Work Text:
Jason isn’t named Jason yet, but by the time he’s fourteen, he knows that something’s not right about the name his mother gave him. Whenever Bruce calls him by that name, it makes Jason’s hackles raise and it speeds up the course of whatever argument they’re already in.
This drags out for months, accompanied by arguments about the dresses Jason refuses to wear to galas, about the way Jason cut half his hair off with kindergarten safety scissors, about how Jason doesn’t want to go to school anymore because the idea of people seeing him like this makes him want to throw up everything he’s ever eaten.
It’s not good to waste food.
Everything feels wrong and nobody gets it. Dick left for New York because Bruce is being a nightmare, even more controlling than he used to be, leaving Jason all on his own. Bruce and Jason are in one of those arguments, with Jason doing everything short of tying himself to the bed, refusing to leave the house to go to school. His grades are sliding out of control, and he cries himself through his English readings trying to find some trace of the obsession he used to have with the subject, and he doesn’t understand why he can’t leave the house anymore without wanting to stab everyone including himself.
“Don’t call me that!” Jason snaps one day, after months of tension building.
Bruce reels back, face marred with confusion, somehow startled out of his lecture. “What? Don’t call you--?”
The name hurts even worse the second time. Jason screams in frustration, not knowing why everything feels so fucking bad. Bruce never listens.
“Hey!” Bruce shouts, his voice bigger than everything in the room, even bigger than Jason’s scream. “Tell me what you mean.”
“I mean don’t call me that!” Jason roars back, voice skipping and cutting out as it passes through his throat. He covers his ears with his hands and screams again as his overwhelming surge of something makes it too hard to think of individual words.
Bruce grabs onto one of his wrists and pries it away from his ear. He’s trying to force Jason to listen as he growls, “Don’t call you what? Your name? Or Robin ? Because your behavior’s starting to tell me you don’t want to be called either of those anymore.”
“I don’t want to be your shitty Robin!” Jason yells, because he doesn’t. He hates getting yelled at for killing someone who he recognizes more for their touchy-feely hands than for their face. He hates that stupid fucking leotard that leaves his thighs exposed. He hates hearing, every fucking night, about how Dick was soooo much better at everything, because Dick was the son Bruce dreamed of and Jason’s just a pale shadow of a replacement.
Bruce has stopped, staring at Jason in only a moment of shock.
“Yeah,” Jason says, doubling down now that he’s found a gap in Bruce’s armor. Jason is crying angry tears, like he always does when Bruce grabs him with this bruising grip, because he hates being touched like this and Bruce is supposed to know that. “I fucking hate you, and I hate being Robin, and don’t fucking call me that anymore!”
In the new silence in the room, Jason wrenches out of Bruce’s grip and stumbles back and picks up his backpack. Before Bruce can say anything, Jason sprints out of the room and runs until he doesn’t recognize the street names.
Jason only stays with Dick in New York for a couple months before he can’t stand it anymore. Being Robin feels marginally better out here in Jump City, where he doesn’t have Gothamites referring to him as the girl Robin, and where he can follow Kory and Roy around starry-eyed without exasperated sideways glances from Bruce.
Being angry makes him so tired. It only surges every once in a while, now that he’s not fighting with his dad every day, but Jason will blow up and then have to crash and hide in his room until he can be sure he won’t angry cry in front of anyone. It’s been getting worse recently, surrounding the anniversary of his mom’s death, but nobody fucking cares and he doesn’t feel like telling anyone what’s going on until they care enough to ask.
Dick doesn’t get it. He understands needing to be far away from Bruce, but he doesn’t understand why Jason’s entire face flushes red with anger every time Dick calls Jason by his birth name. Jason’s been re-reading and re-re-reading The Iliad and he’s been having horrible comforting dreams where he’s hoisting the Golden Fleece over his head and beaming when people stare at him instead of whipping a gun out on them. Dick would never understand that.
One afternoon, when Jason’s begun seriously planning how to ditch the Titans, Kory finds Jason tucked into a far corner of the Tower. It’s been hard to convince himself to emerge. The Tower’s awkwardly silent in the wake of one of his fake-fights-turned-real-fights with Dick.
“Hey,” Kory says, and when she says Jason’s name it almost doesn’t make Jason recoil in disgust. She notices the change in his expression and her face softens before she crouches and sits on the carpet in front of him. “Sorry for that. What would you like me to call you?”
Jason hugs himself around the middle, pulling his book flat open against his stomach. “What?”
“You don’t like it when Richard calls you that, either.” Kory rests her cheek on her palm and raises her eyebrows. “So what can I call you?”
