Work Text:
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
A silhouette hung in the thin clouds far above Gotham, above the smog and the zeppelins, far enough from the eternal light pollution that the last rays of the setting sun and first emerging stars lit the world just as well as the yellow glow from below. The warm updraft of the oncoming night gathered under pale wings, translucent feathers fluttering as air passed by them.
Jason liked it up here. No people, no noise, no expectations. The familiar grime of the city couldn’t touch him this high in the clouds, the sound of constant sirens carried out to the sea with the land breeze instead of up.
Bruce didn’t come up here either. That was why Jason was here today. The Batman was a heavy thing, made of metal and leather and stone even as he rode on the fading thermals of the passed day completely weightless. He clung to shadow and darkness, born of the lightless depths of the caves and catacombs below Gotham. Even at night, the Bat was of the city, not the sky.
Robin was air and light and joy, even if Jason wasn’t much feeling like it at the moment. Robin could float on the updrafts of the city for hours, barely moving a feather, only angling his wings to meet the moving air to get just enough lift to stay aloft.
It was just him and the wind.
Well. Him, the wind, and the fast-moving flicker of black below him.
Jason’s wings twitched as he looked down, adjusting to the slight forward lean easy as breathing. At first he thought it was Bruce, defying the nature of his very being by coming up here, and the thought made an ugly cocktail of anxiety and anger slosh in his heart. Then the flicker flew up to meet the fading sunlight that had already left Gotham below in darkness, and as the golden light dyed the black a deep, burnt orange he recognized the small wingless frame of the hero Phantom.
The ghost came to a hover beside him. He settled in the air a companionable distance away, close enough should they want to talk but far enough to give Robin ample room to maneuver if the wind changed.
“Are you alright?” Phantom asked. “I don’t mean to pry, but I could feel the turmoil rolling off you halfway to Michigan.”
Jason sighed. He knew he probably shouldn’t be bottling his emotions, but he really didn’t want to talk about it. Even if he did, he didn’t know where to start. It was just... the lack of trust was really getting to him. It made him angry, and it made him feel all sorts of awful little emotions that huddled under the anger that he had no words for. They writhed in his heart like worms and made him uncertain, unvalued. Unheard.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Phantom hurried to say, probably sensing his conflict. “We can just hover in silence. Or I can leave, if you want to be alone?”
“No, don’t,” Jason said. “Leave, I mean. I want to be alone, but not... alone-alone.”
“Okay. I will stay with you.”
They floated in the sky. The air around them darkened, and Metropolis far across the bay became brighter than the disappearing sun. Stars twinkled out of the dimness in force, patterning out constellations Jason had never seen from the ground. The pale crescent of the moon grinned in the eastern sky.
The shadows of Gotham deepened below them, and the time for Batman to emerge from the grimy bowels of the city like a vengeful spirit came.
“I’m not keeping you from your patrol, am I?” Phantom asked, so sudden after their prolonged silence that Jason startled and had to actually flap his wings. The ghost winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jason grumbled as he righted himself and gave a glare at the city below. “I’m officially grounded.”
“Grounded?” Phantom asked, turning unnaturally in the air to face him, “But you’re- oh.”
“Yep,” Jason said.
He generally liked to think Phantom got it, properly understood in a way that had nothing to do with his empathic abilities. Phantom understood the wind ruffling his hair, he knew narrow alleyways and dumpsters. The burden and the duty, the joy and love, the isolation, the fear that came with it. The looks and belittlement and mistrust. The freedom.
But at times like these, he was reminded they were different. Not... not too different. Just, enough. Phantom was a hero in his own right, flying alone without a partner or the burden of a legacy. In return he had no support network, not the way Robin had. It was a trade-off Jason had always liked before, but now he wasn’t so sure.
He felt like he finally understood how Dick had felt. No wonder his big brother hadn’t liked him, and often still didn’t after several years- If Bruce adopted some other kid right now, and gave him Robin, Robin’s wings- Jason would resent him forever.
“Batman doesn’t trust me anymore,” Jason said bitterly, and oh did saying it out loud sting. “I don’t even know what I did wrong.”
Jason genuinely didn’t. He knew what Bruce thought he did, but he could not figure out what he’d done to make Bruce believe he would do it. “He looks at me, and sees... I don’t know, something he doesn’t like. But nothing’s changed. I don’t-” His throat closed up, and his eyes stung. He couldn’t finish his sentence, not without it turning into a sob. Jason’s face crumpled into a wet grimace against his will, and his even hover listed sideways and he brought his hands up to cover it.
Phantom darted out of the way before Jason crashed into him, but Jason righted himself again right before they would have collided. His perceived calm, smooth on the surface but roiling underneath like a duck treading water, was gone. He couldn’t manage the tightrope-balance of soaring in place now, heavy heart finally weighing him down, so he had to beat his wings to stay aloft like a hunting kestrel. Staying in place in the air like this was more effort, but every downstroke pushed air down and every upstroke corrected his position- like jogging in place instead of standing on one foot.
“I won’t claim to know exactly how that feels,” Phantom said carefully, approaching him from the front with an arm awkwardly half-extended, like he wanted to clap a sympathetic hand on Robin’s shoulder but stopped before fully committing to the movement, not quite daring to touch the powerful, beating wings on his back. “But I know what it’s like to be judged and found guilty of something you haven’t done, not yet and never will, by some... miscalculation of your character, or fear, or, I don’t know. Maybe the need to pin blame on anyone else but yourself? It feels like a betrayal even when it’s a stranger. I can’t imagine how it would feel for it to be someone that close.”
“Aren’t you emphatic? Shouldn’t you know exactly how bad it feels, how... how deep it hurts?”
