Work Text:
Jason Todd was once foolish enough to believe that in assassinating the catalyst of his hatred on live TV, he would somehow rid himself of the ghost that haunted his every waking hour.
How naive he had been.
The ghost of a young boy, dressed in an early iteration of the very costume that would eventually get him killed, watching his older self light a cigarette from across the diner booth’s table.
“My mom said that smoking’s bad for your body,” Robin said, crossing his arms in mock pout.
Jason kept his voice quiet, not wanting to attract attention to the freak talking to thin air. “I’m not exactly worried about my body right now, Jay,” he snided, sure to keep his hood masking most of his face- his face would probably be known by half of Gotham, though only recognized by the one man who the live broadcast was truly directed towards.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir. There’s no smoking in here.” Jason could tell just by the way the guy spoke that he was a cop. So much for not attracting attention.
Jason snuffed the end of his cig with finger pads that had long since calloused over. He wasn’t here to start a fight. Not even with GCPD sheep. He slid out of the booth, as non-threatening as he could manage, standing up to face the officer, though Jason was about a head taller than the guy.
The officer’s eyes widened when he saw Jason’s face in exact mirror to the one shown across every television in Pauli’s Diner. Saw the unmistakable scarred initial on his cheek. “You’re… You’re the one that killed the Joker. The Arkham Knight.” The poor fool put his hands up, mustering a fake smile. “I didn’t mean any disrespect, honest.”
Jason looked back at the table, signalling to a very bored-looking Robin to abandon his yearnful stares at the sliders in the hands of the diner’s paying customers.
“We were just leaving, actually, officer…” Jason glanced at the cop’s nametag, half-stained with coffee. “...Owens.”
Jason turned to leave, only to hear the officer scurrying after him and Robin, following him to his motorcycle. Owens launched into a whole fan-boy serenade as Jason put on his helmet.
“The whole precinct owes you our lives, boss- saved us a helluva lotta trouble, just puttin’ a stop to the clown like that. You’re a real hero.”
Hero.
Jason really hated that word.
“I ain’t a fuckin’ hero.”
He sped off before the officer could ask for a souvenir selfie, Robin practically glued to the back of his bike- the night was far from over.
---
“Where’we go-in’?” Robin piped, amidst Jason bobbing and weaving through the nightly Gotham City traffic.
“You remember when Alfred used to put on Judge Judy?”
He could feel the kid grab onto his shoulders, nearly throwing the motorcycle out of balance. “The courthouse! Really?? Does that mean we getta kick Two Butts next?”
One thing Jason still related to his younger self about was the rush of excitement that coincided with the idea of justice. He couldn’t help but crack a small smile, even amidst the trail of blood he’d laid before himself.
“Harvey’s just got one butt, kid- same as his face. His name’s just a metaphor-”
“I’m calling him Two Butts now! That makes more sense, because he’s twice the pain in the butt than he used to be.”
“You… do that, Jay. I’ve gotta focus on-”
Jason could hear the familiar growl of the Batmobile long before he even saw the two ‘heroes’ in the front seats.
Just the Bat he wanted to see.
“You brought the kid with you, Bruce?” With a single tap on his forearm, the Knight was able to intercept the Batmobile’s telecom signal. Even after two years, the Batman still hadn’t changed the inscription on his personal line- it made this ‘casual conversation’ far easier, especially with Bruce’s preference of video calls.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
Jason really had not missed the putrid boulder that was the Bat’s voice, an audio mask to make his enemies think he was a much larger threat than he really was.
“What? No… why didn’t anyone tell me!” the Knight snided, accelerating his bike. Arriving at the courthouse alongside a literal tank of a car was certainly not the move for what was supposed to be a quick, merciful assasination.
Behind him, he could hear Robin blowing a raspberry as the Batmobile was inevitably blocked from pursuing their bike. “Nana nana boo boo, we’re gonna get to Two-butts before you~” he teased, before becoming a rupture of giggles. “Be nice, Jay,” Jason scolded. “It’s not Bruce’s fault that he’s old and slow.”
He could hear Robin’s slow, drawn-out gasp, the boy turning his head to his older self. “That is so meaannn!! I’m using that.” Whipping back around, Robin cupped his hands over his mouth. “You’re SLOW and OLD! And-”
“Sorry, hi, Robin here, who the fuck are you talking to?” Right. Batman’s new partner. Jason certainly wasn’t expecting the kid to be… well, not much of a kid, really.
