omni

He didn’t even really remember (or care) how it started. What interaction did he ever have with these assholes that didn’t end up turning into a screaming match?

What did that say about him, that he kept coming back? All he'd ever known was dysfunction.

"We can't all just turn it off, Dick. The sun comes up and you hang up the suit and wake up in the morning to go to your day job. Even you, Tim. Especially you. CEO of Wayne fucking Enterprises. Me? I'm on twenty-four seven. I wake up in the morning and I'm still Jason Todd, Red Hood. Sure, maybe both of you have your heads still in the game all day, but it's not the same."

Everyone always labeled Jason as the one with the scary temper, but they always seemed to forget which of them had been Batman. "You think I don't know what that's like?” Dick snarled. “You think there haven't been stretches where I was 'on' twenty-four seven, too? The Titans, the Outsiders. Spyral? Don't you dare stand there and tell me I don't know what it's like!"

"It's not the same! You still always had Dick Grayson to go back to."

"Don't act like you're not a real person, too, Jason. You can turn it off, you just don't want to. You could take off the Hood, put it away if you wanted. You're an adult, you can do whatever you want."

"I'm fucking dead, asshole. I don't have a goddamn social security number."

"You have dozens, don't act like that's an obstacle."

"You know as well as I do that fake identities don't hold up if someone digs deep enough—we do it all the time on the job. It would be stupid to keep the same one for long. If I build a whole life on a cracked foundation the whole house will come down eventually. I can’t have my entire life destroyed because someone finds out I’m not a real person.”

"So have Bruce have you declared not-dead. He'd do it if you asked. It's just paperwork."

"Paperwork and press. My face would be all over the place, I don't care what any of you say about making sure it stays quiet. Someone will find out and that's all it will take. I haven't always had a mask, you know. Plenty of nasty people have seen my face. People I trained under. Bad people, Dick. I killed most of ‘em, but I didn't kill them all. Others, too. I would be a highly visible target. It would put the whole family in the line of fire." He technically wasn’t supposed to care about that.

“So that’s it, then? You’re afraid it would all ruin your life, so you’re just going to...ruin it anyway? What the hell is the difference?”

“Control!” He needed to calm down. His voice was too loud. His throat hurt. Anger pulsing behind his eyes. Green burning in his chest. “I’d have control over how my life gets ruined!”

Dick scoffed. “That's like choosing suicide because it’s easier.”

“I’m not. It’s not…” He wasn’t. That wasn’t… The anger withered, green embers instead of flames. “I’m not—” Anger morphed into...he didn’t want to feel this. There was something else behind his eyes now. Hot and stinging. “I’m not. It’s just… Four walls with no door. No way out, no matter which direction you look.”

“I know it seems like that from your perspective, but the walls are just cardboard, Jay. You’ve clawed your way through solid wood.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

It was like Jason’d punched him. Knocked the air out of him, eyes wide, mouth paused mid-word. Blink. “You don’t mean that.” Then that Batman anger crept in again. Or maybe it wasn’t Batman—he wasn’t giving Dick enough credit. “You’ve never been a coward. What’s changed?”

Jason opened his mouth, but what tried to come out was only the crumpled beginning of a word. Paper jam, please clear and reprint. He didn’t want to say it. It made him feel vulnerable, but he was in too deep now…. “I tried.”

Dick paused, mouth open again. Struck speechless once more—two points for Jason in whatever fucked up game this was. Dick already had a point of his own, actually, with the paper jam. Who would win? “Tried how.” He said it like an accusation.

“Does it matter? It didn’t work. I don’t work. I can’t—I don’t—”

“Tried how?” Softer—not an accusation this time.

Two points for Dick. Jason shouldn’t have even mentioned it. He didn’t know what to say.

“Jay.” Tim finally spoke up. Always a listener, if he had something to say it was worth saying. Worth listening to. “Since we’re using analogies today, I’ll say—this will just fester. You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to lance the wound. Let us clean it and stitch it.”

“I got a job. It didn’t work.”

“You—” Three points. Maybe they were playing it like a game of H-O-R-S-E. What should they spell? F-A-I-L-E-D, maybe. Jason was half way there already.

“Dick. Let me take it from here?”

Dick clearly didn’t want to, but you could always tell when you shouldn’t argue with Tim. Dick had always plowed over those warning signs, but it had done enough damage in the past that maybe he was finally starting to learn. He crossed his arms and took a step back. Kept his mouth shut. Still at three points, then. Were they tagging Tim in now? Would his points add to Dick’s, or was he starting his own scorecard?

