crusaded | letting them want for a home

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jason todd

letting them want for a home

The lack of care that I've put into covering my tracks in Rapture might be inspiring. Time has won this battle; I grasp after every spare second with my hands, feet quiet as I race down the path, but not silent. I feel the sticky warmth of blood sliding down the length of my neck, the metallic tang clear against the line of my teeth, but I feel not the way that my lungs scream for air, or for the ache of bruises coming to the surface. Adrenaline has left no room for that. Somewhere in these depths, Jason is waiting, hiding, and there's a part of me willing to bet that he'd close himself down here entirely, given a source of food and water. But living by the skin of one's teeth has always been what I sought to help the boys avoid. Never letting them want for a home, for room and board, for a guiding hand.

And no matter how much I've failed with each and every one of them, there is always a greater depth to fall into.

I refuse to leave without laying a line.

Nearly an hour passes before I pick up the proper signal from the cowl. A young man of the right size, less than a block away. It might take me six minutes to get there. Five, if I press.

And every second counts.

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Everything feels wrong.

He thinks, maybe, he's been down here for more than a day now. He hasn't slept, hasn't in fact, stopped moving since Bruce left, and he's tired, exhaustion so deep it shouldn't be possible in a body as fit as Jason's, not after only one night's missed rest, but it's. Difficult. Half his energy has gone to keeping his head together - more than once he's found his own fingers curled tight around his skull, gripping like he can keep his mind in order when all it wants is to fly away from him.

Periodically, Jason comes back to himself, hears a whisper through the caverns that reminds him he's not alone down here, but he's careful. No one will find him. He needs that to be true, needs time to be okay. He shies away from the grind of the bathyspheres when they activate, hides as still and silent as death 'til any searching eyes have passed him by.

Only one voice speaks to him, the reedy whisper reaching out when Jason strays too close to the atrium of Fort Frolic. "Fly, little bird, fly," it tells him, so Jason does.

He doesn't feel so good.

Eat.

It's a good idea, and Jason feels the first measure of comfort he's had in many hours when he returns to his hiding place, picking up a tin of beans and peeling away the top. He knows this. It's been years since he was a boy living in the mildewed slums of Crime Alley, but here, in a dank and crumbling apartment surrounded by his few gathered provisions, he almost feels at home again.

Jason has a bite halfway to his mouth when he hears it. It's only the smallest scrape against the rock, but he knows the sound of that particular boot all too well. He puts down the can.

It's too late to hide the light. It's too late to do anything but get his back to the wall, gun arm braced against his knee and barrel aimed for the door. Jason's thumb pulls back the hammer with a sharp click.

It won't be enough. It doesn't need to be.

"This whole building is rigged."

Edited 2011-11-14 01:06 (UTC)

If there is one thing that is unforgivable for a vigilante, it's failing to prepare for any eventuality. Working outside of the law necessarily means that one becomes far from a cog in a machine. It doesn't come down to a set of rules that a new hire can be made to follow, or a training regimen that brings one up to code. The very nature of a vigilante is to adapt and mold oneself to any situation, any emergency, responding in kind when it falls under a range of principles and responsibilities that are set by no one other than the person under the mask. Not a day has gone by since I took up the cape and cowl that I haven't asked myself what a city would do were I ever to disappear. Sometimes, I've found myself scrambling after the fact, which has never done any favors. (Azrael nearly brought the whole of Gotham down, and were it not for a select few, the city would have fallen further than even I would be capable of rebuilding.)

For once, I feel as though I can picture it with my own eyes. The flash of hesitation in Damian's eyes, expecting to find someone else under the cowl. And I start to believe that Gotham will be fine.

Even without Bruce Wayne.

It changes a man's perspective, enough that I step forward without hesitation. If the building is rigged, then so be it; a shade of gray has settled over Jason's hair, suggesting that the threat isn't entirely empty. In the end, I find that the only detail which gives me pause is the son that I'm leaving above ground. I've never cared much for my own life. My will to live is not born of a desire to reach unrealized potential; I have no list of acts to perform before death's final knell. That will has only ever existed for the sake of a city. For every single person who would dare try to walk its streets. For all the others who fight for its well-being. For the sons and daughters I've raised to inherit it, for the countless other lives I wish not to be torn apart in the way my own was.

