Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I don’t love that shirt.”

Jason sighed, not bothering to turn around. He held the shirt up against his chest again, peering into the mirror. “You can’t veto every shirt that isn’t red.” 

Martha Wayne smirked, floating an inch above his ratty couch. “You look so handsome in red, dear.”

“It’s a bold color,” he said, throwing the shirt onto his bed. Black was understated. Unremarkable.

“You’re a bold young man,” Martha said, smiling. “Try the red one again?”

“I don’t want her to think I have some sort of color scheme.” Nonetheless, he reached into his closet for the dress shirt he’d discarded earlier. 

“So it’s a her!”

Jason winced, leaning back out of the closet. “No need to sound surprised.”

“My own grandson, finally going on a date,” she clasped her hands together, eyes wide, smile even wider, “and you’ve been tragically reticent about the details.” 

Yeah, he could see where Bruce got the dramatics from.

“We met the other day,” he said, unbuttoning the red shirt, “She suggested dinner. It’s not a big deal.”

Martha looked stricken, a translucent hand covering her mouth. “Not a--”

“Oh, shush,” Jason said, pulling on the shirt as she started up, “I know. My sense of romance is terrible, Thomas used to take you on the most extravagant dates, shooting people who piss me off isn't sustainable, settling down would be good for me…”

Sharp blue eyes met his in the mirror. 

“...I’m getting predictable.”

He sighed. “Just a little.”

There was a moment of silence as he examined the red shirt in the mirror, twisting and turning. He’d die (again) before he told Martha, but the red didn’t look...awful. 

“I do like that so much better,” she sniffed, right on cue. “Very handsome.” 

“Go haunt your son,” he said, satisfied. He headed toward the door, snagging his leather jacket off the back of the couch.

“He still can’t hear me,” Martha whined. It was a delicate whine; sophisticated. 

“Tough. I’m gonna be busy.”

Suddenly, she appeared in front of him, the manic grin from earlier returning. 

“Busy making me great-grandchildren?”

Jason spluttered, face going bright red as Martha cackled.

“Martha!”

“She must be beautiful, then,” she teased, “Maybe she’d like some of my old jewelry? As a gift?”

"No."

"Flowers? I know an excellent florist around the corner--"

“Go sleep in your creepy-ass crypt,” he said, when he had his face under control, knowing full well she didn't sleep -- nor did she like the Wayne crypt particularly much, “I’ll see you later.”

Martha smiled. The skin around her eyes crinkled in a way that made his dusty, half-dead heart ache a little. It reminded him of Bruce. “I’ll be here.” 

“Uh huh.”

“Such a rude child,” she tutted, as he slipped through the doorway. 

“Hag."

“Love you too, sweetie. Good luck.”

He hadn’t realized he was seeing ghosts, at first. 

There were a lot of people in Gotham -- and a lot of people who kind of already looked dead. In true Gotham fashion, he’d made it through a few weeks of his “afterlife” with minimal interaction with strangers.

The strange hobo muttering on the bench near the 37th St exit. The woman pushing a stroller up and down his apartment hallway, trying desperately to soothe her baby. The deli cook, always smoking on the stoop in front of Gloria’s -- not his problem, not his business. 

Then, on a perfectly normal Tuesday, he'd tripped -- and put his foot through the stroller wheel, then the stroller, and finally, horrifyingly, the baby itself. Turns out the woman was dead, so was the baby (clearly), and had been for years; case unsolved. 

After that mildly traumatizing discovery, it was pretty easy to weed them out. 

He’d tried putting a few coins in the bench man’s hand, once, only for them to fall to the pavement; tried to hand the deli worker a cigarette late one night when he’d been longing for some company, only half-surprised when it slipped between his fingers. The ghosts--if that’s what they were--kept to themselves, usually stayed in the same spot, and were ever so slightly translucent at the edges.    

It was fine. Much like their living Gotham counterparts, he didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother him. Peaceful coexistence, for as peaceful as the afterlife seemed to be. 

Then Martha found him.

“...and I walked her home. She lives on 45th and Beecher, so not a great area, but not horrible. I haven’t busted anyone over there in a while, though, so maybe it’s looking up.”

Martha was leaning forward, enthralled. She'd long abandoned the pretense of sitting, instead floating a half foot above the couch, “And then?”

“Well, I examined her door once she got inside, because you never know when the plating screws are loose…” he trailed off as Martha’s face fell, “What?”

“You didn’t kiss her goodnight?”

Jason felt himself begin to blush again. He carefully schooled his expression. “No, like I was saying, the area isn’t great and I really wanted to try the kickplate--”

“What about a hug?” Martha interrupted, “What did she say? Did she like the date?”

Jason shrugged. “We didn’t talk a ton.”

