Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-17 00:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, damian wayne, door: dc comics, iron man, red hood |
Who: Damian, Iron Man, Jason + a Bat
What: Antidotes and bad reactions to the use of the Lazarus Pit.
Where: The Batcave~
When: Recently, after all the things.
Warnings/Rating: Sads.
After Damian had let Stephanie get back to monitoring the city from her apartment, he started cleaning up the cave for any signs of the Lazarus Pit. Getting the green off the surface of vigilante gear was easy enough, but Jason’s coat still had a giant, bloody hole through the middle that would raise eyebrows, so (without enthusiasm) Damian removed it and threw the jacket and undershirt off into the depths of the cave below. To make the reasoning look justified, he hooked up a life monitor to Jason’s chest and arms. The bleep bleep of the life signs machine was convincing and Damian was prepared to act surprised if Jason somehow “dreamt” of a green pit in the middle of a cave. In fact, while he was waiting for Iron Man, he was working on his surprise face.
All of this wouldn’t be necessary if Selina had come instead. She had helped him install the pit and at least understood the motivation behind using it. Iron Man was an unknown. Jason’s reaction once he finally came to his senses was also questionable. Damian knew Stephanie might tell someone eventually, but he prepared himself to take this one to the grave. Giving one last phony rise of the eyebrows and slack jaw into the reflection of his computer monitor, he looked over to Jason and offered a silent, barely there apology. Maybe Jason didn’t want to come back, but Damian wasn’t about to give him that choice.
All the security alarms went off like mad Christmas toys for exactly five seconds before the whole system shut off with an ominous click and Iron Man zoomed in from under the heavy waterfall, shedding drops of cold water and steam where the water slid into the propulsion. He came in so fast that he was a blur until he used all four limbs to halt his progress forward, stopping only five feet from the far wall and cutting all acceleration while he was still ten feet off the ground. He landed with a tremendous clang on two feet and a knee, and then he rose and moved the short distance to where the man was hooked up to the monitoring system.
“Long time no see, brat,” he said through his speakers, addressing Damian with his mask still down and blue eyes doing surface and medical scans. He put a metal glove over the inside of Jason’s elbow and looked him over for damage. He didn’t find a scrape on him, which he thought was odd, significant because he needed to take blood to cook up the antidote. Shifting back, Tony picked up his forearm where the compartment of vials were stowed. “How long’s he been out?”
Damian gave a grunt of acknowledgement, standing up to cross his arms and watch Tony inspect the body. His expression was blank, as it always was around new company, like a introvert child that didn’t like guests over at his parents’ house. “Little over an hour.” He said truthfully. “I froze his legs temporarily and then injected him with some mild tranquilizers.” That was also true. The bindings of his cryo-bolas were still around Jason’s legs and the marks on his body from the tranquilizers were also (though faintly) present. To someone like Tony Stark, such gadgetry probably looked like a science fair project, but Damian was still proud of it.
“Fighting him directly seemed pointless.” Damian shrugged, holding the same kind of logic that his father taught him. Of course, that wasn’t true, Damian’s first instinct with every problem was to punch it as hard as he could, but Tony didn’t need to know that.
Tony put in a blood sample, inflicting just the tiniest scratch to get the blood he needed and starting the process, which involved several vials, only three of which he had to toss out into the depths of the cave for poor Alfred to clean up later. With the compartment closed and cooking, Tony did a better examination of Jason’s state. He used one armored finger to lift up the bindings around Jason’s leg, inspected the functionality, and tilted his helmeted head. He didn’t actually make a sound, and it wasn’t possible to see what he was thinking.
Tony left the binding where it was. He put a hand over Jason’s face and the compartment with the vials emitted a puff of mist over the man’s face. “Well, get over here, because after this he’s going to get really ugly for a few minutes before he gets better.” And then, ominously, the metal man spread his hands and pinned Jason’s shoulders down.
