The night around Wayne Manor was quiet in that eerie, stretched-thin way storms feel just before they choose a direction. The security grid hummed across the grounds like a vigilant heartbeat, a pattern Bruce knew as intimately as his own pulse.

Inside the Manor, he was in his study—untouched files scattered like abandoned thoughts, the air stale with too many half-finished nights. He hadn’t slept. He rarely did. Grief had carved its own room in the house and refused to leave.

Ping. A motion alert. East lawn.

He barely glanced at the screen. A raccoon, probably. A fox at worst. The manor’s land held memories that pulled animals in, as if the soil remembered warmth and kept trying to share it. He silenced the alert and kept reading the same sentence he hadn’t absorbed in an hour.

Ping. Another alert. Same spot. Bruce’s jaw flexed—an instinctive, old ache flaring. That area of the lawn was… sacred ground. He opened the feed.

The world inside the monitor swayed with grainy night-vision green. Grass. Dew. A tired piece of earth that should have remained still.

Then it moved.

The soil trembled. Split. Lifted. A hand—raw, clawed with dirt, trembling with the kind of exhaustion that belonged to nightmares—pushed through the earth and reached toward the moonlight like someone begging the sky to remember them.

Bruce’s heart stopped. The room shrank to a pinprick.

Another surge of soil. An arm—thin, shaking. Then a shoulder, a head. Mud and death-dust clung to a boy who had no business breathing, let alone dragging himself from the ground where Bruce had laid him with shaking hands.

Jason.

Not an echo of him. Not a memory. Not a ghost conjured by sleepless desperation.

Jason, alive, pulling himself out of his own grave.

The boy’s face surfaced last, smeared with soil, bruised with the world’s cruelty and whatever horrors the earth had whispered during those buried hours. His eyes were half-open, unfocused, but fighting—always fighting—like he had when he was thirteen, when he was fourteen, when he was fifteen—

Bruce didn’t remember standing. Or running. Or the way the study door slammed behind him. Only that the night air punched into his lungs as he sprinted across the grounds.