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He’s not going to scream. No matter what. He won’t give the Joker the satisfaction. Jason twists his wrists against the cuffs that pin his wrists behind his back.
There’s no give, the metal biting hard enough that his fingers buzz with encroaching numbness. Even if the Joker hadn’t taken his boots—and more importantly, the lockpicks hidden in them— the cuffs are tights enough that he wouldn’t have the mobility to reach the lock.
And the Joker is right there, babbling nonsensically as he digs through a crate. If he contorts enough, Jason could get his wrists in front of him, but not without alerting the Joker. And that would be…bad. His best shot at getting out of this mess is catching the Joker off-guard.
Bruce had told him once, offhand, that you can dislocate your thumb to slip out of cuffs. After Jason had bugged him enough, he’d walked through the steps, but hadn’t let Jason actually go through with it. That was nearly a full year ago now, the details blurring in Jason’s memory. He still has to try.
It would be safer to roll off his stomach, onto his side, so the Joker can’t see what he’s doing, but Jason doesn’t dare risk drawing his attention. He’s at a disadvantage here, he needs the element of surprise to get out. He wraps his fingers around his left thumb, takes a slow, deep breath, and yanks.
It hurts like hell, but there’s no pop, none of the throbbing ache that comes with a joint forced out of socket. Damn. Jason flexes the thumb, wraps his fingers around it again, and—
The Joker’s eyes are fixed on him. Despite the manic grin stretching his cheeks, his eyes are cold and dead. Like a shark. Jason freezes.
“Now, just what are you doing over there, birdie?”
Jason grunts as the full weight of the Joker lands on his back, driving the air from his lungs. The bastard’s fast. His shoulders scream as the clown grabs the cuffs and forces Jason’s hands up as far as they’ll go, bringing them to the Joker’s eye level.
“I was—ngh—just trying to get some feeling back in my fingers, you freak.”
The Joker cackles. “I know better that that, Robin! Batsie has all sorts of tricks up his sleeve, I’d expect nothing less from you.”
Jason tries to keep his hands fisted, but cold fingers pry them apart with terrifying ease.
“Aw, looks like you need a little more practice. Let me help.”
“Fuck off, you—” Stars burst behind Jason’s eyelids as, lightning-fast, the Joker grabs his hair and slams his forehead into the concrete floor. It takes a moment for the ringing to stop, the Joker’s sing-song voice slowly coming back into focus.
“This little piggy had roast beef, and this little piggy had none. And THIS little piggy—”
Jason bucks, hard, as the icy fingers wrap around his thumb, but it doesn’t stop anything. There’s a sickening pop and nauseating pain, Jason tasting blood as he bites down on the yelp that nearly escapes. He can’t help the noise he makes when the Joker keeps pulling, forcing the thumb farther sideways.
Finally, the man stops, and Jason is able to suck in a breath despite the weight cackling on his back. Lightning-quick, he tries to slide his hand out of the cuff, but the Joker forced the finger in the opposite direction of what he needed, and he’s lost all mobility. He could probably force it back into place with his other hand, though, if the Joker gets off of him, and then—
Agonizingly slow, the Joker wraps his fingers around Jason’s other thumb. Jason thrashes, hard, but all it does is grind his face farther into the gravel littering the floor of the warehouse.
His other thumb pops out of place. Jason doesn’t make a noise this time, even as the Joker twists and fire wraps its way around the joint.
The Joker laughs the whole time, gasping chuckles intertwining with Jason’s wheezes in the gruesome parody of a duet.
“Not singing for me yet, tweety bird?” The Joker croons, soft and low by Jason’s ear, “That’s okay. There’s still eight more little piggies left, eighteen if we get real creative, ha!”
Jason grits his teeth. He’s not going to scream. He won’t give the Joker the satisfaction.
The Joker gets bored after four more fingers, leaving Jason gasping and shaking on the floor. He can’t move anything but his ring and pinkie fingers, leaving his hands next-to-useless. Bruce’s words ring in his ears.
“You can’t do that, Jay-lad. I mean it.”
“It didn’t even hurt that bad! I was fine.” He had been lying through his teeth.
“That doesn’t matter. I still want to know. Leaving it for too long can cause permanent damage.
“But the Maroni’s were about to—”
“Jay. Just tell me next time. I’ll fix it. You’re more important.”
"Oh. Permanent damage?”
“Nerve damage. And if it’s the right angle, it can block blood flow, which causes—”
“Necrosis, right. Yikes.”
