Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dick regretted many things.

He regretted not being mature enough with Kori or with Babs, regretted letting them get away. He regretted never fully talking it out with Bruce, and only settling into an uneasy companionship that neither of them liked but both of them had to deal with. He regretted not supporting Steph and Cass and Tim more, regretted leaving them to figure out their lives on their own.

And sometimes, when he caught a hint of red on his patrols, followed by a warehouse filled with dead thugs and villains, he regretted Jason.

Dick never really knew him.

When Jason had just joined the team as the new Robin, Dick had already gone off to be Nightwing, trying to lead his own team, trying to make his own name, away from Batman. The only glimpses of Jason Dick ever had before Jason died were just of a small, scrawny, hard-eyed kid who followed Alfred quietly up the stairs when Dick and Bruce argued. It wasn’t much of an impression.

And then Jason died, Batman went to shit, and Dick couldn’t deal, so Dick left. Sometimes Dick regretted that too, except Tim was better for Bruce than either Dick or Jason ever were. He could see what Batman needed, and more importantly, he could give it to him. It’s how Dick comforted himself when he regret so much he made himself sick.

For a while there, they made things work, him and Tim and Steph and Cass and Babs. They knew how to work with Batman and around Batman, how to have their own lives without having his crash down on them, and things were fine.

But now Jason was back.

Now Jason was back, and Dick had no idea how to deal with him.

When Jason rolled into town, he brought the chill of the north wind with him, the icy bitter cut of a man whose revenge was forever out of reach, so he gathered it about himself and wore it like a harsh brown leather coat.

“Oh, yeah?” he said casually, when Dick found him standing over the motionless body of a drug dealer and a rapist, a terrified boy sobbing in the corner. “You wanna fight me on this? You want that kid – ” and he swung his AK barrel around to point at the boy “ – to have to keep living with his rapist because he has no other place to go? Okay, yeah, I’ll fight you. Right here, right now. Beat it, kid,” he added, glancing at the boy. “This is gonna get ugly.”

The boy scrambled to obey, tripping over himself to skit around Jason and Dick and into the dark Gotham night. It didn’t escape Dick’s notice that the boy gave Dick a slightly wider berth than he gave Jason.

“There are other ways, Hood,” Dick said.

Jason didn’t have to cock his gun (it was always cocked) but Dick could see Jason’s trigger finger twitch.

Dick gripped his escrima sticks even more tightly. The hood blocked Dick’s view of Jason’s eyes, so he couldn’t really say for certain how serious Jason was about fighting him, but Dick had beat off enough thugs and was practiced enough in reading body language that he knew when someone was just bluffing, and when someone was ready to fight with the intent to kill.

Jason intended to kill Dick if Dick didn’t get out of the way.

Dick stood down. He dropped his weapons and put his hands up “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll leave you alone this time.”

“Every time,” Jason corrected. “You’re gonna leave me alone every time. Can’t do my job if I have a baby bat with daddy issues hovering over my shoulder.”

Where could Dick even begin with that? “I’m not going to leave you alone every time,” Dick said, starting with the easiest part. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I did that.”

Dick expected Jason to shoot him right then and there, but instead, Jason just tilted his head sideways (like a Robin) and shrugged, slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Suit yourself.”

Then he shot Dick in the knee.

Leslie was not pleased.

“You fucking bats with your ego complexes,” she raged. “That surgery took hours. But the look in your eyes tells me you’re going to go out and rest for maybe a day before breaking your knee again. Do you know how long it takes to heal a minor fracture? Six to eight weeks, and that’s not including physical therapy. And here you go, bullet gone clean through your knee, hours of reconstructive surgery, with nothing to show for it but some dick (“Ha ha,” Dick said politely.) ignoring my instructions from the moment I leave the room. You’re lucky I even let you back out there with how long it’s supposed to take you to heal, you obstinate prick.”

Dick would feel guilty if he hadn’t heard this lecture a hundred times before. As it were, he gave Leslie a cheeky wink. “Sorry, Les,” he said. “Can’t help it. It’s the circus – ”

“ – in you, yes, I know,” she finished with a very tired sigh. “Look. Just call me if something goes wrong. Please, I’m begging you.”

Dick smiled winsomely. It was about as good an agreement as she was about to get, and she knew it.

She sent him on his way with a new prescription for pain medication and a warning. “It’s not cool or sexy to neglect your health!” she called after him. “I know Big B might act like it is, but it’s not! And I promise Todd won’t think it’s cool or sexy either!”

Point taken.

But Dick couldn’t help but feel jittery if he wasn’t patrolling. Staring at surveillance cameras just wasn’t the same. He never had the same affinity for computers that Tim and Babs had, the ability to somehow treat a host of digital images like his own augmented eyes and ears. A week of trying to man the surveillance cameras sent him jittering out of his skull.

The only constant that kept him tethered to the ground came in the form of one Jason Todd.

It wasn’t that Jason came to visit, or helped him in any way. No, it was simply that Jason was reliable, and exciting. Every night, Jason had some new mob boss to shake down, rapist to murder, or assassin to dispatch. Every day, Jason set up some new insane plan and left Dick clues that he had to solve before sunset. Dick nearly went insane trying to follow him on the cameras and direct Tim or Cass to his location.

“Tim, to the warehouse! Cass, you gotta try to stop that bomb from going off!”

“Rodger,” Tim said, and Cass grunted into her headpiece.

Dick leaned back into his chair with a sigh. “This is too much,” Dick muttered, rubbing his head.

