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Chapter Text

The world was ending in fire and pain and the smell of his own blood iron-thick, mingling with the acrid smoke in his nostrils. Jason Todd, fifteen years old and Robin, tried to breathe and felt a rib shift, a hot, grinding agony in his chest. The warehouse was a tomb, dust and splinters sifting down from the ceiling with each distant tremor. The Joker’s mocking laugh was a phantom echo, overlapping the silence with the high-pitched tinnitus of his own shattered body.

His fingers twitched and made him aware of how cold his extremities were getting. So cold. He didn't need Robin training to know how bad that was. It was the cold of the Gotham docks in winter, the cold of a mother’s hand in bathroom tiles, the cold seeping in from the edges of everything.

Bruce wasn't coming. He knew that now. The certainty was a final, pain deeper than his broken ribs rattling in his chest. The myth of the Batman, the promise that he would always come, shattered as easily as Jason's own bones.

He blinked, trying to clear his vision, a film of blood and smoke damage making the world swim.

The bomb timer, a cruel red countdown, was the only light left in the suffocating dark.

00:00…

The light wasn't red anymore.

He stared at it uncomprehendingly. That wasn’t right.

It was a soft, gold-washed grey, like dawn after a storm. The crushing weight of the rubble was gone. The pain was a memory, a ghost limb of agony. Jason sat up, or he thinks he did. Suddenly he was standing, whole and dressed in his Robin uniform, but it was clean, pristine, the yellow of the cape bright as a canary’s song, undamaged by the explosion and the fire.

He tried to get his brain working, looking at his hands and flexing them. They were looking and working perfectly, no wounds, no scars, nothing.

He was still trying to piece things together, when was when he realized he was not alone.

A woman stood a few feet away; he could see her profile. She wasn't tall or imposing. She wore simple, modern clothes—a leather jacket, boots—but there was something timeless about them, as if they were merely the current iteration of something else.

There was something other about her, a resonance that hummed below the surface of reality. She wasn't human, he didn't think. Her hair was blonde, catching a light that came from nowhere and everywhere. She was looking out at a vast, star-dusted nothingness, a quiet void that should have been terrifying but felt… peaceful.

"Are you an angel?" Jason's voice was his own, not the ragged gasp it should have been. Like it had been he had been calling for someone, anyone, to help.

The woman turned. She wasn't classically beautiful in some ethereal, untouchable way. She had a fighter's face, but with gentle eyes that held an impossible weight of years and a warmth that was instantly, profoundly human. She smiled, a little sad, a little wry.

"Been called a lot of things," she said, her voice like comfort given sound. "But no. Not an angel."

"Then… Death?" He'd read the stories. He knew who was supposed to meet you.

"Sorry to disappoint. She's… tied up. Big cosmic thing. You know how it is." She shrugged, the gesture so normal it was jarring in this place between places. "She asked me to fill in. I'm Devotion."

Jason stared. "Devotion? What does that even mean?"

"It means," she said, taking a step closer, her presence not threatening but enveloping, "that I look after the ones who loved too much, fought too hard, and got a really raw deal at the end." Her eyes, green and deep as forgotten forests, scanned his face. "Like you, Jason."

Hearing his name from her shouldn't have felt so natural. "So, what happens now? Heaven? Hell? Reincarnation?" He tried to sound tough, but a fifteen-year-old boy's fear bled through.

"That's not for me to decide," Devotion said softly. "My job is just the in-between. To make sure you're okay until you cross over."

"I'm fine," he lied, automatically.

She gave him a look that saw right through the bravado, a look that had seen through centuries of lies from scared kids and broken heroes. "You're not. You're angry. You're betrayed. You feel like you were thrown away." She sounded understanding, like she knew how that felt.

The words hit him with the force of a physical blow. All the anger, the searing sense of injustice he hadn't even had time to process, rushed to the surface. "He didn't come for me," Jason whispered, the confession torn from him. "He let that monster kill me, let me die alone."

"I know." Her sympathy wasn't pity. It was an acknowledgment, a validation of his pain. "Some people think my sister's job is the hardest. Taking life. But that’s not it, that’s not what she does. It's watching life be taken. It's seeing the love that remains, and the love that was failed." She gestured around them, at the serene void. "This place… it's shaped by you. It's quiet because you need the quiet. The pain is gone because you've had enough."

"Will it… will it always be gone?"

"For now. That's all that matters." She sat down, cross-legged, in the star-dusted void, as if it were a grassy hill. After a moment, Jason sat opposite her, the boy and the eternal concept mirroring each other. "You can ask me, you know," she said. "The question you're holding onto."

He didn't have to think. "Did I… did I do enough? As Robin? Did any of it matter?"

Devotion's smile was radiant, filled with a fierce, unwavering pride. "Jason Todd, you were magnificent. You were fire and righteous fury in a city that tries to extinguish both. You cared about the people everyone else forgot—the addicts, the orphans, the broken. You fought with your whole heart, every single time. It mattered. You mattered."

Tears he didn't know he could still shed welled in his eyes, cool and cleansing. No one had ever said that to him. Not like that. Not without condition. Not Alfred's gentle pride, not Bruce's gruff approval. Not like it was a fact, universally acknowledged.

They sat in silence for a while, a comfortable, understanding quiet. He felt the vast, cold universe around him, but here, with her, he was warm. He was seen.

"I have to go soon," she said eventually, her voice gentle as a last kiss. "The path is opening for you. It's time."

Panic, sharp and sudden, gripped him. "What's on the other side?"

"Peace," she said simply. "Rest. And maybe, for a heart like yours, another fight, one day. A better one." She reached out and cupped his cheek. Her hand was solid and warm and real, and it felt like absolution, like the hand of a friend pulling you from your own grave. "You are so loved, Jason. Not for what you did, but for who you are. A brave, passionate, loyal boy. Remember that. No matter what happens, remember this feeling."

