#SUPERSHIT.

THE CAVE IS A TOMB AND A TEMPLE, both at once. in it lies the corpse of normalcy, of any semblance of good sense that a man may have had. it is testament to one's fixation in an unachievable goal and a fortress of its own. jason, of course, has been ranked among the few that had free access to it, a realm of madness made concrete and perfect. sometimes, when bruce isn't around and he knows for a fact none of the birds or bats are around, he sneaks inside and looks at what once had been home.

how naïve he had been.

the poor boy that once inhabited these bones, deceived by the shiny toys and apparent affection, deceived by the grandeur of a grown man's crusade. he had been so happy, then. unaware, innocent, blissfully happy.

it did not last, of course. it never does with him.

The Joker doesn’t deserve a single tear. He doesn’t. No pity, no regret, no remorse. Bruce runs the tests on his head. It’s him. There’s no chance to bring him back in this state—he can’t be mended, can’t be healed. (If he ever could have been.)

He holds the head in his leather gloves. Instead of shutting the eyes—he pushes in his fingers, until the blue and grey-white bursts like a popped grape. He beats it. Over and over again, he beats it. One last time. One last kiss with a fist. He won’t have to resuscitate him. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until shuddering breaths start coming out in sobs. The head does not bruise anymore than its already been, or bleed at all. It’s empty. The Joker is dead. The Joker is gone.

The Joker can’t hurt anyone else.

The relief and utter silence—save Bruce’s heaving breath and rolls of fat tears and snot-huffs. Is what Bruce imagines it feels like to be touched by an angel. There is something so profound in this moment. He has been saved. His soul has been saved. More importantly—his CITY has been saved.

And there’s nothing he can do to ruin it with his own rules or compulsions.

He has no obligation to bring the Joker back. He can’t—there’s no way.

He’s free.

Bruce has never felt so grateful.

He will never be able to thank Jason enough. He will never be able to thank Jason at all.

He stands at a crossroads. Does that mean his little boy is back? Or does that mean he no longer exists?

He has been put to rest. Batman’s eternal struggle with the Red Hood—with the ghost of his son—with the Red Hood has met its conclusion.

The relief. The exhaustion. Tonight, Batman will sleep for sixteen-hours straight. More than he’s slept in years without being drugged or disabled.

Then, he’ll get to work.

There are yet still more clowns in Gotham. Set to be judged. He wakes up, drinks coffee, has a full and complete breakfast at Alfred’s table. Smiles come easy over the steam and scent of espresso and milk and pancakes.

Revenge, it seems, is sweet and warm, a syrupy brown, that sticks to your mouth and melts, melts, melts, and leaves you full and brainless.

But he is expressive. BATMAN is not repression. It is the leak of a flood of emotion, the broken dam. It is id, it is impulse, it is fear and longing and want, for vengeance, for violence, for order, for skin-to-leather-to sweat full-body control of mind, matter, and magic.

So he raises his voice. SO he is honest. More honest than perhaps he's ever been with The Red Hood.

His voice goes ragged, angry and impotent.

"You wouldn't have had to beg. I left the door to your room unlocked and untouched. I left your homework on your desk." He memorized every problem, in case Jason's ghost somehow needed help. "The book on your nightstand." He bought another copy, reread it, over and over again, dreamed of talking to Jason about it. "I would've left the food in your fridge if it didn't spoil." And still there was an obsessive loss for it. He pictured maggots in the food and in Jason's corpse with Alfred's snacks for weeks after he cleaned it out. But he reasoned the room still had to smell like Jason, and so he relented, long after he started wearing children's shampoo and soap to smell Jason a little longer---though that too, ended, when Tim noticed and found it strange.

"I spent weeks outside that door begging a God I don't believe in that you would come home."

"I didn't avenge you because I would've gone too far." I would've killed, and killed, and killed, and never.... "And you weren't there to stop me."

"Tim was a replacement because I needed you and you weren't there. He saw me---"

He stops himself. Goes back to absently typing at his keyboard to calm down. Check, check, check. Check the cameras check the oven check the breathing check your pulse check the League check crime alley check the Second National Bank check for alerts check with Oracle ignore the scratching in your heart the bleeding agony in your palms the lump in your throat the bile, the bile, the bile, the leak the leak the leak you've sprung a leak, you cannot fill the hole, you cannot replace what was lost, you have a hole, a hole, a hole, and your mourning cannot fill it and your promise and your mission is a plug that Jason is trying desperately to pull out and drain the totality of your fullness, and he can't because you have to be an infallible riot against God that follows your own self-made scripture in rebellion.

no, that is where he becomes an anomaly, isn't it? for a ghost to become an agent of his own fate again, then he is no longer a haunting but a revenant. something twisted, broken by design.

(he should destroy that damn monument. next time, next time, next time--he isn't sure if the crowbar will suffice, but it would be poetic, wouldn't it?)

he can taste something like bile on his tongue as he hears him speak. if he hadn't heard talia, if he hadn't heard his anger and grief, then maybe, just maybe... maybe bruce would have never needed anyone but him. it's a tempting thought, but he can't fix the past. he can't fix the blood on his hands, replacing what should have been on bruce's, by his own admission. so he laughs instead, a bark that's more broken glass and venom than any real display of mirth.

