Chapter One: Words
Disclaimer: I do not own Batman or the characters created by DC, only my own characters, and plot.
Here we are again folks! A new beginning, a new story, a new genre!
I've been a comic fan since I was a kid, and I love Batman, the characters are diverse and beautifully developed.
And yet my baby Jason Todd never gets enough love, thus this story.
This story will deal with domestic and emotional abuse, please do not read it if it triggers you in any way.
I hope you guys enjoy, here's the first chapter of Sermon.
These are my words, this is my voice, this is my Sermon
- James Arthur, Sermon
If there was one thing Jason Todd hated, it was waking up at six in the morning on a Monday with seven stitches in his lower abdomen.
Mondays, as a rule, were the worst day of the week. But the Monday that dawned exactly one week after Labor Day was particularly hellish for a plethora of reasons in Jason's sleep-addled brain.
Firstly, it was ass-o-clock in the morning and he was awake which his dearly abused circadian rhythm was protesting loudly.
Secondly, he had just fallen into bed not even two hours prior and not even a boat-sized mug of Alfred's strongest brewed coffee could make him function at something even close to 80%.
He had insisted to Bruce that he could handle a patrol of West Harlow before bed, and the Bat, to his credit, had agreed with palpable reluctance and an insistence that his protégé turn in before the clock at City Hall struck one.
In his defense, he couldn't have known about the arms deal the two would stumble upon during their seemingly quiet patrol that shredded that condition. Nor could the Dark Knight have foreseen the ebony haired teen getting his ass handed to him several times over when one of the hoodlums they were trying to apprehend pulled a military-grade tactical knife and slashed Robin across the pelvis with it.
By the time the Dynamic Duo had returned to the Batcave, it was well past three in the morning and Jason was starting to see spots from the blood loss.
Alfred had stitched him up and Bruce had carried him towards his room – despite loud protests – and somewhere in between, he had fallen asleep (or unconscious, it was anyone's guess really).
He figured he slept through his alarm when a gentle but firm shaking of his shoulder roused him from the depths of slumber.
"-first day of Junior Year, Master Jason." Alfred's voice filtered in through his haze of sleep and the next thing he knew he was accosted by early morning sunshine.
"Jesus, Alfred." Jason groaned loudly and burrowed under one of his pillows to escape the burning light. Or rather tried to burrow as the moment he twisted around a sharp pain prodded him from his lower stomach and he froze, hissing in pain.
The aged butler tutted his disapproval from the edge of the bed before swift fingers removed the pillow that obscured Jason's discomfort.
"If it wasn't so imperative that you be present for the first day of the school year I'd have you on bed rest for a week."
"For once, I'm with you on that one, Alfie." Jason ground out through a clenched jaw, hefting himself out of bed with a few mumbled curses.
"Knowing the full capacity of your distaste for being confined to a flat surface for longer than six hours, that in it of itself is a minor miracle, sir."
Alfred hovered behind his youngest charge as the teenager shuffled to the bathroom, his sharp gaze searching for any excuse to fuss.
Flicking on the light in the bathroom, Jason winced and resisted the urge to cover his eyes with his hand before wincing further as he took in his reflection.
"Well I look like death warmed over." He muttered, scowling at the multiple bruises and lacerations that littered his torso and arms. Not to mention the puckering red wound that peeked over the top of his flannel pajama pants, three of the seven stitches glaring at him.
"An astute assessment, sir, but I believe the expression is 'death warmed up'." Alfred corrected, still standing behind against the bathroom wall.
Jason paused, mid-toothpaste squeeze, and turned to give the butler a look.
"No it is not."
"Indeed it is, Master Jason."
"Alfred, death warmed up makes no sense. You aren't nuking death in a microwave."
"By the time this little repartee is over, there will be no time for breakfast to be brought up. I therefore suggest you concede and bow out to finish your morning routine, sir." Alfred glanced at his watch before giving Jason an impatient raise of his brow.
Jason narrowed his eyes suspiciously before turning back to the mirror.
"Lording breakfast over my head as a way to win an argument, not cool, Alfred." He paused again, a thought dawning on him.
"Bring breakfast up? What, is it my birthday?"
"Not since the last time I checked, sir, but I did take the liberty of deciding to have you break the fast in your room this morning, yes."
"Phy?" Jason questioned around his toothbrush, pointedly ignoring Alfred's disapproving look in favor of spitting out his excess toothpaste-foam.
