Hey all! So this is something I'm actually really excited for you guys to see. Backstory: This is an AU in which souls are contained in objects outside a person's body; think Golden Compass style but with inanimate objects instead of animals, for a guideline. Most of the rules will become clear as you read this, but the very basics are that you're tied to this object. If you go without touching it for too long, you start to go mad and die. Too long, and you really will die. If someone else gets a hold of your soul-object, they have control over you and you are unable to disobey any of their orders.

Basically, this is soulless!Jason comes back to Gotham to rid it of crime and is uh... very good at it. Mostly. I've got ten chapters so far, no slash yet but we'll see.

No warnings for this chapter.

It hurts. Everything.

Not just the fire in my veins, or the awful, wet, drag of liquid where I should be breathing air, but everything. I ache down to my bones, I feel wrong, and I thrash in the embrace of liquid. Instinct gets me to the surface, breaks my head up into the air but there's already water in my lungs and it doesn't matter. I convulse, falling back beneath the surface, the flash of fire and rock and figures dressed in red not making any sense.

Something about me works, forces me forward while the rest screams and struggles, until my feet brush rough rock and I can uncurl and throw my head above the surface again. Until I have the leverage and space for my muscles to do what they're trying to, hacking and coughing, stomach cramping as whatever's in my system comes back out. Because it's not water. It's green and stinging, and so is the pool I'm partially submerged in, and the second I can do more than retch and cough I push towards the edge.

The rough stone edge drags across my skin, leaves stinging scrapes, but I just want out. The air is cold against my wet skin, droplets of whatever the fuck it is dripping down my jaw and nose from the wet cling of my hair to my scalp. My hands slip on the stone, sending me crashing to one shoulder, and the sharp pain parts my mouth in a gasp. My fingers curl to fists, knees instinctively drawing up to make me a smaller target.

I try and breathe, burying my face against the stone. It barely works.

There's the sharp tap of footsteps — low heel, my mind recites, stone floor, deliberate noise — and I snap my head up, trying to brace to uncurl. Because some part of me knows it has to fight; always has to fight.

It's a woman, long brown hair, skintight suit, a gun strapped to one thigh and a knife to the other. I snarl at her, baring my teeth, and she comes to a stop in front of me. I'm tunneling, and part of me warns against that, knows that I can't afford to focus so completely on one thing, but…

"Do you remember who you are?" she asks, hands at her sides and so close to those weapons. The words take a minute to register.

"Jason," I spit, when I understand the question. She looks familiar, but I can't place her. Everything still aches, and burns, and there's something I can't pinpoint that's wrong. Something is wrong. "Robin. Where am I?" My voice is rough, cracking from my fight with whatever that pool has in it, but it's understandable.

"Do you remember what happened?" I bare my teeth again at the complete bypass of my question.

But then I haltingly — why is there this screaming bit of me that doesn't want to look back? — think about her words, and it's foggy but I can remember… I…

Oh god.

I cringe at the remembered impact of metal across my shoulders, the crunch of bone, the laugh of a man so psychotic he enjoyed it. The emerald green eyes, blood red lips, white skin, and dark, dark metal of the crowbar. The pain. The fear. The red display of a bomb, ticking down, and the sobs of a woman too stupid to realize how bad an idea it was. The knowledge that my hands were too broken — I was too broken — to do anything but try and shield her with my own body.

My mother. The Joker.

"I remember," I gasp, and it hurts but there's not the terror I expect. My breath comes free and easy apart from the sting of the damage to my throat, and I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment to shake my head. "Why—?"

Then the memory hits me of waking up in the dark, in pain and with an awful hollow in my chest. Of being clear headed enough — no fear, why wasn't I afraid? — to use the buckle of my belt to dig through solid wood and claw my way out into wet earth and not enough air. Of stumbling away from my own grave and into Gotham's streets; blacking out not anywhere near wherever I was trying to go, and I wasn't even sure of that. I just knew I had to move, had to go somewhere.

I shudder. The rest is fuzzy, disconnected images of dirty sunlight and dirtier streets, of neverending hunger and the sense of something, everything, being off. Just not, right.

