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Jason Todd never cared much for God or religion, but he’d always appreciated a good story. After he sprang back to consciousness in the al Ghuls’ Lazarus pit, Jason read up on whatever resources he could get his hands on to rationalize the events of his unasked-for resurrection. There were thousands of theories lying around from a plethora of minds, all trying to make sense of what happens to the soul after death.
Jason couldn’t remember where he went after he died. One moment he was choking on smoke while his broken body melted against the smoldering debris of a ravaged warehouse, and the next, he was choking on green acid that melted away every scar and imperfection he had.
There was no in-between. No pearly gates, no fiery punishment. If there was, he didn’t remember it.
There was one story that Jason wound up fixating on in his research. It was the story of Lucifer, God’s most trusted and beloved angel. Highly esteemed, until Lucifer made the mistake of seeing the fault in God. He turned on his creator, his father, because maybe God didn’t have everyone’s best interests in mind. Maybe someone else could do his job better, but no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t what God wanted, and so Lucifer was banished to Hell where he was sentenced to suffer for eternity.
The thing is, though, what if God was wrong? What if he didn’t know best for once? What if his son knew better?
It didn’t matter in the end. Sometimes parents don’t always know what’s best for their children, but that’s okay. The Devil didn’t need his dad’s approval anymore. He got to thrive in a Hell all his own now, and it was just fine because he realized that there was no better justice than punishing the guilty.
Talia tried to keep the news from getting to Jason for as long as she could, but Jason wasn’t stupid. He heard the whispers circulating around the League of Assassins compound. A replacement, the whispers said. A new son.
When Jason threatened to leave and track down the truth himself, Talia finally gave in and brought him the proof he needed. Indeed, a new Robin had been spotted swinging through Gotham alongside the Dark Knight. Some theorized whether this Robin was even a replacement at all. Maybe the old one had simply changed his look. Or, perhaps this was the latest in a long string of Robins, with one always ready to step up and replace the last after he died. Clones. Robots. Replaceable, immaterial heroes built by a deranged man with delusions of grandeur.
The newspapers all made it clear. Batman and Robin spotted…
Batman and Robin. Jason’s name. He took Jason’s fucking name.
Tears flooded down Jason’s cheeks. Talia was still in the room, but Jason didn’t care. He didn’t care that she was watching the breakdown to end all breakdowns. He didn’t even care that Bruce had found a new son to mold because it wasn’t like Jason would be feeling the pain for much longer.
There were always knives lying around in the Assassins’ compound. Talia herself had two strapped to her person at all times. She wasn’t expecting Jason to snatch one from her belt, bring it to his wrist, and dig in.
For all his flaws and failures, Bruce had taught his partner well. Jason could pinpoint every artery in the human circulatory system with his eyes closed. He could bleed out a victim in seconds with a spoon if the situation called for it.
Regrettably, Talia was faster than Jason. She caught him before he could do irreversible damage to himself, already calling out for aid. She grabbed him around the middle, pinning his arms to his sides and prying the bloody dagger from his hand.
Jason screamed in her unbreakable embrace. Thick, heaving sobs strangled his stubbornly functioning lungs. “You should’ve let me stay dead!” he cried. “Why did you bring me here?”
He didn’t want this. He wasn’t supposed to be here, be alive. Talia had ruined everything by giving him his mind back. Jason had been fine as a thoughtless, emotionless zombie. She should have just dunked him in the pit and left him there—let his flesh and muscles dissolve in the corrosive liquid. Ensure that nothing could ever have the audacity to resurrect him from the soup again.
Talia held Jason close through his agony. Blood poured steadily from the wound he’d carved into his arm, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill him again. Talia would never let that happen to her newest creation.
Talia sank to her knees, bringing Jason down with her. She cradled him in her lap like an infant. “Everything will be okay, Jason,” she whispered into his hair. “We will make the best of this. I will help you. We’ll show them all how irreplaceable you are.”
