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Apr 29

the shape of mercy - jason todd

content jason todd x indigo lantern! reader, gn! reader, angst, emotional hurt/comfort, past violence, past murder, references to war crimes, forced empathy, identity issues, trauma recovery, canon-typical violence, blood and injury, ring removal, temporary loss of self/control, fear of hurting loved ones, alien technology, panic and guilt, jason todd’s lazarus pit trauma, non-graphic gun violence, moral injury, eventual happy ending, gender-neutral reader, established relationship, compassion as rehabilitation, soft ending

masterlist

word count 8.5k

jason todd falls for an indigo lantern whose compassion was forced onto them as punishment for a violent past. when their ring is stolen, they fear the worst parts of themselves are returning, but jason helps them realise love and redemption can still be chosen.

The first time Jason Todd met you, you were standing in a warehouse full of bodies and glowing like a bruise under moonlight.

Not metaphorically. You stood in the centre of the carnage with an indigo ring burning on your finger, its light pulsing in time with your heartbeat. It washed the concrete walls violet-blue, caught on the broken glass, shimmered across Jason’s red helmet where he watched from behind the cover of a rusted shipping container with one gun raised and the other already half-lowered.

Because you weren’t attacking.

That was the weird part.

Jason had come to the East End docks expecting guns, drugs, maybe some half-baked alien tech being smuggled through Gotham by idiots with more money than survival instinct. He had not expected the smuggling crew to already be down. He had not expected the alien device in the centre of the room to be cracked open like an egg. And he definitely hadn’t expected you.

You wore dark clothes beneath a cloak cut in strange angles, the fabric moving though there was no wind. A staff rested against your shoulder, its head shaped around a glowing indigo sigil. Your face was shadowed under the hood, but Jason could see your mouth.

You were whispering. No—praying.

No.

Apologising.

One of the smugglers groaned near your feet. Jason’s gun snapped toward him on instinct.

You turned faster.

The staff struck the ground once.

“Nok.”

Indigo light spilled outward.

Jason braced for impact, but the wave passed through him like cold water through bone. The smuggler gasped. Jason watched, stunned, as the bullet wound in the man’s side closed under your palm. Not completely. Not cleanly. But enough to keep him breathing.

“What the hell?” Jason said.

You looked up.

For one second, behind the glow of the ring, your eyes were the saddest thing Jason had ever seen.

Then you said, in a voice that sounded like it had been dragged through a grave and taught tenderness afterwards, “He was afraid.”

Jason stared.

He almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because Gotham had a way of handing him absurdity like a live grenade.

“He was shooting at people.”

“Yes,” you said softly. “He was afraid.”

Jason stepped out from behind the container, both guns trained on you now. “That supposed to make me feel bad?”

The ring brightened.

You flinched. Actually flinched.

As if the question had struck you somewhere deeper than skin.

“No,” you said. “It makes me feel bad.”

Jason tilted his helmet. “Good for you.”

You looked around the room at the injured men. Some unconscious. Some were tied in glowing indigo restraints. Some whimpering. Alive, mostly. Better than Jason’s usual dockside cleanup.

The alien device behind you sparked.

Jason’s attention flicked toward it. “That yours?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Your hand curled slightly around the staff. “It called to the ring.”

“Alien jewellery doing phone calls now. Cool. Great.”

You blinked, clearly not sure what to do with him.

Jason hated that he noticed. Hated that it made you look almost young under all that ancient, cosmic grief.

“You’re not human,” he guessed.

“I am not from Earth.”

“Yeah, figured. Most Gotham weirdos don’t colour-coordinate with their emotional trauma.”

Something shifted in your expression.

Jason realised, too late, that the ring had translated the joke and the wound underneath it.

Your gaze dropped to his chest.

Not the armour. Past it.

Into it.

“You hurt,” you said.

Jason’s guns steadied. “Everyone hurts.”

“No,” you said. “You were murdered.”

Silence dropped hard.

The warehouse creaked around them. Far away, sirens wailed. Gotham kept breathing its dirty little breath.

Jason’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Don’t.”

The word came out low. Barely human.

You froze.

“I am sorry,” you said quickly.

“You don’t get to know that.”

“The ring—”

“I don’t care what the ring does.”

You bowed your head, and that was somehow worse than if you had argued. “Then I will not look again.”

Jason should’ve shot near your feet. Should’ve told you to leave Gotham. Should’ve called Bruce—no, absolutely not, scratch that, he would rather eat glass. Should’ve done a lot of things.

Instead, because his life was a circus and apparently he was the clown with guns, he asked, “What are you?”

You touched the glowing ring with your thumb. “Indigo Tribe.”

Jason waited.

You seemed to realise that meant nothing to him.

“We channel compassion,” you said. “We heal. We teleport. We can mimic the light of other Lantern Corps when near them.” A pause. “And we are chosen from among the worst beings in the universe.”

Jason stared at you.

“You’re gonna need to run that last part by me again.”

The ring glowed brighter. Your voice changed, just slightly—not colder, not warmer, but pulled taut. Like something else had leaned into your throat.

“Killers. Conquerors. Torturers. Those without mercy. Those who took and took and called it power.” Your hand trembled around the staff. “The ring makes us feel what we could not. It forces empathy into the empty places.”

Jason’s helmet hid his face.

That was good. That was very, very good.

“And you?” he asked.

Your silence was answer enough.

The sirens got closer.

Jason holstered one gun but kept the other out because he wasn’t stupid, just emotionally compromised at inconvenient intervals.

“Did you kill anyone here?”

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

Your mouth parted.

The ring’s glow flickered.

Jason saw it. The panic. The shame. The way your whole body tightened around the question like a blade had been put in your hands.

“No,” you said. Then, quieter. “I don’t know.”

Jason lowered the gun.

Not all the way.

