"Time has had it's way with me.

My broken tired hands cant build a thing.

The wires that have held me still embedded now in flesh to find my will.

The idle of my days is won, the empty I have fed has made me numb,

Despite what you will find in me."

- Demon Hunter, "Deteriorate"

Dick kept a firm hand on my back the entire way to the Clocktower, and I wanted to hurt him and hug him at the same time for it. When we landed through the skylight opening, Dick walked me to a chair and the sounds blurred into each other. Barbara was there, her blue eyes wide and her face whiter as he told her what happened, who we saw.

Roy and Alfred walked in, Lian strapped to the archer's back fast asleep. I didn't feel his hands when he shook me, nor did I hear the butler calling my name. Calls were placed, I faintly made out Tim's smudged face on one of the holographic monitors. No yelling. Just talking. Something shifted in my chest, and told me that was a good sign.

I sat in that chair for hours, maybe days. My nails clawed into the armrests, my leg bouncing like a jackhammer, and my eyes seeing into nothing. Unfocused images, their lines molded together to create something shapeless. My breathing was rapid, too shallow to be called inhales and too fast to be called exhales. I had no idea how fast my heart was going, but if I had a pacemaker, it wouldn't be pleased with me.

The closest thing I had to a pacemaker rolled her wheelchair in front of me, and the rest of them formed a circle as she put her hands on my face to take off the headwrap. She cupped my cheeks in her palms, her thumbs brushed under my eyelashes and I finally found something to draw my eye, a tear on her face rolling down pale skin.

The ringing in my ears faded and her voice clarified like a radio being tuned. "…Jason. It's okay. It's me…It's Barbara."

I tilted my head back, the defense mechanism doing its job, but I didn't want to pull away from her. I fought my body, fought the boa constrictor that came out of my subconscious to devour me in my worst nightmares, and pressed my face into her hands. I looked at her, pleading for her to understand. I'm here, Barb. I'm here.

Alfred knelt beside her, and with gentle, sure fingers, pried my fingernails from the leather armrests. He held my hand between both of his. "Jason. We're going to move you now, alright? We're going to take off the uniform and get you into more comfortable clothes."

Somewhere in me found the whole enterprise of being herded places like I was made of glass degrading. I was the man who had all of Gotham running scared, that was me, and now I was being helped by three men to change clothes. They were surgical, careful not to touch my scars. They had me in an oversize sweater, soft on my skin, and sweats. They let me go barefoot, but Alfred insisted on wrapping my bad ankle.

When they sat me down again, my tongue stopped choking me and I managed to stutter. "J-J-J-Juh…I s-s-saw him. He was…there."

"We know…" Barbara said, and her hand on my forearm squeezed. "Tim's on his way here. We're going to figure all of this out."

Roy stood back, his eyes searched mine for something like an explanation. He didn't know about my torture. He knew about the scars, but he didn't know the torture. He knew I'd been killed by the clown. He didn't know about what happened before that. He was finding out.

"Dead…" I forced out. "Dead…He's…dead?"

My eyes were on Dick. I had been senseless from the laugh till now. Dick's eyebrows came together and I knew he couldn't give me the answer I was begging him to give me. "…I'm not sure. It's possible he's dead, but we've been wrong before. I'm sorry, Jason."

I hung my head over my lap, and my chest shook with things I just didn't do in front of people if I could help it. "…Dead. I'm d-dead."

"The hell you are," Alfred said, his lower lip quivering.

I almost asked him where that had gotten me the first time. I almost said it, and that's what broke me. I hunched over in my chair, laced my fingers behind my neck with my hair in my face, and I cried. I heard Barbara put her head next to mine, her arms around my shoulders and a ginger curtain of hair cut me off from the rest of the world. Dick fell to his knees in front of me, his hands on my knees. Alfred touched his forehead to the hands I had behind my neck.

I remembered holding her in my arms, in that vent where I thought we'd die of heat prostration. I remembered promising her that death wasn't that bad, that the way we were going out was definitely preferable to the first time. I had thought I'd been so lucky to die with her, and maybe the next life would be kinder to us. This might seem odd, but dear God, do I wish I could go back to that moment - holding her.

Because this felt like that kind of hopeless.

It was a day later that I finally reemerged from Barbara's couch, and found Roy in the kitchen. He danced on the balls of his feet, Lian in his arms, and he was rocking her to sleep, humming something low. His eyebrows shot up when I went to the fridge, and did my best to keep my hands away from Barbara's wine in the back. I grabbed a water bottle, and chugged it down.

Roy watched as I moved onto food. I inhaled two straight bowls of cereal, the cinnamon cathartic to my nose after a day of huffing the lavender smell of the Febreeze Barbara sprayed her couch with. I wanted to shower, but I was still too tired.

