i know you - jason todd
content jason todd x gn! reader, angst, hurt/comfort, slow burn, memory loss/involuntary forgetting, identity erasure, trauma from experimentation, kidnapping/captivity, medical experimentation, implied torture/non-consensual medical procedures, guns/weapons, jason points a gun at you repeatedly, blood/injury, violence, emotional distress, grief/abandonment themes, jason's resurrection trauma mentioned, guilt, mentions of jason's death
masterlist
wordcount 6.1k
you develop powers that make everyone forget you the moment they look away, leaving you lonely and erased from the world—even jason, your childhood best friend and unspoken love. jason keeps instinctively threatening you because he can’t remember who you are, but some part of him knows he’s missing someone vital.
Jason Todd started leaving space for someone he couldn’t remember.
It was the first thing he noticed.
Not because he was sentimental. He wasn’t. Not because he liked examining the empty rooms of himself for missing furniture. He didn’t. Jason Todd survived by ignoring the absence until it bled through the walls.
But there were two mugs in his sink. Always two.
One with a chipped handle that said World’s Okayest Criminal—a gift from Roy, probably, because Roy had no respect for subtlety or kitchenware. The other was plain blue, old, the glaze worn thin near the rim like someone had a habit of rubbing their thumb there.
Jason never used the blue one.
Jason always washed it anyway.
There was an extra blanket folded on the back of his couch. Not his. Too soft. Too carefully mended. There were two takeout containers in the fridge when he remembered ordering only one. His emergency medkit had a roll of purple bandages tucked behind the gauze, even though he would rather die twice than buy purple bandages.
And then there were the notes.
Not the mission notes. Not the threat maps. Not the case files in his awful, blocky handwriting.
These were smaller. Written on receipts. Napkins. The inside of his wrist. Once, scratched into the dust on his windowsill.
Don’t look away. Blue mug. You’re forgetting someone. Forget-me-not.
The last one bothered him most.
Not because he knew what it meant.
Because he didn’t.
And somehow, somehow, that felt worse.
You met Jason Todd when he was thirteen and hungry enough to bite the hand that helped him.
He had been trying to steal the tyres off a parked car behind the community centre. You had been sitting on the fire escape above him, eating the last half of a bruised apple and watching him work with the grim focus of a surgeon.
“You’re doing that wrong,” you said.
Jason jerked so hard he hit his head on the bumper.
“Shut up,” he snapped, looking up at you with a tyre iron in his hand and fury in his eyes.
You took another bite of the apple. “I’m just saying. If you loosen the lug nuts before jacking it up, it’s easier.”
His glare sharpened. “You a cop?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“So?”
That had been the first time you laughed at him.
Jason had scowled like you’d personally offended his bloodline, but he didn’t leave. He stayed under that fire escape while you climbed down. He pretended not to listen while you told him which cars had alarms and which didn’t. You pretended not to notice when he pocketed the apple core after you tossed it aside.
After that, Jason was everywhere.
The alley behind the centre. The library steps. The roof of the old laundromat, where the neon sign flickered all night like a dying star. You shared stolen sandwiches, stolen books, stolen hours. He read too fast and argued with every author as if they were personally wronging him.
He liked Austen and denied it with violence in his eyes. He liked Shakespeare but said Hamlet needed to “get over himself.”
He liked you. Not that either of you said it.
Back then, love was a luxury item locked behind glass. You had friendship, which was safer. Friendship meant stealing gloves for each other in winter. Friendship meant pretending not to be scared when sirens got close. Friendship meant Jason showing up at your window one night with split knuckles and saying, “Don’t ask,” and you letting him in anyway.
Then Bruce Wayne took him in. Then Robin happened. Then the Joker happened.
Then Jason died.
And you learned the hard way that some people could leave the world and still haunt every room in it.
For years, Jason was a grave you visited without flowers because flowers felt too soft for him. Too delicate. Jason had been fire and teeth and a laugh like a match struck in the dark.
Then he came back. Older. Broader. Angry in ways that had edges. Red helmet. Guns. Ghost-green rage burning behind his eyes.
