Chapter Text
When Jason was fifteen, he died.
‘He’ had been scraggly and winter-roughed, with wildly matted hair and a thick enough beard that Jason couldn’t make out any discernible facial features underneath it all, save for a pair of dark, creepy eyes, set beneath a heavy brow.
Although, to be fair to Jason’s memory, he had been heavily concussed and extremely injured at the time, so perhaps expecting a flawless visual recollection of some random man that had swarmed Jason’s vision for all of thirty seconds—especially when even just cracking his eyes open had been enough to make Jason nauseous and sick—was probably at least a little irrational.
Not that Bruce would ever understand that.
But whatever. That night—the night of Jason’s almost-death, and the night of ‘his’ real death—wasn’t about Bruce. It wasn’t.
It wasn’t. Bruce wasn’t hurt that night. Bruce wasn’t backhanded and fronthanded and beaten and bludgeoned almost to death by a crowbar. Bruce doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night, a muffled scream lodged somewhere between his gut and his mouth, because to let any sort of sound escape was to let the Joker win and Jason might die, but he wasn’t going to lose.
Bruce wasn’t there. He didn’t save Jason.
No. He saved someone else that night, instead.
‘He’ had been brutally violent, and utterly blasé about his own acts of brutality. Enough so that Jason had first thought, upon seeing the blurry body of the Joker disappear, his mind slow and syrupy, that someone new had shown up and shoved the Joker aside just to have the honor of killing Jason—of killing Robin, he should say—himself.
But no: instead, the man had squatted down, blood—the Joker’s blood, Jason remembers realizing with a slow shock—still staining the metal that had appeared to protrude from his fists, between each knuckle, impossibly enough, in Jason’s hazy memories. The blood had frozen before it even hit the ground as it dripped off of the body-warmed metal, little clinks of sound that still echo in Jason’s mind, even two years later.
The sound of it all, of that night—of ‘his’ death and Jason’s almost-death—is the only thing he can recall with total and complete clarity. The only part of his memory that he fully trusts. His sight had been muddled and foggy, with completely unreliable and unrealistic details that Jason must have imagined in his deliria. Recalling the sensation of touch during that time was unpleasant and brought Jason somewhere he would rather not be, to say the least, and all Jason had been able to smell and taste was his own blood.
But the sound.
Jason can remember the sound of his bones breaking. Of his not-quite-muffled grunts of pain. Of the Joker’s mad cackle, cut off sharply with a hitch of breath and a wet gargle by a man whose footsteps were bold and certain. ‘He’ had not needed to silence himself, or lurk in the dark, waiting for an opportunity. ‘He’ had not hesitated to hurt the person that was hurting Jason.
He would have killed him.
Not like Bruce.
Not like Jason’s so-called-mentor, who watched as the Joker continued to murder his way across Gotham, waiting for the day when the law finally decided the man was too dangerous to live.
Not like Jason’s so-called-father, who saved the Joker’s godforsaken and asswiping life in that fucking warehouse, which was only standing because the wrong person’s body had contained the blast, kneeling among the splatters of ‘his’ blood and flesh, fingers coated in the blood of the worst person imaginable as he staunched that same sinner’s wounds.
That day, three people’s blood froze in the ice-cold air, splattered against the warehouse floors.
And on that same day, the wrong people were carried out of the resulting bloodbath.
Two murderers.
Because when Jason pictures ‘him’, with his dark eyes and a gruff certainty that everything would be alright, even as he laid himself on top of those explosives, Jason can only be sure of two things:
One, ‘his’ name was Logan.
And two… Jason killed him.
Or, as good as killed him, considering Logan had only been trying to save Jason.
Logan.
He remembers the name, remembers the way it sounded in the air, remembers how Logan had talked in an awkwardly calming voice that reminded Jason so much of Bruce. In the moment, Jason recalls thinking ‘Batman is here. I’m going to be okay.’
But Logan wasn’t Batman—not by a long shot, he was just some guy with too many knives and a fucking deathwish—and now Logan was dead, because he’d decided to save Jason’s life. Because he’d been enough of an idiot to die, rather than just walking away and minding his own damn business. Because he was just like Batman in that regard: willing to do anything to save a life.
