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Jason is eight years old when he first wishes for a fairy tale ending. He’s young and naive and hasn’t read enough of the old stories to know better. He’s shivering and cold in an apartment with no heating while he holds Catherine Todd’s limp hand, feeling her weak pulse and he wishes for a savior. Somewhere in the dark corners where the dust gathers and lost things go, his wish is heard.
Then, Jason is eight and alone except for the ghosts in the corner of his vision. He sleeps in the most hidden places and wakes up with his hair tangled in knots. He remembers when he was even younger his mother would tell him it was because the fairies came at night to tangle little children’s hair.He remembers what she used to whisper to him while she brushed carefully through the white strands in the front of his hair (“That’s where the other world ran it’s fingers through your hair, Jason. They always tangle your hair the most because a part of you is theirs.”). He would laugh and not notice when she lined the doorways in salt and cut his hair short as fast as it could grow.
Jason is nine when he learns which shadows to follow for better hidey holes and nicer cars to jack. He wears a red hoodie and he’s the only kid who uses a steel tire iron. The shadows can’t get as close when he holds the cold iron. Jason is nine when he follows the shadows to the prettiest car he’s ever seen, all black with chrome bumpers like mirrors. He leaves that night with four tires and a heavy gaze watching from deep within the alleyway. In the morning, the car is gone without a trace and the tires have disappeared from the garage Jason sold them to. Jason comes to expect the flashes of grey shadow and steely blue eyes he always sees around corners before he falls asleep. He starts talking to the shadow when he gets especially lonely. When Jason is right on the edge of sleep, sometimes he swears the shadow talks back.
Jason is thirteen when he follows the wrong shadow. With his head swimming from hunger and lack of sleep, it’s easy to mistake one tall shadow for another. It’s easy to mistake an enemy for his only friends. Green eyes for blue. The laughter sickens him as the blows rain down on his body. He lays shivering on the concrete for what feels like days before he draws his last breath and the fire that sweeps through the narrow alley wipes away his pain. Somewhere in Gotham public cemetery, there is a headstone for Jason Peter Todd- reported missing 1988, body found 1991. His grave is shallow and small, paid for by the city. A fairy knight weeps for the death of the boy he’d failed to keep safe and swears to himself “Never again.”
Jason doesn’t know how old he is when breaches the surface of some toxic green lake, gasping for breath. The lady with cut emeralds for eyes hushes his screaming with sure, soft words and leads him through maze-like halls. She feeds him and clothes him. She calls herself Talia and tells him how happy Bruce will be to have him back. He doesn’t know anyone named Bruce, but Jason keeps his mouth shut and focuses on how familiar the eyes of the child who sits on Talia’s hip are. He becomes Damian’s caretaker the second the child is settled in his arms, taking as much comfort from the child as the child gains from him. Damian always calms down when Jason tells him stories or sings to him in a voice rougher and deeper than Jason can ever remember his own voice being. The child takes joy in tangling his fingers through Jason’s hair, longer now than Catherine had ever let it grow. He leaves behind knots that Jason carefully undoes every night before he goes to sleep. He always wakes up with his hair tangled anyways.
Damian speaks very little to anyone except Jason and his mother. The child is chronically serious despite his age (Jason doesn’t know how old exactly and no one will tell him). One day as they sit near a window, Damian speaks up.
“You have eyes like grandfather’s,” he says, then pauses. “I like yours better.” Then he settles in closer against Jason’s shoulder. Jason has no idea what that means and has no way of checking to see. There are no mirrors in Talia’s palace under the earth. He assumes Damian must mean his grandfather has the same cement-chip eyes Jason used to see in the mirror or reflected back in Willis Todd’s face.
Jason meets the Demon’s Head. His eyes are like twin pools of glowing acid. He reminds Jason of a cartoon villain in the Saturday morning shows he used to watch through the window of the electronics store across the street. He never went closer to watch because whenever he did, the picture would turn into snowy static and disappear. When he sees Ra's al Ghul from afar, the same thing happens to his thoughts. His mind goes blurry on the edges and he gets a strong feeling of unease deep in his belly.
When Jason catches his reflection in a puddle with a glass smooth surface, he sees eyes like freshly cracked glowsticks peering out from a face that he wouldn’t even recognize if it weren’t for the shock of white at the front of his hair. Even that recognizable feature seems foreign through the mirror of the pool. Jason remembers being thirteen and then gone, but looking at his face now, he wouldn’t put himself physically at a day younger than eighteen. He has been with Talia for some time, but Damian hasn’t grown enough for him to have been there that long. Jason doesn’t know where he lost five years. He doesn’t ask.
One day Talia comes to him, more panicked than he has ever seen her. She hands Jason a backpack and Damian. She tells him to run, to take the child to his father. Take him to Bruce. Jason opens his mouth to ask where, to ask how, but she cuts him off, tells him to just follow the shadows. The right ones this time. He hears the stomping of a giant’s feet coming towards the door and before he can ask Talia to come with, she’s shoving him out into the sunlight and he is running. When he gets far enough away, Jason turns around to look for the hill the palace had been under, to give himself and Damian one last look at their home. The hill is already gone. Damian buries his face into Jason’s shirt and pretends not to cry.
