And When She Was Happy
a B:TAS story
by Merlin Missy
Copyright 2006
PG
DC and Warner Bros. own the characters and situations. Except Jason. This is a sequel to "The Next Best Thing to Normal," but familiarity with that story is not required. Thanks to Dot for the beta. Spoilers for "BB: Return of the Joker"
Jason has been at the hospital for almost a week, going home only to sleep. Debbie says the girls miss him, but as they're two years old, Jason knows it's really Debbie. She doesn't like his family much, and she has good reasons. Mom gets along with her, but Aunt Pam can't stand her. Too much alike, he thinks and never says to either.
He sips his eighth cup of coffee today, thinking he'll get something to eat later in the canteen. The hallway is well-lit, and there are police officers lounging outside the door to one room. They know who they've finally caught, but the joke's on them, because Aunt Pam isn't going to be really caught ever.
"Ten minutes," says the cop on duty, and Jason nods a polite thanks as he sets down his half-empty cup and goes into the room. The door is locked behind him. Outside the window, he knows there are SWAT members on duty on the floors above and below, and he's almost sure he saw the sniper's nest atop the building opposite when he reconned the place six days ago. They are thorough. Aunt Pam isn't leaving without their company, and neither her former enemies nor her former accomplices are going to show up to see her without their notice.
But Jason Dennis doesn't have a criminal record (nor do Jason Quinn, Jason Todd, Jason van Lauten or anyone else he's ever been) and he's listed as family, and they let him visit in short bursts during the day.
"Hi, Jason," says Aunt Pam.
"Hey," he says, kissing her on the forehead. She's too warm, a hothouse flower, and she coughs. The disease is eating her from within. Just in the past five days, he would swear she's lost twenty pounds from her already slim frame.
He doesn't regret bringing her here, and he knows she doesn't resent it, not now.
They've already talked as much as they can. He's shown her the pictures of Delia and Deirdre he has in his wallet so many times the photos are wearing, and anyway she has copies of her own back at a home she will never see again. Instead he holds her thin, warm hand, and listens to her raspy breaths as he tries to remember the words to songs she taught him when he was a kid.
His ten minutes are going to be up soon. He wishes her room could be filled with flowers, and he knows there's no way the police would allow it.
"You know where to bury me, don't you?"
He nods. She bought the plot years ago; he has her power of attorney and will inherit everything she dared mention in her will. When the lawyer asked, and she paid him enough not to ask much, she said Jason was the son of a distant cousin. He knows there will be scrutiny after everything comes to light, knows someone somewhere is probably trying to figure out who he is even now, knows his mothers called in enough favors from enough people to hide him forever.
"You're a good boy."
"I had a good mom. And I also had my mother," he replies. It's their joke.
Her eyes focus on his. "Tonight. I think it will be tonight." Jason stills the shudder through his bones. They both understand the room is bugged, so he can't ask her what she wants to happen next.
"Love you," he says, and presses his lips to her hand when the cop raps on the door to tell him his time is up.
Outside, he grabs his coffee and tosses the rest into the trash. "Not stayin'?" asks the cop who let him in. Usually he's here until visiting hours are over.
"I need to get home." Jason is good at glad smiles, and gives his best to the officers watching him. Jason knows how to be everyone's best friend.
The drive home is tedious. He's been missing traffic leaving the hospital at night, but this is rush hour, and he turns on the news to kill time. The League prevented a disaster in Cuba. The president of Kasnia is under investigation for fraud. The police aren't discussing any leads in the current serial killing investigation.
Jason turns off the radio. He isn't a cape, not a hero and not a villain, though he knows enough about the business to know too much. He also knows his mother's only saving grace with the costumes is that she has not spoken a single word out of turn since before the day he was born.
Aunt Pam has led a less discreet life, but she's tried to keep her nose clean for Jason's sake when it's been feasible. Her last big heist was two years ago. Some of the things she's done have long statutes of limitations, and some don't have any.
He turns the car suddenly, cutting off a guy in an older Honda, and swerves onto the exit ramp to another part of town. He doesn't come here often. He's got a steady job as not quite middle management at a sporting goods company, specializing in imports. He has learned to play a reasonably bad game of golf with his supervisors and potential business partners, and he has practiced telling jokes; for his sanity, both are few and far between.
There aren't yards in this part of the city, so much as desperate attempts at crabgrass jammed into narrow strips of worn-out earth between badly-painted houses. He parks his car in front of a house, second to last on its street, where the grass is peculiarly lush and ivy clings softly to the crumbled brick and peeling paint.
