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Chapter Text

THE BATMAN CATCHES Jason stealing the tires off his car; after that Jason’s pressing a gun to his own temple and saying, the first step to redemption is to atone. It didn't always used to be like this. For a little while, in between these two, maybe, Jason was happy. People are always asking him if he misses it.

The gun against his temple, Jason tells him, “It isn’t really death. ”

It’s windy this high up, the roof of a derelict building. A floodlight slams into the Gotham city sky above him, a shadow at its center, branching off to ragged wings. His knuckles ache, gripping the gun, and his fingers ache perched on the trigger, and his legs ache sitting on the concrete ledge. A dark silhouette standing in front of him, frozen except for the movement of the cape, Jason’s wondering if he loaded the gun with six bullets or only five.

He slumps back and looks up at the night. 

”It isn’t really death,” he says again. "That only happens the first time.”

The figure doesn’t move, and Jason wonders if he knows the building’s set to blow. If he cares about the time Jason took to add 96% concentration of nitric acid to three times that amount of sulfuric and then eyedropper in glycerine to create nitroglycerin. If he noticed that Jason mixed the nitro with sawdust, not cotton or paraffin like some people suggest, and took the time to line the load bearing pillars twentyfeet deep into the foundation with it. If he’s even seen the timer, ticking away in bright electronic numbers a few feet to the left of them, counting the seconds until it all goes boom.

Jason shrugs when there’s no answer. The timer is ticking, and he’s got all the time in the world. 

Around them, Gotham churns. Police sirens blare in the distance, and people argue in the paper thin walls of apartment buildings, and every now and again a group of teens walk past playing music. A man shoots another man for his wallet. A man falls and he never gets up. The miracle of death: a person dies and is no longer a person anymore. 

Jason knows this. Jason knows this because Bruce knows this. 

A man is dying. The wind is blowing. Gotham churns on. 

So they’re up on the roof, and people are dying every minute all around them. The clock ticks down, the signal blares in the sky, and Jason’s arm is starting to strain. And the figure still isn’t moving.

Jason’s planned for everything else: apathy, lamentation, anger. He has contingencies for Bruce trying to stop him, or trying to kill him, or trying to leave before everything is good and done. But Bruce isn’t moving, and the timer is ticking, and the metal of the gun is freezing where it touches his skin.

That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

The bust is nearly over. This is how the Red Hood works. 

He’s invited all the Gotham ringleaders, in sex and crime and drugs, for a little get together in the tallest building in Crime Alley. Seventy stories up and in every one of them are drug dealers bound in rope and human traffickers huddled in corners with two broken legs and mafia men hanging upside down from cement shoes. Packed between them all is half the east coast's supply of narcotics, everything from designer blow for Gotham's rich to special K for the every man. There are weapons, too, guns, bombs, homemade explosives that got caught in the traffic, and Jason’s stored those between the sandbags around the glycerine. He’s hoping it will make for a special kind of lightshow. 

Crime stops when criminals stop. Jason knows this. Jason knows this because Bruce knows this.

Crime stops when criminals stop. And right now, Jason’s the worst criminal in Gotham City.

“It isn’t really death,” he says, and, “Don’t you wanna be a hero?”

The figure hovers. The cape moves and nothing else does.

Twelve minutes. 

Jason’s muscles twitch. He drags the gun barrel to rest beneath his chin instead and relishes the relief it brings his flexors. He taps the fingers of his other hand onto the concrete ledge to the tune of the seconds counting down. He has all the time in the world.

The gun at his chin. The bomb eighty stories deep. All the criminals in the city lined up beneath them like a gunpowder-trail waiting to ignite. Jason knows this. 

The signal in the sky must be calling to Bruce. Must be whispering in his ear. There's another tragedy in the city demanding his attention. There is always another tragedy in this city. The gun, the bomb, the criminals, and the signal. It’s an old equation, and Jason thinks he should know the answer by now. 

But Bruce stays, stock-still on the roof by the clock and the criminals and his son.

He has always had a thing for tragedy. 

Jason swallows. His throat flexes against gunmetal.

“You wanna be a hero?” He asks, and he knows the answer. This is how you become a hero. 

Jason knows this. Jason knows, and Bruce doesn’t. 

But Jason has known the whole time.

“This is how,” he says, and, “Be a hero,” he says, and, “The whole time,” he says, and it’s true.

He remembers everything.

JASON IS ONLY eight when he first hits someone, but he has always been a fast learner. It’s somewhere around then that the checks stop coming in and the bills start piling up. Willis goes to prison and his mother goes off into her own little world and Jason stays exactly where he had always been. 

Jason is male and Catholic and living in America, and so his father is his model for God. Except, his father isn’t here right now, and in all honesty, Jason hasn’t been to church in years. 

He’s starving one night. His mother is laying on the floor in the living room, staring at the wall. Every few minutes she laughs to herself. It’s been three days since he’s last eaten. No one is watching him, and so no one cares that Jason is going to die.

He hears whispers sometimes in the streets of a man flying over the rooftops above, draped black in a sharp silhouette. He hears rumors that he saves people, and fights criminals. Well, Jason’s father is a criminal, and Jason could use some saving, but the shadow man never comes. 

Still, he keeps his eyes on the rooftops when he slips out of the apartment and into the alley behind his building, but no one is watching him. No one is watching him, no one sees him slip away, and no one sees the tire iron in his white-knuckled grip.

Later on, Jason will learn how to use it. He will learn to remove the bolts of hubcaps, and sometimes to unscrew the tires themselves, learn how to unnotch bumpers and pick locks and reach into unrolled windows without setting off the alarms. He’ll learn how to crawl beneath the wheels of any 4-wheeler and cut the exhaust as it leads out of the engine chamber and pry out a catalytic converter rich with palladium and platinum and trace amounts of rhodium. Those words mean nothing to him but stacks of rumpled twenties from the owner of the pawn shop on 7th. 

Tonight he only knows one use for the tire iron. 

His father is gone. Jason hasn’t been to church in years. No one is watching him.

He chooses his spot carefully: close enough to the rich part of town that people will walk past his alley without checking for rats like him. Far enough to escape the cameras lining the good neighborhoods, if any neighborhood is good in Gotham. 

Just like Jason planned, a man steps into the mouth of the alley a few minutes later, scared and skinny and stupid, and Jason aims for the brittle cap of his left knee.

Jason's father isn’t here right now; he bailed out, and was never around, and got himself locked in Blackgate. So what does Jason believe about God?

The man struggles, because of course he does. His kneecap cracks at the first strike, and he goes down, but he goes down fighting. Jason drops the iron at his feet, startled, scared of the man, scared of what Jason could do to him with one too-heavy strike. He uses his hands instead, driving the heel of his palm into his nose and shoving his elbow into the crook of the man's throat and punching until the struggling stops. Jason’s shirt rustles, and from under it falls his cheap metal cross.

His father is gone. No one is watching him. What does he believe about God?

He shoves his hands into the man’s coat. He takes his wallet, his keys, his phone. He tears out his laces and ties them in a quick, vicious knot, so even if he manages to stand, he can't run, not after Jason and not to get help. Jason kicks him once more in the ribs as he goes to leave, and a part of Jason wishes it was out of anger or adrenaline instead of cold, raw pragmatism. Making sure he doesn’t get up. Jason wishes he could feel anything but the ache in his knuckles and the emptiness of his stomach. 

No one is watching him. Jason hasn’t been to church in years. 

He grabs his iron from the alley floor and tucks his necklace back into his shirt and four blocks away he finally stops running to take shelter behind a deli and count his gains. Sixty dollars, useless credit cards, an ID. Spare change. Expired coupons. Pictures of children smiling awkwardly in family photos and schoolportraits. 

Jason stares at the pictures for a beat. He throws out everything but the cash.

What does he believe about God?

When he looks up, he realizes with a start just how far from the Alley he is. The Gotham he knows, its center, its heart, is never silent, but it is quiet. There is always the sound of distant fighting, close and far gunshots, the noise of sirens creeping in from other districts, but they take on a muffled quality through the smoke and smog. Some days he walks through the streets and feels like the whole city is holding its breath. Alley folk who aren’t doing the fighting or shooting or having the sirens called on them quiet their footsteps and hunch their shoulders far enough over they almost disappear.

Here though, out of her bowels and into the real, living streets, every light looks brighter and every sound is more clear and every siren is closer. Jason looks to his left and ducks into the shadows, staring wordlessly as a patrol car passes by. No one patrols the alley.

He’s out of Crime Alley. Out of the dead air. So far from where he was born, it's like the city has its own music. This, he realizes, is the part of the city they haven’t given up on yet. These are the people they still bother to protect. And he is not the type of boy that belongs here.

Jason shoves his dirty money into his dirty pocket with filthy hands, and that night, he eats his first meal in days. What does he believe about God?

JASON IS TEN and his knuckles ache still and for as long as there have been rumors of a Gotham vigilante, he has known he’s going to Hell. 

Jason is ten now. His father is still gone, and Jason knows that by now he is out of prison. His mother is sick and every day she gets worse and every day all he can do is kneel next to her, hold her hand and wipe the blood off her chin when she laughs. The Batman exists, and he’s not coming to save him. And Jason is still here, gripping the same tire iron on the same sordid side of town in the same white-knuckled grip, but at least now he knows how to use it. 

Now he knows a lot of things.

What he believes about his father is this: he must have loved Jason once. Loved him enough to turn to crime to support him, loved him enough to turn himself into the kind of person that would eventually leave him. Loved him, loved him, loved him, until he changed himself into a person that didn’t. That’s love, Jason thinks, if anything is: sacrifice. 

As he sees it, there are two possibilities. The first is that somewhere along the line, Jason had done something to make his father hate him. Somewhere along the line, going to prison seemed better than coming home to his son. Could be, his father hates him. Could be, God hates him. These two are the same.

This isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

The other possibility is that Jason did nothing. That somewhere along the line, love turned, not to hate, but to indifference. Could be, God doesn’t think about Jason at all.

Jason walks through an alley. It’s far from his apartment and his mother who started coughing up blood into her pillow. He wants to buy her a new one, something clean, something special she can look at and know that people — someone — Jason — loves her, but he’s a little short on cash.

Nothing has changed. No one is watching. Jason twirls the iron in his grip and whistles a short, low tune and knows that he is not a good person. 

He’s far from home, from the alley and the city’s indifference to it. He’s wary of shadows this far out. He’s wary of what’s hiding in them. Still, Jason is out near every night with his iron bouncing against his hip, and he’s never once been caught. 

