Chapter Text
Jason Todd hated taking the bus.
He hated the fact that there was only one exit–one escape route, and that he was almost always seated too far from it. He hated the constant contact with strangers, any one of whom could be carrying a gun or a bomb or a knife, never mind the fact that Jason himself had all three on his person at any given time.
He hated where this particular bus had been taking him, right before it had come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road.
The thing that had somehow snuck aboard, ripped off the driver’s left arm, and curled up above the glass doors did not help improve this sentiment.
It had a man’s head, its once-blue pupils now milky with death, sitting on top of a writhing mass of arms. Some of its hands scrabbled at the glass windows, fingernails tapping out a meaningless rhythm that made Jason’s s head ache. Others were grasping blindly at the steering wheel.
Its mouth opened, once, twice, as if trying to speak. But no sound came out. A quarter-sized hole, neatly slotted in the center of its forehead, sluggishly oozed out blood.
Jason’s gun was still smoking.
Someone behind him spoke in a shaking voice. Jason could smell the stink of urine.
“Is it dead?”
The head twitched, when it heard the woman’s voice.
Then it smiled, showing far too many teeth, yellowed and cracked like old tombstones. Its arms stilled their distracted movements, muscles cording underneath gray skin.
Though its eyes didn’t move, Jason knew that the thing’s attention was focused solely on him.
He reached for his other gun.
“No.”
It did not lunge, but skittered, spiderlike, across the cramped space, knocking over suitcases and backpack. Hands with too many knuckles pressing flat against the glass windows, making the thing seem impossibly larger, crowding out all the space in the bus.
All the better for Jason, who didn’t need a bigger target but welcomed it, anyway. His second gun blasted a hole in the sea of limbs, spraying blood and viscera on cheap seats. The creature reared back, and uttered its first sound: a screech of absolute agony.
Behind him, someone was screaming. Someone else was praying. But Jason was focused on the injury he had dealt the thing.
The first shot had been a mistake. He had lived outside of Gotham City for too long, and had only ever needed to deal with humans.
But the second gun had been a gift: carved with glyphs and holy symbols and prayers to long-dead gods, it had a good chance of hurting most of the denizens of Gotham City.
The creature was scrabbling back now. Hands clutching at empty air, where previously there had been a mass of limbs. Jason could see the torn muscles trying to knit themselves, bone and yellowed marrow trying to regrow. If he had encountered it within Gotham, where magic hung in the air like smoke, perhaps its ability to heal would be stronger, perhaps it would have given Jason a challenge.
But it had obviously wandered too far, too long from Gotham City’s limits, and now it was paying the price.
Jason strode forward almost leisurely, and he put the barrel of his gun against the cowering thing.
And it seemed, for a moment, to understand its own death. Its milky eyes streamed tears, and its mouth opened.
“Jason, NO–”
His name erupted from its mouth in a chorus of a hundred echoing voices, and Jason felt a sudden chill roll over him.
The thing knew his name.
His body reacted before his mind could, and Jason squeezed the trigger. Its skull exploded in a burst of blood and brains, sheeting all over the front of the bus. Its many arms spasmed, once, twice before curling in on themselves–too many joints, too many knuckles–like a spider carcass left to dry in the sun.
Blood gouted from the hole where its head used to be, and Jason stepped backward to avoid the spreading puddle, breathing hard.
It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, he thought. Ever since his resurrection, a great many things in Gotham have come to know his name. Shadows would slink away from their masters so they could whisper in his ear, begging for a hundred little favors, a man sitting alone on the subway would come to him, offering to exchange alms for secrets. And every once in a while, Jason would encounter a curse, who used his name as a last-ditch effort at survival.
He wondered if being dead, even temporarily, granted him a sort of familiarity with the many horrendous things that lurked in Gotham City.
Jason scowled.
Just another thing to thank Bruce for.
A sudden sputtering sound broke him out of his thoughts, and Jason looked around to find the bus driver. He was slumped in a corner, as far away from the dead creature as he could get. The man had taken off his shirt and had tied it around his bleeding stump. Sweat beaded his face, and he was breathing heavily. A weal of blood dripped down from his lip to his jaw.
Jason knelt down next to him, frowning. The man’s face was the color of curdled milk; the shirt had obviously made for an ineffective tourniquet. Jason had a few charms in his utility belt, but they were mostly trinkets–stealth, darkness, the odd bit of glamour. He hadn’t stocked up on any major spells or curses since he had left Gotham City several years ago.
