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“There's something so pitiful about you.”
Joker's arms are crossed, and his hands grip tightly to his biceps, leather gloves creaking with the effort. “I sure hope that's not what he sees in me.”
“I'm not his property…” Joker mutters to himself. He's looking at Jason, but his gaze isn't sharp and his mind is idling. Everything about his demeanor suggests he doesn't know that Jason is awake yet, even if he expects it somewhat soon.
God. Thank god. Don't move. Don't breathe.
“Should I be offended? That he wants to keep you like a pet, and not me?” He frowns, waving a hand. “Oh, but you're a child. He feels chivalrous. Maybe if I was a homeless teen. It's nothing personal, just aged out of the real care-work. Over 26? Off to Arkham you go!”
“Little fucker.” He snarls, gazing at the Robin with a sudden burst of psychotic jealousy. “Nobody really wants you either.”
Something sharp digs into Jason's cheek: a scalpel, purple and grey. His eyes shoot open.
“Hey there, champ.” Joker's smile is closed lip and cheeky. “Took a pretty bad fall, over and over and over into my crowbar… I patched you up as best I could, but… I'm not gonna lie to you, it looks bad, kid. Real bad, if my name isn't Annie Wilkes.”
“Now… Say something to me!” His grip lowers, but he screams into Jason's bleeding, childish gaze without mercy.
Jason's eyes seem to plead into whatever's left of Joker’s soul, but only the girlish moue of his mouth cracks open. No sound emerges. He wishes he could say something. He really does. Anything at all.
Joker drags the scalpel to a curl right before letting it clatter on the cement. He grabs Jason by the gash there, the fingertip-sized curlicue and stares back into the boy's eyes. “Awh.” He smiles, pressing his thumb into bloody skin. “Good morning, beautiful.”
The next instant Jason is on the floor, pistol-whipped off his shoddy plastic chair, hands uselessly unable to temper the fall, tied behind his waist. Jason is sure he would've screamed from the pain if his chest hadn't simply wheezed out instead.
Joker has his back turned nonetheless, walking away slowly with a played-up kind of nonchalance.
“Should I kill you?” He asks casually, fiddling with his gun. “I'm bored! I'm- so- fucking- bored!” He states each word with peculiar emphasis, as if to present this to some live studio audience, but… no one is there to sympathize.
“Do something interesting!” He yells, facing Jason again. He grabs the boy by the cheek, bruised, but altogether not so swollen.
Joker had gone mainly for his ribs. Several feel broken. One lung feels punctured, Jason thinks. If it wasn't punctured, he wasn't sure what pain, what fear, could possibly feel worse than this.
Any other day, any other day, Jason would've used his legs to scuttle backwards on the floor. Away from that thing.
But today, god, his ribs… His legs don't feel like they work. Jason does not move. Jason cries, and it hurts just as bad as any knife.
“Now this is interesting.” Joker muses, sheathing his handgun and bending at the hips to examine his captive on the floor. “You appear to be paralyzed.” He tilts his head in curiosity. “Or close enough to it for now, anyway.”
The Joker kneels next to the Robin, but when their eyes meet, he sees Jason, finally peeling the mask from the boy's cheekbones.
The look in his eyes is oddly sympathetic, and there's a brief moment of understanding, where Jason can see just how much agony Joker has endured in his own life. It does not last for very long.
Joker laughs. Of course he fucking does.
“Show me where daddy touched you.”
He pokes into his own bottom lip with a finger, teasing. “Come on, show it to me! Oh!” He smacks the heel of one palm into his forehead. “Silly me, you can't move!” He shrugs, face exaggerated, eyebrows leaping up. “Well then, I suppose I'll have to point…”
And Jason is crying again, when that finger touches his mouth -- his teeth. His gums. Just wandering around. His tongue. The fuck?
Jason's whole body flinches in recoil, and he pays for that in pain.
Go to sleep Jason. Go to sleep and it'll be over.
“No, no,” Joker sighs. “This won't do. I need a real tongue depressor. I need to check the reflexes.”
Jason only hears the dripping of blood on concrete. He is too weak to turn and see where Joker retrieves the crowbar from behind him, but he hears it, with great anguish.
Go limp, at least go limp.
