Chapter Text
He still is a creature that is beautiful, but all dirty. He said:
What you must do is kill me.
Frank Bidart, The Fourth Hour of the Night.
The thing that sticks with Jason is how clean his fingernails are.
Jason wakes up. He wakes up in the medical wing of the cave with blast lung and black feet and tymphanic membrane ruptures and so much taped to his arms, fingers, wrists that he can barely twitch without feeling something threaten to pop. With all his eyelashes singed off. With flashburn flesh alol over.
He wakes up to Dick shelled into a chair next to the cot, long thin scrapes all down Dick’s cheeks.
“Hey, kiddo,” whispers Dick when Jason slits his hard, wet eyes open and blinks, slow, woozy, and barely comprehending. Dick reaches forward, and it looks like he doesn’t want to, but he makes himself.
Dick picks up Jason’s hand like it’s another timebomb.
Jason is suddenly aware of the oxygen mask over his mouth — how loud it makes his breathing sound, how dry and hard the air inside his mouth is. The skin around it is. It’s all raw, but it’s thick and hard at the same time. He can’t speak, tongue a dirtyard, so all he can do is stare at the hand that’s making itself hold his. His gaze falls as his chin flops against his collarbone, unable to stay up. All he can do is stare at his own hand. His no-skin hand. His all-tube-and-medical-tape hand. All held-by-somebody-he-barely-knows hand, by Dick’s hand.
Jason’s eyes stutter when they land on his own fingertips.
There’re bandages on Jason’s thumb, his pinkie. Bright blue splints, too. But his other fingers are all naked, and they’re clean. His fingernails are white. They shouldn’t be white. They should be cherry pie, be smithereens. Jason clawed inside himself when the Joker beat him, felt his own guts while he scrambled to free himself from the ropebonds and slipped in the blood on the warehouse concrete. Jason clawed redwet inside of Bruce through the rips in that smoldering black suit while he scrabbled to find a heartbeat in the rubble afterward. There should be blood.
There should be ash.
Someone must have cleaned them. It must have been Alfred. It must have been with a wet white sanicloth while Jason slept. Alfred must have done it real careful, finger-by-finger, so he wouldn’t jostle the IV or rouse Jason.
Dick squeezes his hand, and Jason drags his slow, sticky eyes back up, unfeeling. Something in the background is beeping.
“It’s going to be okay,” Dick promises. At least, Jason thinks he’s promising. “You’re going to be okay, Jason.”
It sounds more like begging.
Later, Leslie stops by and she doesn’t speak to Jason. Not for most of it. Instead, she looks at Dick. Messes with Jason’s wounds in silence.
Then, suddenly, she takes this deep bracing breath and turns toward Jason, staring him dead in the face and not blinking. She has these big, watery old-lady eyes that she’s forcing even wider with the intentness of her gaze.
Then she exhales hard and says, “How you doing, honeydoll?”
Maybe she wants something. Maybe she wants something to salvage from this, like maybe Jason can show her that Bruce Wayne didn’t die for nothing. Maybe it’s just her Hypocratic oath speaking, making her want to make sure that Jason’s okay.
Whatever she wants, Jason is in no position to give it, so he doesn’t.
He doesn’t give her a damn thing . He just looks at her. Breathes through the loud oxygen mask.
She looks away, eyes darting to the clipboard with all of Jason’s fractures. Her fingers dart to her stethoscope the way little girls play with their braidtails, and she snakes it off her neck and wrings around her hands and continues with her observations. The silence that fell after her question lasts until the end.
That’s when, finally, after she’s tiptoed around his body and electrocardiogram and catheter too thoroughly to linger any longer, she tries again. “For what it’s worth,” she falters, swallowing audibly. Then, reluctantly, frailly, she says, “I’m sorry, hon.”
But I’m sorry is everywhere, and good for not one single thing.
There is a long silence. There’s only beeping, and Jason’s loud breaths.
Dick says, “Doc?” when Leslie finally starts to renoose her stethoscope around her throat, and all three of them know what he’s asking. What Dick’s too good to reify as a real, terrifying possibility for Jason by saying out loud — what it’s right and decent only to imply.
Is Jason going to be okay?
Leslie’s tongue pokes out of her mouth. She’s not looking at Jason anymore. Instead, she’s looking at the ground, until she tilts her head back up to stare at Dick through her sparse old-lady eyelashes. Without looking at it, she touches the plastic foot of Jason’s cot gently, a ghosttouch, with just two fingers. “It’s going to be a long road.”
“Well, Jay’s a hell of a driver,” Dick says.
“Sure,” says Leslie, eyes flickering. “Would you walk me upstairs, Dick?”
Dick glances at Jason, as if asking permission — as if Jason could stop him when Jason can’t even wiggle his toes.
Part of Jason wants to get up, though. Part of him wants to rip off the mask and the tubes and the paper gown and speak now and explode on Dick. You’ve never even seen me drive. Or maybe You’re not who I want. I don’t even know you. (Part of him wants to get on his knees. Don’t leave me here for even a second.)
Instead, Jason only shifts his gaze another time. Now, he stares dead ahead at the faraway computer, not giving Dick a glance. The cave is silent but for the long, terrible beeps of the cardiogram.
“Yeah. Course,” Dick agrees after a long time. He puts a hand on the small of Leslie’s back as they go up the steps to the Manor.
At the top of the stairs, just for a second, Dick looks back down, back at Jason, the light behind him making his face inscrutable. Then Dick turns his head back around, blending back into a shrinking silhouette.
Jason catches Leslie say “— burns in the longterm—” He catches Leslie say “lasting sensorimotor damage in about 50% of patients.” Then the door clips shut and Jason is alone in the Cave trapped in a hospital bed double-bunny-eared to heart machines and air machines and we’re-not-going-to-let-you-die-like-your-dad machines.
Jason keeps staring straight ahead at the distant black screen of the EKG, setting his jaw. He keeps setting and resetting it. He does it so much his jaw starts to hurt. The heat in his eyes fireants down his cheeks, tears racing down into the re-epithelialization bandages on his cheeks. He screws his eyes shut.
He doesn’t open them when the door reopens, or when the bed dips from someone sitting beside him, springs creaking. He just sits here, eyes squeezed tight, body quivering all over.
It’s silent for a long time. Dick’s as good as Bruce was at being silent when he wants to be.
If it weren’t for the burns on Jason’s body and the needles in his skin, maybe Jason could even pretend that Ethiopia never happened. Maybe he could pretend that the silent weight at the edge of his bed isn’t Dick at all.
