A/N: Well, this is it. Only the epilogue left. Happy Halloween. :] Thank you all so much for sticking with me and Jason this whole way, even when I had the update pace of a snail.

Chapter Eleven: And Did You Know?

Hoping felt like dying all over again. Bruce said he was never frightened enough? Old bastard just didn't understand how to scare the kid who was too stubborn to stay in the grave.

His eyes were still closed even though that meant having to work not to meet his conscience's challenging stare, and he realized his breathing was starting to pick up again.

"Jason…" murmured that too-familiar voice coated in gravel, and somehow Bruce had crossed the room to him in the however-many seconds since his eyes had crunched shut, without a sound or a breath of air, and was right there. His own bare hand was fisted in his shirt, over the body armor, where the pain of that rebellious twisting thing was ripping him apart, and he forced his eyes open as he felt a gauntlet on his elbow, and another on his opposite shoulder.

Jerked back from the sight of the looming Bat, and thumped into the smooth white wall, breath gusting out of him.

Bruce didn't crowd after him, had fallen back a step even, but that look on his face, even just the half of it that was showing below the cowl, that worried look, despite the extra lines and those hidden threads of gray, it was the same. The same as it had been all those years ago.

Jason was almost exactly Bruce's height, these days. He could look him back straight in the Bat-masked eye. His breathing was ragged, and he wanted to say it again: I can't trust you.

"Why won't you stop?" he demanded. Too raw, too honest. When he was twelve he'd been willing to trust Batman so easily with so much, but he'd never have risked asking him why. Now he trusted him with nothing and there was no reason not to ask, nothing left to lose or break.

"I never give up on things that are important."

Jason's eyes pricked, and he blinked, hard, banishing the unfamiliar heat, shook his head. "You should stop," he said. One last time. One last try.

He knew very well that Batman never stayed down. Never stopped.

But he knew even better that Bruce Wayne had a limit on his patience, on his warmth. That he'd failed as Robin, taken advantage of the man's generosity, even before he'd practically gift-wrapped himself for the Joker. That he was this, blood and guts and shattered laughter, that he had betrayed everything Batman ever wanted for him, and gloried in it. (That Batman had deserved it, but that didn't make it okay.) That this could not be real, and he could not risk himself on it, and it was too late because he already couldn't let go.

It was suicide, he knew that. Letting himself trust, letting himself hope.

"Just once more."

And…that wasn't his voice. That was Bruce, no, that was Batman, and there had never been a clear line between them because they were only one man, but there was still a divide. "Please, Jason. You don't owe me anything. But give me one more chance. I can't lose you again."

That raw edge in Bruce's voice was familiar, by now. He'd heard it a few times as Robin, and carved it out a few times more as Red Hood, and even provoked it today. But he'd heard it even more recently than that. Just now. He'd heard it from himself.

It was as if what Jason had done, with his choices today, with his staying, and staying, and not betraying, was stab Bruce through with hope, the same way they'd all done to him.

And that made no sense because Bruce didn't need him, never had; he had so many people who loved him, he had his mansion and his mission. Like Leslie said, he'd never have to have an unpleasant day in his life if he decided that was what he wanted. He was the man who had everything. It didn't matter if he got to keep Jason in his little collection.

But it seemed like he didn't know that.

(Or maybe just didn't know it right now. Maybe he'd remember, later. Would Jason be strong enough to turn on him, if he did?)

If they both wanted this so much. Maybe.

Jason dug his teeth into his swollen lip, and thought about a day almost half a lifetime ago (a day in another lifetime who was he kidding) when Batman had stared him down and Jason had hit him with a tire iron and run.

He hadn't escaped then, either. Hadn't really thought he would.

But he'd still given it his best shot.

His eyes flickered shut for a second and again he met that measuring green-blue stare, from the kid he'd been. A child without hope, doing what it took to get by because he refused to lose his life at anyone's pleasure. But he'd also been angry, fierce, had stood up and spat in the eyes of cruelty and hypocrisy because there had been a lot of lines he was willing to cross, a lot of things he'd been willing to do to keep skin and bone together. But none of them had ever meant giving up who he was.