He doesn’t hit people, really, since that first night. It’s not out of fear or ethics or morals; he can just make more money doing worse things.

He thinks about God as he slips beneath the wheels of a pre-1999 sedan. The converter is gone already, scraped by some other alleyrat, but the rest is intact. Jason doesn’t go to school anymore, but he’s still learned a few things. 

The battery sits by the front right wheel just behind the engine coolant tank. The wires are thin and high up, but his hands are small and he can just barely reach the one furthest back. The negative terminal is marked with a minus symbol, and when he cuts it with his rusted pliers and moves back quick to avoid the sparks, he’s essentially turned off the alarm. 

He thinks about God as smashes the car window. He pauses for a split second, waiting, but there’s no noise, no siren, no shout. No one is watching him. He unlocks it from the inside and considers his options. The fenders are shot, rusted and dented to hell, and the car predates any valuable electronics, so the door it is. It’s simple: just a matter of unscrewing the hinges with practiced efficiency and snapping the checkstrap with bolt cutters and leverage. 

Jason thinks about the man who stands on 5th, all day long, every day of the week. He stands in ragged clothes, rain or shine or snow, and the sign he holds reads, “The end is Nigh.”

“God,” he swears to Jason the one time Jason gets too close, “has abandoned us. And the world is going to end.”

Jason smiles, gives him a nod as he walks past, and knows the man is right. 

He thinks about God, and no shadows track him from the rooftops as he darts through alleys, car door jammed under his arm. His mother isn’t waiting up for him to come home. His father would never find out if he died. 

Could be, God doesn’t think about Jason at all.

The door gets him forty in crumpled bills from his fence and a, “Bring me something valuable next time.” Jason flips him off as he walks back out into the city. 

He eats the meal it gets him at the top of a fire escape in East End. It’s almost peaceful here, just wind and light rain and sandwich crumbs, and no one is around to notice the tear Jason won’t acknowledge dripping down his cheek. 

He needs to get his mother a new pillow. He needs his father to come back to them. He needs the Batman to swoop down and fight him because Jason is a criminal now, too, and he needs the Batman to save him because no one else ever has. 

But a man like that doesn’t help kids like Jason, anyway. God doesn’t help kids like Jason, anyway.

No one does.

BARBARA ASKS JASON what he’d been fighting. Jason says, his father.

Barbara’s patching up the arm he’d scraped running for the roof. The cave is empty otherwise, and so is the manor above. Jason stares straight ahead and wonders if he’ll even be let back in.

Filipe Garzonas is dead. He fell from a building and hit the pavement below at a little under 80 miles an hour and shattered every one of his vertebrae and his skull. He is dead and it may have been Jason who killed him. These things happen.

This isn’t about him. 

This is about Jason and his father who is dead and his father who hates him. This is about Jason and how he’s ruined every good thing that’s ever happened to him. 

Jason’s father is dead. 

Jason finds that out himself. He’s doing research on Two-Face, the way Bruce trained him to and then expected he'd never use for himself. He wants to find out if his father is still working for him. He wants to know what he’s doing, where he’s living, if he has a new family already, or if Jason and his mother were enough to put him off that forever. 

What he finds is a death certificate and half a scowling face. These things happen.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He demands, and Bruce doesn’t have an answer. Or, at least, a good answer. Jason can’t remember what Bruce said to that, or what he’d said after: the blood was in his ears and all he could see was red like his Willis’ dying breath and the roses Willis had once brought Catherine out of the blue, back when things were good. 

Things were good, at one point or another. Jason tries his best to forget that. 

When the time comes, though, dressed in borrowed red and yellow and green, Jason does what he’s told is the right thing. He gets Two-Face alone and doesn’t break his ribs or his wrists or his face. He ties him up and calls the commissioner, and then he walks away. For this, Jason gets a hand on his shoulder and a paltry smile, a killer in jail and a still-dead father. 

A few months later, Two-Face breaks out like he always does, and in the hours between recapture, he kills six more kids’ fathers. These things happen. And then they happen again. 

This isn’t about that, either.

This is about the kid Jason was those brief, hazy days when things were good. This is about the kid Jason was after. This is about the kid Jason is now, and everything Bruce and Dick and Barbara don’t know he doesn’t talk about.

Barbara asks Jason what he’d been fighting. Jason says, himself.

Jason sometimes feels like he’s living two lives at once. 

This is how his life goes. Training in the cave. Getting shoved around by Dick. Patrolling rooftops side by side with Batman. This is the life where he goes to school again, the starched collar of his uniform burning into his skin. He sits on marble countertops and swings his legs against the cabinets and ignores Alfred’s frown while he brews tea. This is the life where he jumps and jokes and saves people, smiling with every one of his newly cleaned and whitened and straightened teeth. 

It’s like magic. And if he stays in it, these moments, this life, he can be magic, too.

In the back of his mind, though, he is not the boy going to private school or living in a mansion or flying in stolen colors, red, yellow, green. In the back of his mind he is always the boy moments from getting caught stealing the Batmobiles tires. He is always the boy with bloody palms and greasy fingers wrenching the bolts off the hubcaps. He is always the boy with the rumbling stomach, hollow eyes, ribs poking through his skin. Even his skeleton sick of being him. 

He’s terrified of being made to leave. The first glass he broke in the manor sounded like a thousand car alarms screaming, This when you run. This is when the spell breaks. This is when the magic is over.

He keeps a bag underneath his bed. It has two hundred stolen dollars and two black shirts, two pairs of jeans, two sweaters, four pairs of socks and underwear. Peanutbutter, granola, habitually replaced sliced bread. On his worst nights Jason kneels to the left of it and counts his items — two, two, two, four — until he’s sure he has everything. Until he’s sure that even if they make him leave now, he’ll be better off than he used to be. 

He’s terrified of being made to leave, of course, but mostly he’s terrified of going right back to the person he was before. Because he loves who he’s becoming. Because he loves who he is to the people he loves, and Jason’s never loved any part of himself before. 

So he hides little parts of himself. He plays the part until it stops feeling like a character and starts feeling like him. Until all his rough edges feel like they’ve been sanded away and he knows they won’t catch on anything that will make them throw him back. 

Jason smiles; he laughs. He goes to school and saves people and flies like it's magic, and deep down, he’s punching a man unconscious in an alley. Deepdown he's watching his mother cough up blood, and maybe sometimes in dreams he’s taking his fathers head between his hands and twisting hard left. And he runs away sometimes with the little duffle he keeps underneath his bed, not because he wants to go, but because he needs to get away from the people who love a smoother version of him. So he can be that kid again, all jagged lines and bloody noses and tire irons in white knuckled grips. So he can remember what he was, and what he never wants to go back to. 

What is he fighting, Barbara asks. Jason says his father. Jason says himself. Jason says everything he hates in his life. 

Maybe that is what this is about: maybe that’s him. 

Because despite everything, Filipe Garzonas is dead. He fell from a building and broke every one of his vertebrae and his skull. He is dead, and it may have been Jason who killed him.

Maybe it’s only that Jason is everything he hates in his life. And that he ruins every good thing in it.

These things happen.

JASON GOES SEARCHING for his mother; then, he’s bleeding out in an empty, ticking warehouse with a sobbing, choking woman, and he’s trying to still believe in immaculate conception. 

The Joker has come and gone. And yeah, it hurt. Jason’s ribs are snapped and sticking out through holes in his chest, his eyes black and blue bruised. He can’t feel his legs, but he can feel every scrape of the concrete floor against his raw and bloodied skin, and he can see that his fingers bend the wrong way.  

He can see the timer, too, and he thinks that might be the worst part. He blinks, and the 05:45 turns to 05:40. He blinks and it drops down to 05:15. 

Jason is lying on the floor of an old dirty warehouse thousands of miles away from home and somewhere in the distance someone might be screaming, but his head is so foggy he can’t be sure. This is his life. 04:28.

He remembers the alley. He remembers starving and he remembers Catherine, his real mother, his real mother that he decided one day wasn’t enough, his real mother who shot up every night and coughed blood onto her pillowcase but loved him in the only way she knew how. He remembers the latch on his window and how to pull it back slowly, inch by inch, or else it’d creak and wake her. He remembers the exact metal feel of his first stolen rims. He remembers waking up from a nightmare in a big, empty room and sobbing loud enough that Bruce heard him. This is his life.

Jason blinks and time has passed, slipped right through his fingers. Jason blinks and he’s in the cave, in the Alley, in Dick’s apartment or his own large, cold, empty room. If he can blink and wake up in a different time. If he can blink and wake up at a different place. 

Maybe he could wake up as a different person. 

His eyes close. His eyes open. This is still his life, and it is still ending, one second at a time. 

02:13. 

Jason’s head clears just enough to know that the woman who is and isn’t his mother is still screaming in the far corner, and that she's just as trapped as him. Jason curses himself and drags himself to her, all bloodied elbows and stone-still legs. He throws himself over her, using his body to try and block the blast. He tries to remember that he is not the little kid searching for shadows on the rooftop anymore. He is not the little kid without hope. He is not the little kid who no one was watching, who hadn’t gone to church in years and barely believed he even had a father. 01:00.

Batman will come for me, he tells himself. He is not that boy anymore. He clawed his way out of Hell once already. Jason is Robin. Robin is magic. 

Jason is going to die here. 00:15.

The clock reads four minutes, five minutes, one. He blinks; different time. Jason is here, he’s far away, and then he’s hitting a man until he goes limp. He blinks; different place. 

Jason blinks, and he blinks, and he blinks, but he is still the same person, bleeding out in the same warehouse, and he is still crying the same tears he has his whole life. 

The timer hits zero, and Jason’s father doesn’t come for him, and God doesn’t think about Jason at all. 

I am Jason’s shattered wrist. 

I am Jason’s y-shaped scar. 

I am Jason’s complete lack of surprise. 

00:00

Chapter Text

THE MIRACLE OF death, Jason thinks. One minute you’re a person. The next, you’re an object. 

Really, the next, you’re clawing your way out of the earth, the belt buckle of your burial suit splitting the grain of your wooden casket. The next, you’re wandering the streets of Gotham, grave dirt still staining the hem of your pants, searching blind for a home and a life you no longer remember. The next, a woman is taking your hand and you’re following her and your body doesn't belong to you anymore. 

Again. 

Anymore.

One minute, you’re a person. These things happen. 

