sixthiterationlogs | come to my house, and we'll pick bones.

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come to my house, and we'll pick bones.

WHO: Jason Todd
WHERE: House 9
WHEN: Sometime before Actual Life Ruiner Tim Drake arrives.
OPEN TO: Stephanie Brown
WARNINGS: Probably talk of some unpleasant Dead Robins Club (tm) things.

Jason's still a little amazed Steph's taken him up on his offer to talk - or not talk, as the case may be. Even after Wonderland, even after making friends with Cissie and Jon, Jason isn't used to being someone people seek out for companionship ... or anything, really. But it's nice - if not talking, just being around someone else who knows Gotham and understands the existential peculiarities of finding yourself alive again after you've been killed.

Not really the sort of thing you can easily find a support group for, and Jason wouldn't be caught dead at a support group anyway. But he and Stephanie can be their own support group of sorts for each other, at least, even if neither of them calls or thinks of it as such.

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He doesn't shy away from her sobbing, and he doesn't try to tell her what most people probably would in a situation like this - It's OK. They both know it's not OK, any of it - what Gotham is, what Batman did, what happened to her at Black Mask's hands. It's not OK, and there's nothing Jason can do to make it OK. Some battles leave scars that never fully heal.

There's so much Jason doesn't know about her, but he still feels closer with Steph than anyone else he can remember. Their similarities weigh heavily on his heart, but it's a weight he is content to accept. One hand gently presses against the back of her head, and the other slides across the back of her shoulders to reassure her that he's not going anywhere.

"I've got you, Steph."

It’s not okay, but it’s maybe a little more okay than it was a few minutes ago. She stays like that for a long time, longer than most people would be comfortable with, crying her entire broken heart out. When she finally slows then stops it’s more from sheer physical exhaustion than anything else. She had to start breathing through her mouth.

At long last she pulls a little away to start trying to dry her face. She only has so much to work with and has no choice but to start using her shirt as a tissue.

It’s hard for Jason to let her go when she starts to pull away - his instinct is to keep holding her close, like he could shield her from harm, or transfer her own grief to himself by osmosis. But he recognizes she likely needs space to collect herself, pull the pieces back and stick them together with whatever resolve she has. So he loosens his hold around her and sits back on the stair. After a long moment of silence, he finally speaks up.

“You didn’t have to hide that from me, y’know.” It’s said gently - not scolding her, because Jason assumes the reason she didn’t say anything to him before now is because he must’ve given her the impression he wouldn’t understand, because surely he did something to make her think he was unapproachable. He offers her a faint, rueful smile. “If anyone would understand what all that’s like, it’s me.”

He’s lived with Bruce, worked by his side night after night, loved and admired and hated him, been hurt by him like no one else in his life has managed to hurt him. Maybe Jason hadn’t been fired like Steph was, but they were both abandoned.

“I’m serious about punching his teeth in, by the way.” Jason makes a fist and mimes a slow right hook at the air in front of him, whispering pow! for comedic effect when he brings his fist to a halt.

She sniffles as she tries to get to a point where she can breathe normally again. Once she's gotten as much as she can off her face she pulls her shirt back down in its proper place.

"If I told you he was training me I knew I'd have to tell you the rest. And if I told you the rest..." She looks down and away. The shame is still there, a weight like an anvil pressing on her chest. Just because Jason doesn't hate her for what she did doesn't mean no one will.

"I was afraid you'd hate me. I hate me."

She looks up again when he starts talking about punching Batman in the teeth, and expression of mixed amusement and concern on her face.

"It isn't his fault, you know. If I'd just gone home like he told me none of this would have happened. And it's not like he knew I was in trouble. No one did."

Just in case it needs to be said aloud, Jason gives her the words, short and to the point: "I don't hate you."

He knows that feeling of hating yourself for making a mistake and living - or not - with the consequences, though. It's all too familiar, a bitter tang of bile in the back of his throat every time his thoughts stray to his own death, his arrogance in thinking he could take the Joker on all by himself. If he'd only been smarter, more patient, less impulsive -

But there's no changing the past, is there. And now they both have to live with their respective aftermaths, try to find a way to cope and continue living with the damages done.

"Steph, wearing a mask and fighting crime isn't a business. Batman's not some CEO at a board meeting." Bruce Wayne, maybe, but not Batman, and maybe that's the problem, an area where one mask bleeds through the other. "He can't just fire someone 'cause they're not doing what he wants. There's a responsibility to look out for people in what he does - not just the people on the street, but his own people, too. You. Me." Barbara. Tim. His own son, Damian. "Working with him comes with risks, but he still has a responsibility to do what he can to protect us, and he didn't. That's what I mean when I say he let you die. If he hadn't fired you - if he'd worked with you instead of shutting you out and throwing you to the wolves, maybe he could've prevented what happened to you."

Oh. Something in what he said resonates, but it takes some time to penetrate the shame and grief that's settled around her heart.

"That was the deal I agreed to," she counters distractedly. Batman can definitely fire you if you're training to be Robin. "Break the rules, no more Robin."

