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Being resurrected had a high cost.
For Jason, that cost was one he hadn't been willing to pay but he hadn't really had much of a choice so he'd learnt to just deal with it. In the beginning, everything had gone so wrong.
He'd lost everything that made him… him. He was older, for one, and while compared to everything else, that in itself might not have seemed like too big of a deal but to him that meant a few years of his life lost. Whole years of his childhood just gone, never to come back. He couldn't finish high school, not really. He missed out on so many coming-of-age experiences. All the fantasies he'd had, the perceptions of the teenage experience he'd gotten from books or tv shows were left as fantasies.
In the beginning, it hadn't mattered. In the beginning he hadn't even remembered much, his head all filled with emotions more than thoughts or memories. All he really remembered then and even now about that time was anger. Fear. Hurt. Pain. Confusion. Hatred. Cold. Unforgiving. Resentment. All of it amplified, tenfold.
It'd taken a while for those feelings to fade. Even once they had, they didn't go completely - as they should, as negative as those emotions were but balance was needed - and occasionally they popped up once in a while. The biggest difference during that period was that those negative feelings were aimed at different people. Most of the time. His family occasionally pissed him off, but not nearly as much as they used to; just the usual amount that families piss each other off more often than not. And it had taken a long time to get to that point of even calling them family again.
When he'd come back, they'd been happy. He'd been anything but. 'They' had come to encompass more than what he'd known to be just Dick, Bruce, Alfred, and maybe Barbara and Commissioner Gordon for one. It had seemed like such a big deal to him then, but everything had thanks to the Pit. He'd gotten over it eventually, and so had Tim, he thinks, remembering those few months where the boy couldn't help flinching if Jason shouted or made a sudden move.
Most of the Pit Madness had passed, thankfully. Eventually he'd gotten to some semblance of 'normal'. But he hadn't exactly gotten used to this new 'normal'. Because this normal wasn't the one he'd had before.
He hadn't been dead for too long, but long enough for things to change. Not just his family, or anything to do with his 'hobbies' at all but just the world. The world had changed so much in a matter of years. It never failed to amaze him, but also never failed to frustrate him. Once everything had calmed down, he'd taken a few full days and the better part of a month spread out over several just catching up on everything. New governments, new social movements, pop culture, technology itself, everything.
It was all so different. He was so different. Different from how he'd been as Robin, to how he'd been resurrected, to who he was now. All of them such vastly different people.
Sometimes he cried about it. Any part of his life. He had plenty to cry about. Even before Robin, his life was never great, and while he probably wouldn't change a thing with Bruce bringing him in, he definitely would have changed the Joker's life status. There was so much to cry about regarding his time under the Pit's influence but what he mostly ended up crying about was how little he actually knew, remembered about that time. What he did know and remember was terrible itself so it scared him what he might have done during those blank spots in his memory. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was life-altering. But he'd never know.
Part of growing up was that things changed. Change was inevitable and he knew that. There was no way to go back to how things were before the Joker, and even if there was, he wasn't entirely sure if there was a point. Yes, things were different now, and yes he didn't always love who he'd become, but he would have changed at some point.
Though he'd have chosen a different method, maybe this was for the better. Maybe he was the best he could have been. He was always told no pain, no gain. He'd been through hell and back - quite literally too - but he didn't always see the gains. That didn't mean they weren't there. They were just there in a more subtle way.
That's what Bruce told him. What Dick told him. That yeah, he was different, but it wasn't all bad. Maybe he'd come back a worse person but he'd grown. Tim had forgiven him. Alfred had never even changed sides, staying in his corner for the most part. He appreciated that to no end but he also didn't understand because he knew he'd been a terrible person.
"The fact that you are aware of that, Master Jason, just proves you are no longer the same person. You are better."
The topic came up enough in the family that he more or less had been able to piece together where he stood with everyone, where he fit now and where they went from there. If he had nightmares about his resurrection, he knew there were people he could call to talk about it, reassure him, or just distract him.
He'd come back broken and wrong and he wasn't exactly fixed - doubted he ever would be, Jason Todd had died and a part of him had stayed dead, he could feel it - but he wasn't in pieces any more. He fit somewhere in their broken little family and that was all he could ever ask for.