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When you’ve replaced all of the old wood planks in the Ship of Theseus with fresh ones, can it still be called the Ship of Theseus?
When you’ve been dunked in a healing pit and lost all of the scars that made your body yours, is it still your body? Are you still you?
When he was four years old, Jason tumbled down the stairs of his family’s cruddy apartment building. He doesn’t remember the fall itself, but the memories of the trip to Gotham General are still vivid in his mind. His mom read him two children’s books in the time it took for Dad to negotiate with the receptionist a payment plan consisting of partial cash, partial two hours’ worth of scrubbing bedpans, and partial the ounce of coke he had in his pocket in exchange for the neat row of stitches in Jason’s chin.
They shouldn’t have wasted so much money on the stitches when there was already so little to go around, but Catherine was worried about scarring. Anyone looking at Jason would see it—college admissions officers, cops, future employers. A nasty scar could make or break Jason’s future if everyone who got a glimpse of his chin saw someone dangerous, someone who gets into the kinds of fights that leave marks behind. They wouldn’t assume it was a simple case of a little kid tripping over his blanket cape. Not in Gotham.
The wound healed up just fine. Only a tiny sliver of a scar stayed behind, barely visible unless the light hit it just right.
For all future injuries—and there were a lot of them, considering that Jason was a young boy in the heart of Gotham with a scrappy attitude to match—they never wasted money on doctor’s visits. It took a few extra years of Jason’s life for his parents to give up on trying to afford frivolous things like healthcare and hot water. Jason wasn’t even properly vaccinated until Bruce plucked him off the streets.
Butterfly wound closures and gin disinfectant did the trick just as well as any ER doctor could provide. Jason once stapled shut a gash in his side after he tore it hopping a fence. If he’d shown his mom the wound, it only would have made her sad. The sadder she was, the more she shot up. Best to fix the problem himself.
The injuries became more frequent after Jason started patrolling in the ol’ green and yellow, but Alfred could fix up a wound better than any doctor, and Jason didn’t mind the battle scars. Each one told a story. Each symbolized a life saved. He was proud to have to change for gym class in a bathroom stall so no one called CPS on Bruce if they got a glimpse of Jason’s Frankenstein body.
Now, nineteen years old and still too young to deserve any of this shit, Jason examines himself in the mirror of his shitty apartment bathroom. He strokes his thumb over his stubbly chin, feeling for the telltale dip where the edge of a stair nearly knocked a canine loose on impact. He only finds smooth, unblemished skin now. The Lazarus Pit saw to that.
No wonder Ra’s al Ghul is such a fanatic about his precious bathtub. Just one dip, and Jason Todd was restored to factory format. Every scar, every imperfection was washed away in the green tide as if they’d never existed at all. His flesh, once riddled in evidence of a gruesome childhood, is as smooth as it was the day he was born. He’s been remade.
Fresh start.
New life, new me, he thinks snidely, digging his thumbnail into where there used to be an indent in his chin, as if he just needs to dig in deep enough to find it.
The Joker is still alive. Jason is still alive. Gotham is still a dumpster fire with Batman frantically fanning the flames, believing with every fiber of his being that he’s helping. He’s too trapped in his ways to realize how ineffectual he’s become, so Jason gave it a try, and look how that turned out. His family hates his guts, and he’s not exactly thrilled about them, either, but who else does he have? What is left?
He lays low in the last apartment he and Mom shared. He pays the landlady double her usual rate in exchange for fire escape access and freshly baked muffins on Mondays. She was a sweetheart then, and she’s a sweetheart now, even if she doesn’t recognize Jason. He’s changed too much. It’s better that way, though, right?
New life. New/old apartment.
Jason has a new scar now—his first, since it looks like he’s starting from scratch all over again. The puffy red wound across his throat has sealed shut and scabbed over by now, but it still bleeds whenever Jason picks at it. Night after night he peels away the congealed blood and starts it going anew, hissing at the sting but picking the rest until it’s open and bleeding into his collar all over again.
It feels right that he has to keep feeling what Bruce did to him, all in a thankless effort to save the Joker of all people from a death he deserved a hundred times over. It was a miracle that Jason survived the night after the batarang and the explosion after, but—then again, isn’t that his whole schtick nowadays? Jason is a fucking cockroach. He just can’t seem to leave the land of the living alone.
Jason watches blood bead up along the wound he’s reopened yet again, having been absently picking at it while he thought. It’s crusty and pink around the edges. He’s going to get an infection if he doesn’t put something on it. Hell, he should have just sucked it up and gone to a professional instead of stitching it up himself with a hand mirror and reckless spite that first day. He should stop picking at it if he wants it to heal properly. He’ll leave behind a big fat scar if he doesn’t.
