IT IS FINISHED.

Epilogue: So Right For Me

He came to the back door, in the end.

Not out of shyness, or because the front door looked down over such a wide open space that even the best ninja couldn't sneak up on it, or even to show off that he could get through the security, because he'd been gone long enough that he probably actually couldn't without tripping some kind of sensor, which was why he'd made a point of being seen by a camera on his way to the house so they knew it was him, and nobody went into high alert thinking he was a League of Shadows minion here to kidnap the brat or something. (Though seriously, who would bother.)

But no, he came to the back door because it was his. The Manor was far enough from everything that if you were going anywhere you went by car, and in that case you either met Alfred in the front drive or shot down an underground tunnel, depending.

But when he'd lived here, when he'd gone in and out, on his own, to roam the grounds or venture outside them on foot or by bike, he'd used this door, the little one by the kitchen, with a little flagstone path running along the herb garden, ending at the little iron gate, set into a low stone wall not intended to keep out anything larger than a rabbit. He used to vault the wall instead of bothering to unlatch the gate.

It had been nine weeks and three days since he'd left field hospital Caldera Epsilon. No one was expecting him. They'd know, at this point, if he turned around and left, but it wasn't like there was anything they could do about it.

He bent forward and unlatched the gate. Left it open behind him. Two of the flagstones had cracked down the middle since his day. The bed of sage was looking riotous and the thyme was overspilling its border—the herb garden was always the first thing to fall into neglect when Alfred was busy, because it was his private domain and out-of-bounds to the weekly grounds crew. There were no weeds showing, but he hadn't been trimming anything.

The sage was upthrusting its purple-blossomed spikes, and Jason hung there, a few steps from the doorway. Reached out and bruised a sage leaf, breathed in the smell. Sage always smelled old to him, the way the heavy hardwood furniture or the books in the library did. A clean sort of old that wasn't threatening to rot.

"Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," he muttered. But the man in the poem had been an old migrant farm hand, dragging himself to the kindest of his employers so he didn't have to die entirely alone. Jason didn't have to be here. He didn't need anything from them.

And they didn't have to let him in.

"I would have called it, rather, something you haven't somehow to deserve," replied a trim, British voice, and then the kitchen door swung open and there was Alfred, in shirtsleeves and his white apron, thinner and greyer than ever, but very much himself.

Jason grinned crookedly at the old man. There were traces of flour on his hands, and he could smell cinnamon. "American poetry, Alfie? I'm surprised at you."

"Well, I have spent some forty years on New English soil. We are perhaps not separated entirely by our common language, Master Jason."

And with that gentle use of title, reality raced back and Jason found he'd lost the ability to breathe, because if he'd had a hard time facing Leslie, even before he'd started to seriously doubt his own reasoning…

He'd hated Alfred sometimes, for his stiff judgy face and the way he would always, always side with Bruce, who held his first loyalties, and the delicate uncomprehending horror with which he'd treated some of Jason's street-bred habits and attitudes. He distinctly remembered thinking that the proper class-conscious butler was probably glad not to have to deal with a filthy urchin anymore, shortly after he'd made the decision to stay 'dead' until he was ready to make his move and try to break Batman.

It had never been true, had it?

"I guess you're pretty mad at me," he said, reduced to fourteen years old again, sheepish under the butler's dry gaze.

"There does, I believe, exist a rule requiring you to telephone if you are going to be delayed in returning home," Alfred replied.

Jason choked out a laugh. If only all he had to deal with was the biggest curfew infraction in history. "Yeah. Yeah, I forgot to do that. Sorry."

It would really have ruined the drama, he thought, if he'd called the Manor to say Hey, Bruce, I'm doing a world training tour on Talia al Ghul's dime, but I'll be back to kill you before I turn twenty-one, okay?

"Forgiven," Alfred said, and almost managed to make it sound like he really was just talking about a broken curfew. "Well, do come in. Wipe your feet," Alfred directed, falling back into the house and beckoning. Jason obediently wiped his feet on the mat (a braided hemp rope thing with a design of ivy vines; no 'welcome' here—equal parts Alfred's sense of taste and Bruce's paranoia) and stepped up over the threshold.

Break.

Alfred offered him food almost as soon as he was inside—"might care to fortify yourself with an early lunch"—and Jason accepted because Alfred's cooking. And also an excuse to skulk around down here and put off finding Bruce and dealing with that confrontation.

Constructing a thick sandwich full of greens and scallions and thin-sliced tomatoes, and that expensive brown mustard, and sharp cheese, and strips of cold pork from last night's roast was the work of a few minutes, and then Alfred went back to rolling up cinnamon buns and Jason sat down at the little kitchen table to eat.

He'd demolished about half the sandwich when the door to the dining room swung open. The master of the house shambled in—okay, it was a perfectly normal walk, but he was utterly out of costume and not looking particularly put-together so it felt like a shamble—and came to a halt mid-yawn, hand frozen in the air in front of his mouth.

He was wearing pajamas and that stupid purple bathrobe—actually it was probably a similar-looking replacement; after ten years the old one would be kind of shabby, but it was the same shade of slightly reddish purple and made him look just as harmless as it always had. Or maybe that was the wide, startled look in his eyes. Or the wild thatch of bedhead. Whoever was keeping an eye on the security footage he'd made such a point of appearing on, it definitely hadn't been Bruce.

Under that stare, Jason felt his gut churn. It had been months, since the hospital. Plenty of time to reconsider. He knew how much could go down around here in a few months; had heard about some of it from his Replacement. Killer Croc was dead, killed by falling, of all things; apparently Robin had dutifully attempted to save the villain but hadn't had the necessary physical strength, and had been utterly unmoved by his own failure.

