Work Text:
Round 2
The nightmare starts off like most others: Jason is sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in a coffin. This time, however, he realises that it’s just a nightmare. Lucid dreaming, he tells himself, Bruce is a master of it. He just needs to fall asleep and he’ll wake up back in his safe house in his own bed.
Round 3
He wakes up in the coffin. Jason Todd is, for the second time in his life, sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in a coffin. And this time, he takes in all the details that scream it’s reality. In his memories, he can always see the white of the silk, feel the worms crawling through his skin, even though neither of those things were possible. Now, he’s in sterile darkness. He needs to get out of the coffin.
When he was with the League and the All Caste, he insisted on practicing what to do if he was ever buried alive. Now he finds the weak spots in the coffin easily and pushes through with all the force his broken body will allow. The soil comes down and he comes up, crawling onto the grass. Most of his bones are broken, he’s fairly sure his right lung is collapsed, there’s an aneurysm in his brain, waiting to burst like a ticking bomb. He needs to get to hospital; he needs to contact Bruce. There’s an alarm on the side of the coffin, built to go off if a grave digger lifts the latch. Jason triggers it, the noise blaring in his ears, knowing a similar noise will be going off in the cave. He should stay awake but he’s hurt and he’s exhausted and his eyes fall shut without his permission.
“Jason?” Hands are cupping his face.
He opens his eyes, coming nose to nose with the Bat-cowl. “I need to go to hospital.” Jason tells him.
“We’ll get Leslie —” Bruce starts.
“Hospital, Bruce,” Jason argues. “My head really hurts and I think my brain’s swelling.”
“Hospital,” Bruce agrees quickly. He scoops Jason into his arms and runs to the Batmobile.
Jason doesn’t really remember much for a while after that. He remembers a lot of people being around for a while, Bruce cradling his hand and telling him he’ll be okay, Alfred reading to him, Dick awkwardly standing over him and saying he’s going to be around more often, that he should have been before, but it’s all fuzzy, dreamlike.
They wean him off the drugs and things come with a lot more clarity. He’s definitely sixteen again, definitely in hospital, definitely unable to move the left side of his body. The doctors say that this isn’t a surprise and prescribe him physio, speech and occupational therapy, Dick tells him that he’s going to be there every step of the way, Alfred and Bruce start redesigning the manor to make it accessible for him.
He goes home six months later, able to walk a small amount with support, enough to transfer himself from his wheelchair to somewhere else at least. He can talk again, he can tend to his needs enough to function mostly independently. Everyone says he’s made a miraculous recovery considering the damage done. He’ll never be a vigilante again but considering everything vigilantism cost him, he’s comfortable with that.
To his horror, Tim is taller than him when he meets him. Tim of course takes this horror and disgust as being against him personally and immediately launches into his argument about why Bruce needs a Robin. Jason laughs and tells him he’s just taller than he expected. Tim looks surprised at that and Jason reminds himself that this is probably the first time that Tim’s ever been called tall. With an adult height of five foot six, it’s probably the only time that Tim will be called tall. But Leslie predicts Jason will hit five foot nothing at best so he lets the kid have it. Tim starts to talk about how they’ll be in the same classes next year and then asks if he has any advice on being Robin. “Don’t trust strangers,” is all Jason can really tell him.
Life continues on. Jason thrives at school and thanks his height for the fact people keep asking how many years he’s been moved up rather than realising he’s actually two years behind. He does Tim’s homework for him and in exchange, Tim finds ways to distract Dick and Bruce when they’re getting overbearing. He gets a couple of internships and volunteering gigs for his college application, including a ‘civilian’ internship at Titans Tower, which primarily consists of him keeping an eye on the army of weird little meta kids that Dick and co. have adopted/kidnapped, typical Bat behaviour really. He tries a variety of sports, gets reasonably good at one-armed archery with the help of a custom bow from Roy. Life is decent and no one needs to know about the Pit or the All-Caste or the life he lived before.
It’s five am and Essence is sat on his windowsill. “Are you ready to stop running yet?” she asks.
“Who are you?” Jason asks, trying to play oblivious.
She laughs, almost bitter. “You’re not as good of a liar as you think.” She tells him. “I know you know who you are, what you were. Now come on, we’re going back to the Acres of All. Ducra’s sourced a Pit, you will be a fighter again.”
“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Jason tells her. “I’m sick of cheating death, sick of killing people and I’m so fucking glad to be rid of the Pit.”
“You’ll retain your old level of control over it,” Essence tells him.
“Great, I love shooting people who trigger one of my many trauma responses,” Jason rolls his eyes. “I’m not going.”
Essence looks at him critically, one hand idly thumbing over the metal of the blood blade. “I’m an immortal being, made from the shadows left by distant suns before ours was even glowing. I have seen every beginning and end of this world and every creature on it, do you really think I can’t make you go?”
“Bruce!” Jason yells, making himself cry and hyperventilate.
Essence dissolves into the shadow of his wardrobe as Bruce rushes into the room.
“Jason, what’s wrong?”
