Chapter Text
The familiar, Gotham brogue of Willis Todd met Jason when he bobbed back to the surface of his consciousness. For several minutes, he was a kid again, waking up to the thump of work boots at the sagging apartment door. Holding his breath while he tried to figure out which version of Willis he would see tonight. Wondering if he’d found the scratch to stumble home drunk, or if tonight he was going to sing to Mama and ask her to please come back to him.
There was something off about this version of his former father, though. Something harshly different in the way that a trick mirror might warp a reflection. It was just enough to alert Jason that he was in the present, not in some smeared and half-realized dream or flashback.
He took a moment to test his surroundings before opening his eyes. There was cold cement under him, ties on his wrists, and it was dank. Moldy.
“Willis, you sure know how to make a man feel welcome,” Jason drawled, lifting his head.
They were in a subway station. It was a full subway station. A homeless man in the corner, men and women wandering up and down the stairs, light filtering in from above. But everything… everyone… was frozen.
Some strange effect of Willis’s powers.
Jason tugged at the restraints and quickly dismissed that. They were solid enough. Yeah, he could probably get out of them within a couple of seconds of dedicated effort, but that wasn’t the real issue. There was a reason they hadn’t put more effort into securing him.
“You’re as stubborn as your Mama, boy,” Willis said, turning away from the row of laptops he had set up against some empty chairs.
“That why you killed her?” Because, from what Tim said, this version of Willis had taken that final step. The one that Jason's Willis had hovered at the edge of more than once.
A shadow in the corner shifted, and Ghost Maker leaned out, head tilting slightly as he stared Willis down.
Why the fuck would Ghost Maker be working for Willis? Was he a merc in this world?
“That wasn’t even your Catherine. Don’t act like you give a fuck.”
“And you aren’t Jay-Jay’s Willis.”
“That’s not the same.”
Jason snorted. “Course not. The rules never apply to Willis Todd. No, the rest of the world is subject to laws and logic, but the only rule you follow is the rule of double standards.” Abusers were masters at avoiding the weight of the same rules they weilded like a club against others.
“Don’t pretend you know me,” Willis growled.
“Fuck you, Shit head,” Jason mumbled. Eloquent. Not his best moment.
Willis jolted to his feet, eyes snapping, fists clenched.
“You and I, we know each other in a way no one else will ever know us. Don’t we? Cause no one else has seen me as low, weak, and terrified as you’ve seen me. And no one else really knows what kinda shit father you are," Jason continued.
There was a strange, twisted intimacy that existed between victim and perpetrator. Jason had felt that connection with too many people in his time. Like chains. No like some sort of strange, dark umbilical cord, pumping rot and death between them. A twisted rebirth. Jason was Willis's child by blood. The blood that pumped through his veins and the blood that Willis had shed by his own hand. A dual birth.
If Jason let it, that second birth would have defined him. That one, and every one that had come after.
It was a painful, gory thing. Cutting the umbilical that chained him to men like Willis Todd and the Joker.
The thing was, the connection went both ways. And Jason had witnessed things that no one else ever would. He'd seen the dark, gargoyle face of the man he'd called Father. And Willis knew it as well as he did.
“Shut up!” Willis screamed, his whole body shaking with the effort of it. “You cost me my kid. You cost me my chance. You don’t get to…”
“I’m the ONLY one who gets to,” Jason interrupted. If he wasn’t tied right now, he’d have given Willis a nice bruise to help sink the words in. “I’m the only one who knows.”
That was one of the worst parts about trauma. About Abuse. Or torture. The things that happened to you, that defined the darkest parts of you, were witnessed only by the person who did it to you. The person who hurt you would forever know you, understand you, in a way that no one else ever would. The person who stripped you down to bare vulnerability would always hold on to a part of you that the rest of the world couldn’t have.
To have a piece of yourself broken off like that, left behind, to be witnessed in a state of vulnerability so complete… sometimes it felt like the person who hurt you owned you in a way you wouldn’t even own yourself ever again.
“Don’t blame me for your Daddy’s fuck ups,” Willis growled.
