Fic: Forever Yours
Fandom: DC Comics (vague current continuity)
Pairing: Bruce/Jason / Batman/Robin / Batman/Red Hood
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3000
Warnings (heed them): Complex intergenerational kink (consensual underage, separate mentions of underage pornography and abuse), Robin kink, short shorts, romantic fisting, second person POV, overwritten OTP
Summary: This is you now, forever bloodied from the way you take turns dying with him.
You know he's back when he breaks you out of - what is it this time? - Blackgate prison.
It might be Dick's last suit, but it's Bruce who's wearing it now - again, always - and isn't that a mindfuck. It has to be Bruce who drops into the cell without a word and kisses you behind the glass. Kisses you and holds it, holds it, holds it, until the rogues begin to howl. And you're both disappointed for different reasons when the Joker isn't among them, but that just reminds you of how much work you have to do, and how this right here in your arms is never as it seems.
So he takes you - flies you - away, to the Jersey coast. You've never been to the ocean willingly. Around the world but never the ocean, not when you weren't half-mad and freezing. It's cold, so you wrap your arms across your body, bringing the collar of your jacket up towards your set jaw because he's brought you gifts and it feels good, but maybe you don't want it to. Your hair is red, and though you carry Talia's twisted blade and the Joker's shiny helmet and Bruce's dead heart with you like luck charms, it alone is yours. Hair deep red, eyes deep blue-green, freckles under your eyes like your own scowl gave you sunburn. Eyes rimmed black with lashes. This is you now, forever bloodied - or is it bloodless? where does all that blood go? - from the way you take turns dying with him.
This last time was his turn. He faces you and stares, his cape whipping around him all familiar. You guess this means he's back now. No longer dead. What. Ever. What does he want from you this time? His face without the cowl is that disgustingly true. The way he looks at you. Gorgeous and true and looking at you and it makes you tired. How you hate gorgeous things. The wind chills the water at the edges of your eyes. The damned sun is suspended in the sky, never sinking, never going away, as if stuck on a loop. The nine p.m. summer sun that never sets.
Yours was the love story that no one believed. The father and the son, the man and the boy, the abuser and the abused. Which is which, no telling. Yours is dangerous, murderous, lovely and timeless - depending who asks, and when, so many to ask - but it is yours. Who takes it away is doomed to madness and peril. There should be a warning, for when you challenge the city to try. His city. You are the warning for his city.
He is an idea, a living meme in a dream suit. He is also a man, you say with your eyebrows. You are a boy, his eyes say. A beautiful reckless free thing of a boy, and you were his once. You stay in the city because you love him like you can never love anything else. The way everyone loves him, but more, because it's you and it's him and though no one would ever agree - and though every single one of them would kill you both for this - it is still worth the fighting. Fighting is what you've got. It is your history. God, you wish he would shut up - inside your head, outside, everywhere.
You are a born villain. Even he thinks so. Isn't he always right? Isn't he?
Your eyes narrow. The sun never sets. Batman, the silent sentinel, is never fucking quiet.
*
Once you are still strawberry blond and still light as air. Watching the television, you are resting on his sleeping chest, feeling the hair there, his belly rise and fall with his breaths, his hardness underneath you, as the light flickers over the both of you and the thought flickers in your mind, under your shorts, and you first begin to let yourself have this, and you think you can convince him to have this too. So from then on, it is yours.
Once where you are nothing - just empty street, rainfall, concrete - he sees something bright colored and bouncing and fiercely true. He makes you believe it, and that is wrong, the only wrong. He doesn't have to do that, and you would have been fine, just fine. But the thing is you do see it - you see the whole world for the taking and why shouldn't you take it? Why shouldn't you? It is there - good and bad - it is yours. He only teaches you how.
You hide your cigarettes you steal from the men you take down, and you hide your hard-ons from his vigilant eyes, and you find it works better if you don't hide it so deep, if you let him see you. You talk so fast and you laugh so high you almost chirp, when you're leaping, rolling your eyes at him. When he spanks you, you laugh, you taunt through it - You're so gay, Ace. Don't you know how gay you are? - you make him laugh in the showers while you shave - Can you even find your cock under all that hair, Ace? - and you make jokes he's not used to hearing coming out of Robin's mouth. You surprise him. By the time you're sixteen, he is yours.