The driver took one look at Jason’s face and shook his head.
“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t waste your resources, kid. I got a priest in there that can regrow it for me. I just hope you and the rest of these tourists can walk the rest of the way. No way I’m driving after the day I’ve had.”
Jason looked outside. Even from a distance, he could already make out the glowing city lights, the silhouette of twisted buildings, reaching out to the sky like a drowning man’s fingers.
He shrugged.
“Excuse me,” a new voice broke in, Jason recognized it as one of the civilians who had screamed earlier. “What about us?”
It was a man, his crisp white dress shirt stained with sweat and vomit. He looked like he was struggling to stand.
“You should sit down,” Jason said. “Put your head between your legs. It’ll help.”
But the man shook his head and instead addressed the bus driver. “We still have to get into the city, you’re telling us we should walk?”
It was then that Jason took a long look at his fellow passengers. During his long ride from Star City to Gotham, he had only glanced at them long enough to assess them as possible threats. But now, he really looked at them.
Most of them were dressed plainly for travel: cotton t-shirts and warm sweaters, but it was their jewelry that made Jason narrow his eyes. Silver earrings, thin bands of beaten gold gleaming on a few of their wrists. Fingers sparkling with diamonds.
Gold was all but useless in Gotham, only good for selling at a pawnshop for a quick buck.
Silver, on the other hand, hungered for magic, and took it in its teeth like a starving wolf. Back when he had been Robin, he had used silver rings to store the spells he had bought or to shield himself from a curse, the metal greedily eating away at it until it ran too hot to touch.
But it was iron that was the most important. It was iron that dispelled most of the glamours that were woven and worn like a second skin, spells would encounter it only to dissipate harmlessly like smoke.
There had even been rumors of assassinations carried out with slivers of iron fillings poured into someone’s drink, the targets dying with spots of blood blooming on their lips, unable to comprehend their sudden, violent mortality.
The other passengers wore no such things.
The driver was right. They were tourists.
“Consider this your lucky day, then. Gotham will eat you alive,” the driver spat, a glob of blood and spittle on the floor.
He was already hobbling his way back to the driver’s seat, unmindful of the eruption of protests.
“H-hey, we paid for our tickets, we were supposed to get off at the next stop!”
“We can’t enter Gotham unless it’s by bus, can’t you call the company…?”
Jason spared a quick glance at the knot of passengers, the fast-growing murmurs of discontent, coming in as quick as the tide. A quick assessment told him that no one else was injured, only growing increasingly angry at the driver who was studiously ignoring them all.
It was clear that the bus wasn’t going to move any time soon, and with a quick nod to the driver, Jason Todd decided to pick up his rucksack and decided to walk.
Despite the passenger’s protests, it really was only a short walk to Gotham City. And even if it had been far, exhaustion didn’t come easy for Jason.
Then again, for most people, it wasn’t the distance that was the problem.
It was the fact that the city didn’t always welcome visitors.
As Jason walked, thick fog pooled at his ankles, like the tide coming in at a shoreline. But the lights twinkling from the buildings remained as bright as ever, the silhouette of buildings growing steadily clearer.
He always wondered what it meant, that he could see Gotham City even from a distance.
There were those who didn’t, of course. Those who could stand at the same place Jason was standing in–the same time, the same day–and see nothing at all.
And then there were the ones who could almost sense it. The ones who, just for the briefest second, see the impressions of strange, twisted buildings amidst the shifting fog. The flash of strange lights, some burning with colors that no one left alive has a name for.
He supposed that those were the ones who went mad. Spending their lives looking for a place that will never open its gates for them.
Jason kept walking, feeling a chill begin to form in the air. And though the sun had been shining when he left Star City that morning, snow began to fall. Barely perceptible at first, it began to fall harder as he got closer to Gotham City. Small clouds of frost formed in front of his face as he exhaled, and he nearly smiled at the sight of it.
Despite everything that had happened, he still needed to breathe.
That was a relief.
Some part of him was still human.
But the snowflakes that had landed on his bare skin stayed there and didn’t melt. It might as well have landed on the sheet of someone else’s rooftop, the cold concrete headstone of a grave or–
Or a corpse.
The thought rose quickly in the back of his head, thick and bitter as vomit. Jason shook his head, trying to clear it. It wouldn’t do him any good to be distracted here, at the city’s borders. He had heard stories of people walking through days of endless fog, only to end up back at the same place, just outside the city limits.
