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The children of Crime Alley all want to be Robin.
“He beats up bad guys,” Alisha says, slamming her tiny fist into her tiny palm for emphasis. Eight years old, she spends most of her days slipping out of her house to play in the filthy streets while her parents work two jobs each. “And he’s got a cool sword!”
“Seems like a sweet gig,” Carlos explains, ever practical. “Robin always looks like he’s got plenty of food. And Batman seems like a bit of an asshole, but not that bad, you know?” He’s fifteen and couch surfing with his cousin after running away from his dad and stepmom. He’d actually tried to report the abuse, at first, but the stepmom was a cop, and Carlos didn’t have any real options. His cousin tries, but she can barely afford enough food for a nineteen-year-old girl, let alone a growing teenage boy.
“Robin gets to help,” Rory whispers, voice filled with awe. He’s twelve, with black hair and blue eyes and the audacity to—despite everything—hope. Rory doesn’t have a home or a family or any idea where he’ll get his next meal. And yet, he desperately wants to help.
Jason doesn’t know what to say to these kids. After all, when Batman offered him Robin, he was thrilled. He wanted to beat up bad guys and have cool weapons and eat three meals a day and help people too. And he’d died for it.
“That was a kill shot, Hood,” Batman growls, slamming Jason back against the rollercoaster’s supports, hands fisted in his jacket. “I warned you—”
Jason glances over at Dick, who’s standing off to the side with Damian, disinfecting a cut on the younger vigilante’s arm. No help from that sector, then. He wants to push Bruce away, get him out of his face, but he also knows that right now Bruce is just posturing. If Jason turns this into a fight, a real fight, it’ll get nasty. And Dick and Damian won’t say a word, because Jason will have ‘started it.’ For now? If he plays it right he’ll get off with an annoying lecture. Of course, that doesn’t mean he won’t get his verbal hits in. His pride won’t allow any less. “I know, I know. No killing, blah, blah, blah—”
Batman shakes him, and Jason tilts his neck to avoid letting his head bounce off the supports. “If you hadn’t missed the shot, that man would be dead.”
“I knew what I was doing,” Jason defends, even though it’s unlikely to help much. Bruce has already accused him, so he’s not going to accept an alternative explanation. “And I don’t miss shots. I was aiming for the wheel.”
“You took an unacceptable risk,” Bruce corrects, voice harsh. “If you kill someone—”
“Yeah, I know, you’ll give me a good ol’ thrashing.” Jason says the second part with an exaggerated English accent, trying to play it off for humor. If it works for Dick, it ought to work for him. “Trust me, Bruce, I may be insane, but I’m not a masochist. I know better than to kill in Gotham.”
Bruce’s jaw clenches. “That’s not what I meant,” he says. “I’m not going to…hurt you. Jason.”
Bruce’s hands are still buried in Jason’s jacket, pinning him uncomfortably to the network of metal beams. It’s fucking hilarious. Jason still has a scar on his neck. Put him in an X-ray machine and he can point to the healed cracks Bruce left in his bones after he ‘killed’ Cobblepot.
Jason throws his head back and laughs. He laughs like the Joker, and he’s damn good at it. He hears the laugh repeat over and over again in his nightmares, so it’s pretty easy to imitate at this point.
“Stop, Jason.” Jason leisurely leans back and keeps laughing, his jacket still in Batman’s grasp. “Stop it!” Bruce orders, voice rough. He shakes Jason violently again, and Jason stops laughing.
Instead, he tilts his head to the side and smirks. “Sir, yes sir!” He says, military-style, throwing Bruce a mock salute. Bruce grimaces—Jason is amazing at pushing Bruce’s buttons. “What, you don’t want your child soldier to salute you? I’m even all grown up now. Just like a real soldier.”
“You aren’t a soldier.”
Jason laughs again. A good soldier. Bruce’s selective memory strikes again.
“Nothing about this situation is funny.”
“Nothing about the Joker is funny, but he laughs all the time. Figured I’d give it a try.”
Something in Bruce’s posture changes at that, and Jason feels his heart jump. Cold, sickening fear fills his chest as the tension coils in the air. Dick must sense it too, because he finally sees fit to intervene, leaping to the side of the two of them and slowly pushing Bruce away. Bruce’s mouth opens, like he’s about to argue, but then he closes it and moves. “That’s enough,” Dick says firmly.
Enough? Enough of what? Enough of the bullying from Bruce? Enough of Jason aggravating Batman, who should be above responding to petty taunts? “It’s never enough,” Jason says, just to be contrary, and Dick’s face goes oddly pale at his words. Jason takes the opportunity to slip a few feet away. Bruce mutters something under his breath and Dick leans in, the two conferencing beyond Jason’s hearing range. Jason watches them with a strange feeling in his chest—a doughy mixture of jealousy and anger and grief, rolled and flattened out into forced indifference.
Jason doesn’t know why he bothered to come.
That’s a lie.
He came because Bruce asked, and Bruce so rarely asks for anything. Normally, he just orders, demands, and Jason fights him every step of the way. But Bruce had asked him if he could come help on this takedown, with a please and everything. And so, Jason had come running. It’s honestly pathetic, how a little bit of polite decency was all it took.
Well, that and the fact that the takedown was at the old, abandoned amusement park in Bristol. Jason had thought that maybe that meant something.
Jason was thirteen when Bruce took him there. They went in disguise so the paparazzi wouldn’t recognize them, so they didn’t have to put on any act. They rode all the rollercoasters. Jason put his hands in the air and screamed every time, and Bruce thought it was adorable, even though he wouldn’t say it out loud for fear of offending his newly teenage protegee. Jason and Bruce ate cotton candy until their lips were blue. Jason even won a plush bat at an arcade game. Sure, Bruce had suspicions of the Joker casing the park out, but Jason had privately thought that was just an excuse. Bruce wanted to do something fun with Jason and was too emotionally constipated to outright say it. But that was fine, because Jason understood anyway.
