Chapter Text
He opened his eyes to green.
It was burning, choking, acidic and bitter—laughter was ringing through his ears, high and sharp and malicious—he squeezed his eyes shut and blindly made his way to the surface.
He broke it with a gasp, taking a huge gulp of air—no smoke, nothing burning, no acrid taste of smog—before haphazardly wiping at his eyes.
Assess your surroundings, a low voice rumbled in his mind, accompanied by half-memories of patient lectures and methodical training. Where are you? Who is with you? How did you get there?
He—he didn’t know. Stone all around him, trapping him—his breaths grew faster and shallower—green light shimmering darkly off the walls. Green light. Green pool.
He looked down—he didn’t know what he was looking at, but the instinctive part of his brain told him that anything that bright and glowing was not to be touched.
He grasped for the edge of the pool, stone cold and wet under his fingers—his hands looked weird, too smooth, too big—and he pushed himself out with shaking muscles.
It hurt. It hurt like an overextended muscle. It hurt like he hadn’t been moving or walking or reaching for days, like he’d been forced into a body not yet broken in. He was gasping by the time he got his knees under him, gasping and shivering and shaking.
The room—tomb—cave—was cold. His clothes—his robes?—were sticking to him, thin cotton plastered to his skin. He couldn’t stop his heaving gulps of air.
Calm down, the familiar voice said, breathe with me, Jay.
He was trying.
“Come with me,” an impatient voice said—out loud, not in his head, not a half-fragmented memory. He looked up—hand outstretched, fingernails painted—and instinctively recoiled.
Danger, blared five different parts of his mind, shrieking about betrayal and dread and don’t trust her can’t trust her mom how could you do this to me—before he followed the hand up to an unfamiliar face.
Dark skin. Green eyes. Dark hair. Not blonde and blue-eyed, no cigarette rolled between nonchalant fingers, no hard-eyed look in response to his confusion.
“We must leave,” the woman tutted, frowning, “Quickly.” Now that he was looking, she did seem familiar—like he’d seen her in a photo, maybe. Her eyes narrowed imperiously, “We will be found if we do not move.”
Being found was bad. He knew that very well.
He reached out—that couldn’t be his hand, that couldn’t be his arm—and placed wavering fingers in a callused palm. She tightened her grip and pulled, and suddenly he was much higher off the ground then he’d been before.
He felt like he was on stilts, stumbling after the woman as she held his wrist and led him through dark, twisting, suffocating tunnels—he remembered screaming, he remembered clawing, he remembered crying out for Bruce—as his skin alternately felt too loose and too tight.
What, he wanted to say, but nothing came out of his throat when he went looking for words, and the world was dizzy and too loud, too cold, too much—
The blast of cold air felt like a crowbar to the face.
He stumbled, instinctively curling away from the breeze—they were outside now, darkness giving way to pinpricks of light in the sky and a roiling, seething mess underneath them. The tunnel they’d come from was a yawning abyss, and the woman had let go of his hand to fiddle with a bag.
She pressed the bag into his arms—rough, heavy, the seam of the zipper biting into too-soft skin—and regarded him with those cold, fierce green eyes.
He stared back. He needed—he wanted—he had—his mind was empty and he needed something to hold onto—
“You remain unavenged,” she said softly.
And then she pushed.
He fell. He hit the water, shuddering as icy ripples pulled at him, tugging at his clothes. The words swirling in his head, flitting around like butterflies. Powerful kicks—it hurt, his limbs were cramping and shuddering and weak—propelled him up.
Jason Todd broke the surface with a gasp.
He didn’t know how long he stayed in the water, clutching the bag and remembering how to breathe—remembering how to live—but he eventually realized that he was in a river, and the current was getting stronger.
Jason pushed towards the riverbank, startling himself with the force the simple kick gave him, and caught the rocky edge with his strangely uncallused hands, shifting the sodden bag to one arm as he pulled himself out.
His shaky arms nearly gave out, but he managed to drag himself onto the bank before they collapsed entirely.
He stayed there, rolling over onto his back, and stared up—the sky was brightening slightly, sun rising somewhere beyond the dark mountain ridges, and the stars were fading.