They were exactly the right words that Jason needed to hear. As he buried his face in Talia’s dress and let his tears soak the expensive fabric, he realized that she was right—he couldn’t die. Not yet. If he killed himself now, Bruce would never know the consequences of his stupid, careless actions. The only thing in the world that Jason could ever want more in that moment than to die was to get his revenge.
Jason’s own re-death would have to wait, for now. With Talia’s help, Jason would tear down Bruce’s kingdom. He would rain fire on all of Gotham, and then, when everything was reduced to ashes, finally, he would plunge a blade through his own heart and be finished.
He just had to be patient.
You want to stop me? You’re going to have to kill me.
Jason didn’t honestly think Bruce would do it. Batman could never murder his own son, no matter who he threatened. Especially not the Joker, of all people. Bruce would never hurt Jason—he was certain of it. In the few years they got to have together before Jason died, Bruce never once laid a finger on Jason. Of course he wasn’t going to shoot him. He was Batman. Batman would never cross that line. Not with a bullet.
The batarang was unexpected. Shame on Jason for believing he was worth anything, but go figure—it’s fine that he’s collateral damage if it means saving the literal Joker, apparently.
Blood spurted instantly from the gash carved across Jason’s throat. Like Jason, Bruce could also pinpoint every artery in the human circulatory system with his eyes closed. He knew what he was doing, the enormity of it. The finality.
Things became fuzzy after that, from the adrenaline, from the blood loss, and finally, from the—
I’m the one who’s gonna get what he wants tonight!
The bomb Jason had set for the three of them accomplished exactly what he’d programmed it to. Jason didn’t watch Bruce’s pitiful attempt at stopping the inevitable from happening again. No, he was too busy bleeding to death on the floor where he’d collapsed, clutching his severed neck as black spots filled his vision.
Bruce Wayne was not a killer. He would never kill a person intentionally, but he’d also promised to keep Jason safe, and he hadn’t been able to keep that promise either. Maybe he was aiming for Jason’s shoulder and missed. It happens. No one is perfect. Maybe the batarang was meant to bury itself into the Joker’s eye socket (Batman didn’t kill, but the Joker didn’t qualify as a person) because Jason’s bullet just would have been too kind a death for the baby killer.
Jason wanted to ask, but he couldn’t squeeze out more than a whine through the tear in his larynx. He just lay there and bled.
Finally, Jason thought hysterically as the timer ticked down closer to zero. The way it’s supposed to be.
He did feel slightly bad that he would be taking Gotham’s hero away, but there was nothing to be done for that. Jason was already a lost cause, and Bruce wouldn’t leave Jason to die alone a second time. At least he’d be able to rest this time knowing his killer was dead as a doornail right along with them.
Maybe they would put Bruce’s grave next to Jason’s this time. At least they would have each other for whatever came next. Jason didn’t want to rot by himself again. He was so tired of being alone.
There was no time for Jason to cry. He could still hear the Joker’s laughter when the bomb clicked, hesitated one millisecond, and suddenly all Jason felt was heat. Unbearable heat, and then—
And then he woke up under a dusty layer of rubble. Debris tangled in Jason’s hair and got sucked into his lungs when he coughed. His neck and shoulders were still sticky with the aftermath of blood. Every muscle in his body ached like he’d gone ten rounds with Superman.
How…how long had it been? Jason’s whole body felt cold.
This wasn’t how it felt the first time. No, that burned. Parts of his body had been charred by that explosion. The smoke in his lungs had burned like it was branding him from the inside. The cold didn’t set in until the After part, and the After didn’t look like this. It didn’t hurt so bad, and he couldn’t see a smoggy Gotham sky above his head.
Jason painstakingly freed himself from the piles of broken building on top of him until he reached air. He felt for the rip in his throat, but the skin he found there was smooth, as if it’d never been sliced up in the first place. Not even a nick.
But he’d…
“Jason!” Jason flinched, hackles raised. There was too much carnage for him to see clearly around himself, but a son could never forget his father’s voice. Every feeble instinct in Jason’s battered body ached to answer, to demand an explanation of his creator for why the universe wouldn’t just let him fucking die.
