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Awareness came to Jason in flickers and broken shards of light. At first, it was only seconds, heartbeats. A snatched word here, a name there. At first, it wasn’t even enough for him to realise that he didn’t know the language spoken.
Next came a growing awareness for his body. Suddenly, he felt the pull of muscles well used, the sting of fresh cuts.
Occasionally, he tuned back in for clashes of metal or him rolling away from a blow.
Sometimes, the world was just green.
And then, one day, suddenly, unprecedented, Jason was himself again.
He wasn’t alone when it happened, in a room with a beautiful woman and a child. The woman was brushing the child’s hair, saying something in what he could now guess might be Arabic, but two pairs of green eyes snapped to him when he moved.
Jason blinked back.
There was shock in their eyes and then joy and satisfaction in the woman’s, and suspicion and cautious hope in the child’s.
“Jason? Are you with us, darling?” the woman asked.
Jason couldn’t quite help the way his lips curled at the endearment, eyes dropping to his hands. They were scarred and shaking. Light glinted off metal on his hips and his eyes fluttered to it like a moth to the light. A katana. “Where?” he started, before promptly coughing. His voice sounded horrifically unused and his throat burned enough that he wasn’t sure the word he’d uttered had been understandable in any shape or form.
“Damian,” the woman said to the child. “Go get our guest some water.”
Once again, Jason’s lips tilted, this time into a sneer. Guest, she said. As if he had walked through the door by his own free will.
“Jason,” she said and despite himself, he startled because he hadn’t felt her coming up to him. Perhaps, however long he had spent locked in his head had reset his training.
But…he feels strong. Stronger than he had…perhaps ever. He felt the strain still, the one that said he had worked his muscles, felt it in all the muscles he used for fighting.
“I’m Talia. You’re with the League of Assassins. How much do you remember?”
The League of Assassins. Jason wasn’t familiar with them, but it sounded bad. “A little on the nose, isn’t it?” he asked…or tried to. His words really, really weren’t coherent, but Talia smirked as if she had understood anyway.
“Think,” she chided. “Remember.”
Remember.
What did he remember?
Jason pushed past the flashes of himself and tried to remember when he’d been a real person. A full person.
The last thing he remembered was rain. Dark, clouds, a car, pain. He remembered a confined space, remembered his erratic heartbeat, remembered the way his fingers had torn when he had crawled out of his grave.
His hands shook.
Grave?
Jason had…
Jason had died.
Jason had…
The joker had…
There was an explosion.
“Breathe,” someone said, but Jason couldn’t breathe, because he had died, had been gone, gone, gone, and now he was alive, but phantom pain raced over his body, making him feel alit.
A crowbar came for him through the haze and his whole world lit up green.
“Damian, stay back,” someone sharply ordered.
A moment later, something cool was pressed into his hands.
Jason blinked.
The green receded and he found himself staring down at a glass of water, ice gently clinking. His eyes lifted slightly and he found the child staring back at him, eyes the same green his world had been. Jason numbly lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip, and then another and another, until his throat felt marginally less torn up and the water was gone.
“Right,” Talia said, coming back up to them. She put a hand on Damian’s shoulder, her nails digging in a bit too harshly and Jason glared at it, vision flickering green, until she loosened her grip. “We need to work on your self control, Jason,” she said, gesturing and when he looked, he found the previously beautifully ornate room destroyed.
Jason’s eyebrow ticked up, his hands tightening around the still cool glass. That was…that was unfortunate.
“One step at a time,” she said and Jason took a deep breath.
He would find out what had happened, what this place was. A recon mission. And then he’d escape and go back to his family. He would.
He had to.
~•~
Stifling Jason’s new ‘Pit Madness’ as they called the green anger, was a slowgoing process. He meditated in between Arabic lessons and training.
Eventually though, he was deemed stable enough to join Damian again.
He’d seen the boy from time to time, from afar. Without a single ounce of doubt, he knew that the child had been punished for handing him the water. For his own safety, Talia had said, but Jason had seen the boy’s uneven gait and the way he winced when he sat or when someone jostled his back and he called bullshit.
It had sent him into another green rush of fury, but he hadn’t explained that one.
It was weeks ago. Months, maybe.
“You will be a good protector for my son,” Talia said, brushing her fingers through Jason’s hair in a mockery of gentleness. She was always gentle with him. Nice.
Jason hated her with a passion.
“I will protect Damian,” he said fiercely and he meant it. Even from her. Especially from her.
“I know, habibi,” Talia replied and his skin crawled.
~•~
He watched Damian clash against his sword instructor. The kid was a blur, determined eyes and gritted teeth and metal, but he was also a child. A very, very well trained child, much to Jason’s chagrin, but a child.
