#bartons

Such a mess warrants an ‘all hands on deck’ response, which is how Jason finds himself hopping rooftops with Robin nipping at his heels. Batman and Nightwing are already on the scene, putting out proverbial fires as they come, and the rest of them have been tasked with rounding up all the missing convicts. 

“I have three here,” Spoiler chirps, oddly cheerful for someone dealing with escaped prisoners. Jason momentarily wonders how she does it, so consistently and with so much...emphasis. “All subdued, and waiting on cops.”

“I have six by Gina’s Pizzeria on Fifth Avenue, waiting on cops,” Red Robin reports, sounding sluggish. “They just had to pick an off day to break out of Arkham, huh?” 

“Everyday is an off day for you, RR,” Nightwing supplies helpfully, coupled with the background noises of a body hitting the ground. There is a shout somewhere. “At least today wasn’t an especially off day.”

“Oh, you say that now, but you should’ve seen him this morning,” Signal mutters, and Jason’s lips quirk up at the disgruntled tone. He loves team-ups on Tim. “He put salt in my tea. What kind of heathen does that to a man’s tea?” 

“Blasphemy,” Steph fake-gasps. In her distance, they can all hear sirens approaching. 

“Electric chair for the not-so-baby bat,” Jason chimes in. “Salt infractions are punishable by death in good ol’ Gotham.”

“Got any pointers?” Tim asks, none too gently. They’re still working past their bloodied memories, and Jason can accept it for what it is. While he spent time with Damian and Duke, sometimes Steph and Cass, Tim isn’t in Gotham enough for them to try and mend bridges. 

And Jason, truth be told, isn’t sure if he’d want to. Dick and Tim are different from the others, a reminder of the dark stain in their family’s history that they all created together, willingly or not. And while some things can be put behind them, Jason is a sore reminder of everything they all so desperately tried to ignore in favour of the good. 

“Yeah. Cremation,” he veers to the left, finally spotting the man he and Damian had been chasing down for a solid seven blocks. “Very helpful in preventing zombies.”

“Hood,” Batman admonishes, but its softened around the edges in a way that indicates the old man is amused. Jason pretends to doesn’t warm him inside-out, to hear that soft adoration even now after years of fighting. To know he can still do that, pull that affection from the Dark Knight himself.  

“Eyes on Scarecrow,” Damian interrupts. “And if you intend on dying, Red Robin, do hurry. And make sure to make a spectacle of it.”

Jason lets loose a short laugh and cuts his comm before Tim can cuss them off, reaching over to ruffle Damian’s hair in appreciation. The two of them, surprisingly, have gotten closer since Damian’s unscheduled visit with his mother. After Damian had trailed Selina and Bruce, and Talia’s ‘duel’ with the Cat, the heiress had called Jason and pulled a promise to take care of Damian from him. 

And he intends to keep it.

Jason gets a half-smile as a reward for the ribbing of their mutually ‘disliked’ brother, and there is a few heartbeats of peace before all goes wrong.

In hindsight, they probably shouldn’t have let their guards down so close to a recurring villain. And as the older brother in the equation, he definitely should’ve been on top of everything as soon as they touched down on the ground, but as it stands, Damian is in the direct path of a suddenly thrown canister and there’s no time to pull him out of the way. The motion itself would prove futile if and when the gas releases, which left only one option in Jason’s mind. 

Unthinkingly, he throws himself between the canister of Fear Toxin and Damian with his back to Scarecrow, shoving the boy backwards only a few seconds before he hears the telltale hiss of the gas infiltrating the air and, subsequently, his mask. 

To his credit, Damian doesn’t even hesitate before shielding his face, eyes wide behind the white-out lenses of the mask with what he thinks to be realization. Jason grits his teeth against the shivers already beginning to make their way up and down his spine, and is barely able to catch Damian calling for aid.

“…ood? Hood!” 

Somewhere behind them there is motion as Cassandra lands and sends Scarecrow flying into a pile of crates. How she got there so fast, Jason isn’t sure, but the world is beginning to spin and there are embers in the corners of his eyes and fuck. Everything begins to smell like ashes and blood, and he can somehow taste betrayal on his tongue. 

“Hood!” Damian shouts again, and when this is all over Jason will resent the clear fear in his voice. It’s so, so easy to forget how young the boy is, but in times like this…times like this, Jason wishes he could forget. Wishes Damian didn’t have to be out here with the rest of them.

His knees hit the ground the same moment he feels his fingers begin to bleed, callused skin splitting open in the face of persistent abuse. He thought he was sure that his hands were fine, but the panic inlaid in his mind overrides any sense of logic as he curls in on himself, deadly intent focused on not alarming Damian any further. 

“…Father! Father, he was hit with Fear T–” 

Father?

And just like that, Jason is fifteen all over again and screaming and locked in a coffin with nothing but the blood on his skin and the belt around his hips. He doesn’t register anything other than a concerned murmur before his mind breaks from the intense pressure of fragmented memories; already a fragile thing, the imposed trauma rips through him with the subtlety of a bomb going off. 

