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Jason spends the flight to West Texas immersed in his fears. They burn his eyes and prickle underneath his skin. They are green and acidic. And Jason feels a bit like a cucumber in a vat of brine; like a man named Jack in—it’s a terrible choice of metaphor.
The fear is a nebulous sort that refuses to name itself. It’s not the terror he knows well: the terror of knowing he’s going to die.
He’d first felt that terror four years ago, lighter in hand, the smell of gasoline mixing with the Joker’s usual acrid stench in his nostrils. He’d turned tail and fled.
As Robin, despite all the situations that should have killed him, he remained far too assured that, if he needed it, the wind would always be there beneath his wings to take him away. It’s impossible to put that kind of trust in the wind twice.
Jason wonders if his fear right now is a sort of pastiche of that terror. His body’s attempt to inoculate him in preparation for their confrontation. Or maybe it’s preemptive in nature, the fear of what comes after Jason finally kills the Joker. Or, and Jason suddenly knows with certainty that, despite his instinctive distaste at the thought, it is a fear of failure.
He tries not to, but occasionally Jason will look up the Joker’s victim count, deaths and hospitalizations, and subtract 25,741, the number he’d once tried to use as his motivation to bring lighter to electric green matchhead. It’s burned into his brain now, along with the knowledge that every single death and hospitalization that occurred afterwards he shares responsibility for along with Batman and the Joker.
After he’d taken a Batarang to the neck, he’d tried to absolve himself of future deaths. Lay the blame at Batman and the Joker’s feet, where, at least consciously, he still feels it belongs. Except he’d still find himself clicking on Google’s autofill suggestion, jokercount.com, whenever it came up.
A stupid fucking website that Jason’s never been in the mood to figure out whether it was intended as some sort of civil advocacy or a Gotham U art student’s final project. It reached 32,901 as of boarding the plane.
It will probably grow by the time the Joker’s head is in Jason’s hands, but Jason won’t rush this and risk failure.
It takes a month to set the noose. A month during which Jason’s only contact with Gotham is to and from his lieutenants. His gang has been so used to stasis, to holding and defending the ground that is theirs in the heart of Crime Alley, that he faces some pushback when he instructs them to start going on the offensive during weeks three and four.
His men don’t know what he’s doing. Jason isn’t going to chance Batman or any of the others using them to figure it out if they don’t already know. He thinks if any of Bruce’s brood try to talk him out of it with some nonsense about how they’re actually saving him, he’s going to put a (non-lethal) bullet in them.
His men don’t need to know what he’s doing. They follow his instructions anyway.
He’s glad that’s the end of the fuss. If Jason is about to blow up every single last one of the vigilante contacts he’s curated, he’s damn well going to make sure he capitalizes on the street cred it gives him.
Progress with the Joker is a lot less linear. Jason wastes a week throwing his money around trying to figure out what the Joker is up to. He’d even thought at one point he might have figured it out, but the night came and went, Jason’s sniper rifle trained on a rooftop that remained stubbornly empty.
It was foolish. The first thing Batman tells you about the Joker in Robin training is that he cannot be predicted.
Jason wonders if that’s why Batman hasn’t sent anyone after him yet. Yes, Jason’s taken every precaution to prevent Batman from learning what he’s doing, but he’s not foolish enough to think and behave as if that has worked. Batman may or may not know, and if he hasn’t sent anyone to stop Jason yet, it could be on purpose. Maybe Batman believes it can’t be done like this, Jason beating the Joker after the Joker’s already had the chance to dictate the terms of his engagement.
He’d bet that’s also why the Joker hasn’t done anything yet. He’d let it slip that he was in town at the start of week two. He’s sure the Joker knows he’s coming after him by now. He’s counting on it. Because it delights the Joker, the ways in which he thinks he and Jason are the same. If he thinks Jason has a plan and an audience, he will be there.
The Joker waltzes into the empty warehouse, the rope Jason has prepared. He shoots Jason a conspiring grin, and it is only the way the knife Jason is hiding underneath his body armor digs into his side slightly that keeps Jason present.
“Well, what are you waiting for, boy?” The Joker cackles. “Do make haste on your way to take Uncle J to see Father dearest.”
Jason tries to commit to memory the sound the Joker’s head makes when it hits the floor, but upon trying to recall it later, he can only hear a relieved exhale. One that shakes a little as it exits the world’s mouth.
It’s like a switch has been flipped. The constant low-lying dread that has followed Jason since the words, “you remain unavenged,” left Talia’s mouth, dread that has been steadily increasing over the past month, disappears.
Nothing comes to take its place.
That’s alright. Jason can work through nothingness. He picks up the Joker's head and sets it in the trunk, beside a goon he’d kidnapped and left restrained. From the floor of the backseat, he takes out a gallon of gasoline and a match. The rest of the Joker burns brilliantly even without his lime green matchhead.
He splits the drive to Gotham over two days during which he probably feels every emotion that he’s ever read an author’s attempt to describe, but mostly, he just feels lighter.
The world doesn’t know what he’s done yet. He covered his tracks well, not even checking into a hotel under a pseudonym last night in case it got traced back to him. He’d opted instead to spend the night in the woods. The world will know soon, though, and once they do, they’ll celebrate. Then, Jason will rest.