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“Tim,” Jason says, despite everything. The word doesn’t break in his throat, rather catching against the noiseless void of Bruce’s study, and it makes the world falter. There’s no one here – no one but them, and something bad is happening, all over and over again. It’s deja vu, if only a little more terrible. It’s unsettling; unbearable.
There’s a half-attempted pillow fort made of Tim’s sheets, the old plushies Dick left behind, and Jason’s glow-in-the-dark stars that keep falling from the ceiling –
– and oh. Around its ruins, the insanities of Jason’s brain that refuse to heal after everything, are bleeding onto the floor.
Or so it seems.
Tim can’t know that. He can’t know any of that. About all the bad things. He’s something else – something unmarred and so very young, and he is writing ‘tim and jason’s secret cave’ in curly rainbow letters on printer paper for the ‘door’ of their fort. He’s something that shouldn’t be here, something Jason needs to protect, something that shouldn’t have to watch his older brother collapse and fall apart into smithers because his stupid fucking head doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to ever since he got back.
“Tim,” Jason says again. His voice doesn’t waver, he doesn’t choke on the delicate syllable, but there’s something rotting in his mouth regardless, something acidic and sickening.
His hands are not his hands. Without making the choice to let go, Jason drops the blanket he’d been trying to pin to one of the chairs, and the ‘roof’ of the fort comes with it. He stares at the remains of their little shelter, and Tim sitting inside, stares at him. Jason’s hands start shaking. “Shit, um. Do you think you could get B?”
Tim blinks, confused. His little hands have made a fist around the crayon, and he lets the letter ‘t’ sprawl from the page as he takes in Jason and the fallen fort. His voice is too small, and even after all these months, Tim still looks the same.
“It’s – it’s not ready. It’s not perfect yet. I just put in the chest for our snacks. Alfred said it’s okay to eat them if I don’t make myself sick like last time.” There’s a quietness, a reticence to the calm, oblivious way he speaks. It’s too childlike and sickeningly familiar and it makes Jason want to burn the city until it looks like the inside of his fraying-at-the-seams mind of all things dying and dust. The ghost of hand-shaped bruises decay around Tim’s arm, the sickening wetness bleeding through his hair, the bones in his ribs that Jason can feel through Tim’s skin when he holds his little brother. Tim’s been away from that house for more time than Jason’s been back – and still, he is – they aren’t – getting better.
Tim looks down at the ground, eyes never quite meeting him, and Jason wonders if he can see the pieces of broken-brain-smithers too, all the same. He looks back up at Jason, eyes staring and staring at the peeling glow-in-the-dark stars on the wall, only to tell his new older brother, “I was bad, but… I’ll not be anymore, okay?”
Jason falters. He thinks he should lie down. He wants to kneel down in front of the boy and hold him until Tim forgets everything the Drakes did to their child, but he doesn’t want Tim any closer. Jason’s something of rot, something of sepsis, and this is his body falling apart. If Jason lets Tim touch him, Tim will feel the shaking, he’ll notice the rasping in Jason’s lungs, he’ll have to watch as Jason loses it and –
– Tim is a child. Not in the way children unlike them ever are, but he’s untouched by everything else: this life, what the Bats and Birds of Gotham do in the shadows, what they’ve – what Jason’s – been condemned to because of it; and worst of all, what it’s taken from him. His mind, or at least the sane remnants of it, are seeping into the concrete of that warehouse with his brain matter and skull fragments sticking to the metal, dying together with the corpse of the Joker’s body; and all while Bruce’s morality lies with it, hand-in-hand. Made for each other.
“I know, okay? You’re not bad. You couldn’t be,” Jason says instead. He knows bad. Is bad. Is the reason why Bruce has become whatever it is that he is now. He should know by now to stop wanting, to unlearn how to need someone after you’ve ruined them, but Tim being here with him when everything breaks again is worse. Bruce cannot fix this, but he tried to once and Jason knows he can’t let him go again. Bruce’s love – it’s muscle memory in the worst way, and despite it all, Jason needs it like morphine. Bruce knows what it is to be undone, and awfully, they fit together. Jason made them so.
