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Weirdly enough, things go wrong—if it can be called that—right after they start to get better. Jason is allowed in the cave (but never ever invited to the manor) and there’s this professionalism in his interactions with Batman that almost makes it look like they didn’t know each other until Red Hood grew into power.
All of that for the small price of following Batman’s rules, which for Jason means keeping track of all the people he didn’t kill even if he knows he should have. He knows that one of these days it will happen, that one of those people will escape and act again. His reaction when that happens will be his true test of whether or not he can stay around Bruce, he knows that much.
It is then that he finds a very interesting file containing Batman’s report of Nightwing beating the Joker to death, only to be brought back by Batman himself afterwards. Jason devours the text with morbid fascination, and beneath that, he tells himself he feels nothing more.
He considers not talking about it, but well, it’s silly to pretend that he’ll actually go through with that, so Jason plans all sorts of conversations, how to best exploit this new finding, but when he next sees Dick, it’s all for naught. Maybe it’s because they’re both in the cave, and Jason is sitting next to the memorial case with his old Robin suit, or maybe that’s how this conversation was always bound to go.
“I’ve heard you killed the Joker once,” Jason says without preamble, turning away from the glass case to stare at Dick.
“I bet you’re all happy to know that, huh?” Dick replies immediately.
Jason isn’t. He’s read the report on what happened that day a couple of times now. He knows that Dick didn’t start punching the Joker because of Jason. It was because of Tim fucking Drake. Anything that the clown said about Jason’s death wasn’t about Jason’s death itself, not really, not for Dick. He was just a reminder of what could happen, and Dick’s violence was all driven by fear of new loss, not the loss that had already happened.
Besides, it’s kind of sad to see how great Dick could actually be if he would just stop running away from the darkest parts of himself like a scared child. Jason’s more of a double tap or slitting throats kind of guy if it’s about being lethal and all, but he can’t deny that there’s something interesting in the intensity of beating someone to death, of being the reason someone did that. If it were someone—say, Bruce—doing that for him, he sure as hell would have appreciated it… but it’s best not to go there, he reminds himself, thinking of the raised scar tissue on his neck.
“Not particularly, no.” He replies, and almost adds something about how that loss of control must make them similar after all, just to rile Dick up, but finds that he can’t really say that, not even if it would make Dick all angry and indignant. He’s not a coward who hides inaction behind morals, and he won’t compare himself to one. “I don’t give a fuck if you beat him to death or whatever.”
Dick’s lips curl down, and he takes a few steps forward, until he’s towering over Jason, who remains sitting on the floor.
“I knew it, the second Bruce told me about what you did. It’s not about Joker’s victims, Jason, is it? Not about all of them, it’s just about one in particular. You did it because you’re selfish. ”
Jason shrugs. If Dick wants to call it that, then so be it.
“Bruce—part of Bruce never made it out of Ethiopia, it’s there with you forever. You dying almost destroyed him for good. Why do you want to take more from him? More of him? Why do you need to make others destroy themselves for you?”
There’s a lot, Jason figures, that could be said right now. Most of the words are from a teenager on the cusp of death, the one who would still have a place in this world without fighting for it. The one whose opinions Dick might care about. But the anger that’s always there with him, burning low and pushing him through day after day, blocks all of that; it reminds him that the parts of him that came back are not what anyone wants.
Jason will never say it out loud, but he knows that he’s not better than Dick at reading people. Thing is, you can still read something wrong if you come in with your mind all made up, like Dick is doing. Right now it is Jason who can read Dick like a fucking book. He can see the misconception in Dick’s hard, holier-than-thou stare… he thinks he’s oh so smart for figuring out the selfish motivation behind Jason putting a gun in Bruce’s hands and telling him to choose between him and the Joker, and that is mildly infuriating—not because of the fact that he’s right, but because he assumes that he knows better about things that concern Jason than Jason himself.
No one has to be a genius to figure out that Jason wanted Bruce to kill the Joker for him, because of him. But well, maybe he can give Dick a pass and a gold star—after all, he hadn’t been there that night, so whatever he deduced was from putting things together from whatever he got from Bruce, which probably wasn’t much.
