9591/Knightfall: Prodigal Son

Knightfall: Prodigal Son
Date of Scene:	15 October 2019
Location:	Batcave - Wayne Manor
Synopsis:	Jason returns to the Batcave to learn what has become of Batman and the mission set aside for him.
Cast of Characters:	Batman, Red Hood
Tinyplot:	Knightfall

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Batman has posed:
Batman's training is a long and arduous affair. There is the physical work which is strenuous and tiring, but it's the mental training that is truly exhausting. Hour after hour spent learning languages, forensic practices, chemistry, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering - not to mention folder after folder fool of codes and emergency plans to follow them. You could take the boy out of the Batcave, but these things stuck like hot glue.

'KNIGHTFALL'

It came through Jason's communications device innocuously enough. No fanfare. No instructions. Just simple, blue letters blinking over and over. But its meaning was all too clear. Batman had fallen. Accompanied with the news that he had fought Superman, and Robin's proclamation before the world several days later at Superman's funeral that the Man of Steel had murdered Batman - there was a lot of confusion. No doubt.

But the Batcave was there. The answers lay within.

Red Hood has posed:
Jason had been hot on the trail of a cartel member stupid enough to think fleeing to Central America would get the Red Hood off his ass. He was wrong, though the man's bolt hole had been one of the rare places in the modern world where communications were slow to penetrate, no cell service, internet, even sat phones had trouble. So it wasn't until the man was caught and his money (minus a small donation to the Red Hood crimefighting fund) was burnt that Jason's communicator pinged with the message he never believed he'd ever see: Knightfall.

Jason's quarry was pushed over a cliff and forgoten, still living, likely, but hurting, and Jason was on the way back home. On the way he caught the feed of the funeral for Superman and the news about Bruce Wayne's injuries. It seemed like a lot of crosstalk and confusion, so he went to the one place he knew he could find answers: home.

It irked him he still thought of the manor as home but there wasn't time to care as his motorcycle rolls into the cave and he brings it to a halt.

Jason steps off, dressed in his Red Hood get up minus the helmet, with only the domino mask covering his face, he turns off the bike and steps off of it, shouting. "Someone better damn well be here."

Batman has posed:
Someone is there. No member of the Family's masked contingent, but still a face as familiar to Jason as his own or Bruce's may be. Alfred. Looking as though he hasn't slept in days, his impeccable sense of propriety having drooped somewhat as his shirt seems a little wrinkled and his coat has been thrown carelessly over the back of a chair. The roar of the motorcycle brings him out from the infirmary, a well-lit room up a flight of steel stairs and built into one of the Cave's rocky walls, and he pauses for a moment. The elder statesman of Wayne Manor squares his shoulders, descending the stairway stiffly.

"Master Jason," he speaks, voice thick as though perhaps he had been sitting in silence until now, "I had tried to reach you but you were out of satellite range. I had worried - "

Whatever he is going to say is left unsaid, he swallows heavily and turns his shoulder slightly to gesture back up the stairs.

"He - he's up here."

Red Hood has posed:
Jason takes in Alfred's rumpled state it spoke to the gravity of the situation and told Jason one thing: this wasn't an act. It had been one of the possibilities he'd been clinging to on the ride home, even in the face of Squirt's TV outburst. He felt a little sick when that possibility was torn away from him, most people wouldn't be able to see the signs but Alfred might. The old man was good at that sort of thing.

"I'm fine" Jason says, "Just out of touch."

The gesture and the words that follow stop Jason in his tracks, "Is he dead?" he asks not moving further in the direction that Alfred had indicated.

Batman has posed:
"No, no," Alfred answers, voice hoarse as he shakes his balding head, "Thank Heaven for small mercies. No, Damian's ... display was part of a larger ploy. He - Master Bruce - had intended, should something like this ever happen, that it be used as a form of psychological warfare. To throw his enemies off kilter."

The old man pauses, resting a hand on the railing of the staircase and bowing his head with a sigh.

"It is morbid but - well, not unlike him."

