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tba
Rating: Teen
Archive Warning: Major Character Death
Category: Gen
Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types
Relationship: Jason Todd and Bruce Wane
Characters: Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd
Additional Tags: Body Horror, Possession, Canonical Character Death, Urban Fantasy, Sentient Gotham City, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Published: 2023-07-23
Words: 727
Chapters: 1/1
Summary:
Jason Todd is dead but this is not a death, this is a birth, a becoming.
Jason Todd-Wayne dies. His grave is placed in the private cemetery in the back of Wayne Manor. A cold black tile. A grey headstone.
Jason Todd-Wayne
Rest In Peace
Something crawls out of the grave a day later, a week later, a month later, it doesn't matter when. But it crawls out.
Jason Todd rests in peace.
—
The subway lines tremble eagerly, thrumming like a live wire, the blood vessels of his body. bus stops light up across his body, these synapses firing between every nerve, every cell of his body, transporting information, transporting resources, transporting people.
The child trembles in the station, jerking a leg up and down. He's dressed smartly in slack and button down, smudged in places from dirt.
Information, never said or written down, is as plain as blood to see. Maurita Neal waits patiently for the bus to take her to Coventry from her housekeeping job here in Bristol. She has three kids, no husband. She doesn't know how she'll afford her son's violin lessons at the end of the month.
Andrei Rosca smokes a cigarette, blowing smoke away mournfully. He's caught up with the Odessa Mob and he's working the detail for tomorrow's meeting with Falcones. He'll probably die but at least the insurance payout will be enough to put his little sister through college.
Morgan Magian is sick and tired of playing babysitter for snotty rich kids but this is the only way they're able to make rent. In three hours, they've got a shift as a gas station attendant and after that a class at the local community college, a slow and steady crawl to making their way to a degree.
They are individuals, separate universes of existence only sparingly passing by each other but they are of Gotham , of that little spark of dim light that snarls spite, fight, and lives. They are Gotham and Gotham is them.
Softly, gently, Gotham takes the stumbling steps of a newborn, wide-eyed and shaky.
It is here. It is alive.
She takes her first breath on lungs that have forgotten, on a heart that has stopped beating.
She is Gotham. She steps onto the bus
—
Gotham loved her son, Jason, bright blood, quick hope. There was something with him that had resonated with the spirit, with the essence of Gotham before it had yet awoken–been born.
She had cradled him in her too tight fist, choking him with noxious smog, tightening steel bar fingers around his ribs, and still he stumbled back, grinning red, vicious and bright.
He was her favorite, this child borne of brutality and pain.
When he died, she sobbed, ground heaving with the effort, telephone lines cracking and breaking in her grief and she crawled into, inside of him, wrapping herself in him, becoming him. She saw his pain, his desperation, that screaming, aching need for his father to rescue him.
And she was him and he was her and all Gotham wanted was Batman to rescue her, to save her.
But he never could.
—
Gotham erupts like a volcano, like a reckoning.
It is like all of her villains, her criminals attacking all at once. But she is their mother, the cradle from which they learned their violence and there is no wound that hurts quite like the one inflicted by your mother. It is a wound that will never heal.
The streets heave and sway, cracking into the unknowable depths of the swamp from which Gotham arose. Noxious gas creeps up from the ground underneath, alluringly green. Sirens wail and lamp lights flicker as the city is under attack.
The city is under attack from the city itself.
Hundreds of lives are lost, thousands more are injured as Gotham screams, wrecking herself apart in her misery, in her agony.
Where is Batman? Where is Batman!
Batman lands in the center of Gotham, the heart of her power. Crime Alley is disturbingly quiet as he approaches a boy in a torn, grimy suit.
"It's not safe here. Let me get you to safety," His voice is rough, his chin shaggy from days, weeks, months of not shaving. He is larger than life, a shadow made tangible. The Batman stands strong, immovable, untouchable.
The boy turns.
"J-Jason?"
"All I w-wanted was for you to s-save me…" Toxic green eyes stare back, a stranger in Jason's face.