Chapter Text
The metal door swung open smoothly. A red boot toed the edge of the darkness.
"....Jaybird?"
A moment.
"Kori, can you-" A warm glow lit the first few feet of concrete. "Thanks."
"Of course."
Some flicking noises.
"Huh. Looks like the water got to the wiring in here."
A hum of acknowledgment. The glow brightened and moved further into the warehouse.
"Jason? Are you here?"
The footsteps followed the light, an arrow strung and held at the ready.
"Hold on. Is that- oh it's his helmet. Yeah, he's here."
"I don't hear him."
"We don't hear him like half the time he's around."
"I suppose... it just feels... strange."
A pause of silence.
Shuffling.
"A laptop.. is that double R's?"
The sound of water dripping in the corner. The light floated further.
"Roy."
"What? I- oh."
Illuminated by a warm glow, leaned up against a rack, was a pale, thin skeleton. The white fabric of a t-shirt draped loosely over pristine bones. Almost invisibly, the afterimage of a man shimmered for a blink of time around the bony structure.
"... well."
Jason settled back into existence the same way one tuned a radio to the only available station. Inconsistent, staticky, and wavering.
Despite feeling like all his blood vessels were doing their best impression of a firecracker, his head felt much clearer than it had before all this.
When the buzz of painful nothingness had subsided and he no longer felt like he was fifteen layers of universe away from reality, he attempted to open his eyes. It took a few moments to push past the glaze of zombie-like sedateness that he'd never really been able to permanently shake, but before long he could see-
"Harper?"
Roy's head popped up from where he was... disassembling something. Presumably something of his.
"Jaybird," the redhead grinned at him. "Feeling better?"
He groaned, rolling his neck and hearing the way his spine cracked loudly. He pushed himself more upright.
"Wouldn't exactly call it better, but... yeah."
"Good." Roy sent him an encouraging, genuine smile. He returned a small one of his own.
Kori floated down from where she'd been investigating the leak in the ceiling.
"Jason, I hope this is not where you have been staying." She looked displeased. "You have plenty of safehouses. This is not even sanitary."
"I haven't been," he reassured her, making his way back up onto his feet, bones popping back into position with a now familiar pain. "There's a place a little ways from here that I spent that night in."
"Good." Kori crossed her arms.
He rubbed his face, trying to stimulate his nerves and dispel the strange numb buzzing.
"What-" he cleared his throat, vocal cords feeling dry and strained, "what day is it?"
"May 3rd. You went AWOL after d-Day so we gave you a few days before pulling your helmet coordinates." Something sparked behind Roy and the redhead spun back to the pieces of metal and wire. "Hey, Jaybird, what's the voltage for the stun guns you keep here?"
He blinked slowly, feeling his eyelids stick to his eyes. Dehydration didn't usually bother him, but rematerializing after a long period in the ghost realm always left him parched. "Uhm... not sure. Grabbed them off a busted ship a few months back."
"Crap. Alright, I'll just need to figure it out. No problem. None at all..."
Jason stared blankly at him for a moment, living brain coming back online slowly.
"It's the 3rd?"
"Yup. Last I checked. Which was a few hours ago."
He'd entered the warehouse early on the morning of the 29th, which meant he'd been gone for four days. Not the worst, but not great either.
Walking rather than drifting felt odd, but the feeling had mostly subsided by the time he reached the shelf Roy was working on. A bottle of water sat by the archers elbow, opened but mostly unfinished. He grabbed it and downed it in a moment and a half, tingling fingers lightly crushing the flimsy plastic.
The effect was near-instantaneous, the rush of cool water pulling him fully back into the physical world and soothing the sensation of dried out muscles and skin. He took a few seconds just to breathe, supporting himself on the metal shelving and letting the water work its way through his body.
Looking down, he flexed his hands, watching the way tendons tensed and skin shifted and pulled over the bones he knew had been exposed mere hours earlier. A few flakes of dried blood from before he'd detached himself drifted to the warehouse floor. He didn't pay them much attention.
He cleared his throat. "Any news from the bats?"
Kori's voice was carefully remorseful. "Tim Drake's funeral was announced several days ago. The ceremony happened a few hours ago. We thought at first that we would find you there, but..."
A sharp, painful fury lanced through him for the briefest of moments. They dared to believe he was dead?? So eager to bury a second third Robin they couldn't even be bothered to find his real body?
Almost immediately the feeling faded, replaced by a sense of guilt. It wasn't like they knew any better. Tim was always too clever for his own good. He could have found a way to clone himself and leave that clone somewhere that implicated his death. And it wasn't like Jason had said anything about the body not being the real one.
He almost laughed. Once again, the fatal flaw of this messed up family lay in their inability to communicate. Maybe they would have reconsidered, done things differently, waited a little longer to bury him if Jason had just spoken up, said something sooner, suffered the embarrassment of looking like a callous fool for the sake of the truth.