When the world said change or die he'd answered no, because he knew a bad bargain when he heard it.

Nothing in the universe could change Jason Todd unless he decided to change. He'd always believed that. Pickpocket, thief, grifter, cheat, and he'd have sold his body if that had been what it took. But there were some kinds of integrity that were worth dying for a hundred times over. He was who he was.

And yet in the end, after everything, he'd died at the Joker's pleasure. And he'd come back wrong, and that had changed him. And he'd gone through the Pit, and so had that, probably. And then he'd started changing himself.

He wasn't in control of his fate, maybe wasn't even captain of his soul, and he hated that, hated it so much he'd been willing to do anything to pretend it wasn't true. But every grand gesture he'd tried had backfired, and everything had spiraled further and further out of control, and he just….

Jason raised his eyes to Batman. Standing there, just out of arm's reach. Holding himself back. Not trying to force the issue, and not walking away from it. Because this was Jason's choice. And the thing was, that was taking a lot of self-discipline, obviously, which was something you took for granted in Batman. But. Handing over control of something important (it was important, he was important) to someone who had displayed a savant-like ability to make terrible decisions.

Control was everything.

Control yourself. Control your future. Control whether the people around you succeed, surrender, triumph, die.

Bruce had been fighting for that impossibility since he was eight. So if he could give this much—

Jason had chosen to walk up that ramp into the hover-ambulance. He'd chosen to stay here, not breaking the peace, except that one time. Before all that, he'd decided to get on his knees in the blood and try to save Nightwing.

He'd done something right, hadn't he. Something nobody could ignore, even him. That was why Bruce was here, looking at his greatest failure and not looking away.

Asking for one more chance. Offering one more chance.

My little brother, Nightwing had said. Not our enemy today, Red Robin had said. We all did, Leslie had said.

Never that kind of monster, said the Flash.

"I'm sorry," Jason repeated, one more time. And he meant he was sorry for using Bruce the way he had, for trying to come to terms with his own death by punishing Batman. But what he found himself saying out loud was, "I'm sorry I failed you." Not as Robin this time, because getting killed was the least of it. Even if that was where the worst of it started.

Bruce would never, ever be able to tell him now, you've never made me anything but proud.

But. That was the past.

Maybe he would still matter tomorrow. Only one way to find out.

There was more than one way to live in now.

"Not me," Batman said immediately, and then clenched his teeth. "I forgive you," he corrected himself. It was stilted and awkward, and Jason had the suspicion someone else had told him Jason needed to be forgiven, but.

Apparently, Jason had needed to be forgiven. His breath whooshed out of his lungs and he almost sagged into the wall. He'd forgiven Bruce for letting him die, he'd told him that from the start, and maybe he was starting to forgive him for the rest of it, too. For not knowing when he crawled out of his grave. For replacing him, for moving on.

He thought of Earth-15, where Bruce had been dead, where he'd been Batman. Wondered if Bruce would still have been alive, there, if it had been Drake at his back when whatever-it-was happened. Cautious, clever Drake, who knew how to make friends and how to keep a secret, how to hold himself back and how to believe beyond reason, the way Jason used to. "Sorry I wasn't a better Robin," he said.

Bruce's fists clenched. "You have nothing to be sorry for. I should never have put you in that position. I—"

"Whatever," Jason interrupted, because he didn't care and that was so not the point. "I'm not your Robin anymore."

Bruce frowned. Paused for a few seconds, like he was thinking, and Jason let him have them. "You do realize, Jason, that the costume—that Robin was never what made you important. I trusted you with Robin, as Robin, because I trusted you."

"And I let you down."

"You didn't—no. You never let me down. You weren't perfect, but…no one ever is."

"What, not even Bluebird?"

Bruce gave him a very patient look. "I am fairly sure that in the entire time you lived with me, Dick and I never went more than a month at a time without a serious disagreement."

