Chapter Text
Bruce hated that Jason’s soulmark was on his shoulder blade.
It should be on his hands, his face, somewhere he saw constantly. Somewhere he couldn’t escape. Looking back at him from the mirror every morning. Dead and grey and still and a constant reminder of how he had failed his son. How his crusade had gotten Jason killed.
He’d thought about putting a memorial in the cave. Hanging Jason’s shredded suit as a constant reminder of what his failure wrought. Burning Jason’s soulmark into the wall.
He’d actually tried to set a picture of Jason’s dead soulmark behind the Batcomputer keyboard. Staring back at him every time he used the monitor.
Dick had taken one look at it, burst into tears, and screamed at Bruce in a way he hadn’t done since… Since he’d adopted Jason and given him Robin before he even told Dick what was happening.
God, he had failed both his sons so badly that time. Dick had at least had the sense to make sure Jason was nowhere nearby before he laid out to Bruce exactly how Robin wasn’t his to give away.
Bruce hadn’t known how to explain that it was the only way he could think of to convince Jason to stay. That he couldn’t let the boy go back onto the street and Jason was too guarded, too independent, to just stay because he was wanted. He wouldn’t believe it. He needed the idea that there was a reason why Bruce might want him.
He’d stumbled around the words for weeks while Dick gave him the cold shoulder. He was simply thankful that, in usual Dick fashion, his eldest had endeavoured to hide the frostiness from Jason. Bruce was pretty sure Jason had noticed, he was highly sensitive to negative emotions, but then Dick’s naturally loving nature had kicked in and quickly thawed him into genuine affection. Dick had always loved easily, giving his heart to anyone who needed it without expecting anything in return.
That had terrified Bruce as he’d gotten older. As Dick’s soulmarks began to bloom across the Justice League and throughout Gotham. Dick never seemed bothered by whether he got a return mark or not, although he reacted to every new mark on his skin as if it was his birthday and Christmas combined. But Bruce still remembered a circus where every member had Dick’s soulmark emblazoned on their forearm, where Dick wore his own emotions, and a heartbroken little acrobat with only two grey marks of his own.
Looking back most of their knockdown-dragout fights had been about soulmarks. Bruce could see now that he had been foolish, trying to protect Dick from heartbreak and making his son feel stifled in the process. All he’d done was make Dick feel self-conscious about his wonderful, open heart.
Jason, Barbara, and the Titans had saved him then, when he was failing Dick. As Dick thrived even as his world expanded Bruce began to realise that not only was his son capable of loving widely but he was loved back. Dick’s skin steadily increased in soulmarks as he got older, covered in symbols of love returned. The worry never went away but faith in his son’s ability to surround himself with those who deserved his love helped ease Bruce’s fears and loosen his grip.
There had been a couple of tense years, even if their marks had never faded, but they had recovered and Bruce thought maybe he had done alright with Dick. He’d been grateful for Nightwing still regularly fluttering to his side, light as a bird, secure in the knowledge Bruce wouldn’t try to clip his wings.
No-one had been there to save Jason from Bruce’s failure. Dick had been away in space saving other people and hadn’t even known there was anything wrong. By the time Bruce had realised just how wrong things were there was no time to even call the League. To call Clark. Alfred and Barbara were a world away waiting for him to bring Jason home.
If he just hadn’t left him alone. If he had permanently stopped the Joker any of their previous fights when he could. If he hadn’t driven Jason to run away in the first place. If he had just learned his lesson with Dick and not held so tight, trying to protect Jason from a cruel world he was terrified was strangling the life and light out of his son.
“Are you trying to torture yourself?!” Dick had demanded.
Of course, he was. What else could he do? What right did he have to be happy when his hubris and stupidity had cost his son his life? How could he ever let himself forget what his mistakes had wrought. He deserved nothing less.
But he hadn’t meant to torture Dick too.
The photo was gone by the time Dick finally dragged himself back to the Batcave a fortnight later. He’d brought photos of Jason the Titans had gathered as a peace offering, saying they’d created a little memorial at the Tower.
In the end Bruce hung the mended suit up. But he put it in the general line-up so it was less intrusive for Dick. Dick had vetoed Bruce’s more self-recriminating attempts at a plaque. In the end they’re agreed to “Gone Too Soon”.
Bruce forced himself to stare at the memorial. To remember Jason’s broken body as he had found it. But some days he simply couldn’t bear to tilt the mirror and expose the cold, dead soulmark forever branding his body with his loss. It made it hard to go down to the Cave and try to do what had to be done instead of just lying down on the cold tile of the bathroom like it was his son’s grave dirt and wishing to join him.
So he just stayed in the Batsuit, where he didn’t have to look, and went through the motions day after day.