But enough.

“Yeah,” he said. “That one’s familiar.”

That was how it started.

Not with romance. Not with trust.

With two weapons looking at each other and recognising the fingerprints left on the handle.

You did not stay in Gotham after that. Not at first.

The Indigo Tribe called you away, or the ring did, or the universe tilted, and you followed the ache. Jason didn’t understand the cosmic stuff. He barely tolerated magic, aliens, speedsters, gods, multiverse nonsense, and whatever the hell was going on with Constantine’s coat. Space cops with mood rings were not exactly his preferred genre.

But you kept coming back.

Always at night. Always where people were bleeding.

The second time, you appeared in Crime Alley in a flare of indigo light while Jason was trying to keep a sixteen-year-old from dying in his arms.

The kid had been caught in a crossfire. Wrong corner, wrong minute, wrong city. Gotham loved making orphans.

Jason had his glove pressed to the wound, barking at the kid to stay awake. The kid’s blood was hot between his fingers. Too much. Way too much.

Then the air folded, and you stepped through.

Jason pointed a gun at you on reflex.

You ignored it.

“Nok,” you whispered, kneeling.

“Can you help him?” Jason demanded.

“I can try.”

“Try harder.”

You did.

Your ring blazed. The staff clattered beside you as both your hands pressed over Jason’s. Indigo light crawled into the wound. The kid screamed, then sobbed, then breathed.

Just breathed.

Jason felt the exact moment death lost its grip.

He also felt you trembling.

When the ambulance arrived, you vanished to the rooftop across the street. Jason found you there five minutes later, hunched against a gargoyle, your hood down.

He saw your face clearly for the first time.

Not the shape of it. Not the details. Those shifted under an indigo glow, blurred by the ring’s strange aura and Jason’s own refusal to make you too real too fast.

But he saw enough.

You looked haunted.

Not spooky haunted.

Real haunted. The kind that meant the dead didn’t visit because they didn’t have to. They already lived in your ribs.

Jason leaned against the ledge beside you. “Kid’ll live.”

“Yes.”

“You did good.”

You swallowed.

The ring’s light pulsed.

“I felt his fear.”

“Yeah, well. He had a hole in him. Fear’s fair.”

“I felt his mother’s grief before it happened.” Your fingers dug into your cloak. “I felt the shape of the life that would have broken if he died.”

Jason said nothing.

Rain gathered in his hair and slid down the back of his neck.

You looked at your ring like it was a shackle.

“When I was chosen,” you said, “I thought compassion would be soft.”

Jason snorted. “Big mistake.”

You glanced at him.

He shrugged. “Compassion’s a crowbar. Gets under your ribs and starts prying.”

That startled a laugh out of you.

It was small. Rusty. Like the sound had been locked away for years and had forgotten its own name.

Jason decided, very privately, that he wanted to hear it again.

This was a bad idea.

Naturally, he leaned into it.

The third time you came back, Jason had questions.

He brought takeout.

You stared at the paper bag like it was a bomb.

“It’s noodles,” he said.

“I do not require food.”

“Yeah, and I don’t require emotional stability, but people keep saying it’d be good for me.”

You considered that.

Then accepted the noodles.

You ate with careful, solemn focus while sitting on the fire escape outside one of his safehouses. Jason sat across from you, helmet off but domino still on, because Gotham had taken plenty from him, and self-preservation wasn’t going to be one of them.

For a while, there was just the city below and the steam rising between you.

Then Jason said, “So. Worst beings in the universe.”

Your chopsticks paused.

“Subtle,” you said.

Jason pointed his fork at you. “You’re learning sarcasm. That’s adorable.”

“I could throw you off this fire escape.”

“See? Progress.”

You looked down at the noodles again.

The ring glowed softly.

“I was a commander,” you said. “On a world called Veyr.”

Jason stilled.

You rarely volunteered anything about before. Before the ring. Before the Tribe. Before compassion was forced into you like a second nervous system.

You kept speaking anyway.

“My people were not born cruel. No one is, I think. Or maybe that is the ring speaking. I no longer know where its thoughts end and mine begin.”

Jason’s chest tightened.

He knew something about that.

“I was raised during war,” you continued. “Everyone was. We were taught that mercy was inefficiency. That hesitation was betrayal. That tenderness was a disease that let enemies live long enough to become threats again.”

Jason’s food went cold in his hand.

“I was good at it,” you said. “That is the part I cannot make gentle. I was not forced to excel. I wanted to. I wanted rank. Victory. Fear. I wanted rooms to go silent when I entered them.”

The ring flared.

Your breath hitched, but you forced yourself on.

“I ordered cities starved. I executed prisoners because feeding them cost resources. I turned children into informants. I told myself it was strategy.”

Jason said your name.

Not your real one. You had not given that. You said the ring had swallowed it, or you had, or the past had. Jason called you Indigo when he was being careful and “space case” when he wanted you to roll your eyes.

This time, he just said, “Hey.”

You looked at him.

“I’m not asking because I want a confession booth.”

“Then why?”

“Because you keep looking at yourself like you’re a live grenade.”

“I was.”

Jason’s laugh had no humour in it. “Yeah. Same.”

“You were a child.”

“I came back.”

The words landed heavy.

You knew pieces. Not the whole story. Jason hadn’t exactly pulled out a scrapbook labelled My Death And Other Family Activities.

“I came back wrong,” he said. “Not evil. Not exactly. But angry enough that it didn’t matter. The Pit—Lazarus Pit, don’t ask, magic green trauma soup—brought me back with rage wired into my bones. Every thought had teeth. Every hurt needed blood. And then people found me. Used that.”

Your gaze softened.

Jason hated how much he wanted it.

“Talia,” you said.

He looked sharply at you.

You tapped the ring. “Compassion hears names when they are carved deeply enough.”

