Work Text:
I'm no angel, I'm no savior and I've never been a saint
Well, I know I'm not the devil 'cause I still can feel the pain
I walked through fire and through brimstone and there were no pearly gates
I'll be sure to ask about it on my final Judgement Day
- Judgment Day, Five Finger Death Punch
Jason caught the punch aimed at his face and twisted, redirecting the movement past him helping the goon over his hip leaving him on the floor with a dislocated shoulder and a possible concussion from the sound his head made hitting the concrete of the warehouse floor.
Secure in the knowledge the goon wasn’t getting up any time soon he pulled a gun and fired rubber bullets at the goon currently running up to Nightwing pipe raised to strike. She went down.
“Thanks for the save Hood,” Nightwing called as he dispatched his own goon and moved on to a cluster of three more around Robin.
Jason moved to follow and caught a glint of metal from the catwalk above. Looking up he could see a goon had acquired a rifle and positioned themselves on the catwalk. From the angle they were aiming for where Batman was busy with his own group on the other side of the warehouse.
The catwalk was too high to jump to and Batman too far away to reach. He didn’t know the skill level of the sniper, he couldn’t be sure if he called out a warning that Batman could react faster than the sniper could pull the trigger and splatter Batman’s brains on the corrugated metal wall of the shitty warehouse. Jason holstered his Glock at his thigh and reached into his shoulder holster for his backup Sig loaded with real bullets.
The sniper was too focused on Batman to notice he had the Red Hood’s attention. Jason drew his weapon, and gently squeezed the trigger as he brought the gun into position. The bang of the gun going off was lost in the sound of the absolute chaos of a bat raid. Jason felt the recoil, automatically adjusting the aim back to the sniper barely noticing the motion. The simple action and reaction second nature by this point.
The rifle was already falling from the man’s hands, his head hanging down off the catwalk his body lay on, the blown out remains of the back of his head clearly visible. A quick scan of the rest of the catwalks confirmed that was the only sniper. Satisfied the threat was neutralized Jason turned and joined Nightwing picking off the last of the goons.
Once they were sure all the goons were down Nightwing and Robin started work on trussing up the downed goons for the police while Batman went to inspect the crates to confirm the shipment matched his intel.
Jason walked to the other side of the warehouse from Nightwing and Robin and pulled out zip ties for the goons groaning on the floor there. He heard the exact moment the bats noticed the sniper, the sound of injured goons being shifted quieted and Nightwing’s banter with Robin abruptly ceased.
Jason looked over to see Batman staring at the dead man on the catwalk, the fallen sniper rifle at his feet in a slowly growing puddle of blood. Slowly he turned to look at Jason. The cowl covered the top half of his face, but Jason had spent too much time as Robin to need to see his eyes to read Batman. Right now his shoulders were tense and his lips tightened to a thin line. Yeah, he was pissed.
Jason felt the adrenaline hit his system, and the fear trickle through his chest down to the tips of his fingers. He shoved the emotion to the side letting anger flood into it’s place. Jason hadn’t done anything except save his Dad’s life. He had nothing to be ashamed of.
“We don’t kill,” Batman said.
The fight or flight response hit and running had only ever gotten Jason killed. “Fuck you!” he spat. Batman might not kill but he had no right to enforce that on everyone around him. “You don’t kill. I do.”
Batman’s face shifted from anger to grief and then to a stony blankness. Jason felt the anger spike and the Pit start fanning the flames. His vision narrowed down to Batman and he knew his eyes were likely glowing green.
“Jason,”Batman said, taking a step toward him. He sounded calm, rational. Jason didn’t want to hear it. They had had this argument a thousand times and the answer had never changed from the first night in the abandoned apartment building, the Joker between them. It had ended in a batarang and an explosion.
“No,” Jason said. “We aren’t doing this.”
“I know this is the Pit, you can fight it,” Batman said as if Jason hadn’t said anything.
