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English
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Published:
2025-08-16
Completed:
2025-08-20
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5,457
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2/2
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love, and be silent

Summary:

Jason stares down at his script, feeling nothing.

“All I’m asking,” says TRAGEDY, “is for you to be yourself, Jason. Jason Todd has one job, and that’s playing Jason Todd.”

“Lucky for me, I’m a man of a thousand faces,” he grits out.

“And there’s nothing any of them can do to save him. Any story about you surviving is inevitably a story about Jason Todd’s death.”

Notes:

NOTE: i tend to take a very light hand to tagging. however, this piece is first and foremost an attempt to vivisect jason’s psychology and character archetype and gender coding and sexual trauma & the dramaturgic context in which it is steeped (as well as explore the tendency of comics as a medium to overlap levity and tragedy in a way that is sometimes handled extremely poorly).

as such, the content warnings are gonna be a bit of a doozy:

implications of rape, both in terms of mythological/dramatic references and in terms of jason’s canonical/extracanonical history with sexual assault, including csa. a character deliberately violates jason’s personal space in a way that jason initially interprets as a rape threat and levels accusations of incestuous desire at jason in an effort to get him to self-mutilate and/or attempt suicide. graphic self-harm/suicide attempt. deliberate attempts to trigger and belittle trauma & mental illness, general misogyny & homophobia, victim blaming from all sides, etc. however: there is NO on-screen rape, and NO actual incest or rape between any of the family members, on or offscreen. holy shit, i cannot emphasize enough, this is not a shipfic.

alright. excellent. now that that's settled. title is from king lear. see the end notes for works cited/further reading. today's song recs: spit it out by pharmakon and hell won't want your soul by kleistwahr.

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

ACT I— [In which Jason attempts to move on without the play.]

SCENE I— ALLEYWAY.

TRAGEDY—because TRAGEDY is not human, and because Jason could not shoot it dead, though not for lack of trying—need not enter stage left. TRAGEDY simply appears. It is temping, as it always is, to describe said appearance as “without warning”, but Jason knows better. The stage is already set for it.

Two beautiful, prohibitively expensive Tiffany light fixtures and one Sexy Leg Lamp (hovering somewhere between priceless and worthless) sit on three respective pedestals under three respective spotlights. Around them, an alleyway is frenetically cobbled together out of peeling paper mache and hand-painted cardboard cutouts by a swarm of faceless STAGEHANDS. The two beautiful (and one SEXY) lamps look grotesque against the cheap, grimy backdrop.

TRAGEDY, who need not walk, walks up to the first Tiffany lamp—pushes it off the pedestal. It shatters into white snow. Click, click. Two steps over. Second lamp—deceased. Snow.

Only the SEXY LAMP remains, faux fishnets glinting in the wash light.

Jason watches from the apron: half onstage, half off. His boots trail into the darkness where the AUDIENCE would be. It's not his cue yet, but he’s never been one for waiting in the wings. His brothers, his sister, exchange pseudo-nervous laughter from backstage. They are kidnapped often. Not often together, sure, but often. It's not even the first time some of them have been forced to act in some C-list Freak-of-the-Week’s weird little unauthorized stage production. Nobody’s dead, so nobody’s worried. Having had some time since waking to settle, they’re content to play along until help arrives. Jason is not.

His script is clutched in his hand, his lines highlighted in red—FIRST SERVANT. He dare not read ahead for fear of how the play ends.

Stepping through the glass entrails, TRAGEDY approaches the SEXY LAMP and affixes a poorly-constructed set of bat ears to the top. Christens it anew.

“Alright,” announces TRAGEDY. “Now that that’s out of the way—it’s time to get started.”

SCENE II— CIRCUS.

The STAGEHANDS, like black sheepdogs, herd Dick onto the stage as it is rearranged into an amalgam of colorful streamers, striped chipboard backdrops, sloppy chalk outlines, and obviously fake blood.

