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Bruce comes to in the abyss.
He chokes on air that isn’t air with a deep, gasping breath that fills his lungs at the same time it deprives him of it. He flounders, sinking as he floats, tumbling over himself without moving at all. The world shifts around him, anamorphic, shapeless, forming something he can almost recognize before it changes again, sinking further into grays and inky blacks, and it curls up around his wrists, burning into his flesh without touching him at all.
He twists once more in a dizzying array, body registering pain while feeling nothing at all as he lurches forward. Spots of color dance in the corners of his eyes, along the backs of his eyelids as he closes them, fragments of memories he knows but does not twisting around them; there are tendrils closing around his throat, and then breaking off with a startled gasp, with a cry, with nothing at all.
Bruce comes to in the abyss, and he opens his eyes with Dick’s hand on his shoulder.
His expression is indiscernible behind his mask, though he can sense his eyes flitting behind the lens. His hand remains on his shoulder, even as he twists his head to take in the everything and nothing that surrounds them. While his feet remain planted firmly on the ground (earth?) beneath him, where he’s been standing since he came to, the sensation of falling has yet to leave him. Dick makes a soft noise in the back of his throat, and when Bruce looks back to him he flickers between Nightwing and the multiple other masks he wears: the face of a young boy look back at him, and as he blinks the leader of the Titans does; once more and he dons a cowl that isn’t his.
“B?” he asks, voice breaking the silence. It’s barely a murmur and yet it echoes around him, as loud as it is soft. “You with me?”
Bruce pauses, mouth falling into a frown only to find his body aches in a distant sort of way, phantom sensations of aches and pains pushing at the edges of his consciousness until he feels everything but nothing at all. He takes a breath in to find a cold bite to it, a shock to the lungs, a hint of ash and the lingerings of a stale taste at the back of his tongue. Dick tilts his head again as his brow puckers.
“B?”
“I’m fine,” he gets out, straightening his stance. As he does he knocks the hand from his shoulder, and something flickers across Dick’s expression that tugs at something in his ribcage, but Bruce elects to deal with that later, after they’ve gotten themselves sorted and out of wherever… this is.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Dick states as if having read his thoughts, though he knows it’s more instinct, the unspoken layers of trust. Whether or not they always see eye-to-eye, there is a decade of honed intuition there. As Bruce’s gaze wanders, he continues: “I have no idea where to start, but I also haven’t seen anyone else here—granted, I haven’t really gotten that far since I woke up myself.” His eyes cut back to Bruce. “One of Scarecrow’s tricks?”
“Doesn’t feel like his usual m.o.,” Bruce says. The world, or what he can make of it, constantly shifts, a deep blue it’s almost black curling in on itself, and while it feels as if it goes on forever, he can hardly see more than a few yards in front of him. Smoke, or something like it, twists around his feet, dissipating and then coming back together as he shifts.
Dick shrugs. “Something new, maybe? Scarecrow Two: The Crowing.” He trails off, hands held in front of him before he drops them. He can tell he’s unnerved, at the very least, and the joke falls flat as Bruce straightens his stance. “I’ll come up with something better later.”
“We should get moving.” The ends of his cape disappear in the mist gathering around them, shadows cast against his legs though he cannot pinpoint a light source. Dick steps back, and he swears something whispers to him, just caught on the fringes of hearing as if it were never there in the first place.
“After you.” Dick pivots on his heel as Bruce comes to stand beside him, and for a moment they only survey their surroundings; no discernible landmasses, no proper sense of direction greets them, just an expanse closing in on them as it spreads. The sense of familiarity descending along his shoulders wars with the trepidation skittering up his spine. At once he is exhausted and then invigorated, and the darkness swirls before him.
His footfall echoes but doesn't make any noise at all. Dick looks uneasy, but then schools his expression into a stoic mask that doesn’t befit him.