Phantom shook his head ruefully, hair moving in a current of its own, unheeding of the wind around them that ruffled Jason’s own like the ghost of a mother’s hand.
“It doesn’t work quite like that,” the wingless hero said. “I can feel it, what others feel, but it’s like rain against my skin. It can drench me, it can drown me, but I can never feel how a fish swims through it. So, I know what you’re feeling, but not how you’re feeling it.”
“Can you try? I can’t make sense of it,” Jason said and looked up and around, at the pale twinkling lights in the dark. “It’s all smog obscuring the stars.”
“I can give it a shot,” Phantom said, and darted around him. Jason followed as best he could as the ghost slithered around him like a water snake, like ink on wet paper. Keen bright green eyes bored into his being, his very soul.
“You’re angry,” Phantom said after circling Jason a few times, and settled in front of him to look him in the face. The ghost’s eyes darted across Jason’s features, lingering on the blank lenses of his mask before moving onto brows, cheeks, nose, mouth, chin. “Confused. Scared. Resigned. You’re afraid of... abandonment. Being alone, cast aside. There’s hope, determination, resolve too. An undercurrent of giddiness, a joy of discovery.
“You’re feeling awful about Batman’s mistrust, like some other shoe just dropped. Underneath there is something wonderful you’ve discovered, something fragile you’re almost afraid to commit to, but you’re... you’re going to follow that thread, now. Aren’t you?”
Jason hovered in silence for a moment; his friend’s words dissipated between his wingbeats. With every emotion Phantom had named, Jason had felt like everything became just that bit clearer. He now had words for nearly everything he was feeling. It didn’t hurt any less, but it was a bit less of a quagmire, and he could try to think through it.
Slowly, his wingbeats evened out to a barely-there flutter. A thought in the back of his mind grew, took root, and bloomed.
“I am,” Jason confirmed. “I was going to ask B to come with me but now... This is something I have to do on my own.”
“What is it? If you don’t mind me asking, that is,” Phantom said.
Jason gave him a grin. The thought of Bruce burned like a brand in his heart, but the resolution of going off on his own was like balm. “I’ll tell you,” he said, and closed his wings, and fell.
He could barely hear Phantom’s alarmed grunt behind him, and then the wind in his ears ate all other sound. Jason let weight creep back into his form as he dove, shooting towards the spires of Gotham down below like a winged bullet.
Wind buffeted his form, pulled his hair, whistled through his primaries. Phantom came up beside him, white hair barely moving in the wind, and side by side they plummeted down. The towers and skyscrapers approached fast, and Jason snapped his wings open just as they passed the first zeppelin. He angled his secondaries downwards, redirecting his momentum so that down became upwards, and letting himself be just heavy enough that when his trajectory carried him to the very top of Wayne Tower, he could just step out of the air and onto the old stonework.
Phantom followed on his heels and bounded rather than stepped to a halt, light like someone walking on the moon, and remained at a hover above the grimy wet bricks. The ghost grinned at him, no doubt feeling the thrill of the dive himself.
“Will you tell me now?”
“I will,” Jason said and bit his lip. He wanted to tell, he was giddy with the need now that he had made up his mind, but he had to gather his thoughts first. “I... I found my mom. My biological one, I mean. Her name was on my birth certificate, but I never knew...” he trailed off. Then he steeled himself again. “I know where she is now, and I’m going to her. If Batman doesn’t... if he doesn’t want me anymore, I’d at least have someone who does.”
“That’s wonderful, Robin,” Phantom said, making a strange face like he was both happy and sad for him at the same time, and averted his glowing eyes. “I really hope it works out, but, um. I know it’s not the same, but I’ll always want you. You’re a good friend.”
Jason reached a gloved hand out to pat Phantom on his shoulder. “You too. That’s why I want you to have this.”
Jason reached around his neck with both hands. He dug under the yellow collar of his uniform, between the undershirt and his skin. There his fingers found the reinforced cord of a necklace. Phantom watched shocked, almost in horror as Jason undid the lock, and pulled a heavy necklace out of his shirt. The large chatoyant gem set in tarnished silver glinted golden in the blinking lights of the tower’s radio mast, and as the amulet left the warmth of Jason’s body, his wings became translucent, shivered once, and faded away like the mist of dawn disappeared by morning sunlight.
“I- I can’t- Robin, I can’t take your wings!”
Jason held the enchanted amulet out to his best friend. “Take it,” he said. “I can’t be Robin where I’m going. I might not be Robin ever again. Batman would expect me to give it back, but I can’t, it- it’s too important to me. I can’t let it be passed to some complete stranger. I need you to keep it safe for me, okay?”
Phantom’s hand ghosted over the amulet, and he cast hesitant glances at it and Jason both, as if afraid to touch let alone take it despite the permission. “But how will you fly without it?” he asked, voice nothing but an uncomprehending whisper.
“The magic becomes weaker the further away I go from Gotham,” Jason said, gently took the ghost’s hands and tucked the heavy inlaid gem between them, and then let go. “I wouldn’t be able to fly anyway. Just hold on to it until I get back.”
Phantom stared at the amulet in his hands, and then up at Jason. “I will guard it better than my own life,” he said, and Jason could hear the weight of the promise in his voice. “I will make sure you’ll fly again.”
Jason grinned at him, that patented Robin grin, wishing against all hope Danny couldn’t feel how disconcerting it was for him to be without the amulet, without his wings. “And we can go look at the stars again, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Phantom agreed, and closed his fists tighter around the amulet. “You really can’t see them from the ground.”
“It’s a date,” Jason said and pulled his rarely-used grapple gun out of its holster on his belt. “See you around.”
Then Jason shot his grapple into the night, and flew away with only his short cape whistling in the wind.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.