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2018-07-22
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last word WISDOM better get some even too late

Summary:

Same old story: unjust death, murderer alive, a shade called back from Hades. Jason used to read a lot. He knows what he's doing here.

(---At the end of a tragedy you're allowed to just be dead. That's the deal.)

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

The wonderful, electrifying, and almost comforting thing about tragedies is that they always end the same way. No time wasted on denial or hope, no pretense that rescue is going to arrive, only the glorious inevitability of everything falling into place.

Would you know , if you were in one? You must. You would have to know.

 

- On Robin II, Jason Todd.

As is known, certain diseases are transmitted by the blood. This child inherited his parents' illness: drugs, madness, murder, death.

The facts of the matter are: Jason Todd, age 0, born. Jason Todd, age 13, a criminal. Jason Todd, age 15, a killer. Jason Todd, age 16, dead.

The machines of fate tick on relentless; there was nothing anyone could have done.

 

Until the moment Jason Todd died, he believed help was coming. He did his best to prepare for a world where that did not happen, but he could not help expecting Batman to kick the door down at any second, for the lock to give way, for the bomb to not go off. Almost, almost; they were always just on the edge of everything being alright.

It's after he comes back to life that this is no longer a problem.

 

Dirt. Air. The sky.

A ghost made flesh. A murder unavenged.

We all know how a story like this is supposed to go, and none more than him.

 

"What do you think you are doing, Jason?" Talia asks, some time later.

He can't answer; there is no way to describe the long slow slide towards an end barely visible in the distance which nonetheless holds a familiar shape.

Maybe it's the brain damage, but it feels as though all the noise has drained out of his head.

Felipe Garzonas had weighed, to a fifteen-year-old gymnast, almost nothing at all. Height, obstacle, leverage. Movement. Abruptly, the world had become a better place. This has the same flavor: the process of inevitability. Something yet to happen is echoing back into the past.

If you had one regret in your life, one goal left to accomplish, what would it be? Who would you have stand witness? Choose carefully. Even a dead man only gets one second chance.

 

At the bones of it, every story is a love story. She knows fifteen-year-old Jason would have laughed if Talia or anyone had said that to him; not in a malicious way, but out of simple disbelief. Children want to believe that the world is bigger than it is, that sadness and hatred and love and grief and anger are each separated from one another. That good things and bad do not spring from the same source.

Ra's al Ghul is angry with her, and Damian is not pleased to be abandoned in another country, and Bruce may never forgive her. But none of that matters now. That is for later.

He had been such a wonderful, bright child. Anger like a flame at the evils of the world. Filled up with laughter as a pitcher is filled with water. She had always liked children; she had loved Jason. She catches kaleidoscopic glimpses of him in Damian sometimes: a laugh, a toss of the head, a knife grip. Impossible, of course. They've never met and are not biologically related. Those reflections are coming off of her.

There is nothing wrong with him other than the obvious but he does not laugh. He does not smile. He does not ask about his father. He works to regain muscle mass and reflexes, he eats what he is given, he sleeps, he plans. At least he is still angry.

It's as though Jason is possessed; self-possessed, maybe. As his body had been starved down to skin and sinew and bone when she had found him in a park row alleyway, his mind seems sharpened now to a single point. The child he should be and the man he is not yet look, stretched over a bare framework of personality, the same.

The Lazarus pit has been known to do strange things, but this is not one of them.

She begins to leave things for him, books she might have remembered him reading for school, a knife she had planned to save for Damian when he was older. Most of the books he does not touch. The knife disappears, so Talia assumes he kept it.

Jason moves as though only one thing exists in the world. Otherwise he walks around like a man asleep, as though he is -- still or already -- dead. It is frightening to see someone act as though the course of their life is merely an inevitability. It's like watching a ghost.

Wake up, Jason. When are you going to wake up?

 

The structure of the story looks like this:

The consequence of Jason's death is that he is alive again.

Being alive, he is unable to exist as anyone but himself.

Being himself, he is unable to act except in accordance with his character.

As such, there are three deaths on the table and many others on the sideboard.

Of these three, one is a metaphor and two an inevitability.

On the metaphor we shall remain silent.

The Joker may be considered to be dead already, save for the effects caused by his body walking around

Jason Todd, backlit by his oncoming death, is as alive as he has ever been.

The collision of these two deaths with the initial metaphor is set to bring on Gotham City an earthquake of consciousness from which it will not recover.

 

Jason could delay but there is no point. He could stretch out the hours the days the years until he was ready to do it, until the stars aligned and his hands did not shake and his heart did not shiver but there is no point. However long the road is stretched out the destination is unchanged. Death at twenty, thirty, fifty; no matter. At seventeen the same.

Talia hangs onto him by the bones of his ribcage, by the hair, by the heartstrings, but a narrative cannot be stopped. From Gotham back to Gotham, grave to death, has been less than a year.

 

Jason: See ya, T.

[Exit Jason Todd]

Talia: There's something wrong with that kid.

 

- On the Joker.

There is only one story about the Joker that matters, and it is the one where he dies. Strictly speaking as a character the Joker does not exist. We may represent him here as a cardboard cutout, a cipher, a blank wall in a world full of human beings. Try to tell me you're writing the Joker into a tragedy, a real heartbleeding chestclenching gutsknife of a story, and it will be the only time he's ever made anybody laugh.

You want a story about the essential character of human nature? Call someone else.

 

Jump cut: BATMAN is on the floor, stunned, one hand still holding a batarang. A choice has made itself without him. JOKER is some distance away, bleeding out from head and abdominal wounds. He does not move. RED HOOD, denied his proper stage exit, sinks down to the ground gun in hand. He's shaking.

A SHADOW falls across the floor.

"Get up, Jason," says Talia al Ghul. "The world's not done with you yet."

Notes:

stylistic and literary debts owed to: anne carson, particularly antigonick and autobiography of red; lewis galantiere's adaptation of jean anouilh's antigone; robert fagles generally; and of course to my friends dovey and tara.

judd winick has said that red hood: lost days is a tragedy. he's wrong -- very -- but i wanted to look at what a tragedy version of the red hood origin story might be, and also the reasons it doesn't work as one.

running into something like sophocles' antigone (or any of the famous greek tragedies, really) as a teenager can really shape the way you view the world and the way you think about yourself. i love jason as a literature nerd; i wanted to put a bit of my own experiences with reading things that turn your brain inside out into him.

i wrote this all in lowercase and putting in capitals to some parts of it hurt my soul