Jason was just beginning to come around. He had been somewhere - green fire, burning every piece of him, and endless madness that stretched back a thousand years into nothing, nothing. There was cool air on his face, now, and there were warped voices. He thought he recognized one of them, but he was afraid to open his eyes and find out that it was a trick, and he was really in hell, surrounded by demons who could mimic the sounds of home. He opened his eyes very slowly, just to halfway, while Tony was loading the antidote. He didn't recognize the metal man above him, gleaming red and gold, and guessed he was dreaming.
That didn't last long. Jason didn't know any better than to try to turn away from the puff of mist that drifted into his nostrils as he breathed, breathing still, breathing like a person who wasn't dead. Then the antidote hit his bloodstream, and he wrenched himself so hard toward the edge of the table to get away that it was a wonder he didn't break a bone against that iron grip.
The pain was unbelievable. There had been the pit, before this, the last thing Jason remembered, and now there was this. He was in hell. He was definitely in hell. That was the only explanation for why anyone would drag him through death, resurrection, and then through this, every nerve on fire. He was feeling that crowbar striking his broken body and driving broken bones into more broken bones, feeling the soft sting of the sword in his chest that wouldn't leave. He couldn't breathe anymore, but he still managed to scream. He had screamed so long in the pit already that his voice was a shattered wreck. He had died, and come back burning and lost, and now he scrabbled even for the edges of madness as sight of land, away from the agony and the fear. He would die again, and they would bring him back again, and they would kill him again, and they would bring him back again. He would keep dying and coming back, until his mind was just a collection of jagged edges. He struggled violently, despite the strong hands on him, holding him down. The man above him, holding him to the table, he was just another anonymous face, just a metal-clad nightmare in the carnival of horrors that had been hounding him all his life. He was eight and he was climbing into a car with a grown man, fear low in his belly; he was 15 and the laughter still echoed in his ears, crowbar jeweled carmine, glittering with blood and saliva from where it had struck his mouth.
He tried to claw up at unseen attackers, tried desperately to tear into his own skin, to rend his arteries open with blunt nails. Voices in his ears said he was, he was insane, he always had been but oh how much worse it was now, and he would kill everyone he'd ever cared for.
There would be no more. He wasn't just screaming, toward the end - there were words, too. He begged. As his struggles weakened and slowed, as the pain began to drain from his body, his words began to slow too. His voice was cracked. "Don't bring me back," he said, as he had been saying for several minutes now, over and over. He sobbed, dry, turning his face away, as his struggling slowed to a stop. There was nothing in him to cry. Nothing but sulfur, and the acid green poison of the pit.
Damian grabbed onto Jason’s shoulders, not quite able to look at his face when Iron Man applied the inhaler. Instead he focused on holding Jason down, telling himself that it was like restraining an animal or a monster that didn’t have a clue what was going on. And, that would have been easy enough if Jason didn’t start begging, crying in a way Damian had never seen from anyone. It frightened him and all of that practice into keeping his cool went right out the window. “I had to!” Damian suddenly yelled back, shaking Jason’s shoulders even well after the man had stopped fighting back. “I had to.” He said after a moment, quiet and much more morose than the blank looks he was giving before.
The littlest boy wonder let go of Jason and stepped away from the table, palm running over his chin and mouth like he was trying to slowly erase everything he had just said. He looked at Tony eventually, but didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t point to the very green liquid he had invaded Tony’s lab for.
Tony had been through a lot of terrible things. He had seen and heard the screams of the dying, felt the thrill and loss of war, and been the screaming, dying one himself, once. But he had never tortured anyone, and as flippant as he had been with Bruce on that roof, and now the young man in the cave, it cut him deeply. He kept the mask in place not to separate himself from the antidote (he was almost 90% certain it wouldn’t hurt anyone not affected by the toxin) but because he didn’t want the kid to see his face as he braced himself for what he knew what was going to happen.
Unlike Damian, Tony didn’t need to put much effort into keeping Jason down; that was mostly the suit responding to the position of his hands and Jarvis’ sensors responding to his intent. No, most of Tony’s attention, directed through that unyielding blue gaze, was on Jason’s face as he tore through his torment. He waited a moment when the thrashing stopped, mask firmly in place, and breathing hard not from exertion but from something worse, something that made his chest hurt. He realized this young man, these children, they did not have a Selina here to coo and pet at them in their trials. The unfairness of it pissed him off.
