Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-12-14 21:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | death, red hood |
Who: Jason and Death
What: Jason comes back through the door for the first time. Death appears to watch him, and they have a chat.
Where: Selina's apartment, where Jason is living at present
When: Backdated to before Jason's forum post.
Warnings/Rating: Sads? Oblique mention of bad childhood stuff.
It was a while before Jack allowed Jason back through the door. It was no vindictive withholding on Jack’s part. No, he just had no idea how Jason was going to react to being back on his own two feet again.
Jason had gone through enough before the Lazarus Pit the first time around to send most people screaming into Arkham. Growing up in Gotham was no picnic - everybody knew that. He didn’t try to pretend his lot was worse than anybody else’s. But dying, and getting brought back, it had changed him. He didn’t think it had because there was some magic ingredient X in the Lazarus Pit that drove him nuts. He just thought that being dead had made him realign his priorities - and, more importantly, that Bruce had let the Joker go free had sealed the deal.
But dying again. Being brought back again. That was a thought that had only appeared in his very worst nightmares, in the darkest moments of his soul. It was the sort of thing that danced in front of him when he got gassed by Crane, reliving that nightmare. And somehow, the reality of it had been worse than his imagination could possibly have conjured.
When Jack stepped through the door, Jason nearly fell straight to the ground. He wasn’t physically weak anymore, but having ownership of his body forced him to the forefront where he’d been blessedly dormant on the other side. He sat down instead of letting himself fall, on the floor just inside the apartment he shared with Selina. No sign of her. Thank fuck.
He sat there for a short while. He was dressed still in the ragged pants Damian had found him, and finally got to his feet, walking toward the bathroom. A shower. That was a human thing, a live thing, that made sense, filtering through the dark fog in his mind. Clothes and a shower, he could do that. He knew Jack had been through the door, and that the pit wasn’t really still on him, but he could feel it. He knew it was still there, could sense it on his skin, taste evil and brimstone on his tongue.
He turned the spray up as hot as he could make it go, then stepped under the scalding water. He planted his hands on the wall, because he was not going to fall, that was just too pathetic, and some shred of what remained of his pride protested against it.
The things that Jason had done when he was a kid weren’t the sort of thing you talked to people about, he didn’t think. Almost nobody knew about that stuff. His Bruce had known, but he doubted this Bruce did, unless he’d combed through his criminal record, which probably didn’t even exist in this weird, sideways Gotham. It could remain, then, a secret, something private that he didn’t even touch on with his thoughts unless he absolutely had to, something so long dusty and buried that it had happened, by now, to somebody he didn’t recognize.
That feeling, that unclean, corrupt feeling, that violation that had come with some of the events of his childhood, that was a little bit what the pit was like, the closest thing he could compare it to. It was like having every part of his body attacked, every inch, every cell. It was worse than dying - it was worse than being dead. It made him feel like the pit was in him, those waters settling into the marrow of his bones, suspending his brain in his skull, pulsing through his arteries. If you cut him, he thought, he might bleed green. It made him want to claw his veins from his arms like so many gory tree branches. He wanted to dive down deep somewhere and never come up again, somewhere out in the ocean, dark, cold, clean, where nobody would ever find his body. Where no one could ever do that to him again. No matter how good their intentions were, or how much right they thought they were accomplishing, all Jason really wanted to do was set himself on fire, and scatter his ashes in every direction, to put himself outside the pit’s reach.
His skin had turned pink, and the bathroom had filled up with steam. He turned the faucet down, and hissed as the cold water hit his stinging skin. He grabbed a bar of soap off the shelf, and tried to convince himself with it that he’d cleaned the pit off his skin.
He came out of the bathroom a few minutes later. Clothes. Clothes he could also do. He opened the drawer and stared at his pants, haphazardly folded inside, for a long, strange moment. They looked like artifacts from someone else’s life. Nothing here felt like it belonged to him anymore.
But the pants fit, and so did the shirts. He dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt, his wet hair still clinging to his forehead and the back of his neck. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, and stared through the half-open slats in the blinds. Sleep, maybe? He knew how to sleep. But he didn’t want whatever dreams the pit might have in store for him.