“The Pit?” Jason laughed bitterly. “You want to blame all of this on the Pit? Well fuck you. The Pit didn’t brainwash me or make me do anything I didn’t want to. Everything I did and everything I’ve done is by my own choice. I didn’t push Garzonas off that balcony but I sure as hell didn’t care that he was dead. One less scumbag going around hurting people. The only thing that upset me was that you thought I was to blame.” Jason could feel his chest heaving and the breath catching in the back of his throat with every inhale.
“Jason please,” Bruce said, and this time Jason heard the grief in it. Like he thought if he asked nicely the kid that lived in his head would magically come to life.
“You think I came back wrong, Bruce, but I didn’t. The Pit only amplifies existing emotions, it doesn’t create them. I came out angry because I was. You need to acknowledge that the kid you memorialized isn’t me. It never was. For God’s sake ‘Good Soldier’? In what world did I take orders? That’s not who Robin is, it’s not who I was.” Jason wanted to punch him, he wanted to curl up in his most fortified safe house and cry.
“That man was a person, regardless of his choices tonight he deserved the chance to change. You can’t make the decision for him. That’s not who we are,” Bruce said, all rationality.
“Well maybe I didn’t want to see your brains splattered against the walls of some shitty warehouse. Maybe your life wasn’t worth his chance to change.” He thanked the programming of his helmet vocoder for the thousandth time as it stripped the emotion from his voice.
“You should have found another solution.”
“Bruce,” Nightwing said, butting in for the first time. He sounded concerned but Bruce gave the batsign for him to stand down. Out of the corner of his eye Jason saw Nightwing go still.
“That’s your problem,” Jason snarled. “For all of your paranoia and contingency plans you are such a fucking optimist. You believe that everyone can be saved, that there’s always a peaceful solution. Well sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes people don’t want to change, sometimes they just keep hurting others until they are stopped. Sometimes a bullet to the head is the best solution.”
The blankness of Batman’s face was overtaken with the anger of before and he took another step forward as he opened his mouth to respond but suddenly Nightwing was between them, back to Jason, facing Bruce.
“Bruce that’s enough,” He said, voice cold and laced with steel. His hands were open by his sides but his body was still in the way he only was when he was truly angry.
“He needs to-”
“He doesn’t need to anything,” Nightwing cut him off. “And this isn’t the place.” His voice was ice and carried a finality to it. Batman’s gaze shifted from Jason to Nightwing and then he nodded once, abrupt and jerky.
“We will continue this at the cave,” Batman said, turning away with a silent swish of his cloak.
“Yeah, No thanks,” Jason tried to drawl. He wasn’t sure how well he succeeded over the feeling of ice that abruptly filled his veins. He had been back to the cave exactly once, long enough to see the memorial in the middle of the room and punch Bruce in the face. The idea of going back there, of facing Bruce’s monument to a dead kid, the memory of an ideal that had never existed, of entering Batman’s territory, the man who’d thrown a battarang at his throat, was terrifying. Running had only ever gotten him killed, but he wasn’t going to the cave.
Dick turned to face Jason but he was already moving, grappling gun firing at the catwalk. He let the line tug him up and slammed feet first through a window into the foggy Gotham night. Dick’s shout echoed behind him, but his brother didn’t follow him.
Jason launched himself from roof to roof flying through the night letting the movement bleed off the adrenaline. By the time he got to his desired safehouse he was shaking enough that he struggled with the finicky alarm system.
Once through he slammed through the door and reset everything. He tore his his helmet off and threw it across the sparse basement room screaming. He ripped the domino off next, not even bothering with solvent. Then he took the few steps to the mattress in the corner and collapsed onto it curling into a ball. He let the sobs heave through his body gasping for breath between the shudders.
As suddenly as the sobs had started they stopped. He felt ridiculous for crying. He couldn’t get the image of a blown out skull out of his head, a neat little hole in Bruce’s forehead. He knew he made the right decision, he didn’t get why his dad couldn’t understand. Eventually he fell asleep curled up on the bare mattress still in full Red Hood gear.