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January is killing him, he thinks.
“Hey, I was just calling to check in. Babs said you didn’t show on patrol. Don’t worry about it, it was pretty dead last night. It’s probably this weather. Anyway, I’m just calling to make sure you’re all good. Text me when you get this.”
The voicemail ends with a click , and the room is dead silent. The cracked screen glows a bright white for a few more seconds, then goes black. The battered phone sits on the nightstand, close to dead. He would plug it in, but he forgot to pay the power bill this month.
When the phone goes black, so does the room. Power’s out, so that means the lights are too. And the heat. Not that it matters much to him, because he hasn’t moved from this mattress in almost eighteen hours.
The white screen light has burned a hole into his eyesight. The little white rectangle refuses to disappear even in the complete blackness. The sounds of a one-sided conversation reverberate throughout the room, deafening only to him. Only he can see the phone screen. Only he can hear the echoes. Somebody call the priest, someone alert the Vatican, he is the first ghost to ever be haunted by the living.
Voicemail from Dick. Voicemail from Bruce. Voicemail from Barbara. They must know he’s alive or they would’ve busted down the front door already. They call, and call, and call, and all he can do is watch the phone buzz until it goes to sleep and he goes with it.
It’s funny, he thinks. Because he knows. He knows what this is, better than he knows the scars of his palms and the streets of this city.
How much psych training had he gone through as Robin before Bruce would let him out on the streets? How many people had he talked off from ledges, away from barrels?
The wintertime is terrible. Gotham is always dark, always cold, but January always seems to drag the dregs of the city to the surface. It’s even darker, even colder, even heavier. When he was young, before Robin, it was always January that almost got him. Whatever generosity or kindness people pretend to hold during the holiday months is gone, replaced with cold indifference at best and burning hostility at worst.
The city has sunk her teeth into his back, pulling him down no matter how high he goes. In the winter, it feels like he could claw his way to impossible heights– he could climb a thousand stories, he could touch the clouds, he could build his own glittering golden wings and reach the sun– but she never lets go for a second, never gives him a second of relief before pulling him back down below the dirty river.
It feels like drowning. It feels like he put on a lifejacket but got caught below deck. The city holds him under the water with her barbed teeth and pulls him every which way but free, until the lights are dead and he’s too far down to swim up. The Unsinkable Jason Todd.
He should have taken a shower days ago. He didn’t. He could blame the cold water, or his untimely death, or the axis of the Earth. And he will continue to lie here. The sun will come up again, and go down. But he won’t see it through the tiny blacked-out window across from him.
He stares blankly at the other wall.
His phone is vibrating again. It dances on the nightstand, threatening to dance right off the edge. The light burns his eyes, but it abruptly shuts off again. Dead.
He should get up and find a portable charger. Should find his landlord and give him the money he has to get the power back on. Take a shower and do a load of laundry and go outside into the January night.
He just lies there. Stares. Lets himself go down with the ship.
Jason has seen almost every way of dying.
He slips back into work as quickly as he left it. He texts Dick back. Puts on the layers, dons the helmet, and goes back out into the unforgiving January cold. He finds a pocket of air just big enough to keep his head up for another minute.
“Hey! Glad to know you’re alive, I was about five minutes away from showing up at your door. Or your window, haha. Let me know where you’ll be tonight and we can work together. See ya!”
I could jump, he thinks. The street below is deserted, leaving only the rats and the roaches to disturb the fresh snow. He stands on the very edge of the roof, balancing on only his heels. Ice coats the ledge beneath his worn boots. With his hands shoved deep in his pocket, the wind still nips viciously at his fingers. Even as he stands still, bits of gravel fall off and disappear.
Steam rises from vents across the muted city skyline, illuminated not by stars but by headlights. Most people are in their homes by this time of the night. Not Jason, nor any of the people he knows.
He takes a step back from the ledge, feet once again firmly on solid ground. If his time in vigilantism has taught him anything, it’s that jumping rarely works.
He could break his neck, end up quadriplegic for the rest of his life. Or he could dash his brains on the sidewalk below and spend the rest of his days in some care facility. Or he could break any number of limbs, or end up hideously deformed.
