Red Hood stumbled and fell to the floor of the bucolic apartment in the abandoned building that he had taken for a safe-house. His leg was bleeding out where he had spitefully shot himself to get rid of the tracker Batman had tried to stick in him, losing a gun holster in the process.

Fucking controlling, hypocritical asshole.

He growled and pushed himself up with his arms and crawled over to his medical kit, barely mindful of his injury.

Taking off his helmet, Jason breathed in deeply and proceeded to patch himself up.

He shouldn't have done that, it wasn't worth the trouble. He could have just picked it and thrown it away, but fuck, had he been mad when he saw Batman trying to be sneaky and find his main base. If Bruce actually cared to know his whereabouts then Batman better kill that fucking clown.

Deep breath. Eight seconds in, four out. Repeat.

Jason had been having some issues in controlling his anger, lately. It used to be a conscious choice he made, tapping into that ever-present rage so he could do what needed to be done. To not think twice as he pulled the trigger, to take all these heads in a duffle bag and present them in a dingy warehouse. To put a knife to his brother's replacement's throat. Every time he faced his family Batman, he had to be angry, had to be furious.

Otherwise he would break and cave in.

Deep breath. Eight seconds in. Four out.

The Joker loomed over him, swinging the crowbar over, and over, and over again.

The green waters scalded his lungs, his throat, flowing like hellfire in his veins as it tore his soul from its rightful resting place and back into the pain, disappointment and heartbreak of life.

The Batman jumping from rooftop to rooftop, followed closely by a second, smaller figure with a bo-staff.

Someone far richer smarter and overall better than him, who wasn't a violent, reckless, ruthless street urchin.

Bruce didn't miss him, didn't want him, didn't need him, and had replaced him.

Jason's dad didn't love him.

A pained cry tore from his throat as his leg gave out and Red Hood hit the ground with a thud. Jason panted in ragged breaths and, too slowly, took stock of the situation. He only knew he had been standing because he had fallen, and now his wound was open again, bleeding through the disarranged bandages, his hands hurt and when he looked at them, Jason found the skin of his knuckles open and stained red. He had a few hairs tangled on his fingers and when he touched his head his scalp hurt. He had been pulling at his hair.

"Shit." He looked around, and his room's condition almost made him despair. "Fuck."

The place was pure havoc, as if a hurricane had tried to escape it. His sheets and mattress were torn to pieces, and since his knife was still strapped to his thigh, he could only assume he had done it with his bare hands; the plain table he used as a desk had been broken in the middle, and a pang in his ankle told him how; the contents of his first-aid kit were thrown around, most of them broken and useless; even his books hadn't been spared, and now that hurt, they were just a handful of cheap copies but they were his books, his only escape from the shit of a life he had chosen and-

Jason grit his teeth and held back a sob. He reached out and picked up the torn pages he had shredded.

"… told the girls what an honour they might expect, adding:

"I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy would never have come so soon to wait upon me."

Elizabeth had scarcely time to disclaim all right to the compliment, before their approach was announced by the door-bell, and shortly afterwards the three gentlemen entered the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who led the way"

The worst part for him was that he didn't remember a thing. He had had episodes of blind rage before, he knew the drill, how he felt, how he acted when his reasoning quieted and his anger rose, what he was willing to lose, who he was willing to hurt. He knew all that because he remembered.

Now, though, he couldn't even remember feeling the pain.

One second he was sitting down and the next he was falling in a heap of himself.

"Deep… breaths…" Eight seconds in. Four out. "Fuck!"

He couldn't go on like this. If no one could tell him what to do, then he had to keep himself in check. He knew that from the beginning, when he took up the hood.

There were lines no one should cross. If he caused permanent harm to an innocent … who was to say he wouldn't turn into- into-

"I-" The lump in his throat didn't want to let the words out, but he forced them, forced himself to acknowledge them, to see their truth, "I need help."


He must have blacked out again, just for a second this time, because he was in the same position but now there was a guy picking him up, with Jason's arm thrown over his shoulders and his other hand firmly on his side.

"It's okay, take it easy, man, I'm here, I got ya." He put Jason back on his bed and propped him against the headboard. The stranger placed him on the less torn part of the mattress, and lifted his bleeding leg with a gentle care he hadn't known in a while.

Jason finally got a good look at him, and if his head hadn't been so clear in that moment (in a way it hadn't been in years), he may have confused him for another one of Bruce's kids, maybe even another biological one. Black hair, icy blue eyes, and a fit body that could be hidden under baggy clothes.

"Oof, that looks awful, let me patch you up first." The stranger said, and proceeded to pick up Jason's broken medical aids and go into the small, crappy bathroom where you could touch the door from the toilet. Judging from the sound of running water from the faucet, he was washing the tools and- ah, yeah, he had picked the surviving bottle of alcohol and was sterilizing them too. Good.

