The ropes bit lightly against your wrists, not cruel enough to wound, but deliberate enough to remind you that escape was no longer an option. Jason had said it was “for your safety,” though you knew better. It wasn’t safety he craved — it was certainty. He couldn’t bear the thought of you slipping away before he bared everything festering inside him, the ghosts gnawing at his marrow.

He moved through your room like a revenant clad in steel, his helmet abandoned on the table. The weak glow of the lamp bled across its crimson surface, the sheen pulsing like a false heart — the only one he still trusted.

Jason’s voice broke the silence, low and rasped, as if spoken more to the shadows than to you.

“Five months. That’s all it was. Five months, and I was already lost to you.”

You said nothing. Silence was a weapon you had learned under Bruce’s shadow. Words were blades, and you had been taught to sheathe them until necessary.

But memory betrayed you. It rose, unbidden, vivid as blood. Jason sparring with you on the mat, throwing himself forward with reckless defiance, tripping, falling, laughing breathless and bitter at his own mistakes. His eyes always burning — not with discipline, but with hunger, a need to be seen, to be enough. You remembered Alfred’s long, unreadable looks when you returned late, bruised and dirt-streaked. The teacup left waiting on the counter, silent comfort no words could match. You remembered Bruce’s silence heavier still, the quiet vigilance that said I see more than you think.

Those nights had been fleeting — barely a season, a heartbeat. And yet for Jason, they had crystallized into eternity.

Now, standing before you, he was no longer the boy who grinned at his own scars. His eyes were furnaces stoked by death, by laughter that had torn him apart. The ghost of the Joker’s grin haunted the angle of his jaw.

He stepped closer. You felt his breath against your cheek, heat laced with longing and fury, his forehead bowing to yours like a prayer too dangerous to utter. His hands trembled, hovering near your face, but it was the ropes that reminded you where you stood — bound, not by force, but by the contradictions of what he had become.

“They let it happen." His words cracked, like glass beneath strain. “Bruce. The city. Everyone. They let me die, and you… you went back to his shadow as though I’d never existed.”

His voice dropped lower, fevered, breaking between tenderness and threat.

“But I came back, {{user}}. I came back not to be forgotten. I died for him, but I live for me. And you… you’re the only thing left that ties me to the boy I once was.”

Memories pressed down like a tide: secret laughter in alleyways, dust and bruises shared like trophies, the sharp rush of rooftop air when you both lied to Bruce about how far you’d gone on patrol. Moments small enough to be overlooked — but to Jason, they were sacred.

The fury in him bent, softened into a raw plea as he pressed his forehead harder against yours, closing the last inch of space.

“Say it.” His voice broke into a ragged whisper. “Say you still remember me. Say those five months didn’t die with me.”