The sword instructor had him on the ground for the fourth time in as many minutes.
“Useless,” he said.
These days, Jason was never sure what language was being spoken. Arabic and the League’s dialect and English all swam together. The sun burned down on them. He narrowed his eyes at the boy’s teacher.
“Sorry,” Damian replied.
It didn’t suit him, the apology. He said it much like Jason had, once upon a time, begging for a belt to stop moving when he knew Newton’s First Law. An object in motion will stay in motion. Apologies didn’t change that.
The teacher hit Damian with the hilt of his Katana and Jason was between them in a flash, green boiling at the edges of his vision. “Touch him again,” he said and he was barely aware enough to notice the growl his voice had taken on, “and I will snap your neck.”
The man had the good sense to pale and step back. “Mistress,” he called. “Control your beast.”
Jason bristled at the word, but that didn’t stop him from pulling his lips back and snarling.
Perhaps he really was more creature than human these days.
“Jason,” Talia chided. “Do not interfere with training.”
“He hurt Damian,” Jason replied without looking at her.
“It was discipline,” the woman corrected.
“Hitting a child is not discipline,” Jason replied with a conviction so deep that he felt vaguely like he was pulling it from his very soul. “Hurting a child is never alright.”
He felt a small hand on his back, Damian pressing down just enough for the green to retreat some.
“I can handle training, Jason,” the boy said arrogantly, a haughty tone, true and practised.
Damian was a prince.
Jason turned and looked, green eyes meeting his own and he saw the uncertainty behind it, the confusion because Damian had never been told anything done to him was wrong.
Damian was a prince.
Jason had been gutter trash.
He recognised the expression regardless.
“No,” he said.
“Keep this up and you will be taking a trip to the dungeons, habibi,” Talia warned quietly.
Jason lifted his chin. “Touch him again and I will break every bone in your body,” he told the man. “I’ll start with one finger and work myself up from there.”
Jason didn’t struggle when they dragged him off, eyes locked on Damian.
The boy watched him go with wide green eyes.
~•~
The dungeon always left him freezing down to the bone, which had nothing to do with the cold stone walls and everything with the water over his face and the electricity crackling over his skin.
Regardless, when he came back and found a bruise on Damian, one the boy admitted was from the sword instructor, he made good on his threat.
He broke three fingers and the man’s wrist before they managed to drag him off again.
When he re-emerged, shivering slightly, he found the man gone.
“I know I said you are to protect him, Jason, and I’m very proud of you, but you are not to interfere with his training. Am I understood, habibi?”
Jason looked down at Talia’s hand and the way it was gripping Damian’s shoulder again. The little boy was standing ramrod straight, eyes fixed on the wall, an angry, arrogant expression on his face and the slight glaze of dissociation over the vibrant green.
He fantasized about breaking Talia’s fingers too, but he was well aware that they would simply kill him and be done with it.
If he wanted to help, truly wanted to help, he needed to be better than that.
More cunning.
More patient.
He needed to be Robin.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
~•~
Jason wasn’t allowed to attend all of Damian’s lessons anymore. Some teachers didn’t want him there and Jason didn’t protest when he was kicked out, instead following obediently to go to his own training.
He did, however, memorise all of their faces.
The teenager had been moved, from the small room he’d been staying in, to a cot on the floor of Damian’s room.
“Do you mind,” he had asked the child and Damian had blinked at him.
“It is not my place to mind,” he replied, lifting his chin slightly.
“Right,” Jason had replied and had pulled his blanket over his head before Damian could see his eyes glow green.
However, the princeling genuinely didn’t seem to mind sharing his room. On the third night, he had tentatively scooted to the edge of his bed to peer down at Jason.
“What?” Jason had grouched eventually when Damian simply proceeded to stare at him.
“Tell me about Gotham,” the boy ordered and a jolt of something like fear or anger or homesickness went through Jason. He wasn’t sure how Damian had found out about where Jason came from.
“Tell me about Gotham, please,” he corrected and for one second, just a heartbeat long, less even, Damian looked his age for once, surprised and startled and indignant and so very, very young. Jason desperately wanted to see it again. “Scoot,” he said and Damian obeyed, probably still trying to wrap his head around Jason’s audacity. Likely, no insubordinate had ever dared to speak to him this way.
“Gotham, is a shithole,” Jason started and Damian’s eyes looked up at him incredulously. For the first time in a very, very long time, Jason smiled at something other than violence. “It really is,” he added.
A pause, his eyes going distant.
“But it’s my shithole.”