Jason peels more away until blood starts actually dripping from the slice. It soaks his t-shirt. The fabric is grubby black anyway; Jason doesn’t bother stopping it from staining further.
He hopes it scars worse. He hopes it’s big enough and stark enough against the rest of his skin that Bruce won’t be able to stop staring the next time he and Jason meet face-to-face. Let the bastard see what he’s done. Let him stew in his greatest failure, failed again. Let him choke on it.
It’s nice to be remade stronger than before and without all those grim reminders of what he used to be, but sometimes Jason gets…stuck. More than sometimes. Like a vapid starlet, he stares at his unclothed body in his cracked bathroom mirror. He studies the unblemished skin on his face, his hands, like that of a newborn. No history. No landmarks to show for the flashbacks in his head. Every piece of his body that he once called his own is gone—washed away in the Pit.
Here used to be a stab wound from Killer Croc’s claws. There was the nick on his thumb from a broken photo frame. Here was the dent in his earlobe from when he tried to pierce it himself with a safety pin in the fourth grade.
All gone, except that batarang.
When you’ve remade the Ship of Theseus, no one ever says whether you can put back the old boards after they’ve already been replaced with new ones. Even if they’re broken and old, at least they’re familiar. At least they meant something to the old ship.
They meant something. Right?
“You’re out of control, Jason. You need professional help.”
“You’re calling me crazy?” Jason retorts, grinning with bloodied teeth from Bruce’s fists. His Red Hood helmet was knocked off his head several hits ago. That’s what he gets for holding back. “The guy who’s dressed in a bat costume thinks he’s in any position to judge someone’s mental health? That’s a riot.”
“At least I’m not killing people. Do you even understand the enormity of what you’ve done?”
“Right, because I’m too stupid to think rationally anymore.” All Jason did was take out a trafficking ring and string their bodies from the flagpole on Gotham Elementary’s campus. Now those traumatized third graders Batman saved last week can sleep easy knowing the men who assaulted them got what they deserved. The Red Hood is the new goddamn Santa Claus. “No, right, I need you to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong.”
He knows better than to go on opening up old wounds with Bruce. It never changes anything. They redo the same dance with the same choreography, each hoping for a different outcome. This time. This time, he’ll bend. He’ll see sense. He’ll apologize.
Bruce is incapable of changing. So is Jason.
Batman’s boot presses down harder on Jason’s neck. “This could have been a fresh start, Jason. We could have gone back to normal, but you keep choosing to make the same mistakes. You’ll never get better than this if you don’t choose to try.”
“Choke on a fucking brick.”
Jason ends that lovely father-son conversation with a bruised torso, bruised ego, and a fresh collection of bleeding cuts from batarangs aimed to harm without killing. He doesn’t bother patching them up afterwards. Let them scar. Let everyone see what happens when you break the “hero’s” rules.
Back when he was Robin, Jason spent a weekend in Blüdhaven. Bruce and Dick still weren’t talking, so Alfred was the one who organized the “bro-bonding vacation” for them. Jason had gone into it hoping he’d leave with some trade secrets about what it meant to be Robin, or at least a souvenir or two from those golden days that Bruce went on and on about, like Dick Grayson was some fucking god.
Patrol with Nightwing was nothing like patrol with Batman. Dick and Bruce were so similar, and yet so different, as though Dick had inherited only Bruce’s best traits and thrown away the rest.
Now, Jason knows better. The bitterness. The refusal to back down from a challenge. The stubborn set of his jaw that makes Jason instinctively want to punch it off. Dick Grayson is Batman’s younger, more sinister clone except this version wears a smile.
But at the time? It was the best weekend of Jason’s life. He’d always dreamed of a cool older brother to take him along on adventures, give him tips about growing up, teach him how to talk to girls. Jason idolized Dick. Even when he fucked up, Dick never ridiculed him.
The difference between Batman and Robin is that Robin is human, Dick told him. It was one of the first pieces of advice he ever gave Jason about what it meant to be Batman’s protege. You’re allowed to mess up. All humans do. Just don’t let it happen twice. One mistake means you didn’t know any better, and that’s not your fault. Twice makes you an idiot.
Jason cut his knee on a barbed wire fence while he and Nightwing were breaking into a serial arsonist’s hideout. They retreated back to Dick’s apartment building where he patched up the small wound. “You’d think Bruce would have added pants to the costume by now,” he joked, trying to make Jason feel better about screwing up.
Jason winced at the sting of antiseptic. “You didn’t.”
“You’re not me.”
“I could be. I’m trying.”
“Well, stop trying.” It sounded like a rebuke. Dick saw the shift in Jason’s eyes and changed his tone, gentled his hand while he cleaned the scrapes. “You don’t have to be me, Jay. You’re doing a good enough job just by being you.”
