hush has befallen Gotham, as if the city itself has quieted in trepidation for worry of what’s to come. There’s one hour left until the deadline stated in the letter passes. 

     The Monarch Theatre stands oblivious. Ripped billboards from movies of decades past remain proudly showcased as a sort of symbolic monument to decay, their colors and lettering leaking down the aged paper and onto the brick walls from a generation of disrepair. Ticket booths shuttered up with rotten wooden planks guard the front entrance like unmoving, impassive watchmen, and the old front doors are covered with layers upon layers of yellow crime scene tape. 

     Steph calculates how she should handle her approach. Should she go in through the front? It’s most likely trapped, and it would be too obvious. One wrong step and she could end up shot from a vantage point or blown up by a triggered tripwire. But on the other hand, maybe it would be so obvious as to become unpredictable? Entrance through the front could be considered so audacious that it isn’t considered a feasible option, thus taking their perp by surprise—if they’re in there right now, that is. The back entrance is a potential avenue too, or she could break a skylight and gain an overhead advantage. Perhaps she can—

     “No Nightwing?”

     Steph startles, jolting out of her musings and sent on high-alert. She whips herself around, adrenaline pumping through her body and focus crystallizing into sharp edges. 

     Oh, wait, it’s just Cass. False alarm.

     “Can you announce yourself next time?! You scared the shit out of me.”

     “Sorry.” Cass mutters, shrugging and clearly giving the impression that she does not care. Cassandra Cain is a menace. Unfortunately, Steph has a soft spot for menaces. She did date one, once upon a time.

     “And no, by the way. Nightwing isn’t coming. There was an…altercation. He’s investigating elsewhere. That's why I called you.”

     Cass’s countenance reveals nothing. Her face is hidden by her mask, body language purposefully obscured and indecipherable. Steph expected nothing less. An aggressively uncomfortable amount of scrutiny ensues.

     “You’re hiding something from me.”

     Cass’ whole “trained to be a master at reading people” thing is helpful most of the time, but right now it isn’t appreciated. This isn’t the time for an interrogation.

     “I’m not ‘hiding’ anything, okay?! Talia showed up when we were looking around. She said some things and Nightwing got pissed. It isn’t important. Can we please focus on the task at hand?”

     “If it’s not important…then why are you so upset?”

     “I’m not upset, either.”

     “Another lie.”

     Steph wants to tear her hair out, rip it straight from the roots so her mounting stress can escape. She doesn’t want to say it, because even an act as small as speaking gives it a possibility, uttering it gives it validity, thinking it over gives it legitimacy. What a fraud Stephanie Brown is, striding into a crusade for honesty yet unable to confront a potential truth that causes her duress. It shouldn’t matter who's doing this—it really shouldn’t—but what if…what if it is who Talia says? 

     “It’s ridiculous. I shouldn’t even say it. Talia…Talia said she knows the person responsible, and she told us, but I don’t—can’t—accept the possibility. I was willing to believe her about Jason’s location because she seemed honest and I felt kinda bad for how she was treated, so I put it aside at the time. But now that I’m here, now that we might be coming face to face with them, I'm scared I might be the same kind of hypocrite as Batman. I even told Nightwing that he needs to get the job done no matter who it is! What if I go in there and by some horrible one-in-a billion-chance it’s true? What if I can’t bring myself to stop him?”

     There is no need to specify who she’s referring to. Cass already knows. It would be a perfect conclusion, now that she thinks about it. What else could happen to turn an already hopeless situation into an irreconcilable nightmare? It would truly be sublime, bleach and vinegar over a mortal wound. Death done and undone for the nurturing of their misery.

     “You’re strong. You’ll do the right thing.”

     Steph has done nothing to deserve Cass’ faith. She is not strong. She is a foolish and reckless young woman who doesn’t know when to quit. The entirety of her life has been blunder after blunder, failures stumbling towards other failures.

     “And what would that be? What is the ‘right thing’?”

     At that, Cass pauses, contemplating in her typical reserved manner.

     “Sometimes people do cruel things because they…are sad. Or lonely. It doesn’t make it less wrong. You should still stop it.”

     When Steph first became Spoiler, she was going to kill her father. She had iron chains wrapped tightly around his neck, ready to squeeze the life out of his lungs until his croaks petered into desperate last whispers. He ruined her life and her mother’s with no justification or care. It was only fair that she killed him. Bruce stopped her. 

     However, now there is no Bruce to talk her out of it, and Jason reminds Steph of her father in all the worst ways. A violent, angry man who fancies himself a prophet, smarter than everyone else in the room. Arthur Brown considers himself a criminal mastermind in the same manner Jason Todd considers himself a maligned revolutionary. The harm they inflict is justified, no, necessary because of how unfairly they’ve been treated. How unfair it is that Arthur Brown wasn’t given the same notoriety as Gotham’s most infamous, and how unfair it is that the world decided to still spin after Jason Todd’s death. 

     Her resolve falters; it’s tempting to let fate play its own hand. Standing here, right in front of the theater, a possible future becomes clear. Jason could burn in the Hell he’s created for himself. Let his bones split and crackle in a fire, let his eyeballs pop and dribble like runny yolks. It’s what he deserves. She wouldn’t be killing Jason by abandoning him. There’s a difference between killing a person and deciding to not save them, right? Her conscience would be clean. Mostly. 

     So this leaves Steph with one crucial question: Can she do it? Can she do the “right thing”?

     There's only one path forward, and only one way to find out. 

     “I’m going to…I’m going to need you to maintain a perimeter on the building. Make sure nobody goes in or out. I’ll go inside and see if I can find Jason.”

     A firm, grounding hand presses itself on Steph’s shoulder, and she notices that Cass has pulled her mask down, facing her eye to eye.

     “When we thought you died, Stephanie, it caused me a lot pain. Great pain. And I thought of you often. But I used it. Your…tenacity, your courage. It kept me alive. There is no one else as determined as you. Whoever it is, Tim or not, they have caused suffering. And they might be hurting, too. But this…it can’t go on. No more death. No more pain. No more fear. No more Red Hoods. It has to end. You have to do this. You must do this.”

     Nothing else needs to be said. No goodbyes, no well-wishes, no hugs. It feels final. Steph will walk through the entrance and the world will change accordingly. Something is going to happen in there, a certainty validated by feeling alone. 

     Steph’s surroundings undergo a temporal shift, the veil of time has been stripped away and reverberations of the past echo anew. An innocent boy walking from the movies with his parents, an impoverished boy eyeing tires in an alleyway, an excited boy going to see The Flying Graysons perform. The past will become the future, but she won’t let it repeat. Cass is right, this has to end.

    The doors swing open.

Stale popcorn. Unwashed carpet dirtied by cigarette smoke and dust. Cobwebs hanging down from chandeliers in thin gray ropes. An old poster of The Mark of Zorro stands with faded lettering displayed behind smudged glass panels. Concession stands peppered in mouse shit and sticky with dried soda spills. These are the sights and smells that first greet her. 

     The second thing she sees are the lights. Namely, that they work. They’re modern, and with a low hum emanate a soft white glow above, creating a haze that makes this place seem even more otherworldly. There hasn’t been a renovation here in decades, so someone installed these. Recently. Steph’s intuition was correct, and Talia was telling the truth when she said someone was squatting here. Now she needs to find Jason.

     Wide, reaching hallways are to the left and right of her, containing entrances to theatre seats and screens. If she were the crazy-master-strategist person holding Jason hostage, she wouldn’t hold him there. It would be too easy for him to escape. Screening rooms are too large, too spacious, and hold too many exits. One picked lock or one broken chain and the whole mission would become compromised and put into jeopardy. 

     Employee-only rooms could be a safer bet. They often only have one door that serves as both an exit and entrance, and are typically located in less crowded, less noticeable areas of the building. She spots one behind the concession stand, towards the back but still noticeably far enough away from the exit.

     As she gets closer, an unasked-for musing crosses her mind. Did Bruce walk this same path that fateful night, his footsteps mirroring hers, so long ago? Did he see this stand, then vibrant, then smelling of sweet buttered popcorn and chocolate, and grab onto his father’s coat saying ‘please pretty please’? Did Martha give him a warm, knowing smile and nod in Thomas’ direction? Did a warm glow rise to her cheeks as handed her son a crisp dollar bill? Was Bruce truly happy then, or is that simply another romanticization of life before tragedy? It could be. Romanticization seems to be all anyone is interested in, these days. Steph has a hard time believing he was ever happy. 

     Sympathy for Bruce is a wasted effort, and these reflections are but a distraction. Eight-year-old boy or not, he still grew into a man. One who lies and cheats and manipulates. How he became who he is does not outweigh or justify what he has done. What he chose.

     Now directly in front of the stand, a startling image focuses upon her. There is blood on the floor. Fresh blood, not yet fully congealed into brown slop and hue still a garish red. It forms a sliding stain behind the counter and snakes past the ‘Employees Only’ door. A person was dragged through there. Broken glass makes a harsh clink sound as it crunches under her shoes, and a shrill screech whines as she pushes the door. Her heart is pounding, breaths coming fast and sweat beginning to form at her temples and ridge of her nose. 

     A short hallway stands before her, and what’s at the end of it is spine-tingling. A huge, powered-on freezer door, decked with padlocks and bolts and levers holding it shut. The path of blood travels through the hallway until it disappears underneath. The freezer whirrs a menacing, haunting groan, like it's taunting her, laughing at her hesitation and mocking her fear. Whatever’s—whoever’s—blood that is, alive or not, is behind that door. This is it. This is where Jason is, it has to be.

     “You shouldn’t be here.” Someone states from behind her.

     Steph recognizes it. She could never forget that voice.

Chapter Text

I must be dead. I must’ve died and I’m having my dying dream before the blackness swallows me up. That can be the only explanation for this, Steph thinks.

     It’s his voice she hears. Deeper, wearier, sadder, but still his. Steph can remember how that voice once called her pretty, how it sounded when he was embarrassed or headstrong or nervous. She used to love it, in all its awkwardness and earnestness and sometimes unintentional tactlessness. Nothing is allowed to be sacred, and nothing is allowed to be left unsullied. Everything you once cherished will be used against you.

     “You shouldn’t be here, either.” Steph replies.

     Apathy will be an opaque cloak, and if she wears it well enough, holds it close to her chest and grips it tightly, she can pretend there is no agony or that her heart isn’t glossy with the broken shine of a thousand unshed tears.

     How quickly the mind produces excuses, convenient outs, when it faces harsh adversity. There’s a possibility this isn’t Tim, she thinks. This could be an impostor, or a hallucination, or an evil clone. Scarecrow has injected me with Fear Toxic, Clayface is mimicking a perfect replica, Cadmus created a clone from his DNA. They’re all possible. It’s not really Tim.

     But it is. This is happening. To deny it would be tantamount to surrender. Steph is not a coward, she won’t shy away from the truth. The person who stands behind her is Tim Drake. No proof is needed because it screams right in a way few things do, and she cannot ignore it. 

     “I don’t want to fight, Steph. I just want to talk. I know this is probably…a lot, but please let me explain. Can you give me that chance, at least?”

     If hearing Tim is unbearable, then seeing him is simply unfathomable. Time is supposed to be a barrier, an opportunity for numbness as the gap between “then” and “now” becomes greater and greater still.

     Tim was sixteen when he died, and that is how Steph has seen him since. She got older, but he never would. He still had a childlike roundness to his cheeks and a cute little button nose. He was a boy, not a man. The past is easier to manage when it stays where it should be, remembered but not exhumed. This reunion has brought her only misery. 