Tony stepped back from the table, taking the weight off Jason’s shoulders. His helmeted head jerked from Jason to Damian and back again, and a second later the faceplate clanked up hard, revealing a Tony’s face, sheened with sweat and clothed in an expression of dawning horror. “Did you put him in there?” he asked Damian, disbelieving.
Damian didn’t respond at first, mind ticking with ways to get out of admitting what he did. What he made Stephanie help him with. His face was pale white, hands shaking as he looked to Jason and then back up to Tony. “Shiva intervened.” That was a major understatement and it showed. “She- she just stabbed him! Without even trying to stop him first or knock him out!” Damian might have been older, but in his youth it was a lot easier to ignore how devastated it would feel to actually lose Jason. At ten he’d just leave him on the street like some kind of dead dog and shrug it off like it was nothing. But, this Gotham had changed him. These people, even those through the door in Vegas, changed him. And, Damian just could not live with the hurt. That much showed.
“I had to bring him back. I put the Pit in the cave in case something like this happened.” His voice broke a little, but the resolve didn’t waver. If anything was clear in the way Damian spoke and looked the Iron Man, it was that he really believed this was the right thing to do.
Jason, once he was released, tried to curl up on the table. His legs were still stiff and numb. He looked down from under slitted lids, and saw the bola wrapped around them. There was a flash of fractured memory, of lunging at Damian and having something trip him, and he twitched. He didn't want to think about it. He couldn't, not right now. All he wanted was to go somewhere dark and be left alone. There was a piece of him missing. Another piece of his soul, fed to the pit. What was left of him now? He felt sick.
He tried to push himself up. His arms were shaking. As the fear and pain began to drain from Jason’s body, he felt the resurgence of rage. It choked in his throat, that agony, the betrayal. "You." His hair was still wet, matted from the waters of the pit, but his eyes could still be clearly seen. They were so dark they were nearly black, and they pinned Damian, almost staring through him, like the eyes of a corpse. "You had - no right." His voice wasn't much more than a hoarse whisper after all the screaming, breathless with exhaustion. "I. Should. Bring you back. See if you want it. See what you think about. Doing it. Then." Under that fury, held back only by his physical state from throwing himself physically at Damian, was the violation. And it was a violation. In his mind, scrambled, weak, and shredded, Damian should have known what it would mean to Jason to be brought back again. That some things were worse than death. Damian knew he hated the pit, knew he'd said when they built it that they had no right to bring anyone back with it. He knew those things - but he still said he had to.
"You - you’re no better. Than him," Jason said, clutching the edge of the table with no hands to stay steady, holding Damian's gaze, still pausing for breath, voice shaking. "You're...exactly the same." He gritted his teeth. "You had a choice. I didn’t.” He dropped his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He always chafed when anyone tried to lump him in with the rest of the ‘bat children’, tried to act like they could treat him like a child. He was 20 years old - he could make his own decisions, form his own ideology, fight his own battles, be a killer of men. Just then, though, he looked 20 - only 20. And he didn’t feel very old at all.
Damian’s eyes widened and whatever resolve he had left simply broke under the heel of Jason’s accusations. You’re no better than him. Which, on later reflection, could have meant his father, too, but Damian saw it as his own worst fear. That deep down under the gadgets and vigilantism, he was just like his grandfather. “Maybe that’s what I am, then.” Cold, shaking with anger and completely void of whatever brotherly affection made him bring Jason back. Stephanie was right, wasn’t she? You couldn’t escape who you were and Damian would always be part al Ghul. “You always belonged in this family. But, me? I never did. You and my father couldn’t even tell me about the toxin. Well, now I understand why.”