There was the distant rumble of old foundations shifting while Bruce searched for his child’s seared body a second time. “Jay!”
Jason fled. He wouldn’t—couldn’t be here for this. He couldn’t bear to look Bruce in the eyes while they both came to terms with what had just happened, the choice a father made to sacrifice his own son for a fucking killer.
Aren’t those two things one and the same? his gleeful, evil conscience reminded him.
Dusted with dried blood and ash, Jason stumbled his way back to the nearest safehouse he kept. He heard sirens in the distance. He had no idea if the Joker was alive or dead, and right now, he didn’t give a shit. Nothing had gone according to plan. All Jason had done so far in his miserable second life was fail.
He’d bled out. He knew he had. If the batarang didn’t rip him away from this world on its own, then the bomb should have finished the job, and it did. Jason felt himself slip away. Once you’ve experienced death, there is no mistaking the sensation for anything else. Everything had been carried out the way it was supposed to, so how?
Jason didn’t leave the apartment for nine days. He ate canned ravioli and watched reruns of news footage covering the showdown with Joker, who had landed back in Arkham without a scratch on him. Batman saved the day again, folks. Red Hood was off the streets. Ding dong, the witch was dead.
Most hoped that the Hood was gone for good, either slain by the clown or scared away by the Batman. Either way, good riddance. Black Mask was still alive and kicking, regrettably, the fuckin’ cockroach.
And, more regrettably, so was Jason.
Jason examined himself thoroughly during his self-isolation, but there was no scar where he’d been sliced open. His throat worked fine, his lungs were clear. All of his other injuries had vanished as well, even though no one could have survived that explosion. No one mortal.
And yet.
Jason had planned everything out to the letter. The Joker, and then himself. If Bruce insisted on rescuing Jason from the bomb, then Jason had a pack of cyanide pills in his front jacket pocket he’d use at his earliest convenience to fulfill that last part of the mission. Two black holes would be swiftly extinguished, and everything would go back to the way it was meant to be. The world would have been better off.
Jason wasn’t supposed to come back in the first place, let alone a second time. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t want it.
On the ninth day of self-isolation, Jason slit his wrists open on the bathroom floor.
Talia wasn’t around to stop him this time. Bruce thought he was already dead. All of Gotham was celebrating the fact that the Red Hood was off the streets for good, civilians and criminals alike.
Ding dong, the witch is—
Jason woke up again twelve hours later in a dried-up puddle of his own blood. He added to it by pounding his knuckles bloody on the tile, screaming, fracturing his hand into splinters and not giving a shit about the pain because who gives a fuck about pain when one is already splintering apart like a dying star?
Those wounds at least had the humility not to heal themselves. Jason’s raw, torn-up knuckles stayed swollen for weeks after. Some of them required stitches. Maybe he needed to die in order for his wounds to heal completely? It would take some more trial and error to be sure.
The dead Robin.
What a sick fucking joke.
As time went on and nothing changed, Jason revisited the subject of God and Hell. The longer he lived against his will, it only cemented his new theory in place: that this was his punishment. Not an afterlife of fire and brimstone, but this. Life.
The Devil built himself a kingdom in Hell, but that didn’t make it any less a punishment. The wicked don’t deserve peace. They don’t get to have a restful afterlife. No, Jason wasn’t good enough to stay perfect and uncorrupted in his coffin the way he had before, preserved in his childlike image. He was too tainted for that.
Jason wanted to be dead, and so he would not die.
That was the punishment.
The months following that wrecked night made it blatantly clear just how trapped Jason truly was.
Nothing stuck. The Red Hood took a bullet to the shoulder thanks to a dime-store gangster with an ax to grind. Instead of getting medical attention, Jason let the wound bleed and bleed as he dragged himself back to his apartment like premature roadkill wandering off for a quiet place to die.
The blood loss didn’t kill him, but the infection that set in afterward did.
Jason woke up in his bed after a four-day coma. The crusted blood and dried pus on top of his freshly healed bullet hole smelled like rotting meat. Jason sighed and heaved himself out of bed to shower.