When I met Roy's eye, the shame came on like a heavy blanket. "Hi."

"Hey." He whispered back, tall and unassuming. "…Are you okay?"

"No." The answer was immediate, honest.

"Do you need anything?" I'd expected different questions, but I'll take these over what I thought he'd ask.

"Besides…" I pushed the words off my tongue like a traitor walking the plank. "No judgment…No, not really. Just…takes time."

A crease formed in Roy's forehead. "I'd never judge you for this. I'd known about you…What happened, I just…" He sighed. "Alfred filled me in. He didn't go too in-depth, but I'd seen you. He didn't have to."

Just like that, a step forward - a step back. When he mentioned seeing my scars, the edges of the chest scars itched like an infected bite. "Be thankful he never does."

"Oh…they wanted me to tell you, when you woke up, that Dick and Barbara want to see you upstairs," Roy said, tipping his head towards the door. "The new kid…what's-his-face, he's here too."

A muscle in my cheek pulled at his failure to remember Tim's name, and I wanted to thank him. It was likely the closest I'd get to smiling for the next week. I considered showering before I went up, fatigue be damned, but something in my gut told me that a shower could wait. I needed to hear what they had to say.

I padded barefoot to the top level, appreciated the simple exercise of climbing stairs. I slid my hand through my hair, tried to get it out of my face to no avail. I sighed when I reached the top, paused with my hand on the doorknob.

When I went into the command center, the carpet felt colder than the metal of the stairwell had been. Three pairs of eyes immediately snapped over to survey me, check my wrists and my elbows, count the bloodshot veins in my eyes, and the shadows under them for sleep. If there was any tension between Dick and Tim, I didn't sense it. They seemed as collaborative as they'd been before the fallout, but there's always the possibility that they called a truce for me. Tim came over, and to my surprise, he took my hand and wrapped his free arm around me, saying something about how worried he was.

Dick I expected a hug from, but he didn't. He stayed by the computers, and that was my first sign that something was wrong. I looked past Barbara to him, and asked, "So what's so important? Any news on Talia?"

"Not a peep," Barbara answered my latter question, and her eyes glanced to Dick for the former.

"Before I tell you any of this, I want you to promise that you won't say anything until I've finished talking." Dick prefaced, and his eyes said everything for him. This was the big secret. This was the big thing he'd kept from me throughout the whole business with Falcone up till now, the thing he conveniently forgot to let me in on after the gala, the thing I hadn't given much of a damn about till my paranoia set in late at night.

"Fine." I crossed my arms, and ignored how the barbed wire scars stung as I did that.

Dick took a deep breath, which I assumed he needed, and started to break it all down for me. "Remember when I went to the Manor when Bruce told us he was alive?" I nodded. "And I told you he basically bequeathed me the armory he had under there, made an offer for me to be Batman and all that?" I nodded again, and he bit his lip before confession. "That wasn't all there was."

I figured something else was hidden in there. He only started acting suspicious after that trip. I gnawed at the inside of my cheek to keep myself from interjecting.

"Bruce told me in an encrypted video message dated to just before he left Gotham… that if we were going to stop his return," Dick added extra emphasis but believe me, I understood who he meant. "…That we'd need the master file from the BatComputer."

Okay. I knew about the master file. I had flipped through it sometimes when I was Robin, bored out of my mind and grounded. I couldn't stay quiet. "…Alright. Makes sense. What's the point?"

"There was something new added." Dick cleared his throat. "Something that Bruce considered forbidden for you to know. He asked me to keep you from it at all costs, Barbara and Tim could know, but you couldn't."

"What was it?" I asked, the back of my neck tingling.

Dick tilted his head, and his tone was warning. "It…has to do with him."

"I'll ask again." This scared me, something in his eyes was scaring me about this, and still, I took a step closer and dropped my arms. "What was it?"

"The Joker's name."

The heavy thing that had been thrust into my chest when I saw him the other night fell out of me. I was hollow, and my own words felt like toll bells in my head. "What the hell did you just say?"

"You…told me what Talia took from you, what you saw," Barbara said softly, and moved to the keyboard. The file was brought up on the screen, unopened but there. "…What she told you. Bruce figured it out before all of us, that the demon that possessed Ra's al Ghul for so long had passed on to Talia and corrupted her as it had her father. The 'head of the demon' part is literal. She took your memories and implanted them into a John Doe from northern California. And he looks exactly like Joker. A true doppleganger."