He didn’t expect gratitude for what he did. But, to be treated like the other? That was enough to drive him out of the cave for good. “You think I’m like him? Fine. I’m going to see my grandfather right now. Why don’t you do us all a favor and throw yourself off a cliff? I don’t think there’s anyone who would bother bringing you back again.” Damian turned to walk up the cave stairs and back through the manor. He wanted to say goodbye to his grandparents first, the other ones, before he left for good.
There was already a Bat on the stairs leading up to the manor, half-hidden by shadows, and while it was impossible to determine how long he'd been standing there, chances were it had probably been long enough. He’d braced himself up against the wall until Damian turned, whereupon he shifted and continued his descent, each step stiff and painfully slow. Pale skin, dark circles beneath his eyes, and sweat-damp hair painted the picture of a Bruce Wayne very few had ever seen, a far cry from the seemingly invulnerable persona he’d created for himself. Still clad in the armor he’d worn while under the influence of Crane’s drug, now battered and bloodstained, Bruce paused after the last step, his gaze traveling from Damian to Jason to Tony and back again, as though he was struggling to comprehend the enormity of what had occurred in his absence.
“You’re not...” He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. “You’re not like him, Damian.” Regardless of the fact that he still thought his conversation with Ra’s had been a hallucination, a side effect, he understood who his son--and presumably Jason, though he could have been referring to Bruce himself--was speaking of. “This... is my fault.” Oh, Bruce knew what Damian had done; he’d heard enough to put the pieces together on his own, even if he didn’t know the exact details of how Jason had come to require resurrecting in the first place. A part of him had always known that no matter what he’d said, no matter what precautions he took, there would come a time when the Pit would be used. Maybe he should have simply destroyed it. Erase the Pit, erase the temptation, yet how could he condemn the boy for doing the only thing he could have done under the circumstances? He hadn’t been around, after all, and in the aftermath of his secrets crashing down around him, Bruce was in no place to pass judgment. No, he understood the desire to keep those he cared about close, and maybe it was a selfish desire, to do so despite what the people in question wanted. Maybe it would have been kinder to let Jason have his peace, instead of being brought back not once, but twice... both times against his will. It was more than even the worst criminal deserved.
Bruce would have gladly accepted any amount of physical pain, the worst torment imaginable, if it meant changing this. It was his greatest fear come to life, and as he looked past Damian to Jason, who looked so young, not a man at all but just a boy, he knew anything he said would simply be empty words. Meaningless. His guilt would fix nothing, but it was there all the same, and his expression twisted into something pained. “I’m sorry, Jason,” he said, seemingly torn between moving forward and staying still. “I’m so sorry. I thought... I could save you. Thought I could save us both.” But oh, how wrong he’d been, and now they were all paying the price for his mistakes, weren’t they?
Damian’s nerves were spent, but even the surprise appearance of his worn-out and nearly beaten father delivered one last shock. His still angry expression didn’t show how glad he was that Bruce had survived the night and under any other circumstance Damian might have actually admitted out loud to it. But, there wasn’t a lot that could be said to stop how rejected Jason had made him feel. How what he did was not only shaming, but so incredibly wrong that he could never get his morals in line with the rest of the bat family. And, as Bruce turned his attention to Jason, Damian felt that last part solidify. He was so stupid for thinking this was where he belonged.
With a long look over his shoulder at Jason, Damian moved past Bruce up the stairs swiftly determined to get as far away from the both of them as fast as he could. Actually going to see his grandfather was something that made him a little sick to his stomach, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that his mother, after all this time, was right.
This was turning into awkward city, and if Tony wasn’t the one making the awkward, he didn’t like being in it. He looked down at Jason before the young man could get worked up, and Damian was already a shadow on the stair. He pointed a brightly painted finger down at him, and then over at Bruce. “You two need to rest. The antidote will make your parts fall off unless you get at least eight hours.” This was a bland lie, but there was no way to be absolutely sure. He gave them all a bright smile and then let the face plate clank into place, covering his disturbed expression.
