Work Text:
“I just love to watch you work.”
As much as Jason Todd would hate to admit it, it was true. At first, he tried to lie to himself, thinking that all this watching was purely for the sake of getting to know Bruce again after all the years he had missed – learning his moves and tactics once more, retrieving memories that seemed to have been lost and found at the same time. He would tuck himself into the darkest corners of Gotham’s rooftops and quietly watch Batman work – some nights alone, moving like a living shadow from one street to the next; some nights with the new Robin, who, with his bright red vest, green (back in Jason’s time, they were not pants), and swift movements, looked more like a sunbeam than a person on those gloomy streets. A strange tangle of feelings would settle in Jason’s stomach – not quite jealousy and not quite anger, but something in-between, itching at the very back of his mind. He wasn’t great with feelings before and was even worse with them now, unable to even narrow down the field in which he could find the right name for what he felt.
He would just sit and watch. Watch how Batman gave quick instructions, how he slightly tilted his head as if to catch the distant howl of a police car before it even appeared, how he fought using the same techniques and methods – a small detail that might go unnoticed by most of Gotham’s scum, but not by Jason, who had seen them every day for a decent portion of his life. And still, he would sit and watch, despite already knowing it all. At some point his peripheral vision will narrow down, leaving him with only a small fraction of his eyesight, focusing on the now-Robin and his actions, letting his mind wonder, as if he were him. As if he were still Robin. He would feel the cold air brushing against his cheeks when he jumped higher than an average human ever could, the coolness slicing across heated skin, his body moving on its own, without command or intention – going in a direction he hadn’t planned beforehand, acting on pure reflexes honed through years of street fights and combat training. Sometimes he would feel the burn on his skin from rough landings, the slight ache in his ribs that always appeared after long nights on patrol without proper rest or nutrition, the intensified flow of blood signaling the formation of a new bruise.
He would sit and watch for hours, until his hands grew cold and his back ached and his vision went blurry, and he would finally tear his gaze away from the street to look down at his hands. And once again, he would find himself lost in that strange sensation he still couldn’t quite describe: staring at his own hands and feeling as if they weren’t his at all. He felt present in his mind, in his thoughts, as if that were the place where his very consciousness lived, but he felt like a stranger in his own body, an observer who just happened to be able to see through someone else’s eyes. He would spend another long minute simply watching his hands clench into fists, knuckles whitening with effort, then unclench and repeat the same action a dozen of times, all while feeling like it was him and not him at the same time. Eventually he would snap back to reality, nerves in his hands once again managing to send proper signals to his brain. But those few moments…
The sensation wasn’t new – it was an old, familiar feeling he often had after “zoning out.” During his childhood, if it could be called a childhood at all, he would simply dream. When his mother went numb and unresponsive from whatever she had taken, or when another man came to her door mumbling strange requests Jason didn’t understand back then, his mind would conjure whatever nonsense it could, helping him forget the world around him. One second he was a poor boy living in a place hardly suitable for children; the next he was a knight in shining armor, slaying a hydra with all her heads – always winning, always getting out of every trouble. On worse days, he would dream of being a famous chef – the vivid thought of tasting a soup whose name was too hard for a young boy to pronounce made his empty, aching stomach calm for a moment, chasing away the nausea that came both from hunger and from imagining eating anything other than those fantastical delicacies. These dreams stopped when he started working with Bruce: he had become, if not the knight in shining armor, then at least the squire who bravely stood beside his master, helping him bear a sword. And there was no need to fantasize about food anymore – Alfred provided him with dishes worthy of famous restaurants. Life itself became a dream.
A dream that came true.
A dream that came true and then shattered into a million pieces, leaving Jason feeling emptier than he had ever felt before – leaving him with that constant sensation of being unwired from his own body. So, he would sit and watch. Not for experience or some secret purpose of gaining more intel for whatever vengeance he envisioned, but for the sake of feeling normal again, even if that normality would last no longer than a few hours on a cold and bleak roof.
I just love to watch you work, because it brings me comfort of being me again.