Chapter Text
Dick woke from restless sleep and uneasy dreams he was sure didn’t belong to him, feeling tired but determined. He wasn’t going to get far today on foot, but pounding the pavement was only one way to get started on detective work. He reached for his laptop and flicked it open with a pang of regret for Babs. She’d left without saying goodbye . . . But he squashed that feeling. He had a soulmate to find.
The first thing he did was feed several pictures of Jason before he died into an image processing program and age him up by five years. He used some old images of Jason’s parents to make tweaks - even a 15-year-old Jason had shown signs of developing his father’s jawline, his mother’s eyes. A strong nose that had been broken and reset a couple of times. Brooding eyebrows. Once Dick had a composite image he was happy with, he set a facial recognition program to crawl through surveillance cameras in the areas he felt Jason was most likely to have hidden in. The Bowery, the Narrows, Crime Alley. Jason had grown up there, had spent time on the streets there, loved to patrol those areas as Robin, and they seemed like logical first places to start. Dick was sure that Jason probably had multiple boltholes and safe houses scattered around the city, but he couldn’t imagine that he spent too much time in the Diamond District or the other wealthier areas. Jason would return to what he knew.
Jason probably avoided cameras, but he had to shop for groceries sometime. Dick could find him. It was a waiting game, at this point, and Dick had nothing but free time.
However, after three days with no hits, Dick started feeling restless. Too bad the soulbond didn’t have a GPS function. It would be great if Dick could just ping his soulmate and get a little icon on his phone with an address and street view. Jason was probably keeping as low a profile as possible, and while Dick was sure that his search algorithm would find a facial recognition hit eventually, Dick was having a hard time staying patient.
Meanwhile, Dick was getting a bit better at ignoring the sensations from the link, but not any better at actually blocking them. He asked Bruce how he and Clark managed so well, but Bruce’s answer of mental discipline wasn't very helpful. Clark tried, at least, but Clark was so good at filtering excessive sensory information already, from his super-hearing (his super everything), that his guidance wasn’t very relevant for Dick.
Dick’s desperation grew as the days passed without any new leads. Red Hood was active at night, and that kept Dick awake. When he did try to sleep, his unconscious mind flooded his dreams of events of the last year - Blockbuster, Tarantula, the gang wars, losing Stephanie. Barbara breaking up with him. The circus fire.
He didn’t want to reach out to Tim, who was with the Titans and dealing with his own bereavements. Bruce avoided Dick as much as possible, refusing to admit whether or not he believed Dick’s assertion that Red Hood was Jason Todd, throwing himself into patrolling and abandoning his already poor attempts at normal self-care. He came back from patrol beat up and surly, reminiscent of his behavior after Jason’s death. Alfred checked in on Dick, brought him food, nagged him about not putting weight on his leg, but most of Alfred’s attention was on Bruce’s downward spiral.
Five days after first putting his search together, Dick woke up after a restless night of tossing and turning, repeatedly jolted back into awareness whenever his soulmate's adrenaline spiked. And given that his soulmate was Red Hood, active crime boss, that happened plenty of times.
Despite both logic and his bond telling Dick that the Red Hood was Jason, Dick found it hard to believe. Jason was dead. Sure, there were more things in heaven and earth, and Dick had personal experience with the supernatural, the alien, even the dead coming back, but he couldn't quite manage to wrap his head around the possibility that Jason, the second Robin, has one of those unexplained phenomena.
What proof did Dick have, really, that Jason was alive? That he wasn't still in his grave?
That thought spurred Dick up and out of bed, throwing on the grubbiest clothes he could find, brushing his teeth but not bothering to shower, and down the hallway before he could really examine his impulse. Because there was one way to tell for sure if Jason was still in his grave or not.
He was going to dig it up.
Dick glanced at the clock. Bruce was probably already at WE by now, and Dick would check for sure before starting.
The manor had a tiny backhoe and excavator, not much bigger than a ride-on lawn-mower, for maintenance and landscaping purposes, so digging the grave up would be the easy part. The harder part would be keeping Alfred away, and explaining what he was doing was a conversation Dick really didn't want to have.
Obviously, once he was done, Bruce and Alfred would find out. But Dick would have his answer, at least, and proof if Bruce didn't already believe Dick's theory of Red Hood's identity.
Digging up a grave should be done in the dark of night, Dick thought. Or a thunderstorm, erratic lightning flashes lighting up the scene, water turning the dirt into mud.
