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He wants to leave.
Sometimes it's worse in the Cave, where he can feel that fuckin' case looking at him. He knows it isn't, he's not crazy.
(But he stands there, and he can't even face it. If he looks at it-. He can't look at it. Especially not on a night like this. If he looks at it, he'll throw up, maybe, or just fuckin' scream until his ears stop ringing.)
He stands there, and just the presence of the Case behind him feels like a funeral pyre.
He's not dead, he's not.
He-. He can kinda see why B put it up. He's always been about using his family's deaths to hurt himself. It took a while for Jason to even think that: it used to just be that he saw Bruce hurt on those days.
(But there's a difference between grieving your family, and going to the place they died and turning yourself into an open wound. And that's what B did-. Used to do. He doesn't know if he still does it.)
And B would be raw, on the days leading up to it, and the days after. That's just how it was.
(Jason's never understood why B cuts himself open on Crime Alley. Grief isn't-. It's supposed to be sore, not painful. Supposed to be felt, not wallowed in.)
And the case itself-. B had it put higher up so he could stare into the eyes of the Robin domino mask without looking down, 'cause he was a fucking tiny fifteen-year-old. Didn't want to be reminded how young he'd been, maybe.
And the fucking mask. It's like there's a goddamn ghost in the case. It creeps Jason the fuck out.
Just-. The case is so clearly not about Jason. It's there for Bruce to hurt himself with. To hurt everyone else with too, what with it being right in the middle of the cave. And Bruce had turned Jason's death into something that just made him a worse person. A worse parent, too. It disgusts Jason.
(Bruce had adopted so many kids after - Jason can barely count the number of younger siblings he could now name as his own: and from what he can tell, Bruce isn't a parent to any of them. Not the way he had been a parent to Jason. It's-. He'd made the choice to adopt them, knowing he wouldn't be their father. In Jason's eyes, it's appalling.)
But the case doesn't creep him out as much as the plaque just plain pisses him off. A good soldier.
He'd thought he was B's son. Yeah, fine, that B had said he wasn't should have been a big enough clue. What B did to him when he came back had been the final nail in the coffin -ha- but it still sucked to have confirmation.
(But a soldier. Even if he hadn't been B's son, that B thought of Robin as a soldier-. It makes him want to throw up. Kids shouldn't be soldiers. Robin shouldn't be a soldier. Robin was supposed to be Batman's partner . And being described as a soldier instead-. Soldiers died. They knew that risk and accepted it. Robins weren't supposed to die. Though, judging by the death rate of Robins by now, maybe they were supposed to. But the possibility of dying was different to 'supposed to'. And the plaque of 'A Good Soldier' made it seem much more the latter than the former. It makes Jason sick.)
And sometimes it's worse in the Manor.
He doesn't go upstairs. The first floor is for guests, and he can manage that, because upstairs is for family, and B made it goddamn crystal clear he wasn't, and the others haven't shown otherwise. He sticks to the first floor.
(Alfie-. Alfred. He needs to remember, it's Alfred. He's not Alfie anymore. Not to him. But-, Alfred keeps telling him to come upstairs from the Cave, and at the very least it gets him away from that fuckin' memorial case, even if he'd rather leave entirely.)
But the Manor doesn't lock down the same way the Cave does, and he knows at least five ways to escape from the back of the Manor. Admittedly, some of them involve jumping through the windows - through, not out, if necessary. But he doesn't go upstairs, so at least he doesn't have to plan around falling from a height, just around missing Alfred's rose bushes and pyracanthas.
(He doesn't know why exactly Alfred started inviting him into the Manor. He's missed his cooking though-. Well, really, he's missed cooking with Alfred. But Alfred is-. He doesn't know where Alfred stands, not for sure, but it's almost definitely with Bruce. So-. It doesn't matter.
He's not B's son, so he has no relation to Alfred.)
But he's upstairs, in the Manor, just kinda lurking in the tiny study-come-waiting room that's attached to Bruce's work study that he uses for WE stuff. He likes this room, because it's not far from the kitchen, but not that close either. It's tucked out of the way, and anyone passing through would go straight to the entrance in B's study from the corridor without going through this room. It's also got a window that opens onto a blind spot that he can duck into if he needs to.
His back is prickling like he's in danger, but that's not 'cause of anything specific. It's just the Manor.
(-Just the people in the Manor. The bats. He doesn't know where their lines are. He knows B's, and he's pretty sure that Alfred would just let whatever happened happen. Dick - the same as B, probably. The littlest bat won't kill him, not when he's still the escape route to T. And the other one is Red Robin.
Red Robin, the burger restaurant. Stupid name, makes you laugh, and forget the fact that he blew up half the bases of the League of Assassins: he deems long-distance killing acceptable, or collateral damage, anyway. Jason doesn't know about up close and personal though. Maybe he's only fine with killing if he doesn't have to see it. But at least it's unlikely that he'd blow up part of the Manor, so he doesn't need to watch out for that. Hand to hand, Jason should be fine.