Perhaps the bus driver had been right. Perhaps those people were the lucky ones.
But for Jason Todd, it didn’t matter. For as he approached, Gotham City burned as bright as the day Jason Todd had left it, welcoming him home.
Once whatever strange magic had summoned the fog dissipated, Gotham City exploded into view, a riot of sight and sound.
Towering buildings sprung into existence all around him, amalgamations of magic and twisted steel, their architecture varying every time he blinked. In one second, it was a modern skyscraper, one that would not have looked out of place in Star City, in another it looked more like a cathedral, carved out of cold marble, guarded by gargoyles with twisting faces.
Jason shook his head, and reminded himself not to stare at the buildings for too long.
Neon signs dotted the Gotham skyline like stars, leaving the streets puddled with their burning lights. Vendors with cardboard kiosks littered the side streets, selling trinkets like cats’ footfalls or the spittle of birds, bottled in small, dark jars.
A 24-hour cafe advertised drinks mixed liberally with doses of courage or tea that had been steeped with inspiration, a favorite among filmmakers and writers.
And all around them, strange, inhuman creatures moved in the shadows. They resembled the stone gargoyles that guarded the rooftops of old buildings, loping in the shadows with the easy grace of primates. They melted in and out of dark corners, as fluid as ink on water, as incorporeal as smoke. He could hear their voices echoing in his head, like the chittering of insects.
Watchers, you used to call them, though they had no eyes that Jason could see. They had existed in Gotham for as long as he could remember, hanging off the damaged light poles or lying on the sides of buildings, as motionless as statues.
Everyone tried to ignore the watchers, because no one knew how to get rid of them. Certainly, several people–human or otherwise–have tried. But they were all gone, and the watchers remained.
Come back to the manor. He needs you.
The words rose in the back of his head. A sudden pain, lanced its way across his brow, so sudden and so sharp that for a few seconds, his vision swam.
Watchers collected secrets, the way rooftop gutters collected rainwater, sifting them out from the heads of the hundreds of people who passed by them on the square.
Dead children’s faces staring back at him, their faces distorted into wide smiles. Jason so angry that he couldn’t even count the amount of dead bodies.
The sound of iron splitting flesh, the crack of bone as loud as thunder.
He had not screamed. He didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
It was the car horn that saved him, shrill enough and loud enough that it broke Jason out of his trance. He jumped aside to avoid being flattened by a car, though he could see no driver inside.
He was breathing hard, cold sweat dripping down his face like tears.
He hadn’t felt cold in a long, long time.
High above him, a watcher was staring sightlessly. Jason wondered if he imagined the tongue that slithered, snakelike out of its mouth.
Come back to the manor. He needs you.
On unsteady feet, Jason walked to the nearest alleyway he could find. The one he found stunk of piss and garbage. Not a second sooner, because Jason found himself doubling-over and vomiting, and the taste in his mouth was as bitter as memories.
It was already nearing midnight when Jason arrived at the manor.
Unlike the rest of Gotham, which always burned bright with magic and revelry, Jason’s childhood home was silent. Even his feet moved soundlessly across the graveled path that led to the driveway.
His skin prickled uneasily at the lack of sound.
Even in Star City, silence was never a good thing. It usually meant that a crime was taking place, a lockpick carefully sliding into place, a hostage with a gun to their head, sweat beading on their skin, their screams pressed against the edges of their throats like broken glass.
Silence was the asylum, and the way he had counted his breaths in quiet agony, waiting for Bruce to come and save him.
Silence, after all, was the way it ended.
The slow trickle of blood from a gunshot wound that would have been nowhere near fatal if he had been found. If Bruce had rescued him.
It had taken him a long, long time to die.
No wonder the first thing he had done upon being brought back to life was scream.
Jason realized that he was breathing hard, pale clouds of frost forming across his face. His hand was poised above the doorbell, fingers clenched so tightly that his knuckles ached. He didn’t know how long he had been standing there.
The doorbell, like the rest of the manor, was old, and so ornate it bordered on ugly. It rested inside a gargoyle’s mouth, carved to make it look like it was screaming. The metal, Jason noted, was cold iron and its message was clear: no fae would be welcome within the Wayne Manor premises.
For a long time after his resurrection, Jason had avoided cold iron, sure that his flesh would smoke and the fat would blister and burn as soon as he touched it.