The first time he saw you after his resurrection, he froze so completely you thought the world had glitched.
You were standing in the rain outside an all-night bodega, one hand around a bag of groceries, the other around your keys like a weapon. Gotham rain slicked his leather jacket black. The red helmet stared at you from across the sidewalk.
Then he took it off.
And there he was.
Jason Todd. Dead boy. Living man. Your impossible.
You dropped the groceries.
He said your name like it hurt him.
You punched him in the chest so hard your knuckles ached.
He let you. Then he pulled you into his arms, and for one impossible second, the years folded like paper. You were thirteen again. He smelled like rain and gunpowder and something warm under all the war.
“You died,” you said into his jacket.
“I got better,” he rasped.
You hit him again.
He laughed. You cried.
Neither of you talked about the fact that he held you like someone who had been buried with your name still in his mouth.
The powers came later. Not from a glowing meteor. Not from a dramatic curse. Not from some poetic bargain with the universe.
They came from a warehouse in the Bowery and a group of men who thought memory could be weaponised.
You weren’t supposed to be there. That was the stupidest part. The most Gotham part. You were walking home from a late shift when someone grabbed you off the street because you saw a van door open and a girl inside with tape over her mouth.
You remembered screaming. You remembered a needle. You remembered white rooms underground, men in masks, machines that hummed like insects behind your skull.
They called the project Mnemosyne. They called you Subject Nine. They said things like “retention instability” and “observer-dependent identity collapse” while you were strapped to a chair with blood drying behind your ear.
You broke out during an explosion. Or maybe someone broke you out. It got hazy after the alarms. Smoke. Red emergency lights. Your own heartbeat clawing up your throat.
You found the girl from the van. You got her out. You ran until your lungs shredded.
On the street, under the flicker of a broken lamppost, she turned to you with wide, terrified eyes.
“You saved me,” she said.
Then a car backfired. She looked away. When she looked back, her face emptied.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
At first, you thought it was shock.
Then the paramedics came. You tried to tell them your name. One looked down to write it.
When he lifted his eyes, he frowned. “Sorry, are you family?”
You backed away.
Police arrived. Someone put a blanket around your shoulders, then turned to answer a question, then forgot why the blanket was there.
By morning, every record from the warehouse was gone. Every witness forgot you existed the moment they stopped seeing you. Security footage blurred around your body like reality had rubbed you out with a thumb.
You ran to the only person you trusted.
Jason.
He lived in a safehouse above a closed pawn shop then. Third floor. Reinforced door. Two locks, one electronic keypad, one old-school deadbolt because Jason trusted steel more than software.
You still knew the code. You shouldn’t have.
You entered shaking, half-starved, wearing a stolen hoodie and shoes that didn’t fit. Jason was in the kitchen cleaning a gun.
He looked up. For one second, he was your Jason.
His eyes widened. “Hey—what the hell happened to you?”
You nearly collapsed from relief. “Jay,” you choked.
He crossed the room fast, gun abandoned on the counter. His hands hovered over you like he wanted to check for injuries but didn’t know where to start.
“Talk to me,” he said, voice going low and urgent. “Who did this?”
You tried. You told him about the warehouse. The machines. The girl. The paramedics. The way people’s memories slid off you like rain off glass.
Jason listened. Jason believed you. Of course he did. Jason had crawled out of his own grave. Gotham had taught both of you that impossible was usually just Tuesday wearing a fake moustache.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We figure it out. Babs can look into missing footage. I’ll call—”
He turned toward the counter for his phone.
You felt it happen.
Not saw it. Not heard it.
Felt it. Like a hook in your chest going slack.
“Jason,” you said quickly.
He stopped. His shoulders went rigid. Slowly, he reached for the gun.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
The room dropped out from under you. “Jay.”
He spun, weapon raised.
The barrel pointed at your chest.
You forgot how to breathe.
“Don’t call me that,” he said. His voice was ice over panic. “How did you get in here?”
