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In the end, it was coincidence. Pure, true dumb luck, the kind that seemed somehow fated—the kind that made atheists shake.
“Woah, ‘scuse me, sorry lady!” Jason called, pushing past a horrified woman clutching her chest. “Just tryin’ to—take out the—damn it—trash!”
He rounded a corner with a grin. “You can’t hide from me, bozo. I’m Robin, and I can see everything. Don’t you know Robin’s magic?”
The alley before him was long and dark, purple in the shadows of the night. He’d better wrap this hit up before Batman caught him.
“Hey, pal, I’m sort of on a schedule here,” Jason chirped, stalking closer to the set of dumpsters. “Pee-yew, it’s rank over here. Smells like… “
Jason jumped up on the edge of the dumpster to his left, looking down in the shaded corner. “Crime! Oh, you’re behind the other one.”
Jason ducked as the man fired his gun, and rolled to the side faster than any untrained opponent could track. “Missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss me!” he chanted, with a smirk.
The man stepped into the light with a snarl—he had a patchy mustache that resembled a dead mouse, and a wrinkled, weathered face.
“Uh, never mind,” Jason said, quickly. “These lips are, uh, no longer for kissing.”
The perp roared, firing off another shot, but Jason was too quick—in a flash of red and yellow and green, he’d punched the man in the face, torn the gun out of his hand, and flung him face-first into the dumpster.
Jason twirled the pistol like the star of an old Western movie, the ones Alfred would put on sometimes. “I’d say you’ve been Robin’ed. Told you I was magic. So why don’t you give me that man’s wallet, an’ sit nice and tight for big man Gordon to take you to the slammer.”
The man spat out a wad of blood. “Like hell, twerp.”
He thought of the other day, when he kept moving Bruce’s coffee while he wasn’t looking. Bruce was always half-dead in the mornings. It had taken him a whole five minutes to realize it was Jason, rather than his mind playing tricks on him. Little shit , Bruce had sworn, when he’d thought Jason wasn’t listening. “Eh. I’ve been called worse by better.”
Another man hung at the entrance to the alleyway—Jason recognized him by the red hat as the man whose wallet had been stolen. “Don’t worry, we’re in negotiations,” Jason called, cheerily.
The thief, without a gun and outnumbered, fished the wallet out of his pocket and tossed it into the street. “That man,” the thief spat, pointing at the red beret edging on the outside of the altercation, “is a liar. He’s nothin’ but a damned cheat. He gets money straight from Bruce fuckin’ Wayne, he don’t need whatever’s in here. He’s set for life.”
“Straight from Bruce Wayne, huh. You do know half the city gets money straight from Bruce Wayne, right? Everyone works for him.”
Even me , Jason didn’t add. He pays me forty bucks every time I clean my room. Not shabby, eh? He could almost hear Bruce saying and yet you only have eighty dollars .
Robin secured the thief to the dumpster while the man with the red beret flipped through his wallet - the thief had been right, because if Jason’s count wasn’t off, there was about nine hundred dollars in that wallet that no one living in this slum would’ve had on them.
“The police are comin’, I better clear out,” Jason said, as the sound of sirens echoed through the streets. Late, as usual. “You gonna be okay, buddy?”
“Oh, me?” the man asked, as if startled out of some stupor. “I’ll be… fine. Just startled me, is all.”
Jason threw him a wink. He realized, belatedly, that the man couldn’t see it behind the lenses in his domino. “Next time, don’t wear shoes like that in a place like this.”
“It wasn’t the shoes,” the thief muttered, but Jason didn’t stay to listen to whatever half-baked argument he had to defend himself. He fired his grapple, and swung onto the roof of the apartment building nearby.
“Alright, Batman, I know you’re savvy, but I hope you’re not that savvy,” Jason muttered to himself, glancing around the limited view of the city he had. There was smoke wafting in the air, from the warehouse Batman had been busting that he’d forced Robin to sit out on. “Aw, Bruce, please tell me you didn’t set it on fire.”
“Only a little bit.”
Jason jumped, nearly toppling over the edge before a strong hand wrapped around his arm and pulled him back up. “You’re gonna give me a heartattack at the ripe old age of fourteen, old man.”
Bruce huffed, and herded him further away from the edge of the roof. “I was right there. You were talking to me. I thought you saw.”
“Well, I hadn’t,” Jason said, mulishly. “C’mon, can’t you put a reflective panel or two on that? Maybe tie a bell to the ears?”
