Chapter Text
Lately, Bruce Wayne has been trying to eliminate the word “hate” from his casual vocabulary. It’s an ugly, dogmatic word tied to countless rotten ideologues. Hate is easy. Hate is lazy. And so it must be avoided with great care, lest he fall into habits darkly.
Batman, however? Batman really, truly hates working cases against mages. He does. And he will not apologize for it.
Spell hangover sucks. It sounds so petulant, but there’s no other word for it. It’s awful getting hit by some insufferable, fantastical wizardly blast, but it’s a dozen times worse getting up from the subsequent momentary blackout with a thunderclap headache only to discover that the mage you’ve been neurotically tracking for the last two weeks is now gone without a trace.
Bruce doesn’t even know what he got hit with. Could be a dud, could be on a timer, could be reactive to specific stimulus that haven’t befallen him yet—hell, maybe the knockout was all there was to it. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time. He just knows his body is in screaming pain just about everywhere—nothing new there, forty-two is a doozy when you’ve spent the last two decades as a professional punching bag with a structurally unsound spinal column—and he wants nothing more than to retreat to the Batcave, tail between his legs, and get a good two hours of shuteye before hopping back on the mage’s trail once again.
Last he heard, Zatanna’s off-planet for the full financial quarter. And god forbid Bruce has to call Constantine about this one.
He does a last lap around the facility, finding it disappointingly, and unsurprisingly, fully cleared out of even a smidgen of evidence as to the mage’s whereabouts. The trek back in the Batmobile is miserable—at risk of a spell effect kicking in while he’s behind the wheel, he’s left to the whims of the autopilot, which repeatedly glitches—what else is new?—forcing him to re-input the security codes four separate times to keep the controls from locking up. He winces away from the glare of streetlights and dashboard indicators as the car swerves its way back home.
Car parked, Bruce collapses into the desk chair of the Batcomputer and peels the sweaty cowl from his head, leaving it to hang across his back. Exhausted, he peels the gauntlets from his—
Oh.
That’s… not typical. There are scars around his fingernails. Bruce doesn’t have scars around his fingernails. Does he?
He holds his hands up to a raking light, examining the skin’s rough texture. Maybe not scarred, necessarily. Mild chemical burns? Did he touch something that leaked through his gloves? It’s possible he developed an allergy to one of the cleaning products he uses for his suit.
Bruce hikes the sleeves of the Batsuit up his forearms.
Hm.
A lacerating spell, then. Or a wound transference curse. The angular red-black scabs patterning his forearms are warm and unfaded, but Bruce hasn’t slit his wrists since the year following Jay’s death.
He waits, for a long moment, waiting to see if the effect is progressive. No new scratches appear, and the existing ones don’t better or worsen. In fact, they appear to be the equivalent of a week or more healed. The skin is closed. No fresh blood beads up from the seams. They smell not like wound, but like nothing.
He should document this.
He draws up an incident report on the monitors. Almost every field is left blank on account of a lack of conclusive information, but at least he has a template in place to theorize around. He’d like to take detailed record of the damage to his skin, but the computer system doesn’t really have a setup for that unless he goes searching for Damian’s drawing tablet and stylus, and he really needn’t bother Dick at this hour to figure out those tools’ location.
Bruce limps off to the medbay, fetching a rollerball pen and a blank autopsy form from a tabletop file organizer, and gets to documenting.
This is his happy place.
The wrists hold his attention the longest. They’re pristinely geometric, so much like the nearly-invisible silver marks he’s used to seeing in terms of precision and yet so unrecognizable in their pattern—equal vector of compulsion, opposite direction of obsession. They seem to have been drawn and tended to with such care that at first, he suspects they may be language, or a map, or a set of runes—a tangent which distracts Bruce from his task for nearly forty minutes before he accepts that they really are just… harm.
Stripping out of the bottom half of the suit is no less intriguing—not so much because of what is there so much as what definitively isn’t. Namely: the bullet scar to his thigh from that night in France, forever ago.
Not a basic laceration spell, then. Simple invocation of injuries wouldn’t take away harm. Two-way wound transference, then? Healing at a cost? Those could be horribly dangerous, in the wrong hands.
