Chapter Text
...and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
"Reasons to Survive November" by Tony Hoagland
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There were direct flights from Paris to Gotham, but Jason chose New York. More anonymity that way. He doubted anyone would be looking for him, certainly not Bruce. If he hadn't found Jason when it mattered, Jason doubted he would succeed now he wasn't even looking. After all, Jason Todd had been dead for over five years.
But better safe than sorry. Jason had plans, and those plans involved hitting the wasps nest that called itself Gotham with a crowbar until it shattered. Bruce would come looking then, and the Joker, and pretty much every rogue and wannabe crime lord that had spent the last decades thriving on police corruption and Bruce's utter lack of follow-through when dealing with criminals. They would all come looking, and Jason would be there, waiting. A ticking bomb ready to blow.
It had worked for Jason. His death had been slow and excruciating but ultimately necessary. A lesson he needed to learn. A lesson Gotham would learn, too. She could not rely on Batman to save her. Batman didn't have what it took. He had the tools and the knowledge, but he lacked the mettle. You couldn't clean a sewer without getting your hands dirty, and when it came down to it, Bruce Wayne was just another rich boy who had never needed to clean a mess in his life. He had never needed to dirty his hands and never would.
Jason was a different story. He was born dirty, grew up dirty, and even when he was living in Bruce's dream mansion, deep down, he had always known that it would not last, that someone like him would die dirty, too. And he had.
Jason did not fear doing what needed to be done. He would not lose sleep over it. If anything, he would sleep better. The Lazarus Pit still burned through his veins like molten lava where blood ought to be. It hurt, and the only thing that lessened the pain was killing. Some days it took all of Jason's willpower not to get his guns out and start shooting everything and everyone around him.
If Jason let it, the fire of the pit would consume him and everyone near. But Jason refused to be the pit's slave. If killing was the only out from the madness of it, then at least he would make sure that those who died at his hands deserved it. If the price of self-control was pain, so be it. When he killed, he'd do it knowing that the targets were his choice and his alone. And as it happened, Jason knew a lot of people in need of killing. Quite the convenient coincidence.
Thus, here Jason was, on his way to New York, under a fake name with a false passport and one true aim: to clean Gotham. Whatever it took.
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He cleared customs without issue, proof of the high quality of the documents Talia had provided. The rest was easy. He stole a car, drove to Bludhaven, and found his weapons waiting in the agreed location. Another of Talia's gifts.
Whoever she had assigned to bring the stuff had too much fun booby-trapping the place, and it took Jason almost two hours before he could get to the cache. The moment his fingers closed on the grip of his gun he relaxed for the first time since entering the airport in Paris. Those hours on the plane had been a nightmare. It wasn't that Jason needed weapons to kill or defend himself—Bruce's initial training followed by his years in the League of Assassins had ensured that—but Jason missed having them close.
His love for guns was further proof of how much he'd changed, how different he was from the Jason who died in Ethiopia. As a child growing up in Crime Alley, guns had been the ubiquitous enemy that could and would kill you if you were stupid enough to mess with the gangs or too slow to duck when you heard shots. Later, working as Robin, guns were the tools of criminals and rogues, instruments of death and destruction. Bruce taught him to use them, but the focus of his lessons had been in disarming, evading and dismantling guns, rendering them harmless. More than anything, Bruce taught him to distrust them.
The love was Talia's teaching, and Jason had been such a good student. During his years training with the League, guns and explosives became just more tools in his arsenal, as easy to use as batarangs, and more effective.
Jason took the guns apart, making sure no more nasty surprises were waiting and then put them back together. The cold, hard metal felt familiar under his fingers. He used to think being Robin gave him magic, but guns had their own kind of magic, too. One just needed to know how to wield it. No one would stop him now. He'd use everything Bruce taught him, and everything he'd learned since. Lessons paid for with fire and pain and blood. Lessons paid in death. The best kind of lessons, the ones Jason would never forget, for they haunted him even in sleep.
He found a second bag hidden in a far corner and snorted when he saw its contents. Wads of fifty and hundred dollar bills, carefully stacked next to each other, and on top of them a red helmet with a small note clinging to it:
Cross the line.
It wasn't signed. It needn't be.
'Punish him,' the echo of Talia's words rang in his ears, followed by the Joker's laughter, 'Prepare yourself for a severe spanking, young man.' The world took a greener hue all around him, and Jason had to force himself to breathe in and out, slowly, carefully, counting every breath, holding it for three seconds before releasing it again.
It took a moment for the green to fade, and with it, the echoes of the voices in his head and the memories they brought. He willed his fingers to unclench and with precise, calculated moves concealed two knives and four different handguns into his clothes. He finished inspecting the supplies, careful to keep his mind in the now, the smell of gun oil, the texture of the cash under his fingers, the sound of the zipper as he closed the bags, the weight of them as he hefted and carried them into the car. Easy, mundane details to remind himself where he was and push away shadows that were no more.