For all of fifteen you can both pretend you're kissing with the joy of being his Robin, restless from a night out and squirming his his lap, in the chair, thanking him for your new life - only the best life, the best - and because you are his partner. Behind his eyes he expects that you will leave him because you are young - Are you bored with me yet, chum? - but instead you are stubborn and at his side and across the table and in the car and in his bed. You are more stubborn, and so you will win. In his bed, you always do.
After it starts, Barbara watches you both from the other side of the restaurant table. She looks concerned, and you know what Dick sees in her, you do, but you are glad that it's just the two of you - Ace and chum - and no one else. Her green eyes could tear you both down with a word, but she doesn't do it, just jabs with looks over the rim of her coffee cup, just waits until Bruce is gone before she uncrosses her legs leans in and speaks - You belong together, you know. But he's not always right, even about you, Jason. - and she walks out, like Dick always does, like everyone. You do know all that she speaks of, you've always known. She is tough. Her hair is red. It haunts your dreams like few things do.
*
Gotham has a way of turning on you. The good turns bad, the bad into good. Doesn't make it so. Never ever as it seems. Remember.
He said you must color your hair black, bluest black. Insanity makes sense in love, so you did it. You chump. You heard the rasp he spoke to himself with, even in his head. You felt it when he spanked you, feel it when he punishes you now. His guilt is massive and legendary. The whole city is a mockery of that guilt. That guilt will never leave. It was always in the laughter that he began to hate.
What did you care of these things? You loved him. You saw through him. Such powerful sights to see.
This was all crazy, you think. Your lives were crazy and went against the flow of so much shit - your job was to smile in the face of it, to show him how - and then, just as you knew it would, it drowned you every time. You're standing at the Jersey shore. The fucking Jersey shore, how perfect. Surrounded by a sewer the world doesn't let you drown in and you're left with the flicker of what you can't have anymore. You think - this is what makes a hero? Bruce knows this. Can't he see?
But he looks at you and he sees something else. The undying past. The never ending fucking setting sun.
*
You think you should have known at first. The first thing he does when he finds you - at twelve, were you ever twelve? - is blindfold you and tie you to a chair spread-eagled. When he removes the blindfold, out of the shapes in the darkness, you see every kind of restraint and control. He will teach you to use all of them.
First, he uses them on you. It brings out what you are used to, what you consider to be talents - quickness, fearlessness, persuasion. Bruce is skilled at managing every talent you have, making them shine. He reflects your smile, your smirk, your attitude, your desire, your flair back at you. It feels that way, it does. He was meant to shine. Both of you were. Together.
See? These are the things they laugh at you for. These are the things that get you killed.
One day it dawns on you, what it was in the way he looked at you. It was envy, and pride, and too much pride to let go of all the control he taught you. Still, he wanted you to know. The patient mouth, the insistent hard-on. Nice, Bruce, nice. He would hold you in his lap in the library, and pat your knee with his glove in the car, and stare up at you when he took you into his mouth and every plea for more that you stifled, you could see it in his eyes, blue blue blue and the flicker of the fire in the study. Always - he was asking - for permission. He would have died first. What were you supposed to do?
And what do you see now, all grown up? Aren't villains afraid of their own bodies and the madness that leaves them marred? Isn't that the point - fear and madness? You know how things grow ugly and pretty on the streets. What use is control against that? He thinks being stubborn with you still matters. That's the joke. He was never not yours.
You thought he looked at you and saw he favorite partner. You found he looked at you and saw his obsessed friends with their lost faces. But that was later. By then it was too late.
The sun never sets. There is no dawn like the dawn that used to be.
*
This is when you are sixteen:
In the dawn hours he finds you already in his bed - or you follow him there, because you are not stupid, never stupid - and you teach him what you know of control - control of giant cock, giant hands, his giant fuck. You can beg with every part of your body - begging hands, begging lips, begging eyes. You beg without speaking. He has too much pride to ask, but you have only pride in asking. Always, you are both asking. And Bruce still tries to save his obsessed friends with their lost faces, save all of them. It is the oldest joke - the one everyone else in the world can see. He never finds it funny, this joke of the two of you.