Circumstances forced him to get creative after that. Jumping off a building without a line. He popped back awake within half a day, his broken neck having miraculously straightened itself out. He drowned himself in the Gotham River and came to hours later when his body washed up on the shore. He sliced his fucking veins in every way he knew how, and zilch. Nada.
Meanwhile, people like Ra’s al-fucking Ghul would have sacrificed everything for a power like this. Anyone would have. If Bruce were immortal, he’d be the happiest man in the world. He could carry on fighting criminals for eternity.
It was exactly like the universe’s twisted sense of humor to give this ability not to someone good, not to a hero who deserved it, but to Jason. To a monster who shouldn’t have even been breathing in the first place.
Jason should have stayed in the fucking coffin where he belonged.
Much to Jason’s chagrin, the earth spun on. Time moved forward. He lived through every minute of it.
Jason was slowly reintegrated into the family as old emotional wounds mended. He made up for his mistakes with better deeds. He healed—or, at least, they thought he was healing. The family was so proud of how far Jason had come through every crisis, every loss, every devastation.
Jason healed, but the scars didn’t. The memories wouldn’t.
Jason tasted death so many more times, but it never stuck. Sometimes, when he was at his lowest, he experimented in more twisted ways. Walked into the ocean during a hurricane. Called up one of the few dealers on his patrol route who agreed not to sell to kids and bought a lethal dose of whatever would do him in painlessly. Just to see. Just to check up on it.
He’d tried everything short of decapitation, and nothing. He was unkillable.
On this night, it wasn’t even Jason doing it to himself, for once. Not at first. He reluctantly partnered up with Batman to take down a crime lord neither of them had been able to touch until now.
No guns, Bruce made Jason promise. No killing. Of course Jason agreed to those terms. He didn’t need his guns. Everyone always forgot that Jason was trained just as well as the other Robins. He was trained by Talia. He could handle himself without a crutch.
“It’s been a while,” Bruce said out of nowhere. They were crouched together on a rooftop next to the target’s penthouse apartment, waiting for his security team to disperse for the night before they’d swoop in. “Since we’ve done it like this,” he clarified. “Just you and me.”
It had been. The last time Jason and Bruce tackled a mission like this together, just the two of them, Jason had been wearing a Robin suit. Now, he was practically Bruce’s height. He was a completely different person now compared to that little kid, even if Bruce had convinced himself that they were the same.
That short, stupid kid didn’t exist anymore. Jason came back, but the kid stayed dead. He outgrew innocence a long time ago.
Luckily for him, Jason was saved from having to formulate a response to that by movement down below. The security team was filing out. Time to go.
This wasn’t intended to be a long mission, nor a bloody one. They’d timed everything perfectly, and there were two of them versus one of him. Oracle had already disabled the security system so Batman and Red Hood could slip in unnoticed. The fact that one of the target’s guys tipped him off before they left because they saw the glint of what looked like Red Hood’s helmet on the neighboring rooftop…they couldn’t have predicted that.
“Back the fuck up!” the guy warned, his shotgun locked, loaded, and pointed right at Jason. The man looked frantically between Bat and Hood, his finger poised on the trigger. “Get the hell out of here, Batman, or I’ll blow his brains out. I swear I’ll do it.”
Jason was wearing his helmet, so that was an impossible promise to fulfill. But the way the gun was aimed at his sliver of uncovered neck…he might actually have a chance at hitting something vital. Jason knew it would work, at least initially. Bruce killed him with one batarang that way. It wasn’t either of their faults that it didn’t stick.
Bruce was less than ten feet from Jason, braced with his body angled towards the man, ready to attack if he so much as breathed too harshly in Jason’s direction. But he couldn’t do anything yet with the gun still trained on Jason.
Jason caught Bruce’s eye. It had been a long time, but they’d been partners for years. Jason could read Bruce’s mind. He knew the meaning in the slight tip of Bruce’s chin.
Duck.
They’d done it before. The second Jason dropped, Bruce would leap at the gunman and disarm him in seconds. This guy was barely more than a figurehead. He was no real fighter, not without backup around. They could handle him without breaking a sweat.