Alfred politely clears his throat, straightening his shirtfront and spine for a moment before continuing: "Doctor Thompkins diagnoses a number of injuries, the most severe of which is a traumatic brain injury and severe damage to the ribcage. A number of broken bones, swollen spine. We lost him briefly, sir, but young Master Damian, along with Misses Barbara and Carrie were able to revive him. He has been in what Doctor Thompkins is calling a 'stable but critical' condition since then."

Red Hood has posed:
Jason takes it all in swallowing the taste of bile in the back of his throat. "Of course it's a strategy," he mutters angry at himself for falling for it. What points he'd given Damian for that little display at the funeral were immediately revoked. "He gets his ass beat and we're all still dancing to his tune."

He takes in the report of the injuries, he wasn't any sort of doctor but he knew enough about the body to guage how badly Batman had been hurt, and he had been hurt badly, more than Jason had ever seen. There's a frown on his face, that sort of closed off look Bruce would get when he was concerned but didn't want to show how much.

"So he's going to live?" he asks. "He's getting better?"

Batman has posed:
"No."

The word is clipped, and almost harsh. All those years of pain and anguish - watching Bruce grow into a man only to walk off into the night and battle darkness. All those years spent tending wounds. All those years spent worrying if perhaps tonight would be the night Bruce Wayne would come home. That feeling of intense, basic horror worse than any pale-faced madman in a purple suit or whirling death trap. The feeling that he may have finally, truly lost him.

"He is stable, but - "

"But not improving," comes another familiar voice, that of Doctor Leslie Thompkins. She had been in Bruce's life almost as long as Alfred, and had tended the more serious wounds of Batman and his heirs since the crusade had begun in earnest over a decade ago, "These aren't injuries that always heal on their own. The brain is a complex engine, Jason. Until he wakes up, we just can't know if he will get better."

She says until, but the unspoken reality of the word is plain in her tone - if he wakes up.

Red Hood has posed:
'No.'

That word cuts like a knife. How could /Bruce Wayne/ not be getting better, that's what made him so damn infuriating, he always got through, he always got better, it made it easier to hate him.

"What do you mean no?" Jason asks, the question coming just as harshly as Alfred statement had sounded.

Then Thompkins is there to spell it out for him. "So, you're telling me Bruce could wake up and spend the rest of his life drooling into his pudding?" he demands of her, his voice raw. "How the hell does this happen? Who the fuck let him fight Superman? And who the hell do we have to kill."

He wasn't sure what the story was with Supes. The reports he'd dug up on the way home said Supes had started to get extreme before Batman put him down, he never exactly hung out with Supes much, even when he was Robin, but that didn't scan, Supes was the ultimate boyscout, something had to be up there. Or at least he hoped so, that way there might be an enemy left to fight.

Batman has posed:
"There's no one left to rage against, Jason," Doctor Thompkins says coolly, her silver hair drawn back into a bun that, along with obvious fatigue, makes her seem gaunt and strung out, "Haven't you seen the news? Superman did this, and Superman is dead. He killed him. They resent him for it, but he did it. We all sleep safer now knowing he's not going to be a danger to anyone else. If Bruce never wakes up then perhaps ... perhaps this is the rest he earned."

They reach the top of the stairs now and there Bruce is. The sheets are drawn down to his waist, revealing a bare chest hooked up to every manner of advanced medical machine one could think of. Feeding and breathing tubes obscure much of his face, and an IV drip keeps him hydrated. His face is almost unrecognizable, beaten and bruise to a degree that stitches can only do so much. His midsection itself is bandaged, and from the curve of the blankets it looks as though both legs are in traction. Broken.

"You can speak to him, if you like," Doctor Thompkins says flatly, moving out of the way as Alfred once more takes up what appears to be a constant vigil at Bruce's bedside. "He can hear you."

Red Hood has posed:
"That's it? Superman just snapped? Someone didn't hit him with funky double rainbow kryptonite or something? C'mon there's got to be more to this, there's got to be someone to hit."

There it was out there, he needed that, a target, something to hit, just like when he was a boy, Jason always covered sorrow with rage.

He wasn't even aware he'd started following them however until he reached the room and saw /him/ there, like that. Jason looks away. "Jesus," he curses. "Supes did a number on him."

