Chapter Text
He left me to rot.
Bruce
The words were a phantom, a whisper of smoke in the cold morning air. I stood on the gargoyle’s perch as the sun began to bleed over the eastern horizon, staining the slate-grey sky with hues of bruised purple and fragile orange. Below, Gotham held its breath. The city’s silence was a thin, brittle veil drawn over a bed of chaos, and even from this height, I could hear a distant siren wailing its lonely lament. It was in these moments, caught between the suffocating dark of the cowl and the harsh light of day, that the phrase would find me. It wasn't a memory, not quite. It was a feeling, a premonition of rust, of something vital being abandoned to decay in a place I couldn’t reach.
Down in the cave, the air was perpetually cool and tasted of damp stone and ozone. Jason stood before the training dummy, his movements sharp, brutal, lacking the fluid economy I’d tried to instill in him. He was all coiled fury, a spring wound too tight.
“Again,” I said, my voice echoing in the cavernous space. “You’re leading with your anger. It makes you predictable. You strike to wound, not to disable. Control, Jason. Not force.”
He spun around, chest heaving under the red tunic of the Robin suit. Sweat plastered strands of dark hair to his forehead. “Predictable? I put the guy down, didn’t I? What’s the difference?”
“The difference,” I began, my tone more paternal than I intended, laced with the ghosts of a lecture my own father once gave me about patience, “is that the man you disable can be questioned. The man you break is just another body in the morgue. We don’t create more pain. We contain it. We have a code for a reason.”
He scoffed, turning back to the dummy and landing a vicious side-kick that sent the scarred effigy swinging on its chain. “Your code. Made for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. You didn’t grow up where I did. Sometimes, pain is the only language these people understand.”
I stepped closer, my shadow swallowing him. “I’m trying to give you a better language.” I’m trying to not fail you the way I failed them. The thought was a cold stone in my gut. I thought I was saving him from the streets, but perhaps I had only given him a more ornate cage. He was a son, but I was not a father. I was a general, and he was my beautiful, broken soldier. The distinction was a chasm between us, and I did not know how to cross it.
Jason
He left me to rot
The phrase felt comfortable in my mouth, a well-worn stone I could turn over and over with my tongue. It was the truth of the Narrows, the creed of Crime Alley. You get left. Your mom leaves, the cops leave, hope leaves. It’s what happens. Then Bruce Wayne comes along in his flying death-trap and tells you he’s the exception. But he’s not. He just leaves you in a bigger, emptier place.
In my cramped apartment, the one he paid for but Alfred furnished to feel “homely,” I rehearsed my speech to the peeling paint on the walls. “I’m not a sidekick,” I muttered, jabbing a finger at my own reflection in the grimy window. “I’m a son in arms. I fight with you, not for you.” But he never saw it that way. To him, I was a project. A stray he could tame with rules and gadgets. He didn’t want a son; he wanted a successor shaped in his exact, joyless image.
The night air tasted of ash, and the city’s heartbeat was a distant drum that only we could hear. The call came in—a low-level drug deal in the Bowery. A Joker pawn, the intel said. Small-time. Bruce’s voice crackled in my ear, crisp and commanding. “Robin, maintain perimeter. Observe only. We wait for the buyer.”
But I saw him, the dealer. A rat-faced man named Leo, with a hyena laugh I remembered from my old life. And I saw the girl he was using as a shield. She couldn't have been more than sixteen, thin and terrified, with dark, wavy hair that fell across her face just… just like my mother’s. I stared at the broken photograph every night before patrol, the edges frayed like the promises we make to ourselves. That hair. It was the same.
Something snapped inside me. This wasn’t about a drug deal. This was a sign.
“I’m going in,” I said, my voice tight.
“Negative, Robin. Stand down. That’s an order.”
His order was a static drone against the roaring in my ears. I cut the comm. This was mine. It had to be. This was my chance to save her, the ghost I chased in every shadow. I moved, fast and reckless, a blur of red and green through the warren of alleyways. But I was too late. As I crashed through a rotting warehouse door, I saw him. Batman, holding the girl, his cape a shroud around her shaking shoulders. He had her. He had rescued her. He had taken it from me. Leo was gone, vanished into the ether.
Later, on the frost-kissed roof of Wayne Tower, the city lights below us flickered like dying embers. The wind whipped his cape around him, making him look less like a man and more like a monument to grief.
“You disobeyed a direct order. You were reckless. You could have gotten that girl killed,” he said, his voice a low gravel of disappointment.
“I had it under control! I could have saved her! And I could have gotten a lead on my mother from Leo!”
He took a step closer, his shadow stretching long and accusatory. “Jason, that girl wasn’t your mother. You’re projecting. You’re not a child you can protect by rewriting the past.”
The words struck me like a physical blow, cold and sharp. I snarled, the sound raw in my own ears. “And you’re not a father you can understand. You don’t get it. You never have.”
I turned and walked away, leaving him alone with the city he loved more than any person. He didn’t call after me. He just let me go.