Jason stares at her, wide-eyed. She radiates calm and reassurance, and she’s the only person in the world who’s never gotten pissed off enough at Jason to yell at him. Kory’s been irritated with him, because everyone has, but she’s never risen to the bait just because Jason’s anger begged him to try and pick a fight by any means necessary.
Now, she’s defying expectations in a different way--she’s telling Jason that he can just suggest an alternative name, instead of continually feeling that same name like sandpaper on his skin. It’s not like Jason didn’t know that was an option, but he’s suspected for a while that ditching the name Catherine picked for him would be a betrayal. His birth name is one of the only things Jason has left of her.
Kory knows all the sordid details of the worst day of Jason’s life. She knows how Jason clings to scraps of what things were like before they went wrong. If she’s saying it’s okay, then…
“Jason,” Jason says, holding his book even closer out of the slight paranoia that she’ll notice what it is and make fun of him.
Kory’s smile glows brighter.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Jason says. He hates feeling scared, especially when he can’t summon any anger to compensate for it. It leaves him shaky and kind of cold. “I can’t have that name.”
“Why?”
“I mean, it’s a boy name.”
“Oh, I see,” Kory says, understanding sharpening her vision. “And you do not feel…like a boy?”
Jason’s wide eyed expression must tell her the answer to her question. His blood has frozen still in his arteries, and terror has stopped the air in his lungs. Does he? Does he feel like a boy?
“It’s alright,” Kory finally says, saving him from trying to make his shaky breathing into coherent words. “I’m sorry. That must have been a rude question.”
Jason can’t figure out how to tell her otherwise. He falls back into the safety net of letting Kory chalk it all up to an alien-human miscommunication, and after she leaves he sits there for three more hours trying to stop shivering with fear because her question won’t leave his mind.
Kory keeps secrets well. At least, Jason assumes she does, because when Jason claws his way out of his own grave, nails ripping themselves to pieces and topsoil crumbling in his mouth, his tombstone has the wrong name on it.
He drags his legs out of the dirt, finally wiggling free of his grave completely, and collapses in the mud in the rain, staring at the carved marble that commemorates his life. Jason sees BELOVED DAUGHTER written on his gravestone, and while he doubts Kory had any sort of input, both of the words used to describe him there seem so hilariously out-of-touch that he doubts anyone really missed him at all.
But he’s back, and he can’t live like he did the first time. When Talia finds him, he says, not caring if she decides to ditch him again, “My name’s Jason.”
She regards him, eyes much more understanding than Jason thought they would be. “This is the time to reinvent yourself, if you’re going to do it.”
“It’s not…reinventing.” Jason had been gearing up for this to be an argument, but she’s just accepting his statement at face value. He feels so overwhelmed that for a moment, he forgets about the lingering brutal crowbar damage that still makes it hard to walk. He sniffs. “What’s that smell?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that,” Talia says, shepherding him further down the stone path. The chemical smell in the air reminds Jason of the formaldehyde that preserved his body in the grave. “When I bring up reinvention…how far would you be willing to go?”
“How…far?” Jason asks. He thinks about the long dirt-nap dream he had of himself wearing the same uniform Dick did instead of a dumb altered version, of himself being a younger brother.
Talia looks at him with luminous green eyes, and offers him the world. She calls him Jason while she breaks the news of how little anything changed after he died. She calls him Jason even as she’s shoving him into the roiling green Pit from a story up.
Jason drowns in something that tastes like the inside of his coffin. Rage fills him, blinding and burning, but this isn’t the same anger as before his death. That had been because Jason was scared, confused, completely alone in what he was feeling. This new fury is because Jason deserved to have been loved, and he wasn’t, and now he’s strong enough to make everyone pay for that.
He resurfaces feeling stronger. Angrier, and taller, and something that’s definitely Jason and not whatever he had been before that warehouse blew up. For the first time since he desperately dug himself out of six feet of topsoil, Jason feels alive.
When he goes back to the graveyard, he smashes the headstone with a crowbar and watches it crumble into chunks of useless overpriced marble. His blood broils with energy and he smashes the crowbar down until both it and the tombstone are mangled beyond recognition.
“Are you in Gotham?” Talia asks when he gets her on the phone.
“They didn’t bury me in the family plot,” Jason says. He feels old anger puffing up his face with a red flush, and he hates that he still has the urge to start crying when he gets mad.
Talia is quiet for a moment. In the background, Jason hears the shriek of her seven-year-old son, who has been trying to tame buzzards out behind the compound for a couple weeks now.
“Your return will show him what a mistake he made by letting you go,” Talia reminds him.
Jason wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and nods even though she can’t see him. He uses her voice like a lifeline to pull himself from the worst of his green-tinged anger. It doesn’t make sense how she’s the only person who’s ever understood Jason, when she’s not any of the people who have ever claimed to love him.
