log: jason todd and bruce banner, marvel, chinatown lab Who: Bruce B and Jason What: Blood testing. Where: Bruce's Chinatown Lab. When: Recently. Warnings/Rating: Mentions of violence.
Jason didn't announce to Bruce when he'd be leaving for the Chinatown lab, nor did he give him a heads' up of when he'd be arriving. It had taken a few hours of patrolling just to get up the courage to step across the threshold. He had to trick himself into thinking that the outcome didn't matter, to make it seem small.
When he arrived at Bruce's doorstep he had his helmet tucked under his arm, and he dropped it on the island of lab tables in the center of the room, announcing his presence with the heavy clattering of steel on stone. "So, how're we doing this?" he asked. "Is this a prick on the finger kind of a thing, or do you get to break out one of your biggest, funnest needles?"
Whether it was being trapped inside the physical body of an earthly force, or the work he'd been doing on the streets, or Damian's missing body, Jason looked the worse for wear. He hadn't been able to really sleep since the body had been stolen from the manor, staying up nights and days to go hunting. It was a busy time, this killing season he'd created. He would track down the men who lived as pressure points for the mob and kill them, hunt informants, most of whom had gone to ground when they heard a predator was back in town, and make the twitch and sing. What sleep he caught was often dangerously by mistake, in back alleys where he'd been sitting too long, or in the doorstep of the warehouse on a quick trip to pick up supplies.
After the party, after he woke up with his head splitting, shaking from having his very being torn to pieces like a ragdoll, he followed a Falcone capo all day. He hid in the apartment building across the street from the man's apartment with a rifle. It was hours of waiting before nightfall, baking in the summer heat singing off the concrete roof. He lay in the thin shade of the rail, wan and ragged, and scribbled in his journal.
Later, he watched the man put his children to bed and kiss his wife goodnight before going into his study. Then he made a very, very clean shot to kill him, and felt a dead flip of satisfaction in his chest, the good boy switch going to 'on', and then he threw up behind a humming, ice cold air conditioning unit.
Caught between the heat coming off the roof and the icy, mottled silver metal of the air conditioner, the headache he'd been downing painkillers for roared back in full force. He rested his forehead against the tin, wrong bouncing around his head, wrong and wrong. He had to get Damian's body back, but his plan to get the mob to ferret out Ra's was a dimmer and dimmer hope. What if Banner was right, and he wasn't even in the door anymore? But what if stopping meant that no one ever found him, that no one even looked, and that Ra's got to do to Damian what he'd done to Jason all those years ago? The further he got back into this bloody business, the easier it felt, the more distant he was from it. It would be hard to stop, now. Was the pull to keep going from the righteous feeling he got when he did it, that continual nagging feeling that he was the only sane person in town and they were the crazy ones? Or was it something darker, something alchemical, something that made him incapable of trusting his own decisions? He had to know. When someone blew their brains out rather than live with the sickness, he needed to know if he was immune from exposure, or in way too far to tell.
It had been a day since that kill, and he hadn't gone back home once since then. Coming to Marvel was starting to feel more like walking to another neighborhood than leaving his world and skipping into another one, and while he waited on Bruce in the lab he stripped off his sweat-soaked leather jacket, tossing it down next to the helmet. He had a t-shirt on underneath, worn soft from a hundred washes, gray. Without the helmet or the jacket on, he looked strangely young, strapped up with guns at his waist and a little thin for all his training. Even so, even still, he managed a cheeky smile. It wasn't hard to see why nobody had really noticed what a mess he'd turned into over the past couple months. Or turned back into, maybe.
"Don't you try to trick me when you go to take the blood, doc, I know the trick where you put the needle in on count 2 out of 3."