His speakers crackled, and a new voice came onto the radio. “Oh? Too much, Dick-head?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Tim sighed. “Where are you?”

“Language,” Jason cackled. “And you’ll have to guess, Timbo!”

“Jason!” Dick snapped. “We don’t have time for your stupid games!”

“It sounds like time is the one thing you do have, Dickie-bird. And besides,” Jason said. “Games? Please. I’m dead serious.” And then his line cut off.

For a moment, there was residual silence on their radio. Then:

“For fuck’s sake,” Tim said.

“Language,” Dick said, out of reflex.

Cass didn’t say anything, but Dick could hear her rolling her eyes.

Dick sighed. He was doing a lot of that lately. “C’mon. Let’s just. Keep going.”

It went like this day in, day out. Dick was running on less than five hours of sleep every day, but he didn’t care. It took his mind off not being able to patrol at night.

Until, two weeks later, it stopped. Jason no longer sent Dick notes with shoddily-written clues on them, he no longer hacked into their radio system, and he stopped all his crime-related activities – and his life-related activities, too. No matter how long Dick stared at the CCTV cameras – and he did, for thirty-six hours – he couldn’t find a single trace of Jason Todd.

He began to worry. Nothing would have happened to Jason, would it? If one of Bludhaven’s baddies had killed the Red Hood, they would definitely have showed it off, right? So no news from the underworld had to be was news. But that still didn’t explain where Jason would have gone.

Even Cass was worried, calling Dick no more than twenty-four hours after Jason’s disappearance. What happened? she signed over video-chat.

Dick shook his head. Don’t know, he said. I’m going to find out.

Ok, she signed, and cut the connection.

Dick sighed.

It was time to do something stupid.

It was a little difficult, trying to fly with one leg in a cast, but Dick managed. He had to roll exclusively over one shoulder, and landing was a real bitch, but he was more or less back to sixty-percent his usual speed and grace, and that was more than enough to take on the casual muggers of the night.

He couldn’t dress as Nightwing because Nightwing in a cast was essentially cat food wrapped in spandex, but he could dress in all black and stick to the shadows. The domino would protect his identity.

It felt great, being back in action again. The night air whipped through his hair, cleared his head, made him feel light and giddy. He could hardly concentrate on the patrolling itself.

The sheer euphoria is what he’d later blame for missing Jason twice, because when he finally slowed down enough to focus on his surroundings, he found Jason sitting by himself on a rooftop, out in the open for anyone to see. It was in a CCTV blind spot, which explained why they hadn’t been able to see him on the cameras, and if he stuck to the blind spots and kept his head down, it easily explained how he’d been able to keep quiet.

Jason had forgone his Red Hood regalia, dressing down as a civilian. His grappling hook lay by his side, and the only weapon Dick could see was a knife tucked into Jason’s waistband. It seemed Jason didn’t expect to fight tonight. Dick lowered his own batarangs.

Jason didn’t turn around. “Broke my fuckin’ arm,” he said by way of greeting. He shook his cast at Dick’s general direction. “What luck.”

Dick paused, and thought about it. It was a bad idea to fraternize with Jason. This could be another trick, another hours long chase down the winding Bludhaven streets, and Dick knew his leg wouldn’t make it. But he found himself moving towards Jason, and sitting down next to him. “How’d you break it?” he said.

Jason snorted. “How’d you expect? By shaking down another pedophile-rapist, ‘course. Fucker had a secret assassin buddy or whatever that I wasn’t expecting; threw a fuckin’ knife at me and sliced through half the tendons in my arm. The good doc had to stich me up again. She is seriously not paid enough.”

Suddenly some of Leslie’s comments made sense.

“You should be more careful,” Dick said.

Jason glared at him. “No shit, Batman,” he said, before a wry smile twisted his lips. “’Sides, shouldn’t I be the one to say that to you?”

And all of a sudden, Dick remembered he was angry. “Yeah,” he said. “You should. Why did you shoot me, Jason? Is surrender not good enough anymore? You going around killing innocents now too?”

Jason’s glare narrowed to a point, like the cut of cold wind. “You’re not innocent.”

“I haven’t hurt anyone, not like – ”

“Me?” Jason laughed, but it didn’t sound like he thought this was very funny. “Harm through inaction is still harm, Dick. How many people will the Joker have to kill before you put him down?”

Dick shook his head. “It’s not up to us, Jason.”

Jason snorted. “Maybe not. But whether or not his victims live is up to us, and if I’m not doing everything I can to make sure they live, then I’m helping them die. That’s all there is to it.”

There was nothing much Dick could say to that.

Jason stood up and dusted his pants off with his good hand. “Well, not like this hasn’t been fun, Dickie, but I really must be going.”

“Hang on,” Dick said, struggling to stand up with him. “Can’t we just… I dunno, talk?”

“Talk?” Jason turned back to face Dick. “What is there to talk about?”

If Jason put it like that, Dick wasn’t really sure anymore. “I don’t know, anything.”

Jason rolled his eyes, real slow and exaggerated, and Dick realized it was the first time he saw Jason looking like the kid he was. “Over my dead body,” Jason said. Then he smirked. “Oops. I guess I already am.”

And with a flourish and a bow in the face of Dick’s hanging jaw, he shot his grappling hook and disappeared into the night.

It took Dick a couple seconds to recover before he hastily grabbed his hook and swung after Jason, shouting, “Hey! Bad puns are my thing!”

Jason was like the north wind – cold, bitter, and painful.

But he was like the north wind in Bludhaven – he made Dick feel like he was flying.