“You’ve come so far,” Talia says, urging him back into motion.
“Yeah, I have,” Jason says. He looks at the crowbar in his hand and feels that formaldehyde smell filling up his sinuses and wonders when he’ll stop feeling like he’s being set on fire from the inside out.
Not sugarcoating anything--she never does, and Jason loves that about her--Talia has told him that the Pit turned him sort of feral. He’d taken out several guards on his way out, and hadn’t stopped until they’d shot him with several tranquilizer darts. She points out that he couldn’t have broken a solid block of marble without a superhuman magic boost, though Jason privately disagrees with her on that front.
He’s on the edge of being something inhuman. Judging by the way his eyes glow green, reflecting on the inside of his helmet, Talia’s right to be keeping an eye on his Pit madness. But at the same time, it’s not like his frequent bouts of unbearable anger are new. Now, they just work hand-in-hand with the magic in his veins, channeling into something powerful enough to keep Jason safe forever.
Jason has a firm hold on a territory boundary by the end of his first week. There are men who Batman hasn’t taken care of in the five years since they appeared on the scene, and Jason rips their heads off as a symbol, ending their reigns of terror in moments. There are drug traffickers who Jason remembers from his time running out on the streets, men who scared kids Jason knew into addictions they never recovered from--and Jason finds them all and leaves them in gory piles of their own intestines.
None of them recognize him. With the way the Pit changed Jason’s body, none of them ask if he’s the long-lost girl Robin. Jason could be any one of the hundreds of kids these people fucked over, and Jason loves being a terrifying urban legend. Not that any of this scum will live long enough to warn anyone themselves.
The intoxicating smell of viscerae is something that never fully washes out of his clothes. Jason rides the high of the Pit, learning to take comfort in that stench even when he’s driving a taser into a cyborg’s face and Batman’s shouting at him for killing, for breaking a rule that Jason’s always known is dumb as hell.
Batman’s yelling, and it breaks the spell that’s been over Jason, the spell that’s had him convinced he’s afraid of the man. He’s back from the dead. He doesn’t have to be scared when Bruce tries to shout him into submission. Jason’s already more effective in cleaning up Gotham than Batman’s been in over a decade--Jason has two hundred people working under him, over fifty evil people dead, and Batman has…what? A dead son whose name he never bothered to find out?
This reminder makes green light burn out the edges of Jason’s vision. But he didn’t come here to kill Batman. Batman hasn’t had a real chance to apologize yet, so Jason flexes self-restraint, breathes chemical-scented breath out until it’s not choking up his lungs, and he runs before Batman can drag him home.
“Have we met before?” the Joker asks, holding his bound hands up in front of him. “You seem awful familiar.”
Too many bad turns have occurred, to get Jason where he is now, for him to hold a pleasant conversation for more than a couple rounds. After a while, he’s silent and his crowbar is dripping with blood and he just keeps swinging it, slashing it down over and over and over until the green in his vision abates, replaced by memories instead. That horrible, horrible night is replaying in his head, and he keeps swinging until the Joker’s nearly as unrecognizable as his own tombstone, until the Joker isn’t laughing anymore.
Jason flings the man into a closet, and throws the crowbar in after him, hearing a satisfying thunk and groan. His boots leave red smudges on the floor as he goes to meet Batman, knowing full well that when he finds his father, this will be the first time in this body he’ll be called by the wrong name.
When he takes his helmet off, though, and it’s just him in his old mask, gun pointed at the Joker’s head, Batman just calls him Hood.
It almost makes Jason falter. Batman doesn’t use his name, he doesn’t even call him Robin. Sometime, in the past three years, maybe Batman’s realized something was always wrong with his name. But that’s not the immediate problem here.
“It’s him or me,” Jason says. He doesn’t immediately cry when he gets mad anymore--really, it would be inconvenient, given that the Pit makes him low-boil in rage all the time--but right now he feels, rising up his chest, that old familiar urge. “Just choose, or I will!”
Batman turns and walks away.
That old wound in Jason’s chest rips open. Joker’s too far gone to be fully aware of what’s happening; his words are rambling nonsense and Jason’s not concerned with him retaining anything that Jason says at this point.
“ I’ll kill him!” Jason shouts. “I’ll kill him and I’ll kill your baby bird next.”
Batman stops.
Something ugly and lonely that was there before the Pit starts to consume Jason from the inside out. Green turns into a watercolor blur as his eyes well up. Jason chokes out, “He’s the son you wanted, right? The son you never let me be. If you don’t choose right now, he’s the next on my list.”
Batman’s silence, his stillness, spurs Jason into action. Batman isn’t going to choose. And if he does choose, it won’t be Jason he saves. Jason should have learned his lesson the first time: Batman doesn’t save Jason. Jason saves Jason.
