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The boy knows that the man taking care of him is good. He doesn’t know many things—words, feelings, who he
is—
but he knows that much.
“There you are,” the man says as he places a bowl in front of the boy. They are in the room with the large television and the comfy chairs. Breakfast was served several hours before in the big room with the long table. Every day the man and the man’s old friend bring the boy to different rooms in the big house for different things. There’s the one with the bed that the boy sleeps in, one with all the food and the good-smelling smoke, one with the toilet. He thinks he might like the one with the long table best. The old man prepared pancakes this morning and cut it up into tiny pieces for the boy.
The man settles back into his own comfy chair beside the boy’s. He’s never far away from the boy—never for more than the few hours a night he disappears, but the boy sleeps through most of that anyway. “What are we watching?”
The boy doesn’t know. The shapes and colors on the plasma screen are nothing more to him than shapes and colors.
After a minute or so of nothing, the man sighs. He reaches over and takes up the fork beside the bowl to manually wrap the boy’s fingers around it. The bowl on the tray in front of him is filled with little red, green, and orange things cut up into cubes. He’s been given this snack before, so the boy must like it if they keep making it for him.
“Strawberries,” the man explains, pointing out each one, “cantaloupe, kiwi. You like these.”
The boy eats. The man watches. It’s a thing he does, the watching. His eyes hardly ever leave the boy, almost like he is afraid the boy will disappear if he does. It’s a silly thing to worry about; it’s not like the boy has anywhere else to go. He doesn’t know where anywhere else is.
“It’s nice outside today,” the man tells the boy. “It’s sunny. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sunny day in Gotham.” He pauses as if expecting the boy to comment. The boy spears another berry on his fork and eats it, chewing mechanically. Everything tastes the same to him. “I thought we might go to the zoo. You’ve been cooped up in this house for too long. Some fresh air will be good for you.”
The boy has been outside before. Sometimes the old man takes the boy out to the garden with him and talks while he pulls vegetables from the ground. Apparently the two of them gardened together a lot before. Usually he lets the boy sit in the grass and eat tomatoes while he works.
The old man shows up now, his gray mustache twitching humorously as he takes in the shapes and colors on the television. “My, my. The fearsome Batman watching children’s cartoons? Gotham’s criminals are trembling in their boots.”
“Jason put it on,” the man defends himself, even though they all know that isn’t true. The boy can’t work the remote.
When most of the fruit is gone, the old man clears away his bowl and the black-haired man ties the boy’s shoes for him. There’s a skip of time the boy can’t follow, and then he’s being buckled into the front seat of a sleek black car that smells familiar. He touches the smooth rope holding him back. He pulls it away from his body and lets it snap back against his chest in fascination.
“Don’t take off your seatbelt,” the man says while he settles into his own seat. The boy doesn’t know how, anyway, but he stops touching it. He likes the way the car rumbles when it starts up. He likes the sensation of flying even more when it tears down the street. The boy stares out the window watching shapes rush by.
Once, at the beginning, they asked Jason if he remembered anything from before. He catches glimpses of some things if he really tries, but it’s not good to do that, he figured out quickly. It hurts. There was pain, he knows that part for certain. And laughter. Pain and laughter.
Ol’ Batsy’s going to be angry when he finds out I broke his little bird! What do you think, kiddo? Oh, that’s right, someone’s jaw is in pieces, huh? That’s okay, I know how to get some noises out of ya!
There was endless pain, endless laughter that made the boy scream and cry. Pain sharp and dull, and then
hot,
and then colder, and colder, and then the black air filled his lungs until the darkness swallowed him whole. He didn’t mind it at the end. It was better than having to feel the pain. Somehow, impossibly, the darkness got darker, and the air tasted staler, and the world got smaller and smaller until he had to tear it apart with torn-apart hands that bled and bled long after he’d broken the surface and choked through the layers of dirt for air that
hurt,
and he—
The boy watches a hanging light turn yellow, then red, and the car slows to a halt. He blinks slowly, letting the blankness pacify him once more. He likes the blankness, the easy fog. It doesn’t hurt.
The zoo is big. The boy doesn’t go many places other than the big house and occasionally the place with the white walls and the gentle lady with the white coat. Certainly not any places with this many people walking around. The man doesn’t stray from the boy’s side once. He checks over his shoulder every minute to make sure the boy is still following him as they go to the different exhibits, and he holds the boy’s hand whenever they get caught in a crowded spot.
