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Damian was subdued, the whole ride back. Bruce had roared up in the Batmobile in time to see Damian leaning heavily against the wall, one of Two-Face's goons lying on the ground in a puddle of his own blood and brain matter, and Jason reholstering his gun. Jason had seen the white line of Bruce's mouth under the cowl and thought, fuck this. To his surprise, Damian hadn't protested when Jason had tugged him along towards the bike, just climbed on behind him, holding onto Jason one-armed.
Jason tried to avoid the worst of the potholes, but after all this was Gotham. Damian didn't make a single sound as they rattled over the uneven results of decades of infrastructural disinvestment. Jason couldn't see his face, but if he'd had to guess, he'd guess Damian in pain and trying to hide it looked a lot like Bruce. Or maybe Talia, after all. He'd never seen Talia hurt, so he didn't have a lot of basis for comparison.
"I didn't require your assistance," Damian said, just before the cave opened up before them.
Jason suppressed his desire to sigh. That was Bruce through and through. But then Damian continued, a little stiff. "But I am not– ungrateful. I recognize your value as an ally."
"Don't let Bruce hear you say that."
Damian huffed. "Father is– his methods are–" and then he broke off into a little half-suppressed gasp, and Jason had to bring the bike to a screeching halt and grab him before he tumbled off onto the floor of the cave.
"Fucking hell, kid," he said.
"I'm fine," Damian protested.
"Obviously," Jason told him, and slung Damian's good arm around his waist so that Damian could use him as a crutch.
Alfred was standing in the medical bay, his face drawn.
"It's nothing, Pennyworth," Damian said, but his lips were pale and he hadn't refused Jason's help, which coming from the brat meant he was in agony.
"My dear boy," Alfred said, and for a moment Jason was fourteen years old again, looking at the tension in Alfred's careful hands as he picked bits of glass out of Jason's arm where one of Riddler's goons had thrown him through a window. Alfred put a hand on Damian's shoulder and guided him over to the gurney where a pint of O negative and a suture kit were already waiting, and Damian did not shrug it off.
Jason stood there in the doorway for a moment, watching them together, Alfred's balding head bent over Damian's small dark one. Damian had hated Alfred when he'd first come to Gotham, but clearly they had made amends. Then he turned away and let the frosted glass doors close behind him.
"I thought you were better than this," Bruce said, from the shadows of the cave. He must have been waiting, must have managed to come back some different, faster way. Jason's bike was fast. It wasn't the Batmobile, though.
"Oh, don't give me your faux-disappointed shtick, we both know it's bullshit."
"You shot a man point-blank."
It hadn't really been point-blank. It had been execution-style, neat and quick. One shot to the knee, and the guy had dropped his gun. Damian had spun away, lifting a shaking arm to drop him to the ground. But Jason had read the pain in Damian's shoulders. There had been a large patch of spreading darkness across his side, lethal, wet. Damian was fast. Jason's bullets were faster. He'd stepped over the man's twitching legs and dropped another shot in his temple. You couldn't leave these kinds of things to chance.
"It's really this simple," Jason said. "You can feel however you want to feel about it. I'm not letting another kid get sacrificed on the altar of your principles."
It was to Bruce's credit, maybe, that he didn't flinch. It still made Jason mad as hell, though. That he could stand here, the resurrected prodigal son, and Bruce still wouldn't--
"You undermined my authority with my son," Bruce said.
"Your authority. Will you listen to yourself? Are you his dad or his drill instructor?"
"I am trying to keep him alive," Bruce shouted, and there it was, there was the good old Bruce roar, complete with the arms thrown wide. Jason had watched a documentary on owls once, one late night when he couldn't sleep. They did this kind of threat display with their wings to make themselves look bigger. It looked completely ridiculous, and also not unlike Bruce when he was in peak form.
"Really fantastic job you're doing at it," Jason said, unwilling to yell back. He wasn't Dick. Bruce couldn't make him angry anymore.
Bruce seemed determined to test that statement, because he continued, "Damian more than any of you came to me thinking he was a soldier." Jason could hear the click of his jaw grinding. "He needs direction in the field. He is impulsive and reckless and deadly, and he is also thirteen years old, and if he begins to ignore my instructions because he thinks they're foolish, he will not make it to fourteen. This is not about what feels good. This is about what is necessary to keep him breathing."
