Work Text:
Jason doesn’t know when, or how, he gets to the manor, but he does.
It’s a quiet night. There’s new trees in the garden and there’s rose bushes under the windows. He sees a fountain in the courtyard that wasn’t here before he died. It’s slow, and it’s impatient, and it’s Jason all at once. He walks over to it and stares at the pool of water, at his reflection. He’s wrong. He knows he’s wrong. He’s been wrong for ten years, maybe more.
His death didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was waking up from it, five years later, almost unharmed. The Pit shimmers in his memory as he watches his distorted face shine in the water, reflected by the moonlight above. A full moon. Almost poetic, almost nice. It bounces off a dark window.
He looks to the manor. The few lit windows send his heart into a painful ache, throbbing against his ribs. There is life inside of this manor, even years after he left it. There is likely laughter, or fond conversations, or simply a comfortable silence within those walls. He wants to throw up, he wants to cry and scream and thrash until everyone in there apologises for leaving him. He wants to hug them all and beg for forgiveness. As if it’s his fault.
The five years since he came back to life, clawing out of the Pit with shaking arms and sweat heading down his forehead, have been uneventful. He stuck to the streets, as he once did, fought tooth and nail to get home without knowing why. Revenge and guilt and anger have fled through his systems enough to know there’s worse things than death, so there’s only one thing left to feel.
Hope, he supposes. Maybe even love. Jason walks towards the door. Nobody, realistically, should know he’s alive. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he never died and was left to rot but that’s not true. He remembers dying. Remembers the heat of the explosion, the cool thwack of a crowbar, the pleas to whoever is out there to let him live. Then he remembers being born again. He did die. He likes to remember facts, otherwise he gets lost in his head and can’t escape it for days.
Overseas, his apartment is full of notes about his old life. He has names and dates and drawings if he can manage it. They’re faint, he can’t remember much these days, but he knows who he is and he knows who his father is. He hears about him on the news, sometimes. The name is a pit in his stomach. Once he found an archive of papers with his name in the headlines, trying to find one about him. It’s too long ago now, so it didn’t really help.
Facts. The fact is, Jason is standing in front of his home for the first time in a decade. The fact is, Jason is now twenty six and hasn’t been in the country since he was fifteen. The fact is, Jason stowed away on an export ship and had to sneak around Falcone’s men to get out of there alive. The fact is, that now he’s here, Jason doesn’t know what to do.
It’s not right. He’s done everything he can to get home, because while everything is hazy, even yesterday feels like forever away, he knows this is where he belongs. He doesn’t know a lot of things about himself, but this one he is certain. Being reborn is difficult. Being Jason Todd is difficult. He is difficult, he knows that. He’s always been. This is, however, near impossible.
Sometimes, Jason will wake up and it’s a new week, and there’s blood on his hands and face, and a body of a man who murdered his wife being dug out of the ground. He’s never called for questioning. Sometimes, Jason blinks and it’s Tuesday and he’s wearing a costume then he blinks again and he’s back at his flat. He’s never questioned it. He blinks now, willing whatever force sends him in that blind state to do this for him. It doesn’t.
The fountain rushes louder than he knocks. He waits. Anger and fury overtake hope, but the quiet nervousness he has had playing in the background of his new life for as long as he has had it claws on it to dispel all the rage in a cloud of smog and smoke. It could roll out of his ears almost literally and he’d be none the wiser. His focus is rapt on the door.
It’s been a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and Jason is about to run until the quiet unlocking of a door disrupts everything else. He steps back. He waits, and he waits, and the door finally starts to open. His breathing has sunk to his stomach, air and void holding there. A face greets him after what accumulates to as long as centuries.
Jason knows he looks different. His hair has grown out, there’s white in it now, too, and his face is scarred and tired. But other than that, with the recognition that falters across Alfred’s face - he knows he’s hardly changed. He knows it. Recalling his reflection, it’s not quite him, but it’s not quite anyone else, either.
