Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gotham: Batcave

DICK 

“I’m not fucking staying!”

As always, Jason’s anger is an explosive thing and Dick winces as he faces the full brunt of it alone.  Ever since the Pit Madness trapping his brother in its throes began wearing off and the Red Hood formed a tentative peace agreement with the Bats, tensions between them had settled somewhat, but things were still far from amicable.  Even without the green driving his actions, Jason still had plenty of grievances he needed to air, and with Bruce’s impeccable communication skills, they would probably stay unresolved for a few more decades at least.

Trying to keep the naked longing out of his face, an expression Jason has often described as “stupid puppy-dog emotional manipulation”, he lets out an inward sigh.  After all these years, he wants nothing more than to be able to feel like a family again, not like the splintered, half-formed bonds they share today.  He had a chance once, to be the older brother he should have been, back when a scared, uncertain boy with equal amounts of fear and determination in his eyes had first come to the manor, and he had squandered it over petty jealousy and misplaced anger.  He only came to realise his mistake when he was watching recordings of his little brother’s funeral on the television and was presented by a casket too small to match the hole in his chest.

Robins love to be dramatic and his choices then certainly gave new meaning to the phrase ‘too little, too late’.  In the times when it is quiet, he sometimes thinks he hears that final call he never picked up.  

Dickiebird, it’s me.  I know we’re not close or anything, but I don’t know who else to call.  Please call me back when you get this.

When he finally did get around to calling the number back, it went straight to voicemail.  His youth continues to haunt him in more ways than one.

Now he has the gift of a second chance, but a twisted gift that only ever seems to slip through his fingers.  Still, it is an incredibly precious opportunity, to cherish what he once threw away so callously and he will be damned if he fails his brother again.  His days at the circus may be long over, but one thing he has never forgotten is the importance of holding on tight no matter what.  He has let enough of his loved ones fall.

“Jason—,” he tries to coax but is quickly shut down as his brother’s temper flares again.  The hand that he tentatively reaches out towards Jason’s shoulder is immediately thrown off with a scowl.

“You’re a real piece of work, you know that Dickie?  I came down here all ready to help out because you lied to me and told me there was an emergency!  And then I arrive only to find out that this was all just a little ploy to get me to attend one of your stupid family bonding shindigs.”  

“It’s not like that,” he protests weakly, because it kind of is exactly like that.  “I just- I just wanted to spend some time with you.”

A half-truth.

“Yeah, well,” Jason drawls.  “If you haven’t realised yet, today’s not a very good day for me.”

He flinches at the reference to the date, but can’t stop himself from nodding intently.  “That’s exactly why!”  As much as he knows he should leave Jason to his own devices, he cannot bear to do that today, especially not today.

Jason bristles.  “Did it ever occur to you that I might have had plans?”

“Well, did you?” He probes curiously.  Admittedly, Jason hasn’t been the most forthcoming with them about his social life, and understandably so, but from what he’s heard, Roy isn’t in town and Jason… well, Jason doesn’t have that many other friends.

Despite the technical reasonableness of the question, it is the wrong thing to say.  He only has a second of regret to brace himself before Jason explodes.  “That’s not the point!  I could have had plans, or I could have wanted to stay home and paint my fucking toenails for all that it matters to you, and that would be my choice.  You don’t control me, and what I do is none of your business, so get that through your thick-fucking-head already and leave me alone!”

A pang of hurt blooms in his chest.  It is nothing that has not been said before, but each repetition is a painful reminder of the gaping chasm between both brothers.  “I was just worried, Jason.  You know that I’m always going to be here for you.”

“Couldn’t make it for my birthday though?  And you all wonder why I keep saying that my death matters more than my life,” Jason mocks and Dick fails to suppress the flash of hurt that spreads across his face.  It’s not enough to stop Jason though, as he continues speaking those terrible, hurtful falsehoods that he might very well, and Dick prays that he does not, think are true.

“As usual, no one bothers to be around for my life, but suddenly everyone and their cat turns up to celebrate my death,” he throws up his hands in exasperation.

“Little Wing, no,” he breathes out forlornly, heartbroken that Jason continues to be blind to his place in the family.  “It’s not like that, please—”

“What was it, off-world again?  At least this time, you made it back in time for the 27th!”

“Jason, please.  I was off-world, but it was really important!” He implores, his tone just short of begging.  He would, if he thought it would do any good.  “I really wish that I had been around for your birthday, but it was an urgent mission and I had to be there with the Titans.  It was the Dokris you see, they were engineering time travelling technology to try and conquer Earth again, and it could have jeopardised the space-time continuum!” 

He blurts out the explanation frantically, desperately hoping that he can somehow make Jason understand that he wants nothing more than to be there for his little brother.  Judging by Jason’s unimpressed look, it’s not working.

His mind races for solutions, anything that might help to plead his case before his eyes finally land on something.  Fumbling around the table where all of the artefacts the various members of the family had haphazardly tossed — probably not the safest practice when it comes to dangerous and unstable foreign entities, he realises — he lets out a triumphant aha! when he manages to locate one of the objects that he had brought back from that mission to study at a later date.  

Not being there for his little brother when he most needed it was the worst mistake Dick could have made and he’s determined to spend the rest of his life making it back up to Jason.

“Look, I have proof!  Do you believe me now?” he asks hopefully.  Brandishing the glowing orb proudly, he presents it to Jason, who eyes it with a flat look.

“Great, yeah, another gold star for the Golden Boy over here!  Whoop-de-doo, the world is saved yet again, it’s a pity that poor little Jason is too selfish and unimportant that he’s collateral again and even worse, upset by it.”

He instantly deflates.  “Jason, please.  Why can’t you just believe that we love you and want the best for you?  We’re family, Little Wing.”

“Why?” Jason laughs darkly.  “Well maybe because of the fact that at every turn, you all continue to disregard my wishes or find some opportunity to double check that the Big Bad Red Hood isn’t off slaughtering half of Gotham!  If you’re so worried about me going off the rails again because I can’t handle my death, then why don’t you just throw me in Arkham for the day?  I’m sure there’s a nice empty space that the Joker’s probably escaped from, just waiting for me.”

Dick’s face falls.  Speaking to Jason is always an exercise in navigating minefields, but today in particular, he feels like he is facing a nuclear wasteland.  Just when he thinks that both of them are at a permanent deadlock between two equally stubborn people, someone else enters the conversation, fully prepared to escalate the situation beyond repair.   

A new voice signals the arrival of Bruce.  As usual, Batman travels noiselessly and melts out from the shadows to join his two former Robins.

“What is going on here?”

Bruce’s deep voice rumbles through the Cave and above them, a fluttering of bats chitter in annoyance at the latest disturbance.  He hates how now, even years later, the sound of his father’s voice is enough to have him instinctively straightening his spine and looking to him for instruction.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” Jason responds immediately, snarling his words viciously.  “My buddy Nightwing decided to lie about an emergency in order to manipulate me into coming down for family bonding at the Cave, just because the Earth’s made one more revolution around the sun since I took a little trip down under.  When I found out that there was no emergency, I tried to leave obviously, but Dickface over here is trying to stop me.  Now can you please just tell him to let me go so there actually isn’t any bloodshed tonight?”

Jason bares his teeth in a facsimile of a smile but this grin is all knives.

Bruce hesitates.  “Actually Jason, I think it might be better if you stay in the Cave today.”

“Excuse me? ”  Jason’s face is screaming barely-repressed danger and Dick crosses his fingers and toes in desperate prayer.  

Please Bruce, don’t mess this up.

“We all know what date today is, and everyone is concerned about your potential reaction,” Bruce responds stoically.  

Dick has to resist the urge to bury his face in his hands.  He knows that he’s hardly the best at picking words or expressing himself clearly, but Bruce certainly takes the cake on that front and if there was any doubt that his poor communication skills were inherited, this is all the proof that is needed.  He’s nowhere close to the trigger-edge Jason is on when it comes to mentions of family, but even Dick can see the many areas for misinterpretation and accidental hidden insults in Bruce’s statement, so Jason is bound to seethe at that as well.  

Sure enough, his already hostile sneer twists into a full-on snarl.

“Oh so you really do care, huh?  Did you all sit around and have a family meeting to plan for what to do when the newest Rogue inevitably decided to celebrate his anniversary by going on a killing spree?” He spits out, derision dripping off every word.  Then, he turns to Dick, and the pure rage and hurt in his face causes him to balk.  “What happened, Dickie?  Did you pull the short straw and that’s why you’re the one who has to drag me over?”

The accusation sends ice straight into his heart, along with the clear hurt underlying his words.

“No, Jason, please. It’s not like that,” he begs.  Jason’s posture is bleeding hostility and he doesn’t know how things all went wrong so fast. “No one thinks that you’re a danger, all we want to do is to spend time with you and make sure you’re okay, I swear. ”

Jason barks out a short, harsh laugh.  “Sure, you’re all looking for your sweet little brother to complete this happy family.  I’m sorry to tell you, but that boy died a long time ago in a warehouse in Ethiopia and there’s nothing you can do, not even with your fun time travel trinkets here,” he spits out, knocking the sphere roughly, “that could ever bring him back.”

“Jaylad, I just want my son back.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve already got one!”  He roars, channeling fury in every gesture as he jabs his arm towards — oh no — the memorial.  “ Right over there, in that shiny glass case, that’s where your son is, if you could even call him that—”

Bruce lets out a small, hurt sound at that but Jason carries on unperturbed.

“—so get that through your heads once and for all and leave me alone!”

Dick closes his eyes.  There is an agonising sense of finality in Jason’s words, and if his intense rage was not enough to convey it, then the raw hurt in his eyes certainly would.

Still, Bruce doesn’t back down.  After all, why would he?  The dark knight never retreats from a battle.

“Jason, no matter what you think we feel about you, you have a place here and right now, you’re too emotional.  I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be out alone today.”

As soon as the words escape his lips, Dick knows that they were the wrong thing to say,

Indeed, a frightening blankness slips over Jason’s face and his eyes turn to pure ice.  Even before he pulls on his helmet coldly, Dick can sense the sudden chilling of the air.  It is no longer the hot-headed teenager with a temper, but a large, compassionate heart under all of that rage and bluster; it is the Red Hood, the nightmare of Gotham’s underbelly, whose hands are drenched in as much red as his namesake. 

A chilling silence comes over the cave when Jason pulls out the first gun.

“There’s no way I’m staying here and make no mistake, I will use this if anyone tries to stand in my way.”  The threat comes through clearly, and even through the distorted voice modulator of the helmet, Dick can hear the animosity in his voice.

In the absolute quiet that follows, the sound of the trigger arming is deafening as Jason levels the gun unerringly at Bruce, who stands firm, staring back at him just as unyieldingly.  

That seems to be the last straw for Jason.  In a lightning-fast motion, he lunges forward and to the side in a break for the exit.  Not to be outdone, Bruce is right in front of him just an instant after Jason makes his move.  

Fortunately or unfortunately, a lifetime of experience with Batman’s bulk has accustomed Jason to Bruce’s stonewalling and he meets his new obstacle with a fierce shove.  Bruce lets out a grunt as he loses his balance and stumbles backwards, knocking into the cluttered table and rattling all the objects on it.  A certain orb which had been unthinkingly thrown onto the table after failing to appeal to Jason falls to the floor.  

Fuck.

Dick blanches.  This was not what he had intended when he decided to try and provide Jason with emotional support on this difficult day.

There’s just enough time for him to brace himself before the world erupts into white.

Ethiopia: Magdala Valley

BRUCE (34 YEARS OLD)

The Batcycle only seats one.

Batman has always centered around solitude.  Batman was born out of loneliness, out of the isolation of a young boy who once had his entire world ripped out from under him and never quite recovered from that.  Over the years, with Alfred, with Barbara, with Dick, with Jason …parts of that world had been slowly pieced back together but still, Batman remained a role that revolved around seclusion.

He has never once regretted this fact as much as at this moment, when his insistence on withdrawing from the world means that he might not have left enough space for his son to be safe by his side.

In the searing red wilderness of the Ethiopian desert, there is only miles and miles of sand stretching out across the horizon.  This area is far from a friendly place and he is endlessly reluctant to have left his teenage son in this hostile, foreign land.

Jason is tough, and his survival for years on the streets of Crime Alley is testament to his tenacity.  Training with Bruce has only honed that.  He has faced far harsher terrain so there is little rationality behind his intense fear but still, there is a growing tightness in his chest.  Is there ever a time when a father stops worrying about his son?

He has always been a man of few words so he remembers every one that he speaks.  The last thing he said to Robin was an instruction to stay put.  The last thing he said to his son was a plea to be safe.  Jason for once, please listen to me.  Don't go after Joker alone.  He's just too dangerous.

Did Jason listen?  Did Jason understand that this was all about keeping him safe?

He remembers the words he spoke to Alfred just hours before.  He's a danger to himself.  A danger to our mission.  He realises now, far too late, how little any of that matters now.  He’s not chasing after Robin, he’s racing to his son.  

There is a thrumming in his chest and he hopes it is the pulsing beat of his heart bringing him closer to his son and not the ticking of a clock that is running out far too quickly.  Gritting his teeth, he tries to banish the thought from his mind as he cuts through the unforgiving heat of the Magdala Valley, under a blistering desert sky.

Once more, he curses himself for driving his second child away, for ever forgetting exactly how much Jason means to him and making him feel like anything less than the absolute blessing he is.  He has spent the last few years working each day to prove to Jason that he is more than the place that he came from and he will be damned if a petty disagreement undos all of that effort.

He only worries that he is already too late.

He remembers receiving that heart-stopping call from Alfred, the butler’s usually calm voice wracked with worry as he frantically reported that he had found a hurriedly scrawled note in Jason’s familiar hand, explaining how he was leaving to seek out his birth mother and thanking them for everything they had done for him.  As if it, he, had been a burden on them.

Jason is no stranger to running away — he recalls the smattering of foster homes dotting his early childhood reports until Gotham City Child Protective Services gave up on him, the early days at the manor where a ready-packed duffle bag was stashed conveniently under the bed for a quick getaway — but Bruce had hoped that he had earned Jason’s trust enough to make that a thing of the past.  

Apparently not.  

Though with how the past few weeks have gone, Bruce doesn’t blame him.  Robin, did Felipe fall, or was he pushed?  When it was not being populated by shouting, the manor’s halls had been filled by cold anger.  Bruce is ashamed to say that arguments had become the main form of communication between them.  Somehow though, this latest episode holds a special finality to it, a notion that strikes a cold bolt of fear into his heart.

Gritting his teeth, he presses down the accelerator even more and urges the Batcycle to go faster.  His son is calling to him, and he will not let him down.

One moment he is speeding through an expanse of desert, the next, everything turns white.

When he opens his eyes again, the world is black.  Blinking rapidly, he gradually begins to  make out a few silhouettes in front of him as his vision adjusts to the new shadows.  He lets himself be disoriented for a few seconds before he is automatically seeking, searching.  Against the dark of the space, the first spot of colour he sees is a striking splash of red, yellow and green.

Immediately, he reaches out.  

A wave of relief rushes through him as he grasps on to that sole piece of brightness in this desolate space.  To be able to feel the solid presence of his son by his side, the sensation is indescribable.  Ignoring the squeak of alarm Jason makes as he startles at the sudden contact, Bruce pulls Jason closer to him and the sound is swallowed by the shelter of his cape.

He can practically feel the fear leech out from Robin’s skin.  “B,” Jason sobs into his armour, “you’re here.”  Almost without thought, he feels his arms instinctively tighten around the boy and he tries to tamp down the similar crest of emotion swelling in his chest.  

“Jason, son, I’m so glad you’re safe,” he chokes out in a gruff voice before he manages to clear his throat.  They bask in the warmth of each other’s safety until reluctantly, Bruce pulls himself away.  As wonderful as this moment is, he has not forgotten the circumstances under which he has been reunited with his son.

Once he has sufficiently convinced himself that Jason is free from immediate danger, he is back on alert.  

Even without looking around too much, he knows exactly where he is.  There is only one place on Earth with a darkness as chilling yet comforting as this.  He’s in the Batcave.

His eyes narrow and sharpen on the figures in front of him, and he is acutely aware of the growing number of presences in the Cave, as well as the fact that not all of them are unfamiliar faces.  

The very opposite, in fact.

There is something quite chilling about seeing a copy of your own face staring back at you, down to the identical expressions of suspicion layered over deep mistrust.

Still, Jason’s body pressed against his is a comforting weight amidst a sea of uncertainty.  For creatures of instinct, it speaks volumes that when confronted by a room full of strange, threatening people, Jason’s first response is to lean into Bruce.  It is a precious gift indeed that to Jason, Bruce is still synonymous with safety.

With critical eyes, he assesses the rest of the occupants carefully.

In the time that he spent looking over Jason and reassuring himself, all of the unknown persons have retreated back into the shadows.  Not for the first time, he curses the deliberately dim lighting in the Cave.  It places him at a tactical disadvantage, missing those first few critical moments of observation, but he will never regret placing his son’s well-being first.  

At the very least, he remembers quite distinctly, in the first chaotic seconds when he and Jason were unceremoniously dumped into the Cave, having caught a glimpse of three figures before they faded away from sight.  A too-solid reflection of himself alongside two other well-built men.  One, a slim and lanky figure, the other, with a bulky, muscular frame.  For some reason, he thinks of the colours red and blue.

His hand itches to reach for a batarang, or something to protect himself but he refrains.  In such a dark and enclosed environment as the Cave, the chances of a ricochet are too high to risk.  He knows this, and if the similarities extend beyond appearances, his counterpart knows this as well.  Neither of them reach for a weapon.

Those three, he is fairly certain, were the only ones that had originally been in the Cave at the point of their arrival.  Since then, more children seem to have popped out of nowhere and trickled into the Cave, each one wearing their own specially coloured uniforms.  He has registered at least four new presences, from the rustling of boots on the ground to a near-imperceptible shift in the wind.  They move like Bats, he notes to himself.  He does not know if this revelation puts him more or less at ease.

Then, he feels a prickle at the back of his neck.  All of a sudden, the Cave feels ten degrees colder.  In the rafters above, the bats flutter their wings restlessly.  Stiffening instinctively, he scans the shadows even more intently.  

The flutter of a cape.  The glint of a polished boot.  A ripple runs through the colony above them.

There.  

If not for the faintest flash of yellow in the darkness, he might have missed it entirely.   There is new danger in the Cave, he knows.  The hunch is founded on nothing more than a feeling, but after years of acting as a vigilante in the most dangerous city in the world, he has learned to trust his instincts.  

Then, as quickly as it had tensed, the Cave settles.  Whoever just entered the room has stilled.  Finally, both sides seem ready to engage.  

“State your business,” the other man in the suit, in the cowl — him? — growls.  Bruce straightens instinctively.

“What’s going on, B?” Jason whispers with trepidation, tugging his side anxiously and it is all Bruce can do to pull him closer into his cape into a shielding embrace.  A wave of protectiveness surges over him.

“Don’t worry about it, Robin.  I’ll handle this,” he murmurs, just loudly enough for some of the tension to drain out of Jason’s shoulders.  True to his words, he fully intends to deal with this situation by himself and he will die before Robin is threatened by these strangers, even if one of them wears his face.

Drawing himself to his full height, he looks his counterpart straight in the eye and addresses him clearly.  

“I am Batman, vigilante protector of Gotham City, New Jersey.  With me is my partner, Robin.  The two of us did not intend to enter here and have no knowledge at this point of the circumstances surrounding our ...travel.  Nonetheless, we wish you no harm and request the same courtesy in return.”

After a brief, tense pause where they are looked over with a cryptic gaze, the other man nods in acquiescence.  If not for the fact that it is his own face and he is well aware of his tactics at maintaining his blank mask, he might have missed the brief flicker of respect that flashes under the stoic demeanour.

Like a switch has been flipped, the gesture of acceptance seems to signal to everyone else that it is safe to approach and engage the new visitors because they all begin cautiously stepping closer to them.

“Father?  Is that you?”

The first of them to step into the light is a young boy, who asks the question in a young, high voice, peering at him with poorly disguised hope.  As his features are slowly revealed, a sense of thrilling dread curls in his belly.  He then processes the words.  

Bruce chokes.

Father?  This is his son?

No, I’m not, he wants to say, but he takes a look at those arched brows, a familiar pair of dark eyes, all steely calculation on a familiar complexion of olive skin and he knows.  For all that Talia told him about their lost baby, there is no denying that this is his child.

Oh god, I have more children.

If he had to guess, he would place the boy around twelve years old, but granted, he hasn’t had much experience dealing with children despite his other-self’s apparent propensity for collecting them.  Looking at the way he watches, the way he stands, however, you never would have imagined that this was a child.  There is something far too cautious, far too jaded in his eyes to coexist with any sort of innocence.  He can infer from the other half of his son’s parentage where he might have acquired his behaviours from, but he thinks he would almost rather not know.  A child should never have to be that on guard.

Beside him, he feels Jason shift uncertainly but he knows that he can see the resemblance as well.  A thousand questions are ready to spill out from him but he finds himself unable to speak.  Helpless to do anything else, he lets himself stand there and gape.

The alternate Batman seems to take pity on him.  “I think some introductions are in order,” his counterpart states in a deep, bland tone.  “I am also the Batman of my world and we are presently in Gotham City, New Jersey as well.  I suspect that the cause of your arrival here has to do with some alien artefacts that were recently procured but we will have the opportunity to acquire more information later on.  While you are in our world, you will face no harm from us.”

Bruce nods in acknowledgement.  It is the courtesy he had hoped to receive, but one can never be too certain about where you end up when participating in involuntary dimension-hopping.  

“This is Damian, who currently holds the mantle of Robin,” other-Bruce says next, gesturing to the aforementioned boy.   Beside Bruce, his own Robin tenses.

Then, the other man shifts to indicate a new vigilante dressed in a red and black suit with a dark cape bisected to look like wings.  “That is Tim Drake, also known as Red Robin.”

The teen in question, a small figure with quiet, intelligent eyes (and quite likely a caffeine addiction and/or workaholic problem judging by the bags under his eyes and frequent twitching) gives a small wave.

The yellow-boy standing next to him shifts uncomfortably, seemingly realising that it is his turn to introduce himself.  “Uh, hi.  I’m Duke Thomas.”  “Oh yeah, and I go by Signal in the field,” he adds hastily.  Bruce nods his understanding and commits the name to memory.  

Next up is a pale, willowy girl with dark hair and dark eyes that have a fathomless depth to them. There is both a danger and a grace to her that Bruce would be a fool to disregard  

“Cass,” she says simply and that is that.  Silent but deadly, he notes.  “She goes by Black Bat,” Tim intones helpfully.

“Must be a lot to take in,” a cheeky-looking blonde girl comments.  “I’m Steph, or Batgirl, by the way,” she offers off-handedly, flashing a bright grin at them.

Her smile is one that Bruce returns automatically, because there doesn’t seem any other way to respond to her infectious energy.  He really has a lot of children.  He wonders where he picked them up from.  

“What I’m wondering though, is how you got here in the first place?”  The blonde girl, Stephanie, he remembers, asks curiously.  

He’s just about to shrug cluelessly when someone else interjects.   “I think I might have some idea about that,” a familiar figure in blue steps out sheepishly.

Bruce stops short.  The boy, no, man is older now and with longer hair but he knows that face, those eyes, that smile.  His face softens immediately.  That is his son.

It is a precious thing, to see him without the unease for once, not needing to be on edge.

In fact, even seeing Dick is a gift unto itself.  After their terrible argument that ended with Dick storming out of the manor, he wondered if he would ever see his son again.  If the last time he left the Cave, it would be for good.  

Every visit afterwards was a rare treat that he cherished dearly, even if he didn’t know how to express it.  Past the first rush of joy however, there was a growing sense of worry as well.  Regardless of whether Dick wanted it or not, Bruce was still his father, and he would never stop wishing for the best for his child.  On the few occasions that he did drop in from Blüdhaven, Dick vacillated between angry, tired and lost.   Compared to how he was then, he looks worlds apart.  No longer uncertain about his place in the world as he carves out his own identity, he looks settled in his skin.

I’m trying to make sure that you make something of yourself!

Well, he did.   Judging by the brilliant, radiant smile on his face, his son was successful at making something of himself.  He lets out a shaky laugh.  

His son is happy.  

“Dick?  Oh chum, you look so good,” he chokes out, meeting his eldest son’s eyes through the domino anxiously.  “Are… are you well?”

“Yeah, B,” he rasps, twisting his fingers around restlessly in the same nervous gesture he’s had since Bruce took him in all those years ago.  I’m… yeah, things are good.”

This Dick is healthy and confident and (dare he say it again?) happy, and he feels tears mist in his eyes.  This is all he’s ever wanted for his eldest child, and to see all of it come to life in front of him when the last conversation he had with his son ended in shouts and slammed doors and …  It is overwhelming, to say the least.

An awkward hush falls over the room as everyone pretends not to stare at the burst of emotion that even he can admit is uncharacteristic.  Ever the conversationalist, it is eventually Dick who takes the lead in breaking it, clearing his throat meaningfully.  

“So,” he starts, nervously wringing his hands together, “I guess you’re all wondering how all this happened…”

Bruce can’t help but let out a dry laugh at that.  “You think?” He deadpans, cocking one eyebrow at Dick, who reddens.

“Yeah, so um, long story short, I recently went on a mission to stop some aliens from trying to take over the world, you know, the usual stuff,” he babbles rapidly.  “And I brought back this time orb-thingy, which I guess someone accidentally knocked over or something, and next thing we know, the two of you appear!”

“Tada!”  He completes his explanation with shameless jazz hands.

Bruce blinks.  That is a ...surprisingly sensible account.  He takes the information easily in his stride; it’s not as if he hadn’t raised it as a plausible solution himself prior to Dick’s explanation after surveying his new environment.  There aren’t that many reasons why he would be transported to a bizarre similar-but-not-entirely-similar version of the Batcave and confronted with a slightly older doppelganger of himself and his son, after all. 

