"Sheila wasn't my mother. She was an egg donor. That's all." Some days, Jason still wasn't sure if he was trying to convince other people of that, or himself. "My mom died year before Sheila did, in a ratty apartment in Crime Alley, because my dad skipped out on us both." Catherine had done everything Sheila had never wanted to do. She'd told Jason stories at bedtime, taught him how to tie his shoelaces, held him when he'd been scared. She had wanted him. What had Sheila done besides dump him on his deadbeat dad as fast as possible? There were times when he wondered why she'd even kept the pregnancy. But Catherine had loved him, despite all of her flaws. He'd never been anything but a money ticket to Sheila.
Jason might have spent the last few weeks lost in his head, but he wasn't so lost that he missed how Castiel's expression had shifted. The pride in it, that hint of wonder, as though Cas were a devout follower who'd seen his leader perform a miracle, made the second Robin uneasy. He reached for the plate of food to distract himself. It wasn't fear he felt so much as a variation on that awkward flutter he felt whenever Bruce dropped his walls long enough to do the proud dad thing. Since Cas was definitely not his father, Jason felt even stranger. He crumbled the bacon and began feeding bits to Ace and Deanna to give himself something to do.
"Limbo, huh? How do you figure that?" Be a detective right now, Jason told himself. Work the problem. "Are you saying I was a ghost, or that I just sort of ... hung around in some space for dead people who didn't get a copy of the roadmap?" This was the closest anyone had ever come to telling Jason what had happened in that interim between death and resurrection. Truth be told, that scared him.