“My Dad is Bruce Wayne,” Jason hissed, partially just to see the wince on Willis’s face. “And my Willis Todd, asshole that he was, wasn’t nearly the monster you are. At least I survived mine.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Willis advanced again.
“At least my Willis didn’t strangle my mother to death in front of me.”
“Shut up!”
Willis pulled his fist back to strike, but before it fell, Minkhoa’s hand snapped out and grasped Wingman’s wrist. “Enough,” he intoned.
Jason smirked.
It's what he wanted to see. Khoa was at least adhering to some sort of moral code still. The man didn’t have much to offer for empathy, but Bruce would never have worked with him at all if he had not at least recognized the difference between good and evil.
“I’ll tell you what’s enough,” Willis growled, pulling his arm back. But he had quieted.
That was the thing about abuse. People thought abusers hurt others because they lost control. But it was crazy how quickly they could get control again when there was any form of a threat against them. No, it wasn’t about losing control. It was about being in control.
Khoa wedged himself between Jason and Willis, back to Jason. He was saying something to Willis, but Jason let it slide by and focused on the letters Ghost Maker was finger-spelling behind his back.
“s-t-o-p a-r-g-u-i-n-g. I h-a-v-e p-l-a-n.”
A plan. Great.
Knowing Minkoah Kahn, and Jason didn’t particularly know Bruce’s old friend that well, the man was orchestrating something too big and complex to be of any help to him.
Jason wasn’t arrogant enough to think he’d changed the man’s mind so quickly. He’d wanted to get Khoa asking questions. Looking into exactly who Willis Todd was. The man wasn’t a detective on the same level as Bruce, but he was a tactician on levels that would make even Jason and Tim look pathetic.
It was the psychopathy. Khoa could understand, influence, and manipulate people without being actually affected by their emotions. He would, and had, done things that even Batman, the manipulative bastard that he could be, or Jason at the height of his revenge quest, wouldn’t even consider.
Then again, all of Jason’s intel was based on the limited understanding he had of the man from his own dimension. He couldn’t trust it. Everything was different here.
Still, it gave some insight into what might actually be happening. Ghost Maker was playing a game. Working an angle. He had some goal that maybe hadn’t aligned with Jason’s in keeping Jay-Jay out of Willis’s hands. But, he also didn’t seem to be fully loyal to Wingman either.
Jason hated plans that depended on other people. He always had. He’d prefer to find a way to get out himself, even if he had to carve out and exit. Even if he had to dig his way out of his own grave.
At one point in his life, he’d gotten comfortable with waiting on Bruce to swoop in and save the day before it was too late. That was before Too Late arrived a few steps ahead of the dark night. Now, rescue was a nice surprise, but not something he liked to plan on.
Manipulation with a tool Dick and Bruce used liberally and with finesse. Bruce had once told Jason how he’d managed to escape one of the earliest iterations of the League of Doom by convincing Cheetah that she had a shot with him. Not that she WASN’T his type. Cat. Wrong side of the law.
Still, it had been a ploy to get her close enough so he could escape his bonds.
When Bruce told him that story, Jason, still just thirteen and carrying a lot of baggage that he half-suspected Bruce already knew about, stared at him in horror and said, “You want me to seduce them?”
Jason had never seen Bruce actually go red in the face before. He was awkward when it came to real emotions. It was how Jason learned to tell the difference between a lie and a real vulnerability. But even at his worst, he’d never fully blushed like Jason did.
“Not seduce,” Bruce said quickly. “Please never go that far. You don’t have to offer… anything. I mean… you don’t have to offer…”
He’d then stared at the floor for long enough that Jason wondered if he’d turned to stone, before launching into a new story about how he’d manipulated his alternate-self into standing with their Justice League against the Justice Lords.
Jason preferred to leave that ‘be all things to all people’ approach up to the charmers of the family, and take a more direct approach.
So, depending on Ghost Maker to make a decision in Jason's favor, especially when he didn’t even fully understand Kahn’s motivation, was not in his comfort zone. Even when he did go undercover, which was more common these days, when he had Tim as back up, he didn’t go in before digging through a few wheelbarrows of dirt his family had dug up on whoever he was meant to be tricking.
This, though… this wasn’t a plan. It was a shot in the dark.