“By my best guess, since Jay’s here as well, you guys must have travelled at least five years into the future,” he says, a thoughtful expression coming on his face.  Bruce tilts his head in confusion.  Why at least five?  As if sensing his thoughts, Dick seems to panic, and hurriedly adds, “Or um, maybe six!  Yeah, just a rough estimation,” he ends off with awkward laughter. 

Bruce narrows his eyes in suspicion.  That was a rather odd remark.

He decides to dismiss it for the moment in favour of answering the unspoken question.  More clarity couldn’t hurt.

“Where we came from, the date was April 27th, 2008,” he offers instead.  “Jason and I were in Ethiopia when we were suddenly transported here.”

Instantly, it is like all the air has been sucked out of the room.  All of the people from the future pale at least two shades, and Dick looks vaguely sick.

“Why?  What’s going on?” He demands.

After a long pause and several not-at-all subtle glances exchanged, Dick’s body relaxes entirely and he lets out what is clearly forced laughter.  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he waves his hand dismissively.  Bruce can still see the undercurrent of tension running through his body.

Despite the obvious fact that something is going on, Bruce knows that nothing good will come out of pressing the issue for now, so he grudgingly chooses to accept that bald-faced lie, letting out a curt nod.  The rest visibly relax at his acceptance, and Bruce mentally files all the information he’s gathered away for later consideration.

In the silence that ensues, it is Jason who speaks up.

“So, you’re ...Dickiebird?”  He asks, peering up at his older, older brother, testing out the words cautiously.  At the all-too-familiar nickname, his teenage-son-who-has-now-grown-to-be-a-man, laughs wetly and tears off his domino to reveal a pair of bright blue eyes glistening with tears.

“Yeah, Little Wing, it’s me,” he answers kindly, face melting into a bright smile.  “Aw, look at you, I almost forgot how cute and tiny you were!”

Little Jason scowls at that, and lets out a few indecipherable grumbles at Dick’s cooing.  Bruce is too busy being amused to censure him for his language.  “So you did get rid of the Discowing suit then?  And the mullet too?”  Jason pipes up curiously.

Behind them, a low strangled laugh is choked out of the ominous, foreboding figure dressed all in red.  Until now, he has been silent, a dark, brooding presence lurking in the background.  Bruce has no background or information about the man, but years of honing and surviving by his instincts tell him unmistakably that this man is dangerous.

But he laughs, and the sound is much lower, and more gravelly, and is laced with an undercurrent of bitterness although that is still not enough to disguise the genuine humour in it and that is his son.

“Jason?” He asks tremulously, the hand on his own Robin’s shoulder tightening unconsciously.

“Yeah B,” the figure rasps, pulling off their helmet to reveal a strangely familiar face.  “It’s me.”

In an instant, the whole world picks up speed.  Something in him is falling, falling.

The face that was hidden under the hood is one that he has seen many times before, but with some distinct changes.  First and foremost, he is older, with the soft, youthful edges of his face having given way to hard, sharp planes.  Before knowing the identity of the man, Bruce had been struck by his impressive musculature, which closely resembles his more than anyone else’s.  There is an indisputable strength coiled up in his frame, along with an aura of power that screams danger.  Then, there is the clear age in his eyes, the spark of what little innocence and naiveté he had growing up on the streets long gone now, replaced by an unsettling flicker of something he cannot quite identify.  Most striking of all is the strange white streak in his otherwise black hair and the eerie shade to his eyes.  Snatching a quick look at the Jason standing next to him, he confirms that yes, both of those features are new.

This Jason has aged over the years, no doubt, but Bruce isn’t sure that he likes all of what he sees.  His Jason doesn’t seem to have the same reservations.

“Woah,” he breathes, jaw dropping as he takes in the hulking figure of his future self.  “Look, B!  I grow so big in the future!”  He exclaims, clear delight in his voice.

“You really do,” Bruce echoes softly, raking in the sight of his Robin all grown-up.  Five years has introduced a world of difference, that much is clear, and even with the drastic change in physicality, the most obvious difference is in the eyes.  There is an edge to his boy, a certain hardness to his expression that wasn’t there before, even when he had pulled an angry and combative twelve year old off the streets a while back.  This Jason is angry and scarred and holds a frightening amount of anger in his frame and Bruce feels like a failure.

And of course, there is the disturbing moniker that he’s chosen.  Why ‘Red Hood’, of all the names he could have picked?  He instinctively pulls up an image of a laughing clown and shudders as he pictures the Joker next to his son.  The two could not be more different.

The more he looks, the more he notices that concerns him.  A sinking pit begins to form in his stomach.  It is not lost on him the hostile stance this older Jason takes towards this timeline’s Bruce, nor the vicious glare that seems permanently etched on his face.  It is a far cry from the bright, playful boy he has by his side, and a pool of dread slowly fills.  

Oh my boy, what’s happened to you?

Older Jason turns defiant eyes on him in a clear challenge, his lip pulled back in a mocking snarl.  It hits him like a knife to the chest.  Then, as his gaze falls on the smaller figure of his younger self, the hostile exterior seems to fall away, and in its place, an almost tender expression surfaces.

“Hey mini-me,” he says gruffly.  “Yeah, I can confirm, we get a massive growth spurt somewhere down the line.”

Seemingly oblivious to the dark side that has emerged. his Jason bounces up excitedly at that.  “Oh yeah!  I’m gonna be so cool in the future!”  Then, he stops short, turning contemplative eyes to his older self.  “Do I need to start taking vitamins now or something?”

The harsh bark of laughter that older-Jason lets out sends shivers down Bruce’s spine.  He never wants to hear such a harsh sound from any of his children ever again.  “Nah, don’t worry about that.  We get something a little more potent than some vitamins,” he answers cryptically, and Bruce only hopes that he is imagining the sinister edge to his smile.

Seemingly alarmed by the sudden turn of the conversation, Dick hurriedly jumps in.

“Hey, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting a little confused about calling everyone ‘Old Bruce’ and ‘Young Jason’.  Any suggestions on nicknames to clear things up?”

Immediately, the room seems to thaw a little.  No one responds, but the silence doesn’t seem to faze Dick as he cheerfully carries on.

“Let’s take a leaf out of Dami’s book and go last names then!  How about it, Todd and Wayne?”

This gets a reaction.

“Tt, that makes them sound like a pair of bad sitcom stars,” Damian scoffs disgustedly.  His glare turns murderous.  “Besides, I’m not calling Red Hood ‘Jason’.”

Bruce furrows his brows in confusion.  Having to accept that there is another, alternate version of his son around is certainly bizarre, but now there are apparently more of them, and some of them speak like they are haughty eighty-year-old men.  In fact, the kid carries himself almost like a third-generation Mafia don.  Come to think of it, other than disturbing resemblance the child bears to him, Bruce wouldn’t be surprised if he were a mini-assassin who was accidentally sent to the wrong address during a botched mission and promptly scooped up by his future self.  Oh wait.  His mother is Talia.  That is a distinct possibility.

God, he thinks to himself with growing horror, I really do have a problem.

Dick laughs brightly, good mood not at all dampened by his younger brother’s obvious surliness.  

“Aw, don’t be like that, Lil’ D!” He laughs with good cheer, easily ignoring the angry protests that erupt at the nickname.  

“You can call him Jason, and call me Hood.  Dark Knight 2.0 over there can take Bruce, and our very own first edition can go by Batman.  He’s more Batman than Bruce nowadays anyway,” grown-up Jason snipes, and he sees his other self disguise a flinch. 

A pit opens up in his own stomach.  It had always been one of his worries, that he would be sucked in or overrun by his persona, that in the attempt to save the rest of Gotham, he would end up losing himself instead.  To know that this fear becomes true someday, well, it hurts.  But more than that, he worries about what that means for his children.

If he really is more Batman than Bruce one day, would they even still be his children, or just glorified child soldiers he sends marching to their deaths?

Surprisingly, Damian objects to the first part of Dick’s suggestion and not the second.  “I have no problems with your recommendation regarding Father’s manner of address, but let me clarify — I’m not about to call either of the Todds ‘Jason’.”

Yup.  Definitely an eighty-year-old man in disguise.  Note to self: try and remember the last time he slept with Talia.

Then, quiet, unassuming Tim pitches in with his two cents.  “You could keep calling our Jason ‘Todd’, and call the other Jason ‘Robin’, instead,” he offers ‘helpfully’.

Bruce doesn’t need to look at Tim’s face to know that there is a devilish grin there now.  Right on cue, Damian prickles.  “Never!  I am the one true Robin, as the most well-trained and skilled fighter of all.  This,” he looks over at them and sniffs, “inferior, street rat does not deserve to bear the name.”

At the same time that Dick cries out a horrified ‘Dami!’, his Jason frowns, and Bruce is immensely proud of him for not rising up to the blatant insult.  “Well I was Robin first, so I think I should have the rights to the name.”  Bruce silently agrees with that argument, but knows better than to further inflame tensions.

Even so, it doesn’t take long at all before Damian starts screeching.

Bruce has only been around the family for a few minutes, but even he can sense an explosive conflict brewing.  As if reading his thoughts, Dick skilfully defuses the situation and draws the conversation away to less contentious matters.  

“Actually, maybe it isn’t that hard to differentiate between the four of them!  In fact, it’s getting a little chilly in here, don’t you think?  Why don’t we head upstairs and talk in the Manor instead?” Dick suggests.  Still shooting death glares all around, Damian grudgingly nods, grumbling all the while.

Eager to escape the unsettling environment of a Cave which is not his own, Bruce agrees easily and the group begins to traipse up the stairs.  Behind him, he hears his counterpart gruffly instruct Dick and the older Jason to stay behind in order to research into the orb that brought all of this about.  He hasn’t had nearly as much time as he would like to learn about his sons who have now grown up, but he understands the need for them to hang back.  Still, he hopes that he might be able to speak to them later on.

As they ascend the stairs, he unconsciously begins running his fingers along the stone walls, cataloguing each bump and groove, trying to see what new holes and scratches have been added to their surface over the years.  For a moment, his eyes glaze over as he loses himself in the memories.

A feather-light touch on his skin quickly draws his attention back to the present.  “Hey B?” Jason prods his arm hesitantly and Bruce bends down to reach him more easily.

“I didn’t kill Garzonas,” he whispers quickly, and Bruce has to close his eyes in grief.  Is that what Jason has been so concerned about?

“I believe you,” he responds immediately, squeezing Jason’s hand reassuringly.  “I never should have accused you of it in the first place, and I’m sorry that I made you think that I don’t trust you.”

Jason’s relief is palpable, and painfully so.  “I’m sorry I said those things about you.  I’ve never regretted you adopting me and I’m so glad that you took me in that day, Dad.”

It is nothing that he does not already know but hearing the words from Jason directly is a sweet comfort.  

“I know, Jason.” and his heart swells.  “The day that I found you trying to steal my tires was one of the best days of my life.”

Jason frowns at this and tugs his hand.  “I didn’t try to steal them, I already got three off by the time you found me!”

Bruce just laughs.

JASON (15 YEARS OLD) 

All of the other kids are crowding around Bruce, staring at him with thinly-veiled curiosity.  To be fair, Jason was pretty fascinated by Bruce the first time he met him as well.  (Then again, he had been carted away in a dodgy kidnapping van by a man dressed in a bat-suit in the middle of the night, so he thinks he might be excused on that front.)

He doesn’t want to admit it, but knowing that his father figure went on and found so many other kids, knowing that he wasn’t enough, hurts.  Especially since all these other kids, they make sense with Bruce.  

The small, scowly one is the easiest.  Clearly, that one is Bruce’s biological child, whose blood ties him permanently to the Waynes.  

Then, there is the thin, scrawny boy, the one with the smart, intelligent eyes and clean Bristol accent.  In his few years as Bruce’s newly adopted son, he’s made his fair share of appearances at various galas and so he knows that name, the Drakes.  Knows that Tim is clearly one of Gotham’s elites in his own right, with an impressive pedigree and the good upbringing to match Bruce’s own. 

Not like street rat, thief, criminal Jason, who’s already gotten far more than he deserves.

The other three are harder to parse.  There’s the mouthy blonde, who comes into every room like a firework, all untamed energy and spark.  Her polar opposite: the silent, dark wisp of a girl whose eyes are deep and knowing.  Last of all, the quiet, contemplative boy dressed in a suit that is very ...yellow.  (Then again, he dresses up in green panties like a traffic light.  Although, he inherited those colours, so he thinks he gets a pass on that one.  At least older-him seems to have settled on a pretty cool and intimidating outfit.  And future-him is big. )

All of them speak with a familiar cadence that is all Narrows, and pure Gotham (at least, when they speak at all, that is — the Asian girl is a character of very few words, he’s learned), and the rhythms of his childhood sounds wash over him in comforting waves, putting him at ease.  If the faces of the Wayne household are changing this much in the future, he almost thinks that one day he could truly fit in there, rather than forever masquerading as a cheap imitation of what he is supposed to be.

But there is one difference.  The three of them might look the same, speak the same and act the same, but at the very core of them, they’re still good.  Which means they still fit nicely into the black-and-white, just world of Batman.  None of them were born angry, reckless, impulsive, vengeful like he was.  

He’s cleared up the Garzonas situation with Bruce as much as possible, and reconciled with him as well, but part of him knows that whatever peace has been forged is only temporary.  He will always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Every time he meets a drug dealer on the street selling their goods to kids barely out of elementary school, or sees the familiar faces of pot-bellied johns from his days on the street, he grits his teeth a little harder and counts down the days until Batman’s justice will just not be enough.  God knows he’s already come close enough to that before.

Back on the streets, when he wasn’t jacking tires or scrounging around for food, Jason would go to the library.  At first, it was just a safe place to stay.  Compared to the harsh streets of Crime Alley, the library was clean and warm and dry.  As long as he was quiet and respectful, the librarians were generally fine with him staying there for hours on end.  Some of them would even smile at him when they saw him.  He never intended to fall in love with reading, but there frankly wasn’t much else to do in a library other than read, and once he picked up a book, he was hooked.  

Reading became an escape, a doorway out of his hellish life into a world of hope.  Where he could dream of being more than what he was, of having a future.  He loved reading so much, he almost thought he might one day want to become a literature professor.   Wishful thinking, really.  It’s not like a homeless juvenile  criminal who dropped out in the third grade would ever be able to go to college.  For someone like Jason, there were really only three things he could have ended up as: a whore, a thug, or dead.  At the ripe old age of twelve, he has already been two out of three.

(Maybe with Bruce though, things could be differe—)

But that’s all besides the point.  Suffice to say, Jason reads a lot.  So he knows that a common theme in literature is the concept of nature versus nurture.  Whether a child’s fate is determined by their parentage, or their upbringing.  Although it features quite prominently in many of the books he reads, the debate has never quite mattered to Jason.  After all, he was screwed on both fronts.  Regardless of which stance you took, Jason never quite had a chance.  

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree — Willis Todd was a no-good criminal lowlife, and Catherine was a drug addict.  Is it any surprise that Jason is rotten to the core?

You are what you eat — well, Jason had been eating out of the dumpster since he was three years old.

At the end of the day, it is simple enough.  The rest might have been born into their situations, but Jason is a product of it.  He has Crime Alley in his veins, and more than just righteous anger in his blood.  Bruce might have adopted him and taken him in as his son, but Jason’s true father will always be the one he becomes.  There is no room in Batman’s world for street trash like him.

And so, he can’t help but feel the slightest bit insecure and put-out that in the future, he finds himself having to compete with a whole new brood of children, on top of the Golden Boy as well, for the love and attention he almost believed he had to himself.  

Still, Jason is a fighter, who grew up brawling and scrapping for everything he’s ever owned, so he knows that you never let a good thing go without fighting your hardest for it.  And Bruce has been the best thing that’s ever happened to him, so you better believe that he will go down swinging for him.

Scowling lightly, he places himself in front of Bruce and narrows his eyes at the other kids in clear challenge.  Surprisingly, none of them bar the small-angry-one — and even then, he seems to always be angry anyway, so who cares? — return his gaze with any hostility.  In fact, they almost seem ...intrigued.

Un surprisingly, it is the chatty blonde who speaks up first.

“So,” she drawls, “how are you finding the future?”

He blinks.  This is not quite how he expected the discussion to go.  “It’s fine, I guess,” he shrugs.  “Kinda weird seeing all these new kids that B picked up.”

The girl, Stephanie, smirks.  “Yeah, he’s got a bit of a thing about collecting strays.”

Despite himself, Jason giggles.  It’s hard not to like such a genuine personality, and her brash, unfiltered humour speaks straight to his own.  As much as he loves them, Bruce and Alfred aren’t the most ...uninhibited conversationalists, so it’s refreshing to meet someone who speaks their mind just like he does.

She brightens at his smile.  “Anyway, tell me something about yourself!  I’m dying to know some juicy details about the past and grown-up you isn’t nearly as talkative as you are,” she gushes.  A thoughtful look comes over her face.  “Hey, wasn’t it your birthday a while back?  Why don’t you tell us what you did then?”  

He looks up in surprise.  “You know when my birthday is?”

“Yeah, it’s August 16th,” the Drake boy answers automatically, seemingly without thinking.  Jason startles a little at how quick the response was, and Tim’s face immediately flushes with colour.

“Of course we do,” Steph scoffs.  “You’re our brother after all, and besides,” a devilish grin spreads over her face as she turns her head towards Tim, who squeaks in alarm.  “Timberly here,” she continues, nudging him in the stomach with her elbow, “knows all about you because he used to follow you arou—”

He doesn’t get to hear the rest of her sentence because she is rapidly tackled by Timberly (Jason mouths the name in wondrous amusement) who flings a hand out to cover her mouth, eyes darting in panic.  They tussle on the floor for a bit and Jason swears he hears someone shriek “no biting!” in the chaos.

“You swore you wouldn’t say—”

“I did no such thing!”

Bruce stares at the pair grappling on the floor with wide eyes but the rest seem unconcerned so Jason just shrugs.  No one seems in any danger of mortal injury anyway.  From what he’s heard from Steph so far, he’s got a pretty good idea of what she was going to say and isn’t sure if he necessarily wants to hear the rest.  (It was a little creepy.  But also kind of flattering.  If anyone asks, he will eternally deny blushing.)

Cass steps up next, bringing the rest of the group back on track.  “You.  Brother,” she states simply, poking him decisively in the chest.

Something in him flutters at that.  For all he has thought about losing Bruce, he never quite considered what he might gain instead.  He clenches his fists with slight trepidation.

“So you’re my big sister?”  He peers up at her hopefully.

A wide smile breaks out across her face and she nods eagerly.  “Yes.  Little brother,” she declares proudly, beaming all the while.

He grins back at her, a bright thrill spiralling up his spine.  

“So, what did I miss?”  Just in time, a breathless Stephanie pops up from the floor, casually dusting herself off.  Behind her, he sees Tim stagger to his feet, and ...is he missing a few tufts of hair…?

Jason decides that he’d rather not pursue that line of thought.  He makes a mental note to not mess with scary blonde girls in the future.  “Uh… not much.”

Then he remembers what they were talking about before and his face falls.  “About my birthday,” he scratches the back of his head uncomfortably.  An image of Garzonas’ smiling face flashes through his mind.  “We were going through some ...stuff, at the time,” he sees Bruce wince—

“I’m benching Robin.” 

“—So we didn’t really do much to celebrate…”

A brief silence lapses as his eyes glaze over with the memories but then feelings of warmth and laughter and family suddenly surface and he cannot help the grin that spreads across his face. 

“Oh!  We went out bowling for B’s birthday a while back—”  He starts, but doesn’t make it far before he’s interrupted.  

“Wait, you know his birthday?”

“Batman goes bowling??”

“...who won?”

He blinks.  “Yes, I know B’s birthday,” he says slowly, forming the word carefully while looking cautiously at the rest.  The sudden onslaught of questions was unexpected, to say the least.  “Um, well, he went out as Bruce who is Batman so I guess Batman does go bowling, and Alfred won, duh.”

“What about his favourite food?”

“Does he have any hobbies besides brooding and pretending to be a ditzy playboy?”

“Does Batman actually like bats?”

The questions pour out in a never-ending flood of chatter and by the end of it, Jason is feeling slightly overwhelmed.  Hell, even Bruce doesn’t look like he knows the answers to all those questions.  

Brows furrowing, Bruce looks at them with a mildly constipated expression.

“Don’t you already know this stuff?  You’re five years ahead of me, so shouldn’t you know better than me about, well, me?”

They all exchange glances.  An uncomfortable beat passes before Stephanie speaks up sheepishly.

“Ah yeah, our Bruce isn’t the most ...communicative or open about his life…”

Jason frowns.  Sure, he gets Bruce isn’t the most pro-sharing of all people, but certainly in five years he must have told his children or adjacent-children something about himself?

Then again, he thinks about the grim man downstairs who is supposed to be his father, the man who does not smile and Jason does not recognise him.

What happened, Bruce?

As his thoughts swirl rapidly on the subject, he absent-mindedly watches Bruce continue interact with the rest of the group.  In either of his personas, Bruce’s social skills land at a solid ‘awkward’, and it is no different when confronted with a group of curious, probing children.  Still, he meets their questions with an admirable spirit.  Mostly, he sounds confused but Jason can hear the smile in his voice.

A brief spark of jealousy flares in him but he quickly tamps it down once more.  Somehow unconsciously sensing the new worries in his mind, Bruce reaches a hand back to rest on his shoulder.  Jason relaxes.  

He hasn’t been forgotten.

This isn’t a competition and there’s no need for him to feel possessive over his father.  If there’s one thing he’s certain about Bruce, it’s that as much as he struggles to show it, his heart is big enough for plenty of children to share.

Besides, it would be nice to have some more siblings.

While he’d been born an only child, back on the street, he was always surrounded by other children who were also just trying to survive like him, and had also come to think of many of the working girls who slipped him an extra blanket when it got cold as sisters.  Fond memories rush through his mind, filling his chest with warmth.  Playing cards behind the old Chinese restaurant with a crappy deck of cards one of the kids had scavenged from the dumpster.  Learning how to store his extra food in a tin to prevent the rats from getting into it from some of the older street kids.  They didn’t have much, but they had each other, and they were almost like a big family.  Maybe Jason can have another one again.

His and Dick’s relationship had started out frosty, the older boy angry and hurt that his family’s colours had been given to some strange new kid without being asked about it ( seriously B!), but it had been improving lately.  Just a few weeks ago, Dick had stopped by when a mission in Bludhaven had brought him back to Gotham and the two of them had gone out for ice cream.  Dick even taught him how to do a triple somersault that day!

Anyway, even if it didn’t work out with the two of them, more siblings would mean more people to chat with around the Manor, where despite how much he loved Alfred’s company, it sometimes did get a little lonely there.  And younger siblings meant that he would have the chance to be the big brother this time, and he would be the best big brother ever!  He just hoped at least one of them liked reading classic books too. 

(Surely one of the five new kids would be a Jane Austen fan as well …?)

From a distance, he watches the group banter with each other happily and something in his chest unclenches.  He’s pulled back to the present moment when Duke looks at him eagerly and asks, “Got any more interesting stories we should know?”

In that moment, he thinks that maybe it isn’t so important for him to go and find his birth mother anyway.  Bruce has proven to him time and time again that blood doesn’t matter to family, and so had Catherine, who raised him with love and compassion despite knowing clearly that he was not her biological son.  Maybe with these new people around him, he could do the same.

Shaking his head slightly to dispel all these heavy thoughts, he recovers quickly and offers a wicked grin back to Duke.  It only widens when he sees Bruce try and fail to hide his wince.  “Did I tell you about the time that B and I were at the zoo and…”

If this is his future, he can’t wait to grow up soon.

BRUCE (39 YEARS OLD)

When he follows Dick and Jason, his Jason, he corrects, deeper into the Cave, he leaves the other man upstairs, surrounded by the gaggle of children he had collected over the years.  The last glimpse he had caught of his face showed a clearly bewildered expression, unsurprising given the sudden onslaught of unfamiliar faces accosting him with questions, but above that, an easy, happy smile that he has not seen on his own face in years.

Five years.

Has it really only been that long?  The other Bruce’s hair is still clear of his streaks of gray, and his face is free from the seemingly permanent shadows that have plagued his own.

The distant sound of laughter echoes down into the Cave from upstairs and his jaw tightens.  He wonders what they’re discussing that has everyone in such high spirits.  It’s been a very long time since he has heard many of his children laugh.  Somewhat irrationally, he feels a burst of irritation towards his other self.  What is he doing that makes them so happy?

He hadn’t missed the way that the former-or-current Robin had walked steadily by his younger counterpart’s side, keeping tightly to his father’s figure with all the posture of someone who believed his dad to be invincible.  Had his Jason once trusted him the same way too?

Flicking a glance at the children who are by his side, he frowns as he registers their matching stony expressions.  How long has it been since he last saw them smile?

He loves his sons, he does.  If that powerful swell in his chest is not love, he does not know what is.

He had never imagined a life full of children for himself, but somehow he had ended up with just that.  He cannot bring himself to regret a single one, except for what he has done to them. 

Bruce thinks of his oldest child, his first son, the original Robin.  He doesn’t tell him nearly enough, but he is proud of the man Dick has become.  Dick has always been a dreamer, a bright, endlessly cheerful child with boundless joy and hope and optimism.  Bruce has only just started to realise that he has never quite understood his son.  Unlike Dick, he has never had the ability to easily connect with others, or brighten a room just with his smile.  Dick has a magic in him that allows him to fly, while Bruce’s feet have always been firmly planted on the ground.  

Dick was never meant for college, for the corporate life, for becoming a carbon copy of Bruce.  He had always been more special than that.  Bruce only wishes he had seen that earlier.

In his futile efforts to tether his son to the earth, to safety, to him, he had unwittingly been preventing his bird from soaring.  It wasn’t until the tension and distance between the two of them snapped the string that he discovered that he had been using their relationship as a chain.  The moment Dick had turned eighteen, he had flown away from Bruce.  