It was a banal and slightly irreverant thing to say in the face of what he was witnessing but it was the best he had. Slowly he makes himself look back at Bruce, beaten and barely clinging to life.

Jason crossed the room slowly for a better look, taking off the domino mask that coverd his eyes to take the filters and optics away, so he was taking this in with just his eyes. Once at Bruce's bedside Jason just stares quietly watching his every shallow breath.

"I don't know what I'm going to say that's going to make a difference," he says. "Probably best to leave that to you Alfred, or the others. All I want to do is yell, like always, and it's no fun if he can't yell back."

The glib cover was paper thin and Jason sniffs and rubs his nose with the back of his hand as casually as he can muster.

Batman has posed:
"You can stay as long as you need to," Alfred answers quietly, rising to his feet, "There's a room prepared upstairs, if you want it. Miss Barbara and Miss Charlotte have both taken up residence for the time being. As will Master Richard, I imagine, when he sees fit to return to us. He left instructions that the both of them take over as the Batman should something like this occur. Something about doubling efforts."

The old butler sighs, taking a few shuffling steps towards the staircase before glancing back over his shoulder, "I know you never quite saw eye to eye with him. But I like to believe he knows you're here, and he's grateful for it."

That said, he disappears down the stairway and Doctor Thompkins into the infirmary's storage room. Leaving Jason alone with a comatose Bruce.

Red Hood has posed:
Jason cocks his head at the offer, "Thanks but no thanks, Alfred, I'll be around, but I'm not moving back in," he says rebuilding the walls of bravado back up around his feelings.

As for Dick and Barbie sharing the mantle? That gets a "Heh," but there's no words of protest there.

He looks down at Bruce with Alfred's parting words, "That makes one of us," he mutters about Bruce being grateful he came back.

When he's alone Jason continues to look down at Bruce until words come at last, "I really want to punch you right now," he says. "Fighting Superman, how fucking stupid is that? Remember the shit you gave me that time I tried to take on Croc by myself, where was that Bruce? The 'Jason, don't take on what you can't handle' Bruce? Or is that another rule only your little soldiers have to live by? Arrgh, you /arrogant/ bastard, how the hell am I supposed to hate you if you're like this? Huh? Now I've got to hang around and look out for the others, was that your plan? Is that my role in all this like Squirt's show at the funeral?"

Jason growled and kicked the bed, "DAMN IT!" he rages "I hate that it's so hard to hate you right now. You deserve it though, putting us in this spot."

He sighs, setting the bed to right again and glancing back at the storage room door. "I don't know what you want to hear, but that's what I've got to say. So, if you're going to pull some miracle recovery and drop some words of 'bat-wisdom', now's the damn time."

Batman has posed:
There are no words. No miraculous wakefulness from Bruce. Just cold, dead sleep. The sort of long, deep sleep that Bruce would never engage in willingly. This was no fifteen-minute power nap in front of the Batcomputer. This was, for lack of a better word, living death.

His finger twitches. A moment not easily noticed. Nothing follows it. No further stirring. Not even a change on the various monitor readouts that describe his state of being in numbers and lines and figures. That was all there was. A single twitch.

"Master Jason," Alfred says from the doorway, suddenly reappeared with a small black box cradled in two hands, "he left this for you."

He holds it out to be taken.

Red Hood has posed:
The stillness of near death made the whole damn thing all the more frustrating, he /needed/ to know his words were heard, that they stung, or what was the point of it all.

He almost misses the twitch in his anger, and even catching it, he's not sure he saw it, maybe that was just what he wanted to see, he stares waiting for another but Alfred arrives and he turns away from Bruce to regard the man and the box he holds.

"Yeah?" Jason asks, as he settles his mask back on his face to free up his hands and then walks across to Alfred. "What's in it? Bat-shaped coal?"

Still, when he takes it, Jason doesn't hesitate in opening it, finding a letter and a flashdrive.

"Heh," Jason says, as he picks up the letter to read it. "Wonder what he has to say for himself," the sarcasm is belied by just how quickly his eyes fall to that little bit of stationary that would carry Bruce's words.