Maybe Jason could pretend that he’s just waking up in his bedroom, that Bruce had stopped hovering in the doorway to come in to card his hair when he saw that Jason was awake. The prickling heat covering his skin isn’t from burns. It’s from too many blankets, a left-open window that Bruce will get onto him about in the morning.
Jason is silent until the tears run out. But then the sobs take their place, and they come hard and wracking, and the words that fall out of his mouth aren’t about important things that are gone but the stupid small ones, because those are the only ones that Jason can even start to think about. Those are the only ones that can still maybe even be changed.
Jason’s stupid fucking weak hand trembles as he drags down the oxygen mask. Moving feels like cutting his musclecords open with fabric scissors.
“Where’s Alfred?” he forces out between gaspsobs. His voice sounds like a rusty swingset. “Why isn’t he here? Why are you here? I don’t — I don’t want you. Where is he? Where’s he?”
The bed creaks as Dick moves. Dick’s hand wraps around the part of Jason’s skull that still has hair, fingers burying in the curls, hard nails scraping. That’s not the way Bruce used to do it; that’s not the way at all. Jason wheezes.
“Hey, he’s safe,” Dick soothes. “He’s okay. He just needed — Bruce was his —” falter, quietening. Quiet for a long time. “He’ll be back soon.”
It’s not that Jason calms down. It’s that he stops crying. It’s not that he wants to stop crying either. It’s that his body won’t anymore. It’s so fucked out that it doesn’t know where to allocate its resources. Crying, apparently, is a distraction from essential functions. Crying is a waste of everyone’s time.
Dick doesn’t say that part out loud. All he says is, “Here. You’re dehydrated,” when he brings a cup of ice chips for Jason to suck on. Jason gets the message anyway.
Jason only takes one of the ice chips. He lets it sit on his tongue for twenty good seconds. And then he spits it out onto the bed. Or maybe spit gives him too much credit. It slips out of his limp, unstrong mouth, a worm in mud. He and Dick both stare down at the ice as it melts atop the sheets. It gets the edge of Jason’s collar wet. Jason doesn’t look up from it, slumped chin lolling against his collarbone.
After that, Jason sleeps. He sleeps a lot. Once you’re used to it, the constant electrocardiogram lullaby stops making you want to smash your head against the wall.
Jason sleeps because his body won’t let him do much else. Because that must be one of those essential functions. Jason sleeps, and every time he does, he keeps his eyes shut for an extra few seconds after he finally wakes. It gives him a couple seconds more before he has to confront reality.
Maybe this time he really will wake up in his bed with Bruce’s fingers in his hair and the weight of oppressive, still summer heat. Or maybe, even better, he’ll wake up in the passenger seat of the Batmobile, with Bruce driving them on the long, sloping path home and Gotham smearing in the dark windowtint.
With the wind in his hair.
Later that night (or maybe the next morning — Jason has no sense of time here), Dick crawls into the cot beside Jason, stirring him. In the first few seconds after Jason’s jarred awake, he does that old ritual: keeping his eyes shut and hoping for the feeling of a carride, the smoothness of road under tires, the crush-fizz of the police radio.
Instead, consciousness comes in shards. All he feels is bed, at first. Then skinlessness. Then assless paper gown.
And tubes. Lots of them.
Jason cracks open his sticky eyes to see Dick lying next to him with a thin, open black laptop on his chest. The screen says Empire Strikes Back. His chin pressed to his collarbone, Dick says, “I heard you liked this one.” Then he presses play without waiting for any cue from Jason. Without giving Jason a chance. The theme picks up.
They watch.
It’s Jason’s most favorite movie.
It’s also going to be ruined for the rest of his life now. Luke is trudging through the snow and Jason is thinking about the smell of burn and the taste of butane and his mom’s strawberry blonde hair and Bruce. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. Burnt, and dead, and on top of him as the ash rained down. The lump in Jason’s throat makes a muffled keen.
“Jason?” Dick asks, sitting up slightly. The tauntaun’s guts get shoved aside to make space for the stupid ace-pilot farmboy's body.
Jason doesn’t answer. He breathes hard through his nose, and it whistles. He blinks furiously.
The movie keeps playing. Slowly, when he doesn’t get a response, Dick slumps back down.
It’s only at the end, when screen is smearing with hyperdrive, when Dick tries again. His voice is soft.
“Jason, for whatever it’s worth, I’m —”
He doesn’t finish, his mouth opening and closing a couple times before pinching shut. He swallows audibly. The quiet hangs.
“I know,” whispers Jason when the screen goes black and white with motion lines. The words fog up the plastic of his oxygen mask.
Jason’s sorry, too.
The next day, Alfred is finally back, and Jason could cry.
So he does cry. Before this, Jason would have never let anyone except Bruce see him in tears. It’s kind of crazy how getting set on fire will change you. It’s kind of crazy how losing someone will turn you inside out, like a sock in the laundry.
Not that it helps his cry-willingness that Alfred looks dead-awful. Alfred's eyes are tiny, dull, and brilliantly red. Sure, Alfred’s wearing his normal suit, but its cuffs are flapping in the air because he doesn’t have cufflinks. Worst of all, Alfred looks like someone drained him of all of his blood: He’s the color of table salt. He looks like he might pass out right there.
It only gets worse when Alfred sees Jason, in all his oxygen tank glory.
When he lays eyes on Jason, who’s crying like a little baby, something in whatever semblance of a veneer Alfred’s putting up cracks. His face just crumples.
“Oh,” whimpers Alfred. “Oh, Master Jason.”
Dick is sitting crosslegged on the end of Jason’s bed, watching impassively, hands steepled under his chin, with those scratches still on his face. Jason’s pretty sure Dick gets up to leave, but honestly, Jason sort of forgets Dick exists the second he claps eyes on Alfred.
Alfred isn’t Bruce, but he’s closer than Dick is. Before Jason got their dad blown up — which they have yet to really talk about, besides exchanging unspoken sorrys during Star Wars endcredits — Dick and Jason had only met twice. They had punched a couple goons together, then Dick slipped Jason a phone number and shook his hand and left. And that had been that.
Alfred, on the other hand, is a known quantity, even if he's not a sufficient quantity, and what Jason would really, really like is for someone he knows to hold him. (That’s what he would like. What he wants is another story. What he wants is Bruce. Is nothing, nothing but Bruce.)
