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Jason feels like the ground is swallowing him up.
“Please.”
His hands are sticky, his face is wet.
“Please, no.”
The taste of iron sticks to the roof of his mouth.
“Please…”
There are one-two-three-four-five-six fingers in a puddle of blood.
“No more, please.”
The Joker’s head stares up at the ceiling, sightless.
“Please.”
One eye dangles precariously out of its socket. Iris murky with death.
“Please…”
Jason’s hands spasm as he turns back and towards— towards himself. So very small still, at only sixteen years of age. So very different, yet the same.
“Kid,” he rasps, stepping forward… only to stop again when the boy jerks violently, panicked words slurring into incoherent, panicked gasps.
“Please, no more, please, please, I’ll be good- I’ll be good-“
There’s barbed wire holding him in place. Around his bloody wrists, across his chest, his throat —
Jason breathes through his nose, fighting the green back into submission as he starts forward again. One step after the other. He dealt with the most immediate threat already, now he’s gotta tackle the next problem. One step after the other. Just like they taught him.
The kid’s terrified babbles crest into heart breaking keens the closer Jason gets. He doesn’t strain against the bindings, though. He just grips the flimsy armrests with white knuckles, entire body shaking and shivering as he keeps begging—
Jason wants to throw up.
He knows he’s got his own panic attack waiting just beyond the haze of the green rage, but he can’t succumb to it just yet. There’s still danger. There’s still a victim.
One step after the other, just like he was taught. One step after the other.
When he touches the wire across the kid’s throat, he goes still. Deathly still. Eyes wide and vacant with so much terror and resignation that it cuts off Jason’s air supply.
But he doesn’t pause. Doesn’t talk. If he did, he would be screaming. He needs to get himself under control.
Jason doesn’t give the kid a chance to work himself into hyperventilation and begins the painstaking process of unwrapping the wire, ignoring the quiet keens and sobs as much as he’s able.
“Please, no. Please.”
The kid’s suit is torn up in so many places, and with each spike he pulls away there’s more blood welling up, blooming like flowers across skin and kevlar.
To break kevlar… the kind of blunt force such a feat requires is…a lot. Too much. To shatter it like this…
In, and out. One step after the other. Joker is dead, and there’s a traumatized kid who’s been held captive for fuck knows how long down here. He’s Jason’s priority now. One step after the other.
“I’ll be good. I promise.”
At least— at least the suit’s different. Covers more. Sturdier. Maybe it prolonged the kid’s suffering, god knows it was bad enough having his head bashed in with—
In, and out again. Hold. Repeat.
“Please, don’t make me— not again. Please.”
There’s blood running down the kid’s temple, but it’s slow and sluggish in the way reopened wounds tend to bleed. His skull isn’t misshapen with the tenth-eleventh-twelfth game of “what hurts more?”, and Jason knows the sick fucker well enough to know it was deliberate.
He was long from done with the kid when Jason showed up.
The last inch of barbed wire slips free from raw skin, but the kid stays in the exact same position. Hands glued to the armrests, feet flat on the ground, crying and shaking but not making any move to try and get away.
There’s a an angry red J burnt into the kid’s left cheek, branded like cattle, echoing the autopsy scar in a haunting parody of synchronicity.
Look at me , it says. Look at me. You were always meant for tragedy .
Jason has to stop for a moment. Stop, because he doesn’t know what to do now that the kid’s free of restraints but unwilling to move. Unwilling to flee .
This kid… Jason knows what hopelessness looks like. But this is worse .
In, and out. Hold for two.
“Can you stand?”
The kid doesn’t flinch at his voice, he just cries harder. And Jason wishes it was the loud kind, the one that’s at least marginally cathartic, but there’s no sound at all. Only tears, running tracks through dried blood and dirt like a genesis of rivers.
“I don’t know, sir.”
Jason’s hands ball into fists.
He doesn’t— he doesn’t want to touch the kid. Doesn’t want to make this real.
If this is real, there’s a version of him that Batman left to rot below Arkham.
If this is real, Jason might have to burn even more bridges.