In the light, Bruce looked a little worse for wear - the suit was melted, and still smoking, in several places, and he smelled like he’d been sitting downwind of a campfire all night long. His face, though, or the little bit of it Jason could see, was as steely and unimpressed as ever.
“Here it comes,” Jason whined, crossed his arms. “Get the lecture over with.”
“You disobeyed a direct order,” Bruce growled—it was Batman’s voice, the low rumble that shook the walls of your heart, unless you were the guy standing beside him. “I told you to stay put.”
“I’m not a dog. I don’t listen to commands when they’re given.” Jason shrugged. “Do you think I was just gonna let that guy have his wallet stolen? Because, if you did, you got another thing coming.”
“I’d think,” Bruce said, “you’d have more respect for my authority, and more respect for your life , than to run off where I couldn’t see you.”
“Aw, were you scared?” Jason taunted. “Because, you know, I handled it.”
“You did. Admirably. You’re still grounded.”
“You suck ,” Jason hissed. Anger, now, fed through him like an exposed wire dipped in water. “Do you ever unscrew that stick up your ass, or do I need to schedule surgery to have it removed?”
“Jason,” Bruce barked, but Jason ignored him.
“I’m not defenseless! I know what I’m doing, dammit—you throw a tantrum if I haven’t checked up with you in five minutes, and I’m sick of it!” Jason jabbed a finger at Bruce’s chest. “I’m older now. Someday, I’ll go to prom and get my license and go away to college, and you can’t be breathin’ down my neck while I do it. I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t need your protection.”
“You are fourteen,” Bruce snarled. “You are a child. You will have my protection as long as I see fit, whenever I see necessary, and it’s not your decision to retract it. The final word is that you are grounded, until you decide to re-learn how to follow a basic order, and you will be in the field no sooner than that time. Are we clear?”
“It’s like I’m speaking to a brick wall,” Jason mumbled.
“Are we clear?” Bruce said, again, voice edged with something dangerous, and Jason nodded miserably.
“‘Bout as clear as mud,” Jason muttered. Bruce’s hand wrapped around his shoulder in a viselike grip, and he marched Jason away.
-
The man with the red beret dogged Jason’s thoughts all through the days after that - he knew Bruce sponsored a lot of people, most of which Bruce had met in his years as Batman or through various shelters he visited. It wasn’t unusual, for someone to cash Bruce’s money. It was common, even.
It was something in the way the man had held himself, like he was watching—waiting. Wary. Almost as if he were scared, not only of the thief, but of Robin as well. That was normal for Batman—he terrified most everyone, even Jason—but it was abnormal for Robin, who was something like the bridge between Batman and the rest of the world. The middle ground. Sundown, rather than midnight.
The only people scared of Robin were the ones who had reason to be. So what was red beret into?
Halfway through math class, Jason threw his hand in the air. “Mrs. Davidson?”
Mrs. Davidson gave him a beaming smile, as she always did, because he was the best student of them all. “Yes, Jason?”
“May I got to the bathroom?”
“Absolutely, young man. As I was saying—"
Jason allowed himself to mourn the affection in her tone, because after this stunt, he’d surely never hear it again. He darted out of the classroom and down the hall.
He dodged a couple teachers—an administrator that quite distinctly resembled a parrot, an English teacher that looked like the last time she’d slept was in the 70s and her coat was made from the Frankensteined remains of unfortunate cats—and slipped out of the door by the cafeteria. For a school Bruce dedicated a long list of zeros to, the security was pretty lackluster.
He ditched his bag behind a dumpster, stripped off his vest and tie and stuffed them in one of the pockets, and ruffled up his hair. He popped the first few buttons on his shirt, untucked it, rolled the sleeves up. He looked a little less like a trust fund kid who laughed like a pig and sneezed into twenty dollar bills, that way, but he’d still look out of place, like a duck in with a flock of warblers.
“Where-oh-where are you, red beret,” Jason muttered to himself, and he took off through the streets, in the general direction of the street he’d been on last night.
It took a good bit of bribery (the taxi driver had come so close to reporting him) and a lot of lung power, but he arrived on Full Circle street sweaty and panting. By seven o’clock, he’d scoured every nook and cranny at least four times, and had shimmied up a building and was perched beneath a billboard, munching on a chili dog. He’d paid for it with the eighty bucks from cleaning his room that he kept stuffed in his shoe, and the vendor had given him a grin and a free Coke with a wise donation of wisdom: “Ditch day, eh? I been there, too, kid, been there too. I won’t tell pops if he comes a’lookin’, you got my word.”