He’d read up on the new ‘Robin’, especially when his Robin started getting really upset about being ‘forgotten’ by the big old Bat. “Tim, right? Word of advice, don’t ask stupid questions.” Jason could see the poor teen’s eyes widen from behind his domino mask.
Maybe Bruce had finally come to some sense with his choice in sidekicks- Tim looked close enough in age to Jason that the two could’ve gone to High School together, had Jason gotten that chance. His uniform was in stark contrast to the kid that rode on the Knight’s bike- darker, more tactical, certainly much safer than having some preteen running around in a traffic light ensemble.
Still didn’t make Jason feel any less disgusted that Bruce had made another child into his personal soldier. He could hear the Bat and the Bird talking amongst themselves, Bruce barking orders at him, and hear his little self’s taunts turn to complete silence as Jason’s mind wrapped around itself.
I was a guinea pig. A failure to learn from, so he tried the same formula with a few variables changed. He thought the problem was my age, so he got a Robin that was old enough to drive. He thought the problem was my costume, so he reinforced it with kevlar from his own suit. He thought the problem was my attitude, so he found a kid that wouldn’t object.
When one lamb is carried away by hawks, the wolf, so pitifully alone in his cave, chooses to give the next one a collar of thorns and a wool of grey, so to prolong the lamb’s life, for he would rather feed the hawks mutton than be on his lonesome.
The Arkham Knight soon had the Solomon Wayne Courthouse within his sights, the Batmobile long forgotten behind him, the signal cut from the range. “I like wolves,” Robin muttered, pouting as Jason parked his bike a block away from the target location, equidistant between the Monarch Theater and the Courthouse, for just a chance to throw the Bat off of his trail. Knowing the man’s habits, when he saw the vehicle, he’d split up himself and his partner- one to intercept the theater, where Roman Sionis would be attending a show, and one to intercept the courthouse, where Harvey Dent would be reprising his role as District Attorney, for the first time in a decade or so- a public hearing, at the very request of Dent himself. “It’s a parable, Jay- I’m not talking about an actual wolf.” Robin only huffed at the clarification. “I knew that,” he lied. Jason doubted the kid even knew how to spell ‘parable’.
The Arkham Knight was sure to secure his helmet well over his face before he entered the courthouse. Joker’s death was at the hands of Jason Todd- he made sure that the clown knew the face of his killer, but needed the Bat to know that it was his failure that would be doing what the ‘hero’ was always too afraid to do. For the rest of the evil rot in Gotham, though, the ‘Arkham Knight’ would be their ruin.
He could hear the goings-on, stationed now on the roof of the building, just above one of the structural weaknesses still not fully repaired from the borough's most recent catastrophe.
The GCPD were convinced that Dent had turned over a new leaf in the last year, swayed too easily by Dr. Tommy Elliot’s ‘miraculous’ facial reconstructive surgery, and Harvey’s seeming change in demeanour.
Jason wouldn’t be fooled like the people that pivoted on the criminal so easily. Even if Dent really had turned over a new leaf, returned to the good-hearted “Apollo” that he was before his accident, it didn’t erase the egregious sins that he committed as Two-Face. There was no guarantee, either, that he wouldn’t snap again, ruin the lives of even more innocents- the Knight intended to keep that from ever happening again. To give the people of Gotham a permanent solution to the man they could never fully trust.
He could hear the camera crew prepping the live feed of the hearing, making quick banter with Dent and his wife. He figured, now, that government and law officials alike would be filing into their places, retrieving the Bible that Dent had hypocritized so often.
The Knight placed a handful of miniature explosives along the roof’s weakest point, taking a few paces back, thumb on the trigger. It would be just enough for a spectacle, to get all the cameras on him, right as the scene was broadcast across the city. More eyes than even Joker’s assasination had.
Jason could hear the session begin, his body antsy from waiting so long already. He looked to Robin, who had a cheesy grin on his face, quite a bit more bloodthirsty than Jason remembered.
“All rise,”
That was their cue.
The Knight detonated the roof’s explosives, jumping down to the courtroom floor, Robin in tow, just as the smoke began to clear. A security guard tried to grab Dent, to shield him from the falling debris by tackling him to the ground, but the Knight shot her in the shoulder the second she dared to move.
“A rubber bullet,” he reassured Robin, who clung to his leg, shaking at the sound of the gunshot. “It’ll hurt like hell, but it's just an immobilizer. She’s just doing her job- I’m not a psychopath, don’t worry.”
