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Jason doesn't get a chance to react. The world whites out, pain blisters sharp and sudden and alights in every nerve. There's a single blink of darkness, then whatever fight he was in doesn't matter anymore.
His name is Jason Todd. He clings to it so tightly, because everything else is wrong wrong wrong and he can't breathe and—
The story is the same, it's the same every time.
(The narrative shifts, and with it the connotations, but details, details.)
(72 votes, and Jason Todd dies.)
His father's name was Willis Todd, and the mother that raised him was Catherine Todd. She got cancer and he turned to crime to support her, and then she was dead and Two-Face shot Willis. They loved him but it wasn't enough because the system failed them all.
It's a story about poverty. It's a story that says people can try their best and still fail. He can be loved and it still might not be enough.
Willis used to hit him, Willis was always drunk, Willis never touched a hair on his head. Catherine overdosed and died sickly and succumbed to cancer. He was abandoned by his parents and raised by his Uncle Ray, who overdosed. Willis tried to sell him to Falcone as a baby. Jason sold his parents out to Maroni, who had them executed.
Abusers and addicts and the scum that sticks to the underbelly of society. It's a story about poverty that says look at this poor child. Look at what he came from. Look at what he is doomed to become, if someone doesn't come save him.
His name is Tim but it's still Jason, and his dad is called Shifty but he's still a two-bit thug that double crosses Two-Face and dies for it. And that doesn't sound right at all but it's true, it's him, and he meets Batman (who he idolizes?) when Two-Face tries to kill him too.
He met Batman when he tried to jack the tires of the Batmobile. He met Batman because he tried to steal prescription drugs from Leslie Thompkins' clinic. He was trying to steal the hubcaps. He met Batman by saving the man's life in a fight against the Joker.
Orphan, street rat, criminal teenager. There are extra steps in between but they don't matter; Batman steals him away and makes him Robin.
(Calls him son.)
Batman takes him in because Batman misses Dick Grayson. Batman later takes him in because if he didn't, surely this child would have become a criminal. This child needs saving.
Robin is magic!
Robin has anger issues. He punches hard and breaks bones because his dad hurt him. Poor kid, isn't that right?
Robin shatters a man's collarbone. Felipe Garzona ends up spread out like paste on a sidewalk. He gets kidnapped by Deathstroke and it's too traumatizing for him to handle. Or that doesn't happen, but something else goes wrong. He's a kid somewhere between fifteen and twenty, and the inciting incident could very well be nothing at all.
His name is Jason Todd, but even that isn't entirely true all the time, apparently. And everything is wrong but it's real and he can't do anything about it, and he looks out through eyes that are milky white and dark brown and the same light blue as all the other orphans Bruce Wayne snatches up.
(72 votes.)
His mother's name is Sheila Haywood, and she betrays him. His mother's name is Catherine Todd, and she never overdosed. He dies with her in a warehouse in Ethiopia; blunt force trauma, flash burns, smoke inhalation.
He chases after the Joker alone, because he is young and reckless and wants results, and dies in a warehouse in Bosnia. He chases after the Joker alone, hopped up on anti-fear gas, and is beaten to death via crowbar in Amusement Mile.
He dies and he dies and he dies.
He dies because he wanted to help and he trusted the wrong person. He dies because he was stupid and reckless and had always been the angry Robin. Nuances, semantics. Sometimes the tragedy is in how preventable it all is, sometimes the tragedy is in the inevitability. It ends the same way; he dies.
Even when he is betrayed instead of reckless, even when it's a trap that he couldn't have predicted, he is still a cautionary tale. Don't be like Jason. Be better than Jason. Jason charged ahead without thinking and these were the consequences.
A protagonist's fatal flaw; the fifteen year old kid got himself killed. How shameful.
He chases after the Joker alone, and he does not die, but a video sent to Batman shows the Joker leveling a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
(72 votes for his death, and even that is not sacred.)
He tries to save a woman but it's a trap set by the Joker and he doesn't die there—that's Tim—it's him—and he is tortured for weeks. He does not die, he is kept under Arkham Asylum and tortured into believing that Batman abandoned him. He does not die, he runs off because he is a teenager and upset and needs to find his own way. He does not die because Bruce does in his place.
(He does not die, but he is not Robin anymore because he is gone and it's different but it's exactly the same over and over and over again.)
Details, details.
And it's different but it's the same, because he always comes back.
He crawls out of his own grave six months later and roams the street on instinct. His body is swapped out with a fake by Ra's before he's ever buried. He has a funeral and anything past that doesn't really matter.
The Lazarus Pit. He is pushed in by Talia, after years seeking other solutions. He is dipped in it by Ra's, as some sort of apology to Batman. He is dropped in by one of Scarecrow's men. He never died but in place of that he was tortured and ruined and it doesn't matter because it's the same damn story—he comes back wrong.
