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Jay’s eyes burn from staring at the screen. The search bar is still empty, the text cursor blinking in a steady tunk-tunk-tunk as it taunts him.
It should be easy. Just a few words to type. Jason Todd. Richard Grayson.
A couple of names that will probably amount to nothing but a few public records, if he’s lucky. He could probably get more if he asked Penny for help, but somehow… Well, it would feel wrong, he thinks. She’s offered before, but he’s always declined. Maybe because he wasn’t ready, or maybe because it’s his case to uncover. As if it would be cheating for her to look into him like that.
It’s a poor excuse.
He knows what fear feels like, and hearing his own name filled him with it. And it is his name, that much he can be sure of. That’s the only explanation for the way it had made his heart pound through his ribcage when Dick had said it over the phone.
Jason Todd… The name echoes in his mind as if he’d screamed it out into an empty cavern, booming over every thought and trickle of outside resistance. He doesn’t know who Jason Todd is, beyond knowing that he’s him.
Thinking about it makes his head ache again, and trying to remember anything more than the name itself turns the ache into a throb. The obvious solution is at his fingertips, just a few taps and clicks away. Yet again, he closes his eyes instead and prays that it’ll soothe the flurry forming beneath his skull.
Sometimes we don’t like the truth in a case. It doesn't mean it isn't still the truth.
Clue had pushed him to call Dick for answers. Jay already knows his friend would repeat himself if he told him he was hesitating all over again, especially with such a perfect thread to pull. Penelope has long since gone to bed, exhausted after a heavy case. A glance out his window provides a brief glow of moonlight, letting him know just how late it is - and how much time he still has before his morning alarm goes off for school.
It’s now or never, right?
Jay takes a deep breath - in through the nose, and pushed right back out when he finds he can’t open his mouth.
Now or never.
He sits at his desk and opens his laptop before he can talk himself out of it yet again.
J-A-S-O-N-SPACE-T-O-D-D
The keyboard has its own gravitational pull as his fingers press against it, and his pinky taps the Enter key on autopilot.
The little loading circle pops up for a few seconds, spinning while the search loads on the window behind it. Link after link pops into view - something he expected, considering it’s not exactly the most unique of names.
What he doesn’t expect are the news articles at the top of the page, the dates ranging from only a few weeks ago to years back.
JASON TODD - TRUE TRAGEDY, OR CHARITY CASE GONE WRONG?
WAYNE’S NEW WARD - TIMOTHY DRAKE: A LIVING LEGACY OR A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO COPE IN THE ABSENCE?
WAYNE FAMILY COMMEMORATES TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF TODD TRAGEDY
He clicks to expand the News section, heart pounding all over again as even more articles pop up, and suddenly wishes he’d left well enough alone. There’s too many to count, and even though he hasn’t clicked on any of them in particular, he somehow knows that every single one is about him.
NEW WAYNE COURTESY OF CRIME ALLEY
WAYNE GALA GLAM - JASON TODD, 12, DAZZLES AT FIRST OFFICIAL PUBLIC APPEARANCE
TALKING WITH TODD - ALL ALLEY, ALL CHARM
BILLIONAIRE BRUCE WAYNE BURIES SECOND SON
Jay’s hand is frozen on the trackpad, finger hovering, ready to scroll to the next gutpunch, but he can’t seem to get past the last one.
Buries…?
Buries–
He clicks the article before he can think better of it, but he only makes it a few sentences in before his vision blurs with familiar fog.
And suddenly he’s not looking at his screen, but a wall built of wood paneling mere inches from his nose. He reaches out to push himself away, feeling the edge of his desk beneath his hand, except it’s suddenly raw and jagged, splintering under his palms as he shoves himself back. The air is knocked from his lungs as he topples over from his chair, back pressing against the floor–no, not the floor, no, something softer, something solid, something too close, too tight–
And he can’t move, he can’t breathe, because there’s dirt pouring in beneath his fingers, falling into his eyes and mouth and nose–
The world tastes of petrichor.
—
Jay wakes up on his bedroom floor. His vision is blurry as he pries his eyes open and the first rays of sunlight cast themselves across his face and walls. Above him, his ceiling fan spins. On top of him, Darcy dutifully rests her heavy head across his chest. Below him, his fingers press into the familiar carpet. His back aches. His hands burn, phantom pains stabbing under the edges of his nails when he so much as even considers moving.
He has absolutely zero desire to get up.
Getting up would mean accepting the reality of what happened last night. What he read, what he…remembered.
It’s all still there, jumbled against his skull and trying to unscramble itself. He remembers the coffin, and the drag of his nails across the wood. He remembers the dirt, the weight of it as he pulled himself out of it and up, up, up, into the pouring rain. He remembers stumbling on legs that could hardly hold him upright, he remembers the pain of living again after so many months of being dead, he remembers his own body screaming at him, telling him how wrong it all was.
And he remembers headlights, and a car, and a hospital, and a woman. He remembers Penny.
What he doesn’t remember is dying.
—
He hardly says a word to Penny during breakfast, barely manages a smile on his way out the door. Darcy presses against him as he walks to the bus stop, and he clings to her presence with all his might. She’s the only thing keeping him tethered to reality. He thinks, if she weren’t there, his mind would still be back in that grave.