— — —
The two wander through the miasma, steps forceful yet light as they descend a slope that should have their stomachs turning but does not. The world shifts around them yet remains stagnant at the same time, where gravity exists yet does not, and working to dissect it has a headache forming in the space behind his eye. His cape sways behind him in a nonexistent breeze, and he notes Dick is rather quiet for his usual chatty self.
“This is surreal,” he says as they first start their trek, and his mouth draws into a thin line as he states the obvious.
They continue walking for what feels like hours, or seconds, or years, if they’re even moving at all, and it’s difficult to make out where they are, if they’ve made any progress, as their surroundings reflect nothing yet everything all at once.
The path narrows and widens like a living, breathing being, and both of them slip into fighting stances in fluid motions as the air rips into a sudden, cacophonous scream. It’s the sound of marbles in a steel drum, swallowed up by a deep, guttural sound that is not human, is not of the earth. Instinct tells him to clamp his hands over his ears, a honed fight-or-flight response begging to give way to mercy.
The closest thing Bruce can associate with the figures that rush them are wraiths, parademons, figures that exist in mythical fantasies. A shriek like a banshee and a skeletal hand brushes past his cheek as he ducks away, and Dick grunts as he dodges a blow of his own.
There are two, then three, then four, and then too many bleeding into one another to keep count, the sound they make a resonant hum, building until it reverberates in his ears and then descends into abrupt silence.
“The hell,” Dick murmurs, escrima stick creaking in his grip as it tightens. Bruce’s eyes narrow as the figures who appear roiling in the mists around them circle them. He considers the ramifications of driving his fist into one of their faces, if they have one, if they’re corporeal beings, and with an inhuman sound one creeps closer to him again.
“Back off!”
His reaction time is slower than usual, something he berates himself for with a grimace as another figure flanks him, spilling from the mists to stare him down before charging forward. They brandish what appears to be a bo staff, waving it in an arc at the wraith closest to him, and then at the one that’s been edging toward Dick as he twirls his own weapon. The noise the figure in front of them makes is more discernible, more human than anything they’ve come across thus far, and it gives him pause as the shadows before them meld together, then melding into their surroundings as they vanish entirely. The only trace of them is the ringing in his ears, and the muscles in his back and legs tighten as the figure in front him shifts, straightening, cloak disappearing into the mists with streaks of yellows and greens against the black.
Bruce’s breath catches in his throat, words sticking and all coherent thought leaving him as the figure—no, the boy, turns back to face them. He can hear Dick’s own response as the tension bleeds from his shoulders to give way to the ache of grief.
“Jason.”
“Hey B,” he says, voice soft, and he’s given only a short recovery period before he’s propelling himself at him, lopsided toothy grin and a cackle for his efforts, and Bruce has to adjust his footing before he has an armful of his lost son clinging to him.
The gut response is there, the parental instinct, as Jason, or his memory of him, buries his face in the armor against his chest, grip too tight to be something conjured up. The thought of who his son is now clashes with the man he is today, the man he almost wasn’t, and not for the first time he thinks of Dick, of Tim, of Jason, and how they’re much too young for this world, for what they’ve all endured.
“Jaylad.” Jason squirms and Bruce loosens his hold to release him, his feet hitting the ground as he beams up at him, face open and honest and maskless. As he takes a step back, Bruce removes his own cowl and watches Dick fidget, mask in hand as Jason turns his attention to him.
“What’s with the bo staff?” Dick asks, to which Jason glances to his side and then back with the beginnings of a scowl.
“Dude, it’s literally just a stick.” He holds it out for emphasis, shaking it in front of him. Dick tilts his head back enough to avoid being struck in the nose with it, and Bruce watches the exchange carefully, working through the number of questions he has and the dwindling number of answers he has for them.
Dick snorts, and it’s enough to pull his attention back to his boys. The two of them got along well enough, he’d wager, for what it was worth and as much as circumstances allowed. Both were vying for a place of acceptance in their own right, and Bruce will be the first to admit Dick hadn’t been overly close to or seen as much of Jason as he would have hoped before he died.
He tries not to think of the hand he had in that, all the built up anger from his eldest.
