[debut] batman and robin must die: the robin and the hood

[aworthyone]

He's said he's different. That he's not like the other Robins. Damian Wayne was raised by assassins, criminals, and as such, was taught to kill without mercy. Despite the promises he's made -- despite the promises he's kept -- not for one second would he hesitate to inflict severe brain damage upon one of his father's rogues, and the Joker is

Comments

[prodigaljaybird]

Sometimes, Jason thinks the only people who visit the graveyard more often than he does are the dead. He's come here daily since his second burial, for a while visiting the place more often than his own girlfriend, though that balance has at last begun to shift. Most days, he sits in silence on his headstone and stares at the ground. The soil there has finally resettled, smooth and neat with sparse grass reaching upwards through the dirt. It doesn't look fresh anymore, and Jason feels better for every blade that pops through

[aworthyone]

The face is younger than the last time Damian laid eyes on it, smoother. The hair is darker. The expression, though, that stays the same: twisted with an anger far too big for one person to carry. Jason Todd, the Red Hood. Escaped from Arkham, apparently, though how remains a question best left asked later

[prodigaljaybird]

It's like something from a nightmare, and Jason would know. Robin lurches like a thing undead, pushing Jason another step back until he sees the ropes binding the tiny frame. He presses his heels hard to the earth against an near overwhelming urge to run and makes himself look.

Wide pink smile beneath a domino, something - tape? - beneath, and that ridiculous nose. "Are you his?" Jason asks, voice fluttering out of him like something wild. Does the Joker have sidekicks now? It's horrifying, unthinkable, everything in which the Joker would delight, and Jason sticks his hand out. Ripping that tape away will be a mistake, he knows, but he wants an answer. "Who are you?"

[aworthyone]

It's only to get the blasted tape off that he allows Todd to come so close, and Damian sucks in a deep breath the moment his mouth is free, then briefly ducks his face into his shoulder to knock away the nose, letting it fall in the grass. Were he in a better position to do so, he would crush the infernal thing with his boot, but as it is, it's enough of a struggle just to keep upright. Freeing his legs is his first priority. Petty revenges can come second.

"Tt. Who do you think I am?" demands Damian, his voice hoarse from yelling and grogginess both. None of this makes sense, not the question or the way Todd looks as though he's just seen a ghost, and especially not the almost cheerful green of a graveyard far from Gotham. "How did you get out? Where are we?"

[prodigaljaybird]

There's a moment where Jason's heart tries to seize and expand all at once, one reckless second where he thinks this might be Tim, brought younger than Jason's ever seen, but no, the raw skin beneath the tape folds over a jaw that's not quite right. But it is familiar...something in the eyes behind the domino, the proud line of nose...Jason doesn't have time now to place it.

"I don't know who you are," Jason barks back, "You're dressed like Robin but you're not - " He stops before he can give Tim away, it doesn't matter that no one cares here, he won't be the one to sell Tim out, but who...who the fuck is this? "Who are you?" he says again. "Give me a name and I'll tell you where you are."

[aworthyone]

There's a homemade thermonuclear device back in the bunker that no one knows about except Damian and the man who put it there. Whatever game Todd is playing at isn't important, but it's a hurdle Damian needs to jump to get to matters more pressing than names already once exchanged.

"What, are you dense?" he asks. Throughout the course of the conversation -- if it can even be called that with Todd for company -- Damian's loosening the loops around his ankles, a hundred little movements that lead up to the big reveal. All at once, a small, deadly foot sits poised above the other boy's windpipe, and Damian looks, with the cold analysis of his father, into the face of the madman who once shot him pointblank.

True, detective work bores Damian, but he knows it's necessary now if he's to make any order from this chaos. The facts, as observable, are these: he's in a place he doesn't recognize with a Jason Todd who doesn't recognize him; the Joker is absent, if he was ever here in the first place; and the weather is distinctly tropical,

[prodigaljaybird]

The foot at his throat is unexpected, but even the movement that brought it there is familiar in a way that unnerves Jason, makes him strike out with more force than he'd normally summon against a child, break the contact and dance away.

"You're on a fucking island!" he shouts back. "In a pocket dimension with a couple hundred other prisoners, so you can stop threatening me any time, boy." Boy Wonder, Jesus, Jesus, what the fuck. "Where'd you get that uniform?" What happened to Tim, they're only replaced when they get shot or die. Jason's stomach rolls. "Where's the real Robin?"

[aworthyone]

He's given up everything for this piece of his father's legacy, and to have it denied him if only through inexplicable ignorance is a more devastating blow than having his foot knocked away.