     The gap has now shrunken to almost nothing. She’s seventeen again, finding out Tim was murdered and that his killer will walk free, silver-tipped lies on his lips that are sweet as a lyric. She’s eighteen again, watching Jason and Bruce embrace on the television screen, poxy smiles on their faces while the stupid newscasters and paparazzi and photographers are moved to tears that line their faces like dainty tulips shedding their morning dew. She’s nineteen again, throwing her old Robin costume into the fire pit, pouring a canister of gasoline over it to see the reds and greens and yellows shrivel up and combust into tendrils of dark smoke, vowing to never let the two of them forget what they’ve done. 

     Now Tim is an adult, and it reminds her of just how much both she and he missed, how things should’ve been but weren’t. Time hasn’t passed; they are but grown children searching for vacant meaning in their suffering. 

     “How do I know you’re not lying? Tim’s dead. Has been for years now. I saw the body. You’re gonna have to explain that.”

     She wants to hear him say it. Say it’s him. Why that is, she does not know, as she already knows it’s the real Tim from intuition, her deep gut instinct; confirmation would only serve to drive the knife deeper, but what’s more pain, anyway? Maybe it’s because she’s a masochist, or maybe it's because she simply doesn’t want to be alone anymore. She’s been so desperately lonely.

     “Oh c’mon, Steph.” He takes on an almost teasing quality despite his seriousness, “Are we really doing this? So nobody bats an eye when Superman or Green Lantern or Green Arrow or Flash or a billion other people die and come back; but when I do it, I need proof it’s me and not a doppelgänger. That doesn’t seem fair. After you faked your death, did Bruce make you take a polygraph on your return flight?”  

     That isn’t funny.

     “I’m not joking. Either you tell me something only Tim would know, or I’m calling Batgirl in and she's going to beat the crap out of you.”

     He shifts his eyes away from her, looking to the side, fond nostalgia just barely visible on them, “The first time we kissed was after you saved me and your dad from being buried alive. He planned on hiding the money he stole in a van and then filled it with cement underground, but we both got trapped. You got me out just before I ran out of air and I kissed you.”

     Steph has been robbed. There used to be a linearity to her anger; simplicity was a blessing. Bruce and Jason are one-dimensionally hateable, and pathetic enough to do so without pause because they are daft charlatans solely concerned with the preservation of their cushy family image. But now she hates having to look at Tim. The idea of…this, of the deaths and the revivals and the lies and the betrayals and the indignities and the evils coming together like hordes of snakes to create new tragedies and new miseries and new devastations. Resurrection has not undone death, but instead only made it more pronounced. Nothing has changed. 

     “How? How are you here?”

     “Ra’s al Ghul, mostly. There was some corpse-swapping and a Lazarus Pit. It wasn’t pleasant, both the resurrection itself and having to be around that senile geriatric for so long.”

     “Don’t—don’t downplay this! This isn’t something to joke about, asshole!”

     “I’m not joking. Dying isn’t why I’m here.”

     Apathy has gone out the window, a bitter, sloshing heartache comes crashing down. Steph didn’t imagine this, she envisioned sights of a heartfelt reunion in her rose-colored dreams; not overly-idealistic fantasies, but possibilities like a healing bruise. There should’ve been long-overdue relief, hope for tomorrow, rekindled love, something at least slightly resembling happiness. But it’s not to be, life is a desolation and she’s still the most miserable person alive.

     “I’ve spent years grieving you,” a stray tear threatens to break at the edge of her right eye, “Why did—why did you never come back? I could’ve helped you. We could’ve been there for each other. What did Ra’s threaten you with?”

     “Nothing. Nobody threatened me with anything.” The cracked skylight overhead brings forth night’s illumination amidst the gloomy gray cover of fog; dusk and dawn, yesterday and tomorrow, lingers on them, light meeting the dark. “Ra’s had his own reasons for bringing me back, but I’m only here because I want to be.

     “And of course I wanted to come back. I missed you, I missed my friends, I missed everyone, but I couldn’t return. Not without sacrifices I wasn’t willing to make. Did you think I would want to come back with the way things are? If I did, I would’ve died in a manner far more permanent. I’m not playing the part Bruce wants me to. You…you do know everything about me was a lie, right?”

    An offensive slight, it smarts like a whip’s lash; Steph hasn’t suffered for this long to be lumped in with the unknowing, the oblivious who hold hands and prance on the graves of forgotten dead, who drive their hearse over a moldering corpse. Death is merely spectacle to them, viewed but not recalled.

    “You think I believed any of that ridiculous bullshit? It doesn’t change that you could’ve come back if you wanted. We could’ve set things right.”

     Tim clenches his fist tightly, his arms trembling from the force. “I am setting things right. What should I have done?” He scowls, a seething hatred unsheaths itself, not for her, but for the faceless legion of the ignorant; without eyes or ears but a mouth always open, speaking but without substance. “Should I have come back and given Jason a hug? Said how sorry I am for what he went through? Told Bruce it’s water under the bridge? I don’t think so. I’m not selling away my existence for the benefit of normalcy. I have nothing but hatred for Jason, and I’m not letting that go to make his insipid life easier.” 

     He softens, his fire waning down to a low simmer. Raising his hands in a gesture of surrender, he starts to look more like how she remembered him: kind but determined, charming in an awkward sort of way, “I know how this probably looks to you, like I’m a psychopath or a nutcase, but this…this has a purpose, I promise. I’m not doing this for something as selfish as revenge, this is for everyone he’s hurt, and I’m even doing it for Bruce. I’ve done it for the greater good, to right the wrongs that have tilted so many lives sideways. I haven’t changed who I am. Let me convince you of that.”

     “I know enough.” She counters, but it lacks heat, “I know you’ve done things I’d never thought you capable of. What you wrote in those letters was heinous.”

     “They were hyperbolic, Steph. Intended to incite a reaction. I don’t indulge in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. They were meant to clue you in on my motivations, but that’s beside the point. If you’re here right now, at the very last possible second before the time limit expires, then that means someone snitched.”

     “Who’s to say we didn’t figure it out ourselves?”

      Steph says it more petulantly than she intended.

     “No offense, but you’ve gotten rusty in my time away; you, Dick, and Bruce have been running around like headless chickens. Not exactly the work I’d expect from world-class detectives. Talia must’ve told you where I was. It’s not hard to deduce, we did have a disagreement not too long ago and she’s the type petty enough to ruin a good thing.”

     He’s trying to change the subject. She won’t let him.

     “This isn’t a ‘good thing’. Torture is never a good thing.”

     “But it is, Steph. If I complete this, we can finally return to normal. Think of it, you and I can get back together again, I can restore my image, Bruce can go back to protecting the city. We both want this! The two of us overcoming the odds time and time again, you and Cass sparring on a rooftop, late night crime-fighting dates where we bust a robbery together. It will be as if nothing ever changed.”

     “I want you to come back, Tim.” Her voice betrays her; it rasps, hoarse and exhausted. “I really, really do, but killing Jason won’t fix what’s broken.”

     Emotional flaying, that is what this is; being forced into the role of an angel on Tim’s shoulder while Steph herself contemplated leaving Jason to die all but ten minutes ago. Her tongue swells at the acidulous words it forms, guiding Tim towards mercy for a man whose soul clatters with the bones of the nameless, consumed by the red-masked merchant who deals in death.

   “I have no intention to kill Jason. I only intend to fake it. The mental trauma it causes Bruce will force his failsafe personality to activate and then he’ll send Jason to prison. We can go back to normal. No more deaths, no more lies, and no more Jason. Trust me, Steph. Please.”

     This isn’t justice. It’s obsession, what’s been left of Tim after he’s soaked in the sickly waters of his own indignities. It’s ugly and mean, almost unrecognizable, yet not enough so to stop the bile from building at the back of her throat. It could’ve gone differently. None of this had to happen. But now they're stuck in a pathetic story; a story without heroes, but rather foolish men and women putting bandages on self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

     “Take me to him, then. Show me Jason.”

     It must appear as a concession of some sort, because he smiles, a genuine one. Steph resents the warmth in her chest at the sight, to have that expression paired up with and contrasted against the cruelty that’s pervaded all aspects of her life.

     He points beyond her shoulder, towards the hallway. 

     “I get it, you want proof he’s alive. I expected nothing less. He’s behind the freezer door. I’m pretty sure you already knew that, though. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

     The whole theater sounds a groan that pierces every hallway and corridor, as if the building itself laments past tragedies and tragedies-to-be, rust and rot to both metal and man. The night grows darker yet and the stars dim their twinkle as if the indifferent gods above have turned their gaze elsewhere, abandoning them to the culminations of their wrongs. There is no lifeline to be found.

     Tim walks past her to open the door; the locks and bolts hiss in painful protest.

     “After you.” He says.

     Beyond the door awaits a veil of black, thick and unwavering as if a vaporous ink has encroached on this wicked ground and smothered life itself in its presence. When she crosses the barrier into the freezer proper, frigid air bites at her exposed skin. It makes her overwhelmingly aware of her vulnerability, as if Death itself is with them here and ghosting its touch at the nape of her neck, but no such fate materializes. Is this what Tim felt like when he came back from the dead? Welcoming a conclusion to this transitory existence and embracing an end, only to wake up and realize that the end was never the worst part? That existing in and of itself can become a punishment, if others allow it so?

     Tim turns the lights on.

     She doesn’t know what she’s looking at, at first.

     It is mottled by bruises so deeply purple they appear black like pockets of deep space contrasted sharply by patches of alabaster skin so pale as to appear translucent; a battered, sagging form bulbous and bloated, riddled by marks of all shapes and sizes, welts to gashes to dents that overlap over one another creating ghastly artful shapes of abuse. It rises and falls in stuttering, shallow movements as its chest struggles to take in gurgling breaths that pop and crackle with each laborious exhale. The hands are indigo and shivering with brittle fingers that spasm trying to gain purchase on the ice-covered stone floor, slipping and sliding on palms slick under a puddle of its own blood. From its stomach a steady trickle of blackish-red liquid drips down that turns to slush as it touches the freezing ground. The air smells tart and metallic and it tastes like insensible violence. 

     Only then does Steph register that she’s looking at Jason, and the horror seizes her by the throat. 

     “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Tim says. “He’s putting on a show, it’s a whole routine he does for sympathy.”

     “Tim…what have you done?”

     Jason swings his head around in the direction of her voice; his face is swollen and blotchy, eyes swelled almost completely shut, knees wobbling as he starts to stand up. Tim scowls at the display and sharply yanks at the chain attaching Jason to the wall. Jason’s sent stumbling onto the floor, his head hitting the ground with an audible thump and he groans feebly, coughing up bloody spittle and phlegm. 

     “You have him chained up like an animal! He’s going to die if we don't get him help.”

     “Jason won’t die. I refuse him that mercy. I’ve been planning this too long to back out now. He’s not gonna keel over on my watch.”

     Steph is numb; the old Tim would never say these things. She would ask what happened to make him so cold, so disturbingly apoplectic, but why bother asking the obvious. To survive solely on hatred for so long would stain anyone. This is probably how Bruce felt when Jason came back, when he was betrayed in mind and soul by the realization of what his son became. 

     Steph, however, is not him. Denying what has been said and done will only renew the cycle, and she wants this tale to end. Tim isn’t the same as before—nobody would be the same after this—but he’s still Tim. That’s enough for her to try.