It hadn’t been his most verbose dinner. She hadn’t looked like she was having a bad time, though. He didn’t exactly have a ton of practice with this kind of thing. 

He told Martha as much, which only made her expression fall further. 

“Oh, Jason,” she said, lips twisting, “I didn’t know--”

“It’s not a big deal,” he repeated his words from earlier, the tips of his ears burning. He quickly changed the subject, not keen on reminding himself what he'd lost to the Lazarus Pit. “She said she liked the shirt, though. When we first met up.”

Martha screamed, clapping her hands together. She launched herself away from the couch, floating over to the window.  

“I told you! I told you how handsome it was, and you didn’t believe me!”

Jason sighed. 

“You take after Bruce too much--” and oh, wasn’t that rich, “--always wearing black everywhere. Like you’re constantly going to funerals, mein gott, I don’t understand you Wayne men sometimes…”

“Not a Wayne.”

Martha whirled around, flinging a finger at his face. “You take that back, young man.”

“My last name is literally Todd.”

“Betrayed!” Martha wailed, shaking a hand up at the ceiling, “By my own grandchild! The light of my life! My own little Jasontso!”

“Nobody can hear you,” he sighed again, beginning to unbutton his shirt. “Are we watching Jeopardy, or not?”

Martha immediately straightened, hand falling. “Ooh, yes. We can’t miss it again.”

“That was one time.” 

“And that God-awful Ken Jennings thinks he knows everything. He gets answers wrong sometimes! I don’t know what they thought they were doing, making him host--”

“I am familiar with this rant,” Jason said, taking her original place on the couch, “Seeing as I was present the last six times it was given.”

“Alex would never,” Martha said viciously. She joined him on the couch, gesturing at the tiny flatscreen. “Turn it on, please.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They ended up tied for points, Martha catching up in Double Jeopardy as Jason floundered with the Fine Arts category. Both of them missed the Final Jeopardy question, which, considering the topic was "Current Events", seemed apt. 

It wasn’t a bad way to end the night.

He’d recognized her face, of course. 

She’d found him after haunting Bruce a little too closely in the months after his “death”, curious to meet a grandchild she’d never known. By the time she’d tracked him down, he was already alive again, courtesy of the Lazarus Pit. Alive and still, it appeared, a little dead. 

That hadn’t stopped her from immediately waving a hand in front of his face, shaking it back and forth like she expected him to do something. 

Jason, who had been slumped against an alley wall and bleeding from several (shallow) stab wounds, finally cracked an eye open. God, his head hurt. 

“Would you quit that.”

Martha had been shocked enough to pale, or the ghost equivalent, staggering backwards.

“Wait. You can see me?”

He’d moaned, putting his head back in his hands. 

“Unfortunately.”

“I haunt all my grandchildren,” she’d explained, as Jason slowly pulled himself together, grabbed his mask off the cobblestones, and began the long process of limping home. “I like to stay involved in their lives.”

“Mhm.”

"Your brothers get up to an awful lot of trouble."

He couldn't argue with that. "Uh huh."

“Sometimes I think dear Alfred can hear me,” she mused, floating along somewhere behind his left shoulder, “and he simply chooses to ignore what I’m saying out of spite.”

That got him to crack a smile. 

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

He arrived home a few minutes later, Martha still chattering on above him. She seemed thrilled to have someone to talk to. Jason nodded at the ghost on the deli steps, tucking his mask into his jacket. 

In his apartment, he peeled himself out of his suit, grabbing a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and the suture kit he kept under the bed. 

Martha tutted as he sewed himself up, slowly, painstakingly, looking mildly disturbed. 

He’d turned away, shielding his abdomen from her out of some misplaced sense of propriety. The wound on his back ripped open with the movement, hot blood gushing down his spine. 

The line of foreign cursing that spouted out of her was obscene. He caught a few words -- languages had always been interesting to him -- and smirked, recognizing a threat when he heard one. 

“Who did this?” she finally asked, when she’d calmed slightly. Jason rolled his eyes. 

“Russians.”

“Farkakte."  

He’d thrown his head back and laughed at that, pleasantly surprised at the viciousness in her voice. He swore, sometime long ago, he’d heard a similar word slip out of Bruce’s mouth when he didn’t think Jason was listening. Maybe Alfred had taught him. Maybe Martha cursed frequently around a young Bruce. 

He was starting to think she’d been something of a character. It was funny to see such a prim and proper woman -- barely five feet, still wearing blood flecked pearls with great dignity -- curse so relentlessly. So he'd asked. 

Martha had gone quite still, cheeks pinking. She “sat” on the toilet seat, watching him finish bandaging his abdomen with her hands folded. 

“The closer to synagogue,” she said. There was a distant smile on her face, like she was quoting someone, “the farther from God.”

And that was how he met Bruce’s foul-mouthed, wild-tempered mother’s ghost.