Shoulders bent, his fingers scrape against what he thinks to be the coffin’s lid in a desperate attempt to find purchase, instead only managing to amplify the pain in his fingers. The wet touch of fresh blood does nothing to deter him, and it’s with near inhuman strength that he pushes off whoever is trying to hold him down.

It was Cass, he’ll later find out, as Bruce looks through his pockets, desperately, for their latest strain of the antidote. Tim, Steph, Duke, and Dick had stayed behind to deal with the Arkham mess, and the comms were off for a thin veneer of privacy. 

(Nobody wants to know his demons, because his demons were so staunch with blood and sacrifice that it would horrify even the most seasoned of heroes.)

Someone manages to take off his leather jacket, he thinks, because he can feel the cool touch of a cape against the nape of his neck but all he can think is he’s trapped, he’s dead, he’s lost, he needs–

“Dad!” Jason sobs, voice cracking in panic. He’s trapped in a coffin. He’s stuck with the Joker and a traitor and in a foreign country. “Dad, Dad I’m here! I’m in here! Please, I’m scared, I’m scared…” 

Damian freezes in both shock and what he perceives to be dismay, and next to him Cass frowns in worry. But both of them have nothing on Bruce, who sucks in a breath so sharp it could slice his throat open, lips parting around a single utterance of ‘son’. 

Jason hasn’t called Bruce ‘dad’ since coming back from the grave. But this, right now…he’d somehow forgotten how many times he’d screamed ‘Dad’ between climbing out of that damned coffin and the fatal car crash that would steal his memories from him. 

“Please please please please,” Jason chants, and the syllables crash into each other like waves against an outcrop of rocks, so similar to the man himself. “B-Bruce where are you? I don’t wanna be stuck in here I don’t!” 

They jerk with the effort it takes to keep the second Robin stationary; Jason is nearly Bruce’s size, and it’s no easy feat, keeping him down. Not with the shock flowing through them over seeing their most steadfast so thoroughly dismantled. 

“I’m sorry about Shelia!” Jason yells, a vain effort to get someone, anyone, to listen. “I...I don’t...all I’ve ever needed was you, Dad, please, I’m sorry...”

“Jason,” Bruce whispers, so soft, so scared. This is a display of all the trauma that stood between them, an open sea of all the times Bruce has failed his second-born. A sea so violent that it drowns both of them whenever they brave it, takes them into its darkness before spitting out even hollower versions of the men who went down under.

But not this time. 

Bruce takes off his belt determinedly and hands it to Cass, a pointed look instructing her to keep searching for the antidote. Jason continues to thrash and cry so openly, carving whole pieces of Bruce out and setting them aflame right there at their feet. This is the closest he’s gotten to the truth about Jason’s rebirth in all their years, and so desperately he wishes it could be different. Wishes it was Jason sharing this willingly, in an effort to mend, an effort to move forward.

But wishes are for men who have time and right now, Bruce has none.

Ignoring the flailing limbs as best he could, Bruce gathers Jason in his arms, softly shushing the boy and beginning to rock him the same way he had done years ago, after every nightmare filled with memories of a broken home. Jason shudders against him, still sobbing brokenly about how badly he hurt, and Bruce…

Bruce feels a bloodlust so vicious he can feel it pushes against the seams of his skin, his soul, and if the Joker had been anywhere near him, Bruce would rip the flesh off his bones with nothing but his teeth and anger. Not even the Gods themselves could’ve stopped the man from tearing apart the Clown Prince limb from limb, from a death so brutal there would be nothing left for the Underworld to punish. 

“Bruce,” Jason whimpers, and somewhere in his toxin-addled brain, there is a pause in the onslaught. He recognizes the arms holding him close, recognizes the tenor of the voice humming to him, recognizes the lips that press a gentle kiss to his hairline. “B, you came. Papá...”

And through his own budding tears at the call in Jason’s mother-tongue, Bruce says, “always. I’ll always come. No one’s going to hurt you. Not anymore, chum.” 

“I was so scared,” Jason blubbers, but through the tears staining his cheeks, there is an attempt at a smile; it takes Bruce’s heart in its grasp and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until he’s sure there’s nothing left in its hold. How dearly he loves this boy. “But I…I knew you’d come. I always knew.”

And there’s the flash of the Robin who thought Bruce held the world in his hands, is a God, is a good man. There is the Robin--the Jason--who believed in Bruce. In his father. 

Bruce aches with a fierce love, and a longing for a bridge that’s barely there. 

Suddenly, Jason goes slack, his eyes rolling back in his head as the boy is finally given the sweetness of unconsciousness. Bruce startles badly, and glances to the side to find Cassandra holding an empty syringe with a sympathetic smile on her face. 

“Can we…take him home now?” She asks, and he knows the two siblings have their differences but they are bonded by family and she loves him, in a way, and it shows by how softly she strokes his matted hair now. 

Bruce gives her a tired smile, arms full of his lost son.