That part I still feel. Something isn't right. Something…

"Father?" My eyes snap open, follow the woman's gaze back to another figure — and more circled around the walls, but they're hooded, unmoving, not important — that strides across the room with the same click of low heels.

"Ra's," I snarl, my teeth showing and my eyes narrowing. It hits me again that I should be afraid, but as he comes up beside her all I can feel is anger, and a sickening swirl of… of…

"Well?" she demands, sounding imperious, with a single arched eyebrow.

"It seems to have worked," Ra's concedes, grudgingly. "Are you certain the path you intend to pursue is wise, daughter?"

Daughter? Oh, of course. Ra's al Ghul, and Talia. I've never fought her before, but Bruce taught me about her. I remember. She's dangerous, and Bruce had stressed that she wasn't any less so just because she was a woman. Like I didn't already know that. Of course she wasn't. Half the women I knew in Crime Alley could slaughter any man who'd tried to tell them what to do, and the fact that Poison Ivy runs a park in the middle of Gotham by herself should mean no one has to be told women can be as dangerous as men.

She's armed, he must be too beneath his old-fashioned robes, and the way he's looking at me isn't friendly. I'm injured, somewhere — have to be, with how I hurt — and my skin is bare. My suit is gone, my weapons aren't here, and I'm a good hand-to-hand fighter, but enough for Ra's? Probably—

My thoughts abruptly derail.

My suit, my weapons, my— No. I jerk my head down, desperately dragging my gaze down my own skin, and when that doesn't tell me anything but that I'm not hurt, follow it up with my hands. It has to be here somewhere, it has to be. Dull panic settles in my chest, a need, but it's not as strong as it should be. Muted, distant, and the equally dull horror locks claws into my chest and refuses to let go.

"Where is it?" I demand, jerking my head up, my hands clasped together over my chest, clinging. I— I feel… I don't feel, but I ache and I'm tired and everything that isn't anger is distant and cold, hollow.

Talia winces, and Ra's' mouth tightens a bit as he answers, "When my daughter found you, you were living on Gotham's streets. Mindless but for instinct. You carried no container."

I jerk, feeling the truth in the hollow ache in every inch of my bones. Still, I try and deny it. Try and deny that the muted, dull, horror in my stomach and the lack of fear while I'm kneeling at the feet of one of my mentor's greatest enemies isn't exactly what I know it is. The lack of something important, something hidden and contained in a small, worn piece of metal that shone because I always wore it close, always rubbed it between my fingers when I thought no one else was looking.

The same way Bruce's gaze would drift to a locked, hidden compartment in the bottom of the Bat-computer, or how Dick would lower a hand to the side of his left thigh and the always fraying but never falling apart piece of rope he kept within his suit.

"No," I beg, my voice shaking but I don't know why or how. There's no fear to guide it, only the pain and the knowledge that I'm not complete, not right. "Please."

"The Lazarus Pit has sealed the wound, for now. I recognize that it is cold comfort to you." Ra's inclines his head towards Talia. "My daughter has decided to take your care upon herself. Out of respect for my foe, I will allow it. You may stay with us until you decide what you intend to do, be that whatever it may. I bear no ill will towards you, Jason, and even if I did I would not wish the fate of a lost soul on even the Detective himself."

My— God. I knew it could happen, logically. I knew there were people confined in mental asylums, hospitals, that had been separated from the containers of their souls. But they waste away, they die. You have to have a connection to your container.

Why am I alive? How?

Ra's turns away, and Talia steps forward and offers me a hand. I stare at it, consider it, fight through the burn of anger and the muted horror, feel the ache in every bit of me.

"Why?" I ask, finally.

"Come with me, and I'll tell you."

I take her hand.

The Joker's alive — free — and there's someone else wearing my name. Some other kid — "Timothy Drake," Talia tells me when she shows me the news articles — in a modified version of the Robin costume. Small and thin compared to me, and even more so now that I'm growing. I might only vaguely remember the months between, but time moved on anyway.