Jason’s elder brother has been costumed like a goddamn idiot—struts unconscionably in what appears to be a copyright-wary Spirit Halloween “(Slutty) Bat Hero” costume, with only a shiny silver shock blanket to preserve his modesty. Thinks he looks like hot shit. Doesn’t.

Dick rifles through the script, skimming ahead.

“Am I NIGHTWING?” he asks.

“Yes,” says TRAGEDY.

“How come I’m NIGHTWING in this scene and not ROBIN?” He frowns. Flips back to the first page. “And why am I the only one whose name is accurate in the script?”

TRAGEDY doesn’t answer.

After a beat, he spots Jason down on the apron. Jason glares. Dick winks.

NIGHTWING, consummate liar, raised in and by and for the spotlight, stands square on his spike and throws his arms around the SEXY LAMP and weeps big wet crocodile tears.

“Holy Origin Mythos, Batman!” he recites off the script, really putting his whole Dick into it. “Now we both have orphan trauma!”

“This writing is infantile and offensive,” complains a voice that sounds like Damian's might if muffled by several layers of curtains, “and your atrocious overacting still manages to do it no justice.”

The lamp says nothing. Wow. It knows its lines perfectly.

“Wow, Batman! You want to adopt little ol’ me?” NIGHTWING cups his free hand around his ear. Holds his script up to the light with the other—elbow’s still slung around the lamp. “And what’s that…? You want to fight crime w—” Dick frowns at the script, and then at TRAGEDY. “Really?”

“Footnote says it’s a censor mandate,” Tim explains from offstage, in the shadows of the wing. “You gotta say it.”

“Aren’t I, like, eight in this scene? I feel like it should be pretty self-explanatory. And also not the bit that would be important to clarify.”

“I mean. You’d think so.”

He sighs. “This script is terrible. This isn’t how any of this went.”

Tim only shrugs.

Dick rolls his eyes, and slips NIGHTWING back on like a silk camisole.

“You want to fight crime with me as your partner? But not in a gay way?” Annunciates it clearly. Swoops the SEXY LAMP into his arms. Does a big twirl. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The original dynamic duo! Batman and That Other Guy! Let’s go beat up Condiment King together forever and ever and ever and ever and…”

NIGHTWING exits stage right. Loops around the crossover, ready to enter from the other side for the next scene. TRAGEDY does a polite golf clap as the STAGEHANDS reset the scene again, dragging a tin foil penny and a paper mache T-Rex out from the wings.

Jason stares out at the unlit house. Dread hovers over his shoulder, waiting.

SCENE III— BATCAVE.

Dick seems to, by this point, have forgotten they’re in a kidnapping scenario with an intangible, unkillable, unknown enemy. He’s fully leaning into this shit. He’s having a good time. He's making waves off-Broadway with SEXY LAMP as his arm-candy costar. Jason’s been trying to force-choke him to death from the apron but they didn’t teach him how to do that in All-Caste school so it’s not going too well.

“Fired?” NIGHTWING wails, shaking his costar around. The shock blanket’s long gone. He’s as leggy as the lamp and twice as strappy. “As your son? Well, you’re fired as my dad!”

“…” says the lamp, which sounds about right for Bruce.

“I’m running off to Blüdhaven to pursue my real dream of being an actor, I mean solo vigilante, I mean cop, apparently!”

A crumpled paper ball pelts the Bat-lamp from stage left. Thrown by a small figure—Cass, maybe. Jason can’t tell. TRAGEDY—seated on the edge of the stage beside him. Wolf-whistles as NIGHTWING trounces offstage, leaving the SEXY LAMP behind.

“No notes! Bravissimo, sir!” it calls after Dickie, before dipping whatever passes for its head to Jason’s ear. “That’s your cue, FIRST SERVANT.”

Jason is shaking.

He’s going to have to beg, and it's going to do nothing. He will still have to play his part, as he always does.

“I don't want to.”

“I don’t care,” it says. “You’re my star. The show must go on.”