He remembered thinking he would never see a star again.
He—he remembered dying.
He remembered coming back.
He remembered—laughter and pain and screaming and—no.
No.
No.
He had to—he couldn’t—he—he couldn’t—no. He had to focus on something else. On the stars. On the mountains. On the strange, otherworldly clarity, the way everything felt too jarringly real, from the water freezing on his skin to the weave of the robes pressing against him, to the pebbles digging into his back.
Mountains. There were no mountains near Gotham.
Where the hell was he?
Jason slowly pushed himself upright, staring at the river—the river, not the ocean, not salty and polluted, not green and acidic—and the barren land around him, no trace of person or animal in sight. Nothing but the mountains and the stars and the brightening sky.
And the backpack.
Jason dragged it closer to him and fumbled for the zippers—it was a simple bag, only two pockets. The first was full with water bottles and ration bars—at which point Jason realized he was starving, and tore through five ration bars, not registering the taste, until a stray thought niggled at him about rationing and saving for later, because he didn’t know when he’d eat next. Jason finished the sixth bar and opened a water bottle, going through two of those before his thirst was sated.
Head slightly clearer, he turned to the other contents of the backpack. Some strange device, apparently not damaged by its stay in the water—Jason wiped the drops off the surface and pressed the button on the side—immediately, grid lines lit up on the surface, showing two blinking yellow dots, one smaller than the other, about seven grid boxes apart.
The second object was a compass. The river was behind him, due south, while to the north lay the shrinking peaks of the mountains.
Jason packed up the rest of the bag and pushed himself up onto shaky legs before walking forward.
After walking for about a minute, he could see that the smaller blinking dot had moved towards the larger one. He looked at the compass, the dot, and changed direction—he needed to go…slightly north-west if he wanted to see whatever was at the second yellow dot.
The woman had given him this bag. The woman that had put him in the green water. Jason was not trusting another strange woman, not after what had happened with the last one.
He wanted to go home. He wanted—he wanted—
Bruce.
Laughter, high and sickening and cruel, the flash of metal and the crunch, the screaming but it was too late, time ticked out, and then—
Pain. More pain than anything he’d felt before, because it made sense that it hurt to tear a soul out of a body—because he died, because he came back, because—
Deep breaths. Breathe with me, Jay, the low voice rumbled, and Jason let out a sharp cry, falling to his knees, hands pressed over his ears like that would stop the laughter echoing inside his skull.
Breathe. In for four, hold for eight, out for seven. In for four, hold for eight, out for seven. Again. Again.
Jason lowered shaking hands. The air stung the inside of his nose, cold and pure—not dry and hot, not smog-choked, and that was enough to ground him.
He wasn’t in Gotham. He wasn’t going to trust the woman. But he had no clue where he was—whether Gotham was east or west, north or south—the woman had an accent, but Jason couldn’t pinpoint it—he didn’t know where to go.
Blinking yellow dot it was.
“You remain unavenged.”
The words niggled at him, like a stray patch of dead skin he couldn’t quite get off.
A watch was not among the contents of the backpack, but the sun was still low in the sky—mid-morning, if Jason had to guess—by the time he neared the spot marked on the locator. His legs had started cramping halfway through, and his pace had slowed considerably by the end, his muscles sore and aching.
It was frustrating—Jason had spent longer flying through the air, jumping from roofs and—
“I caught a little birdie!”
It was frustrating. He felt weak, like a newborn foal trying to find his legs, and his mood wasn’t improved by the giant steaming pile of nothing he found when his dot finally intersected with the other one.
“Are you kidding me?” Jason said out loud—his voice was hoarse, and lower than he was used to. He spent half a minute trying to clear his throat before he realized that the crackling, growly voice was actually his.
Did he get swapped into a new body? He had a sickening wave of wrong wrong wrong, only arrested by the sudden appearance of someone dressed in dark brown robes.
“Who are you?” Jason demanded, stumbling a step back and wincing at the sound of his voice.
The person narrowed their eyes, and turned on one heel, beckoning him to follow.