Jason could say a lot about what he wanted, still wants, will always want. To know that something changed because of him. But he knows that Dick won’t ever get that. Maybe it’s a thing that you have to have gone through to understand, Jason will give him that much. It doesn’t fucking matter, though, because Dick will also always think he’s right about everything. And more importantly, he might feel guilty about the kid who died, but he doesn’t care about the one who rose from the grave. So he doesn’t deserve to have anything from Jason.
So what Jason says is: “Think you have me all figured out, don’t you?” And he just leaves at that. Because Dick’s also not completely right. Yeah, Jason didn’t go through all the trouble to get Joker and Batman in the same place just because he wanted to see the clown dead. The insinuation from Dick that Jason is somehow that oblivious is the most offensive part of the entire exchange so far. But that—Joker dying, or rather, Bruce killing him, or rather, letting it happen, really—wasn’t and isn’t all there is to Jason—or rather, to Red Hood.
It’s impossible to tell for sure if that answer throws Dick off, but the way his shoulders and back release tension slightly, his fists become just a little looser, that all speaks of a fight he’d been expecting and that was denied.
Jesus, they all get Jason so fucking wrong. If he cared more about Nightwing’s opinion that would be goddamn annoying, but as it is, he just thinks it’s funny that they all look at him and see some rabid dog, that Bruce’s misplaced morals blind them to all the stuff he actually did back when he was living by his own code.
He turns away from Dick to stare at the memorial some more.
Jason considers the other thing that Dick said, that part of Bruce is still buried in Ethiopia. It’s poetic, in a way; bittersweet in the fact that it’s something, just not enough; maybe it would have been sufficient for the boy who died or for the boy forever in the glass case, but it isn’t for the one who crawled out of a coffin. Just like the part of him that came back was not enough for Bruce to choose him. Maybe Jason coming back from death is almost enough for Bruce too, but they’ll always be at odds because almost is not enough .
It’s not enough for Jason, but he thinks it soothes him, or at least the parts of him that haunt them all. For him—for the man who’s here now—it’s like the hands pressing at bruises ease up the pressure just a little.
Except—
That’s nothing compared with the blow of knowing that he wasn’t enough even for Bruce to just let the clown dead after Dick killed him. No, Dick’s clean hands were worth more than Jason’s mangled and bloodied corpse…
Jason’s been trying not to think much about that part of the whole ‘Dick killed the Joker and Bruce revived him’ incident, because the knowledge of that is one of the things that makes him rest his head on a pillow wishing he wouldn’t wake up tomorrow, if only just so he wouldn’t have to live with knowing those things.
And that’s the crux of the matter. He’ll never be a priority; if he wasn’t one before, it’s not going to happen now.
Jason doubts that killing the goddamn Joker would destroy Bruce, but even if it did, isn’t that reasonable to ask of a father? Or at the very least, isn’t it reasonable to want that? Why does everyone act like he had no right to ask that?
And if Bruce was so fucking destroyed over Jason’s death, why would he care about destroying himself by avenging his son?
If their situations were reversed, he sure as hell wouldn’t act in any way that would make Bruce doubt him. Jason would have destroyed himself for Bruce, and he wouldn’t have ever complained about it…
In fact, isn’t that what he’s doing now? Staying in Gotham, playing by rules that aren’t his and that he doesn’t believe in, just so that he can stay in the periphery of Bruce, begging for the scraps of something that won’t ever be given to him? Sure, part of it is his desire to stay in Gotham, but he can’t deny that he also stayed because of Bruce, because of some hope reminiscent of the boy that raised with him from the grave. A small part of him believes that everything will eventually be alright.
Only, he knows better now, doesn’t he?
Why should he destroy himself for someone who wouldn’t reciprocate that?
Finding out about this thing with the Joker— why would Bruce fucking bring him back? —can be a wake up call rather than just another agonizing truth.
He could leave.
He should leave.