"The name that Bruce inputted to the BatComputer isn't the original Joker's name, but the name found in the John Doe's personal effects," Tim brought up a driver's license with a blurred photo. "It wasn't his name, he created this fake ID with a forger in Sacramento. His real name remains unknown, but before the playing card was dropped off at Arkham with the Platters song…he'd been in a coma for five years."

I felt each word scrape at the walls of my torso from the inside, along the scars. It hurt to swallow, and my head swam. I clenched my fists at my sides.

"The name he chose was Jack White, the alias he used to blackmail Dr. Penelope Young to creating the Titan formula that ultimately killed the original Joker." Barbara said, "And it was six months with Doe in the coma that Joker pulled the stunt in Arkham, and there's only one reason that he could have chosen that alias."

Somehow, in my dizzy head, pieces pushed together. "…They had contact before Arkham Asylum. The original Joker must have used him as a plant, a failsafe."

"Yes." Dick said, his voice low and hoarse. "Before I left with Alfred, Bruce told me that he was close to finding out how Talia knew about Joker's plan, and that if we were going to get through this with you safe, if we were going to win, we had to keep you in the dark until the very end."

I stepped back like I'd been slapped, heat rushing to my head. All this time I spent, thinking that the old man had faith in me. I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, and a cruel, harsh laugh bubbled up my throat. "That son of a bitch…"

"He kept it from you to protect you…" Dick tried, and even when I glared at him, he continued. "If you go after the new Joker now, we'll never know how he did it. We'll never know how he pulled it all off, and if he had any others. We'll never get Talia, we'll never get Bruce's son out of there, and we'll never be free of this."

"Do I look like I'll ever be free of it?" I seethed at him, my shoulders twitching. I stepped closer to him, and to my surprise, Tim moved to Dick's side. "You all kept this from me. You kept this from me for that son of a bitch, and didn't fuckin' care how I felt about it, did you?"

Barbara tried to grab my hand but I wrenched it free as she said, "We also told you about it, against Bruce's wishes, because of what happened the other night. You deserved to know."

"I deserved to know a YEAR AGO!" I shouted. My lungs sang as I ranted, my hands and my head on fire. "Here I was a week ago, feeling sorry because the four of us couldn't get along. And I was thinking, 'boy, won't it be great in a year or so to look back and make fun of ourselves, crying over all this', but stupid Jason." I shook my head, a too-big grin on my face as I looked between their tight eyebrows and downturned mouths. "Stupid Jason had no idea that the biggest fucking problem in this family wasn't the fact that we can't communicate about personal stuff, we can't communicate about IMPORTANT THINGS like the details pertaining to the resurrection of the man who tortured, starved, violated, and victimized me for over a fucking year!"

I breathed hard, and as my voice broke into that fifteen year old's shout that hadn't shown his face since I pointed a gun at Bruce to tell him I was the Arkham Knight, angry tears sprang to my eyes. I wheezed, and pointed at them. "I kept things from you too, because I thought there was a genuinely good reason for doing so. Like how I really felt about Abigail-" I paused, felt my stomach buckle like I'd just been punched. "-because if I did that, then I had to admit how really far down the hole I was with recovering. And I kept other things from you, stuff Gail didn't even know - stuff that's dangerous for me, but I did it because while it posed a risk to me, it'd help Gotham. I thought…" I hiccuped, and I saw Barb crying now, Dick was close, and Tim stared at the ground, ashamed. Good.

"I really thought you guys would be there when I was ready. Because I thought, of all the things you'd keep from me, that'd be the one thing you would tell me about." I wiped my hand against my eyes to get the blur out of them. "Alfred couldn't tell me because he wasn't here. He couldn't tell me a damn thing because he had to take care of the old man, that son of a bitch that don't deserve it."

"…He t-tried to…" Dick attempted to say. He pushed a hand against the back of Barbara's chair for support, she reached back to hold him, and he said, his eyes red and raw. "He was trying to keep you from tearing this city apart again, he didn't want you to fall down the hole again…he thought you'd destroy yourself to kill the Joker."

"He was right." I said, and Barbara gasped, before she shook with more tears. "He was fucking right about that one. Why's he got to be right?" I flattened my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. "I mean, what have I got left? The woman I love is in another city, probably forgotten all about me. My family lies to me and schemes to keep important things from me. The man who tortured me has escaped death to haunt me once again. And the only friend I've got is Roy Harper and a three-year-old girl. This job is going to kill me sooner or later, why shouldn't it be sooner?"

A metal clattering made me jump, and I turned to see Alfred staring at me from the elevator, the tea tray in his hands on the floor. The china teapot was broken at his feet, and he didn't seem to care. His eyes were hidden by the glare of the glasses, but his hands trembled at his sides.