He knows it’s wrong. The kid needs him. Needs him to keep it together. To get him the fuck out of here. But…
“Try,” he says gruffly, ruthlessly smothering a wave of guilt when the kid jerks , like a marionette being pulled by its strings.
It’s physically painful, watching as he tries to stand. To follow the not-quite-order of… who does the kid even think he is? There’s no way he missed the whole thing with the Joker. But the way he’s behaving… he doesn’t think it ever crossed the kid’s mind that he’s here to help.
After the third time, the kid finally manages to pull himself to his feet, trembling like a newborn fawn on legs that refuse to properly support his weight. His back his bowed, his chin almost touching his chest; hunched in on himself like he wants to make himself appear smaller. Smaller than he already is. Like he wants to disappear in the tattered remains of his cape and vanish in the dirty folds of it.
His cape- his cape is torn, not burnt. And it’s that inane detail that finally kicks Jason back into action.
The kid’s legs collapse under him with a whimper, face a mask of painful resignation, but Jason dives right in and snatches him out of the air, tucking the kid— light, feather light, like hollow bird bones, twist and snap— securely against his chest before he holds his breath.
But nothing happens. There’s no cataclysmic earthquake, no flash of light. Nobody appears from a magic portal to accuse him of fucking up an alternate universe’s timeline.
It’s just Jason and the kid, still.
And Joker’s dismembered body.
“I’m sorry,” the kid’s head lolls weakly against Jason’s chest plate, his eyes wide and vacant, seeing nothing. “I’m sorry, sir. Please, don’t let them- not again. Please.”
If Jason were a stronger man, he’d ask what the kid meant. But he’s not, and so he doesn’t ask. His mind is running wild as is.
Joker only had him for a couple hours. The kid’s been here for gods know how long.
In, hold for five, out. Focus on the next task.
Jason cradles his younger self to his chest, one arm below the bend of his knees and the other around his shoulders, allowing him enough range of motion to hold a gun and aim it at whoever’s stupid enough to stand in his way.
Not that many are left to do so. Jason was… thorough , on his way down here.
The kid is still in his arms, too still. But Jason doesn’t stop and carefully walks out of this torture chamber below Arkham and into the dark halls beyond.
The lights out here are a sickly yellow, flickering and tinted green with mould, many do not work at all. Bodies litter the ground, some unconscious, most… not. Jason is almost glad for the way the kid’s head is titled almost into his neck, obscuring his vision. He’s seen enough horrors.
Jason keeps walking steadily forward, careful not to jostle the kid too much. But he doesn’t make a peep aside from a low whimper when they pass something that looks like it could be a bathroom, and Jason speeds up quietly until they’ve rounded a corner and the kid goes boneless against him.
They walk, and Jason’s lips curl with every cell they pass. Every hallway that branches off into another.
These rooms do not exist in Jason’s universe. He used to study Arkham, used to know every vent, every room, every control panel. Just in case.
But his plan had worked. Black Mask did the dirty work, and Bruce—
Bruce .
Jason breathes. In for two, hold for five. Out.
Breaking out doesn’t take nearly as long as breaking in had, and before long the rotten floorboards and walls give way to the more familiar tiles of the asylum.
And then they’re outside and the kid moves for the first time without being prompted to shift his face into the cold breeze reeking of dead fish and chemicals, his unfocused gaze falling somewhere beyond Jason’s field of vision.
Jason stops for a moment, allows the kid to acclimate to being outside again. And to allow himself a second to figure out what the fuck he’s going to do now.
He hadn’t planned much beyond shooting his way through Arkham in an attempt to find out what’s been keeping this world’s Joker preoccupied enough to neglect his game with the Bat, and maybe take his shiny toy away from him.
And Jason had, in a way. Taken it away.
But now he’s got a traumatized kid on his hands, no fucking clue where to go, and about five panic attacks that are still impatiently waiting in the wings.
“Are we going back inside now?”
Jason blinks, looking down at the kid who’s staring out at the distant silhouette of Arkham’s gates with heartbreaking, desolate yearning. Still only dead weight that hangs limply in his grip, no sign that he’s going to struggle.