“Jason, please. Look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“No, I mean—don’t look away.”
His grip tightened. His eyes were sharp, scanning you like a threat map. “Answer the question.”
“You know me.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.” Your voice broke. “You do, Jason. We grew up together. You stole tyres behind the community centre. You loved Pride and Prejudice and threatened to burn my shoes if I told anyone. You came to my window after Willis—”
“Shut up.”
“You died and came back and found me outside the bodega. I punched you. You said you got better.”
His face changed. It was tiny. A crack in the armour. A twitch near his mouth. His eyes searched yours like something in him had heard a song through a wall.
“I don’t know you,” he said, but the words had lost their teeth.
“You do.”
His breathing got rough. “You’re lying.”
“I wish I were.”
For a second, you thought you had him. For a second, Jason lowered the gun.
Then something clattered in the hallway outside.
His gaze snapped to the door.
When he looked back—
Nothing. Blankness. Threat.
Gun up.
“Last chance,” he said. “Who are you?”
That was the first time Jason Todd forgot you.
It was not the last.
Loneliness became logistical.
That was the cruel joke of it. Everyone imagined loneliness as candlelight and rain on windows and tragic music swelling in the distance. Very cinematic. Very marketable. Total scam.
Real loneliness was trying to rent a room from someone who forgot you halfway through handing over the keys. It was ordering food and watching the cashier blink at you because they’d turned to grab your drink. It was the doctors forgetting why you were in the exam room. Bus drivers demanding fare twice. Landlords calling the cops on “an intruder” inside the apartment you had paid for with cash they no longer remembered receiving.
It was learning not to cry in public because strangers would panic at the sight of tears on a face they couldn’t place.
You became a ghost with a pulse.
Worse, actually. Ghosts were remembered.
You tried recording yourself. The video showed you clearly until anyone else watched it. Then their eyes slipped away from the screen. Later, they couldn’t recall what they’d seen.
You tried writing notes. People could read them. They could understand the words. But the moment they looked away from the paper, the context dissolved.
You know me, you wrote once on Jason’s door.
He opened it, read the note, frowned, and looked down the hall.
You were standing right there.
He raised his gun before you could say hello.
Again. And again. And again.
The third time, he had a bruise on his jaw and blood on his collar. You had come because you’d heard gunfire from three blocks away and still knew his patrol routes like a prayer you’d never stopped saying.
You slipped in through the window.
“Behind you,” you said softly.
Jason turned, pistol already in hand.
You didn’t flinch fast enough. The gun pressed under your chin.
His eyes were green-blue violence. “You’ve got five seconds.”
You stared at him. Jason stared back.
Something inside him trembled.
Not his hand. Jason’s hands were steady. Always steady.
But his face. His face did something devastating.
It softened with confusion.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because you keep forgetting me.”
His finger shifted away from the trigger. “Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
He swallowed. “I feel like I do.”
That hurt worse than the gun.
You almost laughed. It came out broken. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, quieter. “That’s the problem.”
You gave him facts.
You learned to weaponise intimacy. Not the pretty kind. The surgical kind. Details sharp enough to cut through the fog.
“You hate peas but pretend it’s ideological.” A blink. “You read the ending of books first when you’re scared the dog dies.” His jaw tightened. “You called me after your first nightmare when you came back. You didn’t say anything for eight minutes. I stayed on the line.”
His hand lowered.
“You remember?” you asked.
“No.” His voice sounded scraped raw. “But I believe you.”
Then he looked down at the gun in his hand.
Gone.
His expression hardened.
“Don’t move.”
You moved.
Not toward him.
Away. Out the window. Across the roof. Into the night.
Jason shouted after you, but you knew by the time he reached the fire escape, he would not remember why he was running.
Jason started hunting a ghost.
He didn’t know that was what he was doing. He called it a case because that made sense. Cases had suspects, evidence, motive. Cases could be solved with enough pressure, enough blood, enough stubborn refusal to sleep.