It’s foggy from there. The fingers on his head brush through his matted, dirt-caked hair.  The fingers on his head push him down, down, until water us up to his chin, his nose, his whole face under, and when he goes to take a breath, it floods his mouth and his lungs and seeps into his veins. His scars heal over and crooked bones snap back into place and he is never going to be the same again. 

After that, sometimes Jason wakes up and has to ask himself where he is; he is always staring up at the harsh line of his adobe room, and the sun is always shining in knife-sharp the way it never could in Gotham.

He trains for long months. Forms, weapons, guns he’s gotten hit by but never gotten to use. He trains. He plans. He eats dinner in his room with Talia, his hand pushing rice down his throat, her hand rubbing circles on his back. He doesn’t sleep and when he does, it's horrible. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. 

These days, the only times he ever feels alive are in the pits. Dirt walls and mud floors and Gotham filth running through his veins. People lining the upper rim, chanting, shouting, making money bets on their favorite fighter. Jason sees it all in flashes. The knuckles headed towards his jaw, the heel nailing his back to the ground, the bruised bloody face that looks back at him in reflections. What happens there doesn’t happen in words.

His first time down is only a few days out of the bath. The man who tags him is tall and strong and trained. Rough hands pull away his tunic and rip off his shoes. The crowd around the lip pull him in and spit him into the ring. Shoeless, shirtless, blood pounding through his veins, Jason doesn’t know how old he is or how long he’s been here or if he will ever leave, if there is anything to go back to. He knows his knuckles are aching and the soles of his feet are hot and he needs a fight. 

The crowd pulses like one body, one mass, screams in one loud, raging voice. The bell rings out. Jason puts up his fists. And when the man decks him straight across the jaw, a roughneck brawler’s strike, and his head snaps back, teeth punching down on all the soft parts of his mouth, the world comes a little more into focus. Tunnelvision, slammed against the wall, tongue swollen, numb in the arms and shoulders, Jason isn’t anything but a body in motion. Isn’t his age, isn’t his past. Isn’t the man he thinks he is.

There's a sleeper hold that gives someone just enough air to stay awake. Jason on the floor, gasping for air through thick mud. The man hits him with bony knuckles, then the flesh of his palm when Jason’s teeth, spying through the skin of his lips, scrape the man's fingers raw. 

His hands slip through the blood and wet, struggling for purchase. He finds it in the meat of a calf and digs in with all ten jagged fingernails. Pulling, ripping away skin and muscle, the man loosens his hold, and Jason scrapes himself standing, hunched against a wall. Before he can catch his breath, a vice grip in his hair slams his face into the dirt sides, bashes his skull against a knee. 

There is no beauty in it. No rhythm. No dance. It’s a violence not pretending to be anything but. It’s a violence in Jason’s bones. What happens there doesn’t happen in words. It happens in the first language he ever learned to speak.

Back and forth, back and forth, his face in the ground, his fist in a face, pummeling cartilage, splintering bone. When it’s over, Jason is standing in dirt and water and blood, the taste of his own victory iron-sharp on his tongue. When it’s over, Jason is more and less himself than he’s ever been.

And when it’s over, Jason smiles closemouthed, red teeth poking through the ripped skin above his lips.

Pit fights aren’t always death matches, but it doesn’t really matter. Jason’s been fighting for his life the whole time.

After that, after every match, Talia comes to him, and she tells him horrible things. Hands carding across his forehead, she says, Jason, you’ve been replaced. Sitting up with him late nights, she says, Jason, no one mourned you. 

With a sincerity he almost believes, she says, Jason, I can help. 

Sometimes Jason thinks he should have stayed dead. He should have never dug his way out. He should have wandered until he collapsed on the streets. Talia should have never found him, never trained him, never let him become what he is now.

Instead of leaving him, though, Talia filled his veins with green acid and his mind with all the ways no one has ever cared about him. So Jason listens to her words and he makes a plan, and Talia watches him like a cat watches a mouse.

And he knows he’s being used. He knows he is just a pawn to the League. Another soldier, another body, another special, festive way to make The Batman hurt enough to stop struggling; to just go limp. 

But Jason doesn’t care, because Jason wants to make him hurt, too. For leaving him. For letting him die. For letting his father run wild, and his mother die quiet in the city he claims to protect.

Jason wants to make him hurt, too, because Jason always ruins everything good in his life, and they always ruin him right back.

He listens to her words, and because of the pit, Jason is always angry. 

Jason is always angry, but he is never once surprised. 

Sometimes Jason wakes up and has to ask himself where he is. Sometimes, Talia asks Jason what he’s fighting. Sometimes Jason dreams about God and wakes up without a father. These things are the same. 

One minute you’re a person.

JASON CROUCHES ON the lip of a warehouse at the docks. The wind is blowing. A clock tower chimes in the distance. Below him desperadoes shake hands like gentlemen. The law of equivalent exchange: money in a pocket, bodies on the streets. It's the same for drugs, for guns, for trafficking. This one’s a drug deal months in the making, thousands of kilos of perfectly wrapped packages, but Jason’s studied this group and knows they deal in everything with a price tag and wide margins. Looking down on them breathing mask-filtered air, Jason’s wondering if he loaded the gun with six bullets, or only five.

He’s been back in Gotham for two months.

It’s dark by the water, the only light from distant streets, distant boats, the distant lighthouse’s pulsing glow; they all shine crimson bright off the metal of his helmet. 

In a few moments, when the product is unloaded, heavy wooden crates on heavy wooden pallets, Jason will drop down. If his information is good, its crystals, pure and clean, ready to be ground up and cut with a dozen other drugs, sold to poor kids as crack and to rich ones, cocaine. 

In a few moments, once the product is unloaded, and if his information is good, Jason will shoot the buyers. Five quick shots, in between the eyebrows and out through the parietal. If his luck is good, he’ll have enough for all of them. If it isn't, on the sixth his gun will click, empty. 

Jason will look down at it and tell the straggler, “Guess it’s your lucky day.” 

And he’ll run, tripping over the pretzled bodies of his friends, and Jason will let him get as far as the next warehouse before pulling out a second gun. And when that is done and all six of the bodies are cooling on the dock, Jason will turn to the sellers and, beneath the hood, smile a full toothed grin.

A lot of things could happen after this, he knows, picking at the roofing and listening to the sounds of the drug tradeoff under him. Best case, they raise their hands, palms out, maybe even try to back away. He’ll laugh, holster his pistol, and maybe they’ll tense as he reaches into his jacket, but all he’ll pull out is a wad of bills. “You sell to me now,” he’ll say, and toss it on the ground between them. 

Maybe if they’re brave one of the sellers will step forward. 

“Those men were Black Masks,” the seller will say, and, “We’re not as interested as you in pissing him off.” 

And Jason will say, “Tough shit.”

“And I’ve heard of you,” the seller will continue. “What you’re doing in Gotham. Eight heads, hostile takeovers.” He’ll look around at the scene. “Interrupting negotiations at the docks.” 

Maybe he’ll say, “We won’t sell to you. We’re not part of your war.”

And if he does, like the last seller that tried to stop him, Jason will shoot him in the chest, just shy of his heart. He’ll live or he won't.

“Black Mask sells dope to children and sells humans like cattle,” he’ll tell the men who are still standing, like he told the last group, and the ones before that. “I got no problem running your shit, but I know where to draw the line. He doesn’t, and if you wanna deal like him, well,” Jason motions to the bodies, to their bleeding friend, “then you can die like him.” 

The rest of the sellers will back off, or they won’t, but Jason has enough bullets in his second for either choice, and either way, the deal will be done.

After, out of the shadows, the Red Hood’s men will emerge at his signal, masked and armed and outnumbering the sellers' thugs; spacemonkeys, coming when they’re called, doing as they're told. They pull a trigger, don’t understand any of it, and then, half the time, they die. But Jason pays better than most the other crime lords, and his employees get a pension. 

From the rooftop, Jason has seen it so many times he can picture it: his men loading up the pallets one by one, carting them away. Can almost hear the staccato gunfire of the rest of the Black Mask gang inside the building, muffled through walls, getting fainter with each passing moment. 

Up there he can already feel the dread setting into his chest, thinking about who he used to be, and who he is now, and the anger bubbling up right next to it. Whatever he tells his men and his enemies, Jason doesn’t like killing. He’s willing to do it, sometimes eager, but it brings a lump in his throat to think about it before or after. 

Bruce always used to tell him that they didn’t kill because a life was everything. Every person, all seven point nine six billion individuals, are a whole world, and every death is its own tragedy. Every death changes everything. Well, Jason died and the Joker is still alive and crime still runs rampant on Crime Alley streets, so it seems to him like it didn’t really change anything. 

Wind blowing across the docks, Jason can still smell smoke from the fire he set to his old apartment building. A ragged, decaying thing, Jason didn’t need much more than a strip of gasoline and a spark. What struck him most was how easy it was. Easy to circle the structural posts with the gas in long, glossy circles. To dig a hand in the wall to pull out the rubber-stripped wiring, float it all across the long pools of fuel, and flick on a light.

He was two blocks away by the time the flames hit the air, but he made a little time in his busy schedule to watch the building burn.

And the building burned; all that rotted wood in floorboards and cross beams and the stairs that used to creak under his feet every fourth step. The moth eaten blankets, the crusted, bloody sheets, the molding yellow curtains his mother always said lit up the room. 

The building burned and then it wasn’t a building anymore.

Person, object. Objects, ash. 

From the warehouse rooftop with men hauling coke bricks below, Jason thinks that maybe that’s what this whole fucking city is. Once standing, then burning, now ash. That this whole city is full of death, full of decay, full of memories best left gone and dead and buried. Full of things that were meant to save him and failed him like everything else. 

The systems, CPS, every foster home and orphanage this side of the bay.

His father, who left him. His mother, a missing organ. 

Bruce, who didn’t save him and doesn’t care.

With buildings like that gone, though, no longer left festering, there’s space for growth. A greenspace, a park, so the kids in the Alley can go somewhere to play that isn’t covered in glass, or hide from shitty parents away from trashfilled alleyways, or sleep outside where at least there's green.

Rip out the rot to save the wood, setting fire to every dark corner of Crime Alley, a prescribed burn to flush out all the combustibles. Purging the scum. Exorcizing the causes. Leaving the good people of Gotham City nothing but good, clean ash.

Maybe Jason has to break everything to make something better out of it.