“Really?”
Dick smirked. “Between you and me, kid, I think you’re his favorite.”
“Dads aren’t supposed to have favorites.” Jason was so gullible back then. It’s embarrassing.
“Ours does. Trust me.” Dick stuck a bandage to Jason’s knee. “Same rule applies, though. Keep being you. Even if he doesn’t like it. Even if it makes him hate you.”
“Bruce doesn’t hate you. No way.”
Dick smiled sadly. He ruffled Jason’s hair. “Thanks, Jay.”
The Batman uniform has been perfectly tailored to fit Dick’s proportions. It still looks too big for him. No one can ever fill Bruce’s shoes.
Dick—Batman stands in front of the Red Hood’s cell at Arkham. “If you cooperate, Hood, the system will work with you. We can get you the help you need.”
Jason doesn’t say a fucking word.
Dick’s eyes scan Jason up and down from behind the cowl, looking down upon this pitiful creature he helped create. He ends on the uncovered scabs on Jason’s knuckles. Of course the Arkham guards don’t give a shit about whatever injuries their prisoners earn—especially when they were earned by punching the sadistic grin off of another prisoner’s face. “What happened?”
“Tripped and fell down the stairs knuckles-first, obviously.” Jason Todd was locked up in a prison with the city’s worst criminals. Of course he’s not keeping his hands to himself. He never learned how to. It’s better than sitting around with his thoughts all day.
When he runs out of crazies to fight, he punches the walls of his cell until his fingers snap and his flesh oozes blood and pus. It feels better this way. His knuckles were scarred to hell and back by the time he reached the end of his first short life. Having the marks back feels…right. It feels like him.
Clearly the discount therapists Arkham’s policy forces him to meet with every week have been doing jack shit for him, but what else is new? You can’t help the unhelpable.
“Nice.” Dick starts to turn away, then hesitates, like he’s waiting for something. Searching. “I don’t want to hate you.”
“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart? I hate you.”
“Bruce wouldn’t want us to hate each other.”
“That’s a real fucking shame, then.”
Dick’s jaw stiffens under the cowl. “Fine. You win.”
Before Dick can leave, Jason calls, “Better be careful out there, Batsy. The new kid’s got a cute face. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. We tend to die so easily in this profession, don’t we?”
Batman doesn’t dignify that with a response.
After his knuckles heal, Jason finds himself studying his profile in the reflection of his barred window at night. He broke his nose once in a fight with Clayface when he was thirteen. It healed fine, but it ended up just slightly off with a small hump where there wasn’t one before. Barely noticeable to anyone who wasn’t close enough to him to remember what he looked like originally.
Jason smashes his face against the metal frame of his bed over and over and over again until it feels right. Until it feels like him.
The orderlies find Jason in the morning laughing alone on the floor with bloody teeth and a crooked nose.
By the time Jason is back loose on the streets of Gotham where he belongs, it occurs to him that just because his family pretends they want to mend the bridges burned and go back to being the happy household they never were, that doesn’t mean they’ll ever accept him for who he is. He sees the way they still look at him. The way Bruce’s eyes linger on the old photos of a little Jason who still had one stubborn baby tooth left.
The new Jason is too old, too broken, too wrong. He can’t go back to who he was before. He knows that. He does.
He still has his methods of smoothing over the differences, though.
Who’s going to stop him, anyway? The vigilante life is dangerous. They walk around every day injured and bloodied. No one will notice a few cuts here and there.
A stab wound under his ribs from one of Two-Face’s goons when Robin freed hostages at a children’s hospital. Jason plunges his kris knife into his side deeply enough to leave the right-sized mark without causing lasting damage.
Burns on his shoulder from the time Firefly lit up a movie theater. Jason goes through a whole pack of cigarettes, pressing the lit butts to his shoulder over and over until his skin matches the memories.
A mugger shot him once. It was pure luck. Robin wasn’t paying enough attention. Batman pounded the man’s teeth out after he staunched the bleeding. Jason ended up with a puckered scar on his thigh, two inches above his kneecap. Entry and exit wounds.
Jason lays plastic down on the floor of his safe house. Can't get away with this in his actual apartment. He puts a silencer on his favorite gun. Spends several minutes figuring out the angle to make the holes line up perfectly to what he remembers. He bites down on a pillow. He fires.
He spends the following days laid up in that same safe house. By the time he comes to the manor for Alfred’s help, the infection has already set in. The old man berates him for waiting so long. Why didn’t he call Alfred the day he got shot?
Jason couldn’t tell him that he needed to make sure it would scar. That’s something a crazy person would do, and Jason isn’t crazy. He’s just…making things right again.
