Chapter Text
Jason’s chest hurts. He can’t breathe. There are hands on him, fingers hooking into his helmet, at the clasps of his armor, and there are voices but they don’t sound right, and the Bats know better than to try to take his helmet off—
There are strangers peeling his body armor off layer by layer. They’re talking in clinical tones and there are too many hands and Jason can’t breathe, can barely think. All he can taste is blood and grave dirt and they’re tugging at his helmet wrong, they can’t find the catches—
Jason can’t see, can’t move, can’t remember how he got here. There’s a fog in his head that he wants to fight, wants it almost more than he wants these people to stop touching him.
“Interesting,” One of the voices says. It’s accented, heavily, and Jason should know what it is, what it means, but he can’t breathe, much less think—
There’s a sharp pain in his arm that Jason knows means syringe. It makes him angry. It makes him so angry that he can see green crowding around the edges of his vision when he can’t even actually see anything.
And then there’s nothing.
—
The table they put him on is cold, but the hand that traces the scar across his throat is even colder. Jason shudders, the most movement he can manage, and someone laughs. They talk to him. Not English, but it’s a language Jason should know— does know—and it takes a minute for him to unscramble his head enough to recognize it as German.
The man is saying something about luck. How lucky he is to have found Jason, though he doesn’t use Jason’s name; how lucky that Jason is all in one piece. It makes anger flood Jason’s veins like adrenaline.
His eyesight is coming back, slowly but surely, but he almost wishes it wasn’t when he sees the tools around him. Usual fucking stakes, then, he thinks. His face is bare. They must have figured out the helmet. They took his mask, too.
Jason tries to tell himself that that’s fine, because he doesn’t have much of a secret identity to protect, being legally dead and all. But this man doesn’t seem interested in his identity at all. Hasn’t called him Jason Todd or Red Hood or any variation.
Fingers prod the autopsy scar on Jason’s chest and he doesn’t let himself shudder again, won’t let this bastard have the satisfaction. He bares his teeth as best he can when he feels dead drugged. The curse he has on his lips won’t make the jump, so he does his best to convey the sentiment in a glare.
“I’m curious,” The man says. “How many times have you died, I wonder?”
Jason’s impeded vision bleeds green, the kind that sits at the back of his throat and turns the inklings of fear into rage. He wants to snarl, to spit in this man’s face and kill him quick and then dismember the body.
He wants to know where the hell he is. More urgently, he wants this asshole to put down his fucking knife.
“I’m not going to kill you,” The man assures, which only makes Jason want to kill him more. “That would be a waste. Let’s see what we can make of you, instead.”
How about they see how fast Jason can rip a man’s throat out. He pretty-promises it’s faster than whatever the man wants to do to him, and Jason’s all about efficiency.
The scalpel is cold too, but it bites like the table and hands didn’t.
—
There is green sizzling through Jason’s brain like rot, and it makes it harder to think than being drugged does. The room they leave him in whenever they drag him off the table is dark and cramped and reminds him too much of the casket he dug his way out of. Every time he inhales he can taste blood and dirt.
He feels like he’s going insane whenever he’s with the man who acts like the leader. The man talks and talks and talks and his voice never leaves Jason’s head, always feeding the green that flickers at his peripherals. Jason has no idea how long he’s been here.
He catches himself wondering where the hell the Bats are. The green chews up the thought and spits it out twice as caustic. He makes himself stop, makes himself think about something else, but the only things to think about in this godforsaken place are his room and the man’s irritating fucking voice.
Jason doesn’t know what day it is when he wakes up in the middle of what feels like a heart attack, choking on nothing. He knows that he bites the first person to try to get him upright and breaks the fingers of the second. He knows the man, the leader, is there because he’s fucking talking like always.
“Shut the hell up,” Jason snarls. The man doesn’t, but Jason can’t hear what he’s saying past the rushing in his ears anyway.
There’s a green haze over everything that makes him want to tear someone’s skin off, and maybe his own after. He’s wrestled to the floor before he can try, and then he’s seizing too much to throw them off.
The syringe goes into his neck this time, which is a nice change of pace.
—
Whatever they’re using to keep him immobilized during their experiments isn’t working as strongly anymore. Or they’re just using lower dosages. Jason doesn’t know and frankly doesn’t care.
He gets one good hit on the man, which is as frustrating as it is satisfying. The man backhands him hard enough to knock him off the table right after, face contorted in a much more interesting fashion than usual.
Jason manages a gasping kind of laugh. The man eyes him with contempt and smooths his hair back.
“Up,” He says.
“What if- I like it on the floor?” Jason says, which comes out raw as roadkill but as smug as he thinks he deserves to be.
“You have a count of five.”
Jason freezes.
“Five.”
Something in his chest buckles when the crowbar hits him.
“Four.”
