A Boy Named Jason Todd

There was a boy named Jason Todd, and he is a series of files in the public record. There's a birth certificate, and a patchy school grade school record filled with teacher's complaints and unexplained absences, suspensions and detentions and disciplinary action. There's hospital paperwork from a broken arm when he was eight. Then, at age eleven, there's a flurry of paperwork as his legal custody is transferred to a one Bruce Wayne, and suddenly there are medical records and vaccinations and a much more thorough academic record for two years from one of Gotham's better private schools. There are still suspensions, detentions, and unexplained absences, though with a caveat that the teachers are sure he would succeed if he just applied himself.

There was a boy named Jason Todd, and he is a collection of memories – faint ones, fading ones. People knew Jason Todd, but they've mostly forgotten him. Teachers, if reminded, will remember one of the most belligerent students they ever had, and shake their heads sadly, knowing such boys rarely do well in the world. There were friends, and sometimes they can't think why they stopped spending time with him, and there was a pretty girl named Rena, who remembers him as her first crush and sometimes wonders what became of him.

There was a boy named Jason Todd, and he is a box in the attic of Wayne Manor, filed with things that Alfred never threw away. There are CD's filled with loud music and magazines filled with fast cars and a surprising number of books, mostly horror and mysteries. No one can bear to open it or throw it out, so it stays in a corner gathering dust.

There was a boy named Jason Todd, and he is a headstone in a Gotham cemetery. He is a paragraph-long obituary in a Gotham paper about a local boy who was tragically beaten to death in a 'gang-related incident'. It's not the truth, but he would hardly be the first or last boy to die young in Gotham, and the only reason it receives any attention at all is because he was living with Bruce Wayne.

Six months later, something claws its way out of Jason's grave, but it is not Jason. The detentions and the friends and the loud music are left behind in the dirt, and this new life has very little to do with the Jason Todd who liked fast cars and mystery novels and everything to do with the mask he wore for such a very short time. It's Robin that comes back from the dead, bitter and purposeless. Not Jason.

There are never flowers on Jason's grave. The 'Bat-family' knows that Robin is not there, and no one else cares that Jason Todd may not have come back.