"I DIE, AND IT'S STILL ABOUT YOU, isn't it? poor little bruce, bereaved by grief once more. still eight years old, aren't you? unable to move on, aren't you?"

he walks closer, step by step, boots echoing against the stone of the cave. the leather of his gloves find the back of bruce's chair and he grips at it, tight enough the leather of his grip creaks. "i die, the boy you loved died, and you still think your grief is more important than mine." he leans in, over his shoulder, gaze greener and greener by the moment. pit madness, he'll call it, and jason knows it. no, this isn't it. this is just the reflection of his own anger, made clearer by all the ways he's come back wrong. no longer man but a living monument to grief; his own and others, it seems. "do you realize you made me into this? you and your mission. you and your stupid crusade. tim was my replacement, wasn't he? what kind of grown man needs children to light the way for him, bruce? why can't you just accept i am your mistake?"

(Which Robin is he talking to in his muddled, swiss cheese overly bludgeoned head?)

No. It’s Talia. It’s the Hood. Anyone but Bruce and Jason. How can something that was so perfect be so rotten in the state of Denmark? Bruce scowls as Jason leans in—-takes his hand by the wrist—another naughty child about to have their knuckles rapped by the resident Catholic school nun—and presses down on the radius to remind him he is not a toy for Jason to act out feelings on—-he is a man, a grown man, even if that man is emotionally an eight year old propped up by Jason and his parents’ corpses like a cartoon little boy trying to get into an R-rated movie. Watch yourself, a warning. He doesn’t so much as turn his head, but his gaze flickers to the side. Blue eyes, concealed by white lenses. He never lets The Hood see him with his mask off. (Leather pulls and chafes and tugs. And it feels good. The sweat slide, the tightness, the heat. It reminds him that he is just a body, meat and bone, and if he focuses on what matters—he can be the best at everything except emotional rigor.)

“What are YOU grieving? You lost nothing but time. If you’re alive—if you’re here. You could choose to be better than this. You could choose to—-“ Come home to me. Be mine again, my Robin, my little boy. The prince to my kingdom of fear and grief and anger that ripples through Bruce now like a red lead helmet into a vat of Acme chemicals.

"You knew there would be failures." I made them untenable, unacceptable, awful silences and heartbreak and rejection. The first Robin was fired, after all. Sometimes Fatherly advice and sharing Alfred's cookies and home-churned vanilla ice cream can't cut through the disappointment and the pain and the look in Bruce's eye when you fall.

"You knew there would be challenges." Insurmountable.

"We don't always win. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes people get worse." He hates it, he hates it, he hates it, he wants to stomp his feet, Robin places a hand on his shoulder or tugs at his cape and he needs a joke or a smile or his joy to feel like the world isn't ending.

"We keep trying even when we fail. We get better with practice, we never lose sight of the mission." He is talking like Jason is a child with wide beautiful blue eyes and not an adult serial killer. He can't help it.

"Why did you stop believing that?"

but what could he know? he had been saved from one damnation to another, from hell to purgatory.

so he doesn't laugh but he looks awfully smug as bruce speaks, the knowing glint in his lazarus-blue eyes, like every word is a badly intoned joke. it's not, no, bruce means every single one of his delusions, but that is what is the funniest part of this. he is just as mad as the people he hunts down, having deluded himself into believing he's the hero of this particular tale. fashioning himself as a knight, as a crusader, as a man on a mission rather than a pathetic broken little child.

jason knows in a way he's not different. he's a fifteen year old that feels unloved, unmourned, unavenged still, a child raised by neglect and poverty made into a haunting by the very man that should have saved him.

it's subject knowledge.

"y'know. you are such a funny guy, thinking that somehow, you know the prices to be paid better than me." he laughs, finally, the noise brittle as he keeps his broken arm close, leans over from his seat towards the glass. he's properly chained down, more beast and villain than person, but he's earned it. he's earned it. bruce knows that too, doesn't he? why he acts otherwise? "it wasn't you who died in qurac, was it? it wasn't you that got beaten within an inch of his life and then got disappointed by two of his parental figures in sequence."

by sheila, in her betrayal. by bruce, in his failure to save him.

two betrayals, in a sense, in the same day. coming of age done in the most brutal of ways: your parents fail you. they will always fail you. they will fail you when they should and when they shouldn't.

they are flawed things, just like you. that's why they made you this way.

And it’s as simple as that. Jason’s death is the worst thing that ever happened to him. Worse than his parent’s death. At least a child is supposed to watch their parents die, eventually. A parent should never have to bury their child. Never. And it was all Bruce’s fault. For loving him like the son he had just fired—-for putting him in that cape and pixie boots. Stealing a Mother’s secret name for her child, and gifting it to his second like it belonged to him, like Jason belonged to him, and him alone.

He did.

jack of no trades.

master of fuck all

🕊️ 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧𝐞: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞

01. gently brushing the other's hair out of their face to tuck behind their ear. 02. wrapping a blanket around their shoulders from behind. 03. brushing tears off of their cheeks. 04. reaching out hesitantly before resting a hand on their back. 05. placing a cup of tea or coffee in front of them. 06. sitting beside them while they are asleep to watch over them. 07. sharing silence with them. 08. pulling them into a tight hug. 09. writing something quietly and passing them the note. 10. fixing a piece of their clothing carefully.

🔥 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐰𝐨: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫

01. staring at them in silence for a long moment before walking away. 02. slamming a door shut without explanation. 03. packing their things up, slowly and deliberately. 04. breathing sharply through their nose and refusing to meet their eyes. 05. cleaning something obsessively in silence.

🥀 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐞𝐱𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧

everyone else. every person who's ever worn a ring, whatever the color. all of them, millions—they were chosen. the ring saw something, something deep in them, a type, a strength. a certain fate.

not me.