always with the Dick jokes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
irrelevant) wrote2010-10-16 07:18 am
irrelevant) wrote2010-10-16 07:18 am
Entry tags:
[fic] the head on the door: Arkham Nocturne, sonata in three movements (DCU)
Arkham Nocturne, sonata in three movements
DCU | PG-13 | Jason Todd, assorted Bats and Gothamites | Bruce/Jay (sort of)
notes: the head on the door interlude. Also, I remembered the prompt: entangled.
In between months there’s a shift, like Gotham’s stretching, straining back into the shape it needs to be.
The clock’s stuck on midnight.
The moon is waning gibbous.
The salt-rot fug of Arkham is sharper, metallic, and everyone inside her breathes in shallow gasps. They walk uneven circuits around their cells, screaming at the walls and in their sleep.
Two nightshift orderlies resign. The new shrink hangs herself in the women’s shower; that’s what the coroner says, but yeah, Arkham. Nobody ever really gets out of here, not even when they die to do it. That’s too sane an ending for Gotham and temporarily defunct sanity can't stand up to the real crazies, even when the weather’s making everyone want to claw somebody else’s eyes out.
Copper and iron clump viscous and thick in the air, so thick it’s like breathing blood. The smell and the unseasonable heat, plus the sound of Dent flipping his coin are enough to turn Wesker’s submissive personality homicidal, but Zsasz doesn’t need a better excuse than an uncut throat. Pulling a homemade shiv on Joker in group therapy makes his third attempt in a week. He lands in the infirmary with three broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a crushed larynx.
Joker squats in his cell sucking on his blood-crusted nails and giggling like a smashed kewpie stuck on one sound bite. He’s out of the clam shell, but a leg, an arm and one wrist are still in casts; he spends most of his time scratching thick welts into the parts of his skin he can get to, trying to kill the itches he can’t touch. The rest of the time he stares at Jason.
Jason doubles his pushup quota. He sweats pure salt and dreams in black and green and yellow and red. Walks everywhere on his hands shouting Suicidal Tendencies lyrics until Wolper gives up changing his meds and trying to talk him down and lets Hernandez threaten to gag him. Jason talks her into sparring him instead; two falls out of three, loser puts up or shuts up.
First time out, she dislocates his shoulder. She squats down beside him while he's working up to punching it back in and says, "I owed you for the eye. Heads up."
"You threw that on purpose," he pants, and she says, "You asked for it," and steps on him just right and also very, very wrong.
Jason sweats and shakes and tries not to puke. She pulls him up, waving off the other guards and hauls his sorry ass to the infirmary.
"You owe me another round," Jason mumbles, and she laughs at him.
"Bullshit. You're down, you're out, you forfeit. I get one more complaint, you're in the gag in the jacket for twenty-four, and you know I mean it."
Jason grins and leans. He was sick of Muir’s masochistic bullshit, anyway. Also, his throat hurts from making his vocal chords go places they don’t want to. In the infirmary, he mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key, then he makes faces at Zsasz while the doc immobilizes his arm, so it’s probably a good thing Zsasz is so high he’s not tracking. His slack-jawed expression doesn’t even change when Jason flips him off. There’s a thin thread of saliva crawling down the side of his chin.
Jason looks away from old death superimposed over present psychosis and still doesn’t puke. He hated drugs and hospitals before Batman’s tires appeared on his horizon. Since then he’s spent too much time on his back with needles stuck in him, and seen too much of what happens to people who like to stick needles in themselves to ever go there himself.
Mind altering substances aside, it sucks hard that there’s a moratorium on the good stuff for dudes who got themselves flushed out less than a month ago. Zsasz is chilling in poppy land, but it’s Tylenol without the codeine for Jason. He’s wrapped up good and tight, and still feeling plenty of pain when Hernandez sticks her head in.
“You done coddling your wussy butt yet, crazy boy? You’ve got a visitor.”
“We prefer the phrase differently sane, Ms. Hernandez,” the doc says stiffly. Jason grins at her as he slides down off the table.
“Speak for yourself, beautiful. Thanks to the good offices of this worthy institution, I am as one with the bugfuck. Give me a new idea, undo all that expensive therapy the tax payers are footing, who knows what’ll happen.”
The guard at the duty station shifts uneasily, like he’s looking for an excuse to use his baton. Hernandez rolls her eyes. “Play nice, bugfuck,” she says, “and I just might break your other arm for you some time.”