He lifts his gun and fires it at the back of his father’s head, but the next thing he knows, his hand is mangled, broken, and his gun has exploded into sharp pieces of metal.
Reeling, Jason staggers backwards, watching with crushing despair as Bruce proves every single one of Jason’s fears right. Bruce makes sure the Joker isn’t dead, comes to the defense of his new Robin, and then he sternly calls Jason by his old, dead name as he tells him to stop .
Jason lets the Pit bubble out of him in a scream. He presses the detonator, and hears the countdown start to reassure him that this nightmare will soon be over for a second time.
Batman tackles him right as the countdown reaches one. Jason claws at Batman’s face with his broken fingers, but when both of them are flung violently away from the blast, Batman’s still shielding Jason with his body.
When Jason wakes up, he’s in Arkham.
His cell has a door half a foot thick, with a tiny rectangular window that lets in sound from the hallway. The bed is a blanket laid down as a thin mattress on a metal slab, and the floors are grimy like they haven’t been cleaned in fifty years. Batman’s blood is still under his fingernails.
Damage from the explosion he was in keeps him from breaking out right away. Jason would be long gone if he didn’t feel like he’d been hit by a cement truck. He steels himself for a miserable recovery period, and that’s precisely what he gets.
The doctor who loops through to check on him condescendingly explains what’s happened: Batman threw him in here to rot because he’s a danger to himself and others. Jason accepts this explanation at face value and doesn’t ask for details. They would hurt too much to hear.
She keeps calling him by that old name, the one that should have died four years ago, and it predictably brings rage out of him. Even the padded walls of his cell aren’t enough to keep him from breaking two of his knuckles. They strap him to his bed until the Pit stops making his eyes glow green.
When the Joker gets out of intensive care, they put him in the cell next door.
Jason hears his laughter at odd hours of the day. It seeps into Jason’s nightmares, and when he’s awake, the sound sends him into fits of recalled memory that make it hard for him to breathe. Jason can’t pull himself out of the overwhelming rush of recollection on his own; usually, he just gets so exhausted or faint from hyperventilating that the problem fixes itself.
The doctor calls Jason by his deadname loud enough for the Joker to hear. After that, specific taunts and jokes join the laughter, and Jason doesn’t have the wherewithal to keep up banter. He’s so tired, and he’s so angry, and he wants to go home .
That thought should surprise him, maybe, but it doesn’t. Jason’s been aching for the quiet, the familiarity, the warmth of Bruce’s house since he left it.
“Are you really surprised that dear Daddy didn’t want you back?” Joker asks, voice somehow always carrying through the padded walls and reinforced doors. “I mean, jeez, I knew teenagers were a nightmare, but this is taking it to a whole new level.”
Jason is slumped against the wall, his head in his hands, begging for this to just be over. His burns and broken ribs and bruises are all healing much more slowly than he thought they would, and he doesn’t have a real plan for escape yet.
“I even tried the whole turning it on and off again trick, and you came back…worse,” Joker says. “Wanna try a second time?”
“Go to hell,” Jason croaks. He doubts the Joker can hear him, but his next-door-neighbor laughs anyway, filling Jason’s ears until he can’t even feel the padded wall behind his back anymore. It all feels and sounds like that warehouse floor, and the pool of his own blood.
Batman comes to visit.
Despite his exhaustion and the way he’s never fully able to pull himself out of a flashback before being plunged into another one, Jason isn’t broken enough to beg for Batman to let him out. He considers refusing the request for a visit, but instead takes it as the opportunity it is.
He waits until Batman sees him. He lets his dad see the full extent of what he did to Jason, lets him see just how fucked up Jason is, and then he unleashes the pent-up energy that the Pit has been begging him to expend for weeks now.
Jason kills one of the guards escorting him with his own gun. He slashes the throat of the other, sending an arterial spray up over the glass divide between him and Batman, and the Pit gives him the strength to smash through the Plexiglass window and bend the bars out of the way. He turns, dripping with blood, to where Batman is attempting to smash through the divider.
“Those deaths are on you, ” Jason says, pointing at the two bodies. His voice is rough and hoarse, nearly rivaling Batman’s own, and that realization makes the Pit gleam with delight.
Batman’s fist cracks the glass, spiderwebbing a small circle into it.
“Don’t ever fucking come near me again,” Jason says. His voice betrays him. A tiny quaver tells Batman that Jason’s still the same stupid angry kid, the one whose entire life and death were Bruce’s greatest failure. Jason turns on his heel without letting himself see how Batman reacts, and he throws himself out the window.