Looking out at the docks, the sound of a drug trade playing beneath him, Jason thinks that despite what they all say, there is something beautifully grotesque about Gotham’s plight. Something Shakespearean about its man-made tragedy. And that's what it is, Jason knows: man-made. Men high up making the choice to keep other people suffering. There’s a reason every hospital in the country is built on cheap floodplain land; the feds don't care if the sick and dying get washed away. 

When he first started out, a decade and change years ago, the Joker ran with a group called the Red Hood Gang. From the stories, Jason knows they were vicious fuckers. They had guns, of course, but their weapons of choice were always more brutal than that: heavy lead pipes, jagged little ice axes, the metallic feel of an old, blood-rusted crowbar. 

Legend says, they were one of The Batman’s first busts, one of the first appearances of the knife sharp cowl working hand in hand with the pigs who patrol Gotham’s streets. After that, the Red Hood Gang fizzled out, the Joker rose, and all that remained of those early days was the caustic aftertaste of cruel and partial justice.

The people they killed stayed dead. Their defeat gave rise to a monster. But Jason has found himself with a second chance, and this time he’s going to do it right.

The deal ends, and his information is good, and Jason drops down, light hitting and refracting around the red of his hood and the red on his leathergloved hands.

And yeah, maybe Jason has become just like everything he used to be against. 

These things happen. 

People change.

At least The Red Hood’s men get dental.

JASON’S SAFEHOUSE APARTMENT. His eight hundred squarefoot flat. His closet-sized bachelorpad for one. Kitchen, bedroom, shitty Ikea couch in the center of his one open room. Shelves along the west wall filled with books he used to want to read, that he thought would set him free, but he's staring at them, slow blinking, like if he turns his head they’ll crawl off the wall and over him. Gulliver’s Traveling up his ankles, Jason hasn’t slept in three days, unless he’s sleeping now. Oliver Twists his arm behind his back, Jason really just wants to rest.

His landlord had studied him when he signed the lease. An older woman, maybe sixty, she said, “You sure you’re eighteen?”

“Need to see my ID again?”

His landlord shook her head. She took the papers back from him and straightened them out on her desk. Looked at him another long moment, and nodded. Said, “Trouble comes looking for you, I won’t send them your way. Just keep the rent coming.”

Behold the cruelties of Crime Alley. And the vicious people living in it. 

Jason nodded back to her. They shook. 

That's how Jason got his apartment. 

Rent was no trouble. The dealers on the streets had it right: drugs make money. There's maybe a hundred thousand in cash in the safe behind a false backing in the closet. His gear, his jacket, his shining hood go there, too. At night when he doesn’t sleep he grabs his weapons from the wall and his suit and eats steadily into Black Mask’s territory. During the day when he doesn’t sleep he cleans. He steps in through the door or the window or the back alley everyday, surprised at how much his floors shine.

Blinking up at his shelves. Shouldering on his jacket. Going out on patrol.

Three days without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. Talia said, “It will take time.” She said, “Learn to control the things that you feel.” She said, “What goes in is not always what comes out.”

Shooting a man in the temple, Jason thinks she's right. He is not the same boy that The Batman knew, and he is not the same boy that Jason knew. He used to be such a nice person. He is whoever he has to be to get the job done. 

He looks up at his shelves. He’s staring down the barrel of a sniper, rapist or drug dealer or human trafficker in his sights, and no one is looking down on him when he pulls the trigger. 

Jason knows this: The Bats have been searching for him. 

Jason doesn’t know when they caught onto his trail, but somewhere along the line they decided to give chase. Now, it’s every night; here Nightwing stalks him across Park Row rooftops, there, a bug with a Robin brand ‘R,’ and between clotheslines brimmed with drying laundry, a dark, mournful sliver of the cape of The Dark Knight. 

It was a matter of time before they caught on. Even Jason in plainclothes hears whispers of the new Gotham crime lord. The bodies in his wake. And now they’re after him and tracking every security cam in the city. They’re popping up in his territory, trying to fence in his patrols. Funny, how it only took eight heads for them to start checking in on Crime Alley, but they did nothing when people were dying every day. 

Death isn’t a problem to them. Disobedience is. 

Exhibit A. 

Jason outruns them. Of course he can outrun them. He trained with the League, silence and shadows, and he knows near every trick in The Batman’s book. Slicing a rope hooked around his ankle, scaling an apartment at incredible speed, disappearing between one corner and the next, it seems to Jason the farther he runs, the more God wants him back.

Jason outruns them. Jason is more paranoid than he’s ever been in his life. He lines his helmet with explosives, and he never takes it off, not until he’s back in his eight hundred squarefeet, two doors and eleven locks behind him in the only place he’s ever really felt home.  

Rooftop. The scope of the sniper. Jason is looking out at Gotham and everything is in motion. Everything is in decay. Even Wayne Tower is falling apart. 

There's a girl on his hall, goes to college in town. She’s got dark curly hair and a streetrat smile she doesn’t really give to anyone, but she gives to Jason. Cash in his safe, gun at his hip, Jason can’t smile back. 

He forgets he’s tall now. The healthy weight of his limbs, the muscles on his arms, his hair’s bone white streak. He’s years older than he remembers being. Jason tries to smile and it pulls at the scar across his lip, the scar through his hairline. There's a gap in his teeth again like there used to be: everything is different and nothing will ever change.

Jason is looking at his shelves, and he’s living the three seconds before death over and over again, when the timer hits 00:03, 00:02, 00:01, and hangs on the decision to blow. For that moment, which is every moment, nothing matters. 

Not his shitty safehouse. 

Nothing matters.

Not the wind in his face on the roof. 

He hasn’t slept. He doesn’t remember to eat. The timer stays stuck and Jason can’t fix cars anymore. Pop the hood with a rusted crow that sticks to his hands like death. He will never get to know his brother.  

Jason’s books form a wall at his ankles. A Black Mask goon dents his helmet with the heavy swing of a baseball bat. Nails drilled in at all angles, one of them punctures the glass of his lenses, eyelash close to blinding him. 

He hits back, and it's none of the trained elegance of the League, it's all of the brutal violence of the Pit fights, of the Crime Alley streets, of clawing another kid over the first food either of you have seen in a week. 

Animal Farm lifts him up and Lord of the Flies sharpens sticks and burns their points over a fire. Jason blinks awake and he hasn’t slept in three days unless he’s sleeping now. 

He hits back and he is not a person; he’s a cog in a turning machine and he’s operating perfectly. Violence for violence for violence. Who is he to deny his blood?

Jason’s standing guard over a warehouse and thinking maybe he’s tired of being an object. That maybe the people who trained him for this were wrong. Maybe the people who trained him for this don’t know jack shit.

The League kills to make money, to gain power, to keep others poor and powerless. The Batman doesn’t kill, even to save the people that deserve to be saved, even to avenge the people that didn’t deserve to die. 

The books lift him up and snap at his fingers dangling over their paper sharp edges. They hang him off his balcony and The Princess Bride asks Jason, do you want to live? He’s awake; he blinks. How long is three days?

He looks in the mirror; he’s dangling over the edge of his building, out the window of his eight hundred squarefoot closet-sized bachelorpad flat for one and he’s blinking at the shelves, at the books of his past life, and Jason has to stop trying to be the boy he used to be. 

This is his life. This is his life and he’s wasting it. And it’s pointless. Nothing is stagnant. Everything is falling apart, and there are so many people he can’t save. 

Jason was never going to be able to do this alone; Jason was always going to have to do this alone. Because the League isn’t enough, and The Batman isn’t enough, and Jason is whoever he needs to be to get the job done. 

He is not special. He is not brilliant or unique. Jason is the same decaying organic matter as the rest of the city. He’s falling apart in Gotham’s Great Compost Heap.

The books ask him, who are you? Do you want to live? Three days can be forever. Three seconds can be a lifetime. And Jason is never going to get a good night's sleep.

This is his life.

This is his life, and it is still ending one second at a time. 

He used to be such a nice person.

JASON RALLIES THE people of Crime Alley. It's a simple solution to the problem he’s having. Jason alone isn’t enough. Jason knows this. The Bats are butting into his operations. Jason knows this. The people of Crime Alley are snapping for change.

Jason visits his informants. Standing in tight dresses against the Gotham cold, every second Tuesday he meets with them and forks over money, and they give him information on his foot soldiers, on his dealers, on his grunts. Which ones are good, and which ones are crooked, and which ones still hang around the high school for easy money. They give him info on the other gangs, the other leaders, every word on the street in every shiny, greasy detail.

They’re good people, and they tell him the truth.

This time though, when he turns to leave, he pauses, asks them, “By any chance, have the Bats been around more lately?” He knows the answer.

They tell him about the eyes on the rooftops. The influx of arrests. Patrolling, monitoring, crackdowns on drugs and crime and violence. The gangs are scared, and that only means they lash out harder. To the everyman of Park Row, that only means they hurt more. 

More fathers in jail, more mother’s stripped of custody. It’s getting safer in Crime Alley. It’s getting harder to live.

Jason tells them, “Next time they come around, and pass this along, do your best to chase them off.” Yell, fight, shoot. Jason’s long learned that ends justify all means.

“The Bats have been around ten odd years,” he tells them, like he tells a group of alley kids, sandwiches in their hands and food in their backpacks and the address to a non-card shelter on little slips of paper. “Does it look like it’s getting better around here?”

He knocks on shop owners' storefronts like the grocer Catherine used to go to before things got bad, who always gave them a smile and a discount on produce when he could balance his paper thin margins. He goes to the ones that pay protection money to Black Mask, the False Facers, any one of Crime Alley's institutional gangs, and he asks, How have they helped you? And he asks, Aren’t you getting tired?

Jason is standing stories up on a warehouse catwalk looking down at his men, picked off the street and poached from other Bosses and all of them homegrown in the dirt and mud of Gotham, and he asks them, “Aren’t you tired?” 

And they cheer, hit wrenches against heavy pipes, bang metal knives against the steel pillars until the building threatens to shake. 

Jason asks, “How have they helped you?” and his spacemonkeys roar and shout and scream, and Jason knows they haven’t really done shit. And Jason says, “Look around you.”

At the alleyways filled with glass and syringes and kids too young to tie their shoes. At the crumbling brick facades, the lead in the water, the high school’s sub-sixty retention rate. Jason sees his mother at every street corner, in every drug house, on every missing person poster that goes unsolved and uninvestigated. Jason sees his father in every fourteen-year-old False Facer holding a gun for the first time in his life, solemn and starving and scared.

Jason says, “Look around you, and do you like what you see? Do you want this for the people you love?” and he isn’t thinking about himself.