There was someone in his safehouses. Someone who knew his codes. Someone who cleaned his wounds when he passed out bleeding on his bathroom floor, because he woke up bandaged in purple wrap and furious about the tenderness of it. Someone who kept leaving food. Someone who had patched a bullet hole in his jacket by hand.
Someone who knew him. Someone he kept forgetting.
It made him meaner than usual, which was honestly saying something.
“Maybe it’s a stalker,” Tim said one night over comms.
Jason was crouched on a rooftop, watching a weapons deal go sideways in the alley below. “Thanks, Replacement. Stellar detective work. You crack that case with your enormous brain, or did the coffee tell you?”
“Your emotional repression is showing.”
“Your face is showing.”
“My camera’s off.”
“I can sense it.”
Oracle cut in. “Children.”
“He started it,” Jason said.
“I’m an adult,” Tim said.
“Emotionally? Twelve.”
Oracle sighed. “Jason, about your ghost.”
“Not a ghost.”
“You have described them as appearing, disappearing, bypassing security, and leaving cryptic notes. That is at least ghost-adjacent.”
Jason hated that she sounded amused.
“They’re a person,” he said.
The words came out too fast. Silence hit comms.
Then Dick, because apparently everyone was on this channel now, said, “You sound sure.”
Jason aimed down his rifle scope. “I am sure.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer.
Because he didn’t know. Because sometimes he woke up with grief in his throat and a name already gone from his tongue. Because he caught himself buying your favourite candy and had no memory of learning you liked it.
Because once, half-asleep and feverish, he had reached across his bed like someone belonged there.
Because every time he found one of those notes, something in him whispered, Don’t lose them again.
Again.
That was the word that haunted him.
Again.
You watched him from a distance because love made you stupid.
That was the ugly truth.
You should have left Gotham. You tried, once. Got as far as Blüdhaven before realising the city forgot you, too, only with worse parking.
You came back.
For Jason. Because he was reckless. Because he bled too much. Because he left windows unlocked without meaning to.
Because some part of you still belonged to the boy under the fire escape, the one who took your advice and pretended he hadn’t, the one who looked at you like you were something worth surviving for.
You were in love with him. You had been for years, probably.
Maybe since the laundromat roof. Maybe since he read aloud to you from Persuasion and claimed it was “for the bit.” Maybe since he came back from the dead and said your name like it was the one thing the grave hadn’t taken.
You loved him. And Jason kept aiming guns at you.
Honestly? This is how Gotham did romance. Absolute trash fire. Zero stars. Would still haunt again.
The worst time happened in his apartment.
Not a safehouse. His actual apartment. The one with books stacked everywhere and a couch too ugly to be ironic. The one place you had never entered without permission.
But he had been hurt. Badly.
You found him by following blood drops up the stairwell. His door was ajar. His helmet lay cracked near the entryway.
Jason was on the floor. Unconscious.
For one terrible second, he looked dead again.
You made a sound you didn’t recognise.
Then you moved.
You stitched the knife wound in his side with shaking hands. Cleaned blood from his ribs. Checked his pupils. Sat beside him for hours, terrified that if you looked away from him, you would forget yourself too.
At dawn, he woke with a gasp.
His hand shot under the pillow.
You caught his wrist. “Jay, it’s me.”
His eyes focused.
He froze. His body knew you before his mind did. You felt it in the way his wrist slackened under your fingers. The way his breathing changed. The way his gaze dropped to your mouth and back up again with the stunned, aching recognition of someone seeing sunrise after years underground.
“You,” he whispered.
Hope was cruel.
You should have known better.
“Yeah,” you said.
His brows pulled together. “I was dreaming about you.”
Your heart cracked open. “What did you dream?”
His eyes didn’t leave your face. “Rain. A bodega. You were mad at me.”
“I was.”
“Why?”
“You died.”
A faint, pained smile touched his mouth. “Sounds like me.”
You laughed through the tears before you could stop yourself.
Jason stared at you like the sound had punched him.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“What?”
“Laugh like I should know it.”
You looked down. His fingers shifted under yours. Not pulling away. Holding on.
