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Lazarus nightmares always hit hard.
Jason knew that. He’d known that since he was living with the League, half mindless and all brutality, when he’d wake up screaming for a man that wasn’t there. That didn’t even know he was alive. He’d known that since he was living with Arsenal and the crazy asshole had to wake him up because he’d made some unearthly sound. He claimed he never remembered them. He wished he wasn’t lying.
He dreamed about being Robin.
Tumbling and flipping and screaming through the sky, landing hard and fast on some cruel abuser’s face, tearing the city apart so the good parts could grow. Hand in hand with someone so skilled, so prepared, and so ready to swing for him that nothing ever touched him.
Until it did.
The Joker didn’t scare him anymore. He’d never really scared him as a kid, either, he’d simply hurt him. He was a pathetic man with a flawed ideology and a crowbar to back it up.
He’d since moved out of his place with Arsenal, instead moving into a simple loft safehouse on the docks where he could maintain his weapons and stay away from both his goons and the bats, keep himself alive while keeping out of under his father’s thumb.
Father.
He shook his head, deftly reassembling one of his weightier pistols and leveling it unloaded at the opposite wall. The front sight was chipped halfway off, but that wouldn’t slow him down.
Bruce wasn’t his father. He was more like the weaponsmith who had started to hone him from crude iron.
Of course, living so far from the nearest bat safehouse didn’t make him safe from their intrusions. It would probably take an act of god to keep them out of his place if it was in Gotham and could be traced back to him. Judging by the footsteps, it was someone small. Probably about 150, 160 lbs? So Cass or Damian.
He stood and leveled his gun at the approaching shadow, tensed.
“Oh spare me, Todd, we both know that isn’t loaded.” Damian yawned, walking as casually as could be forward, then hopping over the back of the couch at him, “Full moon tonight.”
“More crazies out than normal?” Jason lowered the gun and dropped it on the table.
“No, not particularly. I am here, though, to invite you to the manor for Halloween weekend. It is safer to consolidate our little clan over the course of such an auspicious date for so many of our villains.”
“No.”
“Alfred said you might say that, so I have been instructed to extend personal invitations from him for you to take the room on the tip of the east wing, where Father will least be likely to chance upon you. I’m not here to fix your relationship with everyone, brother, but it would give us all more peace of mind to know where you’re sleeping for the next four days.”
“No, asshole, I’m fine on my own.”
“Then I am forced to resort to my personal plea.” Damian sat on his couch, cross-legged in the seat with his hands on his knees, “The pits are reacting to the increased violence and chaos of the city, cursed over and over again as it is, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the way it calls you in your sleep.”
“It-” Jason frowned at the tiny mass murderer he’d helped raise.
“The dreams.” Damian waved his hand dismissively, “I’m sure yours are more intense than mine, as protected as I am by my bloodline, but it would… ease my stress to have you closer than you currently are.”
Jason sighed.
Sometimes he felt like he was going to throw Damian into the bay just to get away from him, and sometimes he wanted to know exactly how much the little Demon remembered of him- things he barely remembered, changing his diapers, teaching him gun safety at age three, carrying him like a prince two steps behind Talia as she dropped bodies to protect them and her position of power in the League.
Bloody and brilliant. Just like him.
Even behind the mask, he could tell Damian was avoiding eye contact. Whether this was actual embarrassment over having nightmares as a thirteen-year-old kid, an act to get Jason’s sympathy, or he was just lost in thought, it was working.
“Fine. Tell Alfred I’ll be there tonight, tell Bruce I’m not coming, and get Dick to start an argument with Bruce so they’ll both stay away from me, and you’ve got a deal.”
“Dick and Bruce are currently arguing over Bruce’s decision to have us all ‘home for Halloween’, and spend most of their time in the Cave, monitoring the city while discussing loudly.”
“Perfect.”
It took Jason all of one minute to gather a duffel bag of everything he’d need to spend five days in the Manor, including all of the ammo for five guns (he could always grab more from his stashes if he were that busy, and in that time, Damian was gone, as quietly as he’d entered.