But no. He didn't. He was too thrown by the sheer wrongness of what was happening to do what he should have.
But it was too late now.
It was all too late.
He'd been too late to save Tim and too late to save everyone else from undue emotional grief.
"Jason?"
"Yeah?" He looked up at Kori. She looked concerned. Oh. He'd probably zoned out.
A frown lingered between her brows as green eyes looked him over. "What happened?"
He opened his mouth, but-
Instead of saying anything about Tim or the body or the ghosts-
"...I need a drink. Or twelve."
With that gloriously descriptive explanation, he started for the warehouse door, not bothering to change out of his cargo pants or slightly blood-stained shirt.
"Uh- hold up." The sound of tools rapidly dropping back on a metal shelf echoed through the warehouse.
"Should you be drinking this soon after your death?"
"Yeah, Jaybird." He could hear Roy's footsteps coming up behind him. "And can't you not get drunk? Isn't that one of the Lazarus things?"
It was.
Pretending like he didn't hear them, he made his way out of the warehouse on increasingly-steadying legs. There was a good bar a block and a half from here that wouldn't bat an eye at a zombie, an alien, and an average human dude who'd hang out but wouldn't drink.
Plus the bats wouldn't be caught dead in it. Not after something like this.
Letting out a sigh, he set down the 5th bottle of the day - a nice Cardinal beer that he'd developed a taste for a few months back. It left a ring of condensation on the bartop.
The alcohol didn't do much for him anymore, but it did bring a bit of a comforting buzz if he got enough of it fast enough. He didn't know if it was just the Lazarus not burning through it all the way or if it was a placebo effect carried over from when he was still alive and human enough to get drunk.
Either way, it made dealing with these sorts of things much easier.
"So." Roy and Kori looked over expectantly, Roy sipping on a glass of water and Kori with a pair of sunglasses on to hide her eyes.
"Apparently," he continued, "Tim is dead. At least that's what everyone thinks."
"But you don't think so."
"No," he confirmed. "First of all, I would have known if he was dead. Second, there was something... very very wrong about whatever body they had that looked like Tim's-" he paused for a moment, taking a drink to wash out the taste of vomit that accompanied thinking of the body- "And third, Tim's ghost is nowhere to be found."
His return to the ghost dimension had been accidental at first. The consequence of high emotions, disassociation, and increased pull towards the land of the shades. But after he'd drifted long enough to realize where he was, he'd gone looking for Tim's ghost.
The world of shades was always a comfortable place for him. If not for his soul being alive and always pulling him back to the land of the living, he would stay there. The underworlds all blended together into this mind-bending realm, peaceful and torturous by turns. As a fan of literature, he'd always gravitated towards the Greek Underworld, exploring and teasing Hades until the old god kicked him out of his office, leaving him cackling with Persephone as they raced off to cause chaos elsewhere.
A hint of a smile appeared as he remembered the days he'd just been a dead Robin, roaming freely about the underworlds, unburdened by the venomous curse of the undead or the fire of a resurrected soul.
Roy's voice brought him back to the present. "You looked everywhere?"
"Everywhere in Gotham and the nearby underworlds." He nodded, taking another swig from the bottle. "Even asked some of the local rulers to keep an eye out for him in case he came by."
Kori frowned. "Is it not true that his ghost will not appear for a time if he truly did commit suicide?"
Right. That.
"Well, yes. Suicide ghosts don't form until nobody alive remembers who they really are." He waved his hand loosely, trying to brush off the way the topic struck something inside him like a warning bell. "Something about wanting to leave this world and never coming back to the people you knew if they weren't worth staying in it for."
Suicide ghosts were among the most heartbreaking ghosts. Jason had helped more than one move on in his years both dead and undead. They were often caught in a state of panic and regret, watching a world that didn't know or care about them and feeling the lack of their life all too strongly.
Many times the suicide ghosts didn't realize how much they cared about their family until suddenly they were the only one left. The cruel reversal of fates led many suicide victims to a point of panicked insanity, desperate to reengage with life and reality. Poltergeists and other such paranormal activities were just likely to be caused by desperate suicide victims as they were by murder victims.
Jason finished the beer, setting it down on the counter next to the other four.
"But that's not the point. Tim wouldn't have killed himself. So there's no need to wait around for a suicide ghost."
There wasn't.
Tim wouldn't have.
Tim knew he was loved and cared for.
He wasn't thinking like that anymore.
He wasn't.
Jason cleared his throat. "Anyway. As I was saying, I searched all of Gotham's underworld and all of the nearby underworlds I could reach. Unfortunately, I'm not completely dead anymore, so my range is pretty limited."
Roy tapped his glass against the counter contemplatively. "Is there a way we can boost your range?"
"No. But there is a certain boatman I know who owes me a favor..."
Roy raised his eyebrows.
Jason grinned.
"I think it's time the Outlaws visited Greece."