Alfred surges forward. He holds Jason. He just holds him. He holds him for a long time. Every second is overly careful, overly ginger — probably because Jason’s more topical antimicrobial ointment and medical tape than real human skin or huggable bits — but it’s enough that someone’s covering him with their arms at all. Down comes the cardhouse. Jason sobs and hiccups and scratches into Alfred’s shoulder all these awful, hot, shuddery, wet, gasping things.
He’s heaving sobs so hard that it takes him longer than it should to realize that Alfred is sobbing, too, right into Jason’s shoulders — like they’re equals, somehow, now, in a way that they weren’t before. Like Alfred isn’t the adult and Jason isn’t still working with a castrato. A rock lodges in Jason’s stomach, the hysteria quelling into something cataclysmically still and sober.
Jason stops crying almost immediately, skin chilling, stiff icicle fingers still outstretched behind Alfred’s hot neck as he holds onto Alfred as the man weeps.
It feels like the pit in Jason’s stomach is going to sink him down into the center of the earth. It feels like the earth has been thrown off of its axis.
Donna picks up on the first ring. “Dick?”
“Don’t,” Dick says. Quiet and sharp.
“Dick — ”
“I’m not doing this right now,” Dick says. “That’s not why I called.”
Dick can picture Donna on the other end. She’s probably sitting on the edge of her bed, chin on her knee, hair braided for the sleep that his call interrupted. He can picture the moonlight through her window — it must be barely three a.m. over there.
It’s already creeping into morning here.
There is a long, resigning silence. “...Fine. Then how’s Jason?”
Really, really fucked.
“Alive.”
Dick leans his back against the refrigerator door and slides down very slowly, shutting his eyes and crushing the phone between his cheek and shoulder. The Manor’s kitchen is dead-quiet. It’s so silent Dick can hear his heartbeat.
Dick flexes his fingers for a minute. Then he drags his nails down his cheek until his fingertips feel wet. Gazing at them, he scoffs. He curls his fingers, letting his wet hand thump back to his lap, head knocking back against the stainless steel door. There’s another quiet.
“Honey,” Donna breathes helplessly.
“Donna.” Dick works his tongue around his mouth for a second, but nothing comes out.
Through the blinds above the kitchen sink, baby blue dawnlight is streaming, turning the fruit in the bowl a grayish color and catching the dust floating in the air like flies in amber. The line is quiet as Donna waits patiently. When nothing else comes, she hums softly.
“Anything. Anything you need, hon. I mean it, Dick.”
Dick’s mouth floods with saliva at the sour taste that suddenly overtakes him. “I need you to tell everyone I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry for anything. God, Dick, this is beyond anything that —”
“I need you to tell them that I’m sorry,” Dick interrupts, “that I won’t be coming back. Not for a while. I’m going to be in Gotham.”
“Of course.”
“And I need you to tell Kory that I —”
Pause. Falter. Dick glances down at the fingers in his lap, the dark red already beginning to harden under his nailbeds. Suddenly, Dick doesn’t have one single word left to give.
Donna, perfect, beautiful Donna, gets it anyway.
“I’ll tell her,” Donna promises softly.
Dick swallows, then nods slowly, even though Donna can’t see him. He blinks furiously, eyes darting briefly to the white-tile floor. “Okay,” he manages around the lump in his throat, his voice very small. “Thanks.”
He hangs up. He stares at the phone in his hand and doesn’t crush it into smithereens in his palm like he wants to. He doesn’t break down like he wants to. He doesn’t curl up into a tiny shriveled ball like he wants to.
He stays there on the ground a few seconds more. Then he braces his hands on his knees and slowly gets back up.
When Dick tiptoes back down to the Cave after getting off the phone, Alfred and Jason are still holding onto each other, passing hushed words between one another and gripping each other’s hair, and somehow Dick feels like he walked in on something too private to be decent; he staggers back, swallowing hard. Then he heads up the stairs again.
He makes dinner and brings it back down. They’re still holding each other when he does. They don’t even look up. He snags a blanket from the Cave’s storage and places it wordlessly on the end of the bed, and lingers there a second too long. Then he leaves again, and tries not to think too hard about all the things he wants and will never get again.
There are things to do, so he’ll do them. He picks up the phone. He arranges what needs arranging. The flowers, the calls, the making-it-known, the coffin. He does it.
He has to.
And if it means there is no time left in the day to fall apart? All the better.
Alfred wakes to plasticine poking at his spine, paper brushing his arms, and coarse hair tickling his nose. Stiffly, he disentangles himself from Jason, who is still sleeping, and blinks slowly.
The rest of the Cave is dark. It always is. But it’s especially disorienting now, for some reason, leaving him no way to know the time.
Alfred rolls over onto his back, staring up at the hard black stalactites he knows must be hanging above the cot. (Something that Alfred had always, horribly, mused about was the possibility of one of them coming down like a knife and coring right through the wretched soul standing underneath it. What a terrible fate, Alfred used to say. You should get out of this cave while you still can, Master Bruce — every second here is another second for one of these to fall and kill you. Or worse, me.)
Alfred drags in a sharp breath through his nose.
There’s nothing in the air except for the smell of damp and the drip of water from the stalactites and the beeps of Jason’s monitors.
But Alfred can still smell dry, hot smoke. And Alfred can still see a little boy with dark, shining eyes and a policeman’s jacket on his shoulders, too-long sleeves scuffing against the wet cobblestone street, stark against the electric yellow police tape behind him. Alfred can still feel his hands carrying that little boy home, and signing his school permission slips, and inserting intercostal drains to salvage his biannual mugger-induced pneumothoraxes.
Alfred can still remember the burnt black body that Dick, with Jason over his shoulders, dragged out of the jet. The way the blackened skin flaked off like dragonscales as pieces floated between the stalagmites.
The way it smelled.
(Alfred thinks that he wouldn’t mind if one of those stalactites came down on him now.)
“Al?” whispers Jason, turning and squinting groggily at Alfred in the dark. Alfred can tell by the way the shine of his eyes catches the almost nonexistent light.
Alfred swallows thickly. He drags a hand down Jason’s rough curls. “Back to sleep, child.”
Jason doesn’t relax. But eventually, something gives, and slowly — so gradually Alfred doesn’t even see it happen even though he’s looking at Jason’s silhouette the whole time — he’s asleep again, breathing faintly.
It is all Alfred can do to keep dragging his hand through Jason’s hair again and again, burning eyes fixed back on the stalactites that he cannot see in the dark.