And so he swallows, tries to smile something soft – something human – and says carefully, “But you have to get B.”
“Why do you sound weird?” Tim asks. He gets to his feet, leaving the paper sign behind, and holds his hand out for Jason to take. “Do you want to sleep first, while I watch for bad guys?”
Jason shakes his head and oh. Bad. That was a bad idea. The world flickers like embers burning away shrapnel, and there’s red and red and red bleeding into his face and – fuck. The crowbar has smashed his eyes from his skull and there, laying waste to itself, is whatever it is that he used to have. The strength to protect Gotham. The art of sleeping through the night. What it is to hold a spoon and feed himself. Being a good soldier. It’s like the fire is still burning. Jason Todd lies there in the ruins for Bruce to find him, to lean against him as he takes his first new steps, to help him remember to take his medicine, to make sure he doesn’t choke when –
He can’t fucking breathe.
Did you take your medicine today?
Jason presses his hand to the wall – concrete, not-concrete, concrete – and moves closer to the ground until he’s sitting and his eyes are closed. He coughs against the smoke – ashes, ashes. He’s going to be sick. It’s in his lungs and his ribs hurt. The bones are moving inside. He tells his little brother, “S’good. Good idea. I just – I’m not–”
“Oh!” Tim sits in front of him anyway, still reaching for Jason’s hand, but stops himself before he gets too close. “I’ll get the cushions from the couch to make my bed, and you can hang the sparkle-lights so we can see in the dark. The stars keep peeling off, but we will make them stay, okay? It’s not very scary then. Only a little.”
Head in his hands, Jason tries putting his skull back. It’s the opposite of muscle memory, it’s stitching together brain matter, it’s knowing what it is to die only to not. It’s coming back, but not all the way.
“Jason?” Tim says, sounding strange just like him, Jason supposes. Everything is so, so wrong. “Why are you–”
“S’okay,” Jason hears himself say, somewhere distant and everywhere all at once. He feels his voice, his corpse through the walls. A ghost that never died but can’t seem to live either. He knows Bruce can’t fix this. The bad is the bad is the bad. Bruce will do nothing but watch as Jason’s body undoes itself to the same ruin it should’ve died in; but again, the crux of everything: Bruce will watch.
Yet for the sake of his sanity that Jason still holds onto with broken, bleeding deformed hands, Tim can’t. He can’t watch, he can’t be here, he can’t stay. Jason covers his mouth with his hand, tasting metal and concrete and his teeth shattering within his own fucking skull. “I just – you need to get B for me.”
Tim, oh God, Tim says, “Are you sleepy? We’re partners.” He crouches down, gravitating closer and closer and closer, peering his head up to look at Jason through his older brother’s hands. He stays; then tells Jason as much, so fucking simply as if it's the easiest choice he’s ever had to make. “I can’t leave you. I can fix you, you’ll see. Let me, I can be good.”
The bad thing is happening now. It’s bad and bad and bad and. Fuck. Jason can’t remember what, but Tim can’t stay here –
Tim says something to Jason and all the words drown. Jason couldn’t comprehend it if he tried. So, instead –
“Tim, please,” Jason – Jason begs. “Leave and go get Bruce.”
And then there’s nothing. The world is quiet and here lies Jason Todd in its gallows so it can finally do what it couldn’t before and –
He throws up. Shit. Oh no no. It’s all there! It’s all here! All the medicine and sanity is spilling out in front of him like blood and the remnants of stupid warehouse ashes that he chokes up sometimes. But oh, maybe this time it’s real. In his hair, in his skin, in his teeth is blood. Dark red and Jason’s and all over Bruce’s hands because – Bruce is here.