Once he’s back in familiar territory, he takes the chance to get back in touch with Talia to let her know in a casual text to remotely destroy the old phone that Bruce must have confiscated. Then he finds his own bike, left discarded back by the exploded warehouse, and he takes that back on the road to go upstate.
Talia calls him when he’s just reached Blüdhaven.
“You’re alive,” she says.
Jason can’t read either disappointment or relief in her tone. He doesn’t know which one he’s feeling, either. “Guess which one he chose.”
“He chose wrong,” Talia says, “because he’s a fool.”
“You knew he wouldn’t do it,” Jason accuses.
“Of course not. But you had to see that for yourself. You’d never believe me.”
Jason wouldn’t have. He wanted Bruce to love him so badly, but this betrayal was one that had to be done to his face.
“Are you going after the bird, now?”
“I’m headed that way,” Jason says. “I’ll call you when it’s finished.”
“Don’t let me down,” Talia says, in that way that suggests she has plans operating outside of Jason’s understanding, ones that he won’t be aware of until it’s too late.
Jason hangs up and keeps driving, using the meditative sound of the road to keep the Pit from overtaking him while he’s operating a motor vehicle.
Upon reaching one of his old neglected safehouses and finding a replacement for the helmet he lost, Jason drinks one of the vials of Pit water that Talia sent him, smashes the glass on the ground, and drives to Jump City. No time like the present for the next step of his plan to ruin Batman’s life. If he crashes from his high of escaping Arkham, it could be a week before he can get out of bed again. Today’s the day.
The Tower has deactivated all of his access codes. Following his threat on Robin's life, it’s what he expected. This only slows Jason down about twenty seconds, though. He’s powering down the Tower and immobilizing most of the team and slipping into the Hall of Heroes before any of the Titans can even think about stopping him.
He looks around for just a moment, and his suspicions are confirmed: they didn’t memorialize him at all. The few months he’d spent here, a confusing and complicated respite, a rose-colored memory of Kory and Roy caring about him, a time spent as part of a real team --it was nothing to them.
Jason prowls the halls, listening to the mechanical clanks of the ventilation system and the utter dead silence and the memories that keep looping through his ears. He’s silent but his approach is still noted by the new Robin--when Jason turns a corner quickly enough, he sees the kid skittering through the door to the stairwell.
Hunting like this brings a high more acute than Jason’s experienced since he woke up. Even when he was beating the Joker within an inch of his life, Jason didn’t feel like this--all of his nerve endings are alight, his vision has sharpened, his heart is racing.
This Robin is a little bit older than Jason was when Jason took up the mantle for the first time, but he clearly has no idea how real fights are supposed to work. He understands the principles, but he’s tiny and fragile and Jason knew that Tim Drake was a silver-spoon baby but this is fucking ridiculous.
Something in him--the part influenced by Dick, no doubt--tells him that this kid never did anything to hurt Jason specifically. Jason’s real quarrel is with Batman. But there was never a chance for Jason to be talked down from this. At every turn, he’s shown that Tim is everything Jason wasn’t. Everything Jason couldn’t have been.
“What gives you the right to steal this title?” Jason asks, low and dangerous, as he blocks the kid’s swings with practiced ease. They’re almost robotically delivered, as though the kid has absorbed Batman’s training routines and can replicate them on command, adjusting them a little but not enough to get past Jason.
“I didn’t steal anything,” Tim says, stubbornly continuing to try to stab Jason. His nose is bleeding, as is a cut above his eyebrow. “I was just trying to help. ”
“God, of course-- my bad. ” Jason grabs onto the kid’s wrist, prying the knife out from between his fingers, relishing in the involuntary squeak the kid makes at the pain. “At least when I was in the fucking ground I didn’t have to deal with rich assholes thinking they were helping all the time.”
“Batman needs Robin,” Tim says, like he’s been saying this entire time, over and over. By now, he’s hiccuping around the pain that’s stealing his breath away. He’s doing a remarkable job of staying on his feet, sure, but they both know Jason could kill him where he stands at any moment. “He needed a--”
“Batman needed a son, right?” Jason demands. “That’s what you were going to say?” Seething with renewed anger, Jason twists the kid’s arm behind his back, yanking high enough to snap that elbow. The sound is clean, and the cry that comes afterwards is just as satisfying. “While you were at your little golf tournaments growing up, I was sleeping on the fucking street. I was learning how to fight the hard way, not just stealing time from a grieving asshole who cares less about his children than a stupid rule that nobody makes him keep except him. I’m so much more than you’ll ever be, and I did it all on my own. Do you get it?”
He shoves Tim, and the kid’s too woozy to stay on his feet. He hits the ground flat on his back, his cracked ribs forcing a broken wheeze out of his lungs. It’s music to Jason’s ears.
“I said , do you get it?” Jason demands.