Those were just the ones he saw the aftermath of, fifteen and already world-weary. The ones where Robin and Batman were too late to stop that fall. By fourteen, he had already seen more failed jumpers than he did successful ones. When that happened, all they could do was wait around for the ambulance, peel the poor fucker off the ground, and go about their night.
The mask stops his breaths from showing. It almost looks like he’s stopped breathing. He should have brought his gloves. He can’t even tell if his fingers are moving as he makes his way for the fire escape.
The real reason he can’t jump is because Batman is on jumpers like white on rice. The man has a sixth sense for the people. Even now, just standing the way he was, he’s risking Bruce showing up like some knight in shining armor.
And if Bruce does show up, then what? Will Jason tell him that it’s not how it looks?
Or will he confess to him that he is so, so tired? That he never really wakes up. That he feels like his life is falling apart around him. That he just wants to go to bed and not wake up. Will he let Bruce talk him down with the same words he himself has parroted dozens of times? Because Jason knows what happens next. The words sound so nice, that someone finally sees you, finally cares about you. Then the ambulance shows up. Then it’s off to Arkham you go.
No. Jumping isn’t an option.
So tonight, he texts Dick back. He leaves a note on his landlord’s door with the promise to pay the power bill. He crawls into bed and forces his head back above the water for one more night.
I can shoot myself.
He stares at the gun on his coffee table. It stares back.
“Listen, I know you’re all independent now and it’s none of my business, but if you can, please call me back. I don’t know if you’re injured or in trouble or mad at me or something, but just give me some sign of life. It’s not like you to ditch a mission like that. No one’s mad– well, Bruce kind of is, but you know that just means he’s worried. And I am too. Give me a sign when you hear this. Love you.”
Second to the jumpers, the guns are the ones he sees most often. Good ole Gotham. The two things never in short supply are tall buildings and fast bullets. It also has a much higher success rate, when they do it right.
It’s mostly the veterans he finds like this. Back from some war or another, sent back home to Gotham like taking a tiger shark and dropping it in a fish bowl. They’re handed $300 a month and their guns and told to make it work.
They’re not the ones he finds on rooftops, crying out for somebody to stop them. They’re the ones he finds after a neighbor complains about a smell from the apartment upstairs that the landlord won’t look into.
He picks the gun up slowly, wraps his fingers around the cold metal and switches the safety off. He brings it up to his mouth, just between his teeth.
It would be so easy. Pull the trigger, bang. Lights out.
But Bruce found this apartment for him. Broke into his old one months ago while Jason was out on patrol and dropped the keys on his rotting table. It’s just shabby enough, just far enough on the wrong side of town that no one bats an eye at his strange coming and going.
It’s never a pretty aftermath. Blood and brain and bone on every surface of the room, seeped into the cracks of the walls and the grooves of the floor. A red so dark that at first glance it’s easy to mistake it for mud, splashed up to the ceiling and dripping down the walls.
Some do it in the middle of their living rooms, just too tired to give a damn about anything further than the finger on the trigger. Others try to make it cleaner, just a little less of a mess for the next guy. They do it in the bathroom, hoping the tile will be easier to clean. It won’t be.
A streetlight is the only light inside the living room. With the helmet off, his breath condenses in the air around the barrel. He never did get around to paying that power bill.
How long will it be before they find him? A week? A month? By that time, whatever room he does it in will be unsalvageable. The drywall will have to be completely torn out and replaced. Wood floors will be warped and tiles will be stained past the point of bleach. The ceiling will have to be redone, which means the nice old lady upstairs will have to move out.
And again, what if he fails? He’s a damn good shot, but the slightest twitch could send the bullet astray. What if he blows his face off instead of the instant death he hopes for?
He could be found that way. Some neighbor calls the cops about a gunshot from the apartment next door, and they find him faceless on the bathroom floor. They’ll think he’s dead at first, think to themselves “There’s no way anyone survives that” and “Guess I’m not having that leftover chili tonight” , then they’ll see the bubbles in his blood where his mouth used to be. Bruce will hook him up to machines in some upscale care facility and keep him alive for years to come, unable to see or eat or breathe.