“Jason. Jason, hey. Sweetheart, it’s okay.”
It’s out from his insides and all over Bruce’s skin like his condemned fucking psyche has corrupted them all. Jason did this to them. He did this to Bruce. Jason ran from the greatest thing he’d ever had to save something he’d deemed enough for him.
And then it killed him – or at least, it should have. Instead, Bruce murdered someone so the son that damned him not good enough could live. There’s blood on Jason’s hands that is not only his own, and maybe that is what will kill him for good. It’s all coming undone like ceiling stars and Tim’s fort and human bones when they crumble in the heat of fire and a fucking crowbar over and over and over again.
“I don’t feel good, ‘m sorry,” Jason rasps, one hand on the floor, while the other is clinging to Bruce’s arm. He can't make himself let go. “I don’t feel good.”
“It’s okay,” Bruce says, steadying Jason, keeping his head from rolling back. Jason is looking at him through his own bloodied hair covering his face, and Bruce, uncaring of all of it, gently pushes it away from his eyes, his cheeks. He’d done the same thing in Ethiopia, feeling the bones in Jason’s face give way under his touch, marring Jason’s skin with the same hands he’d used to kill a man, only moments before. It’s an echo, retrograde amnesia but in a selective way, deja vu but a terrible kind. Circles.
Bruce, again, says, “I’m right here.”
“Where’s Tim? Is he here?” Jason asks, desperately. The sound in his throat is wet. He is shaking his head again despite how badly the room is spinning. He can make out the collapsing pillow fort behind Bruce, and the rainbow-coloured crayons scattered on the ground. It hurts something awful that Bruce is condemned like this – a murderer, a shadow, a thing that has forgotten its own name – but Jason can save Tim. He can shield him. He can’t bring himself to leave the manor, or keep his dinner down, or remember the little things most days, but he can do that. He has to. “I tried t’ make him leave. He can’t see this. I’ll scare ‘im. Don’ let ‘im see me like this.”
“It’s okay,” Bruce tells him. “He’s with Dick outside. Let’s focus on you, alright?”
“I’m bleeding, see? It’s happening again,” Jason says, and looks down at the hand grabbing onto Bruce’s arms, at the vomit in his lap. His insanities are seeping into the mahogany, bleeding into Bruce’s skin, and oh god. This is so fucking bad. It hurts, his head hurts, the not-thinking-about-it hasn’t worked the way it should’ve, and this static screaming in his brain sounds like metal on concrete when he talks. It doesn’t matter that he takes his medicine. It doesn’t matter that Bruce saved him. It doesn’t matter that the Joker is dead. Everything is still fucked. “I don’t – B, I can’t. I don’t feel good,” Jason says, seemingly repeating the only words he is able to make himself say. “It’s all tilting. My head is–”
“I know, I know,” He takes Jason’s arm, gently helping him let go of Bruce’s own. His limbs, his muscles have started contorting, and Bruce coaxes him carefully to the floor. “Let’s get you lying down, sweetheart. Just like last time. It’s alright, I’ve got you. That’s it, on your side.”
“I don’t – I don’t feel good,” Jason mutters.
Hands in his hair, fingers brushing against his cheek. “You’re doing so well, Jay. You’re okay, you’re going to be okay.”
And then –
Everything goes away for a while.
When it comes back, Jason tries to breathe in its wake; it’s dragging him out from wherever he came from by its teeth – all needle-like and titanium. Its digging him up and up and up, through a vortex, through a fire, through the earth, and then –
“Nng.”
“Breathe, sweetheart. I’ve got you.” A hand in his hand, the other against his cheeks. It hurts it hurts it hurts. Lying on his side. It’s sideways. Take medicine. Everything is bad again. “You just had a seizure. Are you with me?”