Jason blabbers about a nightmare and asks if he can sleep in Bruce’s room tonight.
Bruce agrees immediately, debating transferring Jason over to his wheelchair before just carrying him out of the room.
Jason watches the vague outline of Essence glower in the corner of his room before Bruce closes the door behind him.
Essence follows him for the next few days, riding around in his own shadow, and he ignores her, making sure to never be alone for long enough for her to take him. “The world will end if you don’t come with me,” she whispers in his ear while Dick is busy talking to the Titans.
“Find someone else,” he whispers back.
“What was that, Jay?” Dick asks, looking up from his video call.
“Nothing, just thinking aloud,” Jason chuckles, trying to hide his wince as Essence digs invisible claws into his back.
“In Nepali?” Dick quirks an eyebrow. “When did you even learn to speak that?”
“Got bored in hospital,” Jason replies.
Dick nods and unlike any other Bat, he’s probably taken his word for it, overly trusting Dickhead. “Teach me some time, I want to learn another language.”
“Yeah, course,” Jason smiles and then gets roped into the meeting with the Titans.
There’s a gala today and Bruce is helping Jason get into his tuxedo for the event. “Can you stay in your own room tonight?” he asks Jason as he ties his bowtie.
“I sleep better in your room,” Jason argues, making his voice slightly whiny and petulant.
“Jason, has something happened?”
“The Joker beat me to death.” Jason says, playing the pity card.
Bruce doesn’t look happy with that excuse, but Jason can tell he’s won the argument this time. “Okay, you can stay in my room.”
Jason should have known that that wouldn’t be the end of it. He now has appointments with a trauma therapist twice a week rather than the previous weekly meetings, Bruce having even informed her of his current clinginess. Either Dick or Bruce attend all his PT and OT sessions and Tim gets to act as his personal bodyguard at school. Alfred seems reluctant to even let him leave the manor in the first place. He’s either going to have to accept his inevitable kidnapping or come clean about the fact this isn’t his first life before he finds himself wrapped in bubble wrap and surgically attached to at least one of the Bats at any given time.
In the end he comes clean, Bruce looking about ready to put him on anti-psychotics before he summons one of the All-Blades, the All-Caste's markings glowing through his shirt. He’s pulled before the Justice League and Diana verifies he at least believes his statements to be true. Then the DEO and STAR both want to look at him and Bruce looms in the corner like some angry vulture as they run their tests. He gets to watch the entire Trinity threaten Essence, the poor woman actually looking slightly cowed before she disappears off elsewhere to tell Ducra that they have to respect Jason’s decision or else.
The world ends before anyone can really stop it. The world glows with fear and then gradually it fades out as the Untitled consume it. Jason won’t give them that satisfaction from him. He makes a stand, All-Blade brandished in hand. He kills two of them. It doesn’t matter. He dies. He’s twenty.
Round 4
For the third, or in hindsight fourth, time in his life, Jason Todd is sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in his own coffin. He breaks out, this time managing to worsen a break in his leg as he does. The skin breaks and he’s bleeding. He scrambles for the alarm and pulls before he passes out.
Bruce holds his hand and looks sad. Jason doesn’t want Bruce to look sad. “Buh,” the word comes out wrong, but Bruce holds him all the same.
He makes noises that Jason doesn’t understand but that’s okay. He’s here and that matters. Bruce died last time but he’s Bruce, he’s, dark with the spikey bits and Jason can’t remember much, but he knows Bruce can always fix things.
He goes home eventually and Tim acts like he’s a stranger and Steph and Cass and Duke and Dami aren’t here yet. Jason wants to fix that but he doesn’t really have the words anymore and no one understands why he’s crying about them not being here. He spends a lot of time relearning skills but it’s really fucking difficult. A lot of the time his thoughts are just blurry or it feels like there’s some sort of block stopping him from swapping from one task to another. Everyone’s good about it, they celebrate what he can do, help with what he can’t.
Essence is in his room and he remembers this being a bad thing but he also remembers not going with her was bad. She talks to him, asks him if he’s ready to go. And he’s not quite sure where but he remembers the feeling of fear, remembers that it was his fault, and he nods along in agreement, he needs to stop that from happening again.
The Pit hits him hard, having gone seven years without it, the rage clawing at the back of his head is difficult to keep in check. It tells him to press the blades to Talia’s throat and he jerks as far away from her as possible. He’s not the Pit. It’s just thoughts. Just thoughts that he can acknowledge and let go of. He just has to live with intrusive thoughts powered by evil, rage magic for the rest of his life. He punches through a wall and breaks half his knuckles.
Pit thrumming through his veins, All-Blades in hand, he charges into battle against the Untitled. A lifetime ago they killed everyone he loved, this time they made him go in the fucking Pit again. It’s a fucking massacre, it almost kills him, it does kill them.
He takes his victory when he wakes up a few days later in the Acres of All. Seventeen years old with the prophecy fulfilled, he tells Essence and Ducra to leave him alone from now on in a Pit-fuelled hissy fit he’ll later feel bad for. After that he kills Ra’s, shreds through the League of Assassins and takes Damian back to Gotham.