His hand closed into a fist.
And he decided to take the backdoor instead.
It was no easy feat, sneaking around Wayne Manor. It was an old house, perhaps even older than Gotham, and it kept its secrets well. As a child, he had known thieves who would try to break in, to steal secrets or silver or both, only to be found the next day wandering Gotham Square, their minds and clothing in tatters.
He could feel its magic brushing against his skin, twining around his ankles like a starving rat. And for one terrible second, Jason thought that he would end up as a madman on the street, mistaken for a thief or a stranger, and he could not quite tell which was worse.
But then the magic retreated, and he could hear it: the telltale sound of a single window being unlatched. And he knew, without looking, that it was the window to his bedroom. Jason made short work of climbing up to it, the manor walls were overgrown kudzu vines, thick enough to strangle a man and they held his weight easily.
When his boots finally made contact with the plush carpet, Jason looked around. His old bedroom was as familiar as childhood, as sharp as memory. Nothing had changed since he left. Not the color of the sheets, not the books he had left unread on his nightstand, or the posters on the wall that he had shocked Alfred by somehow managing to put them up.
Jason had expected everything to be covered in a fine layer of dust, it had been a long time since he had been here after all.
But everything was pristine, carefully dusted, and kept organized, as if waiting for a child to come back from school. It made his stomach churn, the idea that his absence could have such little impact. One would think he had merely been on vacation.
Carefully, he takes the sheaf of paper out of his pocket. Creased and wrinkled, from the many times Jason had folded and unfolded it. There, in elegant handwriting was the reason for his return to Gotham.
Come back to the manor. He needs you.
It was unsigned, but he would have recognized the careful handwriting anywhere; he had seen it a thousand times during his childhood. The chores list that hung on the wall, the letter that had been written to his teachers whenever he had been too sick or too injured to go to school, the notes he would find next to his bed after he had snuck back in.
When he had left Gotham City, Jason didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He hadn’t even known where he was going himself. At the time, the only thing he had known was that he wanted to get as far away from the city as possible.
That the letter had found him in Star City was pure coincidence. The month before that he had been in Santa Prisca, and the month before that, Metropolis. It made him uneasy to think that Alfred could have been keeping track of his movement the whole time.
Come back to the manor. He needs you.
And hadn’t he come back, like a whipped dog, the moment Alfred told him he was needed? Jason’s stomach twisted painfully, the urge to vomit burning against his throat. He would have been happy never to see Gotham City again, never to smell the stink of magic again, never to feel it against his skin.
But there had been something in Bruce’s expression the night of his resurrection. Something like grief, something like agony, and Jason had never been able to forget it.
He had never had the courage to ask Bruce what it meant, either.
His old room suddenly felt suffocating, as if the walls would close in and crush him between them if he stayed for just a few seconds longer. He felt the piece of paper crumble underneath his hands, fingernails digging into the meat of his palms.
How many times had he wanted to do that? How many times did he look down at that single sentence and thought that this time, this time he would not come when Gotham came calling?
Come back to the manor, he needs you.
Jason. You’re alive. You came back.
Jason straightened up and tossed Alfred’s message to a dark corner in his room, to collect dust and cobwebs, and he went downstairs to face his father.
Wayne Manor was an old place, and like most old places in Gotham, magic had been built into its foundation. Hallways that seemed to twist and turn endlessly, candelabras whose wicks burst into golden light the moment someone enters a room, whispers that seem to originate from darkened corners, ceasing the moment one turns their attention to them.
Even Bruce, who hated anything to do with magic, had used the manor to his advantage. The ancient tunnels that ran underneath its smooth marble floors had been repurposed into the Batcave. And even as he had ripped off the creeping ivy and driven cold iron into the crumbling stone, the house still sought to protect its remaining heir.
Come back to the manor, he needs you.
Jason stood silently, feeling sweat collecting in his palms. His heart beat a steady drum in his chest. Slower now, perhaps, than a regular human’s. But he could feel it just the same, painfully beating against his ribs.
Getting to the Batcave was easy, the manor was full of secret entrances to it: a hidden passageway in the back of a closet, a fireplace that will not burn you, if you decided to walk into its flames.
And Jason’s favorite: a shelf in the library, that was not a shelf at all. All it took was the pulling of a specific book for the dark wood to melt away into stone, for paper to melt into a stairway that led down into the dark.