Really, they should be so easy for the cops to find, and yet they rarely get caught.
Jason rings the doorbell, then remembers it's broken. He knocks in the way he learned as a child: three raps, a pause, two raps, and three again. A minute later, the yellowing lace curtain at the window beside the door peeks open, and his mother looks back at him.
"Well, get inside, Jay," she says, opening the door quickly.
It's dark in the house. Mom forgets that Aunt Pam's plants need light. Absently, he flicks on switches, reminds himself to check feed and watering before he leaves.
He's never actually lived in this house. He moved out and got on his own and met and married Debbie at least four aliases ago. The tell-tale signs of young boy never left their imprint on the things they own now, and they come to visit the girls at his home because he knows how many poisonous plants reside on every welcoming space.
"How is she?" Mom looks distracted.
Jason takes her hand and sits with her on the couch. Mom clutches her throat with her other hand. "She's not ... "
"No," he says, realizing too late he should have said that first. "But it won't be long."
Mom doesn't cry. He thinks she's been crying ever since they accepted Aunt Pam wasn't getting over this.
"I need to see her," she says, and there's a hard note in her voice that Jason suspects his father heard only rarely during their long, fucked-up relationship.
"It's got to be tonight," he says. Jason has always been good at planning. It's a skill he's tried not to use, because it would begin with organizing client sheets, and end with a grand scheme involving deadly itching powder in all the boxers in Gotham. He knows this as a fact.
"Just tell me where to be and when."
"St. Mark's, ten o'clock."
Jason can't be involved in the distraction directly. It's not the easiest thing to be normal, to be sane, and there are lines he can't cross without losing himself completely. Also, the cops will be watching him.
Debbie says this is a good reason not to get involved. She pets the hair of one of the girls as the other climbs into Jason's lap. Jason wraps his arms around his daughter, kissing her until she giggles. He feels older than he is, and he's older than he looks, but his children are young and beautiful. His red-haired wife is young and beautiful, too. They make a good family portrait and he is asking her to be an accomplice to something not entirely legal.
Debbie agrees to do it. She doesn't want to, he knows, but she is estranged from her own family. She will do this one last favor for his. But she makes him get the diapers ready.
It's cold out tonight. The girls don't own matching coats, so it's easier to tell them apart in the pink and the purple as they load them into the car. Their bedtime is long past, which means they will cry at any provocation. Debbie coos to them to keep them awake during the drive.
His mother is wearing a scarf over her hair, and dark glasses. She doesn't stand out as much as she might, and the girls don't recognize her when Debbie hurries them by her seat in the hospital lobby. Jason watches her watching them.
"C'mon," he tells her, taking her hand. Mom turns her head, and for a moment, he sees the pain in the line of her neck and slump of her shoulders. "It'll be okay," he says knowing it's a lie.
He leaves Mom in the stairwell just above the floor where Aunt Pam's room is, and he heads down in the elevator instead.
There are different cops on duty, but he's seen them before. "Visiting hours are over," one of them says. The nurses don't come to this part of the hospital except once or twice in the night to check on Aunt Pam, so even though the same lights are on, it seems dark and empty, and the cop's words echo oddly.
Jason offers one of his apologetic smiles. "I had to get something done at work. My manager is an idiot."
There's sympathy on the faces, and Jason offers to get a coffee for whoever wants one. Both do. He brings back three, sits in his usual chair, and sips his own. The cops drink their coffee, and nod their thanks.
Down at the other end of the hallway, a young mother is holding the hands of her two sleepy daughters, trying to get them to walk. One bursts into tears, and her sister rapidly follows.
"You can't be wet again!" says Debbie, bending down to soothe Deirdre, and then she backs away with a disgusted look on her face. "You're not."
She hadn't cleaned out the diaper pail yet today when Jason explained the plan to her. The poor girls will probably have diaper rash for a week.
Jason sets down his coffee and goes to help. "Ma'am? May I help?" The girls don't stop crying, nor did he expect them to. "I could watch one out here while you change the other."
Debbie glares at him; that part isn't faked. "Thanks, no." She is trying to hold one girl while tugging at the pants of the other.
Jason looks over at the cops. Debbie does too. "Officer, could I ask you to watch my daughter? Her sister's gross and I have to get her out of this diaper now." She continues to glare at Jason.