It never occurred to him that his son might have wanted to come back of his own accord.  Now, he sees how loving and caring Dick is as an older brother, as a hero, as a son, and he realises his error.

Out of everything, his biggest mistake was not trusting his son to fly back home on his own.

Jason was different.

Jason had always been marked by suffering.  As callous as it is to say, his second son’s life has been a series of misery after misery, and he was a fool to think that he could end that cycle.  From a deadbeat father, to a loving mother ripped away too soon because of a poisonous addiction, to the streets, then to an excruciating, fiery death.  Jason came out of every inferno with more tenacity and resilience than Bruce could imagine.  Fate had brushed Jason’s life with suffering, but he had chosen to define himself by his strength.  

Through the Lazarus Pit, then betrayal, he had continued to endure.  Pain was a constant companion to Jason, but he weathered it with a grace that never fails to leave Bruce breathless with wonder.  The last thing he wanted to do was to add on to that hurt, but even so, he found himself starring as the antagonist to Jason’s hero all too often.  

His son had suffered far more than he deserved, and he deserved the world.  Bruce only wishes he could tell that to Jason, or that Jason could see it himself.  

Oh Jaylad, how did we get here?  Where did it all go wrong?

There is an obvious answer to that question.  

When his son had laid half-buried under rubble, lungs crushed by the weight of the crumbling warehouse on top of him or maybe by the weight of his own shattered bones.  Still gasping for breath, although no air ever reaches his lungs.  His heart lets out a few stuttering beats even as the trauma and smoke inhalation had already stopped his brain.  

(At that time, he had dug wildly through the debris for the slightest hint of his missing son, screaming indistinctly all the while.  When he finally managed to pull that broken, ruined body from under a slab of stone, he knew that he was already too late.  Bruce decided then that he would never be happy or whole again.  Cradling the limp, bloodied form of his son, something in his chest cracked.  The world dissolved into a blur of screams.

Now, when he thinks back on this scene in the seclusion of the Cave, replaying the memory of when he first stumbled upon this nightmare, this time with the benefit or torture of infinite time, Bruce thinks about the foolish resilience of the human body.  How it does not know to quit even when there is no more hope for life.  Dying, like the rest of Jason’s life, had not been an easy process.  He screams and rages at the injustice of the world but regret is a worthless currency.)

Or maybe it was already too late when Jason boarded a plane to Ethiopia.  Or when Bruce told him that he wasn’t good enough to be Robin.  Or when Batman found a sullen, spunky child stealing his tires and decided to give him a home.

At the very least, he was absolutely certain that it had all gone wrong at the point where he was lowering a fifteen year old into the ground.

But then his son came back.  Risen from the grave, clawing his way back to life, his miracle child.  His second chance. 

But Jason hadn’t come back to him.  He came back hurt and angry and a killer.  Everything had gone wrong in ways he never had thought of before.  Even compared to when he was six feet under, Jason had never seemed so far away from him.  

Bruce has always believed that killing was unacceptable because it was too final, too destructive.  Of everyone he knows, Jason has come the closest to changing his mind.  Not because he agrees with his reasoning, or point of view, because he doesn’t — he still maintains that no one person should decide to appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner — but because of what refusing to kill has done to their relationship.  

He once thought that Jason’s death would be what ruined their bond. The final nail in the coffin, he can almost imagine Jason saying with a sardonic grin.  A fond smile flickers its way onto his face.  (At times like this, he sometimes almost thinks that all is not lost.)  

In the end, there were worse things to come.

That terrible night, on the roof, with Jason and the Joker and an ultimatum.  A batarang in the throat, a heartbreaking look of betrayal, an irreversible choice.  A wrong choice. In times of pressure, he has always been quick to respond.  He needs to be, in his line of work.  But years of working alone and in the shadows had coloured his world black and white.  He only realises what a mistake that was when he saw the horrifying sight of two grisly red smiles staining the night sky.  One on the unnaturally pale face of his greatest enemy, the other on the throat of his greatest regret.  He created another one when he chose to pull the wrong person from the rubble.

Up until that point, he thought there still might have been a chance.  Truth be told, he doesn’t think that Jason’s grievance is truly about his stance on killing.  

The reason he doesn’t kill is because it is too easy to kill and once you start, you wouldn’t be able to stop.  

He says it often enough, because it’s true.  It is a quaint little truism that sounds wise and righteous when he says it, but when he digs down into what it reveals, there is only shame.  When he says that once you start killing, you wouldn’t be able to stop, what he really means, is that he wouldn’t be able to stop.  

It is less a universal moral statement than an indictment of his own moral failings.  Falling down a slippery slope is only a concern for those who do not have firm ground to stand on.  

After all, Jason managed to do it.  Even in the midst of his Pit Madness, when he was driven half out of his mind by the need for violence and vengeance, he had clear lines that he did not cross.  The only people he killed were rapists, child traffickers and those so incorrigibly evil that they couldn’t be stopped any other way.  Looking at Red Hood’s kill list, there is not a single name there that Bruce can say did not deserve to die, or left the world worse off with their death.  

The truth is, the problem is that Bruce doesn’t have enough moral fibre to know right from wrong without the clearest, most uncompromising boundaries.  At the end of the day, there is one big reason why Jason cannot come home, and the problem is Bruce.

That should have been the end of it.  Any other sane person would have seen that horrible action and decided to leave Gotham, cut ties with the family for good, save themselves from more misery.  

But not his stupid, beautiful, brave, incredible son.  

No, Jason decided to continue to subject himself to the unending torment of his capricious father’s treatment.  Gotham is his home and the people of Crime Alley are his to protect.  He shields himself in biting words and acerbic tones, but never does enough to protect himself from more hurt.  Doesn’t understand that he is worth so much more than what the world has given to him.  

Jason, my boy, haven’t you suffered enough?

As the Pit Madness began to fade, Jason slowly drew closer to the family, but still, a chasm of five years and far too many mistakes lay between them.  He would describe it almost as torture, having his son so close yet still just out of reach, but he knows that he has no right to claim any pain in this instance, having been the cause of so much of it.

He in no way deserves any of Jason, but he cannot stop himself from wanting.  He is a billionaire after all, so he knows all too well that some people just have far more than they should.  It is an evil, twisted thing to prey on, but part of him still hopes that Jason’s history of pain will allow him to forgive even all of Bruce’s failings as a parent.  Above all, Jason is fiercely loyal, and strong, and has known more anguish in his short life than any one person should have to bear.  If anyone has a big enough heart and enough fortitude to give him another chance, it is Jason.  

A good man, a good father, would tell his son to love himself enough to run, or better yet, be the one to leave Gotham.  Bruce hates that he is too weak to do that.  Jason will pay the price for his avarice.

The thought causes him more sorrow that he can handle.  And as always, when things become difficult, he pushes the guilt away and focuses on what he can do.  He drags his attention back to the monitor.

“Are you absolutely sure?”  He pauses.  “Yes, alright, thank you for looking into this, Zatanna.”

He hangs up the phone and pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to stave off the incoming migraine.  There is a pounding in his skull and it is from more than just his headache.  He’s spoken to all the magic practitioners and experts in alien artefacts he can think of, from Zatanna to Constantine — and wasn’t that a conversation he never wants to have again — he even called up Flash, who had been the one to deal with the Dokris the first time round, on the off chance that he might have some insight into the workings of the orb or this specific brand of time travel.

All of them arrive at a conclusion he refuses to accept.

The matter of sending the two time travellers back to their period is a simple one.  The orb was meant to quickly send beings back and forth between timelines, after all.  

The bigger issue is what happens after that.

Clenching his fists, he turns his attention back to the Batcomputer and resolves to do another search.

All of a sudden, Jason stands up, chair sliding back with the force of his movement.  Throwing his hands up in the air, he whirls around to level a ferocious glare at both him and Nightwing. 

“Why are we even bothering with this?  We all know what needs to happen.”

Despite all of his guilt and remorse on how he has been treating his son, his temper is always the first to act and Jason is uncannily skilled at provoking it.  

“Well what do you want us to do then?  Just roll over and accept it?” He snaps.

“It’s what you did the last time, isn’t it?” Jason spits out, and the scorn in his voice cuts deep into Bruce’s heart.

“That’s not what happened at all, Little Wing, please—” Dick tries but is quickly cut off by a dismissive wave of Jason’s hand.  As usual, Jason hides his hurt with bitterness.

“Hey no, really, it’s no big deal!  Just cry a few tears, buy a luxury coffin or two, then erect a neat little memorial for your poor, fallen soldier.  Don’t worry, you’ll find a replacement before my body cools,” he laughs lightly and there is pure venom in his voice.

“Not like it matters anyway, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  After all, you know what they say, can’t wash the scum off the alley!  There really was no other outcome for me,” he shrugs in a what-can-you-do sort of way.  

Bruce wants to protest but the words are trapped in his throat.  Jason carries on, unbothered by their silence.

“It’s alright, I’ll just let the kid know what’s coming.  It’s not a big deal, really.  This house is full of ghosts,” he says before letting out a twisted smirk.  “What’s one more to add to the collection?”

There are so many things that he needs to say, but at this moment, he just feels so tired.  There is a bone-deep weariness in him, and he is on the brink of giving up.  “We’re trying, Jay.  What do you want from us?”

“What I want?  What I want?”  Jason laughs darkly, and the sound, all too reminiscent of a sadistic, eerie grin and a duffel bag dripping with red, sends shivers down his spine.  “I want nothing from you,” he hisses.

Jason is on a roll.  Bruce readies himself for the fallout.  Even then, he is still not prepared for what comes out of Jason’s mouth.

“What I wanted was to not be beaten to death with a crowbar by a deranged clown in a broken-down warehouse in Ethiopia, to not have woken up in my own coffin only to be called a monster by my family! ”  Jason shouts, all the pain and agony he experienced wrapped up in his voice.  “What I wanted was to live to see my sixteenth birthday!”

Bruce stares back, stricken.  Each word Jason speaks feels like it is carving a piece out of his chest.  “Jay-lad, I’m sorry,” he begs, his voice full of grief.  “I would do anything if it meant that you wouldn’t have died that day.”

Jason laughs once more.  “Yeah?  That’s a bald-faced lie if I’ve ever heard one.  There is one thing you could do, one easy little thing that would end with all the people of Gotham sleeping a little easier tonight, make the world a better place, made sure your teenage son wouldn’t have died a horrific death.”

Bruce knows what is coming.  

“Kill the Joker.”

Jason waits for a mocking beat and when he’s greeted by a struggling silence, only rolls his eyes.  “That’s what I thought.  See, for all your big talk about being willing to do anything to save your children, we all know now that that’s a lie.”

Once more, Bruce feels like the air has been sucked out of his lungs.

“Anything but that, Jay, please,” he tries hopelessly.

“No.  You’ve had your chances.  Now there’s nothing that we can do anymore, so let’s go join the rest of them for a nice family meal, shall we?”

His smile is like daggers as he waves a perfunctory hand towards the staircase and Bruce feels his heart cleave in two.

DAMIAN 

With the two visitors entertaining the group with a steady stream of anecdotes, the hours pass by quickly.  Damian was certainly too mature to be amused by many of the more juvenile tales about pranks and other antics like Brown and Drake were, but he did appreciate learning more about his usually distant father, and even about Todd.  It was ...strange, to say the least, seeing such light and carefree expressions on their usually scowling faces, but he had soon come to welcome the change.  

All too soon, their time is cut short as Todd-the-elder comes storming up the stairs, Grayson and Father trailing gravely behind him.  Damian narrows his eyes and resolves to investigate the findings that have brought such sombreness to them later.  Unfazed by the sudden gloominess that descended over the room, Pennyworth swiftly interjects and ushers them to the dining room for dinner.  

Wisely, Brown, Cain and Thomas decide to flee the Manor with rushed excuses about upcoming college exams and pre-arranged meetings with Oracle to get to.  Ten minutes into the meal, Damian wishes he had the foresight to slip away as well.

Grayson tries to keep up the good mood with light jokes and puns but of all the siblings, he has never been truly skilled at deception and there is no disguising the strained quality to his smile.

Even their guests have apparently picked up on the undercurrent of tension running through the room, because alternate-Father and young Todd have been pushing their food restlessly around their plates despite Damian knowing full well that the meal is perfect as usual, with Pennyworth’s efforts.  

Finally, it seems that the building pressure has gotten to be too much and young Todd has had enough.  Standing up abruptly, his chair falls back with a clatter that has everyone’s eyes instantly darting toward him.  “What’s going on here?” He yells, face bright red with frustration and worry.  From under the table, his fists are clenched tightly, and Damian can see that his knuckles have gone bright white.

Brash and impulsive as always, part of him wants to sniff, but given the circumstances, Damian cannot bring himself to censure the former-current-Robin for his discomfort.  Despite his scowl, there is only a weak attempt at malice on young Todd’s face.  It is strange, almost unnatural, to see such innocence and softness shining through Todd’s features.

“Oh Little Wing, it’s nothing,” Grayson tries to laugh it off nervously, reaching out a comforting hand to ruffle his hair or perform some other superfluous gesture of affection no doubt, but Damian can hear the unease in his tone clear as day.  And so can young Todd.

Sure enough, the blatant denial sets him off even more and he expertly dodges Grayson’s hand, rushing to the corner of the dining room with his back facing the wall.  Positioning himself in a defensible location, ready to fend off threats, his mind absently supplies.

Triggered by his obvious and jarring spike of fear, Todd’s Bruce immediately stands up and follows in his tracks.  That Bruce overtly moves to place a gentle hand on his Jason’s shoulder, seemingly in an effort to soothe away his worries, which could very well be the case, Damian concedes, but he also notices the subtle way that Bruce shifts his body in front of Jason, shielding the young boy from the rest of the room’s view.

Just as quickly, Grayson rises as well, drawing his hands up in a well-practiced gesture of placation, hunching his large body to deliberately present less of a threat.  His mouth is moving slowly, forming a chain of words that Damian cannot discern over the roaring in his ears.

At the table, Hood continues eating like nothing has happened, the rhythmic clinking of his utensils against the plate endlessly testing the hair-trigger of Damian’s patience.  Beneath the supposed calm, Damian can detect the faint tremor running through his body.

Across from him, Drake has gone completely still, but after years of living and fighting together, he knows not to mistake the sudden glint in his eyes for anything less than the analytical, calculating gaze it represents.

Father doesn’t move.  Anything he is feeling at the moment is shrouded by an all-too-familiar mask of apathy and the blankness in his expression makes Damian want to scream.  You’re our father, do something, damn you!

All he does is clutch the knife in his palm a little tighter.

The room is at an impasse, and a dangerous energy coils underfoot, ready to unfold at any point.

The tension proves to be too much.  Finally, someone cracks.  

He is surprised to find that it is him.

“You died.”

The words bubble over in a torrential downpour, and once he begins to unload all of the secrets he has been harbouring, they spill out like sand.

“You died,” he repeats and watches as everyone instantly stiffens.  “And you came back but you came back killing people and things are different now and everyone knows it but no one wants to say it.”

Drake instinctively brushes a non-existent lock of hair out of his face, an action Damian has come to recognise as a nervous tic.  Grayson swallows nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing  in his throat, but Damian pays them no mind.  Father is still sitting down.  Damian’s eyes are only on two people.

Although he has a surprisingly large frame of reference regarding people being made aware of their impending death, he still does not know what to expect.  It could go anywhere, from a hysterical screaming match to placid, resigned acceptance and Damian does not know which end of the spectrum would be more frightening to see.

Young Todd lets out a heartbreaking whine that conveys the sheer terror he feels at the moment.  It is the type of sound a child might make, a desperate, last-ditch effort to beg someone not to hurt them.  Damian has been the direct cause of such intense fear in others countless times before, but somehow this time, even if he is merely a messenger of unfortunate news, it feels worse than ever before.

Bruce is another image of misery.  Between fear, disbelief and overwhelming grief, he is a picture of warring emotions even as mounting horror spreads across his face.  He turns a ghostly pale, a sickening chalky white that seems to suck all the colour out of the room along with it.

“What?” He whispers hoarsely.

Damian has never seen his father cry before, but he thinks that might change today.

“What happened to him?  Jason would never…” He trails off, looking lost in the conversation, as if he cannot imagine a world where his beloved Robin would go rogue and become an enemy that needed to be put down.  For as much tragedy as he has seen, Bruce at this stage of his life has not yet endured all the hardships the world has to offer.

Still, it doesn’t take long for the realisation of what must have happened to hit.  Bruce turns to Older Todd shakily, visibly assessing him with a critical eye and Damian can see the moment when it all comes together for him as his eyes come to rest on that white streak in Jason’s hair and the unnaturally green tint to his eyes.

Lazarus Pit, he breathes, with a dawning sense of horror.

Bruce speaks the words just as he forms them with his lips and the chill that settles over the room is unmistakable.  

As he comes to terms with that revelation, Bruce slowly turns towards Father.  

“Where were you?  Why was he going through any of this alone?  How could you just turn your back on your son like that?”

The outrage as well as the accusation in his voice is clear.

“It wasn’t so simple,” Father snaps back defensively.  “You don’t understand.  He came back wrong.”

The other man rears back like he’s been slapped.

“How can you say something like that?  He’s Jason,” Bruce cries, distraught.  Although Damian has come round to accepting the presence of another version of his Father, the sheer amount of emotion captured in what is still his Father’s voice briefly takes his breath away.

(It is impossible not to notice the obvious triumph that Hood feels at Father’s own counterpart, his past self, articulating all of the very same grievances he held so deeply, but to his credit, he does not crow about it.  

Perhaps the tight clenching of Father’s jaw is enough to satisfy him for now.)

“He was killing people.  He brutally attacked Tim and tried to wage a gang war in Crime Alley!”  Father roars, and although he has been feigning nonchalance the entire time, even Hood flinches at the pure rage in his voice.

“He was your son,” Bruce repeats stubbornly, as if that alone is meant to explain everything.  Perhaps it is.  

Family is ...meant to be there with you, through everything, he remembers Grayson once telling him haltingly, back when he was new to the manor and love was an unfamiliar concept.

He never quite understood it when his brother said it then and now he thinks he is even more confused than before.  Is everything truly redeemable?  Does everyone have a second chance?

“He was going mad and slaughtering people by the dozens!  He needed to be stopped,” Father shoots back, uncowed.  “I swore to protect Gotham from anyone who threatened her, and if the Red Hood refused to abide by my rules, I had to put him down.”

“He’s your son!” Bruce cries, horrified.  “How could you do that to him?” 

At those simple, naive words, Damian closes his eyes and his heart aches.  He yearns for a time when merely being family was enough to fix everything.  If only things were that easy.

Father just stares back sternly, unmoved by the argument.  Sensing that their discord will bring them nowhere, Bruce lets out a resigned sigh and almost seems to deflate where he stands.

“Fine, fine,” he hisses one last angry breath through his teeth, throwing his hands up in the air.  “Let’s table this discussion for another time.  What’s done is done.  Now, why don’t we focus on what we can change?  If you’re right about this, Jason and I will be returning to our time period in just a few hours so we need to concentrate on how we can make sure he doesn’t die this time.”

Oh no.

Despite the apparent olive branch being offered, Bruce’s face, if possible, grows even colder at the new topic.  Behind him, Grayson’s face shutters as an ocean of grief surges in him with the knowledge of what is to come.  Immediately, the tentative, superficial smile slides off Younger Bruce’s face as his expression grows suspicious.

“What’s wrong?  Why are you all looking at me like that?”  

The weighted atmosphere is not lost on him and in the face of their continued silence, his face grows stormy.  “Tell me the truth, damn you!” He snarls and there is a dangerous edge to his voice.

Unsurprisingly, Grayson is the one to cave first.  He lets out a shaky breath before plastering on a false smile and adopting his trademark diplomatic tone, the one he uses to comfort victims and break bad news to loved ones.  In this case, Damian thinks, it is probably fitting.

As it stands, the only thing his conciliatory approach achieves is to put Bruce, who responds to this perceived coddling about as well as can be expected, further on edge.  In the end, it seems that the two Bruces are not that dissimilar after all.

He bristles, prompting Grayson to wince before hurriedly commencing with the demanded explanation.  Taking another moment to steel himself, he raises haunted blue eyes up to meet the gaze of his father from another time.  

“I’m sorry Bruce,” he says gently but firmly, “but we can’t afford to disrupt the timeline, so you and Jason are going to have to return to your time period and carry out your future exactly as it happened here, no matter the costs.”

“You’re lying.”  The response comes immediately.  

Grayson’s eyes are sympathetic and sorrowful at the same time.  “I’m not.  We’ve researched this extensively and spoken to countless magic practitioners.  They all say the same thing: we cannot change the past.”

Once Bruce overcomes his denial, it quickly turns to anger.

“How can you expect me to just stand by and do nothing, knowing what’s going to happen?  What kind of father would I be?”

He does not turn to Father, but he doesn’t need to.  The unspoken accusation is clear.  What kind of father were you?

Damian suspects this is a question Father has asked himself countless times before.  He has yet to arrive at a satisfactory answer.

“And- and I know he comes back, but he suffers so much and we lose him," Bruce babbles on, his voice verging on hysterical.

All Grayson can do is restate the words once more, as if they are anything other than the cold comfort they appear to be.  “I’m sorry Bruce,” he repeats quietly.

Once again, Damian is reminded of how much respect he has for his oldest brother, who sometimes holds the weight of the world on his shoulders but never fails to do what needs to be done, still keeping the light in his eyes all the while.

Damian grew up with the League of Assassins, where the Lazarus Pits were much more than a myth.  He had been raised with the knowledge of a centuries-old legacy that would one day be his to bear, under a patriarch for whom immortality was far closer than a distant dream.  As a result, the concept of time travel is hardly a foreign or even unfamiliar one to him, so he knows that Father and Grayson are correct when they say the past cannot be changed lest it jeopardises the present.  

He also knows that hope is a dangerous thing, but part of him still desperately wants for them to be wrong.  For all of the differences between the Bruces, he wants to believe that they at least have in common the fact that they at one point, loved their son.  He wants to believe that that matters.

These thoughts are voiced by Bruce.  “No!  That’s my son!  There is no way I’m going to stand by and let you send my child off to die a horrific and violent death,” he shouts furiously.  

Grayson just averts his eyes.  No one misses what that means.

As quickly as it comes, Bruce’s anger dissipates and instead, his eyes fill with tears.  Something in his face shatters as he begins to tremble.

Wordlessly, Damian turns away.  This intimate moment of sorrow is not one that he should witness.

“There must be another way.  There has to be another way,” he begs, and Damian sucks in a breath at the rare vulnerability Bruce showcases.  There is an aching in his chest and Damian does not know what to do.

Batman’s eyes go light with sympathy and for the first time, it seems like his mask slips just a little to show the ocean of grief in his face.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.  

Bruce crumples.  He looks around desperately, as if someone is playing a cruel trick on them and if he would just apologise enough, it would all go away.  “I’m sorry, please.  I’ve learned my lesson.  I shouldn’t have benched you, Jason, or distrusted you, or ignored you, or been such a bad father.  Please, I’ll do better.  I just need another chance.”  

There is nothing that can be said in response to that.  Throat choked up with sorrow, Young Todd reaches out and squeezes Bruce’s hand tightly, as if seeking to convey even a glimpse of his overwhelming emotion through that contact.  The tears in his eyes speak mountains.  It’s okay.

“No, please, not my son,” Bruce begs, and Damian is struck by the raw, undisguised agony in his voice.  Bruce wears an awful look on his face and Damian would give anything to not have to see his father look like that again.  “Please, he’s just a boy.”

At this show of grief, Damian’s breath hitches.  He has no doubt that if he were able, Bruce would switch places with his son in a heartbeat.   

“When does this happen?”  Bruce asks quietly.

A silence full of regret hangs in the air for moments before Grayson finally speaks.  The words that come out are soft, but ring through the room for seconds afterward.  

“Jason Todd dies on the 27th of August, exactly five years ago.”

Bruce pauses, looking sick to his stomach.  “But that’s…” His voice goes ragged.

Grayson nods grimly.  “That’s today.”

This time, when Bruce begins to cry, no one is surprised.

Then, one small voice rises upon the din and instantly silences the room.

“Will, will it hurt?”

TIM

“Don’t answer that.”

Jason, who has been silent this whole time, immediately bristles.  “Fuck off, old man.  Like hell am I going to let you tell me what to do.  This is my life, and my death we’re talking about, in case you happened to forget!”

At the mention of baby Jason’s impending death, other-Bruce stiffens.  Not only that, he knows now from this exchange that the answer is not going to be good.

He sees other-Bruce’s jaw clench.  “It doesn’t happen easily, does it.”  His voice is deadened, grim.  Phrased as a question, it is anything but.  They all know the truth.  If there even is such a thing as an easy death, that is.  

For a split second, baby Jason’s face flashes with fear but then that stupid, stupid brave boy stares defiantly up at Batman and there can be no disguising his intentions.

Tim knows exactly why Bruce doesn’t want Jason to answer the question, because they all know that there can only be one answer.  Still, the kid, Robin asked, and if knowing what’s going to happen is something that will ease his burden, Tim thinks that it maybe is a request that can be, should be, fulfilled.  

It is a good and valid question, but it is also with a clear and obvious answer.  How strange it is to think that some things can be both at once.

Ultimately though, having been in baby Jason’s exact position before and knowing best of all the exact answer to the question, it seems clear that Hood is best positioned to make the decision on whether or not baby Jason needs to know more.

As usual however, Batman refuses to back down. 

“Don’t answer the question.  He doesn’t need to hear it,” he repeats in that bland, infuriating tone which only serves to further incense Jason.