Jason loaded a lethal round into his pistol. “You, however,” he said, aiming the barrel at Dent’s forehead, the man’s eyes wide and hands raised. He expected there to be an army of red dots trained on his helmet by now, but the helmet’s tech gave him no indication of such opposition. Not only did the elite of Gotham trust Dent far too much, but they seemed foolish enough to trust the public to accept him back into society with open arms.
Harvey Dent tried to plead for his life, had that same look of recognition that Officer Owens had had half an hour before, linking the soldier before him to the soldier that took out the Joker. “I… I know what you’re trying to do,” Dent squeaked. “I promise, I’m not like that. Not anymore- I’m good now, see?” He gestured to the recently ‘fixed’ side of his face- a near perfect replica of what it looked like pre-acid.
The Knight tilted his head. “‘Good’, huh?” Dent nodded frantically. “I promise. Please. I’ve got a wife and kids now, I can’t lose them.”
He could feel Robin tugging on his leg again. Jason shouldn’t have let the reinstated DA talk- he hated having second thoughts. Maybe he really has changed. Maybe he really did just need a second chance.
Two-face rarely gave his victims second chances. Only if his coin told him to.
Jason closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
A batarang deflected the shot, the bullet fusing with the projectile’s hot metal.
A blur of black barreled into the Arkham Knight from the rafters, wrestling his gun from him the moment that he lost his footing, a single punch throwing him to the ground. A crack formed from the impact. Batman isn’t supposed to hit that hard.
Jason rolled backwards, just out of swinging range of the vigilante, back on his feet nearly instantaneously. He could see Robin- his Robin, not the ‘Tim’ guy, watching the standoff with a worried expression. He could hear the boy cry when Jason pulled out a second gun, aiming it square at the Batman’s ribs as he loomed ever closer, slowly shrinking the space between them with every footstep. “No! You’re supposed to shoot Two-Butts, not Bruce! Those are killing bullets, I know it!” Jason grit his teeth, resisting the urge to snap at the kid. He needed a single second to think- to breathe, to steady his hands.
He should know not to expect that sort of thing. “Robin,” Bruce warned, just a single pace from Jason, who still hadn’t moved an inch. “Come home.”
That’s not what he’s supposed to say.
He’s supposed to say ‘Stand down, Jason!’, or ‘Stop this rampage!’.
Not, ‘Come home.’
Not, ‘Robin’.
Something broke. For a single, deafening, terrifying moment, Jason couldn’t hear Robin’s gnawing voice. As if his wish had finally been granted.
“You,” Jason seethed, “Do not get to call me that. ”
Bruce saw straight through him, saw the wariness that began to seep into the Knight’s bones. “Do you think what you did to Joker was justice?” Batman said, unmoving as the gun pressed against his ribs, right at the weak point in his armor. Stop talking. Please. Jason’s sights flitted around the room, looking for his ghost companion. He needed the kid to ground him- assure him that what he was doing was right. “You’re just becoming exactly what he wanted you to become.”
He found the boy at the Bat’s side, hands on the barrel of Jason’s gun, eyes welled with tears, nose red with snot, teeth bared in frustration as he tried to pull the weapon away from his mentor. “You’re a big fat meanie! You’re gonna kill Bruce like that! I hate you! I hope I die before I’m ever like you!”
Robin wasn’t supposed to be able to affect reality. He was a figment of Jason’s mind- a burden only he could see. He shouldn’t have been able to move anything in the real world. He shouldn’t have been able to move Jason’s gun.
“Jay. Let go of my goddamn gun.”
He knew he looked like a madman.
There were too many eyes on him.
Too many would see him talking to himself, mid stand-off with the city’s favorite vigilante, eyes that would declare him another broken clock that just happened to hit the right time when he killed the Joker.
But, the boy didn’t budge, a stubborn mule with a snuffling nose. “Don’t kill Dad. Please.”
Shut up. Shut the fuck up.
Bruce hadn’t moved. Hadn’t said a word. Watching him. Judging him. Waiting. Seeing what he would do. Like the Arkham Knight was just some Saturday night entertainment.
Jason’s head split in pain. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. Too many eyes. I can’t kill the Batman. I’m killing FOR the Batman. He’d rather die, let me waste my bullets making sure that he never breathes again, than sacrifice one miserable villain’s life.
