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He spent a year in a villa in the Hindu Kush. He doesn’t remember most of it. There were people that cleaned and made him food. The whole house smelled like Talia, like rose and jasmine flowers. And there were plenty of windows and big archways, so the space was lit entirely by sunlight during the day.
He seldom left the house, only for walks around the grounds and visits to the doctor, Talia a steady presence at his side. There are ten or so days he can call forth with almost perfect clarity. The rest of that year is a patchwork in his mind, indistinct, fuzzy around the edges.
He remembers —
An argument. Hushed voices outside his door. She had been away for a while, a couple of weeks, maybe. He didn’t think she was coming back. But then there had been the distinctive click of high-heeled boots down the hall, and she had appeared in the doorway of his room, hand on a cocked hip, dressed like she’d left a boardroom to reprimand him.
“They say you’re not eating,” she approached the bed, where he sat cross-legged against the headboard. He matched her stubborn frown for stubborn frown. “You don’t like the food?”
No answer.
“You’re feeling ill?”
No answer.
She pressed the back of her palm to his forehead, then brushed a few curls out of his eyes. “You don’t have a fever,” she wrinkled her nose a little, “when was the last time you bathed?”
No answer. He liked that she still asked him questions like he might answer them, even after the months of silence that suggested otherwise.
“Come on.” She patted his leg through layers of blankets, the simple gold bangles on her wrist making a soft clinking sound. “Up. We’re going to eat something, you and I. I am going to cook for you, Jason Todd. Few men have had the honor.”
He sat on the counter as she worked, the marble shockingly cold through the thin cotton of his pajamas. The fridge stayed fully stocked, but she had come with fresh bags of groceries. It took him a while to realize what she was making, only catching on at the sight of the hot dog buns wrapped in foil.
“You like this, yes?” she asked, shaking a generous amount of cumin into the pan. No answer, but some shadow of a reaction must have passed over his face, because she allowed a small smile, pointed down at a plate of still steaming ground beef.
They ate in the kitchen counter using fingers and paper towels. He remembers Talia staring at the chili dog for an awkwardly long amount of time, presumably trying to figure out a way to look dignified while eating it. It reminded him of something. Someone.
Halfway through the meal, a woman in a cotton nightgown appeared in the entryway of the kitchen, a toddler braced against her hip. “I’m sorry, Miss Al Ghul,” she said, voice steeped in a soft accent like Talia’s. “He won’t settle.”
Talia, still chewing a mouthful of food, shook her head and gestured for the woman to bring him closer. She didn’t bother explaining who he was, but the child sat on her knee for the rest of the meal. At one point he reached out with one of his tiny hands, taking hold of Jason’s sleeve and tugging hard. Jason glanced down at him, something like amusement curling in the pit of his stomach. He had wanted to smile, then, for the first time in so many months, but it was almost like his mouth couldn’t remember how.
Talia watched them with some unreadable expression, cleaning her barely-soiled fingers with a paper towel.
He held the baby while she put the rest of the food away. Part of him couldn’t believe she was allowing him to. Though she kept the doctors away from him, he heard their assessments secondhand from the people who kept watch over him. Traumatized, brain damaged. Not coming back. Functionally useless. Even if he could talk, he wouldn’t have repeated the words to Talia. She would’ve cut their tongues out.
“Damian,” Talia said, not looking up from where she was rinsing dishes in the sink. “His name is Damian.”
Damian was warm and heavy against the crook of Jason’s arm. He had stopped grabbing at Jason’s face and biting him, and was now staring up at him with lidded brown eyes, tired and curious. He was Talia’s son. Jason could see it in the shape of his mouth, in the soft way she tousled his hair when he stirred. Jason held him a little tighter. Something in him trembled at the idea of a child growing up here, in the den of the demon.
Another child, he reminded himself. Talia turned off the sink and dried her hands on a cotton towel. She was tired. She had been trained not to show it, but Jason could see the effort it was taking to keep her spine straight, her eyes sharp. Not for the first time, he wondered why she had added Jason to her innumerable list of responsibilities.
The woman in the nightgown returned to take Damian away. She had to softly uncurl his fingers from the fabric of Jason’s shirt. Jason looked at his legs instead of watching them go. He put his hand over his chest, trying to contain whatever was pulling at him. It was too much.
Talia was looking at him. She spent so much time looking at him, searching for any twitch or crease in his expression that suggested he was — coming back. That he hadn’t left.
He ignored it. Damian’s dried spit was still on his hands. He moved off the counter and stood next to Talia at the sink, scrubbing his fingers clean with a soap made from laurel oil.
Talia stepped closer to him, her hand on his shoulder. She turned him slightly, so he had little choice but to look at her. She had such an intense presence when she wanted to - acute and magnetic. Reminded him of one of the many ghosts that grappled at the edges of his mind at night, in that space between sleep and consciousness.
“You have to fight,” Talia told him, lifting her palm to his cheek. And he knew, even then, that he was only seeing that hint of desperation in her eyes because she was allowing him to. “We’re running out of time. You cannot stay here forever. You were meant for more than this.”
He said nothing, turned his face away from her touch and looked back down into the sink, scalding water still running over his hands.
Three days later, she pushed him into the Lazarus Pit.