Jason had to allow that. At the time, he'd seesawed between smug that Bruce didn't snap at him like that and worried it would be like that, when he was Dick's age. The irony. He cocked an eyebrow. "Not even you?"

Batman's voice was very dry. "It is a comfort to know that if I ever became deluded enough to believe myself infallible, I would have my family to set me straight."

Jason thought of Earth-51 again, and swallowed.

You never let me down was so completely untrue, and he wanted to get mad at Bruce for lying to him. But it wasn't that kind of lie, was it?

He wasn't sure who he was anymore. What he wanted. Hadn't been in longer than he wanted to examine. But whoever he was—Jason Todd the undead Red Hood, monster, vigilante, street trash, former Robin—he wanted to go home. And that…that was a place to start, right? If he was going to try living like he was alive?

(And then go home. Or make a home. Or rest.)

"You know," Jason said. "I…really hate fucking up." He wasn't the perfectionist little shit his Replacement always had been, or as bad as Bruce. Maybe not even to Grayson levels; there was something in the obsessive way the guy sometimes trained…but. He really hated fucking up.

"Mm," Bruce agreed. Gave himself a small shake, and belatedly pulled the cowl back again, so Jason could see his eyes and didn't have to imagine them. With Batman's fixed inky glower dismissed, he could confirm all over again that little please still lingering. He stared at it, for long enough that someone who wasn't Batman would have started fidgeting, or demanded to know what he thought he was looking at. And it stayed put, even as Bruce's eyebrows climbed questioningly. Jason watched it, waiting for it to rabbit.

And he just…breathed.

"So," he said at last. "Family therapy. Me. And you?"

Pale blue eyes didn't flicker. "It's a little hypocritical to say you should go if I won't."

Jason snorted. "Yeah, you could say that. Not like that stopped you before."

"In my defense, that was advice intended for a scenario where I was already dead," Bruce said mildly. It was okay, though; he was doing the point-acknowledged tilt thing with his head again.

"So you're saying you want this to not be a one-time thing. You want to put us both through this…what, once a week?"

"Approximately."

"Leslie says you bit your last therapist."

"I was nine."

"You were twelve." Jason was guessing.

"Ten."

"Eleven."

"Ten. Barely." Bruce was making the uncompromising Bat-face, the one that just dared you to question him, with just a hint around the edges of his being aware that this argument was totally ridiculous, but he probably wasn't lying; he knew Jason could and would check with Leslie. The look broke into a smile, suddenly, the one Jason had only ever seen in the best moments, when Bruce forgot to wish that Dick had never left.

I did that, he thought. I can make him happy.

It had been a long time since he'd felt like he had the power to make anybody happy.

"Okay," he said. Bruce blinked. "Okay, I'll try it."

Bruce blinked again. "You'll…"

"I will come to your house and act like a civilized human being, and Alfred will probably feed us dinner and expect us to talk like normal people. Relatives. It can be like one of those legendary awful Thanksgivings neither of us ever had." Actually, he wasn't sure Bruce hadn't—he'd been in Leslie and Alfred's custody as a kid, but he did have a couple of cousins on his mom's side, and he took family seriously, in theory. He might have spent at least one holiday with them. But if so, it must have been impressively awful, because the experiment had not been repeated or referred to ever in Jason's hearing. "And if we survive that, we can see about this Doctor Ming."

Bruce blinked a third time, and Jason realized he had not actually believed Jason was ever going to cave, but before he could get mad about it, the smile broke again, wider, brighter, and Bruce said, "That's, that's great. Jason."

And, okay, he just made Batman stutter. While smiling like Jason had caused the sunrise. He could forgive a lot, for that.

"Heh," he said, shrugging. Was pretty sure he was wearing a pretty stupid-looking face himself. "Little soldier boy comes marching home."

Bruce's smile went sort of frozen and complicated, but what could you expect. Jason snorted again.