“It’s useful for chasing off all the ladies here,” Jason says with a smirk that offers a sense of ease he hadn’t come to expect from this place, whatever it is.
Dick bats it away again. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what’s chasing them off.”
Bruce watches in apprehension as both tense, preparing himself to step in when Jason abruptly launches himself at Dick, slugging him in the arm and rewarded with a grunt.
“Good to see you too, Dickface,” he says. Dick winds his arms around his shoulders, sure to knock the stick away from his temple again when it gets too close.
“Nice to see your penchant for original nicknames is still intact.”
Whatever Jason says in his response he doesn’t catch, voice muffled, and Dick’s grip tightens before he moves back. The Jason in his mind’s eye he last caught a glimpse of on a rooftop on the west side of the city, their exchange full of barbs and sharp teeth, and as he’d left him there Bruce had caught a glimpse of puckered skin above his collar before he’d pulled his helmet on. This Jason turns and beams at him, and guilt rips at his gut, whispers creeping in at the edges of his vision again.
In his silence and after a weary look, Dick picks up his slack. His arms fold over his chest. “Not to knock on seeing you again, but what is this place?”
Jason shrugs, cloak shifting around him as green bleeds back into grey, into black, melding into the mist swirling around him, like he’s part of it. His expression darkens with the shadows.
“Definitely not Willy Wonka’s hang out, I’ll tell you that much,” he mutters, and Dick’s features mimic his as they twist. Jason shifts on his feet, dragging the end of his stick on the ground with a sound that’s grating, though he can’t hear it. He sighs. “You’re familiar with Limbo, aren’t you? Purgatory?”
The thought doesn’t come as a shock, though little surprises Bruce at this point in his life, what with a life of men who can fly and lost children returning from the dead on more than one occasion, though he and Dick still exchange a look. A collection of Dante’s Divine Comedy lies in the bowels of his growing library, the worn pages once glossed over with reverence the first time he’d taken Jason there. The irony is not lost on him, and Jason watches them both with what he only assumes is trepidation.
“Why are you here then, Jason? You’re…” Bruce starts, trailing off as the words catch in his throat again; despite having Jason back, alive , there still exists a chasm between them, still exists his inability to say his son died. His son died and he wasn’t there, not until he held his cooling body in his arms.
“Alive?” Jason provides, leaning on his staff. “Yeah, kinda. The one you have back home, maybe. I’m like… the trace amounts left behind, you know? Part of you dies, part of you stays. The Lazarus Pit doesn’t do any favors for free, either.” He squints at the both of them in turn. “I’m like eight percent sure I’ve probably seen one of you guys running around here too, but after a while all the shadows start to look the same.”
They’re silent for a moment, again, though Dick is once more the one to break it.
“Well Jesus,” he mutters, and Jason about snickers.
“We should probably get you out of here,” he says before pausing to tilt his head up at his older brother. “Unless you… want to stay here?”
Dick deadpans, “Oh yes, I’d love nothing more than to stay in this screwed up carnival of fun rides and hell.”
“Smartass.”
“You really are the Brat Wonder, you know that?” Dick says, and Bruce catches a hint of teeth in his grin out of the corner of his eye though something about it feels forced.
“B, Richard’s calling me names again.”
“We should get going then,” Bruce says, the first thing he’s said since Jason pulled away from his hug, and the sentiment does not garner the reaction he would have expected. He has imagined a number of reunions that serve as a stark contrast as the one he and Jason actually had, or what he would do had Jason lived, what he would have done with a simple five more minutes with the boy, though those never would have been enough. To be in purgatory sounds like a hell of his own making.
When they leave—if they leave—it only means he loses him again.
“I’ll lead you out,” Jason says, and thus they begin again.
— — —
They make idle chit chat as they go, for the most part, Dick and Jason. Bruce, ever vigilant, keeps his gaze on the fog curling around them, though his gaze flits back to the two as he does. He’s not totally there, Jason says, not technically, more of a figment if they think about it. While they have little explanation as to how they got there, the why goes unspoken, the boy beside him bumping his arm.