He shakes his head, updates his notes on the monitor, and continues charting the injuries. More geometric lines across the left thigh and right calf, fully healed and in layers, either self-inflicted from a thin blade held in a right hand or, less likely, from extensive and specific torture. Several grizzly scars to the knees which suggest GSWs and multiple emergency surgeries. Old damage to the soles of the feet from probable beatings. Road rash across the full length of his outside right thigh with a stark declination line which suggests being thrown from a vehicle in partial armor.
Bereft of his protective covering and prickling with sensations of unnecessary vulnerability, Bruce records these marks as quickly as he can without sacrificing accuracy, before pulling the pants and boots of the suit back on and settling in to continue his notes.
After a few corrections and additions in regards to the arms and abdomen—are those spanning, strangely-healed keloids across his ribs a suggestion of open-heart surgery, or of torture and vivisection? And is that strange fractal pattern evidence of a lightning strike, or an old infection?—Bruce begrudgingly accepts he’ll need a mirror to properly observe and record the scars across his back and head.
This is when the next problem arises: the shape in the glass is not the face of an aging father of five.
“Huh,” he whispers to himself, and it sounds wrong.
Is Bruce—is Bruce twenty? That… is not good. This is not good. He hated being twenty. Twenty was so… weepy.
He stumbles back to the computer to update his notes.
[Secondary spell effect—time/age distortion. (Connection to injuries?)] Current hypotheses:
—Body wound back c. age 20, but every cumulative injury prior to age 20 has now left a visible scar, no matter how minor. [Remote. Even cumulatively, BW childhood injuries were not this extensive, even accounting for early combat with/against GM. Additionally, no GSW to thigh—unless this body is younger than 18?]
—Body wound back c. age 20, but something about the rewinding retained or re-inflicted every injury acquired in the years since in the form of scars, no matter how minor. [Possible, but very unlikely. Some are fresh. Some are absent. Would certainly have remembered acquiring many of the new marks (i.e. neck?) but memory is fallible, esp. in regards to timeline anomalies, as well as injuries which may be decades old or those acquired during DS incident. Cross reference scar chart against BW EMR.]
—Body replaced w/ that of BW belonging to a different timeline/universe. [Plausible. Explains why many scars/injuries do not align w/ own recollection and why the age is phase-shifted (20-25 yrs?) but body is otherwise identical. Which timeline/universe? How to best track it down? (What happened to this BW’s body? Why is it so brutalized, so young?)]
A voice from the east cavern entrance snaps him out of his grim reverie.
“Hey, party people, I was wondering if I could borrow some P-channel junction field-effect transistors, I’m trying to build a—”
“Tim,” he says in relief—and, oh. Isn’t that a doozy. His voice had such a different tonality when he was young. He sounds so… tired. “I was hoping you’d stop by. I’d appreciate your perspective on a—”
Tim stops on a dime, stares for a full ten seconds, turns on his heel, and walks right back out of the Cave.
Hm.
Maybe Bruce should’ve commed the Bats to preemptively warn them about the face.
Well. There’s always next time.
Bruce uploads his documentation to the Bat-abase, spends three hours compiling legacy information from his own EMR, and then blacks out in the decontamination shower in full costume long enough for the emergency shutoff to trigger.
This body can't keep itself awake as well as he’s used to. Not as acclimated to the schedule he upkeeps by middle age, apparently. He marks increased fatigue in his notes as a potential tertiary spell effect, changes into sweats and one of the novelty hoodies Tim had gifted him last birthday, researches magical incidents until his lungs ache and his vision blurs, and then crawls back over to the medical suite to pass out for another few hours, skull still screaming for a horse’s dose of aspirin. At least he makes it to a cot this time.
He goes back out to the facility the following night to see if he missed anything. There’s nothing to find. He checks again anyways, and again, and again. He heads back to the car to return to his research, but the second he’s away, he talks himself into doing a fifth circuit, and then a sixth. Some drunks outside try fire-crackering off the face of an ATM. He departs the building through a window to walk at them menacingly. They scatter to the wind. He stops two muggings on his way out of the neighborhood, and tells some kids huddled around a lighter and a pack of menthols to stop staying out so late after curfew. They cuss him out, but wander on home, and his shoulders sag in relief.
