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Jason Todd doesn’t own a suit. Technically speaking, he still owns scraps of the suit he was buried in that Talia had preserved, but in a practical sense, Jason Todd does not own a suit.
Crimelords don’t often have a need for suits despite some of them having a penchant for wearing them constantly. It’s a luxury, a display of wealth and success for crimelords as much as it is for anyone else. And if there’s one thing Jason hates more than the Joker it is gratuitous opulence. Even when he was living with Bruce, Jason had often felt nauseated by the casual displays of excess he and Alfred and Dick engaged in.
Jason isn’t on Bruce’s dime anymore, so Jason doesn’t own a suit. On the rare occasions he considers buying a suit – the Joseph A. Bank off-the-rack kind of suit because that’s the most money Jason could ever stomach spending on a luxury – Jason shakes himself loose from the consideration absolutely horrified. Even thinking about buying a cheap suit makes Jason feel like he has too much money to spare. Any time the thought crosses his mind, he wanders down to the only halfway decent soup kitchen near Crime Alley, the one his men guard day and night, and donates a few hundred dollars to clear his conscience.
Jason doesn’t own a suit. That’s how he finds himself standing next to the freshly dug grave in the sweltering summer heat wearing black washed denim, his nicest no-holes-in-sight black tshirt, and his least showy black leather jacket.
The priest doesn’t look at all put out by the ensemble or the sheen of sweat on Jason’s brow, but he’s probably used to it by now. Jason can’t remember if the old man looked offended the first time he showed up without a suit. Probably not, he’d probably just been grateful to have someone else there.
As if he can sense Jason’s pondering, Father Michaels turns back to look at him, “What was her name, son?”
“Millie,” Jason answers promptly. “We think her last name was Braddock, but… You know how it is.”
Father Michaels nods with an expression of somber understanding. He does know. “Millie Braddock,” He murmurs to himself, “Millie Braddock.”
Father Michaels always mumbles the name to himself a few times, rolls it around in his mouth like he’s getting a feel for it before he begins the prayers. Jason wonders if he’s memorizing it too. Jason hopes he is.
Just as he’s raising his hand to begin, a sound stops the Father.
There’s a crunch-crunch of someone walking up the gravel behind the pair of them, and Father Michaels shoots a quick glance back over Jason’s shoulder. He’s about to turn around and start anyway when his brain seems to catch up with whatever he saw, and Father Michaels does a double take.
Jason immediately tenses, but he doesn’t turn.
“I-I– I wasn’t aware we were expecting company.” Father Michaels’ gaze is fixed over Jason’s shoulder.
There are only so many people whose presence could startle an old-school Gothamite like Father Michaels, and Jason’s mind quickly crosses out all of the other options before their company arrives.
“Bruce,” Jason acknowledges the older man without turning to face him. His teeth are clenched, and the name comes out as much like a hiss as it does a greeting.
Bruce Wayne, still holding the priest’s stunned attention, saunters up next to Jason and gives Father Michaels a polite smile. “Hello, Father,” he inclines his head. “Jason.”
Bruce Wayne owns a suit. Bruce Wayne might own more suits than anyone else in the world. Bruce Wayne owns a rack of Tom Ford suits in fifteen imperceptibly different shades of black. He once bought a deep purple Louis Vuitton suit solely to attend Stephanie’s private birthday party inside the Manor simply because she requested the theme be purple. Bruce Wayne boxed up the $20,000 all black, custom Armani suit he wore to Jason’s funeral never to be seen again without batting an eye.
The perfectly tailored Ralph Lauren suit he’s wearing is downright bargain bin by Bruce Wayne’s standards, but it is a black suit. He’s dressed for the occasion he wasn’t invited to.
Jason feels like his spine has become a metal bar; he's so tense and rigged.
“What’re you doing here, Bruce?” Jason jerks his chin back to the coffin with a pointed look that tells Father Michaels to get on with it.
