Chapter Text
I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.
I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro.
– The Crystal Gazer
i. watch the weather change–
The smell of a garage is like the smell of home to Jason.
You see, Willis–his dad–owns a mechanic and autobody shop. Jason’s mom works odd-hour shifts, so sometimes his dad takes him along. He knows the musty or damp aroma mixed with unknown burnt components and mildew, engine oil, grease, gasoline, and various automotive fluids by heart. Include the lingering reek of stale cigarette smoke and metal, it’s more like a cocktail of comfort.
The inside of the shop is fairly unremarkable, and surely looks like almost any other non-chain mechanic small business across Anytown, America. There is a paint room off the back, and an office with an ancient and bulky chair surfaced with the itchiest fabric known to mankind. An old office phone sits on an equally aged metal desk with peeling fake laminated wood and a scantily clad woman’s calendar that Catherine Todd would probably throw a conniption over. There are three bays full of flame-painted toolboxes on wheels, squeaky rolling stools with ripped leather seats and the sickly ochre foam poking out, an automotive lift, and old posters peeling off the walls. Jason’s favorites are the Poison Idea and Eric Peters posters.
(In fact, he likes Poison Idea so much that his mom even got him a Poison Idea sweatshirt. It’s red, even though his favorite color is green, but it’s okay because she says he looks nice in red.)
An old radio is always set to 104.7 The Cave, louder than the roar, we bring the noise for Knights’ Kingdom. Alright, be patient. We gotta hand-crank the generator to bring you more pure classic rock. Willis and the other guys all like classic rock, so Jason supposes he likes it too. There could be worse music to listen to all day, every day. He gets pretty good at identifying bands or songs by the first few seconds of the song, or even the first two notes, depending. For example, the song Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison, because Bret Michaels takes such an audible big breath before he sings.
There’s an ancient, still-functioning Pepsi vending machine from the 70s in the main bay of the shop. The light blue, white, and red color scheme is being slowly eaten away by rust, and it always has that loud buzzing of old appliances. Every time someone pays for a soda, it sounds like it’s going to explode, but the can always comes rolling out. Even though it’s Pepsi brand, there’s never any actual Pepsi, and the options are instead inked with black marker and taped on the buttons. The damned thing operates on more of a randomized distribution system anyway. You put a quarter in and make a selection, but god only knows what the vending machine will spit out. Jason likes it and treats it as a guessing game.
Willis has friends who come around sometimes, after hours when it’s long-past dark. If his mom is working, then he brings Jason too. Willis teaches Jason to throw darts and shoot quarters, and he’s beating fully grown men at both activities before very long. He even gets to keep the quarters that he wins. He doesn’t really pay much attention to what Willis and his friends do, per se, because he’s too busy counting his quarters or lazily rolling himself around on a creeper and reading.
He really likes to read, and he gets some quality time with books in the shop more often than not. Sometimes he’ll bring his action figures along and play with those, too. He has all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Master Chief, and even the Gray Ghost. Jason collects spare screws and bolts, washers, and other small parts, and utilizes his imagination in his games. He even leaves his well-loved and well-used guys around the shop sometimes, because he knows he’ll be back.
Willis isn’t always around. Jason knows he goes to work, sure, but he doesn’t always come home every night–sometimes even for multiple nights on end. His mom doesn’t seem to know where Willis is most of the time, either, and if she does know, she never seems happy about it. Sometimes he notices that his mom cries at night, when she thinks Jason has long been asleep. He’s quiet, really quiet, and knows how to tiptoe around the apartment. When he realizes she’s crying, he does everything he can to make her feel better, because he doesn’t want his mom to be sad.
So, yeah, Willis isn’t always around, so Jason eats up any time with him like a child beyond starving. He learns a lot of things under the tutelage of his father and the other mechanic. He learns how to change a tire, how to disassemble and put together a carburetor, how to change oil, hotwire a car, siphon gas, change brakes and calipers, all about spark plugs, all the rigmarole around batteries and bulbs, and more. Sometimes, Willis and the other mechanics even give Jason jobs to do. What other 8-year-olds get to use a Dewalt power sander to prep a car for a new paint job?
Ronnie, the autobody technician, even teaches him how to paint a car. The paint room is the only part of the shop that has air conditioning, and during the hot and humid New Jersey summers, Jason volunteers to help paint as much as he can. Willis dresses him in a too-big pair of extra coveralls (he has to roll up the sleeves four times) and arms him with a face mask, scratched-up safety glasses, and a spray gun. It beats lying out on the dirty concrete in front of the heavy-duty tilt drum fans with a half-cold soda pressed to his forehead and sweating to death.