"I'm gonna need a while," he warned. There was riding a wave and then there was letting yourself get swept away, and there was no way he was going today, or tomorrow. In fact he should probably just skip Dick's whole convalescence.

You know. Just in case.

Bruce frowned, and Jason knew the guy was thinking that if he let him get away, he might change his mind and chicken out. "I figure I'll be in contact with Drake for the next six to twelve weeks." He doubted the kid ever slept six hours in a night, but that just meant a three-day adrenaline crash like this would hit him all the harder. "I'll come by when that's over."

Shouldn't leave it longer, because then he really might chicken out. Weekly contact with his Replacement would either go explosively wrong, which was less likely to be a huge deal if it happened at long range, or ease him into being in civil contact, and either way it would give him a chance to adjust.

"Twelve weeks is too long," declared Batman, high-handed as usual. "No more than eight."

"Medium-sized-bird isn't going to much care for an intelligence report on the state of Wayne Manor," Jason argued, which was weak, but maybe he wanted it to be. Bruce smiled.

"He might," he disagreed, as mildly as Bruce ever said anything when he wasn't lying for his public. "Tim isn't home very much anymore."

"Right, because of the baby monster."

"Don't call him that."

"Did you know he listens better to commands in Arabic?"

Bruce raised an eyebrow, all exactly how do you know that? And to be honest, Jason didn't actually know if it was true; his success might have been the result of surprise as much as anything. It would make some sense if the little Ghul had learned English as a second or third language, though, and if English orders didn't hit his brain quite as directly as what he'd learned in the cradle. He hoped Bruce tried it. He hoped he was there to see the brat's face when he did.

Bruce's face had gone distant, for a few seconds, and now he focused on Jason again. "You want to know something funny?" he asked, and he was so completely Bruce that Jason expected to be called 'Jay lad' any second now.

"I dunno. Will it make me want to kill you again?"

"I hope not," said Bruce, which meant Jason should probably say no, but he wasn't much for doing the sensible thing, so he gestured, go ahead. Bruce's mouth caught on one side, wry. "You remember that when you and I met, Dick and I weren't speaking. So my own faith in my parenting skills wasn't very high, and I asked myself, when I sat down with the paperwork for your guardianship, whether this was a good idea." Jason frowned. He wasn't seeing the humor here.

"Then I thought about the room you showed me, and your life expectancy on Crime Alley, and said to myself, Oh well, even if he hates me in the end, I can't possibly make things worse."

Jason blinked.

And then he was laughing, full throated, lung-heaving guffaws that bent him over until he slapped the blood-stiffened fabric on his knees. It hurt just like hope but it was a good hurt, not scraping at scars or tearing off scabs. More like a broken bone realigning.

And like the slip-lock of cleanly broken bone it ended quickly, and he straightened up, let himself grin at Batman, all the sharp edges and old wounds but also all the yearning weakness and bleeding gaps in his armor and that helpless fondness he'd been drowning out for so long it felt foreign. "You're right," he allowed. "That is pretty funny."

Bruce made a face at that, a weird one that Jason figured meant he was remembering something—ten to one it involved the Joker and he was not asking, okay—and then smiled again, not quite that smile but still.

Had Bruce managed to make things worse? Maybe Jason would have lived to adulthood, if Bruce hadn't taken him home. If he hadn't had Robin's reputation to make him that little bit more overconfident, to bring him that little bit more to a psycho's attention.

On the other hand, he could still really easily have wound up surrounded by larger men, pinned down and broken until he couldn't fight back. That wasn't a scenario unique to crimefighting. And there were worse ways to die than being beaten and burned, there were even worse reasons to die that way than betrayal. Bruce had given him more of a fighting chance than he ever would have had on his own.

In the end, it had been his choice to try to tackle what had become the final problem on his own. He'd had the option of waiting for his partner to back him up. He'd never had that, on the street where hope went to die.