Bruce politely waits until Father Michaels has made a stilted, awkward greeting to the richest and most famous man in Gotham and has turned back to begin his ceremonial prayers before Bruce himself turns to speak quietly to Jason.
“Dick said that you refused his invitation to lunch today.”
“I did.”
“He said the two of you had been getting along lately, so it seemed odd.”
Jason feels his back molars involuntarily grind together. “We have been.”
“He said you blew up when he pushed you on it and that you mentioned something about a funeral.”
Jason resents categorizing his reaction as blowing up. At worst, he raised his voice and told Dick where to shove it. He wouldn’t get so hot under the collar if anyone in this family could just take no for an answer. But that’s just semantics, and if Dick said he blew up then that’s what Bruce will believe. Jason’s side be damned. There’s no point in nitpicking it.
“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“I wasn’t aware of your… team losing anyone,” Bruce had taken to calling the Red Hood’s gang a ‘team’ of late. It seems to make it easier for him to stomach, and it makes Jason’s lip twitch in amusement almost every time he says it — almost every time. “So I had Tim find out what burials were scheduled for today, and this was the only plausible one until 4P.M.”
“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.” Jason snips back. He shifts on his feet, tucking his hands behind his back as if he’s standing at attention. It helps hide the way he’s clenching and unclenching his fists.
Jason isn’t mad that Bruce showed up per se, not yet at least. But he feels a familiar twinge of anxiety prickling at the back of his neck along with all of the usual tension that automatically accompanies Bruce’s presence for Jason.
“Did you know her?”
“No.”
In his peripheral vision, Jason sees Bruce raise an eyebrow. “You ditched your brother for the funeral of a woman you didn’t know?”
Jason can’t bite back the sneer. He tries, but he can’t. “Does that look like a woman-sized coffin to you?”
Bruce turns back to where Father Michael appears to be finishing up, and there’s a shift in his expression. “No, no it doesn’t.”
There’s something dark in Bruce’s eyes that draws Jason in, pulls his body around and makes him turn slightly towards Bruce. Bruce looks haunted – no more than usual for Batman, but much more than he usually allows himself to show when he’s acting as Bruce Wayne.
“She was nine, give or take. The Alley kids couldn’t be sure.”
Jason lets Bruce sit in that for a while, and Bruce lets him sit in it too. They stand there in silence: Bruce staring at a child’s coffin and Jason staring at Bruce.
Father Michaels interrupts, but neither of them really hears it as he says he’ll give them both a moment before having someone come down to lower the coffin in.
There’s a myriad of emotions playing out in Bruce’s eyes that can’t quite reach the rest of his face, can’t quite break through that cement mask he holds so dear. Once upon a time, Jason would have been able to read his emotions like a book no matter how small they looked in Bruce’s eyes. Now, he just wonders which ones are real, which ones are for show, and what they all mean.
Jason turns back to the coffin. This isn’t about Bruce. This isn’t even about him.
“She’s one of Zsasz…”
Bruce sounds almost mechanical when he finally replies, “Zsasz is in Arkham. He has been since–”
Jason cuts him off. “They hold the unidentified in the morgue for one month to give family a chance to come claim them before turning them over to be buried.”
The silence stretches on for a long moment as Jason waits for Bruce to say something more, but nothing comes.
“After a month… that’s when Father Michaels calls me.”
Jason doesn’t really know why he’s telling this to Bruce. He’s not sure Bruce wants to hear, but then he’s not sure why Bruce is even here. He’s not sure of anything about Bruce anymore.
“I…Red Hood pays to bury all the unclaimed Rogue victims. We try to find people in the Alley who knew them, people who couldn’t come forward or people the State didn’t consider family, so we can bury them with their names.”
There’s a sniff, and for once Jason gives Bruce the benefit of the doubt that it isn’t disgust or disappointment. “That’s… I didn’t know you did that.”