He returns to Gotham five months after he left, finding out that his kidnapping has been a high-profile case. He arrives on Wayne Manor’s doorstep, over a foot taller than he’s meant to be, hair streaked with white and eyes more green than blue, but Alfred recognises him, and he’s pulled into one hug, then another, then the Damian drama happens and the question of how Jason knew comes out. Jason tells them all of it, finding himself wrapped in Dick’s arms as he breaks down. They’re all trying to find ways to make sure they remember the resets too, Bruce is immensely eager to do the All-Caste training, although Jason thinks he also really wants pre-cognition for himself. And Jason has to tell them that the training would kill them or destroy their minds or destroy their minds then kill them. Besides, he won this time. Hopefully it will be the last.
Life continues after that. He doesn’t trust himself to do a civilian job, he’s still too quick to anger and civilians are too... squishy. But he joins the Teen Titans then the actual Titans and eventually the Justice League. He’s good at his job too, a good enough fighter that the true metas don’t have to save him often at all, even if like most Bats he’s primarily kept around for his detective skills and battle strategies.
He eventually ends up with Roy this time around. He likes to think he’s a good stepdad to Lian and eventually he starts getting Father's Day cards and she stops complaining that he’s not Cheshire. Life is good, he earns a wage from the League and him and Roy act like prattish trust fund babies for the media.
Everyone else grows older, he does not, some little left over curse from All-Caste training. There’s a mixture of envy and pity in that as he watches his family enter their middle ages, watches Bruce’s hair grow grey and start to recede. They bury him next to Alfred and then Tim due to an unlucky accident. Slowly, they all end up there and once Lian is dead and buried, Jason disappears into the desert. He finds Artemis there and they travel for a long time, sometimes getting so lost in the stars that a hundred years will pass by the time they get to another civilization. Every now and then, Diana and Clark, also stuck in immortality, will drag him off on some League mission but there’s new generations now with better techniques, better equipment, none of their old generation are necessary for long.
It’s an alien invasion that kills Jason in the end. He isn’t sure if the world survives it but selfishly, his last thoughts aren’t really on that as he lies bleeding out in New-New York. He just hopes to whatever is out there that this is the end.
Round 5
Jason Todd is, for the fifth time in his life, sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in his own grave. He breaks out, a few thousand years of inexperience making him a lot rustier than the time before. He pulls the emergency alarm after fumbling blindly for it and then he passes out.
Round 6
Jason Todd is, for the second time in the past hour, sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in his own grave. He breaks out quickly this time, pulls the alarm and is whisked away by Essence before Bruce can ever find him.
He haemorrhages at some point on the journey to the Acres of All. He knows this because he wakes up in the Pit, gasping on viscous water and rage. He hates this so fucking much. By now, he’s come to an understanding with Essence. Immortality sucks, being a little bit too human for the other immortals' tastes sucks more. Being trapped in a never fucking ending time loop that most people aren’t even aware of might as well be hell. They work together this time and the Untitled are dealt with easily. Then, like always, he goes back to Gotham.
Phoenix probably isn’t the most creative hero name, especially considering the context behind it, but seeing he’s the man who had a dog called “Dog” he feels he should at least get a gold star for effort this time. The Bats all absolutely obsess over finding out Phoenix’s identity and after a few thousand years of not speaking to any of them, Jason’s definitely enjoying fucking with them. It’s Tim who works it out in the end, confronting him over how delighted it would make Alfred, Bruce, Dick and Babs if he just came home.
So, Jason does, in a way.
Or more accurately, he works with them more and more until in the end, there’s a moment of inevitability where he’s hurt and someone has to remove his mask and they, being Bats, take the opportunity to look at his genome and find out he’s him. Bruce alternates between hugging him and yelling at him for that one considering it took five years for them to work it out. Jason actually feels guilty at that, guilt turning into horror as he realises he’s starting to view them as disposable, that there’ll be a next time for him to do things the right way. Which there will be, at this point he’s become well aware that he is tangled up in a stable point of the universe and so will always find himself here again. But for them, this is their only life. Jason missed out on five years with Bruce out of eons, Bruce missed out on five years with his son out of decades. He cries and he apologises and he spends the rest of this life making sure his family knows he cares about them.
This time when the last of them dies, he does too. He finds a battle he can’t win and gives it his best go, he’ll ask Ducra if there’s an easier way to reset.
Round 7
Jason Todd is sixteen years old, mortally wounded and buried alive. By this point, the whole experience is the same genre of uncomfortably mundane as a dentist appointment. He digs out, pulls the alarm and leaves his life in the hands of fate as he counts stars in the cemetery. If he also throws a rock at Sheila’s grave because, even after several thousand years, he’s still petty, that’s only for him to know.
Bruce finds him and this time he hears neurosurgeons celebrating because they managed to get out the mother of all aneurysms without any tissue damage. Essence gives him a few months with his family before telling him it’s time to go. He’s recovered well from his injuries and he insists on fighting the Untitled without the Pit.