A long time later, it is still dark, there is still a child in his arms, and it is still impossible to tell what time it is. But this time, carefully, Alfred extricates himself from the Jason’s limbs. The sound of Alfred’s suit scraping against the paper gown is like an emoryboard.
Alfred’s knees tremble once he’s upright. Drymouthed and head pounding, Alfred sways. The artisan pairing of dehydration and grief. He has to grip the edge of the cot to stay standing.
Onward, Pennyworth, he tells himself. Onward.
But that simple directive has never felt more impossible.
At some point — Alfred isn’t sure quite when — he must head up the stairs. He doesn’t know where his legs find the strength to do that. All he knows is that at some point, he isn’t staring into the dense blackness of the Cave anymore; instead, his vision is full of his own, shineless shoes on the luscious red and maroon rugs over the Manor’s hardwood. Even on autopilot, it seems, his body knows better than to dare to let Alfred raise his head enough to glimpse the pictures on the wall. He keeps his head down. That is, until, a hesitant voice calls, “...Alfred?”
He raises his head to find Dick standing in the doorway of the office, a phone pressed between his scratched cheek and a gray-sweatshirt-covered shoulder.
The boy’s hair, length to his eyebrows now, is greasy enough that the curls shine and stick to his forehead. But his eyes are intent, lucid, and startlingly intense. They’re perfectly clear, the way they always are, the way they’ve always been, and suddenly, Alfred can’t help but feel overwhelmingly inadequate. Overwhelmingly pathetic and evil and self-centered.
Dick is Bruce’s son, and he hasn’t fallen apart like Alfred has. He didn’t need to take several days alone in his chambers simply to weep like Alfred did when Dick brought back the corpse and Jason. How dare Alfred grieve more? How dare Alfred have the gall to be more affected? How could Alfred just leave Jason when he was in his time of greatest need? Alfred is only a servant, not even a member of the family, certainly not Bruce’s fa—
There, Alfred’s mind won’t even let him finish, as if his brain, addled as it is, simply cannot accept that thought.
Still, the guilt remains.
“Master Dick,” Alfred croaks in greeting, straightening — or trying to.
Dick stares for a second longer, not blinking but wetting his lips very slowly. Then, “...Can I call you back, John? Yes, that would be fine. Thank you. Thanks. Bye,” Dick murmurs hastily into the phone, those perfectly clear eyes never leaving Alfred. He slips the phone into his pocket, and slowly tilts his head. Then his mouth turns down. “Al, is there anything I can —?”
Together, Pennyworth, Alfred scolds himself. Get it together, man.
Alfred swallows thickly. “I — a funeral. We must put. We must. We. He must have a funeral.”
For a beat, Dick just stands there in the doorway of Bruce’s study, adjusting his crossed arms. How are you so composed? Alfred wonders, half of him wanting to shake the boy’s shoulders and demand his secrets for not crumbling to the ground.
“Thursday,” Dick replies evenly, after another long beat. “The 30th. I already made arrangements this morning. Actually, I was just on the phone with a funeral director. If that time doesn’t work, we can choose another. I just thought doing it as quickly as possible would be best.”
Alfred’s mind grinds to a halt. “...What?” he breathes.
“The 30th,” Dick repeats. “At 10 a.m.”
All Alfred can do is stare.
It seems like that is the only thing Alfred is capable of doing these days: staring. Watching, passively, as everything else happens around him.
Everything passes in a haze. There is sleep. There is a feverpain in his chest. There is gazing at the floor and never at the walls. There are soaking wet pillowcases every night. There is sitting at Jason’s bedside, where the two of them stare at each other in silence and clasp hands.
The only moment of clarity he has ends abruptly when, a gentle smile on his face and a tray of black coffee and egg whites and toast balanced on his gloved fingertips, he opens the door to Bruce’s bedroom to find it empty, dust shimmering in the shaft of light from the open window where it beams over the still-unmade bed. The clarity evaporates instantly, replaced by the memory of what’s happened. By the paroxysm of grief that makes the silverware and saucer on the tray clatter with his sudden tremors.
Somehow, soon, it is Thursday. Alfred stumbles downstairs from his quarters without his vest or coat or tie tied to find Jason, upstairs for the first time, sitting in a wheelchair in a charcoal gray suit and staring at a white plate with two plain slices of toast and a cut apple. Jason looks up listlessly when Alfred comes down and steps inelegantly on the creak in the floor. The sound makes Dick turn around from where he’s facing the stove, a teakettle in one hand.
When he sees Alfred standing in the doorway, Dick freezes. He’s dressed in a dark suit, his hair parted to the left. Both Jason and Dick stare at Alfred for a long time, silent.
The teakettle hisses.
Then, jerkily, Dick steps forward, presses a hand to Alfred’s back, and guides him to a seat at the table, setting the teakettle on the bare tablecloth next to Alfred. Hovering beside Alfred when the man sits, Dick hesitates, still standing. Then the boy gently reaches for the tie around Alfred’s neck and loops it into form.
“Sorry,” Dick murmurs. The sound is loud in the silent kitchen. So is the rustle of the fabric between Dick’s calloused fingers — or maybe it just sounds that way because the fingers at his throat are so close to Alfred’s ears. “I’m not as good at this as you are.”
When he’s done, Dick’s hands fall back to his side. Then he pulls out a chair, the legs scraping loudly against the floor, and sits. The three of them sit in a painful silence until 10 a.m. ticks nearer.
Hanging in the air between the steam from the kettle and the smell of bread is an understanding. A terrible one. Soon, the boys will bury their father.
Soon, Alfred will bury his son.
Dick links his arm with Alfred and guides him down the walkway. He accepts the torn black ribbon the rabbi proffers and pins it to Alfred’s suit for him before pinning his own.
Dick keeps Alfred standing. And when it’s time to cover the coffin with the first few handfuls of dirt, he bends with Alfred. They look at each other as they draw back up, soil clenched in their hands, and then unfurl their fists and let it fall. Then Dick breaks the gaze, turning to pull a white latex glove out of his coat pocket. Dick kneels briefly, his back to Alfred, to worm it over Jason’s bandaged, still-raw hand, which is resting on the arm of the wheelchair. Then Dick scoops up more dirt and places it gently in Jason’s gloved hand.
“It’s tradition,” Dick murmurs when Jason glances up at him questioningly. “We’re not doing everything exactly the way we should, we’re not going to sit shiva or anything, but I know —” Dick falters, glancing back over his shoulder and catching Alfred’s eye for just a second before turning around again. Pause. “Bruce said he did this for his parents. So we’re going to do this for him, too. Can you do this for him?”
