Work Text:
Jason had always been a jealous person. It was in his nature. When he was little, still living in his mother’s house he’d been Jealous of Nina Goodwin’s family. There were nine of them all crammed into a rundown two-bedroom apartment in Crime Alley. They were poor (Everyone in Crime Alley was), But while Jason shivered terrified while his mother lay conked out on the couch hopped up on drugs, there was always a warmth spilling from that apartment. Laughter, warm and sweet and real spilling through the cracks in the thin room and making Jason feel all the colder from the far side of the wall.
When he was ten it had been all the rich kids up on the hill, the fortunate little bastards who could do no wrong. They could steal an entire car and not go to jail. No juvie, no pain, just a fee of so much money Jason could have eaten for a year that their daddies paid like it was nothing. And there was bitterness there too, welling up from his empty stomach cold and acidic and a little angry. Jason stole a loaf of bread and spent a week dodging cops. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, and every time he saw one of them, out committing a crime for fun (and really Jason can’t even fathom that). He feels rage and just a little bit of green green jealousy.
Then he’d been adopted by a billionaire and it was everything and nothing like he thought. There was more food than he could imagine, and warmer softer clothes than he’d dreamed. He had an entire room to himself with a huge pillowy bed and a closet as big as his old apartment. Dick comes home and Jason feels green with envy, even fighting with Bruce there is an ease about them, like they know it’ll be fine. Like Dick and Bruce both know that however it ends Dick will come home and Bruce will still love him. Jason wants it desperately. He’s Robin now, but he’s not Dick and it grates on him endlessly.
Let's not even get started on the problems caused by his initial jealousy of the Replacement after his death, the less said on that the better really.
But this, This was a different sort of jealousy altogether it was an achy longing sort of jealousy. It was a jealousy that left him feeling like he was on te other side of the wall again, but this time the wall was made of stone and smog and darkness he could never escape.
It starts like this. Replacement has a terrible stony look on his face. It's a look Jason knows to be anger. He knows it to be the kind of stubbornness even Bruce could never move. It starts like this, the replacement says “I quit” and silence falls.
It starts like this. Gotham is a city that devours her people. She thrives on breaking and battering and destroying. She lives on breaking her heroes and villains open like some sort of bloody demented geode and then consuming what's left. Gotham hosts a large selection of madmen and terrorists. None of them start that way.
Harley went to Med school with Bruce she was brilliant and empathetic. Gotham drives her mad trying to understand the Joker until she too is little more than an echo of a clown herself.. Harvey was his childhood best friend, a man with strict morals and rules and a love of things being just so, Gotham cackles as he becomes obsessed with righting wrongs. Balance she coos and Harvey knows he must even the score and be as bad as he is good. Nygma had been a thriving scientist, so curious, brimming with untapped potential. There is a joke in the fact that his curiosity literally killed the cat. There is a tragedy in the fact that when he can’t find all the answers he tries to manufacture them. Joker had had a family. Gotham strips him until even he doesn’t remember his name, until all he remembers is that he longs to be happy. Penguin had been maybe not a good man, but a bright one and certainly not a bad one. A little oddity, a penchant for penguins, Gotham makes it his life. There are others so many others. Gotham took them in, broke them open, and turned them into caricatures of the people they were. Gotham ate them away body and soul and everyone in Gotham knew it.
The Bat was the worst of them all. The deeper into Batman Bruce went, the flighter and more airheaded Brucie became. The two personas cracking down the middle, a fractured mess of ideals. Batman grew more paranoid, more restless, more ruthless. His plans got more vicious, his contingencies ever more detailed. Brucie got kidnapped more, his messes were bigger and more ridiculous his laugh lighter and emptier. The man in the middle, the one who was Jason’s dad was teetering on the edge of non-existence. Stephanie had stepped into the picture a vivacious and complicated girl. Jason watched her spiral. Jason watched as Stephanie disappeared into Spoiler. As more and more she became and convoluted conglomeration of Purple and Waffles and Glitter and Malice. They turned a careful blind eye to her bloody grin, but hovering on the edge of consciousness was the knowledge of how little it would take for her to crack.