Jason says, “The Batman has been around ten odd years, does it look like it’s getting better around here?” and he isn’t thinking about anything.

Jason is standing on a rooftop in Crime Alley and he’s looking down at a recording device marked with a Robin-brand R. He’s glaring into the camera and he’s telling The Batman, “You look at this Alley, and you see it for what it is, don’t you?”

The bug blinks its one red light, and Jason has another six minutes before the Bats show up. It’s a quiet night, but not for much longer. Jason’s people are on the move around him, spreading through the city like bugs and rats and roaches. He looks around and says to the bug, to the new Robin, to The Batman, “You tell yourself you don’t believe in irredeemable, but you ask me, this place is pretty damn close.”

“Face it,” he says, “the people down here are Gotham’s thrown out trash. And somewhere deep down, they’re not as worthy of saving as everyone else to you.”

A fire blooms open on a far off rooftop and Jason knows that's where his men are starting. Steel creaks and topples down and that’s where his men are tearing down billboards advertising toxin antidotes, rebreathers, charity spaces bankrolled by Thomas and Martha Wayne. False promises of change, bandaids on the fact that Alley folk suffer long and die quietly. 

Jason looks at the bug and he says, “Yeah, maybe this place is trash.

“This place is trash, these people are trash, and this Alley is fucking crazy.”

He looks down at the bug and says, “Maybe you don’t care how the people here live or how they feel or how they feed their kids or pay the doctor when they get sick. And maybe some of them are criminals and some of them sell drugs and fence shit and hurt people to make a living. But they are still your responsibility.”

“If this is your city,” he says, “then they are your responsibility. So every death that’s happened is on you. And every criminal that's crawled out of these streets is on you. And every man I’ve killed is just one you should have off-ed years ago.”

In the distance sirens start up. Another fire bursts open, angry, crackling. Billboards fall and spray-paint messages join the Old Gotham advertisements, knife-black shadows and the angry, dripping words, “Not My Savior.” 

“This is on you.” The bug blinks and Jason’s time is up. “Got all that?” He taps its little lens twice with a finger tip, and crushes it in his palm. 

Jason is far away by the time Nightwing reaches the rooftop. He watches the silhouette find the mangled pieces of the surveillance device. The figure stands slowly, looking out at the burning skyline, looking down at the scrap in his hands. 

Jason joins the rioters.

IT’S ONLY WHEN they’re alone The Batman speaks. 

Jason has been back in Gotham for four months. He hasn’t slept in days and can’t feel anything anymore. It’s been a week since the riots began and the people of Crime Alley are only getting more restless, more violent. Every night they storm the streets, tear down billboards, turn old, decrepit buildings to flame. Ash lines the roof of every building in Gotham. Filth builds up: all the maintenance workers are on strike.

The Batman catches Jason on a rooftop deadend, no holds in sight and fresh out of ammunition. The Batman corners him and stands far back so that Jason can’t see his mouth, only his outline and the drape of his shadow. 

He stares for a long, long moment and then asks Jason, “Why have you come to my city?”

The Bats have been chasing him for weeks. Buildings have been burning for weeks. Jason outruns them until he doesn’t. Jason is standing on a deadend rooftop looking into the shadow where his father’s face should be for the first time in years, and he asks, “Your city?”

The Batman says, “Yes. My city”

Jason searches the rooftop for an opening, but there is none. The Batman has planned it, down to the minute likely. There’s no way out. Jason presses the button at his belt anyway, disguises it as a grab for his pistol.

Voice filtered, Jason says, “Since when?” He raises his gun, points it at the gap between The Batman's head and neck armor. The chamber is empty and they both know it.

Neither of them move. Gun aimed at his head, The Batman says, “This is my city, and these people are under my protection.”

Jason scoffs, gun barrel straight and steady. “The Alley? Under your protection ?” Beneath the hood Jason licks his bottom lip. His finger twitches on the hard stop. “You don't patrol here. You don't walk these streets. You don't know a damn thing about these people, and you sure as fuck don’t protect them.”

“Is that what you call what you do? Killing indiscriminately? Protection?”

“No,” Jason laughs. “I call this Justice.”

The Batman’s face moves imperceptibly in the dark. 

Through grit teeth he says, “I have been watching you.” 

He says, “You are highly skilled, highly trained, and highly intelligent. You know every working girl’s name, and the street children talk to you without fear.” A beat before he continues, The Batman says, “I know what it’s like to feel the need to do good. And I know nothing good comes from your methods.”

Jason pulls the trigger. He stares at The Batman, the space where his neck armor meets the seam of his cowl. Picture a cross filed neatly into every one of his rounds. Picture a bullet splitting along the little grooves, spreading open when it’s shot, a sharp, jagged flower in bloom, splattering esophagus throatlining in slow motion across the stars behind him. 

Like they both know but neither say, the gun only clicks. 

“Red Hood,” The Batman says very carefully, an edge to his voice. “I want to believe you wish to do good. That your cause is just. But I will not allow chaos, and I will not allow you to kill in my city.”

Jason can feel the trap closing around him. Ropeburn from the noose on his neck. His skin goes cold from the anger burning holes into him. 

“I don’t kill indiscriminately. I kill killers. I keep drugs away from children. And I make sure the people who fuck this city up never have a chance to again. I take care of the shit you stopped caring about years ago.”

“I have never stopped caring.”

“Yeah, well, you stopped trying. Tell a family starving down the block that you still care about them. Tell a kid down the street that he gets your deepest sympathies.”

The Batman is silent for a moment. Jaw clenched, he says, “This city is greater than Park Row. I do what I can. Some things are too far gone.”

Baring his teeth, Jason says, “I thought The Batman didn't believe in lost causes.”

He says, “You’re trying to reason with me . So I thought he didn’t believe in irredeemable.”

Voice ripping out of his throat, Jason says, “You abandoned it. And all the people living in it.” And stepping forward to the edge of the roof and the shadow, Jason says, “So if you don’t care, I do. And if you disapprove of my methods, I don’t give a shit. And if you try to stop me, I’ll put a bullet in every single one of your little bird friends, and this time I'll send the heads to your doorstep.”

Stepping closer, darkness falls on Jason’s mask. Just him clowning around again.

And Jason says, “You’re not special for thinking this city needs fixing, and as long as people die pointlessly under your protection, you are not a hero. You’ve just got the same neurosis as every one of your rogues. Look in the mirror, Batman, and we’re the same. I’m just the one willing to pull the trigger.”

The Batman is the most tense Jason’s ever seen him. Lines taut, still, angry. He’s staring at Jason, his face in shadow getting clearer with every step. 

Something inside Jason breaks. 

He wakes up, and he’s been awake this entire time. 

This is his life. He’s awake, and he can see The Batman’s face. His helmet is off and he can feel the wind on his skin.  

“Jason?” The Batman breathes. Jason laughs, and it’s all Robin, all young Jason and his matchstrike smile. 

“You’re dead,” he says. “You’re dead. We buried you.”

“Fuck that,” Jason says. “Maybe I buried you.”

Hand reaching out, Jason steps back away from it. Gunshot far off, Jason remembers what he’s here for.

The Batman says, arm outstretched, “This isn’t possible. You were killed. You're dead.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jason says, “Guess we’ll see who’s next.”

He presses the button at his belt and hears the chime of his bike at streetlevel. He cracks the safety on his helmet and tosses it to his father. 

The Batman catches it before he can think. He catches it and holds on like it’s the only part of his world that isn’t tilting, and it’s the only thing he has to keep him steady. 

Then it's all shrapnel, a flaming, burning thing where a hood used to be, charred gloves where hands used to be. Jason dives off the building into the alley where his bike’s parked and drives, watching the explosion bloom. Fire strokes the air, red, orange, yellow, even half a block away. 

The Batman lived. Jason knows this. They’ll be after him. Jason knows this.

Well, he thinks, it’s nice to be wanted.

Chapter Text

JASON THINKS THAT when you die, life takes a polaroid.

Jason’s apartment. Eighthundred squarefoot. A couch, and kitchen, and fridge. Shelves and shelves of unread books lining the walls like coliseum seats. And Jason: lying low. Lying on the floor barefaced, jacket splayed open, drained pistols in both fists.

When you die, life takes a polaroid of who you were. One perfect moment, one perfect version of yourself. For the rest of their lives everyone you knew will remember you that way. Not a person, a brother. Not a son. 

As a message. An ideal. 

Flashforward, Jason hasn’t left his apartment in three days. 

The food in his fridge is rotting and so is he. Outside he hears burning, sirens, breaking glass. Gunfire, rubberbullets ricocheting off asphalt and streetlamps. A hiss that could be teargas, could be spray paint. He looks at the shelves lining the walls and sees the water stains and black mold. He looks at his hands and the pads of his gloved fingers still charred from the blast. Jason thinks that under and behind and inside everything he took for granted, something terrible has been growing. Everything has fallen apart.

Outside Gotham is a warzone and nothing is new under the sun.

The people that trained him for this were wrong. The people who trained him for this knew jack shit. Sometimes Jason thinks he should have stayed dead.

Three days pass and he doesn’t sleep and he isn’t awake either. He must get up to eat,  drink, shower. He doesn’t remember any of it. Out of body, out of mind. The Bats know who he is now, and he knows who they are, finally. Full circle.

Maybe he never even woke up in his grave. 

Jason’s not awake, but he doesn’t sleep, either. How long is three days? 

He needs to make a new helmet. 

When you die, you want to think the world will stop to mourn for you. Well, Jason died and the truth is, the world keeps moving. Children grow up. Wives remarry. And The Batman needs A Robin. And Bruce needs a son. No matter what happened to the last one. It isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise. 

Jason thinks about it. The set of The Batman’s jaw, the sound of his father’s voice: You’re dead. We buried you. 

He isn’t his name. He isn’t his family. God doesn’t think about Jason at all.

Cracked ceiling stretched above him, Jason thinks about all he’s done so far. The riots. The revolution. How all of it, everything, has been for him. Jason is so angry. When he’s breathing, he's angry. And he’s using the people of Crime Alley just like every other mob boss does, every corporation, every dirty, grimy scheme that needs fast hands and cheap labor. Jason is using them and he was giving them all permission. 

Be his guest. Help him out. Kill his father.

All his spacemonkeys pulling the trigger? They understood everything. They understood they were probably going to die, and they still trusted Jason. To help them. To get them justice.