And if he had lived to adulthood out there in Crime Alley, maybe he'd never have killed anyone. Almost for sure, he'd never have gained the skills to kill that many people, even if he'd cracked up and gotten his hands on military surplus gear and gone into one of the Black Mask's hideouts spraying bullets. But he'd never have saved nearly as many, either. Not if he'd tried his whole life.

Maybe Batman hadn't really changed anything for him. Maybe it was his destiny, to die young and bloody and stupid, to wind up falling off the narrow line strung between good man and monster on the crooked streets of Gotham. Maybe it had to be like this, Earth-15's annoyingly skilled Batman notwithstanding.

Or maybe it was up to him to decide.

"You should have it out with Leslie," he remarked, slouching back against the wall as though there had been no emotional debridement over Nightwing's hospital bed. When Batman gave him a dubious, sidelong look, he defended his statement with, "Hey, it is strictly freaky how many of the same issues she has about you as you do about us." Me, he'd been going to say, but it cut itself off before it got there. The meaning would get through.

Bruce tipped his head contemplatively. "I don't believe I have the resources to 'have it out' with anyone else today. I should confer with her about Dick's condition, though." His voice turned distinctly wry. "I will practice being civil."

"You can be civil to more than one person per day? Guess old dogs can learn new tricks."

Batman's lips pursed at him in a dizzyingly familiar refusal to laugh, and he pulled up the cowl and vanished inside himself. "I'll be right back," he said, sweeping toward the door. Turned, before he opened it. "Jason," he said seriously. "Are you sure?"

"I'm actually sorry, if that's what you mean." Batman didn't turn away, like that was somehow unsatisfactory, and Jason huffed in annoyance. "Are you?"

"Yes." Short, sharp, somehow reassuring. Apologies Bruce forced on him were annoying, but being able to demand confirmation of emotion from Batman—well, it wouldn't last. Well, maybe in therapy?

"I'm ready to keep talking whenever you are," Jason challenged.

"Later," said Bruce, and sounded like he might mean it.

Family therapy with Batman was going to go right up there with being rescued by good-Joker and beaten up by himself in a Batsuit, on Jason's life record of the surreal.

…his life was kind of weird.

(Maybe, in eight weeks, if they kept it together long enough for this thing to actually happen, Jason would get up the courage to ask just how much Bruce really forgave him for.)

Victory decisive, Batman slipped out into the corridor. With him gone, hanging around on the far side of the room from Nightwing seemed silly, and he walked over. The inside of his head felt—delicate. Like a heap of wineglasses, which if destabilized would start falling and shattering and crushing one another, but which for now were balanced with a distribution of forces that left everything not already broken reasonably intact. Or at least not actively falling apart.

He stared down onto Grayson's face in its silly little mask. Embarrassing as it had been, it was probably a good thing he'd caught some sleep earlier. Today felt like it had lasted about a million years.

"So here I am. Back to playing nursemaid—" Jason saw eyelashes flicker and raised his voice a little as he corrected the rest of his sentence to, "to certain jackasses who thought they could just go and die and leave me holding the bag of baby birds."

A smile stole its way onto Dick's battered face, and only then did his eyes actually come open. Half-masted and glazed from drugs or pain or both, but still looking more alert than last time Jason had seen him awake. When he'd had to be reminded that Jason wasn't dead anymore. Almost as awake as he'd been handing out his last pronouncements and dying messages on the battlefield like an aspiring martyr. Tough cookies, he was going to have to try for his sainthood again another day.

"You were right, by the way," Jason informed the patient. "Replacement is a moron."

"I said that?" Grayson asked blurrily, and blinked hard, like he was trying to wake himself the rest of the way up.

"Well, not exactly. But while you were playing hooky from the land of the living, I had to bribe him to go home and sleep. Like enforcing naptime on a five-year-old, I swear." He sighed. "Anyway. Welcome back."

Dick's eyes had grown alert enough to twinkle. "Welcome back yourself," he said. "Little Wing."

Now there was a nickname he absolutely, totally hadn't missed. And welcome back, huh? He narrowed his eyes. "How long were you awake?"