He spends the drive back, not for the first time, craving the scent of the cigarettes he used to pluck out of Jay’s hand to drop into puddles.
The whole of the next day is lost to research. Then sleep. Then nausea. Then grief. Then research.
Dick is the second of his sons to stumble into the Cave while he’s down there working, suit on but cowl removed—and, bless Nightwing’s militant enthusiasm, he attacks the apparent intruder on sight before either of them can even get a word out, escrima crackling to life in his hands as he leaps into action.
“Nightwing, stand down,” Bruce orders in a booming growl. It doesn’t quite hit the same stern resonance as it does in the older version of his body, but Nightwing is well-trained. It does the job just fine.
Dick forward-rolls to dissipate the momentum of his brutal pounce, knees skidding sideways across the concrete as he decelerates. He drops his escrima with a buzzing clatter. “Bruce?”
Bruce sighs, shoulders sinking just a fraction of an inch. “Yes. There was an incident with a mage a few nights ago. I’m still investigating the specifics, but it appears that my body has either been rewound to or replaced with that of my younger self. Most likely, an elseworld’s younger version of myself.”
“What—” He wheezes on a breath out. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I understand this is an unusual situation, but if you’ll review my incident report and case notes—”
“Bruce. Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
“I don’t kid about incident reports,” he says with a tight frown.
Dick’s eyes glance across the screens, temper flaring dangerously, the way it has ever since he was eight and suddenly had to cope with situations where he didn’t immediately get his way. “You’re serious. B. I know you’re not this fuckin’ braindead. Where’s your head at, man?”
“Watch your tone,” he snarls.
“It’s not your body.”
He reels back. “Excuse me?”
“Jason, Bruce. You’re in Jason’s body. Jason’s current body, from this universe, in the present day.”
“That’s—not possible.”
“Not—” He scoffs, pulling himself up from the floor and stalking a few steps away in disbelief, wrists twitching like he’s waiting for the chance to turn this into a fist fight. “So, alternate timeline bodyswap with little baby Bruce is totally reasonable, but bodyswapping with your own goddamn son—”
“It’s not about the feasibility, it’s—I know what I look like, Dick. I know what I used to look like, when I was younger, as do you. And I know that’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror.”
Dick hasn’t looked this disappointed in him in years, and that’s a feat. “Fucking hell, man. How could you not recognize Jason’s face?”
“Don’t you dare tell me I don't know my own son’s face.” Familiar rage seethes at the base of his lungs. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever.”
“Jesus, Bruce. Jesus.”
“I knew it against all reason. I knew it when it was impossible for it to be in front of me. I knew it faked and warped and desecrated and delusional and spitting mad. I knew it when it killed me to know it, to believe it to be true—”
“Describe it,” Dick challenges.
“I knew his face three years dead beneath a domino. I knew it as he carved a chunk of flesh from his own scalp and cursed my name…” His fingertips drift to a spot two inches behind his ear. Is that uneven texture the sign of a years-old scar, or just a tangle of hair?
“Describe it to me.”
“I recognized… his lopsided smile… the resonance of his voice without the helmet, and how his accent slipped on the rhotics…”
“You're describing your son, Bruce. I’m asking you to describe his face.”
“I know my son’s face,” he pleads.
“You’re fucking wearing it, Bruce, so describe it to me.”
“I don’t—I’d know. I’d know. I wouldn’t have made that mistake.”
Dick pinches the bridge of his nose as he scrolls through his phone, increasingly agitated at whatever he’s seeing there—or not seeing there. Bruce twitches, wanting to reach out and pull the hand away. He’ll give himself wrinkles like that.
“You’re looking for something,” he says, because phrasing it as a question would mean relinquishing just the slightest further sliver of control, and that’s an indignity he doesn't know if he’d survive right now.
“I can't… I’m trying to show you…” He chews at his lip. It's going to bleed if he keeps that up. “How can I not have any pictures of him?”
“I have pictures of him.”
“As an adult, Bruce.”
“I believe you.” Half-lying. “You don't have to show me a picture of his face.”
“I know you do. I'm gonna show you anyways, ‘cause you kinda deserve to feel like shit right now.” Stops scrolling. Zooms in. “Here.” And then something under his breath that sounds like, “Thank god.”