Mad laughter and a godawful beeping trade places in his ears like they’re dancing to the worst fucking song in existence.
“Three.”
There’s a blood trail on the floor and a locked door against his back and when Jason breathes, it’s around a collapsed lung.
“Two.”
He won’t get here in time, Jason thinks, thought, thinks, he’s not going to get here in time—
“One,” The man says, entirely displeased, but he’s too late.
Jason is already dead.
—
His nails are bloody. He’s been clawing at his casket for hours. The stone floor is cold to touch but nowhere near the cold of tables or hands or scalpels. There is dirt falling onto his face. His face is numb. There’s not enough air to scream down here. He’s been screaming for days.
“We don’t kill, Jason,” Bruce is telling him.
The crowbar makes a meaty noise when it hits him. The Joker talks and talks and talks and Jason can’t stand his voice. It floods his brain like green and rot.
The timer on the bomb counts backwards and canned laughter plays. Jason’s blood is all over the floor. “The Joker is once again behind bars after his latest scheme,” A newsclip says, and rage spreads through his entire body because the Joker should be dead.
Jason is scared. Jason hasn’t been scared since Bruce slit his throat. The timer on the bomb counts forward. He doesn’t want to die. He already has. The explosion kills him. It’s agony. It’s relief. It leaves the job half-finished.
What happened to Jason Todd? An article asks. Jason scrolls past it because they don’t have any more answers to that question than he does. He’s been clawing at his casket for hours.
“We don’t kill, Jason."
There’s a bomb. Of course there’s a bomb. Canned laughter plays. The crowbar kills Jason before the explosion does, he thinks. The only thing that dies in that warehouse is his body.
“The Joker is once again behind bars after his latest scheme.”
Green drips through his brain like acid or madness.
“We don’t kill, Jason.”
“The Joker is once again-”
“We don’t-”
“-behind bars-”
“-kill, Jason.”
“-after his latest-”
“We-”
“-scheme.”
“-don’t kill-”
“The Joker-”
“-Jason.”
“-is once again behind bars-”
Canned laughter plays. Jason can taste blood and dirt. The timer hits zero.
—
Jason is lucid enough to know that he’s losing his fucking mind. He just can’t articulate it. The man realizes eventually, though, that all a countdown gets him is a total system failure. He calls it inconvenient. Compares it to someone housetraining a puppy wrong. Jason tries to bite him for it, but he’s still half-hallucinating and misses by a mile.
“Behave,” The man says. “I have been kind so far.”
Jason doesn’t feel like anyone’s been particularly kind to him lately.
—
At some point, they stop putting him on the table. Jason doesn’t know if they got what they wanted or if they’re just bored of him. No experiments doesn’t mean a break from the man in charge, though. It means they drag him to a different room.
He feels more awake now. They don’t restrain him, just toss him onto the floor and let him climb to his feet with altogether too much shakiness.
“You are a weapon,” The man says. He nods to one of the masked people at the door, who comes to stand across from Jason.
Old news, Jason thinks, even as he does his best to size the guy up. He’d win, easy, if he picked a fight with this guy on the street. But they’re in a dim room god-knows-where and Jason is unsteady off the bat and the man’s voice triggers something in his brain like green and laughter.
“Weapons must be maintained,” The man says. It must be a signal of some kind, because the guy across from Jason lashes out. Jason takes the hit and drops, and as soon as he’s on the ground he can orient himself through the way everything’s wobbling.
He kicks out hard at the approaching steps and feels the guy’s kneecap crunch. He hates fighting barefoot. He wishes they hadn’t taken his boots. As soon as the guy sinks, Jason tries to twist onto his feet. The whole world is spinning already though, so he botches it halfway, and feels his trajectory change too much to salvage. He gives up on the maneuver and kicks out blind.
His heel connects with the guy’s temple and his momentum carries the motion all the way through. The guy’s head hits the floor with a noise Jason is almost sure is real, and not echoes in his brain.
He doesn’t get up.
“No hesitation,” The man says with approval. “Someone has trained you well.”
Jason spits on the floor.
The man waves over two more people. “We’ll beat the bad habits out of you eventually.”
They ignore the guy on the ground. Jason eyes them as he gets to his feet again, shakier than before, but he’s not even sure if there are two people or if he’s seeing double right now. He sways.
He would feel bad about how quickly they take him out if he wasn’t busy thinking about the sound a crowbar makes when it hits him in the ribs.
“Get up,” The man says. His voice is like acid in Jason’s brain. Someone is setting off a laugh track.
“Nah,” Jason says roughly.
Hands haul him to his feet anyway. The room lurches and Jason realizes just before he hits the floor that he’s the one lurching. Someone catches his arm and pulls too harshly. His shoulder protests.
“You will get up and fight or you will die,” The man says coldly.
The laugh track plays again. Jason is already dead.