If I cannot save a single life, who is to say that mine has any more right to persist?

"I'll take that risk," I reply quietly, voice ragged and wet.

He knew Bruce would call his bluff.

The Batman's built his reputation on it, making the choices only a madman would make, surviving against impossible odds by virtue of nothing but his will and a lot of excellent toys.

Still, there's a part of Jason that hadn't expected him to actually walk into the room, to be here, huge in the black of his cowl and impossibly, terrifyingly real.

It takes a hand against the wall to him upright, but Jason's gun arm never wavers. "Why are you here?" he asks, and there's no tempering the hopelessness in his voice, nor the bewilderment. "I told you where they were, just leave." He blinks through the ashes in his hair, all that remains of the apartments one bathysphere higher, and feels his chin begin to waver. "You can't arrest me."

I never did ask Damian about the timestream. About when Jason arrived from, his last encounter with any of us. And a part of me wonders whether it was an oversight, or whether I simply knew that my first suspicion would hold true— that the waver in his voice is the same one that I heard months ago, my eyes darting around to a similar fall of shadow, to the doors in the room, listening for another breath. Letting my own slip when silence reaches my ears.

"The people here would sooner arrest me," I reply in turn, swallowing down the blood pooling in my throat, bleeding back; it's not easy going. "I returned because I don't want you staying here, Jason."

I wonder if the scar on his neck has faded.

"This is no way for you to live. There is no reason for you to keep yourself down here."

Jason barks out a sharp sound, resigned disbelief dragging down the edges of what reveals itself to be laughter. His left hand is free and moving before he knows it, fingers curling over the scar only half-hidden by his t-shirt.

"What do you care how I live?" he asks, and it's an honest question, but Jason's eyes are narrowing, focus rethreading itself through his consciousness at the way Bruce holds himself, the dampness in his voice that doesn't belong.

"You fought someone to get down here," Jason realizes, washing cold all over. Someone who could hurt him, Batman, and Bucky's that good but if they fought then where is he? "Who?"

He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand any better than he did on the day he dragged Joker out of the closet, had his gun pressed up against too-pale skin, the indent and give of a temple. And I don't know that I can ever make him understand, or if it's even my place at all to try. The scar peeks through between his fingers, and I feel... regret. Wonder if the murderous gaze that I'd shot Joker in that moment, the blaze of anger, brushed by Jason instead.

In the end, it doesn't matter if he hates me. Doesn't matter if he'll be angry with me for the rest of his life. If there is anything that can convince him to make something out of the years he has left, out of the hope that a part of me wants to believe still exists, buried underneath all that rage, then that should be enough. Let me be the one who stays underground.

Let me be the one who carries the burden.

"The goddamned Wolverine," I reply first; it's the easier answer. No need to say what the injuries do all their own, that the station was filled strategically, and successfully so. It takes another breath.

"This isn't what I wanted for you."

"Oh."

Jesus.

Jason doesn't worry that Wolverine will be all right, and neither does he move forward to steady Bruce, but...it's uncomfortable. Seeing him in pain that Jason himself hasn't caused, hasn't orchestrated, holds no power to stop. Long ago, they'd looked after one another, and he knows what would make Bruce easier now, what to wrap, what to ice, what's worth running for Alfred to fix, but -

- Alfred's not here, and surreal as it is, they are. Jason's eyes narrow.

"I know what you wanted. I know where I am back home." He bares his teeth. "I don't belong in Arkham."

Arkham. I won't pretend that the thought has never crossed my mind before. In all of the time that I've fought against criminals, some with aims far more complex than a mere dollar amount or the thrill of adrenaline, not once have I believed myself capable of encouraging reform. The very decision to use death as a weapon doesn't pave the way for rehabilitation so much as it acts as a deterrent to the rational. To those who can be reasoned with. I wouldn't place Jason in the same class as criminals, but perhaps the greater fact is that his is an anger that slipped from my fingers long ago. My words reverberate, but only at the angle he wants to hear.