"The time it would take you to descend the stairs, eat a wholesome meal and return to your rooms to collect whatever miscellaneous items you will have forgotten would put you too far behind schedule to be punctual for your first day of school." He handed Jason a hand towel after the former had finished rinsing his mouth.
"Now then," he began after Jason had risen from the marble bowl. "On the issue of your morning ablution." He produced a roll of what Jason realized was plastic wrap.
It took him a moment to put it together, after Alfred glanced at the shower behind him and then at his newly stitched wound, clarity dawned on Jason and he groaned.
"For fu-"
"I'd watch your language, Master Jason, lest you'd like to earn a few more stitches."
Only on a freaking Monday.
"If you keep glowering like that, your face is going to get stuck."
Jason turned from the window of the town car to give Bruce, who hadn't even looked up from his paper, a flat look.
"Coming from the king of the brooding stare, that is hysterical."
Usually, a remark like that coming from Jason before nine in the morning wasn't all that noteworthy. However, the tone in which the teenager had spat the words as if they were poisonous enough to burn a hole in the upholstery, had Bruce looking up over the paper at his adopted son, who deflated a little at the unamused stare.
"Jay-" Bruce sighed, laying the newspaper across his lap to see the youth to his left fully.
Before he could expand further, Jason slumped back into his seat with arms folded across his chest.
"I know, I know, 'watch your tone, Jason. Don't slouch, Jason. Try to act like you belong in polite society, Jason.'"
Bruce's gaze sharpened at the pointed words and he fully abandoned his paper, turning to study the teenager closely.
"Do you want me to guess why you're upset or would you rather spare us both a pointless twenty seconds and tell me yourself?" the vigilante questioned after a few beats of silence.
A muscle in Jason's jaw ticked and to anyone else the movement would have been invisible but Bruce knew the youth before him well enough to see it as a white flag of surrender slowly unfurling.
Bruce waited, his patience rewarded when Jason finally let out a long breath and kicked his feet out in front of him, choosing to study the laces of his uniform shoes than meet his father's eyes.
"Michael Dennst sent out a blast text to the whole grade this morning with a link to the stupid Labor Day party story in the Gazette. I haven't even set foot on campus and I'm already a laughing stock." Jason grumbled, looking like the human embodiment of misery.
Bruce winced inwardly. I knew that garden party was a bad idea from the beginning.
Due to the heightened activity of Bruce's 'after hours' duties, the socialite side of his life had taken a hit and the Gotham elite had begun to voice their unhappiness. An unhappy elite made for a suspicious elite, and thus Bruce had decided to throw an end of summer Labor Day garden party as a bone to throw to the horde.
Bruce knew of Jason's strong dislike of the one-percenters that flocked to these types of events, not to mention the events themselves, but after nearly five years of being in the middle of the fray that was the Gotham elite he had learned to keep a lid on his temper and play the part of the grateful pauper turned prince.
And then it had all gone to ruin at the damn garden party.
It hadn't been Jason's fault, really, it hadn't. But when three older, intoxicated teenagers decided to gang up on the incognito-Robin in a quiet corner of the Wayne gardens, his survival instincts had kicked in and he had sent all three running, crying, for their mothers.
Which had felt pretty great in the moment, and pretty damn stupid the moment one of them blabbed to their city councilmen father and he demanded Jason be arrested on assault charges.
Despite the security footage of the confrontation clearly showing Jason defending himself and pointedly not instigating the fight, not to mention the only superficial bruising on all three older boys and the Jim Gordon actually laughing the three families out of his office when they demanded he put the Wayne boy behind bars, the tabloids had eaten it up and by the end of the holiday weekend Jason's name had been dragged through the mud several times.
It was a PR nightmare, and despite Bruce's best efforts to shield his son from it, he couldn't filter everything and Jason had all but become a recluse the week before school started, becoming noticeably moodier the closer the first day loomed.
Bruce felt a wave of conflicting indignation and empathy as he processed Jason's explanation.
Empathy firstly for his son because he knew how much Jason wanted to like school. He loved to learn and loved to better himself but was constantly being ostracized by his classmates for where he came from before he had been adopted into the Wayne family. Making friends seemed to be impossible when everyone around him was either a classist asshole or were too intimidated by the Wayne name to make an effort.
Secondly indignation, because who in their right mind screwed with a Wayne?"
"I'm technically not a Wayne. But solid effort there, old man."
Bruce jerked back into full awareness to realize he had said that out loud, and Jason was giving him a partly bemused, partly bitter smirk.
