Chapter Text
It took some convincing to bring Bruce back to Gotham. Even if he no longer had Jason’s death hanging over him in a cloud of misery and shame, this was still the city that had taken his parents, where he’d worked himself nearly to death and nothing ever seemed to change. Wayne Manor was still the house where he’d walked around seeing ghosts in every room, where he’d been so utterly consumed by self-loathing and depression that it had, quite literally, taken Superman to pull him out.
On the other hand, though, it was his home, just as much as it was Jason’s. Gotham was the city where he’d found his sons. Wayne Manor was the home where he’d raised them, the place where he still had memories of his parents. Gotham was the whetstone on which he’d honed his mind, the place that had made him into the version of Bruce who had been a hero and a leader, a founder of the Justice League, more than any training under Ra’s al Ghul ever had.
He confided all of this in Clark. Since kidnapping Bruce, Clark had made himself an available ear many times. In some ways, he’d never admired Clark more than he did now. All those years ago, when they’d first met, he might have anticipated coming to admire Superman’s power, perhaps even Clark Kent’s subdued intelligence. He never could have imagined how much he had come to rely on Clark’s heart.
“They’ll understand if you can’t go back,” Clark said, perched at the very apex of his parents’ roof, dressed in a baggy hoodie and blue jeans. “Dick’s been there, and Jason’s always been very empathetic.”
“I know that.”
“Can I tell you what I think?”
Bruce grunted. He knew by now that Clark was always going to say what he thought was right eventually. His strong conscience prevented him from doing anything else.
“I think you do want to go back, but you’re scared.”
Too perceptive for his own damn good. Bruce had been telling Clark for years to pay more attention, to hone his mental acuity, but now that he was reaping the fruits of that labour, he found it rather displeasurable.
“Of course I’m scared. That city eats people alive. It’s full of monsters.”
Clark wrapped his arms around his knees and knitted his fingers together. “I used to think that too, you know. That Gotham was the worst city in the world.”
“And your time as a Gotham-based reporter changed your mind?” Bruce demanded, incredulously.
“You changed my mind,” he corrected, “and Barbara, to a lesser extent.”
Barbara had seen the very worst of Gotham. She should have known better than anybody what that city did to people. “How?”
“You two… you’re not like the rest of us.”
“You don’t say.”
“Shut up,” he scolded, fondly, “I’m talking.”
“Remarkable.”
“What I’m trying to say, if someone would stop interrupting me, is that you and Barbara – and Dick too, though he’s less Gotham than either of you – have shown me the very best of Gotham. You’re two of the people in this world who I admire the most, and you’re both impressive in the same way. Not your intellect, but your determination. Grit. I may be a hick from Kansas but one of us took the elbow grease approach to superheroing and it wasn’t me.”
“Kal.”
“So that’s the good in Gotham. As for the bad, well, I suppose I learned something from being a Gotham City reporter about that. See, I report crime in Metropolis too, and what I hate about it is that nothing is ever what it seems. Luthor always has a million shell companies and everyone is secretly working on some experiment to, oh hell, blow up the moon or turn bees evil or something. Metropolis is beautiful, but so much of it is a lie that it kills me. Even I’m a lie. The other leaguers, their hero identities are the real part. Diana is Wonder Woman; the Amazonian warrior is who she grew up as and it’s a part of her that she hides in her other identities. But I’m just Clark, under it all, some kid from Kansas who happened to be adopted from space. Superman is an ideal, something I’m trying to be. But you… Batman was more real than Brucie Wayne ever was.
“What I came to love about Gotham, as Clark and when I was playing Batman, is that so many people in Gotham are what they seem. You know a cat burglar who dresses like an actual cat. So if Gotham seems awful… maybe Gotham is just more honest about what it is than other cities. I’ve seen awful things in just about every country and more than a few territories and I can promise you that Gotham isn’t unique in that regard. Gotham isn’t terrible. Some people are, and some of those people live in Gotham. But some good people do too, and your son is one of them.”
He flew slightly over, until he was settled beside Bruce, their shoulders just barely brushing. Bruce finally voiced his real fear.