“I hope both of you go to hell,” spat, at last lowering his gun. He could see Batman open his mouth to say something. He’d jeer. Taunt. Condemn him. Jason couldn’t let him get into his head like that.
He took a page from Bruce’s book- and a pellet from his utility belt- and disappeared into a cloud of spoke, melting once more into the night sky.
--
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’a snapped at you.”
Robin hung tightly onto the Knight’s back as he sped away from the scene. “It’s fine,” the boy mumbled, burrowing his face into Jason’s armor, clearly not fine.
“I just… I’m doing this shit for you, ya’ know? You were always mad that Batman never like… finished off the bad guys. I couldn’t let Bruce stand in the way of that.”
“You were gonna shoot’im. Kill him.”
“If you think the Batman would die from a single gunshot, you seriously need’a re-evaluate your expectations, kid.”
“You wanted to kill him. Wanted him dead. Wanted me dead. I could tell.”
“No, I didn’t. Joker just messed up my mind a little. I thought I did, but you reminded me that I didn’t.”
“I was just protecting Dad.”
“Bruce. You were tryna protect Bruce. Bruce ain’t your ‘Dad’.”
“Right. Our Dad.”
“Our father is some random prison schmuck, who abandoned us, just like Bruce did. If you wanna call that shit being a ‘dad’, then go the fuck ahead.”
“You’re cursing a lot.”
“Yeah, well I’m pretty fuckin’ stressed right now, kid, and I’m tryna wean off the cigs. So, forgive me, alright?”
“I forgive you. Whatcha stressed about?”
“The fuck you think I’m stressed about? Batman got into my goddamn head, kept me from gettin’ rid of Two-Face, and is probably gonna dive down from the sky at any goddamn moment- so yeah, I’m a little stressed out.”
“Who’s next on the list? We could always double back, like a revive. Retrieve?”
“Reprise?”
“Yeah! A reprise. Who were we ‘sposed to kill after Two-Butts?”
“Roman Sionis- Black Mask, at the Monarch Theater. We would’a been able to catch him at the tail end of whatever show he was watchin’, but Bats had to go in and ruin everything.”
“Wellllll, who after that?”
“Penguin, ‘cept he left the Iceberg Lounge the second I shot that damn clown.”
“And after that?”
“Geez… Bane, Riddler, Mad Hatter, Harley Quinn, Cluemaster, Lady Shiva, Hugo Strange, Professor Pyg, The Ventriloquist, Scarecrow, Killer-”
“And where are theyyyy?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know. I was gonna tackle that once the first four were dead.”
“Somebody’s realllll bad at planning.”
“Shut the hell up, Jay.”
“Oh! I know where we can find more info about where all the bad guys are gonna be!”
“If you say the Batcave, I swear I’ll…”
“I didn’t say it.”
Jason and Robin found themselves in the Batcave within the hour.
---
The cave was pitch-dark, only a few electrical hums to keep the two company as they delved towards the center platform, where the Batcomputer still remained, predictably. Bruce still hadn’t updated his security measures- the same biometric data that had let him through the cave’s tunnel entrance so too allowed him to log onto the Batcomputer, completely silently.
“Woahhhh,” Robin toused, his face illuminated by the screen. Then a realization hit Jason. “Bruce never let you use the computer, did he?” he whispered.
Robin shook his head. Jason let him take the Bat’s seat. He could test something, here. “Alright, fun idea. Try to find any recent information on any of the ‘bad guys’ that we’re hunting down, OK?” Robin pouted, and took his hands off of the dimly-lit keyboard. “That sounds like work, not fun, Jay-Jay.”
This is why I never wanted kids.
“No, it is fun. You get to use Bruce’s Bat-computer! And you won’t even get in trouble for it.” Jason saw the sparkle of joy return to the boy’s eye, immediately clicking around the screen like a rabid squirrel. Interacting with it. Jason didn’t even think the kid knew how to use the Batcomputer in the first place.
The boy opened file after file, ran command after command, like some damn prodigy, finding anything and everything about the villains that the Knight was hunting down. And then… bingo. Bruce had somehow put live trackers on a few of his more ‘reformed’ rogues- Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Clayface- as well as a few of the less ‘reformed’ ones. Firefly. Mad Hatter. Killer Croc. Their exact locations, re-pinging every few seconds. Exactly the type of information that the Knight needed.