“Motherfucking tease,” Jason says, and follows her out.
--
Hernandez doesn’t tell him who rang his bell, but there’s only one person who’d want to, even if Jason still hasn’t figured out why. Dick comes over when he feels like it and never stays more than fifteen minutes at a time. Jason hasn’t figured out the pattern to his visits yet, either, but Dick was always pretty random and that hasn’t changed.
Sometimes Dick is Dick. Sometimes he’s not. But he’s always a dick, and one heat-sticky afternoon Jason tells him it’s nice to be able to count on your family being exactly what they are even when they’re pretending not to be.
Dick grins at him, lots of naturally straight white teeth and one crooked incisor. He leaves without saying anything else but he comes back again after dark and hangs upside down outside Jason’s barred window because he can and Jason can’t, and someday Jason’s going to hurt him a lot for that.
During the day they’re stuck in the single visitor’s room saying fuck all to each other, Dick leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, Jason with his hands laced together behind his head picking camels and mopeds, and once a pair of snakes screwing, out of the water stains on the ceiling. It’s better than a Rorschach, and it means Jason doesn’t have to watch Dick watching him. Nighttime means the same thing, if only because it’s not Dick who shows up after hours.
It’s not Dick who’s waiting in interrogation three tonight – really not Dick. It takes Jason one stuttering heartbeat to recognize the jaw line inside the cowl. Less than that to take a swing at it.
“Leave,” Batman tells Hernandez. She hovers in the doorway with uncharacteristic indecisiveness while Jason shouts, “Son of a bitch, you son of a fucking bitch,” over and over and Batman pins him face first to the wall, twisting his good arm up behind him.
“Leave,” Batman says again, and Jason’s shouts should drown out every other sound but he hears him perfectly. The bastard doesn’t even raise his voice. His hands don’t ease up for one goddamn second.
“Leave,” one more time. Some part of Jason’s impressed. That’s got to be some kind of record for resisting the voice, but everybody’s got their break point and third time’s the charm. The sound of the door closing is one more crazy echo. The wall is cool under Jason’s cheek. Batman’s breath is humid on the back of his neck.
“Jay,” Bruce says, and Jason jerks in his hold and screams, fury trapped in sound.
He tries to rear back, tries to smash the back of his head into Bruce’s face. Sometimes he feels like he’s spent his whole fucking life trying to make Bruce, “Let the fuck go!”
There are so many things those hands could do to him; he’s already had a few of them. They live under his skin, invisible faded bruises he pounds and bites back into existence just so he can prove to himself they were really there.
So many things, but never the ones he asked for. He’s not asking now, and Bruce’s grip is giving. Jason waits for what he knows is coming, and Bruce gives him the opening.
He’s not going to pretend he’s taking, because there’s no way he could. Bruce is letting him come. Letting him kick and punch his way through Bruce’s guard, only blocking when the blow is potentially crippling. When Bruce’s back hits the wall he drops his arms, and then he’s not moving and he’s not blocking and his lip is splitting under Jason’s knuckles.
He doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t ask Jason to stop, or try to stop him. Jason stopped screaming when he threw the first punch. His knuckles sting like a bitch from pounding on shit that’s harder than they are, and he’s dripping blood: some his, some Bruce’s.
Bruce hasn’t wiped the blood away from his mouth yet. Jason doesn’t want to stop looking at it, but he does because he’s licking it up, sucking it away until there’s nothing left for him to suck on but Bruce’s mouth.
Bruce doesn’t push him away. He doesn’t kiss him back, either, and it’s pattern recognition, the son of a bitch is still stuck in his six-year-old feedback loop, and Jason’s had enough of that shit. He bites into Bruce’s lip until blood is trickling into his mouth and Bruce finally, fucking finally wraps a hand around his jaw. His fingers tighten ease up or I’ll break you and Jason jerks back and snarls, “Do something for once, you stupid, self-righteous prick. I’m not gonna stop. Make up your damn mind and make me.”
“Enough.” They’d push each other for hours on the mats and the equipment and in the sims; five fucking minutes in this twelve by twelve cage and they’re panting like a couple of pansy-ass civilians. “Enough, Jay.”
He hates the stupid, irreversible noise that gets through his clenched teeth. He hates that his neck still knows how to bend, that Bruce still knows how to say Jay the way he did when Jason was fifteen and too stupid to live.