Bruce was in a different frame of mind, now, would have a different perspective on the matter of his second former sidekick than he'd had nine weeks ago, standing over Nightwing's hospital bed.

Jason had held it together for more than two months without going on any kind of killing spree, even a little one, and discovering just how hard that had been had freaked him out enough that he wasn't sure he wanted to break the streak, but if this fell apart now he wasn't going to be able to help it. And while he was pretty sure he was never going to come apart hard enough to lose the ability to focus his violence on people who deserved it, pretty sure wasn't completely, and what Leslie had said about knowing what people deserved had kept gnawing at his mind but he didn't think it would be able to stop him, if it came down to it.

Which led to the conclusion that he possibly actually belonged in Arkham, but if Batman put him there again…

"Hey," was what he managed to say, with a little wave. There was mustard on his thumb. He'd gotten to his feet without noticing.

"The prodigal returns, Master Bruce," Alfred murmured, sliding a tray of rolls into the glowing oven.

For this my son was dead, and is alive again.

"Jason," Bruce said. There was something disbelieving in his eyes.

Was lost, and is found.

Jason tugged his left hand out of his pocket and held both of them up, out to the sides, fingers spread far apart. I'm not here for a fight.

Bruce's hands twitched, but didn't go for weapons or up into a guard stance. He took a step forward. Seemed to pull himself back, after that, though he held his actual ground.

"I'm here," Jason said, and this time he didn't manage casual. He sounded just as uncertain as he actually was, fuck.

And Bruce tightened his jaw and strode forward. Jason had a second to register that he was cornered against the table, and think that Bruce couldn't possibly plan to start a fight now, after all that effort to get him here, right in front of Alfred, in his goddamn bathrobe, and wonder what people had been telling Batman about him while he'd been lying low, before Bruce was on him—

And that was not the world's worst grapple, it was a hug. "You're here," Bruce confirmed.

The last time Bruce had done this, Jason's forehead had rested against his sternum. Now he had to let his head drop so it could land on a shoulder, but Bruce had hugged him over the biceps like he was still taller by at least a foot, so Jason slowly bent his elbows up and folded his arms around Bruce's floating ribs. His eyes were burning.

"Shh," Bruce said, when Jason's breath hitched. "It's alright, Jay. Everything's going to be okay. You're home."

Break.

"Sorry I'm late," said Jason. It was a ritual, by now; at least one of them was always late. He tossed his helmet onto the fourth, unclaimed comfy chair and flopped down into his own. "I have a really good excuse, though. Bruce, you will be happy to hear the Westward Bridge was not destroyed by acid-breathing bees. Also, I need my own flamethrower. Need."

"Christmas list," said Bruce. Jason rolled his eyes, and Dr. Ming leaned forward, ready to hear about the bees and then see if it reminded either of them of something that had happened in the past. So far, that had been the best way to get them talking.

Jason wasn't sure if it was the 'therapy' part that was actually making life seem brighter, or the 'acting like he had a future' part, but he was totally convinced Bruce was benefitting from being prodded into talking about things. And maybe they should give in and let Dr. Ming schedule them for some non-joint sessions already.

Except the thing was, irrational as it was on so many levels, Jason felt a lot safer being vulnerable, knowing Bruce was there to have his back. (And got more satisfaction out of expressing his various rage issues with Bruce there to hear. The shrink kept having to talk him down from posturing. He was starting to hear her mild Do you really mean that? when she wasn't even present. It was very annoying.)

Three-man sessions, with one of the other guys thrown in, were always hilarious. Especially the time Timmy heroically rescued a beautiful example of thirteenth-century pottery from Dr. Ming's bookcase before it could be smashed by a flying paperweight. She kept nothing breakable in here anymore.

At some point, they were going to have to try all five of them at the same time. Jason was betting violence would break out before anybody got to the point of tears. (Barbara had refused to take the bet because, she said, he would be there, so he could guarantee his win by punching somebody if anyone started to look weepy, and she had no intention of losing money just to contribute to delinquency.)

Break.

He'd come to the satisfying realization, over the past couple of months, that no one was going to hassle him about breaking any number of bones he wanted. (Unless it meant they passed out before you could get the information you wanted, but after working solo so long he understood that hang-up, now.) This was a weird form of adulthood, but he'd take it. Or maybe this was the power of lowered expectations.

All the same, there are days when you break all a meth dealer's limbs and a lot of his phalanges and blow up his lab, and then there are days when you wind up giving a stupidly detailed lecture about the horrible stuff street drugs get cut with and why, in addition, tripping on cough syrup is also extremely dumb, just not as dumb as believing you can get a tab of actual ecstasy on a street corner in this century.

High school students seemed to be significantly more likely to pay attention to this kind of lecture when it was delivered by the guy their dealer just ran away from really fast. The cool jacket obviously helped. Also the liberal use of profanity.

(Take that, Alfred.)

Also, decriminalize marijuana in this state already, jeezus, dumb kids thinking if one controlled substance was that harmless why not try the others, clearly it was all just adult melodrama. It was mostly dangerous because it was a gateway drug, but it was more of a gateway drug by being illegal. Leslie had a point that he probably wouldn't even kneecap a guy for selling teenagers beer, even though that was totally illegal to do and being drunk got so many people killed.

But there was pot, and then there were hard drugs, and there were teenagers, and then there were twelve-year-olds.