“I don’t know if you’re dead,” Jason tells them. “You don’t feel like it, so I can’t tell you that for certain. What I can tell you though is that you’re supposed to be here, and I’m supposed to be the one to take you where you’re supposed to go.”
“And that is?” Bruce ventures, raising an eyebrow at him. He hums a little, a sound he hears rather than loses in their surroundings.
“The light at the end of the tunnel.” In any other setting it would come off as a poorly timed joke, though he says it with such sincerity that not even Dick hazards so much as a chuckle. At the look he is given, Jason only squares his shoulders and presses forward, their path taking them on turns that defy gravity, if gravity even still exists, here. “Like I said, you’re supposed to be here. Why, I dunno, but nobody ends up here on accident, just ‘cause you took a wrong turn somewhere.”
“That is frustratingly vague, Jay—” Bruce starts, and then has maybe two seconds to press a hand to Jason’s chest and push him behind him as what he can make of the ground opens, smoke spilling into the void that stretches, shrinks, twisting around them as his gaze seeks out Dick, finding him on his flank as he crouches protectively.
The monstrosity looms over them, a gaping maw of jagged teeth, rows akin to that of a great white as they disappear into the black hole of its throat. It shifts, an array of eyes blinking back at them out of sync before vanishing back into the inky blackness that is its corporeal form. The shape of the behemoth shifts, and Bruce’s eyes narrow in how cowl as what he assumes is its head rolls back and a deep, grating sound emanates from it in a roar.
“Nightwing,” he grounds out. In the corner of his eye he can see Dick twirls his escrima sticks as he readies his stance.
“On it.”
“Stop!” Jason calls out just as Dick moves forward, pushing past Bruce’s elbow. “Stop trying to punch everything for two seconds and listen!”
He muscles his way between the two of them, cloak billowing out around him, and in what Bruce is not foolish enough to believe is a trick of the eye the image of him flickers, body twisted and limbs jerked in unnatural angles. An eye, then six, then fourteen, then three, blink down at him out of sync, and the great, beastly noise it makes edges its way into a groan, then a whine, then nothing at all as it dissipates as quickly as it had appeared. Jason trails the end of his stick through the remnants it leaves behind, mist swirling around it.
“Look, you guys are alive, and everything here knows it. Is it going to kill you? Probably not, but it’s definitely going to try if you attack it.” When he turns he’s scowling at them, though it fades into something pensive. “For people who say violence isn’t the answer, you sure do hit people a lot.”
Dick scoffs, and Bruce is still tense, still poised and ready, even as Jason turns away from them, moving until he’s nearly lost in the mists himself.
“Come on, we’re burning daylight, guys,” he says. Dick mutters something about better follow him as he takes off after him, and Bruce pauses and watches the two of them for a moment. It’s hard to think time exists here, if it does, if there is any impact to the outside world, the real world, wherever that is, now. A whisper picks up again, almost recognizable, now. Something tugs at the edge of his very being.
— — —
A trek such as this would exhaust a lesser man, and yet they press on and Jason guides them through a world of smoke and shadow, blacks and greys leaving no distinguishing features, the deep blue of Dick’s uniform and the slip of teeth when he speaks the only splashes of color. On occasion, he spots hints of red so dark it’s almost the color of blood against his chest when Jason turns, footsteps livelier now that they’ve made some decent headway, or so he says. As far as Bruce knows they could have been walking in circles, if they’ve been moving at all. There is little to make sense of here, after all.
Bruce notices before either one of them does, the way the fog churns, curls, the outline of a figure cast in shadow. His head tilts, eyes narrowing as they approach and the figure takes a clearer shape. The recognition hits him all at once, more human than an amalgamation of eyes and teeth.
“What is Barbara doing here?” Dick asks, voice soft and pained.
From where she stands, Barbara is a collection of movement, limbs twitching and grasping at nothing, head shaking on her shoulders before stilling entirely, hands clasped over her stomach. Blood pools down her waist, at her knees, and her eyes rove as her lips twitch in a murmur he can’t make out.