Tim pokes his head out from the wing. Tone scolding. Shoulders tense. “Knock it off, Hood. Just play along until we’re out of here. You’re gonna cause problems for the rest of us.”

“I don’t want to die.” He’s disgusted by his own urgency. Is that even true?

Dick slinks up beside Tim, arms crossed, staring Jason down. “Dude. I just had to act out a parody of my parents’ gruesome murders while wearing dollar store stripper gear, and I didn't throw a tenth this much of a snit. We all have trauma. We all have to make light of it sometimes. Stop complaining and do your scene so we can move on.”

From the darkness of the house—STAGEHANDS manifest like liquid, grabbing fingers spilling over his clothed skin. He scratches and kicks and writhes. Bites something that isn’t flesh. A prick in his neck—sedative, tranquilizer. A child's dose. A small dog’s. He fights, but not enough.

“I’m afraid…” Jason slurs before stopping suddenly, as many hands drag him onstage.

“Oh, Jason,” sighs TRAGEDY. “You’ve read Antigone. I know you know better than to say that around me.”

“Forgive me,” he says instead, knowing his fate is sealed.

SCENE IV— ALLEYWAY.

There’s blood in Jason’s mouth.

“No, no, no, that won’t do. Try it again from the top,” orders TRAGEDY, who is now wearing a very respectable director’s cap and reclining on a very respectable director’s chair. “Really put your heart into it.”

“I don't understand what you want from me,” he bites out slowly. Quietly. “I have no speaking lines in this scene.”

The inhuman palms of numerous STAGEHANDS slide over his body, cupping his cheek, tugging at his wrist. Overly-familiar. Lovers or family. He sways unconsciously with their motions as they coo and coddle and pose him on the stage, blocked three-quarters towards the audience, opposite the SEXY LAMP. He knows he looks hyperreal in the landscape of lazy set dressings and his ridiculous siblings, who watch him like insects from the wings. They bear cheap, ill-fitting, mismatched costumes. He is in his real, actual uniform. His armor. His guns—fat lot of good they’ve done him. His beloved combat knife, sheathed at his spine—one of the hands slithers between it and the small of his back. He shivers, woozy, bile rising. His teeth hurt. There’s so much blood in his mouth.

His brothers heckle him for the weird, uncomfortable tone shift brought on by the new scene. This routine kidnapping could’ve been an easy ride, if not for Jason’s resistance to the script. Dickie’s is irritating and facile and terribly insulting, but unserious enough to be laughed off and riffed on at will. Jason’s is—this. It was a comedy before he walked in. He’s ruining it with his presence. He doesn’t know how to tell them he’s only doing what they asked.

Jason stares down at his script, feeling nothing.

“All I’m asking,” says TRAGEDY, “is for you to be yourself, Jason. Jason Todd has one job, and that’s playing Jason Todd.”

“Lucky for me, I’m a man of a thousand faces,” he grits out.

“And there’s nothing any of them can do to save him. Any story about you surviving is inevitably a story about Jason Todd’s death.”

“I don’t understand,” he repeats, “what you want.”

“You are someone who can’t be saved,” it directs, before nodding at the SEXY LAMP, “but whose very presence urges him to try anyway. It’s the essence of tragedy. You need to learn to embody it, if you’re going to convince the audience of anything at all.” It stands from its chair, approaching. “He can’t swoop in to save you if you don’t act like you need saving. I can give notes. Do you need notes?”

He says nothing. He has no lines in this scene.

“Try channeling a bit of… Lavinia, maybe,” TRAGEDY suggests. (The silhouette of Damian twitches in the wing.) “Should be easy enough, with your history, don’t you think?”

“Virgil, le Guin, or Shakespeare?” he asks. Voice raw. Broken. Anything. Anything to get the scene to change. Anything to get the hands off his armor. Any words to fill his mouth with something other than blood. Anything to get his dad to come save him from this mess.

