About Your Post The Other Day. Bruce Thinking Of A Broken Back As "annoying" Because He Can File Away

About your post the other day. Bruce thinking of a broken back as "annoying" because he can file away his horrific injuries as plain records of facts. Sometimes he accidentally distresses his loved ones about something he's totally minimized. He's comforted that his kids aren't used to forcing themselves to walk on broken bones, sleeping in the snow with infected stab wounds. When they're hurt, they get care. When they fall, there is a net to catch them. They've endured so much, but most of them grew up in a kinder, more supportive environment. If nothing else, the ones forced into training from birth were treated as valuable, every injury carefully tended so they'd always perform with full physical ability. They can't imagine their fingers not responding enough to form a fist, or crawling into a muddy ditch to rest through the night.

Then there is Jason. Instead of horror, Jason has understanding. He reacts to Bruce's old injuries like they two of them share an inside joke, or his gaze goes distant and he changes the subject. Fractured skull, limbs swollen with compartment syndrome, ruptured kidneys, shattered ribs. Sleeping on the streets. Bones healing misaligned, cold seeping into pins and screws. Bruce thinks of carefully putting bandaids on little hands, how those hands carefully turned the pages in his books, how in the end every bone in those hands was crushed. Ever since, when Bruce is injured, he thinks of Jason's autopsy report, his thoughts are a spiral of "This pain is what he felt. This is what he felt. This is what he—"

Outwardly Bruce looks fine. Inwardly he's spiralling about being a worthless failure who never deserved the honor of being called a parent. At this point, Bruce gets pulled out of his head by Dick desperately asking for help on a case that he he already knows how to solve, or Cass tackling him at her full velocity and using him as a pommel horse for a gymastics routine, or Jason showing the younger kids that Bruce can identify which Gotham water bodies you fell into in the last six weeks if you stick your boot under his nose.

"the only person who comes closest to understanding what Jason went through is Bruce" and "Bruce is the last person Jason wants to see most days" are two, beautifully conflicting facts. How much of Jason's distance from Bruce is a desire to not be known, to be perceived? and yet, by putting that space between them, he deprives himself of someone who understands that kind of trauma and has made it out to the other side. and I think a part of Jason knows that Bruce should've died by now, could have died, and has come so damn close with some injuries and torture that the line isn't even definitive. and yet. and yet...