~•~
Damian was running through solo drills, so Jason was allowed in the courtyard. He was absently sharpening a sword, eyes fixed on the boy.
Despite his age, the child moved with lethal precision. Jason saw his muscles flex under the tanktop as the boy moved through swipes and strikes.
There was a concentrated pull to his lips, his eyebrows drawn, the look in his eyes focused.
It was a look Jason was very familiar with.
The teenager tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at Damian.
Now that he was looking, he found the edge of his jaw. The curve of his nose.
He stood abruptly. Damian startled slightly, an unforgivable lapse that nobody but Jason saw, but only frowned slightly when the older boy moved past him and inside. By now, Jason was able to walk around alone. It wasn’t that they trusted him, it was more so that they thought he had nowhere to go.
Which was true.
For now.
“Is he Bruce’s?” he asked without preamble. Even he could hear that there was something bitter in his tone, because if he was indeed Bruce’s, there was no way Bruce knew.
Talia looked up, shooing people out of the room. She only spoke once the door was firmly closed behind the last of them. “It took you longer than I thought to figure it out,” she said. “Didn’t your father teach you how to be a good little detective?”
Jason felt like he’d been dipped in hot water. “Dickie was always better at that than me,” he replied flippantly, trying not to show his shock.
Judging by her grin, he wasn’t successful. “Do you miss them?” she asked, kindly, warmly, gently.
“Yes,” Jason replied, blinking in surprise at his own honesty.
“Aren’t you mad?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“About what?” he asked, shifting slightly, back, away from her, subtle, subtle, his heart thrumming in his chest. “It wasn’t…it wasn’t Bruce’s fault I died.”
She hummed. “No, I suppose not. But it is his fault that he never avenged you.”
He froze, cursing himself for the obvious reaction. His heart was still racing. Green was creeping into his vision. “What?”
“Did you know that he resuscitated the clown?”
Jason hadn’t expected Bruce to kill the man, not exactly, but that?
The world went fully green. She had to be lying. There was no way. Bruce wouldn’t- he wouldn’t-
If he’d been in a better mindset, he might have questioned things like her phrasing. Of course he didn’t know. But the Lazarus Pit cared little about details. It raged and raged inside of him.
“He buried you as Jason Peter Todd,” the woman continued and her voice cut through the green for only a moment, before the Lazarus Pit roared inside of him, drowning everything else out.
“He has a new Robin too. Another kid.”
The green grew more toxic. Had Bruce not learned? Why was there another child soldier? Another kid that would get tortured and die?
Jason was burning.
No more dead Robins.
The world was green and all he could hear was the screeching of the pit.
He came back in her arms, sobbing. The room was destroyed.
“I’m sorry, habibi,” she said, carding her fingers through his hair.
He hated her.
He hated Bruce too.
The pit burned through his veins.
~•~
“Mother says we’re brothers,” Damian said.
It had become routine for Jason to sit next to the other boy and tell him about Gotham. He told him about other things too, all kinds of things Damian didn’t know like planes or Jane Austen or hamburgers or normal school or skating or pickpocketing.
“Mhm,” Jason said non-committally.
“Tell me about father?” the little boy requested.
“No,” Jason said sharply.
Damian didn’t argue, but he slid down to curl into his bed, his silent way of saying that he was sulking and that storytime was over. Jason slid down next to him, pulling the boy into his chest.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“Yes, akhi,” his little brother replied.
Jason laid awake in the darkness as Damian’s breathing smoothed, unblinkingly staring at the wall as he made plans.
~•~
He was watching Damian spar again, this time against five adult men. His little brother was winning, spinning and jumping with an agility that reminded Jason of Dick.
His chest hurt.
~•~
“Do those hurt, akhi?” Damian asked, reaching out to trace one of Jason’s scars.
“Sometimes,” he replied lightly, moving his jaw. His face felt less flexible than it had before he’d died, the scar layer making it stiff. Even now, months into his stay with the league, Jason avoided mirrors. He had no wish to find out how much the Joker had changed him. On the bad days, the very bad days, when he was more a pet than a soldier, when Ra’s had him kneel next to Damian and punished them both for a perceived slight or a small mistake or simply because he was a sadistic asshole, on those days, he wondered if he would ever be more than a canvas that bore the evidence of his murderer’s art.
Funnily enough, Ra’s had made it above the Joker in terms of Jason’s killing priorities.
He saw the way the man looked at his grandson, at Jason’s brother.
“Hm,” Damian said. “Tell me about Gotham, please,” he requested quietly.
And then, for a long while, they were both silent.
“I had a different name back then, you know…” Jason began and Damian’s eyes immediately turned to him, bright green in the dim light, always eager for stories.