Jason looks at Dick for a long time with his thin green eyes.
Slowly, Jason turns back to the hole in the ground. His fingers clench. Then Jason releases the dirt, uncupping his palm. It falls on the top edge of the pine coffin. It isn’t a very large amount of dirt — Jason’s hand isn’t very big.
Something acid and hard thickens in Alfred’s throat. It burns his nostrils. It burns his eyes. He lurches, chin knocking against his collarbone, trying desperately to swallow.
Not here, Alfred tells himself. Not here. Not now.
His body doesn’t listen. Alfred stumbles, then rushes away from the gravehole. He ducks behind a tree and retches. And retches. And retches. He coughs, wiping his knucklebacks against his hot, wet, disgusting mouth, shoulders trembling. He grips the tree, fingernails catching on the rough bark. For a long moment, he stands there, panting and trembling and staring at the watery bile seeping into the mulchground.
“Hh,” Alfred whimpers, eyes tearing up.
Slowly, quietly, a gentle rain begins to fall, so light it is almost possible to miss. It looks like transparent crystal needles falling to the ground.
Then Alfred keels once more, falling to his knees, and lets the rest of his stomach burn out.
It’s only after the burial part is over that Jason realizes that he’s never been to a proper funeral before. Not that he’s entirely sure that this is a proper funeral — Dick’s the one who put it together, and that guy was weird enough to think fish panties were appropriate crimefighting attire. But if it isn’t entirely proper, then it’s close. Or at least, close enough to what Jason would have expected.
There are so many people. They’re wearing black. A lot of them are wearing peacoats. Some of them are crying. Some of them aren’t, but they’re dabbing at their eyes with tissues. Some of them are linking arms.
Jason recognizes a lot of them. This ceremony that Dick put together — it’s mostly people from the underside of the mask.
There are lots of Leaguers — some Jason didn’t even know too well, to the point that he has to squint to identify them without their masks. But they all look different with such red eyes, even the ones he did know well. It takes Jason several minutes to figure out that the puffy-faced man crouched by the grave with his head buried in his hands is Superman.
In glimpses, Jason sees the Titans, too. But the only one he sees up-close is Donna, who comes over to where Dick is holding onto the back of Jason’s wheelchair, where Dick’s situated himself. She squeezes Dick’s arm and puts her head on his shoulder. From afar, Jason sees Roy Harper start to approach, too. But Dick shakes his head, just once, and the arm that Roy has outstretched in the air drops slowly, the redhead’s expression crumpling.
“You know how much we love you, right?” Donna murmurs into Dick’s shoulder, behind Jason’s line of sight.
There is a long, long silence before Dick exhales. It trembles. It’s soft.
“I know.”
Donna stays wrapped around Dick the whole time. And Dick stays with his hands on Jason’s handlebars the whole time, gripping and relaxing and regripping the handles everytime someone comes up to him to extoll Bruce’s virtues or give Dick their thoughts and prayers. And Jason? Jason is stuck staring at the big black hole his dad got lowered into. Other people mill around Jason, never daring to come up to him or look him in the eye. It’s like Jason’s a big black hole, too.
The people that come up to grab Dick’s arm or kiss his cheek studiously avoid Jason altogether. Sometimes, every once in a while, someone from afar will seem to scan the crowd for Dick and find him, and then their eyes will happen to flit down to Jason, where they widen and then dart away, as if they can’t bear to look at him.
Jason yanks his head up to look at Dick. “When is this going to be over?”
His voice still sounds like a sodacan somebody is dragging behind their truck.
Donna’s head is still buried in Dick’s shoulder, so Jason can’t see her face, but at the sound of Jason’s voice, her arms tighten around Dick.
Dick’s brow furrows. “What?”
“When is this going to be done? When are we going to get to be alone with him?”
“I —” Dick starts, brows furrowing even further. Then, abruptly, he cuts off, eyes lasering to the nearby figure that gets up and trudges past them. Dick reaches out a hand, shaking Donna off of his shoulder roughly, attention completely stolen away from both Donna and Jason. “Uncle Clark?”
Clark’s chin turns over the brambley shoulder of his ash-gray coat, his face sunken and swollen all at once. His gleaming eyes soften at the sight of Dick. “Dick,” Clark breathes. I’m —” he falters, eyes suddenly lighting with a new wave of tears, which he tries to blink away. “It’s —”
When that doesn’t work, Clark scrapes the heel of his palm against his eyes like a little kid.
Dick’s face falls slowly. The light rain is making the curls over his forehead look wet and straight, and in the drizzle, it’s sort of impossible to tell if he’s crying, but Jason doesn’t think Dick is. Dick certainly doesn’t sound like he’s crying when he says, gently, composedly, “I know.”
“I’m so sorry.” Clark shakes his head, voice cracking. “I should never have been off-world. I could’ve —”
“You couldn’t have.”
“But I could have. And even if I couldn’t, it doesn’t matter. I let him die. He was too important for me to just let—”
“You were saving the world,” Dick interrupts, and his voice isn’t loud, isn’t steely, but there is a sudden tone in it that makes people around them quieten and turn and watch, as if all of the oxygen in the world has disappeared and the only source left of it is the 18-year-old in a damp suit. “That was more important. That was the choice you made, and that was exactly the choice he would’ve wanted you to make. You were saving the world. He was saving his.”
Jason’s heart thuds slowly in his ears. There’s a thunderclap that sounds like it’s coming from underwater.
He sees Dick’s lips continue to move. In slow motion, Clark brings up a hand to touch Dick’s face that drops down to clasp his shoulder firmly.
Jason sees people rustling around. He doesn’t hear any of it. The only thing in his skull is his throbbing pulse.
Jason’s wet fingers slip on the wheels of his wheelchair as he scrabbles to push himself away, the wheels sludging through the loose, wet dirt. Something else is slipping, too. It takes Jason until he’s back in the Manor’s back parlor, tracking the cemetery mud on the pristine white-and-black tile, to realize what it is: saltwater slipping down his face and into his mouth and fucking drowning him. His throat is all wet. His mouth is all wet.
He gasps. The sobs mix with his hyperventilation and the stinging bodyheat to form some ratleg frogsnout newteye evil potion that surges out of his nose and throat in the ugliest sound ever. He’s crying like a little baby all over again. He’s crying like one of those murderers who’s stoic the whole trial through and starts weeping once the judge gives the sentence.