     “The plan can change. I’ll even help you. We can turn Jason into the police and give them the mountains of evidence I’m sure you have, you can testify to the Justice League to refute Bruce’s lies, and then he’ll be forced to acknowledge that he made it all up because you’ll be around to disprove it. But we need to get Jason medical attention first. Bring him to Leslie’s with me. You don’t want this on your conscience.”

     Something shifts, what was tense has now become hostile.

     “Do you care about him?” Tim spits, “Is that what this is? I can’t believe it. You and the others are so damn gullible. You’ll eat whatever slop the Bat feeds you, blind fools being shepherded off a cliff to die.

     “Jason isn’t—he isn’t like you, Steph! He has no real emotions. He doesn’t want things like you or I do; it’s a facade he puts on to deceive and manipulate. Right now, all he’s thinking about is how to get out of his chains and kill us both. I’ve tried understanding, I’ve tried logic, but those fail against someone who fundamentally can’t be reasoned with and lacks empathy. Violence is the only tool the simple-minded can understand. I treat him like a caged animal because he is one. My conscience is clear.”

     Talking to a brick wall is easier. A brick wall wouldn’t insult you with baseless accusations and imply you're too stupid to see things as they are. If Tim wants an argument, he won’t enjoy the direction it takes. There are hard truths he’s going to hear.

     “With that kind of logic you can justify doing anything to anyone. You can justify killing drug dealers because they’re all monsters profiting off the suffering of the vulnerable—”

     “Stop it.”

     “You can justify murdering thieves because they’re all soulless assholes mooching of the hard-earned work of others—”

     “I said stop.”

     “You can even justify putting a bomb under your dad’s car because he’s a sociopathic opportunist who only ever saw you as a soldier."

     “Shut up!”

     The metal walls of the freezer shudder, droning by the echoes of Tim’s shout. He’s red-faced, livid to the utmost degree, a snarling bloodthirsty beast. 

     “Jason’s a selfish douche! I’m the fucking good guy! The hero! I’m trying to help people and you think you’re being profound by saying we’re alike?! You're like them, the deceptive and the naive and the uneducated who tear me down and degrade me and make me worthless to uphold their imaginary ideas of who I am and what I believe. The greater good is more important than the welfare of one crazy sociopath.”

     Clarity. Cool and focused, pinpointed and precise. It’s what she's been looking for and has finally achieved. Serenity despite everything. 

     “If you were purely concerned about helping people you wouldn’t have done this. You would’ve gone back home as soon as possible to put Jason behind bars. You wouldn’t have tortured him, you wouldn't have taunted Bruce, you wouldn't have stolen those tires or sent those letters. You’ve done this because you want to hurt the people who hurt you. I don’t think you’re even aware of it. You’re so desperate to undo Bruce’s lies you won’t confront the ones you've been telling yourself.”

     Like a raging storm receding, Tim’s rage is momentarily quashed, superseded by melancholy, “That’s really how you see me? You think I’m like Jason?”

     She notices Jason out of her periphery, lying limp where Tim yanked him to the ground. He’s unconscious, breathing steadily but with the occasional gravelly rasp, huffs of steam leaking from between his blue lips and bloody teeth. To think these events started because of a young boy wanting to meet his birth mother. This couldn’t have been the outcome Jason had in mind when he first surfaced from the aureate waters of the Lazarus Pit, when he was a frenetic single-minded body of motion wading through a blaze of liquid gold. What did Jason truly want?, she wonders. If she knew him, what would that change? Her hate is so hollow without a “before” to compare it. In truth, though, Steph doesn’t want to know Jason. She never will. 

     “Our actions live far longer lives than we do. When our bodies are only bones, when generations and generations more have passed, our actions will be what’s left of us. Jason’s will be remembered for what they are, I’ll see to it. He’ll be remembered as a murderer, as another good guy gone bad. But is this what you want to be remembered for? Do you want this to be your legacy? A kidnapper, a torturer? If you follow through with this, it won’t be seen as an act of heroism. It will be seen as another act of senseless violence, and I think Gotham’s had enough of that. 

     “I don’t think you’re evil, Tim. I don’t even think you’re bad. It’s just—I think you have a lot of anger you’ve been holding on to for a long time. And I don’t blame you for feeling that way. I hate Bruce and Jason for what they did to you, and I always will. But this affects everyone, not just them. You have to see this isn’t going to work out the way you want it to.”

     A great conflict reveals itself; Tim’s being pulled in two directions. Between vengeance and mercy, right and wrong. He grimaces as if a colossal rift has formed inside him, each option being pushed further and further apart until the seams holding him together come bursting loose. Steph feels the pressure mount the longer his silence grows.

     The quiet stretches on, heavier and more oppressive. How will the coin flip? Is the ending she’s been longing for here? An end to the cycle of hatred and violence and deception? Will it be over?

     Finally, his stare meets hers; it's flinty and frighteningly cold.

     “I can’t let you leave.” Tim says.

     Her blood chills, running down her veins with a sharp shiver. 

     “You don’t mean that. Think this through.”

     “I do and I did. You’ve taken your side and I’ve taken mine. You chose Jason over me. After all we’ve been through together, after all the atrocities he’s committed, you still chose him over me,” He’s furious, angry burn scars and blisters on each syllable, “This whole theater will be up in flames in under thirty minutes, so you’re going to sit right here until then. I would never try to hurt you, Steph, I wouldn’t even dream of it, but I can’t have you ruin this. I’ll come get you and Jason before I blow this place up. You’ll thank me when this is over. You all will.”

     Steph tried, she really did try. She thought words—love—alone would be enough to alleviate his vicious need for revenge, or at least staunch the flow of hate that pours and pours and pours like breached levees. It wasn’t enough, maybe it never would’ve been enough. 

     He moves to slam the freezer door shut, to lock her up as another hostage of his retribution. Let it be known, God as her witness, that Stephanie Brown went above and beyond to approach this diplomaticly. Let it also be known that Stephanie Brown is a woman of her word; she meant it when she told Dick they were stopping whoever was behind this, no matter the culprit. Her will is immutable. 

     So she grabs a stray loose brick and flings it at Tim’s face as hard as she can.

     He stumbles back, gripping his forehead with a pained hiss, swearing up a storm. She bolts past him, shoving him aside against the wall as she hears heavy shelves and boxes crashing on top of him. 

     Steph doesn’t look back, she can’t afford to waste time; Tim will be in pursuit any second now. The corridors and hallways of the theatre blur and lose focus as she runs, the posters and displays she passes are bystanders, silently judging but refusing to intervene, she is a morbid curiosity.

     She’s a quarter of the way to the exit when Tim’s footsteps come charging in from behind her. Thunderous and booming even through the muffle of the carpet; they gain more ground, closer and closer until they’re nipping at her back and she can feel the vibrations up her back. 

     Tim lunges, tackling her from the side and sending them both into a display case. Glass shatters and scatters around them, getting in her hair and on her costume, glittering white and red under the fluorescent lights as shards mix with fresh blood. He puts her in an armlock, his grip like a vise. She tries to dig her nails into his arms; the leather jacket he’s wearing causes them to slip off uselessly.

     Steph may be almost a full head shorter than him now and might have at least fifty pounds less muscle, but she has an advantage: she won’t hold back. Even now, he’s trying to restrain rather than injure, subdue rather than beat. How chivalrous, she muses bitterly, he’ll lock me in a freezer but hitting me is a step too far. She’s in survival mode and she’s getting out of here, it doesn’t matter if it’s Tim. The guilt can come later.

     Crunch. She slams her head back against his face, and his hold loosens. Following it up, she elbows him in the kidney. Once, twice, and the third hit gets her free. 

     They’re both on the ground, coughing and shaking with exertion. Pulling herself up on wobbly knees, she glances at Tim for a split second. His face is busted, dozens of lacerations create crude red stripes that run down his face like vicious war paint; he must’ve shielded her from most of the glass when they fell. His forehead has a nasty cut on it where the brick she threw landed, the skin around it already turning an ugly purple and blotching different grisly shades of blue and black. She shoves the guilt down again and starts running. 

     The door is less than fifty feet away, just in reach. Steph forces her legs to go faster, to move despite the pain. She’s almost there! She’s almost—

     She spots Tim reach into his belt and pull something out.

     A Batarang.
     
     He hurls it with a quick hand and it whizzes above her; she hears the unmistakable sound of a cable snapping, a shrieking whine stinging the air. Dread hits her moments before the impact.

     The chandelier rams onto her back before Steph can react, the wind knocked out of her lungs. Hundreds of pounds of twisted steel pin her to the ground, legs trapped inside the intricate metal workings. The weight pushes down on her chest and each breath comes more difficult than the last. Her vision is cloudy, her head aches. 

     Tim gets up, blood dripping off his face, its rainfall soaking the insatiable, parched lips of these gruesome halls. A large wooden chunk of the display case is jutting out of his left calf, shifting back and forth every slow limping step as blood spurts from it. He stands over her; Bruce’s second revenant from the past coming to haunt the present.

     “Are you…are you okay?” He asks her.

     Maybe. Probably. Physically, she thinks she’s fine besides a few bruises and a possible concussion, which is rather miraculous given he dropped a chandelier the size of a car on her. Nothing feels broken. Emotionally…Steph doesn’t know. She’s blank. Why was she a fool to hope? Moments like now are when it’s easiest to understand why Bruce did what he did. She wishes she could blame the Lazarus Pit, but the “green” doesn’t exist. Tim’s decisions do. He did this to her.

     “Why did…why did you make me do this, Steph!? You were going to tell. You and them—you and Dick and the others—you’re brainwashed! You don’t see this with the clarity I do! You don’t see the vision. This is—this is salvageable, I can make this work!”

     “You can’t, Tim.” The weariness in Steph can be hidden no more, she’s realized it’s a futile endeavor, “You can’t make this work. Look at yourself. You’ve pincushioned yourself with glass, you’ve got a broken nose, and you might’ve nicked an artery with that chunk of wood in your leg. You’re in no condition to continue and you’ll end up killing yourself if you don’t stop. It’s over.”

     He scoffs, “If I die saving Gotham from a monster, then so be it. I can’t think of a more noble way to go. The first time I died, I wished it could’ve been against someone else. Dying against Scarecrow or Two-Face or even Killer Croc, there’s honor in that. Respect. I could’ve died fighting to protect people. Instead I was killed by a manchild in a children’s costume. I died without dignity, but I can rectify that. I can die in a way I deserve. I don’t intend for it to end that way, but I accept the possibility. Justice never happens without sacrifices made.”

     “…How are you saving Gotham from a monster when you’re acting just like him?”

     Before Tim can retort, the skylight overhead breaks, and two figures come sailing in from the onyx shadows of the night, the moonlight-bathed fog flooding inside from the sky above like divine heavenly hands cradling her, offering to shield her from her earthly woes. 

     It’s Cass and Dick. 

     Steph doesn’t think this is salvation; it might’ve gone from bad to worse.

Chapter Text

There is a button on Tim’s belt. If he presses it, the bombs he’s wired will activate and this whole theatre goes boom in a tawny firestorm so extravagant it brings daybreak to the midnight sky. 

     He should’ve had more time. Tim’s been betrayed by a two-timing crone with daddy issues, and the plan has come undone. 

     They weren’t supposed to be here. Steph, Cass, and Dick. Nobody was supposed to be here, not until the place was smoldering ruins, not until the sounds of Bruce’s screaming wails rang as he believed the flames and ashes had taken Jason once more, dragging the boy underground to be feasted upon by worms and returned to the squalid dirt from whence he came. It would’ve been perfect. 

