Chapter Text
Green clouds his vision, sometimes. Usually, it just hangs around the edges, waiting to be called upon and lulled to the surface, but right now, it’s faded. Pushed back.
His heart feels kind of empty, without the anger.
It feels weird to feel his heart break, because his father is in front of him but will not acknowledge him as a son.
Everything keeps going to hell, and he wants to fix it.
Let’s rewind, since there’s nothing like a good flashback in literature.
It goes like this:
He’s young, barely eleven and already working corners, already homeless because his mom was an addict and his dad was…honestly, he can’t even remember the type of criminal his father was. But he’s working corners, and there’s nothing like the grief of knowing your body is not your own.
He steals tires, sometimes. It doesn’t pay much, as no one with good tires comes to crime alley or even the surrounding areas, but it’s something.
So here he is, shaggy black hair flopping in the wind, waiting for a customer or a car. A couple gun shots go off nearby, but it doesn’t matter, since this is basically a war zone. It would be problematic if there weren’t gunshots.
Suddenly, as the night fades more into deep purple and out of blood red, there’s a low purr of an engine, and a furry steps out of a heavenly car. The furry goes off to fight crime (useless, that man is, and doesn’t he know that bats don’t look like that?), and the car, beautiful in a way that demands to be armored, is fresh for the taking.
And take it he does.
Sadly, he can’t sell the whole damn thing, since it probably has trackers or something and criminals and evil masterminds aren’t completely stupid, but he can sell the tires.
And goodness, the tires are Nice, capital n and all. Crisp and shiny and treads not yet destroyed. People would pay good money for these even just to use them. But as a momento? As a piece stolen from Batman? He could hit up the joker or scarecrow and make bank.
He grabs his trusty tire iron (he loves the thing, really. It’s spray painted a pretty dark green, and it’s got splatters of dark red on it, from when he was doing his own defending. He’s an independent woman, he don’t need a furry to fix his problems), and prepares to pull off the tires. There’s security things on the tires, weird shields that cover them, but he just smacks the underside of the car real hard and the shields just drop like some cool movie.
He gets three of the tires off.
On the fourth, Batman reappears, and grabs his shoulder, like he’s going to pull him away.
“What are you doing—“ Batman starts, before Jason hits him in the stomach with his tire iron. Batman wheezes, then picks him up by the collar like a damn puppy by the scruff of the neck. He fights and wiggles and squirms, but it’s no use.
Then, long story short, he gets adopted. Batman is Bruce Wayne, some billionaire orphan that decided to go beat people up, instead of going to therapy like normal rich people do.
Then he gets manipulated into also being a furry/traffic light cosplayer, and he also beats people up. It’s nice. It’s freedom, almost, because he finally has power. He finally has a family, and he learns some sick acrobatics from Nightwing, and he gets to experience all the good things he thought were only in books.
And then he gets a crowbar to the face. And the back, and the neck, and the stomach, and the face again and again. And there’s laughter in his ears and green fills his vision because the Jokers hair is green.
It’s a horrible way to go, surrounded by the joy of someone else. It’s supposed to be good, to hear happiness in your final moments, but it is not the comfort he wishes it could be.
He wakes up in an ocean, but the ocean is green. The ocean is angry and it hates him and it fuels him with anger and there is laughing. He kills nine men when he wakes up.
Talia teaches him to kill many more. She takes his anger and thrusts a sword in his hand, teaches him to be a part of the sword, be a weapon.
How can he protect anyone as Jason Todd, she asks him one day. How can he protect Damian, who is just a child and already wielding a sword, if he is Jason Todd? How can he help Gotham?
He is Jason Todd, and that is not enough.
So he becomes a weapon, his anger transforms and turns into something worse, and he kills and kills and kills.
And when he is a weapon, he is finally enough, so he goes back to Gotham. Tosses a bag of heads on a table, takes over crime, starts anew.
And now he’s here.
Batman is across from him, and they are in a warehouse. There’s laughing in the background, because Joker has gotten out of his gag.
Green flecks across his vision like a filter.
“I’m not asking for much,” Jason says, and it’s more of a plea than he wants to admit.
“Hood, stop the killing,” Bruce, no, not Bruce, Batman says. His voice is too mean to be Bruce, even if the fond memories of his almost father have been ruined by the replacement.
“I’ve never understood it!” He snaps, “this is the line you won’t cross? This? You don’t even have to kill him! And it’s not like it’s the Riddler, or Penguin, it’s Joker! Joker, who killed me, who can’t be fucking saved!”
“I’m not killing him!”
“Why?” Jason asks, and it’s practically a sob, and he wishes that he had his mask on because that would at least cover the despair crawling on his face.
“What?”
“Why can’t you do this? I’ll pull the trigger, you just have to choose! Please, B, me or Joker?”
Batman stays silent, and green clouds his vision, floods it.
He puts a gun to Joker’s head. Joker laughs and Batman watches.
“Count of three, B,” Jason says, voice angry. Pissed. Broken.
“Don’t”
“Three”
“Jason”
“Two”
“Jason stop”
“One-“ and then he can’t talk. He is numb and when did it start raining? His shirt feels wet, and he doesn’t like it, it’s wrong, it’s wrong.