He leaned into the touch, a lost boy found for a single, perfect moment. The devotion he had poured out into a thankless world was being returned to him, a thousandfold.

"Thank you," he breathed.

"Be brave," she whispered with a gentle smile, echoing words once spoken to a girl facing her own mortality. "It's just the next great adventure."

A doorway of pure, gentle light shimmered into existence behind him. It felt like morning. He felt a pull, not forceful, but inviting, like a hand to hold.

He took a step towards it, then looked back. "Your name. Devotion. It fits."

Devotion, who had been many things, who had once been Buffy Summers, who had been the Protector, who had died and been raised and loved and lost with a fervor that had once shaken the foundations of heaven and hell, smiled. In that smile was the memory of a family and of a love that had literally rewritten the world. "Yeah," she said, her own memories a tapestry of sacrifice and devotion, a pattern that now, eternally, she embodied. "It really does."

She watched as Jason Todd, the boy who was Robin, stepped into the light and was gone. The void returned to its potential silence. Her work here was done. She had greeted him, she had steadied him, she had sent him on his way with a piece of his heart mended.

Somewhere, in the depths of the cosmos, her sister Death, pale and kind, would nod in gratitude. But for now, Devotion stood alone in the quiet, a sentinel at the shore of eternity, keeping watch over the next soul who had loved too fiercely, too completely, for their world to hold.

Chapter Text

The quiet between places was Buffy's sanctuary. It was not a realm governed by her elder sibling, Dream, for this was not the Dreaming. Nor was it the Sunless Lands of her sister, Death. This was the antechamber, the liminal space her own function had carved out of the cosmos—a realm of soft echoes and patient starlight, where the souls she tended glimmered like fireflies caught in amber, pausing for a moment of grace before moving on.

Centuries—or perhaps it was only moments; time was a river she now waded beside, not in—had flowed past since she'd last felt the specific, searing signature of Jason Todd's soul. It had been a clean flame, a righteous burn she had gently banked before sending it on its way.

But now, a jolt, sharp as a shard of glass and as cold as the grave, pierced her calm.

It came from a city that felt like an open, suppurating wound on the fabric of the world—Gotham. A place so saturated with fear and tragedy it was a second heart for their brother, Despair. And it was him. The same fierce, burning heart she had comforted in the ashes of a warehouse. But it was… twisted. Warped beyond simple recognition.

She tilted her head, a gesture left over from a mortal life, as the feeling washed over her. Her brow furrowed not in anger, but in a profound, cosmic sorrow.

His devotion was still there, a core of white-hot, unyielding steel at the very center of his being. But now it was fused with something terrible. It was encased in the cold, ashen taste of her sibling Despair’s hook, and wreathed in the violent, explosive fury of another sibling, Destruction.

A veritable beacon of pain.

She hadn't just felt a devotee. She felt her devotee, one she had personally ushered from one life to the next, and he was screaming into the void without making a sound.

She shouldn't intervene. It was frowned upon to meddle in the mortal coil like that.  But to feel a soul she had touched, a soul that was a living, breathing embodiment of her own domain—the capacity for unwavering, self-sacrificing loyalty—now turned into a weapon against itself… it demanded a response.

She wouldn't go as Devotion. That would be too cruel, a reminder of the peace he had lost. It would be salt in a wound that had never healed. Instead, she folded her power in on itself, becoming smaller, subtler, a single note in the city's symphony of misery. She pulled on a simple mortal form, the one she'd worn when she first met him—the leather jacket, the boots, the body of a girl who had once borne a similar weight. She would walk the rain-slicked streets of Gotham not as a cosmic force, but as a witness. A reminder.

Gotham was a city that chewed on despair and excreted violence. Buffy felt it the moment she materialized in a fog-choked alley that smelled of stale urine and fresh blood. It was a perfect feeding ground for her family's darker aspects, a place where Despair’s rats would grow fat and Delirium’s colors would bleed at the edges. And at the center of it all, a raging star of conflicted purpose: Jason Todd.

She found him on a rooftop, overlooking the city's bleeding heart. He was a giant of a man now, encased in armored leather and a broken, blood-red bat. A helmet hid his face, but she didn't need to see it. She could feel the turmoil rolling off him in waves.

He was watching a building across the street, a clinic with a flickering neon cross. A drug den, fronting as something legitimate, selling a different kind of despair. His devotion was fixed on it with a terrifying, single-minded intensity. He was devoted to erasing it. To saving the people inside by destroying the thing that held them, a brutal, utilitarian calculus. It was a devotion to a cause, to a memory of a boy who died in a warehouse, but it was tangled with a destructive rage so profound it made her ancient heart ache. This was the path of the zealot, a road she knew all too well.

He moved with a predator's grace, a coiled spring of violence preparing to swing across the gap and deliver his particular brand of salvation.

Buffy didn't stop him. She simply stepped out of the shadows, her boots making no sound on the gravel. She stood at the edge of the rooftop, a few feet away, and looked at the same clinic.

"You know," she said, her voice calm, cutting through the static of his rage. "Smashing the cage doesn't always free the bird. Sometimes, it just terrifies it, and the pieces become a new, sharper prison."

Jason froze. His head snapped toward her, the blank white lenses of his helmet focusing. is hand went to a gun at his hip, a movement so fluid it was pure instinct. "Who are you?" The voice was a mechanized growl, all distortion and manufactured threat, a voice designed to inspire fear. But beneath the modulator, beneath the layers of armor and anger, she heard the boy. The one who had been so afraid to go on alone in the unknown.