He kicked a very smug Robin out of his chair, hooking up a hard drive from one of his gauntlets to the computer, wirelessly copying over the tracking program and data to his suit. He’d be able to use the Bat’s own information to deal one devastating blow after another.
The download would take a bit of time. Jason could use this time to scout out more of the cave, just in case he needed to plan a raid, or grab any more data from the computer.
He recognized a few familiar silhouettes in the darkness: the animatronic T-Rex that Grayson had dragged back from a trip to Dinosaur Island, an oversized coin from Batman’s first encounter with the ‘Penny Plunderers’, and a massive, customized ‘Joker’ card, hauled directly from one of the Bat’s first encounters with the clown. It wasn’t looking like he’d be getting any more trophies out of the villain.
But, one new installment caught Jason’s eye more than anything else in the cave, drawing him away from the computer.
A single display case, situated just off from the main platform, far too easy to miss.
An all-too familiar costume lingered inside, held upright by nearly invisible wires, lit on the rims of the glass.
One domino mask, tattered beyond repair.
The Knight flipped up the visor of his helmet, for just a moment.
In the reflection of the display case, it almost looked like Jason was wearing his old suit.
Jesus Christ.
“That’s you, right? Jason Todd? The Robin that died?”
Jason blinked, trying to clear his mind, his mind, for a moment, tricking himself into thinking that his little brat tag-along was the one to make the connection. “That’s… a way to put it.”
Then, Jason’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he realized that the Robin that had made that connection wasn’t his Robin at all.
“Shit.” Jason said, lowering his visor, and drawing a gun, once more.
“Shit!” Tim said, immediately backing right back up the small flight of stairs that he descended from.
Jason waited with baited breath as the lights to the Batcave flicked on. “Coward,” he snarled, though in truth, he was probably far more of a coward than Tim was. Jason saw Robin- his Robin, this time, pop up behind him, arms crossed in pout. He pointed at the platform where Tim had disappeared to. “Brother.” He pointed at Jason’s gun. “No shooting brothers. No shooting Dad, no shooting brothers.”
Jason managed to calm himself down. “You met him an hour ago, Jay. He is not our brother.” Robin grabbed the gun from his hand, and put it right back in its holster. He pointed at Jason’s chest, right at the Arkham symbol over his lungs, the boy’s eyes narrowing. “Bitch.”
“I am not a-”
“Do you have schizophrenia, Jason Todd?”
Tim was in one of the catwalks above him, far beyond easy combat range. Even if he weren’t, Robin held onto both of Jason’s hands. Maybe to keep him from picking another fight. Maybe because the boy knew that his presence helped Jason regulate himself. Calmed him down, in a way, or at least kept him from burning apart at the seams.
“Sorry, that was really rude- but like, I have been wondering that, you know?”
Ok. A conversation. He’s just curious. A teenager.
“What makes you say that?” the Knight replied, making his way, at last, to the main platform once more. “Talking to thin air, listening like it's talking back to you- Batman says you’re showing severe signs of dissociation, too, so it could be like some D.I.D. thing, which would make sense with all the trauma you went through-”
“I doubt there’s a diagnosis for ‘haunted’.”
Tim jumped down from the catwalk, landing perfectly a few feet from Jason. He brandished no weapons, but he could tell that the teen saw the Knight far differently than how Batman saw Jason. Like he was a puzzle to be solved, not a child to be coddled.
Jason didn’t know which one was worse.
“Does it look like you? Your ghost friend?”
“How would you-”
“You called him ‘Jay’. That’s what Batman and Nightwing call you in the letters they leave on your grave.”
They leave me letters? “He… yes. Like a little me. Still in his Robin costume.” But, far from alive.
Tim was quiet for a moment, before his sights fell on the Batcomputer; clearly seeing Jason downloading Batman’s tracking data. “You could have asked me. Didn’t have to break into the Batcave just to find out where Firefly is holed out in.”
“Yeah, not really the move to ask my replacement to give away all of his mentor’s classified data.”
Tim downcast his sights. “I ‘replaced’ you because Bruce was at the end of his rope, after your… death. Or, what we thought was your death. He needed a Robin, and I… uh… stepped in.”
Jason hoped he would’ve done the same.
“He was resistant, at first. I had to convince him that he needed help. That he needed my help. I’m sorry, I really thought you weren’t coming back.”
Jason didn’t feel angry in the slightest, even though Robin was nowhere to be seen, other than the one right in front of him.
“You can have your mantle back, now, if you-”
“Do you like burgers, Tim?”