“I’m trying,” he said.
“I know.”
“No.” His voice dropped, rough and desperate. “You don’t. I keep finding—things. Notes. Food. Bandages. I keep waking up feeling like somebody carved out half my chest and didn’t leave a scar.” His hand tightened around yours. “I don’t know you, but I miss you.”
You stopped breathing.
Jason’s eyes burned. “How the hell do I miss someone I don’t know?”
“Because you did know me.”
He stared.
“You were my best friend,” you said. “Before Bruce. Before Robin. Before the grave. Before all this.”
His expression shattered so quietly you almost missed it.
“Best friend,” he repeated.
“Yeah.”
Something unbearably soft moved across his face.
“And now?”
The question hung between you.
Now, you thought, I love you so much it’s ruining me.
Now, you thought, I would let you forget me forever if it meant you stayed alive.
Now, you thought, I am so tired.
You opened your mouth.
A crash sounded from the fire escape.
Jason turned. Just a glance. Just instinct.
Just enough.
When he looked back, he ripped his hand from yours like he’d been burned.
Gun out. Pointed at your heart.
You stood slowly.
His stitches pulled. He hissed.
“Stay back,” he snapped.
“Jason.”
“Who are you?”
Your whole body went cold.
Not because he had forgotten.
You were used to that by now.
Because this time, you had almost told him. This time, he had almost asked. This time, the universe had yanked the leash before either of you could cross the line.
You raised your hands.
Jason’s eyes flickered to the blood on your fingers.
His blood.
Your hands.
His gun.
“Did you do this to me?” he demanded.
That one broke you.
You left without answering.
After that, you stopped going to him. For three weeks, you did the closest thing to healing you knew how to do.
You disappeared on purpose.
No rooftops. No safehouses. No slipping through Jason’s window to check if he was sleeping. No leaving food. No purple bandages. No notes.
You found an abandoned greenhouse behind an old school in Burnley and made it yours. The glass roof was cracked, but enough panes remained to catch the winter light. Wild vines had claimed the walls. Broken pots littered the floor. In the back, under a rusted table, you found a tray of dead seedlings with faded labels.
Basil. Thyme. Forget-me-not.
The last one made you sit down hard.
Of course. Gotham had a sense of humour, and it was evil.
You stole soil. Seeds. Bottled water. A blanket. Cans of soup. You built a life out of scraps because that was what you had always done.
Then you practised.
At first, you didn’t know what practising meant. How did you control being forgotten? How did you command absence? How did you hold your own shape inside other people’s minds when your power made you slippery as smoke?
So you started with objects.
You put a cracked mirror on the table and stared at yourself.
“My name is…” You said your name.
The mirror held you.
You looked away.
Looked back.
Still there.
“Okay,” you whispered. “Great. Congrats. Object permanence, but traumatic.”
You laughed. It sounded awful.
Next, you tried with birds.
Pigeons nested in the rafters. They remembered food, at least. Or maybe they remembered patterns. You put seeds in the same place every morning. They flew away when you moved, then came back.
They did not know you. But they trusted the shape of your kindness.
That became the first lesson.
Memory was not just a face.
It was pattern. It was feeling. It was the body recognising safety before the mind could name it.
Jason’s body had known you. That meant something.
So you practised being more than sight. You recorded your voice and listened until you could hold yourself steady through the playback.
You wrote your name on your skin.
You held your own gaze in the mirror and said, “I am here,” until the words stopped feeling like a plea and started feeling like an order.
The power fought you. It wanted collapse. It wanted erasure. It wanted to fold you into the blind spot of the world.
You fought back.
Some days, you lost. Some days, you lay on the greenhouse floor with dirt under your nails and cried so hard your ribs ached.
Some days, you hated Jason for forgetting. Then you hated yourself for hating him. Then you hated the men who had done this.
Then you hated the world because it kept spinning, rude and bright and busy, while you became a rumour no one could keep.
But slowly, slowly, something changed.
A pigeon looked away from you. Looked back.
Didn’t startle.
