Chapter Text
Two days before Jason goes to Ethiopia and dies in a dingy warehouse with his biological mother, he calls his older brother.
Dick is in space. Therefore, he doesn’t pick up. Jason swallows down whatever is making his throat constrict and speaks onto his voicemail.
Things have been–
Bad. Worse than they’ve been in a long time. All the time, Bruce’s words rattle around in Jason’s head, I’m not your father and Or was he pushed? and Save me the teenage rebellion. Jason has been– trying, through all of it, to make sense of the fury coiling in his chest.
He’s always been an angry person. It’s nothing new that a lot of things, especially unfair and unjust things, piss him off to the max. He doesn’t know what it is that Bruce sees in that anger – something dangerous and scary, probably, with the way he looks at Jason sometimes.
Jason doesn’t feel like a danger, not really. He’s sixteen and he’s been fighting for nearly all of his life, for his mom to stay alive, for his survival on the streets, for the right thing as Robin, and he’s sick and tired of fighting himself.
“Hey,” he says, pressing the phone to his ear so hard that it hurts. “Uhm, it’s me, Jason. I just, uh… I wanted to– to talk to you, and I know you’re off-planet, and you’re busy and shit, but I– I just need to tell you something. Something important.”
He digs his nails into his palms. When he glances at the mirror in his bathroom, he doesn’t feel like the person looking back is really him. It’s a feeling he’s had all his life, for as long as he can remember, and to be entirely honest, he’s scared of putting a name to it.
Scared to admit that there’s something different about him, on top of all the other things that already make him so different from Dick. But they’ve been growing closer, growing into something more like brothers, lately, and Jason feels like he can tell him.
His relationship with Bruce has been shot to shit by Felipe Garzonas, anyway. Jason feels like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t talk about this to someone, and the old man is out of the question. Alfred– he doesn’t know why, but he feels a little terrified that Alfred wouldn’t understand.
But Dick is smart, and good, and kind. He’s Jason’s brother. Surely, if anyone could hear this and understand it, it would be him.
“I, uh,” Jason says, his voice cracking and breaking, “I think I’m– I’m– fuck.”
He can’t even say it, that’s the thing, because he doesn’t quite know what it is. For as long as Jason can remember, he’s hated his body. He hated looking in mirrors, he hated thinking about himself in any way that included physical features. He likes who he is as a person, that’s not the problem. He doesn’t hate himself.
It’s just his fucking skin that feels wrong – if he could climb out of it, Jason thinks, he would be a much happier, calmer person. It’s hard not to be a prickly asshole when you constantly feel like you need to crawl out of yourself.
He digs his nails in harder. Breaks the skin that he hates so much. The pain is all his, and he doesn’t mind it. When he looks into the mirror again, all he can manage is confusion at the boy that stares back.
His sight blurs, and Jason heaves a frustrated sigh and wipes at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m kind of a– a fucking mess, right now. I just… I don’t know. I– I really need to talk to you. Nothing makes– sense, anymore, and I’m– I’m so tired.”
Something heavy lifts off his chest at that admission, at least. Jason blinks back more tears and sniffs, feeling entirely undignified, feeling just as lost and wrong as he’s felt ever since Bruce took him to get a haircut after he moved into the manor and asked for a boy’s regular.
Boy Wonder, the tabloids call him. Robin. Jason sniffs again, choking back a sob, and wishes he could be a girl.
“I, uh–” he squeezes his eyes shut. “Jesus fuck, that probably sounded concerning as all hell. I’m– I’m okay, just… lost. I think I need– I need someone to help me figure things out, so I just– I– I’ll talk to you when you get home.”
He never gets the chance.
Ethiopia comes and goes with blood and laughter and death. Six months in the ground, and Jason comes back, but he’s damaged and injured and a car accident leaves him catatonic. The League of Assassins picks him up and off the streets.
Distantly, through a haze, Jason thinks someone is taking care of him, trying to guide him back to himself, but it’s of no use. In his mind, the Joker’s laughter runs in a neverending loop, and his gravestone had a name on it that didn’t fit him quite right. He doesn’t know how long he spends reliving his death and his resurrection until someone decides enough is enough and dunks him in the Lazarus Pit.
He only knows what happens after.
The Lazarus Pit doesn’t heal him so much as it pulls him apart.
He’s submerged, and then he isn’t, and then he is again, pushed under by hands he can’t feel, drowning in a green pool that burns like it’s alive and furious that he ever left. It gets in his mouth, floods his nose, his eyes, and his body reacts before his mind can catch up – thrashing, choking, seizing.
Jason screams, but it doesn’t come out right. It bubbles out of him instead, torn apart by the Pit as easily as everything else.
His thoughts fracture. Ethiopia flashes in his mind’s eye again – concrete floor, I just need to tell you something, broken ribs, something important, Joker’s laughter – drowning him more than the Pit does, and he screams louder, screams and screams and doesn’t know how to stop.
Somewhere in the middle of it, something changes.
He doesn’t know how to describe it. He doesn’t even know that he’s noticing it, at first. There’s just a strange loosening, like a knot he didn’t know existed suddenly giving way.
It’s terrifying.
Jason panics immediately – not because it hurts more, but because it doesn’t. Because for the first time since he can remember, there’s a moment, just a moment, where his body doesn’t feel like it’s actively rejecting him.
The Pit surges in response, furious, invasive, digging deeper, rewriting, correcting. Jason’s mind can’t keep up with what it’s doing to him. His thoughts slide away like oil on water. His sense of himself blurs, smears, stretches thin.
He doesn’t know where he ends anymore.
He doesn’t know what he is.
He only knows that something fundamental is being rearranged, and that if he were capable of forming words, he might beg it to stop – or beg it not to.
Then the hands let go.