It’s really red.
It hurts.
God, he wants a hug.
The green leaks from his vision, swirls into the red that drips into his shirt, into the floor that he is laying on.
Ashes to ashes, or something.
Street trash to street trash.
He can hear laughing. And talking. And laughing, and he doesn’t want to die to laughing again, he doesn’t want to die alone.
He curls up and covers his ears and wills everything to end.
-/-/-
The sky is orange, a fiery array of colors but mostly just orange. It’s pretty, reminds him of the evenings when he’d sit by the harbor and watch the ocean before going on the corners.
His neck hurts.
It’s uncomfortable, laying on the ground (a roof?), but not intolerable.
Scarecrow sits across from him.
“Ah, finally awake!” He chirps, slowly approaching Jason. “I saw you, you know, dying. Figured I’d help you out, and we could make a deal.”
He runs his hand over the stitches on his neck. They’re healed already, from the pit, probably. But it should be gone, he hasn’t gotten scars since he died.
It’s wrong.
He hates it.
There’s a gun in his waistband.
Isn’t scarecrow supposed to be smart?
“What?” Jason asks, and Crane comes closer.
“I want to sell an antidote to my fear toxin. I figure, I scare everyone, because fear could really fix this place, and then an antidote would solve it. And of course, we make it addictive so they keep coming back, and-“
Jason shoots him. Through the head.
It’s nice to watch the blood splatter.
-/-/-
It’s been two months since his throat was slit, and it still aches, like a bruise that can never quite heal. Like some kind of fucked up treatment, he hunts down criminals. He doesn’t kill, not anymore, since every time he did, Batman would find him and beat him up and all he could remember was a slit throat.
Rubber bullets are annoying to find. Weirdly enough, they’re on Amazon, so he buys them in bulk. Modifying his guns had been a pain, but they work fine now.
The first thing he did was take down trafficking rings, specifically child and sex. It wasn’t horrifically difficult, since he could just sneak into the GCPD station and find their files on the rings, and just go from there. Most of the leaders killed themselves to get away from him, which is terrifying to think about but also insanely helpful to him.
The next thing is to take down drug rings that sell to children. There’s only so much he can do about drugs in the first place, and to be honest, it’s Gotham. You can’t take drugs out of Gotham.
But dealers that sell to children? Nope.
So that’s what he’s doing. Laying on a fucking roof (it’s raining, that’s why his shirt is wet, that’s the only reason), green on the edges of his vision, gun pointed as he watches a deal through the scope. It’s not really a deal, more like some kind of employee meeting between dealers, and they all look like the low life scum Jason likes hitting.
The air shifts next to him.
“Bucket boy, I thought Batman said no more killing,” Nightwing, otherwise known as Dick Motherfucking Grayson, otherwise known as a bitch, says, poking Jason with a (thankfully off) escrima stick.
“I’m not killing. Fuck off, dick,” he mumbles, not looking from his scope. Dick won’t hurt him, even if he doesn’t know that he’s Jason. He could be wrong, though, since he likes him again.
“Then what’s with the gun?”
“Fake bullets.”
“Ah,” Dick says, sitting on the roof next to Jason. “I’m not supposed to be patrolling according to Agent A, so I’m just gonna sit here.”
Jason stays quiet. He misses Alfred, and his gentle words and his cooking and everything about him.
“Some people think that you’re the dead Robin,” Dick says, after a few moments, and Jason sputters so much that he drops the gun, lunging for it before it can topple off the edge of the roof. “Batman knows who you are, but he won’t tell me. Not like we talk, much.”
“You just gonna spill the family drama?”
“I can’t help that I’m bored,” Dick whines, flopping on his back.
“Annoy someone else?” Jason asks, forcing his voice to sound crueler than it is. The dealers are long gone, except for one, so Jason acts like he’s watching him. Bantering with Dick is normal, and it makes his heart ache with calm.
His soul is not meant for calm, not when he is but street trash tumbling through the alley, waiting to be stepped on. Not when the tides are pulling him in.
“Robin is scary, in case you haven’t met him. He’s like nine, he’s an assassin. And Red Robin has a caffeine addiction, and he’s injured. So all I’ve got is you, and we’re practically besties already!”
“Batman, go annoy him. He’s a furry, you’re like…half of one. You’ve got a blue bird on your chest. The color doesn’t suit you, though,” Jason deadpans, and Dick gasps, poking Jason.
“You ass! This is my color, it brings out my eyes!”
“Does it?”
Dick sticks his face in front of Jason’s, staring into the eye slits of his mask.
Dick’s eyes are the same blue they’ve always been, and Jason wants to cry.
But he’s a man, and Batman is his father and cruelty is in his blood, so he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “I don’t see it.”
“I hate you”
“Ditto, birdbrain”
“Oh Em Gee, you gave me a nickname! We’re besties now!!”
“I-no?”
Dick tackles Jason in a hug, and promptly gets thrown off the roof.
He’s fine, dangling from a fire escape a few stories down with a pout on his face, but Jason still feels bad.
“Bye bye Hood! My bed calls for me!”
His does too, so he leaves with saying goodbye.
There is no green in his sights and the anger he feels is so minute it feels like peace.
It feels empty and freeing and right.