(Still question 8.)

WIP-wise, I have this one WIP where my PoV character is Jason Todd post-Red Hood and his arc in the fic is supposed to be him getting out of the super bad mental place he's in right now and I kind of can't write that without sending myself into that mental place. I mean I know it's going to go to such places as:

Jason facepalms with his Red Hood helmet. If this is going to be his life, maybe he should have stayed dead. He's holding the helmet at arm's length, looking for scratches, when Steph comes in. And, come on, he's not stupid. He knows what he looks like and knows Steph will never let him hear the end of it.

He holds out the helmet towards her. "Alas, poor Red Hood! I knew him, Batgirl: a fellow of infinite anger, of most excellent firepower: he hath patrolled Gotham a thousand times; and now how abhorred in its imagination he is! My gorge rims at it," he flubs the lien about lips, on purpose, thank you, "where be your bullets now? Your knives? Your smiles? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the night on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Now get you to Batwoman's chamber," shit, he missed a bit didn't he? "and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at the Bat. Prithee, Batgirl, tell me one thing."

Steph stares at him, nonplussed.

"What?" he asks. "I read. Shakespeare, even."

But I'm a very chronological writer and I've not touched the fic in months because right now it's more in this kind of place:

"I was dead for two minutes and fifty-three seconds," Steph says. "It felt longer."

"It always does," Jason says.

That's the thing about death (the place) that drives people mad when they come back. When your mind has expanded enough to handle the Untime of the Sunless Lands, you're bound to leave pieces behind when it's stuffed back into a broken shell of a body. Untime broke Jason in the following ways: he met Steph and he met Damian. He met Bruce and Dick and Tim. Barbara held him tight and Cassandra shook his hand. Kate and Betty and Kathy and Carrie and Helena and Helena and all the others and so many more all came to pay their respects. He saw the End that comes for all things.

And then he forgot.

It's hard to tell which of these broke him more.

It's one thing to know that this life will fade and turn to dust and another to face the insignificance of it all, to know that nothing you do matters, in the end. That the people you love and admire, hate and despise, respect and fear, the ones that will carry you in their hearts after you're gone, they too will die and the memory of you will dissolve into the ether, until all that's left of you is a name and then not even that. You will have died a pointless death, lived a pointless life and fought a pointless fight.

This is your eulogy, Jason Todd.

Nothing you did was of any importance and when this universe crumples into the endless dark, whether you lived forever or died trying will matter not at all. Give it long enough and mountains wear themselves down into nothing and empires will fall and empires will rise and you still will not have done anything that amounts to anything.

What are you against the endless press of time? In this and in all things, nothing.

What wars you fought would have been lost or won without you, what students you mentored would have found better teachers and what friends you had would have been better off never knowing you.

The point of you is that there is none. Stop fighting and relish the comfort of death and the oblivion beyond. You were dead for a reason, Jason, and you should have stayed that way. Look at you rage against the dying of the light. You don't matter, you never have and you never will.

Stop trying.

So yeah, uhm, Jason Todd. I love him, but writing his PoV is a headtrip.