     But Talia hates to see a good thing, so she tattled on him like the spoiled brat she is. How much did she tell them? And why would they believe her? Dick, especially, can’t stand Talia. Did Cass or Steph manage to convince him afterwards?

     “…Tim? Is that—is that really you?”

     They’re going to choose Jason over Tim; they always will. That’s why they’re here. It should’ve been clear earlier, when Steph started preaching about forgiveness and love and family. It must be the same for Dick and Cass, too; Jason’s scars become their scars, Jason’s pain becomes their pain, Jason’s death becomes their death. Fawning, fervent men and women that have become victims to their own blissful folly and bound together by shackles they believe to be wings. Tim feels bad for them, despite the delusions that grow fat and plump in their minds like rats shoveling waste into open maws. These are his loved ones, and his love for them hasn’t changed despite their transgressions. But what if they don’t love him back? At least…not really him?

     “Tim, let’s talk this out. Please. We don’t need to do this. Cass called me for backup, I'm not here to fight you.”

     Tim. There is great value to be found in a name. Richard Grayson. Stephanie Brown. Cassandra Cain. With them comes meaning, traits and personality and values. Richard Grayson: compassion, charisma, intellect. Stephanie Brown: courage, resilience, wit. Cassandra Cain: skill, determination, passion. 

     Tim Drake: Jason Todd. 

     His name exists separate from himself, a piece of him that’s been cleaved off and molded into a shapeless vessel, branding his corpse in distorted forms with whatever the world sees, apathetic to the accuracy of the source. Tim Drake is a name with no owner, so he is a man with no name. Dick pleads to an idea, a symbol, rather than a person. Dick isn’t talking to Tim, he’s talking to who he wants Tim to be. A body is immaterial, personality is an illusion, values are an aside, and Tim Drake is a fabrication. There’s no use begging to a living lie.

     He didn’t have the chance to wire all the explosives; Steph barged in before he could see to that. If he detonates now, it will burn the entire building down, but it won’t be the iridescent fireball he planned. Or wanted.

     Tim could press the button. As a distraction. There’s a reasonable chance everyone here would be able to get away before the fire consumes them. He could escape and start a new plan, a better plan. Take Jason to The Cradle or Peña Duro and continue from there. This isn’t over. The good guys can still prevail. Justice is still within his grasp.

     “Goddamnit, Tim! Say something!”

     Hope. That’s the emotion Tim beholds on Dick’s face, even through his mask, even through his terror. Dick hopes. He hopes for Tim to come back home.

     Hope—the perverse kind, clandestine wishing without action—repulses him, a barbarous indecency that soothes crying eyes by promising a better day though the fake idols and false gods can only ensure it in fiction. What is hope to them? Tim knows what. 

     It looks like a wind-up toy. You spin the handle on the back around and watch him perform a little dance. He’ll clap and laugh and cry on command, hugs and cuddles and affirmations for “his Robin”. You can beat him, throw him, shatter his arms and legs—but that’s okay! He’s a toy, he has no worth without an owner. Dress him up and take him out, make him perform some more. Show everyone your shiny trinket, show them how readily he dances for you. Throw him aside when the day is done, shove him away back to the abandoned recesses of your thoughts. He is an object to possess and use and discard; let the fragments chip away and erode with your repetition, leaving the fat and tissue to eventually slough off his skeleton like a bloody mask removed. You can always get a new toy when it breaks. 

     They want a performance? He will give them a performance to remember. 

     Tim is never going back there. 

     He presses the button. 

     At once, huge, bellowing roars thunder with such power they shake the very foundations. Posters and displays fall and crash in a cataclysm of broken glass, brick, and concrete. The skyroof above caves in and comes down in torrents of rusted metal chunks and crystal pieces thrown about here and there as ice and snow and fog pour in droves from the outside. Cracks and fissures split open pillars and line themselves in gaping, anfractuous formations along the walls and floors, creating treacherous, uneven ground see-sawing forwards and backwards with rhythmic subsequent rumbles. 

     The fires come, puffing up everywhere like clouds of dust, burning dreamlike arrays of colors, blues and greens and purples and reds as it eats away at wiring and carpets and curtains the way swarms of locusts level a field of crops. A horrible sizzling noise erupts; rain and ice turn to steam, the sheer heat singeing the ends of Tim’s hair and stinging his eyes as black smog spills out from every direction.

     He runs. Behind him, Dick and Cass pull Steph out from under the chandelier, and he runs even faster. His leg still spurts, coming down his leg in dark arterial flows; each step jostles it further in. He can feel the wood scraping his femur, but no pain registers—probably due to shock, which isn’t good, but there are far more immediate concerns to be had. 

     Broken, flaming planks come tumbling onto him from the rafters overhead, one hitting him squarely in his back, charring him with white-hot embers that violently bubble up and blister. The smoke has turned into a blindfold, moving laggardly and thick like dark molasses that clogs his throat with soot and ash, making it impossible to see or breathe. Blood loss has caused his movements to become gawky and cumbersome; he nearly stumbles over his own feet as the red streams out without pause, his head spinning and tremors racking his arms.

     Still, he goes on down the labyrinthian hallways and corridors, ignoring oblivion’s song that has lured lesser men, men who see dying as a cheap exit from the ripples of consequence. Tim’s on a crusade; his resolve won’t be culled, even as his strength wanes and body begins to fail, even as the void inches closer yet closer. He pushes it away; he won’t die until this is seen through, blood loss and broken bones and burns be damned. Tim has to find Jason before the fire does; if that idiot croaks this will all have been for nothing.

     Finally, he hobbles his way behind the concession stand and into the freezer. The ice has melted, and puddles of brown water slosh from Tim’s motion as he moves fallen crates and barrels aside. Jason is lying still where Tim last left him, his mouth barely above the waterline, sludge lapping occasionally at the corners of his lips. Gross. He’ll need to up Jason’s dosage of antibiotics later. 

     Tim rummages through a container to find a tourniquet of some kind, something to stem the bleeding from his leg. He comes up empty, but manages to find a small roll of plastic wrap—this is going to suck. But he has to do it. He leans against a shelf, holding the jutting wood on his leg with both hands. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t lose consciousness. Don’t fall now at the very end. 

     Biting the fabric of his jacket and closing his eyes, the cold metal zippers chafing against his teeth, he yanks on it. Blinding, agonizing pain scorches like glowing slag and he muffles his scream into the leather. He opens to look—it’s only halfway out, scraps and bits of shredded flesh stick to the sharp, nearly serrated edges of wood. 

     He yanks a second time. The piece comes out with a squelch, and the black closes in on his blurred vision as he verges on passing out. Tim collapses to the floor. It’s an oddly shaped piece of wood—angular and zigzagging, a crudely drawn lightning bolt. He tosses it away haphazardly, out of breath and wheezing from exhaustion.

     The whole roll of plastic wraps around the wound, the gleam of white bone visible at the depths around a sea of butchered meat like an angel wearing a halo of blood. With a groan, he tosses Jason over his back and begins his exit. The weight—physical or mental or spiritual—feels insurmountable. His trial has become Sisyphean; he carries an eternal burden from which there is no rest, punished for his misdeeds though Tim has none to speak of. He has done nothing wrong. 

     The fire is catching up to them, its sinister gait reminiscent of a predator crawling along the walls. He breaks into a dash towards the back exit, his shoes sopping and soaked to leave spattered, crimson footsteps that drench the carpeting as if they’re the marks of some unholy demon.

     But Jason taints everything he touches; he is the unholy demon, the horned beast that revels in ruin. Why should Tim bear the scars of that man’s torment?

     Moments before the flames consume them both, Tim—with Jason still carried on his back—stumbles out the door and onto the filthied street, broken beer bottles and discarded snack wrappers scattering with the hot breeze. The Monarch Theatre has become engulfed by a towering conflagration, forming an amorphous skyscraper billowing embers and char against the moon’s visage, dyeing the fog with bright hues of bloodshed that hang low like dead bodies deserted on the pavement. It’s a horrible spectacle, grand but also terrifying, grotesque yet breathtaking. 

     Tim’s van is on the other side of the road; he needs to get Jason in there and drive off before the others gather their bearings. Bruce no doubt has been made aware of the explosion and will be on his way soon. The clock is ticking and the window is closing. Tim won’t let Bruce win, no more will he let that cowled conductor gather his plague of bleating sheep to whine and blare their ignorance with proud abandon. Bruce and Jason, their glass castle, is going to fall. 

     He shoves Jason into the back truck, his limbs tangled and folded in bizarre fashion, a man reduced to a ragdoll. A prop. Furniture. 

     How does it feel to be an object, Jason? 

     Tim climbs into the driver’s seat and steps on the gas. 

He can’t remember the last time the streets of Gotham were this empty. Passing vehicles are few and far between, leaving nothing except the vacant asphalt and Tim’s own lonely thoughts as he speeds past deserted buildings and degraded storefronts, a ghost town in more than one sense of the word. 

     Think. Next steps. The harbor isn't far from Park Row, so he can reach there, borrow a boat, and sail off into the horizon. But Tim will need to call in a favor. Resources for organizing, contingencies, tech, and the works. Who can he call? Talia is an obvious no—that scheming hag, Pru is a maybe if she hasn’t skipped town by now, and Tim would rather quarter himself than ask Ra’s for anything. Shiva could be an option, though Cass will probably be super pissed about that. Whatever, he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. For now, his priority is getting out of the city. 

     Suddenly, a wave of vertigo sends the world on its axis, surroundings tipping to the side and swimming in circles out of focus. His heartbeat thrums arrhythmically, shallow and weak like incoherent tapping on a broken drum set while his hands shake and his skin blanches, sapped of almost all color to resemble a spectre. He briefly looks down.

     The wound has begun to bleed through the plastic wrap, streams of red outpouring and accumulating under the gas pedal into a puddle; the last cries of a hundred dead men have coalesced to make their wretched, forgotten fates known. The song comes back, sweeter and more melodic than before, with resonant whispered promises. 

     It will be like a lullaby, the song murmurs, or dozing off gently into a never-ending dream. Take the wrap off, Tim. What is there to stay for, anyway? What value is a life lived alone?

     Persuasive argument, but no. Tim’ll have to decline. He’s not ready to go. Not quite yet. 

     He looks back up.

     Jason is staring at him in the rearview mirror.

     Not the real Jason. He’s still unconscious in the back. This Jason is younger, a youthful boy not a day over twelve. Two curls of hair on his forehead bounce as the van passes over bumps and bits of gravel, his skin unnaturally smooth and unmarked, so empyrean it sheds a luminous layer of soft light against the dark shade. His Robin costume is a blinding bright sore, pristine and vibrant, not yet dirtied by the blood and ash that will come to define it; but he doesn’t have his mask on, instead blue eyes that pierce like ghostly headlights cast their silent judgement on him. It riles Tim, fueling him with ire; Jason has no right to cast judgement on anyone.

     “You could’ve killed them back there. How could you abandon your family like that? It was reckless. It was cruel.” It says to him. 

     Ignore it. If he pays it any attention they’ll call him crazy, which is far from the truth. It’s the result of hypovolemic shock or sleep deprivation. It’s not real. He turns on the radio and steps on the gas pedal harder. The sooner this ends, the better. Tim knew they’d get out okay, he would never underestimate their capabilities.

     “You’re not a good person, Tim. They’re going to resent you.”

     So? Who cares if they resent him, that’s often the consequence for being right. They’ll get over it when they realize it was in their own best interest. That’s what’s pertinent. The plans, the actions, the goals have been in service of a greater good. Sometimes bad things need to happen for its fruition. 