I tear my room apart that night, scream my fury into the walls and break anything I can get my hands on. I break my hands in the process, and the pain is sharp and welcoming, it's a distraction. Pain is something I can feel with no interference, and I don't stop until my knuckles bleed and the exhaustion takes me with almost no warning.

Talia finds me the next morning, unconscious in the center of my room, and I come to with my head in her lap. Moving hurts, thinking hurts, and my eyes are dry but only because I'm not capable of tears. I take what little comfort I can from the stroke of her hands over my scalp, my own lax and still against the floor. Eventually she pulls me up, cradled in her arms and I don't — can't — care enough to protest being carried like I'm a child.

I keep my eyes closed, and don't open them again until she shifts to set me down on the edge of something. Then I flick them open to recognize it as the metal of an examination table, as she sets me down with my legs over the edge, holding me up until she's sure I'm sitting on my own. I watch, not willing to feel what little I can, while she collects first aid supplies from around the room, and then brings them over on a tray to set down next to me.

It's not quite numbness. There's a faint, blocked sense of what I should be feeling, but that only makes it worse. It's a reminder that I can't feel any of what I should, that I'm confined to anger, and anything past it is only filled with the hollow ache of a lack. The constant pain that tells me I'm wrong.

I wince when she starts picking fragments of wood and glass out of my knuckles, but close my eyes and breathe through the pain. Welcoming it because I don't have anything else left. Talia told me that I'm strong, that that's why she rescued me off the streets and tried to heal me. She told me no one else has ever been documented surviving being separated from their soul as many months as I did. But she doesn't know what brought me back to begin with.

"Most of your fingers are broken," she says quietly, and I open my eyes to look at her.

"Felt good," I answer without thinking about it, and then pause, shake my head. "No. I can feel pain." It's different. There's so many ways I used to say things that don't work anymore. Things don't feel 'good,' they don't feel anything, but the fact that I can feel something at all, even something physical, is enough. I can focus on it.

Talia considers me, her eyes slightly narrowed before she sighs and reaches sideways, setting aside the tweezers and picking up a swab that she dips in a bowl of some kind of clear liquid. "You will regain your container, Jason. If you choose to search for it."

"Don't lie to me," I snarl, fury sparking bright in my chest, and how intense it is takes my breath. Like last night, where I could barely breathe through the memory of laughter and the rage spurred on by the new Robin's face. "God, why is this—? Why can I still feel this anger?"

The swab stings, swiping across the knuckles of one hand. Disinfectant?

"Normally, the Lazarus Pit's side effects cause brief insanity," she starts, her gaze trained down at my hands, "to those with lesser will. It enhances their anger until they become little more than snarling beasts. My best theory is that because of what has happened to you, it strengthened that particular part of the connection to your soul enough to allow you to feel the anger, despite the distance."

I think, if my soul was really gone and — worst case scenario — it didn't come back to life with me, that wouldn't be possible at all. I'd just be completely numb, wouldn't I? There wouldn't be this faint sense of feeling in my gut, right?

That's… better, I think.

"It is only a guess. You are unique, Jason."

"So you keep telling me," I answer, without the bite to back it up. It's strange. So much of how I speak is automatic responses that I don't think about until it's already out of my mouth. But without the feelings to back them up, it's all empty. I'll have to change this, or something. It's just this awful reminder that I'm… "What am I supposed to do?" I ask quietly, meeting her gaze when it turns up to me.

"That is your decision." Her voice is plain, one eyebrow raising. "I think enough has been taken from you without removing your right to free will as well."

I give a small nod, staying silent as her gaze falls back to my hands. When she moves on to setting my broken fingers it hurts, but pain isn't new to me, and the fact I can feel something is still enough to offset the actual pain. It's not enough to make me jerk away, though I'm not totally capable of stopping the noises of pain I make in response.

A colder part of my mind takes the pain and uses it to focus, considering my options.

I can't go home, that much is obvious. Even if there were still a place for me beside Bruce and Dick — the one filled by that bastard, Timothy — it wouldn't work. Legally, I'm dead. Even if that wasn't true, what would they do with me like I am now? An abomination, a walking mistake, cut off from everything I am except the one thing that Bruce never even pretended to like about me. My temper, my anger.