“Tell compassion to mind its business.”

“I try.”

Jason looked out over the city.

A siren wailed. A couple screamed at each other in an apartment below. Somewhere, someone laughed. Somewhere, someone ran.

“I’m not saying we’re the same,” Jason said. “I didn’t do what you did before the ring.”

“No,” you said. “You chose people. Even at your worst, you chose victims over abusers.”

“Not always.”

“Enough.”

Jason glanced at you.

Your expression was steady.

The ring did not flare. No cosmic compulsion. No glowing judgment.

Just you.

“I don’t know who I am without it,” you admitted.

The words were barely audible.

Jason understood them anyway.

The rain started again, soft as static.

You looked at your hand. “When the ring first chose me, I felt everything. Every person I had hurt. Every life I had ended. Every survivor. Every empty chair. Every name I had erased and never bothered to learn. I screamed until my voice failed. I begged them to remove it. Then I begged them to kill me. Then I begged forgiveness from people who were ash.”

Jason’s throat tightened.

“The Tribe called it rehabilitation,” you said. “Maybe it was. I became better. I stopped killing. I learned to heal. I learned to weep for strangers. But sometimes I wonder…” You looked at him, and the indigo light made your eyes shine like deep space after disaster. “If goodness is forced into you, does it count?”

Jason did not answer right away.

Because the easy answer was yes.

Because the cruel answer was no.

Because the true answer was sitting beside him with noodles going cold and the universe’s ugliest mercy wrapped around their finger.

Finally, he said, “I think what counts is what you do when you get a choice.”

You smiled faintly. “And if I never get one?”

Jason looked at the ring. Then back at you.

“Then we find you one.”

That was the moment, he’d think later.

Not when you kissed him. Not when you slept in his bed for the first time. Not when you whispered his name like it was something worth being careful with.

That moment.

A promise made on a rusty fire escape above a city that ate promises for breakfast.

We find you one.

Falling in love with Jason Todd happened badly. Messily. With terrible timing.

With blood on both your hands more often than not.

You learned Gotham in pieces. Rooftops. Alleyways. Safehouses. The smell of gun oil. The creak of Jason’s leather jacket. The peculiar ritual of him pretending he did not care while doing the most caring thing available, with the emotional subtlety of a brick through a window.

He taught you how to order coffee.

You taught him how to identify seventeen kinds of alien explosives by scent.

He taught you that gargoyles were “dramatic little stone freaks” and therefore family.

You taught him how to fold space through the emotional resonance of suffering, which he called “the worst Uber ever.”

He brought you books.

That was when it got dangerous.

Jason Todd, you learned, treated books like sacred contraband. He shoved battered paperbacks into your hands and said things like, “Read this. You’ll get why humans are insane,” or, “This one’s depressing as hell. You’ll love it,” or, “Don’t judge me for the annotations. Past me was going through it.”

You read them because the ring urged understanding.

You kept reading them because Jason’s handwriting lived in the margins.

Angry underlines. Sharp little notes. Occasional question marks that looked personally offended. Once, beside a passage about mercy, he had written: what if they don’t deserve it but you give it anyway just to spite the universe?

You stared at that for a long time.

The ring stayed quiet.

Which meant whatever you felt then was yours.

Maybe that was when it happened.

Maybe love was not a lightning strike. Maybe it was an annotation. Maybe it was a man with white streaks in his hair and violence in his history handing you a book like he was handing you proof that survival could become language.

Jason loved differently than the ring did.

The ring’s compassion was immense. Cosmic. Crushing. It made you feel the suffering of strangers until you could not ignore it. It opened you by force. It demanded you understand.

Jason’s compassion was quieter.

A protein bar left beside your staff because you forgot food mattered. A blanket thrown at your face because “you look like a Victorian ghost and not in the hot way.” A hand hovering near your shoulder, never touching until you leaned first.

He did not demand entry into your pain.

He sat outside it with a lockpick and snacks.

You kissed him six months after the warehouse.

Or he kissed you. The details were contested.

Jason insisted you started it because you looked at his mouth first.

You insisted he started it because he said, “Are we gonna keep doing this tragic eye contact thing, or—”

Either way, the sentence did not survive.

The kiss happened on a rooftop after patrol, with dawn threatening the edge of Gotham in thin grey lines. Jason’s helmet sat beside his boot. He had blood on his jaw. Not his. Mostly.

You healed the split in his lip with the ring.

He caught your wrist before you pulled away.

“Does it make you?” he asked.

You knew what he meant.

Does the ring make you touch me gently? Does it make you look at me like that? Does it make you care?

You turned your hand in his grip until your fingers linked with his.

“No,” you said.

Jason searched your face like he was looking for a trapdoor.

The ring glowed, soft and steady.

“No?” he repeated.

“No.”

“Good,” he whispered.

Then his mouth was on yours.

Jason kissed like he expected to lose and wanted to make the universe work for it. Fierce. Careful underneath. A little desperate, as if gentleness embarrassed him but he couldn’t stop offering it. His hand cupped the back of your head, fingers threading into your hood, anchoring you without holding you captive.

You had felt the grief of planets. You had carried the agony of strangers. You had been made to understand the cost of every wound you’d caused.

But this—

This was the first tenderness that did not arrive as punishment.

You made a sound into his mouth.

Jason pulled back immediately. “Too much?”

“No,” you said, and the word broke.

His face changed. Softened.

You hated and loved that he could do that. That Jason, who had every reason to turn himself into a locked room with guns mounted on the walls, still had windows. Still opened them, sometimes. Still let light commit breaking and entering.

He pressed his forehead to yours.

“Okay?” he asked.

The ring flickered.

You answered before it could.

“Yes.”

For almost a year, you were happy.

Not cleanly. Not easily.

