Chapter Text
He is the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes. He leans on the wall, head resting, neck stretched and eyes flickering curiously through the room. He looks entirely out of place, peaceful in the midst of the remnants of violence, fingers nimbly tapping on the concrete beneath, a tiny melody too quiet to reach Steph’s ears.
His eyes find hers and her breath hitches - god, he is beautiful, pretty in a way boys hardly ever are. A tiny button nose, freckles dusting the tanned skin, the hair a curly mess falling onto his forehead. He blinks at her and the right side of his lips tilts up in a lopsided smile, and she thinks that if he is an angel, maybe she wouldn’t mind following him to the afterlife.
A small sound echoes through the warehouse - it takes her a moment to realize he snickers at her and immediately her face goes flaming red. She’s not that well-versed in angelology or however this particular part of science-religion mesh-up is called, but it wouldn’t be too unlikely for him to be capable of reading her mind and wow, she must seem pathetic, spending her last minutes thirsting over an angel.
”You gonna keep staring?”, he asks, amusement tinging his voice and drawing her gaze back to his lips. He even sounds pretty, what the fuck. The world is cruel to create perfection like him and throw it into her face the moment she’s unarguably the least perfect being ever. “Or are you finally gonna get out of here?”
He’s pretty enough that she can almost excuse the rudeness. Almost.
”Thought that’s what you’re here for”, she gurgles, blood clotting in her throat. “Peaceful departure to the afterlife and all that shit?”
He raises an eyebrow at her and he has absolutely no right to look this good at being judgmental. She kind of hates him a little bit for it, and the feeling starts burning in her stomach when he says “You do know I’m not real, right?”
She eyes him carefully. He’s still on the ground, but his fingers have stopped thrumming on the ground and he eyes her back, critical. He looks real enough, with a shadow behind him and a strange glint to his eyes (okay, maybe she’s imagining that part, she can’t really see his eyes from so far away), but maybe angels don’t identify as such because they don’t really frequent the earth. Maybe real is defined differently once you’re dead.
”Course I do”, she lies and the words slur before she can get them out fully. He doesn’t believe her, she thinks, but his face is starting to get awfully blurry and she’s not sure she can still trust her eyes. Pain is pulsing through her head, dull and drilling through her skull. Death is a lot more painful than she thought it would be.
Dimly she thinks of another Robin, another broken suit encased in glass and a constant reminder of what they are risking. She wonders if he too thought death would be peaceful, only to be bitterly disappointed by the overwhelming pain.
Batman told her she’d end like him, told her she’s too reckless, too brash, too much like Robin two. She should’ve believed him, she thinks bitterly, before it was too late, before she ended up in another warehouse with just as many broken bones as him and with tears stinging in her eyes and a madman close.
She wonders if Batman’ll put her suit up, too, or if her death isn’t important enough to commemorate.
A soft hum drags her out of her thoughts. “Good”, the angel hums, his eyes still trained on her. “Good. Cause you’re pretty fucking concussed and you’re hallucinating and it’s kind of sad that I’m the person you’re thinking of when you think you’re about to die.”
She doesn’t even know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean. The latter part at least. The former part is pretty clear. A concussion actually does explain a lot, like why her brain feels like it’s been taken out of her skull, puréed and poured back in, or why it’s so difficult to focus her eyes or ears or just about anything.
The last part confuses her though. She’d like to think it’s because of the concussion, but she knows she’s not a very good detective to begin with, so even if she were of a clear mind she probably wouldn’t understand. He shouldn’t be that surprised she thinks of him. Like sure, she’s not exactly religious, but it’s not unheard of for people to find God in their last moments, right? Meeting an angel, or hallucinating one if he is to be believed, doesn’t seem like it’s very high on the weirdness scale. A three or four, at most. Not even close to ten. The ten would be hallucinating Batman in a ballet tutu swinging from the rafters to save her while singing Spanish operas or something like that.