"Look, you guys are on your first strike now," Jason said. The knot of dealers he'd linked to the middle-and-high-school trade for this neighborhood was looking at him with a gratifying amount of fear. "But I'm planning to go home for Thanksgiving this year, and if I kill you before that, it'll make things really awkward. So if you screw up and make me have to hunt you down and cut your heads off with a hacksaw, I'm going to be really pissed, and that means I'll make sure not to kill you clean."

The one furthest to the left looked prepared to vomit. Jason propped the machete in his left hand over his left shoulder in what he thought was a suitably casual pose. His semiautomatic was hanging out somewhere around the vicinity of their knees. He kind of hoped one of them made a break for it. "Do we have an understanding here, guys? Don't make me kill you before the end of November."

"Christmas is a month after that," piped up the stringy crazy one in the front—Jacques, apparently, Jason gathered from the horrified hissing of the guy next to him. He was going to be a problem. Hopefully he'd get himself dumped in the river before he made his way too far up the hierarchy.

Jason rolled his eyes. "I'm not going home for Christmas, what do I look like, a college kid?" Alfred was going to try to guilt him into it, he knew. He planned to leave town in plenty of time to avoid last-minute weakness. "Wait until after Thanksgiving to screw up, and we can just have the normal level of gore. Capisce?"

Break.

"Hey there, Nest Egg," Jason greeted, sliding his tray onto the surface of the table. The executive cafeteria at Wayne Tower pretended to be a restaurant, which was in his opinion just tacky, and he wondered if his target of the moment was eating down here in normal-worker-land instead because it annoyed him too, or to avoid getting buttonholed into an impromptu lunch meeting, or to protect his invited guest from exposure to executives. (Bruce's might have a slightly lower slime quotient than average, but it was still pretty bad.) Maybe all three.

Drake looked up from his baked ziti with a longsuffering expression. "Are you ever going to call me by my actual name?"

"Nope." The breadrolls that went with the ziti were actually fresh. Jason broke his in half and smeared butter over the inside.

Replacement rolled his eyes. "Steph, meet Jason. Jason, this is Stephanie," he said.

"Yeah, I know." Jason shoved half his roll into his mouth and raised one hand, palm out. "Put 'er there."

To her credit, the blonde only hesitated a split second, and when the high-five landed without provoking an explosion of poison gas or a massive electrical shock, she grinned. He swallowed the bread and grinned back. He had preemptively decided she was going to be his favorite, and so far he hadn't seen anything to make him take it back.

"What are you doing here?" Drake asked. Not especially confrontationally, more like he was admitting his detective skills were not up to the task of figuring Jason out and throwing in the towel with an actual question.

"What am I doing here? What are you doing here?"

"I have a job."

"You're being exploited. Go back to school. But that aside, what are you doing here?" he addressed this to Stephanie, who was obviously trying not to laugh at them.

She shook her head. "You answer first."

"Okay. Hey, Replacement, I wanna jump the line to get a project considered by the Wayne Foundation."

Drake looked wary, but not as unwelcoming toward the concept as Jason would have expected. Note to self: shamelessness was a good approach with this guy. He smirked. "See, it's like this…"

Break.

"…thing is, I never blamed her, my mom. Catherine. It wasn't like she started doping for fun. After the insurance ran out there was nothing left to do but die, and she had me so she had to wring every working second out or I'm pretty sure she'd have made it fast about halfway through, when the pain got too bad. But the morphine they had her on before the coverage lapsed, that helped, so she went street for it, and then…" He shook his head, and didn't look up from his hands. "I never, ever blamed her."

"But you were angry," Dr. Ming said. Not smug at figuring him out, and not condemning him. It was—good, she was good at this.

"Of course I was angry! There was a hell of a lot to be angry at." His hands twisted together as he watched them, and he gritted his teeth. He wasn't used to his body doing things he hadn't told it to, except in a fight, and that was different, that was trained reflex. "But yeah," he whispered. "I think I was angry at her, too. For giving in. For running up those debts. For…for leaving me alone."

"You know that was okay, don't you? Feeling like that. There was nothing wrong with that."

Jason's fingernails dug into the back of the opposite hand. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

"But you didn't then? I'm just guessing."

"Good guesses," Jason grumbled. "Yeah, I—I never let myself be mad at her, maybe. And later, when—after what Sheila did. I didn't get mad. I probably would've, if we'd lived. But maybe not. It was a pretty strong habit. Not blaming Mom. She wasn't strong enough. You can't go around punishing everybody who isn't strong enough to take everything the world throws at them."

When he glanced up the therapist was smiling at him, like she liked what he'd said. He ran back over it in his head, to make sure he'd meant it, and—yeah, okay.

It was kind of childish and he could see how easy it would be to use against him—Leslie probably wouldn't be able to help herself, which he guessed was why they had uninvolved-third-party Ming—but it was nothing but honest. Victim-blaming pissed him off like nothing else.

"I was mad," he repeated. That was nothing they hadn't been over before, with and without Bruce in the room, but it was like fighting, really—the first time you did a move, you were never going to get it exactly right. That took practice. You could always eke out a little more efficiency of motion, a little more range, a little more control. "Especially after I came back. The—I still don't know how much of it was the Pit, you know? Maybe I never will. Being betrayed like that—but I did blame Bruce, you know? Not when I used to get hurt, but for letting me down. Even before I died, I'd gotten used to getting mad at him. It's…weird that I blamed him so much and them not at all, isn't it?"

"I don't know if it's weird," said the doctor. "Do you think maybe you focused on Bruce because he was a safe outlet? Someone strong enough to take whatever you could deal out?"

Jason smiled a little. "Aw, doctor. That would be nice to think. But if I'd been trying to lose, believe me…" He shook his head.