But happy in the way Gotham allowed: between crises, under bandages, half-lit by neon and spite.

You had a drawer in Jason’s safehouse.

He pretended this was not a big deal.

He reorganised the entire dresser to make space.

You pretended not to notice.

He learned that when you slept, you curled your ringed hand close to your chest like you were afraid someone would take it and afraid they wouldn’t.

You learned that Jason had nightmares where he woke up swinging and then hated himself for it. The first time it happened, you did not touch him. You sat on the floor beside the bed, hands visible, and talked about nothing until he remembered where he was.

“Your ceiling has water damage,” you said.

Jason panted, sweat shining at his temples. “That’s your comfort line?”

“It looks like a small horse.”

“That looks nothing like a horse.”

“A wounded horse.”

“You’re so bad at this.”

“Yes.”

He laughed.

Shaky. But real.

Later, he reached down, and you took his hand.

You learned each other’s silences.

The angry one. The tired one. The one that meant don’t ask yet. The one that meant ask or I’ll disappear inside myself.

Sometimes you fought.

Jason hated it when you let the ring eat too much of your pain. You hated it when he threw himself into danger as if his body was an apology letter he could keep rewriting in blood.

“You cannot keep making yourself the offering,” you snapped once, after healing three cracked ribs while he sat on the bathroom counter.

Jason glared. “And you can’t keep using compassion like self-harm with better branding.”

You both froze.

The ring pulsed.

Jason’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did.”

He looked away.

You finished healing him in silence.

Then, because you were both disasters but not cowards, he caught your hand before you left.

“I meant it,” he said. “Should’ve said it better.”

You stared at him.

His thumb brushed over your knuckles, careful not to touch the ring.

“I know what it looks like,” he said quietly. “Being useful because you don’t know if you’re lovable.”

The fight drained out of you so fast it almost hurt.

“Jason.”

“You’re not just the ring.”

Your throat closed. “You do not know that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

“How?”

“Because the ring didn’t make you steal my hoodie.”

You blinked.

“That was you,” he said. “Little criminal.”

“It was cold.”

“You can teleport across galaxies.”

“Still cold.”

His mouth twitched.

You looked down at your joined hands. The ring shimmered between you, patient and merciless.

“Sometimes,” you whispered, “I am afraid the only good parts of me are borrowed.”

Jason slid off the counter and stood between your knees. He was still bruised. Still stubborn. Still looking at you like you were not a weapon or a project or a tragedy, but a person standing in his bathroom wearing his stolen hoodie.

“Then we’ll keep track,” he said.

“Of what?”

“What’s yours.”

You gave him a fragile smile. “And what have you found so far?”

Jason pretended to think. “Terrible taste in tea.”

“Rude.”

“Good taste in jackets, since mine keep disappearing.”

“They are comfortable.”

“You hum when you read.”

“I do not.”

“You absolutely do. Also, you hate mint toothpaste but keep using it because you think suffering builds character.”

“That sounds like something you did.”

“It is, and I was wrong. Growth. Look at me go.”

You laughed.

There it was. That little sound he loved too much.

Jason’s expression softened into something almost shy.

“And,” he added, voice lower, “you love me.”

The room went still.

The ring glowed.

Not brighter.

Warmer.

You looked at him, terror and tenderness tangling inside you.

“Yes,” you said.

Jason swallowed.

“I love you too,” he said, like a confession and a challenge and a wound learning to close.

You kissed him until the bathroom mirror fogged and the ring’s light dimmed to the glow of a sleeping star.

For almost a year, you were happy.

Then someone took the ring.

The attack happened in November because Gotham had a flair for seasonal depression.

Rain hammered the roof of the safehouse. Jason was making soup because he claimed canned soup didn’t count and you deserved “actual nutrients, not sodium wearing a trench coat.” You were sitting at the kitchen table with one of his books open in your hand, pretending not to watch him move.

Domesticity still felt like a dangerous animal.

Beautiful. Likely to bite.

Your ring hummed.

You looked down.

Jason noticed immediately. “What?”

“I don’t know.”

The window exploded inward.

Jason moved before the glass hit the floor.

You reached for your staff.

A figure dropped into the kitchen in armour slick and black as oil, a visor glowing with stolen alien script. Not Gotham. Not Earth. They raised a device in one hand.

The ring screamed. Not in sound.

In feeling.

Every nerve in your body lit with warning.

Jason fired twice. The bullets struck a shield of yellow light.

Yellow. Fear.

A Sinestro Corps fragment, maybe. Or something built to mimic it.

The attacker lunged for you.

Jason slammed into them from the side, driving them into the fridge hard enough to dent the steel. “Not in my kitchen, asshole.”

The attacker’s device flared.

Your ring answered, bright indigo bursting outward. You reached for rage, red light flickering at the edges of your aura, mimicked from old battlefield traces. Then green. Will. You shaped it into a barrier between Jason and the weapon.

For half a second, it held.

Then the device opened like a mechanical mouth.

Pain ripped through your hand.

You screamed.

Jason shouted your name.

The ring tore free.

Not slid. Not removed.

Tore.

Like a soul being yanked through skin.

The world went silent.

Indigo light vanished.

You hit the floor.

The attacker grabbed the ring and disappeared in a flash of stolen violet-blue.

Jason was there instantly. “Hey. Hey, look at me. Look at me.”

You could not breathe.

No, you could.

That was the problem.

You could breathe. You could feel your lungs expand. Your heartbeat. The cold tile under your cheek. Jason’s hands on your shoulders.

But the universe was gone.

No endless grief pressing at your senses. No chorus of suffering. No ring filtering every thought through compassion’s brutal prism. No forced empathy. No external gravity bending you toward mercy.

Just silence.

Just you.

Jason’s face hovered above yours, bare with panic.

“Talk to me,” he said.

You stared at him.

