Chapter Text
You shadowy armies of the dead
Why did you take the starlike head
The faltering feet, the little hand?
For purple kings are in your band
And there the hearts of poets beat;
Why did you take the faltering feet?
– On a Child’s Death, W. B. Yeats
i. kelkeyelegn–
The stench of burning flesh is putrid, acrid, moist in your nose with a hint of earth and bubbling fat. It is nauseating and sweet, sulfuric and charcoal-tinged, wet leaves and past-burnt sugar, with iron-rich coagulated blood giving it a coppery, metallic smell. Even still, there is a fog of humanity to it that lingers, so thick and horrifically rich that it’s nearly a taste, long-left sitting heavy on your tongue and permeating your saliva. It’s stomach roiling, a fetor so pungent and disgusting that a wash of stomach bile might improve your condition. It smells like something that you’ll never forget–a memory so sickening, so engrained into your core that you could be reminded of the phantom mephitis and tang on any given sunny day.
Jason comes to with a high-pitched ringing in his ears and that heavy, horrid taste choking him. He’s disoriented, gagging, mouth dry and dusty. Everything hurts, and still everything feels like nothing at all. He lies there and tries to remember.
Ethiopia. The warehouse. Sheila. The Joker. The bomb.
Nothing had changed. Nothing except–
It’s too late. It’s always too late. Jason, the man that he’s always been, just accepts it. He will lay there and take it. It’s what he’s always done.
He hears the telltale rattling of the knob and Sheila’s horrified cry. “The door! It’s locked!”
And then.
And then–
Suddenly, she’s thrown backwards as Batman bursts through the door and doesn’t stop. Now this is new.
11.
“Robin!” Batman screams, and it tears through him like some sort of violence.
10.
Jason lies there, helpless, spent. “I’m…sorry.”
6.
Batman scoops him up, as gently as he can, despite Jason’s pained whine. “Hold on!”
He makes for the door, but there’s no time left on the clock. His foot is barely out of the threshold when the bomb goes off. Batman takes the brunt of the blast, cradling Jason in his arms as the warehouse blows behind them. There’s a high-pitched ringing in his ears, then nothing.
Funny. He’d always theorized that maybe he would have survived his injuries, if not for the explosion. (The explosion isn’t what killed him though. No, not Jason. It was what came after. Somewhere, sometime, there is a boy who is suffocating in the rubble. Somewhere else, sometime else, Jason cannot breathe. ) Seems as though he’d been onto something there.
The ringing has sort of subsided, but something still isn’t right. Everything is shockingly silent. He thinks about hearing-related injuries and blast overpressure and perforated tympanic membranes and inner ear damage. Still though, he tries.
Jason sucks in a deep breath of air and trembles with the force of it, the rush of it through his bruised body. “Batman?”
When Bruce doesn’t respond, Jason musters everything left within himself to prop his body up. He is beyond horrified at what he finds.
“Batman!”
He rolls Bruce over and rips away the remainder of his cowl. There is a horrific third degree burn winding up Bruce’s left side, cradling his jaw and stretching up under his eye, high on his cheekbone. The burn site is completely charred, furious and red, parts meant to be hidden away exposed to the night air. The stench of burnt flesh permeates the air and makes Jason’s stomach roil in protest. That rancid, rotting, greasy odor of burning flesh which smells like nothing else in comparison. It coats the inside of Jason’s nose and he thinks that he may never be able to get it out. His father’s body is wrecked, and Jason doesn’t know how to put him back together again.
“Batman! Bruce!” He begs, tears already welling in his eyes. They sting, a wretched burn he can’t blink or rub away, more than they bring any sort of relief.
Here it is, a vision of thirteen relived, in the tangible and torrefied flesh.
Batman is nothing but gruesome charred flesh, black and hot and burning, alive and dying. His cape billows behind him, more fire than material, and only the pointed ears of his cowl remain. Batman’s face is a blackened skull, jaw working haphazardly as tendons and sinew sizzle and melt off like bacon fat on a grill. The stench of burning flesh makes Jason’s stomach curdle. His father continues to stagger toward him, his typical Batman growl nothing but a shredded, agonizing wail.
Batman wavers before his eyes, caught between a nightmare of calcine flesh and bleached bones and bullet holes seeping fatal amounts of blood over the floor. The red ichor splatters to the ground in great droplets, and the room echoes with a sickening schlop, schlop, schlop. Jason’s eyes water, both from the fetor of decay and scorched flesh, and from the sight before him.
“Jason,” Bruce garbles brokenly, breaking him from Scarecrow’s fear-induced vision.
He doesn’t need the reminder. He’s living it. Jason has failed him once again.
His hands flit uselessly about, bruises mottling his flesh as his broken body already begins to swell. It hurts, like no physical pain he’s ever known before does it hurt, but he tries. By God, he tries so hard for Bruce. With painstaking effort and wasted seconds his father does not have, he finally finds the beacon in Batman’s utility belt. “I’m so sorry. Don’t–don’t try to talk. Look, I can call for help.”
He manages to activate the beacon, to call for help, despite his trembling hand. He can still fix this. He can still salvage all of it. Bruce will not die. Bruce cannot die.
“Jason,” his father coughs, turning his head to the side as he hacks up alarming spatters of blood–that sickening schlop, schlop, schlop . It makes Jason’s mouth feel impossibly dry, heart a lead anchor stopping him in the moment, fear to thread through his veins like an IV drip. The ichor stains Jason’s skin and waters the dry dirt.