“God, I’m really sick and tired of people all thinking that they know best what I need!”  He throws his hands up in the air in exasperation.  “I’ve been taking care of myself since I was six years old and running drugs to make rent so my asshole father wouldn’t beat us into the ground.  I knew what I needed when I had to scrape my drug-addled mother off the floor so she wouldn’t waste away from starvation first.  I was nine years old and on the streets and had to …” he begins furiously then comes to a sudden stop.  A beat passes before he picks up where he left off.  Tim doesn’t want to even try and fill in those blanks.  (Some things are better off unsaid.)

“...when no one else cared about the poor little street rat enough to make sure he didn’t freeze to death and become another corpse on the pavement.  And sure, sometimes things go wrong—”

His furious tirade is cut off.  

“Oh yeah?” Bruce challenges, unmoved by the volume of and hatred in Jason’s voice.  “I’m sure you needed to come back and torture your brother, an innocent thirteen year old child,” he spits out, sarcasm dripping off every word.  Tim immediately lowers his eyes, looking uncertainly at the ground as Bruce carries on with his rant.  He doesn’t want to be part of this.  All too often, he finds himself caught in the middle of the fiery confrontations between Bruce and his predecessor and it never fails to leave him floundering.

“You definitely needed to return to Gotham a murderer, a monster, who wasn’t happy with just killing people, but cutting their heads off and stuffing them into a duffel bag!”  Bruce is shouting now, but Jason remains defiant, rage still seething in his eyes as his former mentor’s words wash over him.    

“You always know what you need best, huh?  Did you know what you needed when you ran off and got yourself killed in Ethiopia?”

At this, both Jasons and the other Bruce immediately flinch back and the impact of his words seems to stop Bruce’s monologue in its tracks.  Tim was there when Batman was falling apart at the seams following Jason’s death, which is why he is shocked by the deliberate cruelty in those words.  (He is almost certain Bruce doesn’t mean any of them.)  

With how fresh the wound is, the time travellers look especially taken aback, but Jason has had years of scar tissue built up to absorb blows just like this so it doesn’t faze him for more than a moment.

“Fuck you,” he grounds out, and the viciousness in those words along with the tears in his eyes are unmistakable.  Tim sucks in a breath at the undercurrent of hurt that he also sees.  He knows to expect worse now.  Based on previous patterns and personal experience, he knows that Jason responds to hurt by lashing out.  It is not uncommon to see Jason angry — in fact, given the nature of their relationship, it is usually the default mode he’s in — but so rarely is he ever pushed to the point of tears.  The sight of fierce, aggressive Jason looking so wounded strikes him as just wrong.

When Tim came into the (stolen) role of Robin, Dick had been the one who spent the most time with him, who mentored him, but confronted by this situation he remembers that Jason was his Robin first.  Looking at how vibrant, how happy, how alive this Jason is, it takes his breath away.

Tim expresses love through touch and knowledge, so he makes it a point to know everything about his family’s skin.  Through little peeks during injury-treatment and stealthy glances when his brother is relaxing in civilian gear, he has catalogued the strange collection of scars on Jason’s body.  There are bruises, burns, still-healing lacerations, all somehow not as out of place on his still-malnutritioned body as they should be — and this, he always thinks, this is what he signed up for, when a small plucky twelve-year-old with a tire iron and a belly full of nothing but fire made the choice to not be a victim anymore, but a protector.  The odd injury, a sprained ankle maybe, still dangerous but manageable.  Not what is coming, not what had happened, not a miserable solitary death in a burning warehouse in the middle of nowhere.  No, never that. 

It’s not fair, he wants to say.

Then again, when had the universe ever cared about what anyone deserved?

“You think you know everything, don’t you?  World’s Greatest Detective,” Jason scoffs, and the once-fond nickname comes out like a curse.  “Well guess what?  Even when I went to Ethiopia, I still knew that even if it was just a sliver, I had to take any chance I could to try to have a family who loved me!”

Tim’s heart clenches painfully in his chest as he witnesses the conflict unfold but another part of him can’t help but feel exhilarated.  For someone who began his vigilante career as a voyeur, the exchange is almost thrilling, for lack of a better word.  Tim watches with a near rapturous sort of attention.  In a twisted way, it is like seeing Batman and Robin in action again.  He will take what he can get.

Something in Jason has always been larger than life, and Tim knows that it is also more enduring than death.  Beneath the ice-cold hostility of the Red Hood’s demeanour, he sees in it the soft, tender care he shows to orphans on the streets of Crime Alley, in the wistful, luxuriant expression on his face as he revels in the indescribable experience of flying through Gotham’s crisp night sky, in the soft flickers of hurt that ever so briefly flash across his face when Bruce unconsciously hints that he will never be family again.  Dick and Bruce are blinded by the betrayal of nostalgia, but there is a humanity to Jason, in its rawest, most unpolished form, and it is this rawness that had first drawn a small eight year old with a camera and cavern of loneliness in his chest to his very first hero. 

With that thought, Tim pulls himself back to listen to what his hero is now saying.

“I guess Demon Brat is right after all,” Jason laughs sadly and Damian instantly stiffens at the mention of his name.  “Blood does matter, because no matter how many times you say it, I never was your son.  No, my parents were criminals and murderers, which is exactly what I am.”  

Damian fails to suppress his flinch at that.  Despite being a frequent victim of his younger brother’s haughty and disparaging taunts, even Tim winces in sympathy.  He knows that when Damian goes around pronouncing himself ‘the one, true blood son’, it is more an expression of uncertainty about his own self-worth than a denigration of anyone else.  For all he speaks about being the clear favoured child, years of indoctrination by the League have convinced him that his only value comes from his birthright, which he clings to with all the desperation of someone who thinks he has nothing.  Damian’s selfishness is no more his fault than Jason’s parentage is a reflection of him.  

Even so, Jason lets out a truly terrible grin and Tim cannot help but see an echo of a villain in it as he turns towards Bruce.  “In fact, I don’t think you should have any say in this at all, should you?  After all, you have the easy path.  You’ve made your stance clear.  If you’re not going to do the one thing I’ve ever asked you to do, why the fuck are you still sticking your nose into my business?”

Jason’s hurt is dizzying to think about so he lets himself float.  For a moment, he is flying through the sky, weightless, empty.  But all Robins fall down eventually.  He lands at his father’s feet.

“Because you’re my son.”  Bruce’s voice is deadly quiet.  “How can you expect me to just let you keep destroying yourself?  I’ve told you before, you can’t come back from killing.  That’s why I can’t do what you want me to do.  No matter what, I’ll always be your father which means that I have a duty to protect you from everything, including myself!”  

The small confession at the end is surprising.  Tim doesn’t know if Bruce intended to let it slip out in a fit of emotion.  By the end of his speech, he had escalated to full-on shouting, and it is impossible to miss how his voice is wracked with guilt and grief.  Tim knows that if he looks up, his father’s face will be streaked with tears.

“There is no world in which I will ever give up on trying to protect my child.”

There is a rare, raw earnestness in Bruce’s voice, but Jason’s eyes are still red and wet and furious.  “Yeah, well, you did a stellar job of that when you slit my throat with a batarang and chose to save the Joker !  I felt real protected then,” he snaps.

The minute the words come out, the room falls silent.  Jason immediately looks like he regrets sharing that secret, but then reverts back to his previous challenging, defiant expression as his gaze hardens.  

Tim chokes down a gasp.  Plenty of hurtful, vicious barbs have been thrown out tonight, but this accusation, no, this fact seems far worse than all of them.  Suddenly, the thick, dark band of scar tissue across Jason’s neck makes sense.  

Tim has spent hours tracing the scars that dot his family’s bodies, brushing over each healed bullet wound and stitched laceration, mind drifting with macabre wistfulness over the worlds where one of those injuries ended up being fatal instead.  He’s seen that scar before, and he’s had his suspicions, but all of his theories were too terrible to even think about and so he brushed them away.  Jason doesn’t even come around much anymore, not like it matters, he would say.  

(Despite all the lies that he tells to himself, he’s always known that cuts that clean can only be caused by something as sharp as a batarang.)

Bruce, Bruce looks stricken.  ( As he should, a vengeful little voice in him snipes.)  Tim hasn’t seen him look this broken since he first lost Jason five years ago in Ethiopia.  Then again, Bruce never did quite recover from that day, ever.  With Jason’s death, he didn’t so much lose part of himself, as become lost himself.  This is why Tim insisted that Batman needed a Robin.  It’s too bad he didn’t realise that what Batman needed was his Robin, and more importantly, that Bruce needed his son.

The other Bruce looks like he is experiencing a waking nightmare and in a way, he is.  Tim wishes more than anything that he won’t have to see himself become what he did in Tim’s world.  The laws of time travel dictate otherwise.

Even Jason seems a little broken by that accidental admission.  “If you want so much to be my father, then…”  Jason cuts himself off furiously but no one has missed the way his words tremble unconsciously.  It is the desperate plea of a child.

...then why can’t I ever come home?

Jason never says the words, but Tim knows what is meant to fill in the blanks.

For once, Bruce has no excuses.  “Jaylad, I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry,” he says in a defeated, guilt-ridden voice.

Jason closes his eyes at that, and the pain in his face is impossible to look at.  Tim turns away.  

When Jason finally does respond, it is in a whisper.  “It’s not enough.  Not anymore.”  

All the strength seems to leach out from his body.  

On cue, other-Bruce is more than happy to take over.  It seems that he is only just starting to understand how truly broken their relationship is.  Until now, the arguments between Tim’s Bruce and Tim’s Jason have been bitter and hurtful, but no more, perhaps, than the ones other-Bruce had been having with his own Jason.  From what he can remember, there had been no small amount of cruel words thrown around before Jason ran off to Ethiopia for the last time, part of what had left Batman so haunted in the aftermath of losing his son.

“How could you do that to him?  What have you become?” He asks, horror-struck, disbelieving, staring straight at his counterpart.  His eyes reflect the loathing in both of their faces.

Bruce hunches over as the words go straight to his heart.  Everyone remains silent.  There is no need for words.  The room rings with the breathless accusation.  Nothing more can be said.

Finally, Jason breaks the miserable silence with a faux-impatient growl.  “Now that that’s settled, can I give the kid his answers now?”  He tries to feign casualness, but Tim can see how he’s permanently on edge.  In the absence of any obvious defence, Jason’s default strategy is always to return to the comforts of hostility.  Drive them away so they don’t have the chance or desire to hurt you.

Everyone turns to look at Bruce.  He shrinks at the attention and Tim can see him very carefully thinking over his words before he says them.  “Jayl— Jason,” he starts haltingly, correcting himself the instant he sees Jason begin to scowl again at the nickname.  Hesitation is rife in his voice.  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea.  You know how ...troubling it can be when we find out information that we weren’t supposed to know and the past is not something we want to change.”

Tim winces.  This is clear evidence that Bruce’s apparent callousness truly is a product of social ineptitude, rather than heartlessness.  He almost wishes J’onn were here to help translate the strength of Bruce’s emotions to something that Jason could feel as well.  In a way, their entire relationship has been Bruce struggling to form love into a language that Jason can understand.  

What Bruce doesn’t know, or think about, is how others perceive his remarks, and how their perspectives are informed by the lens of their experiences.  Just as Bruce never quite left that Alley, some part of Jason still and will always have one foot in the grave.  The flashbacks are only worsened by the fact that his memories of a young, naive child and a protective, loving father, of a simpler time, have now come to life.  This entire situation has wrenched Jason back to the point of his death five years ago and Tim can almost taste the pain and longing on his mind.  When he tries to think like Jason, it does not take a leap to misinterpret Bruce’s words.  

What Bruce means is:

Hearing all these details at once and having to knowingly walk into a horrific situation will be very distressing for both of them.  The last thing I want to do is to increase your suffering in any way.  The space-time continuum might be damaged beyond repair if we don’t replicate the past exactly as it happened, and the consequences would be disastrous.

What Jason hears is:

You shouldn’t have gone meddling and trying to find your mother.  Look at what ended up happening to you.  I’m glad that you died.  Good riddance to the reckless street rat.

In fact, Tim has to try very hard to resist the urge to bang his head against the table.  It really isn’t that hard to communicate your thoughts clearly by not being obtusely vague and ambiguous in your word choice.  

He is entirely unsurprised when Jason’s simmering temper is inflamed once more.  Whirling back around with a flourish, he pins Bruce with a scathing glare.  “Well, fuck you too old man!  This wouldn’t have happened if you had told me the truth in the first place,” he rages, and there is a new but also all-too-familiar sheen of green slipping over his eyes.  

Bruce looks equal parts confused and resigned at Jason’s anger.  Tim unconsciously takes a step back.  He does not know when his hands started trembling. 

Jason smiles, and bares his teeth in a truly terrifying snarl.  “In fact, let me start off by reciprocating.”

“Here,” he says, turning to other-Bruce with a twisted grin on his face.  “To make things fair, I’ll give you the lowdown.  All you have to do is go back, cry over your son’s still-warm body for a bit, not tell his older brother about his death until the funeral is over and engage in self-destructive behaviour instead.  Oh, and don’t forget to adopt a few more dark-haired orphans along the way!  Shouldn’t be too difficult to do that since you’re already so practiced in it.”

Other-Bruce looks like his insides have been torn up and scooped out with a rusty spoon.  Jason pointedly ignores him and moves to face his Bruce again.  

“There we go, happy now?  I’m not about to go on blabbing government secrets or anything,” he spits with a deliberate eye roll.  

Almost like a tribute to the gargoyles that decorate Gotham, Tim’s Bruce stands still as a stone, his expression unreadable under a mask of blankness.  Tim does not need to see any outward emotion to know that his heart is crumbling inside.

It doesn’t stop there.  Of the streets, Batman and the League, two out of three of Jason’s teachers have shown him that the way to protect yourself is to hit the other person, and to hit them hard, until you are absolutely sure they cannot get up again.  Jason has already dealt a paralysing blow to both of his former fathers in this world, so he does it again, and again.  The words tumble out of him like water, spilling cruelty over the room.

Tim lets the shouting wash over him, and he feels like he is underwater.  If he could get his arms to move, he might even have pressed his hands over his ears.  Instead, he just lets guilt and sorrow for all the pain in this family build up in him and what seems like hours pass like this.  It is only when he surfaces abruptly that he realises that Jason’s anger has dried up and been replaced with desperation.

“...and I’ll be damned if I don’t let a scared little kid who is hours away from having to walk into his grave that he later has to climb out of any bit of information I know can bring some comfort!”

Jason’s voice at last dims down to a dying and desperate flame, threatening more so with a flashy show of fire than any actual, dangerous heat.  Bruce seems to realise this as well.  Throughout Jason’s rage, he has remained silent and passive even though Tim knows how much it has hurt him.  As a credit to his stubbornness, he still opens his mouth to challenge Jason’s arguments again, knowing full-well that he is only inviting more pain.  

Before he can get a word out, a small but firm voice speaks out.

“Please.  I-I want to know.”

He sees the moment when Bruce folds like a house of cards.  

It is one thing to argue with a hardened, grown-up Jason who has caused and endured so much pain.  It is another to have to face his still-innocent son.  All too often, it is easy to forget who will be the one to bear the sacrifice.

Broken out of his trance by baby Jason’s words, young Bruce immediately rushes to his Robin’s side and cocoons his small body in a protective embrace.  At the same time, Tim’s Batman steps back into the darkened edges of the room and almost seems to withdraw into the shadows, leaving his Jason, still fuming, behind.

For two men who wear the same face, it is unsettling how different their reactions to the same situation are.  Not for the first time, Tim finds himself at a loss for words.

How can this be the same person?  What could have happened in five years to make a man almost unrecognisable?

In the end, he thinks he can probably guess.  The death of a child, he supposes, is as good an answer as any.  

JASON (20 YEARS OLD)

He feels worn-out, turned upside-down and shaken vigorously for good measure.  The last time he felt like he had just been put through the wringer like this was when he was actually put through a wringer during his time with the League.  (Thousand-year-old ninja societies that don’t speak English as their first language sometimes take things too literally, okay?)

Still, he has a scared kid that he needs to help out, and the Red Hood has never given up on a child in need.  Despite the aching in his bones, he walks over to his younger self and crouches down so he can meet his eyes.  

Still blue.

“Okay Jay, I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen and what you need to do.  It won’t be pretty, or pleasant to hear,”  he laughs wetly, but no one can move nearly enough to mention or begrudge the tears welling up in his eyes.  “In fact it’ll be downright miserable and pretty fuckin’ awful, but you’ve lived through awful your entire life and I know you’re strong enough to get through it.  After all, I did.  So you gotta be strong for me, alright?”

The poor kid is shaking, but nods dutifully anyway.  Jason gives him a tiny smile in return.

“So, you already know that when you go back, you’re going to be alone, waiting outside that warehouse for Bruce to come back.  Spoiler alert: he doesn’t make it on time.”  He snickers at his little joke but no one else is laughing.  Tough crowd.  

“He did tell you to stay put and not go and confront the Joker, but then Sheila tells us all about her sob story and we fall for it hook, line and sinker.  She tells us that she needs help, and that the Joker isn’t around, so like idiots we follow her in.  And what do you know?  The Joker’s inside!  Turns out, your- our birth mother Sheila Haywood is a lying, traitorous piece of scum who sells us out to the Joker to cover her ass.”  

In the corner of his eye, he sees his Bruce startle.  Huh.  It’s almost like he didn’t know that Jason hadn’t wilfully gone in disregarding orders.  Not like any of that matters now.  One more retroactive instance of obedience is hardly enough to outweigh the many murders he’s been committing.  On that note, he turns his attention back to younger-Jason.  

“You know that now, so it’s not going to hurt as much when you find out later on.  That’s something.”  He takes a long, shuddering breath.

“Next comes the hard part.  Simply put, he beats you over and over again with that bloody crowbar while he laughs and mocks and taunts (This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me!) until you can do nothing but wish you were dead."  

Stupid fucking clown.  

“God, all you want is for that god-awful clown to leave you alone but he doesn’t and it feels like you’re with him for hours.  And all you can hear is his demented laughter, the whistle of the crowbar through the air before agony explodes on your skin and the sound of each of your bones breaking into pieces.”  He laughs.  He seems to be doing an awful lot of that today.  (He won’t be the only one.)  “You never really do forget what it sounds like as every bit of you is being broken.  Even now, I still hear his voice ringing in my ears.”

Which one hurts more?  Forehand, or backhand?  A, or B?

He closes his eyes in misery and stands there frozen, breathing heavily as visions of cruel grins on white faces and a crowbar swinging wildly by flash behind his eyelids.  Let’s see if little birdies really have hollow bones!

“But you’ll know.  When you start to feel your breath start to come a little easier, and your hands and feet get a cold little tingle that means you’re about to lose all feeling in your limbs — just like that time when we almost got frostbite in ‘08, remember? — and your vision gets dark and hazy, that’s when you know it’s almost over.”

“There’s no coming back for you, not from broken ribs, a caved-in skull and smashed everything and we all know that Sheila Haywood does not deserve even a ratty old sheet of newspaper to dry her fucking tears, but you’re a good kid, I know that Robin, and your Batman, your dad—” They all notice how he stumbles over the word and both Bruces can’t help but let out a choked, hurt noise but Jason pointedly ignores that and pushes through, not acknowledging the way that his voice falters as his words grow thick with tears. “Your dad taught you about the importance of life and how doing everything you can to try to save people is the most important thing for a hero, and fuck, you have to know that you’re going to go out a hero, okay Robin?”  

“So you’re still going to try to save her and drag your broken, torn up body over to help free her, and that’s fine, okay Jay?  You’ll just about make it over to cover her body — not that our shrimp body manages to do much — but the bomb’s a nasty piece of work and it won’t be enough and there is nothing you could have done about that.  You hear me Jay?  You did your very best, and her death is not your fault, and it’s not on you.”  He pauses for a moment and the stiff silence that follows his frenzied words is filled with echoes of everything he has just poured out.  When he starts speaking again, his voice is soft and gentle.

“When the bomb goes off, you’re still hoping that Batman, Nightwing or even Alfred will suddenly swoop in and save you because if there’s anyone that could do it, it’s them and you know that Robin is magic.  You’re not deluded enough to think that they actually will because even you know it’s impossible, but it still hurts just a little bit to know that they didn’t manage to come for you.”

Laughing wetly, he shakes his head once more.  How foolish he once was, to think his father could do anything.

“And when the bomb goes off,” he continues, voice trembling, breaking.  “God, the agony is unbearable — you can practically feel yourself disintegrating until you want to rip off each layer of your skin but then the fire does that for you…”

He shudders, the phantom echoes of that nightmarish pain rippling down his body and for a second, it’s almost like he’s back in that warehouse, burning to death, all over again.  

From across the room, he can see Dick startle at that obvious show of fear, instinctively moving to comfort him and despite their disagreements, their animosity, the fragility of their bond, despite all of that, Jason wants nothing more than to melt into his brother’s embrace and the unspoken promise of refuge that he so desperately craves.  But he looks up, and there is a shaking fifteen-year-old standing in front of him, pupils blown inky black with fear and he shoulders on through the discomfort.  In a wavering voice, he gives that terrified expression a weak smile and addresses the boy.

“You asked me if it hurt, and yeah,” he laughs, voice thick with tears. “It hurts so goddamn much but what I want you to remember, and look forward to, Jay, is that after the bomb hits, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

The conviction in his tone is unmistakable, because it’s true.  

“I’m not gonna lie to you, one Jason to another, you’re going to die scared, alone and in a lot of pain, but it ends.  When the countdown finally starts, it’s over really fast, in a flash, and afterwards, it’s the most incredible sense of peace that you can imagine.  All that pain, all that agony, a lifetime of suffering, just disappears.  Vanishes in an instant.  Gone.  And you can look forward to that, okay Jaybird?  I promise you.”

With each detail he reveals, the room seems to darken a shade, as if he is literally sucking the light out.  How long, he wonders half-hysterically, will it take to become as dark as the grave?

“Of course, it won’t last forever, because we’re a real special snowflake and we get the dubious honour of being one of the few real-life zombies to come back from the dead.  And because Bruce loved us so much, and also is a disgustingly rich bastard, we wake up in a goddamn monstrosity of a coffin lined with fucking satin trim, dressed in a surprisingly stylish outfit — thanks by the way Alfred, I can appreciate a good death suit in hindsight.  Anyway, we freak out for a bit about you know, suddenly coming back to life in a freakin’ coffin and hyperventilate a little — try your best not to do that if you can, yeah?  Really uses up the oxygen supply, and trust me, there ain’t much of that down there.”

He laughs wryly.  The other Bruce is sobbing now, clawing the open air in front of him as if he could somehow help his once-dead or soon-to-be-dead son out of his grave instead.  Jason quickly tears his eyes away from him before he loses his nerve, or worse yet, his anger.

“So, you’re alone in a coffin with no tools, no way to communicate with the outside world and a growing sense of tightness in your chest.  What you’re gonna do next, after you finish screaming and crying, is to start to dig.  Yeah, that’s really it.  Not much finesse to it.  You’re gonna dig until you tear through that obnoxious thousand-count satin lining, until you hit a frankly inconsiderately sturdy mahogany lid and shred your fingers into splinters and then, after your fingers are bruised to hell and your nails have been ripped off, you hit dirt.  God, I remember having never been so happy to see a worm in my life.  Bit less amazing when it landed in my mouth and tried to suffocate me along with a metric ton of dirt, but still.”

Nervously, he braves a glance at the rest of the room.  Revulsion hangs over the air like a cloud.  Yeah, just be happy it wasn’t and isn’t going to be you.

“After that fucking wood, soil is a godsend so just hold your breath and continue clawing your way out towards the top, you know the drill.  The old man really didn’t skimp when he said six feet under, so it’s going to take quite a while, but right around when you think that you’re going to have come back to life only to drown in a pit of dirt, you reach air and that’s about the second-most glorious feeling.  A light at the end of yet another one of the many tunnels you’re going to experience, you could say.”  

Again, no one even cracks a smile, not even pun-meister Dickiebird Grayson.  He sighs inwardly.  Everyone’s a critic.

“Anyway,” he continues, waving a hand dismissively.  “After that, it’s a bit of a blur, really.  You see, we don’t quite come back all the way, and definitely not right in the head, so I’ll gloss over this part.  Long story short, you wander aimlessly around a bit looking like an extra from School of the Dead: 2 and because this is fucking Gotham, no one bats an eye or does anything about it.  So of course, the one who finds you is our beloved Talia al-Ghul, daughter of the Demon’s Head, occasional lover of dear old dad and mother to our very own darling demon brat.”  He finishes off the statement with a sardonic grin and a sarcastic flourish.  Behind him, Damian bristles, and it is testament to the horror of the tale unfolding and the raw pain in the storyteller’s words that that is all he does.  Under any other circumstance, it would be wise to expect a bloodbath.

“So, Talia brings us to the League of Assassins where we’re pretty much in a coma for a while until Ra’s has enough of our pretty catatonic looks and decides that we have outlived our usefulness.”  He pauses for the reaction to the joke but again, not even Nightwing, proud purveyor of puns, laughs.  Shrugging it off, he carries on speaking.

“For some reason, she doesn’t carry out his instructions and tosses us into a Lazarus Pit instead, and if the radioactive green wasn’t enough of an indication, yes I can confirm, it burns like acid.”  He says it in what he hopes is a casual, offhand manner, but a familiar, dreaded fire starts to burn in his chest.  For a moment, he thinks he can see green in his eyes again.

“That wakes us right up, and thus begins our journey as a trainee-assassin where we get a full-resort tour of Nanda Prabat and its auxiliary locations.  Greatest hits include introduction to killing 101 by Lady Shiva, up-close-and-personal time with Ra’s al-Ghul himself and the old favourite, emotions are weakness and will be beat out of you by, well, everyone.  Zero out of ten stars, don’t recommend at all.”  Understatement of the century.   “Don’t worry too much about the details.  At that point, you don’t have much control or choice over things and good ol’ Lazarus is a rather domineering co-pilot.”

“But it wasn’t all bad,” he whispers, and for the first time, there is a pure, unabridged honesty in his voice.  “Talia really did take care of you, and, and ...it was almost like having a mother again.  A strict, manipulative and violent assassin of a mother, but she truly wanted to help us.”  A painful silence follows his words as all the occupants of the room try to process them.  