She gets the distinct feeling that that’s not what he’s talking about though, so she slurs out “Don’t go boastin‘, I don’t even know who you are.”
He seems to find that amusing if his snickering is anything to go by. “Ouch”, he says anyway, sounding entirely unbothered, and flips up from his position on the ground, unnecessarily flashy and almost like Dick when he incorporates his stupid circus moves into perfectly normal fight routines just to show that he can, because he’s dramatic as hell even if he likes to deny it. The angel-not-angel-hallucination tilts his head. “You really don’t?”
He does seem familiar, in a weird way. Like the knowledge scratches at the edge of her brain and never quite settles. She squints at him. Red curls, so dark they are almost black, with a white strand right in the middle of his fringe. Pretty face, older than it is supposed to be - and where did that thought even come from? Like she’s seen him before, like she saw him back when he was younger, when his face was more filled out, his eyes bigger and his curls shorter and…
”Robin”, she breathes and he raises an eyebrow, waiting, lips twitching in anticipation, so she adds “You’re Jason Todd”, because Black Mask isn’t close and even if he were, he wouldn’t be able to make sense of her hallucinations. Hell, she herself can barely make sense of what she’s seeing and it’s a product of her very own mind.
He grins, bares his teeth almost animal-like and indicates a little bow. “Ding ding, one hundred points to Robin Number four”, he cheers, claps his hands and the sound resonates through Steph’s head and makes her spit out every curse she knows.
She’s in a warehouse, she tries to rationalize the situation. Her body is tortured beyond anything she’s ever experienced and Black Mask will return to finish the job and put a bullet in her brain or whatever fucked up method of execution he prefers. She hallucinates a long-dead boy, the boy Bruce told her she’d end up like.
”Jesus”, she whispers. “Fuck me.”
Jason snorts. Insensitive.
Batman isn’t going to come, she thinks and looks up, looks at the lithe form of Jason in his white sweatshirt and the clear skin and so unlike anything this warehouse should contain. He must’ve been waiting for Batman too, in Ethiopia, only to realize that Batman is only a man and not as infallible as they like to believe he is.
Batman can be too late. Robins can die. It’s a fact, proven by the passage of time. History repeats itself.
”I’m going to die”, she tells Jason and tastes the words on her tongue, pushes them back and forth and wonders if it’s really the words that taste so bitter or the bile rising in her throat. She doesn’t want to die. She’s only seventeen. She has plans. She has a future ahead of her. She can’t die yet.
Jason was fifteen. He doesn’t look fifteen. He’s older now. Does one age in the afterlife? She looks down at his sneakers, grey, outworn, and a little bit dirty. Loved, she thinks. Treasured, as Crime Alley kids tend to treasure the clothes they get ahold of.
”You’re not”, Jason interrupts her thoughts and her head snaps up again, eyes trying to zero in on his face and squinting against the blurry outlines. “Not if you get out of here before he can.”
He makes it sound so easy. He can probably walk through walls or shit like that, she thinks scathingly, because she can’t imagine hallucinations to be bound by the laws of physics. Also, he’s not the one tied to a fucking chair with more broken bones than whole ones and blood flaking off every inch of her skin.
She tries it anyway, because Jason has been Robin for longer than her and if he says she can escape, she’s inclined to believe him, so she tugs on her restraints and catalogues her injuries. Hands, arms, legs, stomach and ribs hurt like hell. Breathing is hard. Her head pulses whenever she moves it, another piece of evidence to Jason’s assumption of her having a concussion. Her wrists are cuffed to the chair, the chair is screwed into the concrete ground.
Well. That was utterly unhelpful. Basically every bone is broken and she won’t be able to break out of her restraints. Great chances for a dramatic escape right under Black Mask’s nose.
Jason tilts his head again, observes her efforts and starts pacing, not nervous but rather bored in the way his steps skip.
”Not gonna help?”, she rasps, blood gurgling in her throat.