Round 8
Jason Todd is sixteen years old, mortally wounded and now has first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a punching bag turned dinner by immortal shadow demons. He digs out of the coffin and pulls the alarm. Essence sits next to him this time, translucent in the shade of his headstone. “I won’t take you this time if you don’t want me to.” She tells him. “I’m going to try and fight this.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“The worst-case scenario is everyone dies and we end up here again, best case scenario is that everyone dies, we end up here again and you get to live the Pit-free life you want.”
“Thank you,” Jason tells her.
He wakes up unable to walk, unable to talk, unable to think much through the brain fog but his family is here and he remembers the sentiment of Essence’s words to him. He’s with them for good this time. He makes a bit of a recovery, the fog sort of fades but it takes him months to learn the simplest tasks. His family don’t mind so he doesn’t either. Last time he was like this, before the green lake and the sand and the monsters, maybe after the monsters, everything is jumbled in his head, last time he could walk around. This time everyone pushes a chair for him.
He spends pretty much all his time with family. Bruce reads him stories; he helps Alfred in the kitchen, mixing bowls and tasting food; Dick and Babs take him swimming in the pool most days or sit with him in the weird lying down swing they made, rocking back and forth; Tim plays video games with him, Jason likes the colours and the movement and the noise; Steph and later Cass do spa days with him, listening to music and painting nails and trying out face masks. A few times, Clark and Diana take him flying and he screams and cackles in delight as they do loop-de-loops and twirls.
Things are good until they’re not. Until the world starts to feel bad, like he does after sleep takes him to terrible places that don’t make sense. This time however, Bruce can’t fix it with the colourful lights and a hot chocolate and reading him stories until he’s not thinking of green hair and crowbars. He cries and he fusses because all he can feel is the growing hurt, fear, that’s the name of it, Ducra taught him to see it a long time ago. The rest of the family start making fear too and then they’re gone and Babs holds him as she talks at her screen less and less. Until she’s talking to him, telling him that it’s going to be okay. The power goes out and she pours him a cup of tea, runs a hand through his hair and promises him everything will be okay when he wakes up. She has a weapon in her other hand. She doesn’t know it won’t hurt the monsters. He falls asleep.
Round 9
“I’m going, now,” Jason tells Essence as he crawls out onto the soil. He doesn’t even bother triggering the alarm this time.
Essence nods, shellshocked before hauling him onto her back and taking him into the Acres.
Jason is conscious this time when he’s put in the Pit and somehow that’s so much worse than only regaining lucidity after it’s healed him. He feels his bones being dragged together, scar tissue torn out. He screams, water flooding into his lungs. Talia hauls him out and she pities him. She doesn’t remember the resets, so far the only people Jason’s met who do are the other All-Caste members, but she’s aware of them, Ducra telling her more than he’d expect. Talia cradles him as he recovers and he tries to bury his resentment for his first life, when she used him for her own gains.
An hour after the Pit, he’s back in the Acres, talking to Ducra. “How many times have I lived now?”
“Nine times,” she tells him, “Have you lost track already, pup?”
“No,” Jason shakes his head. “I was scared that I had.”
She laughs, “You’re smarter than you think, little one.” She strokes back the white tuft in his hair, he’ll have to get used to seeing that in his reflection, have to get used to seeing his eyes as green and not blue. He’s still readapting to talking and walking after five years of doing very little of either. “Although why you keep choosing that point, I don’t know.”
“I can choose when I come back?” Jason asks.
“You can come back in any time when you were alive. The more significant the moment, the easier.”
“Does this world end with me?” Jason asks.
“Are you really that solipsistic?” she replies. “The world continues regardless of if we’re in it or not.”
Jason destroys the Untitled and then he meditates, pinning on a moment in his mind. It made him as much as the League, as much as the Pit, as much as the Joker, as much as Bruce. He holds onto it and somehow he pulls himself back into it.
Round 10
Jason Todd is, for the second time in his life, nine years old and calling an ambulance for his mother’s corpse. Muscle memory ties to force him into his vigilante tone which almost certainly sounds ridiculous with a nine year old’s vocal cords before he manages to bring it to the panicked sobs of a newly orphaned child. The operator is gentle with him as she talks him through what they’re going to do to “try to help mum”, his arms are too weak to do any real CPR, but he tries for Catherine anyway. Then one of the paramedics squeezes his shoulder as they rush her to the ambulance. He knows she’s gone too but it doesn’t matter for now. He lies and tells them that he’ll be staying with the family downstairs, even gives them a fake phone number for them and an apartment number that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t have time to verify it as far as they’re aware. And so they leave, telling him someone will come talk to him later. He leaves then too.