"That wasn't quite what I meant, but from what you've all told me, I think if you had really intended to destroy him, you could have."

Jason snorted. "He's indestructible."

"Really?"

All evidence suggested it was the case, up to and including Bruce taking a legendary one-hit-kill attack and then fighting his way back home against the fabric of spacetime instead of dying. But no. Jason knew not really. As good as Bruce was at picking himself up again and soldiering on, he had his limits. And Jason could have done more than he had to push him past them, even without crossing any extra lines like murdering the innocent. Could also have killed him plenty of times, if he'd really wanted that. (He'd never really wanted that.)

If he really had been unconsciously misdirecting some of his rage to protect women far too dead for him to hurt, then that was just embarrassing, but. But he couldn't say it didn't make sense.

Break.

"I'm not doing this for me," Jason said, rocking his knife back and forth in the wound. "You know? That was where I was getting it wrong before. Why I kept hesitating. Because I thought killing you would make it better. So I thought I had to get it just right. But my death wasn't about you. Getting better has nothing to do with you, either."

He planted his boot on the Joker's back, and yanked the K-BAR blade free from between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. The sound the clown made might have been either a scream or a laugh, or both. It was probably both. It echoed through the deserted garage, reverberating from the corrugated steel walls.

"I should've lit you on fire in that warehouse years ago," he reflected, lining up his next blow. "The first time our paths crossed. I had the resolution. I'd already gotten my hands bloody. Everybody you've hurt since then, that's on me. But you know—nnff," he broke off, as he braced one knee on concrete and put his whole back into stabbing the Joker's, "You know, it isn't. It's always been you. The one who actually does the evil shit. It's not our responsibility to kill you.

"It's one thing for me to say Batman should've—for me. When I hear strangers saying it, I get pissed off. Why don't they do it themselves, huh? They don't get to ask other people to do that kind of thing for them. People want someone killed to keep them safe, they should ask the government. They kill people all the damn time, they could've taken you out. Cops get issued guns for a reason, if there's ever been anyone they could've filled full of lead with clear consciences, it'd be you.

"They haven't yet, they're…what? Too chickenshit you'll survive and come after them? Or are you just too good at dodging?"

The Joker didn't answer. He had been, earlier; had come out with all kinds of disgusting shit that had helped keep Jason on-track, reminded him why he was doing this. (Made him have to fight to stay in control and not start stabbing wildly, but hey. He'd managed.) It was kind of comforting to know that even the Joker had a breaking point. A place where shock set in and blood loss laid him out and just breathing was an achievement.

"But tell me, why do people put it on the old man, huh? What makes 'em think they've got the right to just expect that from us? Even when I really, really hated him, I knew it was kind of a big deal to ask him to go there. And half the people who say it would give him the pariah treatment same as they did Wonder Woman, if he ever actually did it.

"Fucking assholes, the public, always wanting it both ways. You know how easy they are to lead around by the nose. I've watched you.

"Right, so," he concluded, finding his place just below the cervical vertebrae. "Nobody has the right to make me do this. But I said I was going to. I killed a lot of people who needed it a lot less. I practiced for this. I owe everybody you've fucked with since I didn't set you on fire to get this right."

Stab. The first one had been for him. The second, in the small of the back, had been for Barbara. After that he hadn't been specific. There weren't enough square millimeters of back, let alone spine, for everybody who deserved this revenge.

With one last surge of force, he cut the medulla oblongata off from whatever nerve split off from the spinal cord to regulate the lungs, and the feat of breathing went beyond the clown's power.

Slowly, carefully, Jason drew the blade out of the Joker's back one more time. Stood up.

"You always survive," he said. "No matter how dead you should've been. We all know if we didn't see a body, or if we did and then it went missing, you'll be back.

"So survive this. Lie in a bed in Arkham, on a ventilator, and live."

Jason wiped down his combat knife, and stowed it away. Walked out the side door two minutes ahead of the ambulance. Didn't look back.

Leaned up against a wall, a dozen blocks away at the end of an avenue that ran straight and open far enough east that he could see the sun heaving itself out of the sea, and lit a cigarette. Just the one. For old time's sake.

It tasted like heat and dry things. Like memories that lingered, growing more sour and rancid as they faded away. Like betrayal in a desert, like sympathy and like pity, like every bitter thing that came with living.

"I forgive you, Mom," he whispered, squinting into the dawn.

Break.

Jason Todd was lying on his back on the roof of a shabby brownstone in Priest Heights, soaking up the sun. Nocturnal habits and a wanted listing meant a lot of skulking around in the dark, which was bad for vitamin D levels, which was bad for…what was it bad for? Bones, was that it?

Yesterday he'd had an amazingly passive-aggressive ninja birthday. Gifts had just sort of turned up at a couple of his bolt-holes, proving that the Bats knew where they were, which was both ninja and passive-aggressive.

After judicious bomb sweeps, unwrapping the packages had uncovered two different types of stun guns (really, thanks guys), a set of mixing bowls, an electric mixer, and a set of good kitchen knives (Alfred?), a new pair of boots, a collection of George Bernard Shaw (Barbara), a how-to manual on tire replacement and repair (he really hoped that one was from Bruce), and the Punisher T-shirt he was wearing right now.

It was a standard silk-screened piece of merchandising, with artful paint drips coming down the rocker skull to make it look amateurishly stenciled, which might mean it was a movie tie-in; Jason had never had time for comic books but he and Sasha had rented the movie, a few weeks before the clusterfuck of a night that had ended in his arrest, and it had turned out to be pretty much the funniest thing ever. He was pretty sure the shirt was meant as the obvious jibe about his methods, from some Bat-brat or other, but it could, theoretically, be from Sasha, if somebody had tracked her down and invited her to join in their birthday game, or something.