“Do you need to ask, Jason? Shakespeare, of course. The Arden edition already read you for filth: ‘mutilated daughter of late Rome’…” If it could smile, it would be. “…‘Handmaid of Revenge’…”

Depersonalized martyr. Unutterable victim. Handless, eyeless rapedoll.

(“Yikes,” Tim, who has not read Titus, drawls from somewhere to his right.

Damian, who has read Titus, only stares. He has just learned something about his brother, and so knows better than to jest.)

“I don’t—you can’t make me.” He kicks at the STAGEHANDS again. Desperate. Bruising his palms and his legs as he fights the hands that don’t fight him back. He spits on himself and it’s red. “No. No, no, no—”

(“Fuck’s sake,” Dick pleads from his left. “Jason, calm down. They’re only attacking you because you’re antagonizing them. We don’t want to keep watching you get hurt.”)

“Oh,” TRAGEDY coos, sickeningly apologetic, “Jason, sweetheart, not the first half of the play. I would never make you repeat that, least of all in front of your siblings, even if it does happen offstage. I speak towards the second half, after the damage has already transformed the girl into a broken object and the script starts making light of her plight. When it’s time for the other actors to start cracking jokes and slitting throats. When she’s ready for a renewed purpose. Only then can Batman first stumble into you in that alley and try—and fail—to save you from your past.”

Jason, Lavinia, kneels in acceptance of his fate, and says nothing.

The stupid fucking lamp says nothing.

The scene is allowed to change.

SCENE V— WAREHOUSE.

It skips past the finding, the guiding, the saving, the light. Right to the fire, and the beating, and the smoke. Because Jason Todd’s only job is to die.

Dick’s bouncing around the fucking stage with the SEXY LAMP again. Jason is still kneeling. Dead-eyed stare at the script. Crumpled in a single fist. He’s being made to sing and he doesn’t want to.

“They say he made a good end, for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy,” Jason spits, manic and half sing-songed through a feral grimace-grin, glaring up past his brow at TRAGEDY’s non-face. “You’re a hack and a lousy fucking plagiarist.” Back down at his script. “These lines don’t make sense for this scene if you actually know them in context. And Hamlet is the wrong fucking play for FIRST SERVANT.”

“Oh, come off it, Jason,” it scolds. “You said it yourself—you’re thousand-faced. We all know you can play a mean Ophelia. Iconic tableau of beautiful suicidal girl-corpse, whose spiral into insanity is dismissed as hysterical and excessive and ill-justified, while the very same madness in her male counterpart is deemed noble, clever, and downright protagonistic?” It grabs his chin and forces him to look up—the first time it’s touched him since he’s been here. “You were born for this role. Don’t be getting stage fright now, in the middle of your big scene!”

The STAGEHANDS wrench him to a stand, leaving bruises on his forearms, ripping out small chunks of his hair. Dick rolls his eyes at him, half-sympathetic but clearly blaming him for his own plight—they’re not fighting with NIGHTWING, are they? Because NIGHTWING knows how to play a role. NIGHTWING knows how to keep the peace.

Dick, in his dumb fucking costume, with his dumb fucking face, flips to the next page and declares, “Holy frijoles, Bat-Dad! This Joker creep is totally unaliving your weird bird! Should we save him?”

“…” says the SEXY LAMP.

“You’re totally right, I am in space for this scene!” Dick agrees sardonically. “Guess it’s up to you to save him, B! I believe in you! Be free!”

And then the asshole throws the fucking lamp at Jason, knocking him on his ass and shattering it into pieces.

“Motherfucker,” he screeches. Reels back to pounce at his piece of shit asshole brother. Bloodies his hands on the ground. Deep gouges. White. Down to adipose. The cardboard warehouse backdrop, which is apparently on actual real fire, licks at his ankle. His tac-pants are flame resistant, but his socks are apparently not. One of them alights when a stray ember falls into his boot. It singes clear through the first few layers of skin before he can put it out.

Dick, at least, has the decency to look guilty. He probably didn’t mean for that to happen. Too bad he has twelve seconds to live.

