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YOU ARE HOLDING a gun to your murderer's head and looking at your father. this is an ultimatum, but between the tears and your eyes and the strain in your voice you think you might be begging. you look at him and say, please choose me. please choose me over your mission, your beliefs, yourself. prove to me that you love me enough to destroy yourself, because i would destroy myself for you.
and he is your father, and he loves you, and that won't be enough.
(you do not know it but he fell apart without you. he drowned himself in his mission and lashed out in his hurt and he hoped in the passive quiet way that one day he would go out there, gotham's dark knight, and not come back.)
there was a moment where, to your father, an international disaster and the threat of a global war mattered less than the fact that you were dead and your murderer was not. when he jumped from that helicopter and watched your murderer fall into the ocean it was him trying to do exactly what you came back gasping and alive and furious at him for not doing.
it does not matter, because your murderer lives.
because your father fell apart and broke and almost destroyed himself, but he found other people to hold him back and say, this is not you. he has built himself something more than what he once had with you. he is still a broken broken thing, he is still changed, irrevocable, but he does not need you anymore.
because it has been years since your murder and the helicopter, years where your murderer yet lived, years where your father has looked at your murderer and dreamed of killing him and decided, no, i will not. i am strong enough to refuse.
you are holding a gun to your murderer's head and looking at your father. your father has just failed a girl in the same way he failed you, and in the wake of her death, in the wake of the gang war and the destruction of the clocktower and a contingency plan that has gone oh so very wrong and everything else, the things he has built since your death are falling apart.
that is why he is here alone with you.
he has lost everything but he has his mission. he has always had his mission. it is the one thing he cannot lose.
(he has lost you once already.)
please choose me, you beg, but when you ran away to seek out your birth mother, he knew what you were doing and he did not follow, because an enemy he gained in his crusade (the man who was not yet your murderer) had a bomb he needed to stop. it was more important than you.
you met each other later but it was purely by coincidence. when your murderer was waiting in the warehouse with your mother and the trucks were driving away filled with boxes that would kill innocents, he went after the trucks instead of staying with you. they were more important than you.
please choose me, you say, but he has made this decision before. he rejects having the choices placed before him once more, but if there is one thing you did right today it is that you have forced his hand.
his answer is the same.
IN THE MEANTIME, your brother is dead or dying across the bay. your father rushes away to save him, and in that he did not arrive too late. your brother has been struggling for the past six months. six months ago, he stood aside and let someone who has been ruining his life die.
your father tells your brother that there is a difference between watching someone die and killing them with your own hands.
you are dead by your father's hands and your murderer lives and breathes and continues to laugh because your father refused to stand by and watch him die.
.
HERE IS A secret: your father loves your brother more than anything else.
admittedly, it takes you much longer than it should to figure this out.
your brother was the first and the brightest and he wore the yellow cape as your father's partner instead of his son. (your father brought you home because he saw you and missed your brother.)
the first time you faced your father after your death, (faced him, truly, instead of hiding away curled around a detonator you couldn't push yourself to press,) he assumed you a simulacrum, a pretender, modeled after your brother's movements.
(after your first death, your brother's costume is suspended in a glass case. no one ever thinks to take it down. it has been somewhere between four and forty years and there it remains; a taxidermy.)
that night when your brother's city was a smoke-furl fungus gorging itself on the irradiated dead, your father left you blood-sticky in rubble of your own making and rushed to save your brother from his self-destruction. again and again and again your father looks at you and thinks of your brother instead.
when your brother is shot in the head and forgets who he is, your father seeks out the sniper, a mercenary doing what he was paid to do. your father leaves him paralyzed with a broken neck in the snow. this is the kind of thing that leaves someone dead.
(he does not die of course. your father's legacy cannot be stained. convenient. convenient like your murderer bleeding out in a helicopter that spiraled into the ocean only to show up perfectly intact however long later.)
there is another time earlier than that, where, for a while, you think your brother was dead. he was, but his death is one of those stutter-stop ones, where the heart stills but for a moment. when he returns, when he reveals the temporality of his death, you are furious. he lied to you. he lied to the rest of his family, he deceived you all and left you to grieve.
your father knew.
the truth is painted bright and stark, in retrospect, incandescent and undeniable. your father will leave a man to die, cold and unmoving in snow-hushed decay, simply because your brother is grievously injured. if your brother were to die, to truly die, no one in the world would be safe from the vengeance your father would wrought.
your father loves your brother enough to destroy himself. this is something you have always known. of course your brother was not truly dead.
you yearn for that devotion. the ache only worsens with time.
.