Clapping his hands unceremoniously, he perks up in obvious artificial cheer.  “Oh, and you learned Arabic, and some other cool tricks” he adds as a forced afterthought meant to dispel the sobriety of the atmosphere.

“So, she preys on your deepest fears about being meaningless and reinforces those pesky self-worth issues with a few well-timed snippets from conversations in the Cave and some suggestive photos of Replacement over here,” he explains with a quick gesture to Tim, who stands silent and pale-faced by his side.  Sucker.  “That quite effectively sets you on a course straight for home with a directive largely about creating as much deserved death and destruction as possible,” he continues, with a deliberate emphasis and pointed glance towards older Bruce, who stares back with a surprisingly impassive expression.  Jason can still see tear tracks and the remnants of sorrow on his face and figures that the uncharacteristic lack of opposition to his words can be attributed to that.  

Still, he decides to offer up an olive branch.  “Deserved in our mind, at least.  We took on the old moniker of our friend, the clown, out of spite and began our reign of terror.  Hunted down tons of dealers cutting their shit with all sorts of dangerous stuff, peddlin’ to kids, messing with the working girls…” He trails off, before a vicious grin comes onto his face.  “Made sure to visit some of our old friends that we met in the alley or on corners back in the day!”

At this revelation, everyone stiffens.  Shit.  Didn’t mean for that to pop out.  

Much of Jason’s early life was unknown to everyone, and the former street kid was notoriously fierce and territorial about his privacy.  Everyone knew that he had been born in Crime Alley to a drug-addict mother and deadbeat thug for a dad before being foisted onto the streets after their deaths up until that fateful day that he tried to steal the Batmobile tires.  Judging from his living situation and early brushes with crime, it didn’t take the World’s Greatest Detective to guess that some elements of abuse, neglect and violence were commonplace in his childhood, or that he had had to turn to various unsavoury methods for survival.  Still, it was an unspoken hope, or a child’s dream, that he hadn’t been victimised in that particular way.  As if that was a particularly egregious form of hurt, beyond everything else that he had so vividly detailed for them in the past few minutes.  

Perhaps it was because as terrible as the rest of Jason’s life was, there was something especially horrifying about such a young child being exposed to the very dregs of the adult world.  Perhaps because everyone else also drew a mental line between young innocent child Jason Todd and the older, more hardened former-Robin Jason Todd who grew up to be the Red Hood and therefore might have deserved what happened to him.  He scoffs.  Even as a blur of tears overtakes his eyes, he grits his teeth through fury and swallows down his bitterness in a practiced motion.

“Little Wing,” Dick breathes out.  “Why didn’t you tell me …?”

Jason rolls his eyes.  “That’s what you want to focus on?  I told you guys, that was way back in the day, and then I paid them a visit afterwards.  And for all of you sceptics, I can now say from personal experience that all your ‘vengeance doesn’t help victims!’ bullshit is just that — bullshit.  Because I feel a hell of a lot better about knowing that they won’t ever be able to do that to anyone else again and no one can tell me otherwise, but if anyone still wants to, you can go right ahead and shove your self-righteous vitriol up your pompous, entitled asses!”  

Throughout everything, Jason has stayed relatively calm.  Even as he describes the horrors of his past with false good humour and cracks off-colour jokes about his traumas, he prides himself on having largely maintained his facade of detachment.  He’s already been through all of this once and he knows exactly how horrific it was, and how scared his fourteen-year-old self is, so he knows that he has to be strong for the both of them now.  And that means staying calm and being impervious to emotion.  

All of that just went out the window with his recent outburst.  Whoops.

The morality of vigilante killing and the extrajudicial exaction of justice has long been a contentious issue in their ...household, to say the least, but he surprises even himself with the intensity of his response.  It seems that he has not done nearly as well as he thought he had at distancing himself from grievances of the past.  

But he should know better.  He does know better.  The League ensured that he understood fully the folly and error of emotions.  

Now, baby Jason needs him to be strong, so he will be.

Finally managing to calm himself down, Jason takes a few more deep breaths, feeling his lungs expand in the cavernous expanse of his chest as his furious heart gradually slows down.  The only good thing about his past tirade is that it seems to have stunned everyone else into equal silence.  Aside from staring at him with wide, hunted eyes, Dick doesn’t speak.  As unexpected as it is, Jason is grateful for the silence and takes the space to pull himself together.  

When the anger and rage is sufficiently at bay, he shakes the last whispers of it off and looks up at everyone.  “Anyway, I’m not here for another debate, so you’ll have to book an appointment with my secretary if you want to continue this conversation,” he says nonchalantly, cracking his knuckles.

“Where were we?  Ah right, I’ve told you about all the small stuff and some of my side missions, but the real juicy stuff comes during our family reunions.  We hunt down Replacement and give him a serious beatdown leaving him near-death as a dramatic announcement of our return, but don’t worry too much about the specifics — the Pit’ll do most of it.  Sorry about that, Replacement, it wasn’t personal.  No hard feelings, yeah?”  He quirks an eyebrow at the kid, but the Replacement doesn’t respond.  Oh well, can’t win them all.  

“B and I dance around a little and act out the climax to the love triangle story with the Joker, and ...some things happen,” he says with a furtive glance towards older Bruce that he tries and fails to disguise.  

“I don’t want to get into the ugly details about that, so… just know that all of us make decisions and we try to do the best that we can in every situation, do what we think is right.  And things don’t always work out well, and there isn’t always a happy ending.”  Lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug, he offers a sad smile.  

At Jason’s words, younger Bruce flickers his eyes to his older counterpart and pins him with a piercing, searching gaze.  Older Bruce determinedly ignores the clear question and looks straight ahead.  The briefest flash of what seems like regret glances past his face and he looks away for a split second before resuming his stoic posture.  They both shift uncomfortably.  

Do you regret it? He wants to ask, but this is neither the time nor the place.  

Jason decides to draw the attention back to himself, a decision he quickly regrets when he realises that he doesn’t know what else to say.  “So ...that’s about it, really.  The Pit fades away after a while and we haven’t been killing for a few months now, so I guess things turn out alright.  Not sure there’s any more that you need to know, so I guess you’re all good to go…”

The meaning of his words hits him as they leave his mouth, as he realises exactly where he’s going to go.

All the bravado from before falls away.  The air inside his lungs rushes out in one long motion as he closes his eyes and gathers the fractured bits of his mind together for one last, important thing.  Crouching down, he lowers all two hundred and twenty pounds of his impressive and imposing bulk — scars, flesh, skin and all — until he meets the terrified, shaking eyes of his younger counterpart again.  The kid is trembling uncontrollably, still dressed in that stupid traffic-light-green-panties costume.  

Oh god, he’s so young.  

With a trembling and tender hand, he reaches out and brushes the tears away from his face, uncaring about the endless stream that trickles down his own.  “It’s a lot to take in, Jay.  And it’s not fair,” he whispers, the biggest secret he’s held on to this entire time.  Across from him, younger Jason sobs.

“It’s not fair, because we were good.  We were trying, trying so damn hard to do the right thing, to be better, to be more than the gutter we were born into.”  Looking up for a brief moment, he blinks the stars out of his eyes as his throat closes up with tears.

“And we were, okay?  We made ourselves more, but sometimes it just isn’t enough, and the world likes to take and take and take from people like us who have nothing left to give.”  They are both openly weeping now, at the evil, at the injustice, and Jason lets himself mourn for the boy that he once was, that he still is, that was lost and is going to be lost all over again.

“It’s not fair, it isn’t right, and it’s going to happen all over again.  And you’re going to let it.  You’re going to go back to your time, hold your head up high and walk into that warehouse and into another lifetime of misery and pain and utter fuckin’ shit with nothing more than the strength that you have inside of you because it’s the right thing to do, and you have to do it.”

His hands are shaking.  

“Because at the end of the day, we were so many things at once,” he sobs.  “A child, a street rat, a son, a brother, a Robin, but the most important thing that we were is that we were a good soldier.”

A loud, guttural cry escapes from the group but Jason only has eyes for himself and his voice holds strong.

By the time he finishes speaking, his voice has gone hoarse.  The ugliest parts of his world have been made a public spectacle but he cannot bring himself to regret it.  Not when it might in some way be a comfort to a young boy who will have to suffer too much.  Still, he feels stripped bare, scraped raw, cracked open for everyone to see.  His next words are soft.

“And like all good soldiers know, sometimes you need to go through hell and sacrifice your entire soul for the good of everyone else, and you do it gracefully with your head held high.”

And finally, with that, there are no more words to be said and Jason breaks.  He grips himself so tightly that he can almost believe that things might be alright and then he lets go.  

Wordlessly, he turns and leaves the Cave.

Chapter Text

DINING ROOM, WAYNE MANOR (BRUCE WAYNE, 39 YEARS OLD)

After Hood stalks out the room, everything is silent for a moment.  No one breathes, and Bruce wonders if it is because no one else is able to either.  If they all feel suffocated as well, like all the air has left their lungs.  

Always one to surprise him, younger Jason’s face suddenly twists and he sprints past Bruce in a gust of air that startles him into taking a step back.  All of them are quiet as the sound of pounding footsteps overlaid by a muffled series of gasping sobs fades into the background.  Beside him, his alternate version looks shaken.

Bruce looks down.  

Jason’s revelations had been one agonising knife to the heart after the other, an unending cascade of horrors that he could only wish were fiction, or that his part in them were any less real, any less shameful.  In sharing his soul with them, Jason had bared clear to everyone the worst of his sins as well and Bruce cannot bring himself to look anyone else in the eye.

He can just imagine their expressions.  The shock on Dick’s face, the hurt on Tim’s, the betrayal on Alfred’s, the fear on Damian’s and Jason, oh god, little Jason — who still looks at his father with love in his eyes and thinks that he is a hero.

Maybe he was.  

Maybe back then he still had courage in his heart, and he made decisions out of principle and justice, not the desperate actions of a man just trying to cleave onto anything he had left, even if that meant turning them against him or even against themselves.  He is a weak, weak man who would rather see his children alive than happy, but at least now he is brave enough to admit that to himself.  

Forget the large, grand Manor — he has been living in a house of cards that will collapse if anything at all shakes it.  

And if you find him, a couple of shots deep into a bottle of whiskey or a case of bourbon, he might just tell you that the real reason he cannot kill, and why no one else in Gotham can kill — or at least the one that matters — is simply that it’s always been this way, and he doesn’t know how he would be able to handle it if that were to change.  

In a world where often nothing makes sense to him (why did my parents die, why me, why us, whywhywhy ), this rule is all that he has to hold onto.  When he drags himself out from bed every morning and all he has to show for it are bleary eyes and the half-formed reassurance of less people died last night, probably, he knows that Batman is a gift, one he would not have the luxury of if he didn’t follow the rules.

It is his stable ground to land on, the only one he has truly, and he knows just how much of a hair trigger everything in him rests on that the slightest infraction would mean the end of it all.  Whenever he grows tempted, some part of him is screaming that if he doesn’t stay careful, someone is going to die and he knows he could not live with himself if that happened.  

Batman has long stopped believing in a God, or Gods, or any benevolent creature that looks down upon them and cares what people need or deserve, but there is a part of Bruce Wayne that is terrified that someone is going to come take it all away from him.  

If no killing is the simple rule that the ghouls of Gotham need him to obey in order for him to keep his family safe, it is an easy price he is more than willing to pay.  

(But then they took away his baby boy even though he listened and oh god it wasn’t fair this doesn’t make sense jason did you push him and everything inside of him was raging and howling for revenge and for the joker’s head on a pike but he was still a father and he still had another child and so never again we can never kill again—

—and then Jason came back with eight heads in a duffle bag and then the Joker on a rooftop and a gun and all he had in his hands was a batarang and then blood and then laughter and then—

oh god what have I done)

He wonders if anyone else notices him shaking.  He looks up.

No one even spares him a glance.

An ocean of shame and relief rushes through him.  He is unsurprised at the same time.  How could they bear to?  After all that he’s done.  (They just don’t get it no one gets it.)

People always laughed that Brucie Wayne had a type when he was picking up orphans, all black hair and blue eyes and boys with sad, sad faces but truly, any physical similarities were incidental.  His last three …acquisitions certainly bucked the trend.  

If anything, what all of Bruce’s children have in common with each other is their endless capacity for love and forgiveness, but even he knows that this time, he has pushed them too far.  Their tolerance for pain only extends this much when it has been inflicted against anyone other than themselves.  

How could he bear to look at himself?  Alfred had always warned him not to let Batman’s darkness take over his heart, because it would be his own reflection staring back at him when the cowl came off.  As usual, he had not heeded this advice until it was already too late, when the only solution was to then always leave the lights switched off.  

The dining hall continues to be silent.  If he listens carefully, he thinks he might be able to catch the soft puffs of Tim’s breaths and the overly measured way he exhales, how he gets when his anxiety rockets and he’s trying to stave off panic.  

A likely drag-over from his childhood living in the ever-pristine Drake Manor under Jack and Janet ‘never-a-hair-out-of-place’ Drake (on the rare occasions they were there, that is), Tim has always been distressed by conflict.  The icy tension of the evening followed by the recent eruption must have been Hell for him.  Bruce is somewhat surprised that he is still here.

Across from him, he sees Dick shift in place and then hesitate, face stricken as his eyes dart between the still-swinging doors to the West Wing where their Jason had disappeared to, and the rear entrance that his tearful counterpart had run through.  

Bruce can already see his mind racing, the desire to help warring between the too-many people Bruce has hurt while his fire-forged pragmatism launches into an immediate triage of grief.  In the face of twin miseries of both Jasons (both, his brothers, in equal part), his indecision is clear and something in Bruce’s chest clenches at the struggle his oldest must be going through.  

Dick’s heart has always been so big, his need to offer comfort and share in other’s pain only rivalled by the sheer amount of suffering in the world.  Each instance he watches Dick’s smile dim just a little bit more from the evil he encounters both day and night, Bruce wonders again whether he made the right choice letting that eager, bright-eyed child tag along with him that night.  

At the time, all he had seen was the carefree laughter and undisguised delight on the young boy’s face as he flipped across roofs, cartwheeling through streets which days ago had been entirely foreign to him.  Under that though, he had been fool to not recognise the iron-strong will and resolute moral compass that he knew firsthand meant that once this boy had a taste of the vigilante life, he would never be able to live without it and his fate would be sealed.  

And yet, he still brought him along and Robin had soared in Gotham’s skies for the first, but not the last, time that night.  He looks at the agony in his son’s face again and wonders who has been paying for that decision. 

It isn’t long before the room’s occupancy takes another hit.  This time, Damian is the next to leave.  

After Dick’s departure, Bruce has just enough time to watch Damian’s face twist into an ugly scowl as the boy whirls around to face him and throws his arms out in a fury.

“This house is full of miscreants and barbarians,” he sneers, spitting the words out like an angry cat.  Then, pinning Bruce with a scathing glare, “I hope you’re pleased with your decisions, Father!”

Following those parting words, not a beat passes before he storms off as well, muttering angrily in Arabic all the while.  A hand reaches out unconsciously before he even realises it before faltering mid-air as he feels empty syllables half-forming in his mouth.  By the time he’s thought of what to say, his youngest is long gone.

When he doesn’t have his swords, Damian wields insults equally as effectively to harm, his years at the League training him thoroughly on how to wound with words as well.  Bruce knows this, knows that Damian often speaks before he thinks, brain moving to twist expressions into their most deadly combinations even before he has truly grasped the harshness of their truth.  He knows this, but they still hurt just as much.

Even if Damian hadn’t meant what Bruce couldn’t help thinking of, and Bruce knows he was probably referring more to anything other than how his serial adopting of broken boys in an attempt to give them the types of lives they deserved had turned out to do the exact opposite, he also knows what they say about thieves and guilty consciences.

He sags in place, wishing passionately that the floor would open up and swallow him whole.  But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?   

Yes, it would, he thinks wryly.  Fatigue floods into him, but he still has one son left, so he doesn’t have the time to be tired yet.  Dragging his head up, he begins scanning for his last remaining child who has not stormed or fled from the family dinner yet only to come up short.  

Tim’s name dies on his lips.  Somehow, in the midst of his self-recrimination, he has managed to slip out from the room as well.  A broken chuckle bubbles up from his chest.  

Of course he did.  And of course, Bruce had been too caught up in himself to notice.

It is a cruel reenactment of how one by one, his children always leave him.

(Is this to be his penance?  To have every single privilege, every single blessing given to him, only to have them be squandered at the hands of his own selfishness, avarice and cruelty?  In the grand tragedy of his life, is this the scene where it all comes crumbling down?  

When does Sispyhus crumple to his knees?  When does Atlas finally fall down?  When does Prometheus die?

He would that his Tartarus be not a hell of his own making.)

Sneaking a look at the man standing next to him, the petty part of him needs him to look just as run down as Bruce feels too.  Sure enough, he looks like he’s aged twenty years in the few hours he’s been here and Bruce wonders whether the same years are mirrored on his own face.  

The rest of him hopes that memory has simply distorted his recollection about the sort of man he used to be because he needs, no, his sons deserve to have someone to be a better Father than he is, than he can be.  Already, Dick — ever the reliable, self-sacrificing mother hen — had taken it upon himself to go after one of the Jasons, and Tim hopefully hadn’t been too upset by everything, and maybe Damian just needed to get some frustration out of his syste— 

Oh, who was he kidding, it was near impossible that the League hadn’t inculcated some horrible notions about dealing with death on top of the fact that Damian was twelve years old.  He definitely needed someone to talk to.  

Not that Bruce would be any use there, though at least he might be better than nothing.  Or maybe not…

For a moment, the full scale of the crisis that he has to deal with finally seems to rear its head and he wants nothing more than to let himself sink to the ground and give up.  He does not know what strength inside him lets him stay standing and lifts his eyes to his counterpart’s.

An eternity passes between them and somehow, in that time, a silent agreement is reached.  The other Bruce nods to him before walking out the room as well, his exit soundless as the grave.

Soon, he is the only one left in the dining room staring down that long, empty table.  On the first third, the fruits of Alfred’s labours in the kitchen lie scattered across the surface in a surprising array of porcelain dishes and worn china.  Formerly a true cornucopia to behold, they lie half-eaten and abandoned, having cooled and been forgotten during the argument that preceding.  A distant part of him shoots Alfred a silent apology. 

The rest of the table is bare, saved only from a fine layer of dust only by Alfred’s diligent cleaning.  Carved from an exquisite slab of mahogany wood, ordered specially to be able to accommodate all the members of the extended family during one of those loud, rowdy dinner parties the Waynes were known for throwing, it stands solid and unyielding now, even through all the upheavals the Manor has seen.  

Bruce was too young to have any real memories of those, but sometimes when a particular tune drifts past his ear, or the light catches a certain stain in the wood, he thinks that he catches a flash of his father throwing his head back in laughter with a half-full glass of wine in hand, or his mother gazing across the cheer and revelry with a fond smile.  Those are the scenes that Alfred, or really, Alfred’s father, would be more familiar with, when Wayne Manor was vibrant and alive and filled with laughter.  

For a while, he almost thought he had it back.  The joy, the celebration, the family.  Now, faced with an empty room, he truly is the last Wayne once more.

Would you be proud of me?  Do you see what your son has become?

Stumbling over to a seat, he collapses into a chair and buries his head into his hands.  Around him, the phantom voices of his parents sound.  He can almost hear his father’s laughter echo in the background.

Pulling his eyes up to the row of empty chairs before him, he gazes desperately around.

Mom, Dad, what do I do?

THIRD FLOOR HALLWAY, WAYNE MANOR (DICK GRAYSON)

It takes a few tries but he manages to find Jason tucked away in a dusty little closet, surrounded by a pair of mops and other miscellaneous cleaning equipment.

“Go away, Dick!”

Even before he knocks, the muffled words sound out through the thin door.  Somewhat surprised that Jason has managed to identify him seemingly by his steps alone, he falters where he is.  In the end though, he decided to push ahead.

“Ah, there you are, Little Wing!  Almost had to call in the dogs to come find you.”

His attempt at levity falls flat, and the smile slips from his face as he takes in the curled up form of his brother on the closet floor.  As if he can sense Dick’s gaze on him, Jason seems to squeeze himself into an even smaller ball.  

Dick sighs inwardly.  He has always prided himself on being good at responding to unexpected situations, but truly, there is no instruction manual on how to have impossible conversations with your little brother.  Speaking about death is hard enough, let alone when it’s his death they need to discuss.

Still, Jason needs him and the last thing Dick wants to do is let his baby brother go through this horrific situation all alone.  Never again.

Crouching down, he reaches a tentative hand out and is heartened when Jason doesn’t move to shrug it off.

“Hey there Jay,” he murmurs in a low, comforting tone, taking courage from the way that even if unconsciously, Jason seems to respond.  “We got some really bad news just now, didn’t we?”

He knows he’s speaking to Jason like a child, treating him with kid gloves on, but if ever there was a time for delicacy and gentleness, now would be the moment.  And if ever there was a kid who needed more of a chance to be a kid, it would be Jason.

Sure enough, he gets the tiniest of nods from Jason, even as his head is still buried in his arms.  That’s fine with Dick.  He doesn’t have to strain his ears either to hear the soft sniffle that follows.

“Do you want to talk about it?”  

Even before the question is out, Jason is already shaking his head rapidly and Dick can hardly blame him.  Where does one even begin to talk about something like this?

He runs a hand through his hair and tries not to let the frustration and indecision show on his face, if only for Jason’s sake.  As he waits for the words to come to him, silence and urgency war inside him and ultimately sits in silence as turmoil wins and words fail him.  

Of all the times for me to take after Bruce, he thinks wryly.  Perhaps he understands now why his father figure prefers to sit in quietude, shrouded in the solemnity of shadows.  Then again, he knows best of all how waiting for the right words often means waiting forever, and how much those moments of missed responses can hurt.

(“Don’t you ?”)

The combination of a hyperactive nine year old former-circus brat and a gigantic mansion with endless rooms and staircases meant that he spent many an afternoon trawling through the various hidden nooks and crannies of the Manor, trying to uncover its secrets.  With his Jason back, along with a younger Jason as well and an extra Bruce to boot, there are more people than ever in the Manor but it feels even emptier than usual.  After coming across a room filled with portraits of faces with mildly amused expressions and labels situating them precisely in their place within the Wayne dynasty — ones that made Bruce go quiet and Alfred’s eyes turn sad and strained when he asks about them — Dick knows what it’s like to grow up in a haunted Manor filled with ghosts.

(He doesn’t know how he will be able to face the fact that in just a few hours, one more will be added.)

In the end, it is Jason who breaks first.  (And isn’t it always?)

“I don’t want to go, Dickie.”  

The words are soft when they come out, almost petulant even, a reluctant confession dragged out of a blameless sinner to a flawed priest, but they cut down the still air of the afternoon like a dagger nonetheless.  

“I know Jay, I know,” he soothes, rubbing a plaintive hand down Jason’s back.  The trembling reminds him of the first time he met Jason, during the early days in the Manor when neither of them was truly sure about their place in the family, both still trying to disguise their self-imposed imposter status from the other.  (So, this is the new Robin?)  He still remembers the churning feeling in his gut, when jealousy turned to guilt as he hugged his little brother for the first time and felt the accordion bones lining his sides under a thin cotton t-shirt.  

Dick was born to be a protector, a trait further honed during his vigilante days.  His time as Robin had trained him how to be the light to Batman’s darkness, a reassuring face in the midst of tragedy, a guardian for those who needed the comfort of a smile for a moment.  Certainly, he had gently led countless tearful children out of dark alleyways and sat by terrified women on the worst days of their lives but in the end it was his scrap of a brother who taught him what it meant to handle with care .  

Through Jason he had grown to understand what his mother used to tell him when he pouted at her for taking the other circus children for a swing on the trapeze as well, because that was their special thing — compassion has no comparison.  

And it wasn’t because he had sensed some form of weakness in Jason that triggered these new protective instincts, no.  The defiant glare in the twelve year old’s eyes had done well to disabuse him of the notion that love was only for those who needed others to care for them. 

He has never felt so helpless, with both his hands free in front of him, but useless , so useless to do anything that could reverse the destructive wheel of Fate which he knows is going to leave a family broken and devastated in its wake, to offer anything other than temporary, empty consolations.

The circumstances have tied him, chained both arms behind his back and crippled him so the only balm he has is knowledge.  An explanation, perhaps.  As if knowing why the laws of time travel make it so that the senseless murder of a young boy might be any less repugnant or any less impossible to bear.

“We tried, Little Wing, we tried.  Please believe me, I would give anything to undo this, to make it not true but I can’t.”

He is pleading, desperate to have Jason know that his future is in no way a reflection of himself, that fate has so very little to do with desert.  (Or at least he thinks that Jason is the one he is trying to convince.)

“But it’s already the past for us, you see, and we can’t change the past, if not …” He trails off, not knowing how to say it.  

How to put Tim Damian Steph Cass Duke into words and make memories into meaning and names more than names for a boy who has only known these people for a matter of hours.  How not to make it sound like it is a race and in the competition of value Jason has just fallen short.  

(God knows he has come in last far too many times already.  Just once, couldn’t someone have picked him too?  

Then again, it is equally true that even if Jason didn’t die then, in Ethiopia, there was no certainty that he would be alive anyway.  The first time Nightwing met Robin after a desperate call for help during a robbery bust gone wrong, Jason had murmured to him that he was already living on borrowed time.  Dick cannot risk the possibility that there is a world where Jason doesn’t come back, for good.)

“We can’t risk changing anything in the past, in case it leads to any cataclysmic shift in events or threatens the space-time integrity.  It would be a different matter if you were from a different dimension, but since we’re all part of the same timeline, we have to let events, at least the main ones, play out as they did for …my Jason.”