He makes a move like he’s going to grab Bruce’s jaw and turn it, but falters at the last moment. Dick would never hesitate to get grabby with Bruce at any age—hell, he spent half his childhood clambering up his hip. Dick was a boy who wanted to be a mink shawl when he grew up. And then became a mink shawl.
But right now, Bruce accepts with resigned clarity, he's dealing with a body that looks not like his father’s, but like Hood’s. Dick is not skittish with Hood. Skittish is not the word for it. But Hood is not a man many people, Batman excepted, would ever think to simply grab and move around.
Hover-hands direct him to turn his head.
“You're being skittish,” he lies.
“Jay doesn’t like people touching his face.”
“He doesn’t care. You’re just delicate with him.”
“Delicate,” he scoffs, still directing without making contact. “He cares.”
“He's not here to care.”
This finally ticks off Dick enough for him jab Bruce into position, towards a powered-off monitor. Bruce faces the reflection wearily. The cherished features are dull and dim in the smudged glass.
“No, Bruce. You’re right. He’s not,” Dick snaps. “And where the fuck is Hood during all this, huh? He just been skippin’ around the Alley in a Brucie Wayne skin suit? Should I be skimming the headlines for another goddamn Gun Batman painting the town red, only this time he's actually got your jawline? I’m sure having your biometrics at the ready won’t be the slightest temptation for him to slip again. Not like he spent that first year trying to wear my fucking skin.”
Christ. The Clayfaces have caused them grief enough, in years past, and not even Tommy held Bruce’s heart in his fist like Hood does. The damage he could be inflicting as they sit and squabble…
“I couldn’t have known—”
“You spent two days sitting on your ass scribbling in your diary while your favorite crack baby was left to crawl around beside a pile of crack, so forgive me if I’m unsympa—”
“Don’t you ever call him that again,” he growls. He could be imagining it, but it sounds rawer from this body than it would from his own. A strange pain radiates from the top of his throat, crawling down around his trapezius, like a bad knee on a cold day. “Not even as a joke. Don’t even think it.”
“World’s greatest fucking detective,” Dick sneers, holding up his phone up to the screen beside Bruce’s face, zoomed in on a slightly crunchy picture of Hood in the half-gear he calls his civvies. His mask is off and there’s blood on his brow. Dick may have only taken the photo to document a mild cranial injury—and/or as blackmail. “So glad you cracked the case in such a timely goddamn manner.”
“Second greatest,” he redirects, trying to calm himself. “Tim’s better.”
“No shit.”
Jason frowns different than Bruce does. Lopsided as his smile. But the dimple at the corner of his lip matches, and there's a crooked pink line at Bruce’s brow which suggests the very same injury plus a month or so of poorly-tended healing.
“How am I the first poor bastard to point this out to you?” Dick wonders aloud, lowering the screen. His temper has simmered into a low, amused sorrow.
“Can you send that to me?”
“The—what? No.”
“I’d like to have a picture of him.” One that isn't screen-grabbed from a security system. One that isn't four-six and six stone and walking backwards. Walking behind him.
“Tough shit.”
“Damian’s out of town with Alfred,” he replies to Dick’s earlier question. “Tim—ah.”
“What, ‘ah’?”
“Tim stopped by the Cave. May have thought I was Hood.”
He grimaces. “Were you in a Batman suit at the time?”
“Hm.”
“I may need… to do some damage control on that,” Dick sighs, pulling up his contacts and taking a few long treads away from the computer.
Bruce stands from the desk chair, wandering off in the opposite direction to rifle through old notebooks. He know he used one… as a bookmark, at some point…
“Ahoy,” chimes Tim’s voice, tinny and indistinct.
“Hey, bud. You’re on speaker,” Dick replies. “You working?”
“I’m not in the field, names are fine. There a fire?”
“Nope, just a, um, quick heads up—that wasn’t Hood in the Cave, when you dropped by earlier. I know it probably had you freaked, but we’re working on getting it sorted, and it’s not an emergency.”
“Oh,” he says, and then, “Oh? Wasn't a shapeshifter again, right? I’m really not in the mood to get scalpeled.”