YOU FALL APART when your father dies.
well. it's a little more complicated than that. you get wrapped up in a crisis much larger than you are. the stewards of the multiverse want you dead. you jump between half a hundred worlds on a hunt for a man who can fix everything that's wrong.
you are working with people who hate or don't trust you and you tell yourself you don't like them either, but you are tantalus, reaching up to fertile boughs and leaning down for a soothing sip, grasping for that taste of what you used to be. saving people. helping. the things heroes do.
then.
near the end, you meet your father, what he would have been if he had killed your murderer. when you meet he points a gun at your head for stealing the face of his son. his world is safe and perfect but he is lonely and embittered and miserable.
let the world burn, he says. it is safer to wait until the dust is settled before taking it back. his son is dead. you are dead. he is dead too because he has lost the core of who he is. you tell him as much.
you remind him what it means to be a hero. you wear the clothes of his dead son (you are his son) and insist that you are still here. you are disappointed. you are enthralled.
you watch him die.
you know what it means to be a hero. you remember why you rejected it now.
you come back to your city to find that your father, the one that carved a line across your throat, is missing. is gone. is dead. (is not dead, but you don't know that yet.)
there is a child who wore your clothes after you died. he gives you a chance because he is convinced that is what your father would have wanted for you, shares the message your father left you.
you learn what it is like to break.
(perhaps not, because as your father says, you were already broken, a thing that came into his life already dirtied and mangled that he thought he could fix. he tells you to stop and get help. so you cannot be breaking now because you were always broken and there are only so many pieces one person can shatter into and he calls you his biggest failure and you used those words yourself, once—batman's greatest failure—and he is dead you watched him die he died while you were gone dallying around in other worlds and you have always been broken—)
(you make a lot of mistakes. you scrape yourself back together, eventually.)
.
SOMETIME AFTER CRAWLING out of your grave and bleeding out in a room with your murderers and a thousand other acts of violence, it blends into a smear where the details don't matter anymore beyond the fact you are estranged and the bitter taste of regret on your tongue.
you find yourself in a distant, wobbly orbit around your father.
one day, you swoop close to the event horizon, after your murderer comes back intent on ruining your life anew. in the aftermath, your father tells you you are good, that you always have been, that you have been the one to mold yourself into who you are today, not anyone else. when you fracture at the edges he is there to hold you close. you fall easy into the embrace.
and one day, he asks for your help.
it is the mission again. that is okay. you help him, you stop the assassins that were willing to kill a child (his blood son) and in the aftermath you find yourself glad, maybe, to be working alongside him again. trust and faith.
he brings you to the place you died the first time. he tells you to remember. remember how you died because then perhaps you will remember how you came back, because his son is dead and he wants him back. if you came back surely he can find out how to bring his son back, too.
he could have asked. you would have said yes. or maybe you wouldn't have but you don't know because he didn't ask.
instead you are here, and you are in pain and fighting him and he goads you and you throw the first punch because what else can you do in a place tasting so heavily of betrayal. trust and faith and this is what he twists it into. you died here.
you died here.
your mother stood here and let smoke trail from her fingers and beckoned you in and your murderer stood here and beat you with rusting metal to the rhythm of his laughter and the crack of your bones and the numbers flickered red-bright as they counted down too quickly as time bled through your delirious mind and your mother's soft hands guided you to the locked door and the satin-soft dark of waking up after you should be dead.
and all you can think is that he did not do this for you. he did not fight the world and demand it bring you back.
(you do not know that he thought about it. that he thought about steeping you in the molten-gold that gave you back your mind after you crawled out of your grave. he wanted to do it himself but he was afraid you would not come back right, so instead he settled delirious in grief.)
(the rules of the world are different now, after all; death was more permanent then.)
you leave him there. (you run away and forget.) you let him wallow in all he would sacrifice for his son.
for his son, but not for you.
.
YOU ARE HOME. in the city that is your father's and is yours.
you shoot the mayor in the head to free him from mind control and your father tracks you down and you talk it out and he agrees to trust you. this works, for a while. you are free to operate, free to run through the plans that you love making, to do for your city what you know is right.
then when you reshuffle your plans and shoot another man in the head your father tracks you down and beats you into the ground, and when your friends save you only to be dragged away through some dimensional door, he tracks you down again and very nearly kills you.
he tears his symbol from your chest and grips you by the shattered edge of your helmet and tells you you are not welcome in your home, in the city that is your father's and is yours. it is deeply predictable. perhaps he would have killed you, if your best friend hadn't appeared like an angel from red mist and spirited you away.
(when you pressed down on the gun's trigger and scattered shards of monocle into brain matter with the force of the blank, you said you were your father's son. you weren't talking about gotham's dark knight.)
it takes you over a month until you can stand again and your hands remain too shaky to shoot. so when your best friend leaves, intent on getting better, you switch to a crowbar and a costume that leaves your arms bare and you kill and maim and scour your way bloody through the countryside.
your father finds you again and says your best friend is dead, and oh, no, you can't come back to the city that is your father's and is no longer yours. then, with his hands on your shoulders pulling you into a hug, he tells you that he cares about you but sometimes you need to be hit.
surely you understand.