He took his time coming to the Manor, but his access codes still worked, annoyingly.
Either Bruce or Alfred kept him in the system to this day.
On the walk up to the massive old house, he stopped by the graveyard. Thomas, Martha, and Jason. His grave looked perfect, not even a hint of the disturbed earth or collapsed casket beneath. No evidence of where he’d clawed his way back to life. He spit on it, then turned to Bruce’s parents- the couple whose portraits stared down from walls throughout the manor, who’d overseen the only childhood he had that really counted.
“Wish me luck.” He asked, softly, living proof that this graveyard never held her dead.
And then he continued the march to the haunted house on the hill.
The room Alfred had prepared for him was, in fact, the furthest possible from Bruce’s, on the exact opposite side of the building from his former bedroom and therefore… the replacement. For some reason, Tim had taken over his bedroom, out of the nearly hundred rooms the manor had. It was also agreeable to be over here, because Steph and Cass had taken one of the double rooms on this wing, and they made for a good buffer from the rest of the world, between the classical music Cass played, recalling her ballet as she lounged around, and Steph intercepting most people who even attempted to walk this way.
It was also perfect because he had the third library all but to himself.
This wasn’t the library he’d spent all those hours in, but it was comfortable, quiet, and had some classics he wouldn’t mind rereading.
Alfred was, predictably, accommodating, attentive, and no-nonsense.
He’d prepared a tray of tiny tea sandwiches for Jason’s arrival and made him a large helping of coq au riesling when he informed him he hadn’t eaten yet that day.
And then… he had the rest of the day to himself.
Try as he might, he wasn’t about to get some sleep, but just laying in bed resting would help prepare him for the evening. As the sun went down, he sat up and geared up, strapping pistols to his thighs.
His helmet’s filter was functioning perfectly, and his typical body armor should suffice for most physical attacks, so he felt appropriately prepared to go save some people two days before Halloween.
If only Scarecrow hadn’t been prepared with a new delivery system, launching injectors with the force of a bullet and the point of a needle, finding chink after chink in his armor and forcing him back to the manor in a daze.
Manor meant safety, manor meant people who could help him, manor meant- well, home.
He fell through the front door and tore his helmet off, coughing up onto the floor, and that’s when the first threat appeared. Some tall, poised crypt-keeper approached with supplies to embalm him, rambling something about someone who’d died and needed to be reburied. He pulled his gun, trying, with trembling hands, to get the immortal caretaker of the dead to back off, he was still alive, he was here, when a tiny beast tore it from his hand, disassembled it, and threw it far away.
He had been wrong. This manor was not a place of safety.
A werewolf? More like a were-cat, but whatever it was, it growled and roared and tore his other gun from his hand as he pulled it, then tackled him, yowling something incoherent through too-white, too-sharp teeth, claws raised. He threw the beast off of him and ran upstairs, toward his room.
In the hallway, he was faced with some… version of himself. Something that looked like he once had, that spoke calmly, but held a weapon, that stared back at him with blue eyes that had once been his own in a costume that had once been his and tried to reason with him in words that made no sense.
He kicked it in the head and turned on his heel, fleeing that wing entirely.
When encountering some sort of golden moving statue, he grabbed one of its shoulders and threw it over the balcony back into the entryway, only slowing an instant on his escape.
In the other wing, he encountered a dead cheerleader, blonde and beautiful and buff and bleeding from her mouth, and he grabbed her by the hair, dragging her behind him as he ran, so she didn’t have a chance to get back on her feet until he made it to a window, where he simply tossed her outside.
But as he continued through the hallway, the shadows came alive. A being made entirely of shadows struck at him, backing him into a wall, and he was forced to pull a knife and take one of the limbs that was striking, stabbing right through it so he could escape her and keep running.
Her?