Even Dickie had tried to run when his sinews got too malleable and his blood stopped bleeding quite so red. He’d yelled at Bruce for an hour before floating too lightly to the ground and leaving in a haze and angry words. He never makes it past Bludhaven. He couldn’t. None of them could. They’d all tried, heck Jason had died trying in a country halfway across the world. He’d woken up in Gotham mud and clawed his way out to breathe Gotham smog. He’d run then too, all the way to Nanda Parbat. For a little while the green covers up the itchy tugging of Gotham. When he leaves Nanda Parbat he intends to go to France, or maybe Belgium.
The first week is great. He is learning to cook all sorts of dishes, the green of the pit is a distant buzzing at the back of his skull and he is alive, properly alive for the first time ever. It only lasts a week. His shadow starts facing the wrong direction, the sun shines on his face and his shadow streams out in front of him. (To Gotham he knows, like some sort of demented compass). The itch he’d abandoned with the Pit returns with a vengeance leaving his brain throbbing and his eyes watering. His skin burns from the pollution of a city that's not his own. Gotham is a possessive city and Jason has long belonged to her. Jason can never remember how he arrived in Gotham. He can’t remember leaving his flat in Paris. Somehow he finds himself in Crime Alley. Gotham doesn’t even let him leave Crime Alley's borders for a good three months. It takes him another two years to even be able to step outside the city limits.
He becomes the Red Hood, bloody, brutal, and angry. He can tell Gotham approves by the purr-like rumble under his boots every time a murderer's blood waters her stones. There starts to be flashes of blank rage and fights he can’t remember. What he can remember is this. They aren’t Green.
There’s no greenragefightkillbloodysatisfaction. There's no bitter tang in his mouth or acidic burn in his chest. No Green. Just Gotham and dirt and darkness clinging to his skin like ash. It scares him. Jason doesn’t want to become Gotham. He can feel her eating away at his soul. It terrifies him.
And then Replacement had managed to run. To fly off to some farm in the middle of nowhere Montana. Far far from Gotham. Far far from the devourer. He’d just shed his wings and stopped. The bitter taste of Jealousy wells up in Jason's mouth. He watches Replacement when Gotham loosens her leash enough. It’s never more than a few days, Gotham has her claws too far into him for that. But he’s not properly running anymore, he knows better. Timmy looks happy, He’s started a farm and was learning to cook. He was taking a framing class to build a house of his own. He spends every Tuesday and Thursday at the farmers market and hums to himself as he tends to the bees and reads mystery novels. Tim looks happy and underneath the festering bitter envy living in Jason’s chest, Jason wants to sing. Jason is so so happy for his little brother.
He’s far too deep to wonder if the snake's pit of dark anger and envy belongs to him at all.
He tells it all to Dickiebird with a twisted smile. His brother sits there in black and blue, looking nothing more than a songbird in a cage, (with his black hair ruffled like long black feathers. Jason doesn’t dare reach out to touch them least they really are). “Lucky baby bird,” Dick remarks eyes never leaving the shiny print picture of Timbit. “He always could fly farther than the rest of us. Remember how he used to hide from us” Jason does, Jason does and very carefully never thinks about it again. Because Tim was good at hiding, but it was always Gotham who hid him.
He visits Tim again hiding in the treeline. Tim sits on the front porch of his pretty new house with a book. There's a pretty girl leaning on his shoulder. She grins at something Tim says. Jason watches them make bread together which they take to the neighbors. Tim goes to a book club now at the local library. There are Red and Gold leaves on the trees and the most beautiful sunset Jason has seen in a long time. It looks like a dream. Jason tries to take a step toward his broth... Replacement. He goes home instead.
There is a new hero team in Los Angeles, one of the shiny new heroes dressed in blood red looks too familiar for Jason's taste. He turns the monitor off with a sinking feeling in his gut. There is a rumble under his feet that sends a flash of irritation through Jason. “No,” he tells Gotham. She laughs and he feels an errant shadow draw across his face. Jason kills eight people that night. Bruce is angry, no that's wrong, Batman is angry. Bruce is gone. There is a dark bloody hole where eight murders should be. Jason can’t feel anything.