Or he could die on that floor. No neighbor to call the cops, too used to the gunshots to bother. He could live in agony for hours, unable to find his gun to finish the job because the bullet tore right through his optical nerves.
It’d be a little bit like a game of Where’s Waldo, he thinks. Where’s Jason? Well, there’s a little bit of hair above the sink. And oh, is that a molar embedded in the drywall? Or wait, is it bone? It’s hard to tell. What’s black and white and red all over? His bathroom wall. Oh, he cracks himself up. Hey, if you find an eye it’s twenty points.
He pulls the gun out of his mouth, flinching as it catches on his teeth. He sets it back down on the coffee table. He takes his finger off the trigger, slowly switches the safety back on with a soft click.
Not a gun. Too messy, too much uncertainty.
So he walks away, back into the tiny bedroom and crawls beneath the thin blanket. Maybe he’ll call Dick tomorrow. Probably not. Maybe he’ll go on patrol tomorrow. Probably not. Maybe the ship will sink and he’ll finally drown, but probably not.
“I know you’re getting these. If I pissed you off, I’m sorry. I went by your apartment and you weren’t there. Did that one get burned? The power was off. Just call me, Jason, please.”
There are endless ways for someone to kill themself, if they really put their mind to it. World is his oyster, and all that. They all zip through his mind like a flipbook, too fast to pick out a favorite picture.
Carbon monoxide poisoning , He writes the idea off with a laugh. He’s more likely to give himself a headache or kill his neighbor instead with how many holes this apartment has.
Overdose . Too uncertain. Too messy. Too many memories tied to that little orange bottle hidden behind the chipped bathroom mirror.
Hanging . He’s just as likely to tear a hole in his mildewed ceiling as he is to actually hang, and the bats would catch him almost immediately if he tried to find some warehouse to do it in. Hey Jason, what are you doing with that rope? Oh you know, just hangin’.
The longer this goes on, the more nonsensical his ideas become. Maybe he could set up a guillotine right here in his living room. Or, maybe he should take a trip to the Gold Coast and try to get eaten by a shark. And here’s an idea, why doesn’t he blow himself up once more, just for old time’s sake? Stick to what he knows, and all that.
The stress is about to tear him in two.
He stares in his dresser. The well-worn wood creaks when a drawer is opened and groans when a drawer is closed. All of his clothes fit into two drawers, not even needed to start on the third or the closet.
He doesn’t own much. This dresser that he picked up off the corner. Some furniture that came with the apartment. A blanket, a couple outfits, a coffee table. It’s startling to realize that he doesn’t really take up much space at all.
A thing about Jason is that he likes a plan. He likes grocery lists, and sticky notes, and calendars. Little notes and reminders that he still has a future, today and tomorrow and March 23rd at noon.
His room at Wayne Manor is still just collecting dust, but in the pocket of the jacket he saved his allowance to buy, is a paper reminding him of his geometry test on April 29th. In his English notebook is a scribbled page of flight times. On the calendar above his desk, May of 2021 is carefully planned out.
Careless recklessness has never been his style, no matter what everybody else seems to think. Planning is his favorite thing to do, and he does it well. Well, most of the time. Last time, he didn’t plan to die. He’ll just have to plan for that this time.
It’s easier to picture his death when he has a list of things to do, and doubly so when he doesn’t have to worry about anyone else throwing off his plan. There’s no more counting on someone hating him enough to kill him, or loving him enough to save him. It’s just Jason, and this scrap of paper, and this half-empty dresser.
It takes him days, but slowly, the crumpled notebook paper begins to fill up. Bullet points, carefully penned, plan his end just as simply as he used to plan his days.
The first order of business is this dresser.
The first shirt he touches isn’t his, it’s Dick’s. He let Jason take it a few months ago, making him swear to give it back. The black fabric is well-worn, the faded Black Canary logo on the front nearly gone after a decade of washing.
Jason takes it out, slowly and gently as if he’s handling a baby bird and not a ratty t-shirt, and sets it on top of the dresser.
It doesn’t take him long to pull out the rest. For someone who does laundry as little as he does, he really should own more clothes. Oh well, nothing to do about that now.