“Don’t let him near her!” Jason calls out just a split second too late, Dick pausing a few feet away to glance back at them. His mouth opens to say something and then shuts, as Bruce slowly approaches to stand beside him while her chin drops to her chest. Jason grumbles behind them, something that sounds like I warned you.
“Barbara,” Bruce says, softly, and her murmuring takes on a new fervor. He goes to move, extend a hand, repeat her name, when she throws her head back and screams up at them, an unholy sound that tears at her mouth, blood already coating her teeth, an angry gust overcoming them like they’re caught in a wind tunnel, and Bruce’s throat constricts as it reaches a fever pitch, violent spots of red dancing across his vision. Just as quickly as it’d begun it stops, and Bruce gasps in a lungful of air that does little to quell the ache in his chest before he turns to find Jason tugging at his cape and Dick on his knees with his hands clamped over his ears.
“I told you not to!” he yells, and then drops the cape in favor of checking on Dick. Barbara is gone, and there’s a dissonance, a reverberation that does not sit well. Jason helps Dick back up to his feet, though he still holds his head. He casts a glance Bruce’s way. “We should keep moving.”
His expression hardens, as does his eyes, though Dick ignores Jason in favor of staring down at the spot where Barbara had stood. Blood still roars in his ears, something constricting in his chest; physical sensation is clearer, now, more visceral the more they move. Jason drops his arms and goes to retrieve his staff from where he’d dropped it on the ground as he’d reached for Bruce.
“You know the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin? Where the guy is like ‘you can go if you don’t touch shit?’ You should consider doing that,” he says. Bruce opens his mouth to speak when he pauses again, Dick’s shoulders going taunt and Jason stiffening. “We probably shouldn’t be here when she gets back.”
“What the fuck was that?” Dick asks instead, tone biting and words sharp.
“What do you think it was?” Jason whirls back with, angrily ramming his staff into the ground.
Bruce reaches for Jason and gets his hand knocked away for his troubles. “No! Enough of the vague answers and no explanations. We’re not going anywhere until you actually explain something, Jason.”
“Where do you really think you are, Dick?” Jason says, only Mary Grayson stares back at them. “What do you think you’re doing here?” The step Dick takes back falters, Bruce grabbing his arm as Thomas Wayne turns his attention to him. “You must know by now there’s a difference between acknowledging and addressing your guilt. You live with it, you own it, you accept and atone for it.” Harvey Dent says, “Or else you let it consume you.” Donna Troy sighs and folds her arms. “Now, who would you rather lead you out?”
“That’s enough,” Bruce gets out through gritted teeth, grip tightening as Dick goes to move, body all rigid lines. Shadows swirl around them, tugging at Donna’s legs as they crawl up them, and the whispers, though muted, reach a fever pitch as they crescendo into nothing, nothing at all, an oblivion that’s more unnerving than it is bliss.
“It doesn’t matter how you got here,” Tim says, staring back up at him. His expression can only be described as one of pain. “It only matters how you get out, and have to.”
He forces himself to meet his gaze and maintain it, even as Dick rips his away and shrugs Bruce off. He meets his gaze in a silence that’s nearly deafening, and looks back down at the boy who’s brought him back from the brink once before. Dick’s footfall steps reverberate back to him, up to his knees as he stalks off, only a short distance away, lest they lose one another. Bruce looks back down at Tim, at the boy who wormed his way into his life and headed his self-destruction off at the pass and wanted nothing for it, eyes once wide and bright, now scarred by all he has endured. Tim bleeds into Damian, bleeds into Dick, bleeds into Jason.
“All right,” he finally allows after a moment, stoic as ever. It still unsettles him to see the face of Jason so young, so full of life, so… not haunted. Jason nods. Dick only inclines his head in acknowledgment as they begin their trek once more, the path giving way to a slope that still does not dislodge their footing. As they continue Dick refuses to look Jason’s way, and Bruce finds he cannot blame him for fear of Mary Grayson or his own father looking back again.
