Work Text:
Masks
by Amber.
I know that it’s just a little bit of cloth - nothing conspicuous, just a scrap really, but it changes everything. Hides who I am from the rest of the world, protects me from my enemies. It even ides me from my friends, that’s the downside. It’s like everytime I wanted to say something to Ariana, but couldn’t because it would compromise the mask. The mask protects but it destroys as well. I’d still be with Ariana if it wasn’t for the damn mask.
It hurts to know that even though I loved Ariana very much, and part of me still does, I still kept the
secret and let her go. Bruce knew when I broke up with her, and I think that he was a little glad. When I was with Ariana I took time away from the job to be with her. Not much time, no, but it was still time away from the suit and the mask. Sometimes I think that Bruce keeps me around for selfish reasons. I love him, and I love fighting alongside him, but he takes so much. He takes my youth and my heart and then he tells me that I should go and look for other people to love. Other people to spend time with.
Why can’t he just feel something back for me. I love him, I’ve always loved him. He said that he loved me too. One night, one moment, and we were together. He held me and said that he loved me and I believed him. Foolish, childish hope but I believed him. It felt so good, to be loved, to be held by someone and cherished. I *worshiped* him. I’ve worshiped him since I was nine. He was my god, the one thing in the world that made sense all the time. He was the avenging angel, the
dark saviour of an even darker world.
Bruce held me after the fight with Joker, after the shot that shattered Jim Gordon’s life a second time. I saw the body, blood spreading from beneath red hair and children crying all around her. She was his life, his heart, his hope, and she died so that the hope of others could live on. Those kids, they were Gotham’s hope, proof that we really were humans, that the governments abandoning us hadn’t stripped us of our humanity. Gotham is Gordon’s life, his soul, but Sarah was his hope. But I saw the body and I saw the blood and the children just sat there and cried, as if they knew what had really happened- they’re too young to really remember, there’s that comfort, but I know that somewhere in their minds, they will always know what was sacrificed so that they could live. One man’s hope died in that room, just as Gotham had the most reason to hope, all the light went out of Gordon’s life.
And Gordon shot him. Not fatal, though that would have been the right thing to do- I know that no one there, not even Bruce, would have stopped him. Bruce held Gordon after that. Gordon cried and Batman held him. I saw that it was Bruce holding him- through the mask it was Bruce’s heart that was holding him. I think that Gordon knows that it’s Bruce behind the Batman, or maybe it’s really the other way around, Batman behind the Bruce Wayne mask. Either way, the shared pain was there and I chose to go in and help get the children away. It was - frightening - you understand, I know that you understand how frightening the Joker’s work can be.
I stepped in the blood and I moved the children and then later, in the dark, he held me. I cried and raged against the world, against fate, and he held me tight. The mask was torn away then, it was just the two of us, Tim and Bruce, trying to be human. It was hard and delicious and painful and everything that I’d every heard that it could be and at the end, after I gave him everything that I could, after it was all over, he said that he loved me and he held me while we slept.
It was the morning that destroyed everything. He wasn’t Bruce anymore, he was Batman. And that meant that there was no room for love, no emotion at all. So the mask went back down on Tim as well. I wasn’t Tim anymore, but I was Robin. And so Robin was perfect, the consummate partner. A mask that separated me from Ariana, and that separated me from Bruce, from the man that gave it to me and the man that I shouldn’t have to wear it around.
Dick looks at me and I can see that the mask doesn’t fool him. I wonder if maybe the same thing happened with him at one point. I want to talk to him, I do, but I don’t want to make him mad at Bruce again, and I know that he would be. He’d see it not as an equal exchange, and that’s what it was, but as Bruce taking advantage of me. It wasn’t like that, and I think that you know that. I may be young, but I’m not naive. You understand that better than Dick would, I think. Bruce won’t say anything about it but I found your diary and I read it and I know that you and Bruce were together.
Lovers. You know, it’s funny, but I still have trouble using that word with Bruce. He said that he loved me but then he acts like he doesn’t feel anything. So what does it really mean? Lovers, I think that it’s just another mask that he wears, something that suits at the time and then is put away until it fits again.
I don’t want to be like that, I really don’t. I feel, I feel real emotions, not just fake ones, not just ones to make the world believe that I’m alive when I really died years ago. Two bullets and they destroyed Bruce’s soul forever. Those bullets created so many scars that I think he has to wear a mask now. Something to fool the world into believing that he’s still whole, when he’s really only a remnant of the man he was meant to be. He was meant to be so much more than the Batman, but so much less as well. You understand that, I’m sure. And you know how much it hurts to have to put on some of those same masks when you’re not as deeply scared as the man that created them. I wish that you were still alive, so that we could talk, I think that you’d find we have a lot to talk about, of course, if you were alive, then I wouldn’t have to be Robin, and maybe my mom would still be alive.
I don’t blame him but sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t the gods that killed her. The pain necessary to be Robin, to understand even a little of the darkness behind the Batman’s mask can’t be learned second hand, it has to be felt on a personal level, so maybe that’s why my Mom died and Dad was paralyzed- so that I *could* be Robin. The price for the chance to fulfill my boyhood dream.
And still the mask stays on. I’ve shown him everything, I have no secrets from him, nothing left
to hold back, nothing left to give and he still hides behind a mask. Bruce Wayne, Batman, they’re both masks that he uses, and I’m not sure where he really is, the man that spawned both Bruce Wayne and Batman, the core of him, I don’t even know if what’s left is capable of the love that I want so desperately.
So I come here. Ironically, the graveyard was one of the few places not really damaged by the quake. Your grave still stands, though the statue that was over your mother’s has been broken in half and is then shattered. Bruce had an angel put in over your grave, not a cute, sweet angel like you see over children’s graves, but a dark, avenging angel, kind of like what I imagine Zauriel must have looked like when he was still an angel. Or maybe the angel is what Bruce sees when he looks in the mirror. Either way, it’s not embarrassingly cute, which I know you would have hated.
I never met you, but you wrote so much in your diary, so many things that I feel too, that you seem as real to me as Dick, and maybe more so. After all, Dick was always a super-heroic figure for me, even after I got to know him as a person, he has this shine, this glow of untouchable perfection to him. You though, you weren’t that much older than me, and I think that makes you less godlike, more easily understood.
I don’t even bother to wear the mask when I come here to talk to you, I know that you can’t see it, hell, I don’t even know if you can hear me. It just makes me feel better to come and talk to someone that I don’t have to wear *any* masks around. And you’re the only one that I can think of, Jason
end