When he has pulled everything out of the drawers, he lays them carefully on the floor in front of the mattress and sits. Stares down at them. Wonders why this feels more foreboding than when he had the gun between his teeth and a finger on the trigger.
The pile of clothes stare back at him. They tell him, “You need to make a decision.” It’s not accusatory, just straightforward. “It’s on your list. You made the list. Now you need to decide.”
The last time he died, he died in a stolen costume. Bright and vibrant as a cardinal in the winter snow, just a red mark against the cold ground.
What will be his shroud this time, is the million dollar question.
There’s the shirt he got when a mission brought him to New York. The hem of the shirt is splattered with green paint, and “I Survived My Trip To NYC” is emblazoned across the front. It was a gift from Tim, wrapped with a bow and given to Jason the second he woke up from emergency surgery. They found it funny; the others, not so much.
It was probably a little too on the nose. Too ironic, his ninth grade teacher would have docked points.
Next to it lies the dress shirt he bought last-minute for Lian’s daddy-daughter dance, back when Roy was laid up with double pneumonia and wracked with guilt over missing it. The crisp white shirt has laid untouched in the very bottom of the drawer for an eternity, but he can still smell the Sweet Pea Bath and Body Works spray that she sprayed them both with. There’s a dried dandelion in the breast pocket, and a Sonic receipt in the matching dress pants.
And there’s the sweater Bruce got him last Christmas, dark blue and cashmere and beautiful and probably repulsively expensive. And there’s the novelty socks he bought as a joke, but ended up becoming his most worn pair. And there’s the t-shirt he nearly forgot he had, a prize from the fair he went to years ago. And, and, and.
This should be the easy part, goddamnit. He already made the decision to die what feels like a lifetime ago, but somehow, picking an outfit to die in seems harder than the actual dying.
It’s fine. Everything’s fine. He just has to add it to the list.
When he leaves his apartment, it’s daytime for the first time in a long time.
The store he walks into is busy. He wipes the snow off his boots on the doormat, watching it melt into the grime of a thousand other footprints. The fluorescent lights are harsh, and the music is too loud, and he can’t for the life of him figure out how so many people can fit in one aisle.
Shopping is quick when he has a list. He buys a couple cardboard boxes, a plain black t-shirt, and some clearance plaid pajama pants. He hands the cashier a twenty, and she hands him back a five and three pennies.
The sun has gone down again by the time he’s putting the key in the door. Above the endless notifications for voicemails and texts and missed calls, his phone tells him it’s 5:37.
He replaces the clothes on the dresser with his new ones, and places the old ones in the new box.
His own apartment is worlds different from Dick’s. Dick has shelves and tables and displays full of things . Jason calls it clutter, Dick calls them knick knacks. They cover every spare surface of that apartment. Books, magazines, half-full notebooks. Blankets, coffee mugs, remnants of whatever this month’s hobby is. Photo frames and figurines and novelty t-shirts and light-up pens. Every corner of Dick’s apartment is bursting at the seams with life, with proof that someone real, someone who has lived their life to the fullest and never wasted a second, is there.
It doesn’t take Jason more than an hour to pack up his life. Everything he owns gets sorted into two boxes. Does this undershirt tie him to Red Hood? Then it goes in box number one. That’s a completely unnoteworthy coffee mug? Then it goes into box number two.
Easy as one-two.
Throughout the week, he works through his list. Slowly, but surely, it all comes to an end.
“Tim says he saw you today at that Goodwill on Broad St. It’s good to know you’re not holed up somewhere bleeding out. Would’ve liked to hear it from you, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers. Call me when you can. Love you.”
One small thing after another.
One day, he cleans his apartment. Top to bottom. He’s not really sure why, not when the smoke-stained walls haven’t been truly clean since the fifties, not when the grime in the grout probably predates him and his parents and their parents too.
Still, he scrubs the dirty tile with bleach until his fingers burn and bleed. Rivulets of brown bleach-water-whatever roll down the bedroom walls, decades of smoke and sex and sweat embedding themselves in the rotting baseboards and his jagged fingernails.
