Chapter Text
During the whole youthful side of his life, ever since his first memory, Jason Todd had been waiting for something like Robin. Caring for his mother, fighting off bullies from a poor kid defenceless against them, stealing a scrap of food from the oblivious checkout clerk to feed the stray cat which lingered outside the rundown apartment he called home, Jason had held onto the belief that someday, somehow, something would happen.
Then one day it did. And it had been exactly all he had hoped for, Jason was finally doing more than he thought he ever could as a street rat of Gotham City. He was now a bird in full flight, soaring higher than a street rat could ever hope to do with legs bound to the ground. That was until reality told him such beliefs were childish and misguided with the force of a crowbar to the skull and a lungful of ash that burned.
The first time it happened, Jason could explain it away as a fluke strangely enough. He wasn’t one to question when these glitches happened, after all, he wasn’t the first to die and come back from the dead. Living in a world with super beings tends to wear off the effect of strange occurrences, even resurrection strangely enough. And oddly enough, he could shrug off the fact that death didn’t mean gone, with little thought. His body still broken as he clawed himself out of the grave however did leave an impression. He remembered it rather vividly in fact. His throat felt raw, his own voice strained from the lack of use in six months. His fingers still bent at the wrong angles dragged against that god-awful expensive wooden casket- fucking Bruce Wayne couldn’t cheap out just this once- his nails ripping from the beds messily, the flesh clinging in strings to the departed nails. More than Jason would have liked to admit, it took his brain some time to figure out to use his belt buckle. He liked to blame that on the fact that not moments ago half his brain matter was missing though he imagined the mortician did an excellent job at making him presentable if it was an open casket. Hard to imagine it was though, Jason had a picture that his head had cracked open in some of the Joker’s final blows. That in those final moments, even if he had somehow managed to get out of the warehouse, it wouldn’t have mattered much with half his brain outside his skull. He had finally managed to splinter the wood enough but much to his dismay he then was choking on dirt. He rather didn’t like the prospect of living again only to die by suffocating on grave dirt but it would be rather fitting for him. His whole life had been a constant state of highs and deathly lows for him. A perpetual knife in the back. He pulled his shirt over his head in an attempt to prevent the onslaught of dirt but it did little to stop the feeling of suffocating as he could only sip at the air and not indulge in it like a greedy aristocrat.
When he had crawled his way from the dirt, the splintered wood dragging against his skin insignificant in contrast to the other wounds on his body, a single hand outstretched to the sky as though he thought the stars to pull him from the earth and his face finally breaking the surface. He grappled at the earth when finally, both arms were free, dirt mixing with blood sticking to his skin and in his freshened wounds. Yet when the cold and refreshing air kissed his skin like little needles, he still felt the earth smothering his face. His heart spiked; the small sips of air he had taken before had turned into panicked intakes like the air was being robbed from him. It took him a second to realise that his dress shirt was still wrapped around his head, his bloody hands wretched it from his face but the world didn’t register to him. Everything had been so blurry, the world just a blend of white, black and blue, and his brain could only comprehend one thing:
Bruce.
B.
He hadn’t realised his feet had found purchase underneath him nor direction until suddenly the world tilted and he was once again staring at the stars. But this time, the stars weren’t blurry shades mixed with black and blue, they glittered like beacons drawing him back home. He craved their familiarity for it. For that sense of direction and belonging, once he had lost as a child and found in Robin. A boy wandering lost from his home and suddenly the porch light was beckoning him home, that he had somewhere to return to. He had so desperately wanted to return home to the stars yet the muffled blurs that blocked those stars had other ideas. And the porch light was gone and replaced with a deadly white. He was lost in it, its entrapping presence which consumed him. He couldn’t find his way home now that he was lost in that ocean of white.
That was what Jason could vividly recall before the burning of the Pit consumed him. Suddenly that white, though suffocating, had been quiet compared to the loudness of the Pit. The green of the Pit wasn’t suffocating, it was burning, incinerating his very being. Talia had been gentle- as gentle as a stoic assassin and the Daughter of the Demon’s Head could be that is- when telling him the rest between his fits of rage. When the ringing in his ears calmed down enough that he could string together her words like a beautiful tapestry which contrasted with the great tragedy it told. Apparently, he had wandered from the cemetery far enough to be discovered by a rather startled couple and brought to a hospital and had fallen into a coma. Yet all Jason could focus on was the fact Bruce hadn’t found him. That Bruce fucking Wayne of Wayne Enterprises hadn’t found him. That the watchful knight of Gotham City hadn’t been able to find his own child. That even when he had been wandering the streets of Gotham, Bruce hadn’t seen him. That a man with so many eyes in that city had been blind to him. Talia didn’t have all the details of his time wandering the streets so blank spots speckled the next few events in his mind but suffice to say the League of Assassins had found him brain dead and ‘animalistic’ as Ra Al Ghul described. Talia feared that Ra’s impatience would wear thin with him. Though responsive and easy to mould, having another blindly obedient assassin wasn’t worth the risk of the Batman’s wrath if he discovered that he had concealed Jason from him. So, Talia did the only thing she thought could make Jason whole once more and threw Jason in the Pit.