"Someone who recognizes a crossroads when she sees one," Buffy replied, turning to face him fully. She made no move, showed no fear. "The path you're on… it's paved with good intentions. I know it well.  It's comfortable. It makes you feel strong, righteous. But it leads to a cliff."

"Stay out of this." The growl was louder, a warning.

"I can't," she said softly, and the pretense of mortality fell from her words for a single, resonant second. It was the voice of the in-between, the voice that had told him he was magnificent. "I was there when you chose the light last time. I can't help but notice when someone starts trying to blow it out."

He took a step back, the helmet tilting in a gesture of pure, animal confusion. The rage flickered, its fuel line momentarily pinched. A memory, buried under years of pain and the corrosive green madness of the Lazarus Pit, stirred. A quiet void. A blonde woman. A feeling of peace so absolute it felt like a physical touch. The memory was a ghost pain, an ache for something lost.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded, but the growl was weaker.

"You're devoted to your city. To saving it from the rot you see. I feel that. It's a powerful, beautiful thing." She took a step closer, and her eyes seemed to see straight through the Kevlar and ceramic, through the Pit's scar tissue, straight into the shattered, fifteen-year-old soul within. "But you're mixing it with destruction. You're trying to cure a fever by setting the patient on fire. And the despair you feel… that's not a tool. It's a chain. And my sister Despair has a hook for every link."

He was silent, utterly still. The mission was forgotten. The clinic below no longer existed. There was only this woman, this impossible, familiar voice speaking truths that resonated in the deepest, most broken parts of him.

"Who are you?" he asked again, the modulator cracking, revealing the raw, human confusion beneath. It was the voice of Jason Todd, stripped bare.

She smiled, a sad, knowing thing. "A friend. A reminder. Your devotion doesn't have to be a weapon. It can be a shield. It can be a foundation to rebuild on." She gestured to the sprawling, gothic nightmare of the city below. "This place… it needs a protector, Jason. Not just a punisher. It needs the boy who cared about the people everyone else forgot. He's still in there. I can feel him."

She saw his shoulders tense at the use of his name. The confirmation.

Before he could formulate a response, a question, a denial, she began to fade, not vanishing in a puff of smoke, but dissolving back into the ambient mist of the Gotham night, becoming one with the gloom from which she came.

"The next choice is yours," her voice echoed, a whisper on the wind that carried the scent of old stars and clean silence. "Just remember, you were loved for your heart, not your hurt. Don't let the latter extinguish the former."

And then she was gone.

Jason Todd stood alone on the rooftop, the wind whipping around him as if trying to scour the encounter from his armor. The red haze of his mission, the comforting, simple clarity of his rage, was gone, replaced by a cold, clear, and terrifying confusion. The ghost of a touch on his cheek, a feeling of absolute peace, warred with the screaming, righteous anger that had been his fuel, his identity, for so long. It was a cognitive dissonance that threatened to split his skull.

He looked down at the clinic, his target now rendered meaningless. Then he looked at his hands, clenched into fists that had beaten men to within an inch of their lives, hands that had held a dying mother in Crime Alley, hands that had once, a lifetime ago, flexed whole and unbroken in a soft, grey light.

For the first time since he had broken the toxic green glowing surface of the Pit, the Red Hood didn't know what to do next. The mission was no longer clear. The rage was no longer pure.

And high above, in the spaces between the seconds, Devotion watched, her heart a supernova of hope and anxiety. She had interfered. She had cast a stone into the stagnant pond of his destiny. Now, she could only wait, and hope that a single, carefully placed whisper in the dark whisper in the dark would be enough to steer a lost soul back toward the light.

Chapter Text

The Justice League’s main conference room was a temple to human potential and alien technology, its polished chrome and humming holographic interfaces a stark contrast to the pantheon of power gathered around its table. 

Jason Todd, now firmly established as the antihero Red Hood and, on his better days, a grudgingly accepted member of the Bat-clan, slouched in his chair, the picture of detached insolence. He was present under duress, his presence a formality. A piece of political theater in Bruce’s endless campaign to “reintegrate” the Red Hood into the Bat-clan’s fractured mosaic. He was a wolf on a very short, very gilded leash.

John Constantine, a man who carried the scent of stale tobacco and damned bargains, was holding court in front of the gathered heroes. He was somehow looking even more rumpled and morally ambiguous than usual as he was mid-presentation on a "trans-dimensional incursion of despair-entities." The holographic schematic looking like a migraine given form.

“—and that’s when the little buggers started feeding on the local dread and negativity, see?” Constantine rasped, gesturing with the cigarette between his fingers, unlit only by the sheer, silent force of Batman’s glare. “Turns out, your standard entropy blast is about as useful as a water pistol in Hell—”

Then, the world changed.

It wasn't a sound, or a temperature drop. It was a cessation. The hum of the fluorescent lights didn't fade; it was absorbed, swallowed by a sudden, profound quiet that felt less like an absence of noise and more like the universe itself was holding its breath. The air grew thicker. And in the space beside Constantine, where a moment before there had been only empty air, a woman now stood.

She was simply there. No flash of light, no crackle of displaced energy. Her arrival was an established fact, as if she had always been part of the scene, and they were only just now perceiving her. She wore a simple leather jacket and boots, her arms crossed, her expression one of profound, cosmic annoyance.

The reaction was instantaneous, a symphony of controlled, hyper-competent panic. Batman’s hands found the lethal edges of his batarangs, his body coiled into a shadow. Wonder Woman’s fingers closed around the hilt of her sword, a divine light kindling in her eyes. Superman shifted, a subtle movement that placed him between the entity and the rest of the room, his own eyes a glowing promise.

She ignored them all. Her gaze, ancient and utterly focused, was a scalpel reserved for the magician. Constantine, for his part, had frozen mid-sentence, his mouth slightly agape. He slowly lowered his cigarette, patting his trench coat pockets for a lighter with a nervous, fidgeting energy that was entirely out of place.