He scrubs and scours and scrapes, pours over stains and spots and splatters until his eyes are crossed and his knees are bruised, and it still isn’t enough to erase the history from the faded wallpaper. The windows won’t open, layers upon layers upon layers of cheap white paint cementing the locks shut. He’s brought it all out of the walls and the floors now, every sordid detail of ninety years of history. Sickness and health and illicit affairs, first words and closed fists and dying breaths. It lingers in the air now like cheap cologne: dizzying, suffocating, nauseating.
He can’t open the windows, so those years will never escape this endless January. Just like Jason, these ghosts will never be free. They will sink back into their old stains and rot this room down to its very bones.
He knows, even as he scours the chipped linoleum so hard his wrists crack, that he will never leave. Not this apartment, not this city, not this January. He will be just another stain on these walls, just another scratch on the floor.
And one day, when the Atlantic rises and Gotham Harbor swallows this city whole, Jason will still be found fighting memories with a rag and bleach in the wreckage of this decayed one-bedroom, January forever and always.
“Alfred’s making cherry pie tonight. You know you’re more than welcome to come, everyone’s gonna be there. I’ll save you a slice. Call me when you can, love you.”
He’s never kept much money on him.
When he was young, carrying cash was akin to strapping a bomb to his chest and praying nobody saw until he got to where he was going. Sure, those Gotham Heights kids painted the town red every Sunday with their allowances, flashing daddy’s new Mercedes-Benz and mommy’s black card all over the city. Those were the ones who blew thousands every week on clothes and booze and designer drugs, diamonds so heavy they tore holes through their ears and snow so good they blew holes through their septums. It always worked out for them in the end, whisked away by mommy and daddy from private school to private rehab to private sector.
It didn’t work that way in Crime Alley. Still doesn’t. If you had money, you kept it to yourself. Don’t let anybody see what you have if you ever want to be able to walk home without being jumped again. Don’t show your friend, don’t show your teacher, don’t show your dope-fiend mother.
When he was five, he kept his money in an empty can of Campbell’s Chicken and Rice. He’d pull pennies and quarters from the muck of the clogged storm-drains and wash them until they shined in the bathroom sink. Every last one, no matter how green or how worn, would get dropped in the can with a clink . And every night, when the apartment lights were off and the streetlights shone through the window, he’d upend that can on the bedroom floor and count. One, two, three, four, five and onwards to a hundred is a dollar in little copper pennies. Four quarters makes another dollar. Nickels and dimes were rarer, but those five and ten cent coins still made their occasional appearance.
He’d count them, then count again. Sometimes he would make stacks, letting the endless pennies stretch toward the ceiling. Other times he would stretch them out across the floor, just to see if they could reach from his window to his door. And he would make plans for his little fortune.
One day, he was going to be as rich as Bruce Wayne and he and his mom and dad would all move to Gotham Heights. He’d have the biggest house with an actual backyard, and a pool. It would be three stories tall and he’d have a slide that went from the top to the bottom floor, and he’d have a huge TV and a million rooms and maybe a plane.
Every night, he’d make his plans. Some nights, he’d have a penthouse over the entire city and a helicopter that he could go in whenever he wanted. Other nights, it was a mansion in Paris with a Ferrari. He’d count his wealth, cent by cent, and fall asleep without a doubt in his mind that he would have it all one day.
Then his dad left. Then his mom got sick. Then suddenly, pennies couldn’t pay the electric bill, let alone the insurance on a sports car.
The Campbell’s can got donated for an extra ten cents. Dreams of mansions were traded for dreams of hot water. As he got older, and his income shifted from dropped coins to jacked tires, he squirreled the money away in nooks and crannies. Beneath floorboards and inside mattresses and between book pages, his bills were tucked away from prying eyes and sticky fingers.
One day , he swore to himself, I’m going to make it out. I’m going to be different.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He became a billionaire overnight, and all the wishes of a younger him were granted. He got his mansion with a pool, courtesy of one Bruce Wayne. He got his plane, and his TV, and a million other things he never could have imagined even in his wildest dreams.
He became part of the lithosphere of Gotham, the impossibly delicate gilded layer on top of the churning sea of chaos below. Constantly moving, constantly fracturing, until the city decided he’d had his time and dragged him back below into the belly of the beast, replacing him with someone new, someone fresher and unbroken.