“Ah-ah-ah!” warns TRAGEDY. “That’s not your line! Stick to the script, Jason, or we won’t be able to wrap up the first act.”

He just wants this to be over.

Jason grabs for his script again. The STAGEHANDS drag him violently back into his proper blocking. His joints wrench. He breathes smoke. The bad nerve in his right shoulder screams in brilliant, sparkling pain.

“And will he not come again?” he recites. Coughs. Catches his breath. “Fuck.” One STAGEHAND elbows him in the jaw hard enough to split the skin. Another catches him in the temple. “And will he not come again? No, no, he is dead; Go to thy deathbed; He never will come again. He is gone,” Jason snarls for no one, “he is fucking gone, and we cast away moan. God have fucking mercy on his soul.”

Myriad inhuman hands force him to the ground with a brutal crack before dragging him bodily offstage. He stops fighting. He stops fighting because he has to. Death hasn’t freed Jason from this stage. He knows what happens in the rest of the play. It’s only going to get worse for him from here.

The curtains drop, signaling the end of ACT I. Jason heaves on the floor of the wing, breathing blood.

“Damn,” says Tim above him. “Jason’s a really good actor.”

ACT II— [In which the play attempts to move on without Jason.]

SCENE I— MANOR.

“Why does my script call me ROBIN,” Tim asks, “and not Red Robin?”

He is in a Red Robin suit, after all. Layered on top of another Red Robin suit. Layered on top of a Robin suit. Possibly a few other Robin-esque layers in between. When all of this is over, he’s gonna be stuck shedding Robin costumes for almost as long as Jason is stuck picking microscopic shards of porcelain out of his palms.

Jason—on his side. In the wing. The drugs still have some kind of hold. He reminds himself of who he is, where he is. Breathing hard or hardly breathing. He wants to sleep for ten thousand years.

“You’ve been assaulted.” Damian—costumed in a Hot Topic-ass rendition of his already too-edgy Robin suit and a stupid spiky black wig over his already stupid spiky black hair—stands over him with concern in his eyes, but has never learned how to express sympathy without sounding like a fucking prick. At least he had the decency to wait until Cass and Dick were far enough backstage to be out of earshot. Jason stares hollowly at a fixed point on the wall. Not Damian’s fault. Not his fault. Not his fucking fault fucking prick filth teaches fucking prick filth. “In your youth.”

“Dames,” he rasps, “I love you to pieces, but I swear to god if I have to talk about my sexual trauma or what-fucking-ever in front of you people in any fucking context for any reason ever again, I’m sticking a katana through my fucking abdomen.” Viscera. Everywhere. Sinew. Mesentery. He will make it happen for them.

A beat. “You love me?” He sounds genuinely confused.

“Fucking prick,” he breathes.

“Apologies,” TRAGEDY tells Tim. Jason peers out at the stage. Its director’s cap is held over its heart in mourning of Poor Dead Jason Todd. “That’s… a bit of a spoiler—lowercase-s, of course. Or… let’s just call it dramatic irony, so long as we’re being generous.”

“Shouldn’t ROBIN be Dick?” Tim asks, before reluctantly adding, “Or Damian, even? Given that he’s literally currently ROBIN?”

“I’ll simply say it’s the same answer, and leave it at that.”

“This script is insanely insulting,” he says. “Like, it’s not even comedy at this point. It’s just mean. I don’t sound like this.”

TRAGEDY says nothing.

“Do I?” asks Tim. “Did I?”

The STAGEHANDS hover, but seem far less trigger-happy to jump Tim over his kibitzing than they were Jason.

“No,” replies TRAGEDY, but it’s not a happy no.

ROBIN, satisfied with the responses, finally begins to follow his stage directions. Sweeps up the pieces of the lamp. Duct tapes the larger chunks back together. It’ll never be whole again. Jason, still sideways, snorts out a laugh and goes back to staring at his favorite point on his wall.