He swallows before he says his next words.  “So all of the defining moments that led us to where we are now, all the things that Red Hood remembers clearly and shared with us earlier..”

He watches as Jason’s face goes white.  As expected, the mechanics of his death have done little to soothe the terror that trembles underneath his skin.

Jason is weeping softly now, fat, angry tears rolling down his cheeks and landing on Dick’s arms like little drops of fire.  Each one sears a reminder of his brother’s grief into Dick’s skin.  Patting Jason’s back lightly, he whispers words of comfort in English, Romani, sounds whose meanings he does not know either, but all of them are messages of love and regret and tenderness and remorse.

He doesn’t even realise that he’s been rocking them both steadily to the beat of Jason’s hiccuping sobs until they gradually subside and their swaying comes to a stop as well.  In the heavy silence that follows, he feels the weight of the pressure to say something and so he says the only thing he knows to say, what Robin and Nightwing and Officer Grayson alike repeat to all victims when things go wrong and no amount of apologies can make up for the suffering that is to come or has already come — You’re so brave, Little Wing, so brave.  I need you to know that, okay?

(Not a sorry because yes it’s unfair but there’s no point to sorry nothing can change no one can take it back so instead a thank you and we will remember you and it’s the right thing to do.)

If his tear-drenched sleeve is any evidence, it seems that Jason is all cried out and all that is left in that tiny body (ohgodhesstillsosmall) are the dregs of anger and spite and bitterness at the injustice in the world that gives good things only to take them away (the small nine year old who lost his parents and his world to where’s my money and a snapped rope knows exactly what that feels like).  Shaking off the syrupy, melancholy lethargy that had previously overtaken his limbs, he bristles all at once and jumps up, whirling around to face Dick with a fierce glare.

“Well, I don’t want to be brave!  What if I don’t want to sacrifice for everyone else?”  Jason bursts out and Dick instinctively reaches out at the show of his brother’s distress.  On instinct, Jason rears back like a frightened horse, wide-eyed as his hands fly up to guard his face.  

Dick freezes and just as quickly Jason throws himself back into Dick’s arms in a silent apology.  Dick lets the shaking boy curl into his chest and rubs out his own regrets on the soft skin of Jason’s neck.

He doesn’t say anything.  

And truly there is nothing that he can say to that because it is true.  Unlike Bruce, who had donned the cape because Batman had filled the hole in his chest that matched the ones in his parents’ made that day by a man in an alley with a gun; unlike Tim, who had chased the role down himself for want of purpose; unlike Dick himself, who had created the idea of Robin and bore the urge for justice as soon as the tender age of nine, Jason had never signed up for this.  

He didn’t know what he was getting himself into when a starving child tried to steal tires in the dead of the night.  How could he have?

And yet, no one has had — would have — the role as deeply carved into their skin as him, would die in a war he had no stake in.

Any words of comfort would be but lied and Jason at any age has had more than enough deceit and betrayal to go around so Dick does all he can do and wraps his brother up in his arms, rocking his shaking frame in a tuneless lullaby until the sobs subside and grief turns into resignation.

I’m sorry, Little Wing, so very sorry. 

That will have to be enough.  (Will that ever be enough?)

KITCHEN, WAYNE MANOR (ALFRED PENNYWORTH)

How many eggs?

Alright, two extra mouths to feed, some to box up to bring to Miss Stephanie and Master Duke when they next come around which will be on Monday; I’ll need to make something else for Mistress Cassandra since she isn’t too fond of brownies, maybe a batch of white chocolate raspberry cookies for her instead?  Yes, that’ll do, I’ll have to pop by the shops to pick up some more fresh yoghurt anyway so I might as well pick a few punnets of raspberries as well — Master Damian likes snacking on them as well — and they’ll make a good post-patrol treat for Thursday in case I don’t have time to whip anything fresh up…

Four large eggs then, fridge cold.  

Extra white chocolate buttons or a salted caramel swirl today?  Master Richard would most definitely prefer the sweeter option, but there is his and Master Timothy’s sugar levels to be concerned about… Master Jason does prefer caramel and I suppose there are two of him to consider …that is, unless he and his Master Bruce go through the portal before then—

He shakes his head in amusement at that thought before pulling out another bowl to divide half the batter into.  How foolish he has become in his old age, to be deciding dessert menus based on alternative timeline portal-dependent attendance: the obvious answer is to make a batch of each.  

(A part of him wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all but the rest of him has long grown used to Master Bruce’s bat-related supernatural hijinks.)

50 grams of chocolate buttons …oh drat it, I think today’s ordeal deserves 75, or maybe even a hundred—

“Alfred?”

At the tentative call of his name, his head snaps up.  It does take a few seconds for his age-worn eyes to focus in on the silhouetted figure standing sheepishly in the doorway but he relaxes once he takes in the familiar wide-shouldered frame and dark, tousled curls that could belong only to one person.

Well, two now.  The pair of new entrants to the Manor have introduced the additional step of differentiating between both Masters Bruce.

Truthfully, it is not a difficult task.  Despite their physical similarities, there is a weariness that clings to his Bruce like tar, evident in the molasses-slow way that he seems to move about and how every action feels like a Herculean feat.  

His Bruce had changed, that much is clear.  Now, more than ever, spiderweb cracks in his facade have begun chipping away like the old bone china that he has tried for years in vain to preserve.  

How much else of his work has been for nothing?

This Bruce, though weary and beaten down as he is, still lacks the tiredness and defeat that the past half-decade has worked into their bones.

It is strange to think that all this has taken place within the span of only five years.  (Then again, he knows well how one boy’s life can be transformed within the space of an evening in the space of an alley way. Or worse, how a family can be destroyed in the red-eyed blinking of five, four, three, two, one —)

Time, he thinks, is a fickle thing.  

He looks up and the man before him looks so much more like a boy in that moment than he has in the decades that have passed since he first took charge of the lone Wayne heir’s upbringing and in an instant, he is transported to another age.  The same scene transposed over a different time, a young boy, his ward, his son trudging up to him looking so lost Alfred wonders if he will ever be brought back.

Thirty years later, he is even more uncertain if Master Bruce ever managed to find a way out or if there is now just a trail of broken boys wandering the desert.

The thought makes him feel old, so very old.

Years ago, Alfred had once been a soldier.  A young man in his prime, he had been the one on the frontlines, ready and willing to bleed for Queen and country, full of the bluster and blunder that only fools who think themselves to be heroes possess.  

Then, it had been an honour to lay his life on the line and perform the nobility of sacrifice.  Neither had he shied away from taking a life when the circumstances demanded it.  

Transitioning to his new role in Wayne Manor had not been easy, but he is by no means ashamed of his new employment and has found meaning in this new kind of service.  

But there is a part of him that curses and rails against his infirmity that he has never quite been able to silence each time he waits with bated breath in the darkness of the Batcave for whatever casualty will grace him that night, armed only with a roll of bandages and the hope that his family will turn out alright.  

What nobility is there in that?

And this time, this latest mission seems almost like a final death knell.  He has been both subject and bearer of bad news, but never just one standing idly by.  

This time, he can only watch as his grandchild is sent off to war.

To stave off the mistiness he can feel coming over his eyes, he straightens up and wipes flour-caked hands onto a white-dusted apron and hopes the practised motion hides the weakness in his hands.  If ever there was solace in words and wine alone, now would be the time to hope.

“Yes, Master Bruce, how may I assist you?”

As common as the greeting may be, rolling off his tongue like the familiar strains of a song or soliloquy, Bruce looks lost and bewildered by the actual question.  Alfred’s face immediately softens at the all-too familiar visage.  Throughout the years, long, sleepless nights had made it far from uncommon for Master Bruce to wander down to the kitchen to find him with nothing more than the faint idea that he was in search of help.  

Alfred only wishes that this time, he would once again be in possession of any advice of value at all.  

“I …I don’t know what to do, Alfred.”  Bruce runs a tired hand down his face and somewhere inside, the crumbling remains of an old butler’s heart are breaking.  “I don’t know if you remember — God, I can’t believe it’s been five years for you — but just a few hours ago, I was saying goodbye to you then chasing after Jason in the middle of Ethiopia.  I knew that it was one of the …worse arguments we’ve had, but I would never have thought that it would end in that…”

The last word comes out as a whisper.  Alfred has to close his eyes.

“It’s finally sinking in, I think.  In just a few moments, I am going to watch my fifteen year old son go to his death and I’m going to have to let him.”

Alfred doesn’t answer.  There is nothing to say to that and the throbbing in his chest makes it hard to speak.

Faced with his silence, Bruce shakes his head with a mirthless laugh.  “Do you remember what we were fighting about before Jay took off?”

Alfred stiffens.  “Nothing that I would recall, unfortunately.  In light of the events that followed, the preceding conflict did become quite …inconsequential,” he replies woodenly.  

“Inconsequential,” Bruce repeats, letting out a slight smile that has a strange quality to it.  Alfred hates it immediately.  

“That’s certainly one word for it.”  Bruce laughs again, just as brokenly as the first time.

They both fall silent after that so the rhythmic whirl of the ceiling fan is the only noise for a while.  

“What did you do when you found out?”

When Bruce speaks again, the question catches him off-guard and he pauses before answering. When the words come out, they are slow and stilted.  “I went into Master Jason’s room and folded his laundry then read our favourite soliloquies out loud.  His first, then mine.”

Bruce falls silent, and Alfred lets himself slip into the silence of the moment.  For a while, he loses himself in the memories of that terrible, beautiful day. 

Remembering the blankness that followed that phone call with the horrible news, the awful drowning feeling that gripped his chest afterwards.  Remembering the way his feet unconsciously led him to the familiar room, weathered hands trembling and almost buckling under the cotton weight of the clothes they were carrying.  How the first step through the door greeted him with a burst of air that almost made his eyes water.  

Now, standing in a kitchen swept by the cool, evening breeze, he takes a deep breath and picks his chest up, remembering how it felt to put on the strong posture that feels almost like a second skin.  Those same words that he has recited again and again, first under the stars of the magnificent Globe Theatre in London, then on the even grander stage in a teenage boy’s bedroom.  The admiring gaze of an audience hundreds-strong could never compare to the wondrous gaze of a young boy who truly loved literature.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil —

Closing his eyes again now, almost feels himself swaying to the power of the words that he knows like they have been etched onto his bones.  It has been five years since he last spoke those words, but there are some things one can never forget.

He basks in the recollection of that afternoon, soaking in the warm light streaming in through the shuttered windows as it casts the room with a brilliant amber glow.  The serenity of the moment settles over him as that wistful passage comes to a close and a different, harsher mood takes over. 

O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

As per their tradition, he performed a second speech, this one angrier, more vengeful, so fitting, yet so opposite for the boy who chose it.  Felt the words rumbling through his chest, revelled in the chance to speak those powerful lines written by the Bard to life and inhabit, if only for a moment, the invigorating strength of a man born into a world of treachery and deceit. 

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

How apt those lines he delivered then, the new meaning they took on in the aftermath of his tragedy.

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;

And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,

His voice ringing out into the empty space of an abandoned room, rage and hurt swirling inside him in a maelstrom of violence.  He remembers the strength in his young charge, clear from the very first day he entered the Manor.  The tenacity in those eyes, the promise of defiance in a clenched fist, the movements of a world-weary child which screamed survivor.

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,

After Jason’s death there had been no revenge.  Until he came back and seized it himself.  After all, a boy who grew up with nothing knew well that you always had to do things yourself.

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men groaning for burial.

The final word hanging in the air, almost like an echo haunting the room.  Only when he opens his eyes again and takes in the contrasting darkness of the day around him does he remember where he is.  Remembers that this time, he is not alone.  

Bruce watches him wordlessly, with serious, seeing eyes.  Alfred is grateful for the chance to relive that precious moment.  

After a while, Bruce speaks again.  “How do you carry on?”

Alfred sags.  How he wishes that age had actually conferred upon him the wisdom to match the hope others have in him.  Years later, with grey streaking his hair, all Alfred knows is this: experience is a vastly overrated teacher.  All time has given him is an abundance of opportunities for failure.  The biggest consequence of age is simply more to regret.  

The truth is that he simply doesn’t know, has stood in front of the mirror and asked himself the same question over and over again, to which his reflection has no answer either.  Still, Alfred has spent the past few decades seeing this family through unspeakable tragedy and trauma and he knows that what is needed from him now is hope, not honesty so he answers anyway.  

He does not say, you don’t.  You bend and you break and you are never the same again 

“You weep and you mourn and you give thanks for the time that you had.  You wake up each day and you live even though you don’t know how you are still alive but one day you wake up and it is five years later and for some reason you are still here.”

He takes a shuddering breath and feels his ribcage clatter.  Bruce’s eyes are wet and shiny.  Alfred does not know whether the tears he sees are simply from the sheen on his own.

“In the meantime, you remember all that you do have and you hold on to them and cherish every moment that you still have.  And somehow, you make it, one day at a time, and hope that things get better.”

Once he finishes, he quickly ducks his head down and discretely swipes at his eyes.  When he looks back up, he is relieved to note that the other man is preoccupied with clearing his vision as well.  Nevertheless, Alfred is under no illusion that the reason his tears have gone unnoticed is anything but Bruce’s own grief.

“You know, I can’t help but think that although this episode of time travel has probably been the worst trip I’ve ever taken,” he lets out a broken laugh.  “I’m so incredibly grateful for it.”  The little smile on his face falls and his voice drops.  

“The last thing that I said to him was that I wasn’t his father.”  A flash of pain crosses his face.  “I can’t imagine if he died thinking that I didn’t love him.”  Even saying the words feels like an anvil smashing into his chest.

“What kind of father am I?”

He collapses to the floor, hands clutching frantically at his head.  Instantly, Alfred is by his side, gripping Bruce’s shoulder until the man lifts his swollen eyes to Alfred’s.

“You can’t think about that, Master Bruce,” he urges.  “Just remember that you did manage to tell him,” Alfred says fiercely, giving Bruce a little shake.  

“He knows, alright Master Bruce?  Jason knows,” he repeats because this is a reminder that can never be said enough.

It seems that his words have struck a chord, because Bruce nods frantically through tears even as his throat has been seized by his sobs.

Once he feels that Bruce has calmed down enough to listen to him again, Alfred continues.  “The reason why you were so upset about what you might have last said to Jason was because you knew he was going to be dead—” he falters for a moment before steeling himself and saying once again, stronger — “dead, which meant that there was no way to go back and tell him otherwise, right?” 

He pauses a bit and waits for Bruce’s nod.

“And you remember now how trivial, how unimportant whatever disagreement you and Master Jason were having at the time was?  And now, you would probably give anything if Jason could return home, safe by your side, once more?”

Another nod, a little shakier this time.

Truly, the benefit of perspective is unquantifiable.

It is harsh, but Alfred pushes through anyway.  “Unfortunately, that isn’t possible this time,” he says as delicately as he can, for both Bruce’s sake and his own.  “But even as we stare down unspeakable tragedy tonight, you must remember that we were also granted a miracle because Jason comes back.”

He pauses at that, momentarily choked up at the reminder that he needed for himself as well.  Remembering the disbelief, the timid hope, the euphoria when he first found out… 

“And yes, he comes back angry, and he comes back different, but just as it first seemed that you and young Master Jason were experiencing irreconcilable differences which we now know to be anything but, you must believe that we will mend this rift as well.”

Bruce swallows thickly at that, but he does look just a bit lighter as well.  Emboldened by these results, Alfred carries on and tries not to admit that he too is feeling the faint stirrings of what seems like hope in his chest.

“Things will get better, but before that, you still have time, and I suspect, many things that you would like to say to Jason.”  Alfred takes a deep breath.

“So go and talk to your son,” he finishes, and nudges Bruce ever-so-gently. 

“What do I even say to him, Alfred?”  Bruce’s voice is small and quiet.

Alfred offers him a watery grin and hopes it isn’t as brittle as his voice is when it comes out.

“You tell him thank you for all the memories, I love you so much and I’ll be waiting for you, no matter what .”

“And will that be enough?”

“You will have to make it enough.”

(It will have to be.)

KITCHEN, WAYNE MANOR (BRUCE WAYNE, 39 YEARS OLD)

When he walks into the kitchen, he is unsurprised to see another shadowy figure slipping out the other exit.  At any other time, he might even have let out a snort.

Old habits die hard indeed.  And even after that, it seems that dead things have a tendency to linger, in this Manor.

How fitting, then.  A cursed house for a cursed man.  

He knows it seems childish to keep blaming everything that has happened on an incident that took place years ago, decades before most of his children were even alive, but he can’t help but think that it’s still true.  His life ended with a shot in that alley and he has never recovered since.

All of it has been a constant struggle to catch-up, his world narrowed to a hindsight which would only show him what he had after he lost it.

He has been a dead man walking for thirty years and his biggest regret will always be using children to try and fill that hole.  Now, for the second time, he is watching his son pay the price for his audacity.  

And Jason, oh Jason , his little Jaylad — possibly the one least deserving, if ever a child could deserve a fate like that, of having yet another person’s sins foisted onto him again.  

Despite being the most different from him in upbringing — the opulence of Bristol versus the slums of Crime Alley (A Tale of Two Cities indeed; Jason had always loved that book) — somehow it is Jason who has taken after him in nature.  Bruce would have given him the world but his only inheritance had been a silk-swathed coffin.

Against the darkness of the kitchen, a lone figure is illuminated in the centre.  He moves himself inside.  

“Alfred.”

He speaks the name quietly, and to the elderly butler’s credit, or perhaps to his experience, he does not startle.  Instead, Alfred turns kind but weary eyes to him, the same eyes that have watched over him for decades, with the same tenderness that always seems to bring tears to his eyes.

“Master Bruce,” he greets, and the words are said with such undeserved love that he feels a sharpness prickle at him.  His parents may have passed, but Alfred has always been there with him, a steady presence by his side.

Unwavering.  Always constant.  His rock.  Old Faithful.  

“I need help Alfred.”  My parents are dead.  My children all hate me.  I don’t have anyone else.  

“It’s all gone wrong.  I don’t know what to do.”  He has always just done what he thought was right, resolutely chased the arc of justice.  Only now he sees that doing what was right has only led to so much pain, and how can that possibly be justice?

He thinks of the memorial still standing down in the Batcave.  

A Good Soldier.

If even Jason didn’t escape death, maybe being a good soldier was not the way to live.  But after a lifetime of following the rules, Bruce doesn’t know how to do anything else.  

“Please Alfred, tell me what to do.”  I’m so lost without you.  

He waits a lifetime, a breathless eternity, before Alfred sighs and walks over to him.  Please.  I don’t know what I would do if you left me too.

“You haven’t had an easy life, Master Bruce.  I definitely know how much you struggled through your younger years,” he lets out a light, almost nostalgic, chuckle before sobering.  “And that has taught you to be strong.”

Adversity breeds strength; failure, resilience.  Loss proves the value of survival.  

“But it has also taught you to be numb.”

Bruce knows this well.  The first cut, agony; the second, pain; the tenth, and he wonders if his deadened nerves can feel anything at all.  

“You have allowed yourself to grow so accustomed to being miserable that you cannot even recognise what you are doing to others, or the fact that you can change.  It doesn’t have to be this way, Master Bruce.”  Alfred looks sad.  Bruce wonders who he is more disappointed with: the child he raised, or himself.

The luxury of insensateness is not freely given.  Scar tissue can only be gained through suffering, and Bruce has earned his.

But what about everyone else?  What if you’ve been hurting them?  Haven’t you all suffered enough?

All the Robins wear their scars like badges of honour.  (If their bodies are a canvas, Jason’s skin is a masterpiece.)

Should it be?

Alfred’s eyes are piercing, his words even more so.  “Have you truly moved past your pain?  Have you ever let yourself grieve?”

A Good Soldier.  Another Robin.  He doesn’t breathe for a moment.  

Alfred seems to notice his growing distress, even as he tries to hide it.  His face softens.  “I know that you have hurt, and seem to have overcome, but you cannot simply push through it and forget about the wound beneath.  It is real, and raw, and gaping.”

Father …Mother!  …Dead, they’re d-dead!  

“The infection is spreading, to all who are near you.  You may be able to stop the bleeding, but you cannot burn the hurt out of the world.  Your children are crying, and looking to you for help.”

I’m coming, Robin, I’m coming!  

“Triage is something you know well.  Don’t let your preconceptions blur your judgement on what the truth of the situation is — which injuries are real, which ones are painful reminders but ultimately still scars of the past.  Deal with the most pressing issues, and forget about the rest.”

Jason.  The Joker.  Mom and Dad.  Jason.

“You need to think about what’s left, my boy.”  Alfred’s eyes grow weary and tired as his voice falls sombre.

Have those wrinkles by the side of his cheek always been there?  Has his hair always been this gray?  When did Alfred get so old?

“Before there really is nothing there anymore.”

BATCAVE (DAMIAN AL-GHUL WAYNE)

“Drake.”

“Drake.”

“Drake.”

“What?” At the repeated sound of his name, Drake whirls around in a burst of fury and Damian pretends he cannot see the shadows clinging to red-rimmed eyes.  It is easier this way, for the both of them.

“There is no point trying to find a solution.  There is none.”

Internally, he winces.  The words sound callous even to him, but that does not detract from their truth. 

Drake doesn’t react, just turns back to the computer and resumes his work.  Fingers flying across the keyboard, eyes rapidly scanning the rows of data that appear.  Damian scowls and grits his teeth.  

Judging by his single-minded focus on his self-appointed task, it will be difficult to dissuade him from his fool’s project.  If there is one thing even Damian is willing to acknowledge about Drake, it is that his determination and persistence, once something has caught his attention, are formidable.

Nonetheless, it seems that in this case, his concentration is highly misguided.  

Not that Damian can blame him entirely.  This entire situation has been quite unsettling for many of the residents of the Manor, including Damian himself.  It has resulted in a great deal of unproductive conflict and even more concerningly, has inspired a frankly disturbing number of emotional conversations.  

He shudders.

Worst of all, with no opponent to fight, Damien’s combat prowess and training are irrelevant, so the circumstances have rendered him incapacitated.  He feels …frustrated.

The strange sensation in turn triggers a sense of irritation in him and he quickly has to tamp down the urge to go out and hit something.  Such a loss of control will not be productive for his goals and will not be looked upon favourably.  

Instead, he turned to investigate what the other vigilante was doing.  Just in case he was up to some nefarious activity, and Damian had to intervene to stop his scheme.  

Casting a cursory glance at the information presented on the screen, it was not difficult for Damian to deduce that Drake is working on something related to the mechanics of time travel.  Given the context of young Todd and another version of his father appearing, it would not be a leap to conclude that he is attempting to devise a solution to young Todd’s imminent demise.  

While he may not understand all of the complicated equations Drake has projected onto the screen, Damian is familiar with the phenomenon of time travel — having a grandfather like Ra’s al-Ghul who is fixated on attaining the secret to immortality means that he was most definitely exposed to time travel magics since young — enough to know that what Drake is doing is pointless.  

(He had watched as countless of the League’s prized ninjas were sent off into various timestreams, only to return unsteady, half-vaporised, or not return at all.  Back then, it was regarded as an unfortunate waste of resources, but not as any tragedy further than that.)  

Young Todd’s impending end would most certainly be …unfortunate, but that does not change the fact that the laws of time travel are fixed and cannot be changed.  

Loathe as he is to admit it, even he cannot deny that if there is someone who could crack the code, it would most likely be Drake, but not in this moment, not with their restricted time frame.  What remains then is the clear knowledge that all Drake is doing is pursuing futility.  

As the Batcave’s foremost apprentice and future owner, the duty falls to him to inform Drake of that fact.  The teenager has been furiously working for a few hours now and has not taken a single break in that time.  Such conduct is quite likely to result in future impairment, which would then require the involvement of Pennyworth to provide medical attention.  He will not stand for the pointless squandering of valuable resources.  

“Pretender, cease your frivolous actions immediately.   Clearly, there is nothing further that can be done on this matter, and your efforts so far have generated no results.”

Still staring at the computer, Drake frowns and says distractedly, “Just go away, Damian.  I’m busy here.”

It is a clear dismissal.  Unfortunately, Damian does not answer to his lessers.  

His lips curl into a deeper scowl.  “Drake, do not make me repeat myself."

His initial flicker of annoyance grows.  In Nanda Parbat, ignoring the Prince and future Heir to the Demon’s Head in such a disrespectful manner would have seen the Pretender harshly punished, exiled or even executed.  He is fortunate that Father’s rules have constrained Damian’s ability to enact retribution of similar magnitude.  Still, Drake must pay for his insolence.  

Damian feels a wellspring of irritation swell in his belly and gather into a cruel mass.  If polite requests and geniality will not be successful in this interaction, perhaps more direct and severe measures are necessary.

“Even for you, it should not be difficult to understand that you are simply wasting your time and everyone else’s.  I know that the former may not seem like a particularly significant consequence given the minimal contributions you make to this family anyway, but it generally is deemed to be a sign of low intelligence to be engaging in aimless activity for extended periods of time.  Something you might be very familiar with.”

He can see Drake halt his typing and curl his fingers into a fist.  He pauses for a moment to take a deep breath, but Damian can still see a vein beginning to swell near Drake’s temple.

Excellent.  His words are having an effect, then.  Time to carry on and intensify the pressure.

“Of course, it is possible that you are not actually trying in the first place,” he ponders out loud, gazing at Drake in faux-consideration.  “It does make sense, I suppose.  After all, without young Todd’s demise, Father would never have been desperate enough to take you on as a charity case.”

He lets out a sharp laugh.  

“It is rather mercurial of you to be pretending to find a solution in the meantime, but I can appreciate the strategy behind it.  Not to mention, pretending is what you do best, isn’t it?” 

BATCAVE (TIM DRAKE)

Tim is a patient person.  

As a baby, his mother was pleased with the fact that he would rarely cry or demand for attention.  Well-behaved , she called it.  Low-maintenance, his father would describe with a laugh.  