It might madness, to repeat them again, hoping that the message lands.

"No," I argue, and for all that I might have landed him in Arkham back in Gotham, it isn't a choice I would have made without exploring as many other possibilities as time and chance would allow. "No, Jason. I wanted to build a life for you. I wanted you to have a place you could turn to. But more than anything else, I didn't want you to be alone."

It's not an injury that causes my voice to strain. My hand balls into a fist by my side, pressing into the angry cuts left after the fight.

I used to piss him off on purpose. Not when I was Robin - whatever he might think, the choices I made then I made because I believed they were right. Only the Red Hood was meant to be a thorn in his side, and the Red Hood had better toys. I have a gun and a tin of beans and a man beaten down but still filling up that entire wall, and -

"I don't understand you," Jason exhales, letting his gun arm fall. Curling his shoulders in, he lets the wall take his weight, sliding down until he's seated. For a lack of anything more dignified, Jason picks up his beans.

"I have a life here. And up there. I'm not alone."

I have friends, and I came here bleeding. Is that pride?

I don't want them to see how fucking pathetic you make me.

It's a start. There's something almost alarming about the way Jason sits, hunched, as though trying to keep everything about the room from caving in and overwhelming him. For the first time, I'm able to look upon him with some measure of calm, noting all of the years that he's skipped by entirely, the way that they leave him looking young. You can force a boy to become a man under the right circumstances. You can force him to stand tall, to look fear in the eye and drown out his own, but you can't force the growth to be even. Under that type of pressure, there will always be areas that fall short.

I can't even begin to count them in myself. But you make sacrifices, and given the opportunity to start at the beginning of the path again, I'm not sure there are many turns I'd take differently.

"You have people willing to go to great lengths to keep me from coming down here," I admit, glancing over my shoulder, ignoring the throb in my side. No one else here yet. "So why are you alone in this room?"

"To think."

Is that true? I ran to ground like a wounded animal, but I've never been any good at being alone. It's a talent I lost the moment he pulled me out of Crime Alley, and since then there's always been someone. Talia, Durca, Bucky.

Bucky.

He'd know exactly what to do - if he was here, he'd tell me, if not with a kind word than with a smirk, a nod, even irritated brow raised in my direction. But I can't stand it, the idea of him seeing me like this.

"I don't know what you want from me," he admits, miserable with it. His scar hurts in that stupid way it always does when he thinks of Bruce, and maybe Jason forced his hand that day, maybe he's the one who put them all in a room together and demanded blood, but it was Bruce's choice in the end. Jason has worse scars than the one at his throat to remind him that, when it came time to choose between himself and the Joker, he's the one who ended up on the floor.

"Don't you hate me?"

"No," the word leaves my lips again, so sharply that it almost ends up as a growl on my lips. I force myself to take an occasional breath, slower for the way I refuse to let it shake. If there is anything I cannot afford at this very juncture, it's to let myself start sliding. Hesitation, doubt, if any of these etch themselves on my expression or in my voice, they'll only plant further seeds in Jason's own mind, the one that's somehow managed to circle and land on the conclusion that I bear any amount of hatred for him. And that is a thing that I cannot fathom. Never for a minute have I doubted that my parents wanted the best for me. From where they sit, they might be disappointed. They might disapprove. But I won't sully their memory by entertaining the thought that I have done anything to make them hate me.

The two of them were better people than most will ever come to know. And that I fall short of the legacy is a fact that never escapes me for even a second.

"Jason, I don't hate you. I failed you. The only person I have to blame for that is myself."

My chest hurts. I...

It's not funny. I don't know why I'm smiling, but I think if I stop -

His eyes hurt, too much pressure behind them and stinging out, and Jason blinks until they don't, both his hands fisted around his stupid can to stop him helping Bruce to the ground. The way Bruce is holding himself, he might make it there anyway, bowed under the weight of all the wrong regrets.

"You only failed me once," says Jason, "and it's not the time you mean. I'd go to that warehouse again. I'd try to save her again. Those were my choices, and they weren't wrong. He was wrong."