Jason closed his eyes for a second only to open them again with a jolt. Something had happened, he knew it, but he couldn't tell what, just that- just that it wasn't bad. But how…?

"This is gonna hurt but you can handle it, right?" Asked the stranger, back at the bedside with what was left of Jason's medical kit.

He nodded without a word and watched as the stranger sat down at the edge of the bed, uncaring for the mangled mattress and its blood-stains. The stranger finished tearing Jason's ruined pant-leg after undoing the botched bandaging job, cleaning both the dry and fresh blood with a wet wipe to start the aforementioned patching up.

"What are you?" He asked finally, gripping a piece of fitted-sheet in one hand to hold back cries of pain.

"What are you." The stranger shot back, unflinching.

"How did you get here?" He tried, then.

"You called, and I answered." The stranger looked at him steadily. Something was afoot.

Jason thought about it, as the stranger resumed his quite clean and quick bandaging.

"This isn't exactly the help I meant." Said Jason, raising an eyebrow as he stared him down.

"Yeah, I know, and we'll get there. But first I wanted to take care of this." When Jason was about to object and tell him to just get to the point, the stranger held up a hand and closed his eyes. "Just let me do this. I need to make sure you're okay, please."

"Hm. Alright then." He said before he leaned back on the headboard and crossed his arms, mindful of his knuckles. "But you owe me answers. All of them. For starters, if you won't tell me what you are, or why I feel so at ease with a complete stranger that appeared out of nowhere and who now knows my face, then you could at least tell me your name."

"Oh, but you already know my name." The stranger looked him in the eye for a second and Jason felt a familiar, comforting cold wash over him.

The stranger started checking his other leg, palming it gently, and Jason interrupted him. "That one is okay. Just sore."

The other man nodded and stood up. "I'll get some more clean water for your knuckles."

Jason watched him go, pensive. Already knew his name… was it possible that he-?

But before he could even fully have that thought, he already knew the answer. No. This guy wasn't Death, he knew that in his soul. But if not that, then…

"How do you plan to help me, Danny?"

Danny came back with a new bowl of clean water —actually clean, not cleanish, not clean-for-Gotham, clean— and white bandages that Jason knew hadn't been there before.

"Well, I know this is gonna sound cheesy, but it's not so much of 'what can I do for you' and more of a 'how can I help you help yourself'." He started as he cleaned Jason's blood from his hands. "You won't owe me a thing for this, nothing at all. But there is a price to pay, a sacrifice to make. It's… the truth you don't want to accept." Danny finished with his hands and gently put them back on Jason's lap. He looked him in the eyes once again, sad, supportive, and regretful all at once. "You are dead, Jason Todd."

"Fuck off." Jason said with no heat. His throat suddenly felt very dry. He wished he could be angry at Danny for saying that, or for the calm way he fully climbed on the bed and crossed his legs across from him, but he didn't. "I got better, I came back, I'm alive."

"Yeah." Danny concedes easily. "That doesn't mean you're not dead."

"You can't be both alive and dead."

"Most people can't, but we can."

In a broken whisper, Jason said, "I'm not dead."

"I know you don't want to accept it, because everything it entails is terrifying, but you are dead, and you're hurting yourself by denying it." Any easy-going-ness in his voice had left, replaced by icy resolve.

"The fuck are you talking about? How is being alive bad for me? What, you want me to blow myself up all over again and move on?"

With a great deal of patience, Danny ignored Jason's scathing words but answered him nonetheless.

"No. You've already died, no need to go at it again. What you need to do is accept the part of you that didn't get resurrected, because it exists in you, and you trying to repress it is what causes your anger issues."

Jason looked at him sharply, but Danny didn't take the unspoken cue, and instead waited for Jason to finally, willingly (albeit still reluctantly), broach the topic himself.

"You think that's connected to the Pit Madness, which you somehow know about because…"

"You called for help, with real intent, and I answered," he explained, "I needed to know something so I could start helping you, so I kind of just, knew." He looked more human as he shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, and Jason felt himself relax for real this time, not because of some otherworldly influence, despite the implications of what he had just been told.

"Yeah, sure, whatever." Jason sighed and closed his eyes. "Alright, go ahead, tell me how to get rid of the Pit Madness. Stop beating around the bush."

"Okay, so: when you resurrected it most likely was against your will, especially if you didn't even know it could be done, so what's the first thing you felt?"

Every atom in his body screamed in pain as he broke the surface of the water with a scream of horror, in a dark cave surrounded by unknown people.

"Fear." He admitted, and saw his guest nod knowingly.

"And then?"

"I was alone and away from home, with people after me but no one to come and save me."

