Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I don’t remember dying, you think and somehow those words make sense as you stare down at your body. I don’t remember dying, but I remember being in pain.

You remember the little pebbles of gravel digging into your cheek as you curled besides a dumpster for the night, ever annoying and so very scratchy; you remember the gnawing in your stomach, so very empty for so many days now, ever hurtful and suffocating; you remember being so tired you couldn’t move, and you remember closing your eyes to a scream three streets over, to the wet splatter of phlegm the old man down the alleyway hacked out of his lungs. You remember nothing else after.

But you can put the pieces together, if you try hard enough, though you aren’t sure if it was the starvation that got you or the cold. You remember shivering the day before this happened, but you also remember not shivering as you drifted to sleep; too tired to try and keep yourself warm.

There’s nothing else, just a blank darkness, and then you were here, and your body was there.

You want to shrug, because that’s just how life goes out here on the streets, but at the same time you don’t have the energy to shrug; it seems weird, to be an apparition and not have the energy to move. Maybe it’s not that you have no energy, just no purpose; you’re dead. There’s nothing more to it.

As the night wears on, you watch the shadows dance in the street and the symbol in the sky light up—like a beacon of hope, a beacon of promise. You used to hope for him to come; you used to believe he might save you and your neighbors. But as the time went on, and your mother passed on the cold tile of a bathroom, you lost that light; you saw reality, which is that you wouldn't be saved if you didn't try to save yourself.

And, so young, you did try; and sometimes, when you were cold and hungry and crying, you'd look at the sky and see that symbol outlined in the stars. And you would hope; you'd imagine your mom smiling, your father patting you on the back. You'd imagine a classroom, an A on a test, a library that smelled like words on a page; you'd imagine a younger sibling, maybe an older one, people who love you and tease you and hold you when the sky goes dark and you feel all alone.

There’s a man standing over you—over your body—dressed in black and a solemn pinch to his lips; he stands tall, the dark cape flowing to the ground around him, in the light that spills from the slowly rising sun. His head, that strange cowl covering his face, is bent low in mourning as he stares down at your body, hidden away in the shadows. It makes a strange juxtaposition, the Batman so dark and frightening, crying over a dead boy behind a dumpster.

When he bends to pick you up, a shudder runs through you; his hands are gentle, you note, phantom touches across your arms and legs as he pulls you close. When you fall limp against his chest plate, you feel the safest you’ve ever been while anger courses through you; he’s always been just a few minutes too late, hasn’t he?

You follow your body, not that you have to; you’re free from any mortal anchors. You could fly, if you wanted to; you could sink to the core of the Earth, you could fade from existence, you can do whatever you want. At the moment, you decide you want to stay with your body; you want to see where it goes, where it will be kept, what will happen to your physical form.

It seems important.

Chapter Text

You haunt the cave; you never go up the stairs, and you don’t watch him after he removes his outfit. It’ll break the façade of Batman, the idea that there’s something greater than everything else out there fighting; it will make him human, and you don’t think you can handle that. You can hate him in a mask, but the moment you see his face, you see his humanity and his honesty and the man who carries the burdens of the city…you won’t hate him anymore.

So you flitter up to the stalactites, you make faces at the bats there; they never react beyond a slight fluttering of their wings. Your spirit doesn’t bother them; they are used to strange apparitions. They live in a cave with a man who dresses like them and goes out into the night, who dragged back home the body of a dead street rat.

You take the time up there to memorize their voices; there’s another man there, older than the one who brought you here. He mutters to Batman when he comes home, injured; he comes down the stairs in a steady gait. You turn away when he comes too; you don’t ever see his face, but you catch glimpses of a black tail coat disappearing up the stairs.

There’s a third man, much younger than the other two; you think this must be Robin, older, dressed in a black suit with a blue design on it. You plant your feet on the ground by his side, stare up at him; you were eleven when you died. This man is maybe twenty; he’s taller than you, and you think that’s funny. You tip your head to the side, watch him walk around with grace and ease, a knowing set to his jaw as he runs his hands over the computer console. He looks like he gives good hugs; when he starts to remove his mask, you return to the bats.