     “Liar. You have always put yourself first at every step, but you say it’s for their own benefit. You knowingly and willingly let your family suffer as collateral damage. Dick, Steph, Barbara, Cass. You’ve traumatized them and the only justification you can manage is callous selfishness.”

     They aren’t his family! They chose Jason. They all chose Jason. It’s always been Jason. It’s his fault. Bruce’s perfect son, the best Boy Wonder, the Patron Saint of kindness. 

     And what of those Jason murdered? This isn’t for them? This isn’t for the dead and damaged and destitute? Tim made that up? Of course, it was never really Jason’s fault. Those people didn’t deserve to live, the masses of them were worthless. And even if they did deserve to live, even if they did have worth, it still isn’t Jason’s fault because the Lazarus Pit influenced him to kill. Funny how that works out. No matter the cause, no matter the motive, no matter the scale, Jason gets his redemption. He gets to be everything: the well-meaning anti-hero, the angelic do-gooder, the victim, the master strategist, the literary genius, the wronged; but never the villain. 

     What happens when Bruce and Jason get into another spat, be it days, weeks, months, or years from now when they inevitably come to blows over pedantic, faux-philosophical horseshit? Jason’ll go back to being Red Hood and begin his massacre once more, hundreds gunned down and abandoned, left to undergo the same travesties as the many others before. The cycle continues endlessly, another form of damnation Gotham endures, a ritualistic bloodletting by means of wholesale slaughter. There is no need for Hell when it exists right here. But Tim will be the solution, he will save them from their grim destinies.

     “If you were as altruistic as you claim you wouldn’t have resorted to torture. You beat me senseless, you shot me, you slammed me against walls and tables and floors. Was that for the ‘dead and damaged and destitute’, too? Or perhaps in truth it was simply for your own satisfaction?”

     Tim grips the steering wheel harder, ignoring the stinging throb in his hands as he does so. Steph said something similar, that torture is never a good thing, that Tim was wrong. She said he should choose forgiveness, that he and Jason need to reconcile their differences and learn to be brothers. The past is a manacled chain to be unburdened, mistakes are an inevitability, and Jason is just like him. He should learn to love Jason Todd. Learn to love him despite his flawed nature, despite his inability to feel compassion or remorse, despite his lack of positive qualities, despite his inherent evil. Learn to love the man who was born to hate. 

     “Why do you find it so hard to believe I was once good? I wanted to be Robin for the same reason as you.”

     Jason lies. He was Robin because it was an easy meal ticket, because it gave him an excuse to brutalize and maim. Human beings are not on and off buttons, they don’t switch from good to evil because of one bad day. There were warning signs—probably dozens—that Bruce ignored due to his blind adoration. Felipe Garzonas conveniently falls off a building to his death with Jason the only witness? Seriously? These events were known from the start, from years and years before, during the very genesis of this tale. Jason would turn against Bruce and drench the city, down to the capillaries and fibers of the narrowest streets and hidden corridors, in buckets of coagulated gore.

     “You didn’t always hate me. You thought I was reckless, but you also used to admire me—not as much as you did Dick, but you respected me. I came from nothing special, yet despite that I was taught and trained into something remarkable by someone who knew how. You found that inspiring; I was a boy no different from you.”

     Tim’s vision goes red, incendiary vents gushing untamed rage, boiling and spuming and splattering stygian rivers further blackened by the strength of his animosity. His urge foams and froths against the cage with which he contains. You should’ve killed him, it rasps, He was better off dead. He pushes on the gas pedal more, letting the city transform into a hazy smear of blacks and browns and ambers; individual buildings morph together, becoming one long moving line as he speeds past.

     Jason deteriorates in the rearview mirror, swollen bruised lumps take gnarled form on pockmarked skin like bubbles rising on a low simmer while grime and dried blood baked into corroded rust swipe across his now shredded and browned costume, digging themselves under broken raw fingernails and bleary eyes. It’s as if Tim’s conscience has unearthed the remains of a grievous inhumanity, dredged from the murky depths of moral depravity to be judged. The glow is gone, the vibrant reds and greens and yellows are gone, the bright blues are gone. Tim is viewing a corpse.

     He glances between this Jason and the real one; they’ve become hard to distinguish. Their injuries have made them synonymous, one and the same. 

     “You’re unwell.” The corpse says.

     Why does everyone say that? They’re wrong. Every last one of them. As long as Jason walks free, as long as the stench of putrefaction lingers over him potent as a miasma, Tim won’t listen; when the world is an asylum, the inmates are the ones to call the sane crazed.

     Pallid hands start slipping off the steering wheel, they shake and tremble with their weakening grip as his arms start to become numb. Cold and clammy, beaded sweat accumulates on Tim’s forehead and down to his cheeks, leaving clear pale trails on a face otherwise sodden in red. He doesn’t have much time left. Got to get there soon.

     “Will you ever forgive me?” The corpse whispers.

     Vulnerable. Scared. Jason’s chest rises and falls in stuttered motions as broken machines do when crusted by crude oil, and passing street lamps part him with the sickly color of jaundiced flesh. Tim watches as the boy’s tears begin to fall; puffy, spherical ones that run silent and plentiful. Once again, he looks between the two Jasons.

     For the first time, Tim imagines Jason as a child. Not childish, not immature, but as someone who was an actual child once. He probably had dreams and aspirations and fantasies that made his life feel large and wondrous—maybe more so than it truly was. He probably giggled when he found something funny and whined when he didn’t get his way and waddled when he couldn’t quite yet manage to stand steady on two feet. He probably had parents who nursed him and swaddled him and planted kisses on his head when they tucked him in for bed. He probably found sweets yummy and vegetables yucky and had to be told to eat his dinner before he got dessert—no matter how cheap and poor-quality it was. Jason was a child, and he died a child still. 

     Does that change anything? Has the image of this dead boy awoken a sliver of humanity? Was Tim wrong to see Jason as a figure of pure ill-intent devoid of goodness? 

     Perhaps the story of the second Robin was of a boy who used to be kind. He came from a troubled background and wanted to help others who found adversity similar to his own. Despite his noble intentions, he met with a terrible, tragic, undeserved end and was sent to the grave. But fate had other plans, he came back angry and betrayed to only end up becoming everything he fought against. A true Shakespearean tragedy.

     If this were true, if Jason was a good person before, can Tim find it within himself to forgive him? 

     No. Absolutely fucking not. It doesn’t matter if he was a child once, because that child was still Jason. That child taunted and sneered and cackled as he spoiled himself on cruelty, acting as an apostle of sin. That child was a monster from the second it exited the womb.

     Jason Todd will find forgiveness when he faces death a thousandfold. When he is mangled by gunfire and vaporized by explosives and mutilated by blades, when he is killed and resurrected and murdered and revived again and again and again for each and every life he destroyed; for the hordes of victims who pile high in rotting depraved configurations, their mouths gaping and eyes glazed with white film, for the families who sleep in houses one member quieter, who live under the unseen shadow of the demon who stole from them, and for the sixteen-year-old who had his life violated in ways incomprehensible, who deserved to be remembered. 

     But that avenue isn’t a possibility; what Tim has planned is the next best thing. He will never forgive Jason as long as he draws breath, of that he is certain.

     “Well…I forgive you, Tim.”

     He speeds over a sheet of ice.

     Suddenly, all control is lost as the van starts to hydroplane. Veering and swerving from side to side, Tim can’t manage to steady the vehicle, he’s too weak. It continues to slide and slide, and a lone guard rail comes into view.

     Closer and closer without losing any speed, dread coils in Tim’s gut as it approaches thirty feet, then twenty, ten, five, one—

     He blacks out at the moment of impact.

Consciousness returns to Tim quickly—perhaps unfortunately; he couldn’t have been out for more than a minute, as the song that was on the radio is still playing, now scratchy and muddled by static. 

     Tim’s upside down, suspended in the air by his seatbelt. The windows are shattered, the hood of the van crumpled like used tissue paper and scraps of sheared metal litter the road, shining glittering gems against the headlights. 

     He unbuckles himself and falls down onto the roof. Glass slices at his back where he lands, and each intake of breath sends sharp waves of pain up his chest. He shattered one or two ribs; they shift under his coat when he moves, chunks rubbing up against bruised skin. 

     Crawling out where the door used to be—now fifteen feet away and twisted into a rudimentary ball—he collapses on a drift of snow, only to clear his head for a second. He needs to get moving soon, no doubt Bruce and the others will come running at the report of a car crash.

     It’s calm out here. The only noises are that of Tim’s own ragged, wheezing breaths and the radio. The icy gale, freezing winds caused by the beat of Lucifer’s mighty, beastly wings, come soundlessly to dull his afflictions, however slight that may be. Snowflakes drift gently to the ground in fluttering, serene motions; his broken nose, his busted lip, his blood-soaked hair, his shredded cheeks slowly caressed by white that tinges vermillion when it touches him. 

     …Shit. He needs to get Jason.

     Standing up is a mistake. His weight shifts to his left side and pain shoots up from his ankle to his hip. He adds that to the list of broken bones, the very same leg that has the gaping hole. Fantastic, just what Tim needed. This day can’t get any better.

     He limps, dragging his leg behind him, reaching into the back of the flipped car to pull Jason out from the back window. Two fingers under his neck confirm Jason still has a pulse, weak but steady, and Tim finds a dark amusement in the fact Jason’s likely in better condition than him right now. A lot can change in an hour. 

     They’re near Gotham Cemetery, Tim can see the tombstones in the distance that pepper the snowy, slurried grounds with dots of gray and black. The harbor shouldn’t be too far beyond there; he’ll take a shortcut through and then be in the clear. Only a little bit more to go, he can do this. He begins to walk.

     “Let..me go…you piece of shit.”

     Jason’s awake, slurring his words and swinging his arms clumsily at Tim from where he lays, a pitiful attempt at retaliation. He kicks Jason in the face with his good leg, knocking him out again, and he notes the way Jason’s nose crunches; the two of them match now. He grabs him by the collar and carries him from behind, leaving large red blots trailing behind them as they trudge on through the cemetery.

     It’s hard to tell how long he walks for. Eventually the moments blur into one another, and the two constant presents are pain and the overwhelming fear of failure. Each drag of his leg comes with a disgusting squelch and a new jostle of anguish that hurts like smoldering brimstone. Behind each tree and bush, nearly out of view, he sees them: Bruce, Steph, Cass, Dick, Conner, Bart, Cassie, Helena, Cissie, Barbara, Greta, Clark, Diana, Jason, himself. Dressed in their costumes, vivacious and saturated rainbows so bright it stings to look at against the drab, achromous backdrop of a mournful moon. They point at him, What an idiot, they whisper amongst themselves. Their laughter rings into the air, flexing and pulsing and echoing as the pitch rises higher and higher, clownish in tone and intensity. They hate him. They hate him for being alive, they hate him for being himself, they hate him for not being Jason. 

     His foot gives out from under him and slips, falling onto saturated earth, a stew of mud and ice greeting him there. Reaching out for a lifeline, anything to push himself up with, Tim thrusts his hand forwards and finds the frigid surface of a headstone.

     He lifts his head off the ground. 

     Jason Todd, it reads.

     This…is Jason’s grave. Of all the places he ends up, it had to be at Jason’s fucking grave. Bruce never got rid of it. Bruce never got rid of that stupid monument to a dead boy who never deserved to be mourned. Jason still lays buried next to the countless he's also put here. Nevermind the dead when the real tragedy walks with the living. Jason Todd is a perfect victim, a beacon for others to sob and whimper and miss, even when he buries his knife into their necks, gleefully watching them gurgle and choke while they pray over his angelic soul. 