“Excuse me?” Jason called out again, “Who are you?”
“I have been sent by Lady Talia,” the stranger said flatly, “Come.”
And who the everloving fuck was Lady Talia? Jason was done with following strangers, he’d learned that lesson, okay, and he wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“Come,” the stranger beckoned again, their face falling into a frown, and Jason tightened his grip on the bag—the mountains were full of crevices and narrow valleys, if he got a good head start—
Someone coughed behind him, and Jason whirled around to see another person in the same dark brown robes, giving him a cold look. They raised an eyebrow. Frowny scowled even harder.
It was only two against one. Jason had gone against greater odds before.
But not in a strange location. Not when his whole body was cramping or jittery. Not confused and lost and alone.
Jason did not hide his glare, but followed the stranger.
They were walking a path with no visible marker—Jason couldn’t tell how this stretch of gravelly scrubland was different from the one ten steps over, but he cursed and stumbled across the uneven terrain, feeling the burn in his lungs as they climbed up and up and up, until they reached a narrow crevice that could charitably be called a mountain pass.
Jason stopped, his legs rooted to the spot, and refused to move.
“Come,” Frowny said, looking impatient. He couldn’t see Cough Drop, but presumably they were hovering somewhere behind him.
Jason couldn’t move, though. His legs had locked up and refused to loosen, his throat going dry at the sight of the narrow almost-tunnel between sheer, high cliff faces.
It wasn’t an enclosed space, his mind pointed out rather logically. There would be nothing above his head. Unless there was a rockslide.
His body refused to take that on faith.
“Come,” Frowny snarled.
“No,” Jason retorted, stumbling back. The scowl only grew.
So what? What could they do to him? If they wanted him dead, he’d be dead—he’d been dead, and something had brought him back, and he didn’t want to do the whole dance all over again.
It had hurt. Oh, gods, it had hurt so much.
They could force him through that crevice. They could, and they would. And when Jason imagined being manhandled through that narrow space, helpless and vulnerable, his heart rate kicked up, his breaths suddenly too-short, especially when drawing from thin mountain air.
Jason took a wobbly step forward. And another. Frowny turned back around and disappeared into the narrow gap.
Another step. He could hear his harsh breathing echo discordantly against the stone.
Another step. The shadows fell across his face, as quickly and completely as darkness. Stone brushed the sides of his arms. Light narrowed to a thin strip in the distance, the edge of it smudged by the stranger guiding him forward.
Claustrophobia. Jason added it to the list of things he was discovering about himself.
Green pool. The woman that pushed him off a fucking cliff. The mountains. The strangers. The—no, he couldn’t remember that, it sent him into screams and sobs. No remembering.
He felt like he was holding half the pieces to a puzzle he’d chosen to complete blindfolded and, so far, it wasn’t very fun.
His pace was slow. Glacial. Which was funny, come to think of it, because these jagged mountain ranges were carved by glaciers, weren’t they? Some ice-fed mountain stream had chiseled out this narrow crevice, and there wasn’t a single drop of water left to bear it witness.
Focus on glaciers, on rivers, on anything except the way that rough stone was pressing against his upper arms, the way his breathing was too-harsh and too-loud in the shadows—
Gasping, a dying rattle, and it echoed oddly off of broken beams and rubble—
Loud, desperate wheezes, depleting all the oxygen left as the sounds were muffled by cool satin—
There was a sharp throb of pain in his palms, and Jason realized he’d clenched his hands into fists so tightly they’d started bleeding. He relaxed them, and blood welled up, trailing down his fingers to drip against the ground.
They were shaking. He was shaking.
Another step. Another. Another. The light was brighter now. Frowny had already reached the end. The walls weren’t closing in, they weren’t, Jason’s imagination could stop running wild any second now, thanks.
When he finally made it to the other side, Jason wanted to collapse to his knees in relief. Maybe cry. His eyes were prickling and his breathing was still a little too fast, but Frowny only waited for him to appear before starting forward again. This time downhill.
