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Jason is in bed with the bedside lamp casting warmth over the pages of his well-worn paperback of Frankenstein when his phone goes off. He eyes the buzzing flip phone (sue him he never got the teenage privilege). ‘Unknown number’, yeah and his should be too. His thumb holds the page where Frankenstein is about to come to life. He answers only because this phone rings once in a lightning strike.
Not that he ever gets called for anything good. Silence permeates on the other end and he’s about to hang up when he hears his perfect older brother begging, “Jason, I need help.” No one ever calls him for anything good these days.
His thumb itches over the red button, but he’s not 19 and dramatic anymore… at least not too much… instead he sighs, “What do you need?”
“Umm…. I think it’s best that you just come and see. I can’t really explain-“
“Over the phone?” Jason takes his bookmark off the end table and slips it between the pages, gently placing it on his aged, red comforter where it will lay invitingly for when he gets back.
“The coordinates are 40 degrees and 63 minutes north; 74 degrees and 51 minutes west.”
Jason grumbles, “Oh great, I’ll need to get my compass out, this is just getting better and better.”
After a rushed promise of, “I will forever be indebted to you,” the phone cuts out. Jason fully intends to use that against Dick later.
Dark green forest passes by and impending doom looms the further Jason goes. The forest and her spiky crowns are devouring him deeper and deeper. Gravel kicks up on the unstable road he follows. Jason pulls his bike beside a closed access road, he’s deep in Bristol County now. He was just going to park it, but figures he needs to hide his tracks if Dick needed to be so discreet over the phone. Whatever they are doing is probably unlawful. He hides his bike behind some stocky trees.
He walks to the gate and thumbs the lock. It’s definitely been picked, but Dick closed it back up. Probably so it doesn’t get noticed in the time he is back there. Or maybe because he isn’t planning on coming back in the vehicle he used.
It’s a good two-mile trek into the woods and too much time to think.
What is he doing here? What does he owe Dick anyway?
He really shouldn’t be doing favors for his family, it’s bad for his reputation. Dick is going to be forever indebted to him.
Off the trail as far as possible is a 1997 Honda Civic with rivets in its gray paint, the bumper hanging off like a busted lip, and sitting as if it got a bad hip. Dick jolts out of the car with a gun in his hand. He holds it away like a snake, but with a face like he has already been bitten.
He’s a ball of jitters.
Jason shines his flashlight in Dick’s face. “Where are the shovels?” he asks, almost joking.
Without hesitation, Dick answers, “In the trunk.” That’s not what Jason wanted to hear.
“You fucking killed someone.” And after all these years of lectures?
Dick looks down at the gun glistening in the moonlight, and towards the loaded trunk, then pitifully towards Jason. Jason didn’t sign himself up to be a therapist.
“Was it an accident?”
“No.” It hits like a sword impalement. He never expected Dick Grayson, the golden child, to kill someone. He never signed up to be the dead body in a trunk guy.
Then again, that would be a waste of his immaculate body-disposal skills.
Jason presses, “Who did you kill?”
“Jason, don't be mad.” He sounds so calm. Oh God, he killed Bruce.
Dick goes to the driver’s door to pop the trunk. He holds out his palms and lowers them, keep quiet, don’t freak out. Jason should be offended, he handed out a duffel bag of heads as a goodie bag once. Instead, he watches in horror as the new reality unfolds in front of him.
His older brother lifts the trunk, and Jason’s gut does a full quadruple somersault. The nasty grin looks back at him. Even in death that stupid smile feels like maggots in his stomach. Spread so far like the trench that would be needed to bury all his casualties.
Usually, Joker just fills him with rage, but here with the stench of death finally not on him, his stomach just hurts.
Everything is spinning around him. He stares at the face, black gulches in the middle of his face pulling Jason deeper. His throat is scorched and his head is floating. Electricity bolts through him, the faint echoes of his laugh as he turns the dial up. The taste of death on his tongue. He can hear his own screams, the ones he heard when his body untangled itself from him. Then he feels encompassing warmth.
He’s back again, and dark ebony hair is tucked against him. There is evergreen surrounding him and that frozen face cackling for eternity just 10 feet over.
He is still here.
He shoves Dick away, “No.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“That you finally killed him?!” Jason seethes, “Fuck you, Dick.”
Jason stares down at the pathetic man wringing his hands. Golden Boy looks like he has swallowed the world, and he opens his mouth. Jason doesn’t want to hear his placations.
“This bastard doesn’t deserve a burial,” he says, taking in Dick’s mangled work. He chokes the steel snake out of Dick’s hold. Someone who isn’t thinking clearly shouldn’t have a gun.