     Tim finds something animalistic, something intensely instinctual inside him that invigorates with the strength of ten men, hatred straight from the vein. He feeds off it, basks in it, gorges on it. 

     Jason coughs behind him, shakily bringing himself up, and Tim’s body is taken over by instinct; he gives way for a terrifying force that propels him to move, becoming a passenger to his own awareness. It’s as if he’s an automaton, acting on the actions hardwired into him. 

     Tim’s fingers reach around Jason’s windpipe, and he begins to squeeze. His body returns to him; he doesn’t stop, watching Jason’s face turn red, then purple. In vain, Jason digs his nails in, clawing at Tim’s face and arms. The gashes and lacerations do not deter him. Almost nothing can. He squeezes harder, purple becomes blue. Tim knows he should stop, that Jason will die if he continues, but it’s self-perpetuating at this point, a machine powered by itself. Even if he wants to let go, how much resistance can one man hold against the wolfish desire of one hundred ghosts?

      “Let him go!”

     A shadow outstretches from behind Tim; a faceless judge, a witness to misshapen heroism turned feral, naked savagery. His cape rustles in the wind like a flag at half-mast but for those alive. There is nothing here to grieve. Nothing here to miss. Yet he showed up regardless. 

     Bruce.

Chapter Text

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

     With shaky legs, trembling from blood loss, Tim stands, keeping Jason in a choke hold from behind, a knife pressed firmly against his throat. The back of his forearm squeezes on Jason’s windpipe. They’ve both drenched themselves in red suffering, it’s coated their faces, their clothes, their hair, meshing their pain together, obscuring where one ends and the other begins.

     But they cannot be more different. Tim has lived a life of compassion. He lived and died for the innocent, bled so they didn’t have to. Jason has no virtues, and for that he stands here at his hour of judgment. Tim’s “flaws” are decreed by those who would shield devils from due retribution, compromised fools distracted by the projected image of a saint, and his only real “flaw” is being moral in a world that rewards immorality. To punish a creature like Jason Todd is but an obligation.

     “It’s been awhile, Bruce.” 

     With his simple utterance, Tim sees the pieces slot together, and recognition flashes across Bruce’s tortured mask; a final, dawning realization to break a broken man. There are no more facades to hide behind. The illusion has been shattered, the dream disgraced and abandoned by an implacable presence, the dead risen up to speak. They have torn Bruce’s story open, and the past has come to reap its revenge.

     “…No. No. You’re not Tim. You’re not real! You’re—you’re an imposter. A fake, an insult. You’re a monster to invoke his image and you’re going to spend the rest of your life behind bars for what you’ve done, or else so God help me I’ll make sure you never hurt another person again!”

     The denial persists, but the world Bruce grew from mendacious soils stays burning down to the roots; he will be left with soot caked over barren lands. 

     Tim edges on the cusp of a second twilight, drifting towards a journey into reaches beyond the grasp of all forces on Earth, a departure that won’t be undone. He exists yet not, a physical body but no soul to claim ownership. But he cannot stop, for there are no means to rectify this injustice besides his own, and there is no manner by which Bruce can truly threaten him. 

     This is Tim’s last stand—his injuries attest to that—and he will not persist in a world that refuses him his right to live. Denial is a defense prone to attrition, and he will not let Bruce deny, not when the truth lay so bare to behold. 

     “Your disbelief is irrelevant. I am me. I wish you had this same resolve when your son slaughtered all those people. Maybe then things would’ve turned out better.”

     “You’re not Tim!”

     Broad swaths of clouds part, ever so slightly, to shine pockets of shining white beams upon them from an oppressive night, threading through wisps of crimson fog dyed by distant fires and opaque, ashy overcast, illuminating circles of snow spotted iridescent in spilt blood; it sunders deceit and subterfuge, poking holes in the covered lie.

     “Then who was it who told you ‘Batman needs a Robin’ those many years ago? Who was it who saved you and Dick from Harvey Dent with nothing but the clothes on his back? Who was it who stood by you when Bane humiliated you, beat you, shamed you out of your own cowl? Who went against Jean-Paul when he turned rogue and stomped on your ideals? Who endured plagues and earthquakes and wars to protect our city? Who celebrated you in your greatest successes and supported you in your darkest failures? If I am not Tim Drake, then who the hell is?”

     Tim is the lie. That is who Tim is, the shy bud too scared to blossom, the servile waif with bone-deep admiration, the believer who proselytizes peace no matter how heavy the blood rains. Like a cuckoo throwing chicks to die on their lonesome, he was replaced by another version of himself. 

     And he seeks freedom from this. He wishes he could cast aside his physical form like some burdensome robe to let his spirit fly among the stars, away from the vessel that chains him to a walking martyrdom. If only he could discard this body and the curse it comes with. 

     It wasn’t always this way. He once enjoyed being Tim Drake. Robin was a legacy to uphold, an ideal to strive for, and he loved it. He was Tim Drake: Robin. Was it a permanent position? No, but it was still his. Despite the losses, the days when all hope felt distant, he looks back fondly. Memories where he and his team got themselves into wacky hijinks, where Bruce congratulated him on a job well done, where he frantically studied his calculus notes in between patrols for an upcoming test. He liked being him. He was an okay kid, or at least he’d like to think so. 

     “I’ve been watching you since I was nine years old. What made you think death would change that?” Tim pushes the knife harder against Jason’s throat, nicking the skin, and wet gurgles come up in plentiful streams. The two of them spill their scarlet dew onto the mud, “Were you stupid enough to think this wouldn’t somehow find its way back to me? Or were you hoping I’d never come back? Is that why you wanted me cremated, Bruce? So your mistakes could no longer hound you?”

     Bruce stares, stupefied, slack-jawed. Tim nearly takes it as an insult.

     “It’s getting pretty difficult now, huh? To keep denying I’m real. Your charade of normality, your ‘found family’, crumbles in the face of me, and the rest of your fantasy will follow suit. This was a forgone conclusion, the inevitable consequence of your lies. I was always going to haunt you.

     “What is the worth of one evil man against the whole of your values, Bruce? Jason isn’t worth more than the crimes he’s committed. It’s time to open your eyes and right your wrongs.” 

     “How…how are you…how are you here?”

     “The League of Assassins. You know how.” 

     “Ra’s Al Ghul!?” Like a beast spurred to anger, Bruce rages. He snarls, claws and fangs bared to rip and tear, “He did this to you? It—it all makes sense now. He turned you against me! He fed you lies! He infected you with madness from the Pit!”

     “You’re a coward hiding behind pretty fables. Quit your delusions. I’m not another victim in need of saving.”

     Actions hold no meaning, no weight, as long as this paracosm remains intact; the narrative has stitched itself to the source, or supplanted it altogether. Tim has nothing in common with his shadow.

     “I gave up so much for your cause,” a lone tear escapes him, “I believed in your mission, your morals, in you. Even when I had my doubts, even when I hung up my cape, even when I laid dead, I still believed. So why…why on God’s earth is he still here!?” 

     “Tim, I—”

     “I thought you cared about people! If it had been you he killed, I would’ve stopped at nothing; he’d have been locked away until his last dying breath, surrounded by the same evil he claims to hate! But you—you let him go, after the carnage he’s created, the men and women he’s murdered, the many who’ve needlessly suffered. You spat on your promises. You celebrated him and adorned him with praise and said he was redeemed. How the—how the fuck can you live with yourself?”

     His arm’s grip trembles, and his voice wobbles; Tim holds back a great deal of torment, loathing in its most powerful form, and his faltering composure whittles under Bruce’s hubris, the further he falsely swears on notions of green pools of youth and meticulous schemes that push innocents to insanity. Why can’t he just see? 

     “You should’ve—you should've cared. Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you try? And…and even if they didn’t matter to you…then why—why couldn’t you have done it for me?”

     “Because I can’t!” Bruce cries, “I can’t condemn my son!”

     “Condemn him? Jason condemned himself. There’s no one else to blame. I’m not asking you to cross a line, I’m not asking for an execution, I’m asking you to be Batman!”

     “Jason was a victim!” Bruce’s voice becomes pleading, begging in a desperate fashion. This is no hero, this is a charlatan clinging on to the corpse of a belief, “It wasn’t him who hurt you! It was the Lazarus Pit. It was Talia. They changed him, weaponized him to wage war, the same as they’ve done to you. Jason would never hurt anyone in his right mind. It wasn’t his fault. You need to believe me, Tim.”

     The World’s Greatest Detective dallies in fairy tales. The lambs still nurse the wolf, unaware they raise he who will prey on their naïveté and feast on their faith. Mindless optimism will not stop the slaughter when it comes to your doorstep; a wolf is still a wolf, and you cannot undo its predatory nature. 

     Thoughts, questions, theories build and build in Tim’s mind. What has Jason done to you, Bruce? What did he do to make you this way? I need to fix this, I need to fix you. What can I do to push you over the edge?

     “Funny you should mention Talia, because she told me a very different version of events.” Tim pauses with a hum, “You know, it just occurred to me we haven’t asked Jason his opinion; I nearly forgot he was here. Jason, what do you think about all this?”

     On shaking legs that seem to creak and crack under their own weight; grasping, shivering hands that throb a dull purple; a face engorged with bruises and cuts, Jason attempts to speak but only manages guttural, croaking gasps. His mouth sloshes in a pool of blood, coating his teeth and gums and tongue, cresting over the sides of his lips like breached hulls, red onto red onto red, bleached and sodden. 

     “He doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood. Not much I can do about that, unfortunately.”

     Something fractures.

     “Enough!” Bruce roars, blotched in furious hate, “Let him go! Don’t force my hand.”

     Tim scowls, eerily calm, “You’re not the one in control. One wrong move from you and I carve him open. I’ll bleed him dry and make you watch.”

     He doesn’t mean that, but it gets the point across—in truth, Tim hates Jason too much to kill him.

     “Then the Pit has corrupted you! You’re wounded, Tim. Your bones are broken, your body is battered, you’re bleeding out. Are you really willing to die for revenge!? It doesn’t have to be this way. I can cure you, the same way I cured Jason. Let me help you. Please.” 

     They hesitate, looking at the other standing before them. Bruce speaks a thousand words without a sound, and Tim knows what they preach, he always has: Bruce still doesn’t understand. Tim has imparted nothing. How can he cure something that doesn’t exist? Bruce’s lies may fall apart, his fictitious world may shatter, but he will never stop believing in them, regardless. He cannot be reasoned with, and so the alternate must take his place. 

     “…No, Bruce. I’m the one who’s curing you. You just don’t realize it yet.”

     In the distance, and quickly approaching, the rev of racing motorcycles ushers in the rest of them; Bruce’s cult of loyalists, beckoned to the scene by their master’s demands. Dick, Cass, Steph. They live and die by Bruce’s word, mind’s melded to be one with his command. Tim can hardly recognize them, their true selves quashed and marooned, hollowed shells of yes-men who bow down to orders from above. Empty hearts and emptier souls. His absence has made soldiers out of heroes, a stranger out of a brother, apathy out of honest love.

     Dick puts his hands up, a gesture of surrender even though the air rings with the sound of slain masses; peace is a lie as long as Jason walks in daylight, “Tim, put Jason down. I know you’re angry, trust me, but this doesn’t need to end in violence. Don’t do anything reckless. None of us want to see you hurt.”