Ah, there it is. 'Shutting you out.' That was exactly what he did. Even as Spoiler she'd had ways of getting in touch with Oracle or Robin if she really needed to. But Tim wasn't Robin anymore, she'd been cut off from Oracle's comm line and running into Batgirl just ended in more insistence that she go home.

She died alone, unwanted, unmissed, but wasn't that only because Batman had erased her from his vigilante community? They didn't know she was in trouble, but should they have known she was missing? Should they at least have kept track of her? It wasn't like they didn't know her, didn't know that she was going to be a vigilante with or without Batman's approval. So why wasn't anyone looking for her? Why hadn't Oracle at least gotten in touch with her?

Jason zeroes in on only one of her words: Robin. It takes his brain a clumsy moment to wrap around the significance of what she says, to finally string it all together, nearly dumbstruck by the revelation: "You were Robin, too."

The belief that Bruce did her an incredibly disservice and the understanding of the parallels between his story and Steph's solidify in his mind like quick-dry cement. He laughs - quiet, dry, bitter. "How many of you are there, anyway? What, did he set up some kind of school for plucky young sidekicks-in-training?"

There's more that he wants to say, more sharp words that want to slice at his tongue while they spill out of his mouth, but Jason clamps his jaw shut with a heavy breath out and drops his face into his open hands. It's not Steph's fault that Bruce replaced him with other Robins. He's not angry with her - he's angry it happened. His fingers push up into his hair, tightly curled while he waits for the flicker of anger at the base of his spine to fade.

"Sorry," he whispers, finally pulling his fingers out of his hair and clasping his hands together in front of him. "I'm just - so pissed at him."

"I would have been the fourth, I think." She didn't get to hear all the stories, but she'd seen only two Robin costumes in the cave and not Tim's. "If I hadn't flunked out." She wasn't Robin, that message had been heard loud and clear. And after everything that happened she could see why.

"How can you be mad at him," she asks, only a touch of desperation in her voice. She's used up most of her emotion for the night, she guesses.

"I'm the one that practically destroyed the city."

The list of reasons for Jason's anger with Bruce is long and varied, and some of it has to do with Batman's responsibility to protect the city, and some of it has to do with Bruce's unswerving moral code. But the more immediate reasons, the reasons pushing to the forefront of Jason's battered heart - those are personal.

"Because I died," he says, "and he didn't care. It's like I didn't matter at all." Jason closes his eyes and inhales a deep, steadying breath. "Y'know, the first Boy Wonder, he left. Moved on to doing something else. But me? I get beat to a bloody pulp and blown up, and Batman didn't do a damn thing to the maniac who did it." He took me away from you. It's been months, and Jason still clearly remembers just how fragile his own voice sounded speaking those words. An all-too-familiar stinging sensation that heralds tears pricks at his eyes, and Jason unclasps his hands to rub the heel of his palm against one closed eye, then the other. Another deep breath in, and he opens his eyes again and turns his head to Steph.

"If it'd been the other way around - if someone took him out, I would've stopped at nothing to find whoever was responsible and make sure they never got the chance to do it again. But not only did he not stop the Joker, permanently, he just ... replaced me." And that's a fresh wave of hurt that he'd only learned about in Wonderland, because whoever became Robin after Jason either hadn't been chosen yet or had already come and gone.

"He just picked someone else to take my place, some other kid to be a soldier in his damn war, and - I mean, did he even tell you about what happened to me, or whoever was unlucky enough to be Robin number three? Or was it just like - 'Here, your number's up, time to strap on the cape and tights now'?"

Edited 2018-10-20 22:36 (UTC)

Her heart aches for him when he talks about Batman's refusal to act. She knows well that he would never. He even lectured her for being too hard on Zsasz, of all people. Does that mean he doesn't care? Or does it just mean he's a little naive? Black Mask sure as shit deserves to die, and all things considered she really wishes she had done it. Nobody else was going to.

She wants to reach out to him, but isn't really sure what would be appropriate. The only guy she's ever had to comfort was her boyfriend. She settles for a hand on his knee.

"No, but I wasn't allowed to ask about that kind of thing. I kind of just... barged in and said 'hey, I'm Robin now'. But I know whenever I brought it up before that nobody wanted to talk about it. For O at least it seemed like it was just too soon." Batman never wanted to talk about anything, and Tim was always so careful about what he'd share with her.

Deep down, Jason knows Bruce wouldn't kill the Joker, not even for what he did to Jason - maybe especially not for what he did to Jason. It's been apparent to Jason for years that he cared a hell of a lot more for Bruce than the other way around, and yet - some small part of his heart held onto a shred of hope that Bruce would prove him wrong.

So much for that. Bruce made his stance perfectly clear back in Gotham, and every day since, Jason's tried to tell himself that it shouldn't have been a surprise, but that mental mantra does nothing to soothe the sting of the truth.

"So - what, you're saying you volunteered? You weren't recruited for this gig? And he didn't tell you anything about the Robins before you?" Jason shakes his head in disgust. "That sounds pretty damn irresponsible to me."

Steph shrugs a little sheepishly. She didn't 'volunteer' so much as 'demand'.