He stills, looks almost disappointed as he gives her a once-over. “Hallucination, remember?” But he strolls over anyway, leans over her shoulder and inspects the restraints. She almost thinks she can feel body warmth radiating off him.
”Looks pretty basic”, he announces after a few precarious seconds in which she holds her breath without really knowing why. “Should be easy enough to slip out of.”
And for him, it probably would be. Whenever Bruce is not shit-talking the late Robins’ survival skills he is, after all, praising his skill at everything concerning breaking and entering. Including lock picking. For her though… She chokes and tears gather in her eyes again, uncomfortably hot.
”You’re Robin”, he says, slowly, as if to remind her. “You’re trained to get out of these situations.”
But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? She’s not Robin. Not really. She wears the costume and follows Batman and acts the part, but at the end of the day she’s just a replacement, a way to show Tim what he’s missing out on. She’s simply not important enough for Batman to take her training seriously. She knows that, knew that when she took over the mantle. The realization sends a painful pang through her heart nonetheless.
Jason blinks, face mere inches away. She can see his eyes, from where he leans down, the long dark eyelashes framing the ocean blue eyes. He looks just like the pictures Bruce hides away, a boy, a child, gone too soon, missed too much.
”Jesus”, Jason says. “Is he stupid?”
A laugh bubbles from her throat, spills over and echoes through the warehouse. His eyes widen in surprise before he too grins, white teeth slightly crooked, the skin around his eyes crinkled. It’s ridiculous, she thinks, how this beautiful boy leans over her, laughs with her, looks so soft and makes her feel so safe within this room she’s been tortured in mere minutes ago.
She’s glad for the company though, she just doesn’t dare to think too much about what it might mean to have such realistic hallucinations. It’s just the concussion, she tells herself. Not because she’s dying.
”Bruce is an incompetent asshole, but luckily you have me”, Jason says smugly and straightens. “I’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to escape restraints.”
He’s hers, she thinks, her imagination, so he can’t know, not really, but she’s desperate enough to nod, to bet it all on the odd chance that maybe her subconscious knows more on this subject than her consciousness.
”Great.” He blinds her with his smile. “Step one, get out of the handcuffs.”
Her hope dies as the smile on her face drops. That’s unhelpful. Her fingers burn, the broken bones penetrate the skin and she can barely move them, much less pick a lock.
”In case you haven’t noticed”, she tells Jason, annoyance seeping into her voice, “my fingers are broken. I’m not getting out of anything.”
”Don’t be ridiculous. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? If they are broken already you don’t have to dislocate them yourself.”
Her hallucination is mental, she decides. She wants to tell him, but all that gets out is a confused “Wha‘?”
Jason snorts. “To get out of the handcuffs, genius.” He puts his left hand around his right wrist, mimics dislocating his thumb and pulls his hand out, wiggles them in a grand gesture. “Shift them”, he says, like it’s obvious. “Your thumbs are broken anyways, just push them down and you can get out of the cuffs.”
Mental. Completely and utterly mental. Though it’s not like she can injure her hands much further, so she doesn’t have much to lose.
She whines when she tries to use the chair to comply, pressing her irritated skin against the cold metal. The handcuffs cut into her wrists. She gasps, squeezes her eyes shut, whispers “like ripping a bandaid off”, and pulls.
She is almost thankful for the fog in her brain. The pain must be excruciating without it, she distantly realizes as she swallows the scream lingering in her throat. Her fingers throb, the remaining skin is ripped off by her own force, and for a horrible second, she’s pretty sure she just lost movement in her thumbs.
She’s burning up, the drying blood hundreds of degrees on her skin. She can’t get out, she can’t move. She’s going to die here, murdered by a crime lord, with no one near to hear her last screams. She’s going to die alone and miserable and it hurts, it hurts so much.
”Breathe”, a voice breaks through the fog, vividly and insistently. And she’s trying to, can’t he see? Forcing her chest to rise and fall, forcing her lungs to gasp for air, but it doesn’t help. There’s no air left for her to breathe.
