Chapter Text
Jason’s grave dirt wasn’t packed all the way down.
The downpour that followed the funeral had loosened it up, and rivulets of muddy water ran down from the hilltop he was buried on. The tree next to it – sugar maple, if Molly remembered her local ecology right – was failing miserably at keeping the water from running into her eyes. Then again, it didn’t really matter. She was crying too much to notice a difference. Her little brother was dead. He was only three years younger than her, and he was dead.
Bruce didn’t stick around long after he tossed the first clump of dirt into Jason’s grave, a holdover from Egyptian and Christian burial rites – not that he believed in either. Dick wasn’t even in the country, or so Alfred told her. The butler had stuck around until the cemetery workers had patted their shovels down on the final layer, and then he, too, left Molly by the headstone.
Jason Todd Lies Here
No comfort came from rereading those words. Molly stared at it long enough that they began to swim in her vision, the letters no longer forming coherent words in her mind. She sniffed, raising a hand to rub the water and salt and snot from her face as her thoughts began to twist. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to die, and he didn’t deserve a headstone that read like a shitty Halloween decoration with motion-sensor lights.
She sniffed again before turning to her bag, fumbling until her hands reached cool metal and pulled out a pocketknife – a common precaution in Gotham. She stumbled over the poorly packed dirt, apologizing to Jason as she went.
But when her knees hit the ground, the knife flashed open and pressed to the stone, right below the generic epitaph. Her nails chipped, her hands got scraped, and her knees ached to stretch out. But when she finally rested back on her heels, the words came into focus, her eyes clearer than they had been in days.
Jason Todd Lies Here
Brother
Friend
The feeling of satisfaction, of putting a soul to rest and being able to grieve properly, only lasted a month or so. Molly had taken to wandering the Manor, every room and every broom closet. The halls were silent, which wasn’t unusual. But the uncomfortable feeling of the walls widening up, the vaulted ceiling climbing even higher, the floor stretching out in front of her, it all made her feel cold and empty.
There was no wake. No visitation. Then again, Molly didn’t think she could have made it through the funeral with the image of Jason’s reconstructed face, free of the burn marks and bruises that littered it thanks to the work of the coroner. Everyone else would have accepted it as truth, but not them. Not her.
It was an explosion that did it, she was told after begging Bruce to give her some kind of answer to why and how. It was set by the Joker, a clever trap for a boy who was told his mother was still alive. He was on his first international Wayne Industries trip with Bruce when it happened. After that, Bruce clammed up. She didn’t blame him. Well, she most certainly did – he left with her brother and came back with a body. But she wouldn’t want to talk about a failure that resulted in the loss of a child, either.
As Molly laid on her back in bed, hair still wet from a shower she barely remembered taking, her thoughts began to spiral again. She sat up suddenly, throwing off her covers to grab a sweatshirt. She slipped out her door, tiptoeing across the hall into Jason’s old room. The air still smelled like teenage boy sweat and musty old books – an odd combination for a 15-year-old, but one she had come to accept as a marker of home.
She let her back slide down the closed door, and laid her arms on her knees as her head hung down. Jason’s room felt like it was just waiting for him to return. If she strained her ears, she could hear him flipping the pages of a book and wiggling around to find a comfortable way to lay down on his bed while still reading.
The rest of the house, though, reminded her of the time when her fourth-grade teacher had everyone try on noise-cancelling headphones to mimic the soundlessness of space. She couldn’t even remember if the floor creaked like it usually did, or if the wind whistled through the windows in the oldest wings of the estate. It all felt like outer space.
Dick moved out to Bludhaven a week after he got back from his trip. Last she heard from Alfred, he’d started training to become a police officer. He didn’t even talk to her, or argue with Bruce like he usually did – not that she’d laid sight on the latter. Bruce was never home, or if he was, he’d gotten very good at hiding. He used to waste the hours in his study, poring over financials and research proposals for Wayne Industries. She remembered asking him why he let people talk about him on the news like that, and he just smiled and told her it was easier that way.
Easier for who, he never said. But now the study, too, gathered a feeling like a layer of dust even Alfred couldn’t scrub clean. The butler was a steady and gentle presence, but quiet as ever, much like the house he ran.
Molly scrubbed at her face. She didn’t cry, not anymore. It had stopped about a week ago, when she visited Jason’s grave for the first time after the funeral. The ground, poorly packed as it was, had begun sprouting grass. She had thunked down a bag and began pulling out items.
A bottle of pre-made margarita mix. A fancy cigarette that you couldn’t buy at any corner shop. A sticker she had swiped from Dick’s room that read “I Voted.” An extra set of car keys to one of those fancy cars Bruce refuses to drive himself. A postcard from Gotham University. A few crumpled up pages from Pride and Prejudice, the only Austen book that he probably wouldn’t yell at her for tearing – overhyped, he had said. Good, but overhyped. He hadn’t even read it yet.
She drank and smoked (or coughed her way through it) and talked to Jason as she used her hands to dig a shallow grave for what Jason Todd could have done if he had just gotten a little more time. And finally, once the ground was settled back into place – a better job than any of the cemetery workers had done the first time – she grabbed the last item in her bag.
Tearing it open with her teeth, she stood and began sprinkling seeds onto the still barely-packed dirt. Wildflowers native to New Jersey would sprout up in a few weeks. And if the staff had any complaints or tried to tear them up, she resolved to replant them, as many times as it took for them to get the message. He deserved that, at least.
But that was a week ago. In the dusty blue of Jason’s night light, Molly still felt like outer space.
Her hand had latched onto an old figurine Jason kept on his nightstand – Robin, a kid vigilante. She never paid much attention to them, and he never really seemed to mention it, but she wondered if it gave him strength. If the idea that a kid could become partners with Batman was inspiration enough to believe that he could make it after everything that had failed him in his own life.
And then her mind turned to that last bit. Alfred had definitely been a soldier, and almost certainly had been a spy if she had to take a guess. Dick was well on his way to being a full-fledged cop, with the training, resources, and badge to flash around and get answers with. And Bruce... well, Bruce had more than everyone combined. Money, power, a voice that people listened to. He had connections in nearly every major industry and social circle, all ready to drop what they were doing to comply to his will. Together, they were a veritable wealth of capability, able to move mountains. She had seen it happen on more than one occasion.
Yet nobody, nobody was bringing the Joker to justice. They had failed him. Jason was in a fucking grave, packed so terribly she wondered if the employees needed a pay raise, with a headstone that read like a two-star slasher movie. Her little brother was in a grave, and everyone else was up here, hiding away god knows where and doing absolutely nothing.
She wrenched her arm back to throw the figurine across the room, but stopped short before placing it carefully back onto his nightstand. If nobody else would do it, not Bruce, or Dick, or Alfred, or the vigilantes in their stupid capes… well, Molly would just have to avenge her brother on her own.