ALL / THREE.

- obviously she has a scar on her lower abdomen from being shot -- one on her back too, which is less Contained, as well as some scarring from surgery related to her recovery

- she also has a scar in the middle of each of her thighs from when james jr stabbed her -- neither of them are very pretty since they had to be cauterized so there’s some burn scarring there too.

- she also just has like, various little scars all over the place from Batarang Gone Awry incidents, and her hands are fairly calloused

   “Of course they’re not. And I’m starting to run out of excuses not to go find help. Roy was getting help and it still bit him in the ass. And me—I decided to hook up with a civvy and one day he’s gonna turn around and tell me that if I don’t get my fucked head checked out then I’ll have to check myself out. I can’t—”

   He can’t lose something again. He’s so, so unbearably tired.

   Jason clears his throat and sits up.

   “…I know you’re not okay.”

  “You think he’d just spring it on you like that?” It’s not like she knows Buck, not the way Jason does -- in more ways than one -- but they’ve... talked, a couple of times. She’s got his number. She caused a blackout in LA that made his life hell, the first time she went out; these things happen. “For the record, what happened with Roy-- ”  It’s a touchy subject, she’d bet; it is for her, still, a little flame in her chest that gets fanned if she thinks about it too hard. “That was because of what Sanctuary was, not because he was getting help in general. I don’t think any of us can just go around bottling up our lives forever, though.” 

  Hypocrite, she thinks at herself; she’s been bottling things up even when she was going to Sanctuary, censoring what she talked about. But Barbara thinks she can give good advice; she doesn’t always have to take it. 

   “…No.”

   Something scrapes, crunches.

   Jason has pitched himself sideways to lie by the edge of the pool, phone on the ground so he can rest his head over his, free hand floating in the pool.

   “I came back and I cried until I couldn’t feel anything anymore, and I still think I don’t. Like… like it’s not all out yet, and I’m just playing the part of emotions so that… it’s easier. On everyone else. And I haven’t seen Dick cry like that in ages.” It’s easier to admit over the phone, where she can’t see his face. “…I think we accidentally became too dependent on each other, which is a pretty far cry from when I tried to pin a string of New York murders on him. Funny, huh?”

  “You lived together for a long time out there, before all this went down. And neither of you have ever heard of an easy middle ground. It makes sense that you’d get co-dependent.” She wonders if he can hear the tightness in her voice, if he knows her throat’s aching, because he and Dick have been crying and Barbara’s the odd man out in this game; she hasn’t let herself. Not yet. She’s not about to start now, not while she’s still in Gotham; but it’s a close thing.

  She thinks maybe Dick needed it, the crying. Needed to let it out somehow; they’re all alike in the worst kinds of ways, putting themselves last, after everyone else, except for when it’s most inconvenient. And nothing that’s happening in Gotham lends itself to self-preservation. But Barbara’s not sure if Jason needed this, to be going through the motions. 

  “...Sounds like shock, to me.” She sniffles, her mouth twisted to one side. “Speaking from experience, that is.” 

   “…We shouldn’t have to last. I’m tired of making excuses as to why we should put up our fronts and put on the mask and stare down our trauma right in the face and act like we don’t want to bring the whole city down for it.” The noise on Jason’s end subsides a little, dips into a rhythmic push-pull of water. He must be at the pool now, out on the balcony.

   “You should come back soon. I accidentally made Dick cry by apologizing and then getting mad at him because he said something snarky, so I made him soup and said something nice to him and, god, the waterworks, Babs. He fell asleep in my lap watching The Addams Family.”

   A pause.

   “…I hate that he went back to Gotham. He was doing so fucking good. I was trying so hard to make him better.”

  She shouldn’t have left, maybe. Shouldn’t have gone back to Gotham, just should’ve gotten Tim or Dinah or Alfred to ship her stuff to her. 

  “I’m coming back in the next week or so. Leaving some stuff behind for Tim so he can upgrade his hacking gear, but I wanted to have more than the basics with me. --But it shouldn’t take much longer.” Her voice gets a little distant; she’s got him on speaker, reaching for something as she speaks. 

  “I... wish he hadn’t come back, too. Don’t get me wrong, I missed him, but-- it shouldn’t have gone like that. There are always gonna be setbacks with this kind of thing, we both know that, and it’s not all on you to fix anyone, but...”  Barbara sighs. “It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier if none of us had been here for any of this, actually. All this shit just added to it.”

   The call comes in a little half past eleven, only a tight, heavy sigh announcing Jason’s presence on the other line. There’s a din of something in the background, traffic or something, but it’s far away and muffled by the white noise of wind.

   “You make love really fucking difficult around here, Gordon.”

   A sharper inhale.

   “…Sorry. That was a shitty thing to say.” Last thing he needs is to twist his own words around and then have to explain himself over something that isn’t really… real anymore. “I knew from the start this was all going to go sideways. I’m just surprised I lasted that long.”

  “Well.” 