Birthdays weren't even a big thing with the Bats. He bet Replacement had gotten, like, a hug from Dick and maybe a slice of pie for his twentieth. He smelled conspiracy.

A shadow fell across his face, and he had a bad second before he got his eyes open and identified its caster. She sank into a crouch as he lowered the gun he'd pulled in that second, her head cocked at a curious angle, utterly unthreatened.

Cassandra Cain. Black Bat, she was calling herself these days. Former Batgirl. Conscience-ridden child of assassins. Body language expert and off-and-on semi-mute. Brainwashed twice that he knew of. The child Lady Shiva had denied when Jason and Batman had pumped her full of truth serum a decade ago. (Which, interestingly, suggested that even if Sandra Wu San had been Jason's real mother, he'd probably never have known.)

They'd never really talked, or met outside a group except in passing when their patrol routes intersected, and she wasn't in costume, and it was the middle of the day. Either this wasn't a business visit, or the emergency was serious as hell. "Problem?" he asked, sitting up. He left the gun in his lap for now, but didn't let go of it; he knew he couldn't take her hand-to-hand, and just in case she was here on unfriendly terms, he'd hold onto his force multiplier.

Cain shook her head, glossy black hair swaying. "I'm late," she said. "Sorry."

Jason felt his eyebrows draw together. "Okay," he began, half-expecting her to run off to whatever she was late for without further communication. Then she held out a small box tied with a ribbon, and he recalculated. "Uh—thanks," he said, accepting the package and weighing it in his palm. Fairly heavy, for the size. "You know, I think you were supposed to hide this in my apartment while I was out," he remarked, deciding he could probably skip the bomb check in this case. She was right there. And she wasn't the type to blow a guy's hand off by treachery, anyway.

She shrugged, still squatting, eyes almost level with his. "Presents are…less fun, if I can't watch."

Made sense. Even if your first language wasn't body language, it made sense. Jason wished it didn't. He wasn't going to be able to fake liking whatever it was enough to fool her, and maybe he was getting pathetically soft but he didn't want to be a big letdown. He poked his tongue out the corner of his mouth and tugged away the paper.

Inside the box was…another box. This one was made of polished wood.

Cassandra looked expectant.

He opened the box.

It was…a wristwatch. Analogue. Quartz, not spring-powered. Nice, without being one of those absurd luxury pieces people like Bruce wore. The strap was good-quality leather, the hours were marked in Roman numerals, and taking up most of the watch face behind the three silver hands was a distinctly non-terrible painting of a blue bird in flight.

A blue jay. He looked up at Cassandra, knowing she probably knew more about how he felt about his present than he did. "Did you…is this a pun?"

She shrugged. "Told the man at the store I needed…a present for my brother. With a jay on it. Thought this was better than…cufflinks."

Jason snorted. "Definitely better than cufflinks." Where the fuck would he even wear cufflinks. He got cufflinks as a gift, he'd figure it was some kind of hint that he was about to be descended upon by a forced tailoring experience and dragged to some kind of WE benefit gala, or something. Not that he minded nice clothes, as such, but getting out of those awful parties of Bruce's was probably the best thing about having died. He snapped the box shut, figuring he'd wear it next time he was relatively sure he wasn't going to get in a fight that day. Not that it wouldn't get smashed or melted or burned or something eventually, but he'd like to wear it more than once. "Thanks," he said. Glad he was able to mean it.

Cassandra smiled, and he had the feeling she was reading his surprised relief that her gift had been good enough to like just as much as his actual genuine appreciation, but at least he wasn't required to try to prove he liked it by coming up with the correct words. Win, overall.

"Angry bird," she said abruptly. Which, he hadn't heard she was in the habit of renaming people, but it wouldn't surprise him, either. Rummaged in one of the pockets on her windbreaker for a second and came out with a fat, round, fire-engine-red stuffed thing, with a stubby orange beak and thick, black eyebrows drawn low and fierce. An Angry Bird, because when a digital phenomenon took off the obvious step was of course to sell toys.

"Uh, thanks," said Jason, considerably less convincingly, which he felt no regret over at all. He did let her hand it to him, though.

She grinned, and he realized that, deeply knowing eyes and genuine kindness and incredibly deadly hands and feet and language issues all notwithstanding, his only adoptive sister was a gigantic troll. "Not so angry now," stated Black Bat.

He threw the stuffed bird at her face. She ducked.

Break.

"Hey, screw you!" Jason swung, and Bruce—the asshole, the creep, the smug sonuvabitch—let the blow land, snapping his head around to the right. That wasn't enough, not when it had been just handed to him, so he hit him again, an uppercut this time that Bruce still didn't block or dodge, but did roll back with—not willing to risk a concussion just for the sake of pacifying his crazy son, even safe in his cavernous home base.

Jason snapped a kick into the front of Bruce's thigh and wished he wasn't in costume, not so much because the armor made it hard to get a good blow in, but because he couldn't grab a handful of Batman's shirt and drag him close to shout in his face. Much as Bruce deserved a beating, laying it on an unresisting man wasn't—wouldn't make anyone listen to him. Or make him feel any better later. "This is just like before! Just like Garzonas!"

"We don't have the evidence." Batman grated the words out, standing strong like Jason never even hit him at all, and it really was just like back then. All they had was the victim testimony, and an injury, and what they saw with their own eyes.

"So make some!"

"You know I can't do that."