"So you had to survive, and be smart about it; you can't be rational if you're always scared." Jason nodded at him. "What then?"

"I managed to escape and smuggle myself back to the States, to get back home and-" he folded his good leg to rest his chin on his knee, closing his eyes for a moment before soldiering on, "and I found out that my fucking killer was still alive, continuing his fucking reign of horror with no repercussions! I was so fucking mad…" He was startled out of his rant by Danny laying a hand on his shoulder.

He hadn't felt him move. His ratty and torn mattress hadn't squeaked with the change in weight. He wasn't even surprised at this point.

"You were so heartbroken that you hadn't been avenged, that your mentor –your father– had chosen peace, over justice, over you."

Tears started to flow freely down his face. Jason didn't snap back, didn't push Danny away so he couldn't see him being weak, exposed, vulnerable. He just let himself be seen, and be grounded by that point of contact.

"I finally came home, and he was fine. He had replaced me with someone better, someone smarter and better behaved, from his own world, and not some… some street urchin! Argh!" He pulled at his hair in frustration, but stopped when his scalp hurt. He looked at Danny again. "How are you doing that?"

"Doing wh-? Oh! Oh, yeah, the whole 'calm' thing. Well, I'm immune to the… what was it? Pit Madness, pit, pit, pit, pit- Lazarus Pit- Lazarus Water! Man, the names people give it. Yep, I'm immune to the Lazarus Water, so as long as I'm here –and I demand it–" he mumbled to himself, even though he was pretty much shoulder to shoulder with Jason, "the Pit Madness has no power, at all."

Jason sucked in a sharp breath. This… this was himself? When there was no madness-fueled rage to have the biggest input on his actions, or to tint his vision of things red. It felt good. It felt really fucking good; perhaps not right now specifically, with the whole 'baring your soul to a virtual stranger' thing, but maybe in a mission when the correct course of action was 'don't kill them all'…

"I couldn't stand it. Everything was better for everyone now that I was dead. I had just been a bump on the road, a footnote between 'The Original Robin and the Smart Robin', a cautionary tale. So I had to prove them wrong." He grimaced, remembering how he had gone about it. (Oh, so the brutal beat up he gave Tim had been the Pit talking. He was a bit dubious about that one.)

"You couldn't stay heartbroken or in despair, but you also couldn't muster up hope to make you move."

"And I chose to be angry so they wouldn't see me being sad, I know, I'm emotionally constipated." Jason grunted out, frustrated with himself.

"You chose to be angry, and allowed the Pit Madness to finally take root, but you still didn't accept your dead side, so it hasn't gotten out of your system."

"... say what now."

"What you know as Lazarus Waters, for me is a form of contaminated ectoplasm. Ectoplasm is the matter that gives ghosts corporeal forms and different ways to interact with the living world." Giving no explanation on what these 'interactions' entailed, Danny continued. "It can give 'life' back to the dead, and sometimes sapience. It can't naturally bring the dead back to life, but with time, dedication, and magic, I can see it being manipulated to do so.

"I don't know exactly why it worked the way it did on you, when others have been resurrected this way before; because even if it did bring you back, it didn't bring you fully alive, 'cause if that was the case then you wouldn't be dealing with anger issues, you would have completely lost your mind and been nothing more than a mindless, rage-filled machine with the training of the Batman, up for the grabbing for any psychic or anyone with the minimum knowledge of mental conditioning. Trust me when I tell you this: being half dead comes as a blessing when someone brainwashes one half of you, because you can still escape through the other half."

"... so that's why you want me to accept being dead."

Danny rubbed at his temples. "Not exactly; that's just one of the things that would be different if you weren't dead, which you are, and I'm glad to see you coming to terms with it; my sales pitch isn't as bad as I feared, then. I'm not saying that if you refuse your dead, ghostly side that you're gonna go insane. The fact that you even have sanity proves that you have a ghostly side. Despite the secondary effects."

"Well, don't count your eggs just yet, I'm not convinced being dead is a good thing yet. I want more info first, and you promised I would get it."

Danny nodded. "Yeah, you're right. It's not nothing what I'm asking of you. I know that.

"Okay so, when you were brought back, it was half alive and half dead; under other circumstances, that would just end up killing you shortly after, or left you like a 'frail of health Victorian child, bedridden for the rest of however long you lived', or it would have simply shortened your lifespan, since there was magic at play. But it wasn't just any circumstance. It was a pit of gross, stale ectoplasm that strengthened your dead half to create your ghost and attach it to you, I mean your soul —same difference—, along with the Pit Madness.

"If you hadn't repressed it," Danny continued, "the ectoplasm flowing through your body woulda just been processed and replaced, even if you weren't near a strong concentration of ambient ectoplasm. Any type of spiritual energy would've done it. Heck, you only needed to hang out at a cemetery and your ghost half would have been fine.