Here, of course, where the streets were craggy and the signs outdated by a decade or two, word didn’t mean much. But Jason knew that when his father came looking, the whole street would fall as quiet as fresh snow, and everyone would scramble back to their dark corners and Jason would stand alone under the only working streetlight and chirp, took you long enough, gramps.
You knew I’d be unable to leave the Watchtower today , Bruce would snarl, like a rottweiler. You planned this.
And then Jason would snap back, ‘Course I did. Someone, who’s a real ass by the way, once told me that—over and over and over, he seriously would not shut up—that failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
The idea of that conversation gripped Jason’s gut like icy talons. Possibly, he would never leave the house again. Probably, Bruce was going to tie a ball and chain to his ankle and keep him locked up in his room like some Robinpunzel until he was as ancient as Alfred. A lead was a lead, and a person in need was a person in need, so Jason could never really regret it, but eternity was sure going to suck.
He was halfway through his fries when he saw the flash of the red—candy red, like a skittle popping through the crowd. Jason darted up, chili-and-grease stained wrappers fluttering to the ground. “Houston, boy do we have eyes on the target,” Jason said to himself, leaning over the edge of the building.
The red beret was weaving through the crowd, stained brown trenchcoat fluttering out behind him. He was going somewhere in a hurry.
Jason, eyes trained on the target, shimmied down the other side of the building as fast as he could and pushed himself into the crowd, dogging beret’s steps.
He ducked behind some suspiciously-smelling trashcans as the man punched in his door code—it took some jiggling of the mechanism, however, for it to work, and Jason was just fast enough to catch the door before it closed.
Jason shadowed him up the stairs, up a couple floors. Just as the man was turning to unlock the door he pinned Jason with a brown-eyed glare and said, “Are you planning on following me into my apartment? Look, kid, I run a soup kitchen, not a freakshow. Go do your gawkin’ at Haly’s.”
Jason raised a brow. “How’d you know I was followin’ you? I’m really good at what I do, you know.”
“Let’s just say I’m used to sneaks like you,” the man said, bitterly. “What, are you hungry? It don’t look like it. Scram.”
“I’m not a dog,” Jason hissed. He closed his eyes, took a few breaths, and said, “I just got a couple questions, s’all.”
“Ask ‘em and shoo, I ain’t got all day.”
Jason offered his sleaziest grin, ignoring the revulsion rolling his stomach, and said, “You’re the guy my pal gets smack from, right?”
This part of town was where the dealers lived—he knew, because his mother used to come here, and when she was too sick, she sent him.
“Christ almighty, what are you, twelve,” the man muttered, flipping through his keys. “Wantin’ smack at twelve, unbelievable. Can’t you play, I don’t know, Gameboy? Basketball? What is wrong with kids today, Jesus H.”
“Are you the guy or not?” Jason asked, patience wearing thin. “‘Cause I got about seventy-five here burnin’ a hole in my pocket, y’know.”
The man pointed a grubby finger at him, wrinkled face twisted in irritation. There was an odd, powerful edge to it. “Get the hell in here, stop rantin’ and ravin’ ‘bout smack here in the middle a’the hallway, get in here.”
Jason sauntered through the door. It was not the most dangerous decision he’d made in his life. The past week, even—he knew that, if the red beret turned out to be some kind of perv, he could break his face over the floorboard faster than the old man could get his arthritic fingers over his belt buckle. There had been a time when this had been dangerous, though, back when he knew how this street worked. Back when he didn’t know how to kick a bastard in the teeth, when he was actually looking for snow to pass to his mother. Those times were long gone. He was older, now.
“Sit down at that table,” the man said, and, with the unaffected air he’d seen his classmates wear, Jason slouched in the chair with a leering smirk.
The apartment was small, but clean, all of the appliances surprisingly new. He’d expected something seedy, like peeling, rot-green paint, creaking floorboards—but it was average, mundane, nothing like the extremes of Jason’s life.
At the other end of the table, the man stood, hands braced against the chair. It was then that Jason realized he’d made a massive, massive misstep—the man wasn’t just irritated, he was angry, thunderously so. The tendons in his hands were shuddering with effort, and his whole body was taut, like a drawn rubber band.
“Just so you know,” Jason said, warningly, “my dad’s a pretty important guy. Just give me what I want.”
“Oh, hell,” the man snarled. “Sure, kid, I bet he is. Let me tell you something, if your dad gave one singular damn about you, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be home and not—Jesus fucking Christ—asking strangers for drugs. Kid. How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” Jason said, sharply. “And let’s just set the record straight, I didn’t come here to have some dropout tell me what to do. Give me an answer, and I’ll leave you alone.”
