Chapter Text
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired
Jason wishes he’s one of those people who are so good at pretending they don’t need anyone, that they not only resist the urge to reach out, but also get successfully annoyed when someone else tries for them.
He has ignored Dick on the comms. He has ignored Dick’s calls and texts. He has ignored Dick’s WhatsApp messages. He is having a lot of trouble ignoring Dick on Animal Crossing, which is why he starts typing, to tell Dick to get off his island.
He types, Get off my island.
Dick types, But I love you :D
And then, what Jason could have done is to fling the phone and the pastel themed little world into the far corner and sink deeper into his ruined uniforms. But the incoming call startles him. He hits the screen in a fumble and all of a sudden there is his big brother saying Hey Little Wing on the other end, softly, and Jason’s throat tightens.
He hums and grunts through about twenty minutes of very one-sided conversations until Dick pauses with an implication heavier than the easy flow of their chat.
“Have you had something to eat, and stuff?”
Jason eyes the crumpled cans of Red Bulls he has thrown at the wall. “Yeah. And stuff.” His voice is hoarse. Solely from screaming at a particularly asshole-ly Bruce. Dick makes a contemplative noise.
“You might have heard this already, but we got to the kids.”
Here Jason has to fight extra hard to leave what he is feeling out of how he sounds. “How? I was told two hours ago that the ship is coming in tomorrow.” Did every Bat vigilante minus one Red Hood swoop in when he wasn't looking?
“No, not the trafficking case. The kidnapping on the Upper East Side. We got to the kids and O tracked down the kidnappers.”
Right. Jason is disappointed at himself for having forgotten about the other major incident of the night. It had already wrapped up by the time he ducked underground, but he should have made sure to check. “Good. That’s good.”
Then Dick says “this is not me taking his side or making excuses” and Jason gets so mad at the both of them. Dick for saying that, and himself for believing it. He wishes he could hang up and chuck the phone out the window, but Dick follows up with “B was really spooked” and he finds the hand holding his phone pressing into the side of his face with a sudden spike of concentration.
“What do you mean?” He asks.
He could hear the way Dick is looking up to search for the right words in the sky. “He... one of the kids, there was a little boy, 5 or 6, maybe. Cute little guy.”
Jason doesn't know for sure how this will lead them down the road of explanation for Bruce’s becoming of an asshole tonight, but he knows he won’t like it.
“He, uh, sort of reminded me of you. Actually. And of Tim. But more you.”
He needs to relax. The receiver is probably picking up the sound of him grinding his teeth.
“You know, we troll him, but I think B does get more affected when it’s –”
“He didn’t know me when I was 5, or 6,” Jason says loudly. He has no idea why this is the point he decides to focus on. “None of you knew me when I was 5, or 6. I’m going to hang up now.”
The anger propels him up even though what he wants to do, what he really wants to do, is to curl up on the floor and fold into himself so tightly that he starts sinking through the floor and never stops sinking, but he picks himself up, snapping apart the lead lines weighing him down. That’s all there is to it, one second to the next. He’s been dancing this dance since the time before, clenched muscles and teeth and nails, all swing and all miss – on your feet, Robin –
He lets anger drive him through the mundane motions of stripping out of mud-caked layers and rinsing off his everything in the shower, then he allows exhaustion to punch him into his crappy mattress. There is a sagging hole in the middle where he could almost fit in. He balls one hand up into a fist and presses the trembling knuckles into his mouth to stave off the sounds that want to come out, as he listens to Dick’s voice message.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Jay. I’m not saying this to hurt you. OK? I’m not telling you this so you could understand him or anything like that either. Because I don’t think it justifies anything. I just, if anything, what I can only hope is you would feel less bad. I know it’s not fair. It’s just- it’s just how it is.”
Why? He asks silently. What is so bad about him now that whatever used be to akin to love always comes out of Bruce wrong and lands on Jason with cold words and colder looks?
He falls asleep in the hold of the sagging mattress. In his dreams, he could almost pretend it’s what a hug used to feel like.
He has never made it a point to actively contradict anyone on this, but Bruce isn’t thrust into instantaneous stupor whenever a black haired, blue-eyed boy just happens to walk by.
He lets the jokes roll harmlessly off his back. Of course, statistically speaking he also doesn’t have the best track record. Bruce is well aware of that. It’s one of those things that the family seem to enjoy at his expense, so he has learned to enjoy it with them. Over the course of several decades and the coming and going of half a dozen young ones in his life, he has developed the ability to think of many things with fond exasperation. It’s a sleight of hand no less horned than his myriad of combat tactics.