The money he has now has nothing to do with any kind of Wayne legacy. It’s dirty like the coins he used to pull from the dregs, stained by the hands it’s touched on its way to him. The memories cling to the bills like they cling to the walls of this apartment, like how he clings to his last breath. The rich lie to themselves to make themselves feel better about where their money comes from, but the truth of the matter is that it’s all the same. The bills traded at galas wear the same sin as those traded in alleys. Hits and bribes and sex and lies, all the same stone no matter who throws it. At the end of the day, a spade is a spade, and you can’t take it with you when you’re gone.
So he cleans out his hidey-holes and years of stashed bills. He pays the rent. He pays the other bills, and still has plenty left over. He doesn’t hand it out on the street like some born-again Christian would be oft to do, painting a big red “ROB ME” target on the forehead of his beneficiary. Instead, he slips it in an envelope under the door of his upstairs neighbor. She was nice to him that one time he accidentally shot a hole in his ceiling; hopefully she can use the money to jump ship and move far, far away.
And so the water rises and his list dwindles, little checked boxes and crossed lines.
“Remember that arcade on West Elm I took you to once? They’re doing a movie trivia night tonight, you should come with me. We’ll wipe the floor with them, then maybe after we can patrol together. Call me, love you.”
On his paper, there is one final line that has been scribbled out and rewritten over and over.
He has already cleaned out his fridge and donated his box of things. His uniform is tucked away somewhere hidden, never to be found. The floors are clean, his money is handled. He’s dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s. When he disappears again, it’ll be like he was never back.
Maybe that’s what he wants. Maybe he wants the last three years to be remembered as nothing more than a bad fever dream. Maybe he wants to be remembered as fifteen forever, a martyred memory. Not this. Not what he’s become.
Write it down. Cross it out. Rewrite. Erase. Rinse, and repeat.
He supposes the real question is, how important is the truth? If he were to listen to his kindergarten teacher, she would say that it’s not just important but imperative to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
If he were to listen to Bruce, he would say that keeping secrets is a matter of life or death. Speak in riddles and half-truths, whatever it takes to keep the web of lies from collapsing and taking the whole city with it. Bruce is the master of lying. He lies through his teeth and to everyone’s face, day in and day out. White lies and propaganda and earth-shattering secrets, all need to be woven together to keep this family, this city, this country from cannibalizing itself. Oh, but not you, Jason. You need to tell me the truth.
He thinks the real answer is somewhere in the middle. No, the entire world doesn’t need to know his deepest secrets for the sake of being honest and no, he doesn’t need to spin lies for the sake of secrecy until he’s not sure what the truth is anymore. There’s a middle ground in there, somewhere, and his final task is to find it.
Write it down. Cross it out. Rewrite. Erase. Rinse, and repeat.
It’s a hell of a verdict to come to now, when he’s been oscillating between the two extremes for twenty long years. He’s always been a late bloomer though, hitting his growth spurts and finding himself just before his world ends. Maybe his life is just working out the way it always does; maybe this is a sign from the universe that he’s making the right choice.
So tonight, he looks down at his list and decides where in the middle to fall. To his right, there’s another sheet of paper. Blank.
As loath as Jason is to admit it, this one of the few things Bruce got right. Sometimes, the truth isn’t what’s best. Sometimes, people need to be lied to to keep them from falling apart.
Write it down. Cross it out. Rewrite. Erase. Rinse, and repeat.
“I know you need your space, but you’ve gotta give me something here. I don’t know what else to do other than break down your door. You’ve got all of us worried. I know you’re getting these, please call me. I love you.”
Gotham never stops. Not for life, and certainly not for death.
The winter wind bites at his face like a starved animal, digging into his still-living flesh and eating him alive. It whips around in a frenzied dance, pulling and pushing and dragging him further to his final resting place.
He has left behind anything that could possibly tie him to Red Hood, or to the Waynes. He is no longer Jason Todd. Tonight, he is just another carcass in the river. He holds no guns, no money, nothing of note: just a cheap pocket knife he picked up at the pawn shop.