He was vulnerable like this. No helmet. No armour above the waist. Kitchen light gilding the white streak in his hair. A bruise along his cheek from patrol two nights before. Pulse visible in his throat.

Your first thought was: vulnerable.

Your second was: easy.

You scrambled backwards so violently that your spine struck the cabinets.

Jason froze.

You clamped both hands over your mouth.

Horror rose.

Not from the ring.

Yours.

“Don’t come closer,” you whispered.

Jason’s face cracked.

Only for a second. Then he steadied.

“Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”

You shook your head. “You don’t understand.”

“I do.”

“No. Jason, I thought—” You pressed your shaking, ringless hand against your chest. “I looked at you, and I thought like before.”

His jaw tightened.

You saw the hurt.

Worse, you saw yourself catalogue it.

Useful.

The old part of you, the commander, the butcher, the thing the Indigo Tribe had buried under compassion, lifted its head in the dark of your mind.

Jason moved slowly, like approaching a wounded animal.

You flinched.

He stopped.

“Was that all?” he asked.

You stared.

“You had a thought,” he said. “Was that all?”

Your breath came shallow. “I—”

“Did you attack me?”

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

Silence.

Jason absorbed that too.

You watched him. Watched him choose not to bleed where you could see.

“I don’t know,” you whispered.

His expression twisted with something like recognition.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I know that one too.”

The soup burned on the stove.

Neither of you moved.

You left before dawn.

Of course you did.

Jason woke to the smell of rain and smoke, and your side of the bed cold.

For a second, he thought the Joker had killed him again, because the pain in his chest was familiar enough to be nostalgic. Then he saw the note on the pillow.

Not paper.

A page torn from one of his books. You had written in the margin beneath one of his old annotations.

I am choosing not to hurt you. That is the only choice I trust.

He stared at it until the words blurred.

Then he threw the bedside lamp at the wall.

It shattered beautifully.

Gotham’s dramatic little stone freaks would’ve approved.

Jason found you three days later.

Not because you were easy to track. You weren’t. Without the ring, you couldn’t teleport, but you had been a commander long before you were Indigo. You knew how to disappear. How to move through cities like a blade through cloth. How to become absence.

But you didn’t know Gotham like Jason did.

And you had kept the hoodie.

He found you in an abandoned church in the Bowery, sitting beneath a broken stained-glass window where rain dripped through in silver threads. You had stolen medical supplies stacked beside you, three burner phones, two knives, and a gun you hadn’t loaded.

Jason noticed that first.

The unloaded gun.

Hope was a stupid thing. It got him every time.

You did not look surprised to see him.

“You should not be here,” you said.

Jason stepped over a fallen pew. “Yeah, people keep telling me where I should and shouldn’t be. Real popular hobby.”

“I am serious.”

“So am I.”

You looked worse without the ring’s glow. More solid. More breakable. Shadows under your eyes. Your hands bare and restless in your lap.

Jason stopped ten feet away.

Not because he was afraid.

Because you were.

“I’m not coming closer,” he said.

Your mouth tightened.

“You need to leave Gotham,” he continued. “But not because I’m scared of you. Because the thing that took your ring is still here, and I’m guessing it wants more than jewellery.”

“It was a collector,” you said. “Or a zealot. Or a fool.”

“Specific. Great.”

“They knew how to sever the ring’s bond. That is rare.”

“You know who?”

You looked down. “Varkis.”

Jason waited.

“From Veyr,” you said. “One of mine.”

One of mine.

Not one of my people. Not one of my soldiers.

Mine.

The old language slipped out like blood through a bandage.

You heard it too.

Your face went still.

Jason’s heart hurt.

“What does he want?” Jason asked.

“To prove the ring did not change me.”

“Bit rude.”

Your laugh was empty. “He was there when I was taken by the Indigo Tribe. He believes I was stolen. Ruined. Made weak.”

Jason’s lip curled. “And ripping the ring off you helps his thesis how?”

“He thinks if I kill without it, he wins.”

Jason went cold.

You looked up at him. “I left because I knew he would come for you.”

“Yeah, well, he can get in line.”

“Jason.”

“No.” His voice cracked sharply against the church walls. “No, you don’t get to do the noble disappearing act. That’s my brand, and I’m suing.”

Despite everything, your mouth trembled like it wanted to smile.

Then it collapsed.

“I looked at you like prey.”

Jason forced himself not to flinch.

“I’ve looked at people I love and wanted to hurt them,” he said.

Your eyes lifted.

“After the Pit,” he continued, “everything was a threat. Bruce. Dick. Tim. Anyone who got too close. Sometimes I still get flashes. Thoughts. Ugly ones. Doesn’t mean I want them. Doesn’t mean I choose them.”

“You were changed by violence.”

“So were you.”

“I caused mine.”

Jason stepped closer without thinking.

You tensed.

He stopped.

“Yeah,” he said. “You did.”

The words struck. He let them.

He loved you too much to lie.

You looked away.

Jason’s voice softened. “But you’re not causing this.”

“I do not know who I am.”

“I do.”

“You know who I was with the ring.”

“I know who stole my hoodie.”

You closed your eyes. “Jason.”

“I know who alphabetised my books by emotional damage because they thought it was funny.” A tear slid down your face. “I know who healed a kid in Crime Alley and cried after because they felt the grief that almost happened. I know who learned every gargoyle route in the Narrows because I said patrol was easier that way. I know who kisses me like they’re asking permission and coming home at the same time.”

You covered your face with one hand.

“I know,” Jason said, voice rough, “because I paid attention.”

The rain whispered through the broken roof.

You lowered your hand. “What if that was all the ring?”

Jason took one more step. This time, you did not tell him to stop.

“Then why is the gun unloaded?” he asked.

Your eyes flicked to it.

Jason’s did too.