* * *
Jason woke with dry, dusty air slowly shredding his raw throat.
That probably tracked. Last he remembered he’d been being tortured. Or… no there had been an explosion. Or he’d been drowning? Burning green water pouring down his throat as he struggled and tried to scream. Eyes staring into nothing but luminescent green that seemed to pour into him, passing through his skin, light searing through his pupils. Even now there was still a green haze to everything, not in his eyes but in his head. Sickly sweet and cloying against desert heat.
He was on his feet and didn’t remember getting there. His head swum as he struggled to get his bearings. He heard someone panting as if through a tunnel. Where – where was he? Where was Bruce?
Was he dead? Was that why Bruce wasn’t here?
“Calm yourself, child,” a melodic female voice soothed.
Jason jerked away from the potential threat. While much of his mind was still a swirling mess of thoughts and emotions that didn’t make sense, part of it sharpened into clarity like a honed knife.
Five figures. Four dressed in black and cowled. Two guarding the door, two a half step behind and to the sides of the leader in green – bodyguards. Based on silhouettes and weight distribution he thought they might all be female. The leader certainly was. Above average height, chestnut hair, green eyes, trained. She moved with the grace of a born predator, even in the subtlest shifts of posture. She was beautiful. And familiar somehow.
“Take a moment to centre yourself,” the woman’s English was flawless but had the lilt of an accent that seemed like it might be intentional. It gave her voice an almost hypnotic cadence. “All will be explained, Jason.”
“Who are you?” His own voice felt sluggish, heavy, and clumsy by comparison. “How – how do you know my name?”
His body wasn’t moving right. It seemed to jerk and twist, reacting too fast and then too slowly at the same time. His weight kept shifting forwards as if ready to lunge, throwing off his balance. Energy burned in the back of his mind, directionless but insistent. A part of him wanted to wrap himself in it, listen to those instincts licking at the edge of his consciousness, another shied away as if it was noxious poison infecting him. It made his head ache and spin. He didn’t even know what he wanted to do, his mind felt as slippery as his body. Or worse.
The woman’s face softened in a sympathetic smile, “I know your father, child. Or at least I did once. We were close.”
His father? Bruce? Willis? She was far too glamorous to have known Willis and far too… deadly to be someone Bruce trusted. He backed away.
If anything her expression just became softer. “I know this is all a lot to take in but you are safe here, Jason. Your disorientation will pass with time. And I will help you recover.”
“Where is here?” The words came out with a sharp edge. Anger began to bubble in his veins.
He didn’t want to be here with this woman. He didn’t want her help! He wanted to go home.
And then ice spilled through his veins. Bruce, his mother, the Joker.
He had promised Sheila – his mother, his birth mother – that he would help her. He had told her he was Robin! And she had – she had – He choked as the memory of the crowbar coming down flooded his mind. He could feel his bones snapping. See Sheila smoking as she had watched. Like she didn’t care. Like he had never meant anything to her.
He had run away, betrayed Bruce’s trust, and then given his identity (and maybe Bruce and Dick’s by association) away to a stranger who had sold him to the Joker to save her own skin (not that it had). And Bruce – Bruce hadn’t come.
He couldn’t breathe. His hands clasped desperately at his arms, his chest, feeling for shattered bones. But he was intact, unfamiliar clothes scrapping against his skin. How? He had tried – had tried to crawl out, broken body failing him. In spite of everything he’d still been hoping Bruce would come. That he’d save Jason before he was a crumpled corpse like Sheila’s bullet ridden body.
He had seen the bomb as he gave up on the locked door. Nine seconds remaining. He was already dead, just on a delay.
He’d only had enough time to wrestle his left sleeve up, exposing the only soulmark he had that he could see easily without a mirror. “Richard John Grayson-Wayne”, sky blue letters written in Dick’s open, friendly handwriting across his inner forearm, shimmering to just “Dick” as you tilted your head. Still there, stark against his bloodied, bruised, and swollen skin. Still marked firmly against his skin, telling him that even if Dick was somewhere in space, completely ignorant of what was happening, he still loved Jason. That Jason hadn’t lost one person’s love at least. He’d clung to that as the world exploded into fire.
“Breathe, Jason, breathe.” The voice seemed to come from far away. A hand was on his chest, forcing his lungs to depress. He struggled to pull back in air. To match the calming voice’s instructions of breaths in and out.
“The Pit’s effects will take time to fade. We will train you to use and overcome them,” the woman was telling him as her face spun back into his vision. “To become more than you were when you were abandoned.”
“I – I wasn’t –” Jason choked.
Bruce had been coming. He had been coming . He just… hadn’t gotten there in time. He hadn’t abandoned Jason. He wouldn’t.
Where was he?