As a child, Tim learned how to stand obediently by while strangers draped with jewels tittered and cooed over him at galas.  How to last for weeks at a time with nothing but an empty Manor for company.  

Dear Timothy, 

Your father and I have unfortunately experienced a slight delay in our work, so we will have to prolong our expedition for another two weeks.  The housekeeper has been instructed to drop by at her usual intervals to ensure that the Manor remains well-kept.

Do continue to focus on your studies and behave yourself.  You are old enough to conduct yourself properly and we would hate to be disappointed upon our return.

Best wishes,

Janet Drake

CEO, Drake Industries

Tim has spent his entire childhood learning to be silent and unobtrusive.  

That means keeping quiet.  Keeping to himself, never making a scene.  Never causing a mess, creating trouble for others.

It’s why he’s so effective at observation — simply fade into the background, let others take the forefront and listen to what happens when everyone forgets that you are there.  Take careful notes then leave and slink back home, wiser and more knowledgeable.  

Usually, he is fairly good at not responding.  At not allowing Damian to get a rise out of him with his various provocations.  After months of icy cohabitation in the Manor and during patrols, Tim has learnt to let the snide remarks slip by without reaction.  If he had not, he wouldn’t have been able to last that long.  

He knows that the Manor doesn’t belong to him, and that he doesn’t belong in the Manor.  Damian does live there, while Tim is merely an occasional guest, a business associate, if you will.  He has no claims to the family, or any right to complain, but a deep anger still simmers low in his belly.  There is a ticking time bomb buried inside him and it is only a matter of time.

Usually, Tim is able to let things go.  This time, something is different.  There is a change in the air.  

Annoyance shifts to ire and Tim realises that his whole body is trembling.  He doesn’t think he’s ever been this furious before.  

Damian is not a friend, or a brother, and the two of them are barely cordial enough with each other to be considered allies.  What they are is two arms of a machine anchored together by Nightwing and Batman, able to work together as long as they are kept separate from one another.

Damian is a child, and Tim is an outsider, but right now, at this moment—

Tim …Tim despises him.

“ F-fuck you ,” he chokes out, angry tears burning in his eyes.  “At least I’m trying to do something for someone else, and not just thinking about myself!  Unlike some selfish little brat, unlike you!”

He knows that he’s four years older than Damian and should be more mature, knows that Damian had a difficult childhood and challenged upbringing which is the reason behind much of his prickly exterior and belittling taunts.  He knows that more often than not, Damian is just trying to get a rise out of him, like Dick has explained time and time again, and it is Tim’s responsibility as an older brother to demonstrate patience.  

He knows that it’s not Damian’s fault for being an insufferable jerk or a pompous ass, but….. but…… but…… he’s sick and tired of always having to be the bigger person.

To have to constantly turn the other cheek in the face of an unending onslaught of haughty, condescending comments and pointed barbs about his parentage.  

To have to endure countless petty insults about his skills, or apparent lack thereof, only to receive a sheepish shrug from Dick or even be chided on the rare occasion he dares to stand up for himself.

To face Batman’s stoic indifference as Robin parades around in Tim’s costume like it is something he is entitled to, like being the blood son means that he automatically deserves his birthright although he has done nothing to show that he understands or honours the mantle.

Robin was meant to stand for kindness, bravery, sacrifice, and Tim is fed up with how Damian defiles that legacy each time he puts on the colours.  

Those words had been a long time coming and Tim is glad that he’s finally said them.  

Damian’s face shutters but then goes eerily blank seconds later.  Tim grits his teeth as he tries to slow his ragged breathing down.  

“Very well then, do continue with your little project here,” Damian sneers.  “Far be it for me to try and save you some time;  it’s not like you would have done much else of value, after all.”  

With one last venomous glare, he stalks over to the training mats and launches into a series of aggressive katas.  Tim releases the breath he was holding.

Alright, that’s over now.  You should get back to work.

Try as he might to focus, he can’t seem to settle his racing thoughts.  He hates to admit it, but Damian does have a point.

He’s been working on these calculations for a few hours now, but still has nothing to show for it.  He should have found something by now.  None of this is making sense.  

Cautiously, he casts a discreet glance over his shoulder and spots Damian going through some drills with his katana.  Sighing, he runs a frustrated hand through his hair.  

Tim tries not to brag, tries not to be arrogant or overestimate his own abilities or worth.  He has far too many flaws to ever delude himself into thinking that he is infallible or perfect by any means, but one thing that Tim has always been certain of is that he is smart.

It isn’t a boast, or an attempt to show off or impress.  He would be the first to admit that he is good at little else.  Truth be told, the reason why Tim is intelligent is because he has little else to offer, and so he clings on to his mind in the desperate hope that it might be enough to make him useful.

Solving cases quicker than anyone else secured his position as the leader of the Titans.  Finding out Batman’s identity through hard work and deductions had allowed him to become Robin.  Getting to skip two grades in school had prompted his parents to take him out for a celebratory dinner at his favourite restaurant where his mother gave him a hug and his father bragged about his achievements to anyone who would listen.  He still remembers how happy he had been that day.

So, Tim is smart.  Performing calculations and solving problems is what he excels at.  Which means that by all logic, he should have been able to figure out a way around this dichotomy.

Time travel is hardly something unfamiliar to him, and as far as alien artefacts are concerned, the Dokris’ technology is not particularly sophisticated.  

Yet, he has made almost no headway into understanding this device’s mechanics despite almost three hours of studying it.  Something isn’t right.

Unless…

Maybe Damian was right.  Maybe I’m deliberately not seeing something.  Maybe I really am deliberately trying to sabotage this research.

He swallows shakily and feels his pulse start to speed up again.   Could it be?

His first instinct is to scoff and immediately dismiss the idea, but then he glances back at the piles of balled-up paper covered with useless scrawls of information and scratched-out data points and reconsiders his stance.  

Could it actually be that he hasn’t found anything useful yet, because he doesn’t want to find anything useful?  That somehow, he wants…

He loved Jason, looked up to him so much as Robin.  Robin was his hero, taught him what it truly meant to be brave.

He doesn’t voice the creeping thought that has been lingering at the back of his mind, but it speaks up in an insidious whisper still.  

But without Jason dying, Bruce would never have made you Robin, and you would be all alone in that giant house again, just a dumb little kid running around Gotham at night with your silly little camera, pretending to be a hero.   

He feels sick to his stomach.  He doesn’t want to admit it, but he can’t deny that some part of that is true.

He would never in a million years do anything to contribute to Jason’s death, especially in such a brutal fashion.  He’s seen first hand the damage and destruction it wrought on Bruce, on Dick — neither of them had truly recovered from that — so he knows the unspeakable cruelty that such an event had caused.

But despite his best efforts, he can’t help it when a dark part of his mind strays to that possibility and imagines a world where he never gets to become Robin.  Gets to meet Bruce, and Dick, and Alfred.  Gets to become something.  Someone.

Days, months, years, stretching ahead of him, little eternities spent all alone, locked up in that Manor.  No purpose, no family.  

He can’t stop the trepidation that crawls over his skin, or ignore the chill that runs down his spine.  

No, he shakes his head.  That’s not right, that’s an awful thing to do, I can’t do that— let it happen to Jason and everyone else.

I am trying.  I’ve been working hard on this, and I’m going to figure it out.

With newfound determination and drive to succeed, he cracks his knuckles and looks back down at his work.    

I must be missing something.  I must be.

He lets his eyes focus in once more, with the rhythmic pounding of the punching bag fading into a steady soundtrack in the background. 

BATCAVE (JASON TODD, 20 YEARS OLD)

“What’s up, guys?”

Casually tossing a pistol up in the air then catching it again (unloaded of course — what do you take him for?  Gun safety is very important), he strolls leisurely into the Cave.  

Silence greets him.

“Okay then,” he mutters, raising a single eyebrow and quickly sneaking a look at the clock on the wall.  Still the 27th.  He isn’t too late after all.

And wouldn’t that be an interesting role reversal for once. 

Either way, it seems like slightly bad form to miss your own death, and Jason is all about manners.  Besides, it’s a stressful situation, and the little punk might need some moral support, and heaven knows he isn’t going to get much of that from Bruce.  

(His Bruce — tiny Jason’s, that is — or maybe that Bruce is Jason’s Bruce as well.  It’s certainly the one that he’s most familiar with as well.  

Sure, Jason definitely changed after his death and subsequent resurrection featuring a tiny dip in a Lazarus Pit, and yeah, his delayed puberty absolutely involved some minor differences in personality, but he’s not the only one who changed as well.  Jason had returned to a Gotham that was darker, rougher, and it wasn’t just because of the new haze of green over his vision.  

And yet, one thing remained the same.  That really was the biggest punchline of them all.

You know what they say — there are only two constants in life: change, and the Joker.)

Anyway, suffice to say that the events of the day have been the slightest bit challenging for Jason, and he’s eager to get it all over with so he can put it all behind him and go drown his sorrows in booze, violence and other healthy coping mechanisms.

Venturing further into the cave, he finally catches sight of two small figures.

“Hey brats,” he greets.  Damian flickers a withering glare his way from where he’s stationed at the training mats.  Over at the Batcomputer, Tim doesn’t even blink.

Jason stares for a bit, blinking in surprise.  No response.

Sheesh.  Tough crowd.

Walking even closer to them, Jason once again fails to elicit a reaction, or in Tim’s case, even an acknowledgement.  Squinting at the razor-sharp focus on the Replacement’s face, he can understand how Tim manages to forget to eat and go a few days without resting.

Damian’s just a rude little bastard and Jason has the strongest urge to pinch his proud little nose and see how much he likes that.

In the end, he decides to choose the higher path of non-violence and simply annoy the kid instead.  Interactions with Dick Grayson have demonstrated that irritation is just as potent a weapon as any other.

“Oh I see how it is,” he grumbles.  “No love for your big brother Jason!”

“Silence, Todd.  Your voice is grating at my ears and lowering the collective intelligence of the room,” Damian snaps.  

“Well, hello to you too, demon brat,” Jason huffs in response, shaking his head disapprovingly.  Kids these days, no respect for their elders.

Just as Damian opens his mouth, looking ready to protest, another group of people arrive.  Thank goodness.  

Jason perks up.  Everyone looks grim and stone-faced, but he doesn’t let that dissuade him.  Damian sullenly walks over and even Tim has paused his efforts at the Batcomputer, turning around to face them all, though his face is pale and withdrawn.

“Oh look, the rest of the crew’s showed up.  Time to get this party started!”

Young Bruce flinches.  Tiny Jason’s bottom lip wobbles.  Dick balks.  Other Bruce doesn’t react.  

He winces.  Fuck, he really is an asshole.  All he’d wanted to do was lighten up the mood a bit, have a little fun; he hadn’t meant to further traumatise the kid.  

An uncomfortable stillness takes over the Cave.   No one wants to be the first one to speak.

Jason feels a nervous energy run through his body.  He resists the urge to start tapping his foot or make an inappropriate comment.  The only thing running through his brain right now is a joke, but he doesn’t think that will go down too well.

(In fact, he’s got tons of jokes.  You could even call him the Joker.

Jeez, who died in here?  Oh wait — me!  

Look at all your faces.  Why so serious?

This is a real grave affair, isn’t it?

Yeah, not going to say any of those.)

Still, the paralysis persists.

Finally, since no one seems to know what to do, or be brave enough to do what needs to be done, Jason takes it upon himself.  He’s always been good at carrying out all the dirty tasks.

“Alright then,” he claps his hands together suddenly, startling a jump out of a few of the others.  “We all know why we’re gathered here today, so let’s not make this harder than it has to be.  Come on, then!  Last words everyone, to make it simple, I’ll start.”

Briskly, he strides over to Dick, who looks panicked at being the first to be singled out.  

“Right then, Dickiebird, real simple for you.  Don’t be too upset, there was nothing you could have done.  At least you got to say goodbye this time!  Just keep on doing that,” he waves his hand around in a vague gesture, “supporting thing you’ve been doing.  Keep up the good work!”

One perfunctory pat on the shoulder, then he’s done and moves on.  Dick’s mouth is hanging open and he looks a little stricken.  Looks like Jason may have accidentally added to his distress instead.  Oh well, can’t win them all.

Next up is Tim.  Jason hesitates for a moment.  What is there to say to him even?  In the end, he settles for, “Not quite sure what you’ve got going on there, but it looks mighty impressive.  Chin up, okay?  Just remember, you get a new job out of this and I get over it eventually, so it wasn’t all bad, am I right?”

He resists the urge to do jazz hands, although the temptation is strong.  He’s quite proud of himself for that one.

Third in line is Damian, and Jason pauses again.  Nah, this doesn’t really have much to do with him, does it?  

Without saying another word, he walks past.  Straight on to his Bruce.

He doesn’t let himself look into Bruce’s eyes as he walks by.  Doesn’t want to face the disappointment, or anger, or indifference — whatever it may be — that is in there.  Red Hood and Batman have exchanged many words in the past, and none of them are words he ever wants to hear again.

In the ensuing silence, it does feel like Bruce may have some things to say, but Jason doesn’t give him the opportunity to.  

Doesn’t need to.  Has imagined and played the exact scene out numerous times in his dreams.

("Dad, please, it’s me — your son!

Jason, what’s going on?  I thought you were dead!

I …Well, I was, but I came back, a—and I just want to come home.  Will you let me come home?

Why would I?  Why should I?  

Please, dad!  I—I thought I was your son?  

You may have been my child once upon a time, but don’t think you can trick me —  I've seen what you become!

In countless permutations, all ending the exact same way.)  

Continuing on down the line, he comes to a stop in front of the other Bruce.  That version stares at him with a shaky, uncertain gaze, looking as though a single harsh word could bring this hulking figure of a man all the way down.  

The bittersweet hint of nostalgia swells and stings his eyes.  A tiny fondness for the man standing opposite him grows in his chest.  

Jason lets out a small, crooked grin.

“Hey old man, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”  Throat suddenly tight with emotion, he blinks stars out of his eyes and keeps on taking in the wonderful face of the man he never thought he’d see again.  It makes his knees go a little weak.  

Jason is twenty years old, has lived alone for three, taken care of himself for twelve and overseen his own criminal empire for the past two.  He has not been young in a very long time but somehow, something about being confronted with this fragment from the past rattles him.  Gazing up now at Bruce with wistful, yearning eyes, he feels so much like a child again, open and vulnerable and everything he has wanted for forever.  

Independence has always been something that he has valued deeply, because growing up in Crime Alley taught him that to put your trust in someone and rely on them to look out for you is to place your life in someone else’s hands and how you end up face down in a ditch by age twelve.  

But there is a part of him that wants so much to be able to just let go and know that someone there will catch him, craves impossibly the ability to just lay back and have somebody take care of him.  Someone to protect him, to love him and care if he lives or dies.  

For a while, a blissful, euphoric period, he’d thought that he had found that for himself — in the warm, luxuriant comfort of Wayne Manor, under Bruce’s protective embrace and Alfred’s kind, loving eyes.  

Then, it all ended.  

And he only has himself to blame.  It’s time he makes up for all that they gave to him then and lets that fact be known.  

“I—I just wanted to let you know that it wasn’t your fault, okay?  I never blamed you for my death, and neither will he,” Jason says, angling a shoulder to indicate the younger Jason who waits anxiously by their side.  

There has always been some amount of bad blood between Jason and Bruce, no matter the time period — maybe it is the case that they were never supposed to be together anyway — but one of the regrets he has always had is that he was never able to offer this final reassurance, to give some bit of closure on this painful memory.  

Of what he recalls about his Bruce, years back now, he imagines that the considerable guilt complex and childhood baggage may have given rise to some amount of regret on Bruce’s part for not arriving in time to save him.  Batman had then taken each and every death that occured on his watch as a personal indictment and sin.  Jason knows from the memorial in the Batcave that his Bruce views him as his biggest failure as well.  Hot tears prickle at his eyes at that knowledge because it is a reminder of how much he has lost in his life.

“I never managed to do this in my own time, and I don’t know if it will matter to you, but just in case you need to hear this, listen to me clearly now — you had nothing to do with my death.  I absolve you of guilt,” he whispers fiercely.  

If there is one other person that he can hope to save today, it is this man in front of him, who despite all his hardships and troubles, still has the brightness and innocence in his soul that Jason wants to keep there, more than ever.  He had a good two years — two years more than he ever expected or deserved — and all of Bruce’s other kids deserve to experience him too.  

Jason just hopes that he manages to make that happen.

Before him, this Bruce crumples, face folding into an expression of raw, expansive grief and Jason does not know if his words have been a balm or another bullet to the chest.  He prays that he has made the right decision, that he is able, in some small way, to offer a bit of solace to the father he once loved dearly.

In the corner of his eye, he feels his own Bruce startle, eyes growing wide.  Having almost completely forgotten about his presence right by them, the sight makes him jolt as well.  

Whipping his head around, he seeks out his Bruce’s eyes.  There is a rawness in them that has not been there for years and Jason sees, reflected in his own, pain.  It occurs to him now that his Bruce might somehow still be carrying some guilt about this incident, even if it happened five years ago.

This day has made him feel like he’s been stretched and pulled through the wringer already, so he is exhausted.  There is so much to unpack in the depths of his Bruce’s expression that he does not have the emotional capacity to deal with right now so he tears his eyes away and turns back to the other man.  

Fortunately, the short reprieve seems to have given him the chance to pull himself together slightly more.  When Jason looks back at him, his eyes are glistening.

“Those words mean the world to me, thank you for that, son.  I’m so glad to have had those years with you, and for what it’s worth, I cannot express the joy and relief that I have, knowing that some time down the road, you’re alive and I might even get to have you back.”

This time, it is Jason who has to look away, to quell the rising tide of emotion that surges forth.  It would take a few hours and beers for him to properly sift through those lines, but right now, there isn’t enough time.  (There never is.)  

For his last words to this father (to a father?), he calms himself and turns back to Bruce.

“I’m …glad to hear that too.  Don’t worry old man,” he smiles faintly, feeling just ever-so-slightly off-balance.  “It’ll all turn out alright.  J-just promise that you’ll be waiting for us when we get back, and in the meantime, I’ll be fine.  Don’t you see?  The ground remembers my name.”

With that, he quickly moves on.  Doesn’t wait to see how both Bruces flinch back and crumble.

(He knows it best.  There is a part of him that was never meant to survive.)

His final stop is also the hardest.  His last visitee has been waiting and watching every conversation before him, and Jason tries not to think about how he’s been taking everything so far.  All that’s left to do is check in with him and share some final words of comfort, or advice.  

He crouches down in front of him.  “Hey baby Jay,” he says softly.  “You still doing okay?”

Ever the bold one, the boy bites down on his lip and nods his head stubbornly.  Jason cracks a sentimental smile at that.

Patting the boy on his shoulder, he grins.  “You’re such a trooper, you know that?”  Such a good soldier, he doesn’t say.  

“Don’t worry, alright, mini-me?  We’ll be right out in no time, and we’ll be a lot bigger and cooler to boot.”

That manages to earn a shaky smile from the kid and inner-Jason fist pumps triumphantly.  

“I know you might be worried about how I turned out, but I don’t want you to be, okay?  Your dad’s already promised that he’s going to wait and stick by you, and we both know how much he loves you, am I right?”  He waits until he receives an immediate, confirmatory nod, and then carries on smoothly.  

“And our dad is Batman, which means that he’s pretty cool and strong, even though he’s no Wonder Woman” — they both share a commiserating look — “Dad can still probably do lots of things and he’s going to make it all good.  You just have to trust him.”

Those last words ringing out into the air, feeling like a concrete weight over the rest of the room, he’s finished his task.  Jason shares one, last meaningful stare with his younger counterpart and in that brief eye contact, a common understanding passes through them.  

Younger Jason gives a serious, decisive nod before walking over to the portal, where he will wait for the older Batman to perform the necessary configurations.  As he dutifully moves along, Jason can’t help but remember that old, familiar rhyme.  

Little soldier go bravely marching on.

Watching his younger self stride stoically forward, he calls out one, final time. 

“Remember, little one: we live to see another day.”

Jason may not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was thrown out the womb fighting with a spirit that will never die.  His anthem has always been one of survival and like all the sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked children of Crime Alley know in the depths of their empty bellies:

Where there is life, there is hope.

BATCAVE (BRUCE WAYNE, 34 YEARS OLD)

“Jason?  It’s time.”  

Those three words unleash a powerful silence onto the cave.  The implications they have are unmistakable, yet they are not meant unkindly.  Even as he speaks blandly, Bruce can feel the undertow of emotion creeping up onto his counterpart’s face.

Since Jason’s conversations with everyone (and wasn’t that heavy), the other Bruce had elected to begin making the final preparations to send them back and the rest of the Cave had elapsed into silence.  Although the waiting had left him awkwardly standing there, empty hands wringing helplessly in front of him, it is far preferable to the alternative.  

Bruce does not envy his counterpart for his task.  It is almost like having to dig your own child’s grave.  He deliberately does not think about the aptness of that comparison.

Jason shrinks back and the gesture causes that Bruce’s face to go carefully blank.  Before his eyes, the older version of him visibly closes himself off and Bruce cannot find it in him to assign any blame.  He doesn’t breathe either as the man walks past him to make the final arrangements.  His eyes are trained on Jason.

At his back, he can hear the other Bruce tinkering with the wonderful, damnable device that brought them all here today.  He tries not to flinch when a portal whirls to life behind him.  Flickering in the background, he sees a churning of lights reflected against the inky black of the cave floor in an unholy halo of blue and green.

The lights cast their sickly glow onto Jason’s face and Bruce has never detested the sight of his child before him so much.  There is just enough illumination to watch Jason’s face pale even more.

(Bruce wonders what he can see in that portal.  Is he viewing his own death?)

“Dad,” he whines, a plaintive sound that strikes right at Bruce’s heart.  “I don’t want to die.  Can’t you do something?”

“Oh Jason, I wish I could.  I would give anything if it could be me and not you.”

It could always be worse, he thinks, but cannot bring himself to say out loud.

This future is horrific enough, but at least in this world there is still a Jason, still his son.  Even if that son has come back angry and broken and with a heart full of anger directed at a version of himself who cannot seem to feel love anymore.  

It could always be worse.

He does not know whether it is a sign of his optimism or pessimism that he believes it too.  Bruce has lived thirty years of life an orphan to know that most people don’t come back from the grave.

“Will you be there with me at least?” 

He didn’t realise it was possible for his chest to ache even more.  Oh Jaylad, so many regrets.

“I’m coming after you …before we were brought here, I was running as fast as I could, and I could see the warehouse.  I-I don’t know if I made it on time,” he admits, and cannot stop his lip from trembling when Jason just nods in understanding.    

As if it should be expected that his father’s failures are so large that he cannot give him even this.

Bruce hates his acquiescence.  

“That’s it, then?”  Jason gives a sad little smile and Bruce’s heart crumbles where it stands in his chest  “I guess I’ll see you in a couple of years’ time.”

“Just,” his eyes are wet, “don’t give up on me, okay B?”

“Never.”  And he wants so desperately for that to be the truth.  He knows, based on the man in front of him, it might not necessarily be.

“B?  I’m scared,” Jason whispers, and his voice holds equal parts fear and self-loathing.  The shame that coats his words is unmistakable and it hits him like a sledgehammer just how much he has failed his child, that Jason thinks being afraid at the prospects of his impending grisly, horrifying death is a point of weakness.

Bruce’s face crumples.

BATCAVE (JASON TODD, 15 YEARS OLD)

Against the roar of blood in his ears, he hears the firm drumbeat of his heart pounding out his fear and though he knows he is fooling no one, he tries not to show his trepidation.  Without waiting for Bruce to reply, he turns around briskly and walks away.  Behind him, he can feel his Bruce falling to pieces which only strengthens his resolve.  There is no time for weakness now and Batman needs his Robin.

Though true courage remains elusive, Jason is well-practised in wearing a brave face so he pulls that mask out smoothly as he turns back and offers a watery grin to those who will be his family, present and future.

“Don’t you worry Dad, I’m strong, remember?”  He hopes his voice is not trembling and brittle like his smile feels.  He doesn’t wait for his fathers response.  Can’t.  Won’t.  Not if he wants to be strong enough to see this through.  (And he does, for them.)

Bruce is the only person who has ever made him feel like weakness could be alright, not a show of cowardice or a sign of giving up, because those arms had always offered the promise of safety, of refuge with no strings attached.

All it would take is one word, one crack in the armour for Bruce to break and sweep him up in a protective embrace, consequences be damned.  His father would burn down the world for him because Bruce’s love has always overpowered his logic and his children are held as stars in fathomless depths.  But his father has been a martyr for far, far too long and this time it is Jason’s turn to make the sacrifice.   

Robin is magic.  

He chants those words to himself, holding them up as a shield and bulwark against danger and selfishness.

Be like Robin, act like Robin.

Although it is Jason who will die in that warehouse, he will die wearing Robin’s colours.

When the world goes dark again, he awakens under a searing desert sky.

MAGDALA VALLEY, ETHIOPIA  (BRUCE WAYNE, 34 YEARS OLD)

He knows exactly what is going to happen and so there is no reason why he should be surprised.  He still screams when the warehouse goes up in flames.

Debris, planks of wood, the rotten smell of burning blows through the air and he cannot tell if the tears in his eyes are from the dust or something else.

Fire, his heart is on fire in that warehouse.  His baby is burning alone on a pyre without him and there is nothing he can do to stop it.  

Finally, he is close enough to run and thrusts the nose of the bike straight to the ground.  His whole world shudders when his feet contact the sand and the crash produces a painful, screeching sensation in his knees but the tremor that runs through his bones is nothing compared to the way that they are already aching, straining at the joints.  

Breathless, heart pounding, he leaps away from the Batcycle and begins sprinting towards the warehouse.  Dodging between wreckage and detritus, the remnants of what may be left of his son, he runs like he has never run before.  All he can focus on is that tiny spot alight in the distance, a smouldering ember that houses his dying child.  