“No, not a shapeshifter. Jay and B just got Freaky Fridayed.”
“Woof.”
“Yuh.”
“Like, woof,” he repeats. “That’s kinda disappointing, honestly. I’d assumed B’d just had him secretly filling in as Batman on patrols and didn’t wanna risk the inevitable firestorm of letting anyone know.” He sighs. “Jay in the Cave half-stripped out of a Batsuit seemed weird, but not, like, imminent catastrophe weird.”
(“Half-stripped?” Dick mouths at Bruce.
Sufficiently humiliated, Bruce holds up the autopsy chart in explanation, ears heating more than his own would.)
“Those two just have… screwy boundary issues with each other. I really didn’t wanna get in the middle of whatever—that was,” Tim continues. “But I wasn’t ringing any silent alarms over it, if that’s what you’re concerned about. Everything’s copacetic over in Tim Town. Other than the bomb you just dropped forty seconds ago, of course.”
Dick snorts. “Thought you’d be relieved to hear it wasn’t Jay. Last time he put on one of those suits, he—y’know.”
“Well,” says Tim. “To be fair. He did ask me to be his Robin first. Even if he was a bit stabby about it.”
“That’s…”
He does an I-dunno nonvocable into the receiver. “‘Least someone wanted me. Not saying he was in the right, obvs, just saying maybe if I’d turned coat…”
“Not… a justification…”
“If you say so.”
“I pretty vehemently do, yeah.”
“Fuck. You said speakerphone,” Tim realizes. He raises his voice for the next bit. “Hello, gathered allies and/or enemies! For legal reasons, this was all just a fun thought exercise. I would never entertain being that crackpot’s villainous Robin, no siree.”
Dick sighs.
“Even if he does objectively have the best Batsuit out of all of us,” Tim adds helpfully.
“Tim,” Dick warns.
“What? Don't tell me you liked having your entire jaw as an exposed Achilles’ heel for rogues to aim at.”
“Your mouth is exposed as Red Robin.”
“Sandwiches,” he argues. “Fuck. Jason can’t eat sandwiches in his Gun Batman suit. No wonder he was so pissed all the time…”
“He doesn’t still have that thing, does he? Where the hell did it even end up?”
“Um.”
“Please don’t ‘um’ me right now, man, c’mon.”
“No, like. I sorta. Might. Have the Gun Batman suit. At the Nest. For keepsies.”
“Chrissake.”
“It has a cool cape!”
“Tim…”
“I like the spikies…”
“Hm.”
“…and there’s this really unusual detailing going on below the shoulders. Like, a sort of corrugated leather texture? It’s neat.”
“Neat…?”
“And it’s not like I got a chance to admire it when he was going around exploding dudes…”
Bruce glances over in time to see Dick rub at his temples. “Admittedly, the red glowy eyes were kinda…”
“Right? You didn’t add blue glowy eyes to your Batsuit. For shame, Dick.”
“I would like for us,” Bruce mumbles, “to stop talking about this now.”
“Holy shit,” says Tim. “Was that B speaking with Jay’s voice? That’s fucked.”
“Language.”
“That’s fucked,” he repeats. “Wow. It’s crazy close to B’s regular voice, but just, like, off. B, you’re so Bristol. Like, naturally, casually Bristol. Jay’s fake Bristol is so, it’s so oratorical. He does his Bristol accent in a fuckin’—radio voice, it’s so noticeable. Bruce, say, uh—Dick, help me out here, what’s a stereotypically Jersey phrase we can make him say in Jay’s voice?”
“GTL?” Dick laughs.
“B, say ‘gym, tan, laundry’.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Ugh. This is freaky. Color me officially freaked,” Tim decides. “Bodyswap’s rough. ‘Specially with—woof. That can’t be fun. How’s Jay handling it?”
“I mean.” Dick scratches his head.
“You mean?”
“We don't… really know?”
“Fuck’s sake. How’d you lose him?”
“We didn’t—”
“He's wearing the most recognizable skin suit in Gotham City. Jesus, dude. Stick your heads out the fucking window and drive around a little.”
Dick sighs. “You ain’t seen him?”
“Nah. Nah, we were gonna—I got cancelled on. Guess I know why, now, eh?”
“What, you two working together?”
