"You're such an inspiration for the ways that I'll never ever choose to be" - Bruce/Jason
(you breathe me in and you know I’m trouble but you’re the worst yourself so who is judging in the end?)
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The blood on his fingers won’t fade now and Bruce should have learned to accept that but he won’t. Jason knew he wouldn’t because there was still an altar to his death somewhere in the cave in an eternal remembrance of something wasted and lost. There were still cautionary tales of the fallen Robin, even after other Robins fell; there were still traces of his death like endless ripples in the pond of the bat family. But also because Bruce still thought his own hands were cleaner than Red Hood’s and that Red Hood was his fault - maybe that’s why they still couldn’t learn how to talk to each other with anything other than their bodies.
Even before the Joker, before Death, before Talia, there had been cracks between them. Jason remembered them in the ways they used to be Bruce, Dick and him, a weird dysfunctional bunch of make believe family. Dick had been younger than Jason in some ways when Bruce had found him, more adaptable, less set in his ways perhaps. Less damaged, Jason knew Bruce would think. Even now. Fuck that, Jason did not care.
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(“Why won’t you learn about civics test? You should to learn about our justice system Jason, it’s really not something I expected you to fail when you’re so good with history.”
“The question is, why should I bother learning about it since I already know the most important thing about it?”
“And what would that be?” Bruce had asked, a smile barely there on the corner of his lips.
“That it’s bullshit”, Jason had answered, not surprised by the way Bruce seemed to think he was being a brat about the entire thing.
“And who, pray tell, taught you that?”
“Well, you did”, he had said with a smirk of his own as Bruce’s face fell.
It had been a lie - part of it anyway. Jason knew the system was screwed before Batman and before Bruce. He knew it when people wouldn’t treat his mother unless money was on the table, because who cared about human life if they were poor anyway?)
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There was something beautiful in the way the two of them never really fitted each other, or how they fitted too well - in that way they moved together that was never exactly how it should be, in what the adoption papers pretended they were, in the violence always barely there under Jason’s skin and the one Bruce trained himself to keep buried. Jason looked at Batman and still saw everything he had wanted to be and all he never could bring himself to become. There was the mark of Gotham too deep in his veins for him to get it out, deep in a way it wasn’t in Bruce’s veins, in a way Batman wasn’t made to understand that when you’re hungry and cold it’s never black and white but a deep deep gloomy grays that never seems to get lighter except from those few people that bring light with them. (From the few years he spent growing in the Wayne’s manor, hunger had been the weirdest feeling to miss. Not a regret, not that at all, just a surprise every time he had realised he was not hungry. In spite of what Bruce had been thinking, Jason had lost his innocence very early, and it had nothing to do with sex at the start.)
As much as Jason wanted to say he was not a child when Bruce found him, there were still parts of him at that time that longed to feel hero worship, to believe in something stronger and bigger than everything else. Part of him that wanted so badly to be exactly like him, like the first Robin, like what Batman had made and everything good the people saw in him. He wanted it so badly he could taste it and not being able to hate Dick only made it all worse, loving the way he would call Jason “little wing” and move so gracefully it was painful to watch. Watching Dick move had always left him with a mixture of amazement and dejection, knowing he would never move like that. They weren’t built the same way. They were nothing alike.
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(“I’m no ones son”, Jason said and every single bit of that sentence was both truth and false at the same time. Bruce was never your father, not unless Jason was to be Oedipus in a new twisted way, and the man who died in prison wasn’t one either and yet… from both of them, at one point in his life, Jason had wanted complete acceptance, to make them proud, to be wanted.)
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He won’t denied the parts of him that Batman and Bruce used to hold - still hold - the parts of him that wanted to be like them, but he wouldn’t lie now when he said he didn’t want to be them. Not anymore. There were so many flaws in the Bat system, that system that wanted so much to be an ideal carried with it too many dead kids and too many broken people, too many wrong decision and things you can’t never erase, never take away. As much as Batman wanted to be outside de system, Bruce was neck deep in it. The rich heir of a company bracing too much money for it to be clearly counted could hardly play saint when looking down on a city festered by crime reigns fully using the despair and poverty that was the lot of so many people down on the street far from the ivory tower of the Wayne’s. He wouldn’t cheapen Bruce intentions, wouldn’t say his suffering was worth nothing, but there was a gap between them, one that Jason once wanted to erased and later used to define himself. The choice had been a conscious one, deliberate even to become all that Batman wasn’t, the guns, the kill, the deal with the devils, all that Bruce never was and to say Jason didn’t enjoy the way it seemed to make Bruce’s skin craws to watch him be all that would be a lie. But it’s not all it had been about; it still wasn’t everything that Red Hood was about.