“He’s going to want me to be Batman, if I go back. I can’t do that.”
“He doesn’t want Batman. He wants his dad. He told me as much. You can be that without the cape and cowl.”
“Can I?”
Clark bumped his shoulder deliberately. “Of course you can. I’ve seen flashes of it, you know, with you and Kon. I know how hard you were pushing him away, trying not to get hurt again, but I still saw flashes of Jason’s dad in you. You saw a lonely boy and couldn’t help but look out for him. It was sweet.”
“What happens if I do go back?” Bruce asked, aware that Clark wouldn’t have any answers for him. The gift of prophecy was not one of Superman’s many skills.
He answered with a grin. “We work out a joint custody arrangement so you can see Connor on weekends and the high holidays and Ma can have you, Al, and the boys for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and to help with the harvest.”
--
So Bruce steeled his nerves, and moved back to Gotham.
--
Everyone came to help air out the manor. They could have hired a service to do it, but Alfred had insisted this was better and Clark had compared it to a barn-raising and that had settled the matter. Flash threw open windows in every room, while Black Canary followed in his wake with a bottle of glass cleaner. Wonder Woman pulled sheets off the furniture and handed them to Dick to fold. She seemed calm now, focused on the work, but Jason could have sworn that she’d cried earlier, holding Jason even more tightly than Clark and Bruce had. Superboy and Tim were sweeping and talking while they did so. Some people seemed not to be working at all, like Selina, who’d gotten caught up in talking about the curatorial ethics of some new museum exhibit with Lois Lane.
It was sort of a party, Jason knew, to celebrate both his return and Bruce’s, albeit from very different kinds of absence. But in spite of the fact that he was the man of the hour, so to speak, Jason found himself unable to stand the crowd of boisterous superheroes and their associates. He was still struggling with nightmares, with flashes of green at inopportune moments. He was still coming to terms with finding Bruce so different from the man he’d left behind. None of it felt exactly like the moment for a party.
It wasn’t a surprise that, with this crowd, he didn’t find himself alone on the roof. It was a surprise to discover that the other person up there was, in fact, Bruce.
“Alfred’s going to be pissed at us for being terrible hosts,” Jason said, and took a seat beside Bruce, dangling his feet over the edge. If either of them slipped there were at least three dozen people in the house who could catch them before they hit the ground.
“We’ll go back eventually,” Bruce decreed, which was probably fair enough, given that all their friends were actually doing work and they weren’t.
Jason had been planning to smoke while he was up here, but it felt weird pulling out a pack of cigarettes in front of his dad. He knew Bruce wouldn’t approve and didn’t want to fight about it today. In lieu of that, he took out his phone and was midway through an Am I The Asshole post on Reddit (she was the asshole) when Bruce decided to break the silence.
“Tim and Connor seem to be getting along well.”
“Steph and Wonder Girl too.” When Jason had seen them last, Steph had been sitting on her shoulders to dust the top shelves of a bookcase. “Cass is in the kitchen with Ma, so I don’t think she’s met anyone yet. I told her she could, or she can hide in my room if it’s too overwhelming. Nobody will bother her in there.”
“It’s good they’re getting along.”
Jason had some vague plans to suggest the creation of a Titans group for Tim and Steph’s generation of heroes, but he wasn’t going to mention that in front of Bruce.
“They’re good kids,” he said instead. “Better than I was at that age.”
“At Steph’s age, you were already dead,” Bruce pointed out, immediately looking like he regretted it.
Jason let himself huff a laugh. He didn’t mind mentions of his own death as much as Bruce did. “Point stands.”
Bruce gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, half to acknowledge Jason’s words and, likely, half to reassure himself that Jason was still there.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Bruce took a moment to find his words. “You said, when you came to Smallville, that you felt someone needed to adopt them. Cassandra and Tim, at least. You suggested that person should be me. I wanted to ask if you were serious about that.”
