Chapter Text
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
When Jason is seven years old, his mother dies, and he’s alone in the world for five long years, which include five seemingly endless winters. And in winter, the Bowery freezes.
Ice creeps into every goddamn crevice. It rains a lot in Gotham, and in the worst parts of the city, drainage is practically nonexistent – when it freezes, everything bursts wide open with ice, it cracks the pavement and the foundations of buildings and kills, kills all those who can’t find shelter from it, slow and creeping and cold.
The first time Jason brushes hands with death, it’s because he can’t feel his feet anymore.
It’s late – Gotham-late, the time when the streets are empty except for trash and things that don’t want to be seen. Snow has been falling for hours, light and constant, filling his shoes, soaking through his socks until his toes went numb, then burning, then numb again.
Jason ducks into an alley and curls up behind a dumpster, teeth chattering hard enough to hurt his jaw. He pulls his jacket tighter and does what he’s always done, a little trick someone on East End taught him – rat spells, they call it in the Bowery, street magic in the nicer parts of the city.
There’s a whole lotta magic in this world, though it’s rare for someone to be born with it like Jason was. Most of the time, magic is like plumbing. You say the words, draw the symbols, pull power from somewhere else. Demons, ley lines, old gods, whatever you choose to leech off on. But he was born with it, and he should be able to warm his fingers with barely a thought. Rat magic is supposed to be easy.
But his magic is fucking stupid. It’s a stubborn, largely unresponsive thing, curled deep into his insides and refusing to come out when he needs it. Jason’s entire body is shaking when he concentrates on his fingers, thinks of his blood circulating through his body, and tries to force it to flow faster.
The thrum under his skin answers sluggishly, like it’s half-asleep. Warmth seeps into his fingers first – always his fingers – slowly, barely enough that he can flex them again. He exhales, shakily, and his breath paints a cloud into the air.
His feet don’t warm.
Jason concentrates and concentrates and nothing changes. Minutes pass. Snow piles up against his legs. His breath slows without his permission. Almost drowsily, he thinks, This… is a shit place to die.
He’s so cold.
Panic flares when he realizes that he can’t feel anything anymore, sharp and bright, and he grabs for the spark harder, squeezes down on it like he’s trying to wring heat out of stone. His chest tightens. His heart stutters, then lurches forward again.
The magic moves, but it goes in the wrong direction. It pulls heat inward, away from his skin, clamps down on his chest like a fist around a candle flame. His fingers stay warm. His heart keeps beating. Everything else fades into an awful, distant quiet.
Jason thinks, very calmly, Oh. This is it.
The world fades into nothing, and he’s gone.
He wakes up hours later – choking on slush, lungs spasming as he drags air back into himself. His hands are numb now. His feet are pure agony, screaming, blistering pain that makes him sob out loud.
Jason crawls out of the alley at dawn, limping, half-blind, furious and shaking. He doesn’t tell anyone what happened because he doesn’t have anyone to tell.
(He doesn’t tell Bruce later, either, even though he’s someone he could tell.)
It’s not like this is some special occasion. Five freezing winters, and he only manages to find shelter during two of them.
He remembers being five and watching his dad make a spark spring to life between his fingers, setting fire to the wood in their chimney. They don’t have much, his parents and him, but Jason’s dad has magic.
Willis Todd dies two months later. One of the first memories in Jason’s life is his funeral; they don’t have enough money to bury him proper, so they have him cremated, and what his mom calls his funeral is spreading his ashes in the wind where he can be free.
Of course, he clings onto that barely-remembered spark at first. He stares at his fingers in the middle of the night, hidden under his blanket and trying not to hear his mom breaking her teeth on bottles of vodka in her grief, and he tries to imagine a fire springing to life between his fingertips.
It doesn’t come. The spark hums, but it doesn’t give.
He remembers his dad kneading his mom’s shoulders after a long shift, telling Jason how sorry he is that they couldn’t afford him a better gift for his fifth birthday, kneeling down to show Jason that he could make him a little phoenix, made out of magical fire.