He made the short drive from Bludhaven to Gotham with his mind still carefully blank. Meditation had been one of the hardest skills for him to master, much harder than weapons and explosive training. Bruce and Talia had both, at one point or another, tried and failed to teach it to him. Jason had always struggled, unable to sit still or quiet his thoughts long enough. It had been Ducra who introduced him to the art of moving meditation and though it had taken him time to master it, in the end he had.
Even after he left the All Caste, his training completed, meditating became something Jason could not do without: those precious minutes of blessed quiet, when he could mute the voices in his head and just exist. Sometimes, he wished he could do it forever, find that quiet place and stay in there until death came for him one final time. Maybe one day he would, but not before he killed the Joker, not until he fixed Gotham, and never before Bruce Wayne learned that Jason Todd was alive and saw the man Jason had become while Bruce was too busy replacing him.
His fragile peace of mind shattered when he saw the shape of Wayne tower pierce through the fog covering Gotham. The same ubiquitous W stamped and embroidered in every item in the manor: the silverware, the china, the bed sheets, the towels, even those stupid handkerchieves Alfie forced him to carry.
"Fuck you!" Jason growled at the tower. "Fuck you!" he repeated, and he didn't know if he was talking to the ghost of Bruce Wayne or to the stupid child Jason had been, who had actually believed that having that pretentious W embroidered in his school uniform made him one of the Waynes. Well, he fucking knew better now, didn't he?
The green taint of the pit came back and this time Jason didn't bother to fight it. He almost welcomed it. He'd take anger over self-pity any day. So what if Bruce had played him? Bruce was one hell of an actor, and Jason had been half-starved, desperate and lonely when Bruce found him. He fell hook, line and sinker.
Jason concentrated on navigating through Gotham streets, ignoring the pompous W towering over the city. Maybe he should blow up the tower, too. Wouldn't that be fun? He parked the car in a dark, hidden corner of Park Row, fully aware that come nightfall all that would remain of it was an untraceable number of spare parts circulating through Gotham's black market.
He got out, glad to stretch his legs, and breathed in the polluted air of a city with more inhabitants than space. After visiting places like Paris and Singapore, Gotham seemed grimmer and darker than he remembered. It smelled fouler, too. The stink of rotting trash the city seldom bothered to collect, clogged sewers and piss. It was such an ugly city, and yet Jason could not find it in his heart to hate her.
It didn't matter how far away he'd traveled, how many glamorous places he'd seen. They weren't home. Jason was a Gothamite born and bred, and despite her ugliness, Gotham was his in ways no other place would ever be. Being back felt right. Not good. But right.
Standing there, in the middle of Park Row, new memories came back. Things he had not been aware he was missing, erased by death or the Lazarus Pit. The warmth of his mother's hand as she pulled him close to her whenever they went out in the streets. The pathetically overwhelming joy of finding shelter from the cold and the snow in a hidden corner of an abandoned building, hoping that it would be warm enough to survive another week of winter. The self-satisfaction of pickpocketing a wallet with four brand new fifty dollar bills, fresh from the bank, the corners so crisp and perfect Jason could not believe they were real. God, it had seemed like a fortune back then, he had thought himself rich.
An indulgent smile tugged at the corner of Jason's lips at the silly memory. Life before Bruce had been hard and yet so simple. Other memories pushed forward, of lush chairs and huge fireplaces, feather soft beds and silk sheets, of jumping from rooftops in the darkness of the night, laughter and the closest thing he'd ever had to love. Jason stomped them. He would much rather remember his piss-poor days on the streets of Crime Alley than a single night of comfort surrounded by Bruce's lies. Bruce, who had hurried to bury the mistake Jason had been, and wasted no time in replacing him with a better educated, more malleable Robin.
He breathed in the stink of Crime Alley. This was where Jason belonged, this was his world. Believing otherwise had been folly. If there was one thing he'd learned fighting his way out of the grave, it was that nothing in life was free. You had to fight for everything, and even when you won, you still had to pay. Well, dying and coming back to life made him greedy. Jason wanted. All the things he never had: money and power, respect, justice, revenge. And he did not want or need anyone to give him those things; he would take them for himself.
More than anything, Jason wanted to win, and when he did, no child born in Crime Alley would ever again have to worry about abusive assholes and corrupt systems that hurt and used instead of protecting and giving. And if winning that war came with a price, Jason would gladly pay it so that others didn't need to.
It was still early in the day and Crime Alley was almost empty. The prostitutes and the pimps, the addicts and the dealers, the small and big criminals would wait for nightfall. And Batman would too.
Jason's heart beat faster. Soon a new era would begin, and the name people in the streets feared and revered would no longer be Batman.
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