But it had to be. He could get out of his ties pretty quickly. Less than seven seconds, he estimated. But Willis had complete control over the environment, and that was going to go badly. Before he could stage any sort of escape, he had to figure out how to break out of the timeline pocket Willis had created.
His best bet right now was Khoa.
“You know,” Willis, who had been pacing in front of a large billboard, frozen between a political ad and a too-bright beach picture, turned to Jason again. “You say I’m not your Old Man anymore. That it’s Bruce. But I know what happened. I know what he did. That coward couldn’t even kill the man who murdered you.”
Jason snorted, “Look who’s talking, child killer.”
Willis ignored him, as he always had done with any good argument that he couldn’t instantly meet with fists. “I’ve done all this for you. I’ve traveled across time and space, killed thousands, just so we could be together again. I’m that devoted to you. I’m that good of a Father.”
“Oh, please,” Jason didn’t give a fuck about Minkoah anymore. That was probably a mistake, but Jason’s anger was never really subject to logic. He could think his way out of just about any box, but in the end, he’d punch his way out of it just so he could feel his knuckles split and to make the walls give way to him. To prove that he was stronger. Because God, he was sick of being preyed upon. “Hypocritical, isn’t it, that Bruce is a monster for not killing the Joker after he beat me to death, but you’re a good Father despite the fact that you didn’t put a bullet in your own brain when you did. Or no… how about this? How about you explain why you passed up a hundred versions of me in a hundred thousand different timelines just to snatch Jay-Jay.”
“They weren’t my little boy,” Willis growled.
“Fuck that,” Jason snapped back. “No, the real reason is that they weren’t good enough. The newborn that Willis Todd dumped off a rooftop. Or the three-year-old who swallowed Catherine’s drugs. Or the one whose neck you snapped when you shook him too hard. Come on. It’s not just any version of Jason you want.”
“Those versions weren’t right,” Willis was stumbling now, face red with his attempts to explain himself. That was something only this version did. Jason’s Willis was a real asshole. He wasn’t at all disillusioned about that. But if he’d died, Willis would have mourned him like a Father would a son. He’d have mourned him and left it at that. Because that was what Gotham did to its people. It took. It exacted a high cost for the privilege of walking those streets. With each year it let you live it demanded payment in love and loss.
This Willis was something else entirely. This Willis took. Like a great open maw, just devouring. Taking. Consuming.
What Jason’s Dad had done to him hurt more than anything else before the Joker… with few exceptions… because Willis Todd did love him. It was a painful, twisting, broken kind of love with razor-sharp edges and crushing weight. It was cold when it was absent and heavy when it was there. A type of pressure trying to push him to his feet, trying to force him to stand on his own, and usually only succeeding in taking his legs out from under him. Sometimes, breaking bones along with it.
Willis’s abuse hurt more than objectively worse shit he’d gone through in multiple short stints in foster homes and group homes, and more than the empty streets, and more than the any hit he’d taken as Robin, up until the crowbar. It left a greater mark specifically because Willis did love him, and it wasn’t enough. And because Jason loved him back, and that too… all of it… wasn’t enough.
This Willis Todd didn’t seem capable of loving anything. And that was probably where the catch was. Why Jason had survived his Willis, and the alternate version of him hadn’t.
He was a selfish bastard. A devourer.
“Bruce found me at my worst. Some worthless, scrawny thief barely making in on the street. He found me then, and he wanted me anyway, and he poured himself into me until I was something better.” Jason’s lip curled as he studied the twisted version of his own Dad. Twisted, and yet in the end, weren’t they the same? “You are nothing but a parasite, trying to take someone else’s kid because yours wasn’t fucking good enough for you. God, I can’t look at you anymore.”
Everything in Jason just wanted to claw off the bonds and sock Willis in the face. He stood there, looking part horrified, part violently angry, as if he couldn’t figure out which reaction was the safest.
Let him figure that out on his own time. Jason still had to get out, and he had to do it without killing Wingman in the process.
He settled into a meditative pose, reaching for habits he’d learned from Bruce and multiple teachers in Nanda Parbat, and hoped that he didn’t just tip the scales in Willis’s favor with his outburst.