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(“You’ve got nothing left to give Bruce.” - and sure, maybe that one had been a lie. Sometimes Jason wasn’t sure what was a lie and what wasn’t. Things between Bruce and him always ha that tendency to make the separation between the two unclear.)
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Batman was still an inspiration.
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(“I never get tired of watching you work”, Jason had said back then, and he knew the cracks of longing in his voice would be heard but maybe they would cover the raw want.)
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Batman was an inspiration, yes. There was no more of the blind faith that once was burning so fiercely in Jason, of the foolish desire to be the carbon copy of that man, or of anything that man wanted him to be in the off chance hope to be worthy. (He remembered the fear of being sent back to the street if he wasn’t good enough, despite everything Alfred had said, nothing could fully kill that idea. You didn’t get things for nothing in return, not in Jason world. Batman wanted a Robin, but what if Jason wasn’t good enough?) Batman now was the inspiration to be something different. He was remembering the wasted lives, the tears, the horror and the mistakes, knowing he would not make the same one instead. Nor would he try to not make mistake at all. And so Jason killed where Bruce put people in prison, he burned things to the ground where Bruce tried to build, he lived in cheap and more or less secure warehouse where Bruce stayed in his parents manor, he gave second chances to people Bruce never trusted in the first place. And they screamed at each other, kept on hurting each other, each new wound a different way for them to get under each other skin, a warfare as a love letter in progress.
And for all in which they are different, they’re couldn’t seem to let go of what was. Bruce kept seeing echoes of Jason in all the Robins that died or those who came close, in any kids in the street with enough rash bravery in them, while Jason saw Bruce in all the people that tried to keep give him comfort and keep him on leash. The ones that tried to make him in something they wanted, something to control. Part of Jason still craved that.
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(“You were right”, Bruce looked exhausted, he wouldn’t look at Jason and Jason wanted to scream, punch him in the face and kiss him until neither of them remember anything, “You made yourself Jason, you were right.”)
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“I know I was right about that”, Jason thought but never said it. He couldn’t say it then, and now when sometimes Bruce let a “son” slip here and there, making both of them uncomfortable for different reasons, Jason wouldn’t say it either. For all he never wanted to be the Batman Bruce was, for all he was his own person before anyone’s else, he once believe with everything he had that this man was everything in this world, and a small part of him still wanted to be wrong.
There was the intent of something like want yet something of a warning too in the ways Bruce touched him when they worked together here and there. Neither of them were any good at wanting each other; Jason knew that since he was fifteen. After everything they had tried to be to each other, strangers, parents, enemies, allies, family, almost partners. Jason wanted, of course he wanted, he could not remember a time when he didn’t in one way or another, but it was such an old ache in him he wasn’t sure he ever wanted it gone. He wasn’t sure what he would be with that gone. And Bruce never did know what he wanted. Not really. Bruce was all denial and control and Jason made his entire being about being the opposite. Bruce had been the inspiration for everything he was, Jason creating a persona in the negative space of the carefully made construction Bruce had crafted. It made them perfect. It made them terrible.
“I was already a weapon when you met me”, Jason wanted to say when Bruce looked at him like he was searching for a boy Jason had never been, “You just made me sharper.”
One more thing he would not say. The words would only bring guilt to Bruce, not pride, he would not understand that Jason meant it as a good thing - just like Bruce never seemed to understand Jason never regretted being Robin, even if Death had been the cost. He only hated that even his death had not been enough for Bruce to change.
They were both older now - if not wiser - exhaustion made them want more and care less about why not to. Each times they were near each other Jason felt the pull, and more often than not now Jason was the one who tore himself away, while Bruce tried getting closer. How the tables had turned. He wasn’t running away, he was older now, he knew himself enough to know that he was still at risk, knew that even now he could lose himself in Bruce if instead of wanting he suddenly could have. So he felt the pull, and walked away, came back only to walk away again and again. Away from Gotham, away from Batman, away from Bruce until the next time Bruce would bring him back the way he always did or until they blew up in pieces the way they kept on doing, an old dance that was bound to either ended with a fight or a fuck and at this point Jason didn’t know which one he was dreading the most.