“You don’t get to die,” he says against the scruffy heat of Bruce’s skin. “Not yet. Not until I say.”
Bruce is doing something behind him with his hands. Jason wonders, distantly, if he’s about to get neck-pinched into unconsciousness, but Bruce drops a gauntlet inside Jason’s line of sight and wraps his bare hand around the back of Jason’s neck.
Jason breathes in the suit’s leathery chemical odors mixed with Bruce’s sweat. Can’t see, can’t hear or feel or taste, he’d still be able to smell the difference between Dick and Bruce in the suit. “Both dead,” he hears himself say. “No one left to kill but the Antilife freak's zombies.”
“I know.” Bruce’s hand isn’t moving. It’s just there, skin to skin. “I’m sorry.”
He’s laughing silently at himself, not sure whether he wants Bruce’s hand or the apology more. He’s even less sure which one is harder to believe in.
He lets himself have Bruce’s skin. In his head it feels like a minute too long and six years too short. Then he reaches up and pulls Bruce’s hand off him. Steps back and looks at him, bruised jaw, split swollen lip. There’s no blood, not even a crust. It’s all in Jason’s mouth.
“Get the fuck out,” Jason says. “Don’t come back.”
He doesn’t.
--
They drag Pyg in raving about wings and dark and twos, oink oink, but Two-Face is silent and Jason laughs himself hoarse because this is one double feature even Harv won’t touch.
There’s footage from a private cam the day after that. It’s all over the news on every station: Batmen, plural. It’s easy to tell them apart if you’re Jason.
Easier if you’re the Joker. He’s frozen in place on the common room couch, and every piece of him, sane and not, is glued to the screen. “Batsy, you’re looking pretty good for a dead guy,” he says after the clip ends. Jason hopes he’s the only one who hears, “Darling.”
He leans his elbows on the back of the couch, leans down so his mouth is level with Joker’s ear. “You are one sick puppy, Mr. J.” He picked that one up from Quinzel; he’s using it because he’s curious. The most predictable thing about Joker is how his initial reaction is always going to be the one you least expect.
“Flattery will get you – oh it’s you,” he says, looking up at Jason. His smile never changes; it looks the same now as it did when he was caving Jason’s skull in. “How’s about it, birdie boy? Ready to kiss and make up for dear old daddy’s sake?”
Hearing and feeling your skull fracturing around your brain isn’t something most head trauma victims live to remember. Jason didn’t, except for how he kind of did.
The back edge of the couch bites into his hip when he leans forward. Someone just changed the channel and upped the volume, and he’s making sure he’s heard. “Want to know a secret?” he says.
Joker exaggeratedly widens his eyes. “Do tell, sweetums. Loooooooves me a secret.”
They’ve been here before. He knows when Joker remembers; he can see it in the slipping smile, can feel his own smile widening in tandem. It’s like he’s feeding off Joker’s sick amusement; for every millimeter of curve Joker’s smile loses, Jason’s grin gains one.
“Was the kid as good for you as I was?” he says. “Hell, I'll even buy better. He worked you over and then some.”
Minute tells, Bruce used to say, will tell you almost everything you need to know. Joker’s hard, but Talia was an enigma wrapped in a conundrum, and the lines around Joker’s eyes tightened for just long enough to be a flinch.
Jason pushes lazily away from the couch into a full-body stretch; his so-called free hour is almost over. “I was going to kill you before I got out of here,” he tells Joker, “but it's no fun shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Todd,” says Hernandez from the doorway. “Time’s up.”
The Joker shakes his head and tsks. “Ooooh, got you by the short pants, boychick,” he giggles. “Well, what are you standing there for? Didn’t your momma teach you not to keep a lady waiting? Oh sorry, that’s right. She was too busy running away from you for any quality mother-son bonding.”
It should hurt like motherfuck. He’s surprised when it doesn’t. “Todd,” Hernandez says again, and there’s a pissy edge to it Jason would encourage if he didn’t have other stuff on his mind.
Some of the stuff is wiggling his fingers Jason. “So glad we had this little chat, we’ll have to do it again some time. I’ll pencil you in for Sunday brunch. You bring the champagne, I’ll provide the crowbar. Ta-ta until then. Say hi to pointy ears for me won’t you?”
“Nah,” Jason says. “But I’ll tell Robin you were looking for him.”