”Robin, breathe”, the voice repeats, desperate now. Cold fingers cradle her head and she opens her eyes, sees Jason through the tears. Robin, he calls her, but she’s not that, is she? Dick was Robin, the original one, the one who created the mantle. Jason was Robin, the one who made Batman proud and left him broken in his wake. Tim was Robin, too, a brilliant mind like Batman himself. She thought, she’s just a placeholder until Tim returns. She never was Robin, not really, and now she’ll die in a costume that isn’t hers.
”Steph”, the voice says, pained now. “Spoiler, you need to breathe.”
Spoiler. That she recognizes. That’s her. Purple-clad shadow running through the night, invincible in the way only teenagers can ever be. Taking revenge on a father for not loving her. Taking her fate and making it something better, something truly hers.
She hiccups, leans into the hands softly wiping tears off her cheeks. “You’re doing so well”, Jason whispers. “It’s alright, Steph. Look down.” Ever so gently he guides her head down and she stares, for a moment, not knowing what she’s meant to see. It hits her just a few seconds later when Jason’s hands retreat and only the ghost of his touch lingers.
Her hands are curled up in her lap.
Her hands are free.
”I did it”, she says, wonder tinting her voice. It’s the first time she’s ever broken out of cuffs and sure, she thought she died doing it, but triumph rushes through her veins nonetheless. Euphoric she looks up, finds Jason’s face, mirrors his big grin.
”You did”, he agrees. “And now you’re getting out of here and then you’re going to slap Bruce for sending you out of here with so little preparation it’s embarrassing.”
She flushes bright red, embarrassment erasing all pain, so she decides to ignore that statement for now. Instead, she carefully shifts her weight to test how to get up from the metal chair. She’s pretty sure she has broken bones in both her legs, but the right one hurts a hell of a lot more than the left one so she carefully places her weight on that one, tips forward to use natural movements to rise.
”He’s not sending me anywhere”, she tells Jason, who has gone back to being a silent observer of her struggles. “He doesn’t even know I’m here.” Because she thought she could stake out on her own. And then she thought she could stop this drug bust on her own. And when she realized she was in over her head the emergency buttons signal was already blocked and the blood loss muddled her mind and she became a victim of the very recklessness Batman always told her killed the second Robin and would kill her too. Because apparently stupidity and arrogance are her trademark characteristics.
He’s going to be insufferable when she has to confess her failures. He’ll take away Robin and he’ll take away her access to the cave, to proper medical care and a databank bigger than a small countries. All while saying “I told you so” and she’s not sure if she can endure the humiliation.
Jason scoffs. “He calls himself the world’s greatest detective. If he can’t even notice a teenage girl sneaking around right under his nose he doesn’t deserve that title.”
Steph is standing now, wobbly and biting down on her tongue to keep the pain at bay, but euphoric nonetheless. She can’t hear Black Mask or his men coming back, only hears her own wheezing breath and that means she has time. Enough to get to that door. Enough to get out.
Hope surges through her body. She won’t die. Not today.
Her first step sends her spiraling, nearly tipping her right back into unconsciousness. Her legs almost give up under her, incapable of supporting her weight. Fifteen steps to the door. She gives up after three, knows she won’t make it. Tears spring back to her eyes, she gasps for air and a tiny desperate cry slips over her lips.
”Bend your knees”, Jason commands easily. “Makes the movements easier.”
She complies, pants in exhaustion, but he’s right. It still hurts like hell, but maybe she can manage another few steps. One, two. She can’t die today. Three, four. She’ll get out of that door and she’ll press the emergency button and Batman will come and get her. He’s too late, too late to save her, but not too late to act as a taxi to the caves’ med bay.
”It hurts”, she whines at step six.
”Stop moping”, the Jason-hallucination says. “I’ve had like double the broken bones.”
”‘S not a competition”, Steph slurs, oddly annoyed.