“You’ll like this one, Jay,” the man says as they stop at a glass wall as high as a tree and wide enough for a car to fit through. The boy is usually called
Jason,
sometimes
Jay,
sometimes
lad.
Once they called him Robin, but he must not have liked it because no one’s tried calling him that since.
He shuffles the boy up to the glass and leans down to the boy’s level, pointing at something inside. There are fuzzy black creatures crawling around on the ground and some in the tree branches up high. “See them?” the man says. “Those are chimpanzees. They’re your favorite.”
The boy doesn’t have a favorite anything, but he trusts the man to know better. He watches the creatures walk around their enclosure, trapped but abnormally okay with their situation. It’s possible they’ve never known anything different.
“Chimpanzees are highly social animals,” the man reads off a plaque situated in front of the glass. He’s been doing that at every exhibit they’ve come to, citing that the boy was once an avid reader. “Chimpanzees form deep attachments with others in their group, especially with their offspring. Often when a mother chimpanzee loses her baby, she will continue to groom and carry around the corpse up to several months after death while the body decays.”
The man stops reading. He forces a tight expression that must be his attempt at a smile and leads the boy away with a hand on his back. “Come on, let’s get a better view.”
They see every animal in the zoo. The man buys a handful of brown pellets with some quarters and shows the boy how to feed the goats in the petting zoo. He isn’t very good at it, but the goats don’t appear to mind, nibbling up pellets from his limp hand and the ground around his shoes.
The man buys the boy a red popsicle from another man with a cart. The boy watches the treat slowly melt and drip down his hand to his wrist until the man sighs and takes it away. He cleans the boy up with a handkerchief.
The man never complains, not once. That may be the most confusing thing about him. He never says a word when the boy makes a mess, nor when he is asked questions he cannot answer, nor when he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night from a nightmare he forgets the instant his eyes open. The man takes all of it.
When they arrive home from the zoo, a new character is standing in the kitchen with the old man, drinking a glass of juice. He’s young but still older than the boy, with black hair and blue eyes that match the other man. He’s smiling. The boy hasn’t seen one of those in a long time.
“Well, it’s about
time
you got here,” the young man says with an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Poor Alf here had been slaving away keeping me company for almost an hour now. I’m devastated that you went to the zoo without me, by the way. I haven’t been there since—” The young man drops his glass. Juice spills all over the clean tile. He’s noticed the boy.
The man steps in his path, keeping the young man from the boy with a hand braced on his chest. “Dick, I can explain.”
The young man bats the man’s hand away like it’s not even there. He staggers forward a step. “You—oh god,
Jason.”
He rushes to the boy, who doesn’t move or fight when the young man drops to his knees in front of him. He takes the boy’s face in his hands. “What—how is this possible? We buried you. Bruce, what—how—”
The boy stares blankly at the stranger. Somewhere, deep within, there is a spark of recognition, of red and yellow and green, but it’s gone as fast as it came. It doesn’t take long for the young man to realize that the look in the boy’s eyes is more than simple detachment. His hands leave the boy’s face. He looks up at the other man, his face hardening and teeth gritted. “What did you do?”
“Dick, I know what this looks like.”
“What did you
do,
Bruce?” he seethes. He’s lurched to his feet in an instant, wheeling on the man. He’s four inches shorter than the man is, but his anger adds height. “I read the mission report. I saw the death certificate. What the
fuck
is going on here?”
“I know it sounds impossible, but—”
“It
is
impossible! What is it, a robot? A clone? What right do you have to make a fucking
copy
of the son
you
got killed?”
The old man steps in between the other two before their fight can turn bloody, a hand on each of their chests. “Clearly the two of you are incapable of having a civil conversation, which I have accepted, but I don’t think the young lad needs to be present for this. I do ask that you try not to get blood on my clean floors, please.” He places his hands on the boy’s shoulders and begins to lead him away. “Come on, young sir.”
The sound of the two men’s bickering fades into static the farther away the boy is taken. “There is no use in getting between those two and their squabbling,” the old man informs him. “Believe me.”
The old man draws a bath upstairs in the bathroom attached to the boy’s bedroom and fills the tub with soap until a thick layer of bubbles forms on the surface. While the old man washes him, the boy studies the bubble foam. He collects a portion in his hands and watches the tiny bubbles fizz and pop. He pokes one of the larger ones and watches it vanish.