"So you're going to let him walk," Jason seethed. "Because your pretty little principles will let you commit all the B&E and invasion of privacy in the world but you can't falsify some goddamn evidence to put this jackass away. You think a beating is going to stop him? All it means is he'll kill the next girl, to shut her up!"

"You're angry," Bruce said. Which must be hinting at something because the world's worst detective would have picked up that little tidbit at least half an hour ago. Jason had not one drop of patience left to spend on unravelling Bruce's little indirect communications.

"Yes, I'm angry! I want to see this fucker crucified. Literally."

"This isn't ancient Rome."

Jason's lips curled back. "Every empire is Rome, your-highness-of-Gotham. And your little chunk of it could use more bread, less circuses!"

"What's wrong with circuses?" It was Dick's voice, at the top of the stairs up to the Manor, deceptively mild.

Jason rolled his eyes. "Oh, nothing. They just don't feed much of anybody but clowns." He jerked his eyes back to Bruce, teeth baring themselves again as he realized the subject had somehow changed under his feet. "And he wants to let that dog-and-pony-show marketing specialist Anderson walk, because all we have to link him to the assault is testimony. And the victim is just some Crime Alley slut, who's going to listen to a word she says?"

"I did not say—"

"This is important!" He was shouting now. "What's a bank robbery compared to this? Banks are insured! So long as nobody gets hurt, that's nothing! Just because the victims are weak and the bad guys are normal citizens with jobs, you think this kind of thing doesn't matter?"

Grayson again. "No one is saying that, Jason."

"Fuck. You!" Before he knew it he was moving. Wheeled around, snatching up the heaviest thing in reach—which was a strangely prosaic handheld fire extinguisher set near the chem bench—and rammed it full-strength into cold smooth glass.

It had been broken before. His Replacement had mentioned it, in passing. It would have been unsurprising if the current glass was reinforced, bulletproof, at least as shatter-resistant as your average windshield.

But no, it was simple, delicate crystalline glass, and Jason's first blow smashed straight through the case and took down the costume inside, everything except the mask.

He took that out on his next pass, and kept swinging until the largest shard left clinging to the frame was no bigger than his hand. Then he hurled the extinguisher into the center of the mess, on top of the glass-slashed little red tunic. Turned his back, like that would make it all vanish.

"Don't you dare fix it this time," he spat, and strode off, before anyone could say anything.

(Three days later, Anderson turned himself in for five counts of assault and rape, two of which had been reported. He had two broken bones and was missing several teeth. Later, he tried to retract his confession as made under duress, but it had included details of the known crime scenes that no one but the perpetrator should have known. And the victims, and anyone with access to the police files. He thought better of the attempt after a brief, mysterious power outage.

You're sure, Gordon said to Batman, on the roof of the police building. He's guilty? Because beating confessions out of people was nothing but bad policing, when it came down to it; information gained from torture was unreliable and the bad old days of the GCPD had seen a lot of people jailed for things they'd never done, because it got cases closed and people would confess to anything, if you hurt them enough.

We were there, Batman said, and while his word wasn't anything to the law it was enough for Jim. And that burned but leaving all the evils he couldn't fight untouched burned a little hotter, and so for as long as he trusted the Bat, this was how it would stay.

He didn't ask who we was, and Batman said nothing to Red Hood at all.)

All signs of the broken glass case had vanished entirely within three days, though it took almost a month for the Cave's inhabitants to stop detouring superstitiously around the spot. The Robin costume, or one like it, reappeared in another case in the row of cases full of old costumes, undifferentiated from the rest. And Bruce handed Jason the bronze plaque with his name on it, when they passed one day in the street, as though Bruce Wayne frequently strolled out of grocery stores in the worst parts of Gotham with no disguise but a cheap jacket.

Jason buried it in his grave.

Break.

Alexandra 'Sasha' Russenko was an emancipated minor living in Maryland, about three hundred miles from DC. She was seventeen and in her first semester of junior year, and every month she received a maintenance check from what she said was the settlement money after her deadbeat stepdad got slammed in prison. They were actually automated payments from a nameless account Jason had filled with funds taken from people he killed; most of it was drug money. Sasha probably knew this, and gave no sign of minding.

She'd been kicked off the lacrosse team for repeated instances of excessive violence in practice and during games, so now she went straight home to her third-floor apartment after school. She had been doing homework at the desk in her bedroom for the last hour and a half. Closed a densely-marked sheet of graph paper inside her math book, set it aside, opened her laptop, and set her hands on the keyboard.

"Are you going to lurk all day?" she asked, instead of typing.

Jason grinned. "Busted," he admitted, stepping out from the cover of the door. He didn't step into her bedroom, but hung out in the doorway, forearm propped casually against the frame.

Sasha shot a look at him sidelong, her scars stretching around an unimpressed glare, but ran her finger over the mousepad, clicked something, and began to type, eyes fixed on her screen. "I thought you were staying away for my own good."

"Just thought I'd drop by," he shrugged. "I was discrete."

"Not a word that comes to mind when I think about you."

"Like you're one to talk." She still didn't smile back, and had kept her fingers moving so continuously while each of them talked that he wondered if she was just typing nonsense to keep up a pretense of occupation. "You doing okay?" he asked.

She rolled her eyes. "Like you care."

"I care," Jason asserted. Surprised by how much that hurt. Shouldn't be surprised by her rejection itself, though. She hadn't wanted to split up or be fixed up with a normal life; she'd wanted to stick with him and keep fighting, damn all the risks and losses. What goes around comes around, Jason thought wryly. She'd be out on the streets again sooner or later, he knew; she'd gotten the bug under her skin. But hopefully by then she would have a real life to fall back on when the dark got too heavy.