Jason waited, his stomach twisting painfully, for the illusion to fade away, for dark wood to melt away into stone, revealing the twisting staircase that led to the Batcave.
And waited.
He thought of the doorbell. It had been installed by Bruce, he knew, and ever since his resurrection, Jason didn’t have the courage to use it. Afraid that the iron would eat away at his skin like acid.
Finally, after several long seconds, the stairway manifested itself, and cold relief trickled down Jason’s back like rainwater.
It seemed that the manor still recognized him, at least.
But the candles that used to light the staircase were gone, and Jason frowned. He didn’t need to be reminded that these days, he could see in the dark as clearly as he could during the day. Perhaps he was still welcome in this place, but there was no denying that the manor knew that he had changed.
Jason went down into the dark, his footsteps so utterly silent against the crumbling stone that he might as well have been a ghost.
That he might as well not have been there at all.
Jason found Bruce hunched over the Batcomputer. His clothes were rumpled, as if he had shot straight out of bed and went down to the Batcave to keep working. It was something that Jason was painfully familiar with: Bruce’s obsessive need for answers.
Jason carefully studied the massive screen. It showed footage from the hundreds of cameras that Bruce had planted throughout the city. Only half of them were even functional: technology rarely behaved the way it was intended to in Gotham City. The abandoned Gotham Electronics empire was a testament to that. They used to sell everything from televisions to laptops to the newest model of iPhone. Until something happened that made the wires grow as thick as kudzu vines, and just as hungry: twining and strangling anything within reach.
Some crawled up the walls, while others dug deep, like the roots of an oak tree, to split the foundation and make a new one, this time made out of metal and crackling electricity.
And others still, had strung themselves around the legs of store employees. The ones who have either been too slow or too stupid to run when they realized that something had gone wrong in the store. The cables had climbed up their limbs like plants seeking sunlight, thicker and thicker until they couldn’t move.
On a good day, it was said that one could see the employees' thoughts being broadcasted on the cracked television sets, begging for release.
Jason tried to guess at the case that had Bruce so stumped. Most of the cameras were pointed at plants. Colorful bundles of flowers: roses with thick heavy blooms, sunflowers reaching out towards the sun, hydrangeas still wet with dew.
“Poison Ivy, again?” he asked, by way of greeting.
His voice echoed in the hollow cavern, reflected back at him a thousand, ghostly choruses. In some of them, Jason could’ve sworn he heard his name.
Pamela Isley was just one of the city’s many tragic tales: a brilliant gardener who came to Gotham City, lured by the promise of its unique flora of the city’s. Plants nourished by the city’s soil grew strangely, fueled by magic and perhaps, by the hundreds of corpses buried in it.
Magic, especially the kind of magic powerful enough to build a city, required sacrifice, after all.
It was said that some of the plants that grew in Gotham City still remembered the taste of blood, of human flesh, and after that could not be sated with fresh water and sunlight.
No one knew that happened in those first few days when she first arrived in the city, when she made a home for herself in one of the abandoned greenhouses. All anyone knew was what came after: the woman who came out, her skin as green as forest foliage and burdened by the sort of madness that was not of human make.
Bruce grunted, as if in answer to Jason’s words. Finally, he turned around to face Jason.
“Jason,” he said.
Jason thought of the watchers and their unchanging faces, the way their voices seemed to hollow out the inside of his skull, the way they seemed to pull the worst of his memories to the surface. He thought of Bruce’s face the night of his resurrection, when the lines there had been as deep as mountain crags. It was nothing like Bruce today. His expression was so still that he might as well have been carved from stone.
Jason. you’re alive. You came back.
He found himself suppressing a shudder
“I thought you were staying in Star City,” Bruce continued.
Jason scowled. Leave it to Bruce to speak to him as if nothing happened, as if hadn’t been three years since they last spoke.
As if he hadn’t brought Jason back to life, and then left him to deal with the consequences of it. His anger was like a rising tide, and Jason found himself having to speak through gritted teeth
“Alfred sent me a note. He said that you needed help with a case.”
He gestured to the screen. One of the cameras had already broken, its footage showing only ceaseless static. Every now and again, he’d see the silhouette of someone’s face in it
Bruce turned back to the computer, and though he said nothing, Jason could tell that he was angry.
Not at him, though.
During his time as Robin, he had learned to read into Bruce’s silences the way a fisherman would learned read the sky. Even as a child, he knew the importance of being able to predict the people around him.
