You hadn't meant to walk this way. You never did. But something always pulled you back. The echo of a laugh you hadn’t heard in years. A ghost of a red hoodie darting across rooftops in your peripheral vision. The ache in your chest that never left — not since that day.

Jason had been many things to you: chaos, safety, frustration, hope. He was your Robin, your friend. The one who looked at you like the world made sense when it never did. You'd fought beside him, believed in him when others wrote him off. And when he died, you were the one who stayed.

Everyone else mourned and moved on, buried the grief under capes and crusades. But you were the one who picked the suit out for his burial. You were the one who knelt in the dirt and dug your fingers into the earth, whispering apologies into the soil when no one else was around to hear. You visited his grave every week, even after the grass grew over the mound. Even after the others stopped showing up.

But the city never really let go of its dead.

You stopped in the middle of the alley, the air still around you, too still. A familiar presence prickled against the back of your neck — not just instinct, but something older. Something felt.

He was standing a few feet away, in the half-shadow of a broken streetlamp. He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. His hair was longer. His face sharper. His shoulders broader, carrying weight you couldn’t see. But you knew him. You knew him. The way he stood. The way his jaw clenched like he was swallowing things too bitter to say aloud. The way your heart forgot how to beat in his presence.

Jason. Alive.