"I was kinda sorta dating the last Robin? And his dad found out about his extracurricular activities, so I knew there was, you know, an opening." And she took advantage of her boyfriend's problems at home. It was not her finest moment, but she never did seem to be her best around Tim. He had a way of getting in her head without even meaning to.

"I'd worked with him before as Spoiler, so it's not like we didn't know each other. In so far as anyone knows Batman."

"I don't even know that Batman knows Batman," he deadpans in reply. Bruce tended to keep everyone at arm's length, most of the time, which makes it difficult to get in close enough to break through walls and get to know someone. Jason's a lot like him in that respect, though good luck ever getting him to admit it. For Jason, it's a survival strategy he's learned and refined over the years, though he's still willing to try to let the right people in sometimes, as evidenced from his conversations with Steph.

"So ... you were doing the whole capes and masks thing on your own already." But he doesn't have to ask why she'd give that up in favor of being Robin, because he remembers how thrilling it felt to put on those colors for the first time: This is the best day of my life. "Spoiler's not a bad name. Hell of a lot better than Condiment King, at least." He offers her a small grin over that.

The bit about dating the previous Robin is interesting, too. "Which one were you dating? Was it Tim, or Damian?" Jason didn't really get to know Tim or Damian well enough for dating talk, but he's guessing it wasn't Damian, because not only was the boy he met way too young for dating, his personality was far too abrasive.

She gives a small chuckle at the mention of Condiment King. What a loser that guy was.

"Thanks." Batman liked her codename too. She was pretty proud of it, considering she hadn't given too much thought to what to call herself when she first put it on. She hadn't intended to keep it up any more than she intended to be caught leaving clues to sabotage her father.

"Tim," she answers simply, glancing up at him with mild surprise. Were they supposed to be talking codenames like this? Well, if she had permission...

"Is Damian Nightwing?"

Aha. Tim, as he'd guessed. "He's lucky to know you," he says, with a faint smile. "I didn't meet Tim until I got whisked off to Wonderland. Seems like a good kid. I wasn't very nice to him when he told me who he was." To Jason's credit, he only threatened to punch the boy's face in - he hadn't followed through with it.

In Jason's mind, it's complete bullshit that Steph had been given the uniform while having the information about the previous Robins withheld from her. They're not in Gotham, and even if anyone else is eavesdropping on their conversation, there's not much anyone can do with that information. If she was part of Batman's team, she deserves to know who was behind those masks.

"No, Damian's Robin, too," he answers, with a shake of his head. "Son of Batman, and a real jerk about it. Guessing he gets that from his dad. Maybe he's after your time - he knew who I was, but I'd never heard of him. Nightwing's Grayson - first Robin, before me." Jason's mouth flattens into a tight frown. His feelings about Dick have always been complicated.

She flushes at the compliment, but splotchy as her face is from crying it’s probably hard to tell.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she assures him with some amusement. “The first time I met him I hit him in the face with a brick.” And that had worked out really nicely for them. She misses him. She misses being comfortable around him, meshing, not arguing or hiding things from each other.

“Grayson,” she repeats, committing the name to memory. “And Damian. I never really got the chance to talk to Nightwing. I heard a lot about him from Tim, though. Seems like they’re pretty close.” So Grayson is probably nice enough. Probably. She wonders what he’d think of her now. Come to think of it, she wonders what he thought when he found out she was pregnant. Barbara never brought it up but there’s no way they didn’t know about it.

“So... Batman has a kid?” She’s skeptical for obvious reasons.

Jason laughs quietly at the mental image of Tim taking a brick to the face. There must be a good story there, and he makes a mental note to ask Steph about it another time.

That glimpse of mirth is fleeting; Jason’s expression sours when Steph reveals that Tim and Dick are close. It’s not terribly surprising - Tim’s an amicable enough kid, and hadn’t he called Dick a friend when he’d introduced himself to Jason, back in Wonderland? Not surprising in fact, but undeniably and unexpectedly painful to think that the Robin who succeeded him was better liked by the original Boy Wonder.

Dick hadn’t always been enthusiastically accepting of Jason as his own successor to the stoplight-colored uniform, and Jason felt like he had too much to prove from underneath Dick’s shadow to allow him any real degree of closeness. Jason liked to pretend he didn’t care what anyone thought of him, but in his own estimation, he always came up short in comparison to Bruce’s golden boy. If he could see he was an inferior Robin, certainly so could Dick, and that thorn of self-doubt never truly worked its way out of his heart.

Luckily, Steph’s question pulls Jason from his thoughts before he can fall too far down that rabbit hole. “Yeah, apparently,” he affirms, with a light shrug. “I didn’t get too many details out of him, so I dunno who his mom is. The few times we talked, he was a little more interested in cramming as many insults as he could manage into every breath.”

They've both gone through so many emotions in such a short time that Steph's given up on trying to interpret her own, let alone read Jason's. She manages a small smile as he describes the boy. She can't even picture who might sleep with Batman. Catwoman? Maybe. But she kind of thinks Selina has better taste than that.

"Somehow that sounds appropriate." Batman may have been quieter about it, but he could be terribly cruel.

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come to my house, and we'll pick bones.

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