Jason refused to match their pace. He was sore and exhausted and aching, he could feel the sharp throbbing of blisters on his feet, the disconnect in his memories was growing glaringly large, a giant shrieking ‘LOOK AT ME’ sign in his brain even as he tried to ignore it, and he just wanted—
“B—Bruce. Bruce. Please, I think I’m going to die.”
Fuck what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted. He didn’t know anything. He wanted—he wanted quiet.
He wanted a hug, he wanted soft, warm, safe arms wrapping around him in a cocoon of protection and—
No. Not thinking about that. Following Frowny it was.
He could tell he’d pissed off his…guide? Kidnapper?—because when Jason finally caught up to them, the stranger was in a full-grown thunderous scowl, standing next to a mottled dusty brown tarp thrown over what—judging by shape and size—was probably a small truck.
Frowny tugged off the tarp, and it turned out Jason’s guessing skills hadn’t been rusted by death.
They handed Jason a black hood. “Put that on,” they instructed, and then motioned to the back of the truck.
Jason looked at the hood. And looked at them.
Cough Drop made a small ahem behind him and Jason nearly jumped out of his skin, jeez, the person was silent.
“Where are you taking me?” Jason snarled, hiding his wince at the rusty growl that was apparently his voice now.
“Where Lady Talia wants you to go,” Frowny said imperiously, “We do not question the lady’s wishes. Neither do you. Put the hood on, and get in.”
So this was a kidnapping. Nice to know.
For a distinct lack of other options, Jason swung himself up into the back of the truck, and tugged on the hood. One door slammed, which meant that either Cough Drop somehow managed to close doors without a sound, or was currently hanging around in the back with him.
The joke was on these losers anyway. He’d been taught how to map directions while blindfolded, so he knew how far they were going to go, and which general direction, and how to get back.
…So maybe the joke wasn’t on them. It turned out that mapping directions in a city—on an actual road, with turns and speed limits and traffic lights—was not the same as mapping directions while the truck bumped along rugged terrain in a random direction for hours.
It was also possible that Jason had fallen asleep despite the jostling, his sore muscles and blistering feet thankful for the rest, and the rocking motion of the truck strangely soothing. He only realized this when something snapped at his shoulder, jolting him awake as he immediately lashed out—darkness everywhere, cloth against his face—
Cough Drop considerately ripped the hood off of his head before he could work himself up into a panic attack.
The truck was parked in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing that had changed in the scenery was that they were on an actual paved road now. The sun was tilting closer to the horizon, late afternoon, and Jason took several moments to fully blink himself awake.
“Change,” Frowny ordered, thrusting clothes at him. He could see that Frowny and Cough Drop had already changed, out of the dark robes and into woolen shirts and thick pants and shawls—Frowny had theirs around their shoulders, while Cough Drop had wound theirs around their head.
Jason glared at them both, but even sun-dried, the robes he was in were stiff and tacky, and he quickly changed out of them and into the clothes he’d been given—the same thick shirt and sturdy pants, but no shawl.
It was only after he’d taken it off that he realized that the robes he’d been wearing were the same material and color as those of his kidnapper-guides.
Interesting.
They didn’t ask him to wear the hood again, and this time he got to sit in the front, the three of them squished together in the cab of the truck. It was extremely uncomfortable—not because there was no space, but because all three of them were aware that each of them were trained, and the tension chafed.
Jason ignored it as best as he could—they were on an actual road, with road signs, and twinkling lights like a city rising in the distance. The signs were not in a language he understood, but he did manage to narrow down his geographical location.
Russian. Which put him in Asia, or Eastern Europe. Far, far away from Gotham.
His kidnapper-guides made no attempt to ensure his compliance when they pulled up to a building, tipping the scale in the favor of guide—and also stupid—and Jason loitered behind them as they entered a reception room and headed to the desk.
Hotel, Jason was guessing. He paused near the lounge, darted a quick look around him—Frowny was talking to the desk clerk, Cough Drop next to them, no other guests in sight—and picked up the newspaper on the table, quickly folding it and tucking it under his shirt.