“We got a case.”
“What case?” asks Bruce.
“A case.”
“You shouldn't be working with him alone.”
“I made the entire League of Assassins my bitch—”
“That's not appropriate.”
“—and you think I’m scared of fuckin’ SCP-4999? Oh, no, what’s he gonna do, smoke a cigarette at me?”
“He can kick your ass,” Dick reminds him. “Like, heartily.”
“So can a hippopotamus?”
“And do you work cases alone with hippopotamuses…?
“Hippopotami.”
“That’s not,” Dick drawls, “the point.”
“Jay and I are cool. We’re buddies,” Tim declares. “Oomfs. Perhaps even moots.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Bruce, still busy rifling through drawers, would really like his son to stop saying nonsense words, but he’s on his fourth or so round of losing that particular fight.
“We’re certified friendsloppers. He’s a great asset to the company. I’m trying to get him to do cannibalism with me in Peak.”
Dick sighs at the phone. “Please don’t let him do cannibalism again.”
“Again?” Tim asks, intrigued.
“Wasn't he a worm monster at some point?”
“Was he… eating other worms monsters?”
“That's not…”
“And I’m only a little bit pissed,” Tim loops back around, sounding fairly pissed, “at him for short-notice dipping out of our very cool, very awesome case because he had, quote, ‘the flu or a psychotic break or something, IDK, my head fucking hurts, stop texting me’. Which is dumb, because he texted me first. But like, what-fucking-ever. I’m not mad. Stop saying I’m mad.”
“Well. I mean. Not the flu, evidently.”
“No,” Tim agrees. “Not the flu. Again, kinda suspected he was blowing me off to do secret Batman patrols, so I didn’t wanna call him on the lie.”
“Maybe, um.” Dick drags his nails through his hair. “Maybe try to. Not let him near the Gun Batman suit while we’re sorting this out. Just in case.”
“I know what safehouse he’s been staying at, if you need,” Tim offers. “I Doordashed him chicken noodle soup this morning and he texted me ‘KYS’, so I know he got it.”
“Is that a code?” Bruce asks, slipping a faded photograph from between the last few pages of Khoa’s old copy of Dangerous Liasons, which was nestled beneath Jason’s dog-eared In the Country of Last Things.
“It’s an acronym. It stands for Kudos! Yay, Soup!”
“Hn.” That doesn’t sound right, but…
“Has Jason seriously never texted you that, B?” Dick asks him, biting back a laugh.
“I’ve never sent him soup,” Bruce replies thoughtfully.
“I’ll text Dick the address. If he asks, tell him Oracle blabbed, I’m trying to stay on his good side for once.”
“But it’s okay to throw Babs under the bus?”
“Jason forgives women way more easily than he forgives me.”
This pulls a laugh out of Dick. “Fair point. But still no.”
“Maybe if I started crossdressing again—”
“No.”
“Alright. Peace. Have fun with your bodyswap sidequest, dummies. If you end up having to call Constantine to fix it, please be sure to give him my disregards.”
Dick hangs up. Bruce approaches with slow steps—he can't move as silently in this body as Jason does. He holds out the folded photograph. Mea culpa. Or, at the very least, an excuse. Dick’s eyes widen as he takes it in careful hands.
“Shit,” he says quietly, holding up the image of Bruce Wayne, circa nineteen, to compare to the face in front of him. Dick’s voice is warbly and unreadable as he breathes out, “Jay really looks like you, huh?”
Bruce shuts his eyes and breathes.
“I forgot you were ever this young,” he chews over. “Bet that’s how you feel every time you see pictures of us as Robins, though, huh?”
His shoulders twitch in a shrug, which he knows Dick will read as an adamant Yes. Yes, always. He feels, just barely, the heat of Dick’s thumb trace around his occipital without ever making contact.
“Your brows were thinner than his. Longer.” The radiating warmth moves down along his cheek. “And his jaw is a little more… I don’t know how to describe it. Angled down, I guess. Yours was flatter, softer than than it is now. Softer than his is now.”
“I'm a few years younger in the photo than Jason is today.”
“Are you?” he asks, not meanly. “Do we know how long he was dead?”
Bruce doesn’t know what to say to that.
