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“Jason, wait.”
With a begrudging sigh, Jason slows his pace. He doesn’t turn to face Dick when he stops, instead making them both wait while the others shuffle fully out of sight.
Dick thinks he’s been doing an admirable job swallowing down his anger these past few months, but he barely keeps it in check now. He can feel it churning in his stomach, bubbling in his lungs, burning at the back of his throat.
A timebomb ticking ever louder; a torrent barely held back by walls that buckle under the weight of each new mistake Bruce stacks on top of his already crumbling tower.
Bruce is a problem for later.
This one is more pressing.
Jason finally twists around, a sardonic half-smile already pinned in place.
“Look, Dickie, if you’re gonna try to steal the spotlight—”
The only spotlight here is the metaphorical one; throwing into sharp relief all the things Dick never wanted to see.
No. That’s too passive, too kind.
These are things he’s deliberately brushed off, purposefully explained away.
Willfully ignored.
He can’t anymore. He won’t let himself.
He sees it now. He has to act.
“You can’t really be okay with this,” is what he says.
Jason laughs. It echoes around them, each reverberation carrying less and less humor, until it’s as cold and hollow as the Batcave.
“This is what we do, right? Stop the bad guys.”
Yeah, maybe. But Dick misses when the bad guys were garden variety murderers, thieves, and pimps, not the mechanized personification of the absolute worst of Bruce’s paranoid tendencies.
“Not like this.”
“Unless you’ve been holding out on us with a fully formed plan tucked away somewhere in that skintight suit of yours, this is our only option.”
“It doesn’t have to be. We could—”
“No, we couldn’t.”
“Just—”
“There’s no time,” Jason snaps, throwing his arms wide in defiance. “Zur is out there right fucking now!”
Dick thinks, wildly: where was this defiance before? Where is Jason’s righteous anger, his scream for justice? Where is his rage?
“We can take a goddamn minute,” he snaps right back, “after everything he’s done to you!”
They both know he’s not talking about Zur, but Jason shrugs it off like it’s nothing.
“Water under the bridge.” He throws a casual thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of the door, a picture of calm cool-headedness again. “C’mon, Dickie, we got bigger priorities.”
It sounds so fucking rational and reasonable and… just like Bruce.
That pulsing boil of anger finally bursts, hissing and spitting as it surges up in Dick’s chest.
“Will you stop! Stop using his excuses, stop with all the false fucking platitudes! This isn’t water under the bridge, it’s blood! Your blood, Jason.”
Dick lunges forward without thinking to grasp at Jason’s shoulders, to shake the mouthpiece away and talk to his cocky little brother instead of this puppet echoing all of Bruce’s tired lines.
The instant he makes contact, he realizes his mistake.
Jason flinches back so hard it almost makes Dick stumble.
They both freeze, and for a long moment there’s nothing between them but all the signs of just how vulnerable Jason had been made.
Sweat breaks out on his suddenly pale face, his pupils blown so wide they swallow all the color of his eyes. His pulse hammers visibly in his throat, his arms tremble uncontrollably beneath Dick’s hands.
Bruce did that.
Bruce. Did. That.
And here Jason is, ready to die for the man.
Again.
“What else am I supposed to do, Dick?”
The croaked, barely-there whisper fits so neatly into Dick’s train of thought that the shock of cold clarity makes him drop his hold.
Jason steps back a pace, scrubs a hand over his face, and takes a single shaky breath. Then he blows it out and pulls himself back together so smoothly that if Dick hadn’t seen the mask slip he wouldn’t believe it had happened at all.
This is what he’s pushing through every day, this artificial handicap that Bruce installed in his brain.
They don’t have an antivirus or an override key. They haven’t even been looking for one. They’ve all worked through fear toxin before, after all, and Jason had seemed to be coping.
Dick curses his own complicity again.
For all that Dick has raged about the horrific nature of Bruce’s spiraling control issues these past months, about the consequences of his inability to rein it in… he hasn’t actually done anything to find a solution.
None of them have.
Another mistake to fix later. Right now…
“I’m not gonna let you kill yourself.”
Jason brings his arms up, folding them aggressively across his chest. Any other time it might read as belligerent, but right now Dick can only see it as the self-soothing it probably is.
“Not for this, Jay. Not for him.”
The hollowness of Jason’s laugh has nothing to do with the echo this time.
“What other way is there?”
“Any other way–”
“It doesn’t matter. With him, without him, for him, against him. It’s all the same unwinnable game.” Another dark chuckle. “Hell, at least if I die a hero maybe he’ll—”
Jason bites down on his words, shakes his head. More than he meant to let slip, probably, but Dick has had enough of these thoughts himself to fill in the blanks.
If I die a hero, maybe he’ll forgive me. Maybe he’ll love me. Maybe he’ll see me for once, and not some warped reflection of himself.
Maybe he’ll let me go.
But Dick isn’t ready to let this go. Not yet.
“I am not letting you kill yourself. Do you hear me?”
The way Jason cocks his head to exaggerate his smirk in an almost perfect facsimile of himself makes Dick’s skin prickle with unease.
“Now who sounds like daddy dearest,” he drawls. “I don't get any say, huh?”
Sarcasm is better than apathy, Dick supposes.
Even if the comparison stings.
“It's not the same.”
“No, I guess not.”
Jason steps around Dick, starts towards the exit. Calls back;
“Cheer Up, Dickie-boy! If your BatTech does its job, I'll barely even be dead. Think of it like a factory reset, reboot the system.”
Dick follows, resigned. The resin will do its job, he'll check it himself.
All the rest he can deal with later.
“And if a reboot doesn't work?”
He doesn't know which is worse; the possibility of Jason disappearing into the shadows of the Bowery again without a word, or the thought of him sticking around and playing sycophant with Bruce like everything about this isn't fucked up.
Jason just shrugs like it doesn't matter.
Or like he's not planning on letting it matter.
“This is Gotham City. She's always looking for people to die for her.”