Chapter Text
JJ is under the bed when he enters their shared room. There’s a quiet shuffling, the telltale sign of him doing his puzzle.
“Hey,” Jason says. “Whatcha working on?”
“Bricks,” JJ says. “I like bricks. They’re better than cement.”
Jason’s mind flashes to the cold concrete floor he had dragged his beaten body across futilely, door too far and limbs too weak.
“Yeah,” Jason says. “Cement sucks.”
JJ sticks his hand out from under the bed and beckons Jason to come join him. Hesitantly, Jason lies on the floor beside him, too big to actually fit underneath the bed like JJ.
“I don’t know what he meant. Cement.”
“What?”
“Daddy said he was bad. That the bat was bad but he wasn’t. And Daddy wasn’t my dad at all. He was the one that was bad. My bat dad isn’t my dad either. I don’t know. Dad’s aren’t supposed to be bad. But I think they are anyway.”
“Yeah,” Jason breathes. “I think a lot of dads are.”
“Was yours?”
“Yes,” Jason says automatically. “My… my bio dad. He wasn’t a good dad. Or a good man. And then I got taken in by someone—”
“Bat dad.”
Jason stills. “JJ, do you—”
“You should organize the pieces.”
Jason complies, knowing that it’ll be easier to continue their conversation if he does. He moves the pieces into piles by shape.
“No. Color.”
Jason stops and moves the pieces into a brown and blue piles. “Right. Sorry.”
“I’m like this because of him. He’s not my dad. But he made me believe he was. I hate him. But I miss him sometimes too.”
“You shouldn’t,” Jason says. “He hurt you.”
“He did,” JJ says. “I don’t think he ever loved me. I wanted to love him. And I wanted him to love me back. But I don’t think either of us did.”
Jason doesn’t know what to say.
“He said he saved me. But he didn’t.” JJ looks up at Jason. “You did. You were my hero.”
He knows. The realization bounces around in Jason’s mind with disbelief and unease. How?
The Joker must have told him. It’s clear that the “Daddy” he speaks of is the Joker. Who else would fuck up a kid that much, leaving them to looking like a lookalike doll discarded to be lost in their own madness.
There’s a soft knock on the door.
“Lights out, guys.”
JJ immediately slinks out from the bed and jumps into his own, turning his back to Jason.
Jason knows he won’t be getting any answers now and tries to sleep but lies awake, left in the spiral of what-ifs until the morning comes.
JJ is up promptly the next morning, no screams or cries, just a normal wake, and their routing begins again.
It’s a visitation day and Jason doesn’t know what he’ll do when he sees Bruce. To be honest, he hasn’t let himself think about Bruce much, surprisingly. One would think he’d be festering in his resentment, the rage that brought him here growing, but he’d been so distracted by it all and the mystery of JJ that the events that brought him here have been far from the forefront of his mind.
Of course, now they are back in tenfold, leaving Jason irritable and tamping back his anger the rest of the day. Everyone has picked up on his sour mood and he can’t find it in himself to care.
Jason has nearly convinced himself he wouldn’t go down, even if Bruce does come, when JJ comes up to him with his pleading eyes asking if he will go down with him.
And maybe it’s the irrational fear that Joker will show up to visit JJ, as if Jason can actually face the man despite his many fantasizing about killing the bastard himself, or maybe it’s the burning curiosity that surrounds everything having to do with JJ, but Jason finds himself agreeing.
When Bruce comes in, he’s in an old sweatshirt and jeans, a far cry from the expensive suits he usually wears out in public.
When he sees Jason, his face lights up but quickly sobers. When he approaches, he smiles softly towards JJ.
“I see you two have met,” Bruce says.
And Jason… Jason doesn’t know what to think.
Bruce squats to get to JJ’s level who has been sitting on the floor playing with the hem of his shirt as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.
“Hey, Tim,” Bruce says. “How’re you feeling today?”
“Jason’s upset.”