If an eye twitch counts as a tell, the total absence of laughter as Jason walks out is Chemo in Blüdhaven.
DCU | PG-13 | Jason Todd, assorted Bats and Gothamites | Bruce/Jay (sort of)
notes: the head on the door interlude. Also, I remembered the prompt: entangled.
In between months there’s a shift, like Gotham’s stretching, straining back into the shape it needs to be.
The clock’s stuck on midnight.
The moon is waning gibbous.
The salt-rot fug of Arkham is sharper, metallic, and everyone inside her breathes in shallow gasps. They walk uneven circuits around their cells, screaming at the walls and in their sleep.
Two nightshift orderlies resign. The new shrink hangs herself in the women’s shower; that’s what the coroner says, but yeah, Arkham. Nobody ever really gets out of here, not even when they die to do it. That’s too sane an ending for Gotham and temporarily defunct sanity can't stand up to the real crazies, even when the weather’s making everyone want to claw somebody else’s eyes out.
Copper and iron clump viscous and thick in the air, so thick it’s like breathing blood. The smell and the unseasonable heat, plus the sound of Dent flipping his coin are enough to turn Wesker’s submissive personality homicidal, but Zsasz doesn’t need a better excuse than an uncut throat. Pulling a homemade shiv on Joker in group therapy makes his third attempt in a week. He lands in the infirmary with three broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a crushed larynx.
Joker squats in his cell sucking on his blood-crusted nails and giggling like a smashed kewpie stuck on one sound bite. He’s out of the clam shell, but a leg, an arm and one wrist are still in casts; he spends most of his time scratching thick welts into the parts of his skin he can get to, trying to kill the itches he can’t touch. The rest of the time he stares at Jason.
Jason doubles his pushup quota. He sweats pure salt and dreams in black and green and yellow and red. Walks everywhere on his hands shouting Suicidal Tendencies lyrics until Wolper gives up changing his meds and trying to talk him down and lets Hernandez threaten to gag him. Jason talks her into sparring him instead; two falls out of three, loser puts up or shuts up.
First time out, she dislocates his shoulder. She squats down beside him while he's working up to punching it back in and says, "I owed you for the eye. Heads up."
"You threw that on purpose," he pants, and she says, "You asked for it," and steps on him just right and also very, very wrong.
Jason sweats and shakes and tries not to puke. She pulls him up, waving off the other guards and hauls his sorry ass to the infirmary.
"You owe me another round," Jason mumbles, and she laughs at him.
"Bullshit. You're down, you're out, you forfeit. I get one more complaint, you're in the gag in the jacket for twenty-four, and you know I mean it."
Jason grins and leans. He was sick of Muir’s masochistic bullshit, anyway. Also, his throat hurts from making his vocal chords go places they don’t want to. In the infirmary, he mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key, then he makes faces at Zsasz while the doc immobilizes his arm, so it’s probably a good thing Zsasz is so high he’s not tracking. His slack-jawed expression doesn’t even change when Jason flips him off. There’s a thin thread of saliva crawling down the side of his chin.
Jason looks away from old death superimposed over present psychosis and still doesn’t puke. He hated drugs and hospitals before Batman’s tires appeared on his horizon. Since then he’s spent too much time on his back with needles stuck in him, and seen too much of what happens to people who like to stick needles in themselves to ever go there himself.
Mind altering substances aside, it sucks hard that there’s a moratorium on the good stuff for dudes who got themselves flushed out less than a month ago. Zsasz is chilling in poppy land, but it’s Tylenol without the codeine for Jason. He’s wrapped up good and tight, and still feeling plenty of pain when Hernandez sticks her head in.
“You done coddling your wussy butt yet, crazy boy? You’ve got a visitor.”
“We prefer the phrase differently sane, Ms. Hernandez,” the doc says stiffly. Jason grins at her as he slides down off the table.
“Speak for yourself, beautiful. Thanks to the good offices of this worthy institution, I am as one with the bugfuck. Give me a new idea, undo all that expensive therapy the tax payers are footing, who knows what’ll happen.”
The guard at the duty station shifts uneasily, like he’s looking for an excuse to use his baton. Hernandez rolls her eyes. “Play nice, bugfuck,” she says, “and I just might break your other arm for you some time.”
“Motherfucking tease,” Jason says, and follows her out.