     Liars. All of them. Vacuous puppets doing the bidding of a blinded bat. They want him to join the bliss found in unquestioned servitude, to do as Bruce says. Tim shall invite Jason into a fellowship shared by tender hearts and ingratiate himself back into their loving grace despite his own heinous deeds—how awfully he treated poor, innocent Jason, who only wanted to gift Gotham the bounty of his benevolence. He will play the role of Tim Drake, the boy driven mad but forgiven, turned against them but saved by the holy light only family can provide. They will become brothers, because Tim was always Jason’s biggest fan.

     “I’d sooner kill myself then join your cult.”

     Steph looks at him incredulously, “Tim, you sound crazy.”

     “I told you I’m not fucking crazy!” He snaps; it hits a sore spot, “But—but of course you’d say that, Bruce and Jason—they’ve tricked you, brainwashed you, made you complicit in their conspiracy. You don’t know any better.” 

     “Let him go. There won’t be death tonight. I’ll…stop you by force. If I have to.” Cass says it in her typical moral absolutism, unwilling to give an ounce of nuance. 

     “If you wanted to stop me by force you’d have already done it. You don’t think you’d make it to me in time; you’re too far away.”     

     Cass appears unimpressed, “Then we can wait you out. You’re bleeding heavily. You’ll lose consciousness soon. Please don’t make us. We…want you safe.”

     They want him to die; they’ll watch him waste away into the ground and giggle among themselves. They find euphoria in his dejection and savor it like rich burgundy, for that is the punishment the rebellious deserve. To go against Bruce is to go against Gotham; his ordinance is divine law written into sacred scripture. 

     Fine. If they wish to play this game, Tim will simply change the rules. 

     “You guys forced me to do this. Just remember that.”

     From his pocket, he pulls out a black sphere with a singular button on top. He clicks down on it, and it starts to flash red. 

     It’s a bomb.

     “If I stop pressing this button—the instant I let go—you, me, Jason, and everything else within fifty feet is turned to ash. Don’t try me.”

     Horror and shock twists their faces like a perverted communion, a collection of dismay and disbelief and disgust and despair. 

     It’s not an actual, working bomb; Tim didn’t have the time to wire it. It’s little more than a cold metal ball with flashing lights. But they don’t know that, and certainly aren’t willing to call his bluff. 

     “What the fuck is wrong with you!?” Steph condemns him, ripe in animosity. 

     “Tim, please think this through,” Dick sounds as though he’s on the verge of tears, sad and confused, oblivious to the meaning behind Tim’s righteous cause, “Are you really willing to kill yourself to prove a point? We missed you, we care about you, there has to be another way! Give us a chance to do you right.”

     “I gave you a million chances! I gave you an out, I told you what I wanted! I even gave Jason an opportunity to atone. But you made it clear you didn’t want to fix anything, you want to pretend nothing happened. You’ve run out of chances!”

     “It wasn’t that simple!” Dick yells back, “You think I’m happy with how things are? I’ve hated this life! I want retribution just as badly as you do, but not like this. There’s another way. We can get Commissioner Gordon involved, we can turn Jason in to the police, make sure it’s kept under wraps. If you’re there, you can turn the tide. Jason will face justice, but we’ll do it right. This doesn’t help anyone!”

     “I don’t want this ‘under wraps’. I want Jason’s name on every goddamn newspaper cover, T.V headline, APB, everything. I want every single person on the planet to know what kind of monster Bruce let into his home, what kind of animal roams their streets calling himself a hero. 

     “I want them to know Jason Todd by heart. I want to see Bruce screaming from the rooftops saying ‘My son did this.’ I don’t want to see you or Steph or Cass or anyone else turn Jason in, I want it to be him and him alone.”

     In Tim’s tirade, Bruce’s catatonia does not go unnoticed. He has not spoken for some time now, gaze faraway and searching, distant, but for objects or places unknown. Like a statue, Bruce watches but does not act, fit to observe but never to intervene; for that requires a confrontation and he refuses to pay his dues.

     That won’t abide. Tim will force him hyperaware; Bruce must remain conscious for this fallout, he will not be given the privilege of heedless dementia. 

     “Bruce…do you remember Don Perry?” Tim says. 

     Bruce startles, violently so. The name makes him recoil, wince in pain as if shot. No doubt such a memory would make a dreary mind’s haze evaporate. 

     Cautiously, warily, Bruce mutters, unsure of himself, “What…what about him?”

     “How he died. Why he died.”

     Don Perry was a child born into poverty, no older than adolescence when he met his demise. His father wasn’t in the picture, and his mother wasn’t a constant presence, either; she took too many extra shifts at the restaurant to make ends meet. This was the reality for many in Gotham; Jason should know that well. Don Perry was one story in a menagerie of Gotham’s indigence, the thousands looked over and forgotten by the gears of a city grinding the poor to dust. 

     But Don had greater aspirations, he wanted out of this life of minimums, this existence rife with destitution. Don had a passion for art. His folks said he had genuine talent. He wanted to go to school, become a comic book artist, learn to be the next Jack Kirby. But school requires money, and that he did not have. 

     So Don turned to running drugs. Sometimes, bending the law is a necessity to get by. If he could save up enough money, stay low and keep under the radar, he could leave this hellhole for a better life, become the provider for his family, and help them escape. That was why Don Perry committed crime—it was the only way he saw an out.

     One tragic night, Don Perry met with a terrible fate. He was making the typical delivery, a small package to a client in one of the less well-to-do neighborhoods. Business as usual. 

     He wasn’t alone. He was being watched. There was a group of fanatics—a cult of violence—formed by a man named Joseph Blackfire. Blackfire posed as a Deacon, believing the only solution to crime was through death, a “cleansing” of a place corrupted to its core. Redemption, clemency, second chances, those are the passive baubles enabling a cycle of abuse. Through death comes power, and with that, control. 

     So what happened when a group of desperates incited to bloodshed met with poor Don Perry, a child smuggling drugs?

     They slaughtered him, of course. Bludgeoned and stabbed and slashed to pieces, butchered in the street to rot like carrion. It was Don’s own fault, after all. He was a criminal and got what criminals deserved. The streets needed to be cleaned, the crimes had to be stopped. ‘Death will come to those who deserve death’, right?

     In the ever-lengthening expanse of tragedies, few seem more cruel than what befell Don Perry. But there is more to this story. One crucial piece that turns Tim’s heartache to a fever stoked in Hell, an anger eclipsed by none. 

     “Yes. I…I remember.” Bruce says. 

     Good. Then there is no room for error. Bruce should know what comes next. 

     “Then tell me, Bruce: who was Robin at the time? Who bore firsthand witness to the massacres? Who was there to watch you be drugged, beaten, brainwashed into betraying your morals? Who saw Gotham slip into anarchy? Who saw the horrors, the pain, the evil? Who was there for it all?”

     An echo reverberates along the cemetery grounds, traveling on the snow and mud and water like running footsteps. Clouds reconvene over the sky once again to snuff shimmering traces of the moon and abandon Gotham to the mercy of a carmine night that seems never ending. There exists no witness to this tragic congregation except their own disbelieving eyes. What happens here begins and ends with them.

     “Tim, what does this accomplish—” Dick attempts to cut in. 

     “Don’t answer for him!” Tim screams, “I want to hear him say it. This is the entire goddamn point. Everything’s been leading to this. Bruce, who was Robin when Don Perry was murdered?”

     Bruce utters his confession, slow and languid, as though he’s digging bullets out from flesh wounds, gritting his teeth and shutting his eyes tight, “…It was…it was Jason. He was Robin.”

     “Exactly. Jason was Robin during Joseph Blackfire’s rampage, years before the idea of Red Hood ever entered his diminutive little brain. He saw the murders, the chaos, the hopelessness. He saw the flaws of that philosophy, saw the violence that only begets more violence, saw how much destruction it sows, yet he still became Red Hood anyway. Jason already knew his ‘reasoning’ was wrong, and he already knew killing criminals would never bring peace, but he still did so because that’s the kind of sick, depraved freak he is. This is who you’re convinced was a good kid? This is the man who deserves a second chance? This is who you call son?”

     As if a biblical detonation has razed the buildings of their tenuous faith, the desire for family, peace, love has met its complete annihilation at Tim’s hand. No one dares to speak, no one dares to utter a sound. Of course they don’t, what is there to say in the face of such a truth? Their dream cannot persist as long as Tim remains the avenging angel, the forsaken’s champion. 

     Yet Bruce says something. And it heralds the end.

     “…It was—it was the Pit’s fault, Tim.”

     Tim buries the knife into the side of Jason’s neck. 

     It’s an almost instinctual reaction, done only a notch above cognition; the result of a staggering, insurmountable emotion that transcends hate or rage, loathing or repulsion. It is antipathy at its most profound depths, enmity incarnate. One sentiment, a single thought, consumes him.

     This is all Jason’s fault. 

     Like a well of oil struck, blood spurts from the wound, rhythmic and mesmerizing. Jason’s pulse thrums against Tim’s slick knuckles, the red glazes them in a metallic coat glistening orange and yellow and gray and conglomerate hues of this dreadful tableau, fires and shadows and costumes reflected on glimmering hands. 

     “What have you done!?” 

     “No!”

     “You’re insane!”

     “Why!?”

     They heap their cries upon him, shocked exclamations of dismay. It’s unnecessary. The wound is non-fatal, and Tim avoided the arteries. No need for dramatics. 

     “You made me do this! He made me do this!” He says, pointing the knife at Bruce, “So here’s what’s going to happen: either you let me go or I kill him. Right here and now.

     “Or…we can do this a different way. Another option.”

     “What—what is it?” Bruce’s shaking, tremors like aftershocks destabilizing a man impotent and useful to no one. Somehow, Bruce manages to fall further and further in Tim’s estimations.

     “You’ve been hearing a voice in your head, haven't you? A voice telling you to put your mission—your cause—above your heart, telling you isn’t how things are supposed to be. It’s been getting stronger the more your mind stretches thin and the longer this case goes on. I’ve been nurturing that voice of yours, making sure it becomes harder and harder to ignore. You’re going to snap if you persist. Give in to it. Do what it says.”

     In bleak resignation, a weariness that rends a soul in twain, oozing abjection, Bruce responds, “…No. I…I can’t do that, Tim. I won’t abandon you, but I won’t abandon Jason, either.”

     He won’t abandon Jason. He. Won’t. Abandon. Jason. He won’t abandon Jason. 

     It doesn't sound real. No matter how many chances Tim gives, no matter how far his kindness extends, they continue to spit on his corpse and manipulate it to their whims, twisting limp, torpid limbs to form a soft embrace. 

     He’s about to have a full-on breakdown. 

     “I could kill all of us and none of you could stop me. Maybe I should, maybe each and every one of you deserves it, or maybe I should’ve just jumped off a bridge to spare myself the embarrassment. I gave—I gave you everything, ruined my life to give yours purpose, and you threw me away. You’re vultures plundering the carcass of a name.”

     “That’s bullshit and you know it!” Steph proclaims, but Tim’s had enough of lying platitudes, forming so neatly on their lips. He refuses to heed her babblings.

     However much Tim may love them, experience is a forlorn verity; they do not love him back, only the artifice. 

     And this isn’t about proving a philosophical point, anymore. If Bruce can’t be convinced to choose a noble path and refuses to sway, then Tim must employ drastic measures. He will say whatever evil, despicable things he deems necessary to bring about an end. He will completely break Bruce down. He will bring Zur-En-Arrh to the forefront by force.

     This is for his own good, Tim. You’ve always done this for his own good.

