AgeOfArtemis

"Seph. He needs to go through judgement."

"No. He'll go to Elysium."

"Persephone-"

"Do not take me for a fool, Hermes. I know how my own realm works. I've spoken to the judges and to my husband. He goes to Elysium. I would not risk him."

(spring is a cold one that year.)

(for weeks after Jason's death, vegetation behaves weird)

(summer has a weird number of cold days, too. And fall comes early)

So Jason has to wrap his head around the fact that he's part god. Because he knew Greek gods were real, of course, Wonder Woman is his favorite hero thanks, but he'd never thought it would have anything to do with him. He helps his mother in her garden some days, he meets his stepfather and his demigod stepbrother. He considers rebirth.

But then, of course, six months lates, late october maybe early november, he gets resurrected.

I imagine it would be hard for his mother to reach him. Communicating with someone who's brain dead is hard enough, especially if you have to do it through dreams he's not really aware of. And the Lazarus Pit is idk maybe something curse-like? Unnatural, at least, and scrambling Jason's head enough Persephone still can't talk to him.

So he trains and he kills and he obsesses over Bruce and Joker and Tim. Until, finally, he starts getting moments his head is clear enough for Persephone to contact him. And they're in a dream, and it's the calmest he's been in, how long has it been? He's still so, so, angry, and he won't regret what he's done, but he's also tired. His mom is right there and she seems so happy to see him and what the fuck is he doing, wasting his efforts on someone who obviously doesn't want him around?

Persephone gifts him a weapon and tells him to go to New York. That help will reach him there. That he needs to go to Dionysus. And he doesn't go immediately. He keeps training for a while, and the green still takes over sometimes. But eventually he calms down a little more. Talia would be hard to escape but New York is close enough to Gotham that, under the guise of wanting to put his plan in motion, he can hang around there a while without seeming too suspicious.

And so he goes. And he trudges around the city for a while. Nature spirits stare and whisper. Jason does his best to keep from lashing out.

Eventually he runs into Nico, who's in New York with idk Percy probably or maybe on a date with Will, and it's basically the Spider-Man point meme because no one exactly told Nico what the hell actually happened to that kid and Jason sure as fuck wasn't expecting to see him.

Anyway nico takes him to camp. Dionysus helps jason out bc Madness and that whole thing, and it clears most of the lazarus influence but he's still so fucking angry. But he's also tired. And he feels more connected to his mother here than he ever had back in gotham. And the kids at camp are as much child soldiers as he is. Persephone doesn't have her own cabin yet, and there's a bit of a debate if he's going to be put in the Demeter or Hermes cabin for the time being before they settle on Hades because only Nico really uses it. And he genuinely enjoys camp. He's got a better basis for sword fighting than most of the new kids so he gets put into the more advanced class. Learning a new style is fun. The climbing wall is a nice challenge. He picks strawberries with the Demeter cabin. He's decent enough at archery, but definitely a better marksman with guns. He finds out Bat-disappear-into-the-shadows-training works as well in a forest as on rooftops.

But then, a few months in, Wonder Woman visits. She'd never heard of Camp, before the wars, that'd been kept from her. She'd been furious when she'd found out the gods had used children to fight their wars. Tales of it are legendary, around camp.

All the little kids swarm her, of course, and everyone else follows. Jason doesn't. they make eye contact, briefly, and disbelief floods her face. Jason flees.

And at some point they do probably talk. Diana asks why he isn't home, jason says he isn't ready and when she pushes he spits out why (joker, tim, the usual). Diana explains some things (bruce being near suicidal, what shes gathered about how tim became robin). Jason isnt ready to let go of the anger yet, but when diana tells him he cant expect her not to tell bruce his son is alive he tells her to do what she wants.

He spots Batman for the first time in... months, he's pretty sure. They stare at each other for a tense few seconds before Bruce leaves. Jason has the odd suspicion that his soulmates have something to do with it.

When he asks Steph about it (when she comes begging for food again), she laughs.

"Yeah, Tim threatened him ages ago. Should've seen the fallout of the whole Arkham situation after we got you out, it was a shitshow," she says. "Duke yelled at him recently, too. After he bonded with you. Or that's what Cass said, anyway, I wasn't there."

"What the fuck," Jason says.

-

Jason's doing a very good job of ignoring the huge ass elephant in the month, thank you very much. His idiot soulmates, less so. So he's a little jumpy, and he flinches if someone laughs a little too loud. He's fine, thanks, he'd appreciate it if they left him the fuck alone. But noo, these idiots and their souls won't stop bothering him. He's being dragged into shenanigans and team ups and hang outs left and right. There's constantly a soul hanging around or pressing close.

It's annoying.

Robin, especially, hovers. He flits in and out of Jason's days, never coming close but always at the edge of Jason's awareness. When he does touch, it's to say sorry. Again. Again. And again.

Nightwing hangs around Gotham, too. The others try to keep him away, and even Oracle seems to help in redirecting Jason, but they spot each other in the distance a lot.