Finding Bruce is as easy as walking to Bristol and sleeping by the manor gates until he’s spotted. This turns out to be less of an easy task than he expected. Bristol is only fifteen miles from Crime Alley. Jason, being the peak of physical fitness, can walk that in a day comfortably. Problem is, right now, Jason is actually a chronically malnourished nine-year-old and walking more than a mile makes him feel like he’s about to die. Robin finds him staggering through the dark and he throws up on his legs. “This is why we shoulda had trousers, Dickie,” he mutters before passing out.
He wakes up in the Cave, an argument bubbling overhead about whether there’s really any point in coming here. He cringes when he finds the IV cannula in his arm, tilting the bag to see they have him on isotonic saline. “Leave that alone, dear boy,” Alfred tells him softly, he has one of Bruce’s old cowls shoved over his head, making him look slightly ridiculous. “It’s medicine.”
Jason laughs slightly. “It’s isotonic saline. I wouldn’t really call it medicine.”
“You know what that means?” Dick asks and god, he looks baby faced in this light. He’ll only be fifteen right now, Jason reminds himself.
“Yeah,” Jason says, “So saline is a salt water solution. Isotonic means it has the same water potential as my blood should have which is good because it means it can rehydrate me without making my cells lyse like pure water would.”
Even Batman stares at him now. “Is one of your parents a doctor?”
Jason shakes his head. “My dad was a goon for the Penguin. My mum is... she says she’s sick and the men bring her medicine. I know it’s really heroin,” he stage whispers, “It makes her sleep a lot.”
“What’s your name, chum?” Bruce asks.
“Jason Todd.” He watches Dick go and search him in the computer and the poor boy looks like he’s been punched. He beckons Bruce and Alfred over with a hand gesture, his other hand covering his mouth like it will hide his horror.
Both of them scan over the information too and then Bruce hops up onto the medical gurney with Jason.
“Jason, your mum died when she went to hospital a few days ago. You did everything right, calling the paramedics when you did and even doing CPR on her but sometimes things happen that we can’t control.”
Jason nods blankly, looking down at his lap.
“Is there anyone you can stay with?” Dick asks.
Jason shakes his head. “Dad’s parents are dead. Don’t know ‘bout mum’s ‘side from the fact they called her a junkie whore when they kicked her out for having me.” None of this is lying, aside from the shocked little sniffle, he processed the fact he wasn’t liked much by his bio family a couple thousand years ago, had a good cry on Artemis’s shoulder then.
He can see the little eye conversation going on between Bruce, Dick and Alfred. “A good friend of mine will be able to take you in for as long as you need,” Bruce tells him.
“Is that Bruce Wayne?” Jason asks.
“Why do you think that?” Dick frowns at him.
“Well, when your parents died, Batman took you on as Robin and Bruce Wayne took you in as his foster son. Does that mean you’re Bruce Wayne or are you dating Bruce Wayne? Do I get to have two dads?” Jason asks, excitedly.
“Slow down, Jason,” Bruce says slowly, “Why would Robin be Richard Grayson?”
“Because there are four people in the world who can do a quadruple summersault. Two of them live in China and then the other two are Dick Grayson and Robin.” Jason smiles innocently and Bruce looks like he’s about to punt Dick off something. “The likely answer is there’s only one gymnastics prodigy in Gotham.” And oh, Tim must have felt so fucking good doing this.
Essence perches on the Batcomputer desk, just shadows as far as the rest of them are concerned but Jason can see how fascinated she looks by all of this.
“Alfred, call the lawyers in the morning so we can sort out the adoption papers. I’m going to call Gordon and tell him Jason Todd’s been found and I’ll be his emergency foster parent. Jason, you cannot tell anyone any of this.”
“I promise,” Jason makes Bruce do a pinkie promise and okay, he may have sworn not to fuck with his family anymore but this is just harmless fun.
Jason has to talk to the police and then he gets to eat Alfred’s food. It’s hard to remember that these are all strangers to him, that this is a big, scary manor and not home. He’s also having to remember how to act like a kid, something he hasn’t been in a few millennia. In hindsight that fourth life really fucked up his internal timeline.
Bruce returns from a twenty-four-hour Walmart with clothes in Jason’s size and hands him pyjamas, a toothbrush and, strangely, a Pikachu plushie, before showing him to his room. It’s the same room he’s always had and Jason waits until Bruce is gone before he collapses into bed and just appreciates the fact he’s back. It’s not been that long in the scheme of things since he was home, maybe a few months. He’s been gone longer. Distantly, he wonders what the him of his first life would have felt about being here. All of twenty years old and so fucking angry at the world that failed him, that kept failing people. That anger’s still there, Jason won’t lie and say he doesn’t still get the strong urge to destroy the likes of the Joker. But it all feels so small, so transient now. People live then they die and humans are just so much easier to contain than anything else, doing more feels like trying to kill mayflies. But ethics aside, he wishes he’d spent more of his first life seeing this place as home, regrets the Red Hood in all his teenage angst and fury. The men he killed were replaced and now they’re all still alive anyway.
Essence comes out of the shadows once he’s in his pyjamas and curled up in a blanket. Jason palpates the Pikachu, there’s no camera in it but there’s a microphone. Bruce is spying on him. “Use sign language,” He signs to her. It stings that he’s not trusted here yet but that’s the way of things with the Bats.