"But, since you did and are still repressing it, that same stale ectoplasm that stayed with you when it brought you back is still within you, ten years later, which, I told you I wasn't gonna lie, to me, that old ectoplasm is extremely gross to me. Like, I grew up knowing you have to clean and filter ectoplasm just for industrial use, now organic, yikes! It's like, like your blood was all clogged and you weren't producing any new red cells so your body still needed and used that rotten blood and you were up and about on your day with that flowing through your veins. Ugh!" Danny shuddered with a disgusted grimace, and Jason didn't know if he should feel insulted or not.

"Um… ew?" He lamely settled on.

"Yes, ew. I say this in the best, most tactful way possible, but I'm glad to be dead and proud if I don't have to be like that."

"Wow, that was mean."

"It had to be said."

"Did it though?" Jason said, doing his best impression of Alfie's unimpressed eyebrow lift.

"Yeah, it did."

"I don't think so, no."

"Oh, but I do, I do believe it."

Both men looked at each other face to face for a long few seconds, and proceeded to break down in an undignified fit of giggles that shook their shoulders and had them doubling over once it became full-on laughter.

"You- you're an ass!" Jason accused him in between panting breaths, shoving at Danny's shoulder with his own.

"Pft, I'm known to have my moments, but you wanted the truth and that's it! You stink!" Danny said, and returned the shove in kind with his own. Knowing they didn't actually need to breathe, he hadn't gotten winded up.

They kept on chuckling for a few more minutes, until they both calmed down and enjoyed the silence some more.

"It wasn't that funny." Jason told him at last.

"I know."

They were both smiling anyway.

Danny sobered up, straightening his hunched back, and Jason followed suit. There was still stuff to talk about.

"The ectoplasm in your body can't be cleaned but it still needs sustenance; if not ectoplasm, spiritual energy, if not energy, then emotions will have to do. But if you shove it down and push it away, it'll have nothing to latch on to get cleansed. Nothing but itself. So it feeds on the same anger it creates, making it stronger and stronger even as it still tries to be processed out of your body. That's what makes you mad at the slightest provocation, gives you destructive –and self-destructive– tendencies. It's why these things are happening more and more often, why you can" he gestured around them with a hand, "black out and wreck shit up without feeling a thing."

"… will it hurt? If I do it?"

"Yes." Danny said honestly. "The first time it catches you by surprise, how much it feels like dying all over again, just like the first time. You feel like you won't come back this time; if you panic like I did, you start losing the perception of yourself, and it feels like you're dissolving into nothing. When you come back, you enjoy how hard your heart is beating in your ears, how every open-mouthed breath burns your throat as it goes to your lungs. How you can dig your fingers on the hard soil and thump your forehead on the ground. It all feels wonderful, because it shows you are alive, you feel, and you never want to go through that again.

"The second time you do it," Danny continued, "it feels like holding your breath, only to realize you don't need air anymore, and if you look around, for a second you get to see why they are the living. How they shine like stars in a clear night sky, how amazing it is, every little blink of theirs, and how the trees breathe and rustle their leaves, the singing of the birds. You never see everything so alive and so bright until you see it with your own dead eyes." Danny had a faraway look, and Jason felt like he could catch up to that memory if he tried. "And when you come back, you realize it doesn't matter whether you need it or not, it's amazing to breathe, to eel the essence of life be part of you. It's overwhelming, it's not enough. It humbles you, it elevates you…

"From the third time on, every time you do it feels like taking off a piece of clothing in a hot summer day, and every time you return it's like putting on a warm coat in a cold winter. It's not a bad thing, either way. You get the best of both worlds." He finished with a cheeky smirk.

"Hmm. Do you ever regret it? Or want it to go back?"

Danny took a second to think about it.

"I used to. Back when it had just happened. I thought I was a freak and a monster, and sometimes, I even thought it would have been better if I had finished dying all the way," Danny admitted softly, and Jason moved to lean his shoulder against Danny's own, to offer something to ground him, to tell him that it was good he hadn't finished dying, "I haven't felt like that in a long while" Danny continued, leaning back on Jason, "and if I actually got the offer of going back and undoing it all so I could live a normal full-life, I wouldn't take it." He smiled softly. "I like the person I've become. What I am made me who I am today.

"Sure, I'm not saying it's 'great!' I died in a horrific accident just 'cause it made me grow as a person, that part was awful. Or that dying made me better. What I mean is that maybe I would have been alright if it hadn't happened. But it did, and I'm finally fine with it."

Jason processed all of that. Slowly, but surely, he did.

"I still have so many questions." Jason admitted.

"And I'll try to have as many answers."

Danny rested his hand on his thigh, palm up, inviting, unhurried.

Jason took it.