The woman shushed him, gentle fingers tucking hair behind his ear and Jason hated that he couldn’t stop himself from leaning into the touch. Desperate for even the slightest comfort, the slightest kind human touch. He could still hear the Joker’s laughter echoing in his ears.
“Which hurts more, forehand or backhand?”
Both. They both hurt. Everything hurt. Somewhere deeper than the physical.
Why wasn’t Bruce here?! Why hadn’t his father saved him?! Why was he here with this woman?! This stranger – and then something sparked in his mind.
“Talia,” Jason choked. He’d seen pictures but he’d never actually met her.
Dick had and he hated her. Bruce got… wistful sometimes but also grim. When asked about her he would just say they had “irreconcilable moral differences”.
Talia. Ra’s. The League of Assassins. Jason’s breath hitched.
Talia shushed him, hands still gentle in spite of the blood that must have soaked them over the years. “You are safe here, child,” she assured him.
Safe? She was a killer.
But the League of Assassins... they had a code didn’t they? Something about killing evil to remove the rot of the world? That didn’t sound so bad at the moment. He wouldn’t have minded the Joker being killed before he’d ever gotten his hands on Jason.
A heedy green rushed through him, soothing some of the panic, replacing it with seething anger. The Joker had better be dead by now! After what he’d done! He deserved to die for any number of the things he’d done but Jason was Bruce’s son! He had to see no-one else was going to do it and he had to stop it now, right? After Joker had killed his son…
If Bruce still saw Jason as his son…
His hand came up over his shoulder unconsciously, grasping for the mark curling across his back that he couldn’t see. It had still been there. Even when he’d run away it had still been there. It hadn't faded. Not yet. Not before he’d…
“I died,” Jason said thickly.
Talia stared into his eyes for a long moment. They were so green but not the toxic radiation colour that seemed to fill him. A forest green that stood out against her warm tan skin.
“Yes,” she murmured. Jason couldn’t stop the hitched breath at the confirmation. He’d known. He’d known but – “We put you into a Lazarus Pit to bring you back.”
Jason stared at her. He’d heard about Lazarus Pits. They healed Ra’s – gave youth and vitality. But they didn’t resurrect the dead. Did they?
“Where’s Bruce?” the question burning in his head from the moment he woke up finally spilled past his lips.
Talia’s face fell and the pit of Jason’s stomach fell with it. “Oh, Jason, I am sorry.”
Jason couldn’t breathe. What – what had happened – had – had Bruce actually gone after the Joker and died? He couldn’t die! He wouldn’t! Couldn’t they just bring him back too?!
Or were they keeping him from Bruce? As a hostage maybe?
Or – or had Bruce just not –
“Love fades sometimes, child,” Talia told him with painful gentleness.
Jason was on the other side of the room from her before he’d decided to move. “No! That’s not true! You’re lying!” He yelled, trying to ignore the poison in his own brain insisting that, it made sense.
Talia shook her head slowly with that same sympathetic pity that made Jason want to punch her beautiful face in. “I am sorry, Jason, but I am not. I have seen your skin.”
Jason’s heart felt like it stopped. No. No, no, no, that couldn’t –
He wrenched back his sleeve, fingernails cutting into the delicate skin as he forced the black fabric up. She was wrong – she was lying – they wouldn’t –
His forearm showed bare, unblemished skin. No sky blue writing marking Dick’s continued affection. Jason choked.
Of all his soul marks he’d never expected that one to fade, much less vanish entirely. Dick loved so easily, so openly. No matter what happened Jason had expected Dick to keep loving him if only because that was who Dick was, heart unreasonably loyal, rather than it really having anything to do with Jason.
Talia merely stood watching him as Jason fumbled for his pant leg. He couldn’t find the room within himself to care that she was seeing him break down like this. They had to still be there. They had to be. He couldn’t have none.
His right ankle was equally bare.
As he straightened Talia silently inclined him to a small mirror on the wall of the bare, cell-like bedroom he had been given.
He ripped his shirt off. His scars were gone. The ones he should have gotten from his – his death – and the ones he’d had before. No cigarette burns on his shoulders. And no tightly cramped “Barbara Joan Gordon” in the same vibrant red-orange as her hair along the ridge of the muscle.
He didn’t want to turn around. Didn’t want to see his back but he had to know.
For one glorious moment he thought it was still there, dark writing flashing in the mirror. And then he realized it was the faded gray of his mother’s name on his shoulder blade. His real mother, Catherine Johnson Todd, the only reason he had hyphenated his last name when he was adopted. An ancient and faded mark of the long dead. Now raw and painful.
The space between his shoulder blades was blank. No dark writing curling around behind his heart. No indication left that Bruce had ever, ever loved him.
Something inside him shattered and the toxic green spilled into him to fill the spaces as he screamed.