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His name could be anything. No one’s used it in hours. He feels like weeping, but he doesn’t have eyes.
His grave isn’t where it should be, it's not in any cemetery he knows. It’s buried deeper: under concrete, behind fire-melted rubble, down in the places where the earth shakes and his bones cluster.
He doesn’t remember dying. Death is different from what he thought; it’s not instant, it’s not painful, and it’s not non-existence either. It’s a long unraveling; like being peeled away from himself, layer by layer, until all that’s left is the moment, and then the stillness.
He’s outside time. For a moment, he hears and sees all. He thinks he remembers kneeling on a rooftop, knees sore through worn armor. He thinks he remembers gravel beneath his palms. But it doesn’t feel like his memory. Someone taller. Someone older. The memory shifts, and then it's gone.
He thinks he might be remembering something, a feeling, a moment. A flicker behind his ribs, where breath used to live. A laugh. A name. Fingers curled into fabric, holding on too tightly. It slips through him. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like remembering things before they happen.
He keeps drifting.
Somewhere below (below?), the ground changes. The air thickens, metal-rich and sour. He recognizes that smell.
Blood and oil. Earth split open.
This is where the body must be. His.
He descends, or maybe he’s drawn in, he can't tell.
The body is waiting, but it doesn’t look like him. It’s cold in a way he recognizes now. It's not weather-cold, but morgue-cold. Alone in deep-freeze silence. There are tags on things. There are notes. Someone wrote cause of death, but they didn’t get it right.
His rib-cage is a ruin. It’s cut down the middle, its sides flapped open like a butterfly’s wings. Stark white bones against pink flesh, he wants to look away.
Someone lifts a heart with gloved hands. Not now, but before. He remembers it in flashes. Bone saws, clean tools, and a voice commenting on tissue damage, a hand jutting down quick notes. He wasn’t there, but he was.
He comprehends the mess that’s his organs. He wants to feel horror, but the moment has passed.
Dirt hits the lid. He thinks that if he could feel, he would be startled.
If there was a funeral, he doesn’t remember it. Maybe there was a speech. Maybe Bruce said something quiet, clenched behind his teeth. Maybe Dick looked away.
He was buried in pieces. First the body, then the name.
He thinks he was mourned like a mistake.
Time passes differently here. It doesn’t pass at all, even.
He becomes aware of his fingers first. Not the nerves, those are long gone, but the shape of them. He imagines the way they once curled, imagines them curling again. Then his spine, twisted where they laid him wrong, bent slightly to fit the wooden space.
Something is leaking in. Not air, or dirt. It is need; he doesn’t have lungs, but he starts to feel the need to breathe.
The shift is slow. A crawl. His thoughts begin flickering in and out, like a faulty light-bulb: Robin. Mission. Streetlight. Gunshot. Crowbar. Red.
Red.
Red like the back of his throat, like heat behind his eyes, if he had eyes.
The coffin groans, or maybe it’s him. Hard to tell what belongs to whom these days.
Something is listening.
He doesn’t know how he knows, only that he does. It’s patient, this thing. Old. Not God, not even close. He can't name it. It hums under the earth without making a noise. It's more of a feeling, like that pressure behind his teeth. It knows he’s here.
The coffin creaks. The wood is starting to swell. Wetness bleeds through the seams. Mud. He has no mouth for it, but he tastes iron and smoke.
He tries to lift his hand.
Nothing happens.
But it feels as though something moves, below him. A root, maybe. Or a vein. It slithers; curious, wet, and alive.
He doesn’t flinch, not that he could, when it touches him, as it brushes up against the idea of a shoulder, the ghost of a collarbone. It lingers there, this not-root, this vein of something, so still that he almost forgets that it's even there.
There you are, it whispers, not in words, but in presence. It’s an affectionate menace. It wants him strong.
The coffin breathes. No, he breathes. Or dreams of breathing. One ragged pull through lungs that aren’t there, and he feels his whole body shudder.
A crack splinters through the wood. The thing below coils around him. He feels its strength and knows that it won’t let go. This thing below doesn’t ask. It presses closer into the places where breath used to live, where heat used to gather, where his heart used to beat. Until finally, a thought returns to him.
Not red. Not Robin. Not rage.
Just.
Jason.
His name. A rusted bell ringing in his head.
The root twitches. Pleased.
The thing below offers him a trade: memory for strength, compassion for rage, name for something worse. It’s green, it’s wanting.
Jason doesn’t say yes, but it happens anyway.
It’s slow. Dreadful. Bone by bone, nerve by imagined nerve, he begins to return.
At first, there’s pressure. Then a static tingle of sensation too vague to name. His skin doesn’t just reseal; it remembers tearing, and in remembering, it stings.
His bones realign with wet, snapping pops. He hears it, feels it, without ears or nerves. It’s wrong. It’s backwards. They fit, but not how they used to. Something is off in the angles. His marrows itch.
Red-hot blood chases out ice-cold formaldehyde. His veins swell. His heart manages a beat. Then another. Then another.
Then his lungs reinflate like a wet paper bag. His half-made ribs hitch. There’s a heave, then a suck. Air bubbles through the taste of mud and medical residue. The first not-breath he takes is a drag through sludge.
His aspirated organs return like strangers. They slither back into place sluggishly. He senses the snake-twist of his intestines, the groaning stretch of his stomach walls.
It hurts, but not like pain. No, pain is for the living. This is something else. It’s a feeling like being filled with stuffing. He comes back into a shape that no longer fits.
The first sound he makes isn’t a scream, it’s a sob.