They welcome you with a quiet flutter; up here, their voices are muffled, and you don’t have to put syllables together to form names. Names will break the illusion; that Batman is a hero, a symbol, a being of power. That Batman is human, a mortal, a civilian. You like to ignore reality now that you have that luxury.

It’s been a little over a year when Batman pulls a capsule from a safe, built into the cave wall; you always find it morbid how he kept you frozen. You wonder where he’s going to take you now, as he secures your body’s coffin in the Batmobile. He turns to address his friend, behind you; you don’t turn. You still don’t want to see his face.

“I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Are you sure this is something you want to do?” the old man asks, voice resigned but still trying.

Batman doesn’t say anything and gets into the car; you follow him. Whatever he is going to do involves you and you don’t want to lose sight of your body; it’s not that it matters. Anything can happen to it, and your spirit will still be here, floating about in the small cave you haven’t left in so long.

He takes you to a facility, far out of Gotham, way out in the middle of nowhere; it’s cold, dark, unforgiving. There are voices, little whispers that echo in your ears and vibrate through your spirit; they aren’t real, but they are, and the closer Batman carries your body the louder the sounds get.

“Batman.” It’s a woman, strong boned, shoulders straight; she has dark skin and dark hair and beautiful eyes. She smiles, like a coiled snake, but you don’t think she’ll attack. “You know you’ll owe me.”

“I believe this is recompense for saving you four months ago.”

Her smile widens; there’s a green glow in the room behind her. You think the voices are coming from there. “Yet for some reason I believe that all was an elaborate set up.”

Batman doesn’t say anything; he settles a duffle bag outside the room with the strange glow. You don’t step forward when he does, and you don’t avert your eyes when he pulls the cowl down. You can’t see his face—he’s turned away—but you oddly enough study the hair on his head; dark, soft looking. “How long will the process take?”

The woman shrugs, eyeing the body—your body—with a sad turn to her lips. “He’s been dead for a long time,” she mutters, flicking her gaze up at Batman. “Give it fifteen minutes, another twelve for the Pit Madness to wear off; it’s his first dip after all.”

“His last,” Batman growls, and then he’s stepped into the glowing room.

Because you don’t follow, you don’t know what happens; all you know, for a split second, is that you’re standing staring at the woman who seems to be staring right at you. And then, in the next instance, you’re being sucked through a tunnel of spears, with hands clawing at you as your dragged and crammed back into your body.

You come to coughing something vile out of your throat, sticky; you feel sick. Every bone feels wrong, and every organ seems to beat erratically.

“Where am I?” You wheeze out, a hand flittering against the man’s suit jacket; he’s strong, a hand carefully brushing away the wet hair that clings to your temple, cradling you close like you’re something that should be protected.

“You’re safe,” he whispers back; behind him, some people move. You hear other voices, but can’t focus on them.

“S’going on?” you try to squirm, but your limbs are heavy; the man pulls you closer, rubs at your arms. You realize you’re shivering.

“What’s your name?”

You remember that. “J-Jason,” you stutter.

He smiles; “Jason; I’m Bruce. You’ve…” he falters here, and you find that distrustful. “You’ve been in an accident, but you’re going to be fine.”

You don’t remember being in an accident; you remember falling asleep behind a dumpster. You don’t remember dying.

“What happened?”

“Just rest,” he says; and you do. Too tired to keep your eyes open any longer, a strange haze covering your mind, you let your eyes fall shut; darkness greets you, a soft darkness that’s always been your closest companion, the only reprieve from the cold, empty streets.

Chapter Text

When you wake up, you hardly remember the previous night; your body does, though. It’s heavy still, and your mind is a hazy fog covered in green light. You decide to stop trying to remember. Instead, you find yourself wandering the halls of a mansion; it’s not a cold place, as you would expect such a large house to be. There are pictures on the wall; some are portraits, others are images captured by a camera. There’s a boy in a few, dark hair and blue eyes and a nimble body; there’s another boy in some of the other ones, a dark look about him, a determined set to his eyes.

You find yourself drawn to the kitchen; there’s a sweet smell coming from there, noises of someone moving about, humming quietly. You feel like you know the voice, as if there’s a nagging familiarity you should know it; you enter the room.