“This is your daddy's fault.” Joker crouches in front of the boy, patting the crowbar like a disciplinary stick. He leans down and with little effort parts Jason's bloodied lips, devil-horned prongs of metal touching his tongue. “Say ‘ahhh,’” The Joker says, prying into him.
Jason coughs. The metal pushes on his palate. He coughs and coughs and coughs.
The Joker wriggles the end of the crowbar in and out of the boy's mouth, lazily, almost bored. “You see, normal daddies don't want their babies fistfighting. Quite terrible, really. No fatherly instinct, that one. He's a brute.”
One gloved hand pulls back gently at Jason's hairline, almost petting him there.
“Could've just sent you right to college.” Joker shakes his head, crowbar hand relaxed. “All-expenses-paid boarding school.”
“But he likes to keep you around.” Joker removes the crowbar now, spinning the saliva-covered end over his fingers. “He likes your body too, doesn't he?”
Jason doesn't even need to try to be unresponsive-- he just is. There's nothing left to give.
“You two fight a lot?” The Joker seems to be imagining it, for a moment. He slips his finger under the outer edge of Jason's codpiece, inching towards the center, before abruptly stopping, a hair's breadth from no return. “Does he like having you in a chokehold?”
His eyes never leave Jason's. And they hardly blink.
Jason shudders in relief, chest aching, as the hand is lifted from his crotch.
“Did you ever feel like he was using you as a mirror?” One of Joker's hands stills on Jason's head, while the other runs over Jason's side, to the small divot in his waist.
“I'll bet you look just like him, huh?” Joker's smile completely envelops Jason's small eye movement of surprise.
“You do, don't you! Black hair…” He smooths his hand over Jason's matted locks, almost gently. His fingers pinch Jason's upper cheeks, to ensure his eyes twitch open. “Blue eyes, too. And you know how I know that?” He taps a finger against his teeth. “Because you look just like the other one.”
“I would say I wish I had that birdie instead, but I actually don't think it's true. He's the original, but… you're naughtier. And that makes you more like him, believe it or not.”
Jason was growing very tired of the way Joker said “Him” -- as if Bruce were God. Maybe Batman really was his god.
“What happened to your daddy, baby?” Joker's hand squeezes at his waist, sending a fresh shock of pain to his lungs, eliciting a wheeze where a groan could simply no longer take hold. “When he was young like you?”
The fingers are tight enough to bruise on top of bruises. Even still, the pain is barely noticeable after a moment, just harmonizing quietly with twenty other howling injuries.
Jason's eyes water like a leaky faucet, welling, dripping unbidden, without end.
“Something stunted him.” There are two hands on his waist now, gathering him up, ragdoll limp into Joker's kneeling lap. “Your daddy loves like a child does-- with fear --and plays like a child does-- without it. Oh, and he surrounds himself with little boys too… Boys like him. Juuust like him.”
Joker's voice is singsong as his hands caress on Jason's back, but even the softest touch makes Jason's breathing harsher, more staccato.
It's a fleeting thought, but Jason almost wishes he could laugh. Perhaps the irony is the point. The punchline. The Joker is so careful with him now, like he's made of cracked-up porcelain. He might as well be.
When a hand slips over his ass, it's a merciful cruelty, killing any twisted sign of care. He is shifted in the man's lap into a loose hug. The hand lifting him from behind lingers.
“Did he ever spank you?” Joker asks. “Hmm… no, no. Probably not. Poor taste.” One hand migrates back to Jason's waist, the other cupping at a bloody cheek. “Better to let the bad men show you how cruel the world can be. Better to let them kick you, punch you, break you.” He wipes at the tears on Jason's cheek, procuring a silken handkerchief from some unknown depths. “Don't you see how selfish your daddy is?”
Joker tuts his tongue, shaking his head back and forth again in mock shame. “But don't worry baby. The bad men won't be hurting you anymore. Never again!”
“Maybe,” Joker tucks a lock of blood-stained hair between his Robin's ear, “That means I love you more than he ever could.”
The silence, his terrible green stare, all of it sends a fresh wave of nausea through the boy's empty stomach.
“You were never ready to be loved, Jason.”
He hears his own name like a gunshot.
It's impossible, and probably a dying hallucination, right?
The Joker kisses him on the forehead like the father Jason never really had, tucking him to sleep.
“You were only ready to be lost.”
*
And then everything goes dark. Forever.