Dick was right. It’s hard to believe Bruce was young once. Was eighteen once. Eighteen and held in a gentle hand, told in a gentle voice that he is angry and he is violent but it’s okay, because he's allowed to be, because he can channel it for good. Eighteen and taking his first bullet, a shot to the thigh, eighteen and shouting and weeping from the pain, eighteen and cooed over as she stiches him back together and tells him it's going to be okay. Eighteen and knowing damn well he’s not ready to be a vigilante. He's too young, too untrained. He’s going to get killed going out like that.
When Jay was eighteen (or younger, an echo reminds him, younger even than eighteen) Bruce watched him drag a blade across the back of his own scalp for a sample of his hair and flesh and blood. Eighteen and not flinching. What harm’s a knife when you've already been cut and burned and shot and beaten and broken enough for the pain to stop mattering? What harm’s a knife when you’ve been dead?
There’s a sound of paper unfolding. Bruce’s eyelids flutter open.
“Yours are greyer than his,” Dick says after a beat.
“My hairs?”
“Ha. Your eyes.”
“His teachers used to say he looked like a husky.”
“You ever heard him in the decontam showers? He sings like one, too,” he jokes distantly. “Who’s this, with his arm around your waist?”
“It’s no one. Some waiter who recognized the Wayne heir and wanted a picture.”
“Malarkey.” He squints. “Is this Uncle Anton?”
Bruce sighs. “He hates when you call him that. And he's not going to like that I’ve shown you his face…”
“Eh. He never liked me anyway.”
Dick lowers the photo, thumb smoothing over the crease in the photo paper, the image split with a thin crater of white between them. Khoa is grinning, proud. Warm against him, and solid.
“He liked you fine,” he mollifies—but he really, really didn’t. Khoa’s always been like Talia, in that way. “He adored Jay. Always asked about him.”
Always tried to couch it in pointed half-insults that belied deep affection and deeper fear. How’s that new shadow of yours been? I hear you’ve been passing on some of dear Luka’s wisdom to him. Here’s to hoping he won’t let it go to waste. He’s got your fire, Bruce—try not to let it burn him up like it did you. Tell you what, if you ever need someone to take the little one off your hands…
Dick’s lips do something. A tilt, maybe, or a twitch. “I didn’t think he ever met Jason.”
“He didn’t. I’d never have allowed it.”
“Bad influence? Too violent?”
(Luka aims at Khoa. Bruce aims at Luka.
Hood aims at a killer. Batman aims at Hood.)
He shakes his head. “I was concerned he’d say something hurtful to Jay. I… know that sounds silly, considering…” He shakes his head. “But insults never rolled off Jay like they did you. You took them as fuel for your fire. He took them as feedback. Instructions on how to improve.”
“If you were so worried about that, what makes you think Ghost-Maker even liked him?”
“He stopped speaking to me again,” he admits, “after Jay died.”
“You loved him.”
And it sounds like: You can’t save everyone. You can’t even save most people. If every loss cuts against your soul it’ll whittle you down to nothing.
And it sounds like: I have no interest in not caring about people. You’re sick. There’s a part of you that’s broken and you’re angry that it’s not broken in me.
And it sounds like: You were broken, and I thought I could put the pieces back together. I thought I could do for you what could never be done for me. Make you whole.
And not a single one is in his son’s words. But every single one is in his voice.
“So much,” he replies. “More than anything.”
This, too, is in his son’s voice.
(Khoa aims at the moose’s throat and shoots.
Bruce aims at his son’s throat and throws.)
A pang of bitter cold rushes into his body like snow melting through denim. He stumbles back against the rough stone of the wall. His (son’s) hand goes to his (son’s) neck. The knotted texture of the keloid under his (son’s) palm has bile rising to burn his (son’s) esophagus.
“I need out of this body—”
“Bruce,” Dick pleads.
“I need to be out. I need to be away from it.” The hand tightens on his throat. “I can't be in this body.”
“B, you need to calm the hell down. Just, just sit down and breathe for a—”
“I'm going to hurt him again,” he gasps. “I can’t be in this body. I’m going to hurt him.”
“Yeah,” Dick sighs, collapsing into the desk chair after a long silence. “Yeah, you probably are.”