“John Rupert Quinton Constantine—” Her voice was not loud, yet it filled the colossal chamber completely, layered with the weight of epochs. It was the sound of mountains rising and eroding, of stars singing their hydrogen-fueled lives away, of vows made and kept at impossible cost. It was, Jason realized with a jolt that traveled from his spine to his soul, the same voice. The one that had once, in a place of dust and stars, told him he was magnificent.

“—Worldwalker... Hellblazer,” she named his titles, her tone dripping with a scorn that could etch steel. It was the sound of his accomplishments being nullified, their privileges revoked.

Constantine flinched as if struck by a physical blow. “Now, hold on a minute, love—” he began, the charm a brittle, transparent shield.

“Do not ‘love’ me,” she snapped, and her eyes flashed with a light that was the deep, patient green of a primordial forest and the chilling black of the void between galaxies. “You were instructed to return the Croix Configuration to its designated plane. You were not instructed to use it as a metaphysical cocktail shaker to mix the essences of my siblings, Despair and Delirium.”

She took a single step forward, and the room seemed to tilt on its axis around her, the laws of perspective bending to her will. “You have created a psychic hangover that my family will be cleaning up for a century. Your ‘presentation’ is over.”

She reached out, and with a gesture that was both delicate and final, she plucked the cigarette he’d managed to lit from his lips. She snuffed it between her fingers as if its fire were an impertinence and dropped the dead cigarette into the pocket of his trench coat. “The containment ritual is in your left coat pocket. The one you conveniently forgot about because it requires you to return the Tear of a True Penitent, which you sold to a demon prince in Reno for a case of whiskey and a favorable tarot reading.”

She leaned in, her voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow more terrifying than her previous pronouncements, a secret shared with the universe that condemned him. "Fix it. By sundown. Or I will let our brother, Destruction, know it was you who scuffed his favorite event horizon."

Constantine had gone fully ashen. The usual bravado was gone, replaced by the raw fear of a man who had just realized he’d been juggling grenades in the throne room of a king.  "Right. Sundown. Got it." He scrambled to gather his notes, not meeting anyone's eyes, and practically fled the room.

The woman—Devotion—sighed, and the terrifying aura around her diminished, becoming merely formidable instead of world-ending. She turned as if to depart, her gaze sweeping across the room of stunned, silent heroes. It was an impersonal glance, the way one might look at interesting but ultimately insignificant furniture.

Then it landed on Jason.

For a fraction of a second, her eyes—those impossibly old, knowing eyes—paused. The cosmic authority in them softened, replaced by a flicker of recognition, and then a small, genuine smile touched her lips. It was a human expression, warm and personal, a stark contrast to the entity who had just unmade a master of the dark arts with a few words.

“Jason,” she said, and her voice was for him alone, the warmth of a remembered dawn. “It’s good to see you standing with them.”

He felt the weight of the entire League’s gaze upon him—Bruce’s analytical stare, Clark’s curious wonder, Diana’s respectful awe. His throat was tight, his mind reeling back through years of pain and rage to a single, pristine moment of star-dusted void and absolute peace. He managed a single, slow nod, the Red Hood’s customary swagger completely absent. “You too,” he breathed, the words hopelessly inadequate, a child’s pebble offered to a goddess.

She winked.

Then, she was gone. Not vanishing, but un-becoming, the space she occupied reverting to its normal state. The hum of the lights returned. The air stirred again, carrying the scent otherness the stunned silence of the most powerful beings on the planet.

For three full heartbeats, no one moved, no one spoke.

Then, the room exploded into a chaos of whispered questions.

“Who was that?” The Flash whispered, a vibration of red and yellow and sheer awe.

“An Endless,” Wonder Woman answered, her voice hushed with a reverence usually reserved for the halls of Olympus. “One of the fundamental forces of reality. I have heard tales… but I have never seen one so… directly manifest.” She looked toward where the woman had stood as one might look at the space after a lightning strike.

Batman was already a blur of motion, his fingers flying across the conference table’s terminal, pulling up every encrypted file, every mythological text on “The Endless,” his silence more eloquent than any curse.

But it was Jason’s other immediate family who closed in, forming a tight, incredulous circle around him. Dick was the first, sliding into the seat next to Jason, his face a canvas of shock and burning curiosity.

“Jay,” Dick said, his voice low and intense. “How in the world do you know one of the Endless?”

Damian, for once, looked utterly stripped of his inherited arrogance, replaced by pure, unadulterated fascination. “Todd. She addressed you by name. You have a personal acquaintance with a conceptual entity? Explain.”

Even Tim was staring, his brilliant, analytical mind visibly short-circuiting. “Her data signature… it wasn’t just extradimensional, it was meta-conceptual. It doesn’t read as anything we know, a biological or energy-based life form. And she smiled at you.”

Jason leaned back in his chair, the stiff leather creaking. He uncrossed and recrossed his arms, letting the questions hang in the thick, astonished air. A slow, deep, utterly smug grin spread across his face. For a long time, he had been the outlier, the cautionary tale, the ghost at the family feast. The one who came back wrong. Now, in the heart of the most powerful organization on the planet, he was the only one who was on a first-name basis with a woman who could reduce John Constantine to a stammering errand boy and make Wonder Woman speak in reverent tones.

He let the moment stretch, savoring the bewildered respect dawning in their eyes. It was a validation more potent than any he had ever received.

He stood up, the movement deliberate, and clapped a stunned Dick on the shoulder.

“Let’s just say,” Jason said, his voice a low, confident drawl that carried through the room, “we have a history. She was there for me when no one else was.”

Some secrets are worth keeping.