The old man runs some kind of sweet-smelling goop through the boy’s hair. He doesn’t mind it. It feels good as fingers rub over the boy’s scalp and through his black curls. He gets the feeling he hasn’t had a lot of good moments in his life, however long it was.
“I cannot remember the last time those two got along,” the old man confides. “Don’t take it personally. There has been tension between them since
long
before…well, I’ll spare you the details. I nagged him countless times to reach out before the secret would come out on its own, but you know your father as well as I do. For the intimidating Batman, he can be a terrible coward. Close your eyes for me, please.”
The boy obeys. The old man tips his head back and pours warm water over the boy’s hair, rinsing the foam out.
“Don’t be offended by Master Dick’s reaction. He was simply taken by surprise upon seeing you, as we all were. Deep down, I know he is overjoyed to see you. We so rarely get the second chances in life that we want. It may take some time for him to come to terms with the reality, but this is a blessing for all of us. You are so deeply loved, my boy.”
The old man rinses the boy off and drains the bathtub. The boy watches all the puffy bubbles swirl down the drain. He wraps the boy in a big white towel and steers him to the bedroom where he helps the boy dress in pajamas. Part of his nightly routine involves rubbing some kind of smelly lotion on the worst of the boy’s scars. His body is covered in them, some thin and long, while others are big textured blotches that span across his arms, legs, and back.
They burn when he thinks about it too hard—a taste of a memory he refuses to invite in.
Master Bruce never considers proper scar care the way he should,
the old man always says,
but at least you have the sense not to fight me on it.
As the old man works, the boy studies the small creature standing in the floor-length mirror across the room. The creature in the glass is gaunt and pale. It has black hair and blue-green eyes that stare lifelessly at the boy while he stares at it. It touches the long, mangled scar on its head where hair no longer grows. It’s bumpy. He watches it breathe, but he knows instinctively that it may breathe and blink, but the creature is not alive.
The boy looks away.
Something knocks on the door, which makes the boy tense up on instinct. The door opens, and the young man from before creeps in tentatively in a way the boy suspects he usually isn’t. Bright people don’t fit in the darkness.
“I see you have emerged from the scuffle unscathed,” the old man notes wryly.
The young man ignores him and goes right up to the boy. He’s taller than the boy by at least a full head, so he crouches down to the boy’s level to catch his eye, his brow knitted. He studies the boy’s vacant stare for a minute. “Can he…hear us? Does he know what’s going on?”
The old man sighs. “I’m hopeful that he may, but we have no way of knowing for certain.”
The young man shakes his head. His eyes are oddly wet. “This isn’t right. It’s not fair that Bruce gets off scot-free while Jason’s—” He stops himself, stands back up. He rubs the boy’s head sadly, leaving his hand in his hair. “He deserves better than this life. Any of it.”
“I found him like this,” Bruce says. “I didn’t…there wasn’t any interference on my part. You know I would never do that.” If Bruce thought there was
any
chance he could successfully reanimate the dead, he would have started with his parents decades ago.
Dick scoffs. “Right. Because meddling in other people’s business is
totally
not your MO. Jesus, Bruce, how long have you
had
him here?”
Bruce’s mouth tightens; he can’t meet Dick’s eye. “I came across him while on patrol. Six months after we buried him.”
It was an ordinary night up until that point. Batman was reaching the end of his route when he spotted a mugger beating on a small figure in an alley. By the time Batman dropped down to the scene, however, the mugger was flat on his back with blood gushing from his nose. “—little fuckin’ psycho!” the man shouted at the figure standing above him unmoving, unspeaking.
The mugger didn’t stick around long when he caught sight of the living shadow that had joined them. The other figure still hadn’t moved, strangely, even when the Batman had stepped in front of them, which would have scared the daylights out of any other citizen in Gotham. There was blood on their hands.
“Are you all right, son?” Batman asked, because it was clear now that he could see their build and stature that this was a
child
he was speaking to. He didn’t know many children who could take down a grown man on their own. The boy didn’t raise his head, nor did he give any indication he heard a word the man above him was saying. It was as though there wasn’t a person living in the body at all.
“Kid, are you—” Batman lifted the boy’s chin with a gloved hand and saw his face for the first time.
