FIC: A Season in Hell (Bruce/Jason)
MY LOVE FOR BRUCE/JASON IS UNDYING!
FIC: A Season in Hell
Author: eggblue
Fandom: Batman comics AU (see below)
Pairing: Bruce/Jason (Batman/Robin), Clark (Superman)
Rating: R (violent dark strangeness)
Summary: Maybe this is Jason’s hell, for a time
Disclaimer: DC, George Lucas, everyone else owns but me, except this story is pretty much mine, so no one sue anyone
Inspired by all my favorite slashy things:
‘Exit Music (for a film),’ a song by Radiohead (gave birth to my life in slash a decade ago)
‘Emperor Joker,’ a comics mini-series by Joe Kelly
Dream Boy, a novel by Jim Grimsley
Star Wars, films by George Lucas
Little Red Riding Hood, a fairytale
Hayden Christensen in a movie, Life as a House
Red Hood Jason Todd
Rimbaud gave me the title
Robert Desnos made it all darker with the poem at the end
For monkeycrackmary (I can’t believe how much fic I’ve been writing this past year and it’s all your fault, yay) and cosmicastaway (I hope this is nice and musey and dreamy and not depressing in a bad way, just like you’ve been helping me out). Everyone excuse my pretentiousness please.
*
Jason remembers dying each day.
There are all kinds of death, he thinks at his dull reflection in the mirror. His dark-lined eyes seem shadowed against the rising sun, rebellious. What light makes it through the wood-paneled cabin is muted by the dust and darkness inside. But he can see his hair in it, electric ultraviolet and dark. The sun catches the silver hoops in his ears, the paleness of his skin. He sneers a smile at the stud beneath his lip. He feels… natural. Alive. Animal-like. Like something that’s supposed to be. He thinks that’s Bruce’s fault. All of it seems to be Bruce’s fault.
Bruce who is responsible for the full redness of his lips, the yellow bitten bruise on his shoulder, the dull ache in his belly. Bruce the huntsman. Bruce always sheathed in black leather from a creature he once tracked down. It pads his body like an extra layer of strength, of muscle. He is like an animal too. An equal in a black hood and cape.
Jason thinks of his father in the black hooded cloak. He shivers when he thinks of his laugh, his white pock-marked face and his irrational temper that held his whole world in terror. The whole universe. Under the rule of Emperor Joker.
So Jason dies every day. There are lightning strikes. There are shiny blades and rituals and blood in rivers. There are empty endless beatings. There are abuses to his body he couldn’t have imagined. And every day Bruce tries to save him. But Bruce is wrong. Jason knows his death is a sacrifice, an appeasement. If the Emperor wants him, Jason will go. He never believed in destiny before. But now he knows that death is his. There is something right about that. Jason needs to be needed. Jason craves annihilation and endings. It’s the beginnings that never stop hurting, the renewing of life that comes with the sunrise. Somewhere between the maddening pain of brutal sun-scorched death and the pleasure of Bruce all night every night, endless, breaking, naked… But Bruce is wrong. He cannot save the universe from a madman. He cannot even save Jason. Though he tries.
Jason raises his own red hooded cloak and leaves the impossible safety of the cabin. The woodsman is chopping at trees again. Thwack, thwack, thwack as the forest falls. He feels Clark’s eyes on him as he leaves, the neighborly concern masking the despair that had driven him mad long ago. He thinks of the madness in those cornflower blue eyes and it makes what he has to do that much easier. He will kill his father. He will kill Emperor Joker. And if he has to lose his soul, so be it. Bruce will have to understand. He is the huntsman of the woods, the only one left still fighting.
But. This is familiar somehow. Familiar like those nights he knocks on the cabin door, three quick raps, and Bruce shows him inside, shows him another world, and some touches he remembers, some of Bruce’s words already known, and the hope in his eyes burns like madness. Bruce never says a word when he takes him. Never apologizes, never begs, never asks. Jason gives the only way he knows how - completely, broken, soft and sharp and sure and never-ending. Then their safety feels sour and wrong. He knows he’s earned none of this. And Bruce’s denial won’t be enough to save them. But then the hours pass in the night until he’s breathing Bruce and all he can remember is the sound of their blood pumping and the rhythm of their breathing. The only creatures in the universe. That’s what it felt like. Not for the first time he wonders what Bruce wouldn’t do to have him, what Bruce wouldn’t do. He can’t think of a thing.
So he runs through the woods after sunrise, his red cloak like a bird flying through the dead trees. He’s running to his death, he knows this now. The huntsman is chasing him. He feels the Emperor’s eyes ahead of him, calling him. He will die. Bruce will find his broken body, run the tests and know again. Who he is. Who his father is. And Bruce will make a bargain to the night, always makes a bargain. He knows this now. So they can return to the woodsman’s dead eyes as he builds a new cabin beside the dark quiet of the lake.