--
Hernandez doesn’t tell him who rang his bell, but there’s only one person who’d want to, even if Jason still hasn’t figured out why. Dick comes over when he feels like it and never stays more than fifteen minutes at a time. Jason hasn’t figured out the pattern to his visits yet, either, but Dick was always pretty random and that hasn’t changed.
Sometimes Dick is Dick. Sometimes he’s not. But he’s always a dick, and one heat-sticky afternoon Jason tells him it’s nice to be able to count on your family being exactly what they are even when they’re pretending not to be.
Dick grins at him, lots of naturally straight white teeth and one crooked incisor. He leaves without saying anything else but he comes back again after dark and hangs upside down outside Jason’s barred window because he can and Jason can’t, and someday Jason’s going to hurt him a lot for that.
During the day they’re stuck in the single visitor’s room saying fuck all to each other, Dick leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, Jason with his hands laced together behind his head picking camels and mopeds, and once a pair of snakes screwing, out of the water stains on the ceiling. It’s better than a Rorschach, and it means Jason doesn’t have to watch Dick watching him. Nighttime means the same thing, if only because it’s not Dick who shows up after hours.
It’s not Dick who’s waiting in interrogation three tonight – really not Dick. It takes Jason one stuttering heartbeat to recognize the jaw line inside the cowl. Less than that to take a swing at it.
“Leave,” Batman tells Hernandez. She hovers in the doorway with uncharacteristic indecisiveness while Jason shouts, “Son of a bitch, you son of a fucking bitch,” over and over and Batman pins him face first to the wall, twisting his good arm up behind him.
“Leave,” Batman says again, and Jason’s shouts should drown out every other sound but he hears him perfectly. The bastard doesn’t even raise his voice. His hands don’t ease up for one goddamn second.
“Leave,” one more time. Some part of Jason’s impressed. That’s got to be some kind of record for resisting the voice, but everybody’s got their break point and third time’s the charm. The sound of the door closing is one more crazy echo. The wall is cool under Jason’s cheek. Batman’s breath is humid on the back of his neck.
“Jay,” Bruce says, and Jason jerks in his hold and screams, fury trapped in sound.
He tries to rear back, tries to smash the back of his head into Bruce’s face. Sometimes he feels like he’s spent his whole fucking life trying to make Bruce, “Let the fuck go!”
There are so many things those hands could do to him; he’s already had a few of them. They live under his skin, invisible faded bruises he pounds and bites back into existence just so he can prove to himself they were really there.
So many things, but never the ones he asked for. He’s not asking now, and Bruce’s grip is giving. Jason waits for what he knows is coming, and Bruce gives him the opening.
He’s not going to pretend he’s taking, because there’s no way he could. Bruce is letting him come. Letting him kick and punch his way through Bruce’s guard, only blocking when the blow is potentially crippling. When Bruce’s back hits the wall he drops his arms, and then he’s not moving and he’s not blocking and his lip is splitting under Jason’s knuckles.
He doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t ask Jason to stop, or try to stop him. Jason stopped screaming when he threw the first punch. His knuckles sting like a bitch from pounding on shit that’s harder than they are, and he’s dripping blood: some his, some Bruce’s.
Bruce hasn’t wiped the blood away from his mouth yet. Jason doesn’t want to stop looking at it, but he does because he’s licking it up, sucking it away until there’s nothing left for him to suck on but Bruce’s mouth.
Bruce doesn’t push him away. He doesn’t kiss him back, either, and it’s pattern recognition, the son of a bitch is still stuck in his six-year-old feedback loop, and Jason’s had enough of that shit. He bites into Bruce’s lip until blood is trickling into his mouth and Bruce finally, fucking finally wraps a hand around his jaw. His fingers tighten ease up or I’ll break you and Jason jerks back and snarls, “Do something for once, you stupid, self-righteous prick. I’m not gonna stop. Make up your damn mind and make me.”
“Enough.” They’d push each other for hours on the mats and the equipment and in the sims; five fucking minutes in this twelve by twelve cage and they’re panting like a couple of pansy-ass civilians. “Enough, Jay.”
He hates the stupid, irreversible noise that gets through his clenched teeth. He hates that his neck still knows how to bend, that Bruce still knows how to say Jay the way he did when Jason was fifteen and too stupid to live.
“You don’t get to die,” he says against the scruffy heat of Bruce’s skin. “Not yet. Not until I say.”