He slammed into the library he’d been in earlier that day, taking a few moments to breathe, with the door locked tightly behind him, and collapsed. There, in the chairs in front of the fireplace, were a pair of ghosts. Grandparents, the people who watched him grow up during the best years of his life, sat, with Martha setting her book down as Thomas stood, concern evident on their faces over him. He swore he heard their voices, crying out before the door burst open.
There in the doorway was a vampire- beautiful, untouchable, with shiny white teeth and some sort of black bodysuit on. It challenged him with its voice, leveling a weapon at him, and he charged.
The vampire wouldn’t be able to handle 275 pounds of muscle center-mass.
He continued barrelling forward, down the hall, and turning the corner to one of the secret entrances to the caves below. He leapt over the banister and slowed his descent with a cable tied near the top, descending into the darkness in isolation.
As he prepared his escape from the manor, he took the restraints off of the batbike and retrieved a handful of batarangs, before anything else could-
Something appeared from the shadows.
“Enough!” Jason growled, kicking the bike's kickstand and turning it towards the devil himself.
Horns, wings, bright eyes, and a wicked frown, what else could it be but the devil?
“Jason!”
Of course, the devil knew his name.
But instead of forcing the devil to move, Jason was stopped in a jerk by someone lifting the bike from behind, stopping it effectively and precisely.
“Jason.” The warm but imposing voice of someone to trust caught up to him, and then he was lifted into the air in the arms of someone warm and whole and he could not escape. Sure, there was always a way out of holds, even Kryptonian ones, but the adrenaline was wearing thin.
“Get him to medbay, I’ll work on the antidote.” the devil muttered, sounding more and more like Batman as Jason relaxed.
Clark set Jason in medbay, holding him down at first and then simply holding his hand, watching the way those green eyes flickered between him, relaxed, and Bruce, in a panic. He frowned, gently brushing the young man’s hair out of his face.
“What happened?”
Bruce looked up from his analysis of Jason’s blood, then pushed his cowl back, causing Jason to tense up again. “He got dosed with approximately four times the amount Damian, Dick, and I are recovering from. Hallucinations and a solid panic response are to be expected.”
“So he’s not seeing you right now, is he?”
“No. But I believe he sees you with some accuracy.”
“Why would that be?”
“You’re not my dad,” Jason grumbled, squeezing Superman’s hand.
“More or less.” Bruce turned back to his work, then prepared an I.V., “Lift his sleeves for me?”
“Awe, I thought all your kids viewed me as their cool uncle.” Clark smiled, rolling Jason’s sleeve up before settling back to cradling him.
“I believe Cassandra views you as something of a stepfather, actually.” Bruce quipped back, “Is she wrong?”
“Well I mean-”
“Stop. Flirting.” Jason growled but allowed the devil to stab him with some sort of nightmare fluid- Uncle Clark was there. Everything would be ok.
He slept for the next few minutes, after the adrenaline crash and before true coherency, which drew him to wakefulness and the cold of the cave, only warm where someone was leaning casually on his cot.
“Little shit?”
“Good morning Todd.” Damian looked up from his tablet, then raised his arm to reveal his own I.V. drip, “We were dosed with the same compound. Father has elected to take his I.V. in a room other than this one after Dick informed him that you did not want to see him.”
Jason sighed and leaned his head back against the cushion of their cot, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe it would be a good time to talk to Bruce. He was pretty sure he was remembering the manor clearly, “Is Steph alright?”
“Bruised, missing some hair, but otherwise whole. Duke’s suit protected him from much of the impact, and Alfred is unharmed entirely. You gave Drake a black eye.”
The door hissed as Cass stepped in, and she crawled onto the foot of the cot, staring pointedly at Jason.
“Can I help you?”
“Talk to him.” Her voice, as usual, completely even.
“I agree, Todd, Father and Clark are quite distressed that you felt like you had to escape from the Manor the moment you arrived.”
“Yeah, yeah. When does my drip finish?”
“Three hours.”
“I’ll talk to him then.”
He laid his head back as Damian shifted to rest his head on his shoulder and Cass curled up more comfortably to watch him sleep.