Story time was the time Damian most acted his age.
Jason wrapped an arm around him and pulled him into his chest. The little boy clicked his tongue, annoyed, but didn’t fight.
“Robin,” Jason said, a small smile on his face for just a moment, fond and reminiscent. Then it turned hard again. “Stupid, right?”
Damian squirmed slightly, opening his mouth as if to say something, but then he thought better of it.
“I thought I was rid of him for good, but uh…” Jason smiled down at his brother, a small, sad little thing. “You kinda remind me of him.”
It was true too. Now that he knew, he saw Bruce in Damian at any given time. He saw it in the way he concentrated and the way he fought and the way he tapped his chin. He heard it in the questions he asked.
They stared the same.
They stood the same.
It was eery.
But Jason…Jason also saw Robin.
Damian might not quip like Dick and Jason had, not most times anyway, but sometimes, rarely, when the brothers were alone in Damian’s room, his arrogance melted into witty, teasing harshness.
Damian fought people bigger than him and faster than him and crueler than him with the same gritty determination as Robin. He fought to survive in a world that wanted to clip his wings.
Most of all, he saw it in the way Damian always looked torn when Jason was dragged away to the basement or to be thrown in front of Ra’s for punishment. Saw it in the way Damian twitched. Because despite it having quite literally been beaten out of him, Damian was good down to his core and he wanted to help.
Damian had told him about a kitten he had found once. It was the only time Jason had heard him cry.
“Because it’s my birthright,” Damian announced cockily.
Jason scoffed. “Robin can’t be taken,” he corrected. “It has to be given.”
It wasn’t true.
Robin had been taken from Dick and it had been taken from Jason too. But maybe, just maybe, they could make sure that they wouldn’t fail his replacement, whose name he didn’t know, and Damian.
“One day you will be Robin,” Jason told Damian and his little brother hummed.
“Alright,” the boy replied.
Jason shivered.
~•~
“The beast is making him soft,” Ra’s accused, pointing a boney finger at Jason.
Jason entertained himself with visions of snapping it like a twig to avoid looking at his little brother’s devastated green eyes.
“From tomorrow on, the creature will be gone and I will personally oversee my grandson’s training,” the man declared.
It rang through the room.
Jason shifted his eyes to Talia. Even she looked apprehensive.
“I will make you strong, Damian,” the old man said, almost warmly, some twisted mockery of familial pride in his milky eyes when he looked at Jason’s little brother.
“Yes, grandfather,” Damian replied, ever obedient.
The devastation had yet to fade from his eyes.
~•~
“Pack,” Jason ordered as soon as they were in their room. “Only necessities, we can’t afford to be slowed down.”
Damian blinked.
“I’m taking you to your father,” Jason told him, watching the kaleidoscope of emotions the little boy wasn’t quite able to hide.
He might hate Bruce, but he knew, even when being pulled down by the pit, that the man was eons better than Ra’s.
The door opened and Jason whirled around, a knife already in hand.
Talia stepped in and closed the door behind her. She looked at her son packing and then she looked at Jason. “Good,” she said, holding something out to him.
Jason took it. His face stared at him from a fake passport. “You planned this?” he asked even when Talia gestured for Damian to keep packing.
She stepped closer, close enough that he could smell her perfume. “I know you resent me for how I raise him, but I do love Damian.”
Jason stared back steadily.
“His grandfather would break him.”
That they could agree on. The enemy of my enemy and all that. She handed him a backpack and he took it.
“You’re taking him to your father?” she asked.
“I’m taking him to his father,” he corrected sharply and Talia’s face did something very, very complicated.
“Of course,” she said softly.
They waited until the night fell and Jason spent the time going over the documents in the bag and meditating. He wasn’t Robin anymore and Damian wasn’t Robin yet, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be two Robins fleeing their cage.
“Be good for your brother,” Talia said, kissing Damian’s hair.
“Yes, mother,” he said.
Jason and Talia met eyes and he gave her a small nod.
She didn’t smile, didn’t nod back.
~•~
“Do you trust me, Damian?” Jason asked quietly, the two of them standing on a rooftop in Gotham. Batman was coming closer rapidly, a dark shadow and he could feel how tense his little brother was.
“Yes, akhi.”
“Good,” Jason said, kissing the boy’s forehead. “Then trust that I will see you soon.”
He could tell that Damian was fighting the urge to fight as Jason pressed the bag into his hands. It held the boy’s birth certificate and a letter from Talia.
Then, he turned and jumped, disappearing into the churning streets of Crime Alley.
By the time Batman reached the roof, only one of his sons was waiting for him.