Work Text:
The bar was close enough to the harbor that Jason could smell the diesel and brine through the cracked window.
Talia had picked it. They had been sitting across from each other for twenty minutes without saying much of anything, a bottle between them, untouched past the first pour. She had her back to the wall, the room angled before her like an open map, every exit in sight.
Which meant Jason was blind to everything coming and going behind him. He could feel her ever-loyal guards watching them, waiting for the most minute signs to strike. It wouldn’t come to that, he knew, but it would be easy enough to get away if push came to shove. He’d done it before, after all.
So Jason kept his eyes on the water through the window, on the cranes lit up orange against the dark, as he groped for the right words. The silhouette was all wrong, but the low-hanging smog caught the glare of the shoreline, mimicking the perpetual bruised overcast of the Narrows. It was similar enough that it reminded him of home.
This whole city reminded him of home. There were gleaming skyscrapers tearing out of crowded streets, towering over soot-stained tenements and neon-lit slums. Over sprawling tent cities tucked under the overpasses, smoke rising from rusted oil drums where people clustered for warmth. There were even gargoyles staring down from crumbling ledges, onto cracked pavements and overflowing dumpster bins.
All the same bones of a city built around its own rot. Jason would recognize it anywhere. Even half a world away, there was no escaping Gotham’s shadow.
It was why he’d asked Talia to come. Why he’d broken nearly a year’s worth of silence to get her here. Why he gathered his nerve now, schooled his expression into careful nonchalance, and finally turned to her and said—
“I want to go to college.”
Talia nodded and set her glass down. Unhurried, the way she did everything, as though time was a resource only other people ran short on.
“We can arrange that,” she said. “An identity with a paper trail behind it—transcripts, references that will hold up to scrutiny, a believable history. I can have the papers ready within the month.”
“I don’t want a new name.”
If Talia was surprised, she didn’t show it. Not that Jason expected her to—Talia made it a point to never look surprised about anything.
“I want mine,” he said, keeping his voice light. “Do whatever you have to do. Bribe whoever you need to bribe. I don’t care. I just want to be”—he allowed himself a little smirk—“resurrected. Jason Peter Todd. I want to be a person who exists again, not somebody’s well-funded ghost.”
Talia made a soft, considering hum. “He will discover this eventually, however discreetly we proceed.”
“I figured.”
“And you’re prepared for that?”
Not at all. Jason had thought he would be by now, but after months of training, of plotting, of keeping his head low and staying out of Talia’s radar . . .
He had been so sure, so certain, that he knew what the end would look like . . . that he knew where his road would lead, what he would find waiting for him there . . .
“I don’t want to see him,” Jason admitted.
“He will look for you,” Talia said, voice low. “A legal resurrection guarantees exactly that. Even managed quietly—even kept from his knowledge for as long as such a thing can be kept—he will have questions, and he won’t stop looking until they’ve been answered. For reasons that should not need explaining.”
“Then don’t let him find me,” he said, still lightly. “You’ve gotten good at that, keeping us apart. You’ve had plenty of practice.”
Talia said nothing, but for the smallest fraction of a second, the corners of her razor-edged lips twitched downward. Jason let his smirk curl higher.
“I worked it out ages ago,” he went on. “The teachers, the training . . . you were stalling me. Keeping me busy and far away so I wouldn’t kill him.”
Talia sat back in her chair, folding her perfectly toned arms across her tailored black dress. “You let me.”
Jason shrugged. “Your money’s good. Your contacts are better. It took me a while to figure it out, I’ll give you that, but . . . I get it. You love him. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure murdering him is part of the plan anymore.”
Her face was as unreadable as ever, but something in her posture—something he couldn’t quite pinpoint, though he knew inexplicably that it was there—seemed to ease.
“And what is your plan, Jason?” she asked.
“I told you. I want to go to college.”
“You can’t expect me to believe there’s nothing more to it than that.”
Jason snorted. “What do you want me to say? Do you want me to thank you? Hand you a fruit basket? Or did you think I called you here to kill you?”
“I expected you to try,” Talia said mildly.
Jason let out bark of laughter. “You and I both know I can manage more than try, if I really wanted to. But what would be the point? The Joker’s dead. Killing you won’t bring him back.”
Talia arched a brow at him. “You think I had something to do with it?”
He rolled his eyes. “Give me some credit, Talia. I can read between the lines same as anybody.”
The news had come a mere three days after the last of Yuri Karanov’s men had handed him the Joker’s location and got a bullet between his eyes for the trouble. Jason had still been in London, mapping out his next move, figuring out what he’d need and who he’d have to pay for it, when he had gotten the email from Talia. No message, just a plane ticket to Bangkok, the name of his next teacher, and a link to an article from the Gotham Gazette.
He didn’t touch the ticket. He went to the nearest ATM instead and emptied his account—cleaned it out completely, everything Talia had been funneling to him—and then he crossed the channel and dropped off her map. He hit up old contacts and a few new ones, picking up the threads of his training. He covered his tracks, changed cities before her men could get a fix on him, paid in cash, slept in places nobody would think to look. It wasn’t hard. He’d been doing this before he’d ever donned the cape.