”Spoken like a true loser”, Jason sing-songs.
She takes another step, ignores the squelching of her boots on the bloodied floor. That’s her blood, she distantly realizes, way too much. It’s supposed to be in her body and it’s not. But Batman has blood reserves, even for her, so once she’s out of that door she’ll survive.
”And there’s not even a bomb”, Jason continues marveling. “This really is surviving in easy mode.”
She doesn’t know the specifics of his death, knows something about a warehouse and blunt force trauma and a bomb, but Jesus Christ, maybe she really does have simply more dumb luck than he did. Maybe that’s the reason she’s still alive. She’s almost glad Black Mask is too much of a psychopath to outsource her death to a bomb, because at the snail pace she’s stumbling towards the door right now she never would’ve made it fast enough to escape an explosion.
The metal doorknob is cold to the touch. She uses her palm to press it open because her fingers don’t quite obey. Jason cheers behind her.
She finds the emergency button sewn into the costume’s gloves and her hands smear blood all across it as she presses down even before her eyes get used to the outside’s darkness. She feels the pressure, the tiny vibration notifying her of a signal successfully sent and tears spring back to her eyes, tears of relief this time.
”You can fuck off now”, she tells Jason, almost giddy. “I’m not gonna die. Not today at least.”
He laughs. “Maybe find a place to hide first”, he suggests easily. “Like between those containers over there. If Blackie finds you before Batsy comes I’ll be a bit pissed that all of my efforts of keeping you alive were in vain.”
She follows his gaze and is slightly miffed that he’s right. The containers do look like a good hiding place and she really should get away. Depending on where Batman patrols right now he might take anything between five minutes and half an hour to get to her, which is unfortunately more than enough for Black Mask to put a bullet in her brain.
”You’re shit at nicknames”, she tells Jason and wobbles towards the containers anyways. He flips her off, she can see it in her peripheral vision, skips behind her as if to mock her for being so slow.
Her lungs seize as she tries to draw breath into them, desperate to keep the steady walk up. A few meters and she’s safe. Batman has trackers in her suit, he’ll find her. Black Mask won’t. She just has to push through.
”I’m your hallucination”, Jason informs her and whirls around her, miming finger guns at possible shooter spots. “That means that you’re the one who’s shit at nicknames.” It makes her feel safe, somehow. Knowing he’s got the spots covered, will inform her if a shooter appears. Even if he can’t know, not when she doesn’t know. Because he’s a hallucination. Because he’s the product of her dying brain, her panic-addled mind. He shouldn’t make her feel safe, she knows that even in her whoozy hurt state, yet somehow he does.
”You touched me”, she says, thinking back, because everything is better than concentrating on the burning pain in her legs whenever she moves. “I didn’t know hallucinations could do that.”
She still feels the cold ghosts of his fingertips on her jawline, the warm breath against her nose. Safe his eyes whispered as his voice talked her through the pain. Like a guardian angel.
She flushes bright red, glances at the boy next to her. He raises an eyebrow, smirks like the asshole he seems to be, like he knows damn well what she’s thinking about. He probably does, what with being her hallucination and all that.
Scowling, she tries to force the heat from her face. It doesn’t work.
”Apparently they can.” Jason laughs at her. “You have a very vivid imagination.” It sounds like he’s mocking her, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels teasing. Easy. Completely unfitting for the current situation.
She’s closer to the containers now, closer than she was a few seconds ago. She can’t quite remember walking this far, but that’s probably why the hallucination is still here, a desperate attempt to get her thoughts away from the broken bones in her legs, from the blood streaming down her arms, from…
”Bored enough to work yourself right into a panic attack?”
She hates him a little bit, she thinks, hates the way he smiles even when her eyes sting with tears, hates the way he chatters even when her own voice is hoarse. She hates him (because if she doesn’t, she hates herself, and she doesn’t have the energy for that right now).