Jason needs to get up. He feels like his mother. He feels like coughing up blood onto the wood-laminate floors, coughing his lungs out of his body. He feels like he’s dying but he’s not; he can’t afford to. His work isn’t finished. This whole thing has grown beyond him. It isn’t about him anymore. It never should have been. Maybe it never was. 

He needs to get up. He needs to rest. His books look down on him, mocking. 

He gets up. 

He brushes his teeth. Combs back his streaked, greasy hair. Cracks an egg into a pan on high and just stands there. Watches it sizzle.

Bag over his shoulder, hood pulled low over his eyes, in the hallway Jason runs into the neighbor girl. It’s early, just after seven. She gives him that smile as she leaves for class. And life goes on. 

On the street there's no more broken glass and no less pain than usual. Jason hasn’t left the house in three days but he knows his work isn’t finished. He passes a barricade and police in riot gear. He sidesteps an outsourced crew levering a storefront back in place. Across the street dripping words are smothered in whitewash paint. 

You’re dead. All through Park Row. We buried you. 

In the store Jason stands motionless in the self-checkout lane until a blue vest employee taps him on the shoulder. On the corner outside he eyes the security cameras lining the block and wonders which Bat is peering through. 

All throughout the city. Here, taped to a street sign: Vaughn Against Violence. Structure, Order, Peace. There, in the chain store. A notice from the CEO, condemning the riots. And on the TV in the laundromat, a newscast owned by the largest corporation in the city outside of Wayne E. An anchor sitting in a studio in Old Gotham, smiling and perfect and talking about chaos. About anarchy. About the good ones in Crime Alley who don’t want this. Who were perfectly happy, and just want to live their lives in peace. 

Dead. Buried. And Jason’s still breathing.

He turns into an alley the street before his apartment. A block away, he can see his window from the sidewalk, his blackout curtains, his metal grate. He takes the fire escape of the adjacent building, one flight, two. And then he’s on the roof, braced against wind, the sun barely risen breaking through the Gotham haze.

He leans against the maintenance box. Smokes a cigarette. Shoots out the lens of the security cam. He reaches into his bag, takes something out and rolls it between his palms. Then he pulls the pin, tosses once, twice, and throws a grenade through his own window.

Cooking an egg and leaving all four burners on with no flame. Concrete walls two inches thick. The whole room is a bomb. The crash of glass, a long, stuttered drag. Then light.

And out comes the kitchen, refrigerator blasted through the wall and broken open, spilling out glass bottles and melted tupperware and flashfried eggs. Out comes the bedroom, his stained, burning mattress. Out comes his shitty Ikea couch.

In moments his wall-wrapping shelves are firewood on the alley floor, and all those books he wanted to read. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Herman Melville and Mark Twain. His own white whale in the burning heap. All 37 of Shakespeare's collected plays tattered, the Eternal Human Condition. Jason watches Their Eyes Were Watching God burn to sheets of black-carbon ash. 

For the rest of their lives everyone you knew will look at that picture and remember you that way. Not a person, a brother. Not a son. As whoever it hurts them most to mourn.

There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love.

When it hits the filter, Jason drops his cig, still burning, into the pile below. This is his life and he’s watching it go up in flames. And it goes on. 

The revolution rolls on, with or without him. Crime Alley won’t take it lying down. It’s not about him anymore. It never should have been. 

Past a certain point, Jason’s just a figurehead. A face put to the ugly, angry head of Gotham’s lowest class. Not a person. Not a son. Not a leader. Jason is nothing but a symbol, redfaced, eyes glowing and guns pointed to the people on top.

Leaned against the railing watching the ashes of his life fall, Jason thinks in this way, he can never die again. The Red Hood will have to get up, even with a bullet through his eye, and a life in flames, even with blood drenching his hands and the Batman on the hunt. To play his part, and say his lines.

So, he’s been forgotten. So has everyone here. His work isn’t finished. It’s not about him anymore.

This is his life and no one will ever see it, and no one will ever know him again. 

He needs to make a new helmet. 

JASON MAKES A new helmet and decides that Hell is better than Nothing. It’s the same sleek red. Noseless, mouthless, just glowing, watchful eyes. He’s made up his mind. It isn’t about him anymore. It can’t be.

Jason sets up a new base. Two, three, half a dozen. He scatters them throughout Crime Alley, and then, as the movement expands, throughout Gotham.

There are no more bedrooms, no more kitchens, no more books. In each one he puts one white mattress, three crates of ammunition, emergency supplies, and a shit ton of pain meds. He never stays longer than a night, and he never stays longer than he sleeps.  

He sets up a new base in a new warehouse, a tighter inner circle to protect against leaks. And still the people march. And still new recruits line up at his door, come in flocks of threes and fives to his street level guys to ask for an in. 

Business has expanded. Jason’s creating new departments. Enforcers on the streets, rooting out Black Masks men, the False Facers, all the other gangs of the city. Teams of architects who find the weakspots of buildings, root them out, light them up. Welfare checkers for the young and the elderly. Runners for drugs. Grunts.

And Jason’s own little band of Robins. His special forces. His Merry Men.

They come to him desperate. Angry. Always so, so angry. To his warehouses or hideouts or to his men on the streets. They root him out of wherever he is hiding, find him and tell him, Let me help. 

So what Jason does is he trains them. Shows them how to fight, shows them how to win. Shows them how to make napalm. Gasoline and cat litter. How to make bombs. Nitrate. Glycerine. Sawdust or paraffin or cotton and Epsom salts. Tells them that if you wrap blasting gelatin around the foundation, you can topple any building in the world. Hit just the right pressure point, between the right vertebrae, you can win any fight you want to start. 

Apply just the right pressure. Just the right place. The right person at the right time sitting in the driverseat of a car bomb. You can topple governments. 

He makes them fight. He makes them reckless. 

And last but not least, he makes them sit passenger-side in a speeding, reckless car driving on the wrong side of Gotham’s busiest road. Twin truck headlights shining through the windshield, the dark, uncaring night all around, in the moments before their inevitable deaths, Jason makes everyone of them tell him their fears. He makes them tell him their dreams. He makes them tell him one thing they wish they would have done when they were alive. 

I wish I had quit my job. Burned down a monument. Torn down more billboards. 

Killed my rapist. 

Killed my trafficker. 

Found the man who killed my mother, who let them pump poison into her water for years, who made me watch her suffer, and suffer, and suffer, and die.

I wish I had made them all pay.

Headlights in their eyes, they tell him every dirty, shamefaced regret and every violent, burning thought, all the ways they hate their lives and all the ways they wish they had done something about it. 

And then he swerves, careens into a ditch at the shoulder, gives them a loaded gun, and makes them do it. 

After that—Jason calls it a near-life experience—they’re ready to do anything. After that they’re not just their names. Not their families. Not their pasts or the ghosts that haunt them. They are whoever they need to be to get the job done.

So they patrol the streets at day with guns, drawn not on the people but on the riot-geared police and the military intervention. They blow holes in the walls of finance district banks and hustle the money out to the kids on the streets. They stake out produce shipments to chain groceries, swipe the keys from the drivers and jack the trucks. When they hit Park Row they’ve gotten away; it’s been ten years and still, no one patrols the Alley. 

Life and liberty. Money and food. Jason’s own three fish, and his own goddamn miracle. 

His men do more than that. They do whatever he asks of them. And he does whatever he needs to do. 

But that's all amateur. Minorleague. Juvenile. Jason doesn’t want to just fix Gotham. He wants to root out everything that ruins her and burn it to the ground. No more violence for violence for violence. Violence as a means to an end. 

Improvement isn’t the answer. A teargas canister flies past his head. Destruction is the answer. 

The tallest building in Crime Alley is owned by shellcorporation inside of a shellcorporation inside of a weapons dealing ring. Jason holds a gun to the CEO’s temple and watches the tears and snot from his face drip onto the deed. The sniveling, bleating mess signs the building, decrepit, only half built, upper twenty floors bare glass and steel and concrete, over to one of The Red Hood’s Lieutenants. Then Jason shoots him in the skull. 

The plan, he tells his Circle, he tells his trusted men. All the dirt and scum and filth of Gotham. The real filth. Not the addicts in drug dens or the grunts in warehouses. We go to the top. We burn out the roots. We salt the earth. Nothing will ever grow here again.

Nights aren’t dark in Gotham anymore. There is always a fire raging on. There is always steel creaking and paint spraying and glass shattering. Riots. Looters. There are always police choppers shining spotlights on the streets. In all this, they slip by like shadows. 

The Red Hood and his men slip into penthouses. They slip into safe houses. They slip into apartment buildings with twelve too many locks and cameras at every entrance. They break security cams with rocks and creep through every door, every windowpane and chimney shoot until there is nowhere to escape.

The Red Hood holds a gun with six bullets, maybe five, to the skulls of all of Gotham's human waste. All of Gotham's singing, dancing shit of the world. All the lords and the traffickers and the bosses. All the ringleaders, in sex and crime and drugs. 

He holds a gun and shoots a warning shot just past Filth’s ears, and he says, “I’m going to kill you.”

They offer him money. He laughs. They offer him information. He digs the barrel harder into their brainstems. They ask him to just do it already. Ask him, What are you waiting for? Jason’s finger twitches on the hardstop and he says, “I’m going to kill you, later, but I need you to hear this first.” 

Says, “Look around, at all the fine men and women in this room.”

Masks over their eyes, their noses. Hoods up and draped in shadow. There are guns in their hands and their belts and side holsters and blood slashed across their shoes, dried hard and unremoveable. 

“These are the people you're trying to step on. We're everyone you depend on. Every person in this room, before? We were the people who did your laundry and cooked your food and served your dinner. We made your bed. We guarded you while you were asleep. 

“We drove the ambulances. We kept the rogues in prison. We let them out, too. We were cooks and taxi drivers, maids. Gardeners. So we know everything about you.”

He looks up to his men. His hood is on and his voice filtered deep and angry. Under it all he’s smiling. “We are the middle children of history. Toiling like dogs. Wasting and rotting away in a city that forgets we exist when we aren’t killing something, or killing ourselves and ripping each other apart for the bones. We were raised to believe that the police, and the city, and The Batman will make it all better, but they won’t. And we’re just realizing this.”

The windows are open and Gotham breeze blows in past the sheer curtains. The plush rugs. Minimalist furniture. Clever art. The Filth and Rot of Gotham’s breath ghosts out of their mouth. 

He leans closer. Without his mask, his breath would brush their ears. He says, “We’re just realizing this. And that means we’re just starting.”