One of the cops sighs and comes over while the other stays on duty by the door. Debbie grabs Deirdre and hauls her to the rest room a few feet away, shouting behind her: "Honey, stay right there!"
From inside the ladies' room, Jason hears Debbie talking loudly to Deirdre, and trying to reassure Delia outside.
Jason sips more of his coffee, which encourages the other officer to finish his. Less than a minute later, the cop starts walking uncomfortably. Jason crosses his own legs in his chair and says: "I love this stuff, but it makes me have to piss like a racehorse, you know?"
"Yeah," says the cop.
Jason presses his luck, and goes to get a sip from the water fountain.
The cop glances down the hall at his partner, who is still trying to soothe the crying Delia. "I gotta take five," he says. "Can you watch her over here?"
Delia cries even harder. "I can keep an eye on the door," says the other cop.
The one who has to pee tells Jason, "Stay right there, buddy." He goes to the men's room, which is right beside the women's.
The cop with Delia glares at Jason, who holds up his hands and sits in his chair. When neither cop is looking, he reaches back and knocks once on the stairwell door.
Mom is out of the stairwell and into Aunt Pam's room in an eyeblink.
Jason hears is a quiet, "Hey, Red," and then the door closes and the two of them are alone for what will be the last time. He sits. He drinks more coffee. He watches a cop fight the impulse to shake his daughter and also cross and uncross his own legs.
A minute later, the first cop comes back and is relieved to see Jason still sitting there.
Two minutes after that, Debbie emerges with Deirdre and convinces the cop to watch her while she changes Delia. Jason cannot hear anything from inside Aunt Pam's room, which means the cops can't, either. Delia's diaper doesn't take long, and Debbie emerges flustered but triumphant with a second clean toddler.
"Thank you so much for helping me out," she bubbles. "I'd love to thank your commander or whoever. What's your name?"
The cop who watched the girls has a pained look on his face as Debbie makes him spell his name slowly three times. Jason waits until he ducks out to go to the men's room himself, and Debbie asks his partner the same things, diverting his attention completely.
He taps on Aunt Pam's door. Mom doesn't immediately come out, and his stomach clenches. If she doesn't ...
The door is open and shut and Mom is back in the stairwell. She'll find her own way home tonight. The second cop turns back around to see just Jason, still sitting quietly. Jason smiles at him.
When the other cop comes out of the men's room, Jason takes his own turn, because he wasn't lying about the coffee, and he'd dosed all three cups just to be safe.
He reads the faces of the police as he comes back, and knows he's overstayed his welcome. "Can I just tell her good-night? Please? You can stay in the room."
They relent. The door opens enough for him to step inside. She looks even thinner than this afternoon, even paler green, but her eyes are open and bright and she's content. He loves her so much.
"Hi, Jay," Aunt Pam whispers.
"Just came to tuck you in." He moves the blankets around her more tightly, and kisses her hand.
"Thank you," she says, and it has nothing to do with the blankets.
The call comes at four am. He isn't surprised, and still he cries after he hangs up the phone. Debbie holds him as he weeps against her bare shoulder.
He makes the funeral arrangements in the morning. He recognizes about half the people who show up, figures the rest are capes, old friends, or old enemies. He guesses most of them are there to make sure she's dead. They walk by the body alone and in pairs. He makes eye contact with a few, does not take anyone aside; there's no telling how closely this is being watched.
His mother doesn't come. He doesn't speak at the funeral, and suspects most of the guests he doesn't know don't know who he is, who his children are. He watches faces, trying to match jawlines and eye shapes with pictures on the television, and he wonders if any queen had so great a sendoff.
The plot is near the edge of the cemetery, overlooking a forest reserve. In the spring, she will have honeysuckle and primroses, and tall firs to shade her in the winter. Watching the casket lower into the earth, holding a tiny hand to each side of him, he feels as though he is planting a precious seed.
Life returns to normal. Mom comes to see them when Jason is sure he's no longer under surveillance. Debbie goes back to work full time after the twins turn three. Jason continues to grow his garden in the backyard, and makes sure the girls don't touch.
For their anniversary, Jason leaves the girls with his mother and takes Debbie out to a nice place downtown. They laugh together and it's like they're young and dating all over again. On their way home, Debbie is affectionate and warm, and curls against him, and Jason likes the way she slides her fingers up his arm.
The road is slick with rain, and his mind is on the thong Debbie is wearing under her short dress, and he misses the turn in the dark.
The End