“You loved those when you were a baby,” Willis told him once, chuckling. “Would always try to grab ’em out of my hands.” The phoenix beat its wings and didn’t burn Jason when it landed on his hand. “They don’t burn you,” his dad said, smiling, “that’s how me and your mom knew you got the same gift as me.”
Some gift it is. Willis Todd dies with a bullet in his head, gunned down by Two-Face. The spark he had wasn’t enough to save him, and the spark Jason inherited from him is useless when there’s no one to teach him how to use it.
When the wind blows in Gotham, it’s cold and bites into him. He likes to think his dad is a phoenix now, gliding in the sky above it all, where the sun always shines.
Jason hates him for that freedom. He hates that he was magical, but not enough to save himself. He hates that he has his eyes, his eyes that his mother cries over late at night, his eyes and his useless, stupid spark.
He doesn’t know if God is real. His mom takes him to church sometimes, and prays under her breath in the mornings and evenings. He looks up at the altar and wishes for more than a spark. He wishes for real magic.
For fire, and for something that can save him, if he ever gets to where his dad was when he died.
When Jason is nine years old, he laughs himself into a blackout.
He drinks gutter water in the height of summer, thirsty and trying not to breathe in too many fumes in the smog-filled, overcrowded Park Row, where the buildings seem to compete in height and everything crowds close together, too hot, too stuffy – he doesn’t know the water’s poisoned until he starts laughing.
Later, he’ll learn that it’s called Joker Venom. Bruce will explain the chemicals and their effects to him, point out the exact areas of the brain that are affected and tell him about alteration of the senses and uncontrolled laughter and finally, shutdown.
But he doesn’t know any of that yet. Jason is nine, and he’s laughing, and he’s never been more terrified.
It bubbles up out of him suddenly, sharp, breathless giggles that punch out of his chest and leave him gasping. He clamps a hand over his mouth, eyes wide, and stumbles back from the alley tap he’d cracked open with a wrench.
No, he desperately thinks as he wheezes, laughter hitching and warping. No, no…
He’s seen this before. People laughing themselves to death. Drinking bad water and dying is such a stupid way to go, but he wasn’t thinking, he was just thirsty, who the hell dumps poison into Alley waters that everyone knows kids like him drink out of, what kind of monster–
His vision fractures into color. Neon smears across brick. His jaw aches from the force of it, muscles locking into a grin he can’t stop.
No, he thinks, shaking as deep, wild terror settles into his bones. No.
Where is his spark now?
Jason collapses against the wall, knees buckling. His ribs spasm with every laugh, breath coming in thin, useless bursts. He can feel his heart racing itself into something dangerous, something unsustainable.
Help me, he thinks, pleading and screaming internally, and finally, late as always, his spark wakes up.
Heat floods his chest, violent and unfocused. It surges inward, clamping down hard on his lungs, his heart, his brain – the laughter stutters, breaks into choking coughs. Jason retches. Foamy saliva and blood spill onto the pavement.
His fingers burn. Veins stand out under his skin, like wires pulled too tight. His vision tunnels, edges going dark as the venom fights the spark for control of his nervous system.
Don’t let me go, he thinks hazily. Don’t let me laugh to death.
The spark answers by slowing everything.
His heart rate drops, jerky and uneven. His breath becomes shallow but steady. The laughter dies in his throat, leaving him shaking and hoarse.
Jason slumps sideways and blacks out.
He wakes hours, or days later, curled in an alley that smells like piss and copper. His mouth tastes like rot. His muscles ache like he’s been beaten. His hands won’t stop trembling.
He’s alive.
Barely.
Jason drags himself upright and staggers away without looking back. For weeks afterward, his hands shake when he laughs too hard. For months, he avoids water unless he sees where it comes from.