"Since around when nobody's perfect," Dick admitted. "I just faked with everything I had. No way was I interrupting that."

Jason frowned into Grayson's dopey morphine expression and the all-too-alert smug look in his eyes. "What, you think this is actually going to work?"

"Jaybird, there is no way I'm letting this fail."

"Why do you even care?" Most of the sharpness was missing from the snarl, and his voice was oddly small. "I've tried to kill you all."

Dick tried to shrug, cringed, and said, "You're sorry. Family can get kind of messy. That doesn't make it less important. You know how your memorial is still up in the cave?"

Jason tensed a little. Bluebird had a hell of a way of not letting this fail. "Yeah."

"Because you came back, but you didn't come home." He paused, and then added, in a quieter voice, like he was half talking to himself, "I didn't really get it until I watched Roy go through the same thing and looked back to compare, but I think…he's been waiting for you to come home all along. He knew it couldn't happen, but…"

But he never finished grieving. And then it turned out it should have been possible, and it still wasn't.

"And here I thought it was cuz it's actually a monument to his guilt complex and has nothing to do with me at all."

Dick snorted, with some care, and the wobbly smile actually widened. "Well. Yeah. That too, a little. But mostly. You didn't come back."

Jason rolled his eyes. "I get it already; I'm a giant douchebag. So are the rest of you, is all I'm saying."

"Ah, brotherhood. A balm to soothe all wounds."

Jason smirked. "So I guess you slept through the part where Bats and I agreed you're a manipulative little bitch."

Nightwing's mouth dropped open, drew into an offended O, and then he closed his eyes and shook with silent laughter. "Ow," he got out after a few seconds, opening one slightly watering eye to peer at Jason. "Well, as long as you're agreeing about something, I guess."

Jason pressed his hand over what he knew to be a relatively unbruised section of Grayson's shoulder. "Thanks," he said quietly. He wouldn't say it again.

Nightwing beamed, one of the bandages on his face pulling away from the skin. "Any time, Little Wing."

"I'm taller than you are, dammit."

"Little brothers are little forever."

"If you were any less of an invalid, I'd hit you."

"Just give the pretty face a chance to heal up."

"Who's pretty here, Grayson? Cuz it's not you. Not even a little bit."

The tip of Dick's tongue poked out in response, because Nightwing was secretly five years old and couldn't get his mouth wide enough to stick out the whole thing, and Jason rolled his eyes. That gravelly voice was getting to him. "You want a straw, or ice chips?"

"Ice. Please."

Jason nodded, and went to find ice, and possibly a clock.

It turned out, clock located, that he'd slept a little over three hours, which meant Grayson had been out for seven of his predicted eight to ten, because he was stubborn and stupid and had had way too much opportunity to build up tolerance to most common anesthetics.

Jason found a nurse—not Rourdan—coming out of the room two doors down, where the dreadlocked kid from the ambulance was conked out with his three broken limbs all dangling in suspension, and told her Nightwing in #27 was awake ahead of schedule and required ice chips. Batman, he found standing with Leslie in one of the transparent tube-tunnels that ran between sections of the base. He paused for a second, looking at the way they stood close enough together that Leslie had to tip her head way back and Bruce had to duck his, and then swung inside.

"Hey," he said, his voice made weird and flat by the narrow space bounded by flexible plastic. Rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort when both of them flicked their attention to him. "Uh, Big Bird woke up. There's a pretty nurse in with him now, feeding him ice, but. He'll probably be expecting you."

Left it purposely unclear which of them he was speaking to; wasn't totally surprised when it was Bruce who broke out of the tableau first, heading toward the recovery module. Jason was deciding between stepping out of the way and turning around to play tour guide like Batman didn't know where he was going, when Leslie said, "It's still true, you know. I left the city for Stephanie, but I'll stay for you. Again."