Oh. That makes so much sense it almost hurts. Everything is sticky. Sticky like honey and sap and marrow. There’s saliva on his lips, maybe blood, maybe gasoline marring rainbows into the ground, and his – his dad is wiping it away, making him clean. “Bru’s, I–”
“Take your time, it’s okay,” he says. “You’re okay. I’m right here. Can you tell me your name?”
Your name is Jason, something inside him says, but there’s something else, too. Something important, something fatal. Whatever it is that he is, doesn’t belong to him anymore. It’s a corpse in Tim’s pillow fort, the thing left buried in the rubble across the world from here. His body isn’t listening, too busy sinking through the floor for them all to find aeons and aeons later when it’s stopped rotting.
He doesn’t have the words to tell Bruce this. The agony of it all is choking him, and Jason can’t speak, but with careful, tired words, he tells Bruce, “I died.”
The same terribleness cuts across Bruce’s face. “You didn’t die. You’re just confused. You had a seizure.”
“No. I died, ’m dead,” Jason whispers. It’s all so hideously familiar, the inability to pick himself up from the ground and leave, his mind’s unwillingness to unlearn what it is to die. Jason Todd never left the warehouse, caught amongst the in-betweens of those infinities where the red numbers had counted down until they didn’t.
Until Bruce had stopped it. Stopped him. Jason thinks his voice breaks when he speaks again, “What did you do?”
– for me? What did you do for me?
Bruce’s voice is soft, barely anything at all. He isn’t talking about all the awful things Jason is when he says, “Nothing, sweetheart.”
“I wanna get up. Let m’ go.”
“I’m not touching you, Jay,” Bruce says, kneeling there, refusing to look away.
“Not you.” The pounding in his head is rhythmic, mimicking a heartbeat, the faltering breathing of a collapsed lung. He shouldn’t be here. He tries to shake his head, telling Bruce, “He did somethin’ to m’ head, and to you; ’s all wrong. I can’t breathe. I’m dead.”
“Jason, look at me,” Bruce says. “You can. Let’s do it together, okay? Breathe with me. Give me your hand.”
Jason reaches back, automatically, unthinkingly. Muscle memory. Bruce is the only thing he knows and that kills him. Of course he does. “I can’t,” Jason chokes. “I’m bleeding, my mouth.”
“You threw up, sweetheart, but there’s no blood.” Bruce guides Jason’s own hand up to his neck, finding his pulse underneath both of their intertwined fingers, leaving them there. Carefully, he says, “Let’s breathe now. You can do it. You’re doing so well already. I know everything’s all fuzzy right now, but you’re going to be okay, Jay. Feel your pulse? Your lungs? You’re not dead, you’re right here with me.”
No. He doesn’t feel much of anything besides how much it won’t stop aching. The seizure’s remnants is burying itself underneath his skin like an infection, bleeding down to the marrow of his bones, into each organ as if all that is bad belongs there. He doesn’t know how to tell Bruce how awfully he can feel his body decaying, but he wants this to stop. He says, “My head hurts.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Bruce says back. Maybe he does.
“Tim?” Jason rasps, more of an afterthought that is the essence of everything. It’s important, it’s solace, it’s fatal –
“He’s okay, with Dick,” Bruce says. “Let’s get you feeling better before you see him.” He pauses, swallows. “Do you – feel okay to take a bath?”
Jason blinks. There is a wetness to his clothes, something warm and sour. Something to mortify him later when his mind decides it wants to come back together enough for him to make sense of everything. It’s sticking against Jason's sweatpants like an open wound weeping red, but it’s not. Jason almost wishes it was blood. That, at least, would have been easier, kinder. “Hm?”
“A bath,” Bruce says again. He moves his hands from Jason’s where they rest against his pulse, and runs the back of his fingers against Jason’s check, urging him to keep his eyes open. “To help you get cleaned up and a bit more comfortable.”
“Who’s with Tim?”
That… that must’ve been the wrong thing to say, Jason thinks. Bruce is quiet again, letting his hand drop to Jason’s side. Gently, he says, “I’ll help you, okay? Can you stand?”