Or, at least, he thought he understood. Was that just another tactic of Bruce’s? Bread and circuses, to keep the street rat under his thumb? Jason had been twelve—he hadn’t known any better. He’d thought he was living the dream, right until his world went up in flames.
The children of Crime Alley all want to be Robin.
They flock around Jason as he tells them stories, sit crisscross-applesauce on the moldy floorboards of their secret hideouts, reach for the candy bars before the vegetables when he passes out food. He can see the baby fat in some of their faces—the ones who aren’t hollowed out by hunger, at least. Sometimes, they cry in their sleep.
Alisha has a Robin coloring book she found at a thrift store, half-colored-in with pinks and purples. Carlos jumps to reach the top of every doorway he enters. Rory has a ratty stuffed animal named ‘Star’ that he’s been lugging around for two years, to the point where its species is unidentifiable. He curls up around it when he sleeps, protecting the toy with his tiny body.
It's sickening.
Sometimes, Jason punches his wall until it cracks and thinks, Fuck you, Bruce, I was a child.
The rest of time, he screams it.
“If you’re waiting for me to be grateful, it ain’t happening,” Jason says harshly. Dick is hovering, now that they’re back in the Batcave and Damian is updating Bruce on the successful capture of the villain’s goons.
“You need to stop provoking him,” Dick says quietly.
Anger churns in Jason’s gut. Who the hell does Dick think he is? “Fuck that. Bruce started it. You sound crazy.”
Dick scrubs a hand across his face. He’s not that old, not in the grand scheme of things, but he looks old, right now. A whole lot older than Jason feels. “That came out wrong.”
“Pretty sure there was no way for that to come out right, Dickhead.”
Dick visibly flounders. “I…sometimes, if you want to get anywhere with Bruce, you need to just bite your tongue.”
“I don’t owe Bruce anything,” Jason says. “Robin shouldn’t exist, and I stand by that.”
“Then blame me, not Bruce.”
Jason can’t blame Dick, not for creating Robin. He thinks of Alisha. “He beats up bad guys! And he’s got a cool sword!” Eight. Dick was eight fucking years old.
But now, Dick’s a grown adult.
“About that.” Jason nods over at Damian. “The Demon Brat’s getting older. Pretty soon, he’s going to leave the nest.” Dick grimaces, which means he knows it too. “And Bruce is going to get lonely.”
“Jay—”
“Bruce is going to get lonely,” Jason repeats, “and he’s going to find a shiny new kid to recruit. And then you’re going to have to make a decision, Dick. Are you just going to stand by and let it happen again and again? Or are you going to grow a fucking spine and stop letting Batman’s army of child soldiers grow?” It’s a question, but Jason doesn’t say it like one. He already knows the answer. And if Jason’s being honest with himself, there’s nothing Dick can do, really. He’d objected to Jason, and yet here Jason is.
Jason amends his previous thought—Dick doesn’t look old. He looks impossibly young, and old, and whatever else he needs to be, all at the same time.
Dick shakes his head. “That’s not fair, Jason. I don’t control Bruce. And we were never ‘child soldiers.’”
Denial is a coping mechanism, Jason reminds himself as he resists the urge to deck his older brother in the face. “Whatever you need to sleep at night.”
He leaves, after that. Dick and Bruce and Damian don’t stop him.
The Bats all think it’s about Jason’s death, and, well, it’s not not about his death. But it’s about a whole lot more than that.
The first time twelve-year-old Jason encountered a human trafficking ring, he puked in an alley until his entire dinner was gone. Then, he heard the sounds of a fight and broke into the warehouse to help rescue the victims. Bruce gave Jason a pat on the shoulder and a short “well done.”
The next night, they found a boy who looked almost exactly like Jason, if you made his skin just a shade lighter and his height just an inch shorter. Jason had always known that this was a possibility, had always known this could be him. But seeing it—
He threw up again that night, and Bruce took him off the case, effectively benching him.
Jason was scared. Scared of losing Robin, scared of losing Bruce, scared of losing everything. All because he just had to be a big baby. Dick Grayson was handling this type of case when he was eight. And if the first Boy Wonder could do it, then Jason has to learn to do it too.
Jason spent the next few nights on the Batcomputer, feverishly looking at file after file. He read the reports and analyzed the images until they were seared into his brain. And eventually, Jason felt so numb that he could think about the trafficking ring and the boy without his stomach churning. He never stopped to realize that a twelve-year-old shouldn’t be numb to this shit, or that Dick at eight didn’t even understand enough to know he was supposed to be horrified. Jason just plowed ahead with his improvised, unscientific exposure therapy. And when he reported his progress to Bruce, who made a simple grunt of approval and reinstated Robin on the case, Jason was proud.
Jason had nightmares for weeks, but he didn’t lose Robin. At the time, he thought it was absolutely worth it.
The children of Crime Alley all want to be Robin. They have tragic backstories and survival skills and spunk. They are desperate and scared and alone. And they need something to believe in—something that Batman could give them, a void that Batman could fill.
They are young and determined, just like Dick.
They are hungry and proud, just like Jason.
They are clever and caring, just like Tim.
They are angry and brave, just like Steph.
They are lost and devoted, just like Damian.
And above all, they would be useful. So sometimes, when Jason walks the streets where he was raised, he wonders which one will be the next to be drafted into Batman’s war.