He had his first episode three months after that.
Pain. The invisible bugs which crawled all over his skin, under it, he scratched and he clawed yet he couldn’t get them out. Thought to dig them out instead with blunt nails that had been groomed back for this very reason. The burning, it was the burning of the Lazarus Pit inside. It had been simmering under his skin ever since he had been thrown into those water. The waters which bit into his skin and boiled him from the inside out. Ironic, in a sense, that the idea of it sounded so idyllic, waters meant to revive and rejuvenate, yet in contrast, the reality was sinister and twisted. The allure for never-ending life twisted into a cruel joke because this wasn’t life. This was hell and damnation. Everything he thought he had escaped from in death. Why couldn’t he have stayed dead? The anger in him, he could feel it eroding away in his chest, wrapping around his heart like a disease. There was this need in him, compelled by the green which flowed through him like a drug. A drug that yearned for blood and death and carnage. He wanted it from everyone who had hurt him, been there at the Joker’s side as the blows flew down at him. The green which swelled and singed his eyes called for that retribution to be had.
He wanted the Joker, Harley and everyone one of his goons burning with him. It was fair, it was what he was owed. But he also wanted Bruce to pay. His head seized with intent and the fire of the Pit, consuming his entire being and tearing at his soul. Was there even one left?
Death and the Pit had taken so much, how could there be any of Jason Todd left? You’re a killer. You were always going to be. All it took was one bad day… they do deserve it though...
He roared, inhuman and animalistic, bolting from the bed, sweat dripping until the crack of the chain snapped causing him to fall back hard. His eyes glowed with the green of the pit; he could see it in the reflection of her eyes. Talia’s eyes. When he could focus on her and not the muddled haze of his own insanity in these few moments. He screamed at himself, at the horror of it, at the horror he found in himself for her.
The first time, Ra’s had thrown him in a room, locked it and walked away till the madness had passed and he was nothing but rivers of blood etched into his skin. He had done it as a lesson to Talia, a punishment for the use of the Pit against his wishes. Thereafter, it was Talia’s issue to deal with. His Pit madness. Talia had wanted him to murder, to put him in a room with other assassins until the lust for blood was sated and his mind had returned to him soundly. Jason had refused, outright, without hesitation. It was one thing to kill while he was there, in control and he could remember their faces because it was the least some people deserved when working a contract for the League. It was another to kill in the throes of madness. To kill and not even know why. The want to kill blacking out his mind, the want to hurt anything, to bash in their skulls like the Joker had done because any form of retribution would satiate the hunger inside.
He writhed on the ground, breath coming out in harsh short bursts as though to quell the heat of the pit inside him. Joker’s face caved in with a crowbar, just like his had been. It was what he was owed, it was his right. For every other kid in Gotham that had suffered at the clown’s hands, nameless now because there were just too many deaths on the clown’s hands to remember.
And he wanted to see Bruce do it. See the man finally do what any father would have done and beat the clown until his legs wouldn’t work, bent at all the wrong angles, smashed his skull until brain matter spilt and the thing was just a brain-dead mess. Like he had been. Like he had been for months. Because Jason had never had that, had never had someone so blindly loyal to him. So filled with love that they would move heaven and hell for him.
The pit had told him it was just. That it was what he was owed for all the pain he had suffered in his short life. That somehow Bruce could extinguish that green fire in him by just showing that he mattered that much to Bruce. Bruce continued to fail him every moment that madman still drew breath as he had back in Ethiopia. The man didn’t care about him, didn’t want justice for his ‘dead’ son. What hurt was that the simple choice of letting the Joker live meant that thing meant more to Bruce than he ever did, too important to kill for a failed Robin. The low growl bubbled in Jason’s chest, crawling up his throat like a spider ready for a deadly bite.
Then he was jolted, a beacon which he grappled with came out of nowhere to pull him from that darkness, from that cloud of looming green which overtook all his senses.
“Jason.”
The voice was calm and steady, a strong line that Jason could grip onto, it forced Jason to open his eyes which he hadn’t even realised he had clenched shut. He stared at the source for an uncomprehending moment. The woman didn’t so much as flinch at his attention, nor cower at his snarls.
“You are here, Jason. You are with me. It is the 17th of May; it is three forty-five in the afternoon. You trained with me yesterday, you are now going through Pit Rage. It will pass my son; you will overcome it. You will endure.”
When the woman spoke, Jason gripped onto the words like a lifeline tethering him to shore as he drowned in the ocean with no direction towards safety. The haze of the pit madness still roaring inside yet it dissipated with his focus on her. Quelling under her words as though it were an unruly animal finally calming.
“You will emerge, my son.”
Jason gritted his teeth and pressed his head to the floor as though to will the madness out. It was giving him something to ground himself with, weak against the force of the Pit but something tangible. He hadn’t realised that the hyperventilating he had been doing before had eased into longer huffs of air, the wetness of tears dripping to the floor unhindered on his cheeks.