Jason is so stupid. He should have expected this. He should have realized it before. Instead, he had to wait for Dick to say it crystal clear at his dad’s funeral to figure it out:
This is Jason’s fault.
This is all Jason’s fault.
Jason is a human frypan. Sheila is dead. Bruce is dead. And it’s all because of Jason. Because Jason went to Ethiopia, because Jason couldn’t get his stupid fucking wrists out of the Joker’s bindings, because he couldn’t get his mouth to tell Bruce to leave him fast enough, because he couldn’t be smart enough to not get caught in the first place.
Because Jason couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. His breaths get shallower and shallower. He can feel his heartbeat in his throat.
Clark lost his best friend, and Alfred just lost his son, and Dick just lost his dad, and Gotham just lost the only thing keeping it from going to shit so people are going to get shot and mugged and raped and robbed and the whole city’s going to sink into the earth, and Jason lost the person who used to crush pain medicine into applesauce for him so it would go down easier.
Jason lost the first person in his whole life who ever chose him.
Jason presses his hands into his eyes until it feels like his eyeballs are about to pop out of his skull. Something wet and guttural worms out of his mouth.
Jason kicks his legs violently, thrashing like a tantrum. It’s like he was living in a skintight, membranous sac, and now it’s been pierced and he can move and see and feel again, and with the realization setting in, everything is agonizing. Jason’s never going to get to sit with his head on Bruce’s thigh and read a book on the chaise in the study. Bruce is never going to run his fingers through Jason’s hair when Jason wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. No one’s ever going to let Jason try a sip of champagne from their flute at a gala again. They’re never going to lean over gargoyles and stare down at the streetlight city glow and the glint off girls’ fakeshit cubic zirconia jewelry glittering all the way from 500 feet below on a quiet night.
It’s all gone.
Bruce brought Jason into his life and gave him everything, and Jason got him dead.
Bruce chose his world when he scooped Jason up in the warehouse seconds before the bomb exploded, Dick told Clark.
Jason could never say anything bad about Bruce — not while he was alive, and certainly not now that he’s dead. But sitting there crying in a muddy wheelchair, all Jason can think about is what a fucking mistake Bruce made.
All Jason can think is that Bruce chose wrong.
Dick is the last man standing at the funeral. It takes a long time before that’s the case. Even after Jason disappears, the others linger. Bruce, for all of his complexities, his darkness, his temper, was like a planet unto himself, with his own gravitational pull. He was loved. Immediately, abundantly, constantly.
Dick loved him so much he didn’t know what to do with it half of the time.
He’s certainly doesn’t know what to do with it now.
Dick stares at the grave for a long time. Dick knows — God, he knows; he can already feels the ropes beginning to fray — that he can’t keep it inside forever. But he’s afraid that once he lets the grief set in, he won’t be able to come back from it. And he can’t afford that. Alfred and Jason can’t afford for Dick to falter.
Gotham can’t afford it.
Gotham needs Batman. Need doesn’t even cover it. Gotham’s dependence on Batman is something more cataclysmic.
Batman has to be there. There’s simply no other option.
The rain has soaked Dick’s hair so thoroughly that it’s getting in his eyes. Dick rakes it back with his fingers and inhales sharply.
It might kill Dick.
It really, really might.
Dick worked so hard for so long to escape this city before it killed him, before it sucked him dry, before it blackened and burned and ended him. Dick doesn’t have that raw, lonely, inhuman thing that drove Bruce in the darkest times. Dick needs people and love and touch that doesn’t come from a thrown punch. Bruce coveted those things, too — Dick remembers being small and squeezing Bruce extra tight and extra often because Bruce always held on for a second longer after Dick eventually let go, as if he had to force himself to. But they weren’t his coal. Bruce was furnaced by something deeper, something desperate and sad and absolutely unshakeable in the depths of his soul.
Dick swallows. The rain has made the dirt over the coffin wet, black mud. Dick gets a horrible flash of what Bruce’s burnt, black body had looked like amidst the ash over Jason, and he blinks it away. He swallows again.
“Hi, old man,” Dick croaks finally. It comes out so quiet that Dick starts to clear his throat before he stops himself. It’s fine that the rainpatter drowns it out. It’s not like Bruce can hear it. “I…”
He cuts off, blinking furiously.
I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.
His eyes sear, and Dick knows what will come next if he lets it, so he doesn’t let it. He screws his eyes shut tightly, forcing back the tears, and takes a sharp, steadying breath.
(Do you remember the last thing you said to him? the evilest part of Dick barbs. Do you remember how you said you hated him? Do you remember how you said you would never come back?)
Dick sets his jaw. The rain is still going, and it’s getting sharper now, stinging lines against his skin. It gets in his eyes. He takes another breath.
“I’m going to try,” Dick promises very softly. “I’m going to really fucking try, B.”
He swallows again. He rakes a hand through his wet hair, sighs, and turns, his shoes squelching in the mud. He only makes it one more step before he lurches back around, something hardening impossibly in him. His eyes burn with resolve. The rain is freezing.
“No. I’m going to do it.” Eyes wide and intent, Dick looks at the grave, raising his voice as if the dirt could understood the intensity of his fervor if it could only see his eyes and hear his words. “I’m going to do it if it kills me, Bruce. I’m going to do it. For you.”
He stands there getting pelted for a long time after, the muscles in his hands ticcing from how tightly he’s clenching his fists.
Then he kneels in the dirt one more time. He forces his fingers to unclench. Once they’re not being forced into a fist anymore, they tremble. Dick crouches there in silence for a long time. Then he kisses the tips of his shaking index and middle fingers and then touches them softly to the wet, black dirt where Bruce lives.
(Twelve hours later.)
There are many things to do for a man once he is dead.
Talia’s heels sink into the still-wet dirt of the grave.
Her chin dips low, brushing her collarbone as she peers down into the hole the men are digging.
There is ghusl. There is grieving. There is waiting, there is waiting, there is saying a Kaddish. There is linking your arm with someone else at the funeral and exchanging I’m sorrys for the sake of being able to say something to someone, anyone, who is still around. There is waiting for the feelings to pass; there is waiting. There is waiting.
Talia will not do any of these things.
Talia is a woman of action.
The lump in her throat hardens as one of the men’s knees stutters with strain as they pull the coffin out, the pinewood growing shiny in the faint, sprinkling rain before dawn. Talia’s hand lurches out into the air before she can stop it, as if she could prevent the coffin from falling from ten feet away just by sheer force of will.
But the coffin doesn’t fall. The man simply readjusts his grip, and Talia’s outstretched hand shrivels back to her side lamely.