And the quiet of the trees tells him he’s done this before. The unnatural calm and the pressure behind the greying sky. The déjà vu of every footfall. The futility of his breaths. He knows he will not succeed in killing the Emperor. He knows this and he keeps running. He no longer knows who he’s running to, whether it’s the shining eyes of the Emperor and yawning, familiar death, whether it’s the frightening calm of the huntsman and the woodsman, saving what’s left of his reality.
This time, the Emperor’s throne is black, shiny like blood, immense and unconquerable. Stars shine behind him in the endless darkness (he knew it was daylight, he knew it was daylight…). Mesmerizing emptiness. He pulls down the red hood and lets his eyes burn inside the black. The Emperor mimics him, but slower, because he can. Because he’s in no hurry. Jason understands the infinite boredom, the constant death of familiarity. He sees it in the Emperor’s face every day. He thinks the woodsman and the huntsman are only pawns. Allowed enough free will to last through the night until sunrise.
Jason and the Emperor face each other and there is crackling in the air of light and energy and things hidden in the dark. Jason clears his mind of the huntsman chasing at his back, of everything. He realizes like a bad dream that he does not know how to end this. He never knows, he will never know.
Hair stands up on his skin all over and he smells burning rubber. Light blinds him an instant later, and then there’s darkness. Then there’s a thunderclap that shakes his bones, then there’s a voice echoing in his skull.
You exist to entertain me, it says.
You exist for me to hurt, it says.
I want your existence, it says.
Then there is laughter. Then there is a scream pitched so high it turns the darkness into dark.
The dusk is the first thing he smells when he awakes. He knows then that he has failed. He cannot see. He does not think he has eyes anymore. He cannot move his limbs. It does not feel like numbness. He thinks they have been removed. He cannot feel his skin. He thinks it might have burned away. It’s different from being skinned alive. Different from a broken neck. It’s a lack of pain where he knows pain should be. He cannot feel his tongue. Maybe his ears are melted shut.
He smells dusk and… coolness. The woodsman is close by. Maybe the woodsman has found him already, found some dark bloody spot on the ground while flying. Swooped some helpless thing in his arms and flown to an even more remote cabin, a safe place where there are no safe places. Maybe the huntsman is already examining his body for evidence, gathering data for a trial that will never take place except for in his own mind. Maybe he thinks it will be different this time, the Emperor will have shown some mercy on his son, the woodsman will have found a way to save them, the son will have succeeded.
It is over an hour before he can speak again. It smells like darkness now and he can see the dusk has faded away. This cabin is one of the older ones. The walls are warped by rain now and darkened. The woodsman has gone. He can hear the thwack thwack thwack constantly, steady, as if the trees could ever disappear. He can feel them fade as they give themselves up to the ax. He can feel the emptiness where larger life-forces used to exist. He can feel the hum of the force beyond the life he knows. It stretches so far, so huge, he might be dreaming it. It expands immediately beyond all that he knows, all that the Emperor could possibly know, into that place that only the huntsman can sense in his wildest dreams.
Bruce would never believe in such things. Only because Jason tells him so, because he can see Jason rebuilding and remaking what once was.
Thwack. Jason flexes his left hand.
Thwack. Jason bends his leg.
Thwack. Jason’s hair appears, electric ultraviolet like a halo around feather-white skin.
The night is darkest now. Newly-born creatures howl outside the cabin walls. A full moon shines through the cracks in the walls like an imaginary prison. Bruce shines blue and palest at midnight and Jason reaches for him and it begins again. They would not stop this. If any moment in time held a key, they would not search for it here.
Instead they have the will of Bruce’s thrusts, the will of Jason’s open body, the place they meet closed now like a mystery, the feeling of what is and the aftershocks of what it does to them and the incongruity of the meeting of halves and the lack of fear of any kind of damage and no need to be polite and no need to apologize and no need to know.
There is the way his toothy mouth opens its widest to take him in. There is the way the moonlight never leaves his eyes. There is the way his legs jerk in the air. There is the way he rides.
In the moment before dawn, he lies on the floor and feels the absence as the huntsman draws himself away and stalks towards the door. He smells the blood the huntsman smells, he feels the creatures the huntsman feels. He feels the moment when human soul fades to beast and he hears the flap of monstrous, impossible, leathery wings outside the cabin door and floats above the earth for a moment with him in a farewell and fades into a dreamless sleep again.
end
*
Robert Desnos
Last Poem
I have so fiercely dreamed of you
And walked so far and spoken of you so,
Loved a shade of you so hard
That now I’ve no more left of you.