“I’m sorry,” is all he manages to say. For all the killing? For dying? For not getting in contact the minute he was raised from the dead? Jason doesn’t know why he’s sorry, but it’s a fact that he doesn’t need to know. Perhaps he’s not. Perhaps the silence needed to be filled. Alfred takes a step towards him.
His arms are warm, but they shake. He’s holding on to Jason like he could evaporate into thin air at any second, and he supposes that Alfred does in fact have a point about that. For all intents and purposes, this is simply a bad dream for Alfred. Seeing him, standing there, tousled and disorientated from non stop running. He looks over his shoulder. The hallway to the manor looks different.
Jason clings to him, and for the first time in ten years, forgetting that half of that was spent dead, he bursts. He’s been holding himself together for survival, for other people, for the men and women he saves. But now, he has no reason to. He can feel himself crumble into the man who holds him like a grandfather does a newborn, eyes shut and unable to open. He can’t let go if he wants to. And he never, ever, wants to.
“Is this real?” Alfred whispers, right in his ear. Jason just holds him tighter, and sooner or later they’ll have to let go, but Jason can’t. Not right now. Not after everything. He knows too little about the boy he once was, about the man he was supposed to be, but he knows this is right. He knows this. If he were back at his apartment, running over the things he could remember to cool off the rising memories of pain and blood and laughter, then he would write this down and pin it to his bedroom door.
Eventually, Alfred tears away from him, hands on his face, wiping away the damp spots that have formed. His gloves are silk. They’ve always been silk. Jason opens his eyes and glances at the familiar unknown before him. That part of himself, the angry one that blacks him out in fits of terror, is urging him to run either in to destroy or out to evade. He stands his ground. He lets Alfred walk him in.
His boots dirty the floor, and he wants to pause to take them off, but Alfred is insistent on moving further into the home. There’s silence and comfort and no laughter here, but some in a distant room. Tugging back, he manages to step out of them in little time, because he wouldn’t dare disrespect Alfred’s work like that. They look at each other, and the disbelief on Alfred’s face is warmer than the actual manor.
The further they walk in, the more Jason wants to sprint. Whether it’s towards where he is sure his father is, or out of the home and into the night, he doesn’t know. Alfred could pin this as some sort of nightmare, and he could shuffle on a ship back to where he landed in Qatar and stay there. Go back to his apartment and live life as whoever he wants to be.
He swallows, loud enough to echo throughout the halls of the manor. Alfred stops them both, and Jason stares ahead. Too much at once, that’s what this is, really. He can hear the sounds of family, of living, and he knows that there have been new additions but he’s never so much as seen a photo of them. Eyes meet in the middle of the space between them.
“He’ll want to see you,” Alfred says.
“It’s a lot,” Jason says in turn. He glances to where the kitchen is. “Could you arrange something else? Something quieter?”
“Certainly, sir. I’ll pour you a drink, and I’ll bring him in.”
And that’s what happens. Jason sits at the small kitchen table, staring at his glass of water unblinkingly. It’s strange, being empty when you’re so used to every negative emotion overwhelming you until all you see is green, and red, and all of a sudden: nothing at all. It’s far too quiet apart from the hesitant footsteps beyond the walls. Has he told him what’s happening or will he walk in here, find him sitting there, and experience the disbelief writ on his butler’s expression.
Even the kitchen is different. It’s lilac, now, which he thinks is an odd shade for the rest of the manor. But it’s Alfred's domain, so it explains a lot. He drums his fingers on the table’s surface but he cuts it out almost immediately, the sound reminding him of the rain that hammered down on his flee from the Pit, on the windows during his worst nights. He sits silently. He waits, longer than what he waited outside, silently.
Then his blood is rushing to his ears because that’s Bruce. In the doorway, smile dropping almost instantly. He can’t hear the scrape of the chair as he stands, though Alfred’s instinctual wince is enough to alert him of it. He’s been crying, on the way to collect Bruce. Maybe Jason has too. He can’t feel anything but heat, his own young voice calling for his father, and the rain. All of it in his blood.