(But Bruce took it too far. He saved the wrong lives. Life. Just the one—Jason just wants the one! Bruce should have been there— he should have been there— but Jason can forgive him for not being there. He would have been able to forgive Bruce for not saving him. But he can’t forgive the fact that the Joker is still breathing.)
And Jason can’t even picture Logan’s fucking face, just those dark, eerie eyes. All he has of that night—aside from the countless injuries, a fuckload of trauma, and joints that’ll always ache—are the sounds that are forever ingrained in his memory, the faintest memory of knives coming from a man’s hands, and a leather jacket.
It is, as it almost always is, never enough.
Not for Bruce. Not for Jason.
And certainly not for Logan, who didn’t even have enough of a body left to recover.
After the warehouse—after the Joker, or Ethiopia, or his near-death-experience, or whatever it was being vaguely referred to as during any given week by the next doormat who attempted to sympathize with him about it—Jason had been… Well, ‘out of commission’ was putting it lightly.
He was, plain and simply, completely fucked. His concussions had concussions, his broken bones were somehow extra broken (at least, that is what Dick said, the gentle teasing forcefully injected into a wavery voice and watery eyes, upon coming back to Earth and being slammed with a Bane-sized-wrecking-ball of reality that he’d almost become an only child) and the bruising was truly a work of art.
Of really, really shitty art, but still art. Abstract, or maybe monochrome (if the color was just bruise-colored), but definitely ugly.
And Jason could have lived with that. He could have lived with the scars, with the memories, with the way his joints would continue to hurt for the rest of his life, the way his right shoulder will never be the same. He can't move it: that arm only has mobility from the elbow down, now.
He could have lived with the way life was now easier with a wheelchair, or at the very least a cane.
It wouldn't have been easy—not by a long shot—but he could have lived with it all. Eventually. He could have learned to live with it all, because everyone had done the best they could.
Except they hadn't, because the Joker was still alive. Because the Joker got some stitches in his throat and then got thrown right back into Arkham(‘s hospital wing). Because the Joker was bedridden for a month and then used his bedpan to brain his nurse and the five observing guards, killing them all in the process. Because the Joker escaped again, right back onto the streets of Gotham, and held up a bank that, in the end, left five more dead.
Then he got away.
Jason can’t go to the library without seeing green hair in his periphery. He's constantly on high alert—even higher than the natural paranoia that anyone who spends enough time around Bruce develops—and anxious. Doesn't matter who is with him, doesn't matter how logically, Jason knows is safe. Nothing matters except for the fact that the Joker should be dead, but he isn't.
And Jason blames Bruce for that. He can forgive Bruce for almost not reaching him in time, for saving one murderer, for not saving Logan, but he can't forgive him for making Jason feel unsafe in his own city.
So when, a year out from the incident, a woman with sharp green eyes and a stony face offers Jason a way to feel safe again, he says yes.
He doesn't know if Bruce will ever forgive him for that one. For leaving. For going somewhere he can't reach, when he still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming Jason’s name.
Jason doesn't think he cares.
(He does.)
Dick texts him, a week after he left, writing that he is proud of Jason for taking control of his own life. It is proof, perhaps, that Jason truly has made a cleanly untraceable split: otherwise there was no way Dick would be that supportive. His brother also writes that Bruce has gained no less than seven white hairs—one for each day Jason has been gone, Dick jokes—and that he’s gotten noticeably more brutal as Batman.
“Don't feel guilty,” Dick texts, “He needs this. Otherwise he's going to be supervising your fast food runs till you're forty.”
“I'm not fucking guilty,” Jason wrote back, guiltily, “Tell me if he starts eyeing up orphaned/abandonded kids again. Three people and we can officially be a club for talking shit about Bruce instead of just two people venting.”
“Sure. Text me or I will hunt you down :3”
It takes about a year of being in the League of Assassins before Jason finally starts feeling safe again. Finally starts remembering that he has control over his life.
Of course, that's when he finds the files—the detached notes, the experiment data, the hundreds of photos of a mutilated body, the same body, always the same body, the same creepy eyes, destroyed in a hundred different ways—and the situation changes entirely.