"I am the real Robin," he says, and the only reason he doesn't launch in with another attack right away is that his arms remain bound, and he'll need more than legs to best Todd, though the challenge of trying without is one he'd meet gladly otherwise. "Why don't you recognize me? Why are you so young?"

[prodigaljaybird]

"I'm eighteen," Jason shoots back, as old as he's ever been, but it's coming together for him now, what's happening. Tim came here after events long in Jason's future, and this child, this Robin, has clearly done the same. He knows Jason, he threatened him because...because to his mind, taught by Bruce, Jason is a villain.

Jason waits, but the knowledge drops hollow in his chest. Expected. "I don't know you," he says, wetting his lips. "When I came here..." Say it, even if the boy proves an enemy, he won't take the knowledge home with him. "Tim was Robin. Is he back?" Jason steps forward. Tim said he wasn't dead, just lost in time. "Bruce. Is he back?"

[aworthyone]

The questions about his father are interesting -- telling in a way Damian doesn't yet know -- but not relevant. As far as he is concerned, he's the only who needs answers.

"What do you mean, when you came here?" asks Damian, the ropes around his torso falling to the ground with one last jerk of his arms. But patience, now, stays his fists. Todd might have valuable information about their present circumstances, and beyond his defense against Damian's foot, hasn't made any moves towards violence.

Yet.

"You're supposed to be in Arkham, with the rest of the lunatics. I wasn't aware your sentence included trips to tropical locales. How can you be here and there at the same time? Are you a clone? A copy? A trick?"

A joke. The Robin who brought his own crowbar and the one who didn't. He heard the Joker's voice just seconds ago, he knows it. He must be around. Todd is a distraction. Damian starts forward.

"Where's the Joker?"

[prodigaljaybird]

Jason hisses, feet firmly planted but in his head he's falling sideways, slipping past this patch of earth and sun and into something else. For a moment, everything is shrill laughter and hideous screams, but it's not...not real. The Joker's not here for round three between them. Jason knows that when he looks he won't see him, but it's not until he drags his fingers across the scar in his scalp that he feels grounded.

"You came alone," he says, "just you, we all do. It's just a pocket reality, you're still in Gotham, I'm still - " In Arkham, Tim had never said...Jason's hand falls to curl over the scar on his throat. That coward. That fucking coward. His lips curl around a snarl. "Did he put me there?"

[aworthyone]

Damian understands the benefits of killing one's enemies. He would be a hypocrite for condemning Todd on that criteria alone. But the man stripped Damian and Grayson to their underpants and put them in front of a camera, threatening to reveal their identities to the world. Todd's sanity is a debatable point based solely on that fact, in Damian's estimation.

"You put yourself there."

[prodigaljaybird]

It's the same as it ever is, one moment there and breathing, the next swept away in a rush of anger so owning, so complete it makes the world spin around him. "What the fuck would you know?" Jason bellows at him, this little bird, this baby, smaller than Tim ever was.

"He's the one who's crazy, who lets it go on and on and on when he could make it stop." Jason bares his teeth, grits them and feels something hot slip down his cheek. "He'll fucking throw you away, too, it's what he does with little birds."

[aworthyone]

The only movement Damian makes at the outburst is to lift his chin up, just slightly. A gesture of pride.

He's already been rejected by one family. Replaced by his own clone, ten years his junior. He won't be replaced again. He's Robin to Grayson's Batman, and the only way he'll give up that mantle is to become Batman himself.

"Only the ones too damaged to fly," he says, voice cold. "You get treated better if you're a real son."

[prodigaljaybird]

There's a tremor that starts in Jason's fingertips, spreads out and in, shakes his heartbeat loose and pries his reason from its moorings. He's shaking as hard as he ever did while he could scream the leaves down from the branches, but he hardly notices at all, his eyes fixed on that too familiar line of jaw.

It could be a lie, but the boy's bone structure tells him different. Bruce's blood. A hundred hurts knit themselves together, offer Jason a clarity that he seizes on at once. Of course. Tim's not dead, just ousted, erased, just like Jason, just like Dick, even, fired for the audacity of getting hurt. Replaced by a son that's finally good enough to keep around.

Jason doesn't fall, he sits, but it's a near thing. "Your mom?"

[aworthyone]

It's out of something akin to pity that he'll afford Todd this one answer, though he still has too many questions of his own to let rest for long. He steps forward, not out of concern, but to gloat. If the name hurts him at all to say, he doesn't let it show.

"Talia al Ghul."