He gets away with it far longer than he should. Surely someone who loves him would have noticed the familiarity of his scars by now, or at the very least they should have questioned the frequency of his injuries—but, then again, isn’t that exactly what they should expect from him by now? He failed as Robin. He’s failing now. All that’s changed is that he’s lost the failure marks, but that’s easily fixed.
Jason can get back to who he was before, and it will be so uncanny no one will remember he was anything different. He can get it all back. He can.
In the left inner pocket of his jacket, Jason keeps his trusty pack of cigarettes with a lighter tucked in the box. In the opposite pocket is a box of drugstore band-aids with a box cutter nestled inside for easy access and cleanup.
On bad nights, Jason finds new old marks to make. He’ll cut over the same spot repeatedly, going deeper and deeper with every swipe until it’s how he remembers it. There is no shortage of old wounds to be recreated. He is a living wound.
Bleeding and throbbing is the most normal Jason Todd ever feels.
“How did you do that?” Bruce is looking at Jason’s neck. More specifically, at the freshly scabbed slash across his throat. Every few weeks Jason opens it up again with a razor blade, just so he can watch it bleed down his collar bones anew. Just so he can be back in that moment when he realized exactly how unwanted and unloved he was. Ha.
Jason doesn’t bother covering up the scars. He never has. Everyone’s already seen most of them before. What’s the difference if now they’re just fresher versions of old wounds? Does that change anything? It should comfort them, if anything. The fragile little boy is still in there somewhere, right?
Bruce tugs the collar of Jason’s shirt down so he can see better. Jason lets him. He wants Bruce to see the inflamed, irritated skin; the multiple scars forming one big scar over time because he just can’t stop opening it back up every time it heals too much for his comfort. He likes it better this way—fresh, painful, ugly.
“Jason, this is—” Jason tips his chin up slightly. Let the bastard fucking stare. “Did you do this?”
“Does it make you uncomfortable?”
Bruce studies Jason with quiet revulsion, as if it’s just now dawning on him that perhaps his fucked-up second son doesn’t have it all together. Shocker that Jason can’t let anything fucking go. Shocker that he has to rip himself to shreds to feel at home in his body. Who’d have guessed it? World’s greatest detective, everyone!
Bruce looks down at Jason’s shirt as if he can see through the fabric to the many, many other scars hiding beneath. He yanks up Jason’s sleeve to reveal the neat row of scars Jason’s been working on. Some are replicas of what happened before. Some he just made because he felt like it.
“I remember this. Zsasz’s knife.” Bruce prods at one of the cuts from last night. Jason didn’t bother cleaning the wound or slapping on a band-aid. He just bled until he fell asleep. Bruce’s thumb presses on another cut, testing the torn skin. “These are fresh.”
“I’m a slow healer. The Pit fucked me up real bad.”
“Jason.”
“Bruce.”
The problem with Bruce Wayne is that, no matter how stupidly predictable he is for supposedly being this mysterious creature, he still finds ways to surprise people after all these years. Bruce drags Jason by the arm to the medical area of the cave and sits him down in a chair. He proceeds to clean the dried blood from Jason’s skin and disinfect every wound he finds. He wraps a bandage around Jason’s arm, and then another for his neck.
“What happens when you run out?” Bruce asks. “When there’s nothing left to copy? Will you stop then?”
Jason rolls his eyes. “There’s always more.”
“There doesn’t have to be. You can’t tell me this is helping you move on.”
“Moving on is for suckers.” Jason likes rolling around in his misery and sentencing others to watch. It’s what he does best.
“You could come home. Alfred told me he’s been sending you letters. We could set up your old room for you. I think it would do you good to rest for a little while.”
“I have knives under the bed.” Smuggled in for self-defense when Bruce first took Jason in and Jason didn’t know if he could be trusted. After he became Robin, it was to practice fighting techniques after bedtime. “It would be a tragedy if something bad were to happen to your darling boy. Again.”
Bruce doesn’t give in. “A guest room, then. Blank slate. I’ll tell Alfred to freshen up the sheets.”
Jason rolls his eyes. “It’s easier if I just take the old room and get rid of the knives.”
“Maybe, but I like to leave that room as-is. We haven’t moved anything.” Bruce eyes the bandage on Jason’s neck. The damage they’ve both done. “Take the new room. You’ll sleep better without all that dust, anyway. Decorate it however you want. New furniture.”
If you let the old ship sink and build a new one, can you still call it the Ship of Theseus? Does it still count if all that’s left is the damaged captain?
“I’m painting the walls red, then. Gotta stay on brand. It’ll be so ugly.”
Bruce smirks. It’s the first time he’s almost-smiled around Jason since they first met for the second time. “Fine. It’s your room.”