  She wonders if Jason can hear the wry smile she’s wearing; Barbara’s wired and exhausted all at once, running on fumes to try and get the tower shut down enough that if anyone other than her people use it, it’ll be irrelevant. And then there’s-- plenty more that Jason maybe doesn’t need to hear about over the phone. “You know me, I’m a tough love kind of gal.” 

  If Jason listens close, he’ll hear the tell-tale Gotham backdrop: sirens, the sound of traffic, the occasional shout from the streets below. “I’m surprised any of us lasted anytime at all.” 

@ominatorr

[ voice memo; 9:37 p.m. ] hey it’s—it’s me. jason. i mean, it’s obviously me, jason, you can see that, i just…

…came in, found dick in the apartment. he was making himself the saddest ramen noodles i’ve ever seen. anyway he said i should text you. i wanted to call you. this is the middle ground i ended up on.

[ voice memo; 9:45 p.m. ] he said you were worried but i think he said that just to be nice. not that you’re not allowed to be worried about me, i guess. just… lot of stuff happened. i don’t regret what i did, but i regret a lot of the things i said. not what i said to you though.

[ voice memo; 10:15 p.m. ] list of things i would do for you is a lot longer than the list of things i wouldn’t. just hope you know that.

[ voice memo; 10:30 p.m. ]  we did mean to call you, i swear. dick probably told you the same, but this was kind of a spur of the moment thing. i’m gonna be back in a bit, i just needed to tie off some loose ends out here and pick up my favourite tech to bring with. 

[ voice memo; 10:36 p.m. ]  anyway, obviously i’m worried about you, i’m always worried about you. everyone else, too, so you don’t need to worry about it being a thing, or anything, but you have to admit that you did kind of go awol, there. just wondering whether you were okay. 

[ voice memo; 10:43 p.m. ]  and that goes both ways. like i said before, you’re my family, and you know how i get about family. just because we don’t do things the same way doesn’t mean i don’t love you, or that i’m not on your side at the end of the day. my list’s a lot longer, too. 

he smiles at her and it feels a little more real - babs has that effect on him. her hands are burning hot against his, and he leans into it without very little effort. ❛ i guess i thought he’d come back, if i gave it time. realized that he wouldn’t when the sun was coming up. ❜ he sounds pitiful, but dick’s spent the better part of a year with jason, rebuilding himself. it occurs to him now that he hadn’t realized how much of that building was based on jason himself.

but babs is firm, and simplifies it, and dick blinks at her, and tries not to seem surprised. ❛ right now? ❜ there’s still jokers around, everything is still a mess – dick wonders if she’s running because he is, or because she has her own reasons to. he wouldn’t judge her either way.

❛ la, yeah. i – dunno. don’t think i can do somewhere completely new right now but i…can’t do gotham anymore. not now. maybe not ever again. ❜ and maybe he hadn’t meant to say that, but god it feels more true than it ever has. he remembers saying something similar, when he first moved to blüdhaven, but bruce’s influence goes deep.

this is different. especially if barbara’s coming with him.

❛ if you want. ❜  maybe she’s got her own reasons to get out -- staying up worrying about what might happen when they find her joker isn’t doing her any good, especially not now that she thinks she knows the answer to the question. she and jason are not the same person, and barbara’s taken a different kind of path than him, but-- she knows what she’s done in the past, with the joker. and she’s not interested in trying to get him out of her head all over again. if that means running-- well, it wouldn’t be the first time she let go.  ❛ and if you wanna wait ‘til this is all cleaned up, then... that too. like i said before, i’ve been thinking about it anyway. ❜ 

eventually, barbara thinks she’s going to have something shatter within her. but today’s not the day for it, and she can’t afford to let it happen now, not in the middle of a gotham that’s falling down around their ears -- not in the middle of a fight like this. maybe when they get to los angeles. 

and dick... kind of surprises her, this time; not that she would’ve ever forced him to come back, or expect it in any kind of way that would make it so he didn’t have a choice. but, still, she... didn’t expect him to be ready to walk away forever. and to mean it this time, because she thinks he does. thinks that this is more of a permanent break than it’s ever been. 

   Jason doesn’t flinch—or he hides it very well.

   “Why do you care?” he suddenly asks, throwing a quick furtive glance her way. “Like—no offense, but you never told me why you showed up in LA all of a sudden, and I mean before. Before I picked Dick up and flew him across the country. It’s not like we’ve ever been particularly close.”

   They had their moments, sure, more before his death than after, and Jason’s always done his best to not step on her toes in particular even if it mean chasing her around and making sure she didn’t do things she thought she wanted to do under a blinding wave of rage.

   It felt like she’d been mad at him every time, or at least… reluctant to want to need his help. Outside of that they were… okay, maybe. Jason kept out of her way and assumed that she kept tabs on him the way she kept tabs on everyone else. Nowhere to hide from the scrying eyes of Oracle.

   A better amendment to that would probably be that she never felt like she wanted to be particularly close to him.

  “...Is that what you think?” 