Jason had a perfect view of Bruce's face, in spite of the mask, as he froze in place halfway up the tube, just for a second, his mouth all tight and flat, and if you had any experience with masked faces, you could tell he closed his eyes.

Then, "Thank you," flat and nearly cold and without using her name, even though she didn't have a secret ID to protect, and he strode off, past Jason who only just wove out of the way. He shot a glare at the end of the Bat's vanishing cape, not so much because he'd been an asshole—he'd outright admitted he was emotionally wrung out and done making nice for the day—as because he resented that Bruce apparently had the resolve to stride away from parental figures saying things like that. Maybe it got easier by the time you were fifty, or maybe Jason was just a soft touch under all the snarl. Whatever. He arched an eyebrow at Leslie, who looked wry.

"It's not the kind of thing you can fix in one day," she said, and Jason had no idea how much she knew or had guessed about him and Bruce and what they'd spent, god, forty minutes or so in that white plastic cube talking to death.

"Yeah," he agreed, with a rolling shrug. Rome wasn't built, and all that. Then grinned. "Say, how old was B when you gave up on therapy?"

Ten, as it turned out. Dammit.

In the end, he didn't go back to Dick's room before he left. Now that the birdie was awake, it was just going to get crowded, and his stint of guard duty was over. Better catch the next copter out of here before anything had the chance to go wrong. This place was probably still within the borders of Pennsylvania; he'd get back to Philly, pick up the stuff from his hotel room, and send Drake a report on events in Caldera Epsilon. (Just to be a shit, Jason planned to include helpful feedback on the toilet block and free vending machines. The extra typing time was totally worth the face his Replacement would make.)

Dammit, he was going to have to contact someone other than Drake to confirm how many hours the asshole had spent sleeping.

He should get a cell phone again.

It was a close thing, which showed how much his head was not in the game right now, but he remembered to stop by Ops to get his stuff back on the way to the landing pad. The desk was being manned by a little guy in glasses so thick he was either pretty much blind or hadn't heard that lens-grinding technology had advanced since the sixties, and he scratched at his hairline and squinted at his register when Jason asked for his stuff under the name 'Red Hood.' After about thirty seconds of watching the guy scroll up and down, Jason started to tap his foot meaningfully. It wasn't like he had a sentimental attachment to these specific weapons, though the ambidextrous safety-trigger on the selective-fire Beretta was nice, considering how often he needed to shoot left-handed on short notice, and kind of hard to find.

His funds weren't actually bottomless, either, since he'd rejected Talia's patronage and gotten out of the drug lord business. And he didn't think it would be in good taste to spend the probable upcoming Batman bribe money on guns.

"I've got a 'Little Red Riding Hood' here," the clerk offered doubtfully, after a little longer.

And now Jason laughed again, laughter that didn't tear itself from his throat or go along with any of those tearing, settling sensations deep in his chest. Laughed so hard, for so long, that glasses guy started surreptitiously checking the distance to get his hand on his emergency button. Jason waved him off, straightening up and reaching for the stylus to authenticate his brand new alias, still chuckling. Well played, Rourdan.

Well played.

A/N: 'You're right. That is pretty funny' is what Batman says to Joker at the end of The Killing Joke. Meanwhile, Leslie's cryptic comment referenced a conversation she and Bruce had during No Man's Land.

In the ADitF flashback, one of the things that happened in between Jason hitting Batman with a tire iron and Bruce Wayne taking in a new orphan was a visit to Jason's squat. Which appeared to be an actual room in an actual building, but not at all homey. On a less canon-related note, ambidextrous safety triggers should be more common, dammit. Equipment suitable for left-handed use can be hard to find, and since Jason likes to go in guns akimbo, I figure he would value that feature.

In 'The Cult,' after Jason gets Bruce out and they retreat to regroup while the Deacon takes over Gotham, Bruce describes his own internal condition as 'broken glass.' ('The Cult' was basically the first rehearsal for the next twenty-odd years of Batman torture, I think. Canonically it was the first time he really broke, though I believe earlier occasions were retconned in later.)