Chapter Text
In the end of all things, Jason was still a Crime Alley kid hanging on the rooftops, waiting for the night to fall and the hustle and bustle of the day to fall silent. Waiting for a time where it was safe for him to walk the streets - to rule them.
He was the same kid he had been, a lifetime ago, walking through the streets unafraid, knowing he was the worst thing to walk through at night. But he was also the same kid who wanted to shrink away, who wanted for something different, who craved so hard it was as if he could change his destiny through sheer will alone.
The Jason Todd who prowled through his territory at night was everything his younger self wanted to be, everything his younger self feared.
It had been trained out of him, the regret, the impulse to look too closely at who he had once been and grieve, but all the training exercises in the world could not seem to get his head to stop spinning.
Jason was still flightless. Even having spent a year or so smothered in the smog of Gotham, he was still wingless. A wretched, broken thing. His body was a temple, though not holy or sanctimonious, but a brittle, broken thing held together through sheer force of will.
And logically, he knew that Gotham transplants didn’t often get wings, not if they came to the city with their bodies and minds developed, but he had hoped. He had wanted.
It was stupid to hope.
A weakness.
One that Talia had tried so hard to get him to leave behind.
But he was not in Nanda Parbat, the wreckage of memories he had from his childhood was built up all around him, and sure Catherine’s apartment had been gutted and rebuilt and there were new kids with yellow-white wings running amok from his old apartment home, but Jason was still stuck in some inbetween. Half caught by who he had been and who he had become and as Red Hood, he had never been more powerful in his life.
He was able to do good. As good as he was capable of, ruling through fear and respect, through threats of violence and a visage which did not have room for weaknesses, but he was also powerless.
He didn’t know if it was worth it. The bloody revenge schemes. The torturing of Tim Drake, the prodigy Wayne son. Threatening to do the same in low mechanical tones whenever he came across any of the birds poking their noses into his territory.
He didn’t know if it meant anything, if burning his bridges was worth it.
There was a new kid. Small. Young.
But when Jason watched the interviews and looked at the gossip rags, he could tell that the kid had been trained.
He carried himself like Jason did, walked like Talia taught.
And the slope of his nose was the same as hers, the glare he levelled at reporters was much the same as Talia’s stare when she deemed people less than worthwhile.
There was a kid, Damian, who Jason would swear up and down was Talia’s son.
Damian Al Ghul, or Damian Wayne, as all the newspapers croaked.
He was young. And Jason would have remembered him, if he had been around him at Nanda Parbat - the kid was young, but not too much younger than Jason had been when he first began fighting crime in traffic light colors.
He was unreachable.
Surrounded by people who Jason did not trust, people who had let him die and then when he came back, who watched him kill. Who let him kill.
And maybe the green in his vision and in his heart and choking his throat dictated that he be as far away from the bats as humanly possible, but the green also demanded Damian Al Ghul be safe. Be saved. Demanded that Damian never be a Robin, broken and bloodied.
And something inside of him twisted up and mourned because they shared a mother, they shared a father - no matter how estranged, and Talia knew that Jason was in Crime Alley, and she did not send Damian to him.
Jason couldn’t even resent her. Couldn’t even blame her.
He was dangerous. Unsteady, regardless of how much he tried to be in control.
Of course Talia would not send her son to him, would not trust Jason to be able to carry out his schemes and take care of a kid at the same time, but Jason’s heart felt cleaved in two.
He and the kid were the same.
The same black hair and icy eyes, the same glare and grimace and walking pattern. The same lack of wings making them stand out in such a polluted place as Gotham.
The pit raged and raged and would not break, and Jason rode out the misery and the green tides with something akin to acceptance.
He would never be able to protect Damian. And it was his fault.
There was nothing he could say or do to reassure himself, to protect himself from the ugly truth.
If he had more self control, if he had found a purpose to give himself other than being the causation of suffering, maybe the bats would have thrown him a bone. But no.
He had become a monster, death itself.
He had made sure of his iron grip on Crime Alley through bloody threats and altercations with GCPD and the night’s vigilantes, he had assured himself victory, if it was a lonely one, it was his fault.
He was free.
But he was also untethered.
There was nothing keeping him in Gotham, not really, and before Damian had come out of the woodwork, he had toyed with the idea of leaving, of looking for some peace to go with his freedom. But then the kid had arrived, and even though he did not know starvation like Jason had, the kid was raised under Ra’s thumb, he knew suffering, he knew war. He was like Jason, and Jason could not bring himself to abandon his post, to leave his brother behind in a city that was more than capable of eating flightless birds.
He didn’t know if anything was worth it - not when he factored his brother into the equation.