“You’re scared of yourself,” he said. “But you still made a choice.”

Your breath broke. “I wanted to load it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted to call Varkis. To make a bargain.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted—”

“But you didn’t.”

The words landed one by one. Not absolution. Not erasure.

A ladder.

Jason held out his hand.

You stared at it like it was impossible.

“Come home,” he said.

“I may hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Love does that sometimes.”

You let out a broken sound. “Not like this.”

“No,” he agreed. “Not like this.”

His hand stayed open.

“I’m not asking you to pretend everything’s fine,” he said. “I’m not asking you to trust yourself all at once. I’m asking you to trust one choice. Right now. Take my hand or don’t.”

Your gaze moved between his face and his hand.

The old part of you whispered calculations. Distance. Pressure points. Escape routes. Soft targets.

But under it, quieter, stubborn as a match in rain, was something else.

Not the ring. Not a command.

A memory: Jason laughing on a fire escape. Jason asleep with one hand curled in your cloak. Jason reading aloud because you said you liked the way his voice made old words feel alive. Jason trusting you with his throat under your mouth and his nightmares under your hands.

You reached out.

Your fingers touched his.

Nothing forced compassion through you. No cosmic light punished your cruelty. No ring bent you toward mercy.

You chose not to close your hand around his wrist like a shackle.

You chose to hold him.

Jason’s fingers locked around yours. His eyes shone.

“Good choice,” he whispered.

You laughed and sobbed at once.

“Terrible taste,” you managed.

“In men?”

“In everything.”

He pulled you into him slowly enough that you could stop him.

You didn’t.

When his arms wrapped around you, your knees nearly gave.

Jason held on.

Not like a cage.

Like cover.

Varkis came that night.

Naturally.

Because villains had no respect for emotional breakthroughs. Gotham had probably sent him a calendar invite.

He arrived with indigo light spilling wrong from the stolen ring on his hand. It did not belong to him. You could tell immediately. The glow stuttered around his armour, rejecting the shape of his cruelty, but forced through stolen technology strapped to his wrist.

Jason saw your face change. “What?”

“The ring is in pain.”

Jason checked his guns. “That’s new and upsetting.”

Varkis landed in the aisle between broken pews. He removed his helmet.

You had not seen his face since the day the Tribe took you. He looked older. Of course he did. Time had continued without you in places you had stopped being yourself.

His smile was all knives.

“There you are,” he said in your old language.

You understood it. Worse, part of you stood straighter at the sound.

Jason noticed.

His shoulder brushed yours.

Grounding. Not restraining.

Varkis’s gaze cut to him.

“This is the human?” he asked. “The weakness?”

Jason raised a hand. “Hi. Weakness here. Big fan of your villain entrance. Very community theatre, but I respect the commitment.”

Varkis stared.

You almost laughed.

It steadied you.

Varkis lifted the ring. “Look at you. Shaking without your leash.”

Jason’s eyes went flat.

“Leash?” he repeated.

“That is what it was.” Varkis looked at you with something almost like pity. “They took our greatest commander and made them kneel to beggars. Made them weep over enemies. Made them soft.”

Your hands trembled.

Jason murmured, “You don’t have to answer him.”

But you did.

“Yes,” you said.

Varkis blinked.

You lifted your chin. “They made me feel. They made me suffer for what I had done. They broke me open and called it salvation.”

Jason looked at you sharply.

You kept going.

“And I hate them for it.”

The church went quiet.

Varkis smiled.

Jason’s breath caught.

You turned your bare hand palm-up.

“But I do not hate the people I stopped hurting.”

The smile faltered.

You stepped forward.

Jason moved with you.

“I hate the cage,” you said. “I hate that my mind was rewritten. I hate that I do not know which pieces of me are mine. I hate that compassion was used like a weapon and called mercy.”

The stolen ring flickered violently.

“But I do not want to be what I was.”

The words left you shaking.

True. Bare. Yours.

Varkis snarled and raised the ring.

Indigo light blasted toward you.

Jason shoved you aside.

The beam struck him in the chest.

He screamed.

Not from a wound.

From feeling.

The stolen ring, warped by Varkis’s device, forced compassion without focus, without mercy. It ripped open Jason’s scars and poured everyone else’s pain inside.

He hit the ground hard, hands clawing at his chest.

You saw his face.

Jason Todd, who had survived death, resurrection, betrayal, rage, and the long, slow work of living afterwards, curled on the church floor and choked on grief that was not his alone.

Your world narrowed.

Varkis laughed.

“There,” he said. “Does it hurt, human? To feel what you are?”

Jason gasped.

Your old self rose like a blade unsheathed.

Kill him.

Fast. Efficient. Necessary.

You knew seventeen ways to do it with the knife strapped to your thigh. You knew six using the broken pew beside you. You knew how to make Varkis suffer.

You wanted to.

Gods help you, you wanted to.

Jason looked at you from the floor.

His eyes found yours through pain.

Not pleading.

Trusting.

That was worse.

That was everything.

You picked up the unloaded gun.

Varkis smiled. “Yes.”

Jason rasped your name.

You aimed at Varkis.

Your finger rested on the trigger.

Then you threw the gun aside.

Varkis’s smile vanished.

You charged him bare-handed.

Not to kill.

To take the ring.

He fired again. You rolled beneath the beam, slammed your shoulder into his ribs, and drove him back. You had no light. No teleportation. No healing. No cosmic mercy.

But you had been a commander. You had been a killer.

And now, for the first time, you chose what to do with the skills that had survived you.

Varkis struck your jaw. Pain flashed white. You tasted blood.

Jason tried to rise.

“Stay down,” you snapped.

He wheezed. “Bossy.”

“Alive.”

“Working on it.”

Varkis lunged.

You caught his wrist.

The stolen ring burned inches from your face.