He never tells anyone, but sometimes he remembers the taste of rot in his mouth and the stiffness of his limbs and he thinks he died, out there. But thinking about that is scary, so he pushes it out of his mind and keeps going. Keeps stealing, keeps trying to forget his mom with the needle in her arm, dead on the floor, his dad’s ashes in the wind, magic burnt out–
Then he meets Bruce Wayne, and he thinks he might be able to forget about his spark altogether – about the cold alleyways and all the ways he’s so useless even though he has this gift. He’s not useless when he’s Robin.
Robin gives him a whole new type of magic, and Jason can save people now, can fight for what’s right and good, and he pushes everything about his old life away and out of his mind, including the spark under his fingertips.
Things are better now. If he died, he would get a proper funeral. He wouldn’t leave behind a struggling addict and a son with magic that won’t work right.
If he died now, Jason thinks, he could stomach it.
“I miss Dad,” Jason mutters against his mom’s shoulder. She’s out cold, eyes glazed over, deep under that spell her medicine puts on her – he’s surprised when she answers, her voice thin and sluggish.
“Me… me too, Jayie.”
Her hands are always cold and clammy when she runs them through his hair, but he can’t remember a time where they weren’t. Their apartment is downright decrepit, but Jason does his best to keep it clean and warm, tries his best to be there for his mom, because his dad is gone, his dad is gone and all the wide-eyed innocence Jason had once went with him.
“Y’know, you have his eyes,” his mother mumbles into his hair. “His eyes… ’nd his gift.”
Jason closes his eyes.
His eyes and his gift. But what does that matter when he barely remembers the rest of his father’s face and can’t use his magic to save his life? It’s always there in his blood, thrumming along with his pulse, but it has a mind of its own most of the time. He doesn’t know how to reach it. How to use it, really use it.
Maybe his dad could’ve taught him, but he’s dead.
And Jason thinks to himself, harsh and clear, I’m not gonna die. I have this gift and I’m gonna live with it, I’m gonna be magical. I’m not gonna die like my dad.
“Jayie,” his mother mumbles. “You’re so good at slipping around… you with your gift, you’re so hard to notice… can’t you find me more medicine? Please, I… I think I’ll die if I don’t get more…”
Jason loves his mother. He loves her until she dies, and he loves her even after, but his magic is never enough to save her.
And he stops believing in magic altogether when he finds her dead on the floor. There can’t be a thing like magic in this cruel, cold world. There can’t be, and if it could exist, it would go only to people like Zatanna, or Constantine, important people, good and strong people who save others.
Jason can’t have real magic. Real magic would mean he could’ve saved his mom. It would mean his dad could’ve saved himself. It would mean he could do more, other than warm his fingers and slip around, and it would make him a failure of a son.
So he doesn’t believe in magic anymore. Or if he does, he believes he doesn’t have it, or if he does, he believes it’s weak and stupid and useless. That way, he doesn’t blame himself for it all – his dad’s ashes in the wind and his mom buried somewhere she would’ve hated. He ran away and ended up on the streets, didn’t even get to go to her funeral.
He doesn’t believe in his spark. He doesn’t believe in himself. He believes real magic would be like a phoenix – the power to go up in flames and rise from the ashes, over and over again.
But that kind of magic doesn’t exist.
There are always memories, of course. The cold winters – three of them – the ice and the alleys, freezing behind dingy dumpsters. There are the memories of laughing and of crying and of hungering and starving and eating shit out of trash cans because he was so hungry, memories of puking his guts out and waking up facedown in a puddle of his own vomit.
Jason doesn’t like to think about his years on the streets. When Bruce asks him questions about it, he usually evades them.
He dodges too many bullets as Robin and lucks out one too many times – sometimes he catches Bruce looking at him after a mission where the Batman swore his Robin got hurt, and Jason sits there with his mom humming in his ears, you're so good at slipping around, and swallows down the bile in his throat. Thinking about it all hurts and makes him shiver and shake when he wakes up in the middle of the night with phantom hunger clutching at his stomach.
