:WHO Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne WHAT: CATCHING UP WHEN: After This RATING: PG-13+ WARNINGS: Possible mentions of violent character death
I had all and then most of you Some and now none of you Take me back to the night we met
I don't know what I'm supposed to do Haunted by the ghost of you Oh, take me back to the night we met
T
he first time Jason had laid eyes on Batman, he was barely fourteen years old and something possessed him to try and steal the wheels off the Batmobile. Now, a whole decade and a death later, Jason still had no idea why Bruce had taken pity on him. Had picked him, out of all the other Gotham gutter rats, to pour himself into. He wasn't like Dick Grayson, he never had been. If he'd been able to pick out even a crumb of similarities between himself and Dick, maybe he would have been able to settle into the life that Wayne had offered him.
But the truth was, even after he moved into the manor, after he'd worn red-breasted body armor and helped scrap the same kind of scum he'd once been off the streets of Gotham, he never felt like he belonged. He was always looking over his shoulder, always waiting for the other shoe to drop; just sitting on the edge of his seat, ready to run as soon as Bruce revealed his true intentions.
At the end of the day, it hadn't been Bruce that had shown a set of different, true colors. It had been his own mother who had hung him up to die by his heartstrings. Deep in his core, Jason knew that if he'd went to Wayne with his mother's problems, it all could have played out different and he'd never have to know when it felt like to try and breath through a smashed rib cage.
Bruce hadn't saved him that day, but someone else did. And despite what he believed, or felt about Old Bats, it was Ra's al Ghul who breathed life into his broken body. With Ra's, and the League of Shadows, Jason had never felt like he was waiting for the truth to come out because he knew from day one. He knew the kind of insidiousness that ran through the veins of the League, it was familiar to him. There was never a doubt in his mind what Ra's wanted in return for saving him: a life for a life.
Jason sat his wine glass down on the bleach-stiff white table cloth in front of him with a heavy sigh. Across from him sat the life he was supposed to take. Bruce didn't look nearly as powerful or sure of himself as he used to, and Todd couldn't tell if it was this place that had done that to him or the weight of sitting across from a person that you let die.
"This place is - hm. Not exactly your kind of fancy, is it?" He dragged a finger across the cloth and inspected it, as if looking for dust. "Who you getting on anyway, stuck in this two-bit hick son of a place, huh?"
The debt would be paid. Ra's al Ghul was not a man to disappoint. But it didn't have to be paid tonight.