He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and walked toward the exit, the weight of their gazes—the League’s, his family’s—a tangible thing on his back. It wasn’t pity or suspicion anymore. 

Chapter Text

Jason Todd was a man who understood people who were like forces of nature. He'd been raised by the Bat, a hurricane of vengeance and order. He'd been reborn under the care of Talia al Ghul, a glacier—beautiful, ancient, and capable of reshaping continents with her will. Both were formidable, both had left their marks on him.

But neither of them held a candle to Devotion.

It started subtly. A feeling of being watched, not with suspicion, but with a gentle, unwavering focus. Then came the… things.

He'd find a perfect, still-warm chili dog with everything—extra onions, a specific brand of relish he’d only ever found in a dive in the Bowery that burned down years ago—sitting on the seat of his motorcycle after a long, cold night patrol that had left him hollowed out. Not from any place he knew. It tasted like nostalgia and comfort, a flavor that belonged to a life before crowbars and explosions.

A cache of his favorite brand of ammunition, the expensive, custom-made stuff he was always running low on, would appear in his safehouse locker. No note. Just there.

One night, locked in a brutal, bloody fight with a new gang of super-soldier wannabes hopped up on a nasty new venom variant, his primary gun jammed, a shell casing wedged in the ejection port. As he ducked behind a dumpster, the stench of rotting garbage and his own sweat thick in his nostrils, fumbling for a backup, he heard a series of sickening cracks and wet thuds. It was over in less than three seconds. He peered out. All six of his opponents were unconscious on the ground, limbs arranged at angles that spoke of precise, overwhelming force. They were neatly stacked, almost politely, like cordwood. A single, pristine throwing knife was embedded in the alley wall, a small, braided leather tassel tied to the hilt. It was a calling card, but one only he would understand.

It was unnerving. Talia's help always came with strings, with lessons, with an expectation of reciprocation or a test of his worth. Bruce's help was logistical, technological, a distant approval coded in access to the Batcomputer or a new piece of hardware. This was… maternal. On a cosmic scale.

He was a man built on a foundation of defiance and self-reliance, and he was torn between the warm, treacherous feeling of being looked after and the primal aversion to someone—or something—poking their nose so intimately into his business.

The realization that he'd been pseudo-adopted by a fundamental force of the universe truly hit him during a disaster in the Bowery. A tenement collapse, triggered by a gas main explosion, fire licking up the sides of the ruined structure, people trapped. He was digging through rubble with his bare hands, his muscles screaming, smoke choking his lungs, the cacophony of sirens and screams a familiar hellscape. He saw a child, a little girl no older than he'd been in that alley with his father's tires, pinned under a fractured support beam, her face a mask of soot and terror.

And then she was there.

Not in her full Endless glory, but as the woman in the leather jacket, her form solid and real amidst the chaos. She didn't move the beam with a flick of her wrist or a cosmic command. She simply knelt in the grime and ash, placed her hands on the rough concrete, and looked at the sobbing child.

"It's okay," she said, and her voice cut through the din of collapsing masonry and roaring flames like a clear, clean bell. It wasn't loud, but it was absolute. "You are so brave. Just hold on a little longer. Help is here."

And the child… calmed. The raw, animal terror in her eyes receded, not replaced by blankness, but by a shaky, bewildered trust. It was as if Devotion had not offered empty comfort, but had stated a fundamental, unassailable truth of the universe: that she was brave, and that help had arrived. Jason, watching this, felt a sudden, inexplicable surge of strength flood his weary limbs, a conviction that he could move this mountain. With a guttural roar, he heaved the beam aside, the strain a distant echo. As he gathered the trembling child into his arms and carried her to the waiting paramedics, he looked back. She was gone, but the feeling of steadfast, unconditional support lingered after her.

Later, at his most secure safehouse, the one even the Bats didn't know about, he found her waiting for him. She was sitting on his threadbare couch as if she owned the place, examining a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre he'd left on the coffee table.

"You know," he said, dropping his helmet on a table with a heavy, definitive thud. The red metal gleamed in the low light. "Most people send a fruit basket. A 'get well soon' card. They don't stack unconscious goons like polite little presents or perform emergency crisis counseling."

She looked up, that same wry, ancient smile on her face, the one that held the memory of a thousand slayers and a million quiet passings. "Fruit baskets are temporary. A well-timed assist is forever." She gestured to the book with a delicate finger. "You have good taste. Stubborn, passionate souls fighting against the cages the world puts them in."

"Don't change the subject," he grumbled, collapsing into the worn armchair opposite her. He felt the night's exhaustion in his bones, but the usual corrosive bitterness was absent. "What's the deal? Why… all this? The chili dogs? The ammo? The…" he waved a hand, "...the general cosmic hovering?"

Devotion placed the book down gently, treating it with a reverence he found both embarrassing and touching. "You're one of mine, Jason. I don't have many who burn as brightly, or as self-destructively, as you do. It's my function to make sure the flame doesn't go out—admittedly, I’m not usually as hands-on, but every once in a while," she gave him a delicate shrug, a gesture so profoundly human it was jarring coming from her, as if to say ‘it is what it is’.

She leaned forward, her expression softening. "Talia saw your potential as a weapon. Bruce sees your potential as a soldier, a piece on his chessboard to be moved back into the correct square. I see you. The boy who loved so fiercely he came back angry. The man who, despite everything, is still digging children out of rubble, not for a mission, not for approval, but because it is the right thing to do."

He looked away, staring at a crack in the floorboards. The raw, unvarnished honesty in her words was a spotlight, making him feel more exposed than any enemy ever had. "I'm not a good person," he muttered, a shield he had worn for so long it felt like part of his skin.