Tim tries to roll onto his side, but his seemingly infinite ability to keep getting up has been drained. He plants his palm on the kitchen tile and fails to sit up.
Jason steps on his chest and presses him back down.
Tim coughs feebly. They’ve been shouting at each other for a while now; blood loss is likely starting to be a factor. Tim blinks his eyes clear and, summoning the moxy that Jason thought had been beaten out of him by now, says, “You were a shitty Robin anyway.”
Without another moment’s hesitation, Jason reaches down and slices Tim’s throat open.
In a new haze of green, Jason paints up the walls with the sticky red coating his hands. When he slams his open palm into the wall, leaving a satisfyingly dramatic handprint to punctuate his JASON TODD WAS HERE, he hopes for everyone else’s sake that they learn their lesson about what his goddamn name is.
With the clipping of the new Robin’s wings, Jason thinks he’s made it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with Batman or anyone who thinks he’s worth listening to.
Though, he’s always known Nightwing is a total idiot. Jason should have anticipated that Nightwing would ignore all warning signs--including a baby bird in intensive care--and come asking for Jason’s help on a case anyway. He tracks Jason down and corners him in the dead of night, asking with pleases and thank yous. Jason severely doubts Nightwing would be bothering if Jason wasn’t the only person who could help in this particular area of expertise.
“I’m not gonna kill someone just because you asked nicely,” Jason says, cocking the gun in his hands, and he aims it right between Nightwing’s eyes. “Now, are you gonna be a big kid about this?”
“Am I--?” Nightwing sputters.
Jason pulls the trigger.
He’s running before he can see the look on Nightwing’s face as he dodges the bullet. None of them ever thinks he’ll have the guts to fire at them.
Well, none of them except the little boy that’s running around in Jason’s clothes, play-acting the second act of a tragedy that should have ended years ago. That kid had shied from the barrel of Jason’s gun every time. He should’ve been more worried about Jason’s knife.
His tires scream on the pavement as he whips the motorcycle out of its parking spot. With the soles of his feet still ringing with the residual impact of his leap off the roof, Jason tilts the bike into the deepest turn he’s ever pulled off and takes off into the night at full speed.
“Hey, wait!” Nightwing shouts after him, and seconds later, Jason hears another motorcycle taking off after him.
Their chase is short-lived. Jason’s out of it, he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him this week. Either way, Nightwing tricks him into taking a wrong turn, leading him down a street where the pavement is all broken up in remnants of an explosion, and then Nightwing cuts him off and forces Jason into a nasty swerve that throws him from his bike entirely.
Jason hits the ground rolling, tumbling at least ten feet before he comes to a stop in an aching pile. He hears his motorcycle wipe out in a shower of sparks, the wheels still turning, and it’s only dumb luck that keeps him from getting hit by it as it skids to a halt.
Catching his breath, Jason peels himself off the pavement. Nightwing screeches to a halt, already swinging his leg off the seat of his bike and running over.
“Get…away from me,” Jason grunts, pretty sure that every single one of his ribs is bruised.
“ Listen,” Nightwing says, and stops a few feet away, hands up. “I just want to understand. Okay? Can we talk?”
It’s about five years too late. Jason sits back on his heels, patting at the side of his helmet to feel the extent of the enormous scrape that’s ground down the surface of it. Ugh, he’s going to have to replace it again. “I already told you I’m not interested.”
“Can you just tell me what happened with you and B?” Nightwing asks. His hands are still up, like a shitty goalie not sure where the ball’s coming from. He’s not sure if he’s going to be able to stop Jason, and that makes Jason smile. “He won’t talk about it, but I know it was bad.”
“Maybe it’s none of your business,” Jason says. He gets to his feet.
“Jason,” Nightwing says, “ please.”
Jason stops dead. He doesn’t think he could move if he tried. For the first time in weeks, he feels the Pit drain away and when he inhales, he doesn’t smell formaldehyde. He wants to be angry that Kory broke her promise not to tell anyone--or Talia broke her promise, maybe (did he make Talia promise anything)? But he’s caught up in feeling like Dick’s just swept him up in a hug after a mission gone right, like Bruce is giving them a fond glare as they all fight viciously for who gets to pick the movie for movie night.
Nightwing takes a step closer. When Jason isn’t able to run, Nightwing keeps approaching.
“Who told you that name?” Jason asks, voice cracking. If this is a ploy of Bruce’s to lure Jason into being captured and shipped back to Arkham, it’s a devastating and underhanded one.
“You painted it up in the Tower, moron,” Nightwing says. “I realized that you came back…different, and I never asked what your name is now. I should’ve.”
“This was my name before I died, too,” Jason snarls, scrabbling for the remnants of his composure. “I didn’t come back that different.”