The mild sun, ineffective against the typical Gotham gloom, shining weakly through cloud cover on a late spring morning, didn't seem at all appropriate. Still, the more practical side of Dick was grateful that there wasn't rain because doing this in the mud would have been potentially treacherous. It took Dick some time to gather everything he needed, including hauling out a tarp for him to dump the dirt on, work gloves, a shovel though he expected the excavator to do the majority of the work and fetching and positioning the machine itself.
With an apologetic pat to the gravestone, Dick got to work. Alfred came out after about an hour, back from whatever errands he'd been running. He stood a few feet away from the edge of the hole - Dick guessed he was about halfway done, maybe a bit less - hands folded behind his back, posture impeccable. And yet from the rigidly squared shoulders and lines of tension in his jaw, Dick knew that the butler was furious. With a sigh, Dick turned off the digger and eased himself to the ground, aware of how much his knee had stiffened while he worked, and made his way over to Alfred.
Alfred’s nostrils actually flared, and his flinty gray eyes bored through Dick’s soul, making him afraid of the butler in a way he hadn’t been since he jumped onto the chandelier from the banister, only for both Dick and the chandelier to crash to the floor. “Master Richard. Would you care to explain yourself?”
“I’m not . . . this isn’t what it looks like.”
“I should bloody well hope not since it looks like you are trying to dig up Jason Todd’s grave,” Alfred snapped.
Dick could feel himself flushing - a reaction only Alfred could provoke these days. “Okay, so it is what it looks like, but I don’t actually think Jason is there.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
Dick spread his arms wide, pleading, looking at Alfred with an as open and honest expression as he can manage. “I know it might sound crazy, but I think Jason is alive. I don’t know where he is, or how to find him, but he’s alive. So if I’m right, this should be empty.”
Alfred looked wrecked. Devastated. “Master Dick. I know you weren’t here for the funeral, but I can assure you, we did not bury an empty coffin. I saw the - the body myself. Now come inside.”
Dick shook his head. “I’m sorry but I can’t. Look.” He held an arm out to Alfred for inspection, where the blackbird is perched just above the crook of his elbow as if the line of Dick’s elbow was a tree branch. “Do you remember how my bond mark died? And then six months later came back to life? I think it belongs to Jason.”
“People do not simply come back to life.” Alfred sounded so very sad.
“But they do! Superman, Green Arrow - they do.”
Alfred inhaled so hard his nostrils pinch, never taking his eyes off of Dick’s face. He studied Dick for what felt like eons, before sighing once more. “There is no talking you out of this, is there?”
“No. There’s not.”
“Very well. Then I shall help if only to show you how foolish you are being. Then you will come inside and we shall figure out how and what to say to Master Bruce.”
That’s a conversation Dick was not looking forward to having. Either way - grave empty or not - Dick couldn’t see it going well. Even if the grave is empty like Dick thinks it will be, how would Bruce react? He hadn’t taken Dick’s previous assertion well.
Dick outlined his procedure to Alfred, who made a few adjustments, and then they got to work. Even with only one backhoe, having two people made the job easier, and soon the hole was nearly six feet deep.
“I do not wish to damage the coffin, so let’s proceed with shovels,” Alfred suggested. Dick nodded agreement and the two of them climbed down to shovel the rest of the dirt themselves. Soon Dick’s shovel hit something hard.
“I’ve hit wood.” They worked more carefully, not wanting to bash through by accident. Soon Dick had about three square feet of the head area completely uncovered, and Alfred the same amount at the feet. They worked towards each other, hoping to meet in the middle. But then Dick pushed his shovel into the dirt, gently prodding to get to the surface of the coffin, but the blade of the shovel kept going.
“Alfred. Here. It’s - the wood is broken here.”
“Sometimes the weight of the dirt caves in the coffin,” Alfred said mildly.
“That is horrifying and I really wish I didn’t know that.” Dick dug the dirt away in tiny quarter shovels, uncovering more splintered wood. He wanted to drop to his knees, but the damn brace wouldn’t let his leg bend, and the hole was too small to have his leg horizontal.
“Allow me, Master Richard.” Alfred lowered himself to the ground slowly, and Dick felt bad for making the older man kneel. Alfred swept dirt aside with both hands, exposing broken and jagged edges of wood, splinters bristling. Dick hefted out a few cautious shovel-fulls, Alfred moving the dirt wordlessly across from him, until they revealed a rough hole in the lid of the coffin, nearly as wide as the casket itself, surrounded by mounds of damp, black earth and bits of broken wood. Unfortunately, all they could see inside of the coffin was more dirt, splinters, and wood chips.
