Chapter Text
Jason doesn’t remember the first days of his second life much—and what a damning string of words that is. Any Bat worth their salt has had a stint or ten with dimension travel; B drilled in endless protocols in their heads, and Jason can recite them in his sleep. They hadn’t covered reincarnation because B hadn’t had much use for comparative religion. Jason died fair and square, went down fighting as any self-respecting Bat would do, only to then blink his blurry eyes open in what he will later learn is a different world, inhabiting a different body, of a different species.
It’s a problem.
Things get confused, after that. Jason wouldn’t have thought newborns have the hardware to sustain whatever had thought of itself as Jason Todd. Magic is a wacky thing, certainly, but memories have a physical component, don’t they? Emotions and thoughts and such don’t exist in a vacuum. An adult mind in an infant’s body would either be an infant or the body would die, he would have thought.
Apparently not. Apparently, if you have an insanely sturdy, magic-wielding body, you can be stabilised until your body stops freaking out. Jason is born into a healthy, male baby bursting with magic and so—he survives. It’s touch and go for a while, he can feel that much, and the only reason he doesn’t go insane from the pain of it is that he’s drugged to his eyeballs day in and day out, but he can feel things slot into place. The number of machines decreases week after week—probably a good sign—and after about six months or so they start letting him stay awake for more than ten minutes at a time.
It’s around that time that the biological father of the body is first clued into the situation.
***
On balance, whatever deity had placed him in Elemental Nations did what they could to give him a head-start. Jason hasn’t been gracious about anything, ever, and he doesn’t plan to start now, but he will give credit where credit is due: it could have been worse.
For one thing, child prodigies are a dime a dozen in Konohagakure, a pseudo-medieval, pseudo-industrialised city-state of pain and villainy. Jason, the son of a big-shot merc who was himself a prodigy, is all but expected to be some sort of psycho monster. It’s a thing, here. Creepy adult children are the equivalent of Gotham’s gargoyles, well-accepted, grudgingly-loved cultural signifiers. The heir to the Hatake clan walking at talking at two is brushed away as a fun but ultimately meaningless bit of trivia.
The far more significant boon is his old man. Jason can’t quite square how a man like Sakumo could have sprouted up in the moral and spiritual wasteland that is wartime Konohagakure, but he had, and now he’s Jason’s, which means precious beyond reason. Good thing too, because between the untreated PTSD from the war, lack of any meaningful socialisation and the stress of raising a child, Sakumo is hanging by a threat. Who even knows what would have happened if Kakashi was a real boy and not an adult, perfectly capable of raising himself?
***