Nightwing says, “I’m sorry.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Jay, what happened? You disappeared for months, and then you showed up and tried to kill my baby brother--!”
Jason’s vision goes violent green as the Pit comes out of nowhere. Jason wants to kill Nightwing, actually. He’s surprised at how quickly he flips from feeling devastated and small to pulling a knife from his belt and swiping it out, forcing Nightwing to leap back.
“Your baby brother?” Jason screams. He swings again, too fast for his brother, carving a shallow line across his torso. Nightwing starts taking Jason’s threats of violence a little more seriously, after that. Jason pursues Nightwing closely as the latter starts to dodge with more concern dawning on his face. “You’d think you would fucking learn after losing the first one!”
“Learn--?”
“If you loved him at all you wouldn’t let him keep running around with--with someone who NEVER CARED.”
Through the green tint to his vision, he sees that Nightwing has his escrima sticks out now and he’s frantically parrying Jason’s jabs. “B cares. He was a wreck after you died, he’s--”
It’s the same shit that the new model of Robin was saying. Jason keeps pressing, forcing Nightwing into a retreat towards the main road, where cars are zipping past. He sees desperation in how Nightwing’s attacks start coming faster, but Jason’s too high on this visceral anger to leave any weak spots open. There’s something glorious about getting confirmation that he’s much stronger than Nightwing thought he’d be.
“If he cared, if he ever cared, ” Jason hisses, “he wouldn’t’ve thrown me into Arkham to rot. ”
Nightwing falters. He stops, shocked, and Jason stabs him between two ribs. Not fatally, just enough to tell his brother to never come near him again.
“He…?” Nightwing asks, voice small, not just because of the knife in his gut.
Jason wants to twist the knife, but that would do serious organ damage and the look on Nightwing’s face says he had no idea what Bruce did. He settles for twisting the proverbial knife, and he leans in and he says, “You think he wants me to get better? I spent two months next door to the Joker, and I was never sick in the first place.”
“He said Talia told him the Pit was making you crazy,” Nightwing says, one of his hands grabbing Jason’s wrist, holding on like Jason’s going to disappear if he lets go. He’s holding up remarkably well, for the amount of blood seeping out around the edges of the knife. “She said you came back different, and--we didn’t know how much was really you, and how much was the magic.”
They want Jason’s anger to be explained away. It would make it so much simpler for them if Jason had no real reason to be angry. If it was all magic turning the memory of their beloved little girl into the monster they see now, maybe that would make Jason into enough of a bogeyman for them to be fine with putting him down.
In a way, it answers Jason’s question. He’s always wanted to know if anyone would still love him, love Jason, even if they knew how despicable he can become.
And the answer, as he’s known all along, is a resounding no.
“It’s all me,” Jason says. He and Nightwing are so close to the main road now. “It’s all me, Dickface.”
Before Nightwing can attempt any wide-eyed that isn’t true bullshit, Jason breaks Nightwing’s grip on him, yanks the knife out of his torso, and shoves him out in front of an oncoming truck. There’s plenty of time for Nightwing to dodge out of the way, and Jason can’t be here anymore.
Talia isn’t outwardly warm, but over the year since Jason rose from the grave, he’s detected that she has a growing feeling of investment in Jason remaining alive. If she didn’t, in some small way, care about him, she wouldn’t pick up whenever Jason calls.
But something is different in her voice when she checks in on him this morning. Her call wakes him up at four, right after he’s fallen asleep post-patrol, but the icy edge to her voice immediately puts him on high alert.
“You failed,” is her greeting.
Jason pushes himself upright in bed, biting back a groan when his stitched-together bullet wounds all protest in unison. “Well, good morning to you too, Big T--”
“No. Don’t try that with me.” Talia’s seething. “I gave you everything you needed and you failed me.”
Jason was never going to outright murder the kid. He knew that it would hurt far, far worse for Tim to be unable to work or go out as Robin, and Tim’s continued injured existence would remind Batman of his own failure. It’s a remarkable show of restraint, really, that Jason had managed to get Tim so close to death without losing control and sealing the deal.
So maybe he’d promised Talia he’d murder Tim. She should've known better than to believe him; Jason doesn’t kill kids. Batman does enough of that on his own.
Talia says, “I was the only person who still had faith in you. How many more bridges do you think you can afford to burn, Jason Todd?”
Jason flops back down in bed and hangs up without responding. She doesn’t call again.
Without Talia, Jason’s bridges are, in fact, down to zero.
Maybe a half a bridge, if Jason counts Nightwing’s incessant attempts to get in touch with him. Whenever Jason entertains the possibility of reconciliation with his older brother, though, he gets swept up in grief and anger and an intense, acidic longing for how things used to be that makes Jason want to electrocute himself.