Instead of opening the can of worms that was the issue of Jason's legal last name ("I'm not hyphenating shit, Bruce. Only assholes hyphenate their last names." "Language." "I'm not wrong."), Bruce steered the conversation in a more productive direction.
"Did you get this text message too?" the Wayne heir questioned gesturing at the cell that Jason had been clutching in a white knuckled grasp ever since they had gotten into the car, his hand reaching for his own phone with the names of the several defamation lawyers he had on retainer coming to mind.
Jason gave him a look that roughly translated to 'are you a complete imbecile?'
"No." he said, dragging out the vowel like he was explaining something to a child. "Colin Huang texted me a screenshot. We were lab partners in Physics last year and I saved his ass on the final project. He felt bad and decided to clue me in, I guess." Jason shrugged and turned back to glare out the window.
Not for the first time, Bruce noted how comparatively easier it was to track down and bring in delusional criminals every night than it was to find the right words to comfort his seventeen-year-old.
"Are you more upset about the article itself or the mass text?" was what he went with in the end. Tackle two issues at once.
Jason shrugged again, blowing his bangs out of his eyes.
He needs a haircut. Bruce mused, before snapping back into focus as the blue-eyed teen began to speak.
"I don't know, they're equally shi-" He glanced up to the front of the town car, where Alfred was peering at him with a patient yet unnerving stare, "annoying. I knew everybody was going to be talking about it, but I figured I'd be spared from the talk of people who weren't actually there. Not wanting to admit they tune into gossip and all that." He waved a dismissive hand through the air, but Bruce could see how much it still upset him.
He placed a hand on Jason's shoulder, squeezing gently in a comforting gesture.
"They're just words, Jay."
The defeat that simmered in Jason's gaze when he turned to meet his eyes broke Bruce's heart, as did the words that his son murmured as the car rolled to a stop outside Gotham Academy.
"I'd vote for sticks and stones at this point, B."
For some high schoolers having their classmates, upper and lower classmen alike, skittering out of their way as they strode down the hallway was something enviable, a sign of power.
For Jason, it was a prologue to just how shitty his junior year of high school was kicking off to be.
After scaring some freshmen – unintentionally, of course – away from his locker and shoving his books as calmly as possible into their designated place, Jason set off in the direction of his first period – Eleventh Grade AP English.
He had spent an entire afternoon at the Manor practically bouncing from room to room with exuberance when the schedules had been mailed out. Eleventh Grade AP was the only course in the entire school that offered Shakespeare, Doyle, Fitzgerald and Austen in one class and Jason had been waiting practically since the day he started high school to take the class.
He was even beginning to forget the sting of the prior twenty minutes when he opened the classroom door, just as the warning bell sounded.
The second he stepped through the doorway the chatter that had been brewing came to a screeching halt, similar to the cacophonous kind of way an orchestra stops playing without being cued to.
Fifteen sets of unwelcoming eyes bored into his body and it took all of his training, from the street and from Robin, to not turn on his heel and walk away from the bullshit that his day had become.
Instead, Jason schooled his expression into that of bored neutrality and loped his way to the back row of desks, ignoring the murmuring that had picked up as he went.
"Who let the street rat back in the building?" One girl – Angela Martin - stage whispered to her seat partner as Jason took his seat.
The guy, Jason thought his name could be Eric, just snorted and fixed him with a look of contempt before replying at the same volume.
"His daddy paid his way out of the gutter, Angie. You know how these things go when it comes to Bruce Wayne, he writes a check and gets to do whatever the hell his candy ass comes up with." Eric sneered, and the students surrounding him dissolved into haughty laughter.
Lashing out makes it worse, keep your mouth shut Todd. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. You're Robin, Boy Wonder, and could hand any of these stuck up rich kids their asses without even trying. Jason chanted to himself, eyes averted towards the windows, trying to keep a handle on his already precariously balanced temper.
He was so focused on checking his anger, he didn't notice the new addition to the class room.
"Oh you don't want to sit there."
Jason's gaze snapped back to Angela, and then followed her eye line to the person standing next to him.
He hadn't even heard the girl come in. She was short, even standing next to him she looked small, and pretty with long chestnut hair and eyes the color of bluebells.
The girl paused, one hand on the chair next to Jason and the other clutching a messenger bag resting lightly on the desk. She looked confused, and a little alarmed as all the attention in the room turned to focus on her, and her cheeks bloomed with color.
"Oh, sorry, I didn't know it was taken." She apologized, shifting with the awkward pause that followed her statement.
Angela broke the brief silence with a chattering laugh.
"Oh it's not, the company is a bit…uncouth, if you know what I mean."