A batarang slipped into Bruce’s gloved hand.
The guy’s hands shook, warbling the gun’s aim. “I’m warning you, man!”
Duck.
Jason saw it when the man’s panic reached its peak. His finger squeezed the trigger.
Jason closed his eyes.
A solid weight slammed into Jason with enough force to take him off his feet. He hit the ground sideways. A gunshot split the air in half and left a crater in the wall behind where Jason had been standing.
The man was out cold in less than a minute after Batman got his hands on him. He was lucky he lost consciousness so fast. Batman was always ten times more violent on those who tried to harm his Robins.
“What the hell was that?” Bruce demanded as Jason picked himself off the floor. There wasn’t a scratch on Jason. If the bullet had hit him like it was supposed to, there’d have been a hole where his carotid used to be, and it wouldn’t have mattered one measly bit. “You could have been killed!”
Jason brushed imaginary dirt off his clothes, trying to hide his trembling. “Wasn’t.” Won’t.
“Is this a joke to you? Why didn’t you move?”
Jason wanted to grab Bruce by the shoulders and scream in his face that it didn’t matter. It was never going to matter, whether he jumped off a building or took a thousand bullets to the chest. It wasn’t real.
“Get off my ass,” Jason snarled instead. “I don’t need this from you.”
“Jason.” Bruce grabbed him by the arm. The cowl hid whatever expression he wore, but Jason could hear it in his voice. He felt it in the desperate fingers digging bruises through the thick leather of his jacket. Bruce was afraid. “Jason, look at me. Are you—” He scanned Jason as if searching for an injury, some chink in the armor. “Do you… Are you okay?”
Jason didn’t dignify that with a response. He wouldn’t have known how to say anything but No, obviously I’m not okay, I’m fucking dying. Every day, every minute, I’m dying without dying.
Jason stepped over the man’s fallen body and left the fucking penthouse. Let Batman clean up the mess. That was what he was good at, right? Doing good, being a hero? He was better off spending his time on more useful endeavors than trying to save a dead man from himself.
Can you even be officially labeled as suicidal if you can’t die? You’re just pushing a boulder up a hill. You can’t actually have the thing you want, so trying to achieve it shouldn’t count. It was all just a game. Jason was playing pretend.
He was just playing pretend when he unfastened his helmet at the safehouse and released the tears that had collected on his jaw since he left the penthouse. He wasn’t crying, he was mad. Mad tears didn’t count. He couldn’t grieve a normal relationship with his father if he’d never had one in the first place, right? Nothing counted. Nothing was real. Jason wasn’t real. He was a zombie that didn’t know how to quit walking. He was a kid trapped in the body of a dead man.
Jason didn’t know what did it for him tonight: the gun aimed for his neck where the batarang killed him the first time, or the fact that Bruce had saved him from a death he couldn’t achieve if he wanted to? And damn, Jason really wanted to.
He really wanted to.
It wouldn’t last. Jason knew that as a stubborn, unbreakable fact as he picked out a gun for tonight’s attempt. Going for the head didn’t work; he’d tried it before, and it never lasted, but it did give him the longest deaths. Days, usually. Short of burning his body to a crisp or tossing himself into a man-sized paper shredder, this was the closest Jason could get to a real death.
He only needed one bullet, but Jason loaded the full barrel anyway, just in case.
He just wanted to be finished with it. Just for a little while. Tonight, Jason needed to be dead more than he’d ever needed anything in his life. His craving for aimless eternity was greater than any want for revenge, or for normalcy, or for the love of a not-father who would have been better off if he’d never met Jason Todd at all.
Who knows? Maybe this would be the night it stuck. Bruce would grieve at first, but in the long run, Bruce would see that this was how it was always meant to be. Jason wasn’t Jason anymore.
Jason popped the cartridge closed. He lifted the gun to his temple and closed his eyes.
Please, he prayed to whichever puppetmaster had been pulling the strings on his torment. This time, please.