It pulsed.

For one breath, you felt it.

Not as master. Not as a leash.

As agony.

The ring was made to channel compassion, and Varkis had turned it into a torture engine. It flooded through him and found nothing he would accept, so it spilled outward, jagged and screaming.

You pressed your bare hand over it.

Pain tore through you.

Every memory opened. Every city starved. Every prisoner executed. Every child informant.

Every scream.

You nearly fell.

But beneath the pain came something else.

Jason, laughing with rain in his hair. Jason, saying, We find you one. The kid from Crime Alley breathing. The unloaded gun.

Your own voice saying, I do not want to be what I was.

The ring flared.

Varkis screamed.

Indigo light burst between you, blowing him backwards. The device on his wrist shattered. The ring flew free, spinning through the air.

Jason caught it.

Because even half-conscious, emotionally fried, sprawled on the floor of a broken church, Jason Todd still had the reflexes of a feral miracle.

“Looking for this?” he rasped.

Varkis pushed himself up, blood on his teeth.

Jason’s gun was already in his other hand.

Loaded. Aimed.

His finger tightened.

You saw it.

The old dance. The justified shot. The man who had hurt you. The man who would hurt others. The easy ending.

You could have let Jason do it.

Once, you would have ordered it.

Instead, you said, “Jason.”

He froze.

His eyes cut to you.

You shook your head. Not because Varkis deserved mercy.

Because Jason deserved not to carry him.

Jason’s jaw worked.

Varkis laughed weakly. “You made him soft too.”

Jason smiled.

It was not nice.

“Nah,” he said. “Just picky.”

He shot Varkis in the thigh.

Varkis dropped with a howl.

Jason looked at you. “Non-fatal.”

You exhaled shakily. “Petty.”

“Also that.”

You crawled to Jason as he sat up. He held the ring out to you, then hesitated.

The question sat between you.

If you put it back on, would it take you again? If you didn’t, what would you become?

Your hand hovered.

Jason did not push.

Varkis groaned behind you, restrained by cuffs Jason had definitely thrown with unnecessary force.

The ring glowed in Jason’s palm.

Soft. Waiting.

Not lunging. Not commanding.

You looked at Jason.

“I am afraid,” you said.

“Yeah.”

“If I put it on, I may lose this. What I found without it.”

Jason’s face softened.

“And if I don’t,” you whispered, “I may lose the rest.”

He closed his fingers around the ring, not hiding it. Holding it safe. “Then don’t decide because you’re scared.”

You stared at him.

“Decide because you choose,” he said.

The church roof dripped rain between you.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

Your jaw throbbed. Jason’s hands shook. Varkis cursed in three languages behind you until Jason blindly threw a batarang near his head and said, “Indoor voice.”

You laughed.

It hurt.

It was yours.

You reached for the ring.

Jason opened his hand.

The ring slid onto your finger.

Indigo light erupted.

You braced for the flood. For the universe to shove its grief back into your bones. For compassion to seize you by the throat and drag you under.

It came.

But different.

Still vast. Still painful. Still full of voices and wounds and need.

But beneath it was a space the size of one choice.

Yours.

The ring pulsed.

A voice—not heard, but known—moved through you.

Compassion detected.

Not imposed.

Detected.

You sobbed once.

Jason grabbed your shoulders. “Hey. Hey, you with me?”

You looked at him.

The ring showed you his pain. Of course it did. His fear. His love. His exhaustion. The ache in him where death had left its bootprint.

But it did not make you love him.

It only illuminated what was already there.

“Yes,” you said.

Jason searched your face. “You sure?”

You touched his cheek with your ringed hand.

He did not flinch.

“I choose you,” you said. “Still.”

Jason’s eyes closed. His forehead dropped to yours.

“Good,” he whispered. “Because I was about to be really annoying about it.”

“You are always really annoying.”

“Yeah, but romantically.”

You laughed again, and this time the indigo light around you warmed the whole ruined church.

The Indigo Tribe came at dawn.

They arrived through a portal of violet-blue light, silent figures with staffs and rings and eyes full of terrible knowing.

Jason hated them on sight.

You could feel it through the ring: protective rage, suspicion, the particular flavour of fuck around and find out that made Gotham criminals reconsider career paths.

Indigo-1 stepped forward. Her gaze moved from Varkis, bound and unconscious, to Jason, standing bruised at your side, to you.

“You were severed,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And yet you did not return to what you were.”

You held Jason’s hand.

His thumb brushed your knuckles once.

“No,” you said.

The Tribe murmured.

Indigo-1 tilted her head. “The ring accepted you again.”

“I accepted it.”

Silence.

Jason’s mouth twitched. You squeezed his hand in warning.

He ignored it, because of course.

“Yeah,” he said. “So maybe stop kidnapping murderers and calling it therapy.”

Several Indigo Lanterns turned toward him.

Jason smiled with all his teeth.

You sighed. “Jason.”

“No, I’m serious.” He pointed at them. “I get the universe is big and messy and full of psychos with death lasers, but forcing compassion into someone until they break? That’s not redemption. That’s cosmic brain surgery with a branding problem.”

Indigo-1 regarded him for a long moment.

“You speak from pain.”

Jason scoffed. “No kidding.”

“You would prefer killers remain killers?”

“I’d prefer people get a choice before someone rewrites their soul.”

Her gaze flicked to you.

“And you?”

You looked at the ring. Then at Varkis. Then at the dawn beginning to silver the broken windows.

“I do not regret who I no longer hurt,” you said carefully. “But I grieve the self I did not get to build freely. Both are true.”

Indigo-1’s expression shifted. Sorrow, maybe.

Or the closest thing her own ring allowed.

“The Tribe began as a prison,” she said. “Then a penance. Perhaps it must become something else.”

Jason blinked. “Wait, did that work?”

