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He has to squint a little at the pile of glossy pictures Talia gave to him before he realizes exactly what they are and what they mean. His mind takes a minute to catch up with him and, for a moment, it makes him believe that the photos in his hands are of him and Bruce on patrol before he kicked the bucket. Then he thinks it might even be golden boy and Bruce in the middle of a stakeout way back when. Upon further inspection though and an extra half second of thought, Jason's eyes widen in surprise at what he sees.
The young boy who is captured in each individual frame is decked out in the signature green, yellow, and red and is dutifully positioned at Batman's side just as Robin, the boy wonder, is supposed to be. The thing that strikes Jason as odd and leaves him reeling is the epiphany that the boy featured in all of the shots Talia provided isn't him or Dick. It's someone else, someone new. Someone who isn't him.
The realization alone is enough to knock the breath out of Jason's lungs and make his eyes prickle with the threat of tears. Of course when Talia asks him if he's alright, he just shrugs it off and swallows past the lump in his throat as though none of it matters, as if the fact that he had been forgotten and tossed aside just like that wasn't tearing him up on the inside.
It isn't until she leaves that he pins all the pictures up and spends a long stretch of time staring at them from the edge of his bed, until every single one is burned into his memory.
A million questions come to mind. How could Bruce do this? After everything that happened? How could he even entertain the idea of not only forgetting about him, but putting another kid in the same dangerous environment that killed Jason in the first place and hurt Dick at least a hundred times or more? It isn't as though he expected Bruce to lose his grip or even cry at his funeral. He liked to think he knew Bruce better than that, stoic until the very end, but Jason had hoped that maybe Bruce would care and show it, finally breaking that facade, if not for a little while.
Is that really so much to ask?
Wasn't it Bruce who took Jason in, called him 'son' more times than Jason can count, and made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he could be better? Was everything a lie? Was he nothing more than a charity case and a useful asset to the oh so noble and righteous Batman? Did Bruce even care at all?
So many different emotions push and pull at Jason, some foreign and others familiar, but they keep at him until he feels physically exhausted. Eventually, somewhere in between all the desperate inquires and the hitched breaths, he allows those tears from earlier to fall, his forehead pressed against the wall and a hand clutching at the haunting images of his adopted father and the boy he was apparently so easily replaced with.
To make things even worse, Talia passes him another file during their next visit.
The second file burns him even worse than the first, but this time instead of feeling hurt or sad or like maybe his heart may have been fractured, he feels rage. So much of it that his hands begin to shake and he drops the thick file on the floor accidentally. The papers from inside it scatter on the ground, but one particular item sticks out from the rest, a photo of the Joker grinning inside his cell at Arkham with a timestamp in the corner dated only just a week ago.
Jason's stomach lurches violently and he stands up so quickly that he knocks his chair onto the floor with a heavy thud, his heartbeat accelerating as he tries to control his breathing and takes an automatic step back at the sight. Talia doesn't budge and doesn't bat an eye at the sudden outburst, just waits for Jason to calm down and offers him a solution, one that seems to help his fury ebb into a low steady thrum beneath his veins.
The Joker is going to pay for what he did to Jason and if Bruce doesn't have the balls to do it then Jason's going to make him watch. This started with the three of them and that's exactly how it's going to end, Bruce's precious moral code be damned.