I felt like a preteen again, caught red-handed with a Bulgari watch that wasn't mine. My face stung with tears, and I swiped my forearm against my cheeks. "Alfred…"

"Master Jason," He whispered. "I don't want to hear that come out of your mouth again. I don't want you to think it either."

"Fatherly affection aside, I-"

"-Not on your life," Alfred said, louder and his shoe crunched the broken glass as he came closer. "I will not sit idly by and listen to you say that without a fight. I take it they told you?"

I nodded, and he stared up at me, probably hated how much taller I was same as me. How much time had gone by, how we changed. He pointed a finger behind me at them. "These three made the hardest sacrifice they could possibly make for you. They didn't do it for Master Bruce. Of course, he asked them to do it, but believe me, Master Jason, they weren't doing it out of courtesy. They didn't do it to deceive you or to hurt you. Did it never occur to you that they might have done it because they love you?"

Barbara's words came back to me, from all those months ago in the militia compound. Come back to the Manor. Let us help you. Don't let Joker win.

"It did…" I admitted, and shoved my hands into my pockets, which felt better than them hanging dumbly by me. "I just need a little understanding here." I leveled my eyes with Alfred's. "That monster killed me, took me away from my family. I don't want to give him the chance to hurt somebody else like he hurt me, Bruce, or Barbara. Bruce still hasn't come back because of him, and he might never come back. And I hate Joker for all of it."

"So do we." Tim said, and finally lifted his eyes from the floor to look at me. "He's hurt all of us. We kept the file from you so we can make sure he stays gone, and that Talia can't bring him back again."

Barbara rolled her chair forward, her glasses on top of her head. "Nobody wants that man dead more than you and I do," She stared at me hard, and when she took my hand this time, I didn't tear away. "I'm going to help you put him down for good, but you have to understand that we didn't do this maliciously."

"Master Richard had a long argument for the better part of an hour because Master Bruce had put him up to deceiving you." Alfred said.

I met Dick's eyes at last, and he stayed silent. He gazed back at me, frowning and I knew he thought I hated him now. I knew he thought I'd never forgive him.

"I swear to God, this time it's permanent." I said, and he nodded. "This time, it isn't natural causes or an accident. Bruce doesn't just let him die, this time - I kill him. This time, no secrets about blood or files. No secrets at all. We do this one by the book, everything disclosed. We have no secrets."

Left to right, the corners of Dick's mouth turned up.

"No secrets."

That evening, Roy drove Lian and I back to the firehouse. He fed her, bathed her, and shortly after putting her to sleep for the night, he crashed himself into a chair by her bed.

From the moment his snores signaled that he was asleep, I went to the crates in the spare room. The record player was still there, perched on top of a crate like a canary awaited its master. Without allowing time to talk myself out of it, I lifted the crate into my arms and carried it to the bathroom. I stuck it in the corner, far way from the tub.

I fished out a record from the crate under the player, a smooth Sinatra something that she had hummed while cleaning. I put it on, turned the volume low enough to where the song would stay contained in the walls of the bathroom. A weird surge of courage filled me up as the song came on, and I got the nerve to peek under the bathroom sink. Still stapled shut from where I'd put them there, the bags she'd gotten me a year ago - the last afternoon we were roommates - were stashed there in a neat row.

I sat on the toilet as I tore open the first bag, and found citrus-smelling bath salts, the kind I sometimes bought to soothe muscle ache and my scar tissue. I dragged them over to the tub as I switched the hot water on, my fingers in the stream until I got the water hot enough. The citrus scent cut through the fog that had been in my head all week, and as the tub filled up, I stripped off my shirt. Her voice echoed in my ears, humming along with the Sinatra song, but instead of just hurting, I breathed and dragged the tip of my finger over the surface of the water.

The moment the tub was full, I scooped bath salts in and tore away the rest of my clothes. I lowered myself in, sighing at the temperature and how it seemed to hold me in steaming warmth. It was like standing in the sun, truly soaking it up. I craned my head, the lip of the tub against the nape of my neck, and closed my eyes.

His laughing was still there, in the very back of my mind where the mounds of skeletons were kept. Lock and key didn't mean he couldn't shout through the bars. But this little glimpse of how it felt to be with her, to hear her humming in my ears as clear as the water, it drowned everything out.

Some nights, I woke up and I could feel that she was anxious. Over what, I didn't know, but I knew. Miles away and I knew what she was feeling. Some nights, I wondered what she did to remedy it. Did she still wake up like she did a year ago, and go put water on for tea if it was close to dawn? If it was closer to midnight, did she simply lie awake and think about possibilities? Maybe she did what I did some nights. Maybe she drank.

Tonight, I wondered if she could feel that I was afraid.