And the way Bruce was acting right now was familiar: the way his frustration seemed to fill all of the empty space around him, like dark thunderheads rolling over the city skyline.
This was Bruce whenever he was stumped, whenever the answer to a problem was just out of reach. He never could stand not knowing every single answer to every single problem.
A small part of Jason wondered if Bruce now hated him, too.
The thought was like lightning fizzling in his chest: a sudden shock of heat that spread all the way down to his fingertips.
Bruce, after all, was the one who made him like this.
And it was Bruce who avoided his eyes as if the sight of them was painful to him.
Tell me, who do you hate, boy?
Joker’s voice rose from the depths of Jason’s mind. He could feel his hands curling into fists, his fingernails digging half-moons into his palms. Even death did not seem to release Joker’s hold on him, and a part of Jason wondered if his voice would follow him forever, like a ghost.
Once, he had answered Batman.
Once, he would have believed it.
There were days when Jason still believed it.
Batman was still not looking at him. Instead, he turned back to the screens, as if to study them.
There was a pit in Jason’s gut at the sight, as if he had been hollowed out and left empty.
Who do you hate?
He found that he did not want to answer.
“Three people dead in the past week.” Batman’s voice echoed across the cave, and it cut through Jason’s thoughts as cleanly as a knife. “All of them were found with plants growing out of them.”
He gestured towards the screen, and Jason found himself studying them more closely. The plants were pretty, the kind that he would see at the store window of a flower shop. But the more he examined them, the more they appeared wrong somehow, twisted.
He realized that their anatomy didn’t make sense. Roses burst from crawling vines, sunflowers grew from thick shrubs, hydrangeas dotted the dark earth, as thick as weeds.
One of the roses seemed to closing slowly, petal by petal, only to bloom once again from the bud, just as slowly.
It looked as if it was breathing. He imagined one of them growing from someone’s corpse, the stems pushing up through their skin like a germinating seed. Fear skittered along his skin like spiders, but Jason was careful not to let any of it show on his face. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly steady.
“You think it’s a curse?”
“It could be.”
That would explain why Alfred had sent Jason the note. Magic and Batman had never mixed well together; it was too unpredictable, too uncontrollable. It couldn’t be pinned down to a cork board, taken apart and studied. It was the reason for the iron gargoyles that guarded every doorway to Wayne Manor. The salt circles that Alfred had insisted on drawing around his bed as a child.
The only time that Jason had remembered Batman using magic was the night of his resurrection. That night, his eyes had glowed the same color as the swirling waters of the Lazarus Pit. He had looked as if he had been casting spells all his life.
Jason’s throat felt dry. It took him several seconds before he could speak.
“Got any leads?”
“A few.”
Jason waited for Batman to elaborate.
He didn’t.
It meant that he didn’t find the leads worth chasing. Jason took in a deep breath, let it out slowly.
He could feel his own exhaustion like a weight on his shoulders.
He had forgotten what it felt like: to be Robin.
He hadn’t been Robin for nearly five years.
Not since that night, when the Joker had captured him and twisted everything inside him beyond recognition. Until he couldn’t see himself as Robin anymore, until he couldn’t see himself as anyone anymore.
And yet, a part of him–he didn’t know how large–couldn’t sit by while a curse burned through Gotham City and its people. Humans weren’t the only ones living in the city. There were fae, too. Some he had known since childhood. And more still: merfolk, shifters, and gods both great and small. Creatures so old that no one alive remembered their names.
Curses tended to move fast, gaining power with each death they took, and if no one stopped them, they could spread across Gotham City like a plague. He imagined the city lights flickering out amidst the thick fog, the town square growing silent. He imagined plants growing out of living skin, breaking through someone’s glamour as if it were glass.
And he found himself making a decision.
“I have some contacts that can look into it,” Jason said. “I’ll send you a message when I find some new leads.”
When Batman didn’t answer, Jason figured that their discussion was done. He turned around and prepared himself for the long walk back upstairs.
“Jason.”
There was something in his father’s voice that made him freeze. It was the general’s voice, the Batman voice. It was the voice that had waited for him every night after patrol to say, “Report.”
It was the voice that had first called him, Robin.
Who do you hate?
Jason turned around, his skin feeling as cold as ice.
Batman was finally facing him, and he looked at Jason as if he was a stranger.
“We don’t know what this is yet,” he said slowly. “Be careful.”