He hadn’t been, at the time. He’d said the words on a whim as much as anything. Jason had discovered, that day, an ability to blubber that was previously unknown to him, and he’d mumbled quite a few things through his tears. Now, though, he considered the possibility seriously. He thought of how much Cass benefited from being somewhere she felt safe. He thought about the fact that, according to Steph, Tim’s parents had been deeply shit long before they’d died. He thought about how much it would hurt both of them if their lies were ever discovered and they were separated.
“Yeah, B. I am. I’d say all three, but Steph actually loves her mom.”
There was a moment of silence, save for the sounds coming from the gathering of heroes below them. Jason could make out the sound of Impulse, somewhere below them, yelling, “Ew! Get that off my shoe!” Jason decided he didn’t want to know what was going on down there.
“I’m not sure I can,” Bruce confessed, voice low and serious. “They’re not going to give up being vigilantes, are they?”
That had been the line for Bruce’s still-fragile relationship with Dick, and he was an adult. Jason was still scared of what Bruce’s newfound phobia of loving vigilantes was going to mean for him.
“Probably not,” admitted Jason. “Cass might eventually, but she won’t as long as Steph and Tim are in danger. They’re used to being the only ones they can rely on. They won’t give it up while Gotham still needs them. There was a time when they, or at least Tim, would have stopped if Batman was still around, but I’m not sure that would make a difference now.”
There was guilt written all over Bruce, and Jason wished he’d never uttered the word ‘Batman’.
“I-”
“I’m not saying you need to come back as Batman. But I don’t think you should leave them hanging just because they’re all too fucked up to stop dressing up in costumes and fighting people. They need someone in their corner, looking out for them. And maybe that’s helping them train, or running ops, or stitching them up, or just giving them somewhere safe to rest their heads and a shoulder to cry on. I don’t have any fucking idea what this is going to look like. But they need someone and it can’t just be each other any more.”
Jason’s mouth felt dry in a way that was reflective more of anxiety than dehydration, and he was contemplating pulling out a cigarette after all when Bruce said, “I’m proud of you, Jaylad.”
He ducked his head, keenly aware of the fact that he was blushing. “Is that a yes?”
“They can stay at the manor. Anything else remains to be seen.”
Bruce was not going to be able to resist caring for two sad orphans – or one sad orphan and one person who was going to be an orphan if Jason had anything to say about it – once they were under his roof.
“Thanks, B.”
From below, Jason could hear that someone had decided to put on music. Judging from the fact that it was Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA, he was going to lay the blame squarely at Dick’s feet. He cast his eyes up. It was late afternoon, but the sun was still up, occasionally peeking out from in between the clouds.
“There’s one more thing. I have thought about it, and I think you should too.”
That didn’t bode well. “Yeah?”
“Are you going to bring yourself back to life as Jason Todd, or as someone else? Legally, I mean.”
It was an excellent question, but raised another one Jason had been wondering about since his return to Gotham. “So you do know my last name. I was starting to wonder, since you put Jason Wayne on fucking everything.”
“It was a mistake at first,” Bruce admitted, without any remorse. “The associate who drafted the paperwork for the foundation got it wrong. But then I sat back and thought about it and I didn’t think you’d want Willis’s name on everything. And, perhaps selfishly, I wanted you to have mine.”
Jason was torn between being mad – the green was weaker by the day but still sometimes showed itself – and a twisting feeling of affection that was too complicated to fully parse. Sometimes he would forget that Talia had been lying, and that Bruce had missed him profoundly. It both hurt and helped to have the occasional reminder that he had been loved all along.
“I am, you know. Your son, I mean. Whether or not we can think of a way for me to still be Jason.”
Bruce’s arm wrapped around him, firm and comforting. “I love you.”
“Where the fuck did you learn how to actually say your feelings out loud?”
“Ma Kent.”
“You know, that’s fair.”
--
Three weeks after Bruce Wayne’s official, public, return to Gotham, he adopted his first daughter, a former trafficking victim named Cassandra. This latter bit of the story was allegedly a secret, but any thorough digging through GCPD records could have uncovered the sad ‘truth’ about how her parents had died and she’d been trafficked to the US. It explained why she had no legal documentation, as such, and no record of how and when she’d entered the country. Unlike Wayne’s other two children, she was adopted almost immediately after coming into his life, and changed her surname to Wayne with no hesitation.