If only he could deploy some – any of those now.
The air dries up, moisture burnt off by a heat violently quick and rapidly growing. This is when he lifts an arm to shield himself against the sudden explosion, flame and force rivaling that of a white tropic sun. Hard to imagine how the desert is going to follow this fire with such a cold night. Cold nights. In his head, he knows the Magdala Valley gets cold at night. In his head, he knows every detail, everything there is to know, every fact about the climate, every shape of every grain of sand at 11°12′N 39°17′E.
Between one unbreathing moment to the next, he is suddenly kneeling beside the form of his dying son.
In his head he relives the brief seconds before, the lift of an arm, the pause, a fleeting and human second. The pause, because there is an explosion that has claimed his son. Imageries compress until they are only lurid lines, pulled taut, looping around him, round and round and etched into bones, blending into the fat of the marrow. How could he have lived, knowing the feeling of his son’s brain matter cooling off on his hands? How could he have walked away from that place, that day, a defining line suspended in the continuum of life, weighed down on one end, by the impossible pull to reach Jason, and the humanly damning instinct on the other? He feels the tightening of the line, this eternity that cuts him into two halves of a man.
In his head, he asks Jason.
“How could I have stopped before I got to you?”
Bruce comes out of the dream like breaking surface tension of water. The knowing and remembering does nothing to soften his fall. He shatters upon plummeting into the world of reality nonetheless.
His phone sits on the bedside table. One tap and the desert sky is washed out by ceiling lights. He does not allow himself the gentle awakening illuminated by the lamp. No. This way he is thrust under the full force of frontal assaults on his eyes and it –, it’s a good thing, because it yanks his attention away from all the things inside him that are wrong, like how a single seam of pain is hammering away at his heart or how his hands are desperately cool against an unrelenting heat or how he is alive and Jason is –
Sensory memories.
That’s what they are. Sensory memories.
Bruce knocks his head into the headboard and breathes a long sigh through his nose.
That’s what ultimately knocked the air out of him when he clasped a hand around Red Hood’s forearm and pulled him out of the sewer, roughly, panic tapering into fear and voice rising with anger. Some commander he was. Nightwing and Robin were with the victims. The little boy they’d just rescued had been terrified. He should be over there, scouring the crime scene and talking to witnesses. Instead he had sped across half a city to be here, to have a fight with the Red Hood.
They fought. They always fought over this sort of things now: who plunged recklessly into Killer Croc’s lair and who should no longer consider himself in any position to give orders. Batman pressed his lips together, into a thin line.
“Put your helmet back on,” He gritted out. “Why’d you ever think to remove it –”
“Jones gets more aggressive and, imagine this, cagey when he feels threatened. This is me trying to get the intel we need without punching my way to it!”
He was a mess. No one emerges from the sewer looking pristinely well, but he was a mess: where there was a patch of bare skin, there were signs of bruises and scrapes accumulated through at least a week of vigilante works, but the small cut right above his cheekbone that had been dripping blood? That stood out. That cut was taunting Bruce, insulting him like nothing else could. He took it personally. He pinned down the arm that wanted to lift up and reach out, and with bitter resentment began counting all the instances where Jason had practically tossed his life into a game of luck and odds, had practically flaunted his mortality in the face of danger, and the next thing out of his mouth became “I’m taking you off this case.”
The silence after was chopped up by Gotham weather, a downpour, which Jason punctuated with choice words, which Bruce countered with his own, an itemized list of Red Hood’s mistakes. Reckless. Reckless. Running into things. He’s lucky that he’s still –
Out of all his children, Jason had always been the most like him in temperament. A clash of roars, old wounds scorched by new fire. Between the two of them, a lifetime’s worth of those. It’s the ability to hopelessly think one thing and end up saying another that this boy had precariously inherited from him.
Yet the domino mask could not hide the hurt on his face when Jason turned to walk away.
Bruce sighs again and pushes his forehead into one raised knee.
It was still raining when Jason left. He hopes he had managed to grab a hot shower and get out of those dirty armors. He hopes he was headed somewhere warm and clean. He hopes he has somewhere warm and clean to turn to, a place of safety when he deems the manor unwelcoming. If given a choice, he would spend hours, days, simply pondering about Jason, the whys and hows of his son, the where and what. But he isn’t.
He counts to ten and turns off the light so he could lie still with open and unseeing eyes. In the dark, he doesn’t think about how his fingers have hovered over one name on his screen.