Author's Note

Post-Apocalypse AU. The setting here is mostly inspired by Mad Max. There are other influences, but a defining part of the Batman mythos is his ridiculously cool car, so Mad Max seemed like it fit the best.

Because of those influences, slavery is a part of the setting. The main character has been enslaved right up until the beginning of the story, and that informs his perspective of himself and others. None of the characters in this story condone slavery or willingly participate in it.

There are also a few instances of internalized ableism, where a disabled character thinks of himself as broken. The story doesn't focus on this, but it does happen, so consider this a content warning.

Chapter One

Jason wakes up on the ground.

Ringing fills his ears. He curls away from it. His hands brush over broken glass.

He jerks them to his chest and opens his eye, straining to see where he is. He doesn’t remember. The last thing he remembers is the truck—he was in the truck, huddled on the floor, trying to breathe quietly so he wouldn’t get thrown out and have to walk—

He drags himself up onto his hands. Broken glass crunches underneath him. Firelight glints off of twisted metal. Everything is fuzzy around the edges. He can hear gunshots and people yelling, somewhere close, but it doesn’t feel real.

The truck. He was in the truck. Someone said something about being followed, and then someone yelled—

A motor revs close behind him. Jason startles, and the terror is enough to push him onto his feet, clutching the wreck of the truck he was just in for balance.

This is real.

The metal under his hands is warm and jagged. The air smells like gasoline and smoke. The burning remains of another truck light up the night sky, enough for him to see League fighters forming up to face the threat.

The motor whines past him. Jason flinches away, turning just as it cuts an arc through the remains of the convoy. The rider is a dark blur, firelight glinting off their motorcycle and the crossbow held out on one arm.

Crossbow. Motorcycle. Explosives that took out a truck. Whoever attacked them is well-supplied and powerful. They stand a good chance of wiping out the convoy and looting whatever is left.

Jason pushes off the wrecked truck and stumbles away, limping through the battlefield as fast as he can.

No one stops him. In the chaos of the attack, no one even notices. Pain lances up his bad leg as he lands on it, over and over, but Jason grits his teeth and keeps moving. He doesn’t have any way to brace it. He looks out for something to use as a crutch, a metal bar or a tree branch or something, but the ground is flat and featureless, and he can’t see far. Stopping to search the wreckage would take too long.

Motors roar behind him. A crossbow fires. Men yell and scream. A flash-bang grenade lights the world up and Jason flinches so hard he almost falls.

For a second he’s back in the warehouse, half-blind and covered in blood and screaming and crying for help—

Electric lights flash over his shoulder. The motorcycle revs its engine, and a deeper growl answers it—a car, or a truck maybe, but not one Jason knows. The sound ripples through the air like a warning. A threat.

Jason can’t breathe.

He falls against an overturned car, grabbing the chassis to hold himself up. Don’t stop, go, run, his brain screams, but he can’t. He physically can’t. If he tries to run, his bad leg will give out. If he collapses out in the open, they’ll find him.

His brand aches with phantom pain.

He can’t let them find him.

He clings to the car, panting for breath, pushing his face into his arm to keep quiet. His head spins, or maybe that’s the lights flashing behind him. Vehicles weaving through the wreckage. He doesn’t hear any more yelling. When he looks over his shoulder he sees the motorcycle stop on the edge of the field. The rider reloads their crossbow with easy, practiced movements.

The battle is almost over.

Run. You have to run. He has a few minutes, maybe, before the victors sweep the convoy for loot. The car won’t hide him then. They’ll see his brand, his bad leg, the bruises on his face, and they’ll know he’s a slave. They’ll beat him into submission all over again, or they’ll beat him to death for trying to run, or they’ll tie him to a car and take the rest of their rage and lust out on him.

Jason shakes. He can’t do that again. Please, not again.

He has to run.

He tightens his grip on the car, preparing to push off of it and run into the dark. They were traveling near a river, before the attack. He doesn’t know which river, or exactly where it is, but if he can find it, he’ll be able to confuse his trail. They won’t be able to follow him.

Run. Just run. Jason takes a deep breath, bracing for pain in his leg. Three, two—

A dark figure leaps down from the car, directly in front of him.

Jason barely stops himself from screaming. The shadow freezes. It’s a person, wearing all black, a hood and a half-mask. All Jason can see is their eyes. They stare at him.

They’re short. Even shorter than Jason. Maybe that’s why he lunges, hoping to catch them off balance and run. He strikes out with one hand, ready to push—

He never touches them. The shadow slides past him, into his blind side. They grab Jason’s arm, pull him sideways, and twist. Jason falls to his knees.

Everything whites out.

Jason feels himself scream. Black stars swarm his vision. His senses blend together until he can taste the pain clawing through his leg.

When he comes back, he’s slumped sideways across the ground, gasping for breath.

No one is touching him.

The shadow-person stands over him, watching, but they don’t touch him. Jason drags in a deep breath. Then another.

“Please,” he rasps.