The gun was yanked out of Jason’s hand. His eyes exploded open, but before he could react with a cry or a punch, Jason’s wrists were already being seized in a furious grip. “Stop! Jason, what are you doing?”
Jason couldn’t remember the last time he saw true fear in his father’s eyes. Batman wasn’t meant to be a fearful creature; he existed to be feared. Criminals were supposed to take one look at the Bat and run in the other direction. Batman should never be afraid where a criminal could see it, and especially not for a criminal’s sake.
Jason managed to yank one arm free and scramble for the gun where it’d fallen to the floor. He was so close. He couldn’t fail again. He wouldn’t. If Jason surrendered this time, he wouldn’t ever get another chance to try again. Bruce would never let him out of his sight.
“Jason, no!” Jason fought like mad, slamming his head back into Bruce’s unprotected face. It jarred the man just long enough for Jason to wrap his fingers around the gun’s handle. “Stop! Jaylad, please—”
“No,” Jason gasped, tears sliding unbidden down his cheeks. He was so close. He needed this, but Bruce was stronger than him. “Let go! Fuck!” Bruce wrenched the gun from Jason’s grasp and flung it across the room. Jason wailed. “No, no, please, Bruce, please—”
Bruce wrapped himself around Jason’s body, pinning his arms to his sides despite his struggles to free himself. Jason fought like a caged animal, sobbing.
Everything will be okay, Jason, Talia’s voice crooned in Jason’s ear.
Nothing was okay.
“Why, Jason?” He could hear the horror in Bruce’s voice at his ear, the confusion. Jason had no idea why Bruce was even here right now. He hadn’t thought any of the Bats knew about this place. It was possible that Bruce instinctively sensed his son’s life was in danger and came running after the near-miss earlier, or maybe this was simply the universe’s giant middle finger at Jason for daring to play god with his own life. “Why are you doing this?”
“Please,” Jason sobbed in Bruce’s arms, squirming in the iron grip keeping him contained. He sounded like a lunatic. He didn’t care. “I can’t do it anymore, Dad, I can’t. It always goes the same way. I can’t come back again, it’s too much, I c-can’t—”
Why couldn’t Jason ever have what he wanted? It wasn’t fair. He never asked for this.
Bruce hushed him, choked up and lost. He was scared. “Shh, Jay, it’s all right. We’ll get you help. You’re going to be okay. I’m right here.” Then, quietly so Jason could barely hear, “Oracle, send Nightwing to my location. Tell him it’s a code violet and to come in civvies.”
If Jason weren’t crying too hard to breathe properly, he’d have informed Bruce of all the reasons his concern was wasted. Even if Jason didn’t want to be dead more than anything in the world, there was always the likelihood that this method would fail him, just as it had every time before. Jason would just spring back awake days later with a headache and a heart full of disappointment.
“You don’t get it,” Jason cried. He gripped Bruce’s forearms like a lifeline, going limp in the man’s hold. His head fell back against Bruce’s chest, his body wracked with sobs. “It won’t work. Nothing works. I keep trying and trying and I keep coming back. The universe won’t let it stay. I drowned and cut and burned and I can’t—I can’t fucking die.”
It wasn’t fair.
“Breathe, Jay, it’s okay,” Bruce soothed uselessly, kissing Jason’s head. He rocked them both, trying in vain to comfort the psychotic, undead killer trapped in his arms. His kindness was wasted on Jason. Life was wasted on Jason. He didn’t want it, didn’t deserve it. “I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.”
Jason just shook his head. Bruce didn’t understand. None of them would. “I want to die,” he whimpered, closing his eyes. “I’m so tired. I just want to fucking die.”
“Don’t say that. You can come home, Jay, and we’ll—we’ll figure everything out. I won’t lose you again. I love you so much, son. We can still fix this.”
I’m already lost, Jason thought, and he wished he’d picked somewhere else to blow his brains out. Somewhere no one could find him until it was already too late and his body had started to decay. No Lazarus pits. No do-overs. Everything could go back to the way it was. The way it should have been.
But the universe was playing this long, sick joke out to the end, and Jason was the punchline.