“That was impressive,” she signs back. “But what’s the plan?”
“I have twelve years to get strong enough to fight the Untitled without the Pit. Hopefully, good food, good medical care and a lot of exercise will make all the difference.”
Essence nods, “And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I throw myself in the Pit and we go through all of this again.” He doesn’t know why he’s even bothering. He could get twelve years with his family, die and come back to another twelve years. But then he remembers how afraid they were last time. How, in hindsight, Babs went quiet in the end because all of them were dead, there was no one left to co-ordinate. He can’t do that to them an infinite number of times. Even if it means that he has to go into the Pit again and again.
Essence casts him a pitying look, this body wears sadness better than the one he’ll grow into. “Ducra says she cannot see an end to the cycles.” She tells him.
“Can you?” Jason asks.
“Everything ends eventually,” she says. “You’ve seen it too. Eventually the universe enters heat death, even our protons dissociate into cold, lonely bits of energy, dispersed in the darkness.”
“But if we all keep resetting...” Jason shrugs, “Who’s to say that the universe isn’t doing that while we’re dead? This might just be endless.”
There’s a knock at the door and Essence becomes intangible again.
“Yeah?” Jason asks.
Dick opens the door, all baby faced. “Hey Jay, can I call you Jay?”
Jason nods. “Are you okay, Dick right?”
“Yeah, I’m Dick,” he smiles softly. “Just wanted to give you this,” He hands him a rough sketch of the manor’s floorplan, effectively a technical drawing in true Bat-form. “I got lost a lot around here when I first came to live here.”
“Thanks,” Jason smiles, taking it off him.
Dick squeezes his shoulder. “As you can see, I’m just two doors down. If you need anything or want to talk to anyone or anything, just knock and I’ll come help. I’m pretty used to having friends come to me with their problems, day or night.” He looks sad for a moment, then says, “I’ll let you get some sleep. Don’t let Bruce scare you too much, he’s a big softie deep down.” He pauses at the door, “Good night, Jay.”
“Night, Dickhead,” Jason replies on reflex, relieved when Dick only laughs and closes the door to.
Essence is looking slightly fond at the closed door. “The world doesn’t deserve Nightwing.”
Jason wrinkles his nose at that. “He’s a Dickhead.”
“His personality takes all the best bits of Batman and Superman,” Essence argues.
“He threw me in Arkham.”
“Didn’t you shoot Damian and stab Tim multiple times?” Essence replies.
“Shut up,” Jason grabs her hands.
“Bruce,” she hisses, going intangible again and giving Jason half a second’s notice to act natural.
Bruce knocks on the door and Jason invites him into the room. He holds the Pikachu plush close to his chest like he thinks a traumatised kid probably would. “How are you holding up?” Bruce asks.
“I don’t know,” Jason tells him.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Bruce is all awkward and robotic, he really doesn’t change over the years in some ways.
Jason shakes his head into the Pikachu.
“Do you want to be left alone?” Bruce asks.
Jason nods.
“If you need me, I’m just-” his eyes focus on the map that Dick drew for him and he smiles slightly. “You can find me on the map.” He tells Jason. “Get some sleep.”
“Okay,” Jason mutters. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Bruce says back, leaving the room.
Essence reappears when he’s gone. “Are you actually going to sleep?”
Jason nods, “This body needs a lot of it.” He sulks. “Go do whatever it is you do when I’m asleep.”
She fades off into the shadows and he’s sure she’ll find something fun to do for the next few hours. She knows not to kill in Gotham, but she’ll probably scare the ever-living shit out of some goons that make her particularly pissed off. And so, Jason falls asleep.
He manages a grand total of two weeks of elementary school before coming clean to Bruce about the whole situation, or at least most of the situation, the man who hasn’t even adopted a starfish yet isn’t fully desensitised to this stuff. Diana lassos him as he tells his story to the League as well and Jason is allowed to start training to work in the field . He is also, mercifully, ‘home-schooled’, aka, they let him do whatever he wants really because he’s by far the oldest person in the manor.
He spends most of his time training with Essence. When his annoying body fails him, he reads instead, starts learning languages he hasn’t covered yet. He’s always been good at learning languages and it’s not long before he knows twenty. By the time Bruce has decided he’s fit enough to patrol, he’s taken that number up to thirty.
At eighteen, him and Essence go to kill the Untitled. They almost win. He needs to go back further.
Round 11
Jason Todd is two years old and the thoughts in his head are too complicated for him to make sense of. He needs to fight bad guys. He knows that much. He climbs out of the apartment window and falls wrong. If he was bigger, this would have been easier.
Round 12
Jason Todd is twenty-one years old, the Untitled are dealt with and he’s about to execute Gotham Guy for Bane’s crimes. He drops his weapon and storms off to find Two-Face. Task Force Z is disbanded rapidly and the Red Hood fades into obscurity. Guiltily, he collects Essence off of Isabelle and never bothers to explain to the other Bats why he’s particularly tetchy about them touching the sword. This reset is meaningless anyway, it was the first thing his toddler brain could latch onto although the fact he can jump between lives is interesting to know.
