Chapter Text
Jason comes back wrong.
He knows it.
The knowledge sits somewhere between his ribs where he can't feel anymore (he thinks the thing was important, only he can't name it). Somewhere beneath his skin where a truth he can no longer name used to reside like the ancient oaks of untouched forest.
There was something there, immutable as the dawn, that he can't recall no matter how hard he tries. It burned with the green of water in his lungs and as the rents in his skin sealed with liquid fire. It dissipated into the ether in his first breath out of that water, choking sobs.
He came back wrong. He knows.
But he can't remember enough of who he was before to tell himself how. Because if he did, if he could put poet's verse to the irreversible something that twisted to ruin, he knows he'd shatter like the glass of his heart at knowing what precious thing was taken.
Knowing you've come back wrong, and all of the anger therein, does nothing to answer the question. There is no resolution in retrospection. There is no peace to be found in this second life awash in green. And how do you grieve something you can't remember? How do you hold it dear as the very idea of it fades to oblivion? How do you remember any of what once sat in your ribcage when there is nothing of it left to remind you?
Jason knows he came back wrong.
In time, he stops caring how. In practice, he decides he's always been this way- else he'll go mad thinking otherwise.
By and by...
... eventually, he believes it.
Because the grief of missing a soul he can't remember is too much to carry. He buries it in anger, revenge, hatred, forgets he ever knew otherwise when he exited the waters into a world that had buried him the first time around.
...
Jason forgets the thing under his ribs he can't remember as he rages through Talia's training and into the gothic hell that is Gotham's underbelly. There is no room for the sentimentality of introspection, just bubbling green and unyielding anger. His killer still alive, his replacement like a broken plaything, the way his supposed family could have displaced his memory so far from their lives as to move on without grieving him.
Did they ever love him?
Of course not, not in the ways that mattered, is Talia's whispered voice. He didn't avenge you. Your killer still walks the earth. Is that the love you speak of?
Gotham welcomes him home in swirling thought and twisted shadows. The mist tastes familiar as the smog clinging to the back of his hollow lungs. There is not a trace of him left in this city. Not in the ways that matter, and not in the ways that comfort.
He inhales old metal and rolling harbor, listens to the faint cries of people who will never be saved (what kind of man lets his child's killer continue on to kill anothers?) and he decides they never loved him.
Not in the ways that mattered.
Not in the ways that would have survived a swim through wretched green rebirth.
...
Jason lets his second life wash with the single minded focus of retribution.
He's always been willing to commit to the bit, so to speak. Taking over Gotham's underbelly to lure the Bat into a confrontation? Laughably enjoyable in the context of the thing missing under his ribcage. He forgets about it, even.
It's an efficient bloodbath through Park Row first, sprawling beyond his birthplace into the underrun streets of Gotham. The Red Hood is a whispered name, a tangible ghost story spelled out in first hand accounts and bodies dropped like mad dogs. Progress is bloody, brutal, punched out and f***ing useful. The crime rate has dropped in his corner of the city long before he enacts that second phase of his plans.
When he starts taking on higher powers and staking claims to the drug trade, he's in a position to start aggravating the Bat himself. Of course, this naturally means targeting the Dark Knight's favorite soldiers, so called "family" who couldn't be bothered to care further than self righteous declarations of his usefulness as a soldier. It's time to start hitting hornet's nests with sticks, so to speak.
Jason's not careless as he goes about this though.
If he's learned anything in his short second life, and the half-remembered dregs of his first, it's that plans made without all available information are doomed to fall through. To start a spat with Gotham's so called heroes requires knowing where all pieces lay on the board. He cuts time between recruiting a crime empire and gathering intel on all players- pawns, knights, and the two kings locked in mortal combat.
The Clown. The Knight.
The Replacement. The Golden Son.
The players in this drama all reside within his city, information available with careful extraction. He runs through the last three years of the lives of Gotham's residents and refamiliarizes himself with old patterns and new additions. It's as addictive as it is disgusting.
The Goldon Son doesn't live in Gotham though.
In best interest of finally clipping one annoying asshole's wings, the Red Hood decides a field trip to Bludhaven is in order.