Of course he didn’t, Jason’s mind echoes. That’s just the kind of thing Bruce would try not to know.
“I go to every funeral… Most of the time it’s just me and Father Michaels, but…I figure that’s better than nothing, right?”
For a moment, even to himself, it sounds like Jason is genuinely asking. He is better than nothing, right?
Bruce shifts closer. Jason feels the hand before he sees it, but for once despite his tension and anxiety he doesn’t flinch away. He can’t seem to muster up the usual anger or the indignation. The roiling affliction that is ever present in his gut has died somewhere in the graveyard and left him with only a husky shell of his basest defense mechanisms.
Bruce’s hand finds his behind his back and pulls Jason’s fingers apart from each other and laces them through his own. Their hands, joined, fall down between them, and Jason wonders again what Bruce is feeling.
Jason knows what he’s feeling, what he always feels when he comes here, especially to the graves that fell in this particular row.
The graves here are shorter, the row narrower. Most children who die get buried with their families. Here, Gotham has lined up all the unclaimed, unwanted, unloved children together to save a few feet between graves.
‘Put all the four foot and unders in this row,’ Jason remembers hearing one of the undertakers say after another Joker mass casualty event hit a school. He’d been visiting his own empty grave that day. The day Jason decided every Alley kid would have a marked grave.
“When Tim asked how many graves you’d filled, and you said-”
“118.” Jason remembers the number; he’s memorized every one to make sure they’re never just a number. It’s gone up since then.
“-You meant these.”
“I meant these.”
Bruce squeezes Jason’s hand in a vice-like grip for a moment before it relaxes again, and it reminds Jason that Bruce didn’t know. Bruce didn’t know he did this. Bruce didn’t know what he meant. Bruce fully believed until this moment that Jason had murdered 118 people, and he didn’t question it.
Jason feels sick. Like something is bubbling up low in his gut, deep in chest, that’s going to spew out before he can stop it. He’s buried 146 bodies of mostly little kids, and the thought of innocent little Millie Braddock’s blood on his hands, the thought that someone would ever think he killed that little girl…
“I pay for their graves because… I know what happened to me won’t happen to them; I know that even if it does they won’t have a Pit to wake them up. But weirder shit has happened in Gotham, and if there’s even the slightest chance that one of these kids crawls out of their grave one day, I need them to know someone came to their funeral. I need them to know someone cared enough to bury them properly. I need them to know someone knew their name and remembered them. I need them to know they weren’t just a tally mark on Zsasz body or a body to add to Joker's count.”
Jason felt the tear roll all the way down his cheek and splash onto his collarbone, but for once he didn’t mind crying in front of Bruce. Because this wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about Bruce or their fucked up excuse for family. It was about these kids and reminding the world that they mattered to.
“When I woke up, I saw pictures of a funeral barely anyone attended. I saw a headstone that didn’t have my full name on it — just Todd. I saw a Gotham that was exactly the same, like my death meant nothing and changed nothing at all, like I didn’t matter at all. I need them to know that… that they’re not me.”
“Jason, you mattered. Of course you mattered, you—”
“Excuse me,” Jason took a step back, and as smoothly as he could, removed his hand from Bruce’s tightening grip and avoided Bruce’s horrified expression. “I should probably go talk to Dick, so he doesn’t think I was pulling his leg or anything.”
Jason scrubs the tears into his skin as he turns and marches back up the gravel path.
It takes Jason 6 minutes to talk to Dick, 30 minutes to coordinate lowering the coffin and filling the grave, 1 hour to find the two street kids that called themselves Millie’s brothers, 2 hours to get them Batburger and a spot in a safe group home for the night to grieve, 4 hours to do his usual nightly patrol, and 15 minutes to get back to his safe house.
By the time he kicks his bedroom door closed, he’s half asleep. He doesn’t even notice the tailored black suit someone has left hanging in a dress bag on the back of his bedroom door until the next morning.