He walked out into the middle of the room and the rockets accelerated with a dull roar. “Bruce, I want blood samples from you and him to make sure there’s not going to be a relapse. Send them to me or I’ll come and get ‘em.” The glowing blue eyes glanced back toward the stair where the boy had gone, but without a quip, there was no way to tell what he was thinking. Iron Man took off, lighting up the cave with a brief explosion of yellow light, and disappeared through the heavy cascade of water obscuring the back entrance.
Jason didn't have the energy or the coherency to argue with Damian about whose family he belonged to, and the part of him that had been twisted and broken by this whole experience was just glad to see him go. He hated - he despised, wrapped in despair, down to the bottom of himself, his very life. He was ragged, and someone needed to be punished. Damian was a convenient target for his aimless rage. Maybe he would regret it later. Maybe he wouldn't. Damian should have known, Jason was still sure, that wanting him around shouldn't trump his own feelings about being brought back.
Jason watched Bruce stumble in, bloody and exhausted, and knew, then, that he'd been lied to. When Bruce insisted he had tried to save them both, Jason dropped his head into his hands. Everything was a nightmare. People were dead. He'd killed. The man on the other side of the door had killed. They'd both died. And now Bruce, too, had lied by omission, not telling him he'd been hit by the toxin as well. What had he thought? That he couldn't handle it? Well, clearly he couldn't considering he'd gotten himself killed.
He didn't even hear Tony. He resisted the temptation to curl up on the table and not move, and slid off, standing, gingerly disengaging the boa from his legs with stiff fingers. Then he began moving toward the stairs up to the manor, one step at a time, putting a hand out to solid objects for support. He just needed to get up there. Then, he promised himself, he could at last lay down to sleep.
"Nobody can save me," Jason said, as he passed Bruce by. His broken voice was made all the more hollow by the resonant, echoing cave walls, his speech punctuated by the slow drag of his feet. "Try getting some sleep. And then try saving your son. He’ll need it."
Had he been stronger, Bruce might have stopped Damian from leaving altogether. But he was barely managing to remain standing on his own, and when the boy moved passed him he turned too slowly, and when he called out, his voice was too quiet. In the end, he was left watching his retreating back as it disappeared up the stairs, and limbs that weren’t quite up to bearing his weight began to tremble. He barely heard Tony, the other man’s voice sounding as though it was coming from very far away. Rest for eight hours... no, that wasn’t going to happen, but he nodded regardless, and continued nodding as he mentioned blood samples. That, at least, he could manage without anyone dying. There was no farewell, not even an acknowledgement as Tony left the cave; his attention was focused on Jason, and even though he knew his apology meant nothing, that he’d kept the truth from the one person who would have understood, a small part of him hoped that maybe it would elicit something. Maybe Jason would see that he did care, that he’d tried, even though he’d failed in the end.
But, as always, it was a fool’s hope. He flinched as Jason passed, the sound of his voice and the way he moved sending chills down to his very core. “No,” he rasped. “No, Jason, that’s not... not true...” But it was a poor attempt at protest, and Bruce was left to watch as he too disappeared up the stairs, his second son, and it all felt so very final. The tremor in his legs became too much, and he reached out for some kind of firm hold, white-knuckled fingers curling around the edge of a table, but despite the support he ended up on his knees, acutely aware of just how quiet it was in the cave now that he was alone. Had he never noticed before? Perhaps he’d simply become accustomed to it. Regardless, Bruce no longer had any desire to remain, not just then. Maybe he should have gone upstairs to rest, maybe he should have gone after Damian, but he’d kept Luke away from his life for too long, and a reprieve might be something of a relief. What did he have to stay for, after all? A family he’d failed, lied to, and likely wanted nothing to do with him? A mask he didn’t feel worthy of wearing, and a symbol he had nearly destroyed all because of one man, one weak, cowardly man and his drugs? No, better he leave, give them space, and give Luke time to pick up the pieces of whatever disaster he’d left behind in Las Vegas.
Bruce took a deep, shuddering breath that somehow became a sob, and then, it all fell apart. Yes, he would cross. He just needed a few minutes, only that, where there was no one to witness his grief but the bats roosting high above.