“No time for that,” Bruce wheezes. “Listen. Promise me. You won’t kill Joker for killing me.” He painstakingly raises a hand to cup Jason’s cheek. “Protecting Gotham…helping others…healed me. I want that for you…because I love you, son. I know the anger, the pain you have inside. Killing him won’t end that pain. You have to be strong. Use this pain to be strong, son. For your family…Barbara and Dick.”
Bruce gently brushes his thumb over Jason’s cheekbone, a whisper of a touch against a miraculous patch of unmarred skin. There is something in his eyes, something Jason recognizes because he’s seen it before in his own reflection–resignation. But there is something much softer and unwavering.
I love you, son.
Jason loves Bruce too.
His father who’s always been larger than life lies eerily still. He’d had to know how this would end. The two of them would always end in tragedy, one way or another.
Bruce touches him, a ghost of a thing, between his fifth and sixth ribs. Jason is going to be sick. “I’d do it again.”
See, herein lies the problem–his father with his unshakable no killing rule, which Jason had found himself falling back into like a second skin over a year ago, or a lifetime ago before he literally fell back into his thirteen-year-old skin. It is the very reason any of this is happening. If Red Hood had just killed Black Mask like he had originally intended instead of royally pissing him off and invoking a deep-rooted and sanguinary grudge…they wouldn’t even be here right now. Bruce would have never died in the first place, and Jason would have never gone back in time, and none of this would have happened again. No redo. No redux. Death is death would be death would stay dead.
Jason shakes, grabs onto his father and doesn’t let go, as if he’s a lifeline that could tether him to this mortal plane. “Bruce.”
Don’t do this to me. Not again. Don’t leave me again. I can’t take it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It should have been me. It was supposed to be me. April 27, 2006–Jason Peter Todd dies in Ethiopia at fifteen.
Bruce coughs once more, blood running freely down his chin and pooling in the dirt. “Promise me you’ll be strong.”
It isn’t fair to ask me that. It isn’t fair. IT ISN’T FAIR–
“I–” He stutters, the words catching in his throat.
Jason never gets to promise him anything. Bruce chokes on an inhale and dies in his arms with a rattling gasp that will feature in his nightmares forever.
It’s all his fault.
It’s all his fault.
Jason’s fingers quiver as he desperately pats his father’s face. The skin sloughs off into his hand, a sight that leaves him reeling. His voice is hushed, a whisper in want of waking the dead who will not rise. “Bruce?”
He already knows Bruce won’t respond. He is dead again, not lost in the timestream, but lost to the past, lost to the future. He’s twice dead because of Jason. It should be Jason lying there, again and again and again. Everything begins to fall apart around him as the warehouse around them burns to nothing.
(If Jason survived being beaten nearly to death, if he survived the blast, then? A riddle, crime scene evidence, a witness testimony, an anomaly, a haunting–what killed Bruce?)
There is an ache between his fifth and sixth ribs, acid hot and cutting to the bone. His hands shake. Grief creeps upon him again, like an old acquaintance, but when he faces it, it’s just love wrapped in a heavy winter coat that blankets him. If grief is just love persevering, if it’s just love with nowhere to go, and if Jason is full of love for his father, what then? It cuts through his heart like an unsettled score, and he’s never liked to leave fights unfinished. Fear sinks into his skin and rots his veins, turning his blood to thick and hot, suffocating sludge. What is loss? Guilt, suffering, anguish, despair, sorrow, anger, denial, terror–the list goes on. Loss is like a thesaurus inside you, synonyms for all sorts of terrible, a living nightmare you can’t wake up from. It’s the feeling of being stuck in time while everyone passes you by, perfectly preserved in a snapshot of hell on earth. Grief is like a wildfire licking up your ribs and culminating in your throat. It savagely, selfishly, eats up all Jason’s air. It burns as he screams, raw and ragged. It is the dreadful feeling of being buried alive without any dirt over you.
Jason would know. He’d goddamned know.
The burning in his side is a piece of shrapnel lodged there; once, where Bruce had touched him so lightly, but feeling like a punch all those years ago, all the years now that would never be. I’d do it again. Again and again and again. Jason is going to be sick. Bruce stares at him, blue eyes dull and unseeing. Jason thinks the sight will haunt him for the rest of his miserable fucking life.
Perhaps life is just a game that Jason is destined to lose.
Trembling, he wraps himself around the cooling corpse of Bruce Wayne, Batman, his father. The sloughed skin has adhered to the remnants of his gloves, epithelial sunk and singed into kevlar. “I’m sorry,” Jason sobs between screams. “I’m so sorry, dad. Dad. Dad, come back. Don’t go. Five more minutes, dad. Just give me five more minutes. I promise. I’ll fix it. I promise I’ll fix it. Goddammit, Bruce. Goddammit. ”
Time. He needs more time. Even five minutes more. If he’d had five minutes more, he could have fixed this somehow. Five more minutes, dad, he’d begged through his teenage years until the ripe age of fifteen. Please dad, just five more minutes, he’d begged on a rooftop in Gotham at the age of twenty-one.
Sometimes, in the past, his grief has turned to anger, and that anger to breaking things.
By God, Jason breaks good and hard.
Being Robin has always given him magic.
Sometimes magic runs out.