Jason pauses, arms out and they both halt as the mists part, curling in on themselves like a live mass and leaving behind hints of cobblestone and wood, worn smooth and melding together. The patchwork of basalt and aged oak stands out sharply against the mist, and as Bruce studies it finds it leads to a dock sitting on the edge of water, though the waves make no sound. A single boat floats along it, a skinny sort of thing resembling a gondola, or perhaps a punt, the sides nearly dipping into the surface and the ends rising in gentle slopes before coming to a fine point. From this distance, he struggles to decipher whether there is another figure on the boat, or if it’s another instance of smoke and mirrors, grey-black fog milling about.
Jason sets out first with the wordless instruction to follow, and once more Bruce and Dick exchange a look over his head, the latter more perplexed than he is, though he masks it as he clenches his jaw as they follow the steep drop of the path.
Dick says nothing, and Bruce doesn’t push it, though he falters. There is a whisper again, louder, though he can’t make out the words as they meet Jason at the edge of the dock.
The expectation is there, though unspoken, and the figure shifts from their post as they approach. With a glance to them a quick one to Jason, who nods, Dick boards first, quickly followed by Bruce who doesn’t hide his glare at their silent ferryman, lacking any and all defining features.
“Hope you brought some gold coins with you,” Jason says with a toothy grin, remaining standing even as the boat rocks beneath him. Dick’s steps are more hesitant, as are Bruce’s, not as sure footed as they usually are as they come to stand in the bow and starboard, respectively. Jason rolls his eyes. “Relax, it’s not like you’re gonna fall off.”
The dock disappears behind them, seemingly absorbs back into the darkness that swirls around them like a fog, or perhaps it was never there are all. Bruce expects to lurch as the boat picks up speed, but it calmly cuts through water the color of pitch as it carries them forward.
His stomach lurches, fists tightening even as his stance remains steady. Different sensations come and go: that of the first line he ever fired off; his first meeting with Clark; the scent of rain against the grounds of the Manor; Cass’ smile up at him as she runs her fingers along Titus’ fur. There are other sensations, too: a gunman gotten away; Tim’s hiss of pain he tries to hide as Alfred does his stitches; screams of mercy gone unheard.
He closes his eyes, and yet the screams still persist.
“Who—?” Dick starts, leaning forward in order to peer under the ferryman’s hood, and Jason blanches and reaches for his arm to jerk him back in a manner that has Bruce reaching for them both on instinct, lest they go overboard.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jason says as his older brother rights himself again, casting Bruce a glance as he does. He only grimaces and turns his gaze back to the water, watching what appear to be fish or eels roiling beneath the surface. They gather and dissipate like koi, coming together and drifting apart, movements jerky and almost epileptic. Upon closer look a human eye stares back at him, and as it blinks the iris changes colors before disappearing entirely.
“What are those?” he hears Dick ask, and knows he’s looking at the same. Jason shifts and sucks on his teeth; Bruce watches the gnarled fingers of a hand curl and scrap along the back of an eel.
“Well, uh, since this is kinda your guys’ ... judgement zone, I guess you could call it,” he pauses to glance over the starboard side into the water that churns and stares back at Bruce, a particularly dark spot like a gaping maw ready to swallow him whole. “Those are all the people you couldn’t save.”
“Judgement zone,” Dick parrots, and Bruce lets out a breath through his nose. “Yeah, I didn’t pick up that when my mom was shouting that at me the first time, thanks.”
Jason, to his credit, has the decency to look shamed, though he doesn’t back down.
“It was true, though. You don’t end up here for no reason—people who come here… they’ve either died when they’re not supposed to, or come here because they want to, because they think they deserve it.” For a second Bruce looks away from him, but his only other option is to stare back down at the water that he already knows will haunt him for years to come, if not a lifetime. Jason lifts his head and looks right at him. “Haven’t you put it together yet?”