After his oldest, safest safehouse is compromised one night a month later, Jason’s out in the middle of Gotham on his motorcycle. He’s losing blood and one of his kneecaps is fucked up and he thinks one of his shoulders is dislocated, and it suddenly becomes so much more clear that he’s absolutely alone and it isn’t as sustainable as he wanted it to be.
Even putting aside the unexpected home invasion and subsequent brawl, it’s a bad night. Over time, Jason has been having fewer episodes of the Pit taking over, and the emptiness it’s leaving behind isn’t something Jason’s comfortable with. He knows he has a genetic predisposition to addiction--which he’s not completely avoiding, considering the two packs of cigarettes he goes through a week--but Jason just hasn’t realized until now just how much he’d been seeking out anything that could awaken that fury inside of him.
Without it, he feels lost, and it leaves vulnerabilities that let guilt and doubt creep in. Jason craves a feeling of security, no matter how many times he’s had that feeling ripped away from him. And he has to create that security himself, or it’ll just feel like being caged in Arkham again.
Being out in Gotham, fending for himself, brings such sharp déjà-vu that Jason finds himself checking alleys for cars that would be all-too-easy to steal hubcaps off of, like Jason needs cash for a place to stay again. In the current day, Jason just needs to remember the nearest empty apartment he owns, but his brain is stuck somewhere between present and past, unable to disentangle the two.
He sees himself in torn clothes, curled up on a bench to sleep. He sees himself running, leaping down the steps to the subway, trying to forget the sight of someone slumped over, a needle in her arm, no longer around to give him empty promises that things will get better. He sees himself pouncing on a sleek, shiny Batmobile parked in the dumbest possible spot, left unguarded.
It gets to the point where Jason can’t drive anymore. He swerves into a parking lot that feels familiar and his feet take him on autopilot up the stairs of a building whose address he has memorized. Jason knocks on a door, feeling the raw itch of just needing one single lucky break to get through the night.
The door opens and there’s an arrow threatening him, inches from the front of his helmet. Jason’s confused gaze latches onto the familiar design of the arrowhead, and that becomes a lifeline to cling to.
Next to Roy, Kory’s braced for an altercation, too.
“It’s me,” Jason says, almost begging Kory to remember. He doesn’t think he could drive anywhere else tonight if he tried. “Jason.”
Being held at arrow-point shouldn’t feel like a love language. Jason remembers what it was like when he was loved, though, and this is something close to it.
Kory’s confusion abates almost immediately, and her mouth falls open. A rush of longing and hope and everything else he hasn’t felt since Talia first called him Jason-- all of that hits at once, almost buckling Jason’s knees. Kory's hand lands on Roy’s arm and clamps there hard enough for Roy to wince and ask, “Ow, what? Who is he?”
“Robin,” Kory says, like Roy is stupid.
Jason stands there, paranoia still itching at his back, which is still turned out to the open street. He feels exposed as Roy’s eyes look Jason over, widening with delayed realization. The arrow lowers, no longer threatening to embed itself between Jason’s eyebrows.
For a moment, all three of them are silent. Jason watches them take him in, all his battle-scraped clothes and the fact that he’s carrying two hundred percent more guns than Batman’s carried in his life. It’s the worst kind of vulnerability--few things from Jason’s previous life have such a rose-colored tint as the way he hero-worshiped Roy and Kory, and he doesn’t want that illusion completely shattered just because Roy finally figured out what gave Jason such a short fuse when Ollie called him Robinette.
Instead of anything that would put Jason into a Pit-induced psychological break, though, Roy’s gaze on Jason has taken on something approaching reverent awe. Both of them must know what Red Hood’s been up to, but he doesn’t see any kind of disgust in their eyes. Roy and Kory are both almost glowing with excitement, even though they’re taking in a hulking form that’s so opposite of what Jason was when they last saw him.
Roy eventually says, “You got tall, Robbie.”
Jason takes his helmet off so there’s no longer a barrier between his face and theirs. He barely remembers how to smile anymore, but he pushes the corners of his mouth up. The sensation of a boot pressing down on his chest lessens by just a couple degrees of pressure. “It’s Red Hood now. Didn’t you hear that B made some fifth-grader Robin after I kicked it?”
“That motherfucker,” Roy says immediately.
“Jason,” Kory says over Roy, pronouncing his name with so much care, “come inside.”
Jason obeys, unprepared for the fact that he’s starting to feel like he’s fourteen and falling apart again. And his name, god. It’s so good to hear it from someone who isn’t using it just as a way to endear themselves to him.
Jason moves one heavy foot forward. Kory takes his hand and pulls him all the way forward, into hers and Roy’s home, without Jason even having to ask if he’s welcome there anymore.