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He does everything right. He finds the cross roads, buries the bones and the picture of Jason, says the words. He does everything right and still, when Jason comes back to him, he cups Bruce's throat in both hands, eyes lit up like the hellfire Bruce is headed for and asks, "What did you do?"
Bruce doesn't say anything. Jason smells like earth, like blood, like home. His nails are sharp in Bruce's skin, and when he licks his chapped lips Bruce remembers a hundred nights of Jason in his arms, a hundred nights he swore would be the last one.
"You don't know what you're playing with," Jason tells him later. He's covered in sweat and he's smoking by the windowsill, one foot propped up on the ledge. Bruce never let him smoke before, but now, now – he'd let Jason do anything, as long as he's here.
"You've just got no fucking idea, old man," Jason says, and Bruce gets off the bed, kneels down in front of him and looks up.
"I don't care," he says. "I don't care," he says again as Jason tosses his cigarette out the window, slides off the ledge and back into his arms. "I don't care," he says right into the shell of Jason's ear, into the dip between his neck and shoulder.
When he came back home with Jason, Alfred looked at them both like they'd done something terrible, and Bruce couldn't find the words to explain, but Jason just shrugged out of Bruce's grip on his shoulder, stepped up to Alfred and said, "It's gonna be okay, Alf. Promise."
Now, Jason shivers in his arms, hands scrabbling at Bruce's chest as he lifts him back into their bed, and Bruce tells him over and over that it's all going to be all right.
He's not going to lose Jason again.
*
Back on the streets, Jason is a warning sign: kill one of the Batman's partners, and he will come back with a vengeance. Bruce doesn't scold him for being too harsh, too violent in his bright red and green and yellow. The Joker hasn't been seen in months, but there are rumors, and Bruce – Bruce is looking.
He is a little afraid of what will happen when he finds him.
Jason still tells him he's an idiot, that whatever he did to bring him back couldn't have been worth all the trouble, but sometimes – sometimes, before he drifts off to sleep, breathing softly at Bruce's side – sometimes, too, he murmurs, Thank you.