"Good is a small and simple a word for a complex universe," she replied easily. "You are devoted. To justice. To the forgotten. To the memory of the boy you were. That's a powerful, sacred thing. And it deserves to be… nurtured. Not weaponized, not disciplined. Nurtured."

And that, he realized, was what set her apart from every other parent force in his life. Talia wanted to forge him into something greater. Bruce wanted to fix him into something acceptable. Devotion seemed to want him to simply be, and to ensure that being wasn't snuffed out by the relentless darkness he waded through daily.

It was in the little things, the ones that proved she was listening to the man, not the legend. A first-edition copy of The Three Musketeers appearing on his shelf after he'd mentioned it in passing weeks earlier during a rant about the state of modern literature. His favorite coffee, brewed and waiting, in a safehouse he hadn't visited in months, the milk already added just the way he liked it. The constant, quiet assurance that somewhere in the vast, cold, mechanical clockwork of reality, there was a presence that gave a damn about him, Jason Todd, not the Red Hood, not the Robin that was, not the League's weapon.

He was a force of chaos and violence, a man who walked through fire and blood and left a trail of broken teeth and empty shell casings. And he had a cosmic force of nature filling in where his adopted mother had resided so long ago. One who left him care packages of armor-piercing rounds and home-cooked meals and scolded the most powerful occult warlocks in existence in her spare time.

One night, staring at a freshly appeared slice of apple pie that tasted exactly like the one a Alfred made used to make when he was a kid, he let out a short, sharp laugh.

Talia was a force of nature, yes. But Talia commanded avalanches. She was the earthquake that toppled cities.

Devotion was the gravity that held the world together, the silent, constant pull that kept the stars in their courses and the tides in their rhythm. And for reasons he would never fully understand, she had decided his messy, chaotic, violent little orbit was worth maintaining.

Chapter Text

The outings had started subtly, a slow, deliberate courtship from the cosmos itself. A note, penned in elegant, unfussy script, tucked into the box of ammo: "There's a new exhibit on pre-Columbian art at the museum. The security is laughable. We should go and critique it." Another, slipped under his reinforced steel door like a ghost: "The espresso at this little place in Blüdhaven is divine. They make creampuff hamsters. Meet you there at 10."

Jason, against every instinct that screamed this was a terrible, batshit-crazy idea that would end with him on a magic altar or mind-wiped by a reality-bender, kept going. Because beneath the Red Hood's cynicism was a boy who had never been on a playdate, and the pull of that simple, impossible normalcy was a siren's call.

He had no idea how the logistics of it worked. One moment he'd be in a grimy Gotham alley, the scent of damp stone and garbage thick in the air, the next the world would soften at the edges like a watercolor painting left in the rain. The sounds of the city would muffle into a gentle hum, and then reality would refocus with a soft click in his soul.

He'd be standing on a sun-drenched cobblestone street in Rome, the heat baking the ancient stones, or in the thin, crisp air of a Colorado mountainside that smelled of pine and solitude, or in front of a dusty roadside diner in the Scottish Highlands, a single light burning against the encroaching purple twilight. And Buffy would be there, leaning against a weathered stone wall or already slid into a red vinyl booth, looking for all the world like a normal, if strikingly compelling, woman—though people’s hindbrains tended to prompt a double-take, a fleeting sense that they were in the presence of something significant they couldn't quite name.

Today, they were swallowed by the vibrant, chaotic symphony of a bustling night market in Taipei. The air was a thick tapestry of scents: sizzling pork satay, pungent marinated tofu, and the sweet perfume of exotic fruits Jason couldn't name. Buffy was cheerfully haggling with a vendor over a spool of iridescent silk thread, her argument centering not on its price, but entirely on its "metaphorical durability" and its "resonant harmonic frequency." The vendor, an elderly woman with a face like a kindly walnut, was utterly charmed, laughing and pressing the thread into Buffy's hands for a pittance.

Jason watched, arms crossed over his leather jacket, a faint, unguarded smile playing on his lips. This was the most baffling, serene, and utterly deranged part of his life, and in a world where he regularly fought clay monsters and space criminals, that was saying something.

"The Batcomputer has been running continuous facial recognition on you for six months," he said, as she returned, triumphant, the silk thread vanishing into a pocket that seemed infinitely deep. "It's cross-referenced with every known meta-human, alien, and magical database the Justice League and the Bat have access to. Even the magic ones. Constantine tried to scry for you last week. His scrying bowl cracked clean down the middle and he’s trying to make the Bat pay for it."

Buffy waved a dismissive hand. "John never could take a hint. It runs in the family. And speaking of family," she said, linking her arm with his with a comfortable familiarity and steering him towards a stall selling towering mounds of shaved ice, "yours is looking for the wrong thing."

"What does that mean?" He allowed himself to be led, the solid warmth of her arm a strange comfort.

"They're looking for a person. A secret identity. A history. A social security number and a favorite color." She handed him a bowl of shaved ice, the fluffy white peak crowned with a generous helping of fresh, golden mango, already beginning to melt at the edges. "They're looking for a 'who'. But I'm not a 'who', Jason. I'm a 'what'. You really didn’t explain anything to them?”

Jason gave her a crooked smile with a shrug, which made her huff a laugh.

“Okay, so when they see me, their brains—the logical, detective parts—try to file me under 'blonde woman, approximately mid-twenties, potential threat.' But the part of them that's deeper, the soul-part, the part that knows about love and sacrifice, recognizes a concept. It's like trying to take a picture of gravity. You can see its effects, but you can't capture its face. It just is."

He grunted, processing that as he took a spoonful of the sweet, cold dessert. It was perfect, the mango so ripe it tasted like sunshine. She always knew exactly what he'd like, as if his preferences were a song she had memorized. "So, what, you're wearing a perception filter?" he asked, ambling after her down the bustling, neon-drenched street. He’d meant it as half a joke, a sci-fi trope, but it made her look thoughtful for a moment.