The boat carries on in silence to a destination unknown, and where the water crashes against the boat, lapping against itself in the current, there’s only a murmur. If Bruce concentrates on it, they’re pleas for help, reassurances he could not give, did not give in time. One begs forgiveness, another is a muted, wretched cry of anguish for death already.
“You never answered my question earlier, Jay,” Dick says from where he’s fallen into a crouch at the side of the boat, staring into the faces of each person they have failed. He wonders how many are familiar to him, to them, which they could pick out of a crowd; he wonders how the numbers have amassed over the years, just how many he has let fall. John Grayson blinks back at him, one eye and then the other, though they never knew one another; Damian stares at him and he has to force his gaze away. His son is very much so alive.
Jason studies his boots, mouth twisted into a grimace. His cape flutters around him, the dark cloth alternating between as pristine as one can be here and tattered, torn, burned.
“Why was Barbara here, Jason?” Bruce cuts in, in no mood for the squabbling he can sense ensuing between the two. Despite what little time they may have spent together, they certainly have the ‘brotherly love’ aspect down pat, and he is in little mood to watch Jason play shapeshifter once more.
He does not look at them for a moment. “Because she died.”
Bruce is silent. Dick is not. “What?”
“After—when they Joker shot her? She died for a minute, and she’s kinda been stuck here,” Jason says, voice soft. “She wasn’t dead, not officially, so sometimes she shows up and we chat a bit before she disappears again. Other times she shows up and does... that.”
“The trace amounts left behind,” Bruce repeats from earlier, frowning. Jason shrugs.
“Something of the sort, I guess. I don’t make the rules here and I don’t know the science behind it, I just follow along in case anybody shows up.”
Dick mutters something neither one of them catches, arms crossed before him and chin ducked into his chest. The boat glides through the water still, effervescent gleams catching his eye as others blink back at them nameless faces he will carry with him, clawing at his mind’s eye and his rib cage every night, every morning.
Jason turns back to the bow, nearly blending into his surroundings with only a small creak, the first sound the puntas made since they boarded it. Dick gets back to his feet, and he squints as the dock, or a dock, comes into view, though it’s impossible to gage how far they’ve traveled, if they’ve traveled at all. Jason sways from one foot to the other as they dock, turning enough to gesture for them to move first. Whether the ferryman hears them, or can hear them, Bruce can’t tell, though the figure hasn’t so much as twitched since they first approached it.
He can tell Dick toys with another question, another demand for explanation, though he isn’t far behind. Instead, he only frowns and lets the mists engulf his legs again, swirling around footfalls as Jason beckons them forward again. The path narrows once more, or perhaps it stretches out before them, endlessly, folding in on itself of fanning out for forever and Jason guides them for another hour, or minute, or year, his muscles sore from all of his walking only in the back of his mind in a phantom sensation that comes and goes.
They carry on until Jason pauses with a sigh, one heaved from somewhere deep within him and Bruce waits for another roar from another otherworldly creature, for the tendrils to ease their way around his wrists, his throat, to be dragged off into oblivion, a hell of his own making. He waits for any sign of Dick struggling, body tensing and at the ready on instinct.
Jason takes his staff and knocks it against the ground with a hollow sort of sound, one that reverberates up to his kneecaps and has him narrowing his eyes. Below them, the smoke dissipates once more, giving way to obsidian and tektite, flashes of bronze woven into it, colors twirling and bleeding into one another, and the next sound Jason makes is a resigned sort of one.
Bruce hums, nearly a grunt.
“So that’s it, huh?” Dick says, voice suddenly too loud for how soft it is. “No great and powerful Oz behind the curtain?”
“‘fraid not,” Jason says, breaking away from the two to stand before them. As he does he twirls his staff and it shrinks until disappearing entirely broken into wisps of dust and mist. He eyes them both, scrutinizing, looking older, wiser, and drawn beyond his years and Bruce awaits his assessment, whatever it turns out to be. “Listen, no gimmicks, no lessons learned, no five-thousand word essay about what you did over summer break, just a walk to take.”