“Poor Dead Jason Todd,” ROBIN declares pointedly, dryly, “is in the big blue fish tank in the sky now.” There’s a hesitated sound which suggests he picks up the the SEXY LAMP. Gingerly. “But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be disobedient, poorly-trained dipshits!”

“…” says the broken, empty, SEXY LAMP.

“So true, Dad, I mean Batman! Wow, I sure love speaking ill of the dead. Now c’mon, B. Let’s go do some crime-fighting with NIGHTWING and find some new, better orphans to adopt!” And then an aside, though he understandably seems embarrassed to read this one aloud: “And maybe once he seems how sucky those orphans are, he’ll finally adopt me instead!”

(Damian kneels beside Jason on the floor, careful not to touch any part of him. “I’m sorry,” he mouths once he’s certain Jason’s looking, and it’s so genuinely shocking that he immediately convinces himself he read Damian’s lips wrong.)

SCENE II— CITY.

Cassandra is dressed in a haphazard, mismatched amalgam of the Batgirl, Black Bat, and Orphan suits, as if the costumers couldn’t decide on one mantle to settle on… nor the script, which refers to her, rather diminutively, as “GIRLBAT”.

Her mouth is duct-taped shut, and apparently has been this whole time. With magic, presumably, given that she hasn’t just ripped it off by now. Jason presses his forehead to the floor guiltily. He doesn’t know why, but he’s struck with the solemn certainty that this has to be at least forty percent his fault.

TRAGEDY’s next words do nothing to assuage that.

“Apologies for the indignity, GIRLBAT, but if there’s more than one woman with a speaking role in the script at a time, the boys start to get nervous.”

Jason sighs against the floor.

The second scene of the second act begins. Some loud, quippy back and forth between his brothers. Jason’s not really paying attention, though he does his best to follow along in his copy of the script. Every time Cass makes muffled, incoherent noises through the tape, the boys respond as if she's speaking perfectly clearly and pretend she’s agreeing to everything they say—the same way they do with the SEXY LAMP. She is visibly irate at the fact, but her temper cools quickly when the boys, the morons, finally remember she can sign and start paying attention to her hands.

Damian’s script lists him as “SON OF THE BAT”—never mind that two to three of Batman’s other sons are also in the cast. He is visibly humiliated to be reciting his own lines, which have him acting both deeply petulant and viciously disrespectful at every opportunity. Keeps quietly, politely interrupting to request revisions that would “allow for some subtle character development across the full length of the script”. Each is rejected. He keeps asking.

NIGHTWING and ROBIN, SEXY LAMP in tow, do some goofy-ass fake martial arts against duct-taped GIRLBAT and edgelord SON OF THE BAT, and get their asses kicked semi-for-real, before finally inviting Cass and Dames over to their side to fight alongside them.

Jason grows tired of it all. Stops watching the play. Stops following along in the script. Waits in the crossover for the scene to end. But he hears it through the curtain and it drags and drags and drags.

His siblings—all colorfully costumed heroes. Love each other. Do their wacky crime-fighting choreography together. Exchange quips and jabs and peanut gallery commentaries. Don’t take anything too seriously, despite the dreadful situation. Ignore the script and badger each other in and out of character. It’s good he’s not out there. The STAGEHANDS would be punishing him for playing along with them, punishing him for not. It’s easier for the family to have a lighthearted, fun time now that he’s out of eyeshot.

He hates them for it.

Hates.

Hates.

Jason, still beaten, still bloodied, still smelling of smoke, stomps onstage and rips the SEXY LAMP from Tim’s cradling arms in an effort to stop this ridiculous farce.

It does the job. The next scene triggers. The STAGEHANDS begin to prepare the set, dragging his siblings back out to the wings. Jason looks around and knows exactly where he is.

SCENE III— ABANDONED APARTMENT COMPLEX.

“I’m sorry, Jason,” TRAGEDY says, not unkindly. “But you need to take off the jacket.”

Jason is in pain.

“Why?”

“Your first set of armor did not cover your throat.”

“Oh,” he says, but comes out more like a sob.