Jason crosses his arms and sets back against a tree. The audacity of Dick to call him into the middle of the woods to show off his kill like some compensation for all the years of Jason’s agony. He’s not moving a muscle.
Dick’s lips press thin, he knows he can’t say anything to make Jason feel better. Instead he turns to the ugly, mangled corpse, the living person he killed , and pulls him out of the trunk. The body thumps as it slips out of the trunk, Dick drags the cold and stiff lump of cells to the middle of the clearing.
The body lays crookedly in gray embers of the leaves. His gray skin and hollow eyes blend into the night, it’s only his garish hair and suit that makes him look human. A monster dormant like Frankenstein before the lightning.
Jason raises the gun and shoots him once for good. Then he shoots him twice more just because. Then again and again and again. The gun clicks, empty.
“JASON!” Dick hisses, “Someone could hear us!”
Jason huffs and then roots through the trunk. He finds the box of bullets and fills the magazine. He aims at the tattered mass of flesh and bone. Bang. Bang. Bang.
No lighting can bring a piece of Swiss cheese to life.
Jason rounds on Dick, “What else don’t I know about you?”
Jason is met with a clenched jaw. Dick reaches down and tries to wrangle the gun out of Jason’s hands. Instead he stumbles back and Jason spits, “This is your mess. Fucking clean it up.”
“Don’t you want to bury him, Jason? Bury all of this?”
“The only person I’m going to bury is you.” Jason holds the gun to Dick’s head. Dick had counted the shots, twelve, there are thirteen in a magazine. One left.
Jason isn’t having rational thoughts right now, it’s hard when everything is warring inside of him. That fifteen year old kid in the warehouse, the crime lord chasing for peace, and the guy who supposedly moved on. Everything is turning upside down and inside out and shaking him all around. Reality is shattering and rearranging; pretty boy is a murderer and Joker is dead.
Dick looks at him with eyes of flint, and dares him, “I know you won’t.” On the inside everything is shaking, because both of them seem very unsturdy.
Jason is the steel needed for the spark. “Do you really?”
Here between the evergreens, it’s just them, both about to combust or collapse. “If you killed me then you would be left alone with him .”
Dick shakes his head, taking the shovel from the trunk. The shovel hits the ground with a nice crisp hit of vindication. Joker watches, head lolling to the side. The soil is moist, and sometimes there is a clink as the shovel hits a rock. Dick’s forehead is shining, and his arms are covered in dirt. Sweat sticks to his back.
Jason just watches. “Why are you even burying him?” Dick ignores Jason’s pestering, the shovel hitting the earth with another clink. “He doesn’t deserve a burial, to be treated like a human.”
“It’s a carcass, they go in the ground.”
“All he has done and this is all he gets?”
Dick just plows through the dirt. The smell of the Earth reminds Jason of dirt underneath his nails, choking on mouthfuls of worms, his eyes closed against the ground trying to keep him buried. His nails dig harder into his palm, he always dug harder.
“Aren’t you just happy I killed him?!”
“You weren’t the one who was supposed to kill him, and now I can never have that.”
“Jason, we are too old, too old to hold on to what doesn’t matter.” Dick points at the monster, “ He doesn’t matter.”
“It’s too late to tell me that I do.”
“ You do, that’s why I murdered him.”
“You didn’t murder anyone; there wasn’t a soul to take. You’re just too weak to admit you were never some moral angel.”
Dick hops out of the ditch and props the shovel against the taillight.
Jason’s words make him boil, and maybe if he was younger and still controlled by bubbling rage he would fight. Dick looks down at that sorry face, the one he caved in once. He wants to burn him, he wants to beat him eternally, he wants him to feel pain forever, for all he's done. He can’t allow himself to do that. To let Joker consume him like that.
Maybe he can’t string him up in Gotham Square, or light him on fire at the old amusement park, but why can’t he let it consume him? He drops to his knees above the Joker. He feels Jason tense behind him. Why go this far, but then stop? He can control himself, can’t he?
He grips the cold chin in one hand, turning the face side to side. Analyzing it with nothing but cold in his veins. The body’s greedy vortexes try to pull him in, always trying to drag one final victim in. No suffering was funny enough for him . He lifts his fist into the air, poised to strike, and imagines the crack of the crowbar, the flash of the camera, the grins that would never go away. Dick wails the first punch with a whack and a crunch. Bones pulverize under his fists for every pain Joker caused. Skin squelches for every lost soul. There is a scream, but Dick doesn’t know from whom.