At the time, the thought had been a little gross. Now it’s near panic-inducing. Nerve damage alone can be crippling. Could he still be Robin if his hands are that damaged? And necrosis can lead to amputation, and—Bruce will fix it. Once Jason gets out of here. Bruce always fixes it.
Something clatters, interrupting the Joker’s eerily cheerful humming. Jason rolls onto his side, bites his tongue when it jostles his mangled hands. Being on his side isn’t enough, he can’t see where the Joker is. There’s a low box nearby, barely higher than a stepstool, and he shoves his feet on top of it so he can roll onto his back and keep his weight off his hands. The Joker isn’t a pretty sight, but not being able to see him is far, far worse.
The clown is whistling cheerfully as he draws—something, a crowbar, out of the crate. Jason recognizes the tune as his blood runs cold.
Take me out to the ball game…
Jason doesn’t hesitate, contorting to try and get his arms in front of him. Screw the Joker noticing, he has to get out, now, before he’s too hurt to move. A fucking crowbar will shatter every bone in his body, and that’s if he’s lucky.
He barely starts the motion before racing footsteps approach. He moves faster—if he can just get his hands in front of him, he can protect his ribs, take whatever the Joker deals out, he just has to—
The whoosh of displaced air, a loud and meaty crack. For a split-second, Jason certain the Joker somehow missed, before fire engulfs his leg, white-hot and excruciating.
Jason screams.
When awareness filters back through, all he can hear is that godawful laughter. High and cackling, like it’s the funniest goddamn thing he’s ever head.
Jason forces himself to look, nearly throws up when he sees it. His leg is—it’s bent the wrong way, at the knee. Just the sight makes the pain, impossibly, increase tenfold.
The Joker prods the leg with the bar. It’s barely a tap, but Jason can’t bite back another scream as something in his leg grinds, and the Joker is still laughing.
“And we have a bingo!” The Joker draws the words out like an announcer before breaking into peals of laughter, “That’s the sound I wanted to hear, boyo! Care for an encore?”
“Fuck. You.” Jason forces out. It comes out wrong, shaky and weak through shuddering breaths. The damn clown just cackles.
His full weight is on his hands, crushing them against the floor. It’s not—his leg hurts so much it should cancel it out, but it doesn’t, it just compounds, and Jason thinks he might puke.
He shifts, tries to get some of the weight off, but even that movement jostles his shattered leg, and he cries out again.
Okay. Okay. He’s not making it out on his own. That’s fine. The Joker clearly wants this game to last, and Bruce is already tracking him down; Jason just has to hold out until he gets here.
He can do this. Jason’s made it through every beating of his life so far. And there’s no way the Joker can hit harder than Bane. Or Willis.
The Joker’s whistling again, the crowbar whooshing through the air as he tests the swing.
Jason is not fucking dying in this godforsaken warehouse. He’s made it through too much for that. And he’s not going to do that to Bruce. It’d kill him.
He can do this. Bruce is coming.
He just has to last until then.
~*~
Bruce isn’t coming.
The blows stop eventually. He thinks. It’s hard to tell. The Joker’s still talking, even if Jason can’t make it out anymore. That’s…probably a good thing. But the pain doesn’t stop, the world hazy and smearing like bad impressionist painting, each moment bleeding into the next. He shuts his eyes.
He couldn’t tell what the Joker’s saying, not over his own choking breaths, but the sudden quiet grabs his attention more that the clown ever could.
It’s been hours and Bruce still isn’t here. And Jason can’t breathe.
It hurts. He’d always thought that there’s a limit to pain. Nerves overload, the body goes into shock, and the brain just…shuts everything off. He doesn’t think that’s true, anymore. Bones keep snapping and the pain doesn’t dull for a second. It’s sunk it’s claws deep enough that there’s no reprieve, even when he blacks out. It just follows.
He can’t get enough air, chest tight and full of splinters around his bubbling gasps. The Joker had said something about a collapsed lung, cheerful and razor-sharp. Jason had spat in his face instead of answering.
Maybe it would’ve been better to play dead, but if he gives up enough to play at it, he thinks he might actually—he might not wake up. He grits his remaining teeth forces himself to listen.
The Joker is still talking, voice fading as he moves further away Jason doesn’t care so long as he keeps the distance. He only manages to focus in time to catch the end of the sentence.
“—and tell the big man I say hello.”
The door to the warehouse slams shut with an echoing thud, cutting off the sounds of the clown’s laughter.
Jason forces the eye that isn’t swollen shut open. The warehouse is empty. Give Bruce a message. The Joker’s leaving him alive to send B a message. And he’s leaving, running away, he—that means Bruce will be here soon, right?