“Tell me what happened.”

Tim almost earned a point, but Jason wasn’t going to let that happen. He was determined to be the one to spell the whole word. It was all about control.

“It was stupid. It was just a dumb job at a garage.” He got into this life with a tire iron, may as well try to get out of it with one.

It would have been fitting if it hadn’t F-A-I-L-E-D.

“I couldn’t—It’s different, real life. It’s like… If I had the helmet, the guns… Even if I didn’t, even if I were just undercover...it would have been fine. I could have handled it just fine, it’s never been a problem before. But just me as myself, it was like—everything was too loud. Engines turning over, metal clanging, guys yelling… It doesn’t make any sense. It’s never happened before. I couldn’t stick it out.”

Tim’s eyes sparked with understanding. “Ah.”

Jason’s cheeks felt hot. Vulnerability turned to embarrassment translated to anger in his fucked up head since it was the only emotion he was good at.

“Don’t stand there and fucking psyche me, Drake. Got enough of that bullshit in Arkham.”

“Lance, stitch, remember? You brought this up, you want to talk about it.”

The anger turned to a low simmer and his throat tightened. This goddamn conversation was too much. He was flipping back and forth through emotions like a toddler with a picture book.

“Fine. What’s wrong with me?”

Tim chewed the inside of his cheek. “Control.”

Like that was anything new.

Tim continued. “When you’re Hood you’re in control. When you’re Jason Todd you aren’t. You can’t just shoot your way through life, you have to play it the hard way and that means giving up a lot of control.”

“Okay, but what does control have to do with me freaking out?”

“Lack of control makes you vulnerable. Being vulnerable makes you jumpy. You don’t have your guns, don’t have your armor. You’ve never done that before.”

“Bullshit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about the dead kid who’s cape you were putting on? I wasn’t born wearing a mask.”

“No, but that was years ago. And back then was about pure survival, anyway. You spent your whole childhood in fight or flight mode. You’re still in that mode, really. Never dropped out of it. Right now you’re stuck on ‘flight’ because you can’t fight in real life in the ways you’re used to.

“You have PTSD, Jason. C-PTSD, specifically. You’re stepping into real life after a literal lifetime of fighting and dying. How could you not?” He sighed. Scrubbed his face. “Bruce. He has a habit of taking kids who are already traumatized and piling on more trauma. He doesn’t know any better. He’s—”

“The fucking king of those five letters.” And F-A-I-L-E-D had six letters, so maybe it didn’t fit here.

Tim snorted. “That’s one way of putting it.” They shouldn’t make light of that, probably. Jason didn’t give a fuck. When had he ever?

 “So there’s no point in trying, then. I’m too fucked up.”

Dick chimed in again, too impatient to be on the sidelines. “You’re not, Jay. You just have to take it slow. Now you know what to expect. And you know...I still have a lot of contacts, from when I was on the force. It’s really common for cops to—”

“No. I’m not—not that part. I don’t want to talk about any of this shit to anyone else.”

“Dick. Easy. That’s a lot for a first step. Start slow, like you said.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

Tim thought for a second. “A job is good, but you need somewhere safer, quieter, so you won’t get overwhelmed so easily.”

“Babs could get him a job at the library,” Dick suggested.

Tim hummed. “Too much like being in Bat mode, being with Barbara.”

“I resent that.” The Bat thing.

Tim rolled his eyes. Dick rolled his eyes. Jason crossed his arms and tried not to grumble.

“It’s...not the only library in town,” he murmured.

Dick’s eyes lit up at that. “So you’ll do it?”

“Dick,” Tim scolded. Dick’s typical Dick energy was starting to radiate from him. “Rein it in a little.”

He shut his mouth but he was still practically vibrating.

“We could ask Barbara to get you a job at another library. I’m sure she could swing something.”

A library sounded...nice, actually. Calm, quiet, familiar. But he’d be in civilian mode. A civilian mode that he couldn’t just burn when he was finished with it like a cover. And it was familiar, but still in a foreign enough context that he wouldn’t be able to help but squirm. Squirming was good, though. He could learn to deal with it if it came in small bursts. Like building up an immunity, only he was teaching his wrong-wired brain instead of his immune system.

“Yeah, okay."

"I'll call Babs!"

"Dick."