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searchforahero · 6 days

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wrote this brujay(?...) + sasha thing after reading batman & robin '09 #5 and it's been sitting in my computer for weeks. finally got around to cleaning it up a little. extremely normal about jason & sasha as a mirror to batman & robin.

Jason grips the sink hard enough that he feels it shift where it’s attached to the wall. Everything in the shithole him and Sasha are crashing in is crumbling, he should let go of the sink before it cracks too.

He looks up and is met with the sight of himself, washed out by the light in the mirror. The dressing room lights are nearly blinding, their light reflects off everything, off the mirror, off Jason, off the grimey porcelain of the sink. They make the rest of the world appear wavy, hard to interpret. They’re the only functioning light in the room.

Jason runs a hand from his jaw up to his hair, he has a prickly layer of stubble growing in. Looking at the dark shadow of his chin, he’s suddenly struck with his own resemblance to Bruce. His jaw is wide and strong, and he grows facial hair at the same rate Bruce had. He remembers when he was young how Bruce used to let it grow when he was stressed with a case, how Jason could tell a mission was over by the way the stubble would disappear.

He wants to stop thinking about Bruce. The old man was dead to him long before he died for real, yet he finds that he has thought of very little else since he came out of the pit. He tries to think of all the things he has done since his revival that have nothing to do with Bruce; his relationship with Talia, his confrontation with the Pretender, his stint as Nightwing, his feud with Black Mask. If he dwells on it for too long he’ll circle back to all the ways these things are still about Bruce, so he doesn’t.

Instead he turns to Sasha. She’s sitting with her back against the wall, knees curled up to her chest like she tends to, and reading a book. It’s a copy of Frankenstein from his main safehouse. She had bitched and moaned about his bookshelf looking like it belonged in an English classroom, but eventually she had picked that one out and begun reading it.

When he first saw her reading it he had given her a smug look, and she had hit him in the arm with it and told him she was just about ready to die of boredom. She looks engaged enough now. She’s gotten a good 100 pages or so into the book and hasn’t complained since she initially attacked him with the pocket sized paperback.

He doesn’t want to disturb her, so he turns back to the sink. It starts and jitters a bit when he turns it on. He looks down to inspect the tap and finds a small clump of ginger hair sticking to the side of the sink. It isn’t Sasha’s, her’s is obviously artificial, color just off the edge of natural, fibers not quite human, so it’s gotta be his.

He rubs his hand through the short hair at the base of his skull, up and down, up and down, in a familiar gesture. When he pulls his hand away he sees thin strands slip through his fingers and onto the floor.

He sucks in an inhale and breathes out a garbled “Hah- Jeez.” His hair is falling out. He’s just on the cusp of 20 and his hair is falling out. He hears Sasha shift behind him, probably looking over to see what made him speak. He turns back to her and grimaces.

“My hairs falling out Sasha. I’m 19 and my hair is falling out.” He sucks in a breath as a memory hits him. It’s funny the things that slip his mind, regardless of how clear his recollection of his time as Robin feels to him. “You wanna know what I bet? I bet it’s all the damned hair dye Batman shoved on me. He used to make me dye it so I’d look like Grayson. I can’t believe I forgot he did that.”

He’s mostly muttering to himself at this point. He can tell Sasha’s still listening intently, she’s slipped her bookmark into place and closed the book, leaving it propped in the valley between her shins and thighs.

She always gives him her full attention when he speaks, even when he’s sure he’s boring her, rambling on about Talia or giving her glorified book reports. It feels like looking in a mirror, he sees himself looking at Bruce when she looks at him. How he used to absorb every word Bruce said, like he could put together the puzzle that was his life if he just listened hard enough. It makes him desperate to go unseen, he so badly wants this to not be about Bruce. He wants something for once in his life to not be about Bruce.

He wants to help Sasha because she deserves to be helped. He wants to work with Sasha because she is his friend. But he keeps catching himself thinking what would Bruce have done? and veering in the complete opposite direction. And isn’t he, in trying so desperately to make this not about Bruce, still making it about him?

When Jason looks back to the mirror he sees his face reflected. He looks older than he did the last time his hair was black. He’s bigger, his expression is grimmer, there are new scars lining his skin. Bruce had said he needed to dye his hair to look like Dick, but when he scrutinizes his face in the mirror, he sees not a reflection of Dick, but of Bruce.

He looks closely at the bridge of his nose, slope of his jaw, set of his shoulders, he looks so much like Bruce. He looks enough like Bruce to give the newest Boy Blunder a run for his money.

He stares at himself in the mirror until his appearance seems to warp and change, age lines, hair color, a little more weariness to the eyes. He’s so startled by what he sees that he stumbles while reaching down below the sink to grab his helmet. He shoves it over his head, it settles off-center, pressing his nose uncomfortably into itself.

Jason knows then, as he’s watching himself in the mirror, feeling the heavy weight of Bruce’s stare, that the man will never die, because he and Jason are one in the same. And that’s so funny that his breath catches in a half-wheeze half-laugh, that these hands that once tried to snuff out Bruce’s life, have now immortalized him forever.

#posting my writing is. scary. but i'm doing it anyways. hooray.#jason todd #bruce wayne #sasha dc #dc sasha #dc scarlet #scarlet dc #batman & robin #batman & robin 2009 #red hood #batman #i don't know if i should tag this brujay or not #i didn't write it with that in mind but when i read it over and think about jason saying that his relationship with talia was 'about bruce'#hrm.#the vibes are definitely here #but bruce isn't #so idk #also this is a bit ooc don't look at me i was having fun #kel writes fanfiction #kel's bat problem

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