Dick, though. He's all about up close and personal. You think you're fine with him on the other side of the room, and then before you realise, he's backflipped closer and used that momentum to kick you hard enough to shatter ribs. The escrima sticks make it worse, especially with the added electrification. Jason hasn't been on the wrong side of it himself, yet, but he's seen Nightwing use them enough times to be wary of it.
There are other bats too, but they're not in the Manor right now. But Red Robin and Nightwing are, so he's got his back to the window, and he's watching the door.
He taps the handle of his knife: still there, good.)
He can hear Tim moving around upstairs. 'Cause, yeah, sure, B liked his privacy, but this is an old building. It creaks, no matter how much sound muffling they try to shove under the floorboards. And Jason's in the room right below. He could hear every shift of weight, if he tried.
But fuck, that just makes the prickling worse. He rolls his shoulders. Tim's room is next to his old room. He hates thinking about it.
He snuck in once. Just to see.
He'd picked the lock and looked inside, and hell. It was almost worse than the case in the Cave. They hadn't touched a damn thing, apart from Alfred dusting it. He doesn't know if it would have been worse to find out that they'd packed everything up into boxes after.
(But fuck. He'd looked at it, and it had looked like the fifteen-year-old him had just stepped out, and was going to return at any moment. There were still his half-read books on the bedside table, and his homework on the desk. It was tidier than he'd left it, but only a little bit.
It had skeeved him the fuck out. They'd known he was back for a while by then. But what the hell was the point of keeping it like that. Fifteen-year-old Jason had died. He wasn't coming back.)
He's pretty sure that when someone dies, you pack up their stuff, give it to charity, dump it, give it to other people in the family, or to friends maybe. He doesn't really know - when his mom died, he fled the apartment and the entire block, didn't deal with any of it, just took the stuff he needed and ran. Maybe locking the room up is just what rich people do. But it creeped him the fuck out.
Jason had fled.
Down in the Cave, there was a martyr-shrine to a dead soldier, and upstairs in the Manor, there was a mausoleum of a dead kid.
But that dead kid was him, and he wasn't dead anymore.
He doesn't know if them keeping his room like that meant they were hoping that fifteen-year-old Jason would come wandering back in someday, move back into his old room, like nothing had ever changed.
'Cause they definitely hadn't put his stuff back in, after they realised he was back. No, his stuff was still there, just the way he'd left it before he ran away and got murdered.
Jesus.
(He doesn't even understand why. He's seen the case. He wasn't B's son. And he knows the shit they used to say about him. Don't be reckless, don't be angry, don't be stupid: don't be like Jason. It'll get you killed, if you're like Jason. He was turned into a cautionary tale.
He was a warning, a soldier, a dead kid.
He wasn't their friend, their brother, their son.)
The room upstairs-.
Hell, he doesn't know. It was his room. His. It was personal, as in, it belonged to a person. Maybe that's why they closed it up, left it alone, because then they didn't have to acknowledge that. They could just close the door and forget about who he was. There aren't even any pictures of him up in the Manor anymore. None at all - and he'd looked. Anything that was his, that was him, not a false ideal of something he wasn't, it was behind the door. And the door was kept closed and locked.
And then there's the tombstone in the graveyard. Oh no, not the Wayne family plot for Jason, no no, not for him. He got buried in Gotham Cemetery with everyone else from north Gotham. And it's-. He's got no problem with the cemetery. It's nice. But it wasn't the Wayne family plot. And then, to make everything so much fucking worse, he'd been buried next to Sheila. Not even Catherine. Sheila.
And the inscription: HERE LIES JASON TODD. Sterile. Factual. And incorrect. When he was fourteen, he'd changed his name to Jason Peter Todd- Wayne. And he wasn't lying there either. Four words total, and only half of them correct.
(Just a creepy ass angel, and a burial plot next to the bitch, in the public cemetery. Truly, what a stunning show of how much he was cared for.)
The case for grief and pain, his room for bile and horror, the empty grave for loneliness and fury.
He doesn't know what the fuck anyone else feels about them.
He hates all of them. None of them-. They don't-. They don't grieve him, just different ideas of who he was. A good soldier, a kid who'd just stepped out and was coming back any second, and a dead boy from Gotham.
And he was-. Is. those things. But not in any of the ways that were intended.
Because he had been a dead kid from Gotham - but the grave pretended he'd never even been adopted by Batman, by Bruce Wayne. (He still was dead, a bit, but he was alive enough that it didn't count: but he wasn't alive as B's kid anymore, that was for sure - and even if he were dead, he wasn't dead as B's kid either)
He could come back any second - but the room pretended he was still a fifteen year old, that he'd never died at all, never grown older, that he was still exactly the same kid as he had been almost a decade ago.
He could be a good soldier - but the case pretended it was because he followed orders, not because he was very good with guns, and at killing.
It was some kind of horror story, to not only watch people grieve you when you're alive, but to know that they were grieving their idea of you, not even who you actually were.
So he stays on the first floor of the Manor, with at least five exit routes available at all times, and his knife on him in case he needs it.