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Jason wakes up underground and it is the last time he’s coherent for a year and a half.
The next time he’s coherent, he’s holding a pup and snarling at a woman he thinks he should recognize but doesn’t. She has her arms held out, expression cautious, not quite reaching for the boy but ready to lunge for him should she need to—should he prove a danger to his pup. He bristles at the implication.
She croons at him, a comforting alpha noise that soothes some of his ire, but he knows she isn’t the one he wants.
“Bruce,” he says. His voice is deeper than he remembers it and hoarse like he’s spent a lot of time growling recently.
Her face does something complicated and it makes his stomach clench—nerves, maybe, or something more instinctual. But when it settles, her expression is warm, and she says, voice soft like a whisper but not quite, “I’ll get you back to him, Jason. You just have to trust me.”
He doesn’t trust her, doesn’t know her, but he has a pup clinging to his waist and no way to get back to Bruce on his own, so he nods.
The pup’s name is Damian, and he is Bruce’s and the woman’s—Talia. It feels not quite like a betrayal, though on whose behalf he’s not sure. Regardless of his parentage, he is Jason’s, that much he is sure. He is seven, nearly eight, and smart and capable and almost independent—almost, almost, because his pup still needs him despite his capability, his independence.
Jason is proud of him, and loves him, and can’t imagine his life without him despite being not quite seventeen and an amnesiac.
He doesn’t remember much before he comes to himself in the League base, only flashes of his life before and after Bruce took him in, and nothing between waking up in his coffin and the League.
It seems a cruel joke that he remembers every second of the Joker’s beating.
It’s a year before Talia can smuggle them off Nanda Parbat and another before they make it to Gotham. During that time Talia fills in some of the missing pieces of his life, how he crawled out of his grave and wandered into a Gotham hospital, calling for Bruce all the while, and how Bruce showed up to the hospital the next day, too late to stop Ra’s from stealing Jason’s body. She tells him about the year after his resurrection when he was more or less catatonic and responded only to Damian—omega instinct, he knows, to latch onto a pup in a time of uncertainty, moreover a pup of familiar stock.
Damian’s never been to Gotham before and he looks at it all dubiously. Jason understands; Gotham is cold and dirty and mean. Damian is used to mean, but the cruelty of the League is not the same as Gotham’s underhanded hurt. He thinks Damian will learn, as much as Jason wishes to protect him; she never leaves her children unmarked.
Alfred opens the front door of Wayne Manor to find Jason Todd, remarkably alive and grown, holding the hand of a pup who looks so much like Bruce. His face is something akin to slack even as he ushers them in from the rain, but the hug he gives Jason once he closes the door is anything but.
…
Coming home is the easy part.
Jason doesn’t know what to do about his siblings. He and Dick were never close, too busy being resentful of each other to actually be brothers. They were just starting to mend things when Jason died. Absence makes the heart grow fonder but it doesn’t fix the breaks already there. Dick calls him Little Wing and hugs him, but Jason’s incomplete memory makes the fissure between them much too vast for Dick to trapeze his way through.
And Tim—Tim is a whole different problem. Jason’s first instinct is to snap and snarl at his replacement, but Tim looks at him like he’s a vision and it throws him. The first time Jason calls him Replacement, sneering and low over dinner, Tim gets quiet, contemplative, then smiles. It makes every instinct Jason’s honed over the last four years twist.
“I didn’t want to replace you,” he says, placid. “I still don’t. I just want to continue your legacy. You were my Robin, and Robin is magic.”
It brings Jason up short and he stares dumbfounded before Damian saves him by snorting inelegantly and saying, “Sentimental fool.” He loves his ridiculous brat, and he thinks he might love Tim, someday.
Bruce is at once the easiest and hardest reunion. There is history between them, stretching the depthless canyon of the four years they were apart. Jason is no longer a lost child trying to find his place in a world that doesn’t want him, but he thinks Bruce is no longer a man trapped between a grim past and an uncertain future, knocked firmly into the present by a tragedy of his own making.
They’ve both grown.
…
“Jay,” says Bruce. He holds out his arms, palms up, and Jason approaches. Damian stands just behind him, frowning down his nose at his father like he thinks Bruce will hurt Jason. He won’t, Jason knows that almost as surely as he knows anything. It is a knowledge that transcends even death.
Jason says, “Bruce,” and tilts his head back. Just like that, something snaps into place, they snap into place, and Bruce descends on him. Damian worms his way between them, jealous and mumbling that Jason is his. Jason laughs and Bruce tucks their pup more firmly against their bodies with an indulgent smile at them both. He thinks that, eventually, Damian will be just as possessive of his father as he is of Jason. He looks forward to it.