You sobbed over that bird like it had handed you the moon.
The next week, a stray cat remembered where your hand was.
Then an old woman at a corner store frowned at you after turning away to count change and said, “Didn’t you already pay?”
You almost kissed her.
You didn’t, because boundaries. Also, she had a broom.
Control came like sunrise through fog.
Not all at once. Not enough.
But real.
You learned that fear made the forgetting worse. Panic scattered you. Shame erased your edges.
Calm helped. Touch helped. Names helped.
Love—
Love did something strange.
You didn’t know how to test that.
Not without Jason.
Jason did not handle your absence well.
He would have denied that under oath, threat, torture, and probably alien mind probe.
But he was falling apart in practical, masculine, deeply embarrassing ways.
He stopped sleeping. He stopped cooking. He started tearing apart old case files from the Bowery, hunting for Mnemosyne, Subject Nine, memory tech, missing witnesses, anything.
He found nothing.
That was impossible. Nothing in Gotham left nothing behind.
So he dug deeper. Black Mask whispers. Penguin shipments. Old Cadmus shell companies. Court of Owls banking ghosts. He kicked down doors and broke fingers and followed the absence like it was blood.
Every trail ended in static.
Except one.
A flower. Pressed between the pages of a book he did not remember buying.
A tiny blue forget-me-not.
Beside it, in handwriting he recognised as his own:
They loved these.
Jason stared at the note until the words blurred.
A person. His person.
The thought slammed through him so hard he had to sit down.
His person.
He didn’t remember your face. He didn’t remember your name.
But grief had weight. Love had gravity. Whatever had been taken from him had left a crater.
Jason touched the dried flower with one finger.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to someone he couldn’t remember.
The apartment stayed quiet.
No answer. No laugh. No soft footsteps behind him.
For reasons he could not explain, that was when he broke.
Not loudly. Jason did not break like glass. He broke like a building condemned quietly from the inside.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his eye.
And cried.
You returned because Jason found the warehouse.
Of course he did.
You heard about it from two men in an alley who forgot you while you were standing between them. They were nervous. Talking too much. Red Hood had been asking questions. Red Hood had found the old Mnemosyne site. Red Hood was going to get himself killed because subtlety had never met that man and lived.
You went cold all over.
The warehouse was not empty.
They had rebuilt underneath it. New locks. New guards. New machines humming beneath the concrete.
And Jason had walked right in.
By the time you arrived, the place was already burning. Gunfire cracked below. Alarms shrieked. Smoke rolled through the stairwell.
You moved through it like a ghost, because that was what they had made you. Men looked away and lost you. Cameras blurred. Guards shouted at shadows.
Then you heard Jason scream.
Not in fear.
In rage.
That was worse.
You found him in the central lab, chained to a metal chair under a halo of white lights. His helmet was gone. Blood ran from his temple. Electrodes clung to his skin.
A man in a lab coat stood beside a console.
“You are fascinating,” he said to Jason. “Repeated exposure to the anomaly has created subconscious retention pathways. Emotional memory without declarative recall. Remarkable.”
Jason spat blood on the floor. “You talk like a Wikipedia page grew legs and got bullied.”
God, you loved him.
The scientist sighed.
“You keep searching for them,” he said. “Even when you cannot remember who they are. The attachment survives erasure. We need to know why.”
Jason’s head lifted. Something terrible moved through his face.
“Them,” he said.
The scientist smiled.
“Ah,” he said. “There it is.”
You stepped into the room.
The scientist turned. His eyes landed on you.
Recognition flared—not of you, but of his experiment.
“Subject Nine,” he breathed.
Jason looked at you.
Everything stopped.
He stared like a starving man seeing food. Like an injured animal seeing home. Like a boy under a fire escape looking up at someone who knew which cars had alarms.
“You,” he whispered.
You held his gaze. “Hi, Jay.”
His breathing shook.
The scientist reached for a switch.
You moved first.
You were not a vigilante. Not really. You didn’t have armour or training from assassins or a dramatic cape. But you had survived Gotham. You had survived being erased. You had survived Jason Todd’s gun pointed at your heart more times than anyone should.