Batman has posed:
'Jason,' the letter reads, neatly written in Bruce's own hand on his letterhead - from the Visconti fountain pen kept on his desk in the study, by the looks of it, 'I have failed you more than I failed anyone else, and by not explaining to you my reasoning I feel I have failed you again. But know that when I thought you were lost to me, you were never once absent from my thoughts. When you returned to us, no matter what harsh words may pass between us, I have never felt greater pride than knowing you clawed your way free of the grave to find your vengeance. You are the strongest of us, and the one most in need. I hope you will find the peace you deserve. Your father, Bruce Wayne.'

Beneath Bruce's signature, there is a postscript: 'P.S. You always liked the view from Colgate Heights.'

The flashdrive itself is a simple affair, matte black and steel like so much of the Batman's accoutrements.

Red Hood has posed:
Jason can recognize those pen strokes and can all but see the pen in the study, rememebring times he barged in on Bruce while he was using it, with some complaint or to tell him about some new triumph in his training. His fingers run over the text of the letter almost fondly even as he says, "Screw you, old man," but the words have no bite it's almost a catharsis to have something from Bruce to respond to.

He folds the letter and sticks it in the pocket of his coat and then glancing to Alfred he pulls out the flashdrive, "Wanna see what it's got on it?" he asks him already heading to the Bat Computer. "Probably going to need your codes, I think mine are out of date."

When he reaches the computer he inserts the drive and waits for Alfred to get the show on the road.

Batman has posed:
Alfred says nothing for the moment, a wry but faint smile on his face as he watches Jason read the letter. He holds up a hand, bowing his head slightly as the flashdrive is inserted into the computer. Out of date though some codes may be, the computer seems to respond to it all the same.

A map is brought up on the screen, the full county of Gotham by the looks of it. A section of it is highlighted, and then it zooms in. Several neighborhoods in what is regionally considered to be 'Central Gotham' - Colgate Heights, Columbia Point, Fort Clinton and the Narrows. The entire east side of Gotham's central island. Once highlighted, the section is cordoned off and the words 'Red Hood' appear over them.

What follows are a series of maps, identifying what must be bunkers and equipment stashes within the area - several Jason would remember, a number more that must be new.

"In his absence," Alfred explains quietly, "It was his intention that Gotham should be divided up, different areas protected by each of you. This, it would seem, is yours."

Red Hood has posed:
Jason's head tilts as the computer responds, but he let's it go without comment and his eyes fix on the screen. He studies the map and takes in Alfred's explanation with a "Heh. Cute plan, and of course I get the Narrows," he remarks, crossing his arms. Some of his ease returns as they turned to strategy and tactics instead of the raw reality of what lay in the medbay and what it might mean for the future. Right now though, this gave him something of Bruce to joke about and rebel against.

"You know I am not going to stay to my little corner right?" he asks Alfred. "Despite what it says on the case," he jerks his head towards his old uniform. "I'm nobody's soldier and I don't take marching orders." Though, despite his protestations there was something appealing about it being his.

Batman has posed:
"That's up to you," Alfred says softly, knowing Jason well enough to understand what is happening here, "I don't imagine he truly meant for everyone to stick to their appointed rounds, so to speak. You are an individualistic set, after all."

On the bed, Bruce remains still. Eventually, Doctor Thompkins emerges from the storage room and sets about reviewing the readings on Bruce's machines and administering a few more medications. It's at once very clear that he requires constant care and supervision - there is more than simply sitting at his bedside and waiting, by the look of it.

"Would you like some tea?" Alfred asks, once more moving towards the stairs, "Or something to eat? I can't imagine you've had anything homemade in months."

Red Hood has posed:
Jason's eyes are fixed on the screen even as he talks to Alfred, committing the locations of the caches and bunkers to memory before he removes the flashdrive and puts it in his pocket.

"Some more than others," he says of being individualists before he shakes his head to the offer, even though Alfred was right, most of what Jason ate came in a wrapper or a box rather than homemade. "Got to raid these caches before someone thinks better of letting me have all this stuff," he says with a half-hearted smirk.

He turns to leave and in doing so his eyes fall on the medbay door and he pauses a moment and looks to Alfred. "If anything changes..." he says before letting the thought trail off. "Anyhow, I'm out of here, we'll see you around."

Jason starts his way back to his bike.