Bruce’s head snaps to face Jason and looks at him with that calculating gaze that Jason hates so much, like he’s a case that Bruce needs to solve, and his fists clench tightly. “Who is he?” he grits out.
Bruce looks between the two with confusion. “You don’t know?”
“Who the hell is he, Bruce?”
But Jason knows. He knows because Talia showed him the articles of Bruce’s new Robin. Who made him hate the idea of the boy, of the perfect little rich prick who had stolen the space that Jason left. Who convinced him that Timothy Drake was the shiny new Robin who was everything Jason was not.
And instead the Joker got him too and ruined him even more than he ruined Jason. He may have beaten Jason with a crowbar, broken every bone he could until he was sobbing with a body throbbing with insurmountable pain and blown him up, left to die alone, but seeing just a glimpse of what he did to JJ— to Tim, to Timothy Drake, Jason almost feels like what he did to him was a mercy.
And isn’t that fucked up. Just a few minutes ago, Jason was seething at Bruce, of the injustice of what had happened to him and what Joker did to him.
Now he doesn’t know how to feel. He doesn’t know anything anymore.
“How could you let this happen.”
“Jason—”
“How could you let him get another Robin? How could you take another Robin in and fail them like you failed me?!” Bruce tries to reach out to him but Jason grips his wrist and twists. Bruce breaks free from his grasp easily but takes a step back. “You let that bastard live because of your fucked up sense of morality, of the line that you can’t let yourself cross, that you wouldn’t let Dick cross even though Jason could’ve been left dead in the ground, and look what he did! And he’s out there, doing God knows what, the man who killed me is out there—”
“I killed him.”
Jason stops, the words disappearing from his throat as he turns slowly to look at Tim who smiles that crooked, twisted grin filled with devastation.
“He’s dead. Daddy’s dead. He can’t hurt any birdies anymore.” And with that, he bursts into tears, cackling as he cries. Bruce wraps him up into his arms and it’s that, seeing Bruce hold him, hold the boy that he should’ve protected, who should’ve never been hurt like this, and he sees GREEN—
—and comes to in an unfamiliar room. White walls, cuffed to a cot, more like the Arkham he expected it to be. There’s a nurse standing in the corner, watching him with trepidation.
“What… what happened?”
“You had an episode,” she says. He almost snorts at the mild clinical term. “You grew violent and your father—”
“He is not my father.”
She falters. “Your… your guardian sustained most of the injury.”
“Most?”
She purses her lips as she considers her next words. “You and JJ are going to be separated for a bit. At least until we know that you are in a mentally safe place and that he is not a trigger for you.”
Jason wants to argue that he’s not but he knows that that isn’t true. He doesn’t know what will happen if he sees JJ — Tim — again.
“And Bruce?”
“He’s not going to be permitted to visit for some time,” she says, almost an assurance.
Jason falls back into the stiff bed, staring at the tiled ceilings. “What did I do?”
“There was no major injury. Your f— guardian was able to hold you back.”
“And Tim?”
She blinks.
“JJ?”
“He was already working through his own episode and lashed out in his own right too.” Jason is suddenly aware of the stinging of scratches on his face. “You are here to heal, you both are, and know that lapses happen and may be a setback but are not a failure. JJ has been insisting to apologize to you and seems to hold no ill will against you. It’s up to you to decide how you feel.”
Jason takes her words in. “And when will I get out of these?”
“We’re going to have to observe you and reassure that you are not a danger to yourself or anyone else.”
“Great,” Jason mutters.
“Lapses are a part of recovery,” she says. “You are still healing, Jason. And there is no question whether you deserve it involved with that. You are healing and you are always deserving to do so, no matter what. And I can see that you do want to heal. That’s more than a lot of people can admit.”
“I didn’t,” Jason says. “When I got here.”
“But you do now,” she says. “Even after this.”
And she’s right. Jason does. If not for himself, then for Tim.