So you picked up a metal tray and hit the scientist in the face with it.
He dropped like a sack of bad decisions.
Jason blinked.
You froze.
No. No, not now.
His eyes closed for half a second from blood loss and pain.
When they opened, panic flickered there.
Not blankness.
Panic.
“Don’t go,” he said.
You nearly dropped the tray. “You remember?”
“No.” His voice cracked. “Yes. I don’t—stay where I can see you.”
You rushed to him and started working on the restraints.
His hands were shaking. Jason Todd’s hands were shaking.
“Look at me,” you said.
“I am.”
“Keep looking.”
“Not a hardship,” he rasped.
“Jason.”
“What? You’re pretty. I’m concussed. Let me have this.”
You laughed, breathless and wrecked. His eyes filled with something like wonder.
“I know that laugh,” he whispered.
Your hands stilled.
“I know it.”
The restraints snapped open. Jason sagged forward. You caught him. His forehead dropped against your shoulder, and for one impossible second, he simply breathed you in.
Then the door opened.
Three guards rushed in.
Jason’s instincts took over.
He turned.
“No!” you shouted.
The forgetting hit like a wave.
You felt it tearing at the room, at him, at the fragile thread between your mind and his.
Not again.
Not again.
Something in you rose up.
Not fear. Not grief.
Fury.
You were tired of being stolen.
You grabbed Jason’s face between both hands and forced him back toward you.
“Remember me,” you said.
The lights flickered. The air bent. Jason’s pupils blew wide.
You felt the power twist, searching for absence, searching for the old path out.
You refused it.
“I am here,” you said, voice shaking. “I am real. You know me. You loved me before you had words for it. You found me in the rain. You forgot me with a gun in your hand, and I still came back because I am apparently an idiot with catastrophic taste in men.”
Jason made a strangled sound.
The guards shouted.
You did not look away.
“You are Jason Peter Todd,” you said through tears. “You hate peas. You love books. You died and came back wrong and still tried to be good even when you didn’t believe you were. You were my best friend. You are the love of my life. And I am done being erased.”
The room went silent.
Not actually. The alarms still screamed. The guards still moved. Fire still ate through the walls.
But inside the circle of Jason’s gaze, silence bloomed.
Blue and bright. Forget-me-not.
Jason stared at you.
Then, slowly, impossibly, he said your name.
You broke.
Jason caught you with one arm and raised his gun with the other.
He did not point it at you.
He pointed it past you.
“Hey,” he said to the guards, voice low and murderously calm. “You interrupted something important.”
The fight lasted forty-seven seconds. Jason was injured, half-electrocuted, and running on spite, which, unfortunately for everyone else, was his most renewable energy source. You helped by making yourself difficult to track, appearing in blind spots, knocking guns aside, and turning absence into a weapon instead of a wound.
When it was over, Jason leaned against the console, breathing hard.
You stood in front of him.
He looked at you. Then, deliberately, he turned his head away.
Your heart stopped.
“Jason—”
He looked back.
His face crumpled.
Still there. Still seeing you. Still knowing.
“Oh,” you whispered.
Jason laughed once, broken and disbelieving.
Then he reached for you.
You met him halfway.
The kiss was not graceful. There was blood on his mouth and smoke in your lungs. His hand shook against the back of your neck. You were crying too hard to breathe properly. It was a terrible first kiss, technically speaking.
It was also perfect.
Jason kissed you like a memory returning to a body. Like a vow. Like a wound finally closing.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.
“I forgot you,” he said.
“Not on purpose.”
“I pointed guns at you.”
“Yeah.” You swallowed. “We’re going to unpack that. Emotionally. Extensively. Possibly with yelling.”
His mouth twitched. “Fair.”
“You scared me.”
His face went hollow with guilt. “I know.”
“No, you don’t.” You touched his jaw. “But you will.”
Jason nodded. No defense. No deflection. No joke sharp enough to hide behind.
Just Jason.