I’m left to be a shade among the shades
A hundred times more shade than shade
To be shade cast time and time again into your sun-transfigured life.
FIC: A Season in Hell
Author: eggblue
Fandom: Batman comics AU (see below)
Pairing: Bruce/Jason (Batman/Robin), Clark (Superman)
Rating: R (violent dark strangeness)
Summary: Maybe this is Jason’s hell, for a time
Disclaimer: DC, George Lucas, everyone else owns but me, except this story is pretty much mine, so no one sue anyone
Inspired by all my favorite slashy things:
‘Exit Music (for a film),’ a song by Radiohead (gave birth to my life in slash a decade ago)
‘Emperor Joker,’ a comics mini-series by Joe Kelly
Dream Boy, a novel by Jim Grimsley
Star Wars, films by George Lucas
Little Red Riding Hood, a fairytale
Hayden Christensen in a movie, Life as a House
Red Hood Jason Todd
Rimbaud gave me the title
Robert Desnos made it all darker with the poem at the end
For monkeycrackmary (I can’t believe how much fic I’ve been writing this past year and it’s all your fault, yay) and cosmicastaway (I hope this is nice and musey and dreamy and not depressing in a bad way, just like you’ve been helping me out). Everyone excuse my pretentiousness please.
*
Jason remembers dying each day.
There are all kinds of death, he thinks at his dull reflection in the mirror. His dark-lined eyes seem shadowed against the rising sun, rebellious. What light makes it through the wood-paneled cabin is muted by the dust and darkness inside. But he can see his hair in it, electric ultraviolet and dark. The sun catches the silver hoops in his ears, the paleness of his skin. He sneers a smile at the stud beneath his lip. He feels… natural. Alive. Animal-like. Like something that’s supposed to be. He thinks that’s Bruce’s fault. All of it seems to be Bruce’s fault.
Bruce who is responsible for the full redness of his lips, the yellow bitten bruise on his shoulder, the dull ache in his belly. Bruce the huntsman. Bruce always sheathed in black leather from a creature he once tracked down. It pads his body like an extra layer of strength, of muscle. He is like an animal too. An equal in a black hood and cape.
Jason thinks of his father in the black hooded cloak. He shivers when he thinks of his laugh, his white pock-marked face and his irrational temper that held his whole world in terror. The whole universe. Under the rule of Emperor Joker.
So Jason dies every day. There are lightning strikes. There are shiny blades and rituals and blood in rivers. There are empty endless beatings. There are abuses to his body he couldn’t have imagined. And every day Bruce tries to save him. But Bruce is wrong. Jason knows his death is a sacrifice, an appeasement. If the Emperor wants him, Jason will go. He never believed in destiny before. But now he knows that death is his. There is something right about that. Jason needs to be needed. Jason craves annihilation and endings. It’s the beginnings that never stop hurting, the renewing of life that comes with the sunrise. Somewhere between the maddening pain of brutal sun-scorched death and the pleasure of Bruce all night every night, endless, breaking, naked… But Bruce is wrong. He cannot save the universe from a madman. He cannot even save Jason. Though he tries.
Jason raises his own red hooded cloak and leaves the impossible safety of the cabin. The woodsman is chopping at trees again. Thwack, thwack, thwack as the forest falls. He feels Clark’s eyes on him as he leaves, the neighborly concern masking the despair that had driven him mad long ago. He thinks of the madness in those cornflower blue eyes and it makes what he has to do that much easier. He will kill his father. He will kill Emperor Joker. And if he has to lose his soul, so be it. Bruce will have to understand. He is the huntsman of the woods, the only one left still fighting.
But. This is familiar somehow. Familiar like those nights he knocks on the cabin door, three quick raps, and Bruce shows him inside, shows him another world, and some touches he remembers, some of Bruce’s words already known, and the hope in his eyes burns like madness. Bruce never says a word when he takes him. Never apologizes, never begs, never asks. Jason gives the only way he knows how - completely, broken, soft and sharp and sure and never-ending. Then their safety feels sour and wrong. He knows he’s earned none of this. And Bruce’s denial won’t be enough to save them. But then the hours pass in the night until he’s breathing Bruce and all he can remember is the sound of their blood pumping and the rhythm of their breathing. The only creatures in the universe. That’s what it felt like. Not for the first time he wonders what Bruce wouldn’t do to have him, what Bruce wouldn’t do. He can’t think of a thing.
So he runs through the woods after sunrise, his red cloak like a bird flying through the dead trees. He’s running to his death, he knows this now. The huntsman is chasing him. He feels the Emperor’s eyes ahead of him, calling him. He will die. Bruce will find his broken body, run the tests and know again. Who he is. Who his father is. And Bruce will make a bargain to the night, always makes a bargain. He knows this now. So they can return to the woodsman’s dead eyes as he builds a new cabin beside the dark quiet of the lake.