He knows it’ll be for the better this way.
The river never gives up its dead, at least not until it has stripped every last identifier from the body. If he is ever found, it won’t be until he’s nothing but a set of bones, indistinguishable and inseparable from every other soul in the muddy riverbed.
He didn’t write a note. They won’t ever know what really happened. That was his final compromise. Maybe they’ll think he finally got the hell out of Dodge like he was always threatening to. Maybe they’ll wait for letters that’ll never come and watch for signs that’ll never show. This way, maybe he’s giving them some modicum of hope that he’ll be back one day.
Jason Todd will never leave Gotham. His ship has finally capsized, he’s used up his pocket of air. The water’s in his lungs now and he’ll never reach the surface again. He’ll be here forever, in the river, in the wallpaper, in the January wind.
He finds himself standing on the edge for the second time in a month. Ice coats the crumbling asphalt from where the river has escaped its banks. It cracks under his feet, inaudible over the howling wind. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he’s aware that he should be freezing in his t-shirt and pajama pants.
In front of him, the black river swirls. It crashes against the manmade banks, begging to be let out. Streetlights reflect off the waves and the ice, no stars to be seen. It’s impossible to see an inch below the surface in the inky darkness, so he is left staring at his own reflection.
They won’t miss him, he knows. They never did the first time either. They’ll miss the memory of him, the idealized fifteen year old boy who never stood a chance against the cold world. They’ll remember his time as Robin, as a son, as a child lost too soon. The memories of fights and differences and deaths will sink with him tonight, preserved by the stains on the wall and the ice in the water.
He’s stalling. He’s not sure why. This would normally be the part in the story where someone showed up and saved him. Bruce or Dick or Clark fucking Kent. They’d whisk him away from this place and remind him that life is worth living, and he’d magically get better. But it’s only him out on the river tonight. He planned it that way. No one is coming to save him.
His hand is steady, even in the voracious wind. The knife is something he would never give a second glance normally. It’s cheap as hell, probably some tourist trap souvenir. The varnish is cracked and the words “Denver, CO” are barely visible anymore. But the blade is sharp, and that is all he needs tonight.
His right hand remains steady as he raises it to his left wrist. If he had lived long enough to write his tell-all memoir, he would have told his readers that the best way to complete a goal is to always double down. Never leave anything up to chance, because he’s proof that Murphy’s Law is real and true. If you want something done, do it twice.
The burst of pain as he drags it across the thin skin isn’t gratifying. It doesn’t suddenly clear his head, doesn’t give him the answers he’s been searching for for years. It hurts like a motherfucker, is what it does. He grits his teeth and digs it deep into the tissue until the blood is dripping from his fingers, until he can hear more than he can feel the pop of ligaments giving way to shitty stainless steel.
His arm is white-hot against the freezing air, steam rising from the deep-welling blood and fogging up the clean blade. It mixes with the condensation from his shaky breaths, mixes with the smoke and the fog. It’s like his body is trying to escape itself, trying to turn inside out.
He’s sure that he’s supposed to feel something at this point – euphoria or regret or anger – but all he is is tired. He pulls the knife away, slippery with blood. It drips from his fingers into the river, disappearing in the ebb and flow. Drip, drip, drip, dark as wine.
This is fine. This is what he wanted.
He tries to switch the knife to the other hand, but his left fingers refuse to grip. The blade slips through his hand just as easily as it slipped through his skin and disappears silently into the river. He makes a half-hearted grab for it, but the blood loss is already making him woozy. His hand isn’t even close.
He’s felt this unsteadiness countless times before. The first time a mugger’s knife caught him in the leg. Watching red numbers steadily tick down on a warehouse floor. Digging the bullet out of his shoulder in a shitty New York City motel on a mission he wasn’t even supposed to be on.
But this is the first time the unsteadiness doesn’t elicit a spike of fear. More like… curiosity.
Okay. Okay, step two.
It’s with a lot of effort that he toes his shoes off. He holds his arms out, trying his best not to let the blood stain them. It just seems wrong to him to die with shoes on, especially when it looks like he’s dressed for bed. Maybe someone will come by and find them, who knows? He stumbles, nearly falling headfirst into the river before he’s able to catch himself. He kicks the shoes away, not trusting his balance enough to bend over.