No, there's nothing left for me there.

I can try tracking down the container of my soul. But the first two places I can think of looking are my coffin, and the cave, and both of those would bring me face to face with Bruce. Who let the Joker kill me, who didn't get there in time to save me, who replaced me within months. Who didn't even do more to the Joker than throw him in Arkham to break out, again. Who apparently never noticed that I clawed my way out of my own grave and spent months living, mindless, on his streets.

There's a lot of my anger that's directed at Bruce.

If those two places don't work, even if I could possibly get to them without alerting Bruce to the fact I'm alive and wrong, where would I even start looking? I know that I'm missing it, but how do I find my soul? Will it pull me the right direction if I'm close enough? Is there some kind of internal tug I can follow if I can focus on it through meditation? Is there some kind of magical way to trace the connection? I've got no idea.

So if that's true, I guess… I guess the best option would just be to accept what I am now. Not as difficult as it might be, considering that any kind of grief or fear over it is gone. That just leaves the anger to deal with, and the frustration, and that's not easier I don't think, but I have at least a little bit of practice dealing with anger. I can probably make it work.

That doesn't give me anything to do with what I am, but at least that takes the focus off of trying to fix me. At least then the search for my soul will be incidental, and not the focus of my existence. That's definitely easier. Then, if I never find it, it's not as big a deal. It's better that way.

So, I'm accepting that this is my life. To never feel anything but anger and pain. That's… it's wrong, but I can learn to deal. I've dealt with a shitty life before.

Ra's and Talia agree to train me.

I'm not stupid enough to think it's selfless, or that Ra's doesn't have some alternate plan that he's keeping to himself. Probably something to do with using me as his own personal weapon, considering that I'm already Batman-trained, and now I lack any kind of ability to feel grief, or fear, or guilt. I'd probably make a fantastic assassin, if I didn't still remember my morals.

Turns out those don't have all that much to do with my emotions.

It's not like I'm going to feel the guilt of breaking the rules Bruce set for me, but there's something in me that's still unsettled by it. Something trained and encouraged to think that if I cross over that line there's never any going back, no matter what. That if I dare consider killing anyone, if I somehow go through with it, suddenly I'll be some kind of villainous, cold-blooded murderer. Worse, that suddenly I won't be good for anything but being put away in a cell.

But then, I already crossed that line didn't I?

There was that rapist piece of scum, Garzonas. I didn't kill him, but I thought about it, considered it, almost did it. When it counted, when I had him on that roof and it was just the two of us, I shouted at him and he did slip. But I could have caught him, and I didn't. I chose to let him die. I expected to feel guilt over that, especially after Bruce confronted me about what happened before he got there, but I didn't. He deserved it.

I still believe that.

So maybe, I don't have to stick to Bruce's code. Maybe I can walk both worlds and not have to be condemned to just one. I can kill the people who deserve it, stop them from hurting anyone else, but not become a real villain like Bruce was always convinced that someone who slipped would. I can do that. Especially now that there's nothing in my way to make sure I don't.

I can save Gotham, how it needs to be saved. By putting a bullet in the head of anyone who threatens its citizens, by making sure that the only crime in town is safe for everyone involved. I'm not naive and stupid enough to think that you can really erase crime. For god's sake, I grew up in Crime Alley. I've seen what happens when people try and 'erase' crime. When Bruce took apart one gang, all it did was make another gang carve a bloody path through what was left to take control of the abandoned territory.

That's all that ever happens.

This isn't an ideal world, and idealistic views don't have a place in it. Bruce can think about his precious world where no one ever needs to be hurt again all he likes, but that's not realistic. Realistically, the best Gotham can hope for is a crime empire that's run smoothly, safely, efficiently. No drugs to anyone but consenting adults, no theft from small businesses or anyone who can't afford to replace the product or cash, no more illegal prostitution where half the time the pimps are violent and the whores have disease. It wouldn't even be that hard.