"Something like that, yeah. To them, I'm forgettably significant. They know, on an instinctual level, that I'm important, that my presence matters, but they can't hold onto the why. It slips through their fingers like smoke. It makes them crazy. I could make the effect go away if I really wanted, but…" she grinned, a flash of the Slayer who had once sassed ancient vampires, "it's kind of fun watching the world's greatest detectives short-circuit."

Jason shook his head, a dry, genuine chuckle escaping him. He could picture it perfectly, a montage of Bat-frustration playing in his mind.

Tim, staring at a frozen, high-resolution frame from the Watchtower's security footage, his coffee going cold as he tried to pin down the exact shade of her hair or the curve of her jaw, the data refusing to coalesce into a coherent profile. Dick, rubbing his temples after a five-hour research binge, saying, "I know she's important, I just... what did she look like again?"

Damian, angrily insisting to a confused Alfred that she had a "regal bearing worthy of notice" but being unable to describe a single feature of her face. And Bruce, in the cave, the cold blue glow of the monitor highlighting the deep, frustrated frown on his face as the most advanced system on the planet returned zero matches for the being who had verbally spanked one of the most powerful sorcerers on the planet.

They were the world's greatest detectives, and they were utterly stumped by the woman currently trying to win him a stuffed animal at a terribly rigged ring-toss game, her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration.

"Your aim is terrible for a cosmic entity," he teased as her third ring bounced comically off the neck of the bottle.

"I'm Devotion, not Accuracy," she retorted, handing him a few of the cheap wooden rings and stealing the dessert from his hands in the process. "You try. Your devotion to showing me up should be a powerful motivator. Channel that competitive Bat-spirit."

He snorted but took the rings, the rough wood familiar in his calloused hands. He missed his first two, his focus split between the game and the impossible reality of his life.

On his third throw, he felt it—a gentle, steadying presence at his back, not touching him, but a warmth, an unwavering certainty that flowed into him, quieting the noise in his head. It felt like a hand on his shoulder, a voice saying, You can do this. The ring sailed from his fingers in a perfect, clean arc and landed with a definitive clink around the neck of the bottle.

The carny looked stunned, as if the laws of physics had been personally violated. Buffy clapped her hands in genuine, unfeigned delight, her joy as bright and real as the market's neon signs.

"See?" she said, as the man handed him a truly hideous, lopsided purple plush dragon with one eye slightly higher than the other. "Told you. It's all about focus and, you could say, devotion," she smiled cheekily.

Later, back in the familiar, rain-scented grime of Gotham, the transition as seamless as always, Jason tucked the hideous dragon under his arm and headed back to his bike. The world always felt sharper, the oppressive grey of the city a little less suffocating, the colors a little brighter after an outing with Buffy. It was as if she recalibrated his soul.

He found Dick waiting for him, leaning against the handlebars of his motorcycle with practiced casualness. The posture was relaxed civilian, but the energy was all Nightwing—coiled and ready.

"Hey, Little Wing. You've been… busy." Dick's tone was light, the big brother checking in, but his eyes were sharp, analytical, missing nothing.

"Just seeing the sights," Jason said, his voice a low rumble as he unlocked his bike.

Dick's gaze, sharp as a hawk's, fell on the garish purple dragon. "Uh, new friend? He's... got character."

"Won it," Jason said, the simple truth feeling like a shield.

There was a pause filled with the distant wail of a Gotham siren. Dick's brow furrowed, the way it did when he was trying to solve an impossible case, when the pieces refused to fit. "Jason… about that woman. From the Watchtower. We've been… we can't seem to…" He trailed off, a rare flash of pure frustration evident on his usually open face. "You know who she is, right? What she is? I mean, we know what they’re called, but we’re having trouble finding anything solid."

Jason looked at his brother, at one of the world's most formidable detectives and warriors, currently being baffled by a fundamental, nurturing facet of reality who liked to take him out for shaved ice and help him win ugly toys. He saw the genuine concern warring with the professional irritation, and he felt a surge of something that wasn't quite pity, but a deep, profound understanding of the chasm that now lay between his life and theirs. A selfish part of him didn’t want to share.

He smiled, a slow, easy smile he didn't have to force, a smile that reached his eyes for the first time in years.

"Yeah," Jason said, swinging a leg over his bike, the engine purring to life with a visceral roar that cut through the Gotham night. "I know."

He started the engine, the roar cutting through the Gotham night. Dick stared at him, waiting for the explanation, the dossier, the truth that would finally make it all make sense.

Jason just winked, a gesture he'd picked up from her, and tucked the ridiculous purple dragon securely into his jacket. Then, without a further word, he sped off into the dark, leaving his brother staring after him with nothing but the maddening, beautiful, and utterly unsolvable mystery of it all. Maybe it’d work as a learning opportunity, who knows.

Chapter Text

The quiet between moments was Buffy’s favorite place to think. It was a realm untouched by the tyranny of seconds, a sanctuary where the echoes of choices not yet made rippled like moonlight on a still pond. Here, in the soft, star-dusted silence that she mentally called her private office, she could observe the vast, shimmering tapestry of mortal lives without the deafening noise of their daily struggles. And lately, one particular thread—a brilliant, frayed, and fiercely burning crimson one—had captured her attention entirely.

Jason Todd.

She knew she was playing favorites. A faint, wry smile touched her lips, a human mannerism she’d never seen the need to shed. She’d seen it before in her family. Her brother Dream, for all his regal aloofness, had his beloved pets, his muses like Hob Gadling, whose stubborn joy in living was a story he never tired of rereading. Her sister Death, in her infinite compassion, had a well-documented soft spot for those who met her with curiosity rather than fear, who offered her a smile at the end of their road.