Bruce is doing something behind him with his hands. Jason wonders, distantly, if he’s about to get neck-pinched into unconsciousness, but Bruce drops a gauntlet inside Jason’s line of sight and wraps his bare hand around the back of Jason’s neck.
Jason breathes in the suit’s leathery chemical odors mixed with Bruce’s sweat. Can’t see, can’t hear or feel or taste, he’d still be able to smell the difference between Dick and Bruce in the suit. “Both dead,” he hears himself say. “No one left to kill but the Antilife freak's zombies.”
“I know.” Bruce’s hand isn’t moving. It’s just there, skin to skin. “I’m sorry.”
He’s laughing silently at himself, not sure whether he wants Bruce’s hand or the apology more. He’s even less sure which one is harder to believe in.
He lets himself have Bruce’s skin. In his head it feels like a minute too long and six years too short. Then he reaches up and pulls Bruce’s hand off him. Steps back and looks at him, bruised jaw, split swollen lip. There’s no blood, not even a crust. It’s all in Jason’s mouth.
“Get the fuck out,” Jason says. “Don’t come back.”
He doesn’t.
--
They drag Pyg in raving about wings and dark and twos, oink oink, but Two-Face is silent and Jason laughs himself hoarse because this is one double feature even Harv won’t touch.
There’s footage from a private cam the day after that. It’s all over the news on every station: Batmen, plural. It’s easy to tell them apart if you’re Jason.
Easier if you’re the Joker. He’s frozen in place on the common room couch, and every piece of him, sane and not, is glued to the screen. “Batsy, you’re looking pretty good for a dead guy,” he says after the clip ends. Jason hopes he’s the only one who hears, “Darling.”
He leans his elbows on the back of the couch, leans down so his mouth is level with Joker’s ear. “You are one sick puppy, Mr. J.” He picked that one up from Quinzel; he’s using it because he’s curious. The most predictable thing about Joker is how his initial reaction is always going to be the one you least expect.
“Flattery will get you – oh it’s you,” he says, looking up at Jason. His smile never changes; it looks the same now as it did when he was caving Jason’s skull in. “How’s about it, birdie boy? Ready to kiss and make up for dear old daddy’s sake?”
Hearing and feeling your skull fracturing around your brain isn’t something most head trauma victims live to remember. Jason didn’t, except for how he kind of did.
The back edge of the couch bites into his hip when he leans forward. Someone just changed the channel and upped the volume, and he’s making sure he’s heard. “Want to know a secret?” he says.
Joker exaggeratedly widens his eyes. “Do tell, sweetums. Loooooooves me a secret.”
They’ve been here before. He knows when Joker remembers; he can see it in the slipping smile, can feel his own smile widening in tandem. It’s like he’s feeding off Joker’s sick amusement; for every millimeter of curve Joker’s smile loses, Jason’s grin gains one.
“Was the kid as good for you as I was?” he says. “Hell, I'll even buy better. He worked you over and then some.”
Minute tells, Bruce used to say, will tell you almost everything you need to know. Joker’s hard, but Talia was an enigma wrapped in a conundrum, and the lines around Joker’s eyes tightened for just long enough to be a flinch.
Jason pushes lazily away from the couch into a full-body stretch; his so-called free hour is almost over. “I was going to kill you before I got out of here,” he tells Joker, “but it's no fun shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Todd,” says Hernandez from the doorway. “Time’s up.”
The Joker shakes his head and tsks. “Ooooh, got you by the short pants, boychick,” he giggles. “Well, what are you standing there for? Didn’t your momma teach you not to keep a lady waiting? Oh sorry, that’s right. She was too busy running away from you for any quality mother-son bonding.”
It should hurt like motherfuck. He’s surprised when it doesn’t. “Todd,” Hernandez says again, and there’s a pissy edge to it Jason would encourage if he didn’t have other stuff on his mind.
Some of the stuff is wiggling his fingers Jason. “So glad we had this little chat, we’ll have to do it again some time. I’ll pencil you in for Sunday brunch. You bring the champagne, I’ll provide the crowbar. Ta-ta until then. Say hi to pointy ears for me won’t you?”
“Nah,” Jason says. “But I’ll tell Robin you were looking for him.”
If an eye twitch counts as a tell, the total absence of laughter as Jason walks out is Chemo in Blüdhaven.