He has amnesia and stands by Ra's side. He is manipulated by the Joker. By Scarecrow and the drug that makes him unafraid. By Talia as she tries to keep him from killing her Beloved—but that corruption was all him, that time, he wanted to be worse; it was his choice. He was manipulated and brainwashed and always going to turn out this way.
A tragedy of inevitability. He is like this because he is a drug addict at Scarecrow's beck and call. He is like this because he is angry and has personally seen the failings of Batman's philosophy. His motives, how much he is in control, it's so very, very different.
Either way, he dons a red helmet with white eyes and drops a duffel bag full of heads on the table, so really, it's the same story.
Hush. Red X (maybe?). Red Hooded Ninja. Arkham Knight. Red Robin. Red Hood.
Red and red and red he bleeds, and the Lazarus Pit is molten gold and acid green.
His name is Jason Todd (usually) and in every universe he died (or was beaten within an inch of it, or he just wanted to play that stupid fucking video game on the Batcomputer) and he comes back wrong and vengeful, angry and twisted, and only sometimes is it someone else's fault.
A batarang slices through his throat, and he knows what an arterial spray looks like. A batarang to the gun that explodes in his hand. He's holding a detonator—Joker's pointing a gun at the bombs—the apartment block blows. Batman gets through to Jason, and Jason listens—or Jason realizes what the drug is doing, reaches out to Grayson—and takes down Scarecrow.
Bruce sees him as a wayward son, someone who can be saved. Batman sees him as just another enemy, whose presence and words change nothing. Bruce Wayne says I love you. Batman says this changes nothing. All of this is true.
His name is Jason Todd even though it was Tim that one time. He should have blown up the Batmobile, because if he did then maybe the story would have been different. He can't live this hell if Batman is dead, because it all comes back to Batman.
The story is the same and it rolls straight on. He is a villain. He is an antihero. He works with the Bats sometimes, he is suspected when things go wrong. He blows up Mia's high school to make a point.
Batman blows up everyone on the roof of Wayne Enterprises.
Jason uses guns, and he kills, and at some point they're rubber bullets and electrified crowbars. The scrape of metal on concrete sends him into a panic attack. He looks the Joker in the eye and laughs and says you ain't that crazy.
Damian stabs his leg in a bar. Batman says they have a top suspect for who Leviathan is and Jason realizes in the next breath they think it's him. The Joker breaks out of Arkham and it sends him into a fugue state so bad he needs to get out of Gotham. The Joker isn't even Joker anymore and he still slams a knife through the man's eye.
He runs off with the Outlaws (twice, the team is of a completely different makeup each time) and he ends up back in Gotham anyway. He finds a new team and new connections and friends. They support him when he needs them, showers him with love. They die and are ripped away and he crawls his way back to Bruce, back to family, and Willis is alive? He never finds that one out.
He drops Black Mask out a window. He reunites with Bruce Wayne and decides to forge his own path forward as a vigilante. He puts a bullet in the Joker's skull. He shoots Penguin with a blank and nearly gets killed by Batman again.
Grayson throws him in Arkham and they transfer him out quickly because he isn't crazy. He is thrown into Arkham and everyone, from guard to inmate, knows he's crazy. The Joker is a few cells down. The Joker was never in Arkham when he was there.
Scarecrow clutches his face and admires him, so paralyzed with fear, jealous that Batman came up with such a wonderful concept before he did.
Jason comes crawling back to the Bats because he has nothing else.
Failsafe punches him once and he dies. He comes back. He drives a plane into a meteor and it isn't enough to kill him. He is blown up by the Pierce brothers. He blows up on the rooftop of Wayne Enterprises and an abandoned apartment block and an abandoned warehouse in Ethiopia, in Bosnia.
It doesn't matter.
His name is Jason Todd. His hair is black or ginger and sometimes has a white streak. There is a J branded or cut into his cheek, or it's a larger scar, or there's nothing there at all. He was Robin. He dies, or close to it. He comes back wrong. And he cannot ever become more than that. He knows this, just as he knows everything else is true.
He knows that he was supposed to die again, in that abandoned apartment block in Gotham, that it was meant to play out exactly how Ethiopia or Bosnia or wherever else did. Jason dies, the Joker lives, Batman walks away. The same story. Nothing changes.
Damian dies but he comes back, and things settle again. Bruce Wayne is trapped in the timestream but then he comes back, and things settle again. Dick is shot in the head and loses his memories, but then he recovers them, and things settle again. Stephanie dies, comes back, and is still Spoiler. Things settle; nothing changes. This is how it has always been.
Death has always been temporary. Trauma after trauma and the world spins on.
But he is different, isn't he?
Jason was some kid on the street and then he was Robin, and then he died, and the world moved on without him. Nothing changes, but too much did and when he returned there stopped being space for who he is a long, long time ago.