“Careful,” Talia manages to order, strained. “Be gentle with him.”
It turns out that Talia will do one of those things after all. She waits.
She waits, hand poised above the shimmering green pool, ready to grab the large, white hand that will scrabble out soon. It is one of her father’s lesser pits.
Talia brought no men with her here — except the one in the pit. She drove in the night with him lovingly laid in the backseat, and she carried him over her shoulders here. She submerged him herself, pushing the top of his skull under the surface with her fingertips.
She dries her hands by rubbing her fingers against the linen of her pants, and then stretches the hand out again, and waits. And waits.
And waits.
The surface bubbles violently, and Talia’s breath catches in anticipation, back straightening. Nothing happens.
Talia leans back on her haunches, outstretched hand falling once more to her lap. She feels herself sway with exhaustion, and not for the first time, the guilt sets in. Bruce will hate her for this. He would never have wanted this. The madness, the rage that will come, it’s anathema to everything Bruce was: pure, perfect self-control.
But what does the world look like without him? She can reason it this way: Gotham is what kept him going. He knew Gotham needed him, so he stayed alive and he fought another day—everyday.
He can’t die. His mission isn’t over. Gotham still needs him.
(Talia still needs him.)
That is when the water breaks like a skin. It rips right open, a pale, seething figure scrabbling against the rockedges with their fingertips. Frothy waves ricochet over the pool’s stone edges, lapping translucent acid foam onto the rock.
Bruce is wild-looking. His gaze is ratcheting all around the cave, eyes enormous and shining, mouth rattling open and sucking in air like a collapsing hole in space. Beads from the pool are racing down his plastered-down hair and chin and collarbone and —
“…Lover,” breathes Talia, wide-eyed.
The silence of the Cave makes the quiet word seem very loud. At the sound, Bruce’s eyes dart to Talia where she sits at the water’s edge, gripping her knees, as if he hadn’t noticed her before.
Bruce’s chest heaves.
Then, Bruce is out of the water and surging toward her, slamming her to the ground and pinning her hands bruisingly. She kicks upward, but Bruce doesn’t budge, even with Talia’s superior training. He barely even grunts.
Talia swallows, cheek ticcing. She drags her gaze up to meet his blown eyes.
Burning water drips from his hair onto her face. It stings and sizzles when it touches her skin.
Bruce’s hands tighten around her wrists. His breathing is heavy, labored, and hard, nostrils flaring. She feels the heat of his breaths on her face, and they stare at each other for a long time.
After a while, their chests heave in alternating rhythm, like he’s in systole whenever she’s in diastole, like a perfect match.
Slowly, Talia loosens her left wrist from his grip, prying Bruce’s long, hard fingers off one by one. Bruce’s eyes, still dilated, still brilliant beetle-green, don’t move an inch at the movement: His gaze stays locked on his face. He grunts out of the side of his mouth.
When Talia brings her free hand up to touch his cheek, his expression doesn’t change either. His fierce eyes don’t move. His hard breaths just keep coming.
But, slowly at first, then all at once, Bruce creaks downward, as if his arms gradually realize they can’t hold him up anymore. He collapses on top of her, that big heavy man.
His face slits into the notch of her collarbone, hot panting captured in the hollow there. Talia brings the free hand around his cheek to his temple and then to the back of his head. She lets her own skull slip back, knocking against the hard ground.
She blinks, eyes hot, up at the brown stalactites dripping from the cave ceiling, and swallows, her cheeks hurting. She lets out a long, sharp breath of her own, fingers knotting in his thick, dark hair, and breathes out a small, incredulous laugh.
“Welcome back,” she whispers, smiling, “Bruce.”
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Dr. Thompkins muses, clicking off her octoscope and stepping back. It takes a second for the horror at what she just said to set in, dismay and apology washing over her expression.
It’s been about a month since Ethiopia and three-and-a-half weeks since the funeral. All things considered, Jason’s doing pretty well for someone whose skin melted off, legs broke in opposite directions, lungs got bombshelled, and eardrums jack-in-the-boxed.
That last one is what Leslie is talking about: his ears. He lost about 30% of his hearing. They were worried it would be more like 70%. That’s not as bad as it could be.
He could have lost more. And Jason can’t exactly say that about everything these days.
“Is there anything we should be looking out for, moving forward?” Dick asks. He’s sitting with his legs folded up on the doctor’s exam chair, his constant fidgeting making the paper lining rustle loudly. For all that he’s jittery and constantly moving right now, Dick’s looked absolutely dead for the past two weeks. Even Jason hasn’t been out of it enough to miss that.
Jason glances at Dick out of the corner of his eye. There are bright purple veins bulging at the inside of Dick’s elbow and wrist, dark rings around his eyes, and a saucer-sized bruise on his left cheek. The bruise is so dark it almost blots out the scratches.
Leslie gives a single, almost-hysteric note of laughter. “I’ll write you a list.”
When she finishes scribbling notes down on a piece of paper and the printer finishes spitting out the information for Jason’s prescriptions, Dick takes the sheets from her and reads over them, mouthing along silently. After several seconds, he looks up, sliding off of the seat. “All right. Thanks for everything, doc. As always.”
Leslie’s eyes soften as she gazes at Dick. Then she glances back at Jason. It’s not so much that she flinches. It’s not even that the softness disappears—but it changes, clearly wrangled into pity.
If Jason had it in him, he would scowl, but Jason doesn’t think he has anything left in him anymore except smoke residue and antibiotic resistance.
Instead, as always, he just stares.
“Come on,” Dick says, swinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Let’s get going.”
The trek to the car is silent. Most things are nowadays. Dick opens the cardoor for Jason and activates the lift. Dick fiddles with the radio for a second until they’re playing the police radio. Jason presses his forehead against the window and counts every slow, gooey heartbeat.
Leslie’s clinic is in the Narrows, and Jason dreads it everytime they go to one of his appointments. He knows the fire hydrants they’re going to pass. He knows the streetbenches they’re going to drive by, which ones are good ones to sleep on and which ones the cops will prod you awake on. He knows the potholes, and he knows the sidewalk cracks, and he knows the wet fucking alley that Bruce first found him in.
They pass Park Row and Jason slams his fist so hard against the window that the glass cracks. Dick exhales sharply at the splintering sound, whipping his head toward Jason with wide eyes. The police radio crackles like a song.
“You good?” Dick asks, alarmed.
