Chapter 3: Rule Three: Don't Come Back
Batman doesn't sit. You don't offer.
He stands in the middle of your waiting room, between the plastic chairs and the blood-pressure pamphlets, and he's somehow even bigger than Red Hood, or maybe it's just the cape. You stand behind the reception desk with your hand resting near the phone, and the two of you look at each other for a long moment.
"Leslie told you," you say.
"Leslie told me he's been coming here." The white lenses don't blink. "She didn't have to tell me the rest. He walks you home. He doesn't walk anyone home."
Your face goes hot. You refuse to let it go any further than that. "If you're here to warn me off—"
"I'm not." He says it fast, and for a second something gets through the gravel, something almost human. "Someone's put a price on him. A large one. Cobblepot's people are asking questions on Park Row. They know he has a doctor." The lenses move, very slightly, toward Exam One. "They don't know which one yet. They will."
"So close the clinic. That's what you're going to say."
"For a week. Until it's handled."
"There's a woman who comes in every Wednesday for insulin because she can't afford it anywhere else," you say. "There's a man with a leg ulcer I'm keeping out of the hospital by about a thread. There are forty people a night who walk through that door, and they don't have anywhere else. I'm not closing."
He looks at you for a long time. You get the feeling he's not used to people saying no to him in their scrubs.
"No," he says finally. "Leslie said you wouldn't." He takes something out of his belt and sets it on the desk. It's small and black, like a car key fob, with a single button. "If anyone comes who isn't a patient, press that."
"And you'll come?"
"Someone will."
He turns to go. At the door, with his gloved hand on the bar, he stops.
"He was dead once," Batman says, without turning around. "You've seen his chest. You know what that is." It isn't a question. "He came back angry. He's been angry for a long time. The last few weeks, he's been less." A pause. "Don't tell him I came."
The door closes. When you get to the window, there's nobody on Park Row at all.
You tell him, of course. You tell him the second he walks in.
He comes at three, with a bag of dumplings from the place on Ninth, and he's smiling when he gets through the door, a real one, loose and easy and a little bit shy. He's never been shy before. He's halfway through saying "Hey, Doc—" when you say:
"Jason."
He stops dead in the middle of the waiting room.
You watch it hit him. You watch every bit of the easiness go out of his body at once, his shoulders squaring, his weight shifting onto the balls of his feet. His eyes go to the door, to the window, back to you. They're green. Pit-green, you'll think later, once you know what that means.
"Who told you?" he says, very quietly.
"Tall guy. Cape. Doesn't blink."
He says a word you've only heard from surgeons. He drops the dumplings on the desk and paces three steps toward the window and back.
"He came here. He came here, to you." His jaw is tight. "What did he say?"
You tell him. Cobblepot. The price. The doctor they're looking for. The panic button, which is still sitting on the reception desk next to the hand sanitizer. He looks at it like it's personally insulted him.
Then he goes very still. You've seen him do that before, in this exact room, the night you told him you'd stitch him if he gave up his guns. Deciding something.
"He's right," he says.
"He's not—"
"He is. They'll find you. They'll find you because I couldn't stay away from a damn free clinic for one week, because I'm—" He breaks off. He looks at the sign on the door. At the third rule, in your handwriting. "You had it right the first time, Doc. You wrote it down. I just didn't listen."
"Jason. Don't."
He's already at the door. He doesn't look at you when he goes. That's the part that gets you. Everything else, you could argue with. But he doesn't look back once, and the door swings closed behind him, and the bell over it rings once in the empty room.
He doesn't come back the next night. Or the one after that.
You stitch up eleven people. You give the woman her insulin on Wednesday. You walk home alone at six, on the street side, between yourself and the traffic, and you don't cry, because you're a doctor and your heart is a tough little organ in a lockbox behind your sternum.
Leslie looks at you over her crossword on Thursday morning and doesn't say I told you so. That's almost worse.
On the third night, at 2:40, two men come in who aren't patients.
You know it the second they come through the door. Nobody hurt walks like that. They're wearing good coats and bad smiles, and one of them flips the lock on the door behind him without looking.
"Evening, Doctor," says the taller one. "We're looking for a friend of yours. Big guy. Red hat."
Your hand drifts toward the black fob on the desk.
You never get there. There's a sound from the roof, a heavy thump, then the window over the waiting room chairs comes in all at once in a shower of glass. Something red drops through it and lands in a crouch, and both men go for their coats, and both men are much, much too slow.
It's over in about four seconds. You'll replay them later and still not be sure what happened in them. Then there are two men groaning on your linoleum and Red Hood standing over them with a pistol in each hand, his chest heaving.
"You okay?" he says. The modulator flattens his voice, but it doesn't flatten that.
"You broke my window," you say. "You were on the roof."
He doesn't answer. You come around the desk, past the men on the floor, all the way up to him, close enough to see your own face reflected in the blank red helmet.
"How long have you been on the roof, Jason?"
There's a long, static-filled pause.