He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. Please, don’t do that again. Please, don’t hurt me. Please, let me go. He won’t get any of those things—he’d be better off if he just lay back and took it—but he has to try.

He always has to try.

The shadow crouches next to him. Jason flinches. They reach out, looping an arm around his shoulders, and before Jason has time to wonder why they’re pulling him up onto his feet. They hold him upright, supporting him easily, despite their smaller stature. When they start walking, they pull Jason along with them. He tenses against the pain crackling up his leg—but the shadow braces him for that step. And the next one. And the next.

It doesn’t hurt.

What, Jason thinks, too startled and scared and suddenly tired to find any other words.

The shadow guides him across the battlefield, into the circle of electric light cast by the motorcycle and the car. The rider with the crossbow sits astride the motorcycle.

“Cassie?” At their approach, the rider puts up their crossbow and takes off their helmet. Light falls across shiny black hair, sharp cheekbones and an aquiline nose. Her voice is high and clear. “Who is that?”

The rider is a woman.

“Hurt,” the shadow says. Their voice is rough, but almost as high.

“I can see that,” the rider says.

Cassie. Jason tries to think past the terror and exhaustion and pain. Cassie is a woman’s name. Woman fighters aren’t unheard of in the wasteland, but two of them—together, in the same group—attacking the League—

They could be Amazons.

Jason’s heart leaps, though he knows, he knows better than to hope. Amazons don’t keep slaves. They don’t keep men either, so they’ll throw him out as soon as they’re sure that he is a man, but—maybe he can beg to ride with them until they’re at least close to a settlement. He can be quiet. He can be good. They won’t have to feed him, or give him anything, so maybe—

“Who is that?”

The voice that greets them from the car is deep, a gravel-edged knife shredding all of Jason's hopes. He drops his gaze to the ground and keeps it there as a pair of heavy black boots walk closer. Steel-toed boots. The kind that can shatter bone.

Jason shuts his eye, just for a second, and prays for them to kill him quickly.

Not again. Please, please, not again.

“No idea,” the rider says. “Cassie found him.”

A hand touches his jaw. Jason flinches. A short breath hisses through his teeth before he can stop it. He closes his eye again, bracing to be hit, but the hand only tilts his face up.

“It’s alright,” the man says. His voice is deep, but calm. Gentle, even. “Look at me.”

Jason opens his eye. He looks up, past black armor and a black cape, into a lined, weary face.

He knows that face.

Bruce.

Bruce Wayne. The Bat. The protector of Gotham, the ghost of the wasteland, the man who picked Jason up out of the gutter and gave him a home.

Jason’s dad, for three short years.

Bruce’s hand holds him still, almost cradling his face. Jason wants to lean into it. To sway forward and let Bruce catch him. Bruce wouldn’t care about his bad leg.

Bruce doesn’t know about his bad leg.

Jason snaps back into the moment, into his broken body. Bruce doesn’t know about his leg. Or his ribs. Or his eye. Those things happened after. After Jason ran away, after he got himself captured, after he cried and screamed and begged and broke.

After Bruce left him for dead.

“Who are you?” Bruce says. Jason’s heart stutters.

“I—”

I’m your son, he wants to say. He wants to scream. I’m Jason, your son, don’t you recognize me?

Bruce doesn’t recognize him. His eyes are sharp but impassive as they move across Jason’s face. He takes in the brand, the bruises, the crooked nose and bad eye, without any flicker of recognition. He doesn’t stare, or flinch from Jason’s empty eye socket, like most people do, when they look him in the face at all. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Jason has seen his reflection. He knows how bad it looks.

“Do you have a name?” Bruce says.

He looks at the brand as he says it, the burn scar that stretches from cheekbone to jaw. Do you have a name, he says, because the brand marks Jason as a slave. An object. Something to be used up and thrown away.

He isn’t Bruce’s son. He isn’t anyone’s son. He’s a mutilated slave, too broken to even say his own name.

He can’t look at Bruce anymore.

“Hey, Bat,” the motorcycle rider says.

Bruce turns his head, though his hand stays on Jason’s face. “Huntress,” he says.

“Are you gonna stare into his eyes all night, or can we get moving?”

Bruce grunts and lowers his hand. Jason’s skin feels warm where he touched it. Jason lowers his head, fighting the urge to put his own hand over that spot.

“Come with me,” Bruce says, and turns away. Jason limps after him. Every one of Bruce’s steps covers three of his, and by the time they reach the car, Jason is out of breath, praying his bad leg holds out long enough to get him inside.

“Go ahead,” Bruce says. He nods at the open gullwing door. Jason braces one hand against the frame, sucking in as deep of a breath as he can manage. His ribs ache. He knows better than to keep people waiting on him, though, and after those few seconds he forces himself up the stairs and through the doorway.

The inside of the car is—familiar. Jason finds a handhold without looking and pulls himself across to one of the jump seats on the inside wall. He’s been here before. He knows where the jump seats are. He almost drops into one of them, before he remembers his place and lowers himself to sit on the floor of the vehicle.