So there he stands. Barefoot in his pajamas, standing at Death’s Door like he’s had a nightmare and wants to sleep in Her bed tonight. He stands at a towering 6’2, muscles and scarring covering his body like a thick coat of armor, but he can’t help but feel as young as the day he died.
Maybe the truth of the matter is that it isn’t this January that he can’t escape. Maybe it’s an unassuming April day, many Januaries ago.
He’s a child playing dress up in a grown man’s body, living some twisted amalgamation of Thirteen Going On Thirty and a backwards-Groundhog Day where he lives the same day over and over but everyone around him moves on. He can’t move on. He never could.
The clouds don’t part to grant him a final glance of the stars. The wind doesn’t pause to give him a final breath. Gotham moves on as she always has, and so he must too.
And so, he steps over the edge.
It’s a five foot fall, but as he hits the water, he thinks it must be at least a thousand.
He knows cold. Cold is a concrete floor, cold is a saline drip, cold is an unpaid bill on the coffee table. This is not cold.
This knocks the air out his lungs like a freight train. It’s static, it’s a storm, it’s a category five hurricane tearing all of his nerves out of his body and wringing them dry. It digs into the gash on his left arm with all the delicacy of a rabid dog, reaching its claws through the jagged vein and clawing at him from the inside out.
It’s so dark , is the first thought that comes to mind when he claws through the shock. His eyes are burning so they have to be open, but there’s nothing in front of him. Not the sky, not the ground. He’s falling, he’s floating, he’s standing on nothing and being dragged through everything.
The water tumbles his shell-shocked body and he can do nothing but let it. There’s a rubber band wrapped tight around his torso, squeezing so hard he can’t move. Not his arms, not his chest. His lungs are empty but he can’t force them to inhale. He couldn’t swim for the surface even if he changed his mind.
His leg hits something hard. The swirling stops.
His lungs burn. He can’t tell if he’s still moving or if it's just his mind playing tricks on him, trying to disconnect from his body and be anywhere, anywhere but here.
Static creeps into the blackness as he sinks deeper into the darkness. It plays with his vision like a kaleidoscope, fractals of color that he can’t possibly be seeing this deep down. His eyes refuse to focus.
His body won’t listen to his brain. It’s too far away, it’s lost the signal. He’s stuck in some kind of stasis, and he can’t tell if it’s a minute or a millennia that he’s been floating down here.
He can’t give up control now, though. He made the list, he made the plan, so he gets to make the final decision this time.
So he fights through the static one last time, wills his body to listen one last time, before he is torn apart and buried for good. For the first and the very last time, it listens.
And he breathes.
The water burns his lungs like the smoke did, clouds his vision like the smoke did, fills his head and silences his heart like the smoke did. He thinks maybe, just maybe, he’s still on the floor of that warehouse, and it’s a warm April day.
And so, he goes under.
And under.
And under.
The rubber band around his lungs snaps.
The air is somehow colder now, barbed wire scraping down his lungs as it fills the spots the water vacates. There’s a spool of it in his chest, unwinding slowly as it is pulled out through his mouth.
His head is pushed to the side as he gags and gasps.
He is cold but the hands that touch him are molten, grabbing at his face, his chest, his arm . They’re setting his skin ablaze like it’s nothing, like they’re cremating him.
Below his thin wet clothes, he can feel the gravel he was standing on. Maybe a second ago, maybe a decade ago. It digs into his bare arms, steals the heat of the touches right back and sinks them into the ground.
There’s a voice yelling at him. Maybe more than one, but it all falls into the same cacophony. It doesn’t matter, not anymore.
They’ve stolen his bones from the river and brought him back to the surface. They shine lights at him and wrap him and demand he look at them, demand he answer for his actions.
He stares past the familiar faces, past the burning touches and the begging voices. He stares past, just to see that the sky is still dark. There still aren’t any stars, and the snow is still falling. Nothing that they could say to him matters. They may have saved his body, but that’s irrelevant. His soul is still in the river, and it is still January.