”Shut up”, she rasps, and he grins, skips ahead to guide her through the containers. Five steps to the left, legs thrumming in pain. She can’t see the warehouse anymore, from where she stands. Her legs wobble and the containers are cool against her back as she slides down and leans back, finally resting. Breathe, she tells herself, Jason’s voice echoing through her mind. Harsh concrete beneath her, cold steel behind her, a warm gust of wind around her. The murmur of the harbor in the distance, her own breath loud and near.
She opens her eyes again, focusing. Jason sits a few meters away, mirroring her stare, and smiling softly. He looks unapologetically handsome, with no blood on his white clothing and his hair somehow perfectly tousled by the wind and not disheveled like hers must be. She’s pretty sure she’ll have to get a buzzcut to get rid of the knots.
Though she’s pretty sure her hair will be the least of her problems, even after being saved.
”When Batman finds out I’m hallucinating he’ll ship me off to some psychiatric ward or something”, she tells her hallucination, which is probably not the proof of sanity she needs to exhibit once Batman shows up.
Still, Jason grins like that’s the best joke he’s ever heard, though there’s a tilt to his lips like he’s the only one to truly know the punchline. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem”, he says jovially.
She does, but if her subconscious is this unbothered by it maybe it’s useless to worry about it. Her subconscious has been pretty helpful until now, there’s no reason to lose that trust. Also, it’s simply easier to trust Jason. Thinking for herself is near impossible, what with her thoughts staggering sluggishly through her brain, never quite reaching a level of meaningfulness.
She rests her head against the container and continues watching Jason, the way his body radiates calm by slumping back himself, steadied only by the container behind him. His smile is wavering now, though, bordering on concerned.
”Are you sad that you’ll stay the only dead Robin?”, she asks, the words sluggish, like her thoughts, but it seems like a kind thing to ask. He helped her, no matter how real or unreal he is. He doesn’t deserve to feel lonely for eternity, to never encounter a human being again.
He blinks in surprise, smile slipping entirely off his lips. Then he sighs. “I’ll get over it”, he says, and she’s not entirely satisfied with this answer, with the lack of yes or no, so she stays silent until he continues, closes her eyes and waits until his voice rises up again, somewhat wistfully. “We’ll see each other again though”, he says and it sounds kind, despite the words. It’s a promise, in a way. A promise that she won’t have to suffer alone. “There’ll be plenty of chances for you to die.”
She doesn’t like that answer either. She does want to see him again - it’s like outsourcing her brain and a distraction from the negative parts of life - but she doesn’t want to nearly die for it. Dying is, now that she’s speaking from almost-experience, pretty shitty. Being dead has to be even worse. Cold, probably. Quiet. She’s never been very good with silence.
”Is it lonely, being dead?”, she asks softly.
He doesn’t answer, stays silent as the wind ghosts around them.
The rustle of fabric alerts her to Batman’s arrival and she opens her eyes just in time to see a shadow jump down the containers, black cloth fluttering around his Kevlar suit. They are alone in the small alley between the containers now, Batman mere inches away from her as he leans over to inspect her injuries.
Safe, her mind whispers, she’s safe now. But it feels like a lie.
She doesn’t know why she misses Jason, why her heart bleeds thinking of his faltering smile. He was death, in a way, a companion of cruelty and hurt, yet he was safety so warm and soothing that Batman can’t compare.
The night feels darker, without Jason.
”I don’t know”, Batman says, voice gravelly and quiet, and he shifts above her, slides his gloved hands beneath her shoulders and knees, carefully lifting her up. She leans into the embrace, closes her eyes and thinks of Jason, of the only dead Robin.
”I hope not”, she whispers and Batman’s hands twitch minutely, tense.
”You won’t die”, he tells her, but it’s not about that, not really. It’s about another Robin, reckless and young and dead.
She doesn’t say. She just stills, allows the pain to pass over her and her consciousness to slip away.
Safe, a voice whispers, warm and young.
She believes it.