They stay standing. Bruce looks older, worn and exhausted. His hair is greying at the sides, his stubble looks manufactured and salt-and-peppery. There’s a new scar by his nose here, a burn on his neck there. He’s unmoving, barely even breathing, caught half way through an inhale. All the time, all the while, his eyes are locked intensely on Jason. Like he might leave. Like he lost him.
Because he did. They lost each other. They lost time and love and the Joker and they lost each other. Alfred is stock still, awaiting either man’s move, not daring to leave or take his eyes away from the newcomer - the intruder to his own home, the boy lost to the dirt and the worms. Jason’s breath stutters, and the slight noise brings Bruce to his senses.
“You’re not dead,” is the first thing Bruce says to Jason in ten years. It’s absurd. It’s blunt, to the point, oblivious, and it brings back the nights that have sprawled on where Jason wished that fact was one he could rip from his walls. It reminds him of escaping the Pit with demons in his throat and daggers for nails. All in all, he didn’t expect any other sort of response.
“I’m not dead.”
Bruce takes a step forward. His feet echo through the new kitchen, and Jason is already running. For the second time in the past ten years, on the same night, he runs into the arms of the family he lost. He’s angry. He’s distraught. He wants to hurt him, as they collide, he wants to destroy him for what he did. For leaving him. For ever making him believe that he couldn’t die in his care.
Then they’re sliding, grasping on to the other as if this is a decade ago, to the ground together. Jason’s knees wouldn’t be able to handle it otherwise. He’s livid. Everything is rushing back and his body can’t take it anymore, shutting down like he’s dying all over again. Like he’s going to lose Bruce again. Even if he’s here. Even if he’s not letting his grip loosen for even a second.
Jason is torn. One wrong moment and he’s out of the door, the manor on fire behind him. He wants to stay. He wants Bruce’s arms and his scent and the strength that comes only from war. Hands in his hair. There are hands in his hair and Jason breaks. They’re rough, calloused, but gentle and rhythmic. Folding into his father more, clinging on to his past and his present and his future, he allows himself to break.
Had he been anywhere else, he wouldn’t. Jason can’t break. Not in his position. He breaks and he’s dead, one sign of weakness and his whole operation breaks like a promise. Jason doesn’t make promises, doesn’t bend, he just doesn’t. He can’t. There can be no pity for him, not a drop, when it comes to the rest of his life. Tonight, though, he disobeys all those facts at once. He swears, on his life, that now, he’ll be alright.
“I’m so sorry,” Bruce says. Jason wails and he slots his head under his father’s chin. He doesn’t move. He can’t move. Revenge and fear and anger and pain and helplessness seep through his fingertips, rushing off of Bruce’s sweater as if bulletproof.
“I’m not leaving,” he promises. He shouldn’t. He does anyway.
Bruce hums something and it tickles the top of his head. They stay there, unable or unwilling to move. Alfred has taken to standing guard so that the moment can exist with just them, and as Jason begins to let out the sort of pent up emotions even death cannot strip from him, he’s thankful for it. Neither man mentions his state. Neither man mentions anything, really.
“Do you have anything?” Alfred asks, while Bruce takes to carding his fingers through his white strip of hair.
“I left everything at HQ,” Jason says. He swallows. “I lost some supplies at the docks. Falcone’s men. I couldn’t risk much, I-“
“We’ll get it,” Bruce says, and Jason nods. The questions of ‘how long’ and ‘how far’ and ‘why could I just not find you’ are willing to leap off of his tongue, or perhaps Jason’s so deluded with the need for an apology or an excuse that he’s making up the unsaid words that ring throughout the room. Either way, he graciously declines to answer.