Jason rolled his eyes as Angela and Eric's cronies erupted into quiet laughter again.
He snuck a peek at the brunette to his left to find her still staring at the other girl, now with more wariness than confusion.
"I don't follow."
Angela rolled her eyes this time, and opened her mouth to shoot something probably catty back, when her eyes wandered to the label of the messenger bag laying on the table and she froze.
"You're Aurora Stathos?"
For the third time in five minutes, the classroom fell silent as Angela's question hung in the air.
The brunette – Aurora, apparently – colored a deeper shade of pink and covered her messenger bag with her burgundy uniform jacket.
"Y-yeah, that would be me."
All of Alfred's etiquette and socio-political lessons that had been hammered into Jason's brain since he was twelve and new to the Wayne household kicked into muscle memory as everything Jason knew about the name Stathos floated to the top of his mind.
Stathos family; originally from Coast City, owners of Stathos Inc. – fibers manufacturers. Supply diverse fabric materials from Chinese silk to high-end fashion designers to synthetic skin prototypes to medical research facilities. In the one percent of one percent. He recited to himself. He didn't remember hearing about any Stathos members moving to Gotham, but then again he had been a little preoccupied as of late to soak up that particular tidbit. It would have had to been recent, he deduced, because Bruce hadn't mentioned anything about another tycoon family moving to the area.
"Sit with us, Stathos, we wouldn't want you feeling uncomfortable on your first day." Eric's voice broke Jason's thought process, and he gave the other boy a flat look.
"If you don't want her uncomfortable you'd be directing her to the other side of the room instead of staring at her chest." Jason snarked and Eric's lip curled into a snarl.
"Shut up, sewer slime."
Jason actually laughed at the attempted dig.
"Aw, Eric I was so hoping you'd become creative with your insults in the three months I was blessed with your absence."
"Guess you'll have to get used to disappointment."
"I've been forced to look at your ugly mug every day for the past three years, believe me, I'm used to it."
A choked sort of giggle sprouted up next to Jason, and to his complete shock, the formerly silent new girl began to laugh.
"I-I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt but, he's funny." The brunette kept giggling, gesturing to Jason as her shoulders continued to shake.
Jason almost started laughing himself when he saw the way Eric's face fell and the shock that colored Angela's face.
She was the first to recover, her lips pursed and eyes narrowed in displeasure.
"Aurora, come sit with us." The blonde girl patted the empty seat next to her as if baiting a lapdog. It was almost a demand and one that Jason thought was a little outrageous for somebody who hadn't even given their name yet.
The final bell cut through the conversation like a knife, and at that moment Mr. Mathers swept into the classroom.
"Good morning everyone, take your seats." The aged schoolteacher greeted them brusquely and turned to the black board at the front of the room.
With little more than a not-so-apologetic shrug, the Stathos girl plopped down into the chair next to Jason and placed her bag on the floor before turning to face him.
"Hi." She chirped in a whisper as Mathers began roll call.
Jason stared at her a moment before allowing a tiny, almost friendly smile onto his lips.
"Hi."
"So was he really staring at my chest?" she murmured, tilting her head in the direction of a still glowering Eric.
"Only when you weren't looking."
She hummed in understanding before sticking her hand out.
"Aurora Stathos, pleased to meet the uncouth but thankfully un-creepy company."
Jason wondered if he should be offended or not, but the bright glint of mischief in her eyes threw him more in the direction of not, so he placed his hand in hers and shook.
"Jason Todd, the pleasure is all mine."
Aurora opened her mouth to respond, but before she could speak Jason's heightened senses picked up on an object hurtling at their heads, sailing through the air.
Without having to really think about it, Jason grabbed one of his books and batted the wadded up paper ball away from where it would have made contact with Aurora's head. He heard Eric and one of his friends curse lowly as the paper wad bounced off into a corner, away from its intended target – Jason.
What he also hadn't been thinking about until the moment a sharp, stabbing pain erupted in his lower abdomen with the quick motion of deflecting the paper wad, were the stitches he had so blissfully forgotten about.
It wasn't until Aurora gasped loudly that he realized what exactly he had done, his gaze shooting downwards towards where a large red stain was quickly blooming on his dress shirt.
Motherfu-
"You're bleeding!"
Awesome.
What was that ending, honestly.
This is un-beta'd because it's two thirty in the morning, I have to be up early tomorrow but my plot bunnies wouldn't let me sleep until this thing was done.
Let me know what you guys think, chapter two should be coming at some point in the near future (I hope)
- Rose