Unless the message is Jason’s body.
No, no—no. If the Joker wanted that to be the message, he would’ve made sure Jason was well and truly dead before he left. Or he just wanted to give Jason a false sense of hope, letting him think he has a chance before coming back and finishing the job—
Jason has to get out.
He rolls over, relying more on momentum than any strength he might have left. Curling over to maneuver the cuffs makes something in his chest shift, his next inhale alarmingly thick and wet.
He doesn’t make a sound when he finally, finally, gets his hands in front of him. It’s not a choice, anymore. He’d screamed so loudly his vocal cords were shredded hours ago.
It takes a long time to get his good leg under him, but he forces himself to his feet in one smooth movement. The room sways sickeningly around him, ribs grinding in his chest, and he can’t breathe, he can’t—
The room goes dark. His nose gives a sickening crack as he lands on the floor, unable to get his arms up quickly enough to break his fall. He doesn’t feel it. That’s, that’s bad, right? He should’ve felt the fall. But he has to keep moving if he wants to make it out.
He spits out a mouthful of blood before he can choke on in it. The door is right there. Twenty feet.
Jason digs his bent and twisted fingers into the floor, ignores the way unnatural way the bones shift under the pressure, and drags himself forward. Nineteen and a half feet. He can do it; he can make it out. He just has to get to the door.
Inch by agonizing inch, he hauls himself closer. Reach forward, pull, gain another few inches, ignore the warm slick of blood and the crunching of bone. Repeat. Bruce would want him to categorize his injuries, find a way to work around them to avoid making things worse. But there’s too many. Even the smallest motion sends a shockwave of pain rippling through his entire body, but he keeps moving because he’s making it out, goddamn it.
He's so focused on just keeping moving that he nearly smacks his head into the door when he reaches it. He did it, he did it, he can get out, he just has to turn the handle and he’ll be okay. He reaches up, uses the chain of the handcuffs rather than his mangled finds to catch the handle and yanks—
It’s locked.
Shit. Shit.
There’s a tiny keyhole on the handle, if he—who is Jason kidding? There’s no way he could jimmy a lock in this state even if he had something to pick it with. He needs—he just needs a moment.
He slumps against the door, tries to catch his breath. It’s cold. He’s cold, he can’t breathe, and he wants his dad. But Bruce hasn’t come, so. He has to find his own way out. In a minute. Once he pulls himself back together.
It takes a couple seconds for him to notice the noise. It’s quiet, nearly covered up by his own wet wheezes. High pitched, rhythmic beeping. Like an alarm, or a…a timer.
His eyes catch on a dim red glow from the farthest corner of the warehouse. A blocky outline, the flicker of numbers on a screen counting down—
Oh.
He’s not making it out.
How can this be it? This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d finally started to believe—Bruce had promised he’d go to college. He was going to be a doctor, or a teacher, or, or—he didn’t know yet, because he was supposed to have time to figure it out, because he finally had a future worth looking towards.
The timer kept ticking down. Ten seconds.
He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t—he doesn’t want to die.
And maybe it’s just desperate synapses misfiring, but he swears, under the ticking, he can hear Bruce calling for him. He won’t make it in time, if he’s even really there.
Five.
It’s a good thing. Even if Jason wants nothing more than to see him, Bruce will be safe from the explosion.
Four.
Bruce will come, even if he’s too late, and the Joker won’t get away. Batman is vengeance and justice and a promise.
Three.
Bruce won’t let this happen to anyone else. If there’s one thing Jason knows, down to his bones, it’s that.
Two.
Jason will be the Joker’s last victim. The last person that man will ever hurt.
One.
Jason closes his eyes. The world around him explodes.
~*~
Two years later…
Jason scoops up the newspaper from where it had been unceremoniously dumped in front of him. The Gotham Gazette. He unfolds it. He hasn’t seen news from Gotham since…since before he woke up. There’s a reason for that, he knows. The League never does anything without a reason. So why now? What’s changed?
It has to be something with Batman. Nothing good. The League doesn’t spread good news. If Bruce made a mistake, if Alfred and Dick couldn’t keep him safe, if Jason went through everything, clawed himself from his grave and fought his way through the pits and he’s still too late—he just wants to see his dad again. That’s it.
He’s so convinced of what he’ll see that the actual headline takes far too long to register.
28 Dead: The Joker’s Rampage Continues.
Batman and—Batman and Robin are emblazed across the page, shot taken mid-fight.
It’s dated from yesterday.
Jason sees green.