  Barbara doesn’t like having regrets; they’re an inescapable part of her life, of all their lives. But she wishes she hadn’t been so sick of being Batgirl when Jason joined up with Bruce the first time, wishes she hadn’t been such a wreck when everything came to a head. She doesn’t blame herself for that, not given how close everything was, but-- she does regret it. 

  So maybe she and Jason weren’t as close as they could’ve been -- maybe Barbara wasn’t really in a mindset to get close to anyone, back then, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t are about him. And it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still care about him. 

  “You’re my family. I know we don’t-- always see eye to eye, I know we don’t do things the same way, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you.” 

  Barbara wants to look him in the eye for this, but she’ll take what she can get; if the length of this drive is the duration of time she has to make her point, here, she’ll take that. “I wish I’d been able to be there for you, before, that I’d-- I don’t know, somehow known you weren’t dead, or that I’d had my own head on straight enough to do anything about it.” They all do; Barbara knows that like she knows breathing, like she knows her systems. “But I have my head on straight now -- as straight as it’s ever gonna get -- and I did when I tracked you down, then, too. I did it because I wanted to -- because you’re my family, and I care about you, and I was worried about you then. Not... what you might do. You.” 

   “Why?” The leather of Jason’s gloves squeak against the steering wheel, he’s holding it so tightly. Underneath his knuckles must be bone-white. “So that Bruce can hold me in contempt for the rest of his life? So that he can turn to me and tell me that I played right along into Joker’s hands, like that psychopath has any plans worth dissecting anymore? Yeah, sure, it was the Joker’s plan from the moment of my conception to turn me into a tool to use against Batman—I didn’t come here to be a playing piece in their stupid game.”

   He takes a breath and his hands relax.

   “Probably shouldn’t have come at all.”

  “So it stops being about him!” This time she does snap, her jaw tight and brow furrowed. “About either of them.” Barbara’s not fool enough to think she’ll ever forget what happened to her, the ways it changed her life, and she still has days plagued by anger and grief and cynicism. More of those, lately. 

  But she has a life, too, one that isn’t constrained by what Bruce might think of her, or what the Joker’s plan for her father was back then, or what he did to her. “God, Jason, so you can do what you were doing before this, so you don’t have to keep getting dragged back into their game.” 

  She’s quiet for a long moment, her heart hammering in her chest. “Or-- don’t, I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life.” 

   “There is no turning point,” Jason mutters, voice dropping again to match the rumble of the stolen engine. “The only person I can rely on to do what needs to be done is me—if I left tomorrow? Tonight? Bruce wouldn’t step up. He’ll do things the way he has to do them for himself. Not for you. Certainly not for me. End of story.”

   He’s tired of being Bruce’s footnote, so tired that it sits like a burning piece of charcoal in the back of his throat.

   He’s tired of swooping in for a rescue only to be dismissed—but he’s probably earned that from terrorizing Gotham for so long.

   “Nothing’s different. There’s a Joker out there for each of us.”

  “I don’t mean for Bruce, Jason.” They all keep coming back here, no matter how many times they leave or how far they go away from the city -- Gotham’s like some kind of shitty magnet, pulling them back to its heart, and all the mess at the core of it, every time. But Barbara hasn’t needed Bruce to do things her way in a very long time, and she hasn’t needed him to change his ways for her, either; so maybe she doesn’t need to stick around for his sake, out of some misplaced obligation. “I wouldn’t expect him to do things for me -- if he ever changes how he does them, it’s gonna be for his own sake, too.” 

  Barbara sometimes thinks she was lucky, that she was never a Robin; that she made her own identity from the start, didn’t let Bruce try to define it for her more than she’d already defined it for herself. It wasn’t what she meant to do, when she was a kid, but-- she doesn’t think any of them meant to become what they are, now, when they started. 

  Maybe not even Bruce. 

@ominatorr

❛ jason’s gone. ❜ dick doesn’t know what time it is when he goes back downstairs, but the sun is up now and he lost feeling in his toes and fingertips too long ago. should’ve worn shoes – he always forgets something now. 

he slides into a chair at the kitchen table and blinks at babs, and feels numb all over. ❛ we need to get the fuck out of gotham, babs. i hate this place, i hate what it does and how it feels and i hate what it makes people do. ❜ his elbows come to rest on the table, head in his hands. ❛ i can’t lose jay again. not now. ❜

god, she wishes it was a surprise. 

❛ you’re freezing, ❜  is what she says, instead of that, instead of anything approaching a comment on how fucking predictable this whole thing is becoming, how the joker’s sticking a knife into all their old wounds and reopening them all over again. instead of anything about how tired she is of being on opposite sides of the playing field from her own family. she presses her palms to the backs of dick’s hands, a second foundation for his head, and wishes none of them had gotten dragged into this mess in the first place. 

and she’s not sure she means this particular disaster, or-- this life. bruce’s life. 

❛ okay, so let’s go. ❜  it’s more spontaneous than she meant her departure to be, more like flight than intentional movement, but barbara’d been planning this already. tim’s just going to have to change his schedule a little earlier, and she’ll call dinah and helena when they get where they’re going -- they’ll understand it, she knows.