Sasha set her jaw, dragged the mouse around the screen selecting a number of points with great ferocity, and resumed typing, even faster than before. "I hear Red Hood is working with Batman now," she said. Where she was picking up rumors like that, he didn't want to ask; hopefully just chatrooms. Timmy had a lot of less-talented successors dutifully sharing all their stalkery findings with the non-Gotham internet.

"That's…a bit of an overstatement," he replied, sheepish.

He and she had fought together against Batman and Robin, even if they'd been setting themselves up as rivals rather than full-bore enemies; she'd picked up his hatred. Robin had promised to save her from Pyg, after all. He'd failed. "I did wanna tell you, though, if you keep your grades up you'll probably get offered a massive Wayne Foundation scholarship to any school that accepts you."

Sasha's hands fell silent on the keyboard. "So he is back," she said. He'd never really told her about his past, but he hadn't hidden anything, either. She'd read between the lines.

"He has this tendency to try to solve everything via his bank account, and he doesn't know you well enough to buy you a car."

"Has he bought you a car?"

Jason grimaced. "He'll probably try."

Sasha's mouth tightened. "I'm not for sale."

Jason couldn't help the grin that stretched across his face. He couldn't take credit for her, didn't have the right to be proud of her, but he liked her. Always had. They'd only ever been tied together by rage and vengeance and the sight of her putting down the empty shell that had once been her father. (It had been a mercy killing, Jason did not doubt that, and if there had also been some old resentment at work, he had never asked.)

"Think of it as a 'sorry my family got involved in your life' present," he advised. "Free stuff isn't usually one of his control mechanisms, it's more like a replacement for actual communication."

"My radio-silent ex-con sugar-daddy doesn't get to say that," Sasha announced, and then slammed the 'enter' key with two fingers and rolled her chair away from the computer to look at him. She smirked.

He grinned. "I do miss having you around to put me in my place."

Break.

"I'm so tired of people dying," said Dick.

He sounded tired, too, his voice sort of scraped and small even though he was perfectly healthy. "Jason wasn't the first, but…I don't know, it sort of felt like after him, it was open season. They…kind of start to blur together, after a while. And it's easier to just stop trying to remember them the way they were when they were alive. But then when you do think about them you feel like such a traitor…"

Bruce reached over and wrapped his hand around Dick's arm, just above the wrist, and the younger man started, like he'd forgotten he wasn't alone, or at least that he wasn't alone with Astrid Ming. "For what it's worth," Bruce said, in that stupid diffident voice of his that Jason had always known was him being delicate but had at some point finally twigged was the Bruce Wayne equivalent of nervous, "I…think they'd understand."

Dick's face crinkled up weirdly and then flattened again, and he jerked his head away, but left his arm where it was. "I knew these people. You didn't."

"…you keep telling me I shouldn't try to make monuments of the dead."

"Well maybe that's just self-justification."

"Guys." Jason could kind of see why Ming wasn't saying anything, but that didn't mean he couldn't. They weren't really at a point where a fight could possibly help anything except his own blood pressure. "I think it's safe to say there's some kind of middle ground here, okay?"

Break.

"Dammit, Todd," Robin snarled through the darkness. His voice had started breaking earlier this year and it was frequently hilarious, but now it was just rough and hoarse, and the crack in it could have been a lot of things besides hormones. "You are not permitted to die."

"What, from this?" Jason chuckled—carefully. "Look, I know you can't tell under all this crap, but I'm fine."

"You idiots need to stop trying to protect me."

"Sorry, D. You're the baby. It's…somewhere in the contract, I'm pretty sure." The building had started coming down around them pretty abruptly, and after they fell through the rotted floor during the first phase of collapse, he'd located the spot in the basement that had the best chance of staying clear, and kicked Robin over there before the whole ceiling gave.

Reflex. He'd have followed if he'd had time. Wasn't a fancy self-sacrifice gig, just bad luck.

"Tt. I will have you buried with an assortment of children's toys."

"Just bury me shallow," said Jason, who felt that six feet was much too deep to have to dig yourself out of twice, and then realized that wasn't the most tactful thing to say to a kid worried you were going to be crushed under most of a house, even if he'd brought up burial arrangements first. "I'm fine, though." Much more fine than he could have been, definitely. He could even feel his toes still. They weren't happy.

They could go on being unhappy all they liked so long as they kept talking. Babs might make a wheelchair look good, but it really wasn't him.

"I will also have that phrase added to your headstone."

"Stylin'," Jason grunted. Why would the brat even think that counted as a threat? His stone had nothing but a name and dates; Bruce had saved his dysfunctional epitaph for the Cave. A pithy morbid Jason quote about resurrection would make a great addition. (Jason Todd: 1989-2004; 2005-2015: 'Just bury me shallow.' Heh. Yeah. 100% improved.) Or did he mean 'I'm fine?' Because that wasn't even his catchphrase. It was Drake's, if it was anyone's.

Bare fingers, cold and blunt and tipped with callus, poked him in the eye, which was fortunately closed against dust. Moved on before Jason could decide between one-liners, and poked him in the cheek instead before tracing down to his throat, settling over the pulse point, and staying there. "Seriously," Jason groused, once he got over the cognitive dissonance of 'kid is seriously worried about me' crashing into 'pinned down in the dark NINJA TOUCHING NECK.' "Just fine."

"Which is why you haven't tried to force me to unhand you."