“Mm.”
When he doesn’t make any actual effort to move, Bruce tries again, “Jason. You have to sit up, sweetheart. Can I help you?”
Bruce’s touch is warm, grounding. Jason is – is on the ground. There are lost pieces of himself that he lies with here, and yes, maybe Jason should do something about it. “Okay,” Jason whispers, and Bruce doesn’t let go.
Bruce tucks an arm underneath Jason’s knees, the other supporting his back, holding him upright until Jason is off the ground, in Bruce’s arms. He presses his face into Bruce’s chest, shutting his eyes against the nausea climbing back up his throat. Bruce murmurs something again, soft words within his ear like ‘breathe’ and ‘you’re doing good’ as he keeps holding Jason close.
It isn’t until they reach the bathroom and Bruce helps Jason sit on the edge of the tub, does he let go. Bruce helps him take off his shirt, his pants, his – his underwear, leaving everything that’s ruined in vomit and sweat and urine in a pile of dirty laundry on the floor. Jason wants to ignore it until it becomes a permanent fixture, like the aching walls Jason needs to sleep against or the ghosts that sometimes live here in his body. A pile of clothes and bones and Bruce are sitting beside Jason, and suddenly Jason doesn’t want to do anything but rot there with them.
He remembers pieces of the hospital in Ethiopia, how they couldn’t bring him home because his body was too unstable, how the injuries were ‘catastrophic’ and ‘life-threatening’ and – ‘Jesus, how is this kid still alive?’ He remembers how he had to relearn how to walk, how he couldn’t feed himself, how Bruce needed to take him to the bathroom. It’s not the same, now that he’s in Gotham, now that his body is trying better to recover itself piece after piece after piece – but after everything, he’ll always be some sort of stuck there.
Bruce’s hand is against his back, steadying Jason as he lets himself sink into the water. He watches, pulling his hand away, not touching anymore than Jason needs him to. He busies himself in finding a washcloth, wetting it slightly, and holding it out for Jason to take.
When he doesn’t, Bruce sighs, running the washcloth up Jason’s chest, all across the newer canvas of scars that Jason can’t quite remember are his own most of the time. Bruce is being soft and gentle in the way Jason never thought he could be, more than Bruce thought he himself was, and it seems neither of them know what to do with that.
Bruce murdered someone with these hands.
Jason stares and stares and stares at nothing.
“Jay,” Bruce calls gently. “Do you feel sick?”
“I don’t know,” Jason mutters. “Dizzy.”
“Is it too warm?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to leave?” Bruce asks, waits. He lets the washcloth drop to the bottom of the bathtub and neither of them make any sort of move to catch it. He swallows, Bruce says some more things. It all sounds like awful, grating static. “I can’t leave you alone completely, but I can stand outside the door.”
It’s too much. Jason can’t do this, but he can’t bring himself to get up. “You can stay,” Jason tells him, and something in him breaks.
It’s nauseating and overwhelming and distantly, he remembers drowning on his collapsed lungs, how that is synonymous to this moment in the water, how against everything, he can't pick himself up and leave. His body won't let him. He is stuck, he is stuck, he is stuck, and so Jason stays, letting the stark lighting of the bathroom reach him all the same, and tries to breathe in something other than smoke. He wonders if Bruce sees all that is terrible when he looks at Jason – all hollow-boned and sickeningly pale and matted hair. He wonders when Bruce will decide he’s finally had enough of looking at the ruins of it all. He wonders if it will hurt him too.
“Jason,” Bruce whispers. “You’re crying.”
When Jason speaks again, the words are strangled, dying somewhere within his throat that’s drowning in bathwater and ash and his own blood. This is a collapsed lung or smoke asphyxiation or a panic attack but it doesn't matter when they all feel the same. “I’m sorry,” he rasps, refusing to look anywhere but straight ahead, unblinking.
