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His body is still his own in a way that haunts. Here he is, black unruly curls with a warm brown undertone like his father's, gunmetal blue eyes plucked straight from his mother's face. Here he is, pale skin that tans easily, teeth slightly yellow-tinted, eyebrows still catching in that furrow his brother-not-brother told him was too obvious a tell, but it's okay because they're always wearing masks anyway.
Here he is, his memories perfect moments placed in order, a well-funded library in a city's heart organized Dewey-decimal, by author last name, with an online catalogue of all the titles they don't have in person.
You remain unavenged, Talia tells him, and he remembers satin tearing and splitting his fingernails, and he remembers splitting bread between himself and tired men on nothing more than instinct, and he remembers when Talia sat by him and told him how much Bruce was coming apart without him.
So yes, Jason is furious.
Here he is, with a body that is growing again when the doctors said the malnutrition could not be undone. Here he is, with no scars from the streets, from patrol, from dying. Here he is, a fresh-pressed sheet of paper from the mill, 8.5" x 11" and six F's in a row in hexidecimal, with all the black liquor, toxic and alkaline from something-around sixteen years of living, squeezed out and left behind in vats to burn. Here he is, stubble on his chin—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—growing, gathering new scars on a body living-breathing like it never died.
Except he did, and the Lazarus Pit laced its gold fire through his synapses and his bones, sinking in and never letting go.
He lives for a while amidst a secret order of warrior monks. So he is in a place where the weather is always sunlight and cumulus clouds, perhaps a few feathery sweeps of cirrus, where the grass is always yellow-green and the waterfalls keep cascading from impossible heights with no clear source of water. So he kills demons and walks his way through rituals he doesn't quite understand the purpose of, gets tattoos in red of shapes and words he can't read.
His soul is placed into copper—ductile—and stretched and reformed, alloyed with something stronger so it can be formed into a weapon against Absolute Evil. He carries his soul as weapons, draws twin swords arced with fire, fuels them by splitting his skin and spilling living blood across the blades. Neat shallow notches at the base of his skull—because head wounds bleed and always look worse than they really are.
Ducra tells him to leave behind the vengeance in his heart. Essence argues with him about his duty to the All-Caste, against the Untitled. He wields the blades. They need him.
He leaves the place stuck in stasis with its perfect weather. He has a father and a clown to kill, and anger buzzing like gnats under his skin. His soul is still his own.
There's a new Robin, Talia tells him. Timothy Drake, and Jason wonders what makes the new kid so good, when Jason died too weak to scream.
Three years is not very long at all, but sometimes it feels closer to seventeen. Gotham has always been rotted to the core, or so the justifications go. Old nursery rhymes, haunted by the demonic dead, because its reputation has twisted in some self-fulfilling prophecy of a proving ground for the corrupt, take a pick. Gotham is soaked to her foundations in curses and death that she may well be alive.
It's so blatant that when he steps into the city's borders he nearly chokes on it. Gotham's the same as she always is, the same bleeding haunted ground that grinds people to dust and leaves them stubborn and gritty, faceless masses standing up again and again so they can be stripped back and crushed by the same crises, the same colorful cast of murderers, the same cycles of gang and vigilante violence.
Gotham's the same, sure, but Jason's not. His body is Lazarus waters and his soul forged into something meant to kill, and a fresh new instinct less than three years old wants to tear his home up by the roots, raze it to the ground, reach back in time to when the land first rotted.
Gotham is evil, he already knew, but he never quite realized just how intrinsic that corruption is to her core. Burn it all down and build it anew—not a terrible plan, really.
Three years is not very long at all, but apparently that's enough for a massive earthquake to hit, enough for the buildings to shift and collapse and for Gotham to be cordoned off from the world and then welcomed back into it. Already the destruction has been cleaned up and folded away into a past no one bothers to remember, but the signs are there—streets a few feet to the left and oddly angled, new offices in places that used to be residential, an uncanny valley spot-the-difference game of imperfectly repaired facades.
His favorite gargoyle is there, but the initials he carved at the base of its wings are gone. Its face is sharply defined around the water spigot and not yet weathered by time. He thought for a while that the streets not matching with his memories is just another way Gotham has rejected her wayward son, but it seems she too is capable of changing, tilting just a little off her axis into something different.
Wayne Manor collapsed, too. He wonders what his room looks like—if they kept it untouched, if his belongings were shuttled away into the attic. If any of it survived. If they kept the room when they rebuilt the house, or if its entrance is now just another stretch of drywall, an excised space.
The rot is heavy in his lungs and his blood and his body is ever-tingling with the way evil permeates the air, whispering and begging him to slice himself open, from each shoulder to the sternum, from sternum to pubis, curved around the belly button. Flay open his skin and bleed out fighting to kill and save a city corroded and unfixable.
Batman's been doing it for years, after all.
Jason presses a blade to the new Robin's throat. He is the same, after all—same unruly black curls and snarl-twist to his smile and the little furrow between his eyebrows that he covers up with a mask. Here he is, another moving part in someone else's game, another element in the proving ground that is Gotham, one final trial run before the finale. Batman looks at him and thinks that this cannot be his son. He was never that good.
Hah.
There is Batman and Robin. That has not changed.
Batman does not wear blue anymore. It's black and gray, and Robin too has desaturated—the green pulled from murky lake beds instead of sunlight through tree leaves, the red pomegranate juice instead of raspberry skin. The yellow's been swallowed with black.
Batgirl has hidden her face and her hair. There's a streak of purple called Spoiler, there's a voice in everyone's ear known as Oracle. Nightwing is sleek like the new wave of minimalist graphic design, smooth and streamlined. The gold, the swooping V of the neckline, the glamor is gone.
Huntress is a part of this picture too, in a way she never was before. Harold is dead. The jigsaw puzzle of family is an outdated one.
There is Batman and Robin, but Robin is a blonde girl with her hair pulled back in a green headband. It's gang violence that claims lives, this time, and perhaps its the worst its ever been but Gotham is evil and staining Jason's lungs like cigarette smoke. Same as always, then. There is Batman and Robin, but Stephanie Brown flatlined and had her secrets plastered over the news.
There is Batman and Robin, but Robin disappears to San Fransisco with friends that Jason never got a chance to make, and Batgirl wanders off to Blüdhaven before going further afield, and Oracle relocated to Metropolis. Spoiler was Robin is dead.
So it's just Bruce and Alfred and Jason. And Dick's there for a while before he inevitably leaves again, so really, it's like old times.
They're in the alleyway where Bruce's parents first died, in the alleyway where Jason swung his tire iron and made Batman laugh, stories that are about to be overwritten with a new tragedy.
Gotham's evil. Joker lives. Batman has a Robin.
Nothing's changed, and everything has.