There were quieter parts in Gotham City, the places that didn’t burst to life with magic and vivid color. Instead, they exuded a sense of quiet resignation. The people who came here were not dreamers, still carrying the dust of the real world on their shoulders and burning with the desire to change the world for the better, they were not spellcasters who could bend reality to their will with the single world.
The people who came to Park Row were the dregs of society, and they came here to die. However long that may take. And for some of the citizens of Gotham, that was a very long time indeed.
He never could understand why you chose to stay here.
As children, the two of you had promised never to come back to his place again. And for good reason, Park Row was a place where time stood still. There were still the same buildings, filled with people who gazed at him with haunted eyes.
There was even the same horned beggar, his rack of antlers broken and bent, shaking an empty tin can at passersby. A half-fae woman, scantily dressed and shivering in the cold, calling out to possible customers. The glamour she had woven for herself had grown so thin that Jason could practically see through it: the wrinkles peeking out from underneath the illusion of smooth skin. One eye blind and milky with cataracts.
Even the air felt different: heavy with the stink of pollution and unwashed bodies and magic gone rancid. Neon signs, long disconnected from any power grid, flickered eerily, leaving vivid puddles of light on the streets. Someone lay unmoving on the sidewalk, his eyes completely black and streaming tears, many winged insects curling around his face to drink at the liquid streaming from his eyes. Jason wrinkled his nose as he passed.
A new type of drug, maybe.
He found your place easily enough, it was still the same place you had stayed in three years ago.
Before he left Gotham City.
He could feel the same security spells that the two of you had placed together on the property, like ghostly fingers pressing into his skull, looking for any sign of ill will towards the person inside, and then retreating when they found none.
The illusion that turned your door into part of the wall, however, was solely yours. Jason raised his hand and knocked on the cold concrete.
His knuckles made a sound as if he struck wood.
He could hear shuffling inside.
“Coming!”
The door swung open with a force that would have knocked Jason off his feet if it had hit him. For a moment, Jason stood there, as if struck dumb. He realized that this is the first time the two of you had seen each other in three years.
That he had not even say goodbye.
He found that he did not quite know what to say. You looked drastically different, but that meant little, to someone who wove glamour as easily as a seamstress wove new clothes to wear.
Your eyes, however, remained the same. Although Jason knew that you could change them, too. As a child, he had always wondered if that was for his benefit. So even with an endless parade of faces, he would always be able to find you in a crowd.
Jason knew that he looked different, too.
The Lazarus Pit had erased all traces of his previous life, as if he had been born anew in its boiling waters. All of his scars were gone, the skin as smooth and unfamiliar as a stranger’s.
It had even erased the brand, too. And yet he would never forget the heat of it, pressing into his face, the stink of his own bubbling flesh, and the way he had screamed until his voice broke and there was nothing left but a dry clicking in his throat.
And then there were his eyes.
Once blue, they were now a vivid green, the same color as the Lazarus Pit.
No one in Gotham could look at him and not realize that he had been touched by powerful magic.
He realized, with a jolt, that he could not remember if he had visited you after his resurrection. .
“Well, Jason Todd. You certainly took your time about it, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse.
He had screamed until his voice broke and he is surprised there is no dry clicking in the back of his throat.
You pushed out your bottom lip into a pout and did not answer, forcing Jason to press on.
“I’ve got a case. A new curse, I think. Something that makes plants grow inside people.”
“Typical,” you sniffed. “The first time I’ve seen you in years, and the first thing you talk about is business.”
He could feel the corners of his lips twitching. You weren’t part of the fae, not really, though you often liked to pretend to be as proud and as haughty as the rest of them. But if you had truly been upset with him, you never would have opened the door. Jason could feel the stiffness in his shoulders unraveling. There was no trace of Wayne Manor or Bruce here, and you acted as if nothing had changed between the two of you.
“I’m sorry,” he said it sincerely, even as he suppressed a smile. “I bought some souvenirs, if that helps.”
“I suppose I could be convinced,” you said, hesitantly.
You opened the door a little wider and over your shoulder, he could see the familiar couch that he had often slept in back when he had been Robin. The same painting hanging on the wall. The same stack of books you’ve often sworn that you’d get to reading.
A kettle was whistling in the background.
Then your face split into a wide grin, your eyes dancing with excitement and it felt as if he never left Gotham City at all.
“Welcome home, Jason Todd. It’s good to have you back.”