“Don’t,” Bruce says and – fuck, he sounds the same, the same as Jason and – that’s not right, that’s not okay. “Please don’t say that.”
“I’m broken,” Jason whispers back.
“Jason. Look at me,” Bruce tells him quietly, fingers digging into his own palms as if reaching for the sanity underneath Jason’s crumbling psyche, needing to bury himself there in his own flesh like he could otherwise change it. Jason’s never heard Bruce sound like this and it is frightening, almost. He knows all the sounds of Bruce’s screams from the desert and what he whispers to himself after he has a nightmare, when he doesn’t think Jason is awake to hear. He knows what Bruce sounds like when he lies, and Jason realises, he doesn’t sound then the way he does now. He tells Jason, so horribly truthfully, “That’s not true.”
As if it is. As if Bruce actually believes it. As if it has never not made sense to him.
“I can’t be Robin. I can’t be a good brother. I can’t stop fucking everything up,” he says, mourns. “Tim needed me to build a fucking pillow fort and I – I seized on the floor while pissing myself and now you have to clean me up. My body can’t get used to being alive and it – it won’t stop. It won’t stop being broken.”
“You do not have to be sorry for what was done to you; what was taken from you,” Bruce says. “You are not broken for surviving despite it all. I know it feels like that. God I know, but you’re still you. You’re Jason Todd, you’re Robin, you’re a good brother.”
Goodness, morality, the meaning of everything. Jason wants to scream at Bruce until his throat is raw and bleeding, he wants to weep against the floor until Bruce decides the child he took in isn’t worth this anymore. He should stay, infinitely, the way he is now in this bathroom because Jason has condemned Bruce here, choice after choice after choice. Perhaps it is penance for him to lay catatonic, covered in urine and vomit, undead in the catacombs of the manor.
But he won’t. Bruce is here and he won’t fucking give up and leave. He doesn’t understand the evil he is running a bath for. There are irrevocable, undeniably and eternally condemnable things in this world, and Jason knows this because, now, he is them. He’s sick and irredeemable and damned, but he is what they made him, and Bruce is insane for thinking he could be otherwise.
Jason doesn’t quite know all the words to articulate this to Bruce, so he simply shakes his head, trying to breathe again, and tells him, “You killed for me and – it didn’t even matter. I ruined you, too.”
Jason’s skull had been fractured in three different places, his spinal fluid had bled out against Bruce’s hands, his brain matter had been to be pieced together in a surgery that took five hours. It still takes him some time to remember how exact he got here, but Jason Todd will always know this:
Instead of being grateful to be alive, he is thinking about how insanely awful it is that their ghosts don’t have the decency of staying dead when they died; how annoying the thing that calls himself Justice is condemned in this bathroom with him because Jason needed him to; how funny it would be if Jason died anyway because he wouldn’t know how to do anything else. It’s Batman’s morality in smithereens on the warehouse floor in Jason’s place and none of it fucking matters. How hysterically ironic: a father paying for the sins of the son.
It’s sickness, it’s lunacy the way Bruce seems to think there are some things just simply not worth letting go of, despite everything Jason’s made of him. Bruce is a murderer. Jason made him so, but he’s still selfish enough to want Bruce anyway, and Bruce is condemned enough to want Jason back. It’s not fair, what’s become of them.
It’s not Bruce’s fault, but he isn’t listening. He damned himself for Jason and he doesn’t even care – doesn’t realise.
But there’s an understanding in Bruce’s eyes, a comprehension that’s finally dawning on him in a terrifying clarity. “You are not responsible for the choices I made,” he says, words careful, concrete. “If I hadn’t stopped him the way I did – you would be dead. But Jason, that will never be on you. I would make the same decision a thousand times over if it meant you could live.”
Justifiable homicide in the defence of an incapacitated victim. It makes sense, but. That’s not – good enough. “You should hate me,” Jason tells him.
Easily, so terribly easily, Bruce says, “You’re my son, Jason.”