     “Jason was fifteen when he died, right?” He starts, feigning causal interest, “…Don’t you have a son right now who’s about fifteen? Damian?”

     Immediately, Bruce grows still, his fearful shaking and trembling cease, frozen in a deathly quiet anger that pulls his muscles taut and hoards shadows that cascade and swim and beat around him like thrashing tempests confined to a livid frame.

     “Stop.” Cass says. Tim ignores her. 

     “…He’s in Smallville right now, isn’t he?” He continues. 

     “Tim, I mean it. Cut it out.” Dick says, fire brewing in his gut. Tim ignores him, too.

     “It seems pretty dangerous to me. Clark is a very busy man, Bruce. He can’t be everywhere at once. Jon is no different. They’re both superheroes. And I’m sure Jonathan and Martha are great company, but their age is catching up to them. If someone were to, say…break into the farm when Clark and Jon weren’t there, I doubt they’d be able to protect him. 

     “And there’s something to be learned in that, I think, especially when you’ve managed to piss off someone who doesn’t have anything to lose. Someone who knows a lot of people from a lot of places. You weren't able to save Jason in time, and it would be awful if the same were to happen to another son. Perhaps your lesson was that actions have consequences. Then again, sometimes a lesson needs to be learned twice.”

     Tim’s so close, he can sense it—victory, triumph over a tomorrowless destiny. This is the beginning of a nascent dawn, where the fraud with a red-plated skull no longer stands atop a beguiled crowd and preaches gospel, whispering sweet nothings of penance. Where a man once again becomes the night, the dark protector of a city plagued by misfortune. The clock shall reverse itself, Tim needs only to make one more push.

     “Maybe after it happens you can put another memorial next to Jason’s—”

     A sinister shiver trails through the air, an insidious gleam of metal that whooshes past Tim’s shoulder before it ricochets off of Jason’s tombstone behind him. It’s a Batarang.

     It slices his throat open. 

     He stumbles, falls to the ground, his hands futilely holding back the torrents spouting from between his fingers. Blackness throbs at the edges of his vision, growing deeper and deeper into his sight with each pour of blood. The fake bomb rolls uselessly across the mud. 

    There’s a new pair of hands on him now, pushing down on his neck, muffled shouts and pleas through a layer of static noise, another’s tears dripping on his face. He can’t see them clearly, only a vague purple and yellow blur. He’s too busy staring at Bruce, being held down by blobs of black and blue, madly struggling against them to try and break free. 

     Their eyes meet.

     Tim doesn’t recognize them. Those are not Bruce’s. They are purely cold, focused, determined in a wrathful kind of way. Those are the eyes of a hunter, calculating and without warmth. Tim did it. He won. Gotham can sleep soundly. Their protector is back.

     …Then why is he still not happy?

     Jason lies next to him, face down in a squalid puddle between dead patches of grass and stained snow. A light drizzle taps on his back. It’s a fitting end to this night; the boy who crawled out from the mud returns to it, slumbers soundly, as if he never left, like a domicile unchanged. The two of them share fates, though Tim’s the only one at the helm of a hearse. Jason will live to see another day, but he’ll wish he hadn't, and that is solace enough for Tim.

     It’s strange. He was expecting to feel…stronger about this, for lack of a better word. Dying again should be scarier. Is it shock clouding his emotions? Could be. It also might be that he’s tired. He’s spent. He’s lived countless lives, not one of which was his own. It’s becoming harder to think. 

     His eyes start to drift shut. Someone’s slapping him, shaking him awake, but it’s from too far away, as if Tim’s an observer watching this through a view not his own. He’s losing consciousness. 

     The last thing Tim sees is the circus. A quadruple somersault. He’s flying with them now. The stars.

     This is not an exit.

Wakefulness does not return to Tim gently. It arrives without mercy, like a startle from dreamless sleep, dire pains and aches that scorn him for his tribulations, painting their punishments on a blemished body; a sling on his arm, a splint for his leg, stitches on his neck, wrappings for his ribs, an intravenous drip in his hand.

     He’s in the Batcave. One of the containment cells, to be exact. From his cage, he can see the computers, the dinosaur, the giant penny, the winding stairs and drooping stalactites swarming with the cries and shrieks of flying bats. It almost feels homely, ignoring his handcuffing to the bed and monitoring by at least five different cameras. Good to see their paranoia-induced precautions haven’t left them in total. 

     Though, it’s a surprise to be here; he thought he wouldn’t wake up. Numbness encroached on him and brought idyllic final visions of acrobats and pigmented skies free of strife or burden or complication. They were imaginations for a mission accomplished, a swan song. Yet he’s still here and forced to an ambivalent awakening, to come back but do so entirely unprepared, uncertain and unplanned. As much as Tim did not want to die, he was expecting it wholeheartedly. 

     So…what does this mean? What does tomorrow bring when tomorrow was supposed to be an improbability? What…what is his purpose, now?

    “You’re awake.”

     Barbara. She’s watching him from behind the computer. Steph and Cass accompany her. 

     “How long has it been?” Tim asks. He sounds raspy, raw, it itches as he speaks. 

     “Three days.” A curt reply. Tonally blank, testing the waters. It’s another game they’re playing. 

     “…Don’t you have better things to do? I’m chained to the damn bed. I’m not going anywhere. Go see your team or whatever. Leave me alone.”

     “Dinah and Helena can handle themselves. They don’t need me right now. You do.”

     “I don’t need you. Not after what you’ve done.”

     The gall of these three to stare at him this way, with morbid interest as if he’s a pet. He’s their submissive Robin, misty-eyed and withdrawn. Don’t let him out of his cage; the outside is a scary place for one fragile little bird. 

     “We didn’t do anything.” Cass says, and crosses her arms. 

     “You’re marauders,” Tim spits, “You let me become a mockery, you let my dignity be stolen, you let my self be desecrated. ‘We didn’t do anything’? That’s the fucking issue. Your inaction, your simple-minded gullibility, condemned me. I live in purgatory. You believed Bruce at every step, and I suffered for it. I’m so sorry I didn’t act how you wanted. I’m so sorry I made things hard for you.”

     “You’re a self-righteous, hypocritical ass,” Steph points a finger at him accusingly, cold yet frightfully fervid in its temper, “You care so much about trying to ‘save people’ yet you’re willing to victimize the ones closest to you. You bled out in my arms, Tim. You flatlined. And I resuscitated you. Twice. I performed an emergency transfusion to save your life. I literally gave my blood for you. Don’t tell me we didn’t fucking do anything.

     “Barbara worked her ass off trying to prove Bruce was a liar. She planned to attend Jason’s trial to tell everyone she believed Jason deserved prison time. You want to know what happened? Bruce changed the date of the trial without telling her and revoked her access, saying it was for ‘founding Justice League members only’. He shut us down no matter what we tried. We did everything we could, but sometimes people don’t want to believe the truth, and there’s nothing we can do about that; they’re willing to believe what makes things bearable, they’re willing to believe there’s a moral to be found in pointless violence if they care enough about the one who committed it.”

     He forces down the pang of guilt that emerges, hot and sharp like heated glass. They’re obviously lying. They didn’t bother going against Bruce. Nobody did. They were devout believers.

“…Well that won’t be a problem anymore, will it?” Tim replies, “Bruce has seen the error of his ways, thanks to me. He’ll come down here to thank me. He’ll let me out of here and we’ll go back to how things used to be—”

     Barbara cuts him off. 

     “Bruce isn’t coming for you.” 

     “Huh?”

     “He’s not coming for you,” she repeats, and it holds a weighted sympathy, “He’s not pardoning you or releasing you or rescuing you. For now, it’s just us.”

     This—this isn’t right. That can’t be right. Tim made sure of it. Bruce should be back to normal by now, the past five years of mistakes discarded and forgotten. Did…did it not work? Is Bruce still the liar, still the fraud? 

     “Then where is he?”

     “Telling you where he is isn’t going to help.  And you’re not in any state to listen. You’ll just have to trust me when I say he isn’t coming. I’m sorry.”

     Bruce is in the Manor. That’s where he must be. He’s upstairs, snickering and laughing, watching Tim be treated like an animal bound to bite, stories and excuses loose on his lips. It’s the Pit, you see, Bruce will tell them, That’s why we have him locked up. It comes and goes in episodes, these green conniptions. Please don’t blame the poor lad, it isn’t his fault. It was the same with Jason. We’ll cure him in due time.

     It amounted to nothing. The years of planning, the blood and tears, the stress and hardship, all expended for Tim to end exactly where he started: a pitiful, histrionic, frail child who was born to be abused by his idol. It will never end. It was never going to. Hell is other people. And Jason is Tim’s Hell.

     “Get out.” He says. 

     “Tim—” Steph starts. 

     “I said get out. Bruce was the one who sent you, wasn’t he? He thought he could lull me into your stupid ‘family’ if he brought you here to soften me, make me weak. You bend yourself in obeisance towards him like unthinking thralls. Watch me from upstairs if you need to, since you’re so concerned about my wellbeing. That’s what the cameras are for, aren’t they? Get. Out. I see why Bruce regretted installing an elevator down here.”

     To her credit, Barbara doesn’t react to the pointed slight, but Steph’s face flashes red, and it looks like she’s about to start screaming, but Cass puts her hand on Steph’s shoulder and somberly shakes her head as if to say “It’s no use arguing with him”. What a show of empathy, compassion for Timothy Drake, who doesn’t realize how far he’s fallen. They pity him, but Tim pities them and their ignorance more.   

     The three of them leave in silence, not a sound to be made. He misses them when they’re gone.

The hours turn to days which turn to weeks, one and then two. Tim’s wounds heal with time…but only the physical ones. Under Cass’ watchful eye, they first remove the sling, and then the splint, and then finally the handcuff. It seems they no longer believe him to be an imminent elopement risk. They give him meals through the slot in the door and let him borrow books if he asks. Phone use is a resounding “no”.

     They still interrogate him from time to time. Sometimes it’s only one of them, sometimes it’s two, rarely it’s three. He’s gotten accustomed to the sounds they make. He can tell when it’s Steph coming, or Cass, or Barbara, or Steph and Cass, or Barbara and Cass, or Barbara and Steph, all without opening his eyes. He’s starting to feel like Gotham’s own Hannibal Lecter, though that might have some stiff competition considering who else calls the city home.

     They ask the usual questions. “Who else helped you?”, “Why did you do it?”, “Did you have other plans in place?”. They never answer his queries, namely the location of Jason and Bruce; they say it’s a “safety issue”, so Tim doesn’t answer them, in turn. If they are to treat him like a prisoner, then it’s quid pro quo. He will not give them anything for free.

     But the isolation is taking a steep toll. It’s harder and harder to stay unaffected, to put on the show of a hardened, uncaring insurgent. Love doesn’t die when simply wronged. And as much as he tries to ignore it, he loves them. They sign his own self-destruction; he would still take a bullet for them, he would still lay down his life for them, he would still sacrifice himself for them. That was never in question. What was in question was how long he could pretend otherwise.

     One day, a new sound enters the cave. New footsteps. Heavier, tired-sounding, judging by the way they drag slightly against the ground. It’s not Bruce, obviously, he’s busy mocking Tim from afar. It’s not Jason, either, there isn’t a noticeable limp in the echo. Alfred has been unseen these past couple weeks, strangely enough, but it can't be him, either. They jingle with the chiming of loose zippers, and Alfred wouldn’t be caught dead wearing zippers. There’s only one person it could be.

     “Bruce must be desperate if he’s sending you to play interrogation with me.” Tim says to him.