Jason is thrown forward, dragged up and out, lungs burning, body convulsing as the Pit finally releases him. He gasps for air, hands dragging on cold stone, half-remembered memories of digging his nails into his palm coming and going in a flash.
Shaking and spitting, he pulls himself up to his feet. He trembles and trembles, feeling like he’s about to shake apart, and then he pauses.
Because Jason feels–
Fucking weird.
He’s taller. Noticeably taller, though he’s more lanky than anything else. There’s something off about his body. He looks down on himself in complete bewilderment–
And then freezes.
Because holy shit, Ra’s al Ghul’s magical green-glowing pool of doom gave him fucking boobs.
Jason stands there, and he just stares down at himself– bandages peeling and sagging with moisture, giving way like he’s a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. That’s genuinely what it feels like, looking down on the body that very definitely belongs to a girl, and then the realization comes crashing down on her.
Oh.
The Pit. With its magical healing properties. Her. Really not a boy at all. More than a decade and a half of living in a body that she hated more than anything else in the world. A dip in the pool of correcting flaws, a pool that sized up her brain and decided to make her body match it.
She’s a girl. Because she’s always been a girl.
She was a girl when she hated being called the second Boy Wonder, and she was a girl when she wished and longed for longer hair but kept cutting it because that was what boys were supposed to do, she was a girl when she stared at the women at the fancy Wayne galas until Dick pulled her aside and told her not to stare so much because it was rude. She remembers feeling so envious of their lipstick-red smiles and their glittering jewelry under the soft light – because I wanted to be like them, Jason thinks faintly, oh, I always wanted to be a girl.
The Lazarus Pit bubbles behind her. Jason still stares down and down at her body, and for the first time in her life, she can’t see enough of it. She feels so unbelievably at home so very suddenly – not in this dank-ass cave, but in her own skin, in a way she’s never even known she could feel.
And all it took was dying, clawing her way out of her grave, getting hit by a car, spending a couple months catatonic, getting kidnapped by the League of Assassins and dunked in a pool of magical chemical bullshit that apparently saw the error in Jason’s biology better than she ever did.
What. The fuck.
Her center of gravity is different. She teeters a little when she takes a step forward, and slings her arms around herself when it settles in that she’s pretty much naked.
It’s then that she realizes she’s not alone.
There’s like a dozen assassins staring at her, Talia and Ra’s al Ghul at the very front, both looking about as baffled as she feels. Jason instinctively glares at them, because fuck you, she really isn’t about to start showing any sign of fear or shame. She’s a fucking girl, physically, now. Big fucking deal.
“Fuck you looking at?” she snaps, and Talia blinks like she’s snapping out of a daze.
At once, she seems to realize that a teenager is practically naked in front of a bunch of random-ass people, which is creepy as fuck and for the record would have been creepy as fuck even if Jason still had a dick (which she doesn’t. What the fuck!). Talia pulls her shawl off her shoulders and doesn’t rush, but very quickly walks towards her and covers her up a little.
Jason eyes her. Talia took her in, cared for her, if her fragmented memories are anything to go by. Even now, she looks at Jason with something like pride in her eyes, slowly losing her bafflement the longer they stand there staring at each other.
Then she smiles.
“I’ve always wanted a daughter,” Talia says, and Jason can’t help herself – the word daughter makes something in her chest loosen and warm, and exhaustion hits her like a freight train the second she relaxes at it.
“Cool,” she faintly says. “I really hope this is permanent.”
Talia’s smile is soft, and so are her eyes, and Jason feels a litte like she’s going to start bawling if Talia keeps looking at her like that. Like she’s a precious gem of sorts, something to be admired and held gently. Something beautiful.
“You have always been a woman in spirit,” she says, and Jason kind of wants to never stop feeling the feeling that those words give her. “The Lazarus Pit only made your body catch up to who you truly are. What shall I call you?”
Jason blanches a little.
Here’s the thing.
She always knew there was something different about her – about the horrible feeling in her gut every time she looked at herself in the mirror. She knew, on some level, that she was probably trans. But she kind of had other things to focus on, all her life; first taking care of her mom, then surviving the streets, then Robin. By the time she felt safe enough in Wayne Manor to sleep without leaving the lights on, years had passed.
And so she told herself she had time. She had all the time in the world to figure out how to tell Bruce Wayne that he didn’t have a second son. To figure out who she really is, and then make it clear to the people that cared about her. She pushed it back and out of her mind as best as she could, told herself that maybe it would pass if she got older, maybe it would stick, and in any case, she had time to figure it all out.
She wanted to tell Dick. She called him, she remembers, and she almost told him right then and there: I think I’m a girl. And she thought she would tell him, when they saw each other again.
But that phenomenally went to shit when she died. Her gravestone said it right there, the name of a boy engraved in marble, Jason Peter Todd.
You have always been a woman, she silently repeats to herself, marveling at how easily it all slots into place within her. And then she thinks of her mother; not Sheila, never Sheila fucking Haywood, but of Catherine Todd.
Her mom told her once that she was named after Saint Catherine of Siena, patron saint of nurses. Catherine lived in the 14th century and dedicated her life to caring for the sick. In Greek, her name means pure – Jason is a Greek name, too, and it means healer.
Jason always liked her name, even when it didn’t quite fit right. She liked the connection to her mother, the name she gave her, even if she did wind up finding out that Catherine wasn’t actually her mother.
She remembers asking, six and young and cautious even then, what Catherine and Willis would have called her if she’d been a girl. Catherine had smiled at her warmly and said, If you’d been a girl, we would’ve called you Jasmine.
And if she calls herself anything new, it’s gotta be the name her mom would’ve given her daughter.
“Jasmine,” she says, and the name feels like the best thing she’s ever said. “My name is Jasmine Todd.”
And then her legs give out.