Your Jason.
“I’ll remember,” he said.
The words trembled.
You believed him.
Recovery was not pretty. It did not arrive in one cinematic montage where sunlight poured through windows and everything healed because love had entered the chat.
Love helped.
Love was not a cure.
There were still bad days.
Some mornings, Jason woke up reaching for a gun because you were in his kitchen and his brain stuttered before recognition landed. He never pointed it at you again, but the reach was enough to make you go quiet.
He hated himself for that. You hated the flinch.
You both learned to survive the aftermath.
He started sleeping with his weapons locked away when you stayed over. You started announcing yourself before entering rooms.
He put your name in his phone with a blue heart beside it and stared at it so often you threatened to change it to Emotional Support Cryptid.
He said, “Do it, and I’ll make yours Haunting Me Professionally.”
You changed it immediately.
Jason laughed for a full minute.
The first time he left the room and remembered you when he came back, he cried in the hallway before opening the door.
You pretended not to notice. He knew you noticed.
He loved you for pretending.
The Bats took it with varying levels of grace.
Dick hugged you, forgot you when he turned to yell for Bruce, then turned back and screamed. Tim started wearing a body camera and taking notes with alarming intensity.
Damian narrowed his eyes and said, “Your condition is inconvenient.”
You said, “So is your personality, but here we are.”
Jason laughed so hard he had to sit down.
Damian remembered you after that. Pure spite, apparently, was also a memory anchor.
Bruce was the hardest.
Not because he forgot.
Because he looked at Jason after remembering enough and said, quietly, “You’ve been grieving someone.”
Jason’s face closed.
You reached for his hand. Jason let you.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”
Bruce looked at your joined hands. Then at you.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And maybe he forgot the exact shape of you when he looked away.
But he remembered Jason holding on.
That was enough for now.
Months later, the greenhouse bloomed.
You brought Jason there on a Sunday morning, when Gotham was pretending to be gentle.
The forget-me-nots had grown wild in the back, tiny blue flowers spilling from cracked pots, stubborn and bright against the ruin.
Jason stood under the broken glass roof with his hands in his jacket pockets.
“Subtle,” he said.
You nudged him. “Shut up.”
He looked down at the flowers. Then at you.
He did that a lot now. Looked at you.
Not out of fear. Not because he had to.
Because he wanted to. Because every glance was proof.
“You know,” he said, “I used to think I was haunted.”
“You were.”
“Rude.”
“You left notes to yourself about me. That’s haunting behaviour.”
“I was being investigative.”
“You wrote ‘blue mug’ on your arm.”
“Important clue.”
“You cried over a flower.”
Jason pointed at you. “That information was shared in confidence.”
You smiled.
His expression softened.
“I missed you,” he said.
The air changed.
You looked at him.
Jason swallowed, but he didn’t look away.
“I didn’t know your name. Didn’t know your face. But I missed you all the time.” His voice roughened. “There was this… space. Everywhere. In my apartment. In my bed. In my head. Like my life had been built around someone, and then the world took them out but left the shape behind.”
Your eyes burned. “Jay.”
“I think some part of me knew,” he said. “Even when I forgot. Even when I was scared. Even when I—” His jaw tightened. “Even when I hurt you.”
You stepped closer.
“You didn’t stop loving me,” you said softly. “You just couldn’t remember where the love was supposed to go.”
Jason’s face broke open.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
You took his hand. He held on carefully, like you were both precious and real.
“I love you,” he said.
You had imagined those words so many times that they should have felt familiar.
They didn’t. They felt new. They felt like sun through cracked glass.
“I love you too,” you said.
Jason smiled. Small. Shy. Devastating.
Then he turned away.
Only for a second. Only to look at the flowers.
When he looked back, his smile was still there.
So was recognition. So was love.
You exhaled.
Jason squeezed your hand.
“Still here,” he said.
You leaned into him, shoulder against his arm, and looked at the forget-me-nots blooming in the ruins.
“Yeah,” you whispered.
For once, the world remembered you.
For once, so did he.