Jason doesn’t know how long they walk. Damian walks holding Jason’s hand until he tires and then Jason carries him as he sleeps. Jason himself never seems to tire, but he makes sure they stop to eat some of the food Talia packed in the bag whenever Damian starts to get hungry. Jason goes through the backpack and finds more inside than it seems like the bag should be able to hold. There’s enough food for weeks, several sets of clothing in varying degrees of formality, stacks of money in currencies from all around the globe, and wallets and passports for so many sets of brothers, all bearing Jason and Damian’s pictures. A knife. Damian’s favorite blanket and a vial of Talia’s perfume are tucked deep in the bottom of the bag, the only sentimental items there. The note pinned to the blanket just says “Find Bruce Wayne. Follow the shadows to Gotham and to him. Take care.”
They reach Berlin much faster than Jason knows is logically possible for having started somewhere in the Middle East. Jason has walked day and night through disjointed landscapes for who knows how long, time seeming to bend around him while they chase shadows. Damian is mostly quiet and clings to Jason more tightly than he ever has. When they reach the city, Jason is ready to just keep going, but Damian tugs on his arm to get his attention. Then Jason notices the stares that Damian had already felt on them. They stick out like a pair of sore thumbs, wearing their old fashioned Eastern style clothing and no shoes. Jason hurries them into a public restroom, silently thanking Talia for packing a pair of sneakers for each of them as well as the rest of the clothing. Jason gives Damian some jeans, a plain t-shirt, and a soft dark green hoodie. Jason ends up wearing almost the same thing, but he finds a red hoodie in his size that seems to be almost identical to the one his mother had given him so long ago. The shoes and socks feel unfamiliar on Jason’s feet and he can tell from the look on Damian’s face that the boy doesn’t like them very much either. It occurs to Jason that he had never seen anyone wear shoes in Talia’s underground palace. He has to help Damian tie the laces on his sneakers.
As they leave the rest room, Jason catches a glimpse of himself and Damian together in the mirror. They really do look related, like they might be brothers in more than name. They share the same ink black hair and have green eyes, though Damian’s are darker than Jason’s. They look almost normal, just a pair of brothers taking a day trip into the city to see the sights. Normal, if it weren’t for the shock of white running through the front of Jason’s curls (bigger now, he thinks, than when he was younger), the lantern glow in both their eyes, or, how if a person really focused their eyes, they could see the shadow of a crown sitting on Damian’s head. Some lumbering, unnatural creation and the child king he serves. Jason tears his eyes from the mirror and they go back out into the world.
Jason falls back onto instincts from years on his own. He has a good enough grasp of German to ask for directions to a train station (Talia’s suggestion that he learn as many languages as possible must have been forethought). Damian’s complaints about the shoes in hushed Arabic make Jason laugh and the following banter back and forth makes it almost seem like they really are just taking a nice little trip together, not running away from everything Damian has ever known.
They take a string of trains and buses all the way to London. Jason is shocked that the money doesn’t run out, but he doesn’t question it. Looking gift horses in the mouth is something Jason’s mother taught him never to do. The last leg of their journey takes them all the way to Heathrow airport. Jason uses the American passports for Jay and Damian Peterson and has to buy their tickets at the front desk because the automated kiosk keeps shorting out when he tries to use it. The nice lady at the front desk asks why they’re going all the way to Gotham and Jason panics a bit internally. Damian swoops in and tells her that they’re meeting their father there. She coos over them for a second before sending them off to go through airport security.
The flight passes in a blur. When the plane touches down in Gotham, a weight Jason hadn’t even known was on his shoulders lifts. He feels more grounded than he has in a long time. The streets are familiar enough that Jason doesn’t feel lost, but so much seems to have changed in the time he’s been gone. He spots a newspaper stand and buys a candy bar for Damian and a newspaper for himself to sate his curiosity. They sit down on a bench in a park, Damian curled into Jason’s side. Jason’s head goes fuzzy when he sees the date. Based on the newspaper, Jason should be almost 45 years old. He looks like he might be twenty at the most. He pulls Damian tighter to his side and presses a gentle kiss to his brother’s hair. Damian is mourning the loss of all he’s ever known and Jason the loss of all he never will. They sit until the sun starts to sink below the horizon and Jason sees one of the shadows move to lead them away.
Strangely enough, Jason thinks he recognizes this shadow. It’s not the massive grey one that he always followed to the nicest cars and the best scores. Instead it’s the one with the blue streaks through it that always led him up fire escapes to the cleanest roosts, the one that he always heard laughter in the wake of. The shadow slides over the walls and across Jason’s chest, almost like a hug and twines curiously up Damian’s legs before doing the same to him. They follow the blue shadow to a door in the base of a clock tower and knock when the shadow slides underneath.
The woman who opens the door has hair like fire and the sharpest eyes Jason has ever seen. Jason almost remembers seeing this face in a dream, does remember that this is the face of someone with eyes that will see right through him. She sits in her wheelchair like it’s a throne and Jason has enough self preservation to bow and make Damian do the same. Jason can see the blue shadow melting off the wall behind her and into the shape of a man. She gives them a wry smile and invites them in.
“Be welcome as guests in my home.”