Jason's mouth twisted. Stupid intelligent teenagers. His right arm was totally pinned; he wasn't sure he dared try anything strenuous with his left. Ulna was possibly cracked, but more importantly, until he was sure his spine was okay, he wanted to keep his shoulders exactly where they were, to the millimeter. "I'm a little tied up, you might've noticed."

"Is that what they're calling it n—listen," Robin interrupted himself. "Did you hear that?"

"No." But then he did. A shifting, scraping noise above them, louder than the settling of the collapse that had been going on all along. Jason kept his breath even, and if there'd been somewhere safe from another collapse to go, would have told the brat to go there. But there wasn't. So he said nothing.

Robin was staring up at the point in the rubble the sound had come from. It came again. "Father?"

Such faith, Jason thought. Almost without bitterness.

More noise, and then light broke through. Another splintered beam was hauled to one side, and a stenciled blue bird was just visible in a patch of blackness. "Robin?" came a desperate, dust-choked voice. "Hood?"

"We're here, Grayson!" Damian called up, terrible as ever about codenames. "Todd is busy being slowly crushed to death, so if you would…!"

Hands in red gauntlets joined the blue, hauled debris aside with a mutter about proper leverage, and as Jason's vision went grey, a dark shadow swooped across the sun.

He felt a smile pulling at his mouth as he gulped another shallow breath, and darkness swallowed him. He wasn't worried at all.

His family was here.

Break.

"For she's a jolly good fellow, for she's a jolly good fellow, for she's a jolly good feeeeellooooooowwww…."

Damian punched Dick in the stomach in passing, cutting off his serenade, and Jason toasted the action from across the room. "Thank you, demon bird." Damian flipped him off, and claimed the footstool that gave him the best line of sight to both Cass and the door. He wouldn't've accepted anything less than one of the wingbacked chairs, not that long ago. Jason thought it was the growth spurt. Robin was starting to take up enough space in his own right that he wasn't feeling the need to coopt impressive positions so much.

Or maybe it was a sign of emotional growth. Who knew.

"Which nobody can deny," Tim threw in, not singing, blasé as could be. Dick stopped holding his gut and looking pitiful, the better to stick his tongue out.

"Order in the peanut gallery," commanded Stephanie, more confident in her position than she'd been even a year ago. Jason had been all kinds of correct on insisting on inviting her to stuff like this, even if it had been mostly because he wanted an ally. And then Cass wrinkled her nose with laughter and Damian tutted, and Steph dissolved into giggles.

How anyone had believed Leslie could've killed this ridiculously alive girl just to prove a point, Jason couldn't imagine. But then, people did a lot of things you wouldn't have believed them capable of until they did them. He was glad she wasn't dead. He was glad both of them weren't dead.

It slammed into him, hard and golden and abrupt, how glad he was that he wasn't dead. That he was gladtobealive, here, now, today—he hadn't been, for a long time, but he was these days, he was glad about it and he wasn't even the only one.

Before he could get knocked too far sideways by that, the sound of Alfred's throat being cleared broke into his thoughts and everyone else's bickering, and the door toward the kitchen swung open, revealing Bruce juggling one-handed a stack of plates and cups and forks and cartons of ice cream and milk, and the long, thin knife that Alfred had been using on cakes since long before Jason first came to the Manor. Bruce let go of the knob and with two hands stabilized his load, and moved forward to set all the paraphernalia down, on the coffee table, clearing the way for Alfred to enter the room.

The cake he was carrying was low and white, sprinkled with shredded coconut, and the ring of candles gleaming on top just managed to gleam in the dimness created by closing all the curtains against the daylight.

"Happy Birrrrrthday to you," Dick started singing again, now safely out of reach of either of the brothers likely to hit him for it—fuck's sake the man was over thirty, he was seriously never going to grow up—and Steph was right there with him, and Tim joining in a beat behind, more quietly. Tim was smiling at Cass, one of his weird smiles, and Jason remembered suddenly that she had been his Batgirl, the way Steph was for Damian or Babs had been for him and Dick.

"Happy Birthday Dear Cassie~~~!"

Jason could maybe manage a hum.

"This is an unnecessarily elaborate production," Damian muttered, perfectly audible under the idiot singing vigilantes, and Jason's humming along.

"It's not every day a woman turns twenty-five," Babs muttered back.

"Happy Birrrthday to youuuuu!" finished the singers, defiantly cheerful.

"Make a wish, Blackbird," said Jason. His voice strangely soft in the sudden silence.

Cass leaned forward with stars in her eyes, and blew.

For the rest of us, Happy Midwinter! So much love and gratitude to everyone who's joined me and Jason on this trip, especially everyone whose reviews kept me working no matter how stubborn the boys got. :D I think it turned out pretty well, and it would never have been finished without you.

Final round of citations: Alfred and Jason quoted 'Death of the Hired Man' and the Gospel of Luke. The Punisher movie is the most eighties thing to happen in 2004 and you should watch it. (It exists in the DCU because shush. It could.) Refusing to blame primary attachment figures for anything is a really common defense mechanism in young children, one which I think Jason totally displays re: moms. Experiencing those negative feelings in their correct context was necessary for his mental health, but then without the structured resentments he's built up around Bruce to keep him in a rage feedback loop, I couldn't see him not forgiving Sheila, let alone Catherine. Felipe Garzonas is the rapist whom the second Robin may or may not have pushed off a balcony, and the time teen Jason didn't set the Joker on fire was in Lost Days.

Ffdotnet is glitching and I'm getting no hitcount, so I won't know you came unless you leave a review, but I've decided that's a dumb reason to hold the chapter back, so here we are. Nearly ten thousand words of epilogue. And...that's it. The end. We have reached it. o_o Wow. See you around? ;]