There was only one other option, after sleep, but he was so tired. There was something he needed to do, something very important. But his skin still ached from the too-hot water, and his mind was still stuffed with cotton. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might be in shock. And that was ridiculous - he’d been through the door for ages. He couldn’t still be in shock, could he? But he hadn’t been in his own body, really, and he hadn’t faced what was here, yet.
Something prickled the back of his mind. It was a sensation of familiarity, of comfort, and it made him feel like maybe he could sleep after all. He could feel the rage burning in his chest, threatening more and more every second to drag him down the old road again. But rest, first. Just for a moment. Then he could go blow the pit, the cave, and the manor into a billion splinters of rock and wood. And then he could go somewhere quiet and burn.
She knew. The second he crossed the threshold of the door, she knew. In the fall-out after that one night, Death had been able to work out an agreement to spend a fair amount of time through the door, so she was very present when Jason arrived, escorting people away, breathing life into newborns. Her awareness gave a little shiver once she recognized the strange feeling of someone that had been pulled back by that pit. It made something ache high in her chest, and she couldn’t stop herself from pushing her thoughts in his direction.
She sat unseen on the bathroom counter as the small room filled with steam, moved to stand close as he regarded the drawer of clothing, and perched on the very corner of the bed without the dip of any sort of weight marring the covers. He was younger than she expected, even though she knew. Knew him and everything he’d been through, how it had warped him in painful ways. But the face that she stared at was still younger than expected. Young, but tired, and she felt a tug of compassion that she rarely felt. Her existence left little room for compassion or sadness, but she felt it now. Knees pulled up, arms wrapped around her shins, she watched as he moved stiffly through the motions of being alive, but she could feel the conflict of it. She sighed. Things were never supposed to be like this. It was her job to make sure of it.
Jason sat still for a long moment, and he tried to trace that feeling at the back of his mind. Once he became aware of it, it was less of an emotion and more a sensation, like heat, caused by proximity to something else. It had been lesser before, he realized, but now it was strong, like sitting close to a fire. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and surprise shook some of the dead exhaustion from his gaze.
He turned and looked slowly at the corner of the bed. There was nothing there, nothing he could see...and yet, it felt like someone was in the room with him. Maybe it was something the pit had done to him. Maybe he would get to be like that little kid in the sixth sense, and see ghosts now, on top of everything else.
Or maybe, more logically, it was a meta, somebody powered who had decided today was the day to sneak around his apartment. He stared at the corner of the comforter, and tried not to feel like he was slowly losing his mind.
Death had found herself getting lost in her own thoughts as she watched Jason move around the room. They were the same sorts of thoughts she’d had since she arrived: how was she supposed to do her job when she was only allowed on this side of the door for part of the time? The young man in front of her was strong proof that she was needed on this side, but as much time as Iris was willing to give her, she knew the woman needed to be on her side of the door as well. But when Death wasn’t there, the possibility of things going so very wrong went up. Way up. Jason Todd levels of up.
With her thoughts circling back around to him, she finally realized that he was looking at her. The exhaustion had melted away from his expression, and the intensity and weight of his gaze startled her enough that in the next second she was standing near the bed, still in his line of sight, even though she should have been hidden from his view. A quick check of herself reassured her that her awareness hadn’t bled into sight, but his eyes were still on her with a focus he shouldn’t have had. Like a cat. But while cats always knew she was there, could track her and even waited for her when she was about to take someone, humans never had that sort of ability. She was used to moving among them with no one even realizing she was there. To have someone look at her when they shouldn’t have even realized she was in the room was something else to add to the pile of things that were both confusing and unsettling to her recently.
She moved away from the bed, hoping that it was something else that had caught Jason’s attention. On top of everything else, he didn’t need some strange new awareness of her as she moved through the world. One slow step became four, and instead of standing near the bed, she’d moved over toward the dresser, away from his line of sight. If she breathed, she would have been holding her breath, hoping that his eyes wouldn’t track her progress, that it truly was something else that he was staring at so intently.