Was it so wrong, then, that she, Devotion, had found a soul whose capacity for it was so profound, so all-consuming, that it had survived death, betrayal, and resurrection? A love that had curdled into rage was still, at its heart, a form of devotion. A fierce, protective loyalty to a city that had never loved him back was a hymn sung in her name.

Jason Todd was hers. Not in a possessive, transactional way, but in the way a particularly resilient, thorny, and breathtakingly beautiful rose belongs to its devoted gardener. Its growth was its own, but her hands were there to ensure the soil was rich, the pests were kept at bay, and it had just enough sun to remember what it was fighting for. She was, quite simply, devoted to his devotion.

Which was why, on this particular Gotham night, she found herself orchestrating a little… coincidence. A nudge. A carefully placed stitch in the fabric of the real.

She watched Bruce Wayne, a man whose own devotion was a cage he’d built around his own heart, patrolling the rooftops of the Bowery. His path was a rigid, predictable algorithm of efficiency and control, if you knew him. It was a prayer of motion offered to the memory of cascade of pearls scattering in a dark alley. And tonight, his prayer was going to be answered in a way he could never have anticipated.

It was a symphony of subtlety. A gust of wind, sharp and laced with the promise of rain, that tugged at his cape at the precise moment. A misplaced cry for help from a nearby alley—a sound that was just a fraction louder, carried just a little farther on that manufactured breeze than physics should allow. A flicker of a shadow, cast by a tumbling piece of newspaper, that caught the edge of his peripheral vision and pulled him three degrees off his intended, sterile route. It was the universe whispering a suggestion.

He dropped into a narrow alley behind a row of condemned apartments, somehow landing even more silently than usual. The air here was thick with the smell of rotting brick and despair.

And there, in the adjacent vacant lot, was the scene.

Jason—not in the intimidating, anonymous Red Hood helmet, but in a worn leather jacket, his white streak a vivid slash in the grimy half-light—was on one knee. He wasn't fighting. There was no enemy here.

A young girl, no more than eight, with tangled hair and a dirt-smudged face, was sobbing quietly, her thin leg trapped in the jagged teeth of a collapsed chain-link fence.

Bruce froze, becoming one with the deeper shadows. He was a statue, every line of his body rigid with a surprise that was seismic in its quietness.

This wasn't the Red Hood he knew. This wasn't the furious, brutal vigilante he’d clashed with in warehouses over methods and morality. This was a ghost. A glimpse of the boy he’d lost. The one who used to sneak candy bars to alley kids on his patrols, who would argue with Alfred about the moral ambiguity in Les Misérables, whose eyes would light up with a fierce, protective fire when faced with those life had treated unfairly.

Jason had his gloves off. His hands, usually clenched into fists or wrapped around the grips of his guns, were bare. They were gentle, his fingers carefully working the twisted metal apart, his voice a low, steady murmur that carried on the still air.

"Almost there, kid. Just breathe. In and out. You're doing great." A piece of metal snapped free. "See? Progress. Your mom's gonna be so relieved when she sees you that she’ll forget to be mad you snuck out to see that feral cat, I promise."

It was the tone. The one Bruce had taught him, the one reserved for victims, for the scared and the innocent. The one that said ‘You are safe now. I am here.’ It was patience. It was care. It was a devotion to the idea that no one should be left helpless in the dark. It was the core of the Robin mantle, stripped of all its colorful theatrics.

Buffy watched from her non-space, a satisfied, maternal smile touching her lips. She wasn't forcing a reconciliation. She wasn't writing a saccharine script for a Hallmark moment. She was simply… setting the stage for something to start anew.

She was giving Bruce undeniable, raw evidence of the truth she had known since she first gathered Jason’s soul in her hands: that his core, the boy she had comforted in death, was still there, still good, still fiercely, unbreakably devoted to protecting the innocent.

She saw the exact moment it hit Bruce, an impact more devastating than any punch Bane had ever landed. The slight, almost imperceptible slump of his shoulders, as if the weight of the cape had suddenly quadrupled. The sharp, silent intake of breath. He watched, utterly captivated, as Jason finally freed the girl’s leg, his hands immediately checking the ankle for subcutaneous injuries with a clinical tenderness that spoke of long practice.

"Alright, looks like it’s just the scratches. Up you go, troublemaker," Jason grunted, turning and hoisting the girl up in a princess carry with effortless strength. She clung to him, her sobs subsiding into hiccupping sniffles. "Let's get you home before the real monsters come out. And by monsters," he added, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial stage-whisper, "I mean my brother, who probably has a five-point PowerPoint presentation on the structural integrity and public health hazards of rusty fences already queued up and ready to go."

He carried her away, his broad back a shield against the world, completely unaware of the haunted, grieving audience of one he left in the shadows.

Bruce didn't move for a long, long time after they had gone. The alley was silent once more, save for the distant heartbeat of the city. He stood in the darkness, the image seared into the back of his eyelids, more vivid than any criminal file or forensic report.

Good, Buffy thought, her work done. She leaned back into the cosmos, the star-dust of the in-between swirling around her. Her brother Dream wove his grand, convoluted stories in his castle of shadows. Her sister Death offered her gentle hand at the end of every tale. Her role was quieter, but no less vital: to nurture the connections, the loves, the loyalties that made those stories worth telling.

And if nurturing that connection, that flickering ember of a father's love for his prodigal son, required a little nudge for a stubborn, grieving bat of a man who had forgotten how to see the forest from the trees?

Well, that was for her to know, and for Bruce Wayne to painfully, wonderfully, agonizingly unravel on his own.

Jason’s devotion was a beacon, blazing in the Gotham night. It was time his father remembered how to see its brightness.