They don’t ever reply, because Jason has pistolwhipped the gun against their temple. Their eyes have rolled back. He motions to his men to bind them, tape across their mouths and rope around their feet. He gives the rapists two broken legs. He gives the child killers four less fingers. 

And then, once they’ve collected each member of Gotham’s worst in giant black garbage bags, Jason invites them all cordially to a get together seventy stories up Crime Alley's tallest building. Packed into closets. Under desks. Lengthwise beneath the tires of BMWs in the parking garage. Drug dealers bound in rope. Traffickers huddled in corners. Mafia men hanging upside-down from cement shoes.

And he lines the foundations with his homemade napalm, his storebought dynamite. Gunpowder and gasoline. Coke and ketamine. Everything in this city, in this world, that Jason wants to see go boom.

And finally, when they’ve scraped rapists from off the streets and ringleaders from their cushy, penthouse homes and broken the legs of all the organized crimeleaders and tucked them neat and nice away inside of the ticking timebomb of Crime Alley's tallest building, Jason sits on the rooftop’s concrete ledge, and he pulls out a gun. 

He thinks about how everything you ever love will reject you or die. 

Everything in Gotham is falling apart. 

He thinks about violence as a means to an end. And who is he? What is his blood?

Gun to his temple, timer counting down from twenty, the signal glowing gold-bright in the overcast sky, Jason is sitting on a rooftop ledge with aching hands and aching legs. The Batman swings down to stand opposite him, and Jason’s wondering if he’d loaded his gun with six bullets, or only five.

SO THE BATMAN and Jason are on the top of the tallest building in Crime Alley. Jason’s pressing a gun to the underside of his own jaw, and he remembers everything. 

Wind blowing. Floodlight signal behind him. Blind and bound criminals writhing in the floors below. And God might be on that rooftop with him, stock still except for the movement of his cape, a darker shade of black than the rest of the night.

The clock chimes ten minutes. The building won’t be here in ten minutes. Jason knows this. Jason knows this, and Bruce does, too.

Gun against his jawbone, Jason says, “I won’t really die.” Maybe he’s thinking of vampires.

“It isn’t really death.” He says, “It’s getting even.”

And he says, “Don't you want to be?” And he says, “Be a hero.”

The gun is just to keep Bruce here. In case the building doesn’t blow first. In case Bruce tries to leave before everything is good and done. 

Nine minutes left and The Batman breaks his vow of silence. 

Jason’s shifting his finger on the hardstop and The Batman says, “Wait!”

And just like a magic trick, Jason is fifteen again. The Batman is his father, is Bruce, and Jason is just one man holding a gun to his own head. 

Bruce says, “Wait!”

And, “Stop!”

And, “Jason.”

And Jason has never been good at doing what he’s told but he has always been a fast learner. His finger stills. His helmet is off, it’s been off the whole time, and the wind blows his hair onto his forehead, into his eyes. Through it: The Batman streaked in black and white.

Bruce says, “We’ve been following you. Through every camera in the city.”

Jason’s teeth are bloody when he bares them. Jason’s nose is dripping red. The further he runs, the more God wants him.

“I don’t know how you came back. I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through. But Jason, your plan isn’t going to work. There is another way.”

And he says, “Jason. Put the gun down.”

You take a 96-percent concentration of nitric acid, eyedrop it into threetimes the sulfuric acid. You take a kid trying to steal your tires off the street. You have nitroglycerine. 

Mix it with sawdust. Let him die, and let the man who killed him walk. Now you have an explosive. 

What is a gun, Jason works his jaw around the barrel, but an explosion focused in one direction.

Jason keeps the gun up. 

Below them blare sirens. Jason can only imagine the scene. Pigs and paramedics breaking down the front doors, flooding through the building. Pulling Dirt from half built broom closets, Filth from beneath car wheels. Untying hogtied crooks. Undoing all his hard work. He grits his teeth. Across the sky, the whop, whop, whop of police helicopters. They shine their spotlights on the surrounding rooftops and crackle their speakers loud. Here must be every cop in the city.

Jason says, “Another way? I’m done with your other ways.”

Crime stops when criminals stop. 

“The Bats have been around for ten odd years,” he says. “Look at how they’ve helped me.”

Eight minutes.

The blood from his nose, from his mouth, is really coming down now. It hits the barrel of the gun, down the stop and around his trigger finger. It wasn’t a cheap gun, and Jason wonders if a clot might fuck it up.

“I know I’m not perfect. I’ve never claimed to be,” Bruce says, and Jason is only half listening, thinking about the blood on his gun. “But I have tried. Am trying. For you, and for Park Row.”

Bruce says, “I can help you.” And he says, “Let me help you.”

Jason says, “I don’t need your help. Everything is going according to plan.”

Bruce asks, “What plan?” And Jason doesn't answer, looking just behind his shoulder, at the stars peeking through the clouded sky. 

Bruce says, “I saw you kill someone yesterday.”

If he means the boy Jason used to be, that happened a long time ago. If he means the second lieutenant of the Blackgaters, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He knows.

Bruce says, “I know you, Jason. This isn’t who you are. And it isn’t who you have to be.”

But Jason isn’t his name, he isn’t his family, and he isn’t the man Bruce made him into.  

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Yeah, maybe it is.”

The Batman stares like he’s trying to see right through Jason. Like he’s trying to peel back his skin and find the words to say to make him stop. 

He must find something, because The Batman says, “Jason.”

He says, “Jason, I forgive you, and I’m sorry.” 

Five minutes. 

Jason tilts his head. The gun goes with it. Jason is past grief and past anger. This is a peace like he’s never had his whole life. He says, “You don't even know what to be sorry for.”

The Batman says, “I do.”

And Bruce says, “I should have known this whole time.”

He says, “You were only a kid, but you gave up everything for your mother. You took care of her the way a child should never have to. And when you discovered the truth of your father’s death, you wanted to kill the man responsible.

“Love for you has always been in sacrifice, and in retribution.”

I am Jason’s bloody nose.

Bruce says, “Jason. Your killer is still alive, but you have not been forgotten.”

I am Jason’s burning arm, and his finger wrapped around the trigger.

“I’ve made many mistakes, but I've never stopped grieving you. And I have never stopped loving you." 

I am twelve-year-old Jason’s broken heart, because my father left me, because my mother left me. And I’m wondering who is left to leave. And that old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love? Well, it really does work both ways. 

Jason is silent. A tear leaks down his cheek, down his gun, curls around his trigger finger. It wasn’t a cheap gun, and Jason’s wondering if the saltwater might fuck it up. Three minutes.

Jason says, “I’ve been angry for so long.”

The wind blows his hair from his face, and for the first time in years, even through the cowl, he can see his father in perfect clarity.

He says, “I've been angry as long as I’ve been alive.” 

And he says, “For so long, I would have killed to hear those words. I would have died again. But I’m not all that angry at you anymore. I forgive you for letting me die. Maybe I forgive you for not being the man I always wanted you to be.” 

One minute. Jason cocks his gun.

"Jason," Bruce says. Hands spread, palms out. Approaching a wild animal. A son you don’t know anymore. "You don't have to do this. There is another way."

Jason laughs, and it’s all Robin, all wind on his face and Sunday breakfasts and starched collars and perfect, straight teeth. Jason laughs and it’s all a lie he can’t tell himself anymore. “Don't you understand? This isn't about you anymore. This isn't about us.”

Jason looks down to where the crowds press against yellow police tape. All the cruelties of Crime Alley. All of it running through his veins. They’re still protesting. They're yelling at the sky. They're yelling his name. 

Picture a bullet, every one of his bullets, cross filed into the tip. You fire them, and they bloom, metal splitting open around the grooves, a beautiful, bloody, copper flower painted pink and grey from brainmatter. 

The timer beeps. 00:00. 

Jason pulls the trigger. 

But, turns out, Jason only loaded the gun with five bullets. And he’d used them all up on warning shots. The chamber is empty. The gun is just to keep Bruce here. In case the building doesn’t blow first. In case any of the Bats catch on.

The gun just clicks, and it’s the loudest sound in the world. Jason smiles. He says, “Bruce, you fell for it, didn’t you?”

All his homemade dynamite ignites. 

And on the rooftop of that tallest building in Crime Alley, Jason tips himself back, back, back off the ledge. Jason the Streetrat. Jason the Letdown. Jason, the bomb and its fuel and its fuse. Jason the Robin, who was perfect for one moment and in that blazing polaroid, will be perfect forever. Jason the Haunting, back from the dead, and all he ever wanted was Justice.

Jason Todd slumps off the building and to the ground.

HERE’S WHAT REALLY happened.

Jason wakes up on the concrete subfloor of his late, great apartment. Eight hundred squarefoot closetsized bachelorpad. For one. There was maple flooring once. He had books along the walls. There was a kitchen, and a fridge, and it was home. Before Jason. Before Bruce.

Of course, when he fell seventy stories from the tallest building in Crime Alley, he died.

Liar.

Not again.

He’s still alive because he’s died before and he knows what it feels like. It’s not this.

What really happened is that Jason tells his Circle, his trusted men, two versions of one plan. 

What happens is they gather all the Dirt and the Scum and the Filth of Gotham. The real filth. Not the addicts, not the grunts, not even just the ringleaders and mob bosses and kingpins. The Red Hood and his men slip into penthouses. They slip into sprawling estates. They slip into country homes and into country clubs and into courthouses and into every precinct of Gotham PD. They go after the bent cops. They go after the bribed judges. They go after blind-eye politicians and gentrifying elites and exploitative loansharks and cheappaying employee-killing corporations, the ones that target immigrants and street kids and small, quick hands. 

The Red Hood and his men stalk them for weeks. They slip into offices and find evidence. They slip into offices and plant some, too. And on the night of the roundup, after they’ve stuck up every petty criminal and broken every leaders’ legs, and every cop in the city is drawn out of the nest, The Red Hood’s men break into homes and offices and country clubs and big money gambling dens and finance street strip clubs and they round up all the prissy, high-class grifters, the bloodsucking devil-eyed felons, reprobate scoundrels who eat Gotham’s poor and powerless for breakfast.

The Dirt and Filth and Scum and Shit of Gotham, and The Red Hood’s men hold guns to their heads, tie ropes around their ankles. Bound, chained, the Red Hood’s men make them sign professions of guilt in blood red ink.

If they threaten to call their lawyers, The Red Hood’s men say we’ve killed your lawyers. If they threaten to call in a hit, The Red Hood’s men say we’ve got one on you. And when they cry. When they plead and beg and pray for mercy. When they say, Please, please please, I’m not ready to die. 