Bruce sweeps through the doorway a second later, blotting out the light from outside.

“You don’t have to sit on the floor,” he says. Jason flinches. Then the words register, and he grabs the jump seat to pull himself up. Bruce passes him to climb into the driver’s seat, and Jason flinches again.

He doesn’t think Bruce will hurt him. No, he knows Bruce won’t hurt him. Even if Bruce doesn’t recognize him—the Bat doesn’t keep slaves. Everyone knows that. Whatever Bruce wants him for, it isn’t that.

And he doesn’t want Jason to sit on the floor.

The shadow from the battlefield climbs in last. Then the door shuts, sealing them into the dark. Moonlight shines through the front windshield. Jason hears a hand-crank rattle in the cockpit, and then a dim flashlight shines back through the rest of the car.

“B?” a new voice says. Jason looks forward. He sees a pale, angular face looking back at him. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce says. He drops into the driver’s seat. “He didn’t tell me his name.”

He turns a key. The car rumbles, shuddering as the engine turns over. Outside, Jason hears the other vehicles echo it.

“Oh,” the boy in the gunner’s seat says. He looks like a boy, at least. He has a young face and short dark hair. He keeps looking at Jason, looking him over, taking him in. Jason tries not to meet his eyes. “Was he with the League?”

“Not by choice,” Bruce says. “He’s coming with us.”

Jason knows that voice. It’s the voice that Bruce uses when his mind is made up, and he won’t be hearing any further arguments.

The car accelerates smoothly. Jason hunches over in his seat, savoring the lack of jostling, the way his feet stay planted on the floor. The shadow sits across from him—only now, with her hood and mask removed, she looks less like a shadow and more like a girl. She has dark hair, dark eyes, and a lot of scars.

She stares at him.

Jason huddles in his seat, avoiding her eyes.

“B,” the boy says. “Did you tell him what’s going on? Or, like—who you are?”

“I know who you are.”

Jason’s voice surprises him as much as it does everyone else. Only the girl doesn’t react to it. She just keeps staring.

Jason glances forward. He can’t meet Bruce’s eyes. He looks at the floor instead. “You’re—”

Bruce Wayne. The dark knight. Protector of Gotham.

Dad.

“You’re the Bat,” he says. The only name he can say without screaming, screaming, screaming.

“Yes,” Bruce says. “But my name is Bruce. This is Tim. My son.” He nods at the boy. “And Cassandra.”

“Daughter,” Cassandra says, tapping her chest. The corner of Bruce’s mouth twitches.

“Yes,” he says. “Cassandra is my daughter.”

Jason breathes in.

He should have known that Bruce would move on. That Bruce, with his enormous fucking heart, would stumble on another helpless child and take them in the same way he took Jason. But in his memories it was always just him and Bruce. The Bat and his Robin, roaming the wasteland together. Their talks, their hugs, their inside jokes that made Bruce’s mouth twitch like that.

He thought it would be like that forever.

He thought he would never see Bruce again.

He wasn’t ready to come back and see Bruce show that hidden smile to someone else.

Jason curls his hands into fists. He wishes Bruce had hit him. Had knocked him down and kicked him with those steel-toed boots until he stopped screaming. It would have hurt less.

“I am not going to hurt you,” Bruce says. Jason hunches his shoulders, longing to pull his knees to his chest and curl into a ball. His bad leg won’t let him do that anymore. “No one here will hurt you. You are not a slave anymore. No one here will treat you as one.”

The car rumbles around them. Jason stares at the floor.

“Okay,” he says hoarsely.

Bruce nods. Then he faces forward again.

You are not a slave anymore. Bruce says it the way he says everything: with quiet certainty, leaving no room for doubt. He sounds just like Jason imagined he would. Even after the warehouse—the Joker—even after the League found him, Jason still thought Bruce was looking for him. For months, he clung to that hope. Bruce will find me.

At first he imagined himself playing a part in it—escaping the League, finding his way back to Bruce’s territory, and reuniting with him. When his body started to heal wrong, his bones knitting into painful new shapes, the story changed: Bruce would find him, Bruce would steal him back from the League, Bruce would carry him home.

On the worst nights, the ones that left him shaking apart and scratching his skin until it bled, he imagined Bruce holding him.

It’s okay, he told himself. Over and over again. You’ll be okay. Bruce will find you. He’ll bring you home. He’ll keep you safe. He promised.

He stopped believing it the day a League blacksmith held him down and pressed a red-hot blade against his face.

Jason turns in his seat. He leans against the cabin wall. This way he has the wall on his blind side; he can see Bruce and Tim in the cockpit, and Cassandra in the other jump seat, at the same time. He tucks his hands close to his body, under his arms. He breathes in, as deeply as he can, and feels his misshapen ribs rise under his hands. He lets the pain pull him back to the present moment.

You are not a slave anymore, Bruce says, like that makes it true.

Jason doesn’t know how to be anything else.