Jess and the others greet him with smiles in class, same as they always do, and when they recognize his silence for what it is - a Bad Day - they’re kind enough to be patient and courteous with him. They always are. He doesn’t deserve them, he thinks, and then he wonders what they would say if they knew who he really was.
Would they still be his friends if they knew he wasn’t really alive?
Sometime after lunch, the weight of Darcy’s head on his lap snaps him back for a moment, just long enough to remind him that he is, in fact, actually alive. How and why, he can’t say, but his heart is technically beating somewhere in there, and he’s breathing, so…he must be.
Penny would tell him if he wasn’t.
He spends free period at the end of the day looking up more about the Wayne family. Dick Grayson is next, his self-proclaimed older brother. True, as far as he can tell, though their adoption dates provide some confusion. It’s the least concerning of the mysteries at hand though, so he doesn’t bother trying to make sense of it.
Instead, he stares at photographs from paparazzi and tries not to let himself float away all over again when it starts to feel like he’s spying on a stranger.
He glares at a camera. The photo, plastered on the front page of the Gotham Gazette, is so surreal that for a moment he feels like he’s both within it and outside it all at once. The lines of past and present blur until they’re nonexistent, and Jay wonders if he’ll ever feel like himself again.
—
At dinner, Jay stares at his hands where they rest on the table. His palms are empty but every time he blinks his brain adds a new splotch of dirt to his skin before taking it away again the next time around.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He looks up at the sound of Penelope’s voice, meeting her soft, apologetic smile with wide eyes.
“What?” The way his voice scratches with the response makes him wonder if it’s the first word he’s said all day.
“Whatever is on your mind,” she says gently. “Would it help to talk about it? You know I’m a good listener.”
The edge of his lip twitches upwards. “You are,” he agrees, and the little smile fades as easily as it came. “But…I think I just gotta let it all process.”
He doesn’t specify what ‘it all’ is, and he doubts he needs to. Not for Penny. She’s observant, a skill that’s only gotten more impressive the longer she’s been with the BAU. He won’t be able to hide this from her for much longer, even if she won’t say anything until he does so himself. She knows he’ll tell her when he’s ready, whatever it is, but the offer does make him wonder just how much she already suspects.
She nods thoughtfully nonetheless. Neither of them have really touched their food, and she seems too distracted to bother changing that now either. Instead, she leans forward ever so slightly, elbows on the table, and smiles again.
“I was talking with JJ today,” she says, and he knows it’s meant to be a distraction from the whirl of everything on his mind. He’s grateful for it. “I guess she and Emily are trying to bully Rossi into hosting dinner soon. Apparently he has a very fancy house with one of those high class kitchens. You know the ones that are all sparkly white marble and stainless steel appliances?”
The small talk gets a little smirk out of him again. “He would.”
Penelope’s answering smile is blinding. It makes her eyes sparkle. “Right? Anyway, I’m all for it if you are.”
Jay’s smirk becomes a little more genuine as a strange sense of recognition swells in his chest.
It only makes sense for Pops to have a kitchen like that. All rich old guys do. He just wonders if he actually cooks in it himself, or if he’s like Bruce and has someone like Alfred to do it for him.
The thought comes unbidden and has Jay mentally stumbling to a stop. Bruce. Alfred. Just the names come to mind, surely a result of reading all of those articles earlier, and suddenly he can see them right there. Their faces start to fade in where they used to be little more than a blur, filling in blanks in his memory and dreams alike.
“Out, out,” Alfred says, herding Bruce out of the kitchen with the flap of a tea towel. “You had your chance, Master Bruce, and you burnt it to a crisp!”
Bruce holds up both hands in surrender and lets Alfred shuffle him along. “No second chances?” he whines, but it’s lessened by his laughter.
“No sixth chances,” Alfred corrects, making Jason crack up laughing from his perch by the stove. “My oven simply can’t take it!”
Bruce accepts his defeat after that, heading off with a chuckle and leaving Alfred and Jason to their project.
“Now, my boy. What shall we bake today?” Alfred says, and slowly, his voice seems to begin to get further and further away, until the memory fades and blurs back into the present completely.
Penelope doesn’t notice the way his expression must have surely frozen in place, finally bothering to pick up her fork to take a bite of her lukewarm dinner.
“Apparently he knows how to make pasta from scratch,” she continues. “Only seems fair to make him give us all a lesson.”
Jay’s heart thuds again and he looks up at her with a much more wary smile. “Yeah,” he manages. “Makes sense to me, too.”
And he tries not to think too hard about the last time he was in a kitchen, taking a lesson from someone who knew how to handle the tools of the trade far better than him.
—
That night, Jay Garcia decides to lie on the floor of his bedroom and once again watches the fan turn circles above his head. The window is open just enough for the smell of wet earth to waft in, not quite raining yet but close enough that the whole world feels damp.
Jay Garcia stretches his arm out and rests his aching hand on his phone, and he debates with himself the merits of texting a friend over calling a brother he only just remembered he even had. It’s 2 am, and he’s not sure if they would answer, so he doesn’t do either of those things, in the end.
Instead, Jay Garcia closes his eyes, and has nightmares of a reality where Jason Todd opens them in the morning.