Work Text:
Slade sits on a chair in the corner of the room.
Jason is curled up under a pile of blankets in the closet, and Slade sits on an armchair parked in the opposite corner. It’s an old, wing-backed thing, and Slade is sure that it belonged to Bruce Wayne’s great-something-or-other.
He leans back in it just to hear the old wood creak, threatening to snap.
Jason’s eyes are slits in the dark, the only part of him exposed to the room. The closet has old sliding doors, and one is pushed aside so Jason can see out. The sun started setting a while ago, but Slade didn’t get up to turn on the lights. He doesn’t think Jason would want it.
Of course, that’s all speculation. Jason hadn’t said much when Slade had arrived, just demanded that he sit there, that he watch the window that Jason couldn’t see. Slade thinks about how Wayne has the property wired up with just about every defense system imaginable, and then thinks about how that doesn’t matter at all.
Jason glares at him in the dark. Slade stares back.
There’s the muffled sound of footsteps in the hall, and Jason flinches, lets out a wail that’s muffled by the blankets he’s buried himself in. It’s quick and sharp and he cuts himself off and squeezes his eyes shut.
The door creaks open. Jason presses himself further back into the closet with a thud. He’s breathing harshly, loudly, filling the small room with his gasps for air.
To his credit, Bruce doesn’t seem surprised that Slade is there. He doesn’t even seem that angry. Instead, he just notes the empty bed, stripped of blankets. He doesn’t have to ask. His turn to the closet is so automatic that Slade knows Jason must have made a habit of this, as a child or maybe more recently.
“Jaylad.” Bruce says, and Slade watches him kneel down in front of the closet. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Jason doesn’t say anything. There’s just the same ragged breathing, the terror and tenseness in his body. Slade can’t see Jason’s face anymore, Bruce is in the way, but he can see the way the pile of blankets is trembling from the shaking of the man underneath.
Slade watches as Bruce leans over and curls himself carefully, gently, around Jason. Jason’s face buried against Bruce’s knees, Bruce’s lips brushing against the shell of Jason’s ear as he whispers to him.
A pale, bandaged hand darts out and grips tightly onto Bruce’s sweater.
Slade doesn’t listen. He could, his hearing is good enough, but he doesn’t want to hear the things that Bruce is saying. He could lip-read too, if he wants. He sees Bruce’s mouth form the syllables of “sweetheart,” and “you're safe,” and tears his eyes away to look back out the window that he’d promised Jason he’d watch.
He remembers the first time watching the Bat coach one of his kids through a panic attack. He’d stood on a roof and watched silently as Bruce knelt by a young Dick Grayson, still in his Robin suit.
At the time, he’d just watched from the shadows of a roof, and thought that it would be a real asshole thing to do take advantage of the moment and attack.
It’s a far cry from where he is now, parked in a chair in Wayne’s plush manor.
It went like this;
One night after Bruce had taken Jason from Slade’s house, Slade found Batman on a rooftop.
“Jason was raped.” Slade said.
Batman hadn’t reacted. He hadn’t even flinched. He held perfectly still, inscrutable behind the white-out lenses.
Slade turned to look out at the city. There was a ghost of a breeze, and then Batman was gone, the rooftop empty.
There was plenty of justification for telling him. PEP could be a months-long course of drugs, and if Jason didn’t continue taking it he risked getting sick. There could be other complications, too, and Bruce was responsible for his son’s medical care.
And even more than that, Slade did not want this to be some sort of secret between him and Jason. He doesn’t know if it bothers Jason, if being raped somehow hurt him more than dying, or torture, or kidnapping, and he doesn’t want to know. Maybe it was the least frightening part of Black Mask’s treatment of him. As far as Slade knows, the Joker never raped Jason.
But all the same, he does not want this secret.
Two nights later, it was Batman’s turn to seek him out. Slade had heard him long before he showed up, and so he waited patiently with a gun in his hand just in case Wayne had gotten some ideas in his head.
Batman was unarmed, and his eyes flicked down to the gun before going back up to Slade’s masked face.
“Do you want to see him?” Batman had asked.
Slade had said no.
Two hours later, he broke into Bruce Wayne’s home.
Bruce is sitting up now, his back resting against the wall of the closet, Jason asleep in his lap. Bruce is doing something strange with his breathing — it’s huffing and wet, like someone trying to hold back tears. His face is completely blank and emotionless, at odds with the shaking of his shoulders and the wet gasps coming from him. A tear streaks down his motionless cheek. He cries like the action is meaningless, his face a mask as he gasps through it.
Slade remembers Jason smoking his cigarette with shaking hands, cooly examining his bloodied, empty nail beds. He remembers the way he’d tried to walk on bloodied feet, destroyed by days of torture.
He thinks about the way Bruce promised Jason safety.
Slade knows that safety can never be promised. Nowhere is safe if the right people want you. Nobody is safe no matter how fast they run.
The only way to survive that fear is to rid yourself of it.
Bruce must know that. He’s been in the game long enough, lost people and things a thousand times over. He knows that nothing can truly be safe.
He had assumed that Bruce was fearless and was lying to his children. Slade had never bothered with the lying, he knows the way that it makes children soft. But instead Bruce had pretended the Cave is safe, the Manor, their family. He had carefully drawn out fake little rules so his children wouldn’t be forced to develop the fearlessness that so many already had.
Slade had assumed that Bruce invented those rules for the benefit of his children, that Bruce himself knew the truth of things, knew that he could not be afraid.
Slade was wrong, he sees that now. He sits in his soft chair in the fortresslike manor. He watches Bruce clutch his ruined son, and gasp for air, and knows that he is terrified.