There was no movement for a long moment, and then he shifted again, turning to follow the sensation as it moved away, toward the wall, in the direction of the dresser. His expression went from confused to angry, jaw set, expression hard. Someone was toying with him. That had to be it.
He let his eyes fall on that indistinct space by the wall. "I'm not in the mood for jokes," he growled. It had been some time since he'd screamed himself raw in the pit, so his voice no longer sounded like he'd been swallowing gravel, but it was still deadly serious, lower than most expected from someone as young as he looked. "If somebody's there, you come out and talk to me, or you get out."
There was no hope for it at his words - he knew she was there. Even so, she held very still for a moment before she finally sighed, the sound mingling with a strange flutter that announced her physical presence. She appeared several feet away, watching the angry shift of his expression. She looked the way she always did: slim but not too short, dark hair, dark eyes, a cut-up shirt hanging off one shoulder, black jeans and her boots. Her necklace hung heavy around her neck, swaying when she moved. “It wasn’t a joke. I was just checking on you.” She stood there, boots sinking into the rug, arms crossed over her chest. It was a defensive sort of posture she never took, but strange times called for strange actions. “I didn’t mean for you to know I was here.” Though as she thought about it, she supposed it made a strange sort of sense. Couldn’t she feel him, after all? In a way that was beyond the awareness she had of any other living thing.
Jason didn't quite flinch, but he did straighten, and pull back a little. He'd been right. He looked over her, her pale skin and the dark eyeliner, those dark eyes that went on forever, and he knew. He knew who she was.
He stared, for a long moment, and then he stood. He was tall, a little over six feet, and while he didn't quite tower over her he did have enough height on her that he had to look down to meet her gaze. She still felt bigger than him, though - bigger than this room, bigger than anything.
"You weren't there," he said, voice struggling in his throat. It was all he could think of to say. "You weren't there, not either time." Was she supposed to be? He didn't know. But if she was Death, which he somehow knew like he knew his bones, then she had to be like the grim reaper, like the skull-faced nightmare in picture books that came to reap the dead when they fell.
His words caused a quick intake of breath from her, something almost startled and pained, but it was not who she was to shrink from his gaze. Her arms dropped from their crossed position and she tucked her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, a forced-casual pose as she looked up at him. “No,” she replied. “I wasn’t. I should have been, at least this second time.” Her voice had a sort of husky quality to it, something that was increased by the way her throat felt tight around the words. There was a sadness and apology laced through them, and she shook her head. “It shouldn’t have been like this...” Even as the words came, she knew that there had to have been some inevitability to what had happened, that it had shown up on the pages of her older brother’s book - wherever he was. But it was easy to refuse to accept something that ran so counter to everything she had always known, and the Lazarus Pit was that sort of thing.
Jason's fists were clenched at his sides, his breaths short and quick. "Then take me now, then," he said. His dark eyes were wet at the edges. "Make up for it, and take me now. I shouldn't be here, you know that. If anyone can get me outside their reach, it's you. Where ever it is people are supposed to go, even if it's that nothing I was in, I don't care. I'll go." It was a heart-rending plea, intent, almost child-like in its sincerity. It could be so simple. If she would just take him now.
“Oh, Jason...” Death’s voice had gone soft, sad, full of pity. Pleading and begging, usually for more time, for her to let someone alone for a little longer, usually had no effect on her. But this, the young, almost innocent begging for relief from a life that had treated him so badly, dragged him back more than once. Her expression reflected her own conflict, sad and somehow helpless, even with the control she usually held over the beginning and end of lives. She reached out, touched the corner of Jason’s eye where the sheen of tears gathered. Her fingers went warm at the contact, almost a shiver of electricity before she pulled them back again in surprise. She tried to hide how it had made her startle and shook her head slightly. “I can’t,” she whispered.
Jason held very still when Death reached out to touch him. He thought maybe that would be it - that she'd touch him, and there would be nothing again. Maybe it was that simple.