Flashes of the grim future that awaits him, that he has already encountered, spot his vision and his hammering pulse ratchets even higher up.  He won’t accept this.  Fate has taken too much away from him already.

There is sand on his face and tears in his eyes and his son has never been further from him.  

“Jason!  JASON!”

In the distance, smoke is rising through the air.

BATCAVE (BRUCE WAYNE, 39 YEARS OLD)

After the two of them disappear, Bruce is left just standing there.  For a moment, it feels almost anti-climatic.  As if what just happened was no different from them walking through a door.

He instantly hates himself for the thought, and berates his own inflated ego for trying to sensationalise the moment.  It isn’t as though Jason’s death was some grand, cataclysmic event that would shake the whole foundations of the universe.  

Who did he think he was?  Just because he was Bruce Wayne, didn’t mean anything for how the levers of space-time would act.  

Still, part of him thought that something should be different.  His son may have just died and the world keeps on turning like normal.  Wasn’t Jason special?

He really should know better, though.  He’s had four years to get used to the fact that life does go on even when his son is dead.  

“So they’re gone, then.”  Jason comments off-handedly.  “Huh.”

He looks surprised, and the only thing that stops Bruce from snapping at him is the fact that the flippant remark seems to have been made unconsciously.  

Remember Bruce, this is hard for him too.  In fact, probably even harder for him than it is for you.  

The thought lets tension ease from his shoulders again.  Then, a pesky voice once more:

Hmm, I wonder if Jason’s been blown up yet.  Based on the earlier description, it seems like we’re at least past the bludgeoning stage, when the Joker broke both of his kneecaps to see if he could still crawl.

A dizzying panic takes over him for a moment at the realisation that his son could have died already — could be dying at that very moment — and he would never know.  He thinks he understands Dick’s intense rage back then a little better now.  

It takes him a while to calm back down but he breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth until he manages to stop feeling lightheaded.  Don’t do that to yourself, Bruce.  Focus on what you can change and don’t obsess over what is gone and past.

He thinks about what Alfred told him earlier as he looks over at his second son come-back-to-life, notes the white-knuckle clench of his hand.  

He may not show it, but Jason is probably hurting too.  

Just as he builds up the courage to reach out and talk to Jason — you can do it Bruce, this is Jason, you love him, just go and speak to him — the boy-man-child (his child) abruptly stands up and walks out the Cave again, for the second time.

Bruce blinks.

He struggles for a moment and swallows harshly, trying not to let feelings of dismay drag down the rest of his newfound courage, before turning to survey the other occupants of the Cave.  (There will still be time.)  In the corner of his eye, he can see Dick talking in low tones to Tim near the Batcomputer.  His eldest has an arm wrapped around Tim’s hunched shoulders as the boy stares down at the table.  Tim’s face is shrouded by shadows from his angle but Bruce can still recognise the way his frame is shaking.

Breathing out through his teeth, he decides that Tim is probably in good hands.  He makes a promise to himself to speak to Dick later on and make sure that in the process of caring for others, he has not forgotten himself.  And to tell him how proud Bruce is of him as well.  

He looks up.  His youngest is standing arms-crossed in the corner, usual scowl on his face.

Alfred had said it in other words, but his meaning had been clear.  You have other children, Master Bruce.  Act like it.

As he walks over to Damian, he wonders what is happening now five years in the past and sends a prayer halfway across the world.

Bruce may be far from a perfect parent, but he loves his children and will try anything to make things better.  If the past has shown anything, perhaps there was a time when he might once have been a good father.  

He is determined to make that happen again.  

MAGDALA VALLEY, ETHIOPIA  (JASON TODD, 15 YEARS OLD)

Everything is hurting.

At first he had tried to—

Another indeterminable pulse of time floats by.  When he lazily cracks an eye open, it is still dark.

His hands are so heavy.  (He cannot feel his feet.)  

Why is he awake again?  

(There is a niggling feeling in the back of his head that there is something he is supposed to be doing but he is so comfortable lying where he is and his brain is a river of thick, honeyed syrup and that thought is so …far …away…)

In the unerring silence, he feels the soft caress of a phantom hand brush across his cheek.  Bruce? he thinks he murmurs blearily.

Against his skin, he feels his father’s smile.  The gentle double flutter of a hand patting his forehead like the paper wings of a hummingbird before a snowflake kiss lands on his forehead.

His lips quirk into a smile.  Muted footsteps fade off into the muffled surface of a shag rug.  The beige one, in front of the fireplace in the den in the manor, the one that makes him feel like he’s lying in a pile of sheep and makes Bruce smile.  Yes, by the gentle crackling of the fire with a belly full of rich chocolate and marshmallows warming him up from the inside.  

Slow, sleepy blinks.  Bruce?

Another smile, all fond and happy.  Quietly, don’t make a sound, tiptoe over and shut the door, so carefully—

Jaylad, it’s okay, go to sleep.  Dad will be here when you wake up.

BATCAVE (JASON TODD, 20 YEARS OLD)

There is a solemnity in the air as he looks around at all the sombre faces.  Ironically, he feels little grief for himself.

In fact, part of him is floating, flying through the still, stagnant air of the Batcave.  

After a while, the oppressive silence and piercing weight of the stares had grown to be too much for him, and with a flourish, he had up and left the Batcave.  After all, it was an action he was all too familiar with.

Well, sort of.  Something inside wouldn’t quite let him leave the Cave fully, and so he did the next best thing for a former Robin — which was an identity he still couldn’t quite shake — go high and hang out in the rafters until he could zip home on his bike and live out the rest of his Death Day in peace.

It had all been going so well until his menace of an older brother decided to drag him back here under false pretences.  Thanks a lot, Nightwing.

He just manages to stop himself from grinding his teeth into another headache.  The pleasant fuzziness surrounding his brain makes it easier than expected.

Hmm.  Is this what closure feels like or something?  He ponders for a moment, then lets out a snort.  Nah, couldn’t be like that.

It then strikes him that perhaps the reason why he isn’t sad is because nothing really happened for him.  That’s why it doesn’t bother him at all.  

He’s so used to bad things happening to him that the one time it doesn’t, and it’s happening to some other poor son of a gun, he can’t bring himself to feel anything about it.  

Maybe just a slight twinge of pity for the young boy who was about to get himself blown up.  He was still a child, after all.  

It lasts only for a short length of time before he relaxes once more and lets his body melt into the cool steel bar that he is perched on.  This time, it doesn’t have to be his cross to bear.

He knows all about the whole, funerals aren’t for the dead, they’re for the living schtick.  As someone with the, let’s say, unique experience of having been on both sides of the veil, he is accordingly in two minds about it.  

Growing up in Crime Alley, it only took him two years to figure out that that was absolute garbage.  

(And trust him, there were a whole lot of dead people there for him to gather his observations from.  A good sample size, and all that — he’s pretty sure that that was one of the things he was supposed to learn in Science class in third grade before he dropped out.)

Despite the supply of bodies that would routinely turn up around his neighbourhood, the actual number of funerals thrown were few and far between.  Nobody was going to cough up a couple hundred bucks to rent a space for a fancy box and a bunch of chairs.  

(Hell, a coffin was only for if you even got lucky enough to have a body intact, and not floating in the Harbour somewhere, blown to bits or kept to make an example of.  And as for a venue — most people could barely afford a space to live, let alone a glorified storage spot for a corpse to hang around in for a few hours.  

All his mom got was a plain, unmarked urn that he fetched from the hospital one day after they cremated her since there was no one to collect the body.  He ran to the cemetery one night and dug a tiny hole beneath a bush of yellow zinnias and buried her ashes there.  He chose zinnias because they were his mom’s favourite flower — she admired them for their resilience and tenacity through the years; and he picked yellow because they symbolised daily remembrance — he wouldn’t be able to visit often but he wanted her to know that he was always thinking of her.  He placed the prettiest rock he could find there as a grave marker and tried to pretend that the dampness of the soil was from the morning dew.  Either way, at least his tears might help her flowers to grow.

Besides, the main thing at funerals was crying, and you could do that from anywhere — tears at least were something free, as long as you had enough water, you could keep them coming for quite a while.  

He would know.)

The few occasions someone did throw a funeral, all of the Crime Alley kids knew that they were going to eat well.  Sure, it was perhaps a little tacky to be stealing food from a funeral, but it’s not like anyone else would have eaten it, and he’d bet 87 year old Mr Li from Apartment 3B wouldn’t have minded him sneaking in and getting a hearty plate of rice and braised pork as well as a tiny piece of candy to take home with him.  

(He sure wouldn’t be missing any food wherever he was — dead people don’t get stomach cramps.  He knows that for certain now, from personal experience.)

The old man had lived a long time, been one of the few fortunate enough to be taken out by something as mundane and pedestrian as coronary heart disease.  (Jason had looked the term up once — it was called ‘diseases of affluence’.  Funny; they’d always just called it ‘rich person illnesses’).  While he’d been alive, he had always been kind to Jason.  

Jason wonders now what Mr Li would think about the fact that his family had ended up eating plain rice and soup made from boiled carrots for two months afterwards to make up for the cost of the funeral.  The joss sticks and paper money they’d burned had cut an equivalent hole in their pockets.  (That revelation had made the food in his belly sit a little heavy and the crystals of sugar still on his tongue turn slightly sour.)

When he’d asked Shaochen, their granddaughter, about it though, she only shrugged and replied that it was all worth it for her ah gong, because her family believed that performing the proper funeral rites was essential for ensuring her family’s spirits made it safely to the afterlife.  

Nobody could convince him later on that funerals were for anyone other than the dead.  During that particular funeral, yes, some of the living, including himself, had certainly benefited — and probably a few of the street kids managed to continue staying amongst the living because of that meal — but the funeral hadn’t been organised for them.

During his time as a ghost, however, he couldn’t quite reconcile the idea that the events at a funeral mattered once you kicked the bucket, with his own experience of all-encompassing blankness.  Maybe it was just that he was sent to one place, while good folk like Mr Li got to go to the good afterlife, but watching his perfect, seamless procession back on the television — and hadn’t that been a fun old time; especially with his big brother’s conspicuous absence —  did nothing for him besides prolong his torture.

He supposes that this will just have to remain one of the grand mysteries of life.

What he does know, is that although, or maybe because, it is a boy wearing his face that had walked off to his death, that send-off was not for him.  That grief belonged to his family.  

Still, part of him does feel a tightness in his chest for agony of the others which is plain to see.  From his position above the memorial, he locks in on the dark shroud of sadness that hangs over everyone else’s heads and tries not to acknowledge his own reflection staring back at him in the glass as he sends his own wishes upward.  A tiny elegy, a whispered prayer.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

GOTHAM CEMETERY (BRUCE WAYNE, 35 YEARS OLD)

The ground in front of him is dark and damp. 

He looks up at the sky.  His eyes are wet.

“Jason,” he smiles, brushing over the smooth stone with a trembling hand.  “It’s raining.”

BATCAVE (DICK GRAYSON)

“Hey there Timmy, how you holding up?”

He doesn’t really need an answer.  He knows it already, judging by Tim’s stiff, unnatural posture, his brittle, clamped expression.  It does not take a genius to figure out that he is hurting.  

“I’m fine,” Tim says tersely.  

Inwardly, he sighs.  This stubborn insistence on maintaining emotional distance is something that he is far from unfamiliar with, but the damage that the resulting repression causes is always a struggle to deal with.

If only we had chosen a cuter, more quirky and less harmful habit to emulate instead, he thinks mournfully.  Fortunately, years of dealing with the OG inventor of the technique has equipped Dick with the necessary skills to tackle it.  

“Are you?”  He prods gently, careful not to push too hard.  “Because it’s okay if you’re not,” he continues.  

Sure enough, he sees a crack beginning to form in that exterior.  Tim squeezes his eyes shut, hard.    

“I-I didn’t manage to save Jason,” he blurts out, wilting like every word is a physical blow.  “And Damian said that it’s because I purposely didn’t try hard enough because I wanted to make sure that Bruce would still let me be Robin anyway.”

The last part comes out in a rush and Dick has to close his own eyes at that.  Oh God, Damian, why.  He loves his little brother, really, he does, but sometimes he just wants to throttle him for the words that come out of his mouth.  

“Aw Timmy, no.”  His heart is breaking as he watches his other little brother glare down at the table. 

“I really thought I could fix it.”  Shame coats every word as Tim hangs his head down.  Dick’s soul begins to ache in his chest.  

“You tried.  I know you tried,” he assures while pulling Tim into a tight hug. 

So does he, he wants to add, so does Jason, but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t know.  After all, he never did really know Jason in the end.

“Really?”  Tim’s voice is hoarse and hopeful.

“Really,” he confirms.

A tiny, heartbreaking smile blooms across Tim’s face.  The ice in his chest slowly begins to melt.  

Almost there.  

“So why don’t you go take a little nap now?  The rest will do you some good,” he urges encouragingly.

Letting out a big yawn, Tim nods his acquiescence before plodding obediently up the stairs, hopefully to face plant into his bed for a couple of hours at least.  

Suddenly drained himself, Dick feels his shoulders slump as he rakes a tired hand through his hair.  

This day has been difficult for everyone, and he only hopes that he’s done enough damage control in the ensuing fallout.  He barely knows how to start unpacking the many bombshells that both Jasons have sent his way as well.

After this, he still needs to talk to Damian…

There is an unscalable mountain reaching up before him.  How does one even begin to talk about any of these issues?  None of this was mentioned in the Robin or good older brother training manuals his parents didn’t leave him. 

Just as he’s tempted to go do a face plant himself, except this time maybe into a slab of hard concrete, another voice calls out.  

“Are you …are you feeling alright?”

He freezes, turning warily to regard the figure in question.  The voice is familiar but the words are not.

Nevertheless, he goes ahead with it and nods slowly.  “Yeah, just kind of tired,” he answers flippantly, suspicion and doubt still warring inside of him.  Alarm bells are ringing in his brain.  Just in case, he flickers his eyes towards the Cave’s silent alert system and discreetly begins inching closer.

“Good  …that’s good, chum,” Bruce(?) says gruffly, then gives a stiff, almost contemplative? nod.

Dick is equally taken aback.  Bruce hasn’t called him chum in years, since probably his days in green scaly panties.  His heart is pounding through his chest.

Clayface?  Ivy’s pollen?  No, we’ve been here all this while and done those tests already.  No one could have infiltrated the Cave since.

Despite the literal time travel that had taken place just minutes before, this is what makes him feel like he is upside down, in outer space.  The whole world is spinning.

Bruce takes a deep breath.  Dick braces himself.  (It still isn’t enough to prepare him for what is about to come.)

“I just wanted to say, I’m proud of you for all that you’ve done for your brothers,” he says, just the slightest bit uncomfortably, reaching out a hand in stiff and jerky movements before clapping him on the back firmly twice.  Dick’s eyes are wide and darting back and forth.  It’s like a slow-motion car crash in front of him, but he can’t pull his eyes away or stop himself from watching with a sense of morbid fascination.  

“I also wanted to tell you,” Bruce continues, taking a moment to apparently pump himself up for the following words. “That I’m proud of you for the man you’ve become.  And I wouldn’t want my family any other way.”

With that, he finishes, nodding once to himself and then again to Dick in a self-satisfied manner, as if to say, yup, that’s it, I’m good now.

Bruce turns to leave.

Dick is not good now.  He stands there, gaping for a while, trying to figure out what has just transpired before his eyes soften.  Something flutters in his chest.

He feels …lighter.  

GOTHAM CEMETERY (JASON TODD, ?? YEARS OLD)

Everything aches.

Letting out an aborted grunt, he tries to shift himself from where his limbs are trapped in a stiff cast of their own making.  None of them respond but he cannot tell if it is because of the firm walls around him or because the anchors in his hands and feet are too heavy.  They don’t seem to want to move and his neck feels awfully tight.  

He imagines twisting just slightly to the right.  Yes… that would just hit the spot and give off a delightful crack as well, probably.

But his body is so heavy and there is no space between the light, gauzy sheets he is cocooned within.  His quicksand eyelids slip down again and for a while things are dark and quiet.

How long has he been sleeping for?  

When he opens his eyes again, the world is still dark.

The air is thick and muggy with …something, and around him is some cloth, soft and damp and heavy against his skin.  Somehow, it still seems to feel like parts of him are on fire.

He takes a deep breath and winces as all of his rib bones rise and fall individually, rattling and scraping against each other like the precarious arrangement of crystals on Wayne Manor’s chandelier, or a delicate bundle of sticks, all piled together.  

Somehow, he manages to free his fingers from where they had been tangled in the sheets.  It’s uncomfortably warm and stuffy in here, but the light smell of earth is comforting — it reminds him of those rare days spent out in the park, soaking in the breeze, balmy sun bathing his skin in gentle rays.  

When he finally pulls his eyelids open, the lights still aren’t switched on. 

Mom — he moans, though no words come out — did you forget to pay the electricity bill again?  

She doesn’t reply.  She’s probably just tired.  

He’s tired as well.  

But it’s still dark out.  Does this mean that he needs to go turn on the lights?  Can’t somebody else do it?  He is so very tired and aching right now.

A name comes to mind.  A sound, a collection of letters, floating through his sleep-battered mind.  

Bruce?  …No, Dad — is Dad coming?  

The air is growing thin.  The pounding in his ears grows louder and his breathing accelerates.  

Dad, I’m scared ...Will you come and help me?  Why is it still so dark, Bruce?

The ticking of a clock.    Blood-slick fingers scrabbling against the ground.  A cigarette.  Laughter.  The smell of smoke.

Oh …Dad’s not coming, is he?

His chest is getting tight.  The space is suddenly too small.

He starts to claw. 

ROOF, GOTHAM CITY (JASON TODD, 20 YEARS OLD)

The city is quiet now.

Compared to the dull, smoggy skyline that normally looms in the background, Gotham at night time seems almost …peaceful.  Although he can still hear a dog barking and a car alarm going off in the distance, the overarching sense of tranquillity still remains.  

Amidst the muted activity on the streets, he has found himself a charming little rooftop on which he can seek some temporary respite.  It even has a convenient ledge that he can lean against.  After the day that he’s had, he definitely needs it.  He takes a drag of his cigarette and watches the grey wisps of smoke twist and twine as they rise up and dissipate into the night sky.  

Suddenly, the night seems to still.  

His ears prick up and he hears the flutter of a cape, the soft landing.  Behind him, he can feel a presence which he recognises even without moving to look.  

He doesn’t turn around, just brings his cigarette back to his mouth again.  By now, he’s learnt that when it comes to Batman, there’s no point fighting or even trying to convince him of your side.  

When it comes to Bruce, that’s even more true.

Instead, he stretches out languorously and takes another puff of his cigarette, relishing in the smooth, acrid rush of nicotine into his lungs.  He figures that if he’s going to be lectured, or arrested, or whatever crazy punishment the Bat decides to exact against him now for whatever new wrong he’s committed, he might as well enjoy himself in the meantime.

When a few more minutes pass during which he manages to finish his cigarette and light a new one, his curiosity finally wins out and he rolls around, turning a lazy eye towards the figure on his side.  

He looks impossibly uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as a dark figure looming in the shadows can look at least, and the sight makes Jason giggle.  If even possible, Batman’s face beneath the cowl grows even more pinched.  

He quickly puts the cigarette back in his mouth to stifle the rest of his laughter before it gets out of hand.  They continue to sit in surprisingly companionable silence until suddenly, Batman speaks.  

“It wasn’t all bad, was it?”

The question is quiet, and the vulnerability in it makes Jason almost want to laugh.  He doesn’t.

(It also almost makes him choke on the smoke in his chest, and it is only his well-honed skills as a childhood chainsmoker that allow him to play it off as a deliberate exhale.)

Instead, he turns his attention back to the skyline and takes another drag.  The roof is silent.  Three heartbeats pass before he answers.  

“No, no, it wasn’t all bad.”  Leaning back, he breathes out a stream of smoke through his teeth and closes his eyes.  He raises a wrist and lets it fall to cover his face.  “In fact it was pretty fuckin’ good at times, which was half the problem to begin with.”

“I’m sorry.”

That chokes a startled laugh out of him, the type that is halfway to a sob and it is all he can do to not break down crying where he is.  All of the earlier conversations have left him raw and scraped open and Jason distantly wonders whether this is all part of some ploy by Batman, to prey on him when he is vulnerable and broken down.  The thought makes him sad and he doesn’t know if he would be able to take it so he chooses not to believe it.  

He’s so tired that it somehow seems to give him courage so in a soft, questioning tone, he asks, “What for?”

Bruce doesn’t respond, just sits there quietly, brooding.  Maybe Jason is growing more conversant in Bruce’s latest form of wordless communication, but this particular spate of silence feels more contemplative, the lack of response because Bruce himself is yet to know the answer and not because he is ignoring Jason.  That knowledge means more to him than he would have expected.  

In this stilted, staccato conversation that they are having, it is Jason who moves next.  He doesn’t actually know why, know what compelled him to speak, but perhaps it is the long, drawn-out silences, the confessional tone of the twilight hours or a combination of the two.  Either way, he feels honesty pouring out of him like a waterfall of truth, spilling boldly forth through all the cracks that have been bored into his chest.

“The first thing I ever stole was a pack of cigarettes and a jar of tomato sauce from the corner store.”

He can feel Bruce’s stare on the back of his neck.  He doesn’t turn to look.

“I was seven years old, and I took the jar because I was hungry and Mom hadn’t been out of bed all week, but I took the cigarettes because I wanted to, just to know I could.”  Taking another drag of his cigarette, he lets his eyes gaze off into the distance.  The smoke tastes stale in his mouth.

Then, he snorts.  “At the grand old age of seven, already training to be a criminal.  What a catch!”  He stops and shifts.  “Displaying thieving and deceptive tendencies at an early age; likely signs of a troubled upbringing,” he quotes sarcastically, an ugly thing of rage growing in his belly.  “That’s what they wrote about me in my file, you know?  CPS, when they picked me up the first time.”

Bruce probably already knows.  He would have seen Jason’s records during the adoption process, even if he had picked Jason up from the streets under slightly dubious circumstances.

Oh, the start.  Let’s not even talk about your origin story.  

He ignores the annoying voice and carries on anyway, beginning to wave his cigarette around angrily.  “Then again, you knew that I was a bad apple right from the start, given that you adopted me while I was in the process of stealing the tires from your car.”

He can hear Bruce’s soft footsteps as he gradually approaches.  Jason tries not to stiffen.  

“Tire theft, theft in the third degree, is a gross misdemeanour, you know?  Up to five years in prison — I looked it up before I started.  Figured that it wouldn’t be too bad as a first-time offender, but more so that I wouldn’t be caught in the first place.  We all know how that went, huh,” he laughs again, a dark and bitter sound.   

“That’s me, just like my old man.  Rotten to the core, eh?”  Even as he tries to shrug it off, a tide of shame floods his cheeks and he angrily stubs his cigarette out on the concrete floor.

“No, Jay, I don’t think that at all.”

“Codenames,” he tries to scold, but only manages to do it half-heartedly.  This time, his cheeks redden for a different reason.  He tries to hide how secretly pleased he is with that statement.  

Stupid, stupid, Jason!  You know he doesn’t mean it.  Don’t fall for this again!  

Despite his best intentions, his traitorous mouth moves without him.  “I-It was good for you too — before, that is — wasn’t it?”  

Bruce’s answer comes immediately, and he nods his head just as expressively.  “Yes, Jaylad, it was good.  Some of the best times of my life.  His voice is rough.  

Jason nods in return as well.  His chest feels tight.  He is twenty, he is twelve, he is small, so small again.  “Do you think it could be good again?”  

“Yes, I think so.  I’m so sorry for all the things I’ve done to you in the past.  I want to be better, Jay.  I want to make it up to you.”  A shaky inhale.  “I want to make it better for you, give you what you deserve, and you deserve the world, Jaylad.”  

He doesn’t know when he started crying.

“I know I’ve been an awful father, but I’m going to try to be better.  It was good once, wasn’t it?”  Bruce’s voice is scared, and so, so hopeful.

Once again, Jason nods his head furiously, through tears.

He can feel Bruce’s shy smile again.  “I’m going to try to make it good again.  I think it could be good again.”

He doesn’t know how it happened, but suddenly he feels himself pressed against Bruce’s chest, head buried against cool Kevlar.  A hand tentatively wraps around his shoulders.

I hope so too. 

ROOF, WAYNE MANOR (JASON TODD, 18 YEARS OLD)

It’s night time when he finally makes it back to Gotham.

Landing soundlessly on the roof, letting the balls of his feet absorb the familiar shock of worn concrete under his boots.  It is fitting that his return to the city would take place under the cover of darkness as well.

He walks forward, taking in the sounds of the cars, of the people that he has not heard in years.  Even through his helmet, he would swear that he can smell the unique mixture of smoke and air that only exists in Gotham.

Across the roof, he watches the figure stiffen imperceptibly at his approach.   

Pulling off his helmet, he turns his head to face the man before him.  Electric green eyes glitter in the darkness.

Batman doesn’t react.  All he does is gaze silently and something rankles at his skin.  It takes all of Jason’s training not to fidget under that stare.  Since that final day in the Cave, he has not felt those eyes again.

“Jason, you’ve come back.”  

When he finally speaks, Batman’s voice is toneless and without inflection.

“Batman, it’s been a while,” he nods and greets in return.  The face under the cowl remains expressionless.  The placidity does nothing to settle the churning in his stomach.

A lengthy silence passes before something changes and suddenly he is running— feet pounding against the ground, wind flying in his face until he stops just short of the man in front of him.  His chest rises with the exertion of the gesture.

A black-gloved hand reaches out toward him.  A breath catches in his throat.  Large fingers open up and ever so gently cup his cheek.  A single droplet falls and lands on the ground between them.

He leans forward and presses his trembling face against that broad chest, closing his eyes when that same hand hesitantly strokes into his hair.

A muffled confession.  A soft reply.

“Hi, Dad.”  (I’ve missed you.)

“Welcome home, son.”  (I love you too).