Work Text:
-It was different before
-Before you were the happiest child Bruce had, always bright and bubbly and seeing the best in everything
-You couldn’t harm a fly and you never wanted to, which was why you were kept out of the loop with all the vigilante stuff
-Your family was pretty happy about that, they didn’t want you hurt and they thought you going out as a vigilante at night would achive that
-They were wrong
-Thinking back at it thing would maybe have been different if they had taught you how to fight, how to defend yourself, just a little bit more
-But they didn’t
-And so one nice afternoon you left to hang out with your friends from school and don’t come back
neither do your friends
-It’s Tim who finds them
-Or rather whats left of them
-They were discarded of in the sewers, their face discarded into horrifying smiles of pain, the signature of who did it clear for him to see
-Even with all what he already saw in his time as a vigilante he felt the need to throw up rise and almost would have if the overlying thought of finding you wasn’t powering over everything else
-A part of them him is relieved that your body isn’t with the ones of your friends, but a different part realizes that the alternative isn’t much better
-The tension that unfolds in the manor after they all find out that you were taken by the Joker was unstandable
the reactions differ from each of them with, but it’s especially bad with Jason, flashbacks and nightmares haunting him again and the feeling of fault for not having killed that son of a Bitch earlier fill him
-Of course all of them feel guilty to some extend
-but they also know that the person who is really respondible is him and they would make sure that he’d regret it
-They tried all their best tricks to find him, but after a week of absolutely nothing coming out of it they start to worry
-They expected the Joker to make a big thing out of it, but they get no message, no nothing from him
-And then a week become a month and even with members of the justice league having an eye out for you, there’s nothing to be found
-it’s like neither you or the Joker existed anymore
-The only sign that he had you was the silence in the manor and the new gravestones in the cemetary
-After the second month passed your family becomes desperate
-It’s around that time that Harley stands in front of their door, covored in blood from head to toe
-She tells them where they can find you and that she was sorry for everything that happened, that she didn’t know what he was doing behind her back and that nothing like that would ever happen to anyone again
-She had taken care of that
-When they finally get to you they understand why she didn’t bring you with them
-You were in no state to be moved without medical care
-On their way in they also understand what she meant when she said she took care of things
-What seems to have once been the Joker was now just a pile of flesh, bones and blood, beaten and perforated to near unrecognizability
-They don’t know for sure what was done to you during these two months, but they know just by the extend of your physical injuries that it must have been terrible
-Bones that are broken over half-healed cracks
-Cuts over scars from cuts that were there before them
-the doctors even find a bullet or two
-The extend of the injuries and the way they were inflicted makes it obvious that the goal behind them was not to kill you or to damage your permanently
-They were to break you and to simply torture
-And they did break you
-When they were finally allowed to take you back to the manor with them they had hoped that bringing you into a environement that you felt safe in would help, but you didn’t really react to anything at all
-You’d sit in your room night and day and just stare in front of you
-Your family tried their best to help you, but there was only so much they could do
-There were other things too
-You would refuse to sleep in your bed
-Not outright, but Bruce would help you into bed in the evening and when he went to wake you up in the morning you either sat in your chair again, seeminlgy not having slept at all, or in the rare instances that you actually slept he’d find you in the closet
-He later would find out that on the rare occasion that the Joker would allow you to sleep he’d make you sleep in a turned off fridge
-You also don’t talk anymore, everytime someone asks you something you’d just stare at them with wide, scared eyes before looking away againn
-What was worst was the way you flinched
-a move that was too sudden or the glinting of something metal made you draw away and sometimes it would make you stop even looking at them for days after
-It was like you were only a shell of who you used to be and it tears your family apart to see you like that
-It will probably take months if not years until you’ll be able to smile again or hold a short conversation, but your family will be there with you on every step, no matter what
