A/N: This was inspired by heartslogos's Jason/Tim drabbles (#009, Impulse) on Archive of Our Own. My mind made it into this monster.
Jason had done a lot of really fucked up things in his life. Mostly the second one, but in his first life he wasn't any sort of saint, either. He wasn't a stranger to violence, and usually, the things he'd done only hurt him when he stopped to think about them. Which is something he tried really hard not to do.
But there were a few things that haunted his every waking moment, a few things that followed him into his sleep.
First, there was attacking Tim, a complete innocent, for filling in the shoes he left behind. Jason liked to think that the pit had made him insane, made him do irrational things. He pretended that he wasn't lashing out, like the forgotten middle child.
Then, there was everything that happened after Bruce 'died'. He didn't know why he did what he did. Why he tried to be Batman, to do something for the man he considered a father. Why he tried, even after Bruce's death, to make Batman proud.
Finally, the incident that messed up his entire life. No, it wasn't his own bombing. The one that ended his life. Some even said that the bomb had done the world a favor, and most of the time, Jason was inclined to agree. Trying to get Bruce to kill for him. It had been years since the incident, but Jason still remembered how horrified Bruce had been to see what Jason had become. That incident was probably why he was still so far away from them, why he had to hate them and not love them, why he had to be ashamed of himself but still spit in their faces.
That ridiculously well planned but awfully thought out plan that sought to make Bruce realize how much he loved his son only made him realize how much he hated him. Jason had no idea what to do to make up for it.
He was twenty now. By the standards of math, he'd been an adult for a long time now. By the standards of days lived, he was about seventeen. He didn't really know how many days he'd been alive out of the twenty years his atoms had been on the planet.
Out of those maybe seventeen years, he'd spent the vast majority alone. His father was gone before he could remember him as anything but the giver of cigarette burns and the man who yelled in the night. His mother was always there physically, but emotionally, mentally, she was gone before his father. Sometimes he liked to look back to that time before her body left him too, and he liked to pretend it was happy. He liked to pretend that she'd walked him to school, that she'd rubbed his back when he got food poisoning, the she'd made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich whenever he wanted them.
He liked to pretend that he'd never found her lying in that bathtub with a smile on her face, eyes wide open. It was a face that flickered back and forth with the Joker's in his dreams. He pushed the needle in her arm, the Joker's arm out of his mind, he pushed the crowbar in her hand, in the Joker's hand, pushed the faces out of his head.
It'd been a long time since he'd allowed himself to think those thoughts, and he really did not like them. These were thoughts that really needed to be followed with a shot.
And so twenty year old—or maybe seventeen year old—Jason Todd continued on his morning's path of getting wasted before noon. Getting wasted alone before noon.
He felt like everything in his life had led up to this moment. The cigarette burns, the needle in his mother's arm, the little green panties, and the crowbar. He didn't really count his second life, though. He preferred to ignore everything that had happened post-resurrection. Because all of that stuff sucked pretty hard. Pre-resurrection, it wasn't a cakewalk, but at least he'd had Bruce for a while back then. At least he'd had family, once in a blue moon.
But now he was getting wasted before noon, thinking about his mother's face, her happiness as she stared at the moldy ceiling. She stared at that ceiling, with a smile, for over a day before eight year old Jason closed those eyes.
He imagined how easy it would be. How easy it would be to just smile at the ceiling. Smile at the ceiling for the rest of eternity. Just like his mother.
She was happy now, right? She was in heaven. That's what everyone told him. Now, he most certainly would not be going to heaven, not with the things he'd done, but he didn't remember any sort of hell. He only remembered blackness. Which was a hell of a lot better than the hell he was in now.
He picked up the needle that sat next to his almost empty bottle of cheap whiskey.
Heroin. Just like his mother, with hands shaking from the alcohol, he brought the needle closer to his face. His teal eyes, dull with drink, slowly looked over the object. It was cleaner than his mother's, he noted. He was pretty that the liquid inside was much higher quality than what his mother used, as well. But the Red Hood, scourge of Gotham's underworld and lord of all the drugs it possessed, could only have the best.
The syringe was full, and as he tilted it back and forth, considering, preparing, he decided. Today was the day. He'd finally do it today. At the rotting table in the abandoned apartment he grew up in, he decided that he'd man up, and do it today. Surrounded by wallpaper that had peeled away before Jason had been born, at the table where he had made himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all on his own, he decided to right a wrong of the universe.
He was ready. He was going to do it. It was so easy, to slip the small needle into his arm. It was nothing. A small pinch on his skin, already numbed from the alcohol.
He was a breath away from hesitating when he pushed the small plunger all the way down.
And then he couldn't breathe at all.
Suddenly the room was warmer than the Gotham winter should allow it to be.
He could see his mother, making him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
He could see Bruce, sitting down next to him, smiling.
He could smell Alfred's cookies.
And it felt so nice. Lying on the floor in a cold, moldy, dark apartment off of Crime Alley in a puddle of his own vomit, he was at home.
A/N: This is not the end, I promise!