Make examples of any gang member that steps out of line, run everything with the absolute minimum of violence. A quick bullet to anyone who tries to take over or plan a coup. Enforce testing, safe practices with clients of sex workers, and only the people actually interested in having it be their line of work. Protect them. No more violence, no more death for anyone who doesn't deserve it, but there's still profit. It would be easy for anyone with an inside knowledge of how the practices run.

I could do it.

The idea seizes me, shortening my breath in the middle of the acrobatics routine Ra's has me in the middle of. He's reading a book, across the room, but he almost instantly glances up at me as my landing from the midair, tucked flip comes down a little awkwardly. Not enough to hurt, but enough to make me wobble and scowl a little bit.

"Repeat that section," he commands, absently.

Instead of obeying Ra's I turn and stride across the room to stand in front of him. The adrenaline rush and sweat of a workout isn't excitement, or anticipation, but I could mistake it for that if I didn't know better. He looks up, one eyebrow arched, and lowers the book a touch.

"What if I took over Gotham's crime?" I offer, before he can ask me what I'm doing. The eyebrow lifts a little higher, and then he snaps the book shut and sets it aside on the small bench.

"Interesting idea. Have you been here long enough to acquire a taste for running a criminal empire yourself, Jason?" Ra's looks at ease, of course, but there is a hint of intrigue in his eyes. Maybe I'm not totally nuts.

"You know I haven't." I swipe my hand across my forehead, wiping away sweat and narrowing my eyes a touch, brushing away the anger that rises every time I even think of Bruce. Who didn't save me, replaced me, left my death unavenged. "The way Batman runs things doesn't work, I know that. Everyone breaks out of prison, one gang takes over for another. Nothing ever gets better."

Ra's doesn't offer anything to confirm or deny what I've said, so I continue. "So what if I take over one of the gangs? Take over Gotham? Make sure that everything's run so no one gets hurt but the people who deserve it? No kids, no innocent or unwilling victims. But murdering psychopaths, the Joker? Don't they deserve it? Wouldn't that be better?"

Ra's studies me, silent, and then finally says, "That is your choice to make." There's no disapproval in his voice, and that's practically an encouragement when it comes to Ra's. I've learned that much. "However, the Detective will not simply allow you to do this. You understand that?"

My hands clench, anger returning to my chest. "Isn't that what this has been about?" I counter, and then shake my head. "You told me I could stay until I decided what I was going to do; this is it. I'm going to fix Gotham in a way that works, that actually helps. Not how he wants it to work." I force my hands out, and draw my mouth into a grin that I know isn't much more than a baring of teeth, since the only thing behind it is anger. "It's not like I'm going to feel anything; I'm pretty uniquely qualified to be the bad guy for a good reason."

"They won't thank you for it."

"Then to hell with them. If they can't see they're not doing any good—" I cut off, not sure how to end that sentence, and then shake my head again. "I can see it. Won't feel their rejection anyway."

"You'll have to kill," is the next thing Ra's points out.

I step forward, sinking to my knees without hesitation and looking up at him for a moment before bowing my head and closing my eyes. "Then let me stay, and teach me how." There are several long moments of silence, and then fingers touch my cheek and tilt my head up, and I flick my eyes back open to meet the gaze trained down at me.

"And what do I get out of this, Jason?" he asks, with a hint of amusement.

"Don't play games with me," I snap back. "You've already considered it, or you would have said no and kicked me out instead of asking."

"Say it anyway," he demands. "Humor me, and prove that you understand it as I do."

It's a pretty obvious sign of my soullessness that I can kneel at Ra's al Ghul's feet and face him down without any fear, without even the thought of fear. "If you train me, I'll keep him busy. You know as soon as he figures out who I am he'll focus on me. As long as you're subtle you could have months where he won't have the time or energy to stop whatever you want to do. But that's not enough for you, and we both know it. So if you teach me, no matter what happens, as long as you're not threatening the world, Gotham's innocents, or the Bats' lives, I don't care what you do. I won't turn what you teach me back on you."

Ra's' smirk is almost proud, and he lets go of my face and leans back against the wall. "Very well, Jason. You have a deal."