Running out on the street wouldn’t do him any good. He was guessing that they were pretending to be civilian—hence the change of clothes—but he needed a lot more to work with than in Asia or maybe Europe. He still had his slightly damp backpack, with ten more ration bars and five more bottles of water, but aside from a garden variety compass, he had nothing of value.
No papers, no money, no documentation—he supposed that he could try to find the US embassy, but even if he could prove that he was American, claiming to be a dead boy was unlikely to go over well. He didn’t know any Russian superheroes, and he was pretty sure that claiming to be a dead hero was going to go extremely not well.
Frowny had finished their business at the desk and beckoned Jason forward. Jason pushed down the desire to break those fingers, and managed to regulate his bad mood to only a scowl before stomping over.
Hotel turned out to be correct. Frowny led them to a room on the second floor—tiny room, two beds and a small ensuite bathroom—before giving perfunctory instructions, “Freshen up. We are awaiting Lady Talia’s orders.”
Jason gladly took the opportunity to use an actual bathroom.
His first shock came with the mirror.
He…hadn’t been bodyswapped. Or, if he had, it was into some strange, mutated clone, because Jason could see himself in the mirror, but could also see all the ways the face was just slightly off from how he remembered it.
He was taller, for one. His scars seemed to have disappeared, along with the calluses on his palms—and his feet too, the way they were complaining. His eyes seemed brighter than they usually were, more green than blue, though that could definitely be due to the clothes and shitty lighting.
And there was a shock of white hair at the top of his forehead, like he’d dipped a lock into bleach.
“What the fuck happened?” Jason whispered hoarsely. His voice was just another reminder of the differences.
His hands were shaking again, clenching the edge of the sink so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He—he needed to—to figure this out. He needed time. He needed—he didn’t know what he needed, but it was not being stuck in a tiny bathroom while two trained assassins lurked outside the door.
Wait.
Assassins?
The League of Assassins, came the memory when he poked at the thought, a file spread across a massive set of displays, dark brown robes and fluid movements and that woman was smirking at him and there was green—green—green—
No. He—he needed information. He needed a starting point.
He fished the newspaper out from under his shirt. It was in Russian, which was disappointing but not surprising. The year, however, was still legible, and Jason had to sit down while the room spun around him.
It had been two years.
Two years.
He—he was seventeen. He might even be eighteen, he didn’t know what month it was. He—he couldn’t believe—
Jason scrambled upright again, and started at himself in the mirror. Seventeen-maybe-eighteen years old. Yeah, he could believe it.
There was a sharp rap on the door. “Lady Talia has delivered further instructions,” Frowny said.
“Give me a minute,” Jason rasped back.
The newspaper was fluttering in his shaking hands as he looked over it again. He couldn’t read the articles, but the pictures might be informative—two people shaking hands, a building, a dog, children arrayed in front of a garden, a still of a soccer match, someone giving a speech on stage, heroes capturing a villain—
Batman. And Robin. Standing over the Joker.
Jason stared.
He couldn’t fucking read Russian, no matter how hard he stared, the alphabet itself was incomprehensible, so he had no clue what the caption said, or the article underneath, but there had to be some reason they had put the picture there—in this newspaper, in a country far away, it had to be of some significance, it had to—it—
That wasn’t his Robin suit.
The picture was black and white, but he didn’t need color to know that the design was off and the belt was larger and figure slimmer and holding some sort of staff. It wasn’t Dick, either.
Which meant.
Which meant.
“You remain unavenged.”
Laughter and shrieking and screaming and begging and the sickening sound of bones crunching under the onslaught of metal, the throbbing, tearing agony, dying, the world going red and then black, fingers scrabbling at wood, crying, please Batman, please Bruce, please Dad—
And. And what? And a new Robin and the Joker alive and well and Jason thought he’d meant something and—and the memories were tearing forward too fast for him to stop them and everything was green and everything was red and someone was laughing and someone was screaming and someone was shouting.
“Which hurts more?”
“You’re grounded.”
“I promise.”
“Bruce. P—please.”