“He looked exactly as he did when I last saw his face,” Bruce tells Dick. “His wounds had reopened and were bleeding openly. He was still dressed in the suit we buried him in. I
know
my son. There was no mistaking him.” Even underneath the blood, the burns, and the glazed void he saw in the boy’s eyes, Bruce could never forget Jason.
He brought Jason straight to Leslie’s clinic for medical attention, half-convinced that he’d lost his own mind. It’s a miracle that Jason didn’t die again on the drive. Among the obvious blunt force trauma, broken bones, and third-degree burns on his body, Dr. Thompkins discovered ripped-apart fingernails, a collapsed lung, and a traumatic brain injury that put him into a coma for over a week.
But it was Jason. And he was alive.
Bruce isn’t a foolish man. He ran every test he could think of while Jason was in the coma, and once the swelling in his brain had gone down enough for Leslie to bring him out of it, Bruce made every attempt to get answers from the boy. It was a pointless effort, of course. Jason hasn’t said a word since Bruce found him. He doesn’t even make eye contact or react with more than a twitch or blink when he’s spoken to. It’s a toss-up on whether he’s aware he’s even
alive.
Maybe the boy believes he’s still a corpse, and thus he must behave like one.
“I went to the cemetery, Dick. I saw it myself. The coffin was broken open from the inside, and his injuries all match up exactly with the ones from the coroner’s report. It’s him. I can’t explain it, but it’s him. Something brought him back.”
From what they’ve gathered in the first weeks after bringing Jason home, the boy’s body and muscle memory work just fine. Fighting, eating, and moving he can do. It’s the intelligent and emotional parts of his brain that have gone offline. He flinches when approached and he eats when food is given to him, but the rest of him is nowhere to be found. He doesn’t seem to recognize Bruce or Alfred, or even acknowledge that they’re there when they are right in front of him.
The only thing Bruce has to hold on to is that Jason tried to fight Leslie off the first time she touched him. He knocked that mugger on his ass in seconds. And yet, he hasn’t raised a hand to Bruce or Alfred in the entire time he’s been here. It’s all the hope Bruce can find, but it’s all he needs.
“The brain damage Jason suffered was extensive,”
Leslie informed Bruce that first week.
“Not to mention mental trauma the likes of which we can’t even begin to imagine. I need you to realize that it’s possible you might never get the old Jason back.”
Bruce didn’t care. He would take whatever he could get.
He and Alfred don’t stop trying to jog Jason’s memory, pointless as their efforts probably are. He tells Jason stories about old adventures they went on together as Batman and Robin. They give Jason his favorite foods and put on his favorite TV shows, hoping and praying he’ll recognize something and come back to them.
Bruce doesn’t attempt to spar with Jason or dress him in the Robin uniform, although he knows it could very possibly be the thing that works. Physically Jason is there—he can feed himself and walk around, and he can fight back when fought, so it would make sense to appeal to that side of him, but Bruce has already hurt this boy deeper than anyone his age should have to be hurt. Bruce is done hurting Jason.
Dick shakes his head, disbelieving as he takes it all in. Bruce doesn’t blame him. He still can’t believe it either. “This doesn’t make any sense. Six months…his body should have decayed. He would have suffocated in the coffin after the first day. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And yet he’s here,” Bruce says simply. He came
back
to them. He’s different and shattered, but he’s still Jason. He is Bruce’s boy.
Dick is pacing now, his mind running through it all, searching for rationality. “There’s gotta be someone we can ask about this. John Constantine, or Deadman, or—”
“It doesn’t matter how he came back,” Bruce stops him. “What matters is that he’s here now. This is a
blessing,
Dick, can't you see that?”
Dick swivels to stare at Bruce. “A blessing? You’ve got a
zombie
living in your house, Bruce. I mean, he’s—does he even know what’s going on? Does he understand what’s happened to him? He could be suffering and you wouldn’t even know it because he can’t
communicate
any of it! At least take him to a hospital, or—there have to be places out there he can go. Places that can
help
him.”
“I’m
helping him,” Bruce says. “I know what I’m doing.”
“No, you don’t! You’re leading the poor kid around, feeding him, bathing him, and he’s not getting any better. He’s trapped in a house with the man who got him
killed.
You could be doing
more
damage to whatever's left of his psyche by keeping him like this!”