Jason wishes he could feel something. Even the greengreenrageangerdestroy of the pit was preferable to this nothingness. The green meant he was alive. The rage meant Gotham hadn’t stolen him. Jason pulls out his copy of Pride and Prejudice. He can’t remember why he hated Mr. Darcy, he has a niggling feeling he should have Thoughts on this. He doesn’t. He keeps reading anyway.
The next day Red Hood kills six more men. He goes home with their blood still splattered across his chest and watches his big brother fly across the city. Nightwing's arc hovers at its crest for just a bit too long. Jason shakes his head and turns away. He's planning on making Baklava tonight and needs to get started.
The new hero in Las Angeles calls himself the Red Star. Jason muses idly as he looks through his fridge that it was a poor decision to choose red. Red belongs to Gotham. Then again Red was the best color to hide blood. He doesn’t think about it again.
When he visits Tim again watching from the shadows. Tim just sits stone faced for three full hours. The garden, the one Tim has meticulously tended and curated for two whole years is overrun with weeds. On hour three Tim’s little girlfriend (or was it his wife now, he thought he
spotted a gold circlet on her left hand) comes out the door and Tim wakes up. He sweetly kisses her on the cheek and goes inside, smile firmly in place. He throws a fleeting glance at the too long shadow of the tree Jason is perched in.
Sometimes he thinks he can hear Gotham in his mind. Like a second mind resting against his. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes he can’t tell which thoughts are his and which are her. When he tells Dick this Dick purses his lips and tells Jason quietly that he sometimes wonders if any of his thoughts are his own. “Sometimes,” he says “I can’t remember my mother”
They never talk about it with Bruce. Jason privately speculates that Bruce who lost everything to Gotham far too young has had her bloody claws in his mind too long to understand what is happening to him. And more importantly what is happening to his children. Gotham is not an empathetic city and so Bruce is not an empathetic man. There is one act of rebellion though. Gotham would prefer her heroes bloody. Bruce made non-lethalness part of the identity. Gotham can twist all she wants, but she can only amplify never add. It's why Bruce so carefully doesn’t kill. It’s why Robins get fired when they do. He hadn’t understood that.
Now he does.
The next time he sees Tim it is Red. That's all he’ll ever remember from the encounter. Tim sits sobbing on the bloodstained floor of the cabin. There is the mutilated body of a pretty woman. Tim is rolling a sticky ring between his fingers and the tiny tiny body of an infant across the room. Jason doesn’t want to know what happens. He turns to leave and tries to ignore Tim’s curses toward Gotham. He can’t blame him. He doesn’t want to think about what it means.
Jason takes down three drug rings. He doesn’t kill them. They haven’t broken my rules he reminds Gotham. He feels her frown in his mind and tug at his control. His fingers twitch. Don’t test he he thinks viciously. I have rules for a reason, you have me. You know that, but you take away my rules and I’ll put a bullet in my head before you have a chance to stop me. You know I will. The pressure leaves and Jason breathes a sigh of relief. He goes home and eats plain toast for dinner.
When he arrives at the cave Damian is sitting on the floor in the Robin suit. There is blood splattered across his face and in his dark hair. Jason sits beside him “Giant penny for your thoughts?” he asks. Damian's voice is quieter than he’s ever heard it “It hurts” he says “Why won’t it go away” Jason freezes and very carefully says “What hurts Dami” Damian goes quiet and for a moment Jason thinks, hopes, he won't respond. “The darkness, it feels like it’s eating me. I’m so cold all the time and my mind feels too crowded. How do I make it stop?” The last word inadvertently comes out a whine and Jason stills, there is Ice creeping up his spine. He curses himself. He wants to say run. He wants to put Damian on a spaceship to Mars or maybe another Galaxy altogether. He wants to tell Damian they’ll fix this. For all that Jason is a murderer and a crime lord, Jason is not a liar. “You can’t,” he says.
It is the truth. The bats have always loved their contingencies. Their plans, their meticulous control. The truth is, there never was a chance. Nowhere was far enough to run, no one was strong enough to resist. The Bats had never been in control.
Jason knows what will happen next. There's no jealousy twisting in his chest now. Just a deep sense of regret
A broken bird flies into the nest. He is dressed in Red from head to toe, the bloodsoaked replica of Batman’s sidekick. “You are my Red Robin,” Gotham tells him. “Mine.” and Tim knows it to be The Truth.