So he doesn’t think about it. It’s an instinctual, guttural thing, his spark, refusing to listen to commands that aren’t as simple as they can possibly be. The only real magic he thinks he has is Robin.
Death is something that Jason knows, halfway, he’s seen before. He doesn’t exactly fear it. Bruce and him clash over his recklessness, but in the end, Jason never explains why he’s so unafraid of dying. Never makes himself think about the hunger and the pain and the cold. Never forces himself to remember his dad’s phoenixes and the way something locked into place in his chest when he first saw them; kinship.
In the end, Ethiopia happens, and Bruce doesn’t know he’s magic at all.
When Jason is sixteen years old, he dies.
Tale as old as fucking time, at this point. It all goes so fast and so agonizingly slow at the same time – his mother and the warehouse and the Joker, the crowbar, the bomb, dying and death – when Jason is sixteen years old, he dies a cruel, gruesome, horrifying death, and he dies with a spark under his fingertips.
Not a fire. A useless, stupid, weak spark.
He doesn’t know the big-game type of magic. Zatanna is already the top of the class when he dies, and she still is when he comes back, but he doesn’t know magic like she does, like Constantine does, all chaos and color and nothing impossible, nothing’s ever impossible with magic, Catherine Todd used to tell him, grabbing at his arm in the throes of withdrawal, her eyes shining with fever and tears, can’t you be a good boy and find me medicine, you’re so good at slipping around, Jayie, my little magician–
Jason is not, presently or ever, a fucking magician. He learned his rat spells when he lived on the streets, and then he never touched his magic again. Sure, as Robin, he cushioned some of his falls sometimes – dodged a few stray bullets, warmed civilians’ hands if it could go unnoticed – but he never even told Bruce he had magic.
It hurt a lot to think about his parents. And every time Jason used his magic, he thought about his mother throwing up and begging him to use his gift to steal for her, telling him she would die if he didn’t, screaming at him to help her. Every time, he thought about his father, a thieving, lying, magical scumbag that gave him this tiny thrum of power beating in time with his heart and then got himself killed before he could teach Jason any of it. So he used his little street rat spells and otherwise tried to forget about it most of the time.
Looking back, that was monumentally stupid. He could’ve learned it, could’ve learned how to grip the power slumbering in his blood tight and shape it to his will – no magic is the same twice, and Jason has something wildly adaptable and unique, something that he could’ve used to save his mother, to save himself.
But that didn’t happen.
Ethiopia happened, and he was a little boy with too little magic, and even littler knowledge of how to use it. Sure, when he pushed himself up on broken arms and forced himself to try to save Sheila, it probably wasn’t entirely his human strength that gave him the ability to untie her. There was that glimmer of magic sparking in his blood. But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough, and in the end, they both died.
When Jason is sixteen years old, he learns what it’s like to really, finally die.
And then–
He dreams.
Jason stands in front of a mirror, and his father is looking back at him. They have the same eyes – hooded blue, heavy and tired even when they’re wide awake. His father smiles at him, a little sadly.
“Hey, Jaybird,” he says. “You’re not meant to be here.”
The memories come back in fragmented stutters, waves of agony and tears and blood, mixing together in dust and sand and hot smoke. Jason chokes on the impression of the Joker’s laugh floating through his mind. His ears are still ringing from the explosion.
“Dad,” he whispers, reaching out to touch the mirror. Its surface ripples, and Willis Todd vanishes like an illusion.
Jason sobs.
He curls into himself, phantom pains of his bones breaking under steel echoing across his skin, and makes a noise of absolute and utter agony. Deep under the pain, his magic sparks to life, a whisper in his ears.
You’re not meant to be here.
“Why?” Jason chokes out, and he’s not sure if he means to ask after the meaning of that ominous sentence or ask his father why on God’s earth he would work for Two-Face, why he would get himself killed, why’d you leave me before you could teach me how to handle things, why’d you make me all wrong, I could’ve had magic, I could’ve had you, Dad–
You’re not meant to be here.