The JL ‘die’, Roy comes back, the JL come back, Jason tries to act like any of the events of the Dark Crisis particularly surprise him. Everyone else is more surprised by the fact that he’s willing to go along with the plans. Also, that sometimes he draws the magic sword on his back and turns into a magical shadow girl. Him switching out with Essence definitely threw Dick the first time he saw it happen.
Eventually, he makes the wrong judgement as to whether someone feels guilt or not and he ends up in the blood blade with Essence. “Reset?” he asks.
“Reset.” She agrees.
Round 13
Jason Todd is fifteen years old and the Joker is stood over him with a crowbar. This is not going to go the way the clown expects. Jason hits hard and fast, snapping Joker’s wrist as he wrenches the crowbar from his hands. He looks to Sheila, for the first time in millennia, as he ties the man’s wrists, using the severed wires from his now deactivated bomb. “He would have killed you, I’m going to drag your name through the mud,” Jason tells her because who the fuck sells out a child they don’t even know to the Joker.
Bruce is angry and then horrified when he finds Jason in the warehouse, devolving rapidly into overprotective Bat-mode when he realises that the Joker intended to kill Jason. Jason decides not to tell him that he did once. Instead, he says he’s realised he needs to travel and train and he leaves Bruce at the airport, heading to Nepal again.
This time he decides to get the Pit done with quickly, him and Essence go on a few month-long crusade against the Untitled. He gets cocky, loses his arm and Essence starts calling him Skywalker. “You’ve watched Star Wars?”
“I need something to do when you sleep,” she tells him. They banter as they keep fighting, him eventually tossing an All-Blade between his teeth like Zoro.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“You’ve never watched One Piece?” he asks.
“Isn’t that over a thousand episodes long?”
“Yep,” He tells her, “But we might have eternity in front of us. We should watch it together.”
With the Untitled defeated, he heads back to Gotham, meets Tim and Steph and trains them up in what he’s learnt over the years whenever Bruce isn’t ‘studying’, fussing, over his prosthetic. He goes back to high school, gets his diploma, gets a degree in English. He helps Artemis and Bizarro deal with Black Mask, restarts the Outlaws as a general auxiliary group to the Justice League. Him and Artemis fall in love, he finds Dog again. He gets married, friends and family around to see him and Artemis in their finest suits. They have kids, Amazons their selves, they won’t grow old without him. His family life feels like some sort of sitcom premise, English lecturer by day, exorcist/general crime fighter by night.
It can’t last and it doesn’t. Him and Artemis start to drift, neither of them have ever been good at this and the moment their youngest is off in college, they’re parting in the desert. They love each other, they will love each other until they die and then again when they come back, but they’re not in love anymore. Jason gets speaking gigs as a guest lecturer, travelling the world and changing identities every other decade so no one realises he’s not aging. They bury Alfred, then Bruce, then slowly, everyone else follows. When Duke dies, aged ninety-eight. Jason burns all ties aside from with his kids and makes a new identity. He gets a medical degree this time. Works for fifty years as a doctor around the world. Then, he’s a lawyer, a professional sportsman, then just an incredibly boring salary man of the twenty-fifth century. He drifts from life to life until his youngest dies to Trigon. He storms into Hell a little too late, bleeds out among the pile of demonic corpses.
Round 14
For the first time in a while, Jason Todd is sixteen years old, mortally wounded and trapped in a coffin. This isn’t where he intended to end up but he couldn’t stop thinking about his youngest and that led to him thinking about Bruce burying him and now he’s back. He thinks about just resetting here, but maybe it’s worth another try to start from here. He doesn’t even know what he’s trying for. Regardless of what he does, the loop will continue. But once again, he reminds himself, the loop will continue with or without him. He breaks out of his coffin, pulls the alarm and waits for help to come.
He wakes up unable to move the right side of his body. He winces as he realises that means he’s probably aphasic too. His memories of all the languages he speaks better come back on the next reset. He can hear Bruce but can’t make coherent words back, Wernicke’s area is intact at least.
His speech therapist makes him learn to talk again through singing and he flushes with embarrassment when he has to. He’s never really had a strong singing voice and the smoke inhalation from the explosion combined with the fact his body is once again going through puberty, means he sounds like a chain smoker getting repeatedly punched in the dick. A lot of the time, he chooses not to speak. Although some nights, he whispers lullabies to Essence, for the first time they begin to ask why them? They go to the Justice League, Essence explaining their pitch. All of them are eager to become ‘basically Jedi’ as Barry puts it.
The Justice League tries, most of them die. Clark and Diana, driven mad from their ability to see everything at once, instead prove that the Untitled aren’t the only ones who can destroy the world.
Round 15
He’s in the middle of his All-Caste training, cutting midway through life one. Him and Essence freeze mid-sparring match, Ducra looking with interest. “We both chose this exact moment?” he asks.