The Red Hood’s men say, Don’t think of it as death. Think of it as downsizing.

Tied up, security systems still pinging silently to empty precincts and noses bleeding their brains out of their skulls, The Red Hood’s men leave them to wait for justice in their offices and homes and villas surrounded by sheer curtains. Minimalist furniture. Clever art. Surrounded by wealth soaked in the blood of Gothamites and evidence that will get them sent away for long, hard years. 

The gun is just to keep Bruce here. In case the building doesn’t blow first. In case any of the Bats catch on.

The plan, he tells his Circle. Burn the roots. Salt the earth. Nothing will ever grow here again.

And if everything goes according to plan, all the corruption in Gotham will be cornered. Contained. All the criminals will be tied up and delivered oh so nicely to the only clean cops of Gotham PD.

Well. All the criminals but one.

Because crime stops when criminals stop, and right now Jason is the worst criminal in Gotham City. 

Of course, when he fell seventy stories from the tallest building in Crime Alley, he was supposed to die. 

Liar. The Red Hood, the symbol, can never die. 

Jason was supposed to die. The Red Hood was supposed to live forever. 

Because in that moment he was a hero. He was a hero, and he was perfect. A person had to work hard for it, but a moment of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. And life was going to take that polaroid and Jason was going to die and for the rest of their lives, everyone he knew would remember him.

What really happened was he was falling, twenty stories, forty stories, sixty stories down and in came a Bat, swooping like his namesake, to gather Jason up and bring him here.

Jason wakes up on the concrete subfloor of his late, great apartment, and in the time he’s unconscious, he sleeps better than he has in years.

His nose is still bleeding. His teeth are still red. Concrete against his achy, stiff palms, Jason stands up to wash his mouth before he remembers the bomb has pushed all of his furniture out of the window. Everything and the kitchen sink. From the place the grenade must have landed black powder blastmarks stretch out like fingers. 

Jason remembers lying on the floor of this room, back when it had the maple flooring and the books and the sink and all the facets of a modern life. Getting up to patrol. Coming back to sleep. He might as well have stayed dead. 

Now it's all over. Now his work is done. And by some fucking miracle, he is still alive.

Jason Peter Todd, he thinks, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life.

Jason doesn’t know why, but he knows who is waiting for him on the roof. And he remembers everything.

He goes up. 

JASON STEALS THE tires off of The Batman's car; after that they're standing on opposite sides of a rooftop, a thousand words and a hundred bodies between them. The Batman looks at Jason, whose teeth are still red and nose is still bloody and mask is still long gone, and he asks, “How?”

And he asks, “Why?”

And he says, “Jason.”

It’s so very nearly dawn. The city is anything but quiet. Everywhere he turns, sirens blare in the distance. All of Gotham is one big crime scene. Sirens, radio static. The wind, and his father’s voice.

That night, Jason didn’t have a jack but he did have a few stacks of bricks. Unscrew a bolt and pry off the hubcap, then loosen all five of the lug nuts. Not enough to pull them off, but enough that they make a noise, clatter around the sockets when you push at the wheel. One by one, place the bricks under the car to prop the bumper until the weight is off the back left wheel and there’s a quarter inch sliver of air between it and the road. The first time he met Bruce, Jason didn’t feel anything at all.

This night, Jason takes in the tipped over billboards, and the ash on the roof, and the hard, knife sharp silhouette of the Batman's cowl, just before Bruce pulls it off. Face to face, Jason leans back against the rooftop ledge and feels the wind through his hair. Lights shining down, sun close to rise, they see each other perfectly.

“I was angry,” Jason answers, “and terrified and lost, and everytime I looked at my life, I wondered why the fuck the universe brought me back.”

Once it’s propped, unscrew the lug nuts beneath the hub in a star formation. Do not unscrew them one in a row. Sometimes, the lugs are rusty and the bolt heads break off the stems, and there’s nothing you can do. The job is over and Jason doesn’t get to eat that night. But on this car the condition was perfect.

“I hated myself,” he says. “I envied people dying of cancer because at least they got to die. I was tired and angry at how shit had gone for me. Then I was angry that no one was doing anything to stop it from happening to anyone else. 

“I couldn’t do shit to change things.”

He says, “Only end them.”

Jason was never a delinquent. Pocket the bolts because they're good metal and could go for a buck or two. Place your hands on either side of the wheel and pull towards you to remove it from the lug studs. Then you have a tire.

Bruce says nothing but Jason thinks he wants to. It’s been a long time since Jason could read his father’s face. Inside his father’s house are many mansions. Inside his father’s head are many people. It isn't so much a family as it is a hall of mirrors. 

Do this three times. Uncap, unscrew, prop up with bricks and grit teeth. Stare at the three hairless rims on the nicest car you’ve ever seen. There’s an itch in your fingers, and there is still a fourth tire.

Finally The Batman clears his throat, and Bruce says, “I meant what I said. Every word. Jason,” he says, “there is another way. Let me help you.”

Jason is shaking his head before Bruce can finish his words and he keeps shaking, shaking, shaking, “No, no, no,” he says. “No, no, no, there isn’t, and you can’t.”

He says, “I’ve broken your golden rule too many times and I don’t regret a single one.”

Rip off the cap. Greasy fingers. Bloody palms. And behind you, find a man in a dark, silent cape. This is his car.

Bruce says, “Jason. I know you've always believed that some people deserve to die, but we are not the ones to dole out that punishment. We cannot be the ones to decide that.”

Hit him across the face with the iron.

Jason smiles, tips his head back to the lightening sky. He knew Bruce would say that, because Bruce always says that, and he really believes it, too.

“I don’t just believe some people deserve to die,” Jason says. “I believe that some people deserve to live. It’s our responsibility to make sure they do.” 

He says, “And this is the only way to do it.”

One last tire. Bruce could have just let him have it. 

Bruce never just lets him have it. 

He has always had a thing for tragedy.

Sirens. Radio static. Wind blowing across the bay. But even in the distance, there is no gunfire. There are no screams. Without all the racket, Jason thinks, this high up, it's like the city has its own music. This is a peace like he’s never had his whole life.

To the space behind Jason’s head, Bruce says, “Nobody died last night.” 

Jason knows this. That was the plan.

Bruce says, “Your plan worked, and nobody died last night. The worst criminals in Gotham city, tied up. At your mercy. And yet, nobody died last night.”

Whatever he tells his men and his enemies, Jason doesn’t like killing. Bruce used to tell him that they didn’t kill because a life was everything. Every death was its own tragedy.

Truth is, every death was a great distraction. 

Jason says, “If they died, I wasn’t a threat anymore. It was only urgent if they were still alive, and you were still afraid I’d kill them.”

The gun is just to keep Bruce here.

“And,” Jason says, “I was giving you another chance.”

Jason’s men. The people who do your laundry. The people who cook your food. Serve your dinner. Guard you while you are asleep. 

The men who work in Arkham. In precincts. In Blackgate. Who keep the rogues in prison. Who decide when to let them out, too.

Jason says, “I’m giving you a chance to keep them all off the streets. For good this time. I’m giving you one chance to make me believe in rehabilitation.” 

Truth is, to love is to change for another person. To love is to sacrifice.

And if the sacrifice is bullshit, and the love isn’t true, Jason’s men are right there waiting for him. So he can do whatever he has to do to get the job done.

Bruce says, “They won’t get out.”

Jason just laughs.

And Bruce says, “Jason, all of your targets have been put away for good. You’re going to stop killing.”

It isn’t really a question. Hands braced on the outside edge of the guardrail, Jason says, “Sure. Yeah. Fine. But Bruce, I have never killed indiscriminately.”

He says, “I have always gotten justice.”

The Batman sighs. 

And God stands where he always stands, draped in black, knifesharp cowl hanging down across his chest. His eyes are dark pindrops in his face, and there’s a bruise blooming on the side of his cheek. God stands across from Jason and he closes his eyes and he says, “I still don’t understand. You said you’d forgiven me. Then why do all of this?”

Jason looks God in his pinpoint eyes and knows, all of a sudden, that God does think of him afterall. That maybe God does care, he always has, and he never stopped. And he also knows that God’s got this all wrong.

Because this isn’t about Bruce. This isn’t about Jason. This isn’t about the Joker or the warehouse or his death.

All of this? 

This is about Jason’s mother, who Crime Alley killed.

And Jason’s father, who Crime Alley killed.

And this is about Jason doing the only thing he can to help the people who are still living.

And God says, “No.” 

He says, “No. There are other ways,” and, “No, that’s not right.”

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.

Take three wheels and stash them away and instead of getting out of there, you get greedy. You think about what an extra fifty could buy you. 

Go back for the fourth tire. Meet the shadow. Try to fight the shadow, and realize you can’t. That scares you, and that thrills you. You swing the iron, but the shadow just laughs, long and hard and heartfelt. When he’s done, he offers a hand and a meal. 

After that, he’s your father, and you’re a kid the way you’ve never been before. You’ve always ruined everything good in your life, but even you can’t hurt the shadow. You hold out hope you won’t ruin this, too. 

You’re happy. You’re happy. You’re happy. 

You ruin it, too.

Jason now, on the rooftop, lowering his gaze from the sky. Jason now on the ledge like the night before. Jason’s nose had stopped bleeding hours ago, but his chin is still crusted red. 

Jason on the ledge, Jason on his hands and knees, Jason gasping for breath, wrestling to die, wrestling with living again. Jason looking at Bruce looking at Jason, and Jason says, “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

And he says, “Sometimes I think you’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

Bruce stares back and he looks so old. Jason has been dead for five years but Bruce has aged a hundred. Like a magic trick, Jason is fifteen again. Bruce is his father, is The Batman, and Jason is watching him say, “Sometimes, I think that, too.” 

The Batman is looking down at a twelve-year-old street kid and offering his hand. Bruce is looking across the roof at a dead man, and a criminal, and his son. His cowl is down around his shoulders. His hand is palm-up, outstretched.

The Batman asks, “What’s your name?” 

And Bruce says, “Jason.”

Pit fights aren’t always death matches. A father and son are never just a father and son. Perfection isn’t a word, it’s a moment. It’s this moment. It’s every moment. A person has to work hard for it, but a moment of perfection is worth the effort.

And Jason isn’t his name. Isn’t his family. Isn’t the man he thinks he is, or the man Bruce made him into.  

Jason is his father’s son.

He stands, steps forward, and takes the hand.