By the time he’d left the continent, the story had spread. Joker confirmed dead, the headlines read. Decade-long reign of terror ends. Body found floating at the Port of Los Angeles. Who had the last laugh?
Half the coverage was people insisting that it wasn’t really him, or that somebody had faked it, or tossing around theories about who had done it and why. Jason knew better. He knew what Talia’s work looked like. He’d been trained by the same people she trusted to do this kind of thing, and the particulars of it—the location, the timing, the slow and agonizing death—had her fingerprints all over it. Whether she’d done it herself or handed it off to her assassins didn’t matter. It amounted to the same thing either way.
The Joker was dead.
The Joker, who had beaten him and left him to die. The Joker, who had killed his mother. The Joker, who had killed countless others, who had filled graveyard after graveyard.
Dead.
Gone.
And Jason had felt—
He had expected rage. Or relief. Both at once. Something.
Instead, there was a strange, hollow ache where the fury should have been. Ashes in a cold, empty hearth.
“I should’ve seen it coming, really,” Jason continued, when Talia didn’t say anything. She just took a sip of her drink, offering nothing but an unblinking stare over the rim of her glass. “You’ve kept me out of Gotham—out of the country—so I wouldn’t go near Bruce. You made sure I never got close enough to do something I couldn’t undo. And then you did the last part yourself, so I’d never have a reason to.”
For the first time all evening, Talia seemed to hesitate. Her chin lifted, her eyes narrowed. Something flickered across her face—something that looked, if he didn’t know any better, almost like surprise.
“Is that why you think I did it?” she said, putting down her drink. “For him?”
“Isn’t it?” Jason said flatly. “You’ve always been afraid of me. Of what I could do.”
And she was right to be afraid. Even now, cold rage surged through Jason at the thought of Bruce. There was still a part of him that wanted to make Bruce understand what his inaction had wrought, to make Bruce look at what he’d allowed to happen, what his mercy had cost. That anger still lived in Jason, a pilot light that hadn’t gone out—that probably never would.
He still wanted revenge, still wanted vengeance. He still wanted Gotham cleaner than Bruce was willing to make it. But the truth of the matter was, none of it had ever been about Bruce. It hadn’t even been about the Joker. Or Jason.
It had been about the three of them. It was supposed to be about the three of them. Jason had believed that when this ended—however it ended—that was how it would be. Him, that psycho, and Batman—headed toward a collision he hadn’t yet fully pictured, had only trusted was coming. It was why Jason had come back from the grave. He had believed that. He had built everything around that certainty—all that training, the scumbag teachers he’d endured, every mile he’d put between himself and Gotham.
And now the Joker was dead.
Jason had been so sure he’d want to kill Talia for it. It seemed like the obvious thing to feel—she had taken the choice out of his hands, made a decision that wasn’t hers to make. He had every reason to be furious with her.
But every time he reached for that anger, that familiar rage, it just . . . wasn’t there. There was nothing. There was only that hollow pit inside his chest. Only the empty hearth.
And now . . .
Jason didn’t know where to go from here. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do now, what he was supposed to want. So he’d kept moving, kept running. It was the only thing he could think to do.
Somewhere in the middle of all that moving around, his eighteenth birthday had come and gone without him noticing. He’d been on a train out of Seoul when he finally realized, and it had occurred to him suddenly, as he watched the city give way to hills, that he should have been starting college by now. That if things had gone differently—if any of a hundred things had gone differently—he’d be in a dorm in Gotham University, calling Bruce to complain about his roommates, or describing to Alfred the dining hall food in unflattering detail.
The thought festered inside him. Everywhere he went, everywhere he looked, it was all he could think about.
Home.
Just . . . home.
With its jagged skyline. Its cramped, crooked streets. The gargoyles perched on weathered cornices, centuries of dust baked right into the stone. The smell of the city after rain. The way it all looked from above, lit up and restless and never fully asleep, the sky stained gold even after midnight.
He wanted to go home.
And so he had called Talia.
She was frowning at him now, watching him intently.
“Oh, Jason,” she sighed. “Have you forgotten already?”
She sounded . . . sad. Almost pitying. It made Jason bristle on instinct, and he was half out of his seat before he could think better of it, a sharp retort on his tongue—in that same instant, he felt rather than saw her men rise and move toward him—
But Talia was on her feet, already coming around the table, dismissing them with a flick of her wrist. Jason stayed standing, frozen in place, though he couldn’t for the life of him say why. He was taller than her now, he realized. Even in her heels, she had to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes.
Then her hands came up to frame his face. He bowed his head without thinking, and she pressed a kiss to his forehead.
Jason didn’t move. He didn’t pull away. He had no memory of ever being held like this, not by her, and yet the warmth of her palms against his cheeks felt familiar. Like something from a dream.
“I have told you from the beginning,” Talia murmured, her hands still cradling his face. “All I have done, I have done for love.”