Work Text:
Jason doesn't fit into his skin anymore. Which is kinda ironic, seeing as how he shot up almost a foot and a half, and gained more than a hundred pounds of muscle.
The thing is… there's something crawling in his veins. Something boiling beneath his skin. Some dark, teeming mass where his heart should be.
He can feel it pumping in tune with his pulse, can feel it throbbing in his head.
Before all of… this… Jason never really was angry before. Didn't really understand it. It was always something… abstract. He felt frustrated a lot, sure. Annoyed, hell yeah. But not this blinding, all-consuming rage.
It feels like it's burning him alive from the inside out. Like it's woven into his muscles, and veins. As if, when Talia chucked him into the pool of glowing green acid, it infused every single molecule of his body with white-hot anger.
Even when he's not actually angry, he can feel it there, pulsing just behind his eyelids. Like a pressure valve just waiting to be unscrewed. Like his skin is the casing on an overstuffed sausage, about to explode.
It just sits there. Waiting. Like a living, breathing presence in his head, waiting or the right moment to burst free.
Once, back when he was Robin -before he was murdered, beaten to death, blown up, unavenged -he got to watch a K9 officer with his dog. Officer Dominguez and his dog Gibbs.
And the thing is… Gibbs was a perfectly behaved, well-mannered dog. Right up until he wasn't. Bruce let him watch the video of what happened when a routine traffic stop turned lethal, and a suspect attacked Dominguez.
The whole time the beating was happening, Gibbs was in the backseat of the patrol car, snarling and snapping and howling like Kujo on steroids. When Dominguez managed to get away from the two men attacking him long enough to open the door…
Gibbs in the backseat of that car was terrifying. The stuff of nightmares. There were two camera angles, one dashcam facing forward, and one facing the backseat.
And Gibbs had torn through the cushions, tore the seats to shreds, then started on the grate separating the backseat from the front. It might've been metal designed to withstand criminals bashing into it… but Gibbs clearly hadn't been told it was supposed to be unbreakable. He'd smashed and chewed and snarled his way straight into tearing some of the bolts holding it to the car frame.
It'd been a little terrifying to think that the dog Jason had fed a dog biscuit to just a week prior had been capable of that level of aggression.
Then Dominguez had managed to open the door. And what had followed is something that Jason will never forget. Gibbs had torn into the two guys who'd attacked Dominguez, stopping only to go back and curl around his handler. He'd growled and snarled and snapped at everyone else who tried to get close, and they'd ended up shooting him with a tranq just to get him away from Dominquez long enough to get him to a hospital.
The anger living inside him feels a little like that. Like a snarling, angry thing, desperate to get out, and not caring what it destroys in the process. Like if Jason lets that door open, lets it out…
There's no telling what it'll do. When it'll stop. Who it'll kill.
And again, it's new. Jason's never felt this burning hot rage, filling up every corner of his being before. He's been annoyed, and frustrated, upset and hurt, but…
Well, truthfully? He never really had the time to get angry. Never was much point to it. There was no point in getting mad at Willis for beating the hell out of him, because getting angry about it wasn't going to change it. There was no point in getting mad at Catherine for getting high and forgetting about him, because it wasn't going to change anything.
There was no point in getting mad at Bruce for not trusting him, for not believing him, because getting mad wouldn't change Bruce's opinion. Jason may be frustrated with it, he may be upset about it, but he's starting to understand that he's never really understood anger before.
Because this thing crawling up his throat? If this is what Willis felt, right before he laid into Jason for being in the way? If this is what Bruce felt, staring at Felipe's body?
Jason understands them a little better now. Because some robed asshole ninja-wannabe elbowed him in the ribs a week out of the Pit, and Jason nearly killed him for it. Didn't want to, didn't mean to, didn't really intend to… But it happened anyway, and all Jason remembered of it was the comedown, the exhaustion settling in as the asshole's friends dragged him off to whatever counts as medical for the League of Assassins.
At first, Jason thought maybe he was just broken. That the magical green acid didn't heal him entirely, that it left a part of his brain damaged. Because this isn't him. He doesn't get angry like this. Not this all-consuming rage. Something must've went wrong.
Except it didn't. This is just what the Pit does apparently. Magic green acid will restore you to health, fix all your injuries -including severe brain damage from blunt force trauma and oxygen deprivation -but in return…
Talia called it a 'payment'. That the magic waters demand blood as payment. That he'll learn to leash the rage inside him, but that it will always be there. Always waiting for the next victim. Always waiting to destroy.
Some days, Jason wakes up and thinks he shouldn't have come back at all. That this was a mistake, that he should still be lying dead in his coffin, dead and buried and gone.
Other days… He feels that rage burning inside him, feels the heat of it flowing through his veins like lava, and he thinks that maybe, if he were a better a man, a braver man… he'd just figure out a way to kill himself.
But he isn't dead, and he's not a good man. He's an angry man.
An unavenged man.
And that, if nothing else, is something he can rectify before he figures out what to do with himself.