His name is Jason Todd. And it's all wrong, the pieces don't fit, but it's the truth. He knows that the world looked at him and said: you will die.
(72 votes. That's all it took.)
The darkness flickers back into place around him.
He opens his eyes. His body aches with remembered pain. He doesn't even wince at the bright lights above him. He doesn't need to move to recognize that he is on a medical cot in the Batcave.
"Jay?" Dick asks, gentle, hovering over Jason like he wants to touch. He hasn't changed out of his gear, but the domino mask is gone. His face is wan and tired, but there's a smile forced onto his lips anyway.
"What happened," Jason says, and it comes out flat but his voice barely even rasps. He's offered a glass of water anyway, one that doesn't soothe much as it travels down his throat.
"What do you remember?"
(Too much.)
Jason went to New York and killed people using the Nightwing suit, at some point. He can't remember if it was something that happened here or not. Dick is staring at him, clearly worried, so he guesses not. He assumes this means he didn't shoot Damian in the chest, either? Is this the Dick that saw Jason dressed in his old Discowing suit, ears burning red with embarrassment? It might be. He sips more water to buy some time.
Dick had wished, somewhere between all those other threads of what's real, that Jason never came back from the dead at all. He might have screamed it in Jason's face, he might have just thought it in passing. It's something that happened, either way. So what comes out of Jason's mouth, instead of an answer to the question, is, "Sorry."
Dick's face twitches. He seems to be aiming for comforting and friendly, but lands as a grimace. "For what?"
Jason waves a hand in the air, as if he can capture everything in that single gesture. He should check who his biological mother is. That seems important somehow, to know if he was betrayed or set up or just acted too recklessly. He doesn't think Dick would be here if he built a high-tech militia with the aim of invading Gotham, so he did actually die in this case. He thinks.
The silence stretches for too long, so Dick prompts him with. "There was a magician. He hit you with some sort of beam."
Magic. It was magic. Jason hums out something noncommittal. "I should go," he says after a while, "I feel fine." He does, physically. If he thinks too long he suspects he might get sick.
"We need to do more checks, make sure there's no lingering effects. It seems like it was just a magically induced coma, something temporary, but you never know for sure."
"How long was I out?"
Dick shrugs. "Couple of hours. We figured it out early."
Jason should probably be grateful it wasn't longer. He doesn't know what he'd do if he had to keep living through other lives, through the other versions of his life. Was his dad's name Willis or Shifty? Steven "Shifty" Drake was Tim's dad. Ew. Nevermind.
Willis it is.
Willis is alive?
"I saw things," Jason offers, after a while. "Other… realities, I think." Other canons feels too much like admitting something he isn't ready to face yet.
"Ah," Dick says. "Do you want to talk about what you saw?"
That was a nice respectful way to let him set some boundaries. Jason doesn't answer it with anything more than a shrug. He wouldn't know where to start.
He's glad Tim isn't around at the moment. Off with the Titans, maybe? Tim's the type of person who would want to know too much about the mechanics of what Jason saw. That's not an answer he has. Not really.
They sit there in silence, for a while. Jason drinks more water. The aches have faded and now he feels… normal. He's not tired. His head is clear. He's half tempted to put a bullet through Crane's throat. Has he done that already?
Batman appears in the doorway. It might be the Bruce that tracked him across the globe with a satellite while he was in his teenage rebellion phase. It might be the Batman that ripped the red bat off his chest. It might be the Batman that died and got put in the pit and then died all over again.
Perhaps not the last one.
It doesn't really matter. There is one thing that's true, across everything.
"You couldn't have saved me," Jason says, and he's talking about the warehouses and the crowbars and the kidnappings.
Dick makes an aborted noise. He catches the minute stiffening of Bruce's spine, the way a muscle in his jaw jumps. Bruce doesn't speak. Jason doesn't expect him to. He continues, anyway, for both of their sakes.
"There was nothing you could have done that would have changed things. You weren't in control. They said you were going to be too late, that I would die, so that's what happened. And you can go back, ask what would have happened if I didn't die, if things didn't turn out the way they did, but it's too late to know for sure. The narratives have already been set. They chose. There's no world where you could have saved me."
(72 votes, the first time. It didn't have to turn out this way, it was so close to being something else, but that was how it happened. And every time after that would always have the same beat.)
If he didn't die back then, it wasn't going to shape into a story where Dick became Batman and Jason became the Joker, that's for sure. It wouldn't have turned out that way back then, but that's the only way things can be now. It's the way that stories work. It's how things are.
"Little Wing," Dick murmurs, and Batman steps forward, but Jason doesn't want to hear what they're thinking. He might already know, between everything else.
"It's fine," Jason says, and he knows that's true because things will always settle again. Nothing will change. He has to be fine, because what else can he be? "I'm just telling you to get over your guilt, old man. There's nothing you could have done."
The story is the same, every time.