The thought almost draws a chuckle from Bruce, as he thinks of all the stories he’s read over the years, the myths and fantasies he’d lost himself in in his younger years, and the torment he’s put himself through as he’d grown older. All the stories of loss, heartache, and the struggle for redemption steadily becoming realities.
“You both have immense weight on your shoulders, guilt that should not be shared, but accepted, dealt with, grown from and not defined by. You’re not Atlas; you’re Bruce and Dick, two of the world’s biggest assholes, and that’s just from me.” He grins, though it softens into a genuine smile. Something about him flickers, and for a moment Bruce sees someone he isn’t, someone he’s never met, and someone he’ll never know. Beside him, Dick’s fingers twitch.
Jason’s teeth click and he takes in a breath while something like sensation flows back into Bruce’s fingertips, pins and needles giving way to something real, something grounding. The whisper he’s been hearing since he came to makes its presence known again, only this time it’s clearer, only this time it says a name.
“Seriously though, you both harbor too much, and it practically rolls off you in waves. Consider what you’ve done and will do, not just what you haven’t. Your failures don’t define you—not if you don’t let them,” Jason says, and the worry lines fade from his features; his cloak stops billowing around his knees. “So please, go home now? As nice as it was to see you guys again, I’d rather not see you anytime soon. It’s too early, and we all have too many things to do.”
From the corner of his eye, Dick’s stance falters, and Bruce goes to move toward him when Jason beats him to it, stepping into his space and looking up at him with all the conviction he ever could have mustered and then some. There’s a small glint of his teeth as he smiles up at his older brother.
“I don’t know what I really expected,” he says, hand coming to rest on Jason’s shoulder. The latter hand raises to knock his fist against his elbow, and after a moment of hesitation winds his arms around his waist, face tucked into his chest as Dick’s hand comes to rest at the back of his head.
“That’s why I was always the brains of the outfit,” he says, tone cheekier than their last exchange, and Dick lets out a real, short, genuine laugh. “Go home, Dickhead. You’re making Barbara and the others worry.”
Bruce is not entirely prepared when the attention shifts back to him, and as it does Dick moves away to afford them privacy, or as much as can be allotted here. Jason is quiet for a good moment, quieter still as Bruce crouches, suddenly feeling too large for his body, for this space, and there’s a buzzing in his chest as he meets his eye.
“You’re not supposed to be here, B,” Jason says, at the end. His frame is too thin, body too small, and Bruce stoops down further, to his knees so that they’re almost at eye level. He’s tinier than he remembers, as he gestures vaguely around them, to this vast, nebulous mass of in-between, a collection of blacks and grays with spots of color like starbursts against the backs of his eyelids. “Not that I mind havin’ ya here, but...”
Jason’s shoulders sag and his eyes are wide as they bore into Bruce’s own, wider still as he catches a flicker of pain in them. He looks and he sees the young boy who hit him with a tire iron, the one who told him being Robin gave him magic, and the young man begging his father to tell him why he’d gone unavenged. It dislodges something in his chest, and then Bruce reaches over to wrap his son in his arms.
“I’m sorry, Jay,” he says into the unruly mane of his hair, and in turn Jason tucks his face into the side of his neck and winds his arms around his shoulders as far as they will go.
“I know,” he says. “It’s okay.” And in that moment they’re two lost souls, lost children, in the middle of Crime Alley all over again, and Bruce clings to his son because his arms remember the weight of cradling his body and how still, so still, it had been, and Jason wraps his arms around him tighter because he knows. “I wish you didn’t have to go, but you should. And don’t come back until you’re old— older . Like a hundred-and-five old.”
Bruce cracks a grin, one that doesn’t reach his eyes, damp as they are, and Jason reaches up to pat his shoulder. He smiles, as bright and lively as ever, even as his voice wavers.
“Go home, B,” he says, softly, dropping both his arms and taking a half step back. “You gotta go home and wake up—there are bad guys who need their butts kicked!”
Jason taps him on the forehead, and Bruce closes his eyes and falls, and he falls, and he falls.
and
falls.