You glanced at him. “You sound disappointed.”

“I had more speech.”

“I know.”

“It had bullet points.”

“I know.”

Indigo-1 approached you. “Your bond has changed.”

The ring glowed.

“You may remain with us,” she said. “Or you may remain here. The ring will call when compassion is needed. It will no longer drown what you choose to become.”

Your breath caught.

Jason went very still beside you.

You looked at him. His face gave nothing away, which meant he was feeling everything at once and hated that there were witnesses.

“You don’t have to stay for me,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got space stuff. Tribe stuff. Big glowing destiny nonsense.”

“Jason.”

“What?”

You smiled.

“I am choosing,” you said.

His mouth closed.

The ring hummed softly.

You turned to Indigo-1. “I will stay on Earth.”

Jason’s hand tightened around yours.

Indigo-1 bowed her head. “Then stay.”

The Tribe took Varkis.

Before the portal closed, Indigo-1 looked back once.

“Compassion is not softness,” she said. “You have taught us this.”

Then they were gone.

Jason stared at the empty air.

“Okay,” he said. “That was ominous but kind of flattering.”

You leaned against him, suddenly exhausted.

He caught you automatically.

“Home?” he asked.

The word hit you harder than the battle.

Home.

Not the Tribe. Not the battlefield. Not a prison disguised as salvation.

A safehouse with water damage on the ceiling. Books in chaotic stacks. A dresser drawer he pretended not to care about. Soup probably ruined on the stove. Jason Todd, impossible and stubborn and warm beside you.

“Yes,” you said. “Home.”

The safehouse kitchen was destroyed.

Jason stood in the doorway with you beside him and stared at the shattered window, dented fridge, burned pot, broken table, and soup dried into something tragic on the stove.

“My soup,” he said.

You touched his arm. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“That was good soup.”

“I know.”

“It had layers.”

“It did.”

“Like me.”

You looked at him.

He looked back.

“You are comparing yourself to soup?”

“I’ve had a long night.”

You laughed and leaned into his side.

Jason’s arm wrapped around you, cautious for only a moment before settling firmly around your waist.

Later, after the glass was swept and the window temporarily boarded, after Alfred somehow sent food without asking questions because Alfred was either psychic or simply terrifying, after Jason showered and you cleaned the blood from your jaw, you found him in the bedroom holding the page you had left behind.

I am choosing not to hurt you. That is the only choice I trust.

You stood in the doorway.

“I am sorry,” you said.

Jason didn’t turn around immediately.

When he did, his eyes were red.

Not crying, he would insist.

Allergies, probably.

To emotional vulnerability.

Very common in Crime Alley.

“I get why you left,” he said.

“That does not make it right.”

“No.”

You accepted that.

He set the page on the dresser.

“I wanted to come after you angry,” he admitted. “Like, full dramatic storming the castle mode.”

“You did storm a church.”

“Yeah, but emotionally I was very mature about it.”

“Debatable.”

His mouth twitched, then faded.

“I was scared,” he said.

The honesty landed between you like a fragile thing.

You stepped closer. “So was I.”

“I know.”

“I thought if the worst of me came back, love would be the first thing it killed.”

Jason swallowed. “And?”

You reached for him.

He came easily.

That still stunned you sometimes. How this man, who had been taught by death and betrayal to flinch from open hands, still came to yours.

You touched his chest.

The ring hummed, showing you his heartbeat.

Steady. Alive.

“And it wasn’t,” you said. “Fear came first. Then strategy. Then the old hunger for control.” You looked up. “But love stayed.”

Jason covered your hand with his.

His palm was warm. Scarred.

Real.

“You chose,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Without the ring.”

“Yes.”

His breath shook.

You had seen Jason injured. Furious. Tender. Half-asleep. Smug after winning arguments he absolutely had not won.

You had rarely seen him relieved.

It made him look younger.

It made you want to protect him from every god that had ever taken anything from him.

Instead, you rose on your toes and kissed him.

Softly.

A question.

He answered by pulling you closer.

Jason kissed differently now than he had that first dawn. Still fierce. Still Jason. But slower, too. Like he trusted there would be another kiss after this one. Like wanting no longer had to arrive armed for a siege.

When you parted, he rested his forehead against yours.

“You still with me?” he whispered.

You smiled. “Yes.”

“The real you?”

The question did not hurt the way it once had.

Because for the first time, you did not need one clean answer.

You were the commander and the penitent.

The killer and the healer.

The prisoner and the choice.

You were what had been done to you, and what you had done, and what you would do next.

So you said, “I am becoming.”

Jason’s eyes softened.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

Outside, Gotham woke mean and grey and alive.

Inside, Jason picked up the ruined hoodie from the floor, shook glass out of it, and held it up.

“This yours?”

You took it with dignity. “It is mine now.”

“Grand theft hoodie.”

“You gave it willingly.”

“I absolutely did not.”

“You left it unattended in a shared emotional space.”

Jason stared. “That is not law.”

“It is Indigo law.”

“You just made that up.”

“Yes.”

He smiled then.

The real one. The rare one.

The one that still looked a little surprised to exist.

You put on the hoodie.

The ring glowed at your hand, no longer silent, no longer screaming. A star with boundaries. A mercy with teeth. A reminder, not a master.

Jason watched you, gaze catching on the indigo light.

“You okay?” he asked.

You considered lying.

Then chose.

“No,” you said. “But I think I can be.”

Jason nodded. “Good enough for today.”

“For today,” you agreed.

He held out his hand.

No cosmic force moved you. No ring dragged your fingers toward his.

You took his hand because you wanted to.

Because he was Jason.

Because you were becoming.

Because compassion, you were learning, was not the thing that erased the monster.

It was the hand that reached into the dark, found the monster trembling there, and said:

Come on.

We’re going home.

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