Cassandra Wayne mostly stayed out of the press, but there was a tasteful interview between Wayne and Lois Lane that featured a picture of Cassandra and her new brother, Dick Grayson, doing ballet warm-up exercises together, along with another of Cassandra sitting by a fireplace in Wayne manor, curled up with her rescue cat, Giselle.
Tim was happy for her. Really, he was. Cass deserved the world and Tim couldn’t have ever given her a public, legal identity in this way. He could only ever have given her lies. But none of that changed the fact that the Nest felt inescapably emptier without her there. She’d nearly always been silent, moving around the apartment, but she had provided a sense of companionship without ever saying a word. He missed her.
“What are you moping all the way up here for?” Jason asked, from the other side of the gargoyle.
Tim shrieked, and was saved from falling to his death only by Jason’s hand on the back of his collar.
“Jesus, Perry.”
Tim was wearing his Peregrine suit. To his surprise, Mr. Wayne had looked it over and decreed it perfectly acceptable to fight crime in, for now. He’d always assumed that he was missing something. Now he wondered if maybe Batman had been just a little less well-prepared than he’d thought.
Jason, on the other hand, was wearing a t-shirt, a leather jacket, and his helmet. Even after all these weeks, he still hadn’t settled on an official name or uniform. Steph was threatening to break out the Wikipedia page again to find him one. Mr. Wayne was probably going to help her, if it would mean that Jason would get a uniform with actual safety precautions.
“Sorry.”
Jason let him go, and sat on the other side of the gargoyle so Tim couldn’t actually see him. There was a click as he took the helmet off and his voice returned to normal.
“Sorry for startling you. Penny for your thoughts?”
“Can I get the big penny?”
He snorted. “Only if it’s a really big thought.”
Tim didn’t say anything, just leaned slightly over the edge of the cathedral roof and gazed down at the pedestrians below. This time of night, there were only a handful, a man in a ratty brown coat walking his husky and two tipsy college students leaning on each other.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here, Little Bird, and guess that it’s about Black Swan moving into the Manor.”
Tim didn’t bother lying. “Congratulations, you won a toaster.”
“And I’m guessing B hasn’t managed to talk to you yet?”
That caught Tim off guard. “Talk to me about what?”
“About moving in.” He couldn’t be serious. He just… couldn’t. “You and Swan can’t come too close together or people will think it’s weird, but… B did promise to take you both, and Spoiler too, as much as she wants that.”
Tim’s body felt very far away. “What?”
“Your fake uncle gambit is clever, Agent P, but it’s not that clever. We’d all feel better off having you home with us. Swan especially. She sleeps better when she knows that everyone is safe.”
“You’re serious.”
“I swear it on my own grave. You did good on your own, kid. Better than I did at your age, that’s for fucking sure. But you belong with us, now. After everything you did for us, it’s the least we can do.”
“All I did was fail to break into the Justice League for you.”
There was a creak of the roof and Jason’s masked face popped up over the gargoyle. “You’re a real piece of work, Perry, you know that? You proved my fucking identity and brought me home and believed in me when I thought I was a fucking monster and you’re like ‘oh well all I did was some hacking’. Fuck off with that shit and come home.”
Tim found himself completely robbed of speech, but fortunately, since Jason was looking at him, all he had to do was nod and strong arms pulled him to his feet, and he was practically frog-marched back to the Batcave.
--
Dear J,
I wanted to do something nice for you, in payment for everything you’ve done for Tim and Cass lately. But then I remembered that I’m not very nice, and also that you are being completely ridiculous by not just picking a fucking name and getting on with it already. So in lieu of an actual gift, I’ve gotten you this.
Spoiler’s Bird Names Suggestions:
Buff-crested Bustard
Tit
Bowerbird
Warbler
Nightjar
Sunbird
Cinereous Tyrant
Starling
Dull-coloured Grassquit
Great Xenops
Snipe
Please Please Please pick ‘Buff-crested Bustard’. Or at least tell B you’re picking it,
S
--
“Bustard?”