“We spend too much time together,” she replies.
He nods in agreement, “Untitled?”
“Untitled.” She follows after him as they off on another mission.
As they travel through the Acres, Jason starts to notice something. “This place changes.” He tells her.
“It’s the Acres,” she replies. “It’s always changing.”
“Yes, but nothing else is,” he scrapes his initials into a piece of stone. “We’ll see if it’s here next reset.”
They destroy the Untitled. They live lives. They die.
Round 16
His initials remain in place even though he travelled back to before he made them. Jason sits in the Acres for years, writing down every detail of every life he’s had. He emerges to a world where everyone he knows has died. He resets.
Rounds 17 through 73
The cycle continues in cycles of its own. Sometimes Jason tries to find a way around the Pit, everyone dies, the next time Jason goes straight into the Pit and then he puts it off a little more and a little more until everyone dies again and he’s back with the Pit in his head once more. Every time he comes back with enough literacy skills to write, he does. The Acres of All gradually becoming covered in his and Essence’s stories.
He tries out different things, spends a good few cycles just hunting Chuckles the Murder Bat or whatever edgy interdimensional Bruce is called. “The Batman Who Laughs,” Bruce corrects him every single cycle.
“Giggles,” Jason calls him, when he lets the All-Blades cut through him. Turns out they’ve both sacrificed enough of their humanity for the blades to cut them now.
He tries once or twice to make him see sense, for him to perceive the toxin like the Pit. But Bruce has always been stubborn when it comes to not listening to his kids. The times when he offers mercy, Jason dies and he wakes up wherever he was last thinking of and goes back to killing the Murder Bat.
He does save a couple of his Robins a few times, has tiny, homicidal versions of himself trailing around after him chanting “Crowbar”. His families of these worlds don’t get the morbid humour in it. They’ve never seen the Red Hood, all misplaced fury, they don’t know why Jason hates crowbars, don’t get quite how far his hatred of clowns goes. The little murder Robins don’t really get it either, they’re just repeating what their abuser told them to. The murder Robins rarely do well, tend to end up primarily under house arrest. But they never end up in Arkham and for that Jason feels just a little proud.
After incorporating fucking with Murder Bat into his life-ly routine, Jason decides that the next step is to just toy with Lex Luthor. Lex is a very different beast to Chuckles and requires a lot more subtlety to deal with but Generation Outlaw are dropped off on Titans Academy’s front door and Jason tells Dick they’re a ‘him problem’ now before leaping into the Acres of All. Once, he makes the mistake of trying to cut Lex with the Blood Blade, just to see what would happen. He ends up stuck and Essence has to carry him around in there for the rest of the cycle. The devastation the Bats feel at seeing him trapped in a piece of metal once again reminds him that his life isn’t disposable to them.
This doesn’t stop him from selfishly going against Darkseid just once to see what happens. He loses miserably and Essence calls him every insult under the sun as he recovers from brain surgery in the next cycle. He flips off where he thinks she is, the aneurysm having taken out his occipital lobe this time.
In cycle seventy-three, things go horrendously wrong. Somehow Dick becomes a vampire and has decided that Jason will make his ideal lieutenant. There is no way in hell Jason is going through with this. The Untitled are done with, the world will be better off without him as a Pit-All-Caste-Vampire with thousands of years of combat experience. He nods to Ollie in the distance and he just wants to go home as he dies.
Round 74
Jason hadn’t meant to pick this moment, gasping back to life as he clears out the ghosts of blood in his mouth. The cat named Alfred watches him in a mixture of curiosity and concern as he checks himself over. He doesn’t know what life this is although he appears to be in his twenties. “Essence?” he asks to no response, she’s probably not reset yet. He reaches for his phone, checks his appearance in the camera. His eyes are teal, his hair has a white strand in it. The manor looks like it did when he was younger, evidence of Alfred’s hard work all around. This is probably the sweet spot then, young enough that most of the people he loves are alive, old enough that the Untitled are not a threat anymore. He looks to the book he’s been reading, Homer’s writing of the Iliad, compiled in the original Greek. Vaguely, he remembers tracking down this book, maybe five thousand years ago now. Suddenly he realises he’s older than it, in a way. He doesn’t know how long he’s actually spent alive, would have to go into the Acres and calculate it from the years he carves with each almost diary entry of his existence. Later he will write down this past one too, how sweet Dickie Grayson also becomes a serial killer when given enough evil juice.
For now, however, he pets the cat on his lap and looks to the page he was on however many lifetimes ago. Sisyphus was a cunning man. He broke Zeus’s rules on killing, cheated death twice by tricking Thanatos and Persephone, and toyed with Ares. His punishment for this is to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to fall down whenever he reaches the top of it. Jason remembers college philosophy classes asking if Sisyphus is happy in his task, he remembers his answer then too, “Well, it’s a better deal than Prometheus’s punishment.” Now he thinks there’s a different question to be asked about Sisyphus’s life. After this long, does Sisyphus even remember life before the boulder?