#like no lmao you've written it a lot for GRACE. not Todd. but anyway

[happyk44]

Jason who comes back to life but he's not quite right. The Lazarus pit - something went wrong. He's crazed as they all are when they reemerge, angry, and raging, but there's a difference, a change.

He bites down on the nearest person, some low-level assassin, and tears their throat out with his teeth. They fall to the ground, limp and choking for air they cannot receive. The others ready themselves. Their weapons are poised for attack.

But it doesn't happen.

Jason swallows flesh and blood and sinks to his knees, tearing and ripping at the dying below him. He hungers, he thirsts, and he consumes every bit of what is available. Blood, guts, flesh and heart.

Oh, does he savour that heart.

It becomes a threat to trainees. Fail, and you'll be offered up to the man that flanks Talia's side, that carries her young son, as protective as a bear. The man with teeth so sharp, and nails like claws.

Fail, and he will consume you whole, devour you while you still breathe, and feast on your screams.

It never quite goes away, but as time passes, it becomes controlled, a loud itch at the back of his mind, but nothing he can't adjust around. How many years on the street did he itch for things he couldn't have? Countless. Even homed and housed, he itched.

He knows how to repress the itch, to let it sit, angry and demanding at the back of his head. So strong, sometimes he fears only a drill to his skull will scratch it out.

He leaves the League behind. Becomes a fearsome creature. Hides his teeth behind a red mask, and his claws behind warm leather gloves. But as he slashes and shoots and decapitates, the itch burns. Blood flows, flesh sits limp. The still pumping organs, working and moving with the last words of a dying brain.

What a waste to leave it all behind, the itch whispers.

He agrees.

What a waste.

He doesn't eat in Gotham. His acts are a message, and there's no message if there's no body. But he ventures outside it, for bounties, for treats. Never too often. If he feeds the itch too much, it'll overpower him. But just enough. A birthday present to himself. A new years celebration.

Small tastes scattered sparsely through the year.

Damian emerges, young and feisty like his mother, and Jason remembers a toddler sucking on a pacifier as he organizes knives by size. How much the boy has changed since then. How little he has. Growth and personality.

The biggest change is the kill. Blood doesn't drip down his hands. Doesn't freckle his face with meaningless splatter. Swords have been discarded. He doesn't touch Jason's guns as they're disassembled to be cleans. He knows how. He's used them.

Jason remembers holding tiny hands around a pistol, a small frame against his chest, steadied, before the deadly shot. He remembers the sound. How Damian didn't flinch. Remembers the blood. The curious eyes staring down at a gasping body.

He remembers eating. Digging in, more civilized than eating a person should be, and remembers wide young eyes watching. Watching. Then tucking a tissue to the blood soaking his chin and wiping it away.

Unbothered and uncaring to the person below. But mimicking kindness he was taught to the beast in front of him.

No wonder Goliath followed him home.

Damian has always had more love for monsters than humans.

Love that shows in the late night of Jason's birthday. When he emerges through the window into the tiny apartment he's hidden himself in this month, and finds a helpless woman sitting, naked and gagged, in the middle of the floor. She is kept near motionless with strong rope. There's a note taped to her face.

Happy birthday. Enjoy your gift.

The delicate handwriting needs no signature.

There's a folder beside her. Jason ignores her gagged cries to pick it up. There are many papers inside it - police reports of domestic violence, a CPS report that ends with a reluctant acceptance of no actionable strategies, x-rays of small broken bones and pictures of bruises on young faces. There are tiny notations written in delicate handwriting - all fact, no opinions.

Jason reads and seethes. Some people forget that mothers can be terrible to their children too. Jason doesn't.

He can't.

So he eats.