And he didn’t know when he’d left the bathroom but there were two faces in front of him and he was moving on instinct, instinct not made for this new, stronger, faster, taller body, but instinct all the same, and they weren’t expecting an attack—stupid and sloppy, they should’ve taken a crowbar to the face, or maybe ten, and then they’d learn to be on their guard—and finally, Jason was heaving for breath in the middle of a silent, trashed room, knuckles bruised and stinging.
“You remain unavenged.”
Yeah. Jason had gotten the fucking memo.
Frowny and Cough Drop looked like they were enjoying their impromptu nap. Jason stepped past them, and towards the bags that hadn’t been there before, presumably dropped off with those instructions.
Jason was done dancing to other people’s tunes. Now he knew. It had been two years since he died.
Two years since he was murdered by the Joker, and Batman had done nothing about it.
Two years since he’d been replaced as if Robin was just an empty suit to fill.
Anger solidified into rage and sharpened into fury.
But unfortunately for all those involved, Jason had come back.
One of the bags had papers. Several sets of IDs and passports for Jason, under different names and ages. Money. Clothes and supplies.
Jason let his lips curve into a smile.
“I want the earliest flight out of here,” he told the desk attendant at Khorog International Airport. She blinked at him, at his attire, and his request.
“I’m sorry, sir, what—”
“The earliest flight. Whichever one that is.”
She stared at him for another stretching moment before looking down at her screen, “There is a flight to Moscow that departs in forty minutes.”
“Perfect,” Jason said, pulling out the Russian passport.
“Sir, but it has already starting boarding—”
“Not a problem,” he said, handing over the black credit card, “First class, please.”
Huh. Apparently he was in Tajikistan. Another country to cross off his list of ‘why do I never end up in these countries when I want to go sightseeing’.
Jason bought a change of clothes in Moscow at an exorbitant price, and added a colorful knit cap to cover the white streak in his hair. There, after gorging himself, buying several bags of snacks, and another couple sets of clothes that barely managed to fit into his bag, he headed for the ticket counter.
The next flight leaving, which happened to be Istanbul.
A different one to Dubai.
Another to London.
A flight to San Francisco, and Jason was wondering what the limit on the card was.
And one nonstop, direct flight to New York City.
Thank you very much, Talia al Ghul.
The League of Assassins had resources, Jason knew that. It was kind of impossible not to know that when he exchanged his Russian passport for an American one to board his flight, and tossed the credit card into a trash can with full knowledge of how many stacks of cash lay buried underneath bags of chips and cheap clothes. But Jason had finally taken off the blindfold and, half the puzzle or not, he was beginning to get a sense of the full picture.
Green pool. League of Assassins. The Demon’s Daughter herself, “we will be found if we do not move”, the roundabout circling through the mountains.
He bought a newspaper in English. The caption for the picture was ‘Batman and Robin foil Joker’s latest plot’. Jason couldn’t bring himself to read the article, not inside the middle of a bustling airport, not when he wanted to scream and rage and cry.
It didn’t matter how many pieces of the puzzle he had if he was planning on burning the whole fucking thing to the ground.
Batman was going to pay.
Jason remembered every second of that final, awful countdown, he remembered watching the numbers tick down, he remembered thinking ‘this is it, I’m going to die, this is it’, he remembered still believing that Batman was going to come and save him.
He hadn’t.
“You remain unavenged.”
He hadn’t stopped the Joker.
‘Batman and Robin foil the Joker’s latest plot.’
He’d just found someone else to fill those stupid boots.
Jason had died in fire, trapped in a coffin of broken rubble, and he was going to ensure that Batman learned exactly what that felt like.
They passed the dizzying spires of Manhattan on their approach, and Jason could pick out the exact skyscraper that Nightwing and his Titans called home.
Dick had once given him a phone number and told Jason to call if he ever needed him.
Jason had called, before he went to the airport with a list of woman’s names.
Jason had called, but Dick hadn’t picked up.
“One ticket to Gotham, please.”
A hazy skyline. The faintest scent of salt on the breeze, buried underneath exhaust smoke and city pollution. The grime and darkness and grit that seemed to seep through his shoes as he took a step out of the airport.
He was home.