Jason glowers, cheek ticcing. But when his silence makes Dick’s eyes linger, he spits, grudgingly, “Peachy.” He still feels Dick’s eyes on him. “You want to watch the road?” he snaps.
“I know it well enough. I used to run it every night,” Dick brushes him off, but reluctantly returns his attention to the front. Still, he brings up one hand to turn off the stereo’s police radio, as if that was what made Jason snap.
It wasn’t.
They ride the rest of the way home in silence.
Back in the Manor’s kitchen, Dick kneels and wraps up Jason’s knuckles. They’re bleeding a little bit from the glass — but they don’t look nearly as bad as Dick’s, which are scabbed and almost grass-green with bruising.
“What happened?” Jason asks when Dick finally turns back around to pack the first aid kit in the medicine cabinet.
Dick doesn’t turn around, but he stops what he’s doing, arm frozen midreach. “What?”
“Your hands,” Jason says. “They’re all fucked up.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“Yeah, they are.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jason,” Dick says calmly, and finally slips back into motion, motions smooth as water. He closes the cabinet door and faces Jason. Jason checks him up and down for any sign of deceit, but there isn’t one. No stiffness in his shoulders, no clenched fists, no ticcing cheek. But his hands are messed up. Dick must see that. He has to know why. So why is he lying? “What do you want for dinner?”
Jason blinks at the abrupt change of subject. “I’m not hungry.”
“Then what do you want me to bring to your room for you to not eat at dinnertime?” Dick counters, and Jason immediately scowls.
Dick’s taken charge of doing the chores in the house with Alfred…with Alfred indisposed. Alfred is a ghost these days. Jason doesn’t see him very much. Granted, Jason doesn’t leave his room very much. But the shift is hard to miss; there are little clues of Alfred’s absence in many different areas of life in the Manor now. Dick makes dinner and uses more salt and herbs and less butter. Dick does laundry and doesn’t do the dryer sheets that make Jason’s sheets extra soft.
Dick’s the one who bandages up now, too, apparently.
Jason shifts his fingers surreptitiously where they rest on the wheelchair arms, testing them. The bandages are well-done, are perfectly done, and Jason’s fingers ball into hard fists, his fingernails digging into his palms.
“I hate you,” Jason says. “You know that? I hate your guts.”
Dick’s face stays that stupid calm expression, like nothing in the world ever happened. Like Bruce isn’t dead, like Alfred isn’t a scraped-out old snakeskin now. And it makes Jason even fucking angrier. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that Dick even grieves better than him.
Jason’s eyes burn with tears.
“I hate you,” Jason whispers, voice harder and faster than before. “I hate you. I wish you were the one who died. I wish you would go back where you came from and leave us alone. Go be with your girlfriend and your stupid freak friends. You’re so fucking useless. You’re so annoying, and nosy, and fake, and you lie, and I know you’re lying. You’re not even sorry he died, are you? You’re just fine! You’re just peachy! None of this even matters to you so I don’t know know why you don’t just go back where you came from. I hate you! I hate you! I hate —” Jason breaks off sharply, baking hot tears rolling down his face, chest heaving. His teeth catch on his hot, swollen lips. His mouth trembles. Jason’s whole body trembles.
Dick doesn’t.
Dick doesn’t tremble. Dick doesn’t move a fucking muscle. It’s like Jason is plummeting off a highrise and Dick is just opening an umbrella so he doesn’t get Jason’s red confetti intestines on him. It’s like a bank robber is openfiring eight rounds right through Jason’s chest and Dick is at the desk trying to cash a check. It’s like he’s seeing it all happen and it doesn’t phase him at all, it’s like it doesn’t even matter to him, it’s like he’s just fine.
Jason sits there in tears and waits for Dick’s face to break open like his is. He waits, and waits, and waits, and nothing comes.
“I thought you would be the only one who would understand.” Jason shakes his head so violently it makes his pounding skull throb harder, sucking in one hot, wild breath after another as he tries to ratchet himself down. “You don’t understand anything.”
The silence boils like water. Dick says nothing.
0:16.
Jason’s knees skid on the pool of blood beneath him as he tries to get upright, and his face plants right on the red, shining cement, breaking off his front teeth like pieces off of a waffle cone. The sharp shards left in his gums pierce Jason’s lips as he drags in more ragged, wet breaths. Jason’s eyes sting, but he desperately throws his bound hands over his head so they’re in front of them anyway, dragging the hard rope around his wrists against the warehouse floor so he can push himself back up.
“Please, please. Come on. Come on. Come on, c’mon, ” Jason begs, sweat and hot blood making his fingers slippery around the hard rope as he scrabbles to get it off. Distantly, dimly, in the back of mind, Jason knows that he should be focusing more on standing back up again than on his wrists, but somehow, his mind will only let him do this. The hard ridges of the warehouse walls ripple against Jason’s spine with every shudder he gives. “Com-come on.”
He raises his head up again to check the timer again and his wet hair flops directly onto his sclera, his cornea, his whatever-the-fuck eyeball parts and it only partially obscures the 0:09.
It also, partially, obscures the fierce blast of metal that is one side of the warehouse blowing open, but even without seeing all of it, Jason knows the figure that steps throught it. Even without seeing all of it, Jason knows Bruce.
“Batman,” Jason wheezes, eyes watering. Suddenly, more than he ever did in the hours before that, Jason wants to cry. Relief like that feels like getting stabbed. Relief like that feels like the crowbar all over again because it’s so much and all at once. “Batman—”
Bruce has Jason in his arms in seconds. The stinging, cold air of the outside world breaks Jason’s skin into shivers the second Bruce’s sprinting takes them out of the stagnant metal hotbox warehouse, and the cold hurts going down Jason’s throat in the gasps he scrapes in. Jason’s chin jags against Bruce’s armored collarbone as Bruce runs.
“I’ve got you,” Bruce rumbles, and Jason’s hand fists in his long black cape. Jason gives a wet, ragged, incredulous laugh into the kevlar, tears jacknifing down his face. Of course Bruce has got him. That’s what Bruce does.
Jason squeezes his eyes tightly as he laughs into Bruce’s thick black kevlar, boiling tears leaking into the biweave. Jason’s eyes are shut. He doesn’t see the timebomb go off.
“You know, Jason,” Catherine used to say, when she was on her side on the bathtub with her hair wet from bile and the remains of last night’s $0.89 box of spaghetti. When Jason came home crying over a bust knee. When Jason crawled up her on the sofa after Willis broke her cheekbones for crying too much. “Some things just don’t turn out right.”