Jason has to close his eyes, has to block out the entirety of the world. It’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much. He is telling the truth when he says, “I wanna get better.”
“You are. This is your body getting better. It’s healing itself, if only a little late. I know it’s not fair, but we have to try. I’m not giving up on you, Jason. I couldn’t, and you shouldn’t either.”
“Tim,” Jason asks. “Is he okay?”
“He’s okay,” Bruce tells him. “You didn’t scare him, he’s just worried about you. He loves you, and I know he’s young, but he can see more than what all of us are hiding away from him.”
He can’t take this anymore. For the first time, Jason turns away from the nothingness, meeting Bruce’s eyes and refusing to look anywhere else. “He can’t replace me.”
“Jason.”
“He can’t be Robin,” Jason says, suddenly the most steady thing he’s been able to say all afternoon. “Promise me, he won’t.”
Bruce stills. Gently, he says, “He couldn’t replace you, even if he may become Robin one day.”
It’s worse.
Jason can see the way his mind works, the way Bruce thinks he knows so definitively what Jason is trying to tell him – but he’s wrong. Batman’s Robins are damned, children condemned by their necks with Gotham’s rope, needing Bruce’s love to save them like dying things. And Bruce does, giving them everything and making something of them. His children will never know what it is to be powerless again.
Except, now, Jason does. Despite everything Bruce made him to be, how desperately he had tried, how deluded he was into believing he could be good – Jason ended up here. In that warehouse. In that hospital. In this bathtub.
This cannot happen again.
“No,” Jason says, everything collapsing at the seams. Desperately, he tells Bruce, “He can’t, please. I don’t want – I don’t want him to end up like me.” It’s a terrible thought, really. Sickening like sweet honey suffocating his throat, like the never-ending taste of metal in his mouth. It’s the need to protect another person with his own life, until, hand in hand, they become an infinitely finite thing that Jason doesn’t know how to bury. Tim has become the gritty graveyard earth embedded underneath his fingernails, nestled in between his flesh like the scars that constellate his skin. Tim is the feverish, suffocating warmth that wants to lie next to Jason when he can’t sleep, like he doesn’t have anywhere else to be, and maybe Bruce can get up and move forward and forget how easily it is to ruin something unbroken, but Jason can’t. He can’t. Tim is everything Bruce and Dick and Jason couldn’t be and – he has to stay that way. Jason will let the world break its own neck if it means keeping Tim from everything the Bats of Gotham are condemned to.
Jason breaks, says, “He’s just a kid, and he’s good and he could be your Robin but – I don’t want him to be. If he’s like us, he’ll hurt like us. Like this.”
“You are hurting because of me. Jason, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should’ve saved you, I should’ve,” Bruce is so still, he falters. He falters. Everything about him is a paradox, a vibrant shade of grey that will never make enough sense to Jason, and yet here, Bruce breaks. An insignificant fracture of himself gives way in the awful atmosphere of the bathroom, and Jason doesn’t know what to do with that besides feel ill all over again. Blatantly, he realises Bruce loves Jason more than he could comprehend he did. Neither of them know what to do with that, with themselves. Bruce’s breath hitches, voice thin, “You’re a child and I’m sorry.”
Bruce is –
Bruce is crying.
Bruce is crying, too.
They stare and wait and breathe within the nothingness for too long again, Jason willing his father to give up, to go away, to stand up, and for the first time, he seems to realise Bruce can’t. They’re stuck here, both of them with each other, with the bathwater turning cold, with Jason’s dirty laundry on the floor like old piles of dust and bones. Maybe they’ll rot together, maybe they’ll want to. Maybe they’ll pick themselves up off the floor and do better than this.
Nothing is okay. Everything is still fucking awful. The sick feeling will never leave –
But Jason needs Bruce to be right.
“Okay,” Jason tells Bruce. “It’s okay.”
And maybe Jason believes it, too.