(here is the part where your brother forgets. here is the part where your grandfather dies, and you are not invited to the funeral. here is the part where you come back to your city, anyway.)
.
SOMETHING ABOUT ORBITS and gravitational wells: eventually you come back around. you kill someone in your father's city again and somehow this fixes instead of breaking things.
(it is a child that protects you from your father's wrath, and it is the child of the man you murdered, and you are lying to him about what happened to his father, just like your father lied to you about the man that first raised you, and isn't that funny.)
you put down the guns again, though you don't remember when you picked them back up. your father gives you a box containing a helmet shaped like the one he shattered off your face not very long ago at all.
then he shuffles you away on some undercover mission with the government, one that you accept easily, where you are surrounded with dead men and monsters. and death is something of a joke now, staved off with little glowing green pills.
(you refuse to let the scientists use them on you. but when you flatline on the operating table after a newly-revived still-dead man shoots you through the spine, they bring you back anyway. they lie to you, after. you never find out.)
things go wrong, as things tend to do, (you kill the man who killed your grandfather) and you need more of that glowing green and your father comes to find you and he's back to telling you you are his fault and his thing to fix. the fighting is more than familiar, by now.
he wanted you to stand down, to stop and back out, but he is the one who put you in this position with this team of dead men and monsters and you insist you will see it through.
so you dive back in without backup, because your father and by extension the rest of his family don't trust you, and won't help you, so you trick them and turn tail and run. the way it ends, as it always seems to, is with an explosion. in the rubble you are very nearly (betrayed and) shot and killed all over again.
.
YOUR FATHER HAS you gasping for breath with a chest that refuses to expand and a body that would be paralyzed if it wasn't shaking so hard. he says i love you. you cannot remember the last time he told you this. you think it was probably before the first time you died, but you cannot remember if he ever said it to you then, either.
he says, i am doing this for you. i am destroying you to save you from yourself. he says, i love you enough to destroy you.
later, you learn that it was not truly your father saying this. you will forgive him for pulling you off your bike with a grapple line and cracking your skull open on the pavement and pulling your brain out, scraping off the myelin wrapping the axons of your neurons and rewiring your synapses so you are left unable to stand, unable to run, curled around a child in a burning building and drowning in the dread of knowing you are not enough to save her.
hoping against hope that she will live because you are scared and your murderer (a man with delusions of being your murderer) is here now and he promises to fix you.
later, you learn it was not truly your father saying this. somehow, that is worse.
in the meantime, you drag yourself up and seat yourself in a plane. and you're still shaking and you aren't quite capable of shaping all the words you want to say in your mouth, but a long time ago you learned how to operate every vehicle there was under the sun and your teacher showed you how to be calm.
you can't be calm now, but it is enough. you aim the plane at the asteroid and you stutter your way through your goodbyes.
your father is devastated in the ruins. (it isn't about you—he thinks his lover died, the lover whose conflict with him is responsible for much of this mess in the first place.) you are the one paralyzed by fear and scraping the broken pieces of yourself out of the wreck of the plane and your own mind. you are the one that extends a comforting hand.
HE FINDS YOU alone before the final showdown and he explains his plan, and it involves him dying but he is needed alive. it is such a glaringly obvious flaw that it can't be anything other than intentional, but you play along anyway. you know what your part is, in all this. you know what you are willing to sacrifice for his sake.
maybe. you aren't certain what the limit is. you don't know if you will ever find it.
you walk out there and die for him.
(his family has a reunion, after all this. maybe your invite got lost in the mail.)
.
YOU ARE BEATEN with a crowbar and blow up in a warehouse. you bleed out from a slit throat in a condemned apartment building before it explodes. you die and are brought back and you don't ever realize that it happened. you fly a plane into a meteor. you crash a blimp into a train filled with flammable, toxic chemicals on a bridge. you let your father's corrupted contingency kill you.
i would have destroyed myself for you, you told him somewhere between two and twenty years ago, or perhaps it didn't happen at all, but you continue to die because of him, for him, by his hand.
you die you die you die you die you die and you quietly hope that one day you will stay that way.
.
.
.
HERE IS A secret: tucked away in a secret room in a secret city, hidden by magic between icy mountain peaks, is a little bald man, millennia old. he holds your most cherished memory.
you are robin, in this memory. you are sick. your father looks at gotham, who needs her dark knight, and thinks of you, curled up upstairs with a sore throat and a sniffling nose.
he is still wearing the bat when he comes upstairs, when he tucks the blanket around you and turns on a comforting movie, when he brings you popcorn and steaming hot chocolate and lets you rest your head on his shoulder.
outside the window, gotham lives on.
is it better? not remembering the one time he chose you?
(does it matter? you keep coming back to him, regardless.)