That wasn't what happened, though. There was a flicker of something in her fingers, but it wasn't the ill-gained life going out of him. He watched her snatch her fingers back and wondered what she'd felt, what was so wrong with him that even Death couldn't keep her hands on him for long. There was no hope of respite, and there would be no chance for rest, not here, not anywhere else. He couldn’t even rely on death to take him and keep him, when there were vultures circling always, ready to drag him back into the pit again. Fine then. Fine. He would go another way. He pulled back from her a step, and set his jaw, not bothering to hide his slowly mounting anger. "Can you at least help me destroy that thing?" he asked. She would know what he meant. She had to know. "I'm going to get rid of it, no matter what it takes. I don't care what I have to do. No one else is going in."
She saw the way his anger started to build, and her sadness and inner conflict was pushed away with an annoyed sigh of her own. She stepped back in when he moved away, readying herself for a renewed contact, and rested her hand over his heart. Her palm warmed, more than she was used to when touching anyone, and her expression was still and calm even in the wake of that sigh. She knew his own reaction to her pulling away seconds before, and did her best to catch his eye, show him that it wasn’t him that had caused her to remove her fingers, but something greater and stranger. “Stop,” she whispered, but then he was asking about the pit, and her fingers actually trembled at the thought of it.
“I’ve never, never seen anything like it,” she replied, her fingers pressing into his shirt in an unconscious attempt to still that tremor. “I want it gone.” Her voice shifted again, this time into something ironclad and stern and backed by anger and a newfound fear. “I don’t know how, but I want it gone.” She finally let her hand drop away, suddenly two steps from him, eyes dark and deep. “I don’t know what it would do to me.” It was a vulnerable admission, whether he realized it or not.
Jason glanced back at her when she reached out toward him, and stayed still, again, when she touched. It was an odd feeling, like his skin was asleep, tingling. Was she really even here? Hard to say. If she was real, real in the sense that she was Death itself, then maybe she was everywhere, or nowhere at all. The thought of it was more than he could work his way through, with so much else crowding his mind. It boiled down to a strangeness of sensation when she put her hand on is, and a little comfort. He would never have admitted it, that it stung to be pulled away from, but it was just a telescoping of all that he'd felt since the first time he was thrown into the pit. Everyone treated him differently after he'd been dead. Everyone used it as an excuse to belittle him, estrange him, pity him, condemn him, or dismiss him.
He didn't know what it meant, that Death didn't want to get near the Pit. It probably made sense, though. The thing was an abomination, after all, and an abomination to her specifically. "I don't know how either," he said, meeting those dark eyes. "But I'm going to start by blowing everything above it, and trying to fill it in."
“It’s a step,” she reluctantly agreed, but it was obvious that the answer wasn’t one she was satisfied with. “It’ll still be there, but at least no one could use it.” But she would still feel it, that sickly green magic that had a pull on her that she could feel even standing there in the apartment. She knew that there were very few ways to actually unmake a thing, but if ever she had wanted an unmaking, she wanted it now. She ended up sighing though, because she knew of nothing that would help blot it from existence. The way it pulsed in her awareness was almost like a living thing, but she wasn’t about to reach out and try to take it.
Jason glanced toward the doorway, then back to the peculiar vision in his room. “I should go,” he said. He had so much work to do, and so little time to do it in. If he was kicked back through the door, they would try to stop him. That much, at least, he could be sure of. He looked at her, sideways, regarding her. “If I leave now, will I see you again?” Or would she turn out to be a figment of his fevered brain? No way to know, really.
She wanted to say no, to leave him be, but she knew that they would cross each other’s paths again. Even if only because she could feel the space he inhabited with a different weight than anyone else. There were echoes of the same energy in different places, but none that were quite so strong as him and the pit, and she couldn’t ignore that. So she nodded, just slightly, just once. “I’m here every time I’m through the door.” She was technically everywhere any time she was through the door, but that didn’t need to be said. She reached up, the same way she had the first time she’d encountered Bruce, and carefully smoothed the hair back from his face, gentle and with barely a touch.
Jason looked back at her for a moment, then turned his eyes down and away. There was something strange about looking at her, looking at Death. She was beautiful, of course, but she wasn't for him. Clearly, experience had shown that.
By the time he looked up again, and that whisper soft pass of fingers had dropped from his face, there was nothing but a fluttering sound of feathers in the room. Then, again, everything was still.