There’s an elderly man—not the one from last night—pulling a pan from the oven, with a somewhat frilly apron on; he turns, pan in hand, and gives you a warm smile.

You don’t trust him, if only because his eyes look ever so tired and saddened; the smile is fake.

“Good morning, young master—well, I should say afternoon.” He sets the pan—scones, you think, though you can only guess—on the counter and removes the oven mitts. “I wasn’t sure if you would wake up today; are you hungry?”

Your starving; “where am I?”

“You’re at Wayne Manor.”

You know Wayne; everyone knows Wayne. He’s Gotham’s king, genius, patron deity alongside Batman. He’s also the man who was holding you last night. “Why?”

The man—he must be the butler—pours batter into a pan. “He found you after your…accident. He wishes to help you find your family.”

Finally, you snatch a scone when the man’s back is turned; you wolf it down with expertise. If you don’t eat fast enough on the streets, your food becomes someone else’s meal. You swallow the evidence before you speak. “I don’t have a family.”

The man freezes before turning a wide eyed gaze on you, shock apparent. “But…we thought.”

“My mother is dead,” you recite, hoping the fact your eyeing the scone pan doesn’t give you away. “And my father…” You’re never sure where he is.

The butler pushes the pan towards you and when he turns back to the batter on the stove, you scarf down several more scones. “Well…we’ll have to talk to Master Bruce about that.”

It’s a strange, but not necessarily unpleasant, series of events that sees you as Bruce’s ward, and then adopted son; it’s another strange series of events that makes you find the cave, the getup, the car, the computers. Alfred smiles at you, and somehow the sadness is hidden far away to be replaced with a strange sort of pride.

“There was a boy once,” Alfred says as he tailors the Robin suit to fit you. “Young; Master Bruce couldn’t save him. It was…out of his control, but it’s haunted him ever since. He used to tell me ‘the boy was so young, Alfred, and I couldn’t save him; I was too late’.” Alfred turns you to face him; his hands are old people hands, but they’re still strong and steady. He cups your chin, not forcefully or mean, but hard enough for you to pay attention. “Master Bruce cannot save everyone.”

You roll your eyes; it seems like such an obvious but stupid thing to say. A juxtapositional definition for Batman, that a hero like him cannot save everyone; but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. He’s just a man in a suit punching bad guys at night. Of course he can’t save everyone.

But you want to think he can; so when you’re out with him, swinging from roof top to roof top, you pretend he’s saving the entire city. You never forget what it was like at the bottom of Gotham, scraping crumbs from the gutter…but you’re not there anymore, though others are, and you’d like to think Batman’s saving them when he stops Riddler from robbing a bank.

You like to think when Bruce builds a school in the slums, he’s saving everyone; you like to think when Batman sends Joker back to Arkham Asylum, he’s saving everyone; you like to think when Bruce donates to a charity, he’s saving everyone; you like to think when Batman pulls a woman from a burning building, he’s saving everyone.

He, somehow, transforms into your hero; you idolize him, because you think he’s invincible and honorable and capable of anything.

It’s another strange set of events that places you in the Joker’s hands, tied up in the middle of a cold and empty warehouse; the way you got in this predicament seems inconsequential, so you don’t dwell on it. What you do dwell on is the metal as it hits your skin repetitively, the way your bones bend in the moments before they’re about to break, the strange familiarity of the cold, solid ground beneath you. You think if you close your eyes, you could float away. You could stand above the man beating you, above your broken and bloody body, and you think you could live like that.

You know there’s something beeping, sometime after the Joker leaves, but you can’t focus on the red numbers in the distance; everything is hazy. And you find yourself closing your eyes; you’ll sleep for just a bit, yes? It’s easier than facing the bomb; it’s a bomb, you know.

Your thought of Batman’ll save me is cut short by an explosion.

I remember dying, you think solemnly, and somehow those words make sense as you stare down at your body. I remember dying, and I remember the pain.

You stand amongst the rumble; you aren’t sure which took you first. The beating, or the explosion. You see the flames lick all around you, and off in the distance is a shadow running closer; you wonder if he might cradle your body again, as if you are precious, as if you are something to protect.

Several years later, you crawl out of your grave; you’re tossed into the Lazarus Pit again, and you come out still remembering.