“I’m tired, Bruce,” Jason says. He’s trying hard to not simply fall asleep in Bruce’s arms, because his father would not move an inch if he does. That much he knows, half remembers, in fact. He knows they’d spend the night together on the tiles, the thought of his protection after so long hits his lips with a smile.
“I know, son,” Bruce says. Alfred is walking away now, as father and son work to untangle themselves. Jason yawns, stretching now he’s free. Free. Alive and free and there’s a life to rediscover. “Come on, up you get, Jaylad.”
Jason allows Bruce to guide him up, up off his feet, and up the stairs to his room. Tomorrow will be another day, and he’ll meet everyone else, and he’ll see his brother again. It’s a prospect both too far out of his grasp and entirely too close to his face. He shuffles along when he reaches his room. They stand at the door. It’s surreal. They share a look.
“I won’t be able to sleep,” Bruce says. “I have this dream too much, and I’m scared it’ll wake me up.”
“Then don’t,” Jason says. Truth be told, he was likely to sleep for days at this point. But that would worry Bruce, so he decides to rise once Alfred calls him. He promises it, in fact. He should start writing promises on his walls in the lieu of facts.
He doesn’t sleep for a while, though, and neither does Bruce. They stay awake, in his second floor office, barely saying a word. Together, on the small couch by a stack of books, they simply hold one another. He remembers this couch, remembers it vividly, a few of the most persistent memories involve him falling asleep on it while his father works away, just over there, on his desk.
So it’s rather easy to sleep, a decade of restlessness and adrenaline finally warded off by the protection that he’s finally being granted. Years ago, decades ago, he lost everything in one bang. Years ago, he went out without so much as a hand on his shoulder to tell him that it’ll be okay. Years ago, he died because Bruce wasn’t there, and Bruce couldn’t protect him.
He’s going to forgive him, one day, he decides as the edges of a peaceful night, the first one since he was nine, close around his vision. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day. It had taken him long enough to remember him that throwing it away could only lead to more pain. He knows, in his heart of hearts, that there is love there, always will be. It’s a fact, and he’s gotten good at those.
Jason knows that Bruce is still wide eyed and guarding, not letting anyone rip the boy from his arms. He wonders if he sees the teenager he lost when he looks at him, he wonders if he thinks he’s going insane. He wonders what the people downstairs will think upon realising he isn’t going back down there until Jason is ready for him to. Even if he can’t remember specifics, times or dates or even faces - Jason is certain he remembers this. The familiarity in the warmth, the rise and fall of Bruce’s chest. He can tell he’s crying.
Finally, he drifts off entirely.
“Is Master Jason still with us, sir?” Alfred asks, finding them eventually, with a blanket over his arm. He throws it over the Waynes and tucks it around them meticulously, working around Jason as not to startle him awake.
“When did he ever sleep like this?”
“A lot must have changed.”
“Yes, too much, too long. Where was he, Alfred? When did he get here? How will we-”
“Enough of that, sir, I think you should cross those bridges when you get to them. Enjoy this, now.”
Bruce smiles as he holds his boy tighter. Alfred turns to leave, and he lingers, watching the men with a sad, but hopeful look in his eyes, before he turns away with a poorly disguised sniff. His son is home. He is alive. They both know it. He can confirm it. It doesn’t take long for Bruce to sleep after that.
When Jason wakes, still in Bruce’s arms and with tomorrow fresh, it’s to a young boy in the doorway. He doesn’t know him, and he’s on alert, until a half a dozen or so more children gather around him with wide eyes on their targets. Jason could cry. The manor never did make sense, especially if you look too far into corners and crevices.
He supposes that’s how they’ve found them, curious and morbidly infatuated. Today will be the start of something new, something discarding the frustration and the blank spots in his memory. Something different, and strange, and Jason doesn’t know if he has it in him to be anything but the sourness that the Pit puppeteers him with. He sighs, but he smiles.
Jason doesn’t know why, doesn’t entirely know if, he managed to return to the manor, but he’s glad that he did.