It takes a full thirty seconds for Jason to hype himself up into being able to shed his outermost skin. His underarmor is sweaty. Bare wrists black and blue. He faces stage right. Half because his next monologue must address the lamp. Half so his brothers, his sister, frozen in the left wing behind him, cannot get a good look at the scar.

“What set is this?” Dick asks, nerves audible as he rifles noisily through his script. Must be very embarrassing for him. He’s supposed to be a performer. “Jason, where is this supposed to be? What did—what did it mean about your throat?”

A single STAGEHAND moves the SEXY LAMP from beside Jason’s feet over to the far side of the stage. It needs to be plausible that he would miss. (It could never be plausible that he would miss.) The STAGEHAND returns to stand behind him. Slips the combat knife from the sheath at the small of his back. Holds him, holds it, almost lovingly—Jason’s blade, once Bruce’s blade, on Jason’s bared throat. The old scar there. Another life. Through and through.

Jason refuses to hold the script, so it holds it for him. There’s nowhere to look but the lines: King Lear, Scene I. Cordelia’s love test.

He dare not challenge TRAGEDY’s direction, lest it again insists that it should be no challenge at all for Jason to find solidarity in another mutilated Shakespeare girl—Cordelia, Lear’s favorite daughter in one moment, disowned by him in the next. Cordelia, who fails Lear’s test of love because she could not swear herself wholly to him. Only halfly. Because she chose to speak truly. Who ends the play, which by that point has no living women, executed and carried in her mad father’s arms.

Jason takes a deep breath. He already knows his lines.

“What shall Cordelia do? Love, and be silent…” The blade scrapes at his throat, drawing blood. The SEXY LAMP is unreceptive to his bared affections. “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth: I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less…”

He turns to TRAGEDY.

“Do I have to?” he pleads. “I’ve been good.”

But TRAGEDY has one job, and it is to love TRAGEDY.

“Did you know, Jason,” it says, and it has chosen cruelty, now, he can hear it in its voice, he has challenged it a bridge too far, “that some scholars read the play as hinging on overtones of love of another sort? The bond between Lear and Cordelia is so intense, so volatile. So disastrous. In the very first scene, he makes it so his favorite, most disobedient daughter cannot marry exogamously—if he can’t have her undivided, devoted love willingly granted, he’ll forcibly revoke her inheritance, and so take away her prospects of ever leaving the family, just to keep her by his side.”

“You're wrong,” he growls, shadows gathering at the edges of his vision. He twitches and the knife digs in. “Wrong, you’re wrong. You’re a shitty critic and a shitty director and you don’t understand him. You don't understand him. He would never. He’d sooner die. Fuck, he’d sooner kill.”

“So you’re the problem, then?” TRAGEDY accuses, and Jason feels, acutely, as if he is going insane. “Maybe the SEXY LAMP should be Cordelia, and you should be King Lear. It’s the lamp whose love you were testing, after all—”

“Fuck. Right. Off.”

“—the lamp whose love failed your test. But really, just between us, I don’t think that approach fits the direction of the rest of the play, do you?”

He needs to be dead.

He needs it to be over.

(“Holy fucking shit, Jason, it’s just Shakespeare,” one of his brothers, behind him, begs with burning energy. “Stop arguing, just read the script as written, it’s not that hard! There’s a knife at your throat, can you please be serious for once in your goddamn life?”)

Jason steadies his aching breaths, fuming, wracked in tremors. He presses into the knife. The STAGEHAND shifts it away. He follows it.

“Good my lord, you have begot me,” he spits, “bred me,” spits, “loved me.”

TRAGEDY tilts its head. Displeased by his delivery. Blood wets his collar.

“I return those duties back as are right fit,” he barks, “obey you,” barks, “love you, and most honor you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say they love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, that lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry half my love with him, half my care and duty: Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters, to love my father all—”

“Cut,” says TRAGEDY, “cut. This isn’t working. I don’t believe you at all.”