The man scrubbed a hand over his face, and pulled off his beret, revealing a thinning layer of mousy blond hair. “Shut up. Shut the hell up, and listen. I’m a lot worse than a dropout, and I’m a hell of a lot worse than a wash-up, and I’m a lot worse than anyone you know. You know what could’ve happened to you, tonight? You could’ve ended up dead in an alley somewhere. Is that really how you wanna go?”
“Do you ever just answer a question?” Jason asked, petulantly.
“You’re not listening,” the man snarled. “You’re not—you won’t listen, will you?”
“I don’t make it a habit.”
“You better start, because you’re not leaving that chair until you know. You could’ve died tonight, you idiot . You could still die—you wanna go to, hell, prom, is it? Don’t you? College? You got dreams? You go down this path, you end up cut down, whether it’s ‘cause someone else did it for you or because you took too much. Or you end up like me.”
The fury must’ve been infectious—it was thudding through Jason, too. “Oh? And how’d you end up?”
It was less about the crime, now, more about the pride—but Jason was never good at backing down.
The man rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You wanna know how I—let me tell you a story. It ain’t a good one. It ain’t very long, neither, so don’t give me that look. I was born with nothing. Most of my life, I had nothing. Was a father at sixteen, never saw that kid again. Was a father again at twenty-three, and I actually managed to raise that one, except apparently I didn’t do so hot, ‘cause he ODed the night before he graduated from high school.”
Jason thought of his mother’s dead flesh beneath his fingers, the father that had surely died because he couldn’t crawl to the liquor store fast enough. The father he had, now, who took him to baseball game,s when he had the time, so they could eat chilli dogs and Jason would pretend to squish the players between his fingers, the father who was anal about things being put in their place and always ended up cleaning Jason’s room for him. Dick, who he sometimes called when he was frustrated, and Alfred, who was always there with a raised brow and some ice cream. The family—small, weird, broken, but still good—he’d stumbled upon. The thought of losing them was like tearing out his heart and hammering a train stake into the raw hole.
“I drank until I couldn’t see straight,” the man said, voice fluttering like a leaf in the wind. “I drank ‘til I didn’t know my name. I drank ‘til I had no money, and, y’know, somethin’ real savage happens to you, when you’re that low.”
The man swallowed. “I saw this family, walkin’ down the street, dead of night. Gleaming, they were. Beautiful family. An’ these people—their cabinets were probably stuffed to the brim, and I had molded bread in mine, hadn’t eaten in days. They had clothes, mine were shredded and molding. They had money. Loads of it. They still got to keep their son. They had everything, an’ I—I had nothing. And I was angry.”
Jason’s heart stopped.
“The broad, she had this shining pearl necklace, and I thought to myself, ‘I got this gun. If I wave it, they’ll drop everything and scram,’ right? So I pull it out. They don’t scram. The man tries to deck me, and I shoot him, point-blank, in the chest. Blood everywhere. And the lady, she screams like a banshee, and she steps forward and gets her hands on me and that necklace comes swinging up ‘round the gun and—and these pearls, they clatter to the ground, just everywhere, right along with whatever’s left of her pretty face.”
Jason’s blood started rushing like a fire. “You killed them. You killed those people.”
The man nodded, bobbing his head. “I didn’t kill the kid. I couldn’t. It would be like… killing my own son, my Tyler. He gave me this look. He looked like I’d broken his whole world. Not a night went by, that I haven’t—haven’t dreamed of that look. You understand what I’m saying, kid?”
“You did,” Jason snarled. “Boy, is Bruce Wayne gonna be mad when he sees your filth.”
The man raised a brow. “He was.”
The world tipped sideways, and for the second time that night, Jason was left scrabbling for purchase. “Was?”
“He was,” the man repeated. “You think I’d tell you that if I wasn’t protected? I found him sitting right in that chair, years and years ago. Lights off. Very dramatic. An’ I said I know who you are, where are the cops. He passes me this folder, all proper-like—he’d dug up my whole life story. I’d spent years under aliases, no damning connection to those murders whatsoever, I’d turned my life around. And this guy—I stole his world, then, an’ I thought he was here to steal mine.”
“Please tell me he punched you in the face and didn’t stop,” Jason growled.
The man shook his head. “No. No, the exact opposite. He told me… he handed me the folder, and said, I don’t think old evil should get in the way of new good. He says, I hope you found your peace. Just the damndest thing.”