"Every night," he says finally.
He put his guns in the paper bin the first night because you asked him to. You think of that. The way he left without looking back, and then went three floors up and sat in the cold for three nights, watching your door.
"Take it off," you say.
He reaches up. The hiss, the click. He lifts the helmet off, and there's Jason underneath, sweaty and furious and exhausted, and his eyes are wet. He'd never admit it.
"Rule three," you say. "Don't come back. It's off the sign. It's done."
"Doc—"
"New rule." You take hold of the front of his armored vest in both fists. "You come back. Every time. Bleeding, not bleeding, I don't care. You come back to me. That's the rule. Can you follow that one?"
He looks down at you for a long time. Then he drops the helmet on a plastic chair, where it rocks and settles, and takes your face in both gloved hands.
"I'm Jason," he says. "Jason Todd. I'm twenty-five. I died once, and I came back, and I've been mad about it ever since. I'm trying not to be. I want you to hear that from me and not from him."
"Okay," you say. Your voice is shaking. "Hi, Jason."
"Hi." His thumbs move along your cheekbones. "What's yours? You never told me."
So you tell him. Your whole name, there in your wrecked waiting room, with the glass on the floor and two of Cobblepot's men moaning at your feet.
He says it back to you. Slowly. Like he's tasting it. Like it's something he's going to keep in a pocket close to his chest.
Then he kisses you, and somewhere behind you, very faintly, the front door's lock clicks open and a figure in a cape drags two men out by their collars, and neither of you looks.
His safehouse is four blocks away, above a shuttered laundromat, and it's nicer than you expected: brick walls, shelves of books stacked two deep, a kitchen that's clearly the most expensive thing in it. You don't see much of it. He gets you through the door and up against it before the deadbolt's even thrown.
This time is different. Last time was a fever. This time he takes you to his bed and lays you down in it and undresses you like he's unwrapping something he's been told he can keep. He takes his time. He kisses every inch of skin he uncovers. He says your name against your shoulder, your stomach, the inside of your wrist, like he's making up for every night he couldn't.
"Jason," you say, just to say it. "Jason."
He groans and presses his face into your throat. "Keep doing that."
You pull him down on top of you. He's naked and warm and heavy, the scars smooth and rough under your palms, and you can feel how hard he is against your hip. You reach down to stroke him, slow, and he shudders all along his body and drops his forehead to yours.
"I thought about this," he says, rough. "On the roof. Every night. I'd sit up there in the cold and think, she's right there. She's right there and I can't."
"You can now."
"Yeah?"
"Yes," you say. "Please. I want you inside me."
He reaches for the nightstand. You hear the tear of foil. Then he's back over you, holding your gaze, and he slides into you so slowly that you both forget to breathe. When he's all the way in, he stays there, still, his whole weight resting on his forearms on either side of your head, and he just looks at you.
"Hi," he says. Again. Like the first time in Leslie's office.
"Hi," you say, and you're laughing a little, and so is he, and then he moves and you aren't.
He makes love to you slowly, long deep strokes that drag and fill and make your toes curl in his sheets. Your legs are wrapped around him. His mouth keeps finding yours. Every time you say his name, his rhythm stutters, and you start doing it on purpose, and he knows you're doing it on purpose, and he says, "Oh, you're mean," into your mouth and drives into you harder.
It builds like that, slow and then not. His hand slides between you. His thumb finds you and circles, steady and sure, while he keeps moving, and the pleasure winds tighter and tighter until it snaps, and you come with his name in your mouth this time, all of it, loud enough the whole laundromat probably heard. He watches you the entire time like it's the best thing he's ever seen.
"There she is," he whispers.
Then he lets go. His rhythm breaks, goes rough and deep, and he buries his face in your neck and says your name, your real name, over and over, until he shudders and goes still inside you.
You lie in the dark afterward with your head on his chest, over the old crooked marks on his sternum. You can hear his heart, slow and steady now. You think about the textbook. Perimortem. The man in the picture who didn't get up.
This one did. He's right here. You put your hand flat over his heart and leave it there.
"Doc," he says into your hair, sleepy.
"You know my name now."
"Yeah," he says. "But you're still my doc."
The next morning, before Leslie comes in, you take the marker out of the drawer and stand in front of the clinic door.
You cross out the third rule. You stand there for a while with the cap in your teeth. Then, underneath, you write a new one.
COME BACK.
Leslie reads it when she arrives, with her coffee in the WORLD'S OKAYEST DOCTOR mug and her glasses low on her nose. She reads it for a long time.
"Well," she says. "I told you that last one would break your heart."
"It didn't."
"No." She smiles, and takes a sip of her coffee, and heads for her crossword. "Bruce is going to want to have dinner, you know. He'll pretend he doesn't. He'll want to."
"Who's Bruce?" you say.
Leslie stops. Turns around. Looks at you over the top of her glasses for a long, long moment.
"Oh, honey," she says. "Jason really didn't tell you anything, did he?"