Absolving me. That's what it feels like he's attempting. Hand gripped around the can, as though it's the only thing that helps him retain resolve at all. I don't need forgiveness— I stopped seeking that long ago. Whatever he chooses to forgive me for, whatever anger he continues to bury in his heart, none of it changes the past, nor even leaves a door open to try. And ever since Damian appeared, his existence kept secret from me for nearly a decade, the prevaling thought in my mind and the one most gripping is the fear that, in time, I will also let him down. My absence would have him pushing ahead in the wrong direction. But the very same care I feel, the desire I have to see them happy, it indulges them to the point of overstepping that line.

What do I do?

What can I even do?

"Jason, you still don't understand. I don't blame you for this. For what you wanted to do to him."

Why, why even in a city so desolate and barren, abandoned long ago by those who once reveled in its luxury, why must his voice even sound here?

"I'm sorry that I couldn't."

Fuck you.

He's so suddenly, incandescently angry that for a moment, Jason can't even remember why. "Wouldn't," he hears himself snarl, "and you wouldn't let me do it either. What would it have hurt?"

Feels weird, he's closer, I'm -

Standing with the tin forgotten at his feet, Jason closes the distance between them by half. "Not me, not anyone but him, how many has he killed since then, Bruce? How many fucking lives has he ruined?"

And how many lives do you think I'd ruin, Jason? If I allowed myself to be blinded by rage, if I allowed my hand to fall where it may. And here is where that previous statement cuts to the quick again, because for all that Jason claims that he doesn't belong in Arkham, it's the deliberation and the choice that makes him the most dangerous. Of being able to assess a situation and manipulate it at will.

There are times when the only thing holding me back are the rules I've set for myself, the safeguards against becoming the very darkness that I fight, each and every day. I've seen Jason descending, spiralling into the thick of it. The island may, for all that I know of it, pause the progress and hold it in suspension. But it isn't a fissure that any of us have patched.

How do I explain to him that the very fear he's gazed upon me with could be that of any other innocent citizen in the wake of flames spreading across the entire city?

Killing would be too easy.

"Not half as many as I could."

Jason goes ghost white. In the chalk of his face, his eyes are bright, burning with a hundred unanswered wants, and his scar, a year faded, throbs an angry red. "Get out of here," he whispers.

There's a twitch of his hand and an answering whine from the wall behind him, detonators arming. Maybe he hadn't had time to rig the entire building, but he's not been idle down here.

They offer everyone that shows up a blank slate, but only the ones that arrive already dead know what that really means. You don't get to start over until you've truly lost it all.

"Go back, or I'll take us both out."

I weigh for a moment the possibility of dragging him out. Because I don't doubt that he'd set off the detonators. I don't doubt that he'd bring the entire world crashing down until it crumbles at our feet, no more than a pile of rubble. And, God be damned, the only thing right now that would leave things worse than as they are, with him as enraged as he's ever been, is if somehow he was physically hurt in the process. I've lost him once.

I know I wouldn't survive if I lost him again.

The only thing to do is turn my back on him. If he wants a clear shot, hell, there's nothing clearer than the one he has now of the back of my neck, the most vulnerable juncture of the suit. I make no effort to hide.

He's crying.

He's standing in front of Bruce and he's crying, again, but this time it isn't Jason's throat that's bared, and it's not the Joker's finger on the detonator. This time Jason really does have control, and he hasn't worked to get it, he hasn't planned and schemed and orchestrated for the better part of a year. He has control because Bruce gave it to him, and he doesn't...

He doesn't know what to do with it. He doesn't know what to do with the fact that if he chose, he could kill them both right now. He doesn't know what to do with the way he wants to grab Bruce and make him stay almost as much as he wants to scream at him to run. So Jason stands there, stupid and silent and listening to the scuffle of Bruce's footsteps as, impossibly, he does what he's asked and leaves.

When the last of his cape has passed the threshold, Jason's numb fingers fall away from the detonator, but the whining doesn't stop, it just gets worse and worse, clawing out of Jason's chest and mouth in sobs so huge they hurt. "Get out of here," he murmurs, but he can't.

He just can't.

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letting them want for a home

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