There are phantom hands pulling him away. Pulling him up off his soaked knees. It isn’t until the grip bruises that he feels the ground, his breath, and his little brother. He is a slobbering, sobbing, drooling mess. His knuckles are weeping blood, maybe his, maybe Joker’s, maybe both. His chest puffs out the last of the anger.
Whatever is left is just carnage.
One last angry burst shoots through his leg and into the remains, kicking them into the grave.
“You weren’t done digging.”
“It’s deep enough.”
Jason looks over the edge, and he spits on the green, red, and purple mess.
Dick grabs the shovel, “Now he gets to fade into nothingness.”
The burial is a meditation of sorts. With the Joker’s pain, trauma, the hurt of loved ones, the death of many is buried too. There isn’t going to be a eulogy or flowers at this funeral. There is just finally an end.
The car is humming, but they haven’t moved. Dick turns to Jason, “Bruce can never know.”
“Dick, Bruce is going to notice that Joker is dead.” Jason turns to his brother, and he looks desperate. Jason can’t lie to him. “He’ll find out it was you.”
Dick hits his head back against the stained patterned seat. “I’ve got to get out of town.”
Jason puts his hand on top of Dick’s. “Let’s go home.”
Dick fervently shakes his head. “Jason- I can’t, I’m tainted .”
“Then you’re at least giving me a meal.”
Jason lifts the rock and smashes it through the window, then he takes his knife and cuts through the seatbelt, he chucks the knife in, and as the car drifts away he takes the match and tosses it in.
Dick and Jason stand on the river bank and watch the car on fire drift towards the water. It’s four in the morning and no one is on the road.
It’s just them, a burning car rolling towards the river, and a secret.
If Jason had known earlier that kerosene was an option, he would have burned the body. But then, Dick probably would have told him it would be too flashy. Dick is no fun like that.
They watch the car engulfed in flames be swallowed by the water for a moment. Letting it sink in. When finally there isn’t anything but smoke and steam they mount Jason’s bike and leave.
Dick holds on tight to Jason. It’s not exactly the most comfortable motorcycle to be riding with a partner. Alfred would throw a fit about a lack of a helmet, but Dick doesn’t seem to exactly want to protect his body at this moment.
They finally stop at Darlene’s, a pink uniform with white aprons, and red booths kind of dinner.
Dick robotically chooses the most tactically located booth.
When the waitress comes, Dick mutters the least amount of words he needs to, to get a breakfast noticeably lacking syrups and whipped cream. A coffee and oatmeal, with berries on the side.
“How did it happen?”
Dick goes quiet leaning over his coffee, and more violently stirs in the creamer.
Neither of them really want to eat, but digging and screaming has made them both hungry. Yet Jason feels like he would throw up if he took one bite out of the sausage and pancakes. They both mull over their plate.
Dick never answers Jason’s question.
Jason says, “Heck, if anyone finds out they will give you an award.”
Dick glances up from his muddled plate, and that’s the end of that.
Jason glances over at the other bed where Dick is staring at the ceiling. Jason’s tired, Dick must be too, but he knows that sleeping won’t be easy. Not with Joker’s dead body seared in his mind.
It just happened. A body in a trunk, buried in the woods, like some shitty crime show you watch at three in the morning.
Dick is blank staring at the wall propped up against the headboard, mirroring Jason. Rubbing his hands together, his hands that must have been covered in blood at some point.
Now in the light, Jason can finally see the blood on the collar of a white button up, with a collared grey zip up jacket. It has a logo on the breast that he doesn’t recognize. Irritatingly, Dick’s hair is in a perfect swoop.
He’s rubbing his hands together, and that is the only sign that anything is wrong.
Usually Dick can’t keep his mouth shut, but it’s so silent. It’s been silent since they sat down. Barely any words have been spoken between the two of them, instead it swirls around them in whispers of the unsaid. Jason almost wants to break it. Almost. Another sign that something is wrong.
Jason knows he won’t get Dick to speak. So he slips his eyes back over to the wall in front of him. He doesn’t like the weird splatter there, but then again they didn’t exactly shack up in a five-star hotel. If it were darker it would be much better, but the curtains are open and the morning is filtering through the sheer ones underneath.
Jason has seen too much, so he slips his eyes closed.
Jason leans into Dick’s embrace. Dick doesn’t have much on him, no phone, no cards, and not even extra clothes, but Jason knows he will make it out alright. They always do in the end.
Dick may never tell him why or how he killed the Joker. He just did. Jason would like to think that maybe something finally snapped in Dick.
Well, it’s nice to know he’s the person someone would call if they had a body in their trunk.