The STAGEHAND at Jason’s throat—perhaps overeager—hears the direction and does exactly that: It cuts.

SCENE [?]— [?].

Jason is down, but never out. The STAGEHAND dropped him to the floor before it could do anything it couldn’t take back. But his hands are red. Wet. Familiar. He wants to be dead. He wants to punish them by being dead. He scrambles for the knife that was just used to half-open the old wound. Vows, as he did the last time, to finish the job.

His brothers, his sister, have skittered onstage. They look at him like he’s going to try and kill them again. He might, he might.

“Tsk, tsk. Actors are such prima donnas,” chides TRAGEDY, approaching. “If you’re unwilling to play Jason Todd properly, then perhaps I’ll simply have to recast you in a new role!”

No, no, no, he doesn’t, doesn’t wanna…

“You could play a very convincing Talia al-Ghul, surely!” Its steps click on the cork of the stage. “Or Andrea Beaumont!” Click. “Or Selina Kyle! Or perhaps even Minhkhoa Khan, if we’re feeling progressive…” it simpers. Leans in conspiratorially. Pulls back to mime thoughtfulness. Tsks again. “Oh dear, there seems to be a bit of a pattern, there…”

Sticky hands find sticky handle.

“Why is it, Jason, that your closest narrative counterparts seem to be the women your father has slept with?”

Doesn’t wanna. Doesn’t wanna hear this.

“Why do you seem to have modeled your life so closely after the Sexy Criminal Antiheroes who lust after the Batman, but whom he cannot be with because they defy his one true love: his Code?” It grabs his hair and tries to drag him upright. His soul sits wrong in his body. “It’s not the direction I would’ve taken for the role, but hey, Jason, you’re the actor here! Who am I to micromanage your character motivations?”

It’s wrong. It’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong, it’s lying, he doesn’t, he wouldn’t, it doesn’t understand—

“Yes, yes, that works perfectly, Jason! Are you perhaps jealous that your father’s lovers survive their irreconcilable moral differences with him relatively unscathed, while you, his lamb, get exsanguinated, lobotomized, and driven into the ground? Do you believe you would finally earn your Abraham’s love if you found your way into his bed?”

Jason plunges the blade into his ear canal before his sister can wrangle it away from him.

TRAGEDY cackles above him. His skull splits at the sound. He curls up, fetal. “Oh, I just love this new, authentic direction my best actor is taking with the role,” it taunts. “Lean into it! You're so right, Jason! Shakespeare is totally last millennia, ancient Greece is where it’s at—especially after all that fuss with that League-mother of yours! That’s exactly correct, Jason! Just like Oedipus did! Next time, aim for the eyes!”

But before Jason can follow through on the new instruction—deliverance takes the form of a caped man in black kevlar. The real guy. Not the SEXY LAMP.

There’s a sound—glass and metal shattering. Steps scattering. Can’t tell from where. Can’t hear out of the bad ear.

“It thought you… it thought I wanted to…”

Bruce grabs for his wounded skull. Wounded throat. Wounded self.

“Please don’t,” Jason pleads, probably inaudible. “Please don’t touch me right now.”

He drops him, backs off, but only just. “You need medical attention.”

“I don’t,” he says, “I don’t. I need to be dead.”

“Boys,” Bruce requests wearily. “Come help me with him. He seems… upset.” King of understatements over here.

Jason grasps for his knife again, pulling it close to his chest. Cassandra comes up behind him as he does. Can probably tell, from some latent twitch in his muscles, that he’s still an imminent risk.

He isn’t free yet. The threats still echo in his head. The blood still spills from his neck.

Jason Todd, recalling his title of FIRST SERVANT, turns the blade away from himself and swings it at his father instead.

Notes:

works cited/further reading: antigone by jean anouilh. antigone and oedipus rex by sophocles. titus andronicus, hamlet, and king lear by shakespeare. the world's last night by c.s. lewis.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

rendered + lineart. sorry for the torture, jason, i love you dearly