“Why?” Jason asks again, but his magic flickers and sputters out, and his breath catches in his throat.
No.
He reaches for the tiny ember he tries to forget but can’t ever keep out, he curls his fingers around it and sobs harder, begging someone, anyone to not let it burn out– this is his, this is the only thing he has left, he’s dead he’s dead the Joker killed him and his mom he killed them both and Jason is dead–
The ember glows faintly. Jason’s mind fractures around half-remembered details of his own cries. Help me, he thinks, not sure if the image of his father in the mirror was really Willis or Bruce. Please, please help me.
But there is no one to help you here. Do you understand?
The mirror is still there, and when Jason looks up, he sees himself staring back – bloodied and hollow and dead, his eyes empty. He closes his eyes and keeps brokenly crying. It’s too much – Sheila’s sobs fade into his own and there is too much blood and his magic is burning but it’s too thin and it can’t save them now–
Jaybird, his father’s voice says, a garbled amalgamation of Bruce and Willis until it fades into only Willis Todd. You can go, if you want. You can leave this place.
But Jason knows that. He knows that his magic can die with him, and he’ll pass into whatever comes after this. He’ll be nothing but a memory, his spark gone and dead, and he doesn’t want that.
His father hums. You run so fast, kid, he sighs. I coulda never kept up with you anyway. You’re not meant to be here, and no one’s gonna help you, you understand?
Yeah. Jason understands all too well, just enough to make the spark under his fingertips sear into his flesh. He curls his hands around the flame and makes it burn, burn like he’s never made it before, because he can’t bear the thought of it dying, because he can’t bear dying and wondering if he’s even loved.
And his magic–
Explodes.
Jason is sixteen years old when he dies, and he’s sixteen and a half when he finally learns that death doesn’t stick for him.
He wakes up in his grave – claws his way out – gets hit by a fucking car and slam-dunked into a coma for about a month. There’s a huge empty space in his memory then. Next thing he knows, he wakes up in a pool of green-glowing doom.
And his eyes and ears and mouth are flooded with it, this green rage fills his mind to the brim and his magic roars to life like a wildfire. Suddenly, he feels like he’s burning alive, and he screams through the green and wildly flails out with his arms and legs, fighting himself to the surface.
His mind cracks and bends and almost breaks under it all – the warehouse and the Joker and– and– he can’t take it anymore, all this repeating and rinsing and coming back, why is he always coming back–
I’m not gonna die like my dad, he swore to himself once. I’m magical.
Yeah, he’s magical alright. And when the Lazarus Pit floods his veins, it tries to drown out the spark in him and instead fans it into a searing flame. Jason breaks through the surface and gasps for air, finally seeing for the first time in months– or has it been days? He can never tell, time blurs and twists when he brushes hands with death every single time–
He used to think that his spark was useless. Real magic, he used to think, would look like a phoenix. Rising from death to be reborn again.
And here he is, gasping for air as feeling returns to his limbs, the Lazarus Pit infesting his mind with rage and fury, realizing that he had it wrong. His dad didn’t give him something weak and stupid to ignore and forget for the rest of his life. The real magic wasn’t Robin.
Green and copper burn in his veins, and his spark refuses to let the madness take him. He thinks about fire and feels it raging inside of him, straining against the green torrent of anger in his mind, keeping him together the way it’s done all his life, as long as he can remember.
You’re not like me, Jayie, his dad used to whisper to him. I know you aren’t. You’re gonna be something much better, you’re gonna be something great. I see this spark in you, and whatever you're gonna do with it, the world’s never gonna be ready for it. You got a magic that nothing can burn out.
Like a phoenix, Jason rises from the ashes of himself, fire burning in his veins, every breath tasting like green madness and cold wind. And as he realizes just how much real magic he really has, he thinks he knows exactly what he’s going to do next.
He’s going to figure out why death refuses to keep him.
And this spark he has?
He’s going to learn how to fucking use it.