“Well it was that or ‘tit’. Those are my top two choices.”
“And here I’d been working on costume options for ‘Cinereous Tyrant’.”
Jason couldn’t help it. He broke first. Bruce joined him in a moment of shared, unapologetic laughter. The sitting room seemed warmer when filled with the sound. “Maybe you could make Steph the ‘Cinereous Tyrant’. She’s still lacking in bird names.”
“There’s nothing ‘cinereous’ about her costume.”
Jason had googled the word, which apparently meant ash-gray, and had to agree.
“Still no serious options, then?” Bruce asked, setting his knitting – half a sock – down on the tea table. Apparently, Ma Kent had been teaching him and he didn’t want to let her down now. Jason was torn between finding it endearing and hilarious.
“Honestly, Nightjar is my favourite on the list. Dick is still pushing for ‘Flamebird’. But none of them really feel right. Maybe I’ll just go back to my original idea and be Red Hood. Then I won’t have to change my costume.”
There was a silence that felt unusually tense before Bruce said, “I would prefer it if you didn’t.”
Because the name was a constant reminder of the Joker, who Bruce had murdered. Right. Jason was a fucking moron.
“You’re right. Not really my style. And it should still be a bird. Just because Steph can get away with pretending that ‘spoiler’ is a bird doesn’t mean the rest of us can.”
“And what will you do, when you have your uniform?”
Unlike the name, Jason actually had made some progress on that front. “I’m going out. I’m not going to take the guns. They’re… if the pit ever comes back, I don’t want to have them on me. I want to keep the Little Bird’s rules, about always patrolling in pairs. Me and one or both of them. I’ll try to lighten how much they take on, keep them out of danger. I don’t think I’ll run with the JL. Dickie and Barbie have that covered.”
“So you’ll be their leader.”
“I guess?” Jason hadn’t set out with that plan in mind, but he wanted to look after them, see that they were safe. This seemed like the best way. Tim and Steph might fight him on it, some, but they’d both come around eventually. They wanted to learn how to do this, and Jason was the best person in Gotham to teach them how.
Bruce shifted slightly, and Jason tracked his eyeline, up to the portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne that hung on the wall above the fire. When Jason was a kid, he’d thought they looked old, sophisticated. Now that he was an adult, all he could see was how young they were. Was Bruce older now than his parents had been when they died? If he wasn’t, he would be within the next few years, probably. Jason had known Bruce for almost as long as Bruce had known his parents.
“I have a name suggestion,” said Bruce.
“Please don’t say ‘blue-footed boobie’.”
“It isn’t a bird.” There was a low and serious note in his voice.
What? Oh. He meant– Oh fucking hell.
“I can’t be Batman!”
“Why not?”
Jason bit his tongue before he could say ‘because you’re Batman.’ That was obviously a non-issue, and it would hurt Bruce to say.
“Because I’ve killed people!”
Bruce raised an eyebrow at him, which, well, fair. If Bruce had picked the cowl back up, Jason wouldn’t have batted an eye.
“I’m dangerous.”
“Batman is always dangerous.” The most dangerous member of the Justice League, Wonder Woman had said once. Jason remembered that.
“I tried to murder Uncle Clark,” he sputtered.
“Part of Batman’s job is to keep Superman on his toes. And Clark has already forgiven you.”
Aware that his objections were growing weaker, Jason said, “I can’t.”
“Do you want it?”
The thought had never even crossed Jason’s mind that it was something he could want. But now that it had, he considered the implications. There was an advantage to making a role all for yourself. That was what Dick had done with Nightwing, and he’d done brilliantly, better than Jason thought Dick could have as Batman. But there was something to be said for stepping into a premade role and wearing it in, molding parts of yourself to fit it just as you molded it to fit you. That was what Jason had done with Robin, and he’d loved being Robin. This, the chance to be Batman, was something far greater still. In some ways it terrified him, that he might mess it up and ruin Bruce’s legacy and destroy everything. But on the other hand, the potential of it, what it could be if Jason did it right, was more than he ever could have imagined.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s yours, Jaylad.”