“He’s my son.” He knows that Dick has a point. He knows that. Bruce is a smart man, and any smart man would be able to see that he and his butler alone cannot possibly give this boy the degree of help he needs. A facility filled with people trained to handle this exact type of condition would be better. He
knows
that.
But Bruce has already lost Jason once. And damn it, he’s not strong enough to be parted from him again. It nearly killed him the first time.
“He’s not your son!” Dick says. “He’s not even aware enough to realize who you are! He’s not even
Jason
anymore! It’s not right, Bruce. You’re keeping him around like a
pet.”
Suffice to say the fight doesn’t end well. Bruce knew going in that Dick would never understand, and he’s made peace with that. It will take some time, but eventually Dick will see where Bruce is coming from and forgive him, for Jason’s sake. The boy shouldn’t have to live in a house filled with fighting. He’s had enough of it for one lifetime.
Dick presumably sees himself out. Bruce lets him go. He needs to cool down, and Bruce’s presence would do nothing but remind him of why he’s angry. He’s
right
to be angry about this, but Bruce can’t change the situation, and he has no desire to. He has his son back, and that’s all that matters.
Alfred has finished getting Jason ready for bed by the time Bruce arrives upstairs. Jason’s teeth are brushed and his hair is damp. Bruce has kept up a routine of putting Jason to bed himself before he leaves for the night’s patrol, and every time it becomes more difficult to leave him. He checks on Jason again when he arrives home afterward, just to sit on the side of the bed and watch him breathe.
Every night he’s terrified that it will stop, and his boy will slip away from him again. No one knows how long this gift the universe gave him will last, but Bruce will not miss a single moment of it.
“Where did we leave off?” Bruce asks Jason, even though he knows the answer. He sits in the armchair beside the bed and picks up the book sitting on Jason’s nightstand: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
They’ve slowly been working their way through Jason’s collection of favorites. Bruce reads him a few chapters every night. “Chapter sixteen, I believe? That’s right where it gets good.”
Jason lies in his bed, watching Bruce with glazed interest. Every night Bruce foolishly hopes that all these memories will jog something for Jason, and he will come back to himself. He will blink, and suddenly he’ll be all there again. Scarred and traumatized and undeniably changed, but
Jason.
The son Bruce raised.
Bruce clears his throat and begins to read. Jason’s expression does not change once throughout. He doesn’t mouth along with the Monster’s soliloquy the way he once would have, engrossed in the story. Bruce has no way of knowing if Jason is even aware Bruce is speaking to him at all, but he doesn’t stop.
Does Jason even have the capacity to
think
anymore? It’s too terrible a thing to imagine, but Bruce wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t wonder. Is he truly the empty shell Dick claims he is? What if Jason is fully conscious somewhere inside, trapped within his own mind, unable to make his mouth form words or his body send a sign he’s in there?
Maybe life is nothing more than an endless dream for him now—hopefully of all the pleasant things. He walks and he breathes and he eats, but the Jason inside is asleep and dreaming of warm memories. Bruce hopes they’re warm, at least. He couldn’t stand it if Jason were trapped in nightmares instead, reliving that last awful day on an endless loop. He prays to god that it isn’t that.
Bruce sighs and lowers the book. “I’m sorry you had to hear all of that before. Dick was…justifiably upset. He just doesn’t understand the situation for what it is. He believes you’re gone, but I know you’re in there somewhere. My son is in there.”
Bruce stands and moves instead to sit on the edge of Jason’s bed. He runs his fingers through the slightly damp black curls, sighing softly. “I understand if you don’t want to come back. You went through so much.
I
put you through so much. I should have been there to keep you safe. He never should have been able to put his hands on you, but I wasn’t there when you needed me. It should have been me in the ground.”
It’s unlikely that Jason can hear any of this, or that he has any idea who the man before him even is. Bruce is very possibly speaking to a brick wall, but he’ll take whatever he can get. If this is how Jason will always be, then Bruce will be here for him every step of the way. He owes him that and so much more.
Bruce rests his forehead against Jason’s, closing his eyes. “I’m so sorry, son. I’m sorry I let him take you away. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you, but I promise I’m going to make it better. I’ll keep you safe this time, for as long as I live.”
When Bruce pulls away to wipe his eye, he catches the glimmer of a single tear trailing down Jason’s cheek.