“No,” he says eventually, unspeakably grateful that the modulator filters out the hoarseness of his voice, “We’re leaving.”
The kid hums noncommittally, but compared to the eerie silence of earlier… well. Jason counts it a win.
Maneuvering the kid onto the bike so he doesn’t fall off is… a challenge.
Not that he gives Jason any trouble ( gods does he wish the kid would give him trouble, anything but that blank stare) but the way he just kind of slumps back against Jason’s chest after the first five minutes has Jason embarrassingly terrified he’s just gonna… slide off. Go bye. Splat on the pavement.
For the first time in his life he drives several miles below the speed limit, one arm curled protectively around the kid’s waist and the other balancing out the bike. It’s… an interesting experience. One that Jason doesn’t want to repeat anytime soon.
But against all odds they arrive in Crime Alley none the worse for wear.
Jason leaves the bike in a dirty back alley for whoever finds it first. It was stolen anyway. And then he hefts the kid back into his arms, rechecks the street corners for cameras— he’s not sure he won’t shoot any Bats right between the fucking eye of they show up— and then slips unnoticed into a rundown apartment building, bypassing several doors and “welcome” mats before he finds one that seems to have collected more dust than the rest and proceeds to pick the lock before be sliding them both soundlessly inside.
Jason breathes a little sigh of relief when he sees the interior.
Spartan furniture, likely left by the previous tenants, but everything covered by thick layers of dust and missing any glaring signs of recent occupation.
For the next few days, this will do. Or at least until Jason knows that the fuck he’s going to do now.
The kid tenses when Jason walks deeper into the apartment, the lights from the windows lost once more to the lonely glow of the helmet’s lenses. Still, he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t try to fight Jason.
He wonders if Joker managed to beat it out of him so completely he’ll allow anything to happen to him without a complaint.
He fucking hopes not. Jason knows how to deal with anger. With rage . He’d had both in abundance when he woke up in the pit.
He doesn’t know how to handle the absence of it in the face of all the shit Joker must have put him through.
The apartment opened up into a spacious living room and Jason heads for the couch immediately with a little sigh of relief, eager to put the kid down and do… something. Preferably punch someone (or several someones) until he feels better. Maybe dig up his outdated comm to tune into Bat frequency and describe to this universe’s Batman in excruciating detail what Jason is going to do when he gets his hands on him. Maybe see how much, if at all, this Bruce ever gave a single fuck about his Robin.
Jason’s reasonably sure he can manage to make the Bat lose his temper in ten minutes flat with some nice pictures and a bit of taunting.
“Don’t make me wake up!”
Jason blinks, startled back to the present by a set of hands suddenly fisting into his leather jacket and huge, wet eyes staring right into his soul .
And the kid’s eyes are still blue, Jesus Christ the kid’s eyes are blue— and he’s clinging to Jason with a white knuckled grip that’s about the reopen the scabs.
“Please, please , I don’t wanna wake up. I don’t want to be back there.”
Jason’s heart aches .
In for two, hold. Out. One step after the other
“You’re never going back there,” he promises, kneeling down beside the kid. And he knows he must cut an intimidating picture with the helmet, knows the kid knows what represents— but he doesn’t flinch away. Doesn’t react at all save for the way his bottom lip wobbles traitorously. “You’re safe now. They’re never gonna hurt you again.”
The kid’s face shatters, his hands loosening until they fall away and back to his side.
“I don’t want to wake up,” he repeats, sounding lost. Eyes far away. “I don’t want to go back.”
Jason doesn’t respond and gets up to hunt for a first aid kit.
It’s fine if the kid doesn’t believe him, Jason never expected him to. Not right away.
But it’s fine, because he’s got all the time in the world, and because he’s going to earn that trust.
Fuck universal laws. He’s going to take care of the kid from now on. Batman obviously can’t be trusted to.
And maybe Jason couldn’t take his sweet time with the Joker the way he wishes he had, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t make Bruce pay for not coming for this Robin, either.