I hope you found your peace.
“I hope they find your pieces ,” Jason snarled.
-
Later, Batman found him sitting beside the lamppost, picking at the blood spattering his hands. Sure enough, the roar of the Batmobile had driven everyone else from the street, and it was as quiet as a winter’s day, except for that low rumble of thunder. It was a deeply ominous sound, a foreboding promise of pain to those who splattered the streets with gore. It was an empty promise.
“You,” Batman snarled, “are in a world of trouble. Get up.”
His tone, tonight, was more molten lava than voice—it was the angriest Jason had ever seen him, so bad Bruce was almost shaking with it.
Dully, Jason slid in the Batmobile’s passenger seat. Bruce gunned it the whole way home.
“I see you’ve found Master Jason,” Alfred said. “Sir, you had us horribly worried.”
Jason felt that one, deep in his heart—worrying Alfred was different. Bruce, he was always worried, no matter what you did. Alfred, though, wasn’t grieved until it was serious, didn't tremble until the world did.
“Give us a minute,” Bruce barked.
“Of course, sir.”
Alfred was gone, no sympathetic look left for Jason, no subtle hint, no find me later and tell me all about what a stubborn ass he is. Jason swallowed, and came around to the front of the car, so he was leaning against the Batmobile’s hood.
Bruce loomed like a dark cloud on the raised platform, silhouetted by the blank, massive blue screens of the Batcomputer behind him. “Explain.”
“Explain what,” Jason said, surly.
“I am not in the mood to play games , Jason,” Bruce said, voice rising. Fear trickled down Jason’s spine, but he ignored it. “Explain yourself.”
“I think, actually, you’re the one who’s got some explaining to do,” Jason said. “You remember your good ole pal, the one that murdered your parents?”
It took a full minute for Bruce to respond, and when he did, his guttural snarl had cooled off by ten degrees. “What do you know about Joe Chill.”
“You even know his name,” Jason said. The anger from before had become a numbness, an ash in his veins, but now it was starting to pop and crack and throw up smoke—it was okay, then, that Bruce was angrier than he’d ever seen him. So was he. “You even know his name, you hypocrite—everything you told me, about justice, about what we do, it’s all a lie!”
“None of it is a lie,” Bruce said. “Jason—"
“How can you say that!” Jason screamed. “I just beat the hell out of the man that murdered your parents, and you’re angry with me? Don’t you remember what he did? Don’t you think he’d do it again?”
“Don’t I remember what he did,” Bruce said, quietly. “Don’t ever speak to me that way again.”
Jason ducked his head, tips of his ears burning. “That—I shouldn’t have—said… that. I’m sorry.”
Bruce stepped down the stairs. “Jason. Let me tell you something, that perhaps I should have made clear much earlier. I used to want nothing more than Joe Chill’s head on a spike. I was obsessed with it. I spent years being obsessed with it, years convinced that Joe Chill was a great evil, just because he had taken something from me. It was something dear to me, of course, but it was only myself I was thinking of. I thought him pure evil. I wanted vengeance."
Bruce tilted Jason’s head up. “I was wrong. I was wrong in every feasible way. Chill acted wrongly, but he acted wrongly because he was in pain. That's not evil, that's not undeserving of a second chance. There is nothing that can be pure evil.”
“A murderer,” Jason said, disbelievingly. "The man who murdered your parents."
“By the time I had found him,” Bruce continued, as if he hadn’t heard Jason, “he had become a different person. He ran shelters. He ran kitchens. He’d saved kids I hadn’t even known existed. He had changed.”
“A murderer,” Jason said, again, stronger this time.
Bruce pulled off the cowl, pinning Jason with his gray eyes. “Old evil should never stop new good.”
“You excuse it,” Jason snarled. “You—I—"
“I will never excuse it,” Bruce snapped, expression gone cold. “Don’t ever accuse me of that, Jason. I will never forgive him. I will never excuse his crimes. Any second, on any day, he slips even the smallest amount, I will come down on him so hard they will be pulling his teeth out of the wall with pliers, you understand? But if he is willing to do good, and keep doing good, I am willing to stay out of his way. I am willing to help him do good. To punish him now is not justice, it's vengeance—and we have to be more than our base instincts."
Jason held the sharp retort behind his teeth, and for a moment, the two of them were locked in a silent staredown, breathing in each other’s space.
“You’re still pissed, aren’t you.”
“Like you would not believe.”
There’s a lot about you I wouldn’t believe in anymore.