And the quiet of the trees tells him he’s done this before. The unnatural calm and the pressure behind the greying sky. The déjà vu of every footfall. The futility of his breaths. He knows he will not succeed in killing the Emperor. He knows this and he keeps running. He no longer knows who he’s running to, whether it’s the shining eyes of the Emperor and yawning, familiar death, whether it’s the frightening calm of the huntsman and the woodsman, saving what’s left of his reality.
This time, the Emperor’s throne is black, shiny like blood, immense and unconquerable. Stars shine behind him in the endless darkness (he knew it was daylight, he knew it was daylight…). Mesmerizing emptiness. He pulls down the red hood and lets his eyes burn inside the black. The Emperor mimics him, but slower, because he can. Because he’s in no hurry. Jason understands the infinite boredom, the constant death of familiarity. He sees it in the Emperor’s face every day. He thinks the woodsman and the huntsman are only pawns. Allowed enough free will to last through the night until sunrise.
Jason and the Emperor face each other and there is crackling in the air of light and energy and things hidden in the dark. Jason clears his mind of the huntsman chasing at his back, of everything. He realizes like a bad dream that he does not know how to end this. He never knows, he will never know.
Hair stands up on his skin all over and he smells burning rubber. Light blinds him an instant later, and then there’s darkness. Then there’s a thunderclap that shakes his bones, then there’s a voice echoing in his skull.
You exist to entertain me, it says.
You exist for me to hurt, it says.
I want your existence, it says.
Then there is laughter. Then there is a scream pitched so high it turns the darkness into dark.
The dusk is the first thing he smells when he awakes. He knows then that he has failed. He cannot see. He does not think he has eyes anymore. He cannot move his limbs. It does not feel like numbness. He thinks they have been removed. He cannot feel his skin. He thinks it might have burned away. It’s different from being skinned alive. Different from a broken neck. It’s a lack of pain where he knows pain should be. He cannot feel his tongue. Maybe his ears are melted shut.
He smells dusk and… coolness. The woodsman is close by. Maybe the woodsman has found him already, found some dark bloody spot on the ground while flying. Swooped some helpless thing in his arms and flown to an even more remote cabin, a safe place where there are no safe places. Maybe the huntsman is already examining his body for evidence, gathering data for a trial that will never take place except for in his own mind. Maybe he thinks it will be different this time, the Emperor will have shown some mercy on his son, the woodsman will have found a way to save them, the son will have succeeded.
It is over an hour before he can speak again. It smells like darkness now and he can see the dusk has faded away. This cabin is one of the older ones. The walls are warped by rain now and darkened. The woodsman has gone. He can hear the thwack thwack thwack constantly, steady, as if the trees could ever disappear. He can feel them fade as they give themselves up to the ax. He can feel the emptiness where larger life-forces used to exist. He can feel the hum of the force beyond the life he knows. It stretches so far, so huge, he might be dreaming it. It expands immediately beyond all that he knows, all that the Emperor could possibly know, into that place that only the huntsman can sense in his wildest dreams.
Bruce would never believe in such things. Only because Jason tells him so, because he can see Jason rebuilding and remaking what once was.
Thwack. Jason flexes his left hand.
Thwack. Jason bends his leg.
Thwack. Jason’s hair appears, electric ultraviolet like a halo around feather-white skin.
The night is darkest now. Newly-born creatures howl outside the cabin walls. A full moon shines through the cracks in the walls like an imaginary prison. Bruce shines blue and palest at midnight and Jason reaches for him and it begins again. They would not stop this. If any moment in time held a key, they would not search for it here.
Instead they have the will of Bruce’s thrusts, the will of Jason’s open body, the place they meet closed now like a mystery, the feeling of what is and the aftershocks of what it does to them and the incongruity of the meeting of halves and the lack of fear of any kind of damage and no need to be polite and no need to apologize and no need to know.
There is the way his toothy mouth opens its widest to take him in. There is the way the moonlight never leaves his eyes. There is the way his legs jerk in the air. There is the way he rides.
In the moment before dawn, he lies on the floor and feels the absence as the huntsman draws himself away and stalks towards the door. He smells the blood the huntsman smells, he feels the creatures the huntsman feels. He feels the moment when human soul fades to beast and he hears the flap of monstrous, impossible, leathery wings outside the cabin door and floats above the earth for a moment with him in a farewell and fades into a dreamless sleep again.
end
*
Robert Desnos
Last Poem
I have so fiercely dreamed of you
And walked so far and spoken of you so,
Loved a shade of you so hard
That now I’ve no more left of you.
I’m left to be a shade among the shades
A hundred times more shade than shade
To be shade cast time and time again into your sun-transfigured life.