"Is that what you told yourself?" Jason said "With me? With Dick? With all the other kids you throw into the Gotham meat grinder?"
"I am aware," Bruce said, low and rough, "of what you think of my parenting choices." He clenched his cowl in his hands. It was so small a thing, without him inside it. Just a bit of tactical weave and reinforced rubber. "And I am aware," Bruce continued, "that you might expect an apology, or amends, for what happened to you."
"I don't expect anything," Jason said, his tone as harsh as Bruce's had been confessional. "Jesus Christ, could you climb down from your martyr's pyre for one fucking second. I told you a lot of bullshit when I first came back, but that part was true: I'm not angry that you let me die."
Bruce's lips tightened, as if to say, aren't you?
"I'm angry that it didn't mean anything. Years later, and you're still doing the same goddamn things that got me killed. I always thought the mission mattered more than anything. And I was excited to be a part of it, of this thing that we both cared so much about. And you threw it away. You let people get hurt. You keep letting people get hurt."
"You do blame me, then," Bruce said. "You died, and you think that means I should have cast aside every principle. Should have thrown them away, as you claim. Do you want me to go out and brand people? Do you want me to put some heads in bags?"
"No!" Jason roared. So much for Bruce not making him angry. "I want you to pretend like my death made any difference!"
Bruce was white-lipped. He held himself in the careful way that said he had passed through rage and come out on the other side, and didn't trust himself to speak.
"Not to you," Jason said. "I know it mattered to you. But did it matter to Batman? Because from where I'm standing, it's still just situation normal."
And he saw Bruce flinch, full-body, as though Jason had given into his first impulse and punched him right in his self-righteous mouth. It should have been satisfying. But at this point, getting a reaction out of Bruce was not so much satisfying as it was almost reflexive, an empty sort of pleasure, hollow in both concept and execution.
Bruce was still clutching the cowl in one white-knuckled hand.
"Whatever," Jason said, with no small bitterness, and turned to leave the cave. He could check on Damian later, or he could just text Dick in a couple hours and get pretty much the same result.
"I lost you," Bruce blurted. "And then I received a chance few are granted. You came back, but you were still lost."
"No, I wasn't," Jason said, and if he had been bitter before, now he was caustic. "You don't want to look at me, at the person that I am now. That's not the same thing."
He didn't want to look back, to see what Bruce's face looked like. But death had not made him better at impulse control. Bruce stood there under the lights, steps away from a pool of shadow. The cape sagged around him. He looked old, Jason realized, the harsh overheads casting the crag of his brow and the hollows of his eyes into sharp relief. And he looked at Jason with the same hungry incomprehension as he always did. Like he was searching Jason for traces of the dead boy.
Bruce always thought everyone could be redeemed. That was his problem. It was a child's way of looking at the world, believing that everyone had a happy ending waiting at the end of the path, if only you could send them down it. He thought that somewhere inside Jason the dead boy was waiting, and all Bruce had to do was yell at him enough times and the dead boy would wake up, all ready to be shaped into a good little soldier again.
But that wasn't true. It had never been true, not for the drug lords who had gotten rich off of his mom's slow poisoning, not for the kingpins, or the slumlords, or the corrupt bureaucrats who kept the system churning. Not for the fucking Joker. And not for Jason, either.
Had that dead boy Bruce was looking for ever existed? Jason knew how Bruce had used his death as a cudgel to beat himself and his Robins into obedience. A good soldier, but also reckless, too young, too angry. Out of control, and yet perfectly ready to fall in line when called. Bruce had forgotten, in his anger and his grief, who Jason had been, and so he had made Jason into whoever he needed Jason to be at the moment.
But Jason remembered. He had been a kid. He had been excited about seeing Superman, and he had been worried about his history test, and he had been helplessly furious at the way Gotham crumbled under his fingers every night. Jason remembered, and he didn't want to see that look on Bruce's face anymore. So he did the only thing he could think of to wipe it off. "Go check on your son," he said, and stalked from the cave.