This is the deal: Offer him freedom from himself and he will take all you have. But you want to do it, you do. So he will call you villain. And then that is that. That is why you are enemies.
Fuck him then. You'll show him. When he is ready, you are quick. You know. You get on your knees and you suck him, and suck him, and suck him, and you let the sounds echo in the cave. When his thigh muscles twitch under your palms, you crawl underneath him - between his legs - and let his hair tickle your face. You lick your way over every texture of skin and then lick in, squeezing your face between his cheeks, squeezing his cheeks against your thumbs. He is a monument above you. Everything about him is hardness, from the stretched slit on the end of his cock to the ring grabbing around your tongue. You think he was meant to be hard. Some of you are just meant to be. That's right, that's true.
You show him you are hard, grown, old, young. Riding him when you're sixteen is like riding a bucking horse, fucking into him as best you can, pressing down at the back of his thigh with all your might and your hands barely able to span the width at the back of his knee. Pale scarred skin taut beneath you and his ass tight enough to eat you whole, sucking at your cock and him nothing but muscle.
But his eyes can stop your breath. But his hands can teach you anything yet to learn. But he's Bruce. But he's the goddamn Batman. It's not enough.
He asks you to fuck him - hands tied, face down, knees on the bed - and he doesn't have to ask, but you make it so he has to. You turn him over, you breathe his name at his neck and bite down until you're drooling on the skin between your teeth and you can't wrap around him yet but you can fit your chest to his back as you claw and you claw at the scarred remains of his nipples and you feel it when he comes, his back to you, how you could almost be him - that thing that even he himself wants to be.
You fuck harder then, because he always asks if you can handle it, if you want to, he always makes you beg him, and you start to think he is the one who isn't sure he can handle it, who needs to beg. You wonder what that sounds like. You come before he has the chance. You begin to wonder if all of this is a lesson too. If Bruce even knows what they're practicing for. If the Batman does.
He asks you to restrain him, fist him, do it quietly enough to feel his pulse on your pulse. Moans and breathing. Hot skin. Little sounds, his name on your breath. Your pulse saying not Dick or Harvey or even Robin. Only Jason at sixteen.
It sounds just like this, one year later, when you crawl out of your own grave. As your name is on his when he holds you, broken and not yet stiff. The softness in death you both look for and do not find. In these moments, you find a memory in him and pull it out. It's in his face, glossy-eyed and disgustingly true. My boy - he says. You can't look away. You are buried deep - to the elbow, to the gut, to the ground. You are, finally, speechless.
In this way, you become what he dreams of - the thing he is conquered by - and he calls you a nightmare. It is who you both are, the armor you carry. Still, both of you saying - I am not this man.
*
It is his turn to return from the dead, to say a hard little speech. He does not apologize for calling you a mistake. He does not clarify his meaning of the terror he speaks of, the one from your past. Does he know about the child's scrapbook, the one you filled with scraps of the Batman? The filled pages of the good kind of fantasies, of the good kind of shadowy men meant to save the good kind of world, the good kind of boys like you? Hardboiled stories written in scrawl, newspaper snapshots and urban legends collected like the most precious pornography? Does he have pictures - archives - of you in other men's arms, strawberry blond videotapes, all the things you don't think about - and does he know in your face you were thinking of him? Was he aware of that past before your death? And which horror - of a lifetime of horror - is he blaming for you now?
You do not need to ask. The answer to his every question has always led him back to himself.
And oh, you almost forgive him for that - the feat of taking on the man you love and all his horrors. You never meant for it to leave him as hard and as broken as you. Not crumbling buildings if you touched. Bricks and mortar.
And maybe he is only timing his hard words with the sun as it goes down behind him. Maybe he's just that hard. Hard as a crowbar. How many times will you have to keep crawling out of your own graves for the sake of arms around your shoulders, fists in gauntlets at your back? It is so much easier to take the punches.
Like all your fights, it ends quick and messy. Ending messy like he always did when you took off the green shorts, pressed them to his face. Endlessly quick like the bullet you will both keep taking to the armor, to the heart.
The End
(I haven't written them in quite some time. Feedback would be cherished.)