--
Batman returned to the streets of Gotham after nearly six years away, although Gotham herself didn’t know it. They would know soon, if not the duration of the absence, then at least the fact of the return. Word would spread, just the way it had spread the first time, just the way that word of Spoiler and Peregrine had spread, from person to person, as whispers that grew into shouts. They would recognize him as Batman, although the costume was different. The ears were shorter, the cowl more reinforced than ever, padded like a helmet. The eyes were covered with dark glass, giving the impression that the bat had no eyes at all. The armour was perhaps slightly more intense, five years of scientific advancements having taken place. The cape, though, was just the same, giving the vague impression of a bat’s wings as Jason landed cleanly on the roof.
“Cinereous Tyrant, Agent P, Stick together,” he ordered Peregrine and Spoiler, who were poised to jump off the roof in front of him. They both flipped him off in unison. “And tell Agent B if you need backup.” Into his own comm, he said, “how’s the view from down there?”
“Not as pretty,” B said, with a hint of laughter in his voice that made Jason feel viciously glad that Steph and Tim had bullied him into this.
“Maybe you should come up sometime, just to see it. You know Peregrine did that for years. He’d probably love to have a nighttime photography buddy.”
Tim would probably faint from joy if Bruce offered to take him out wandering the city at night.
“Maybe,” agreed Bruce.
“Batman,” Talia said, from the shadows, and Jason squeaked like a chihuahua with someone standing on its tail and went for his knockout gas.
“Batman?” Bruce demanded, over the comm. That was going to be fucking weird.
“Talia,” Jason greeted her, for both of their benefits. He pressed the switch on his glove to give the person on comms ambient audio.
He hoped that Bruce would have the good sense not to send in Tim and Steph. Cass at least might have a shot at defending herself, but the littlest birds would have no hope against the league.
She raised her hands in surrender. “No need to call for reinforcements. I’ve only come to talk, Little Bat.”
“To talk about how your plan failed? It didn’t work, Talia. You couldn’t turn me against him.”
He hated that smug, self-satisfied look on her face as she stepped closer, into the light from the nearest billboard (‘From the Creators of Batburger: SuperNaan’. Had they no loyalty? Well, Jason would have them singing a different tune.)
“Did my plan fail?” Her lips turned in an arrogant smirk. “What exactly was my plan?”
“You lied to me. You set me up. You tried to use me to murder Bruce.”
“Why on Earth would I want to murder my Beloved?”
In Jason’s ear, Bruce murmured darkly, “black widow complex.”
“What do you want, Talia?”
She stalked forward another couple steps, only stopping as Jason raised his knock-out gas and pointed it directly in her face. “Well, I wanted you to come up with a plan to lure Batman back to Gotham. I confess that this was… not entirely what I had envisioned. When it became clear you were tied to the pit, I could only hope that your escalating violence and knowledge of his identity would force his hand. I had not imagined that you would be able to break free of it.”
Jason gritted his teeth so hard he could practically hear it. “Well maybe if you hadn’t fucking lied to me, I wouldn’t have been so pissed off.”
“And if I had not delayed you long after my father would have seen you take the field, you might still have been too close to the pit to manage what you did.”
“Fuck you. I didn’t do any of the shit you wanted.”
She only kept her dickish smile. “I am not displeased with this outcome. Indeed, it was well done. In some respects, this makes it easier. Your repeated death would have created… awkwardness, and my Beloved’s presence without it is preferable. As is the assembly of a strong defensive alliance in Gotham.”
Jason did not want to find out what kind of machinations Talia had in the works that required Bruce’s presence and a strong defensive alliance in Gotham. “B-”
She extended a hand towards the shadows and beckoned. “Come, Damian, and meet your elder brother.”
Jason’s jaw dropped at the sight of the mini-Bruce who stepped from the shadows. Talia, he thought, was a liar, but she wasn’t lying about this.