Teen Titans one shots

Jailbird

"You wish to be uncooperative? Would you like me to go on?" She thumbs an imaginary script. His poisoned voice emitting from her honey mouth.  "See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum..." 

"Stop it. STOP!" Jason swung his head into the bars. Red pulsed under his eyelids as she recoiled. "Don't you know that whenever he tells that joke, somebody dies?"

"I-"

"Barbara, Bruce, me. It's told a different way each time, but in the end, it has the same result. Legs disembodied. Morals twisted. Graves filled. And I knew if I did nothing..."

His tears stick on him like a second skin. "I  would be next." 

She lets her heart break for him. It was inevitable. 

"And you were." 

If the bars were stripped away, he would still feel like he was in a cage. "What?"

"And. You. Were. Did I not make myself clear?" She lurches so far forward their foreheads were almost nuzzling. He needed the steel there now. "You died twice on that day, Jason. You became what he always wanted you to be." 

His heartbeat is ugly and mangled as Starfire craned her neck away from him. "A murderer."

"Last I checked, princess, dying doesn't happen overnight." Jason rasped. "If I did die, I died a slow death. Where I was wasting away and no one fucking noticed." 

"You think we didn't care? You think I  didn't care?" Her gasps are harsh, the waiting room stirs from her explosion, and holy fuck, she loves me. 

And holy fuck, I love her. 

"All those visits, all those people doing the check of ins on you specifically, and you count that as nothing?" If she wasn't so beautiful and kind and goddamn perfect, she would call him pathetic.  

He deserved it.  Dick and Clark and god know how many others' deepest of confessions were white noise whistling through his ears, their warmest hugs ice. 

"Everyone had their own ideas of what would help. Nobody bothered to ask what I  needed." A low blow, but a deserved one. Not every feeling fits into a hero's sympathies.

Like rage. Anger. Vengeance. 

"Because they did not say exactly what you wanted. Wonderful." Her drawl was bitterness sinking into honey, pushing the tired back into his bones. "Do you know how the much Dick took time out of his day to visit you, always talking and crying and worrying-"

"They all had their motives." They passed the burning ache back and forth like they were playing catch. "Like you do." 

He bends so much strain on the fork it snaps in two. 

"Give it up, sweetheart." He mumbles to the death-gray ceiling. "Give it up." 

Star's gasps for oxygen were hot on his neck, her desire for his redemption evaporating into the muggy air. He felt like shit, pivoting the blame on her like a bullet pivots back on its own head. 

Burying his head in his hands, Jason's reanimated corpse resigned to the lull of her heart. 

He braced himself for the worst. "What does he want?" 

"The inheritance has finally come the through from Bruce's bank to Richard." Her tremor is glass. Sharp and clean-cut and a scratch away from breaking. "We have enough earthling currency to pay for your bail." 

Jason leans back and sighs. He misses the numbness of when there was no possibility. "What's the catch?" 

"You must stop. Stop everything. The guns and the killing, and the pain y-y-you-"  Salty wetness sears from her tear ducts to her cheek. The shock of what he has done relapses every time her chest heaves. Fuck.

He could have justice or he could have her. It couldn't go both ways.

"No." 

No explanation. No second thought. Ending it was worth ending other things.

"Your only defense in court was that you ended it." He remembered her presence at the trial, her jade orbs burning holes into his back as she sat dead silent in a black funeral dress. "Did you?" 

"Joker wasn't enough." Evil can't be cured. Only killed. "It won't be enough until I save Gotham from all the criminals. All the Jasons." 

"You embody both. The criminal, and the one who needs to be saved."

 Fuckin' space kitty, smarter than anyone could give her credit for. 

"And what's gonna happen if I get out, huh?" He lept from his dead man's slump into a rabid, grim reaper-esque stance that wore the weariness of a thousand lifetimes. "You and Dickiebird are just gonna make me push it back, bury that part of myself and pretend it doesn't mean shit to who I am." He punts the pieces of the fork away. It dings like a pinball against the bars. 

"Then when I lapse up, stop checking the boxes of a test I don't even understand, then what are you gonna do? Keep on payin' the pigs off because it's easier to think a little dip into Ra's fountain of youth turned me rabid?" 

He challenged her to see beyond what he used to be, past the glossed over fairytale that happens when you're in love. "Or is this just the real me?" 

Silence. The worst kind.

I ended it and I'm happy. I ended it and I'm happy. I ended it and I'm-

"We were going to help." He could swear she might just start handing out waiting-room brochures for therapists as they spoke. "But it is clear you do not want that." 

Help is not what he wants. Not if he can't be pure again.

"You think I don't-" 

"Yes." 

"Fine. You wanna help me, princess?" His croon was silk oil. With a hell of a bitter aftertaste. "You and Grayson fuck off and leave me alone. Leave me to rot for all I care."

He's finally coaxed the fire out of her. And it is exhilarating.  

She shakes as if flames and ice are taking turns dousing her, and her sneer is so seethed with rage that the battered welts on his jaw feel like kisses.  "I respect your decision." 

Don't let her leave. 

She takes a step. And then another. Rocking wordlessly to the exit. He tries to imprint her into his mind, her smell her sight, her everything because he knows this will be the last time she walks away. 

Her swish-swish of her magenta hair steams into the null void behind his eyes. The automatic door hums shut, and Jason Todd dies for the third time. 

He ended it. 

And he will never, ever be happy.  

----

takes place after that ending from death in the family, where jason kills the joker as a civilian for killing bruce and goes to jail. that ending.