Work Text:
Jason’s shoes are still next to the front door.
Mud is crusted to the bottom of the soles, and splashes of it stain the bright red canvas. He had asked for a pair of chucks after seeing Dick wear his own, and he had begged for them to be Robin red so that they could be a match to his brother’s Nightwing blue.
The rubber of the soles is beginning to peel away from the fabric, and Bruce had offered to replace them, but Jason had refused. They were his favorite shoes, and Bruce had not been able to bring himself to bury the boy in them.
His son rests in a box six feet below the rain-soaked Gotham dirt, suit neatly pressed, tie knotted perfectly around his neck, dress shoes polished until they shone. He had hated those shoes. After a night spent trying and failing to escape social obligations, the boy would fling the shoes across the room and stick his bare toes in Bruce’s face.
“See?” he would shout indignantly. “I’m blistered to all hell, Bruce! Who cares what shoes I wear, anyway? I’m a Wayne, aren’t I? Maybe I’ll start a trend.”
The perfect creases ironed into the trousers of his suit fold in on themselves as Bruce kneels by the door. He doesn’t dare touch the shoes, these precious reminders of the boy he had loved so deeply, and so he just stares at them as his eyes begin to blur.
There is dirt still staining the lines in his palms. The Manor is quiet in a way it hasn’t been in years, and Bruce can still hear the dull thud of the first handful of dirt he had thrown on top of his boy’s coffin ringing in his ears.
He is just one boy.
Bruce has seen thousands like him lost to Gotham’s street, casualties in the never-ending war that still, even now, rages beyond the gates to Wayne Manor. Jason is nothing but a statistic, a name at the bottom of the list of those that the Joker has taken from this world. He is just one boy.
His death is the end of the world. Time stops, hangs suspended in this moment. Bruce kneels at the border between before and after, looking at such a simple reminder of the child he has lost, the soldier sacrificed to a cause Bruce wishes he could now forsake.
He would leave Gotham to rot if it meant Jason would walk through that door. He would hand the Joker the city on a golden platter, would fill the Cave and the ghosts it now houses with cement, would tear his heart out of his chest and force it past Jason’s ribs until his boy began to breathe again.
Bruce Wayne has seen planets fall, fought monsters and men and the horrors that lie between, and none of it compares. Superman could crush Bruce’s skull between his soft, gentle hands, and it would still be a fate far kinder than this.
There should be no after. How could there be? A parent was never supposed to outlive their child, and yet Bruce Wayne is still breathing.
He wants to dig his hands into the dirt and climb down into the earth’s hold, wants to curl up on top of the box in which his son lies, wants to cover his boy and protect him the way he should have done before.
How can there be an after? His soul peels free from his body as he rests his cheek against the tile. He is canvas threads unravelling. He is rubber soles cracking. He is falling apart next to a pair of shoes that mean so, so little.
Time moves forward unflinchingly. It does not care about the before or the after or the grass stains rubbed into the fabric of a little boy’s pair of shoes. It cannot hear the whispered cries of a man who has nothing, but Bruce begs anyway.
He thinks of bare toes shoved in his face, knobby knees digging into his side, a faint smattering of freckles that would scrunch ever so slightly whenever his son would smile.
There is no after. Bruce will lay here beside these shoes, and he will rot. His flesh will pull free from his bones, the tiles will soak with purge fluid, and he will decay as his son does.
He thinks of a crowbar, of fire scorching skin, of a too-small corpse pulled from the wreckage. Grief does not hurt enough. It is a pale imitation of how his boy suffered, of how Bruce let him suffer.
He had taken this boy, this bright, kind, angry, perfect little boy and sent him off to die. And like a good soldier, Jason had. He had sacrificed more than Bruce ever could for the city he had so fiercely adored, and now he rests in her cold embrace. Bruce wants to rip him from Gotham’s clutches, but her hands have always been far kinder to him than Bruce’s have.
It was not Gotham that made Jason Robin. It was not Gotham that had scolded him. It was not Gotham that had pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed until he had been pushed right into the arms of the Joker.
Bruce Wayne will rot here, and he will deserve it. These shoes will bear witness to the end of his life, and they will survive when he will not. They will remain a testament to Batman’s greatest failure, his deepest shame, and the blood that dries out in his veins will serve as an offering to this shrine of the boy he has lost.
There will be no after. Bruce will make it so. There is nothing to keep him from staying here, no calloused little hands to pull him to his feet, no brash laughter to chase away his grief. There is nothing.
Outside, time moves forward. On the other side of space, a brother laughs with his team, unaware of what he will return to. Out in the garden, an old man weeps as he presses a wrinkled forehead against freshly carved stone. In the streets, Gotham’s citizens go about their days. The world has not ended for them.
But here in the quiet, empty foyer of a quiet, empty house, the world falls apart. A man lies before a small pair of shoes and he breaks, over and over, until there is nothing left of him at all. He lies trapped in the now, in the aching grief that presses him against polished tile and keeps him from standing. It does not push hard enough, does not allow him the dignity of joining his son in the dirt, and so he remains caught between heaven and earth, between before and after, between a red pair of shoes still stained with mud.