Dick and Alfred paused as if in mutual, unspoken agreement and looked at each other. Alfred’s face looked stoic and calm, but his white-knuckled grip on his shovel betrayed some of his tension. Dick, so close to either confirmation that he was right or that he was out of his mind, eager to finally get an answer, still knew that whatever they found, nothing would be the same. He was desecrating Jason Todd’s grave and had compelled Alfred to help him. If he was wrong, and they were about to disturb the body of a brutally murdered fifteen-year-old, there would be no going back. On the other hand, the implications that Jason had somehow come back to life, crawled out of his own grave, didn’t come to them for help, and they didn’t know for five years, could barely be contemplated.
After a moment of quiet, meeting each other’s eyes, Alfred seemed to get whatever reassurance he needed, and Dick felt ready to move on. They worked in silence until they had enough soil moved out of the coffin that they could peer into the space themselves.
Weak sunlight strained to penetrate six feet below the lawn, dripping past their own shadows like honey, fighting to reach beyond the splintered boards, illuminating the dark brown soil that barely filled a quarter of the coffin. The blatantly deserted coffin.
Only empty space and dirt.
“It’s empty.”
Alfred pulled off one glove, then the other, movements crisp, almost brittle, his fingers shivering like late autumn leaves. He sifted one hand through the dirt in the coffin, encountering no resistance.
“Indeed.” Alfred removed his hand, looked at the dirt on his fingers as if he'd never seen such a thing, then dropped his hand to his knee. “I admit to being a bit . . . perturbed from this discovery.”
Even though Dick had expected - hoped - to find the coffin empty, otherwise it meant he was truly going crazy, he had to nod in agreement. He bent stiffly to pick up a piece of wood, one side polished and stained a dignified shade of mahogany, the other plain, natural pine. Dick rubbed his fingers across the deep gouges carved into the surface, four harsh parallel lines.
“It’s empty. And someone clearly clawed his own way out.”
Alfred picked up a broken board as well, turned it over in his hands. He breathed in, then out, slow, eyes closed, like he was exhaling all the energy in his body along with the air. His shoulders slumped and even his mustache seemed to droop, his life force draining into the ground, pulled down by the weight of the empty grave. “Bollocks. I didn’t think you could possibly be correct.”
Dick nodded, no offense taken. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been right either, which is one of the reasons why he’d had to dig up Jason’s grave, knowing he would have a thread of doubt unless confronted with the evidence, despite what the soulbond was telling him.
What kind of struggle had it been to force himself out of the grave, and what kind of shape would Jason have been in afterward? How long had he been buried before he got out? Dick’s gut seethed with nausea. He examined the shattered board more closely, making out brick-red stains in the splintered wood. Blood. Dick dropped the piece of the coffin as if burnt. “Fuck.”
Dick’s bond with Jason churned with curiosity and concern, as if Jason could tell Dick was upset, perhaps, and was wondering why. What did you endure here, Dick thought, trying to send the message through the bond. But it didn’t work like that, at least not yet; they couldn’t communicate in words. Still, Dick thought “I’m sorry you had to go through this alone. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.”
The interest sharpened for a moment, questioning and probing, then focused into keen-edge anger, the familiar simmering fury Dick was coming to realize was Jason’s near-constant emotional state. Dick felt the full blast of that rage for three tense heartbeats, thud, thud, thud, and then Dick felt Jason’s regard fall away. Whether Jason had figured out what Dick was thinking, or whether he’d simply decided to stop focusing on their bond, Dick couldn’t tell, but Jason’s attention was no longer directed inward but moving on and out.
Dick decided to focus on his own external situation as well. Alfred didn’t look well, so Dick had to take care of the older man first and then figure out how to tell Bruce. Now that he knew that Jason was actually alive, getting Bruce to admit it as well would be crucial, then they could figure out what to do, hopefully together.
Dick hobbled over to Alfred and clasped his shoulder. “Come inside, Alfred. Let me make us a pot of tea.”
Alfred startled and twisted his head quickly to look at Dick as if he’d forgotten that he was alone. “I’m . . .” He cleared his throat. “Pardon me, Master Richard. I admit that I am a trifle shaken in light of this discovery.”
“Don’t apologize, Alfred. Let’s have a nice cuppa and we can try to figure this out.”
Alfred stiffened under Dick’s hand, and he turned carefully amongst the disturbed soil to face Dick fully, life slowly returning to his pale face. “As startling as this is, and as horrific as it must have been for him, Jason is alive.”
DIck nodded. “Yes he is. Jason is alive.”
For now, that would be answer enough.