Jason learns to keep a grease rag in the back of his stained jeans, the knees nearly worn out, and even how to sneak a cigarette out of Ronnie’s pack he always leaves lying around. On the nights that Willis stays well past work hours, Jason likes to snag a smoke and slip out back. He’ll scramble up the rickety old fire escape and dangle his legs over the side, light up a cigarette, and watch the city skyline. He might even trek down the street to buy a chili dog with his hard-won quarters. Sometimes, Willis will even give him a few dollars to run down to the bodega on the corner over and buy snoballs or twinkies.
His mom always looks so proud when he comes home and tells her all that he did during the day. He tells her how he sanded a car, or is getting all As in school, or about the latest book he’s reading. She tells him how she’s always liked Pride and Prejudice, so he gives Jane Austen a whirl–even if his classmates make fun of him. Jason reads better than the majority of the boys in his class anyway. He always scores high on those standardized tests that the state makes all the kids take every year.
Park Row is scary and his mom doesn’t like it when Willis lets him roam about with dollar bills clutched in his grease-stained fingers and spare quarters in his pockets. Willis says to keep it between the two of them–a special secret, just between them. He asks Jason to keep some other secrets, too. And Jason does keep them, hidden up the fraying sleeves of his favorite hoodie and tucked away close to his heart. He keeps them like he memorizes his mom’s favorite recipes, or the calculation of quarters he’ll need to buy a chili dog with all his favorite toppings, or the book list he has for the library. It’s okay, because he’s never really paying that much attention to Willis anyway.
Everything is great, until it isn’t.
It turns out that not all the cars Willis and the other mechanics had been working on or that came through the shop were legal. As in, some of them were very, very stolen. Somehow, this also led to him being tangled up with Two-Face. Willis ends up in jail, Catherine ends up raising Jason alone, and the mechanic shop closes its bay doors–presumably forever. Things go even further downhill from there, and after a few short years, Jason finds himself an orphan on the streets of Park Row.
But Jason is smart, and he has a lot of skills that even some of the other homeless in Gotham don’t have, so he gets by. And then, one fateful night, he spots the score of a lifetime lingering in Crime Alley. Let it go on record, in fact, never let it be said, that Jason Peter Todd isn’t made of sterner stuff. Never let it be said that Jason isn’t brave.
Jason has a growling stomach, a tire iron, quick hands, and his sights set on the Batmobile. And if he hadn’t gotten greedy, if he’d never gone back for that last tire, perhaps his life would not play out the way it does. But Jason does go back, because he wants the matching set to fetch a higher price, and this is when Batman catches him in the act.
If Batman is bewildered at the scrawny boy jacking his tires, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he levels Jason with an unknowable look and says, evenly, “You’re going to give me back my tires.”
Jason sneers at him, instantly rising to the challenge, having hidden the tire iron behind his back. “Who says I took ‘em?”
The Dark Knight, with presumably the patience of a hundred saints and the pursed lips and tone of a practiced father, settles a hand on his hip and stares him down. “What else is the tire iron for?”
There goes that, Jason thinks, and swings the tire iron in question with all his might. It strikes home somewhere between Batman’s ribs, winding him. As the vigilante is very audibly wheezing, Jason high-tails it out of the alley like a bat out of hell. No time like the present to run for it, he figures.
“You little son of a gun–” Batman grates through clenched teeth, holding his spasming and bruising side.
Jason is already halfway down the alley because he’s learned to be quick and how to get away. He’s learned how to taunt, too. “Try and catch me now, you big boob!”
The story goes that Batman had indeed caught him, despite his valiant escape efforts, but it had ended in Bruce Wayne taking in Jason Todd (the little thieving badass) as his ward, then as his son, and it had been great, until–
Until it wasn’t, again. Until Jason ran away to search for his biological mother, who promptly turned him over to the Joker, who beat him nearly to death and then blew them both up, and he died. He died and then came back to life and crawled out of his own grave and spent a year comatose–part of which he spent wandering the streets again–before being taken in by Talia al Ghul. Then he’d taken a little unconsenting dip in Ra’s al Ghul’s beloved Lazarus Pit waters and come out as good as new (this last part is debatable).
He’d come back to life and coherent thought only to discover that his life would never–could never–be the same again. How could it? Jason Todd was murdered, the Joker is still alive, Batman has a new Robin, and he doesn’t know where he fits anymore. He could get revenge, could make them all pay for everything–for being taken from Bruce, for Bruce letting him be taken and not avenging him. He could make Bruce choose. He could return to Gotham City with a bang and burn as much as he could get his hands on.
Yet, Jason doesn’t. Not quite. Instead, he finds himself back in Park Row, dialing the number printed on the aged realtor's sign hung in the window of the mechanic shop where he spent his younger years.
He figures that’s as good a place as any to start.