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“Do you remember your name?” an accented female voice asked.
The mindless, fear-addled thing that had emerged from the Lazarus Pit in Jason Todd’s body opened his eyes in a room he didn’t recognize. He was aware almost instantly that his wrists and ankles were strapped down to the cot in which he lay. He could not see the woman who was speaking to him, but he answered her anyway, rummaging through the fog in his brain for any scrap of information he could find. He was, he figured, at least as curious as she was.
“Jason,” he rasped, voice hoarse from disuse.
“Just Jason?” the woman pressed.
“Jason… Todd,” he recalled slowly. “Jason Peter Todd.”
“What else do you remember?” she asked him.
“I’m fifteen,” he replied after a moment.
“Well, you were fifteen,” the woman conceded. “You were comatose for quite a long time, I’m afraid. You’re sixteen now.”
Jason blinked, letting that settle. “Sixteen,” he repeated, trying to slot this new information into his already shaky worldview. “I live in Gotham City.”
He could hear an intensity in the woman’s voice when she spoke again, as if he had piqued her interest at last. “And what can you tell me about your life in Gotham City?”
“Um.” Jason wracked his memory, squeezing his eyes shut against the dull headache blooming in his skull at the effort. “Lived in a. Big house.” The memories were coming back faster now, threatening to overwhelm him. “Wayne Manor. With Bruce Wayne. He was my —”
“Tell me about Bruce Wayne,” the woman cut across zealously.
“He —” he tried to answer shakily. “He was —”
He was Batman.
Information exploded before his mind’s eye as he remembered, all at once, three years spent leaping from rooftop to rooftop as half of Gotham’s Dynamic Duo. Every feeling he’d ever felt beneath that domino mask flooded his veins as if from a broken dam, the thrill and the joy and the anger and the frustration and the pain. The pain. The pain.
“Stop,” he whimpered, unsure who he was talking to, the woman or his memories. The pain in his head had reached a screaming fever pitch and was spreading throughout the rest of his body as the very last thing he remembered hurtled through his every sense, as a horrible, sickening laughter began to echo in his eardrums. “I don’t want to — I don’t want to —”
“Tell me about Bruce Wayne!” the woman demanded again, and he felt her bring her hands down on the edge of his cot.
He strained against the straps that kept him tied down, wishing he could cradle his head in his hands, wishing he could squeeze it until it broke so it couldn’t hurt him anymore. It was getting harder to parse memory from reality; the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth, but he had no idea whether it was from biting his lip in the present or from the blunt metal object the laughing man had cracked across his jaw —
“I died,” he blurted brokenly as a hot tear slid down one cheek. He opened his eyes, gasping shallow, shaking breaths, and saw that the woman he was talking to had moved into his line of sight. She had dark skin and shining brown hair, and he recognized her, he realized. Her name was on the tip of his tongue… but she had asked about Bruce.
“Bruce Wayne,” he said, holding her eyes with his own for stability. He swallowed, and his voice became cold. “Bruce Wayne let me die.”